Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

What A Surprise

Some of us predicted this the minute John Negroponte was named as ambassador.

Newsweek has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported ‘nationalist’ forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success-despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

[…]

Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government-the Defense department or CIA-would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In “covert” activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)

Well now, this certainly explains the ongoing need for that pesky finding that the president can ignore any laws he chooses, doesn’t it? And good old Porter is certainly unlikely to have any qualms about doing it.

The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days.

[…]

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, “are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.” He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.

Yeah, “shock and awe” just needs to be fully unleashed. Surely, if we just scare them enough they’ll learn to love us.

If there has been a worse idea, I don’t know what it is. If anyone thinks in this day and age in a country like Iraq that ongoing “covert” operations will stay covert, they are dreaming. The details of the operations will emerge replete with pictures and testimony. It will naturally make us even more hated and even more vulnerable to terrorism.

On the other hand, it’s also true that the Pentagon has run out of options. We don’t have the troops to quell this insurgency with any humanity and even if we did, it’s probably too late. The civil war that everybody from Scowcroft and Bush Sr to Joseph Cirincione predicted is already in full swing. The US is in the middle of it, universally mistrusted and widely hated with all the predictable results. It’s a cock-up of historic proportions and it gets worse with every passing day. I’m not sure we can do anything but withdraw and institute immediate energy conservation on a scale previously unheard of. It may not have been the only reason we invaded in the first place, but losing, which we are, means that Iraq’s oil fields are now a battlefield. It’s time to trade in those SUV’s folks.

Boo!

“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?” — Albert Einstein

Via Daou I see that some on the right are kind of disturbed at all the Dem activity these last few days.

Out of the Gates:DEMS GO CRAZY

OFF WITH A BANG!: It only took seconds for the Dems to set the new record for crazy…Kerry bashing the U.S. while in Iraq, Boxer and Conyers pulling the “dimented act of the year” award, and the Gonzales grilling was accompanied by the MSM’s coordinated attack in the five most recognizable daily newspapers in America. My new World Net Daily column gives you the blow by blows…as the DEMS GO NUTS.

Better keep your heads down, little wingnuts. We’re OUT OF CONTROL. Who knows what we’ll do next!

It’s quite liberating being completely out of power after hearing the right insult, browbeat and demonize us for more than 15 years. After this over the top post election end zone dance in particular, we no longer have anything to lose by making it our business to simply fuck with Republicans for the pure entertainment value. In some ways it’s a kind of political insurgency. They refuse to compromise, they insist on being demeaning and crude, so all that’s left is to make their lives unpleasant is a thousand little ways every single day.

And the really fun part is that we represent 49% of the people so there are quite a few of us around.

Help Us Understand Ourselves

This is so cool. An academic conference on Blogging, Journalism & Credibility with select journalists and bloggers discussing the issues surrounding this incredible year in political blogging. Check out the panel of experts. At least four or five of them even have blogs of their very own!

It’s good to see that they did invite at least one non-media or academic blogger — Hinderocket. (We on the left are well represented by the corporate media and liberal academia, of course, so we needn’t have any similarly popular grassroots partisan bloggers on the panels.)

They seem extremely concerned about the bloggers inconscionable lack of ethics so I’m hoping they can find some ways to correct our egregious practices. Perhaps they could convene a panel with John Ellis, Howell Raines and Judith Miller to give us some guidance.

If anyone were to ask, I might point out that there are a few blogging practices that the media might want to adopt for themselves. One is that we back up our assertions of fact through linking. The internet makes it quite easy to footnote our posts and our readers demand that we do it. (Too bad journalism doesn’t have the same requirements or the public wouldn’t be constantly misinformed by “opinion” writers who dishonestly whore for corporate interests on the op-ed pages of major newspapers.) And, as shocking as it is, most of us adhere to that “ethical guideline” without even a professional association or stylebook to guide us. Imagine that.

Not that I would ever presume that those who created and fuel the blogosphere 24/7 from cubicals and laptops in Starbucks around the country have anything useful to say on the matter. Best leave it to the experts.

Mixed Nuts

Yglesias says that the neocons may not be as triumphant as we thought since John Bolton has been eighty-sixed. I’m not so sure. Bolton, for all of his insane ramblings, wasn’t really a neocon. He was Jesse Helms’s boy — reflexively anti-international, confrontational and crude. He’s more of a paranoid John Bircher than a starry-eyed neocon intellectual and while it’s true that their interest in unilateralism and American hegemony intersect, they really come from different schools. Bolton was a loose cannon. I’m not surprised the neos would want to see him gone.

Wampum Needs Some Wampum

Stat.

These guys are hosting the Koufax Awards for us at considerable expense. If we all kick in a few bucks we can help them get over the hump.

