It truly is obscene to label the so-called “Patriot Act”an act of patriots:
After fighting ferociously for months, federal prosecutors relented yesterday and agreed to allow a Connecticut library group to identify itself as the recipient of a secret F.B.I. demand for records in a counterterrorism investigation.
The decision ended a dispute over whether the broad provisions for secrecy in the USA Patriot Act, the antiterror law, trumped the free speech rights of library officials. The librarians had gone to federal court to gain permission to identify themselves as the recipients of the secret subpoena, known as a national security letter, ordering them to turn over patron records and e-mail messages.
It was unclear what impact the government’s decision would have on the approximately 30,000 other such letters that are issued each year. Changes in the Patriot Act now allow the government discretion over whether to enforce or relax what had been a blanket secrecy requirement concerning the letters…
Ms. Beeson said yesterday that she believed the government’s decision to drop the appeal was politically timed.
“The issue over whether the government was using its Patriot Act powers to demand library records was one of the hot-button issues in this debate,” she said. “And our clients could have been extremely powerful spokespeople in opposing the reauthorization of the act, because they had actually received one of those national security letters.”
Now that the debate in Congress is over, she said, “There’s no longer any reason to keep our clients quiet.”
By the way, the reason they dropped their objections is that the prosecutors had made a little boo-boo, inadvertently revealing the name of the group, the Library Connection, in court filings, which led to the name being published in the NY Times.
UPDATE: The original title of this post was “30,000 Subpoenas A Year To Libraries?” Several commenters noted that the article simply says that 30,000 subpoenas a year, in the form of “national security letters” are sent out. It is, as I read it, vague as to whether those are all sent to libraries. However, once you folks pointed it out, I obviously misread it: 30,000 subpoenas to libraries would be incredible even by the incredible standards of the Bush administration. I apologize for the mistake.
Feel the magic. Joe Klein has a new book coming out in which he excoriates the rich insider Democratic consultants. Apparently, Klein thinks the Democrats should listen to rich insider Democratic pundits instead.
Roger Ailes was right when he predicted at the beginning of the television era that in the future all politicians would have to be performers.
How interesting. What to make of the fact that two paragraphs later he says this:
…let me give 2008 a try. The winner will be the candidate who comes closest to this model: a politician who refuses to be a “performer,” at least in the current sense.
Whatever. Klein criticizing the Democratic consultants is like Charlie Manson criticizing Richard Jeffrey Dahmer as far as I’m concerned.
Eric Alterman reported on a foreign policy discussion that he and Klein attended yesterday:
It was a useful discussion with many useful tributaries and give and take with the audience and we all felt better for it.
That is right up until the very last moment when, after someone brought up the question of the whether the Democrats will be able to present an effective alternative to Bush in the next election, Joe Klein shouted out, “Well they won’t if their message is that they hate America – which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years.”
This is the man who is lecturing the Democratic party about losing politics.
He also appeared last night on Charlie Rose in an otherwise quite interesting round table about Democratic foreign policy and he refined his point a little:
I think the problem for Democrats now is this: there are some well-informed and intelligent and tough centrists, but there are challenges coming from two separate directions. One is coming from the left of the party which ever since Vietnam has assumed that any use of American force overseas is immoral.
And the more serious threat — and this threat is coming to both parties — and this is coming from below, it’s this populist threat that I think is absolutely significant in this country and this is people who just want to make the world go away — they want to pull the troops out of Iraq and not think about the consequences, who are anti-immigrant, anti-Chinese economic competition and just want to make the world go away.
That’s his analysis. The party’s big challenges are finding a way to deal with the pacifist left and the threat “from below” of the the barbarian populist hordes. What ever are the intelligent, well-informed, tough centrists supposed to do with these horrible people?
He sounds quite frightened of the Democratic voters who are getting sick and tired of being told that we should shut up and listen to people who seem intent upon helping the right use “values” and national security to bludgeon this country into accepting a religious police state.
It shows what a philistine he really is that he conflates pacifism with “hating America” which he quite obviously does. Pacifism is a respectable philosophy that has been a part of the American (hell, the Christian) experience forever. And it, at least, has some intellectual coherence, unlike this hawkish/centrist mish mash of nothingness you find among the so-called liberal hawks.
But most Democrats are not pacifists, even the liberals he seems to loathe with such a passion. Most of us simply do not believe that the United States’ security, “honor” or credibility has been well served by hardliner hawks who are in a constant state of hysteria agitating for war all the time to prove the country’s military prowess. They’ve been doing this as long as I can remember and it’s always been absurd.
