I have finally come around to the administration’s way of thinking on this unlawful combatant thing. Here we have an American who was trained to blow up apartment buildings and maybe set off dirty bombs, but the only way we could get the information that he was trained to blow up apartment buildings and maybe set off dirty bombs was by denying him his right to counsel and holding him until he confessed to those potential crimes — which means we can’t use that “confession” in court. We simply could not take even the smallest chance that an apartment or dirty bomber might not tell all by allowing him due process. Surely, everyone can understand that.
That whole fifth amerndment thing was only put there because back in the olden days we had kings who would falsely imprison people for political reasons. Needless to say, that could never happen now. Great americans like John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney would never take advantage of the American people’s fears by saying that they have captured a dangerous terrorist soldier who was trying to kill them unless it were true. And they do not make mistakes about things like that. They are good people. There is no reason to fear the misuse of government power against its citizens so let’s take that off the table right now.
All of which makes me wonder how much better off we’d be if we didn’t have to deal with those inconvenient legal rights and due process to begin with? I know that potentially blowing up an apartment building is a heinous act of terrorism, but suppose we arrested a member of a criminal gang who was planning to blow up the very same apartment building for the insurance money? That would just be considered plain old murder so we’d have to let the guy speak to a lawyer and face a judge. But, the result would be exactly the same. A bunch of innocent people would potentially be dead and we would not have been able to stop this heinous mass murderer because our stupid constitution forced the government to allow him due process. Not to mention that we couldn’t have sufficiently leaned on him to extract a confession in the first place! I’m hard pressed to see how the families of the victims would see the distinction between a normal old “crime” and terrorism.
Why should any potential murderer or informant be allowed to use this excuse of “due process” simply because he hasn’t been to Afghanistan? Why should innocent people ever be put at risk?
If there’s one thing the Jose Padilla case is teaching us is that it’s long past time we started calling all criminal suspects what they really are — unlawful combatants. All criminals disrupt our way of life and hurt innocent people for their own gain. Is that not the very definition of terrorism?
The founders obviously just didn’t comprehend what problems they would cause when they wrote the bill of rights. Of course, they didn’t have crime and terrorism in those days to deal with, so they couldn’t have known how restrictive their naive little document was going to be on future generations. I’m just glad we finally have a government that’s willing to show some moxie for once and ignore these outdated sacred cows in our constitution. I would imagine they’d have the founders deep respect for doing so.
You have to admire the loyalty among Republican hitmen. Even when confronted by a fellow traveller with irrefutable evidence of their pal’s depraved thuggery, they simply refuse to acknowledge that it even happened. This is a rare thing. In fact, I think it happens only in the Republican Party and the mafia.
O’REILLY: Now are you buying into the — this is just a hazing thing at Abu Ghraib?
COULTER: What, the media is hazing the American people by seeing how much we can take?
O’REILLY: Some of the right wing commentators say it’s just hazing, what’s the big deal? Are you buying into that?
COULTER: No, I don’t think anyone is.
O’REILLY: No, they are. You know that. I’m not going to embarrass people but on the radio, talk radio you have right wing commentators say it’s just hazing, what’s the big deal?
COULTER: If I know what you’re referring to, there were two hours and 59 minutes not saying that and at one point making fun of liberals for making fun of — if you’re talking about Rush, but Rush went on…
O’REILLY: …program and he said it’s not a big deal, it’s just hazing.
COULTER: If you’re talking about Rush, he definitely didn’t say that.What other talk radio hosts say…
O’REILLY: I compete against him every day on the radio and I know what he says. He said many, many times and not only him that it wasn’t a big deal.
COULTER: No, he didn’t say that, but whatever — no.”
Ann, of course, has other ideas about what caused the torture:
I think the other point that no one is making about the abuse photos is just the disproportionate number of women involved, including a girl general running the entire operation.
I mean, this is lesson, you know, one million and 47 on why women shouldn’t be in the military. In addition to not being able to carry even a medium-sized backpack, women are too vicious.
