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Running On Empty

Will Marshall of the DLC has written a critique of us Michael Moore Democrats who are ruining the party with our anti-Americanism and lack of real patriotism. Don’t even bother to read it if this kind of thing pisses you off because this one’s a doozy.

There are many problems with his thesis, but this is perhaps the central thing he gets wrong:

The left’s unease with patriotism is rooted in a 1960s narrative of American arrogance and abuse of power. For many liberals who came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War, writes leftish commentator Todd Gitlin, “the most powerful public emotion of our lives was rejecting patriotism.” As he and other honest liberals have acknowledged, the excesses of protest politics still haunt liberalism today and complicate Democratic efforts to develop a coherent stance toward American power and the use of force.

When Americans ponder such questions today, their frame of reference is not the Vietnam War, but Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks evoked the most powerful upsurge in patriotic feeling since Pearl Harbor, and thrust national security back into the center of American politics. Democrats have yet to come to grips with this new reality. More than anything else, they need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism — a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter the politics of polarization.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I happen to be an American who went through 9/11 just like the conservatives and the hawkish centrists did. I don’t know who he’s talking about. We all have the same frame of reference as everyone else who has lived in our time. We live in the new reality too and we’ve come to grips with it — we simply don’t agree with their prescription for dealing with terrorism and it has nothing to do with Vietnam or patriotism.

How petty and lacking in imagination this discussion is. Apparently, all honest liberals are ex-campus radicals who went to school with Todd Gitlin and who feel “uncomfortable” with this new patriotism because their formative experience was with protest politics. Whatever. Perhaps Marshall ought to check with his boss Al From, who Rick Perlstein quotes in “The Stockticker and the Superjumbo” as saying that that his formative experience was McGovern’s loss in 1972. I think that might just be a bit more to the point.

I’m a baby boomer but I’m 48 and my formative political experience was probably Watergate, in which patriotism was shown to be a willingness to put the country above politics when the chips were down. Republicans Howard Baker and Barry Goldwater ranked as major patriots for me. Indeed, Watergate was one of those moments when I think the entire country was impressed (and surprised) by the incredible resiliency of its system of government and the integrity of men and women who rose to the occasion. To me patriotism isn’t about fighting wars, it’s about love of country.

People born in 1970 are now in their mid-30’s. Are they scarred by their parents’ youthful beliefs in “anti-patriotism?” Their formative political years were during the Reagan era, hardly a period of anti-americanism. Flag waving was a fetish.

My friends’ mother is 80 years old. She’s a child of the depression and she’s a Democrat who was adamantly against the Iraq war. It had nothing to do with Vietnam; it was because she didn’t believe in “wars of aggression.” That was the reflexive foreign policy belief of cold war liberals who learned their lessons from the two world wars. I have another friend who is 22 and was against the war in Iraq because he believes it distracts from the War on terrorism. I was against it because I gravely mistrust the neocon vision of American global hegemony and I wanted them to do the minumum possible until we could get sane people in office to assess the threat properly. We are not all singing kumbaya from the 60’s campus radical manual.

He talks about liberals (or maybe just the unbearable bi-coastal elites he describes in such loving detail) as if we are from Mars. I have no doubt that there are quite a few who really disdain the military and would be shocked to see one of their friends’ children from the elite private school choosing to join the marines instead of going to an Ivy League College as expected. But really, can we call this a particularly Democratic or liberal response? Considering the remarkable problem the military is having with recruitment, I’d have to say it’s a pretty common American response, rather than any comment on Democrats. It’s not as if Republicans are all rushing out to join up either. If it’s a lack of patriotism that’s causing that reaction I think you would have to say that most Americans are unpatriotic.

He worries that the military itself is too Republican and laments that the Democrats are not better represented. His evidence is two polls which show that the majority of officers are Republicans. Can everyone see what might be wrong with that picture?

The salient point in all this is that there are no national Democrats who are anti- military and very, very few rank and file Democrats who are anti-military. Even the hated Michael Moore shows a tremendous affinity for the grunts in his movies in which he focuses on the sacrifices of working and middle class families who are being treated terribly by the government in thanks for their sacrifice. This thing that Marshall and his DLCers see is not anti-military; it’s anti-Washington and that’s not the same thing at all.