The vast majority of the country supported the Afghanistan operation, as did most of the world. But the left and the rest of the world checked out over Iraq, and obviously not because we believed that all use of American force is immoral — it was because the plan was fucking hallucinatory. If there were intelligent, well-informed, tough centrists around you sure as hell didn’t find them in the DC wading pool where Joe Klein was climbing into George W. Bush’s codpiece as fast as his chubby little arms and legs would carry him. There were plenty of smart, well-informed tough liberals around the country, however, who understood that the Iraq war was a huge strategic error from the first moment the administration began doing the war dance.
Speaking only for myself, I do find the Bush Doctrine of preventive war to be immoral. Torture too. I also think it is wise to participate in international institutions and follow international law so that people around the world can have some confidence that we will not use our awesome power capriciously. Superpowers need to behave in a predictable, responsible, thoughtful, mature fashion lest ambitious enemies get the idea that we don’t have control of the situation. When we fuck up, the ramifications are huge and very dangerous. We simply cannot afford to play out starry eyed neocon experimental fantasies because the opportunity presents itself. The stakes are much too high.
This is a complicated subject and one which we all debated in the run up to the last “preemptive” war that was sold as necessary to prevent a catastrophe that was not imminent, but inevitable. We later found out the war was not only strategically unsound, as we all knew, but that the future threat assessment was based on lies.
But even if we were to accept this doctrine as being useful some time in the future (which I don’t) I think we can all agree that this administration has zero credibility. They are the last people on earth we or anyone else can trust to launch a “pre-preemptive” strike against anyone. That’s not pacifism, that’s common sense.
As for Klein’s fear of the populist hordes, well Jesus: is he really surprised that many working people are “anti-chinese competition?” What in the hell did all the smart, well-informed centrists think was going to happen when the manufacturing base was decimated and the Republicans engineered income inequality not seen since the gilded age? (And he should thank his good friends on the right for pulling out their dog-eared nativist playbook. They’ve always found it’s more convenient to blame the local brown foreigners than blaming free trade/free lunch utopians like Joe Klein.)
It’s not that these populist hordes want the world to just go away. They want guys like Klein to just go away and stop blowing smoke up their asses about how much better off they are when their jobs are outsourced and how glorious it is to get your kid killed in a useless war.
As much as I agree that the Democratic strategists are lame, I actually think that the liberal punditocrisy is a bigger problem. They spend all their time kissing up to the right, disparaging elected Democrats and mischaracterizing the real concerns and beliefs of the grassroots of the party.
President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.
According to a memo sent to aides yesterday, Bush expects all White House staff to adhere to the “spirit as well as the letter” of all ethics laws and rules. As a result, “the White House counsel’s office will conduct a series of presentations next week that will provide refresher lectures on general ethics rules, including the rules of governing the protection of classified information,” according to the memo, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post by a senior White House aide.
Since Bush himself did not attend, one assumes that he believes selectively and secretly declassifying national security information for political purposes is adhering to the “spirit as well as the letter” of all ethics laws and rules.
The military scientists, engineers and war geeks have it all wrong. It really doesn’t take much effort to make a tactical nuclear device. In fact, it’s actually a rather straightforward two-step process:
1. Take one nuclear weapon with the destructive power of as many Hiroshima bombs as you like.
2. Add the word “tactical” to the description.
Voila! You now have a tactical nuclear weapon that magically always hits its target and only kills evil people, leaving all the good people alive and perfectly healthy.
Billmon’s discussion of the global and strategic consequences of American nuclear tyranny are as trenchant as his comments always are. And his impression of what the “day after” will look like in the US is quite realistic. But by focusing on the largest pictures, Billmon neglected to mention one very plausible and important reaction to an American nuclear war. That is a massive, and rapid, emigration from this country of people with brains, capital, and simple human decency.
Billmon is absolutely right: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other sociopaths in charge of this country’s foreign policy think nuclear bombs don’t count if they can be described as “tactical.” But many Americans surely know that they do indeed count, they will want nothing to do with a government insane enough to use them, and will get the fuck out of here. And among those people will be hundreds of thousands of scientists and intellectuals that no country can afford to lose and thrive, even a nuclear dictatorship.
UPDATE: Josh Marshall is right. It’s pointless to “engage” the Bush administration. The only thing to do is to hem them in. However…
In this post, Josh failed to mention the mushroom cloud in the room and, in fact, seems to want to avoid bringing it up. That is no mere “particular,” Josh, but a brand new level of insanity. The way to hem them in is by focusing on that insanity, and then push from there. If Josh thinks a successful defense against Bush’s latest madness can be had by ignoring the fact they are brandishing nuclear weapons in the world’s face, then he has learned absolutely nothing from the run-up to the Bush/Iraq War, when Josh himself was far too late in understanding how seriously nuts Bush’s plans were. In 2006, trying to brush anything as criminal as first strike nuclear war under the table is what Bush expects “thoughtful” liberals to do. NO. It has to be rubbed in their faces. Once nuclear weapons are made inconceivable again, then the rest of Bush’s mad scheme can be confronted.
