Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Rule ‘O Law

by digby

Glenn Greenwald notes that the neoconservatives reflexively defend their crooks, no matter what they have done:

But what has become increasingly apparent of late is that the rejection of the rule of law finds expression not only on a political level — as a license for political leaders to break the law to advance the neoconservative political agenda — but it also serves as personal immunity for individual neoconservatives who are charged with breaking the law or committing serious ethical violations.

When it comes to instances where neoconservatives stand accused of criminality and other wrongdoing, the same neoconservative movement which shrilly advocates the virtually complete abolition of limits on federal power to detain and punish people — a movement which mocks every notion of due process or restraints on federal power as terrorist-loving subversion — suddenly reverses course and begins reflexively defending the accused, complaining that they are the victims of wrongful prosecutions and overzealous government power.

Ain’t it the truth. But it isn’t just the neos. It’s the religious and the old-line establishment right too. Listening to most of the GOP presidential candidates defend that lying weasel Scooter Libby in their debate the other night was astonishing. Here’s Sam Brownback, the Christian Right candidate:

Moderator: OK, let me go to a question that’s more ephemeral and it is passing and it will decided in the next several months. We’ll go down the line again. This isn’t as much fun as cutting taxes. Do you think Scooter Libby should be pardoned.

(Unknown)[It was Brownback]: Let the legal process move forward, and I’d leave that up to President Bush. And I think he could go either way on that.

Moderator: The judge is going to rule on that case next month and decide whether he will be in prison during his appeal. Would you let it go, let him be imprisoned?

[Brownback]: At this point in time, I would leave that up to the president, if at the end of the term, he decides to let him out.

Moderator: You don’t encourage him to repeal, to…

[Brownback]: I would see willingness to go either way on that, because the underlying facts of this case are ones where there was not a law that was violated. So what they’re saying is: OK, you didn’t remember right, and that’s what you’re being prosecuted, and that was what you were guilty for. And, my goodness…

Isn’t that a stirring defense of the rule of law? It’s funny, he had a very different take on another case that hinged on lying to a grand jury about something for which there was no underlying crime:

On August 17, 1998, William Jefferson Clinton swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth before a Federal grand jury of the United States. Contrary to that oath, William Jefferson Clinton willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury concerning the nature and details of his relationship with a subordinate Government employee:

A. Testimony that conflicts with Ms. Lewinsky’s account of the relationship:

Ms. Lewinsky testified as to the extent of her sexual relationship with President Clinton, and her statements were corroborated by numerous individuals with whom she contemporaneously shared the details of her encounters with the President, including two professionals. Her testimony indicated direct contact by the President with certain areas of her body. The conduct described by Ms. Lewinsky clearly falls within the definition of sexual relations as President Clinton understood the term to be defined in the Paula Jones case and during his grand jury testimony.

In his prepared statement to the grand jury, President Clinton stated that the sexual encounters between he and Ms. Lewinsky ‘did not constitute sexual relations as I understood that term to be defined at my January 17th, 1998 deposition.’ President Clinton acknowledged that the type of activity described by Ms. Lewinsky constituted sexual relations as he understood the term to be defined during the Paula Jones’ deposition: ‘I understood the definition to be limited to, to physical contact with those areas of the bodies with the specific intent to arouse or gratify.’ However, during questioning under oath, President Clinton repeatedly denied engaging in the activities described by Ms. Lewinsky.

President Clinton was even asked by a grand juror whether ‘if Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area you touched [certain area of her body that falls within the definition of sexual relations as understood by the President in the Paula Jones case], would she be lying.’ President Clinton responded: ‘That is not my recollection. My recollection is that I did not have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky and I’m staying on my former statement about that.’

