Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Heroes And Chickenhawks

Gary Farber has been writing about a very interesting follow-up to the story from last night about the Iraqi General who was killed with the novel “beating with a rubber hose while tied up in a sleeping bag” interrogation technique. I was unaware that this was only uncovered because of another honorable whistleblower:

For Sgt. 1st Class Michael Pratt it would have been far easier to look away. If war is hell, after all, there are going to be some demons. And since hooking up with the Colorado-based 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in early 2003, the Utah National Guard soldier had learned it was simpler to ignore questionable actions than report them.

But the guardsman couldn’t look past what he had seen in the Al Qiem Detention Facility. Not after the death of an inmate whom he believed had been abused by a senior officer. Not even as the Army announced that the prisoner had died “of natural causes.”

Army records show that apparent abuses of inmates at the makeshift prison, known as the Blacksmith Hotel, may have been ignored had Pratt not reported his concerns to Utah Guard officials, outside the chain of command of the unit to which he was temporarily assigned. The documents, transcripts from testimony given by Pratt in a closed hearing last March, also detail the soldier’s struggles to do what he felt was right in the face of pressure to remain silent.

The record also illustrates a disturbing charge: That the unit with which Pratt found himself in Iraq was little interested in hearing an enlisted soldier’s complaints and concerns about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

Contacted by The Salt Lake Tribune, the Bountiful native declined to speak about the matter, saying he wanted to ensure any further testimony would not be tainted by public comment. Maj. Mark Solomon of Fort Carson, Colo., the commander of 3rd Cavalry troops not currently deployed – including four soldiers implicated in the inmate’s death – said he could not comment on any of Pratt’s allegations.

But a 38-page transcript of previously secret testimony details what Pratt claims to have seen at Blacksmith – and why he ultimately decided that he could not remain silent.

[…]

A soldier with a squeaky-clean record and reputation during his 18 years in the Utah National Guard, Pratt was apparently unprepared for what he found in his first few months with some of the regular Army soldiers of the 3rd Cavalry.

Among the allegations made in his testimony: That he had witnessed a soldier shoot a 14-year-old boy in the back during a raid – as the boy was running away. That matter, he claimed, was never thoroughly investigated, though fellow soldiers assured him that the rules of engagement had been followed when the teen was shot.

Later, when he learned that unqualified soldiers were conducting interrogations, Pratt again logged a compliant. In response, he testified, he was investigated – and told by other soldiers it was for blackmail purposes.

The final blow came when Pratt reported that a group of combat engineers had confiscated a large stash of currency from an Iraqi family who intended to use the money to send their daughter to Jordan for an operation. When he reported the matter to an officer in his chain of command, Pratt said, “he told me I was getting too close to the Iraqis. He accused me of losing my objectivity.”

“After that incident,” Pratt said. “I realized that it was pointless to report anything.”

[…]

Still, Pratt said he confronted the senior soldier after he watched another officer pull a sleeping bag over an inmate, immobilizing the man with cord before slamming him to the ground. When the inmate began to pray aloud, Pratt said, the officer poured water into his mouth and cupped his hands over the inmate’s face.

Welshofer, the unit’s “subject matter expert” on interrogation techniques, told Pratt “the sleeping bag technique” was authorized, though only certain soldiers were allowed to use it, according to Pratt’s testimony. In the following days, the record states, Pratt watched as Welshofer himself applied the technique on another inmate, sitting on the bound man’s chest and stomach as he asked him questions.

“I could tell by the way he was sitting, if I was in the detainee’s position, I would have had a hard time breathing,” Pratt said, adding afterward: “I’m surprised that it didn’t kill him.”

This guy was finally heard when he left Iraq and reported what he knew to an officer from the Utah National Guard stationed in Kuwait. It’s likely that this whole story would have been swept under the rug if this man had not come forward as he did.

He is a hero, to be sure, as are others, which I wrote about the other night. It’s quite clear that torture, beatings, abuse and sexual humiliation were standard operating procedures from 2002 – 2004 at least, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I won’t even hazard a guess about what happened to the ghost prisoners they considered to be real threats and kept in various offshore prisons or rendered to friendly despots who would happily torture them for us. One of them says they sliced his genitals — but then we are told that they are all liars, so what do I know? (I thought the tales of menstrual blood in Guantanamo were ridiculous too — until they turned out to be true) Considering what was done to those who were considered low level, I’m not sure we ever want to know the details. Apparently, at least for a time, people at high levels ordered our military to behave like barbarians. And gosh, it’s really worked out so well.

