Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Breaking The Furniture

by digby

This is going to keep me up tonight:

One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston,South Carolina.

That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.

“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

[…]

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said Sunday that the military disputes Mr. Padilla’s accusations of mistreatment. And, in court papers, prosecutors deny “in the strongest terms” the accusations of torture and say that “Padilla’s conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his safety and security.”

“His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment when necessary,” the government stated. “While in the brig, Padilla never reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel.”

In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”

Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, “There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement.”

Ali al-Marri, a Qatari and Saudi dual citizen and the only enemy combatant currently detained in the United States, has made similar claims of isolation and deprivation at the brig in South Carolina. The Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Vician, said Sunday that he could not comment on the methods used to escort Mr. Padilla to the dentist. Blackened goggles and earphones are rarely employed in internal prison transports in the United States, but riot gear is sometimes used for violent prisoners.

One of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said, however, that Mr. Padilla was a “completely docile” prisoner. “There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience,” said Mr. do Campo, who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender’s office.

I know that all the tough guys on the right will say that Padilla is just being a typical whining malcontent but I have a feeling that most of them would crumble into blubbering babies after five minutes in his position. This treatment is extremely inhumane. They basically blinded, deafened and then isolated him, essentially destroying his mind. There is no reason on earth to put those goggles and earphones on him to go to the dentist in the prison in South Carolina except to keep him from ever feeling like a normal human being, part of the natural world. It’s sick.

A psychiatrist for the defense says:

“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.

Of course this could just be a defense tactic. But there’s something really sinister about his behavior that leads her to these conclusions. It’s not your typical insanity type assessment:

Mr. Padilla’s lawyers say they have had a difficult time persuading him that they are on his side.

From the time Mr. Padilla was allowed access to counsel, Mr. Patel visited him repeatedly in the brig and in the Miami detention center, and Mr. Padilla has observed Mr. Patel arguing on his behalf in Miami federal court.

But, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit, his client is nonetheless mistrustful. “Mr. Padilla remains unsure if I and the other attorneys working on his case are actually his attorneys or another component of the government’s interrogation scheme,” Mr. Patel said.

Mr. do Campo said that Mr. Padilla was not incommunicative, and that he expressed curiosity about what was going on in the world, liked to talk about sports and demonstrated particularly keen interest in the Chicago Bears.

But the defense lawyers’ questions often echo the questions interrogators have asked Mr. Padilla, and when that happens, he gets jumpy and shuts down, the lawyers said.

Dr. Hegarty said Mr. Padilla refuses to review the video recordings of his interrogations, which have been released to his lawyers but remain classified.

He is especially reluctant to discuss what happened in the brig, fearful that he will be returned there some day, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit.

“During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body,” Mr. Patel said. “The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.”

When I was a kid I read “The Count Of Monte Cristo” and it had a profound affect on me. It is a book about horrible injustice, terrible solitary confinement and the natural human response to suffering it. Every time I read about these prisoners being thrown into these high tech dungeons, isolated and dehumanized I think of that book and the descriptions of madness to which Edmund Dantes nearly succumbs until his mind is saved by the presence of another person to talk to. I think isolation and lack of a sense of time and strange repetitive interrogations may be even more cruel than physical punishment. The belief that it will never end, that you’ve lost all normal sense of personhood and control — that your mind is being stripped away and there’s nothing you can do about it — must be terrifying.

I get the sense that a lot of this stuff was rank experimentation. We have known for years that Guantanamo became a guinea pig farm very early on in which they trained green interrogators in “new” techniques. This was probably part of a similar program.

From a January 2004 article in Vanity Fair by David Rose:

Reporters are not allowed to speak with interrogators or anyone else who deals with intelligence at Gitmo. The only testimony I hear is from General Geoffrey Miller, the task-force commander. “We are developing information of enormous value to the nation,” says Miller, a slight, pugnacious man said to be a strict disciplinarian. “We have an enormously thorough process that has very high resolution and clarity. We think we’re fighting not only to save and protect our families, but your families also. I think of Gitmo as the counterterrorism-interrogation battle lab.”

But Miller’s background is in artillery, not intelligence, and senior intelligence officials with long experience in counterterrorism, who spoke to Vanity Fair on condition of anonymity, question his assessment

[…]

General Miller, however, sees no cause for concern. “I believe we understand what the truth is. We are very, very good at interrogation… As many of our detainees have realized that what they did was wrong, they have begun to give us information that helps us win the global war on terror.”