If Ms. Lewinsky’s testimony is true, President Clinton committed perjury during his grand jury testimony. I have had the opportunity to read the portions of grand jury testimony provided by both President Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky concerning their characterizations of their sexual relations. I also had the opportunity to watch Ms. Lewinsky’s videotaped deposition in which she reaffirmed her previous grand jury testimony concerning the extent of their sexual relations. Based upon (1) the corroboration of Ms. Lewinsky’s testimony by numerous witnesses with whom she had spoken contemporaneously, (2) the detailed nature of Ms. Lewinsky’s testimony, (3) the evasiveness of President Clinton’s testimony, (4) the apparent sincerity of Ms. Lewinsky in her videotaped deposition before the Senate, and (5) the President’s refusal to be deposed by the Senate, I find that the President provided false and misleading testimony before a federal grand jury that constitutes perjury.

Now, I realize that Brownback probably belives that the “underlying crime” was “direct contact by the President with certain areas of her body with the specific intent to arouse or gratify” but that hasn’t actually been codified by law. (Yet.) In that case, he was willing to remove a duly elected president from office for failing to remember if he had touched Lewinsky’s naughty bits with an intent to gratify. Scooter Libby, on the other hand, “misrembers” under oath almost a dozen different conversations in which he publicly names an undercover CIA agent and the prosecutor has overstepped his bounds in prosecuting him. This is the level of integrity we are dealing with, even among the pious believers who run on the character platform.

But that’s not all. Among what now passes for the conservative establishment old guard, it gets even worse. (You know what’s coming, don’t you?)

Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.

There is no corner of the conservative movement that has any intellectual integrity left. The neocons may be on the hotseat right now because so many of their brethren have recently been proven asses. But the tribe defends Ann Coulter and Limbaugh with even more fervor. Meanwhile, they are crawling over each other to jump the good ship Codpiece after years of slavering obeisance to every puerile utterance. Let’s just say that consistency isn’t one of their strong suits either.

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Bully In Chief

by digby

Here’s a wonderful lesson for the children from our president:

The informal Bush enjoyed the formality so much that he even took time out to torment an underdressed photographer. After his walk with the queen after lunch, Bush got the photographer, Newsweek’s Charles Ommanney, to agree that it was “a special day” at the White House. “Then why,” the president asked, “didn’t you wear something other than hand-me-down clothes?”

It’s not quite as rude as when he told the blind reporter to take off his sunglasses when he talked to him, but it’s actually worse because he’s going out of his way to humiliate this person on purpose.

I know this towel slapping form of “humor” is supposed to be some harmless macho bonding thing but I have always found it very, very creepy when powerful types, in the locker room or in the white house, find it necessary to reaffirm their position by publicly humiliating others. I think it betrays a lack of character, maturity and class. I look forward to having a president who does not behave like a junior high school bully — and I have to say that I don’t think there is one candidate, Democrat or Republican, who does that in quite the juvenile and embarrassing manner as this one.

What a jerk.

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Too Busy Laughing

by digby

Hullabaloo is proud to present another episode of “Imagine If This Were A Democrat” this week starring Condoleeza Rice:

Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, according to investigators.

The admission is part of a settlement being negotiated with United States prosecutors and includes fines totaling $25 million to $30 million, according to the investigators, who declined to be identified because the settlement was not yet public.

The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal.

[…]

The settlement discussions are a result of months of work by a joint task force of the United States attorneys of the Southern District of New York and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, with help from Italian authorities. Kent Robertson, a spokesman for Chevron, said “regarding the oil-for-food program generally, Chevron purchased Iraqi crude oil principally for use in its U.S. refineries and the United Nations approved the initial sale of all cargos ultimately purchased by Chevron.”

He said Chevron has cooperated with inquiries into the program “and we will continue to do so.”

The United States attorney’s office and the office of the New York district attorney both declined to comment.

Thus far, only former United Nations officials, individual traders and relatively small oil companies have come under scrutiny in the United States.

According to the Volcker report, surcharges on Iraqi oil exports were introduced in August 2000 by the Iraqi state oil company, the State Oil Marketing Organization. At the time, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was a member of Chevron’s board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.

Ms. Rice resigned from Chevron’s board on Jan. 16, 2001, after being named national security advisor by President Bush.