I know that war is hell and all, but it’s really important to keep in perspective one particular thing. We invaded Iraq; it didn’t attack us. We weren’t invited in either. We just did it. And as we now know, the reasons we gave for doing it were false. And when we got there we were so unprepared that we allowed the country to immediately devolve into chaos. Out of that chaos an insurgency developed. Our reaction was to “take the gloves off” — in a country we had allegedly just liberated — the same way we “took the gloves off” with al Qaeda.

The vast majority of Iraqis were not Saddam’s bitter-enders, not insurgents and certainly not terrorists. They had just spent 30 years under the thumb of a totalitarian dictator. And yet we were rampaging through their homes, “hunting insurgents” and treating them as if they were an enemy. We sent in too few troops and those we sent were untrained and inexperienced. And we let the CIA and other unacountables have a free hand.

Again, these were Iraqis, the people we claimed to be liberating — not a country of terrorists who threatened our way of life. And yet I think many of our troops did not understand this. And why would they? The president of the United States constantly made it sound as if they were one in the same. He evoked 9/11 in the same breath as Iraq over and over again. Many of our troops believed that the Iraqis were responsible for the terrorist attacks. And with the instructions to “take the gloves off” they took out their rage against those they believed were responsible.

This is why the chickenhawks should be forced go to war. It’s not that they must be willing to die for their country; nobody’s dying for America over there — they are dying for George W. Bush. It’s because if young (and not so young) men and women are going to be forced to have blood on their hands like this; to be involved in the killing of innocents and torture and abuse due to political incompetence, then the political supporters of this war should have to share in their nightmares and their guilt. Let them be the ones fending off nervous breakdowns and suicide, let them have this on their consciences. The chickenhawks who support “taking the gloves off” in an unjust war should be forced to be the ones who do this barbaric dirty work on behalf of the man they see as the great deliverer of freedom and democracy.

I sincerely hope that George W. Bush’s God exists. Because if he does, he’s sending that SOB straight to hell.

Farber has been posting on this for several days. Here he discusees an earlier story from the Denver Post.

Update: For another excellent analysis of the full story read this post and the next one down from Marty Lederman at Balkinization.

What Makes You Feel Free?

Armando points to this WaPo article in which we find that John Roberts does not believe in a right to privacy. Now, I realize that this is really an arcane legal debate, but I wonder how it plays politically?

According to this Gallup Poll (pdf)from 2003 (when we were in high GWOT “fear-up) this is how the American people saw it:

Tell what makes you feel free?

36.

Next I am going to read some basic American rights. For each one, please indicate whether this is crucial to your own sense of freedom, very important but not crucial, somewhat important, or not important at all.

How about – [RANDOM ORDER]?

2003 Nov 10-12

Crucial—very important—Somewhatimportant—Not Important—No opinion

The right to vote 60 37 2 1 *

Freedom of religion 55 39 5 1 *

The right to free speech 52 40 7 1 *

The right to due process 52 37 7 1 3

The right to privacy 47 44 9 * *

The right to petition the government 44 37 15 2 2

Protection against unreasonable searches/seizures 40 39 16 2 2

Freedom of the press 36 37 22 4 1

The right to keep and bear arms 30 26 27 15 2

Interesting, don’t you think? It would appear that a rather large number of Americans not only believe they have a right to privacy, they believe it is more crucial than freedom of the press and the right to bear arms.

I think that this is one of those big ticket “superjumbo” items that Democrats should begin to stake out. This issue is not just one that applies togovernment, but business as well and with companies selling our personal information to the highest bidder and the government and religion encroaching into our private lives, this issue is becoming more and more salient.

The Republicans are always introducing constitutional amendments and bills that have no chance of passage in order to stake out their position on constitutional issues. We should do this too. And our elected representatives should say loud and clear that we believe in a right to privacy. Let the Republicans explain why they don’t.

This seems like a no brainer to me. Guys like Rick Santorum are now just coming right out and saying that they don’t believe in a right to privacy and we are about to put a new justice on the Supreme Court who believes that the Bill of Rights does not imply such a freedom. Ok. Let’s amend the constitution and make it explicit, then. 91% of the public are with us. And I suspect they are going to be a bit surprised to learn that there are big thinkers out there in the GOP who believe that this very important, crucial right doesn’t exist at all.

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Wedged In

I keep reading in the mainstream press about the terrible rift between the DLC and the left and how Democratic candidates are going to have to thread the needle in 06 and 08 to deal with it. We are all told how desperately the party needs to stop being a collection of issues and come together around some big ideas that we can all endorse and win mainstream support with.