Spies and psychiatrists may have their doubts, but Donald Rumsfeld is convinced that even the mere foot soldiers imprisoned at Gitmo are “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” All, he has said, “were involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans.”

You read some of this stuff now and it’s like these guys were all running lines from some cheap 1950’s era B-Movie script. Yet the press corps called this nutcase Rummy a “rock star.” It was some sort of mass delusion.

Somewhere they came up with the idea that every single person detained by the military as an enemy combatant was not just guilty, he was not even a human being. And so they did this stuff almost as if to make sure the person was not treated as a human being in any way. Perhaps it tested their own assumptions too much if they were seen as people instead of pure personifications of evil.

And it worked:

In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”

This “piece of furniture” had to have blackout goggles and earphones, manacles and a force of men in riot gear in order to go to the prison dentist. I do not know if they made him wear the goggles and earphones when he had his root canal. But I’d be willing to bet they did. It would be so much more punishing not to be able to see and hear, but be able to feel. Why waste an opportunity to further dehumanize the furniture?

Oh, and be sure to read the whole article to remind yourself of just what a pathetic, absurd case the government is bringing against this guy.

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No Child (Or Farmer) Left Behind

by poputonian

What do you call a “large canister … as long as 13 feet and weighing up to 2,000 pounds … packed with … hundreds of … bomblets or submunitions packed with shrapnel and an explosive charge … launched from the air by fighter planes, bombers, or helicopters, or shot out of artillery, rockets or missile systems?”

It would be tempting to call it a cluster bomb.

Suppose that between 20 and 40 percent of the bomblets do not detonate upon impact and thus “their effects stretch beyond the duration of the hostilities” and when they do explode they “cannot distinguish between civilian and combatant.” What do you call it then?

How about a big canister full of land mines?

Probably not. Cluster bombs are legal and land mines are not. So we’d better go with cluster bomb.

The State Department is investigating Israel’s use of American made cluster bombs during the war in Lebanon–in particular whether Israel broke a secret agreement made in 1967 not to use cluster bombs against civilians.
…
During the last three days of the war–as the final touches on the peace agreement were being made–Israel dropped an estimated 1.2 million bomblets throughout Lebanon, a country smaller than the state of Connecticut. Jan Egeland, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, was decidedly undiplomatic in his assessment: “What is shocking and, I would say, to me, completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution.”

With their failure rate of up to 40%, more than one of every three bombs may not detonate immediately–lying in wait for children, trucks, and livestock.
…
An unnamed Israeli commander of a rocket unit in Lebanon told Haaretz on September 12 that the saturation bombing with cluster weapons was “insane and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs.”
…
The saturation bombing has effectively crippled agriculture. Farmers’ fields and orchards are now minefields and their crops are rotting on the stalk. The summer tobacco, wheat, and fruit, as well as late-yielding crops like olives, cannot be harvested, and winter crops, like lentils and chickpeas, have not been planted because farmers cannot plow their fields.

Many of the two to three daily casualties are poor farmers desperate to feed their families from fields that are now de facto minefields.

Rida Noureddine, an olive and wheat farmer whose land is littered with cluster bombs, feels the frustration of many southern Lebanese who are dependent on the land. He told the New York Times, “I feel as though someone has tied my arms, or is holding me by the neck, suffocating me because this land is my soul.”
…
An Israeli Defense Force spokesman insists that “all of the weapons and munitions used by the IDF are legal according to international law and their use conforms to international standards.” That is cold comfort for the family of 11-year-old Ramy Shibleh, one of the post-war victims. He was gathering pinecones outside Halta, a small southern town where the Lebanese army had already cleared mines twice. But more bombs remained, including the one that Ramy and his brother hit with their cart of pinecones. Reuters reported that Ramy tried to toss the rock-like object out of the way, but it exploded, tearing off his right arm and the back of his head and killing him instantly. His mother keeps the shreds of the yellow shirt Ramy was wearing when he died. “He was only picking up the pine nuts to buy the toys he loved,” she told reporters.

From “What We Leave Behind: From Kosovo to Lebanon, cluster bomb casualties continue to mount” in the December print edition of In These Times. The article will be available on-line soon.