And don’t forget to vote in the semi-finals as they roll out over the next few days. (I’m pretty sure I’m going to be nominated for Best Costumes.)

Fact Checking The Asses

Via the Poorman I see that the Columbia Journalism Review does a little fact checking on the fact checkers in the glorious blogospheric triumph of “Memogate.” The kerning sleuth’s scoops were actually inferior to the average newsflash in the Weekly World News, but in these heady days of faux internet journalism, as pioneered by our own William Paley — Drudge — it ranks right up there with “Monica’s talking points” for making utter fools of the mediawhores. That in itself is a triumph since they are so good at making fools of themselves.

…much of the bloggers’ vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers’ lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. Dan Rather is not alone on this one; respected journalists made mistakes all around.

[…]

Would-be gumshoes typed up documents on their computers and fooled around with the images in Photoshop until their creation matched the originals. Someone remembered something his ex-military uncle told him, others recalled the quirks of an IBM typewriter not seen for twenty years. There was little new evidence and lots of pure speculation. But the speculation framed the story for the working press.

The very first post attacking the memos — nineteen minutes into the 60 Minutes II program — was on the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com by an active Air Force officer, Paul Boley of Montgomery, Alabama, who went by the handle “TankerKC.” Nearly four hours later it was followed by postings from “Buckhead,” whom the Los Angeles Times later identified as Harry MacDougald, a Republican lawyer in Atlanta. (MacDougald refused to tell the Times how he was able to mount a case against the documents so quickly.) Other blogs quickly picked up the charges. One of the story’s top blogs, Rathergate.com, is registered to a firm run by Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative fund-raiser. Some were fed by the conservative Media Research Center and by Creative Response Concepts, the same p.r. firm that promoted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. CRC’s executives bragged to PR Week that they helped legitimize the documents-are-fake story by supplying quotes from document experts as early as the day after the report, September 9. The goal, said president Greg Mueller, was to create a buzz online while at the same time showing journalists “it isn’t just Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge who are raising questions.”

Doggonnit to heck. And after all those false tips during the Clinton years. Whodda thunk that liberul media would get taken again?

There was actually a big story of blogospheric triumph this year that the mediawhores have conveniently ignored since they weren’t spoonfed the delicious details by their trusted RNC sources.(They’re very busy.) It was the story of a big media player being forced to back off a plan to air partisan propaganda as news in the waning days of the presidential campaign when the internet organized a boycott that made it’s way to institutional Wall Street investors and snowballed into a precipitous stock dive. But that’s a very dull story that didn’t feature even one adorable tale of an intrepid blogger cracking the DaVinci Code in his pyjamas. Who cares?

The Poorman notes another real blogospheric reportorial triumph with serious real life consequences. Not that it matters.

Stand Up

Ezra says:

Unfogged is right; barring a miracle of competence and media responsibility, opposing torture will end up making the Democrats look like we get the vapors whenever the menfolk whip out the cigars and talk terrorism. Our press flacks are are ineffective, our caucus can’t stick to a message, and we don’t have a party leader charged with articulating our position to the public.

Doesn’t matter. Torture just isn’t something you compromise on. I’m as coldly political as the next guy, but not torture. That’s not part of the country I grew up believing in.

But, you see, the mere act of finally drawing that line in the sand, of saying “No More” is the very thing that refutes the charge. It’s hemming and hawing and splitting the difference and “meeting halfway” and offering compromises on matters of principle that makes the charge of Democratic splinelessness believable. This isn’t about a special interest giving money or bending to the will of a powerful constituency. People can feel the difference. There is nothing weak about simply and forcefully standing up for what is right.

A number of the commenters to the post below are convinced that the American people actually approve of torture so this will not be a very salient issue for the Democrats. I disagree. I think it may just be a defining issue for Democrats.

It’s not that I believe that all Americans are horrified, or even a majority of Americans are horrified. Clearly, the dittoheads think it is just ducky. But that isn’t the point. Just because they aren’t horrified or even endorse it on some level doesn’t mean that they don’t know that it’s wrong. They do. And it is very uncomfortable to be put in the position of defending yourself when you know you are wrong. Even good people find ways, but it cuts a little piece out of their self respect every time they do it.

Every person alive in America today grew up with the belief that torture is wrong. Popular culture, religion, folklore and every other form of cultural instruction for decades in this country has taught that it is wrong, from sermons and lectures to films about slavery to photographs of Auschwitz to crime shows about serial killers. It is embedded in our consciousness. We teach our children that it is wrong to torture animals and other kids. We don’t say that there are exceptions for when the animals or kids are really, really bad. We have laws on the books that outright outlaw it. The words “cruel and unusual” are written into our constitution.

