NEW YORK—New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller today announced that the paper’s longtime staff writer Michael Gordon is not an actual person, but rather a voice-activated tape recorder.
“I’m not sure why everyone didn’t figure this out before now,” said Keller, pointing to the fact that, in Gordon’s 26-year career, all of “his” stories have consisted entirely of transcribed statements by anonymous government officials.
According to Jill Abramson, the paper’s Managing Editor, Gordon was purchased for $27.95 at a Radio Shack on West 43rd Street. Describing the situation as “a prank” that had “gotten slightly out of hand,” Abramson said the paper had decided to acknowledge Gordon’s identity because—after the tape recorder’s front page story today, “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says”—there “was no place left to take the joke.”
It took far too long, but a report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war…
The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations.
Now let’s shake off the lulling effect of their deliberately dispassionate language and think about all this for a few moments. Then it becomes quite clear that given what is actually at issue here, the editors’ atrociously mixed metaphor – “cooked up a link” – is an inexcusably cowardly effort to avoid their solemn responsibility to talk truth to power.
Even in the face of an official report from the Pentagon inspector general which all but says so, the New York Times still cannot screw up the courage to state plainly the only possible conclusion: The Bush administration knowingly, criminally lied to the American people in order to start an illegal war and invade a country that, no matter how odious its leader, was no threat to the United States. Nor do the editors have the guts to dispense with cooked links and write clearly about the ghastly consequences: Feith’s hands – and those of even higher officials – are dripping red with the blood of over 3100 American soldiers and countless thousands (literally) of innocent Iraqis, victims of the murderous evil of this administration’s lies.
This is not the kind of behavior over which to mince words. These are the sorts of actions that treason trials and international war crimes tribunals are for.
There is something terribly corrupt about a country that will permit such unspeakable, murderous acts to remain unpunished. And it is high time the so-called political and cultural leaders of this country said so without equivocation. My God, people, we’ve had our country’s government openly as well as secretly establish concentration camps all over the world; practice torture as an approved government policy; engaged in, and boasted about, international assasinations; destroyed through military action a foreign state merely because it could (and openly plan to do it again in the near future); undermined the integrity of the press by deliberately planting false stories and suborning journalists; been exposed as capable of using every tactic short of physical violence to prevent critics from publishing the truth; ignored the will of the American people, expert opinion, commonsense, and all common decency; advocated ever more bizarre theories of unlimited, unchecked power, and acted as if they were the law of the land …
We are being ruled by psychopaths and fascists, not link cookers.
TPM , The Carpetbagger Report and others including yours truly wrote recently about this bizarre new theory that the VP’s office has cooked up apparently granting him some sort of special, unaccountable status as an office that is both Executive and Legislative and so reports to nothing and no one.
Steve Benen reports tonight that this is actually a working theory they are using in other circumstances:
An important legal ruling is pending over Vice President Cheney’s refusal to disclose statistics on document classification and declassification activity. The Information Security Oversight Office, which is responsible for the policy and oversight of the government’s security classification system, has asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to direct Cheney’s office to disclose these statistics.
Cheney’s office provided the information until 2002 but then stopped doing so, J. William Leonard, the director of ISOO, told U.S. News. At issue is whether the office of the vice president is an executive branch entity when it comes to supporting the activities of the president and the vice president. The reporting requirements for disclosing classification and declassification activity fall under a presidential executive order.
“Basically the definition says that any entity of the executive branch that comes into possession of classified information is covered by the reporting requirements,” says Leonard. “I have my understanding of what the executive order requires, and I’m going to the attorney general to ascertain if my reading of the executive order is correct.”
However, Megan McGinn, Cheney’s deputy press secretary, says the vice president’s office is exempt.
“This matter has been thoroughly reviewed,” McGinn told U.S. News, “and it has been determined that reporting requirements do not apply to the office of the vice president, which has both legislative and executive functions.”
Benen says: “At the risk of sounding intemperate, this is insane.”
At the risk of sounding even more intemperate, Dick Cheney may need to be removed from office. This makes Dick Nixon’s theories of presidential power look like childsplay.
When I asked if Cheney had “found” a fourth branch of government in position that until a decade or so ago was considered a seat warmer for a presidential run and the designated state funeral stand-in for the president, I didn’t realize they were actually setting this forth as a legal argument. Dear God.
This means that he considers himself even more “unitary” than he considers the president, beyond all reach of either branch, answerable to no one.
Cheney is refusing to comply with a presidential executive order. What do you suppose the Empty Codpiece feels about this? Does he know that his Vice president believes he has an independent office that doesn’t answer to him or anyone else?
But maybe Junior likes being publicly humiliated by Dick Cheney. He seems to have a very high tolerance for looking like one of history’s most memorable horses asses, so who knows?
