Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Contextualizing

by digby

Jane discusses this article in today’s NY Times about how blogging is affecting journalism and she makes this important point:

They do not spend the hours and days sifting through raw data now available to average people on the internet. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. That is not what they do. If you want to know some obscure detail about something Judith Miller did or said in June of 2003 you call emptywheel. If you need to know about journalists named in the subpoenas sent to the White House in January 2003 you email Jeralyn. If you expect that kind of depth of knowledge about details from the people whose job it is to dig up new dirt in this case, they don’t have it. They don’t have the time.

In this light bloggers serve the function of analysts. Or re-analyzers, more aptly, who attempt to contextualize as they sort through available data and look for patterns, inconsistencies and greater truths. For my money if I was trying to marry a blog with a newsroom that’s where I’d start — I’m constantly amazed that with all the access to information now available the big news bureaus don’t have a deeper pool of researchers to be the adjunct memories of people who spend their time in the development of external news sources.

There was a guy who did this kind of journalism long before technology made it possible for many of us to carry on the tradition. At their best, bloggers are the heirs to IF Stone, whose methods wwere described by his friend Victor Navasky this way:

His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain. It was his habitat of necessity, because use of government sources to document his findings was also a stratagem. Who would have believed this cantankerous-if-whimsical Marxist without all the documentation?

Sound familiar? And while we scruffy bloggers are (mostly) not marxists, we are greeted with great skepticism because we are unregulated, uncredentialed, and in some cases psuedonymous, so we also must go to great lengths to document our findings. Luckily, the technology that gives us such amazing instant access to reams of information also gives us the ability to link directly to our source material — as Arianna once described it “showing our work.” And over time we gain credibility with our readers the same way that newspapers do.

What Jane says about contextualizing is absolutely correct. If you followed the Whitewater scandal (or attempted to) you came to realize that the journalists who were writing about it were so caught up in day to day reporting that somewhere along the line they lost sight of both the big picture and the details. It became a daily exercize in futility trying to sort out what exactly was going on. Until Gene Lyons’ articles in Harpers (that led to his book “Fools for Scandal”) and then a couple of jury trials, I honestly couldn’t figure out what was going on. And I read three or four papers a day at the time. It was a story in desperate need of context, research and command of detail, mostly because it was a story being dribbled out a daily basis by political operatives and Arkansas opportunists to journalists who, in the midst of daily reporting, couldn’t see the larger story. (I have no idea where their editors were.)

I didn’t know how that worked in those days, thinking that journalists would see through spin and report it if it was clearly partisan. But I was wrong. They did fall for that story and turned it into an unintelligible, meaningless scandal that harrassed the president from almost his first day in office.

Today, certain bloggers would keep meticulous track of details, speculation and obvious spin and would report and discuss them in real time. Others would bring the whole story into historical perspective. Still others would try to tie all the disparate threads together to show larger patterns and trends. And many would speculate about the meaning of the scandal and the political ramifications. The scandal might happen anyway, but at least there would also be informed, engaged readers and easy access to those who have taken the time to analyze and contextualize the story as it unfolds. The alternative is to continue to allow the powerful triumverate of official sources, professional PR flacks and political operatives to lead the press (and, therefore, the country) around by the nose as they have so often in the last 15 years.

I’m not suggesting that blogging is a replacement for mainstream journalism. The daily papers, news broadcasts and news weeklies are indispensible. But more and more, people are recognizing mainstream journalism’s vulnerability to conventional wisdom, establishment pressure and partisan spin. And the longstanding reliance on he said/she said “objectivity” is simply no longer adequate in the modern world of sophisticated public relations. Blogs fill in some of the gaps.

I’m a little surprised that so many reporters are fighting them so hard instead of doing the smart thing, which is co-opt them. Good bloggers can be a reporter’s best friends if he learns how to use them.

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Up Down By 15 Points!

by digby

Steve Benan points out that Elaine Chao needs to find a standard of success other than the Dow Jones to tout this fabulous Republican economy:

[W]hile it was the 0.6% decline for the year that generated headlines, most seem to have overlooked the fact that on the day Bush was sworn into office in January 2001, the Dow Jones stood at 10,732.46. As of now, it’s at 10,717.50.

In other words, after five years of Bush’s presidency, the stock market has a cumulative gain of negative 15 points.

Under Reagan, the Dow went up 148%. Under Clinton, it grew 187%. After five years, Bush isn’t quite breaking even.