And that makes a certain amount of sense coming from her. Ann probably believes that she is a normal woman rather than the shrill, shrieking succubus that she is. It’s an understandable mistake.
For two months, someone has been kidnapping the best doctors in Iraq. Health officials and doctors estimate that as many as 100 surgeons, specialists and general physicians have been abducted from their homes and clinics since the beginning of April. Some were beaten and tortured. Most were released after the payment of between $20,000 and $200,000 in ransom.
[…]
The list of kidnapping victims and those who have fled the country is a who’s who of Iraq’s medical establishment. A pioneer in renal transplants. Saddam Hussein’s former plastic surgeon. And Khalily, who was voted Best Arabic Doctor in 1998 by the Pan Arab Medical Union.
The top cataract surgeon at a leading eye hospital in Baghdad, Dr. Jawad Shakarchi, moved to London after being abducted from his garage in April.
“He was a genius,” said a hospital manager, Amira Salman. “Now his students are doing his job.”
Many of the doctors also taught at Baghdad University’s College of Medicine. Officials there said a quarter of the school’s surgeons have gone or have requested temporary leaves next year.
“A lot of doctors are planning to quit for a year, and we don’t have enough teachers for the clinical studies,” said Dr. Hassan Rubaye, deputy dean of the medical school.
Some schools are having to limit enrollment for advanced studies until they can be sure there will be enough doctors to teach.
The good news is that 14 clinics have fresh paint and 8 have new office chairs. The chairs were donated by Halliburton for only $22,000 apiece, which they said only represented their cost.
Mark Kleiman notes that the raid on Chalabi’s headquarters was based in part on these charges and wonder whether it was a pure money making scheme or if they were trying to deliberatly create chaos, perhaps even on behalf of Iran.
I wouldn’t put it past them but I think it was probably the former. Although they did not see eye to eye on the timetable for invasion, Chalabi and GOP tough guy Dick Armey surely see eye to eye on Armey’s view of power — to the victor shall go the spoils. Ahmad was just taking the taste he deserved. Doctors have money, therefore they are lucrative kidnapping victims. It’s not personal. It’s not even political. It’s strictly business.
As I read this absurd story of the childlike preznit showing everybody Saddam’s gun like he’d won first place in the spelling bee (fat chance) I was reminded of another illustration of the lil’ guy’s statesmanlike maturity, that I posted earlier
President-elect Bush asked some practical questions about how things worked, but he did not offer or hint at his desires.
The Joint Chiefs’ staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen’s mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.
‘N he has pitchers ‘o the bad guyz in his desk, ‘n evertime we killz one of ’em, he crossus out there faces, cuz there ded.
Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented — both in speeches and in advertising.
Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush’s campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads — or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate.
Amazing, isn’t it? And people wonder why Kerry hasn’t been surging in the polls as Junior systematically destroys the country. And, it has such a nice salutary effect of making Democrats feel less than passionate about their candidate, too. If it weren’t for such a strong and unyielding ABB feeling on our side, I have no doubt that these ads would have worked as effectively to reduce Dem turn-out as on the undecided voters they are supposedly trying to convince. As it is, I think they are succeeding only to the extent that they make it uncomfortable for the politically timid to publicly support Kerry — e.g. take an unequivocal stand at the water cooler and the supermarket. That is an effect that is fading fast as disillusionment with Junior grows.
Incumbent presidents often prefer to run on their records in office, juxtaposing upbeat messages with negative shots at their opponents, as Bill Clinton did in 1996.
Scott Reed, who ran Robert J. Dole’s presidential campaign that year, said the Bush campaign has little choice but to deliver a constant stream of such negative charges. “With low poll numbers and a volatile situation in Iraq, Bush has more hope of tarnishing Kerry’s image than promoting his own.”
“The Bush campaign is faced with the hard, true fact that they have to keep their boot on his neck and define him on their terms,” Reed said. That might risk alienating some moderate voters or depressing turnout, “but they don’t have a choice,” he said.
