Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The End Of The Modern Era

Robin Wright is one cool customer. I’ve been reading her work for many years — before she went to the Washington Post, she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, my daily paper. She regularly appears on The Newshour and is an acknowledged mid-east expert from whom I have never seen or read any trace of hysteria or even much emotion. She’s a real journalist.

Her analysis today of how the Iraq war has changed everything in the region — for the worse — and how the consequences are much more serious than anything that’s gone before in the region, brought me up short. This is not a writer who is given to hyperbole, yet she writes today:

Over the past quarter-century, I’ve covered the rage of the Islamic world, witnessing much of it up close, losing friends who became victims to its extremist wings and watching its furies swell. But I’ve never been scared until now.

The stakes in Iraq — for which the Abu Ghraib prison has tragically become the metaphor — are not just the future of a fragile oil-rich country or America’s credibility in the world, even among close allies. The issues are not simply whether the Pentagon has systemic problems or whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon brass or even the Bush administration can survive The Pictures. And the costs are not merely the billions from the U.S. Treasury to foot the Iraq bills today or the danger that Mideast oil becomes a political weapon during tumultuous days down the road.

The stakes are instead how the final phase of the Modern Era plays out.

That 500-year period, marked by the age of exploration, the creation of nations and the Enlightenment that unleashed ideologies designed to empower the individual, faces its last great challenge in the 50 disparate countries that constitute the Islamic world — ruled by the last bloc of authoritarian monarchs, dictators and leaders-for-life. The Iraq war was supposed to produce a new model for democratic transformation, a catalyst after which the United States and its allies could launch an ambitious initiative for regional change.

But now, whatever America’s good intentions may have been, that historic moment may be lost for a long time to come.

Funny, that. We find today that the Bush administration is making policy based upon the apocalyptic fantasies of a bunch of crazed American fundamentalists . And on a political level, rejection of the Enlightenment has been in the works in the Republican Party for a long, long time. I doubt they quite had this in mind, however.

Over the past dozen years many factors favored transformation in the world’s most volatile region. The buzz among students at Tehran University, editorial writers in Beirut and Amman, the leading human rights activist in Cairo, a feminist leader in Rabat, intellectuals in Lahore and teenage girls in Jakarta has increasingly been about democratic reforms and how to achieve them. New public voices, daring publications, occasionally defiant protests in widely diverse locales gave shape to an energetic, if somewhat disjointed, trend.

Thanks to satellite dishes, shortwave radios and the Internet, Muslims have longingly watched societies from South Africa to Chile to the former Soviet republics shed odious ideologies and repressive regimes. Many haven’t wanted to be left behind; they’ve wanted much of what we’ve wanted for them.

[…]

The bottom line: The primary battle for the majority of Muslims has not been with us. Their jihad — or struggle, as the word is accurately translated — has been against their own autocratic governments. A surprisingly small minority of extremists, from Lebanon’s Hezbollah to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, have gone after us most often because we were seen as the prop for corrupt and immoral regimes, or we deployed troops on their land to achieve suspect objectives.

Yet I am scared because the foundation for the region’s democratic transformation has steadily eroded over the past year. Whether the U.S.-led occupation was wise or well-handled, the way it unfolded in Iraq has profoundly disappointed many Muslims both near and far from Iraq’s borders. The accumulation of events threatens to undo rather than remake the region, in turn delaying or diverting the course of the Modern Era’s final phase.

The occupation of Iraq has affirmed the worst fears of the Islamic world, reinforcing distaste for America and what it represents, and spawning wild conspiracy theories about the motives of the West. Many Muslims now see the American intervention as a devastating betrayal, starkly reflected by the Red Cross’s recent conclusion that 70 to 90 percent of all Iraqis who were “deprived of their liberty” — by the world champion of democracy — “were arrested by mistake.” Others in the region react with fury to the symbolism of a naked Arab male on a concrete floor tethered to a female American soldier looking down with disinterested arrogance on her prisoner at Abu Ghraib.

“Beyond those frolicking soldiers, there is a certain cavalier attitude toward Arabs and Muslims that has created a sense that Arabs are guilty until proven otherwise,” reflected Hisham Melham, a Washington correspondent for al-Arabiya television. So while America’s ambitious postwar initiative to promote democracy in the “greater Middle East,” — which includes imaginative proposals, such as training 100,000 female teachers to instruct and empower girls by closing the gender gap — will probably still make its debut at three international summits next month, it’s unlikely to generate much traction anytime soon.