In 2005, The Per Capita Income Of Kenya Was US $463

by tristero

So sez Centre for Business Information in Kenya. Now, I’m no economist, and I understand one can quibble about how useful per capita income is when comparing economies. Even so, a pci of $463 is a truly sobering figure for those of us in the USA, where a penthouse apartment can set you back as much as $70 million (pending board approval, of course) and where our own pci is $42, 000

So what is the vital issue that the evangelicals of Kenya plan to focus on next year? You guessed it:

Leaders of Kenya’s Pentecostal congregation, with six million adherents, want the human fossils [in Kenya’s National Museum, some of the most important fossils in tracing the evolution of hominids to modern Homo Sapiens] de-emphasized.

“The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact,” said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.

“Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory,” the bishop said.

Bishop Adoyo said all the country’s churches would unite to force the museum to change its focus when it reopens after eighteen months of renovations in June 2007. “We will write to them, we will call them, we will make sure our people know about this, and we will see what we can do to make our voice known,” he said.

Dear Bishop Adoyo, If you ever get tired fighting the good fight in Kenya, Move here! I’m sure you’ll find a really great job that pays a lot more than the price of a single iPod, give or take.

Hey, Hey, Joe and J

by digby

So Holy Joe backed St John McCain’s call for more troops this morning. If Bush agrees, which I think is possible considering his temperament and history, then they can be the Johnson and McNamara of 2008.

Newsweek reports:

Since the election, the Arizona senator has pushed for more, not fewer, troops in the Iraq conflict, claiming “without additional ground forces we will not win this war.” It’s a striking stance for a man considered to be the front runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, considering the American public’s growing impatience for the end of the war. Even in conservative New Hampshire, 38 percent of voters now support bringing troops “home ASAP,” according to the most recent Granite State poll. South Carolina, where a tough defeat ended McCain’s 2000 campaign, will play an even more influential role in 2008 thanks to early placement in the primary calendar. There, too, Republican voters are growing unhappy with the war. “People are wondering how long this is going to go on,” says Buddy Witherspoon, a Republican National Committeeman from Columbia. “I don’t think a proposal like that is going to get McCain any votes down here.”

Privately, some McCain supporters have begun to worry that the senator’s hard line on the war may turn off the moderate, independent-minded voters who’ve long formed the bedrock of his primary support. “We lost independents,” says one campaign adviser, who asked for anonymity discussing the politics of national security. “McCain will have to get them back to win, or at least convince them to trust him.”

Still, some members of McCain’s inner circle are convinced the position could actually work to his advantage—reminding independents of the maverick they fell in love with in 2000. In a 2008 campaign, aides say, the senator would accentuate his differences with the Bush administration over management of the Iraq occupation, stressing his early criticism of ousted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the persistent call for more troops. The hope, the campaign adviser says, is that even antiwar voters will gradually come to accept the position as “a long-term stand based on principle.”

I have written about this before. The McCain Iraq escalation plan is a very dicey proposition, but not necessarily for the reasons stated in that article. He’s making some assumptions about the state of play in 2008, not how voters are thinking in 2006. If there is no escalation and things continue to disintegrate, which it will no matter what we do, it allows McCain to run against both Bush and the Democrats (as any GOP candidate will have to do) and say that if they’d followed his advice we would have won the war. The Democrat will be left with “we should have admitted that we lost two years ago” which is not exactly a stirring refrain. The lines are already being drawn between the cowardly Dems who urged a pullout and the brave Republicans who did their best and were betrayed by the vast hippie conspiracy. Nobody will be better positioned to creatively use that argument for himself than McCain if he can say that he had the “winning” plan and nobody listened.

I realize that is an absurd position. But when you’re talking about presidential politics it’s exactly the kind of position that can win. I think it’s a very smart move.

However, if the McCain Iraq escalation plan is actually gaining ground, as it seems to be, with his exact request for 20,000 troops being bandied about by the Pentagon and others, then perhaps McCain is going to see his plan put into action rather than have it as a conveniently theoretical alternate reality. As I said before, I don’t want to see any more troops sent over to that meat grinder. But if it happens, it’s going to mess up McCain, big time.

If he goes into ’08 being the guy who escalated the war when we were about to end it and it didn’t work, he’s got a problem. If it remains theoretical, he may be able to get away with it by appealing to American’s need to believe that we would have won if only we’d done it right. Nobody should delude themselves into thinking that many Americans aren’t going to find that appealing. In America “losing” must be blamed on someone and firmly establishing the other side as being responsible is going to be the number one job of both parties and each individual candidate over the next two years. It isn’t going to be pretty.