This reminds me of an article I read in the LA Times over the week-end. In the relativistic fashion we’ve come to love in the Bush era, that inconvenient fact has made many people simply decide that the Dow is no longer relevant:

As for the Dow, many believe the 109-year-old index of 30 large, blue-chip companies hasn’t been an accurate barometer of the economy or the broader stock market for the past two years.

Yes, and we’re actually winning in Iraq and global warming is a hoax — which you’d never know just by looking at the facts. Clearly, the facts are biased.

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Hold Harmless

by digby

Hey all you macho Republicans. Do you know why you elected Junior Bush to be the president?

I was elected to protect the American people from harm.

Thank goodness for Daddy.

And here I thought the Republicans were against that sort of fuzzy wuzzy kumbaaya pussified crapola. I guess not. How about a federal helmet law for bicyclists, then? (Gawd knows he needs one) Maybe he could outlaw pretzels and alcohol too. Or driving over 35 miles an hour. Or trans-fats. If protecting us from harm is what we elect presidents to do then he’s been seriously falling down on the job. There’s a ton of harm out there he hasn’t done even one thing about.

Oh, and isn’t it inappropriate for the administration to be talking about this while there’s an ongoing investigation? Seems I heard that somewhere.

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Divine Right Of Republicans

by digby

This Newsweak story is, well, weak:

The message to White House lawyers from their commander in chief, recalls one who was deeply involved at the time, was clear enough: find a way to exercise the full panoply of powers granted the president by Congress and the Constitution.

First of all, I’m sick of this bullshit about the president being the commander in chief all the time. This isn’t a military dictatorship. Citizens, and even lawyers in the Justice department, don’t have a commander in chief. We have a president. I know that’s not as glamorous or as, like, totally awesome, but that is what it is. A civilian, elected official who functions as the commander in chief of the armed forces.

But that’s nit-picking. This is some real bullshit:

When the story of the NSA’s program broke in The New York Times on Dec. 16, there was an immediate uproar in the press and on Capitol Hill. The reaction was predictably partisan. Most Republicans and conservatives defended Bush for safeguarding the country (though warrantless spying gave libertarians some pause). Most Democrats and liberals cited the eavesdropping program as more damning evidence that Bush and Cheney, already caught countenancing torture and jailing detainees without any legal rights, were running roughshod over civil liberties.

This is wrong. The Cato institute, which I think everyone in the DC orbit will agree is a libertarian think tank said this:

Cato senior fellow in Constitutional studies Robert A. Levy says, “President Bush’s executive order sanctions warrant-less wiretaps by the National Security Agency of communications from the United States to foreign countries by U.S. persons. Reportedly, the executive order is based on classified legal opinions stating that the president’s authority derives from his Commander-in-Chief power and the post-911 congressional authorization for the use of military force against Al Qaeda. That pernicious rationale, carried to its logical extreme, renders the PATRIOT Act unnecessary and trumps any dispute over its reauthorization. Indeed, such a policy makes a mockery of the principle of separation of powers.

Crook and Liars has footage of libertarian (and Republican hitman) William Safire joining with the critics this morning on Press the Meat.

That’s more than a pause. It’s a full stop, hold your horses, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? This is a partisan issue to the extent that the Republicans are invertebrate, hypocritical chichenshits who would be having a full on case of the vapors if anybody but their Dear GOP Leader tried a stunt like this. They certainly called for the smelling salts often enough over a couple of furtive blowjobs, shrieking to high heavens about tyranny and the rule ‘o law.

Harken back to the immortal words of Henry Hyde:

That none of us is above the law is a bedrock principle of democracy. To erode that bedrock is to risk even further injustice. To erode that bedrock is to subscribe, to a “divine right of kings” theory of governance, in which those who govern are absolved from adhering to the basic moral standards to which the governed are accountable.

We must never tolerate one law for the Ruler, and another for the Ruled. If we do, we break faith with our ancestors from Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord to Flanders Field, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Panmunjon, Saigon and Desert Storm.

Let us be clear: The vote that you are asked to cast is, in the final analysis, a vote about the rule of law.

The rule of law is one of the great achievements of our civilization. For the alternative to the rule of law is the rule of raw power. We here today are the heirs of three thousand years of history in which humanity slowly, painfully and at great cost, evolved a form of politics in which law, not brute force, is the arbiter of our public destinies.

We are the heirs of the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law: a moral code for a free people who, having been liberated from bondage, saw in law a means to avoid falling back into the habit of slaves.

We are the heirs of Roman law: the first legal system by which peoples of different cultures, languages, races, and religions came to live together in a form of political community.