This is where George W. Bush and his facile cowboy talk really fomented the hell that is unfolding in Iraq. I hold him (and the speechwriters like David Frum and Mark Gershon, whom everybody extolled for providing the moron with such stirring oratory) responsible. The purposefully and for craven political purposes unleashed the beast.

But what I fear most is that frustration over Iraq and disgust with Abu Ghraib will give common cause and a rallying cry to far-flung Muslim societies. Until now, al Qaeda — with its global reach — has been the exception. Most Islamic groups have had local causes and operated at home or very nearby. And they’ve always been a distinct minority.

The worst-case scenario is that the Cold War of the 20th century is followed in the early 21st century by a very warm one, with no front lines, unpredictable offensives and a type of weaponry from which we’re not yet sure how to protect ourselves. This time the majority could become involved, either by empathizing, sympathizing or actively participating in a cause they see as righting a wrong against them.

The unintended consequence of the Iraq experience could well produce a third generation of militants — a cadre that didn’t fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s or train in bin Laden’s camps in the 1990s — who will launch a conflict whose tactics, targets and goals will be even more amorphous. Their conflict will be more than an intensified or expanded war on terrorism. And, I fear, we’ll be groping for a long time to figure out how to counter it — and how to get back to finishing that final chapter of the Modern Era.

I’ve always maintained that we couldn’t have designed a better recruitment plan for bin Laden than invading Iraq. It looks as if it’s working. And, like Robin Wright, for the first time I feel truly scared.

Calling All Ombudsmen

The press in this country is unbelievably bad. So bad that I am tempted to say it is urredeemable.

Everybody is all excited by Newsweek’s revelation of the “Gonzales Memo” like they’ve just uncovered the Rosetta stone. Michael Isikoff claims right there in the article:

The memo—and strong dissents by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his chief legal advisor, William Howard Taft IV—are among hundreds of pages of internal administration documents on the Geneva Convention and related issues that have been obtained by NEWSWEEK and are reported for the first time in this week’s magazine.

In light of all this hoopla, one of my readers wrote me asking who might have leaked this memo. It’s an excellent question. Who leaked it and why right now?

Well, I don’t know who just recently gave Isikoff the copy of the memo, but the fact is that it was leaked more than two years ago to the Washington Times (likely as a shot at Powell) and was written about in the NY Times by none other than William Safire. Even a googling blogger like me referred to it in a post last week as a “famous early skirmish” in the Bush administration’s ongoing civil war because of Colin Powell’s vociferous objections to Gonzales’s recommendations. The Washington Times story contains the “quaint” quote and everything.

Here’s the Washington Times article for January 26, 2002, one day after the memo was written. Powell urges POW status

Here’s Safire’s column from January 29, 2002.

Jayzuz.

Housekeeping

Please update your RSS readers with my new site feed, shown at left or here.

Due to popular request, I’ve changed to Feedburner, which should theoretically provide a feed to the following:

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Xpyder

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Now leave me alone. I’m a techno-phobe and this stuff makes me feel all icky.

House of Bush, House of Borgia

Fred Kaplan in Slate says:

The White House is about to get hit by the biggest tsunami since the Iran-Contra affair, maybe since Watergate. President George W. Bush is trapped inside the compound, immobilized by his own stay-the-course campaign strategy. Can he escape the massive tidal waves? Maybe. But at this point, it’s not clear how.

[…]

Seymour Hersh seems to be on his hottest roll as an investigative reporter in 30 years, and the editors of every major U.S. daily newspaper aren’t going to stand for it. “We’re having our lunch handed to us by a weekly magazine!” one can imagine them shouting in their morning meetings. Scoops and counterscoops will be the order of the day. [this is key. ed]

All of these hound-hunts will be fueled by the extraordinary levels of internecine feuding that have marked this administration for years. Until recently, Rumsfeld, with White House assistance, has quelled dissenters, but the already-rattling lid is almost certain to blow off soon. As has been noted, Secretary of State Colin Powell, tiring of his good-soldier routine, is attacking his adversaries in the White House and Pentagon with eyebrow-raising openness. Hersh’s story states that Rumsfeld’s secret operation stemmed from his “longstanding desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA.” Hersh’s sources—many of them identified as intelligence officials—seem to be spilling, in part, to wrest back control. Uniformed military officers, who have long disliked Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew for a lot of reasons, are also speaking out. Hersh and Newsweek both report that senior officers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps went berserk when they found out about Rumsfeld’s secret operation, to the point of taking their concerns to the New York Bar Association’s committee on international human rights.

