Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Compare and contrast.

Today Eric Alterman howls at the outrageous conduct of the Bush administration. The complaints are about huge matters of war and civil liberties and presidential actions that have extraordinary consequences for the entire world:

It’s hard to say which is the best representation of what this war is doing to and has done to this country. Is it the lies that were told to get us into it? Is the fact that we are picking up innocent people off the street and torturing them? Is it that we have suspended the most basic civil liberties in our own country? Is it that the work of professional intelligence agencies has been corrupted? Is it that we have drawn resources away from the fight against Al Qaida which has completely regrouped? Is it that we are creating more terrorists? Is it that more than seven hundred Americans have been killed and thousands have been seriously injured? Is it that thousands of Iraqis have been killed but nobody is keeping an account of the numbers of their deaths? Is it that we are now more hated around the world than we have ever been? Is it that we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars while actually decreasing our security? Is it that we are doing all this while starving the most crucial homeland security programs? Is it that everyone who told the truth about what was being planned has been dismissed and seen their characters attacked? The usually soft-spoken and moderate intelligence analyst and author Thomas Powers does not exaggerate when he notes that Bush and the neocons have “caused the greatest foreign policy catastrophe in modern U.S. history.”

Now take a look at a similar howl of outrage from William Kristol The Weakly Standard, August 31, 1998

WHERE ARE THE RESIGNATIONS?

…For seven months, the president asked his staffers and supporters to lie. He assured them — some of them personally — that he had told the truth when he denied a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ann Lewis and Paul Begala; Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala; Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt: All of them were lied to by the president. And all of them, in turn, were sent out to lie to the rest of us on his behalf.

[…]

As Charles Krauthammer said, “This is the point at which cynicism turns into moral depravity.” And the night of August 17 was the moment at which loyal service to Bill Clinton (already morally problematic) crossed the line into self-abasement.

Does no one in the administration realize this? The president engages in sordid activity in the White House — in the Oval Office — with a 21-year-old intern. He lies about it. He attempts to cover it up. Now he admits (albeit grudgingly and partially) to the truth. Yet none of his staff, no member of his administration, and almost no Democratic official seems to want to hold the president truly accountable for his actions — by demanding that he resign. And, in the absence of Clinton’s willingness to go, not a single person who works for him seems to have the honor to leave himself.

Is this an unrealistically high expectation? I don’t think so. I worked in two administrations, first for Bill Bennett, then for Dan Quayle. It goes without saying that neither of them would have done what Bill Clinton has done. It also goes without saying that, if either of them had done something even remotely so disgraceful, he would have resigned. But I honestly believe that, if either man had resisted resignation, my colleagues and I would have told him he had to go. Failing that, we ourselves would have resigned.

Bill Clinton is not a man of honor. But are there no honorable men around him? Can his staff and cabinet be lied to without consequence? Is there nothing that will impel them to depart? They need not become vociferous critics of the president. They need not denounce him. A quiet, principled leave-taking would suffice. But it would be refreshing if one of them refused to be complicit any longer in the ongoing lie that is the Clinton White House. Apparently, not one of them is willing to do that.

[…]

Personal loyalty is an admirable trait, and so is political loyalty. Up to a point. Government officials work for the nation, not simply for the president. They swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. To remain loyal to a president who lies is to make oneself complicit in his lies. To remain loyal to a man who has brought shame to his office is to make oneself complicit in that shame. At some point, blind loyalty must yield to principled honor. When?

Stirring, wasn’t it? From the son of the Neocon Godfather himself.

How did the nation survive the great Fellatio Threat of 1998 — a year which, not incidentally, Clinton bombed the shit out of Iraq (likely taking out any possible remaining WMD) and came this close to killing bin Laden. Not good enough for old Bill, PNAC wetdreams notwithstanding. Clinton’s manly member was causing a constitutional crisis.

Today we have lying on a massive scale about matters of war and national security and Bill isn’t worried. He isn’t exercized about the president asserting a right to set aside laws and order torture. Back in 1998, Clinton’s lie about his sex life required that the entire white house staff resign if the president didn’t. But, when it comes to lying about terrorism, nuclear weapons or Bush-approved pictures of Iraqi men being sexually tortured, Republicans are “outraged at the outrage.”