This is all true. Democrats squabbling amongst themselves is an old story and it is certainly the case that the grassroots (which I think are erroneously referred to and perceived as far left) are more restive than I’ve seen them in years. We will undoubtedly have some arguments over the next couple of years about the direction of the party and what it’s going to take to win.

It’s interesting to me however, that there is another similar story building about which the mainstream media seem to be mostly oblivious. Indeed, many Democrats seem oblivious as well, certainly those of the Washington persuasion.

Yesterday, the president of the United States once again declared himself in favor of teaching the religiously based propaganda campaign called “intelligent design” as science. He’s done this before, back in the day, coming out in favor of teaching creationism. (It’s actually quite amazing coming from the son of the president who once called the religious right “the extra-chromosome set.”) This is, and has been for some time, the sort of pander that nobody really took all that seriously. After all, the religious right was quite a docile community that could be manipulated for votes without ever having to deliver. But that may be changing. We are beginning to see some big tensions building around the radical religious right and its symbiotic relationship with the Republican Party.

After last night’s squeaker in Ohio, people are sure to be wondering what the salient issues were that made this race so unexpectedly close. Certainly we had an attractive candidate and a Republican party in disarray. The war was an issue and it’s becoming more and more unpopular. But one of the things that struck me strongly in watching Jean Schmidt was just how extreme she was. She’s definitely a member of the extra-chromosome set. Her shrill views on abortion we’ve become used to, but what about this stuff about living wills and stem cell research? (And what in God’s name was a woman from Ohio going on about the minutemen for?)She represents the far right of the GOP and it looks to me from the election results that her extremist agenda may be coming up against resistence in her own party.

There’s a reason why Bill Frist just did a Sistah Soljah on stem cell research. And I think that the reason is examined in some detail in this very interesting article in USA Today:

CANTON, Ohio — Pastor Russell Johnson paces across the broad stage as he decries the “secular jihadists” who have “hijacked” America, accuses the public schools of neglecting to teach that Hitler was “an avid evolutionist” and links abortion to children who murder their parents.

“It’s time for the church to get a spinal column” and push the “seculars and the jihadists … into the dust bin of history,” the guest preacher tells a congregation that fills the sanctuary at First Christian Church of Canton.

That is his mission. Johnson leads the Ohio Restoration Project, an emergent network of nearly 1,000 “Patriot Pastors” from conservative churches across the state. Each has pledged to register 300 “values voters,” adding hundreds of thousands of like-minded citizens to the electorate who “would be salt and light for America.”

And, perhaps, help elect a fellow Christian conservative, Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, as governor next year. That has alarmed some establishment Republicans who back rival contenders and warn that an assertive Christian right campaign could repel moderate voters the party needs.

Evangelical Christian leaders nationwide have been emboldened by their role in re-electing President Bush and galvanized by their success in campaigning for constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage, passed in 18 states so far.

Now some are organizing to build on last year’s successes. They want to solidify their role in setting the political agenda and electing sympathetic public officials.

The Ohio effort isn’t unique. Johnson’s project — which he says has signed up more than 900 pastors in Ohio during its first 10 weeks in operation — has helped spawn the Texas Restoration Project in Bush’s home state. The fledging Pennsylvania Pastors’ Network has signed up 81 conservative clergy so far. Similar efforts are beginning to percolate elsewhere.

“It’s maturing as a movement within the evangelical Christian community,” says Colin Hanna of Let Freedom Ring, a Pennsylvania-based group that teaches pastors how to be involved in politics.

John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, calls the networks a new chapter in an effort to organize conservative clergy that began with the Moral Majority a quarter-century ago, then faltered.

“This generation of evangelical pastors is much more open to this type of activity,” says Green, who studies Ohio politics and religious conservatives. “There isn’t the kind of hostility to involvement in public affairs you would have found among evangelicals 25 years ago.”

[…]

But the unyielding focus by many conservative Christian activists on such issues as abortion and gay marriage worries Republican loyalists who have other priorities. Economic conservatives want to lower taxes, for instance; small-government conservatives want to limit the intrusion of government on daily life. For many voters, jobs and education are top concerns.

“This is a 50-50 state,” almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, state Auditor Betty Montgomery says. She and Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro are the other Republicans now in the gubernatorial race. “We are a crossroads state and very diverse. We’ve never really elected anyone too far to the right or too far to the left, too liberal or too conservative, and that could make it difficult for Ken to win in the fall.”

