Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Mercenary Blogging

by digby

Ana Marie Cox dredges up that old Kos chestnut about the mercenaries to point out that the families of those men who were ritually killed in Fallujah are suing Blackwater for failing to adequately protect their employees. She retracts her earlier assertion that “liberal bloggers famously derided these contractors as mercenaries who deserved to die” when Attaturk pointed out that it was really Markos alone on that. (She does add “I do suspect that Markos is rarely alone in his opinions on such matters” but whatever.)I can only speak for myself when I say I didn’t ever even call them mercenaries because I doubted they’d fight a war for anyone but the United States or one of its allies.

I have certainly had a lot of misgivings about the outsourcing of the military over the years, however, which I don’t think is quite the same thing. Cox brings up the fact that the families of these men claim they “operate as part of the ‘military force,’ but they don’t have the same level of protection, they don’t have the same level of survivor benefits, and — perhaps most tragically — their families don’t have the right to find out the details of their deaths. And a lot of them have died.” I was unaware of that part of the issue, but it doesn’t surprise me. The whole “contractor” scam is filled with unaccountability from the billions of dollars the companies are paid, to the fact that the contractors don’t necessarily fall under legal jurisdiction of any kind, either military or civilian.

From Tara McElvey’s article in last September’s TAP:

On May 7, 2004, shortly after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Brownlee said they would make sure individuals “responsible for the shameful and illegal acts of abuse are held accountable.” Eighty-nine members of the U.S. military have been prosecuted for detainee-related misconduct since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom. And recent reports of rape, murder, and other crimes in Haditha, Mahmudiya, and other Iraqi towns indicate that some soldiers responsible for such acts will be held accountable.

Not so for independent contractors like Nakhla, who has been implicated in charges of rape, torture, and assault during his one-year stint in Iraq. He is one of 25,000 civilian contractors who have worked for the military in Iraq since hostilities began. Currently, more than 15 contractors are under Justice Department investigations. While that number may seem small set against 25,000, many observers say instances of contractor abuse are vastly underreported by victims — and underinvestigated by the military. Only one civilian, David A. Passaro, a CIA contract interrogator, has been indicted — for assault on detainee Abdul Wali, who died in June 2003. Passaro’s trial opened on August 7.

These cases are moving forward at a snail’s pace. That’s partly because it’s not clear which laws can be applied to a nonmilitary person who commits a crime on foreign soil. In legal terms, this means untangling a web of justice that no one — not the administration, military, the public, and certainly not the contractors with powerful government ties — seems intent on untangling. In practical terms, it may mean that American employees, working alongside the U.S. military and on their payroll, committed crimes in Iraq for which they will never be punished.

They estimate that there 100,000 contractors in Iraq today, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are significant numbers more. They don’t operate under the auspices of the military and they answer to their “bosses” not the generals. This is one of the most under-reported and least investigated aspects of the occupation. Despite my undying fealty to Commandante Markos, I’m actually thrilled that the families are getting their day in court. Maybe it will shake some of this loose and we can see exactly what our tax dollars have been paying for — and what they aren’t.

.

Marketing Kucinich

by poputonian

You know, when I watched this video of Dennis Kucinich, I felt a bond develop with someone who speaks in direct terms, from the heart, and with proper regulation from the mind. I saw someone Lincolnesque in appearance, slightly disheveled, but articulate and somber. Watch and see if you agree.

Unfortunately, as some commenters noted in the thread to this post, there is a perception ‘out there’ that Kucinich ain’t cool. George Bush is cool. Barack and Hillary, and Bill Richardson are cool. Nancy Pelosi is cool. America only elects cool candidates, or kewl kids, as digby so often describes them.

So, if you’re ‘not cool’, how do you challenge the conventional wisdom?

One way is by linking to the accepted reality, but positioning yourself as different from it, in this case as “Uncool.”

“Strategies in an overcrowded marketplace suggest that to be successful, the “thing” being marketed must be correlated with what the target audience already knows and accepts as “truth.” For example, a popular commercial slogan in the 1980s was “Seven-Up®: The Uncola.” The marketing team, in this case, recognized that the competition cola products were better sellers and therefore perceived as better products. Rather than directly challenging this “accepted reality,” the marketing slogan for Seven-Up® provided an alternative for those who might be ready to try something different, thereby “re-positioning” how people think about the products.” (Ries & Trout, 2001)

Are you ready to try something different, say, something without the political ‘caffeine’? Check out this awesome 30 second retro-spot for the Uncola.
Clean, refreshing, different.
Dennis Kucinich ~ the Uncool candidate ~ Serious about America.