(I love it when GOP operatives actively embrace totalitarian imagery. Smells like … bad apples.)
At this point, the only way that Bush can win is by destroying John Kerry. Even if one of the much discussed “external events” take place, I doubt bush will gain from it. As a result he is forced to run the most negative campaign in modern memory. Unfortunately for the country, if there’s one thing the Republicans have perfected, it’s negative campaigns and character assassination. The Bush family specializes in it. They are the Borgias of our time.
I know that some believe political advertising has little effect on people, but the studies they cite are based upon respondent’s own perceptions. The truth is that people rarely admit to being influenced by ads of any kind, yet their buying habits and perceptions of products prove that they are.
The thing that will change all of this is a critical mass of people using TiVO type technology. Then TV advertising is going to be in a world of hurt. TV ads (political ads especially because they are almost all so bad) work mostly on a subliminal level. People rarely pay active attention after they’ve seen it the first time. The key is for people to hear and see the key memes often enough for it to be absorbed subconsciously. One thing the Bush campaign has going for it is the money to relentlessly hammer their ads home. This gives them a much greater chance of having their message seep into the collective unconscious over time.
On the other hand, their image of Kerry as a of liberal, French flip-flopper only works well as contrasted with the Omnipotent Steely-Eyed Rocket Man, an image that I’m afraid is no longer operative. They are going to switch gears, I think, although I have no idea what form of destructive lies and images they are going to haul out this time.
It is only June. Bush poll numbers are still plummeting. It is going to get uglier and uglier. It’s the only hope they have. And, don’t underestimate them. They are very good at just that kind of politics. They’re never happier than when personal destruction is job one.
It really has fallen completely apart. The government, I mean. The CIA and the Pentagon are at each others throats, as we already knew. The State Department and the Pentagon, too. The office of Homeland Security is pissed at the Justice Department. Everybody hates everybody.
Now, according to Laura Rozen the White House is tacitly approving all this infighting as long as nobody directly criticizes Junior Codpiece:
Secondly, about Condoleezza Rice’s meeting with the pro-Chalabi crowd last week. I am told Rice requested the meeting with Perle, Woolsey, Gingrich, Pletka, Rubin et al, to ask them not to go off the reservation, in reaction to the White House cut off of Chalabi. And if you have noticed, they have refrained for the most part from directing their public criticism directly at the White House, attacking the CIA, DIA and State instead for a policy decision that came from the very top.
That’s how bad its gotten. Go ahead and rake our administration over the coals if you want to. Just don’t say anything bad about Junior. (Voters don’t know that the president is responsible for the whole executive branch so they won’t hold it against him.)
A new book on the Bush dynasty is set for release just six weeks before November’s knife-edge presidential election. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley will have an initial print run of 500,000, and the main source is believed to be Sharon Bush, the ex-wife of Neil, President George W Bush’s wayward brother.
Live by character assassination, die by character assassination. It looks like it’s going to come out right after Junior makes his triumphant return to Ground Zero.
Daniel Okrent says the paper failed in its WMD coverage prior to the war. Everybody is at fault and it’s wrong to single anybody out in particular and the way to put this behind them is to finally report the truth. Great.
Here’s the problem. Like the Bush administration, they seem to think that “taking responsibility” means acting as if it was some vague and ephemeral “somebody” who committed the act and then going on as if nothing happened. These are children’s ethics.
The only way journalists will understand that repeatedly publishing and hyping incorrect information (particularly disinformation) is unacceptable is if they will pay a price for doing so. That’s what grown-ups expect when they screw up. And the only way the public can be assured that The New York Times cares about its credibility is if it holds the people who made these massive errors responsible.
The New York Times recently fired Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg because they plagiarized and misrepresented the truth. Presumably, the paper did this because its credibility was at stake. They simply could not countenance publishing work that was not truthful because then people would stop believing what they printed and wouldn’t buy the paper.