The problem is not that there isn’t a widely accepted admonition not to conduct torture, it’s that many people, as with all crimes, will choose to ignore the admonition under certain circumstances. However, that does not mean that they do not know that what they are doing is wrong. There is nothing surprising in that. It’s why we have laws.

The arguments for torture being raised by the right are rationalizations for what they know is immoral and illegal conduct. Their discomfort with the subject clearly indicates that they don’t really want to defend it. (Witness the pathetic dance that even that S&M freak Rush Limbaugh had to do after his comments were widely disseminated.) Will they admit that they know it’s wrong? Of course not. But when they take up their manly jihad and accuse the Democrats of being swooning schoolgirls they will also be forced to positively defend something that many of them know very well is indefensible. And every time they do that their credibility on values and morals is chipped away a little bit.

I don’t expect them to change their tune. Way too much of this comes from a defect in temperament and garden variety racism and that’s not going to go away. But Democrats have to thicken their skins and be prepared for the usual attacks and insist over and over again that it is against the values and principles of the United States to torture people, period. It is not only right, it is smart.

As I wrote below, the opposition will bluster and fidget and scream bloody murder. But listen to the tenor of their arguments. The WSJ article below rails against the “glib abuse of the word” as if they can run away from the issue by engaging in a game of semantics. They are reduced to claiming that unless we torture it will be unilateral disarmament. We, the most powerful military force the world has ever known, will be defeated by a bunch of third world religious misfits if we don’t engage in torturing suspects. Just who sounds weak?

Moral Quicksand

I see that right is fulminating about the Democrats’ objection to torture as an American value. Yeah, it’s tough, isn’t it?

The WSJ said today:

The White House appears to be dreading today’s confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales now that Democrats seem ready to blame the Attorney General nominee for Abu Ghraib and other detainee mistreatment. But this is actually a great chance for the Administration to do itself, and the cause of fighting terror, some good by forcefully repudiating all the glib and dangerous abuse of the word “torture.”

For what’s at stake in this controversy is nothing less than the ability of U.S. forces to interrogate enemies who want to murder innocent civilians. And the Democratic position, Mr. Gonzales shouldn’t be afraid to say, amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament that is likely to do far more harm to civil liberties than anything even imagined so far.

Gonzales certainly wasn’t afraid to use the word torture. In fact, he personally asked for a definition and a legal finding as to whether the president had the authority in wartime to ignore the laws against it, both American and international. Why the squeamishness about the word now?

Perhaps because they have waded into quicksand on this issue and they know the only thing that will save them is if the Democrats throw them a lifeline by refusing to expose the shallow prurience of their “values.” We should not do it. We should turn the spotlight back on those who made a fetish of morals and show them for what they are.

The right is going to accuse us of not caring about winning the GWOT but we should stand tough and not flinch when we say that torture is immoral. They are now caught in the bind of having to defend it (indeed, some relish defending it) and it is indefensible on both moral and practical grounds. We should not be afraid of their bluster. It is the sign of their weakness. Let them bellow.

The American people know that torture is wrong. They know. That does not mean, of course, that some don’t think we should use it. Even so they know it’s wrong . And because the modern Republican party has sold themselves as the party of values this discussion leaves them uncomfortable, squirming and impatient. Their smugness has turned to waspishness. They want desperately to change the subject.

This is the dawning of a new values debate and one which is far more defining for a great nation than tendentious posturing about personal sexual morality. This goes to the very core of what we, as Americans, really are. It’s time for us to take that fight to those who constantly use their cramped definition of morality to bludgeon us into a corner.

Torture Debate

Human Rights First Blog is blogging the Gonzales confirmation hearings. There are also links to the audio in case you are tired of watching that Ken doll anchor on MSNBC commend the president for saying he doesn’t believe in torture.

L’etat C’est Moi

As long as I’m approvingly linking to myself, I might as well pat myself on the back for seeing this one coming.Atrios points to a Nelson Report that says Junior refuses to hear bad news and has personally directed that his staff not burden him with it.

Our sources are firm in that they conclude this “good news only” directive comes from Bush himself; that is, it is not a trap or cocoon thrown around the President by National Security Advisor Rice, Vice President Cheney, and DOD Secretary Rumsfeld. In any event, whether self-imposed, or due to manipulation by irresponsible subordinates, the information/intelligence vacuum at the highest levels of the White House increasingly frightens those officials interested in objective assessment, and not just selling a political message.

I am not surprised. In fact a couple of weeks ago I wrote:

This is the big story of the second term. Bush himself is now completely in charge. He did what his old man couldn’t do. He has been freed of all constraints, all humility and all sense of proportion. Nobody can run him, not Cheney, not Condi, not Card. He has a sense of his power that he didn’t have before. You can see it. From now on nobody can tell him nothin. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?

They can’t control him.