We are the heirs of the Magna Carta, by which the freeman of England began to break the arbitrary and unchecked power of royal absolutism.

We are the heirs of a long tradition of parliamentary development, in which the rule of law gradually came to replace royal prerogative as the means for governing a society of free men and women.

We are the heirs of 1776, and of an epic moment in human affairs when the Founders of this Republic pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor – sacred honor – to the defense of the rule of law.

We are the heirs of a tragic civil war, which vindicated the rule of law over the appetites of some for owning others.

We are the heirs of the 20th century’s great struggles against totalitarianism, in which the rule of law was defended at immense cost against the worst tyrannies in human history. The “rule of law” is no pious aspiration from a civics textbook. The rule of law is what stands between all of us and the arbitrary exercise of power by the state. The rule of law is the safeguard of our liberties. The rule of law is what allows us to live our freedom in ways that honor the freedom of others while strengthening the common good. The rule of law is like a three legged stool: one leg is an honest Judge, the second leg is an ethical bar and the third is an enforceable oath. All three are indispensable in a truly democratic society.

Very moving, no? All those fine words about the rule of law safeguarding our liberties, the arbitrary exercise of power and Bunker Hill, Lexington and Normandy went right out the window on 9/11. That was when Henry and the rest of his stalwart defenders of the rule of law promptly wet their pants and then let their president use the constitution to clean up the puddle.

Update: For a full compendium of conservative critics of the president on the NSA illegal spying scandal (including one leg of the Powerline stool!) read this excellent post by Glenn Greenwald.

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Shaft of Sunlight

by digby

I wrote the other day that I thought it was time for some angry Justice Department lawyers to step up and reveal what in the hell went on with the White House cherry picking and stovepiping the legal advice that allowed them to create a new commander in chief infallibility doctrine.

It looks like we know the name of one of them and he’s a biggie, James Comey. Comey is, by all accounts, a very straight arrow. He’s exactly the kind of guy whose credibility is required to make this case if there is one. If this article is true, he refused to sign on on their little plan when he was filling in for Ashcroft when he was in the hospital. Jane has all the details. She’s been following Comey for a long time and will have lots of tid-bits about this development for us I’m sure.

Also, Walter Pincus reports this morning that the NSA shared its illegally obtained information with other departments, including the pentagon, which we know has been tracking anti-war protestors.

The picture gets clearer every day. The evidence increasingly points to the possibility that NSA and others illegally monitored Americans who disagreee with administration policy and shared that information with all the federal police agencies in the government. This does not surprise me. They’ve called us unpatriotic to our faces. They’ve written best-selling books calling us treasonous. It’s not exactly a stretch to suspect that these were not just rhetorical flourishes.

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Happy New Year Everyone!

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Clearing The Ranchette

by digby

This is the wierdest damned article I’ve read in ages. I knew that Junior did the brush clearing thing, but I assumed that he did it for photo-op purposes. It turns out that he’s actually obsessed with it.

He’s obsessed with brush clearing.

On most of the 365 days he has enjoyed at his secluded ranch here, President Bush’s idea of paradise is to hop in his white Ford pickup truck in jeans and work boots, drive to a stand of cedars, and whack the trees to the ground.

If the soil is moist enough, he will light a match and burn the wood. If it is parched, as it is across Texas now, the wood will sit in piles scattered over the 1,600-acre spread until it is safe for a ranch hand to torch — or until the president can come home and do the honors himself.

President Bush, shown clearing cedar at his Crawford, Tex., ranch in 2002, has not lost his enthusiasm for the task during recent trips to what aides call the Western White House.

Sometimes this activity is the only official news to come out of what aides call the Western White House. For five straight days since Monday, when Bush retreated to the ranch for his Christmas sojourn, a spokesman has announced that the president, in between intelligence briefings, calls to advisers and bicycling, has spent much of his day clearing brush.

This might strike many Washingtonians as a curious pastime. It does burn a lot of calories. But brush clearing is dusty, it is exhausting (the president goes at it in 100 degree-plus heat), and it is earsplitting, requiring earplugs to dull the chain saw’s buzz.

For Bush, who is known to spend early-morning hours hacking at unwanted mesquite, cocklebur weeds, hanging limbs and underbrush only to go back for more after lunch, it borders on obsession.

The president of the United States likes to spend his suburban ranchette vacation killing time cutting stuff down with a chainsaw and then torching it. Holy shit. Does it get any more symbolic than that?