Natural Progression

[link]

Address Change

by digby

I thought this ws a joke when I heard about it, but it isn’t:

Halliburton Co.’s decision to relocate its chief executive and corporate headquarters to Dubai has scratched one of Congress’ most sensitive sore spots — suspicion that U.S. corporations are restructuring their operations to shirk domestic taxes.

Adding to a rush of Democrat calls for hearings, the House is pushing forward a bill whose accompanying report will ask the White House to address no-bid government contracts for contractors who relocate overseas, an apparent reference to plans by the defense contractor and oilfield services company.

But despite the mini-maelstrom created by its Sunday announcement, Halliburton’s is unlikely to see its tax bill shrink by much, say tax experts.

Unlike the well-publicized cases of Stanley Works, Halliburton says it has no plans to change its Delaware-incorporated company to an overseas tax jurisdiction.

Only the address on Halliburton Chairman and Chief Executive Dave Lesar’s business cards will switch, from Houston to Dubai.

Ok then. No big deal, right?

U.S. companies do not have to pay domestic income taxes on earnings of a foreign subsidiary until they decide to bring the money back into this country, a process known as repatriation. Dubai has no corporate income tax, a big advantage compared with the 35% corporations pay on earnings at home.

And U.S. companies typically do not pay U.S. payroll taxes on their overseas workers.

Overseas “workers” like their CEO who has a business card that now says Dubai.

C’mon.

Keep Off The Hippies

by digby

Ron Brownstein and Matt Cooper were on Hardball today (a refreshingly excellent show when it’s hosted by David Gregory instead of you-know-who) discussing the Plame hearing. Brownstein is a good reporter who usually gets it right, but today he betrayed a little bit of that beltway reflexive dismissiveness of anything “the left” finds important. He said that Waxman needed to pick his battles better because playing to the liberal blogosphere with hearings like this will create the same problems for Democrats that Republicans found themselves in when they went after Clinton. Setting aside the fact that the Republicans’ “problems” resulted in them holding all three branches of government for six years, this sounds to me like one of those tired GOP talking points that reporters love to parrot because it distances them from the hippies.

It’s especially ironic since we’ve just seen the mainstream press sporting dripping oozing egg yolk all over their faces over the US Attorney scandal, which they also dismissed as a figment of hippy conspiracy mongerer’s imaginations. This knee jerk loathing of the left tends to lead them astray and they should check themselves before they do it.

Matt Cooper and David Gregory ably argued that the Democrats can hardly be called overly zealous since this is only the second hearing the congress ever held on the issue and Cooper pointed out that this is hardly a settled issue what with the possible pardon and all. Furthermore, the underlying “crime” that Waxman is getting at isn’t the covert agent act which the lying Gorgon Toensing insists on arguing every five minutes. The crime was lying and misleading the United States of America into war, something that the congress damned well should be investigating. Valerie Plame’s outing is a window into that crime and the Democrats are wise to explore her story to show just how far the administration was willing to go to cover their tracks. What a prosecutor cannot do — prosecute a political crime — the congress surely can.

There is a huge need for the Democrats to develop the record on this administration’s many crimes. It’s important for our future and it’s important for history. What they have done should never, ever be repeated. You had the highest reaches of the white house casually revealing what was clearly “need to know” classified information (which they had no “need to know” in the first place) to reporters, for purely political purposes. The same people who did this later turned around and said that reporters for the Washington Post and NY Times should be investigated by the Justice Department for revealing classified information that was not released purely to punish a political enemy, but rather in true whistleblower fashion, to tell the nation what its government was illegally doing.

We now know that in the case of the NSA spying stories, the Attorney General personally intervened to stop an internal investigation of the program when it came too close to him, but allowed those who were investigating that alleged treason of the NY Times to carry on.

This is all part of a very large mosaic of government secrecy, political backstabbing and abuse of power. Those of us who were screaming about this until we are hoarse were dismissed out of hand when we argued that no administration should be allowed to seize such unchecked power and the assumption among the establishment was that it was just more of our “unhinged” hysteria.

It wasn’t. This stuff happened and it’s likely only the tip of the iceberg. If the press can get past their loathing of the dirty hippies for five minutes they will see that not only have we been right, we have been flogging some amazingly good stories for the past six years that had they bothered to report them would have been journalistic coups. We really aren’t that nuts — and the Bush administration really is that bad.

.

Good Assassination/Bad Assassination

by digby

Who Said This?

“You know Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has confessed to 9-11 and trying to kill President Carter. Why would you try to kill President Carter? He’s on your side, for the love of Pete.”

Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler? Ann Coulter?