Josh promises a second post on the subject. Let’s hope that in that one he fully understands that a failure explicitly to denounce the nuclear war plans of the Bush administration is not a shrewd tactic but sheer moral cowardice.
UPDATE: A couple of commenters think I’m coming down too hard on Josh’s failure to mention nuclear war in his first post. I certainly hope they are right. But I have this in mind, where Josh cut the neocons some rhetorical slack when he should have simply denounced and ridiculed them. As I wrote then, Josh really isn’t that important in the big scheme of things. However, every little bit helps to shape the debate. As I see it, Bush, et al, is hoping that everyone will be too embarassed to make nuclear war a salient topic until it is too late or think it is merely some kind of perverted saber-rattling that reasonable people should simply ignore.
That is all the reason to rub the mushroom clouds and the horribly mutilated children to come in their faces.
It would be a brilliant diabolical plan were it not for the fact that Tony Soprano’s drunk younger brother and his gang of thieving crony morons would be running the thing.
Jumping off the shocking article in last Sunday’s NY Times magazine about the criminalized abortion doctrine in El Salvador, Eric Zorn has begun an interesting dialog about why anti-choicers don’t logically insist that women be tried for their crime? The usual answer seems to rest on the idea that women are so dumb or brainwashed that they don’t know what they are doing so they can’t be held liable for their crime.
I can see how that might have played in the years before Roe when it much more common to infantilize women. But I suspect they are going to have to completely turn back the clock to at least before WWII if they want to pull that off. Nobody is going to buy that women are all just victims of the “culture of Roe” and can’t be held responsible for what they do. There are going to have to be prosecutions.
Zorn suggests that this be used against the forced pregnancy extremists the way that “partial birth” was used against the pro-choice movement and I agree. By using the extreme argument you expose the illogic of their most cherished delusion: that from the moment of conception, the fetus has the full rights of every other human being. Once they are forced to face the full implications of that argument they lose. In arguing this with a pro-lifer, Zorn said:
Your own logic locks you into prosecuting women who seek abortions for murder. You write of such women as “secondary victims” and hem and haw about transition periods and the ineffectiveness of coercion because you know how utterly unpalatable such prosecutions would be for the vast majority of Americans who do, in the end, see, feel and sense a real distinction between an embryo and, say, a one day old baby.
And I thought I was depressed about this Iran gambit. Billmon lays out a very convincing case that the US can probably launch an unprovoked nuclear attack against Iran — and nobody will really care. Indeed, it might serve everybody’s interests quite ably.
Damn if it won’t be a heckuva show, the kind we really love with handsome flyboys taking off from aircraft carriers and big beautiful explosions that make us all feel good about how our high tech “surgical” weaponry only kills the bad guys.
For most Americans, then, the initial impact of war with Iran could play out in the same theatre of the absurd as the first Gulf War and the opening phases of the Iraq invasion — that is to say, on their living room TVs. And if there’s one place where a nuclear first strike could be made to appear almost normal, or even a good thing, it’s on the boob tube.
After all, the corporate media complex has already shown a remarkable willingness to ignore or rationalize conduct that once would have been considered grossly illegal, if not outright war crimes. And the right-wing propaganda machine is happy to paint any atrocity as another glorious success in the battle for democracy (that is, when it’s not trying to deny they ever happened.) Why should we expect something as transitory as a nuclear strike to change the pattern?
Let’s be honest about it: For both the corporate and the conservative media, as well as for their audiences, a air campaign against Iran would make for great TV — a welcome return to the good old days of Desert Storm and Shock and Awe. All those jets soaring off into the desert twilight; the overexposed glare of cruise missiles streaking from their launch ships; the video game shots of exploding aircraft hangers and government buildings, the anti-aircraft tracers arcing into the night sky over Tehran — it would be war just the way we like it, far removed from the dull brown dust, raw sewage and multiple amputees of the Iraqi quagmire.
And to keep things interesting, we’d have the added frisson of nuclear weapons — a plot twist that would allow blow-dried correspondents to pose in borrowed radiation suits, give Pentagon flacks the opportunity to try out new euphemisms for killing people, and encourage retired generals to spice up their on-air military patter with knowing references to blast effects, kilotons, roentgens and fallout patterns.