Our show will take you back in time to a world where the entire political and media establishment rose up in horror at the merest rumor of impropriety among the president’s advisors and cabinet — to a time when editorial writers would have thundered about the unacceptability of a former National Security Advisor and current Secretary of State having even been remotely associated with such illegality and malfeasance. Indeed, in that era, it would have been considered inconceivable that someone under such a cloud could possibly be allowed to continue to represent the nation abroad in times of such great peril. Calls for resignation would be loud and boisterous.

Today scandals bubble for months in the blogosphere, pooh-poohed by the cognoscenti as trivial. Until half a dozen Republican Federal Prosecutors are forced to blow the whistle, no one even thinks it’s worth looking into. In fact, it’s all very droll:

But folks like Karl Rove–and the not-so-dearly departed Tom DeLay–have no respect for the beauty of such balance. Unwilling to leave such weighty matters as choosing leaders to the whim of the unwashed masses, they spent their days trying to rig the system so that the playing field was irretrievably slanted in favor of their team: gerrymandering voting districts, pressuring U.S. attorneys to pursue partisan prosecutions, urging federal agencies to operate with an eye toward partisan gain, and otherwise harnessing the machinery of government for political means. Their entire goal is to screw up the natural cycle–to ensure that, no matter how miffed voters get, the structural barriers to change will be insurmountable. This is why DeLay had to go. And it is why, if the gods of politics are just, Rove will eventually find himself in equally deep poo. Guys like this aren’t just trying to destroy the opposing party. They are mucking around with the fundamentals of our entire political system.Which would make me want to pop someone in the nose–if I weren’t so busy chuckling at just how many of the Bushies’ tawdry little schemes are now boomeranging back to bite them on their complacent, corrupt, entitled, incompetent backsides.

A real laugh riot.

I fully expect the press to stop chuckling once a Democrat is in the white house, however. They will take stock and realize that they need to provide the kind of skeptical, muckraking coverage they used to before the Bush administration came in. The mea culpas and promises to do better will abound — they will have “learned from their mistakes” and will pursue even the slightest appearance of impropriety going forward. And the Right Wing Noise Machine will be there to help them with the foot work. They make quite a team.

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Vain In Our Highmindedness

by digby

It’s funny that Atrios highlights this perfect quote by Charlie Peters just as I was writing a post on this very subject as another follow-up to Jonathan Chait’s piece on the netroots.

I’m very fond of Mike [Kinsley]. He’s genuinely brilliant, but I think there has always been a tension between Mike and me, in that I sense he is embarrassed by passion. Mike’s detachment has notably decreased since his marriage and the onset of Parkinson’s, both of which had a pronounced humanizing effect, but his more sardonic imitators have become a major problem in journalism — very bright people who seem too concerned with being bright.

Well, you know, that’s true. But it’s probably been true forever. In fact it’s been the subject of rumination among political observers for a very long time. I wrote this a couple of years ago:

This interesting post from Steamboats Are Ruining Everything takes us back to 1820 and reminds us that brutish conservatives are nothing new:

William Hazlitt explained the nature of it in his 1820 essay, “On the Spirit of Partisanship.”

Conservatives and liberals play the game of politics differently, Hazlitt wrote, because they have different motivations. Liberals are motivated by principles and tend to believe that personal honor can be spared in political combat. They may, in fact, become vain about their highmindedness. Hazlitt condemns the mildness as a mistake, both in moral reasoning and in political strategy. “They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse.”

The conservatives, on the other hand, start with a personal interest in the conflict. Not wishing to lose their hold on power, they are fiercer. “We”—i.e., the liberals, or the “popular cause,” in Hazlitt’s terminology—“stand in awe of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our persons.

They beat us in courage and in intellect, because we have nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will; they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters of mankind or to be hurled from high—

“To grinning scorn a sacrifice,
And endless infamy!”

They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them; if they pause it is to gain time; if they offer terms it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs. While they give no quarter, you stand upon mere ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanité. Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them—to treat them according to your own fancied dignity. They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it. It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest.

It is not fair play, and Hazlitt thinks that liberals who decline to fight fire with fire are fools. “It might as well be said that a man has a right to knock me on the head on the highway, and that I am only to use mildness and persuasion in return, as best suited to the justice of my cause; as that I am not to retaliate and make reprisal on the common enemies of mankind in their own style and mode of execution.”