Montgomery and Petro are proven vote-getters and known statewide; each received more votes than Blackwell in their respective contests in 2002. But Blackwell can claim a base among Christian conservatives — he’s featured in “Ohio for Jesus” radio spots and regularly speaks from pulpits across the state — while the other two divide the party’s more moderate ranks.

Some establishment Republicans want either Petro or Montgomery to drop out and allow a one-on-one contest against Blackwell. (Both insist they’re in the race for good.)

Neil Clark, a former chief operating officer for the Ohio Senate Republican Caucus and one of the best-connected lobbyists in Columbus, the state capital, says he and other moderate Republicans are worried about the state “going back to the Stone Ages of Salem.”

[…]

State Republican Chairman Bob Bennett, who is neutral in the primary, predicts “a very tough year” for whoever wins the gubernatorial nomination. Investigations into financial improprieties have engulfed the Taft administration and touched other officeholders.

He says the odds are against Republicans uniting behind any one candidate — and against having a primary that doesn’t leave scars. “They’ll be out to kill each other,” he predicts, “and they’ll have $10 to $15 million each to do it with.”

[…]

First, though, there is next year’s gubernatorial primary — no sure thing, and a test for the emerging network of Christian conservatives.

Petro, 56, has raised the most money and gotten the most endorsements from state legislators. His hometown of Cleveland gives him a stronghold in a Democratic part of the state. Sitting in an office suite lined with portraits of his predecessors, he says he has a “record of accomplishment” in state office that Blackwell can’t match.

But Petro’s positions on social issues have caused controversy. After being endorsed in 1998 by the National Abortion Rights Action League, he announced two years later that after reflection he had decided to oppose abortion except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. While he opposes same-sex marriage, he also opposed the constitutional ban last year because he said as written it could have unintended consequences, including undercutting laws on domestic violence.

Montgomery, 57, has been the state’s top vote-getter in the past two elections; she was the first woman elected auditor in Ohio and, before that, attorney general. She backed the gay-marriage ban but is anathema to many conservative Christian leaders because she generally supports abortion rights.

The focus on that issue to the exclusion of all others exasperates her. “If you get somebody who is with you 100% of the time and can’t win an election, isn’t it better to have somebody who is with you 80% of the time and can win?” she asks, sitting in a conference room at her campaign headquarters. Boxes of campaign literature are stacked along the walls. She says she was raised “not to wear your religion on your sleeve.”

I think there is a good possibility that this is going to be played out all over the country in the next few years. This 50/50 electorate is not confined to Ohio. And despite the RNC’s attempts to demonize Move-On as the modern Weathermen, the face of radicalism today is not Democrats who were opposed to the war in Iraq — the Republicans themselves are trying to distance themselves as fast as they can from that debacle. (Perhaps the DLC could take notice and stop flogging the GWOT, too. It’s been officially decreed as last year’s color.) No, the face of radicalism is guys like this pastor who are insisting that abortion is like kids murdering their parents and saying that the “secular jihad” should be pushed into the dustbin of history. Moderate republicans are getting nervous about this crap at long last.

Unsurprisingly,Paul Weyrich is quoted in that article saying that “Ken Blackwell ‘believes God wanted him as secretary of State during 2004’ because as such he was responsible for voting operations in a critical state during a critical election.” Weyrich added: “It is difficult to disagree with that proposition.” Paul Weyrich obviously has a sense of humor. He, along with a a cadre of movement conservatives (that includes our boy Karl Rove) have been building an evangelical political machine for more than two decades. It’s the red state version of Tammany Hall. “God” placing Ken Blackwell in charge of counting the votes is one of his proudest achievements.

It is, therefore, in our best interest to separate these people from the rest of the Republican party. I certainly do not believe it’s impossible. They are beginning to be difficult to control and are pushing the party farther to the right than the country can accept.

The conventional wisdom yesterday was that Hackett needed a low turnout in order to get close in this very conservative district. The turnout was phenomenally high for a special election and Hackett did very well. I haven’t been able to find any breakdown of the electorate yesterday, but the campaign clearly managed to engage Democrats in larger numbers than expected (there are many fewer of them in the district), suppress turnout among Republicans or persuade a fair number of Republicans to vote for him. It was probably some combination of the three. Whatever it was, it’s clear that Jean Schmidt’s extreme politics and Paul Hackett’s “man of the people” approach was perceived very differently in 2005 than the Bush-Kerry race was in 2004. I’ll be curious to see whatever extrapolations people come up with.

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that we become hostile to religion. Nor am I suggesting that we run as the libertine Girls-Gone-Wild party. But I do believe that the zeitgeist is changing. I think we need to help drive this wedge between the radical religious right and the moderate Republicans.