St John and Holy Joe are pushing to send more troops to their deaths for cynical political reasons. They are betting that Bush won’t do what they want him to do. I certainly hope they don’t send any more soldiers over there to get killed. But it would probably be better for the Democrats if they did.

If Bush doesn’t do the wrong thing this one time then the Dems had better figure out another way to block his play.

*tristero muses below about another theory — that Bush will withdraw to the borders. St John would drop to his knees and thank the good lord Jesus and Allah too is Bush were kind and generous enough to let that happen. The last thing he wants is for Bush to actually follow his advice.

I realize that it is also cynical for me to even be considering the political implications in all the horrible options. But in my view Bush is going nowhere, no matter what Uncle Jimmie and the boys or anybody else says. It’s just not in his nature — or Cheney’s. So what Democrats do about the war are largely a hypothetical questions to do with the 2008 election. I wish I could believe that someone could make George W. Bush or Joe Lieberman see reason on this but it’s not going to happen. All that’s left is who gets the blame.

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Bush Exceeds Expectations. Again.

by tristero

A while ago (I’ll get the links later), I took a lot of flak from folks when I opined that stay or leave wouldn’t matter very much ’cause Bush would find a way to fuck up either action beyond everyone’s wildest imaginings. What got everyone so steamed was the assumption that somehow I was going all McCain on you. In vain I protested that I was not in way endorsing the idea the troops stay. Of course I don’t. I was simply talking about how spectacularly incompetent Bush was.

But I felt quite certain that if Bush agreed to a withdrawal, he would find a way to do it that would make matters far worse. Exactly how he could manage such an astonishing feat I had no idea, Torch Najaf? Destroy Fallujah again? Nevertheless, I know this president. I knew he was capable of making a troop withdrawal as insane an action as all his others.

It looks like I may be right, unfortunately:

President Bush is weighing a range of options in Iraq, including a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from violence-plagued cities and a troop buildup near the Iranian and Syrian borders, his top security aide said today.

Do I have to spell out what’s so awful about this? Ok, I suppose I do.

Since late this spring, Seymour Hersh has been publishing article after article detailing behind the scenes plan for nuclear war with Iran. That’s right, nuclear war with Iran. Sometime around April, there was a revolt among the US generals who insisted that the nuclear option be removed from discussions about military options re: Iran before they would agree to discuss them. Only after the generals went semi-public did the Administration back down and take the nuclear option out of discussion. Now if you believe Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld stopped jonesing – and planning – for the Big Bang on Iran, you’re a fool. But ok, at least officially, active planning to hit Iran continued, but no nukes (wink, wink).

Recently, Hersh reported after the November election that as far as Cheney was concerned, the Bush administration will simply circumvent Congress if he, Cheney, deems it necessary to whack Iran or Syria. And believe me, he does so deem it necessary.

Soooo, we come to today. The Iraqi civil war that Bush/Iraq ignited has descended, as many said it would, to close to utter anarchy. And the US, weakened -as Kurtz so helpfully informed us – by all those Democrats who want America to “lose” is demanding withdrawal. And lo and behold, Emperor George listens to his subjects. We will given them withdrawal.

Now, no one said where they wanted the troops withdrawn to. Surely you didn’t expect Bush to ship them all to Honolulu and spend the rest of their service sipping Mai Tais and lowering their precious supply of oxytocin engaging in fornication with the locals, now did you?

So Americans want withdrawal? They’re getting withdrawal. To the Syrian and Iranian borders. Where else?

Check it out: Bush will tell us, as he always has, that the Iranians and/or the Syrians – it depends on which day it is as to who’s to blame – are the ones doing all the mischief in the Middle East. “That’s why I withdrew ’em!” You can see the smirk, can’t you, as he says he’s just doing what we wanted in the best way he sees fit. And no doubt, the soldiers will be very useful interdicting the clotted mass of terrorists sneaking over the borders.

But here’s the genius of it. If tensions rise maybe – say, if Iranians foolishly get alarmed that American troops are massing on the border after nine months of rumors of an American nuclear attack, and an Iranian sneezes a little too loudly – why how convenient! Before you can fake a bad Colonel Klink accent and mutter “blitzkrieg,” kaboom! That’s one small step for some troops, one more insane new war for a total moron and a horrified world.

Face it, ladies, gentlemen, and Republicans. When it comes to malicious incompetence, they broke the mold when it comes to 43, the Florence Foster Jenkins of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave (with profuse apologies to the dear lady).

