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Rogue State Chronicles

Speaking of warcrimes, I just remembered another action premptively absolving Americans of war crimes — the dramatic “unsigning” of the International Criminal Court Treaty and the subsequent signing of the “American Servicemembers’ Protection Act” handily tucked into the “vote for it or you’re a traitor” Supplemental Defense Appropriations Act of 2002.

The first action, a highly unusual unilateral repudiation of a signed treaty, was taken in May of 2002:

“Dear Mr. Secretary-General:

This is to inform you, in connection with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted on July 17, 1998, that the United States does not intend to become a party to the treaty. Accordingly, the United States has no legal obligations arising from its signature on December 31, 2000. The United States requests that its intention not to become a party, as expressed in this letter, be reflected in the depositary’s status lists relating to this treaty.

Sincerely,

S/John R. Bolton”

Easy as pie. No muss no fuss. We don’t like it we just unsign it. Now that’s some tort reform.

It must be noted that the Republicans had long opposed the ICC on the grounds that the jack booted, blue helmeted thugs of the UN were coming to kill Americans because we’re so strong and so good. It was not surprising that they would do this when they got the chance, although “unsigning” treaties was a bit of a shock. (How innocent we all were in those days.)

However, in May of 2002, we also now know that the US government was actively looking for ways to legalize war crimes under all international treaties and US Law. That puts a little different spin on the unsigning, doesn’t it?

And it also makes you wonder about the administration’s strong arming for the ASPA, aka the Hague Invasion Act:

The Washington Working Group on the ICC described it this way:

President Bush signed the Supplemental Defense Appropriations Act of 2002 (HR 4775) into law on August 2, 2002. Contained in the measure was a version of the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA) that is heavily modified from the first version introduced over two years ago (for more information on past versions of ASPA, see the WICC Archives). The ASPA limits US cooperation with the International Criminal Court, restricts US participation in UN peacekeeping, prohibits military assistance to most countries that ratify the ICC Statute, and authorizes the President to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to free from captivity any US or allied personnel held by or on behalf of the ICC — a provision that has led European leaders to call it “The Hague Invasion Act.” However, the final version includes broad waiver authority for the President, strengthened by a stipulation that no part of the bill may interfere with the President’s constitutional authority to make foreign policy.

This last part is interesting in that the original versions of the bill, originating during Clinton’s term (sponsored by none other than Monsieur Tom DeLay) put huge restrictions on the president’s ability to conduct any kind of foreign policy with signators of the ICC treaty. Since then we have learned that the president answers to no one and can set aside any law he chooses. Tom didn’t seem bothered by this.

I am not suggesting that there was specific coordination between the congress and the administration to loosen the definition of war crimes so that George W. Bush could assert that he has followed the law when he orders torture (or whatever else his puerile little imagination believes is necessary to defeat Satan.) However, it does reveal the underlying mindset that allowed these budding war criminals to seize the day without any obvious conscience.

The Republicans believe that world leadership is defined by the aggressive use of American power against others and holding itself unaccountable for it, apparantly guided by the absurd fantasy of the mythic, invincible American cowboy. Evidently, nobody told them that the cowboy myth was created by a bunch of pansy-assed, effete dime novelists from New York City.

Shallow hubris has always been their downfall and will be again.

Maybe if some of these tough guys had spent more time actually reading the Canon of Great Dead White Guys instead of complaining that liberal mush-headedness was ruining education they might have learned a thing or two. Even the good old Bullfinch’s Mythology would have sufficed to warn them about the fate of nations whose leaders foprget they are not Gods:

The story of Niobe has furnished Byron with a fine illustration of the fallen condition of modern Rome:

“The Niobe of nations! There she stands,

Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe;

An empty urn within her withered hands,

Whose holy dust was scattered long ago;

The Scipios’ tomb contains no ashes now;

The very sepulchres lie tenantless

Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow,

Old Tiber! Through a marble wilderness?

Rise with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress.”

Catchup

Ronald Reagan is still dead. In other news America is now officially a Rogue State.

