Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Metrics

Last week I wrote a post featuring Lt. Col Stephen Jordan and his testimony that the White House had been “impressed” with the “flow of information” coming out of Abu Ghraib. Today, Spencer Ackerman, pinch hitting for Josh Marshall at Talking Points, references this USA Today article about the same fellow, connecting many of the same dots and more.

There seems to be a great deal of emphasis placed on the numbers game. From the USA Today article:

Sergeant First Class Roger Brokaw, told the paper. “How many raids did you do last week? How many prisoners were arrested? How many interrogations were conducted? How many [intelligence] reports were written? It was incredibly frustrating.”

From the Christian Science Monitor article I referenced in my earlier post:

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.

General Ripper, as well, seems to have been mighty impressed with the quantity of intelligence he got from prisoners in Guantanamo after he “took the gloves off.” From January’s issue of Vanity Fair:

According to General Miller, Gitmo’s importance is growing with amazing rapidity: “Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I’m talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world.”

Daily success or failure in guerilla wars is notoriously difficult to assess. Unlike a war for territory you cannot say that you took a certain hill or town. Political types are always looking for some measurement, some sign that they are succeeding (or failing.)

Billmon noted this back in October in an interesting post on Rumsfeld’s angst at being unable to assess success or failure in the WOT:

Above all, Rumsfeld cries out for “metrics” that can be used to measure progress in such a war:

“Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror,” he wrote. “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”

Billmon makes the obvious comparison between Rummy and the most recent war criminal sec-def, Robert McNamara, concluding:

The same mindset also spawned McNamara’s preferred metric: the infamous “body count.” In that earlier, more naive, era, it hadn’t yet occurred to management theorists that numeric targets can quickly become bureaucratic substitutes for real objectives, such as winning wars. So McNamara (and the military) had to learn it the hard way, as industrious field officers dispatched soldiers to count graves in Vietnamese civilian cemetaries in order to hit their weekly numbers.

I’m not sure what the equivalent might be today, although Rumsfeld’s memo points in a possible direction when it suggests the creation of a private foundation that could fund “moderate” madrassas (Islamic schools) to counteract the radical ones. Perhaps someday we’ll have a “moderate student count,” in which hard-pressed CIA officers dispatch agents to count child laborers in Pakistani sweat shops in order to hit their weekly numbers.

It looks to me as if they found a simpler metric than that. Like the mediocre, hack bureaucrats they are, they decided that they would guage success or failure — certainly they would report to the White House success or failure — based upon the sheer numbers of raids, arrests, interrogations, reports, confessions and breakdowns achieved, regardless of whether any of it resulted in good intel or enhanced security anywhere.

This was the only metric they could conceive of and in order to get those numbers up they had to detain large numbers of innocent people and torture them for false information to fill the endless reports of success on the ground in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. They could hoist up a huge pile of paper in a meeting with their president and say, “look at how much intelligence we’re getting. We’re really getting somewhere.”

McNamara quotes TS Eliot at the end of The Fog Of War:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

Well, not everybody apparently. Thirty years after the hell of Vietnam, it’s the same shit, different fools. Lyndon Johnson is laughing his ass off in hell.

It’s Here Already!

Take a look at the new Ronald Reagan stamp.

Spin Out

Commenter Ras_Nesta alerted me to some rather testy exchanges in this morning’s gaggle.

Q Scott, you said there is a misperception of what the commission said on ties to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, let me ask you this, did this administration commit any mistakes? Are you — in other words, are you considered a perfect government?

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m sorry? Do you consider what?

Q A perfect government. I mean you are not accepting any —

MR. McCLELLAN: You’re talking about the government in Iraq?

Q No, this government — the government of President George W. Bush.

Q You’re perfect.

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m sure that there are mistakes that are made, but talking about Iraq and talking about the economy and those decisions, those policy decisions were the right decisions. Let’s go to those issues. Just a general question about any mistakes —

Q As we’re talking about Iraq —

MR. McCLELLAN: The decision to go into Iraq was the right decision. We stand firmly behind it because it made the world a safer and better place, and it’s going to make America more secure.