The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.

Read the whole thing. It features a particularly nice, concise chain of events.

E-mail it to your friends. It makes a lovely graduation gift.

The War Of The Worlds

The Political Animal brings up a point that I agree should get a full airing before we go any further in our discussion of America’s behavior in the GWOT:

Gonzales concluded in stark terms: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

This strikes me as an issue that everyone — pro-war and anti-war alike — ought to take a firm stand on: should the Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners captured in the war on terror or not?

Gonzales’ reasoning is appealing but misguided, I think. After all, every generation believes at one time or another that the enemies they face are so savage, so fundamentally different from any that have come before that old rules of conduct no longer apply. Every generation also turns out to be wrong. The reality is that the Taliban is not more dangerous than the Cold War Soviets, who in turn were not more dangerous than the Nazis. If we were willing to treat prisoners decently in those conflicts, why not now?

The ability to “quickly obtain information” from captured prisoners has been a critical part of every war, but we nonetheless agreed half a century ago to place this under strict limits. This was not because we felt the wars of that era were unimportant, or because we deluded ourselves into believing that our enemies would always follow suit, but because we wanted to set a standard of simple human decency for ourselves and others.

It was also viewed as counter-productive to our own troops when they, inevitably, get captured. It helps to be able to say ‘we don’t do this and you’d better not do this either.” Just ask members of the military these days how happy they are with the prospect of throwing out the Geneva Conventions.

The larger issue is what’s important, though. The 9/11 attacks were extremely dramatic and horrifying spectacles. That was, of course, the point. But, Islamic terrorism, per se, is not a threat to the nation on the scale of WWII or the Cold War. Indeed, its greatest threat to our survival is the extent to which we allow our fear to blind us to the possibility of creeping totalitarianism from within. It does not threaten our sovereignty or our way of life as those earlier wars did, despite our very understandable fear of further attacks.

I have thought since the beginning that stoking our bloodlust, while emotionally satisfying, was exactly the wrong thing to do. I thought that the correct response to 9/11 was to observe the appropriate period of mourning for the victims and then quietly, calmly and systematically set about working the problem from a number of different angles — particularly using the unprecedented outpouring of international support — to mitigate the threat and secure our own country. It seemed to me that the most powerful statement would be to quickly and cleanly unseat the Taliban and then be menacingly mysterious about what else we were doing behind the scenes. We should have openly and obviously embraced international institutions and foreign countries and touted their cooperation as a way of marginalizing Islamic fundamentalism as much as possible to keep terrorists wondering who was friend or foe.

We instead reared up on our hind legs like a wounded animal and began thrashing about, enraged and unhinged, stoking bloodlust and fear. Rather then dealing with the problem with seriousness of purpose we responded with vomitous bromides about our superior morality and behaved as if 9/11 was s unique threat to our survival instead of an asymmetrical challenge — the asymmetry of which accrued to our benefit, not theirs. If we had resisted the impulse to demonstrate our power like a Moscow May Day Parade circa 1965 and engaged the world against what should have been conceived as a common enemy, we might have been able to deal with this threat over time without catastrophic results.

But we did exactly the wrong thing. We inflamed the situation with the “bring it on” and “you’re with us or agin’ us” macho rhetoric and, stunningly, even went so far as to invade an uninvolved Arab country. The president told our troops they were fighting for the survival of the nation in Iraq and encouraged them to believe they were exacting revenge for the acts of 9/11 even though it wasn’t true.

We continue to lose hearts and minds everywhere. As Josh Marshall’s Iraq correspondent reports today:

Also it is no secret that ON THE STREET the US Army was and remains openly kicking Iraqi asses whenever and wherever they want to.

About the Army – Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968. I knew we were finished when I had a soldier point his Squad Automatic Weapons at me and my bodyguard detail for driving down the street when he decided he would cross the street in the middle of rush hour traffic (which was moving at about 70 MPH) … He made it clear to any and all that he was preparing to shoot drivers who did not stop for his jaunt because speeding cars are “threats.”