I like the way Hackett put it: “I don’t need Washington to tell me how to live my personal life, or how to pray to my God.”

Update:

Via Maha in the comments, I see that Fafnir has weighed in about “the democratic party an its terrible internal divisions an stuff.”

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Singing For Jesus

…as long as it doesn’t require any travel.

In a telephone interview late Tuesday, Perkins said Frist wasn’t invited because he had participated by videotape in the group’s previous event. The main reason the event is being held in Nashville, he said, is that it is easier to line up country music stars there to perform.

So I guess country stars, many of whom spend months at a time on the road, are so committed to the cause that they will only perform if the event is held in their home town. That’s very inspirational.

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Effective Interrogation

A week into Mowhoush’s detainment, according to classified investigative documents, interrogators were getting fed up with the prisoner. In a “current situation summary” PowerPoint presentation dated Nov. 18, Army officials wrote about his intransigence, using his first name (spelled “Abid” in Army documents):

“Previous interrogations were non-threatening; Abid was being treated very well. Not anymore,” the document reads. “The interrogation session lasted several hours and I took the gloves off because Abid refused to play ball.”

But the harsher tactics backfired.

In an interrogation that could be witnessed by the entire detainee population, Mowhoush was put into an undescribed “stress position” that caused the other detainees to stand “with heads bowed and solemn looks on their faces,” said the document.

“I asked Abid if he was strong enough a leader to put an end to the attacks that I believed he was behind,” the document said, quoting an unidentified interrogator. “He did not deny he was behind the attacks as he had denied previously, he simply said because I had humiliated him, he would not be able to stop the attacks. I take this as an admission of guilt.”

Excellent work. Sipowitz would be proud.

Three days later, on Nov. 21, 2003, Mowhoush was moved from the border base at Qaim to a makeshift detention facility about six miles away in the Iraqi desert, a prison fashioned out of an old train depot, according to court testimony and investigative documents. Soldiers with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 101st Airborne Division were running a series of massive raids called Operation Rifles Blitz, and the temporary holding facility, nicknamed Blacksmith Hotel, was designed to hold the quarry.

U.S. troops searched more than 8,000 homes in three cities, netting 350 detainees, according to court testimony. Even though Mowhoush was not arrested during the raids, he was moved to Blacksmith Hotel, where teams of Army Special Forces soldiers and the CIA were conducting interrogations.

At Blacksmith, according to military sources, there was a tiered system of interrogations. Army interrogators were the first level.

When Army efforts produced nothing useful, detainees would be handed over to members of Operational Detachment Alpha 531, soldiers with the 5th Special Forces Group, the CIA or a combination of the three. “The personnel were dressed in civilian clothes and wore balaclavas to hide their identity,” according to a Jan. 18, 2004, report for the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.

If they did not get what they wanted, the interrogators would deliver the detainees to a small team of the CIA-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary squads, code-named Scorpions, according to a military source familiar with the operation. The Jan. 18 memo indicates that it was “likely that indigenous personnel in the employ of the CIA interrogated MG Mowhoush.”

Sometimes, soldiers and intelligence officers used the mere existence of the paramilitary unit as a threat to induce detainees to talk, one Army soldier said in an interview. “Detainees knew that if they went to those people, bad things would happen,” the soldier said. “It was used as a motivator to get them to talk. They didn’t want to go with the masked men.”

The Scorpions went by nicknames such as Alligator and Cobra. They were set up by the CIA before the war to conduct light sabotage. After the fall of Baghdad, they worked with their CIA handlers to infiltrate the insurgency and as interpreters, according to military investigative documents, defense officials, and former and current intelligence officials.

Soon after Mowhoush’s detention began, soldiers in charge of him “reached a collective decision that they would try using the [redacted] who would, you know, obviously spoke the local, native Iraqi Arabic as a means of trying to shake Mowhoush up, and that the other thing that they were going to try to do was put a bunch of people in the room, a tactic that Mr. [redacted] called ‘fear up,’ ” Army Special Agent Curtis Ryan, who investigated the case, testified, according to a transcript.

Classified e-mail messages and reports show that “Brian,” a Special Forces retiree, worked as a CIA operative with the Scorpions.

On Nov. 24, the CIA and one of its four-man Scorpion units interrogated Mowhoush, according to investigative records.

“OGA Brian and the four indig were interrogating an unknown detainee,” according to a classified memo, using the slang “other government agency” for the CIA and “indig” for indigenous Iraqis.