What absurd people these neocons, especially, are. It was clear then that those who were in high dudgeon about this naughty nothingness as if it meant something important were much too trivial to be entrusted with real power. For all of their dreams of world domination, (it seems almost cartoonish now) they are incredibly childlike and naive. They may have more respect for book learning, but these people have much more in common with Bush’s embarrassingly immature worldview than they’d ever admit to their cosmopolitan friends in Georgetown.

More broken Kristol at Liberal Oasis.

Useful Idiot

Come on Hitchy-poo. You’re almost there.

You know your grubby little neocon friends are a bunch of scumbag totalitarians in democratic drag, don’t you? And you know you blindly aligned yourself with a movement that pretended to be all about “liberation” when, in fact, it was all about domination. Bad move. Very bad move.

In the sober light of day, hung over and awash in moral clarity, you know it. Go ahead. Confess. We won’t even put you in a painful stress position. You’re already in one, aren’t you?

Testimony

“Torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

In case anyone’s wondering about the specific torture methods that are considered legal in the various gulags we now have around the world, there has been some work done on this by Human Rights Watch, even before Abu Ghraib. They found that at the “detention centers” in Afghanistan, torture as it was defined under the Geneva Convention was used routinely, often against innocent civilians.

According to the two men, bright lights were set up outside their cells, shining in, and U.S. military personnel took shifts, keeping the detainees awake by banging on the metal walls of their cells with batons. The detainees said they were terrified and disoriented by sleep deprivation, which they said lasted for several weeks. During interrogations, they said, they were made to stand upright for lengthy periods of time with a bright spotlight shining directly into their eyes. They were told that they would not be questioned until they remained motionless for one hour, and that they were not entitled even to turn their heads. If they did move, the interrogators said the “clock was reset.” U.S. personnel, through interpreters, yelled at the detainees from behind the light, asking questions.

Two more detainees held at Bagram in late 2002 told a New York Times reporter of being painfully shackled in standing positions, naked, for weeks at a time, forcibly deprived of sleep and occasionally beaten.

A reporter with the Associated Press interviewed two detainees who were held in Bagram in late 2002 and early 2003: Saif-ur Rahman and Abdul Qayyum.86 Qayyum was arrested in August 2002; Rahman in December 2002. Both were held for more than two months. Interviewed separately, they described similar experiences in detention: sleep deprivation, being forced to stand for long periods of time, and humiliating taunts from women soldiers. Rahman said that on his first night of detention he was kept in a freezing cell for part of his detention, stripped naked, and doused with cold water. He believes he was at a military base in Jalalabad at this point. Later, at Bagram, he said U.S. troops made him lie on the ground at one point, naked, and pinned him down with a chair. He also said he was shackled continuously, even when sleeping, and forbidden from talking with other detainees. Qayyum and Rahman were linked with a local commander in Kunar province, Rohullah Wakil, a local and national leader who was elected to the 2002 loya jirga in Kabul, and who was arrested in August 2002 and remains in custody.

According to detainees who have been released, U.S. personnel punish detainees at Bagram when they break rules for instance, talking to another prisoner or yelling at guards. Detainees are taken, in shackles, and made to hold their arms over their heads; their shackles are then draped over the top of a door, so that they can not lower their arms. They are ordered to stand with their hands up, in this manner, for two-hour intervals. According to one detainee interviewed who was punished in this manner, the punishment caused pain in the arms.

In March 2003, Roger King, a U.S. military spokesman at Bagram, denied that mistreatment had occurred, but admitted the following:

“We do force people to stand for an extended period of time. . . . Disruption of sleep has been reported as an effective way of reducing people’s inhibition about talking or their resistance to questioning. . . . They are not allowed to speak to each other. If they do, they can plan together or rely on the comfort of one another. If they’re caught speaking out of turn, they can be forced to do things, like stand for a period of time — as payment for speaking out.”

King also said that a “common technique” for disrupting sleep was to keep the lights on constantly or to wake detainees every fifteen minutes to disorient them.

Several U.S. officials, speaking anonymously to the media, have admitted that U.S. military and CIA interrogators use sleep deprivation as a technique, and that detainees are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, and held in awkward, painful positions.