I also once had a soldier from a squad of Florida National Guard reservists raise weapons and kick the door panel of a clearly marked CPA security vehicle (big American flag in the windshield of a $150,000 armored Land Cruiser) because they wanted us to back away from them so they could change a tire … as far as they were concerned WE (non-soldiers) were equally the enemy as any Iraqi.

Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit. I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.

From the beginning we have behaved as if this was a threat so unprecedented that we didn’t have to observe any previous notions of civilized behavior — as if it were War of The Worlds and aliens were trying to colonize the planet rather than a bunch of clever criminals armed with box-cutters and a suicidal excuse to kill in the name of God. We invaded Iraq with too few trained troops, no help or input from the experts in nation building and peacekeeping and now we find ourselves in the worst possible situation. We are seen as unsympathetic, arrogant, violent and inept. This should be expected when the government and the likes of Rush Limbaugh (who is piped in every day on Armed Forces Radio) encourage our military to act like barbarians by lying to them and the public about the nature of the threat and the identity of the enemy.

We may not be facing aliens from a foreign planet, but we have now sown the seeds of an anti-American backlash that encompasses this planet and may well last for generations. And America is demonstrably weaker in the world than we were before this cock-up. For no good reason, we have boldly demonstrated for all to see that our intelligence operations are virtually useless and that we don’t even have enough troops to invade and occupy a third rate dictatorship. I know I feel safer knowing that. And I have no doubt that the rest of the world has made a note of it too.

I have long said that these neocon Bushies have always been wrong about everything. But, they have never been as wrong as this.

Nobody should be surprised. They advertised their intentions quite openly. In their Pax Americana Manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses they clearly state that it would probably take a catastrophe on the scale of Pearl Harbor to rally thecountry to their classic comic Imperial wet dream. Despite the fact that they do not understand the concept of terrorism in the least, they nonetheless realized that 9/11 would work very well to advance their plans. All of the breast beating and sabre rattling was ultimately in service of their starry-eyed ivory tower vision of The New American Cakewalk and the triumphant erasure of the asterisk that sits next to George W. Bush’s name in the history books.

Since making that first fundamental error, they made every single mistake it is possible to make, starting with pissing off the entire world and ending with Abu Ghraib. Their dream is dead, but we will be paying the price for their arrogance and vanity for decades to come.

If anyone but the airheaded George W. Bush and his terminally incompetent neocon/Team B cabal had been in office, the idea that the threat of Islamic fundamentalism was so unprecedented that it meant America must discard all of its values and morals would have been laughed out of the oval office for the absurdity it is. Sadly for America and the world, bin Laden got lucky.

Ya Think?

And in other news, the sun came up this morning:

Republicans have adopted a scorched-earth strategy toward Democrats who challenge the wisdom of the way the war in Iraq is being conducted. Such critics, GOP officials say, are not merely misguided but are craven cut-and-runners who help the enemy and put politics ahead of U.S. troops’ safety.

Democrats say the Republicans are twisting facts and trying to stifle debate through intimidation. Not so, say the Republicans, who insist they are not questioning Democrats’ patriotism, only their judgment and resolve. If accuracy and nuance sometimes fall victim to all this rhetoric, well, there’s a war on, folks.

The ruckus began May 6, when Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) — a hawkish, longtime defender of the Pentagon — told reporters he believed the war in Iraq could not be won without sending in significantly more troops and equipment, which he advocated. “Our failure to surge in terms of troop level and resources needed to prevail in this war” has resulted in “what appear to be unattainable goals in our current path,” Murtha said at the news conference, hosted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

House Republicans responded within minutes. “This morning, in a calculated and craven political stunt, the national Democrat Party declared its surrender in the war on terror,” said Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). “Out of sheer, brazen partisanship,” House Democrats have “undermined our troops.” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.) said Democrats “are basically giving aid and comfort to our enemies.”

Reporters pointed out that Murtha has consistently said the war was unsustainable only under the current policies, and that he urged massive troop buildups as a remedy. DeLay was unmoved. “If you don’t give solutions,” he said, “that is saying, ‘Cut and run.’ ”

The focus turned to presidential politics Monday, when Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie accused Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) of using the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq — and a mass e-mail calling for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s resignation — as a fundraising vehicle.

Kerry campaign spokesmen said the online invitation to donate was a link in virtually all campaign e-mails and similar to one on the “national security” page on President Bush’s campaign Web site.