Many people have noted that popular culture has added tremendously to an acceptance in the culture of torture techniques and abusive behavior toward suspects and prisoners. It’s a staple of television and movies and it’s even been posited that this has had an effect on poorly trained and sadistically minded people who have been involved with the US torture regime of the last few years.
So it was with interest that I noticed that HBO‘s series “Rome”, as violent and bloody a spectacle as you will ever see, featured an unusual perspective on the subject. One of the characters, a lieutenant of the future Augustus Caesar’s mother Atia, is called upon to perform despicable acts of torture against his mistress’s rival Servilia. But as time goes on he finds himself estranged from normal life, an outsider in his own family, disdained by his religious (but hypocritical) brother and generally coming to feel disoriented and odd. He gets edgier and edgier until he finally breaks down and refuses to carry out the latest horrific torture, screaming at his mistress “I’m not an animal!” and he lets the victim go.
I’ve written about this before, about the danger to the people we are forcing to carry out these inhuman acts in our names — and the danger to our society as a whole:
To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo — you didn’t question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it’s wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it’s immoral — and, more shockingly, whether it’s a positive good. Our country is now openly discussing the efficacy of torture as a method for extracting information.
When Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” he couldn’t ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family (and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It’s not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture is really torture if it features less than “pain equavalent to organ failure.” People no longer instinctively recoil at the word — it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights. It spirals down from there.
Today the Washington Post features a first person account by an American interrogator who reflects on his complicitness in the torture of prisoners in Iraq — and the nightmares he suffers from it:
A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.
That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I’ve long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.
The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.
Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.
I’m sure there are those who have no such self-awareness, or who truly believe that such sadistic treatment was warrented and correct. But it will blow back on them too, in some way, somewhere. Because it is a simple truth that when you treat human beings like animals, you become one yourself. And on some level, there is a part of every person that howls in protest against such debasement whether they are the perpetrator or the victim.
This man knows what he did and is speaking out as a way to redeem himself. Others will likely use far less positive means to exorcize themselves of this pain and degradation. And everyone will pay the price.
I’m sure most of you have already seen this, but if not, click over to C&L to see The Daily Donohue, a new public service feature by John Amato devoted to the talk show oeuvre of the ubiquitous president of the conservative Catholic league.
Here’s the money quote:
“As for the alleged abuse, it’s time to ask some tough questions. First, there is a huge difference between being groped and being raped, so which was it Mr. Foley? Second, why didn’t you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn’t allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?”
Reporters all over the country are quoting this man as being a leading spokesman for Catholics all over the nation.
MSNBC featured a lively segmentthis morning between Dan Gerstein, Joe Lieberman’s personal WATB, and some other guy on the subject of the Edwards blogger brouhaha.
Nameless MSNBC blond host: Here to talk about how much this could hurt John Edwards are Dan Gerstein former senior advisor for Senator Joe Lieberman and Democratic strategist, as well as Brad Blakeman a Republican strategist.
Let’s start with you Dan. These bloggers that we’re talking about. If Edwards is so personally offended by their comments, why not just fire them and be done with it?
Gerstein: Well, it sounds like a simple question, but there’s a big problem in the Democratic party right now. And let me preface what I’m about to say by saying I have a blog, I’m a big believer in the power of blogs in politics to make it more Democratic and empower people’s voices, but for a lot of the Democratic bloggers there’s extremism, anger, and there’s a kind of lack of accountability for what people say and do and I think this is more and more going to become a problem in presidential politics as the blogosphere and the campaign world start converging. And I think, to sum it up, I think this is a warning sign there’s a risk of getting fleas if you lie down with blogs.
NMBH: Interesting. Hey Brad I have a question. Can you really hold John Edwards accountable for something that low level staffers posted this one in particular before she was even working for the campaign?
Blakeman: Yes you can because, you’re directly responsible for your employees. And this isn’t a third party who has no connection to Edwards. These are people who work for him. And there’s no way to defend this type of activity whether they are Republican or Democrat.These people need to go and they need to go quick. And if they don’t go quick, it’s going to be very detrimental to Senator Edwards.
NMBH: Dan, when you see someone like Bill Donohue jumping all over this. This is the head of the Catholic League,about 350,000 catholics across the country that are members of that, does it make you think that this incident might haunt Senator Edwards down the line, especially as he tries to court the conservative Christian voters?
Gerstein: Well in the short term it’s gonna help him because in the Democratic base, the activists, he stood up to the far right and he refused to be bullied, and the won the favor of the bloggers which are an important constituency in the Democratic Party. My concern is that how this is going to affect him and the Democratic Party down the line and particuarly in the general lection and here’s why.