He builds a straw man out of poll results that purport to show that most Democrats don’t want to fight the war on terrorism with the same sort of dizzying fervor he thinks is required, and calls them unpatriotic for their views. He refers to a list of foreign policy issues in which more Democrats consider outsourcing to be a bigger worry than dismantling al Qaeda.

Why is that a measure of patriotism? It’s actually surprisingly rational. The statistics would certainly show that any individual stands a greater chance of being personally affected by outsourcing than an al Qaeda terrorist attack. It’s actually kind of dumb to put al Qaeda at the top of your list of national security worries when really, it isn’t the biggest one we face — loose nukes are, and nobody gives a fuck about that.

Furthermore, it’s entirely possible that at least some Democrats realize that al Qaeda isn’t something you can just “dismantle” with a ripping good show of military might because it’s morphed into a constantly changing, moving concept, rather than a single entity you can “end.” And while terrorism is scary and we need to do all we can to protect people from it, it is not any more threatening than Leonid Bresznev potentially getting into a pissing match or losing control of his military or any other thing that could have resulted in an accidental nuclear exchange during the cold war. We lived for many years under an unimaginable threat (still do, actually) and we managed to keep our heads for the most part and not turn ourselves inside out over it. This threat of terrorism is real and it’s important, but we simply have to stop overreacting like we did with Iraq or we really are going to turn it into the existential threat these people seem to desire so fervently.

Finally, Marshall suggests that we not make such a big deal out torture.

“…the revelation that some U.S. troops aren’t saints should not come as too great a shock, at least to grownups. By dwelling obsessively on U.S. misdeeds while ignoring the far more heinous crimes of what is quite possibly the most barbaric insurgency in modern times, anti-war critics betray an anti-American bias that undercuts their credibility.”

(Yeah, it’s the liberals who are ignoring the barbaric insurgency in Iraq. And here the last I heard they were in their last throes.)

Let’s just say I’m a big believer in supporting the troops — troops like Spc. Joseph Darby, for instance, who had the courage and patriotism to stand up and say something when his fellow troopers were committing reprehensible acts — or the FBI agents who complained on the record about what they saw at Guantanamo. I will never excuse the United States using torture or abuse or holding prisoners indefinitely without due process. Never. No matter what the “barbaric insurgency” does in Iraq. And I am more than willing to throw down the gauntlet on this and say that anyone who soft peddles those things is the worst kind of anti-American there is. We’re not going to find common ground on this subject. If that kicks me out of the big tent so be it. I’m not signing on to that shit, ever.

I recognise that saying all this means that I couldn’t get elected. And for that reason there are almost no elected Democrats who do say what I’m saying. They all wave flags and shriek like old ladies every time something happens — and they back ridiculous wars, because if they don’t the chattering classes will go nuts and label them unpatriotic. But saying it doesn’t make it true. That’s inside the beltway Republican kabuki which nobody who calls himself a Democrat should ever allow himself to perform. There are legitimate reasons why we might disagree on this stuff and still take national security seriously.

Being lectured all the time by effete DC Democrats on “patriotism” because I don’t back their reflexively hawkish foreign policy is not only insulting it’s dumb. It plays into stereotypes that only serve the Republicans by turning this into a dick measuring contest when we should be turning the conversation into who can get the job done. I would submit that if anyone’s been traumatized by the Vietnam experience it’s the tired Democratic national security hawks who are always rushing to support military action, no matter how insanely counterproductive, because some Republican somewhere might call him a pussy. They’ve been around since the 60’s too. Hell, they’ve been around forever.

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“Never Tell Anybody Outside The Family What You’re Thinking Again”

This Alberto Gonzales 12 hour gap is quite interesting, but I’m sure that we all also remember that Gonzales also later reviewed every document that was produced and vetted it before it was released to the Justice Department — the Justice Department run by John Ashcroft who didn’t bother to recuse himself until three months later. Let’s just say there were many opportunities for documents to have gone astray in this process.