(It reminds me of the tales his pals told about his childhood, stuffing frogs with firecrackers and blowing them up.)

Certainly the 1,583 acres of rugged canyons and rocky hillsides, creeks and pasture land on Prairie Chapel Ranch contain a lot of brush. Bush, a creature of habit, is not in danger of finishing the job. The Bush ranch, however, is not a working ranch. The president has kept only a handful of cattle on the property since Kenneth Engelbrecht, who sold him the former hog farm six years ago, stopped leasing back some pasture land that supported a herd of cows.

[…]

Real ranchers, who need to clear a whole lot of brush for pasture land, either hire someone to spray herbicides from the air or run an excavator through it. They tend to tend cattle, several said.

Bush, by contrast, practices a selective, do-it-yourself sculpting to enhance his enjoyment of his property, local experts say. He will clear underbrush to preserve beautiful live oaks and pecan trees, or to prepare the 50 acres where Laura Bush is cultivating native grasses, or to help carve nature trails through the ranch’s many canyons.

“It’s a selective control of the brush,” said Sam Middleton, owner of a West Texas ranch brokerage, who added that this enhances a ranch’s value.

Then again, there will be times when the president drives around his property and “will see a stand of cedar trees and say ‘Let’s clear those,’ ” said Joseph Hagin, Bush’s deputy chief of staff, who has been cutting brush with his boss all week. They do not talk a lot of policy over the sound of their chain saws, he said.

You can’t compare this to his bicycling or running obsessions, because those have a certain meditative yet thrilling physical challenge. This is something else entirely. This is the the only thing he can think of to do when he isn’t running or biking. Mindless, loud, repetitive manual labor. It’s like obsessively jackhammering sidewalks for fun.

A reader wrote me an e-mail asking me what conclusions I had come to about Bush after all this time. Is he evil? Is he stupid? Is he a religious fanatic, a spoiled frat boy, what?

I haven’t actually changed my mind from the first impression I had of him when he said “Christ. He changed my life” in answer to the debate question about favorite political philosophers. He’s simple but well-trained. And he hasn’t changed. The person we have been watching for the last five years is the same inarticulate, testy, arrogant and shallow, rich mediocrity he was when he took office.

He’s also as laughably robotic and unresponsive as ever. (Only Scott McClellan is less spontaneous.) But the Republicans discovered that if the president doesn’t submit himself to spontaneous situations and is disciplined in his message, people will get used to it after a while and stop expecting him to actually answer questions. This was new. Reagan wasn’t a genius, but he understood the public after a lifetime of training in what they wanted from a celebrity. He also had a good sense of humor and great timing. He was very capable of dealing with the press. Clinton was a master of detail who could riff on anything. His intellect and his obvious enjoyment in governing prepared him to answer any question that was thrown at him. Bush senior was bumbling but professional. He responded.

Junior simply doesn’t engage unless he is forced to, seeing encounters with the press as nothing more than an oppportunity to get out the message of the day and run out the clock. He is a living stone wall who speaks in strange parables and cliches and sometimes just pure gibberish. He falters, he stammers, he looks uncomforatble and weak. Yet he was until fairly recently perceived by most to be a strong and resolute leader. (The post 9/11 delusion was some powerful mojo.)

I know that it’s not considered wise to “misunderestimate” him and I’ve heard many people say that he’s got political acumen that we elitist nerds just don’t get. I don’t believe it. I know what I see. The man has been in over his head since the day he entered the presidential race and he’s still in over his head. 9/11 got him reelected in 2004, but he and his administration have been hanging on by their fingernails since the day they took office. They wear suits and ties and say sir and ma’m, but it’s all to cover for the fact that they had no idea how to govern and by now it’s clear they never will.

I see a man who is barely holding back his panic; a man who clings to his pathetic “war president” image like a talisman. He looks confused and hurt by the criticism he’s receiving from people who he thought bought into the program and reportedly knows on some level that he’s been duped by his advisors. He has no choice but to keep barreling along pretending that he knows what he’s doing. He barks at underlings and pretends to be in charge even as he gets more and more confused. He’s distanced from his father, the one person everyone thought could help guide this callow airhead if the shit came down. He trusts no one now.

So he clears brush like a madman everytime he gets the chance, hiding behind his Oakley’s, blessedly unable to hear anything over the sound of chainsaws —- maybe even the voices inside his head that remind him that he’s still got three more years of this horrible responsibility he knows he cannot handle.