Hazlitt was right. And never more than today when the stakes are so high…History proves that bad things do sometimes happen. Being barely left standing to say “I told you so” will be no compensation.

(The link to the “Steamboat” blog is now dead, but you can read Hazlitt’s piece here. )

I wrote that post three years ago in the midst of what seemed like an overwhelming Republican juggernaut. I felt intense frustration at the fact that so many political and opinion leaders seemed to think there was something distasteful about the passionate outrage that many of us were experiencing and dismissed our passion as simpleminded and unsophisticated . (Admittedly, that frustration, born of a decade or more of ever increasing assaults on our politics, fueled a sense of mistrust of the Democratic establishment and liberal punditocrisy that lasts to this day — I simply don’t trust their survival instincts.)

But passion is more than just reaction. It also provides the opening for ordinary people to involve themselves in politics generally. Whenever I hear people complaining about the unseemly behavior of people who go to peace marches or Cindy Sheehan or the DFH’s who just ruined everything for all of us back in the 1960’s I can’t help but wonder how they expect non-news junkie policy wonks to connect with the world around them? Stirring debates between Peter Beinert and Jonah Goldberg?

Humans need to feel part of something, that they have a stake in the outcome. Emotion is what moves people, whether it is demagoguery, fear, anger or inspiration (and there’s often tension and similarity among those things.) To get people engaged you have to give them something to care about, to feel connected with, to want to devote some of their precious time and resources to something for which there is no direct compensation except a feeling of doing the right thing or righting a great wrong. Change requires energy and energy is one thing that sophisticated intellectual salons and learned political journals, however important they may be, simply do not provide.

Sadly, liberals are far more difficult to draw in to that for the reasons that Hazlitt cited nearly 170 years ago. It’s a temperament thing. We are just more dispassionate as a rule than the rowdy right because they feel they are protecting their prerogatives — and they just get off on the fight. But from time to time liberals simply have to get religion or risk losing it all. There have been certain periods where they were able to mobilize, usually in reaction to a great social upheaval or obvious conservative failure. Over the long run, we have actually progressed. (And you know where we’ll all be in the long run…)

But mostly it’s been as Hazlitt observed:

It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest

Chait grants that the netroots “instrumentalism” (our “practical interest”) is perhaps necessary, but he frets that there is a danger that the movement will devolve into some sort of unthinking know-nothingness that rivals the right. I think that’s highly unlikely. As much as we grubby netrooters have a different temperament than the more staid punditocrisy, we have much more in common with them than the other side — and will always be at a disadvantage because of it. We are not, as a rule, drawn in solely for the combat, where the action is the juice and dominance for the sake of dominance is our motive. Indeed, just like the sniffing pundits, we all tend to be vain in our highmindedness, it’s only a difference of degree. It seems to be intrinsic to our nature.

So I think we liberals can afford to take at least a little of what Hazlitt wrote back in the day to heart without fearing that we will turn into mouthbreathing demagogues. If the last few years of modern conservative dominance have proved nothing else it proves that we “betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse.” The best case scenario is that you get left with the ruins of failed conservatism to clean up and straighten out over and over again. The worst case scenario is that someday they may just break the country for good.

Update: Caleb Crain, the author of the post I linked above, has moved his blog. The link to the post is now here. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

H/T again to KG

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Action Items

by digby

There are a couple of good intiatives and action items for you to consider today if you are so inclined.

First, Brave New Films has done a powerful new short for Mother’s Day:

Here’s the link to the site and here’s the YouTube featuring an exceptional group of women reading Julia Ward Howe’s original statement:

Send that around too. I had always heard that Mother’s Day was invented by Hallmark to sell cards. It’s nice to know that it is for real, even if it does promote something as unfashionable as peace.

The second item is an issue very close to my heart — privacy. For those who watched the Republican debate you saw that group of clowns dance on the head of a pin (and just lie right out) trying to reconcile their alleged small government philosophy with their national security authoritarian and anti mexican factions which are clamoring to turn the US into a police state when asked about a national ID card. It’s a serious issue.