As I was perusing old articles about the document production, I also realized that none of the top administration aides bothered to lawyer up in the early days when they were talking to the FBI. One could assume that they were confident they’d done nothing wrong, but it strikes me that these guys may have thought it was in the bag. They had old “Let The Ego Soar” Ashcroft at justice and Alberto the torturer handling any incriminating documents.

And while one might have expected the president to say that he knew the truth would be revealed because he expected his staff to be forthcoming with the authorities, instead we got this:

“I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers,” he said. “You tell me: How many sources have you had that’s leaked information that you’ve exposed or had been exposed? Probably none. I mean, this town is a town full of people who like to leak information.”

We always knew that somebody leaked this to Bob Novak. And unless Novak was lying, it was two senior white house officials. But the president of the United States said quite candidly that he didn’t think we would ever know the truth unless reporters burned their sources. He certainly didn’t seem to expect the “senior white house official” sources to come forward, did he?

With the benefit of hindsight, that sounds like the president of the United States was reminding the press corpse to keep its collective trap shut, doesn’t it? (Are you listening Judy?)

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Tripping Them Up

Josh Marshall points out today that Senator Pat Roberts (R- Partisan Tool) has decided that the congress must waste no time holding hearings on whether the CIA is properly protecting its covert agents. After all, if Karl Rove and Scooter Libby can find out who they are, how safe can they be?

The only other possibility — one which I’ve referred to jokingly in the past — is to argue that she wasn’t covert enough. That is to say, maybe she was covert to the CIA. But she really wasn’t covert up to the standards of say, Bill Safire or Tucker Carlson or Bill O’Reilly.

And this, understand, is the premise of the new Roberts’ hearings. Was she really covert enough? And does the CIA really know how to define ‘covert’. Asked about a bankrobber caught red-handed outside the bank, Sen. Roberts response would be to say, “But how much real claim did the bank have to that money? Did they really earn it? And what did they do to protect it?”

Roberts is one of the more reprehensible hacks in the GOP caucus and that’s saying something. That he’s chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is frankly scary. His little addendum to the SSCI report on Iraq pre-war intelligence is one of the most amazing examples of partisan smearing we’ve ever seen coming from a committee that is usually held up as the model of bi-partisan seriousness.

But his appearance on CNN yesterday had him dancing like he was challenging Ricky Martin to a samba contest. And, unfortunately, my senator, Dianne Feinstein made little effort to trip him up.

BLITZER: How big of a deal in your assessment is the fact that the CIA asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak of that covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame? Is this a big deal in your opinion, releasing the identity of an undercover CIA officer?

ROBERTS: Why yes, it is a big deal. And in the Intelligence Committee, we’re going to go into quite a series of hearings in regards to cover. You cannot be in the business of outing somebody, if that’s the proper word.

BLITZER: I ask the question because some are suggesting she really wasn’t undercover any more. She had been working at the CIA in nonproliferation. She really wasn’t a technical…

ROBERTS: There’s a five-year period, OK? And whether or not that five-year period had been reached or not is still questionable. And I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don’t know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert.

But generically speaking, it is a very serious matter although it obviously dovetails now into the issue of the day in regards to Karl Rove and the First Amendment, and all of that.

BLITZER: The fact that the CIA asked for this criminal investigation, this probe into who leaked her name to Bob Novak, what does that say to you, Senator Feinstein?

FEINSTEIN: Well, it says to me that the CIA values this as extraordinarily important. If they can’t protect their agents, they can’t survive as an agency. And I’ve been distressed to even see in the newspapers, I believe this morning, about what some of the undercover placements were, listing them rather generically.

BLITZER: Have you been briefed, has the committee been briefed by the CIA about the potential damage that has been done, if any lives have been endangered, her contacts, undercover spies, if you will, as a result of her name being made public?

FEINSTEIN: I have not been briefed.

BLITZER: Have you been briefed on that?

ROBERTS: We are going to have those hearings, or those briefings, pardon.

BLITZER: But have you received a preliminary assessment of damage? Because usually when someone has been exposed like this, they do a damage assessment.