On Wednesday, Bush-Cheney campaign chairman Marc Racicot said Kerry had suggested all U.S. troops in Iraq are “somehow universally responsible” for the Abu Ghraib prisoner mistreatment. Kerry had said essentially the opposite. The reported abuse, Kerry had said, “is not the behavior of 99.9 percent of our troops.”

House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), noting that DeLay sharply criticized the Clinton administration’s military intervention in Kosovo, said Friday: “The hypocritical attacks on legitimate calls for an inquiry [into the prison abuses] and thoughtful critiques of the administration’s Iraq policy . . . represent a purely political calculation designed to silence debate and undercut Democrats.” Pelosi, picking up the theme, said Republicans “will not silence us with these personal attacks.”

Joe Biden said this morning on Meat The Press that we have to “heal Red ‘n Blue, man” and everybody’s begging Kerry to put McCain on the ticket and golly gosh, can’t we all get along?

All I can say is good luck.

There is only one way to heal red ‘n blue and that is to so thoroughly repudiate the Republican party at the polls that they will be forced to purge assholes like DeLay from their leadership and start putting their country before their party. Then we can talk. Unless that happens, it’s brass knuckles political warfare because when you give these guys an inch they always take a thousand miles and move the destination even farther to the right.

We have to hold the line.

And while I don’t think it would be a bad idea to put a Republican or two in the cabinet and to try to reach out to the congress (no matter which party holds the leadership) we’d also better have eyes in the back of our heads because they will slip in the shiv the first chance they get.

We’ve been down this road before. In the 90’s the “third way” experiment was designed to mitigate the polarization of the left and right, both in politics and policy. On a policy level there was some limited success. But it was a political disaster because of the very same scorched earth tactics employed by the noxious Tom DeLay and his Godfather Newt Gingrich. You cannot compromise with people like that. I sincerely hope that we do not have to relearn that lesson.

Black Ops

Seymour Hersh’s latest reveals the existence of a black operation put into high gear after 9/11 that was stupidly pushed into Iraq due to frustration and impatience at the Pentagon.

First, let me say that I am not all that surprised that such a program existed nor that it was given greater ability to operate independently after 9/11. As Hersh points out, these clandestine operations had been used during the cold war and I certainly assumed that dealing with the assymetrical threat of terrorism would probably require at least some element of high risk spook style activity. It would be naive to think it wouldn’t. In the hands of these unbelievable incompetents in the Bush administration it naturally turned into a complete disasater.

Moral questions aside (and there are many), as the article details, the problem is that if you use these techniques in anything but the most secret and rarest of ways and it comes into the hands of regular people instead of highly trained specialists using real intelligence, then it is not only ineffective in obtaining useful information, it is dramatically counterproductive in terms of compromising long term policy goals.

The CIA sources, perhaps covering their asses, tell Hersh that even they backed off of this stuff when it came to using it against regular people in Iraq. Some in the Pentagon apparently maintain that they had been getting good intelligence on the insurgency using these harsh measures until the “hillbillys” got involved and took pictures, which I find hard to believe. If anything the insurgency got stronger over the period they were sweeping innocent people off the streets and then torturing them in prisons so it doesn’t track that they were really getting anywhere. In fact, it looks as if it may have contributed to the US military’s problems. If they mean that they managed to get Saddam, I hardly think that was such a big coup. After all, he had terrorized the population for over 30 years so it’s not unlikely that someone would have dropped a dime on him eventually.

The fact is that these torture techniques in anybody’s hands are a terrible way to get information. People will say anything under torture. I suspect that the “historical information” that General Ripper is so proud of obtaining in Gitmo is probably bullshit. Certainly, after being down there for more than 2 years those prisoners don’t know shit today. Believing their own hype about Gitmo, these people inexorably came to believe that if they just inflicted a little more pain and humiliation in Iraq they’d get the answers they wanted. Meanwhile, bin Laden is still at large and Iraq has blown up into a nightmare.

So, it is a case of macho overstepping and making things worse than they already were, much as the march to Iraq itself was a case of macho overstepping and making things worse rather than better. Evidently, the events of 9/11 released some testosterone rush in the pinched, unfulfilled systems of the ivory tower neocons and they lost the ability to reason and plan.