Nope. This was CNN and Good Morning America contributor, Glenn Beck.

But that isn’t actually an unusual sentiment among rightwingers. Glenn Greenwald pointed out yesterday that despite the explosion of outrage at the horrible anonymous (allegedly) leftists who expressed dismay that Cheney wasn’t killed in Afghanistan, nobody seems worked up in the least by statements such as Beck’s or the even more bloodthirsty ones on the hugely popular right wing blog, Little Green Footballs. That’s the same Little Green Footballs that led the charge against those aforementioned anonymous commenters who wished for Cheney’s death, by the way.

John Amato is waiting for Michele Malkin’s bff Howard Kurtz to write about this. He was terribly upset, you’ll recall, by all those lefty horrors (which were removed as soon as they came to the attention of the blogmasters.)

This is really sick. I know we’re living in a polarized time. I know there are people who absolutely detest George Bush and Dick Cheney. I know they like to vent their spleen online, sometimes in vulgar terms, and hey, that’s life in a democracy…

Kurtz had never heard, apparently, of LGF’s hilarious jokes about “pancake girl” Rachel Corrie or the endless, disgusting homicidal rants against muslims, liberals, Clintons etc from the very same people who were falling on top of each other to get to the fainting couch over those allegedly liberal anonymous comments on Huffington Post.

I wonder how many times Kurtz is going to get punk’d by his galpal Malkin before he starts to feel like a used, wet kleenex? (Yeah, I know. What a silly creature he’s become.) Malkin’s foray into the mainstream media has given her little crusades quite a profile lately. Her patented shrieking about “unhinged” leftists has fallen on very friendly ears for reasons about which we can only speculate. But it’s starting to make some of these reporters look very, very stupid. I wonder if they know or care?

.

Red Flags

by digby

In the Plame hearings this morning Chris Van Hollen asked Victoria Toensing the question I have been waiting for somebody to ask these hypocritical Scooter Girls for a long time:

Van Hollen: Do you think White House officials have any obigation at all — put aside the techinical legal obligation — as stewards of our national security — when they find out that someone works for the Central Intelligence Agency, do you think they have any obligation to the citizens of this country to find out before telling the press about it, whether that disclosure would compromise sensitive information? As citizens ofthis country, wouldn’t you want that to be the standard?

Toensing: I think the press secretary should always tell what’s accurate so…

Van Hollen: I’m sorry?

Toensing: A press secretary should always tell what’s accurate, I have no problem with that.

Van Hollen: But before somebody goes around saying this person’s works for the CIA, in a kind of cavalier manner, and an obviously intentional manner, to try and spread this information, you said, don’t you think they have an obligation to the citizens of this country to make some determination —this was, we’re talking about the Iraq war, the decision to go to war, whether or not Saddam was trying to get nuclear weapons material.

Before they disclose the identity of somebody who works in the nucelar non-proliferation area of the CIA, don’t you think they have some obligation to demonstrate the good judgment to find out if that would disclose sensitive information?

Toensing: Uhm..well..could be, but I don’t particularly think that, uh, a red flag would go off because those of us who work in government all the time know people who work at the CIA…

I hope every covert or classified employee of the CIA takes notice. The Republicans don’t feel there’s any need for red flags to naturally go up even in the highest reaches of the White House when it’s proposed that somebody leak the name of a CIA employee who works on WMD. After all, people in government are apparently babbling to anyone who’ll listen about this stuff all the time. Good to know. I’d watch my back.

And I hope Americans will remember this when they hear the inevitable GOP caterwauling and rending of garments about leaking of classified information and national security the next time somebody leaks to the newspapers. People in government talk about people in the CIA (and I presume all other government departments) all the time so no red flags go up when they are talking to reporters about potentially sensitive information. Why should it? It didn’t even occur to the White House to double check to make sure that they weren’t giving away classified info when they used CIA agents as weapons against their political enemies.

This is the principle thing I think was lost in all this. Let’s suppose that everything the Scooter girls have been saying is true and that nobody was trying to out a CIA operative and that she wasn’t legally covert and that it was just politics as usual. Even if all that were true, which it isn’t, they would still be culpable for having the exceedingly poor judgement to casually bandy about the name of a CIA employee without checking to see what she might be working on and whether it was a good idea to publicize her name.

There is simply no excuse for outing this CIA agent, whether it was legal or not. This was the Bush Administration, the people who are allegedly fanatical about national security and who are so secretive that we can’t even know who works for the Vice President’s office. Yet, they apparently just cavalierly dropped this woman’s name to several reporters and Victoria Toensing wants us to believe that this is perfectly reasonable. I realize she’s playing with a bad hand, but this little performance was a stretch even for her. (You could practically see the gears of her brain seizing up while she played for time with that non-sequiter about the press secretary.)