ROBERTS: I’ll tell you what we have done in the 511 page document that we’ve released from the WMD report: We went into considerable detail in regards to the veracity of Admiral Wilson’s testimony.

BLITZER: Ambassador Wilson.

ROBERTS: Pardon me. Admiral. All of a sudden, I’ve got him in a different, you know category. But the ambassador. And I’m just going to be very blunt about it. I don’t think the White House had any need to discredit him. He discredited himself. He was all over the lot.

Now, I’m not going to say anymore about that because that’s one issue.

I want to know basically who assigned him and what role she played. And then obviously we want to find out exactly what happened in regards to her covert status.

Now, we’re going to have to wait on that in regards to the special prosecutor. But overall, Dianne is exactly right. If we’re in the business now where somehow, through some means, a covert officer working in the CIA, if that becomes public, that just can not happen. And so that is why the committee is going to be so aggressive in really taking a look at it.

BLITZER: Should the president’s top political adviser, the deputy White House chief of staff, Karl Rove, who has now apparently, according to sources close to him, acknowledged speaking to reporters about Valerie Plame Wilson, should his security clearances, based on what you know, Senator Feinstein, be revoked?

FEINSTEIN: Well, based on what I know, I think yes for the time being. I think you have to look at this: Who had opportunity, who had means, and who had motive? And if you look at those three things, you see the White House somewhere, some way figures into it.

Now, the details and the precise statements are being analyzed by the prosecutor, very well-regarded Mr. Fitzgerald. It’s going to be very interesting to see what he comes up with. But in the meantime, I mean, you have somebody that quite possibly either corroborated or volunteered information that shouldn’t be in the public sector.

BLITZER: Let’s talk about the new Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts.

ROBERTS: I had another comment by the way, but…

FEINSTEIN: I figured you would.

BLITZER: Well, go ahead. Briefly comment and then we’ll move on to John Roberts.

ROBERTS: Well, I think you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. And I think we ought to wait on the special prosecutor. If you go down a laundry list of leaks in this town as to who was involved and who wasn’t, you’d probably have 10 or 12 people, and some of them are in the CIA. And there’s been leaks from the CIA.

You know, in this town, when there is a leak, nobody gets wet until there is a leak. And right now we’re about up to here on this particular issue. So let’s wait on the facts.

Roberts refused to say if he’d been given a damage assessment, which is kind of interesting. But, he’s just a blunt tool, not a very sharp one, so it could be that he was just rushing to the next talking point. But he was all over the map with that little exchange, ending with the “everybody leaks classified information so what’s the big deal” excuse.

Dianne said that Rove should probably have his security clearance revoked for the time being and that the white house had the means and the motive to leak Plame’s name. Well, doesn’t that just blow the lid off this thing? As if we don’t know that the white house was involved ferchirstsake. She wasn’t well prepared, as usual.

She and all the Democrats should be trying to tie these guys up in knots with the obvious contradiction that the tough-guy national security Republicans have been caught red-handed being loosy-goosy with classified information for political reasons. They should always bring up the president. This isn’t too difficult to do.

Imagine if Feinstein had said in reponse to Wolf’s question about revoking Rove’s security clearance, “Well, Wolf, it is well established already that Karl Rove was involved in leaking Valerie Plame’s identity to the press. His lawyer admitted just this week that he was one of Robert Novak’s two sources. I have every faith that the special prosecutor will find out if there is evidence that he or anyone else broke the law by doing this. But I think that even Pat here would have to admit that regardless of whether it was legal or illegal, Karl Rove and others in the White House have shown an appalling lack of judgment. As the man in charge, the president has a responsibility for the actions of his staff. He should have called Karl Rove into his office and demanded an explanation and withdrawn his security clearance the minute it was found that he was involved in this. Breaking the law isn’t the issue here, Wolf. This is about national security. We’re at war. The president shouldn’t be playing politics with this stuff.”

