Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Dinner With A Liberal Hawk

by tristero

Last night, I went to the annual dinner of a liberal group, and sat next to a very smart, very successful, and very well travelled man in his mid 60’s. I found him likable, talkative and in many ways, quite an interesting fellow.

He told us he supported the Bush/Iraq war because 9/11 was a wake-up call and it was inconceivable to him that the Bush administration would lie the United States into an invasion. Another reason: he had been in Cambodia and seen firsthand the capacity of human beings to do evil. Also, he said that during his lifetime, there was the Holocaust. If there was a chance to prevent that kind of horror from re-occurring, then he felt it was important to take that chance.

My mind started to reel from the effort of discerning what the connection was between Pol Pot’s atrocities and the September 11, 2001 attacks. Yes, they were both horrible and both were inflicted on innocents. But how did that lead one to conclude: “Invade Iraq?” And as catastrophic as the Holocaust was, I couldn’t figure out how the desire to prevent another such tragedy factored into his willingness to support the pre-emptive invasion and conquest of a country which, while brutal, had apparently given up gassing its citizens right around the time Donald Rumsfeld no longer was in a position to shake Saddam’s bloody hand.

There’s something about such reasoning that strikes me as profoundly illogical, as if history literally repeats itself and therefore we’re now getting a second chance to “get it right.” Time The Revelator (in Gillian Welch’s brilliant phrase) has other tricks up Her sleeve and never repeats, only cycles.

I tried to interrupt – as I said, he was talkative. But when he claimed that the Middle East had been “deadlocked for years,” I saw my chance, “What’s so bad about a deadlock? It certainly beats sheer chao…” and then he repeated everything in the first paragraph again. He seemed calm to me as he went through his reasons, but I noticed he spilled some wine on what looked to be a rather pricey shirt. He dropped his fork just a mite too loudly on his plate.

My friend on the other side managed to slip in, “Y’know, Tristero got it right from the start. He knew Bush was lying. He was right. And he was worried about the aftermath from the start.”

“So, you were right,” he said, a little bit of anger now creeping into his voice.

“Yes, I was right, and I knew I had to be right from the beginning, in 2002 and 2003,” I said, with not a trace of false modesty – or any other kind.

“Okay,” he rapidly wiped his lips with a napkin. “You know, a stopped watch is right twice a day.”

“True,” I said, “but I wasn’t a stopped watch about Iraq.”

Eyes blinked, but he didn’t skip a beat.

“Okay, you were right. I ‘ll grant you that. You were right when the rest of us were wrong…”

“Well, actually…” I was trying to tell him that in fact the majority of the world opposed the invasion and I was simply in the majority, but I couldn’t. He was angry and unstoppable.

“No, no, let me ask you a question. How come you, a musician, maybe a good one, maybe a well-read one, but a musician with no training in affairs of state – how come you of all people were right about Iraq but the most respected, most experienced, most intelligent, most serious thinkers in the United States got it wrong?”

“That is a question I ask myself every day, because it scares the daylights out of me,” I replied.

My eyes started to tear up and the winter of 02/03 raced through my head. That awful sense of dissociation watching every American media outlet try to outdo its rivals by printing lies, the unspeakable dread as I watched my country willingly go over the abyss. The shock of realizing that nearly everyone I knew had bought the myth of the Good War and that nothing I could say or do, nothing anyone could say or do could change their mind. It was too late.

I tried to say more, but I couldn’t, and then the subject changed and the dinner went on.

[Update: Link added to the great Gillian Welch’s album, Time (The Revelator), and my shameful misspelling of her name corrected. ]

Objectively Bad Guys

by tristero

Let’s not forget that there are those amongst us who opposed the Liberation of Iraq. They were, and they remain, objectively pro-Saddam and therefore “not neutral” in the Great Crusade against evilosity. A Crusade, I remind you, in which God On High personally guides the decisive decisionmaking of George W. Bush.

In short, dear friends, it is not only a patriotic duty – nay, honor – for phone companies to turn over the records of these damned souls for data mining. It is a solemn spiritual obligation, a tithe, as it were. What mortal Verizon employee would dare risk damnation -ie, working for a bloody phone company for all eternity – by objectively defying the Will of the Lord?