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Constitutional Thuggery

by digby

Mark Kleiman makes a point about the NSA sping scandal that I think is essential:

Of course the Rasmussen Poll purporting to show 64% support for the Bush secret eavesdropping policy is an artifact of artful question design.

But, unlike some of my liberal friends, I don’t think the answer would be much different if the phrase “without a warrant” had been included. The key missing word was “illegally.”

The word wiretapping should always be preceded by the word illegal. That’s the qualifier. Nobody thinks that wiretapping is always wrong and nobody knows from warrants. I have little doubt that most people assumed the government was wiretapping terrorists suspects and their suspected friends. What we didn’t assume was that the president would consciously break the law to do it — and that he believes himself immune from all laws during “wartime,” (which he alone defines.)

Kleiman goes on to say that the issue should be framed as “rule of law” rather than civil liberties and I slightly disagree with that. I think you must do both. The frame of civil liberties is important for our party’s long term health because it is a fundamental value — and we need to be willing express those even when the country as a whole might not agree. Right now a good many people think that the only things we believe in are gay rights and abortion, and they have no concept of the fundamental values that undergird our positions on those issues. Liberals should not be afraid to wave around the Bill of Rights any more than the right waves around the only amendment it cares about (the second.)

I do not think that conflicts with the argument that America is a land of laws not men. Indeed, I would suggest that the two messages go quite well together. If you want to go all “originalist” on us, the belief that the president cannot violate the laws and the Bill of Rights whenever he feels like it is as fundamental as it gets.

As I listen to the Bush apologists on Fox and elsewhere, it’s become clear to me that they are hinging their argument solely on the idea that the president was “protecting” us infantile Americans and was only monitoring the “bad guys.” This shows the weakness of their argument. They are not standing up and saying “yes, even if they did illegally listen in your phone calls, comrade, it’s the least you can do to keep the homeland safe” or “if you have nothing to hide you won’t mind if the government illegally spies on you.” The ramifications of data mining aside, they are saying that only guilty people were monitored. Sure.

As Kleiman points out, there is already one excellent example of using the power of the federal government for political purposes in a post 9/11 environment:

The ability to spy on domestic conversations is obviously abusable. And we already know that Tom DeLay tricked the Department of Homeland Security into tracking the whereabouts of Texas Democratic legislators who had fled to Oklahoma to try to block a quorum for DeLay’s redistricting scheme. And we know that DeLay got away with it. So if the question on the table is “Will the Republicans abuse domestic-security powers for political purposes?” we know that the answer is “Yes.”

Governor Bill Richardson, who isn’t exactly shrill (he’s running for president as a centrist) is very suspicious that the NSA illegally tapped his domestic calls to Colin Powell regarding the North Korean crisis — and then illegally gave the transcripts to John Bolton:

“The governor is upset that his conversations with Secretary Powell would be intercepted since most of them were domestic calls,” said Richardson spokesman Billy Sparks. “The governor felt his calls about North Korea were confidential.”

This is where the Plame scandals and the NSA illegal spying scandals intersect. It’s the ethics, stupid. These people are partisan thugs. They used journalists to leak classified information for political purposes. They are now going to try to destroy both whistleblowers and journalists for political purposes. And if that doesn’t tell you that they are willing to illegally monitor citizens for political purposes then you are absurdly naive. In fact, this government is the poster child for the division of power and the rule of law. They were written into the constitution with these guys in mind.

Update: I don’t know how reliable Wayne Madsen usually is,(Michael Froomkin says he’s not a nut) but in the course of writing that post, I came upon this:

December 30, 2005 — More on Firstfruits. The organization partly involved in directing the National Security Agency program to collect intelligence on journalists — Firstfruits — is the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC), a component of the National Intelligence Council. The last reported chairman of the inter-intelligence agency group was Dr. Larry Gershwin, the CIA’s adviser on science and technology matters, a former national intelligence officer for strategic programs, and one of the primary promoters of the Iraqi disinformation con man and alcoholic who was code named “Curveball.”

Gershwin was also in charge of the biological weapons portfolio at the National Intelligence Council where he worked closely with John Bolton and the CIA’s Alan Foley — director of the CIA’s Office of Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) — and Frederick Fleitz — who Foley sent from WINPAC to work in Bolton’s State Department office — in helping to cook Iraqi WMD “intelligence” on behalf of Vice President Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby.

In addition to surveilling journalists who were writing about operations at NSA, Firstfruits particularly targeted State Department and CIA insiders who were leaking information about the “cooking” of pre-war WMD intelligence to particular journalists, including those at the New York Times, Washington Post, and CBS 60 Minutes.