It would be helpful to show Bush as being either impotent to deal with Karl Rove, or covering for him, because it is imperative for Democrats over the long haul to begin to show the Republicans as being unable to deal responsibly with national security. If you look at what Roberts was saying it was basically, “Joe Wilson is a liar and his wife worked in Washington and anyway everybody leaks.” Hardly the stuff of a macho “never complain, never explain” warrior, is it? This is an opportunity for Democrats to change the long standing narrative that the Republicans have built up about their national security prowess. If the Commander in Chief can’t even call his own staff on the carpet when they screw up, then how tough is he?

This is the second time in 25 years that we’ve had a two term GOP president who has to be portrayed as dumb, distanced and out-of-it in order to cover for his staff running amuck. They’re always out of the loop, aren’t they? Never quite in charge when the bad shit happens, only the good. It’s time for the Democrats to start tying this into a bigger narrative about national security. These tough guys, these people who are going to keep us safe, seem to continually elect presidents who are cluelss about what’s going on around them. Or, at least, that’s what they are always forced to use as an excuse when they fuck up.

It takes time to build new storylines. Even if this one isn’t very good, we really need get started on something. And that means that Democrats have to agree among themselves on a basic framework of criticism for Republican national security policy and practice. They need to internalize it so that when a guy like Roberts starts blathering, they can respond with vigor and authority without having to think too much about it. Vague, off-point pablum like Feinstein’s is exacerbating our problem. We look weak because we won’t confront a blowhard like Roberts. And we are weak because we refuse to take every opportunity to show the American people that the Republicans are screw-ups on national security. That last should actually be pretty easy, because it patently true.

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Second Track

Meanwhile, a parallel investigation is under way into who forged the Niger documents. They are known to have been passed to an Italian journalist by a former Italian defence intelligence officer, Rocco Martino, in October 2002, but their origins have remained a mystery. Mr Martino has insisted to the Italian press that he was “a tool used by someone for games much bigger than me”, but has not specified who that might be.

A source familiar with the inquiry said investigators were examining whether former US intelligence agents may have been involved in possible collaboration with Iraqi exiles determined to prove that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear programme.

Well now. That would be something, wouldn’t it?

Josh Marshall, who was once hot on the trail of this forgery story, wrote this a couple of weeks ago, the night O’Donnell revealed Rove’s name on the McLaughlin report:

One other note along these lines.

I’ve gotten hints or suggestions from several sources over the last month that new information is bubbling to the surface, not about who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity, but who was behind the underlying caper that started the whole drama afoot in the first place: those phoney Niger uranium documents.

As longtime readers of this site know, last year colleagues of mine and I were able to trace the documents back to a former Italian intelligence agent named Rocco Martino. Martino was the ‘Italian businessman’ who tried to sell the documents to Elizabetta Burba, the journalist who eventually brought them to the US Embassy in Rome.

We were able determine that the documents had been put into Martino’s hands by a then-serving member of SISMI — Italian military intelligence. And this SISMI colonel had done so using a women working in the Niger embassy in Rome, an Italian national, as a cut-out.

This was, as you might imagine, more than enough to make us want to know a lot more. But we were never able to develop any conclusive proof about who or what was behind the SISMI colonel or what the backstory was within SISMI.

Suspicions, we had plenty. But in terms of hard facts, we hit a wall just inside SISMI.

Just who forged the documents? And, more significantly, who put the whole process in motion? And why had SISMI or elements within it involved themselves?

This story and Plame ar running on different tracks, but they come to the same station eventually. And, once again, the spectre of Judith Miller hangs over it — she’s the Zelig of the iraq operation.

I don’t have enough information to speculate about this, but I think it is significant that information is leaking out about this case as well. It’s hard to know whether it’s because people are fed up or because the white house is weak or some combination of both. But the veil is lifting on this administration’s shenanigans, for sure. It’s going to be a very interesting time.

Here’s the immediate political result for Dear Leader:

Across the board, those stellar character ratings which supposedly meant Bush could weather any political storm have become mediocre to poor. And he’s lost the most ground among independents, only 38 percent of whom now believe Bush is trustworthy or cares about people like them. Even more amazing, less than half (48 percent) of indepedents now think Bush is a strong leader, which is a massive 24 point decline since Pew’s previous measurement.