PS I hope you realize I’m not whining or angry that folks let me have it when I said it didn’t matter whether the US withdrew or not as long as Bush was in charge, ’cause he’d fuck it up either way. I’m glad you did, I pay close attention to when you disagree, I learn a lot when you do, and I try my best not to take the insults that accompany disagreements personally, even if they were meant to be.

Just don’t call me “Upstart!” Ever. That would be…war.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Articulating The Popular Rage-The Mad Prophecies of Paddy C.

By Dennis Hartley

I couldn’t take it anymore…after viewing the first few episodes of NBC’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, I got up off my couch, switched off the DVR, went to my DVD shelf and made my annual pilgrimage back to The Source-Sidney Lumet’s Network . Back in 1976, this “satire” made us chuckle with its incredulous conceit-the story of a “fictional” TV network who hits the ratings g-spot with a nightly newscast turned variety hour, anchored by a self-proclaimed “angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisy of our time”. Now, 30 years later, it plays like a documentary (denouncing the hypocrisy of our time). The oft-noted prescience of the infinitely quotable Paddy Chayefsky screenplay goes much deeper than merely prophesizing the onslaught of news-as-entertainment (and its evil spawn, “reality” television)-it’s a blueprint for our age. In the opening scene, drunken buddies Peter Finch (as Howard Beale, respected news anchor soon to suffer a complete mental breakdown and morph into “the mad prophet of the airwaves”) and William Holden (as Max Shumacher, head of news division for the fictional “UBS” network) riff cynically on an imaginary pitch for a surefire news rating booster-“Real live suicides, murders, executions-we’ll call it The Death Hour.” Funny punch line back in 1976. Sadly, in 2006, we call it “The Nancy Grace Show”.

Later in the film, when the corporate “hatchet man” for “CCA” the network’s parent company (brilliantly played by Robert Duvall) barks “We’re not a respectable network, we’re a whorehouse”, one can not help but flash on the Fox network. Faye Dunaway steals all of her scenes as Diana Christenson, the completely soulless, ratings obsessed head of development who comes up with the idea to turn Beale’s mental illness into revenue. The most famous scene, of course is Beale’s cheerleading “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” tirade, a call to arms (borne from a “cleansing moment of clarity”) for viewers to turn off the tube, break the spell of their collective stupor, (literally) stick their heads out the window and make their voices heard. Uh, the “Blogosphere”, anyone? (It’s very astute of Digby to choose Beale’s image and an excerpt from that monologue for the “Hullabaloo” masthead). For me, the most defining scene in the film is between Howard Beale and Arthur Jensen (CEO of “CCA”-wonderfully played by Ned Beatty). Jensen is calling Beale on the carpet for publicly exposing a potential buyout of CCA by shadowy Arab investors. Cognizant that Beale is crazy as a loon, yet still a cash cow for the network, Jensen uses reverse psychology and hands him a new set of stone tablets from which to preach-the “corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen”. The ensuing monologue is surely screenwriter Chayefsky’s finest moment, savagely funny and frighteningly true (accurately presaging the whole WTO/New World Order scenario). Required viewing!

Got Chayefsky? A few more I recommend: The Americanization of Emily, The Hospital and Altered States (although he had his name taken off in protest to director Ken Russell’s brutal script revisions, a few unmistakable “Paddy meltdowns” remain intact).

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Corruption, Cronyism and Incompetence

by digby

I sincerely hope that the Democrats in the House and Senate, no matter how much pressure they get to do otherwise from the “centrist” Mandarins and callow Kewl Kidz, go hard after the Bush administration on war profiteering, cronyism, corruption and waste. This is a rare opportunity for the Democrats to properly expose the Republicans for the crooks they are — and dispell the myth once and for all that they are the wise stewards of the taxpayers money.

With Rumsfeld’s ignominious and overdue downfall, and the new willingness, however tepid, among the press to look at the malfeasance in the pentagon, this may be the best opportunity they will have in decades to show just what a mistake it is to write blank chacks for military spending.

Jason Vest spells it out in this interesting new article about what Robert Gates is really facing at the Pentagon — and what he’s likely to do about it:

“Rumsfeld will have two legacies. One is the war—it’ll go down in history as much as Rumsfeld’s war as Bush’s war,” says Winslow Wheeler, a veteran former Senate staffer and investigator who now runs the Straus Military Reform Project at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Center for Defense Information. “But initially, people will probably miss the other legacy, which is the total mismanagement of the Pentagon. He inherited gigantic problems—ones that had nothing to do with Iraq—and made them worse. Iraq is only one part of Gates’ job. He’s going to have to undo a disastrous legacy on budget, program, and management issues.”