Bad Guys

by digby

One senior government official, who was granted anonymity to speak publicly about the classified program, confirmed that the N.S.A. had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States. But the official said the call records were used for the limited purpose of tracing regular contacts of “known bad guys.”

“To perform such traces,” the official said, “you’d have to have all the calls or most of them. But you wouldn’t be interested in the vast majority of them.”

Well, that’s good. I feel so relieved. But it sure would be nice to know what the criteria for “known bad guys” are. There are, after all, people who work for some security agencies who have some funny ideas:

“You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act.”

And you just never know when somebody’s going to take it into their heads that it’s a threat to national security to dissent, do you? Why, it’s already happening:

The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation’s supposed “war profiteering.” The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. “It was tongue-in-street political theater,” Parkin says.

But that’s not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA’s role is “force protection”—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect “raw information” about “suspicious incidents.” The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon’s “terrorism threat warning process,” according to an internal Pentagon memo.

The fact this administration continues to say “trust us, we’re only going after Al Qaeda” even though we already know they are tracking political dissenters is galling in the extreme. There is every reason to believe that the government that has instituted surveillance on protesters, that revealed the identity of a CIA agent for political purposes and that continues to characterize each revelation of their unconstitutional acts as a threat to national security will use this illegal NSA program to invade the privacy of Americans for political reasons. It’s insulting to the nation’s collective intelligence to suggest otherwise.

To this administration it’s “L’etat c’est moi.” If you are against the administration, you are against the country. Which means that 71% of Americans are unamerican.

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See No Evil

by digby

With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, while other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem.

“It’s the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system,” said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who is an examiner of electronic voting systems for Pennsylvania, where the primary is to take place on Tuesday.

[…]

David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems, said the potential risk existed because the company’s technicians had intentionally built the machines in such a way that election officials would be able to update their systems in years ahead.

“For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,” he said. “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.”

Of course they don’t.

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Freefall!

President Bush’s job-approval rating has fallen to its lowest mark of his presidency, according to a new Harris Interactive poll. Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush is doing an “excellent or pretty good” job as president, down from 35% in April and significantly lower than 43% in January.

Roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults say “things in the country are going in the right direction,” while 69% say “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” This trend has declined every month since January, when 33% said the nation was heading in the right direction. Iraq remains a key concern for the general public, as 28% of Americans said they consider Iraq to be one of the top two most important issues the government should address, up from 23% in April. The immigration debate also prompted 16% of Americans to consider it a top issue, down from 19% last month, but still sharply higher from 4% in March.

The Harris poll comes two days after a downbeat assessement of Bush in a New York Times/CBS News poll. The Times, in analyzing the results, said “Americans have a bleaker view of the country’s direction than at any time in more than two decades.”

Oh, and Jane says the Rove Grand Jury has been called tomorrrow. Fasten your seatbelts.

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And I Thought I Was Jaded

by tristero

During the past five godawful years, I’ve tried as hard as I could, as a defense and therapy, to cultivate a zen-like attachment that is beyond shock. And yet, dammit, It’s simply impossible.

The moment I think the group of morons running amok in my country couldn’t possibly make bigger fools of themselves, they manage to surpass their previous idiocy by being more incompetent than anyone, not even I, could possibly imagine:

Inside Higher Ed reports that some people got together and went through David Horowitz’s book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America looking for errors. They found a bunch, of course, but by far the funniest one was the discovery that “While Horowitz’s book promises a list of the 101 most dangerous academics, he actually includes only 100.”

PZ Myers makes the excellent point that this means that those of us who are royally pissed that we weren’t included can assume it was just an inadvertent editing snafu (I’m no professor but I have taught at some good universities on occasion, and did my best to corrupt young minds by exposing them to leftist/liberal masterpieces like the Marriage of Figaro. Man, I so totally deserve to be 101.)

(slightly edited after original posting.)