From the Privacy Coalition:

Organizations have launched a nationwide campaign to engage the public in the debate over what would be the first national identification document. These transpartisan, nonpartisan, privacy, consumer, civil liberty, civil rights, and immigrant organizations have joined in this unique public education project because the REAL ID proposal put forth by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would harm our lives in a multitude of ways every day. The proposed regulations set requirements that states must follow to have their state issued identification documents accepted for federal purposes, like getting on an airplane or entering a government building, including courthouses. The power of the Department of Homeland Security, along with other federal government agencies, to reach into the everyday lives of people living in this country will be unprecedented. This is the same federal agency that had responsibility for helping people following hurricane Katrina, and proved itself not to be ready for the challenge. Creating a national identification system is a huge, complex project and there no agency in the Federal government that has proven that it could manage a project of this magnitude. What we do know: You will make more than one trip to the motor vehicle office to apply for your REAL ID national identification card; the government has estimated that the scheme will cost taxpayers $21 billion; REAL ID requires documentation that most people will have difficulty finding; and the cost of driver’s licenses and state ID cards will skyrocket. We do know that the federal government is considering expanding the REAL ID card to everyday use.

There is a limited time to submit comments against this initiative. Click here for instructions on where you can send them.

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A Perfect Storm…Of Incompetence

by tristero

Tornado recovery:

The governor said the state’s response was limited by the shifting of emergency equipment, such as tents, trucks and semitrailers, to the war in Iraq.

Not having the National Guard equipment, which used to be positioned in various parts of the state, to bring in immediately is really going to handicap this effort to rebuild,’ Sebelius said.

To state the obvious: That’s the problem with incompetence. It compounds catastrophe.

[UPDATE: Some commenters read the above and thought that I was accusing the Kansas state government, or the victims themselves of incompetence. Not so. The incompetents here are the Bush administration who made an utterly incompetent decision to invade Iraq and somehow thought things were going to turn out for the good. Well, that was never gonna happen. And suddenly other problems mount, like being woefully unprepared for disaster recovery in Kansas, caused by the shift of equipment to Iraq.

Another point also should be clarified. Some commenters said something to the effect of well, a lot of these people brought it on themselves by voting for Bush. I don’t think that is called for. Many of the people affected surely were decent, ordinary folks, and just as surely some were scoundrels. Regardless, the only appropriate identification of them all right now is as victims of a terrible natural disaster. They deserve our sympathy and support. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the fact that votes for Bush helped enable the terrible response. But at this point, I’m more focused on getting them the help they need, as I hope they put possible political/cultural differences aside for those of us in NYC on 9/11, and as I hope they will again if we’re attacked again. Even if they didn’t back then, it’s still the right attitude to take towards their emergency. An F5 tornado is simply a horrible thing to endure, and to recover from.]

Better Things To Do

by digby

I have been listening to various people today discuss the George Tenet book in light of Bob Woodward’s review of Tenet’s book in today’s WaPo:

In his remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir, George Tenet, the former CIA chief, describes a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In much more vivid and emotional detail than previously reported, Tenet writes that he had received intelligence that day, July 10, 2001, about the threat from al-Qaeda that “literally made my hair stand on end.”According to At the Center of the Storm, Tenet picked up the phone, insisted on meeting with Rice about the threat from al-Qaeda, and raced to the White House with his counter-terrorism deputy, Cofer Black, and a briefer known only as “Rich B.””There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months,” Rich B. told Rice, and the attack would be “spectacular.” Black added, “This country needs to go on a war footing now.” He said that President Bush should give the CIA new covert action authorities to go after Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. After the meeting, Tenet’s briefer and deputy “congratulated each other,” Tenet writes. “At last, they felt, we had gotten the full attention of the administration.”Though Tenet was meeting almost daily with President Bush to give him an intelligence briefing and an update on threat reports — “extraordinary access,” he labels it — by his own account he did not take the request for action “now” directly to the president.During a CBS “60 Minutes” television interview that aired April 29, correspondent Scott Pelley nailed the crucial question that Tenet leaves unanswered in his book “Why aren’t you telling the president, ‘Mr. President, this is terrifying. We have to do this now’? ” Pelley asked Tenet.”Because the United States government doesn’t work that way,” Tenet replied. “The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security adviser and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they’re going to implement.”Whoa! That’s a startling admission. I’m pretty certain that President Bush or any president, for that matter, would consider himself or herself the action officer when it comes to protecting the country from terrorism. I can already see the 2008 presidential candidates promising, “I will be your action officer on terrorism and security.”