For the full compendium of news stories, opinion and blogorama on the subject:

Sisyphus Shrugged – torture link dump

In the president’s beautiful mind, he didn’t order torture because he told the lawyers to make a legal finding that torture was ok and so they found that what we call torture is legal now but it isn’t called torture anymore because torture is still illegal. So the president followed the law.

And lots of people pitched in to make it all possible.

Ignominious Nothing

Aladdin Sane wrote:

Okay, did anyone see how insignificant Dubya seemed at today’s memorial? He’s probably the only man ever to be upstaged by Brian Mulroney.

Lou-seur.

The stench of defeat is starting to rise off of him. I watched it happen to Carter and Senior. People keep a little distance. They don’t look him in the eye. The winner’s gloss is replaced by a sheen of desperation. He’s got trouble. You can smell it.

Persuasion

Mike Finley writes a letter to an earnest young conservative and tries to explain what politics are all about. In the process, he explains what life is all about. It’s a wonderful post.

Young people are persuadable. They’re looking for answers not validation. It’s always worth taking the time to talk to them about politics in a thoughtful interested way. By the time you get to be my age, you’re already who you’re going to be and it’s all about finding ways to justify what you’ve become.

Thanks to the great Avedon Carol for the pointer.

Da Comrade Norquist!

Kevin at Catch has more on what he calls the Ronald Reagan Lunacy project:

In a statement on the project’s Web site, www.reaganlegacy.org, Norquist said, “Ronald Reagan was the greatest leader of the free world in the 20th Century. Franklin Delano Roosevelt left Europe half-enslaved. (Winston) Churchill left Britain in economic decline.

“Ronald Reagan both defeated the Soviet Union and began a period of economic growth that has lasted a generation and continues to this very day.”

At first, Norquist backed the idea of replacing Roosevelt’s likeness on the dime with Reagan’s. But that has met resistance from Democrats.

Chris Butler, executive director of the legacy project, said, “The ten dollar bill is a more prestigious location. The dime is so small you can hardly see the face. The name is given on paper currency.”

Chris Butler knows that size does matter.

And it’s so hard to tell those presidents apart if you don’t have the name written there.

But, let’s be serious. The only patriotic thing to do is put Reagan on all the money.

TBD

Jeffrey Dubner at TAPPED notes in his post called “HOWARD THE GIP” the fact that many in the blogosphere are making comparisons between Howard Dean and Ronald Reagan.

I don’t really want to open up this can of worms, but I just have to say it:

The difference between Ronald Reagan and Howard Dean is that Ronald Reagan won two straight national elections in landslides that featured huge crossover numbers of Democrats. Howard Dean failed to get even 20% of the Democratic vote in the primaries. He may be similar to the Ronald Reagan of 1972, but he’s a long, long way from the Ronald Reagan of 1980.

Ronald Reagan articulated for the base of his party a very distinct ideological form of conservative Republicanism. His entire worldview was shaped by anti-communism and low taxes and laisse faire capitalism, period. It was, rhetorically speaking, a repudiation of the New Deal and it was a big, big idea that animated many Americans after the hangover of the 60’s. (Of course, he didn’t govern as he preached — and people didn’t really want him to — but the fact that he was able to keep his base fanatically loyal despite that is a testament to his political skill.)

Dean on the other hand offered no such big ideas — not that any of the other Democrats did either. He ran on the “Stop The Republicans Before They Kill Us All” platform, one which I think was very powerful in helping break the trance into which we’d all been forced after 9/11 and the patriotic police started their patrols. I don’t underestimate its significance or its importance in jumpstarting the Democratic will to fight back in this particular election.

But, if Dean is to build on the truly amazing loyalty he has engendered among his core group of Democrats, he’s going to have to articulate a bigger vision and animate Democrats on a more ideological level.

I’m personally hoping that he will take the job of DNC chaiman in the short term, even if he decides to run again. I think it would be a huge statement to the ossified party bureaucracy and would give a voice to all those who feel left out of the party apparatus presently. That job requires a fighter and that’s what Dean is all about.