Hersh’s article pretty much confirms that the person who gave the orders to take off the gloves in Abu Ghraib is Don Rumsfeld gofer, Steven Cambone, the man most uniquely unqualified to hold his office since well…President Bush. Of course, Cambone being the ultimate micromanager’s clerk means that Rummy himself was well aware of everything that went on and approved it.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that the White House was intimately involved in these issues, regardless of their plausible deniability. As I point out in my post below, one of the main reasons they wanted to create the “unlawful combatant” designation was to allow unfettered interrogations. The White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, led that argument. The Newsweek article shows that Cheney and Rumsfeld were deeply involved in the Padilla and Hamdi cases and argued forcefully that they (and any other American they deemed a threat) should be considered unlawful combatants, without the protections of even the constitution, much less the Geneva Conventions. They believe in harsh measures without regard to human rights. They have both shown a remarkable propensity to overlook the long term strategic damage of any given decision in favor of some short term emotional satisfaction or political gain.

They knew.

He Never Learns

In a bid to get American bloodlust refocused, Crusader Codpiece lied yesterday again about terrorist ties to Iraq prior to the war. Apparently unhappy that the torture at Abu Ghraib has been temporarily halted, the president wants to re-inflame and confuse members of the military and the American public so that they will continue to support the idea that Iraq had something to do with the events of 9/11 and therefore believe killing and torturing Iraqis is an act of revenge (while he spouts sophomoric bromides about peace and freedom.)

President Bush on Friday blamed al Qaeda supporter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for beheading American Nicholas Berg and cited him as an example of Saddam Hussein “terrorist ties” before the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Bush’s revival of accusations linking Saddam to terrorism comes as the president faces growing doubts among Americans over his Iraq policy.

At a fund-raising lunch in Bridgeton, Missouri, Bush said Zarqawi was an example of the threat posed by the ousted Iraqi leader. “We knew he (Saddam) had terrorist ties. The person responsible for the Berg death, Zarqawi, was in and out of Baghdad prior to our arrival, for example,” Bush said.

It’s obvious that Bush doesn’t give a shit about this country. At every step of the way he has made this country less safe by his words and actions and he continues to do it without even a second thought. Every time he utters one of these proven lies he prolongs this madness and puts our lives in greater danger.

He is showing unprecedented gall in this case,however, because it has been shown that the only reason he didn’t kill Zarqawi when he was holed up in Kurd territory before the war was because it was his only evidence of terrorism in Iraq (even though outside Saddam’s control) and his death would have impeded his blind determination to invade at all costs.

To use Berg’s murder as an excuse to lie about this once again is obscene.

And He Wept With Happiness

Kate “yes, I’m really this desperate” O’Beirne defends her Big Boy:

Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.”

Yes. That’s what it says. Even the quotes.

We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.

That’s very special. But, you might want to keep an eye on him when he’s around old ladies or a medicine cabinet. Word to the wise.

100=2.5 to 3 days of the little blues[oxycontin] You know how this stuff works…the more you get used to the more it takes. But, I will try and cut down to help out. But remember, this is only for a little over two more weeks. Just two weeks….I understand your challenge and will do all I can to help. But I kind of want to go out with a bang if you get my drift. Hee hee hee.

Yes. He certainly has excellent judgment.

As for his decency, I guess old Kate shares his excitement about “babes and torture” which isn’t altogether surprising.

Link via Media Matters

Taking Off The Gloves

Matt Yglesias points us to law professor Eric Muller’s post about the possibility that the Solicitor general lied to the Supreme Court. Matt says:

The subject is Clement’s contention in oral arguments on the Padilla and Hamdi cases that the US government doesn’t engage in even “mild torture” to try and secure information from detainees. This is going to wind up hinging on whether or not various “stress and duress” interrogation techniques count as torture — certainly this stuff sounds a lot like torture to me.

I agree that this particular argument is going to rest on whether these techniques are considered “mild torture” but it should be noted that both General Pace and Wolfowitz of Arabia agreed yesterday that these acts are inhumane and they would consider them violations of the Geneva Convention if used against US troops. (Civilians are accorded even greater protections.)