“When he didn’t answer or provided an answer that they didn’t like, at first [redacted] would slap Mowhoush, and then after a few slaps, it turned into punches,” Ryan testified. “And then from punches, it turned into [redacted] using a piece of hose.”

“The indig were hitting the detainee with fists, a club and a length of rubber hose,” according to classified investigative records.

Soldiers heard Mowhoush “being beaten with a hard object” and heard him “screaming” from down the hall, according to the Jan. 18, 2004, provost marshal’s report. The report said four Army guards had to carry Mowhoush back to his cell.

Two days later, at 8 a.m., Nov. 26, Mowhoush — prisoner No. 76 — was brought, moaning and breathing hard, to Interrogation Room 6, according to court testimony.

Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr. did a first round of interrogations for 30 minutes, taking a 15-minute break and resuming at 8:45. According to court testimony, Welshofer and Spec. Jerry L. Loper, a mechanic assuming the role of guard, put Mowhoush into the sleeping bag and wrapped the bag in electrical wire.

Welshofer allegedly crouched over Mowhoush’s chest to talk to him.

Sgt. 1st Class William Sommer, a linguist, stood nearby.

Chief Warrant Officer Jeff Williams, an intelligence analyst, came to observe progress.

Investigative records show that Mowhoush “becomes unresponsive” at 9:06 a.m. Medics tried to resuscitate him for 30 minutes before pronouncing him dead.

According to the article, they were just making up these “interrogation techniques” as they went along. One of the interrogators said his brother had zipped him in a sleeping bag when he was a kid and it had made him feel vulnerable. No word on whether the brother then beat him senseless with a rubber hose though.

They do mention that this happened after the instructions came from on high to “take the gloves off.” When you get an order like that it inspires all sorts of experimentation apparently. It illustrates why the military usually operates on a very specific level with rules and orders and discipline. Things do tend to get out of hand when people are given the green light to “do what needs to be done.”

They don’t say it, but I have a feeling that comic books and Dirty Harry movies also played a large role in fashioning our interrogation techniques in this war. Funny, I thought we were well into the third wave information warfare and sophisticated new methods of gaining intelligence. We may document them with Power Point presentations our techniques come right out of the 14th century. Putting someone in a bag and beating him to death isn’t exactly modern high tech warfare.

And man, that rotten apple barrel is getting full, isn’t it?

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What Went Right In Ohio

Well, waddaya know? Schmidt pulls it out with a four point squeaker in a district that hasn’t given a Democrat more than 30 percent in 20 years. And all it took was a little last minute massaging of the count in her home district.

Too bad Karl’s so busy these days. The party would probably really like his input on where that permanent majority thing he’s been working on stands.

Seriously, I think this really is a bellwether. There is no way in hell that Hackett should have come within 15 points of Schmidt and the fact that he came so close says that something is seriously going wrong with the GOP brand, regardless of how appealing Hackett is as a candidate or how fucked up the Ohio GOP is.

The polls show a spike in Democratic party ID and the GOP is looking more fat and corrupt than the Democrats were after almost half a century in power. We may just be seeing the beginning of our 1994.

Don’t ever think it can’t happen. Much larger swings than we need have happened a bunch of times. I have a feeling that this 50/50 stasis is about to break — and this election makes me think it’s going to break our way. I hope the powers that be take the time to really study what went right in Ohio.

And I hope our man Hackett decides to run again. He’s got the shinin’.

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They Love Controversy

Talk Left points to a discussion regarding whether bloggers should stay with Blog-ads or go with the new Pajamas Media. It’s using a different business model and apparently targeting larger mainstream advertisers.

My only question is how these mainstream advertisers are going to react when they find out they are affiliating themselves with a very controversial racist blog like Little Green Footballs? I suspect we’ll find out.

It would certainly be a problem for me.

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Divining The Will Of The Voters

I’m looking at the return for Hackett at 9:49 and it’s at 50/50. This is a very red district and the fact that Hackett is even in spitting distance is amazing.

But man, I’m getting tired of these squeakers, aren’t you?

I suspect the GOP machine has kept a few votes “in reserve” if you know what I mean. It’s Ohio, after all.

Update:

Ok. This is getting fricking ridiculous. Hackett’s down by 800 votes and for some unknown reason they are holding back the tally for 91 precincts in Jean Schmidt’s home county. Seems they are having some “problems” counting the vote. Can ya believe it?

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Talk Puke

I guess these Marines and soldiers in Iraq had better check their foxholes and humvees and ask whether their buddies hold the proper political beliefs. Those who are Democrats are all cowards and liars, evidently.