Despite all the at-odds-with-reality praise once lavished on Rumsfeld for his supposedly brilliant management style (2002’s The Rumsfeld Way: The Leadership Wisdom of a Battle-Hardened Maverick probably won’t be meeting the test of time), nonpartisan studies and government audits have long shown Rumsfeld to be a less-than-able Pentagon steward. In 2002, for example, Bush’s own White House Office of Management and Budget initiated the President’s Management Scorecard, a sort of quarterly report card assessing the top management of 25 major federal agencies and departments.

It uses a “Stoplight Scoring System,” with green for success, yellow for mixed results, and red for unsatisfactory. Wheeler notes that the DOD’s columns are more often defined by red and yellow than green. “The last time I checked, DOD ranked 24 out of 25—hardly a ringing endorsement,” Wheeler says.

Another solid indicator of the true nature of Rumsfeld’s legacy can be found in the files of the Government Accountability Office, the congressional investigative arm. Of the hundreds of GAO investigative reports devoted to the Defense Department on Rumsfeld’s watch, 25 deal in some way with Iraq. The other 861 have titles that, in many cases, indicate that Iraq wasn’t the only crisis crying out for Rumsfeld’s attention. Some pull no punches (“DOD Wastes Billions of Dollars through Poorly Structured Incentives”); others are, intentionally or not, drolly understated (“Hurricane Katrina: Better Plans and Exercises Need to Guide the Military’s Response to Catastrophic Natural Disasters”). It’s also hard not to be struck by the frequency with which subtle-yet-pointed phrases like “actions needed,” “issues require attention,” and “room for improvement” appear. (“Oversight,” for example, often appears in contexts that indicate a marked lack of the practice.)

Though the GAO organizes its reports by subject matter and agency, it also pinpoints “High Risk” areas, which it defines as activities with “greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” In this area, Wheeler notes, “Rumsfeld’s DOD has earned itself more GAO High Risk reports on failed management than any other federal agency.”

Read the whole thing. The level of corruption and mismanagement is so overwhelming that it’s almost impossible to believe that Republicans who built their careers screaming “tax and spend liberals!” have the nerve to even slink around the beltway like the lying weasels they are. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Being as he is a Bush crony himself, Gates has more than a few skeletons in his closet with their hands out, so I wouldn’t hold out any hope that he’s going to be a crusading good government reformer. Not to mention the fact that his history shows that he is more than willing to, shall we say, shade the truth. But he’s only in for two years anyway, so his only job will be to hold things together until Junior can be safely spirited back to Crawford and they can begin to re-write history without him around to muck it up. Nothing serious will get done until there is a new administration.

But these two years can serve a very important political purpose for the Democrats if they play their cards right. They have a once in a generation opportunity to shine the light on the Republican revolving door with the pentagon and defense contractors that makes the process so corrupt they don’t even bother to put the numbers in the budget anymore. The way to do this is to contrast this bloated cronyism with the lack of body armor for the troops, the treatment and benefits they receive when they get back, the unwillingness to properly spend money on homeland security and all the rest. Now is the moment to show that these people have been getting rich off the backs of Americans overseas and taxpayers at home.

This issue touches every aspect of the Republican cock-up of the last six years from the insistence on tax cuts for the rich in the face of wartime spending, to corruption, malfeasance and failure. It will illustrate better than any other issue the fact that Republicans in both the congress and the White House are incapable of seriously dealing with the threats we actually face and are willing to steal the treasury blind whenever they get their hands on the check book no matter what the circumstances. The polls showed that corruption was a salient issue for voters this time but they are only aware of the tip of the iceberg. Now is the time to tattoo this image on the foreheads of every Republican office holder in the country.

If they can use “acid, amnesty and abortion” against the Democrats for thirty years, the Democrats can use “corruption, cronyism and incompetence” against them. Every time they talk about Democrats “taxing and spending” the Democrats should counter with “taxing and stealing.” These people have shown over and over again that they will rob the citizens of this country blind and then blame it on black people or single mothers or the working man who didn’t happen to be born rich. The Dems have a chance to turn that back on them for a generation if they do this right.