But, if he is going to have the galvanizing effect on the Democrats that Ronald Reagan had on the Republicans he will have to embrace and articulate a fresh, affirmative, long term vision for the party that goes beyond what he’s talked about in the past. He has a base to build upon if he wants to do it.

The Sweater Is Unravelling

Billmon has been writing about Joe Ryan, the “private contractor” from Abu Ghraib who abruptly stopped posting his “diary” as the scandal broke. Alert readers found a cache of Ryan’s previous writings which are interesting mostly for the fact that Ryan is revealed to be dumb as dirt about the country and culture he’s dealing with. (And *sigh* he’s supposed to be a trained intelligence guy, not some grunt from podunk.)

However, Billmon unearthed this interesting little entry:

March 30: The other big news at work was a message sent to us from Ms. Rice, the National Security Advisor, thanking us for the intelligence that has come out of our shop and noting that our work is being briefed to President Bush on a regular basis.

Now, this could be nonsensical “rally the troops” crapola. However, this article in today’s Washington Post makes it much more intriguing:

The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by “White House staff,” according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.

Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003, said a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned “any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues.”

The Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, asked Jordan whether it concerned “sensitive issues,” and Jordan said, “Very sensitive. Yes, sir,” according to the account, which was provided by a government official.

The reference by Jordan to a White House link with the military’s scandal-plagued intelligence-gathering effort at the prison was not explored further by Taguba, whose primary goal at that time was to assess the scope of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The White House was unable to provide an immediate explanation.

[…]

The precise role and mission of Jordan, who is still stationed in Iraq and through his attorneys has declined requests to speak with the news media, remains one of the least well understood facets of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

[…]

Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the chief military intelligence officer at the prison, said in his statement to Taguba that Jordan was working on a special project for the office of Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top U.S. intelligence official in Iraq. He also described Jordan as “a loner who freelances between military intelligence and military police” officers at the prison.

[…]

But Jordan, in the statement to Taguba, described himself as more of a functionary than a rogue operator. He said that Pappas was really in charge, as evidenced by the fact that he was not responsible for rating other military intelligence officers in reports to superiors and “had no input . . . no responsibility . . . no resources” under his control. He said he was just a “liaison” between Fast and those collecting intelligence at the prison.

What do you suppose the White House staff would have been so impressed with? There have been numerous reports that the only good intel anybody was getting in Iraq during this time came from the field. Abu Ghraib seems to have been almost worthless, which is not surprising since most of the people in there were poor schmucks who got caught up in raids and personal vendettas and wouldn’t know an “insurgent” from a ballet dancer.

Specialist Monath and others say they were frustrated by intense pressure from Colonel Pappas and his superiors – Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez and his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast – to churn out a high quantity of intelligence reports, regardless of the quality. “It was all about numbers. We needed to send out more intelligence documents whether they were finished or not just to get the numbers up,” he said. Pappas was seen as demanding – waking up officers in the middle of the night to get information – but unfocused, ordering analysts to send out rough, uncorroborated interrogation notes. “We were scandalized,” Monath said. “We all fought very hard to counter that pressure” including holding up reports in editing until the information could be vetted.

Ahhh. So, perhaps it was the “flow of intelligence” that was coming out of Abu Ghraib that impressed the White House so much rather than the intelligence itself. Condi Rice is, after all, notorious for not even reading reports as important ans the NIE. I’m sure a “document count” — the GWOT version of the “body count” was more than sufficient to show “progress”:

Miller’s mission came shortly after the horrific suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad. He was encouraged by Rumsfeld’s senior intelligence aide, Stephen Cambone, to ensure there was “a flow of intelligence” from detainees picked up in Iraq.

Everyone’s been speculating that the reason General Fay has requested to be replaced by a higher ranking General is because of a need to interview General Sanchez and army protocol precludes him interviewing someone of a higher rank than he. I’m sure that’s at least partly true, although it is more likely that this shuffle is designed to kill more time before the election. But there is also the problem that Fay cannot complete his investigation without being able to talk to his equal in rank, Maj. General Barbara Fast, something which is also prohibited.