This hearing was designed to show that the White House leaked classified information and nobody paid a price for doing that despite the fact that many others in government have paid significantly. It’s impossible to defend what they did, even if it was just an honest oversight. This is the White House and the CIA and weapons of mass destruction we are talking about. But as we’ve learned these past six years, there really is no limit to how much the Bush administration can screw things up and there is no limit to the dishonesty and hypocrisy of Republicans in defending it.

Toensing’s testimony was extremely difficult to listen to. She is an arrogant gorgon and lies as easily as she breathes. Waxman even said at the end that he knows her testimony was inaccurate and that he was going to leave the record open to correct all of her misstatements.

I love you Henry.

.

Tacit Approval To Let The Decider Decide On Iran

by poputonian

Around blogland there has been some backslapping and high-fiving by establishment Democrats who are proud of the House’s Iraq spending legislation. Apparently, these high-fivers believe the Cheney-Bush administration is trustworthy, that they will voluntarily handcuff themselves by virtue of their consummate sensibilities on matters of war and peace. Others don’t quite see it that way. Here’s John Nichols writing in The Nation:

… the decision by Pelosi and her allies to rewrite their Iraq legislation to exclude the statement regarding the need for congressional approval of any military assault on the neighboring country of Iran sends the worst possible signal to the White House.
…
It is not too much to suggest that Pelosi’s disastrous misstep could haunt her and the Congress for years to come.

Here’s how the Speaker messed up:

The Democratic proposal for a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq included a provision that would have required President Bush to seek congressional approval before using military force in Iran. It was an entirely appropriate piece of the Iraq proposal, as the past experiences of U.S. involvement in southeast Asia and Latin America has well illustrated that when wars bleed across borders it becomes significantly more difficult to end them. Thus, fears about the prospect that Bush might attack Iran are legitimately related to the debate about how and when to end the occupation of Iraq.

Unfortunately, Pelosi is so desperate to advance her flawed spending legislation that she is willing to bargain with any Democrat about any part of the proposal.

Under pressure from some conservative members of her caucus, and from lobbyists associated with neoconservative groupings that want war with Iran and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC), Pelosi agreed on Monday to strip the Iran provision from the spending bill that has become the House leadership’s primary vehicle for challenging the administration’s policies in the region.

One of the chief advocates for eliminating the Iran provision, Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley, said she wanted it out of the legislation because she wants to maintain the threat of U.S. military action as a tool in seeking to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. “It would take away perhaps the most important negotiating tool that the U.S. has when it comes to Iran,” explained Berkley.

The problem with Berkley’s “reasoning” — if it can be called that — is this: Nothing in the provision that had been included in the spending bill would have prevented Bush from threatening Iran. Nothing in the provision would have prevented war with Iran. It merely reminded the president that, before launching such an attack, he would need to obey the Constitutional requirement that he seek a declaration of war.

I think Nichols has it right. There is greater likelihood the war-makers will interpret the change in language as tacit agreement that it is the Decider who decides:

By first including the provision and then removing it, Pelosi and her aides have given Bush more of an opening to claim that he does not require Congressional approval.

Again and again, the Bush administration has seized any and every opening to claim powers that were never accorded the executive branch by the Constitution or the Congress. Remember that this administration has sought to justify a massive, unregulated domestic spying program by claiming authority under narrow legislation that was passed permitting the president to respond to the September 11, 2OO1, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Never mind that no mention of such spying was included in the 2OO1 legislation; the fact that it was not explicitly barred gave the administration all the room it required to claim the power to disregard the Constitution and the rule of law.

By stripping the Iran provision from the legislation that is now under consideration by Congress, Pelosi has handed Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — no believer he is [in] the separation of powers — exactly what they want. They can and will say that, when the question of whether Congress should require the administration to seek Congressional approval for an attack on Iran, Pelosi chose not to pursue the matter.

Anyone who thinks that Bush and Cheney will fail to exploit this profound misstep by Pelosi has not been paying attention for the past six years. The speaker has erred, dramatically and dangerously.

Dennis Kucinich apparently agrees with this; he made these remarks on the House floor yesterday:

This week the House Appropriations committee removed language from the Iraq war funding bill requiring the Administration, under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, to seek permission before it launched an attack against Iran.
…
This House cannot avoid its Constitutionally authorized responsibility to restrain the abuse of Executive power.
…
The Administration has been preparing for an aggressive war against Iran. There is no solid, direct evidence that Iran has the intention of attacking the United States or its allies.