The vice chairman of the FDDC, James B. Bruce, wrote an article in Studies in Intelligence in 2003, “This committee represents an inter­agency effort to understand how foreign adversaries learn about, then try to defeat, our secret intelligence collection activities.” In a speech to the Institute of World Politics, Bruce, a CIA veteran was also quoted as saying, “We’ve got to do whatever it takes — if it takes sending SWAT teams into journalists’ homes — to stop these leaks.” He also urged, “stiff new penalties to crack down on leaks, including prosecutions of journalists that publish classified information.” The FDDC appears to be a follow-on to the old Director of Central Intelligence’s Unauthorized Disclosure Analysis Center (UDAC).

NSA eavesdropping on journalists and their sources is sending chills throughout Washington, DC and beyond.

Meanwhile, WMR’s disclosures about Firstfruits have set off a crisis in the intelligence community and in various media outlets. Journalists who have contacted WMR since the revelation of the Firstfruits story are fearful that their conversations and e-mail with various intelligence sources have been totally compromised and that they have been placed under surveillance that includes the use of physical tails. Intelligence sources who are current and former intelligence agency employees also report that they suspect their communications with journalists and other parties have been surveilled by technical means.

Scroll down to December 28th to get the first story on “Firstfruits.” Bob Baer mentioned this tracking of journlaists on Hardball a week or so ago too, causing Andrea Mitchell to blink hard a few times.

For a primer on the meaning of the biblical word “Firstfruits” try this. Feel free to speculate in the comments as to why you think they chose it to describe a surveillance program.

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Cui malo?

by digby

Krauthamer just said that he needs to see a case of abuse before he is convinced that the leakers in the illegal NSA spying case are whistle blowers. That’s interesting. It shouldn’t be required to show harm in a criminal case like this, but perhaps on a public relations level this is really what needs to happen.

I believe there is only a one percent chance that this extra-constitutional power grab did not result in abuse. The FISA court and the justice department both pulled in the reins in 2004 for a reason. The president kept this program secret long past the time he could have developed some reasonable legislation to accomplish what he needed to accomplish. There is something very wrong with this program or they wouldn’t have handled it the way they did.

Considering the history, “trust us we’re only monitoring the bad guys” doesn’t pass the smell test. We need real hearings and if we get them Krauthamer may very well get the examples of abuse that he needs.

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Our Allies

by digby

Kos has the story on the Uzbek torture memos that are being leaked to blogs in the UK (and preserved by blogs in the US.) I honestly don’t know what to say about this except reiterate futile statements about oil, the Great Game and moral clarity.

If we are in the business of invading countries to depose tyrants, there’s no good reason that we didn’t go to this one first. That it is our ally in the “War on Terror” is a cosmic joke of epic proportions.

Here’s just a small excerpt of one of the memos:

The Economist of 7 September states: “Uzbekistan, in particular, has jailed many thousands of moderate Islamists, an excellent way of converting their families and friends to extremism.” The Economist also spoke of “the growing despotism of Mr Karimov” and judged that “the past year has seen a further deterioration of an already grim human rights record”. I agree.

Between 7,000 and 10,000 political and religious prisoners are currently detained, many after trials before kangaroo courts with no representation. Terrible torture is commonplace: the EU is currently considering a demarche over the terrible case of two Muslims tortured to death in jail apparently with boiling water. Two leading dissidents, Elena Urlaeva and Larissa Vdovna, were two weeks ago committed to a lunatic asylum, where they are being drugged, for demonstrating on human rights. Opposition political parties remain banned. There is no doubt that September 11 gave the pretext to crack down still harder on dissent under the guise of counter-terrorism.

Yet on 8 September the US State Department certified that Uzbekistan was improving in both human rights and democracy, thus fulfilling a constitutional requirement and allowing the continuing disbursement of $140 million of US aid to Uzbekistan this year. Human Rights Watch immediately published a commendably sober and balanced rebuttal of the State Department claim.

Oh, and we commonly “render” suspects to Uzbekistan for interrogation. I’m sure they promise not to boil them though.

Update:

correction: “render-ed.” Via Upyernoz I see that we have, apparently, seen the light and cooled our relationship with Uzbekistan since the government there opened fire on a bunch of civilians last May. Still, people wonder why (considering that we didn’t object to the boiling and all) a little random shooting into crowds would cause our relationship to suddenly be strained. I suggest that someone look into Vladimir Putin’s soul for the answer.

Update II:

Americana has more on this.

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