And how about this: in February of this year, the two leading one word description of Bush were “honest” and “good”, cited by 38 percent and 20 percent of the public, respectively. Today, honest has declined to 31 percent, closely followed by “incompetent” (26 percent, up from 14 percent) and “arrogant” (24 percent, up from 15 percent).

Reality bites.

Update: Just to be clear, what’s new about the Guardian story isn’t that the FBI suspects Iraqi exiles of being involved, it the part about retired US intelligence being involved that I was unaware of.

Seymour Hersh has speculated that it was a sort of reverse sting by appalled ex-CIA operatives, but this would indicate a less byzantine explanation. People with common interests helping each other out.

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Waivering

Via Atrios I see that Steve Clemens has it on good authority that John Bolton is known to be a regular source for Judith Miller, although we don’t know if he was her source on this.

We know that whoever spoke with Miller waived his or her confidentiality. Does anyone know who all signed waivers?

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Too Tired To Be Outraged

This is just sad:

This morning the Wall Street Journal reported that Senate Democrats were planning “to grill Bush confidant Karen Hughes” about her involvement in the ever widening leak-case. But, Senate Democrats must have gotten lost on the way to the hearing. Not one showed up. Instead, according to the Associated Press:

“A scaled-back Senate Foreign Relations Committee showered praise Friday on Karen Hughes and put the former political adviser to President Bush on a fast track to confirmation as the State Department’s top public relations official.”

The absence of the Democrats is even more glaring considering just today the New York Times reported that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald called Karen Hughes before the grand jury to testify as to her involvement in the leak-case. Of course, this begs the obvious question: Karen Hughes, did you have a role in leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent?

Instead of any substantive questions, the Democrats simply didn’t show up. But we did get this statement from ranking minority member Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE):

“Mr. Chairman, I regret that previous commitments prevent me from attending the confirmation hearing this morning.

I am particularly interested in and supportive of the nomination of Karen Hughes to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. What this job requires, among other things, is continuity. The last two undersecretaries have stayed six and 18 months, respectively.

I met with the nominee yesterday and understand that, barring unforeseen circumstances, she is willing to stay through the president’s term.

I believe that she is highly qualified because of her professional background, and, importantly, enjoys the full confidence of the president and the secretary of state…

Well, that’s awfully friendly of him. No need to provide the evening news or the Sunday news shows with footage of Karen Hughes being grilled about getting called before the grand jury in the Plame case. That would be what Republicans would do in our situation and that wouldn’t be nice at all.

Think Progress has a list of questions the Democrats might have asked if they could have gotten it up to attend the meeting. I assume they were too busy with their preparations to lionize John Roberts and didn’t have the time.

We just don’t have the killer instinct. They do. So they win and we lose. I guess we have to wait for total economic armageddon or nuclear meltdown in which case we will win by default.

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Executive Infallibility

It would appear that the president is sticking to his belief that he has the sole right to order torture, hold people indefinitely and secretly and make up the rules as he goes along. To hell with the congress. It doesn’t matter what Senator John McCain, former torture victim and POW says; it doesn’t matter what Senator Lindsey Graham, former JAG lawyer says; and it doesn’t matter what Senator John Warner,former Secretary of the Navy says. (I won’t even mention that “elections have consequences” and Democrats are supposed to STFU for the duration.)No one has any right to tell the president nothin’ bout prisoners in a time ‘o unending, ever-present war. And they have no right to ask any questions about it either.

The White House on Thursday threatened to veto a massive Senate bill for $442 billion in next year’s defense programs if it moves to regulate the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees or sets up a commission to investigate operations at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere.

The Bush administration, under fire for the indefinite detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and questions over whether its policies led to horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, put lawmakers on notice it did not want them legislating on the matter.

In a statement, the White House said such amendments would “interfere with the protection of Americans from terrorism by diverting resources from the war.”

“If legislation is presented that would restrict the president’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice,” the bill could be vetoed, the statement said.

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said after meeting at the Capitol with Vice President Dick Cheney that he still intended to offer amendments next week “on the standard of treatment of prisoners.”

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was working on legislation defining the legal status of enemy combatants being held in Guantanamo, also said he would offer an amendment.