Tenet was asked about this on Meet The Press and others discussing the Tenet book this morning also seemed to assume that had Tenet gone directly to the president with this briefing, all hell would have broken loose and the entire government would have lurched immediately into action. (Not that anyone brought up this little bit of unpleasantness, but the implication then must also be that Condi failed to mention this to the “Action Officer” as well.)

Whatever. This whole line of thinking is bizarre. We already know what Bush’s reaction was to being informed that “bin Laden determined to strike in the United States”:

The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to the President — “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” — has been widely noted in the past few years.

But, also in August, CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the President — to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.

The analytical arm of CIA was in a kind of panic mode at this point. Other intelligence services, including those from the Arab world, were sounding an alarm. The arrows were all in the red. They didn’t know the place or time of an attack, but something was coming. The President needed to know.

[…]

He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer.

“All right,” he said. “You’ve covered your ass, now.”

Bush knew about the terrorist threat assessment that summer and simply didn’t give a damn. He thought the CIA were all a bunch of panty-waisted panic artists (that’s what Uncle Dick said, anyway.)

Tenet has a lot to answer for, most especially for failing to speak up when it really mattered instead of now that he’s trying desperately to keep from being seen as Bush’s personal cheerleader. But Woodward’s odd notion that his crime was not taking his concerns directly to the president in the summer of 2001 would only be meaningful if there was a shred of evidence it would have made any difference. I don’t think so. The “action officer in chief” spent most of that summer posing for what appeared to be a series of Ralph Lauren undershirt ads. He wasn’t exactly minding the store.

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Landmines

by digby

I have long been concerned about the effects on society at large when a government openly endorses torture. It would appear that we will get a first hand look as some of the troops who fought in the Iraq war come home for good. It’s hard to believe that they will easily shed these views and may even find themselves hardening them in order to defend their actions abroad.

In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.

“It is disappointing,” said analyst John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank. “But anybody who is surprised by it doesn’t understand war. … This is about combat stress.”

The military has seen a number of high-profile incidents of alleged abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of 24 civilians by Marines, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family and the sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

“I don’t want to, for a minute, second-guess the behavior of any person in the military _ look at the kind of moral dilemma you are putting people in,” Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said of the mission in Iraq. “There’s a real tension between using too much force, which generally means using force to protect yourself, and using too little and therefore exposing yourself to greater risk.”

The overall study was the fourth in a series done by a special mental health advisory team since 2003 aimed at assessing the well-being of forces serving in Iraq.

Officials said the teams visited Iraq last August to October, talking to troops, health care providers and chaplains.

The study team also found that long and repeated deployments were increasing troop mental health problems.

But Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, the Army’s acting surgeon general, said the team’s “most critical” findings were on ethics.

“They looked under every rock, and what they found was not always easy to look at,” said Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health.

Findings included:

_Only 47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect.

_About a third of troops said they had insulted or cursed at civilians in their presence.

_About 10 percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating civilians or damaging property when it was not necessary. Mistreatment includes hitting or kicking a civilian.

_Forty-four percent of Marines and 41 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to save the life of a soldier or Marine.

_Thirty-nine percent of Marines and 36 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to gather important information from insurgents.

Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, a Marine Corps spokesman, said officials were looking closely at the ethics results, taken from a questionnaire survey of 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines.

[…]

Pike contrasted Iraq’s campaign to World War I, saying: “The trenches were pretty stressful, but a unit would only be up at the front for a few months and then get rotated to the rear. There’s no rear in Iraq; you’re subject to combat stress for your entire tour.”