Kucinich then added this very important sentiment, hopefully edging us closer to an impeachment reality:

Since war with Iran is an option of this Administration and since such war is patently illegal, then impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran.

Kucinich made other important remarks yesterday, which I’ve partially transcribed:

Congress is on the threshold of a momentous decision. If Congress continues to fund the war, the President will have enough money not only to carry the war to the end of his term, but he will also have money that could be used to attack Iran. This is something that I know has united everyone here. I have long been in contact with people from all over the region — ambassadors, people at the level of national leaders, their cabinets and secretaries, people at the UN — and it’s across the board, that people of the world agree that an attack on Iran has the potential to precipitate not just a catastrophe but a cataclysm.

Today, I had the opportunity to speak with a friend of mine who is a high ranking official with the Israeli government and this is what he told me, he said, “We really don’t have an interest in attacking Iran.” But I told him that you have to understand that your supporters here in this country are sending cues to members of Congress and to people in the administration which indicate that you favor such an attack.

In his comments, Kucinich follows the above remarks with a thumbnail sketch of administration maneuverings with regard to Iran. He goes back to the Hersh articles and forward to the Administration’s claims about the IEDs. He then talks of the grave danger that results from removing the important and constraining language, as noted above, from the Iraq spending bill. In response, Kucinich is trying to force an opening up of the language in the provision, to restore its teeth and to eliminate the ambiguity that might result from its removal.

Kudos to Kucinich, both for the nudge toward impeachment, but also for his dedication and desire to put the brakes on the Administration’s latitude to make war with Iran.

http://www.kucinich.us/

Save Some Time Henry

by digby

I don’t know if looseheadprop and Marcy Wheeler and CHS have the time, but if they do, Henry Waxman should hire them as consultants on the Plame hearings. There is no substitute for their deep understanding of the evidence or the law on this case.

.

Desperately Trying To Be Right

by digby

Matt Yglesias points us to an article by Michael Hirsch in the Washington Monthly which at least partially makes the point that the new 9/11 boogeyman did not, in fact, require that we completely overhaul our foreign policy. Indeed, it would seem that many of the old ideas would have worked quite well if bush had had the wherewithall to actually use them. It’s an interesting read.

Yglesias makes this further point:

This is not to deny that pre-Bush US foreign policy entailed, over the decades, some very serious pragmatic and moral flaws. I think it used to be the case, however, that the main elements of US strategy were basically sound, and presidents sometimes made bad decisions. Bush has turned things on their head and adopted a fundamentally flawed strategy from which he occassionally deviates by doing non-catastrophic things. In particular, it’s as if Bush ransacked post-WWII history looking for the areas where American policy has been at its worst — Indochina and Central America — and decided to apply the animating spirit of those errors across the board.

This is because the people who have been advising Bush since 9/11 are the same people (or their intellectual heirs) who were the drivers behind those earlier bad decisions. Their defining characteristic, in fact, is that they have always been wrong about everything and they never, ever learn anything from their experience.

It is also the case that their animating principle in the first few years of the administration was to do the exact opposite of Clinton in all things. It was a simple, easy to remember formula (for simple, forgetful people) that unfortunately led them to reject long-standing, bipartisan foreign policy along with everything else. When you combined the neocon and harcore hawk track records with a mandate to reject anything that Bill Clinton might have endorsed, you ended up with the hacktacular mishmash of sophomoric chest thumping, mindless military actions and conscious rejection all mutual understanding with our allies. It was an amazing thing to watch and I’m not sure we have enough distance from it yet to even begin to understand the full dimension of the errors that ensued.

Also, you really can’t discuss these people and their repeated bad decisons without mentioning the running battles with the CIA over the years. The Dick and Don Team B show, in particular, had overestimated the Soviet threat so many times in the past that the fact that anyone listened to a word they said is a testament to the sheer will of their personalities. When you come right down to it, this all goes back to the credibility issue we have discussed ad nauseum. It’s true that making the wrong call about Iraq does not destroy one’s credibility in one go and I certainly hope that most of the liberals who made that call will not develop an entire worldview based on vindicating that one wrong decision.

The people who were flogging Iraq for the past decade or so had all been proven wrong many, many times before. I frankly couldn’t believe it when the Team B people were screaming that the sky was falling again, based on transparently flimsy evidence, and people were actually believing them. That is why there is an obvious danger in allowing people who are wrong over and over again to have privileged access to the informed discourse when big decisions are being made. In the heat of the moment people forget that these people are always wrong about everything.

.