They were working with Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner of Virginia on amendments intended to prevent further abuses in the wake of the scandal over sexual abuse and mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and harsh, degrading interrogations at Guantanamo.

And just look at what these unAmerican, commie bastards are trying to do:

Possible measures included barring the holding of “ghost” detainees whose names are not disclosed, codifying a ban against cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, and using the Army manual as a basis for all interrogations.

Really, what business is this of the congress anyway? Who do they think they are — elected representatives of the people?

It would be very nice to see the president veto the defense bill over this but, needless to say, it will not happen. But someday, if the country survives this wretched radical era, people will look back on this with particular disgust, not just because the president of the United States openly seeks to preserve his right to torture (which is stomach churning) but also the total abdication of responsibility by the Republican congress.

And people say the Democrats are the chickenshits. Another big lie. Nobody, but nobody, is more gutless than a congressional Republican cowering at the feet of the flatulent Rove and his little dog George.

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Leaking Briefs

Talk Left has an excellent primer on how to figure out who’s doing the leaking.

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Overlooking The Obvious

In this week’s editorial The New Republic discusses the rightwing push back on Rovegate. They complain that the emphasis on Rove obscures the more important story of Iraq lies. I submit that without Rovegate, there would be no coverage of the Iraq lies at all, so we should not knock the hook that gives us the opportunity to talk about the bigger picture.

The editorial brings up something else, however, that I think is quite important. It mentions the single most important weapon in our arsenal when arguing about the bigger picture surrounding Wilson’s trip:

As that investigation has spilled onto the front pages in the last few weeks, supporters of the administration have picked up where they left off two years ago, saying that Wilson was unqualified for the Niger investigation and declaring that his credibility is in tatters. It’s true that Wilson has made himself an easy target for such accusations by posing with his wife for Vanity Fair magazine and taking a very public role advising the Kerry campaign last fall. But the most serious charge that Wilson’s critics level against him is the allegation that he was wrong in his assessment of Iraq’s dealing with Niger. Supporters of Rove have revived this accusation in an effort to claim that, when Rove spoke to reporters about Plame, he wasn’t trying to disparage Wilson so much as warn them off a “bad story.” But what, exactly, was “bad” about Wilson’s story?

Both the national security adviser and the CIA director at the time (Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet, respectively) issued public apologies for the Niger claim, admitting it was unsubstantiated. And the most authoritative report on the matter comes from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which spent a year combing the Iraqi countryside for alleged weapons of mass destruction. Its conclusion: “ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material.”

Because of all the deliberate obfuscation coming from the Rove machine, this central piece of evidence has not been discussed nearly enough. Ivo Daalder on TPM cafe brought this up some time ago, but it’s worth repeating: Wilson’s conclusions have been born out by the Iraq Survey Group, who spent a year inside Iraq, looking at all the records and speaking to the parties. There is no point in speculating about meetings in 1999 or the Butler Report or any other reports that testify to evidence that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. The fact is that it didn’t. Period. End of story. The non-believers were right, the true-believers were wrong, whatever their motives.

It’s two years later, we have a definitive report from the ISG, and people are still saying that Wilson was a flake, he was sent by his wife, he was trying to set up the Republicans, whatever. In a normal world, that fact that Wilson’s conclusions (along with others) were correct would have some salience in this argument — particularly since the Reublicans are basing theirs on the the mistaken premise that Wilson’s credibility is in question when quite clearly, he was right.

Rick Perlstein relayed in the comments of one of my other posts a comment from a right wing correspondent of his who said of Plame: “she was part of a CIA attempt to discredit the elected government. She should be swinging from a lamp post.” And yet, there was no uranium deal. There were no WMD. This comment therefore means that naysayers (in and out of the CIA, presumably) were trying to discredit the elected government with the truth.

It’s enormously frustrating to argue with people who have so little intellectual integrity, but that’s the way it is. They continue to dig themselves in on this point — even as the huge elephant holding a sign that says “there were no WMD in Iraq” is sitting in the middle of the room, mocking them.