The Democratic Party has made great efforts and I give Howard Dean great credit for this, for reaching out to the evangelical community, and the faith based communities in general to try and rebuild some of the trust that’s been eroded over the years. And an episode like this, what it does is, regardless of whether John Edwards fired them, he appears to be tacitly condoning anti-Catholic bias when there are a lot of Catholic Democrats in this country and that’s going to have the potential to turn off voters to the Democratic Party.
NMBH: Guys listen, I’ve got to call it a wrap, this time. I know you’re both coming back. Brad, I’m going to begin with you next time, make it a little more fair and balanced.
I know that we can’t expect MSNBC to know that Bill Donohue is a date-rape defending crackpot or to know that Dan Gerstein is a far right neocon who represents about three nominal Democrats in the whole country — Lieberman, Lanny Davis and Martin Peretz. The media are all very distracted by the breaking news that Anna Nicole is still dead and they don’t have time to seek out any real facts or provide serious context.
But really, do they not even know their anchors are using the FoxNews tagline? No wonder they languish in third place…
Cliff Schecter has more on the recent ramblings of Dan Gerstein, the Democratic “strategist,” who’s written an analysis for the DLC positing that Lieberman is the true representative of the base of the Democratic party. Update: Uh oh. We’ve lost Bérubé.
Well, I used to be a Democrat, but these foul-mouthed liberal bloggers have left me no choice but to join forces with Bill Donohue and Dick Cheney. I’m looking forward to the restoration of civil discourse in the public sphere, and might I add, now that I’ve decided not to hate America any more, I’m really angry about Chappaquiddick.
Oh, yeah, almost forgot: I didn’t leave the left blogosphere — it left me.
The appeal of Jim Webb has been mentioned a few times as having a yet-to-be-defined quality that Democrats find endearing. What I’ve noticed is that he speaks in direct terms, from internalized knowledge, and with little hesitation. In this way, and for lack of a better description, he does not appear ‘politician-like.’ People tend not to trust politicians, but they do trust leaders who are confident, and who fall within a range of sensibilities.
One other thing I’ve noticed about Webb is that when he cites a source as evidence, he uses people his opponents are more likely to deem unimpeachable. This is good polemics. In his State of the Union response, he used Republican Teddy Roosevelt to support the case against class division, and Dwight Eisenhower to suggest how a past Republican ended what seemed an interminable war. Reaching to the other side for evidence can devastate a debate opponent.
For example, if someone like Bob Novak took a big, though legitimate, dump on Republicans, like he did the other day:
The result of McConnell’s tactics is that no resolution will be passed by the Senate anytime soon. The White House was overjoyed. But Tuesday’s headlines indicated a public relations fiasco for Republicans: “GOP Stalls Debate on Troop Increase” (The Post),””In Senate, GOP Blocks a Debate Over Iraq Policy” (New York Times),” “Vote on Iraq is blocked by GOP” (USA Today).” Considering that outcome after a tactical victory, the Republicans might have been better off with a strategic defeat.
And if Novakula even threw John McCain’t into the mix …
McCain was particularly vigorous, antagonizing Reid and other Democrats by contending that anti-surge resolutions say to U.S. troops that “we think they are going to fail, and this is a vote of no confidence.”
… you’d want build on the case that only Republican Neanderthals would suppress the Iraq debate. To do this, I imagine Jim Webb would find sources who are unimpeachable in the eyes of his opponent, less likely sources who exhibit a better appreciation for Democracy than Republicans do.
ANDREA SEABROOK: The House Armed Services Committee room was packed. Two guests faced the rows of lawmakers. They were Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace. … Secretary ROBERT GATES (Department of Defense): As a truism from the beginning of time and the time the first Neanderthal picked up a club, you try to see whether your enemies are divided or not, all I would say is that history is littered with examples of people who underestimated robust debate in Washington, D.C. for weakness on the part of America.
I think he just called McCain’t and his ilk “Neanderthals.”
SEABROOK: Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace was even clearer.
General PETER PACE (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Army): There’s no doubt in my mind that the dialogue here in Washington strengthens our democracy. Period.
SEABROOK: Pace said enemies may watch and take comfort in the debate in Congress, but they have little understanding of democracy, he said. And as far as the support of U.S. troops, said Pace –
General PACE: They understand how our legislature works. And they understand that there’s going to be this kind of debate, but they’re going to be looking to see whether or not they are supported in the realm of mission given and resources provided.
SEABROOK: There were also troops on Capitol Hill today, former soldiers now lobbying against the surge. They made their way from office to office, finally paying a visit to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. John Sults(ph) runs this group of veterans.
Mr. JOHN SULTS (Former Soldier): We’re the troops, we’re here. We are the troops. We’re sitting next to leader Pelosi, because “they” don’t support the troops.