Q You probably don’t see the headlines around the world today —

MR. McCLELLAN: If you have a specific — if you have a specific question, I’m glad to address it.

Q But you don’t think the commission is right with its conclusion about there is any — any ties between terrorism, al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, they talked about — they talked about the ties. They talked about the contacts between al Qaeda and the regime in Iraq. And they pointed out some of those high-level contacts that occurred. We pointed out some of those high-level contacts that occurred through Secretary Powell, and through Director Tenet. It’s perfectly consistent.

Q Scott, I’ve got a specific question. Who are the doom and gloomers to whom you are referring here on the economy? And by name?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think you hear from them. You know exactly who they are. They’re those who try to talk down the economy when the economy is moving in the right direction. We have overcome significant challenges over the last few years. And the economy is shifting into a higher gear.

Q We’ve already heard you say that. But I’m just wondering, you and your associates sitting over here like to lecture us about, who are you referring to when you mention critics or observers or whatever, so we’re asking you: Who are these pessimists?

MR. McCLELLAN: Peter —

Q I’m talking specifics. What are specific names?

MR. McCLELLAN: And, Peter, these people are well known. All you have to go is go and look and read the paper, or watch the news.

Q Well, give us a name here, Scott.

Does anyone know who Peter is? I’d like to buy the man a drink.

Flounder (as Susan calls him) went on to repeat the new mantra:

R. McCLELLAN: The President is going to continue to talk about his optimistic, positive vision for this country and how we can build upon the policies that we have implemented to get our economy growing stronger. Our economy is growing stronger every day. New jobs are being created. This administration acted decisively to get our economy out of a recession and get it growing stronger. And all you have to do is look at the news, and you’ll see who those individuals are.

Don’t worry, be happy.

Is this is some lameass, obvious, “morning in America” bullshit, or what? The best they can come up with is some warmed over 20 year old bullshit from a dead man and it isn’t even half true. Why not “chicken in every pot,” it’s more fitting.

An entire week of wall to wall slurpy Republican soul kissing and the best Bush could pull out of it was a 3 point bounce? Let’s not kid ourselves, it may be 1984 again, but it’s Orwell’s version this time, not Ronnie’s.

Fool Me 2,653 Times…

Peter Beinert has some second thoughts about trusting Republicans.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, I tried hard not to be partisan. I distrusted the Bush administration and feared it would be politically empowered by the war. But such thoughts felt petty and limited at such an important time. And so I evaluated the arguments for war on their merits, irrespective of my feelings about the people making them. Doing so made me feel superior to the Democrats, who, I suspected, would have supported an Iraq war waged by Al Gore, and to the Republicans, who had opposed the Kosovo war because it was waged by Bill Clinton.

But, in retrospect, my efforts not to be limited proved limiting. Partisanship, it turned out, was an extremely useful analytical tool in understanding the Iraq war. Had I not tried so hard to cleanse myself of it, I might have seen some of the war’s problems earlier than I did.

This was a partisan war. By partisan, I don’t mean that it was led by Republicans. It was partisan in the sense that the people who formulated it prized group loyalty above all else. They divided the world, the country, and even their own administration into people who could be trusted and people who could not. And, unfortunately, the people who could be trusted knew much less about how to build democracy in Iraq than the people who could not.

[…]

For conservatives, the right lesson of Iraq is that, if you apply a loyalty test to this country’s best sources of knowledge–the academy, the press, and the government itself–you’ll lose the war on terrorism through sheer ignorance. For liberals, the lesson is to see conservatives as they are, not as you’d like them to be. I’ll try to remember it next time.

For some of us, it was enough to watch the “conservatives” engage in a decade long smear campaign, impeach a president over a private sexual matter and then steal an election to prove that they are “not as we’d like them to be.” But, those were such fun times for the press, when they all got to pretend like they were happenin’— talkin’ ’bout the nasty ‘n shit, all the while cluck clucking like a bunch of women’s temperence workers over the horrors of sexual incontinence. They just couldn’t bear to see the party end. The deification of Bush after 9/11 was just the latest chapter in their lazy acceptance of GOP political propaganda.