Yet, they have repeatedly allowed themselves to be used by GOP Washington players to further their agenda over the last twelve years and as a result have printed wrong or misleading information hundreds of times. Sometimes, as with the Wen Ho Lee story, they investigated the problems, issued a mea culpa and then moved on. Other times, as with the endless Whitewater and independent counsel stories, they simply never addressed it. The hyped WMD stories are only the latest in a series of politically motivated disinformation campaigns.
And, the problem remains. After twelve years of blown story after blown story, it is time for the press (and not just The NY Times) to either declare that they are extensions of the Republican Party or expose their sources when they’ve shown themselves to be purposefully passing incorrect information (which Okrent endorses as proper journalistic ethics.)
Judith Miller undoubtedly believes she is being unfairly scapegoated, but she is not. Blair and Bragg were fired for offenses that didn’t lead to any real consequences other than a lot of journalistic navel gazing. Yet Miller, more than anyone, was a willing tool for certain political friends and sources and used her prestige and position on the paper of record to further their agenda to take this country into a war. That is inexcusable. However, The New York Times has decided to excuse her and others like Patrick Tyler and Jill Abrahamson and is allowing them to keep their jobs.
Fine. If the paper wishes to hang its credibility on journalists like this then it obviously no longer cares about it. Therefore, the New York Times is collectively guilty and should be held responsible for the actions of these failed journalists.
The paper of record has officially chosen to became just another daily rag. RIP Gray Lady.
Interrogation experts from the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were sent to Iraq last fall and played a major role in training American military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison there, senior military officials said Friday.
The teams from Guantánamo Bay, which had operated there under directives allowing broad latitude in questioning “enemy combatants,” played a central role at Abu Ghraib through December, the officials said, a time when the worst abuses of prisoners were taking place. Prisoners captured in Iraq, unlike those sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, were to be protected by the Geneva Conventions.
The teams were sent to Iraq for 90-day tours at the urging of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the head of detention operations at Guantánamo. General Miller was sent to Iraq last summer to recommend improvements in the intelligence gathering and detention operations there, a defense official said.
[…]
In interviews, two military intelligence soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib as part of the 205th Brigade described the unit from Guantánamo as having played a notable role in setting up the interrogation unit in Iraq, which they said was modeled closely after the one that General Miller put in place in Cuba.
“They were sent to Iraq to set up a Gitmo-style prison at Abu Ghraib,” a military intelligence soldier said of the unit. None of the soldiers knew what military unit the group from Guantánamo had been drawn from, but one of them said he understood that it had also served earlier in a detention facility in Guantánamo.
It wasn’t a bunch of bad apples. It was at the explicit instruction of General Geoffrey D Ripper, who sent in his best leg breakers to teach ’em how to get the job done.
And then, as reports of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib were coming to light the Bush administration decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to put in charge the same guy who had recommended and implemented the abuse and torture in the first place.
How long will it take for somebody to ask, considering his history at the prison, why in the world General Ripper was brought in after the scandal broke? I’m just asking. He is, after all, an obviously sadistic freak who is one of the causes of the greatest foreign policy PR disaster in American history.
The commander of Guantánamo Bay, sacked amid charges from the Pentagon that he was too soft on detainees, said he faced constant tension from military interrogators trying to extract information from inmates.
Brigadier General Rick Baccus was removed from his post in October 2002, apparently after frustrating military intelligence officers by granting detainees such privileges as distributing copies of the Koran and adjusting meal times for Ramadan. He also disciplined prison guards for screaming at inmates.
In one of the general’s first interviews since his dismissal, he told the Guardian: “I was mislabelled as someone who coddled detainees. In fact, what we were doing was our mission professionally.”
[…]
Eighteen months after being removed from Guantánamo, Gen Baccus, 51, and a commander of the Rhode Island National Guard, is still waiting for a new military assignment.
As for Guantanamo, I keep reading this refrain about prisoners with negligible or non-existent ties to al Qaeda or the Taliban having been “sold” for four or five thousand dollars by the Northern Alliance or others. They held the five Britons for more than two years as “unlawful combatants” and then the UK just set them free. How many other “terrorists” like that are there down in Guantanamo?