There are huge problems awaiting the next president. Unbelievably huge problems. If this country elects another Republican he will be just as beholden to the same interests that spent five years getting filthy rich off the backs of dead people in Iraq and Afghanistan — and New Orleans. If over the next two years the Democrats can peel back the curtain on the deals that were made, the American people might just recognize that we cannot afford to allow any more of these con-artists and screw-ups to run the country.

.

Mistah Kurtz, He Weird.

by tristero

Double-plus wow from Stanley Kurtz:

America’s growing contingent of post-60’s doves and the hope of military transformation are two sides of the same coin. The post-Vietnam rise of reflexive opposition to American military involvement has given birth to the dream of military transformation: war conducted by technology, with a “light footprint” from soldiers. So I “blame” both the administration’s over-hopefulness, and the very real domestic political constraints that make almost any American military venture difficult to undertake.

Check out that second sentence in the above excerpt, folks. Read it again and marvel. Kurtz is saying that the Rumsfeld doctrine – “a war conducted by technology, with a ‘light footprint’ from soldiers” – is, in fact, a response to liberals who made the American public, for the past 30 years in the wake of Vietnam, risk adverse. Put another way, using the rhetoric Kurtz’s pals applied to brand people like me “objectively pro-Saddam,” Rumsfeld and Bush are merely political compromisers who made the mistake of taking the “anti-war left” too seriously in making their plans for war.

I’m sure Kurtz thinks this is a thoughtful, nuanced, and balanced argument. After all, he’s assigning blame equally to an overly optimistic administration and an overly cautious public. And indeed, Kurtz thinks Josh Marshall’s criticism of his drivel is – such a thoughtful word! – “simplistic.” So let’s provide another example of Kurtz’s fair-minded, sophisticated “analysis:”

In fact, a huge chunk of the Democratic Party was against the Iraq war from the start, and would have opposed it even if–no, especially if–they thought that war could be won.

You read that right. Kurtz said many Democrats would have opposed the war because they thought the US would win it.

But maybe you think I am lifting Kurtz’s crap out of context, creating bullshit from pure gold. Ok. Here are the following sentences:

The doves hugely exaggerated even minor problems, such as those we faced in the first week or two of the shooting war. And as I noted in “Troop Dearth,” the polarization of debate during even the early and more successful phases of the war made it tough for the administration to admit errors on troop strength and correct course. But that doesn’t mean I hold the administration blameless. Far from it.

Yup, that’s what Kurtz wrote. He actually blames Bush’s penchant for suppressing bad news and his failure to admit mistakes on none other than we liberals who are way too quick to criticize him.

Now there are many ways to respond to this kind of garbage. One way is to do what Josh Marshall does, correctly note that Kurtz’s argument is beyond absurd, but argue with it anyway, patiently reminding everyone that Republicans completely controlled the government for nearly all of the past six years. To take his argument as serious enough to deserve refutation (and Josh does refute it with passion), however, provides Kurtz with gravitas he doesn’t deserve. It’s as if Neil de Grasse Tyson took time out to refute convincingly a clown who thinks the moon is made of green cheese – a significant portion of the DC punditocracy will start to smell something funny during a full moon. Hey, y’never know!

Another response is to ignore Kurtz, which unfortunately has the effect of letting this stuff fester and grow, as the history of rightwing nuttiness in America proves it will.

A third response is to note that this life is far too short, and the situation in Iraq is far too dire, to take seriously a man who blames the tragedies perpetrated by the Bush administration on the profound influence Michael Moore – via proxy – had on Donald Rumsfeld’s military strategizing in 2001.

A fourth alternative: Offer Stanley Kurtz an internship on the writing team for The Colbert Report. But there’s a slight problem: Kurtz isn’t the slightest bit funny in the “funny ha-ha” meaning of the word.

I choose Door Number Three.

Palestine Debate

by poputonian

Former president Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has, according to Democracy Now, been completely ignored by the print media:

… the nation’s newspapers have largely ignored Jimmy Carter’s book since its publication two weeks ago. The book hasn’t even been mentioned in the news pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Boston Globe or Los Angeles Times.

But, interestingly, the points raised in his book about the apartheid in Palestine are debated elsewhere, even in Israel. Carter points out on Hardball:

… the people in this country, in America, never know about this [apartheid], they never discuss this, there‘s no debate about it, there‘s no criticism of Israel in this country. And in Israel, there is an intense debate about the issues in this book. In this country, no.