I heard Senator Tom Harkin talk the other day about his still unsuccessful attempts to get Armed Forces Radio to provide some balance in their programming. Perhaps he might have better luck next time if he’s armed with a transcript of that drug addled gasbag’s characterization of Marine major Paul Hackett as a “staff puke.” If there’s anyone left in the GOP caucus with a conscience (and that’s highly doubtful) it might just make a difference.

And honorable marines out there should tell that flatulent fuckhead to shut his vomitous pie-hole, regardless of their politics. Chickenshit chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh are telling them that they are required to be Republicans or their service will be deemed open season for any asshole who disagreees with their politics. Max Cleland, John Kerry, now Major Paul Hackett. This pattern is becoming quite obvious.

The military is Republican, godddamit. And remember that when you come home, you’d better toe the line. If you don’t the Republican party will portray you as a “puke,” no matter what you did. Word to the wise. Forget about freedom. Just vote GOP. That’s what you are fighting for.

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Novakula’s Tea Bag

The Howler notes something important about Novak’s column yesterday in which he wrote:

I have previously said that I never would have written those sentences if Harlow, then-CIA Director George Tenet or anybody else from the agency had told me that Valerie Plame Wilson’s disclosure would endanger herself or anybody.

You have to assume by this statement that he must have talked to Tenet before he ran the story, right? Perhaps this is common knwledge and I’ve just missed it, but this is the first I’ve heard of this. Novak just slinging around Tenet’s name in that context is a little bit bizarre to say the least.

Somerby thinks that there’s a good chance that Tenet was the source Novak refered to as “not a partisan gunslinger,” and I think that’s certainly a possibility. (According to joe Wilson, Novak told him that his original source was with the CIA.) In fact, Tenet was one of the few members of the Bush administration who could even conceivably be characterized that way. Somerby speculates that Tenet being a “hail fellow well met” sort who knew the names of agents and remembered birthdays and such that he might have been the one who knew Valerie Wilson by her maiden name and told it to Novak.

This is intriguing since just a couple of weeks ago the papers were all reporting that a “source who had been briefed on the matter” and others were saying that Karl Rove and Lewis Libby had been working closely with Tenet on the official mea culpa:

“People who have been briefed on the case said the White House officials said Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr., were helping to prepare what became the administration’s primary response to criticism that a flawed phrase about the nuclear materials in Africa had been included in Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address six months earlier. They had exchanged e-mail correspondence and drafts of a proposed statement by George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to explain how the disputed wording had gotten into the address. Mr. Rove, the president’s political strategist, and Mr. Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, coordinated their efforts with Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, who was in turn consulting with Mr. Tenet.

[…]

The work done by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby on the Tenet statement during this intense period has not been previously disclosed. People who have been briefed on the case discussed this critical time period and the events surrounding it to demonstrate that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were not involved in an orchestrated scheme to discredit Mr. Wilson or disclose the undercover status of his wife, Valerie Wilson, but were intent on clarifying the use of intelligence in the president’s address. Those people who have been briefed requested anonymity because prosecutors have asked them not to discuss matters under investigation.

We all wondered why that odd bit of information was revealed by the Rove forces. It was interesting, of course, as all these tid-bits are, but during that flood of friendly Rove-camp leaking, this always struck me a strange. How was this supposed to exonerate Rove? Somehow, we were supposed to believe that Tenet and Hadley and Rove and Libby were working together coordinating a Tenet’s response. But, so what? Why would that have prevented Rove and Libby from leaking about Plame? Can’t they walk and chew gum at the same time?

Then, on the 27th, the WaPo prints this and we are reminded that this has always been a battle between the white house and the CIA and it seems to be escalating as Rove comes under closer public scrutiny in the leak probe:

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet’s statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, had a role in Tenet’s statement.

If I had to guess, Novak’s seemingly innocuous mention of Tenet yesterday wasn’t an accident. Tenet is being fingered as the source quite deliberately. It’s another salvo aimed at laying the blame for this whole mess (and I mean the WHOLE mess — wmd’s and all) at the CIA’s feet:

Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to remain in Bush’s speech. As part of this effort, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not think Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by prosecutors, but it is not clear whether he appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.

Obviously, this article is informed by CIA sources who are enacting their own damage control. But it’s pretty clear to me on whose side Novak is coming down.

Somerby chastises me a little bit for assuming that Novak was carrying water for the White House when it’s possible his source was actually George Tenet. It’s true that Novak’s original column was fairly measured. It often is. But Novak’s appearances on CNN leave absolutely no doubt as to his loyalty to the Republican party and his willingness to carry water for the Bush administration. When a journalist appears regularly on television to openly advocate for one political party or a specific administration I think he gives up any right to claim journalistic objectivity or even journalistic integrity in a situation like this.