Here is some direct testimony of men who have been interrogated under rules that allow torture short of the pain accompanying “organ failure or death”

“stress positions”

Many men were handcuffed or tied to a stool as a means of slow torture. The [detainee] sat in one position, day and night. Each time he would fall over, the guards would sit him upright. He was not allowed to sleep or rest. Exhaustion and pain take their toll. When the [detainee] agreed to cooperate with his captors and acquiesced to their demands, he would be removed. Here, I have pictured a guard named “Mouse,” who liked to throw buckets of cold water on a man on cold winter nights.

You’re always sitting either on the floor or on a stool or concrete block or something low. The interrogator is always behind a table that’s covered with cloth of some kind, white or blue or something. And he sits above you and he’s always looking down at you asking you questions and they want to know what the targets are for tomorrow, next week, next month. You don’t know. You really don’t know. But he doesn’t — he’s going to have to have an answer of some kind. Now the back of the room comes the — the torture. And he’s a — he’s a big guy that knows what he’s doing. And he starts locking your elbows up with ropes and tying your wrists together and bending you.

“dietary manipulation”

Our normal diet consisted of either rice or bread and a bowl of soup. The soup was usually made from a boiled seasonal vegetable such as cabbage, kohlrabi, pumpkin, turnips, or greens, which we very appropriately called, “sewer greens, swamp grass and weeds.

“sleep deprivation”

Some men were tied to their beds, sometimes for weeks at a time. Here, I have drawn a picture showing the handcuffs being worn in front, but the usual position was with the wrists handcuffed behind the back. A man would live this way day and night, without sleep or rest.

The guards come around the middle of the night just rattling the lock on your door. That’s a terrifying thing because they may be taking you out for a torture session. You don’t know.

“… obviously this is an emotional thing to me, was listening to the screams of other … prisoners while they were being tortured. And being locked in a cell myself sometimes uh, in handcuffs or tied up and not able to do anything about it. And that’s the way I’ve got to spend the night.”

“isolation”

The ten months that I spent in the blacked out cell I went into panic. The only thing I could do was exercise. As long as I could move, I felt like I was going to — well, it was so bad I would put a rag in my mouth and hold another one over it so I could scream. That seemed to help. It’s not that I was scared, more scared than another other time or anything. It was happening to my nerves and my mind. And uh, I had to move or die. I’d wake up at two o’clock in the morning or midnight or three or whatever and I would jump up immediately and start running in place. Side straddle hops. Maybe four hours of sit ups. But I had to exercise. And of course I prayed a lot

Oh, sorry. My mistake. Those illustrations and some of the comments are by former POW Mike Mcgrath about his time in the Hanoi Hilton. Other comments are from the transcript of Return With Honor, a documentary about the POW’s during the Vietnam War. How silly of me to compare the US torture scheme with North Vietnam’s.

It’s very interesting that all these guys survived, in their estimation, mostly because of their own code of honor requiring them to say as little as possible, fight back as they could and cling to the idea that they were not helping this heartless enemy any more than they had to.

As I read the vivid descriptions of these interrogation techniques of sleep deprivation, sensory manipulation, isolation, stress positions and dietary manipulation I had to wonder whether they would be any more likely to work on committed Islamic jihadists than they were on committed American patriots.

The American POWs admitted that they broke under torture and told the interrogators what they knew. And they told a lot of them what they didn’t know. And over time, they told them things they couldn’t possibly know. The torture continued. Many of them, just like the reports from Gitmo, attempted suicide. They remained imprisoned never knowing when or if they would ever be set free.

“unlimited detention”

We began to talk about the war. How long are we going to be there and everything and I — I was thinking well I’m only going to be there about six months or so. And then uh, Charlie says oh, we’re probably going to be here about two years. Two years? And when I — I finally came to that realization, my God, that’s going to be a long time. And when I – it just kind of hit me all at once. And I just took my blanket and kind of balled it up and I just buried my head uh, in this — in this blanket and just literally screamed with — with this anguish that it’s going to be that long. Two years. And then when I was finished, I felt oh, okay. I — I — I can do that. I can do two years. Of course, as it turned out, it was two years, and it was two years after that, and two years after that. Uh, until it was about seven years in my case. You know? But who was to know at that time.