As to whether the solicitor general’s office knew about it (however it is defined) it would certainly appear that Ted Olson was brainstorming in the White House about the case, right along with Cheney and Rummy:

The president’s men were divided. For Dick Cheney and his ally, Donald Rumsfeld, the answer was simple: the accused men [the Lakawanna Six] should be locked up indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” and thrown into a military brig with no right to trial or even to see a lawyer… “They are the enemy, and they’re right here in the country,” Cheney argued, according to a participant. But others were hesitant to take the extraordinary step of stripping the men of their rights, especially because there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist acts…Cheney and Rumsfeld argued that in time of war there are few limits on what a president can do to protect the country. “There have been some very intense disagreements,” says a senior law-enforcement official. “It has been a hard-fought war.”

[…]

But as the months wore on, Justice lawyers became increasingly uneasy about holding him [Padilla] indefinitely without counsel. Solicitor General Ted Olson warned that the tough stand would probably be rejected by the courts. Administration lawyers went so far as to predict which Supreme Court justices would ultimately side for and against them.

But the White House, backed strongly by Cheney, refused to budge. Instead, NEWSWEEK has learned, officials privately debated whether to name more Americans as enemy combatants including a truck driver from Ohio and a group of men from Portland, Ore.

Did the administration lie to the Court? Ted Olson almost certainly understood the mindset of the administration as it dealt with these “unlawful combatants” which is characterized by a total willingness to throw aside the rule of law. (Cheney is quite obviously out of his mind on these issues. Remember the smallpox freak-out?) Whether the lawyer Paul Clement was aware that the White House had taken a no hold barred approach to the treatment of prisoners is unknown. In any case, as Matt says, if that argument is ever broached it will hinge on the question of whether these admitted techniques, like holding someone under water until they think they’re drowning, can be called torture. In the Bizarro World in which we now live, it’s entirely possible that Scalia and gang will find it perfectly acceptable.

But, there is another little problem with the legal situation pertaining to prisoner treatment. Rumsfeld effectively locked out the JAG office in making all these decisions and the military lawyers have been complaining about it for months:

A group of senior military lawyers were so concerned about changes in the rules designed to safeguard prisoners during interrogation that they sought help outside the Defense Department, according to a New York lawyer who headed a recent study of how prisoners have been treated in the war on terrorism.

The military lawyers were part of the Army Judge Advocate General’s office, which in the past has played a role in ensuring that interrogators did not violate prisoners’ rights.

“They were extremely upset. They said they were being shut out of the process, and that the civilian political lawyers, not the military lawyers, were writing these new rules of engagement,” said Scott Horton, who was chairman of the New York City Bar Assn. committee that filed a report this month on the interrogation of detainees by the U.S.

[…]

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the rules had been examined and approved by lawyers for the administration.

On Tuesday, Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, “issued any number of statements and directives to the effect that detainees in Iraq, civilian or military, were to be treated under the provisions of the Geneva Convention.”

[…]

Horton said the military lawyers told him that Feith pressed for looser interrogation rules and won approval for them from the administration’s civilian lawyers earlier in the U.S. war on terrorism.

Which lawyers? They don’t refer to these decisions as coming from the Justice Department but rather more broadly from “the administration’s civilian political lawyers.”

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales openly defends the White House’s decision to call the Guantanamo prisoners “enemy combatants” largely because the Geneva Convention would limit their ability to interrogate the prisoners.(It’s comforting to know that they promise to operate in guantanamo in the “spirit” of the Geneva Conventions, though. Trust Us)

In a famous early skirmish in the Bush administration’s ongoing civil war, Gonzales sent around a memo trying to persuade the national security council to reject Colin Powell’s request to give the Guantanamo prisoners POW status. (Condi later said it was just a draft…)

It’s possible these military lawyers are referring to Justice, but it’s just as likely that the rules were debated and decided right in the White House. History suggests that Cheney and Rumsfeld are always in favor of the harshest possible treatment. They gave in only when Ashcroft argued to protect his own turf (and profile) in the US. (That’s what passes for compromise in the Bush administration.)

In other words, it is likely that the rules for the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, just as they were in Guantanamo, were not created in some obscure Justice Department or CIA office as is stated in this NY Times article today. The history of this issue leads to the White House Counsel’s office and the Office of the Vice President.

As I wrote earlier, they were frantic to get intelligence on the whereabouts of the apparently vaporized WMD. They believed from the beginning that this was such a “different kind of war” that they needn’t adhere to the rule of law or war.

Somebody needs to ask which civilian “political” lawyers were making the interrogation rules in the War On Terrorism.