But over time, through all the bickering and small bore detail and gossip, that elephant comes more and more into focus for average Americans. And it lays the groundwork for a scathing Democratic critique of Republican foreign policy for the first time in many years if we can just find the nerve to claim it. The Republicans are going to have Iraq hung around their necks like a burning rubber tire for a long time to come, as they should.

When you strip all the fulminating away, the Republican argument for the massive failure in both concept and execution of Iraq is that they didn’t do it on purpose — they just screwed up. That’s the same excuse Karl Rove is using, as well, and it’s no surprise. At this point, it’s realistically their best case scenario. Would you want to run on that record?

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Depends On What The Definition Of “Secret” Is

I confess that I’m feeling more than a bit of schadenfreude reading the rightwing bloggers’ responses to the Plame scandal over on the Daou Report. It so sucks being on the receiving end of the drip, drip, drip, doesn’t it?

Here’s one that’s fairly typically uninformed from Captain’s Quarters (all links available at the Daou Report), in which he, taking his cues from the RNC, piles on the ridiculous assertion that Plame was not covert, even if her status was labeled “secret.”

“Today’s Washington Post article on the State Department memo detailing Valerie Plame’s involvement in sending her husband to Niger lacks a great deal of context. Bloggers appear to assume that the (S) described in the article denotes the status of Plame’s identity, but a more careful read of a poorly-written article shows that it doesn’t mean that at all. Most people don’t understand that “secret” is the second-lowest classification grade possible. I would hope that NOC lists have much higher classification than that, and surely they do.

It all depends on how you look at it. It’s also the second-highest classification. There are only three levels of classified material: confidential, secret, top-secret. According to the very Washington Post article he quotes, covert agents are all classifed as “secret.”

Apparently, these people think that the government has a whole string of classified levels, many of which you don’t have to take seriously. Like “secret” which doesn’t really mean secret, it means kinda-sorta secret but not if you need to smear a political opponent. They assume that there also must be a bunch super-duper-double-cross-your-heart secret levels that you really, really, really shouldn’t tell the media about. But “secret?” Not a problem. Go ahead and spill your guts to Bob Novak.

Google is your friend:

Classified vs. Unclassified Information

In the U.S. information is called “classified” because it has been assigned one of the three levels, confidential, secret or top secret. Information which is not so labled is called unclassified information. The term declassified is used for information which has had its classification removed, and downgraded refers to information that has been assigned a lower classification level, but is still classified. Many documents are automatically downgraded and then declassified after some number of years. The U.S. government uses the term sensitive but unclassified (SBU) to refer to information that is not confidential, secret or top secret, but whose dissemination is still restricted. Reasons for such restrictions can include privacy regulations, court orders, and ongoing criminal investigations as well as national security. Information which was never classified is sometimes referred to as “open source” by those who work in national security.

Levels of Classification used by the U.S. Government

The United States Government classifies information according to the degree which the unauthorized disclosure would damage national security:

Top secret

This is the highest security level, and is defined as information which would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if disclosed to the public. Despite public mystique, relatively little information is classified at “Top Secret” (when compared to the other levels of classification). Only that which is exceptionally sensitive (weapon design, presidential security information, nuclear-related projects, various intelligence information) is classified at the Top Secret level.

Secret

The second highest classification. Information is classified secret when its release would cause “serious damage” to national security. Most information that is “classified” is held at the secret sensitivity.

Confidential

The lowest classification level. It is defined as information which would “damage” national security if disclosed.

Unclassified is not technically a “classification”, this is the default, and refers to information which can be released to individuals without a clearance. Information that is unclassified is sometimes “restricted” in its dissemination. For example, the “law enforcement bulletins” often reported by the U.S. media when United States Department of Homeland Security raises the U.S. terror threat level are usually classified as “U//LES” or “Unclassified – Law Enforcement Sensitive.” This information is only supposed to be released to Law Enforcement groups (Sheriff, Police, etc.) Because the information is unclassified, however, it is sometimes released to the public as well. Information which is unclassified, but which the government does not believe should be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests is often classified as U//FOUO – Unclassified-For Official Use Only.

It is very serious if they were collecting and disseminating cheap political dirt from a classified document labeled “secret.” The definition of secret is secret, and it’s a big deal.

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