I would imagine that our torture regime is much more hygienic than the North Vietnamese. Surely it is more bureaucratic with lots of reports and directives and findings and “exit interrogations.” We are, after all, a first world torturer. But at the end of the day it’s not much different.

“bad apples”

And he announced to me, a major policy statement. Some officers and some guards had become so angry at what the Americans were doing to their country that they had far exceeded the limits which the government had wished they would uh, observe in treatment of prisoners. That they had um, brutally tortured us. That was the first time they ever acknowledged that it was torture not punishment.

Same excuses, too.

The good news is that the mental torture that was used in North Vietnam, the isolation, the sleep deprivation etc. did not seem to create a lot of “long term” damage in the men who lived through it. Most have done well since. Therefore, all the mental torture they inflicted on our POWs was perfectly legal and above board under the Bush torture regime. So that’s nice.

“When word of torture and mistreatment began to slip out to the American press in the summer of 1969, our public-relations-minded captors began to treat us better. I’m certain we would have been a lot worse off if there had not been the Geneva Conventions around.” John McCain

OhFerChristsake

Mr. Clinton’s efforts to help Mr. Kerry are fraught with risks, Democratic strategists say, including the danger of arousing the legions of Clinton-haters, the possibility of upstaging the candidate himself, and campaign finance rules restricting publicity expenditures around an election. For months, Democratic strategists have worried that if Mr. Clinton’s book appeared too close to the election, he could hog the limelight and upstage Mr. Kerry. In the last election, Vice President Al Gore sought to distance himself from Mr. Clinton on the campaign trail rather than risk association with the scandals surrounding his administration.

Christine Iversen, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, argued that Mr. Clinton’s popularity would prove as much of a liability for Mr. Kerry as an asset. “If Bill Clinton is the most energizing Democrat available, he is not on the ballot, and that is a problem,” she said.

Yes, it would be terrible to remind people of a time when the country was so peaceful and properous that we could afford to let a bunch of flaccid, hypocritical phonies gin up a bogus impeachment for fun and profit. And, needless to say, it’s always a mistake to have interesting, charismatic popular people supporting you publicly and making the case for your candidacy all over the country. Silly Kerry.

I don’t know what it’s going to take to get these anonymous “Democratic strategists” to recognize that Clinton was a very popular Democrat who has a remarkable ability to charm even people who hate him. It’s only when they let the Republicans caricature him that Clinton hating gets any traction. I would bet money that he’ll bring about a national wave of nostalgia for a time when watching him dodge the slings and arrows of Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich was the only war we saw on America’s news channels every night. Jesus, if the GOP were such nervous nellies as this they’d have dropped Reagans body off the Santa Monica pier at midnight and said the family wanted a private service.

Oh, and Republicans really should be careful about talking about “sex” and scandals in this campaign. They really should. The pictures of the Bush approved “frat boy hijinks” they are trying so hard to sweep under the rug are a lot fresher than Bill and Monica in that rope line.

More Paper Trails To Torture

Unit Says It Gave Earlier Warning of Abuse in Iraq:

Military officials said the assessment branch was created to help speed the flow of detainee releases. The unit screened prisoners in a process that fell somewhere between an exit interview and an interrogation. The purpose of the screening was to determine whether a detainee was no longer of ‘intelligence value’ — that is, whether other interrogators had forgotten to ask important questions, or failed to notice inconsistencies in the answers.

In preparation for the screening, interrogators read through the detainees’ files, which consisted mostly of notes by other interrogators and any intelligence reports written about the detainee. Detainee Assessment Branch personnel then asked detainees the same basic questions other interrogators had asked, like biographical queries and whether the detainees knew where Saddam Hussein was hiding.

Starting in mid-November, one member of the unit began asking detainees, ‘How have you been treated since you have been in U.S. custody?’ It was intended as a tactic meant to make the detainee feel like the interrogator cared, military intelligence personnel said. But the question soon began eliciting vivid and disturbing answers.

“One guy said he was thrown on the ground and stepped on the head,” said one soldier. “That’s when I started paying attention to it.”