What’s your impression of Guantanamo? Do a lot of people belong there? What’s your impression of the inmates?
They asked me always this question. I told them in 100 percent there is 80 percent of people that went to Afghanistan, like people that can’t do anything. They’ve had enough. If you put them back in their countries they won’t do anything. That’s in 80 percent.
Among those 80 percent there is almost 60 in those 80, 60 that are people that haven’t done anything. People that worked in a project in Pakistan, an old man that his son brought him, you know, just to sell him for $5,000. Drug dealers, people that didn’t have anything to do with Al Qaeda were put there for no reason but because someone brought them there or someone thought of getting thousands for them, whoever captured them that they were Al Qaeda.
The rest, the 20 percent from the whole 100 percent, there’s 10 percent of them that should be kept there and 10 percent of them if they go out and they catch up with Al Qaeda again they might go back to being Al Qaeda. But there’s only like 10 percent of the people that are really dangerous, that should be there and the rest are people that don’t have anything to do with it, don’t even, don’t even understand what they’re doing here.
Just explain the bounty hunting, how people ended up there. That they paid a bounty.
At the very beginning, after Americans took over Afghanistan, they needed to show the American public that you know, we have got people. So there was normal Afghans would catch normal Arabs, normal small Arabs and go to the American base and tell them, you know what, we have a big commander. The American would say yes okay and they would just buy him.
If the Americans were paying large bounties, a large amount of money they would have ended up with a lot of innocent people there, don’t you think?
Yes, a lot of innocent people. I told you the one story, I remember two, actually. One is the father that was brought by his own son. The son gave him a gun and took him up to an American base up there and took $5,000 for him. That’s one story.
The second story is a drug user, a person that was sitting next to me, not worried about being in jail, not worried about what’s going to happen to his family, not worried about what he’s going to get. All he’s worried about every time he asks the MPs to come around, asking them for a smoke, asking them for some hashish for you know, for marijuana, something like that, you know. Not even, he doesn’t even know what he’s doing here. Truly a drug addict, not Al Qaeda at all.
Yet, despite the obvious probability of corruption and error in capturing these “dangerous terrorists,” the Geneva Conventions were openly discarded because we could not take a chance that these people could be set free on a technicality if they were allowed any kind of due process. Indeed, we couldn’t even treat them humanely or eschew torture in interrogations. And when Iraq didn’t turn out to be the promised cakewalk, and the damned Iraqis refused to cooperate sufficiently in their foreign occupation, we decided we couldn’t take a chance on due process or humane treatment with them either.
And wherever the orders for endless incarceration and torture don’t get followed the way they’re supposed to, whether from the resistence of a decent, professional soldier or the inattention of a half baked reserve general, the go-to guy is General Geoffrey D. Ripper.
Tristero reminds me of another reason I recoil at the very sight of Crusader Codpiece:
There was not only a new sound,’ said Al Gore, speaking about the Beatles to the editor of Rolling Stone. “There was something else that was new with the Beatles. A new sensibility…that incredible gestalt they had.” The great exception to all this is George W. Bush. He was at Yale from 1964 to 1968, and liked some of the Beatles first records. ‘Then they got a bit weird,’ he has said. ‘I didn’t like all that later stuff when they got strange.
He was too stoned on Jack and coke to unnerstand them big words. Jayzuz…
Tristero also mentions that Paul McCartney (finally) spoke out against the war.
You know, it might have helped just a little bit if Paul and others like him had shown a bit more guts a couple of years ago. I remember writing on this very blog, with a kind of naivete I haven’t seen in myself for quite some time, that we could count on the artist community to step up.
Some did. Janeane Garrofolo, Sheryl Crow, the Dixie Chicks and the already politically active lefties like Ed Begley Jr and Ed Asner. The big names played it safe. Pretty much everybody else hemmed and hawed and looked the other way when they had a chance to actually make a difference.
And the last of my ideals shattered like an old 45 record on the asphalt of my dreams….