Fiercely Protecting Our Privacy

by digby

I love to bash the Bush hadministration as much as the next person, but all this talk about trashing the Bill of Rights has got to stop. The administration has a stellar record of protecting American’s civil liberties, even in the darkest early days, just a couple of months after 9/11. I’m sure you all remember this:

Ashcroft Blocks FBI Access to Gun Records

Critics Call Attorney General’s Decision Contradictory in Light of Terror Probe Tactics

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 7, 2001; Page A26

The FBI will not be permitted to compare the names of suspected terrorists against federal gun purchase records, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft told the Senate on December 6, offering no encouragement to senators willing to guarantee the FBI the authority to do so.

Defending his decision to block the FBI from using gun documents in its terror probe, Ashcroft said the law does not allow investigators to review the federal records created when a buyer applies to purchase a weapon at a gun store.

Some critics charged that Ashcroft’s strong opposition to gun control is interfering with his role as the government’s top cop. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing him of “handcuffing” the FBI, pressed him unsuccessfully to say why he did not seek access to gun records when he claimed expanded investigatory powers after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

When Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked Ashcroft whether he wants the power to review gun records in the fight against terrorism, Ashcroft replied that he would not comment on a “hypothetical.”

Bush administration officials said information collected by gun stores for use in background checks was not intended for other law enforcement purposes. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the administration is following a regulation signed in January by Attorney General Janet Reno, who ruled that records can be used only to audit the background check system.

Such regulations are easily changed, countered Clinton administration officials and other critics. They pointed out that Ashcroft has issued an order permitting federal investigators to listen to attorney-client conversations and sought to lengthen the time illegal immigrants can be held before being charged. At his request, Congress has granted many other powers in recent months.

When you hear all these shrieking moonbats going on and on about the Republicans shredding the constitution, remind them of this. When the whole nation was losing its head, the Bush justice department kept its eye on the ball. Their priorities were straight. It is better that a hundred terrorists have an arsenal than even one citizens’ gun buying records are saved long enough to compare them to a terrorist watch list. That’s the kind of integrity this administration has.

So why should we suspect them of using these illegal wiretaps for partisan purposes? When it comes to fighting terrorists, the Bush administration has never played politics.

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The F Word Goes CNN

by tristero

Cafferty and be sure to watch:

Cafferty: We all hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cause he might be all that stands between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. He’s vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records, and yours, and tens of millions of other Americans.

Shortly after 9/11, AT7T, Verizon, and BellSouth began providing the super-secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the War on Terror, President Bush says. Why don’t you go find Osama bin Laden, and seal the country’s borders, and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?

The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and declared the government is doing nothing wrong, and all this is just fine. Is it? Is it legal? Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn’t have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation. Read that sentence again. A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it’s not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says ok and drops the whole thing. We’re in some serious trouble, boys and girls”

Yup. And one more time for the slow readers amongst us:

A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it’s not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says ok and drops the whole thing.

But not to worry. The NY Times webpage greets us with this reassuring news: Bush Says U.S. Spying Is Not Widespread. And let’s face it, he’s right. After all there are, what, 250 million Americans, and Bush has only “obtained information on on numbers dialed by “tens of millions of Americans” and used it for ‘data mining.’ ”

That’s right. Tens of millions.Do the math, people, there’s no widespread spying in the US if less than 100 million people are being spied on and no one’s claiming that many. The spying effort is carefully focused on the mere 10’s of millions of evil Americans. Those of us, the good people, needn’t concern ourselves. And besides, we can’t. It’s too top secret.

Whew, for a moment there, I was worried.

Help Me To The Fainting Couch

by digby

…pass me the smelling salts, burn some feathers, throw vinegar in my eyes. I’m having a spell. Roy Edroso is so appallingly uncivil!!!

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Man’s Better Hells Angels

by digby

It appears that Judge Michael Luttig learned the hard way that believing certain men can be entrusted with extra-constitutional powers because they are “good” is foolish. You’d think that a member of the “Federalist Society” would have known better since the main author of The Federalist Papers made it pretty explicit that this was the reason for the three separate branches of government. Luttig got burned in the worst possible way; he put his reputation on the line and they used it like toilet paper and then threw it away. And predictably they are now busily smearing his character:

When the opinion was issued on Sept. 9, Judge Luttig delivered a coup: a unanimous opinion, written by himself, declaring that the president’s powers to detain those he considered enemy combatants apply anywhere in the world, including the U.S.