As more abuse reports emerged, members of the unit made the question a formal part of the screening process. In early December, the question was added to a Microsoft Word document of questions for the unit’s interrogators to ask detainees, several military intelligence personnel said in interviews.

“We couldn’t believe what we were hearing,” said one soldier. Two detainees reported having been given electric shocks at other holding facilities before arriving in Abu Ghraib, according to the interviews. One prisoner’s file included photographs of burns on his body. “We didn’t want people to know that we knew about it and didn’t report it,” the soldier said.

First of all, whether the Torture Working Group deemed it legal or not, if electric shocks and burns aren’t at least called torture rather than “abuse” then we really have gone down the rabbit hole. The press needs to start using plain english. This is getting ridiculous.

These guys reported these incidents of torture, as part of their normal process, to a three person panel consisting of Generals Janis Karpinski and Barbara Fast and a lawyer, who then decided who could be released.

Karpinski has claimed Fast was responsible for overcrowding in the prison because she refused to let prisoners who had been cleared go:

…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.

This new article says that the panel voted on who was to be released, so I don’t know what the real story is. However, it looks fairly obvious that Fast was in charge of the prison — Karpinski has said that Fast spent more time there than she did — so I wouldn’t be surprised if her vote was a bit more important than the other two.

Why do you suppose Fast wouldn’t want to release these useless prisoners from an overcrowded and understaffed facility?

Spicy Mercenary

Controversial Commando Wins Iraq Contract

Occupation authorities in Iraq have awarded a $293 million contract effectively creating the world’s largest private army to a company headed by Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, a former officer with the SAS, an elite regiment of British commandos, who has been investigated for illegally smuggling arms and planning military offensives to support mining, oil, and gas operations around the world. On May 25, the Army Transportation command awarded Spicer’s company, Aegis Defense Services, the contract to coordinate all the security for Iraqi reconstruction projects.

[…]

Major Gary Tallman, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army, explained that the contract was to create an “integrator” or coordination hub for the security operation for every single reconstruction contractor and sub-contractor. “Their job is to disseminate information and provide guidance and coordination throughout the four regions of Iraq.”

I sure hope that doesn’t mean that they’ll be doing any “gathering and analysis of tactical intelligence” because that would be against Army regulations, as this article in today’s NY Times discusses:

The use of private contractors as interrogators at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq violates an Army policy that requires such jobs to be filled by government employees because of the “risk to national security,” among other concerns, the Army acknowledged Friday.

An Army policy directive published in 2000 and still in effect today, the military said, classifies any job that involves “the gathering and analysis” of tactical intelligence as “an inherently governmental function barred from private sector performance.”

Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army public affairs officer, acknowledged after consulting with senior Army officials that the service was in violation of that rule, but added that military commanders in Iraq, “retain the right to make exceptions.” Another senior Army officer, in Baghdad, explained that using contract interrogators was a solution to shortages of suitable Army personnel.

The rule does not authorize exceptions for jobs involving the collection or analysis of tactical intelligence, which is perishable information the military can use for planning operations. A related White House policy directive insists that agencies “perform inherently governmental activities with government personnel.”

Well gosh, it’s getting a little bit hard to know where those lines are drawn, isn’t it, what with private contractors being the second biggest providers (after the US military) of manpower in the coalition of the willing?

Private security companies have been asking the military for help in coordinating work for several months. In April, following the killing of several private security contractors in Baghdad, Falluja, and Kut, the companies started to pool information on an ad-hoc basis. At the time, Nick Edmunds, Iraq coordinator for the Hart Group, which provides security to media and engineering groups in Iraq, told The Washington Post, “There is absolutely a growing cooperation along unofficial lines. We try to give each other warnings about things we hear are about to happen.”

This particular contract is interesting not only because it is run by a war criminal (which in this administration is a selling point) but it is also a big fat payoff to the UK, for huge money:

Under the “cost-plus” contract, the military will cover all of the company’s expenses, plus a pre-determined percentage of whatever they spend, which critics say is a license to over-bill. The company has also been asked to provide 75 close protection teams–comprised of eight men each–for the high-level staff of companies that are running the oil and gas fields, electricity, and water services in Iraq

[…]

Industry insiders speculate that Aegis won the contract because of growing anger in Britain that UK-based companies have not been awarded large contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq, despite the leading role that the Tony Blair’s government has played in the “coalition of the willing.” The only other British bid for the contract, the Control Risks joint venture, was disqualified because one of the partners was under investigation for undisclosed reasons at the time the bids were evaluated.