What I’m suggesting here is that it is probably naive to expect the American public to react with horror, remorse or even shock to a U.S. nuclear sneak attack on Iran, eve n though it would be one of the most heinous war crimes imaginable, short of mass genocide. Iran has been demonized too successfully — thanks in no small part to the messianic delusions of its own end-times president — for most Americans to see it as a victim of aggression, even if they were inclined to admit that the United States could ever be an aggressor. And we know that a not-so-small and extremely vocal minority of Americans would be cheering all the way, and lusting for more.
More to my point, though, I think it’s possible that even something as monstrously insane as nuclear war could still be squeezed into the tiny rituals that pass for public debate in this country — the game of dueling TV sound bites that trivializes and then disposes of every issue.
We’ve already seen a lengthy list of war crimes and dictatorial power grabs sink into that electronic compost heap: the WMD disinformation campaign, Abu Ghraib, the torture memos, the de facto repeal of the 4th amendment. Again, why should a nuclear strike be any different? I can easily imagine the same rabid talk show hosts spouting the same jingoistic hate speech, the same bow-tied conservative pundits offering the same recycled talking points, and the same timid Beltway liberals complaining that while nuking Iran was the right thing to do, the White House went about it the wrong way. And I can already hear the same media critics chiding those of us in left Blogostan for blowing the whole thing out of proportion. It’s just a little bunker buster, after all.
Read the whole thing. I don’t think I’m a panic artist. At least I never have been. But after the last few years I have to say that Billmon’s dark prediction sounds entirely believable to me. This Iran thing scares the hell out of me, and I’m not sure what anyone can do about it.
This president has asserted a doctrine of presidential infallibility. He does not believe that he can be stopped. And the way things are going I think he may think he has nothing to lose. There has been a sense of craziness in the air ever since 9/11, but it’s just taken a very, very surreal turn.
This is an interesting attempt by the NY Times to suss out the “narrative” of Fitzgerald’s case based upon his recent filing:
Every prosecutor strives not just to prove a case, but also to tell a compelling story. It is now clear that Mr. Fitzgerald’s account of what was happening in the White House in the summer of 2003 is very different from the Bush administration’s narrative, which suggested that Mr. Wilson was seen as a minor figure whose criticisms could be answered by disclosing the underlying intelligence upon which Mr. Bush relied.
[…]
Mr. Fitzgerald said he was preparing to turn over to Mr. Libby 1,400 pages of handwritten notes — some presumably in Mr. Libby’s own hand — that could shed light on two very different efforts at getting out the White House story.
One effort — the July 18 declassification of the major conclusions of the intelligence estimate — was taking place in public, while another, Mr. Fitzgerald argues, was happening in secret, with only Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby involved.
Last week’s court filing has already led the White House to acknowledge, over the weekend, that Mr. Bush ordered the selective disclosure of parts of the intelligence estimate sometime in late June or early July. But administration officials insist that Mr. Bush played a somewhat passive role and did so without selecting Mr. Libby, or anyone else, to tell the story piecemeal to a small number of reporters.
But in one of those odd twists in the unpredictable world of news leaks, neither of the reporters Mr. Libby met, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post or Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, reported a word of it under their own bylines. In fact, other reporters working on the story were talking to senior officials who were warning that the uranium information in the intelligence estimate was dubious at best.
I don’t know why the NY Times fails to mention this but Fitzgerald makes it quite clear in his filing that this “piecemeal” story was designed to discredit Wilson not just with the selective (and misleading) leaks of the NIE but with the bogus notion that his wife sent him on this “junket.” After all, Judy Miller wrote the words “Valerie Flame” in her notebook in the first meeting she had with Scooter in June of 2003. They were the same operation.
And that operation almost assuredly involved at least one other person who was conspicuously absent from Fitzgerald’s narrative. That person told Fitzgerald all about the “concerted effort” inside the white house to discredit Wilson. Once again, here’s Murray Waas:
President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel’s investigation of the matter.
But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.
The NY Times seems to take at face value that this secret cabal only involved Bush, Cheney and Libby — and Bush only tangentially. That is very doubtful. Karl Rove is likely the mastermind of this campaign. Discrediting critics is his job.
The question for Bush, Cheney and Libby is whether Karl is cooperating even more fully with Fitzgerald than when he spoke proudly to the FBI of this campaign to discredit Joe Wilson (probably assuming that John Ashcroft would never let the information see the light of day.) His lawyer certainly has been tightlipped lately.
If Waas’ story is correct, Karl Rove undercut Libby’s defense from the get. No wonder Libby wants to see what Karl specifically said.
Needling is a tried and true political tactic. I recommend that people needle Republicans relentlessly for their blind support of every crackpot scheme that George W. Bush has set forth for the last five years. Tie them to that dramatically unpopular piece of work so tight they can’t breathe. They deserve it.