Obviously, war is hell and the amount of stress they are putting on these guys is quite inhumane. The mission is a mess, they don’t know who the enemy is and they likely feel they are under seige from every direction, even from the US, although I don’t think anyone actually holds them responsible for what has happened. If there was ever a reason to remind the chickenhawk “300” afficionados that the real thing is something other than a video game and should not be undertaken for anything less than vital purposes, this should do it. (But it won’t — the quest for martial glory is embedded in the human DNA, I’m afraid, only in the past it was required that you join up to prove your manhood rather than shake your pom poms from the sidelines dressed in a warrior’s costume.)

But even with all that, 40% of the military believing that torture is acceptable is more than alarming, particularly in an elective occupation like Iraq. This is the mightiest military on earth we are talking about, not some fourth rate militia that doesn’t understand that even aside from moral considerations, torture is not worth the price in bad information, wasted time and the dehumanization of those who perpetrate it. (Of course, those in our government who use “24” as their moral and tactical guideline might disagree.)

Even more shocking to me than the torture numbers,however, is this:

47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect

Noncombatants are the very people we “liberated.” I’m hard pressed to find any reason other than rank racism or a very serious misunderstanding of what the American mission is supposed to be to explain this. I suspect it is both. Even without all the other considerations that is a clear indication that the American military can no longer effect positive change in Iraq. It has, in some very important respects, lost its honor.

That’s a problem that’s going to bite all of us. At some point these people will be bringing home these attitudes and all the confusion inflicted upon them about “enemies” and “liberation” and whether torture is moral and whether the Iraqi people deserved to be treated with respect will manifest itself in post-traumatic stress syndrome and many broken lives. It is going to be very difficult for these people to reconcile all this.

War can do that, even the “good” ones. There was plenty of “battle fatigue” after WWII and a whole lot of “shell shock” after WWI. But this is actually a magnitude worse, as Vietnam was, because when a failed and disasterous war is based on lies by powerful people for murky political ends, the people who fight it pay an unusually steep price with the guilt and confusion and life-long struggle with the fact that the people who put them there really didn’t give a damn. They react to it in many ways, some with deep anger at those who spoke out, others with a lifetime of resentment toward authority, but virtually none of them without serious damage to the psyche. I’m not sure what the effects of having two such wars in a single generation will be, but it’s bound to be very, very serious. It was bad enough the first time.

* And then there’s this —- sheer, bureaucratic ass-covering masquerading as leadership. No wonder those grunts think what they think.

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Weird Willard

by digby

“There is no work more important to America’s future than the work that is done within the four walls of the American home,” Romney said. He also criticized people who choose not to get married because they enjoy the single life.

“It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking,” Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. “In France, for instance, I’m told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.”

(Clearly, he hasn’t been watching “The Tudors.”)

But excuse me, what in hell is he talking about? There is some speculation that what he “was told” about was a fluffy French comedy that he thinks somehow reflected the law of the land, but who knows where he got this ridiculous idea? It would be in keeping with most of the Republican leadership’s dependence on popular culture for their understanding of … everything. (And I suppose we could take some heart in the fact that it was an actual “foreign” film, so that’s at least an improvement over the “Rawhide” and “Leave It To Beaver” curriculum that informed the current administration about foreign policy.)

Mitt Romney may look like Mr Perfect but I am getting a distinct whiff of the weird coming off this guy. Too bad he doesn’t dress in earth tones or the press might even notice.

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Cui Bono?

by digby

I can’t help but be reminded of something very creepy when I read this strange story about the US Attorney from Washington being recommended for firing because he was insisting on action from Washington to find the murderer of an assistant US Attorney — who happened to be a gun control advocate.

Remember this?

The National Rifle Association’s second-ranking officer boasted at a closed meeting of NRA members earlier this year that if Republican nominee George W. Bush wins in November, “we’ll have . . . a president where we work out of their office.”

C’mon. Don’t tell me you think it’s not possible…

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