Judge Luttig, according to a person familiar with the court proceedings, put his own credibility on the line, drawing on his own experience in national-security law and confidence in Bush administration officials he knew. He argued to his colleagues that the government wouldn’t have sought such extraordinary powers unless absolutely necessary, this person says.

Then, in November, the administration suddenly announced that it didn’t consider Mr. Padilla an enemy combatant any more and would charge him in a regular federal court. The move came just two days before the government’s deadline to submit briefs to the Supreme Court, which was weighing an appeal of the Fourth Circuit’s September decision.

A person familiar with the judge’s thinking says it’s evident he felt the government had pulled “the carpet out from under him.” In an interview yesterday, Judge Luttig said, “I thought that it was appropriate that the Supreme Court would have the final review of the case.”

Attorney General Gonzales offered no explanation for the move, but critics accused the government of gaming the court system. By making the Supreme Court appeal moot, the government could avoid a possible reversal at the nation’s highest court while preserving the favorable Fourth Circuit ruling.

Instead of granting what the government considered a pro forma request to transfer Mr. Padilla to civilian custody, Judge Luttig ordered the parties to submit arguments over the question. On Dec. 21, Judge Luttig delivered a judicial bombshell: a carefully worded order refusing to move Mr. Padilla until the Supreme Court decided what to do. The order all but accused the Bush administration of misconduct.

“The government’s abrupt change in course” appeared designed “to avoid consideration of our decision by the Supreme Court,” Judge Luttig wrote. The government’s actions suggested that “Padilla may have been held for these years…by mistake” and, even worse, that the government’s legal positions “can, in the end, yield to expediency.” Such tactics, Judge Luttig warned, could exact a “substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts.”

A furious Bush administration asked the Supreme Court to overrule the Fourth Circuit. The ruling “second guesses and usurps both the president’s commander-in-chief authority and the Executive’s prosecutorial discretion in a manner inconsistent with bedrock principles of separation of powers,” Mr. Clement, the solicitor general, wrote.

The Supreme Court agreed to let Mr. Padilla move — he is now in a Miami jail — but the administration’s strategy of funneling war-powers cases to the Fourth Circuit was in tatters.

“Luttig’s parting shot as a judge may be the most defining opinion that he’s written,” says A.E. Dick Howard, who taught Judge Luttig at the University of Virginia School of Law and has been his friend since. Prof. Howard says the opinion reminds him of a line from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”: “Nothing in his life/ Became him like the leaving it.”

People familiar with Judge Luttig’s thinking say he knew his condemnation of the administration would bring a personal cost but he believes that judges must apply the law regardless of its political implications. These people say he has been disillusioned by the encroachment of politics on the judiciary — and the view that judges are on “our team” or “their team.”

People close to the Bush administration see it differently. They dismiss Judge Luttig’s opinion as a judicial tantrum, noting that it came after he was passed over three times for a Supreme Court position. President Bush nominated Judge Roberts, Harriet Miers (who withdrew) and Judge Samuel Alito.

Welcome to our nightmare, Judge.

And then, of course, we find out just today that the government has been lying through its teeth about its illegal wiretapping when they said it was carefully targeting to only Al Qaeda suspects making calls to or from a foreign country. Basically they’ve been gathering information about every American’s telephone and email habits. What they’ve done with all that information we do not know.

This is the same government that Michael Luttig told his fellow judges on the fourth circuit could be trusted because they would never do such things unles they absolutely had to … the same government that turned around and punked Michael Luttig by doing an end run around the Supreme Court which precipitated him leaving the court.

This is not an abstract argument anymore. It’s not just about what might happen if we slide down the slippery slope and somebody really bad takes power and uses these powers to do bad things. The people in power right now are doing bad things and lying about it, as Michael Luttig, one of their own, found out personally. They are the reason the Bill of Rights were written in the first place.

Look for Karl Rove and his band of media sycophants to start agitating for the Democrats to lay off this issue again because it will make them look weak on terrorism. Everyone needs to start asking themselves why Karl would be warning Democrats not to do something that he believes will benefit him.

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