For instance, here’s one we can all appreciate Speaking of Al Gore at the Democratic convention last summer Novak said:

They [Democrats] just pray he doesn’t go into one of his rants where he’s screaming and yelling and can’t control himself. They shouldn’t feed him too much Coke before the uh– Coca-Cola before tonight.

Any journalist who says things like that can be fairly assumed to be “sympathetic” to white house spin, I think.

We know that Karl Rove, and very likely, Scooter Libby, were passing the “wife” information around, whether Tenet was the original source (and whether he was involved in the smear) or not. Rove has admitted that he spoke with Novak. And, finally, we also know that Robert Novak is the only one of several journalists reportedly approached who ran with that information. I do not think it is all that unreasonable for me to characterize Novak as doing Rove’s bidding in this. As I wrote yesterday, there really was no legitimate reason to report that Wilson’s wife was involved if what they were trying to do was say that Wilson’s mission was low level.

The man who likes to call Hillary Clinton “Madame Defarge” and a “very mean lady” who has “done very bad things” is just the guy I’d go to if I wanted to create a little smear about a henpecked little wimp and his overbearing spy of a wife who just wanted him to get a damned job.

Certainly, Novak’s statements subsequent to the leak have been just as dicey as Sommerby has documented Wilson’s of being. And I would suggest that they are far more worthy of condemnation since Novak is supposed to be a journalist.

In his original column revealing Plame’s name, he wrote this about Wilson:

That’s where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein’s wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed “the stuff of heroism.” President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.

[…]

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Wilson had taken a measured public position — viewing weapons of mass destruction as a danger but considering military action as a last resort. He has seemed much more critical of the administration since revealing his role in Niger. In the Washington Post July 6, he talked about the Bush team “misrepresenting the facts,” asking: “What else are they lying about?”

Here is his characterization of Wilson a few months later when he spoke with Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: Joining me now for an exclusive conversation, the veteran journalist, is my colleague, Bob Novak. Bob, thanks very much for joining us. Let’s talk about this. What made you decide to go out, first of all, and write about former Ambassador Joe Wilson?

NOVAK: Former Ambassador Wilson broke the secrecy that a retired diplomat, unknown, had gone to Niger in the year 2002 to investigate whether the Iraqis tried to buy yellow cake, uranium from Niger.

BLITZER: You mean when he wrote that op-ed page article in The New York Times?

NOVAK: New York Times … That was on a Sunday morning. On Monday, I began to report on something that I thought was very curious. Why was it that Ambassador Wilson, who had no particular experience in weapons of mass destruction, and was a sharp critic of the Iraqi policy of President Bush and, also, had been a high-ranking official in the Clinton White House, who had contributed politically to Democrats — some Republicans, but mostly Democrats — why was he being selected?

I asked this question to a senior Bush administration official, and he said that he believed that the assignment was suggested by an employee at the CIA in the counterproliferation office who happened to be Ambassador Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame. I then called another senior official of the Bush administration, and he said, Oh, you know about that? And he confirmed that that was an accurate story. I then called the CIA. They said that, to their knowledge, he did not — that the mission was not suggested by Ambassador Wilson’s wife — but that she had been asked by her colleagues in the counterproliferation office to contact her husband. So she was involved.

Novak seems to be trying to make a case that he’s the one who asked how Wilson got selected for the mission, not that anyone offered it up to him. In that same interview, he furiously denies that he ever told Newsday, “I didn’t dig it out. They gave it to me.” His characterization of Wilson is quite dramatically at odds with the way he wrote of him in the original column.

I would imagine that this discrepancy is something that Patrick Fitzgerald wondered about and why he was checking phone records after the Novak column came out. It reeks of cover up.

I realize that this does not demonstrate absolutely that Novak was carrying water for the administration when he revealed her name, but it certainly does show that he was carrying water for them after the fact. This entire line of bullshit about Wilson being a partisan is White House damage control chapter and verse.

I want to make clear that I’m not picking on Bob Somerby here. In the midst of that minor criticism, he also positively linked to my piece on Novak from yesterday, which I appreciate. He made a reasonable point, I think, that I was making an assertion that was not grounded in specific evidence. My response here is to demonstrate that I think it’s a reasonable assertion based upon observing Robert Novak’s career, his other public statements and the fact that he is, quite demonstrably, a douchebag for liberty.

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