Because of the politics in the decision, some groups are questioning the contracting process. “It’s not evident why they they would run a rent-a-cop contract through an Army transportation division in Virginia except that maybe the staff there are more experienced and can write a professional contract that can withstand a bid protest better than the Heritage foundation interns that run contracting in Baghdad,” said John Pike, a spokesman for the military watchdog group Globalsecurity.org. For the first 12 months, all contracts in Iraq were evaluated by a group of six men and women in their 20s who were hired on the basis of job resumes they posted at the right-wing foundation’s website.

Maybe. More likely they are just hiding the paper trail.

If you want to read about the super-hero owner of this company, here’s a good run down. He’s quite a glamorous war criminal as war criminals go. Now he’s going to be filthy rich on our dime. Ain’t freedom and democracy great?

Last Chance

When U.S. officials pushed for war in Iraq claiming that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat, Berka believed them. Like many who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, he was inspired by President Bush’s call to liberate the Iraqi people from a brutal dictatorship.

Not anymore.

“In the last few months I have seen that I was wrong to support the war,” Berka, 36, said, sipping beer after work.

A tour guide from Prague, Berka is part of what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once called new Europe — the former Soviet satellite countries that have come to be regarded as America’s staunchest allies on the continent. The Czech, Polish and Hungarian governments not only sided diplomatically with Washington as part of Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” they committed troops to the cause.

But support for the United States, already damaged by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and a seemingly ever-growing insurgency, has taken a particularly heavy blow from the photos and other revelations of abuse against Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison.

“The photos were the last straw,” said Berka. “When I saw those pictures, it was a signal to admit that I was wrong.”

Similar sentiments are being heard throughout this pro-American part of the world.

In Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, many say they were dismayed to see the United States — a beacon of freedom and democracy during their dark decades under Soviet domination — employing methods reminiscent of communist dictatorships.

[…]

“Abu Ghraib dented my belief in the perfection of America’s Army, but not in its democracy,” said Blazej Roguz, a 25-year-old resident of Katowice in southern Poland who still supports the war.

Describing the abuse scandal as “poisonous” for America’s image, Roguz said he was nevertheless impressed that the photos were made public and the matter is being investigated.

“They published them,” he said. “I liked that they didn’t try to whitewash the whole issue.”

Opponents of the war, like Berka in Prague, expressed similar hope in the United States’ ability to rectify the damage that has been done.

“My trust in America is still there,” he said. “The thing I always believed is that America has a good immune system — that it can correct and clean itself. This is a big test for the American democratic system.”

Yes it is.

These guys know that the one thing we have left is a free press and the ability to rise up as citizens and change the course of our policies. Whether we will have the wisdom to understand what is at stake is another thing. These people certainly do.

Match me, Sidney

A Republican front group has been created to smear Fahrenheit 911. If this becomes a “controversy” it’s important that we all send letters to the press so that they will know this group is not grassroots.

I imagine that this is why Moore has hired a war room staff:

Parachuting into France for the documentary’s Cannes Film Festival launch, a Miramax rep told us, were Howard Wolfson, ex-campaign press secretary for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Michael Feldman, a top adviser on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential race. (Feldman founded the Glover Park Group, a D.C. communications outfit, with ex-Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart.) Also providing PR expertise on the anti-Bush movie: former Clinton White House advisers Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane.

“We knew the film would obviously draw a lot of political attention and attacks, and we try to do what’s best for our movie,” Miramax spokesman MatthewHiltzik said from the film festival. “We felt that having the political expertise to withstand the political attacks would require hiring the people who have the most experience on that terrain.”

I know that everybody hates Lehane with a fervor only matched by their hatred for Bush. But, this is what he’s good at. He’d “sell out his own girl if he could stand up there … and suck in the sweet smell of success.” Politics and Hollywood have always had guys like him. They serve a useful purpose.