He reiterates this point in the Democracy Now Q & A:

So the book is deliberately — I wouldn’t say controversial, but it’s deliberately designed to be provocative, because, as I said earlier, in Israel and in Europe, these kind of issues are debated every day, in a most vehement way, particularly in Israel. Pros and cons, arguing back and forth, in the news media, television, radio, the major newspapers. Never, in this country, do you hear any of these issues proposed publicly by an elected member of the House or the Senate or in the White House or NBC or ABC or CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times. Never. And I think it’s time for Americans to start looking at the facts about the Mid-East situation. And only then, and based on the knowledge of the facts, will we ever have a chance to move forward and consummate a peace agreement that would give Israel what they need and what they deserve — permanent peace, recognized by their neighbors and all Arab countries and the rest of the world — and the Palestinians to have their human rights, their land and a chance to have their own state, side by side, living in peace with their Israeli neighbors.

On the Hardball segment last Tuesday, Carter deconstructed the book’s title along with its purpose, which in part is to stimulate the debate:

Let‘s look at the entire title, if you don‘t mind. The first word is Palestine, which involves the land that belongs to the Palestinians, not the Israelis. I didn‘t refer to Israel, because there‘s no semblance of anything relating to apartheid within the nation of Israel.

And I also emphasized the word ‘not‘ — that is, peace, and not apartheid. That is what I hope to accomplish with this book, is sort of move to that goal. But there‘s no doubt that within the Occupied Territories—Palestinian land—that there is a horrendous example of apartheid. The occupation of Palestinian land, the confiscation of that land that doesn‘t belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonization of that land, and then the connection of those isolated but multiple settlements—more than 200 of them—with each other by highways, on which Palestinians can‘t travel and quite often where Palestinians cannot even cross.

So the persecution of the Palestinians now, under the occupying territories—under the occupation forces—is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation that I know.
…
What is being done to the Palestinians now is horrendous in their own territory, by the occupying powers, which is Israel.

They‘re taken away all the basic human rights of the Palestinians, as was done in South Africa against the blacks. And I make it very plain in this book that the apartheid is not based on racism, as it was in South Africa. But it‘s based on the desire, of a minority of Israelis to acquire land that belongs to the Palestinians and to retain that land, and then to exclude the Palestinians from their own property and subjugate them, so that they can‘t arise and demonstrate their disapproval of being robbed of their own property. That‘s what‘s happening in the West Bank.

The transcript at Democracy Now covers most of what you get from the one at Hardball, but also goes beyond it with more information and assertions, and mentions three possible options for Israel. I would recommend that it be read first before delving into a debate here. Also, it’s worth reiterating that Carter is not ascribing racist underpinnings to this case of apartheid, and its use is only in reference to what is happening inside Palestine, not within Israel. In Israel, he acknowledges that Palestinians have full voting rights and are not separated out (by the State) from other Israeli citizens.

Greenwald

by tristero

Greenwald skewers Friedman, easy pickings as those of us who have been appalled by his writings for years know. But Greenwald truly advances the dubious discipline of Tom Friedman Studies: The poor guy went back and reviewed Friedman’s pre-war columns and noticed among the scrambled metaphors, stupid aphorisms, basic grammatical mistakes, and bad analogies an incredibly dishonest pattern. I’ll leave it to you to go to Glenn’s site and read that part; it is well worth your while. What especially interested me was later on in the post, as it is apropos of our own discussions here:

It is not merely the case that having been pro-war doesn’t count as a strike against anyone. That is accurate. But far worse, the opposite is also true. It is still the case in Establishment Washington that having been pro-war in the first place is a pre-requisite to being considered a ‘responsible, serious’ foreign policy analyst. And having been anti-war from the start is the hallmark of someone unserious. The pro-war Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are serious national security Democrats but Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha are the kind of laughable losers whom Democrats need to repudiate.Establishment Washington really is not interested in how to end this horrendous and despicable debacle we unleashed in Iraq. They are not interested in how to maximize U.S. interests. They are only interested in how to find a way to bring this disaster to some sort of slow resolution that looks as though it is a respectable and decent outcome — anything that makes it seem like it wasn’t a horrendous mistake in the first place.

That is exactly right. And it is outrageous. Why? Because it means that Bush/Iraq will be repeated real soon now somewhere else, by people who think the only problem was that Bush didn’t know how to do war right.