SEABROOK: They, in this case, is the Republicans, says Sults.
Mr. SULTS: If you all want to talk about not supporting the troops, go over to the Republican side ask them how to vote against body armor instead, not once, but twice in 2003. That’s not supporting troops. If you support escalation, you don’t support the troops. Twenty thousand more troops in Baghdad is a backdoor timeline. It is like spitting in the ocean. It will not make a difference. We need a new strategy in Iraq.
That’s how Webb would do it, methinks. Where possible, use sources your opponents respect, even worship, and the cases will almost close themselves.
I realize that to many readers this makes me sound like the immortal Roger De Bris,* but despite having lived through it, and having also read The Hunting of the President pretty closely, I never knew about this truly incredible behavior by WaPo and the other media outlets:
What were the rules in the Clinton era? Consider the Post’s clownish conduct in covering that Lincoln Bedroom matter. First, to swell the number of “overnight guests” at whom the eds could scream in dismay, the Post decided to include—no, we’re not kidding—guests at Chelsea Clinton’s middle-school slumber parties. On Day One, the Post had reported a smaller number of “overnight guests” than the bulk of their clowning competitors. So presto, change-o! On Day Two, they added in Chelsea’s 72 guests, without explanation—thereby producing a larger, more troubling number of White House “overnight guests.”
Yes. They actually did that.
That’s right. Post readers were handed a larger number—because a bunch of 13-year-old girls had been added to the miscreant list. In this manner, the Post made a rolling joke of your discourse—your democracy—all through those vile Clinton years. (Forgive our “poor form” in remembering.)
The things you learn from the blogosphere! I am not suggesting that things are any better today (see, for example, Donohue, William; Beck, Glenn; and of course the moral idiot D’Souza, Dinesh upon whom WaPo recently re-bestowed their imprimatur, going so far as to provide this bilious scoundrel with highly valuable op-ed space to use as a barf bag for his pseudo-intellectual vomit .). Btw, not to be a niggling nitpicker, and a lazy one at that, but Bob didn’t provide links. Anyone got ’em? UPDATE: Total list of Lincoln bedroom guests courtesy reader Poolside. Now, can we get links to the WaPo adding in Chelsea’s classmates?
…Mr. Edwards sets out to cover the uninsured with a combination of regulation and financial aid. Right now, many people are uninsured because, as the Edwards press release puts it, insurance companies “game the system to cover only healthy people.” So the Edwards plan, like Schwarzenegger’s, imposes “community rating” on insurers, basically requiring them to sell insurance to everyone at the same price.
Many other people are uninsured because they simply can’t afford the cost. So the Edwards plan, again like other proposals, offers financial aid to help lower-income families buy insurance. To pay for this aid, he proposes rolling back tax cuts for households with incomes over $200,000 a year.
Finally, some people try to save money by going without coverage, so if they get sick they end up in emergency rooms at public expense. Like other plans, the Edwards plan would “require all American residents to get insurance,” and would require that all employers either provide insurance to their workers or pay a percentage of their payrolls into a government fund used to buy insurance.
But Mr. Edwards goes two steps further.
People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.
Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting — the process of screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.
Better still, “Health Markets,” the press release says, “will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.” This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition.
And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. “Over time,” the press release says, “the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.”
So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.
Oh, and by the way, Krugman, unlike his employers, knows better than to play along with faux controversies ginned up anti-semitic theocrats: he completely ignores them.
And also by the way, Edwards’ not the only Democrat running who’d be a superb president. And it’s early. Looks like we’ll have many excellent choices.
So I hear through the grapevine that Libby defense fund chairwoman and all around GOP assassin Barbara Comstock turned heads by bringing former Republican Senator and current TV star Fred Thompson to the trial today. (Here’s a news report on it.) I’m sure the town was all atwitter at the return of the glamorous Tennessee hunk.
The New York Post, of all venues, reported recently that the Tennessee senator had of late become something of a sex object for “Capitol Hill hotties,” one of whom complained about “all these other women” who wouldn’t leave the senator alone. “I can’t get up to get a cocktail at a party without coming back and finding some girl sitting at my chair,” the woman was quoted as saying.
Margaret Carlson, the writer for Time and host for CNN, is described this way: “She calls his apartment all the time. It’s the joke all over Washington that Margaret has this huge crush on him. And Fred is clearly not interested.” (To which the gallant Thompson responded: “I generally don’t comment on these matters, but as it relates to the statements made about my friend Margaret Carlson, I should be so lucky.”)
I would feel sorry for poor Margaret except for the fact that she’s supposed to be a journalist and all this insider political/media incest makes me sick. Is it too much to ask that reporters refrain from actually sleeping with the people they are supposed to be covering? It’s bad enough that we have to put up with the cocktail weenie phenomenon.