And one rather significant thing is that Moore and the Weinsteins aren’t hiding anything. The GOP frontgroup is pretending to be a bunch of Nascar Moms and Waitress Dads. The press will have to be reminded of this when they start interviewing Ethel and Gomer about how offended they are by the movie.

Dim Justice

Can somebody explain to me why everyone is assuming that Bush is going to be defeated in the Supreme Court on the Guantanamo and Padilla cases? The Guardian had this similar story.

Common sense would tell you that the court would reject the administration in light of all the information that’s come out in the press regarding torture, assertions of presidential infallibility and the like. (One would think that the court would want to guard it’s own turf at the very least.)

But common sense also would have said that the court would stay out of electoral matters to preserve its own reputation and they didn’t. On that day, I lost all faith that the court could be relied upon to behave in a rational, consistent or even self-serving way.

I suspect that this has more to do with Sandra Day O’Connor than anyone else who seems to make things up as she goes along. She may very well vote against Bush on thses cases. But since she has no intellectual consistency, she may just as easily vote against him. Which is why I ask why anyone makes any assumptions about this court? The swing vote is completely incomprehensible.

Update: Lawyers, Guns and Money weighs in.

Any other lawyers, court watchers or dilettantes care to?

And Bob Jones Says Hello

Bush Asked for Vatican’s Help on Political Issues, Report Says

This is the reason for the separation of church and state in a pluralistic democracy. It’s not that you don’t want politicians to be religious people or that you don’t want religious people to be political. It’s that when you get politics enmeshed in religion you screw up religion and politics to the detriment of both. Hundreds of years of bloody religious wars in Europe taught the founders of this country that religion can be a dangerous political weapon and they decided that the government should remain neutral on the subject in order to prevent both religious persecution and undue influence. It’s worked out pretty well for us up to now, at least better than most.

But that’s not the only reason why government and religion are a bad combination, and nowadays it’s not necessarily even the most important reason:

In the last six months, a handful of Catholic bishops in the United States have already weighed in on the presidential race by threatening to withhold communion from Catholic politicians who disagree with the church’s stance on abortion, a group that includes Senator Kerry.

Other bishops, however, have said that threatening to withhold communion goes too far, and the pope has warned of “the formation of factions within the church” in the United States. The bishops are expected to take up the matter at a closed-door conference this week in Colorado.

I realize that the american catholic church has a number of internal issues that are not related to politics, but surely this is not helping. And catholics aren’t the only churches dividing up into political factions. You can see it happening in the episcopal church with gay priests; the methodists and the baptists both have issues with women’s rights. Jews are fighting over the country’s stand on Iraq. Much of this stuff is purely doctrinal and hasn’t got much to do with government. But, our president and his braintrust’s obsession with the religion vote as a single constituency, is making these issues more and more explicitly political. It’s not only dividing the country, it’s dividing the religions themselves.

If you are a religious person you should be very worried about this development. It is not in the American tradition to treat “religion” as a political constituency and govern explicitly from a religious standpoint. This is new. But as much as that might be uncomfortable to despised atheists like me, it should be doubly uncomfortable to believers who care about their religious institutions. Priests and Pastors are as susceptible to vanity and power as anybody else — perhaps more. These are among the things that caused the schisms in Europe and led to reformations and huge changes. It hardly seems worth it in order to gain temporary influence over some politician whose time in office is short and whose loyalties are necessarily divided.

It’s not only that religion is corrupting the government. It’s that government is corrupting religion. That’s always been the problem.

Thanks to Tristero for the link.

Update: Julia points out that Henry Hyde is making veiled threats to the Catholic church.

She reminds us:

Mr. Hyde is, of course, the gentleman who took the lead in investigating Clinton’s blowjob, as well as the gentleman who was discovered while that investigation was going on to have committed a “youthful indiscretion” from the ages of 41 to 46 and precipitated the dissolution of the marriage of a woman with three children.

[…]

…I suspect that the bishops are not all that terribly likely to be led by Mr. Hyde’s non-traditional view of Catholic doctrine and the public responsibilities of a moral person in this matter.

Or, for that matter, to lift a finger to help someone who is attempting to blackmail them stay in power.

For the sake of all my Catholic friends, I hope not.