And, she may just be the key to the whole story:

Back on May 12, David Hackworth is quotedin the Sydney Morning Herald as saying:

“This is unravelling like a cheap Chinese sweater,” said David Hackworth, a retired colonel whose organisation, Soldiers for the Truth, helped bring the abuse story to the US media.

[…]

But Mr Hackworth said he believed that more junior soldiers would soon come forward to “blow the whistle”.

He said the general who was in charge of military intelligence in Iraq, Barbara Fast, who has escaped media scrutiny, was likely to become the focus of questions in the next few weeks.

So, what’s the story with Fast? Surely she is under increased scrutiny since the Abu Ghraib scandal happened under her command, right?

Last summer, Fast became deputy commander of Fort Huachuca in Arizona, home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center. But she soon transferred to Iraq as chief military intelligence officer.

In September, Fast set up the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. There, detainees were questioned for whatever light they could shed on the insurgency.

Fast’s involvement, if any, in the abuse remains unclear. She was in charge of military intelligence officers at the prison, including Col. Thomas Pappas, who is accused in an Army report of being “directly or indirectly responsible” for the abuse. According to the New York Times, Pappas emerged from meetings with Fast and Sanchez “clutching his face as if in pain.”

Fast also had oversight of civilian interrogators at the prison, two of whom are implicated. And another female general says Fast was largely to blame for the overcrowding at Abu Ghraib.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who ran Iraq’s prison system until February, said Fast refused to release prisoners who were no longer security threats and ordered them “back in the box” for more questioning

Quite a few of the prisoners who were tortured and abused wouldn’t have even been there if it weren’t for Fast. I wonder if “quantity” over “quality” may have been her watchword with prisoners as well as bureaucratic reports to the White House staff and pentagon command?

Whatever it was, it was enough to get her promoted:

In February, as investigators were deep into their still-secret probe of prisoner abuse, the Senate confirmed Fast’s promotion to major general. On March 1, Sanchez pinned the second star on Fast’s collar in a ceremony seen via videoconferencing at Fort Huachuca, where her husband watched, and at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, near where her parents now live.

At the same time, it was announced that Fast would return to Fort Huachuca this summer in the plum post of commanding general.

“She’s done outstanding things,” said Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary, “and I expect more in the future.”

God help us.

The Mook Vote Rises

Via Campaign Journal I see that the New Democrat Network has released a new polling memo featuring an interesting tidbit:

The Stern Gang. Potentially offsetting the conservative dominance of the radio waves is Howard Stern. The nationally-syndicated radio host is listened to by 17 percent of likely voters, and nationally, they would support Kerry over Bush by a margin of 53 percent to 43 percent. In the battleground states, their preference for Kerry is even stronger, backing him by a margin of 59 percent to 37 percent.

More importantly, one-quarter of all likely voting Stern listeners are swing voters. This means that four percent of likely voters this fall are swing voters who listen to Howard Stern, showing Stern’s potential ability to impact the race. Generally, likely voters who are Stern listeners are: 2 to 1 male to female; 40 percent Democrats, 26 percent Republicans, and 34 percent Independents; more liberal and less conservative than the average voter; significantly younger than the average voter (two-thirds are under 50 and 40 percent are under 35); more diverse; and more driven in their vote by economic issues.

Sleeping giant, I tell you. I have some relatives who live in Nevada — early 30’s, apolitical mostly, libertarian by instinct, hard core Howard, Tool and Quentin Tarantino fans.

I don’t know if they are representative, but their big issues are freedom of speech, the religious right, Iraq and The Patriot Act. One has never voted before and the other two considered themselves Republican until now. Howard has them all fired up about this election and they can’t wait to vote against Junior.

The Ronald Reagan States of America

Via Catch.com, I found the awesome, majestic Ronald Reagan Circle in Tarnow, Poland, courtesy of “The Legacy Project.”

I agree that we should have one of these in every single town in America! How could we do any less than this for the greatest president America has, no — the greatest leader the world has ever known.

A fitting, fitting tribute. Thanks Grover.

“He looked frightened”

Brad DeLong has a must read post up featuring an e-mail from a reader who heard Sy Hersh give a lecture at the University of Chicago.

DeLong says:

If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined–even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today.