It was, in fact, another example of that which Beinert finally realized perpetuated the failure in Iraq — myopic, group loyalty so profoundly disdainful of anyone outside of it that they cannot be trusted to even carry out their own plans successfully. The modern GOP lives in a little world of its own, made even more parochial by the advent of its own media infrastructure. The people who are in charge are second rate thinkers who rose to the top because the pool was so small to begin with.

In America today, there is no such thing as bipartisanship. It didn’t have to be this way, but it is. The Democrats compromised with the other side until they came this close to selling their souls and got nothing but the boot on the neck in return. They can go no further.

And the press actually did sell its soul for some cheap, tabloid thrills and a puerile story line about Democratic weakness and Republican strength. It’s way past time for them to rub the cobwebs from their eyes and recognize their snooty superiority is simply an excuse for applying a lazy “he said she said” journalistic ethic so they could go home early and chatter about the perfidy of politicians — who are, in their minds, all alike.

After the last decade, it’s quite obvious they are not.

Another Snootfull ‘O Freedom

A suicide car bomb in central Baghdad ripped into a throng of men waiting at a recruiting station to sign up for the new Iraqi army today, killing at least 35 people and wounding at least 138, hospital officials said.

[…]

The explosion at the army recruiting station in Baghdad caused by artillery shells packed into a car raised questions about whether the Americans and Iraqi security forces could even protect men willing to sign up.

Saddam was a madman who tortured and gassed his own people and all, but nobody ever said he didn’t have some good ideas:

Iraq’s new defense minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, promised a bloody crackdown on the insurgents. “We will cut off their hands and behead them,” he said.

The deputy United States defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, who is visiting Iraq, suggested that Iraq’s security forces were still far from being able to patrol the country alone and would need “substantial help” for some time, Reuters reported.

Much more “help” from us and Iraq is going to look like the set of a Mad Max movie.

Would mayhem be considered as severely painful as organ failure, I wonder? That wasn’t discussed specifically in the torture memos so we can’t really be sure. But, it would certainly be justified under the “necessity” clause of Iraq’s new constitution (modeled after ours, of course) in which the president can do whatever he wants whenever he thinks it’s necessary. Maybe a few of those bad insurgency apples would think twice about doing this kind of thing if they lost a hand or two.

Saddam, after all, had great success with the cutting off of ears.

Draft Bruce !!!

What a great way to counterprogram the be-tokened,”up-with-jackboots” FUBAR convention. Sign the petition.

What Code Red?

AMERICAblog reports that the military unfortunately seems to have recorded over the tape (they originally denied existed) of the American soldier beaten to a pulp in Guantanamo. I hate when that happens.

Divorce #3

…and it’s not hard to figure out why.

Ladies, this will make your blood boil:

LIMBAUGH: I remember way, way back in the ’80s, at — at one of the fractious moments when the militant feminists were ruling the roost and defining a lot of the national debate. … The NAGs would have a press conference. Six NAGs would show up somewhere — National Association of Gals — don’t misunderstand this, my pet name for the NOW gang. … The NAGs don’t represent the majority of female thought in this country, and they aren’t — they aren’t determining who wins elections. White men are. And this is — I’m not being sexist. This is just pure demographics.

I guess it’s a good thing he’s so charming and handsome or he might have trouble getting a date now that he’s back on the market.

The Poorman knows a very hot Republican babe who is definitely interested. Not only is she brilliant but if you scroll down the entry, you can see that she’s just the kind of gal Rush has been dreaming of (as he “investigates” those pay porn sites he keeps talking about …breathlessly…holding back a slight moan … whenever the topic of that girl with the leash comes up….)

Neocon Worms

The call for President Bush’s defeat in a statement released Wednesday by a group of former diplomats and military officials highlighted the stark divide that has opened among foreign policy experts over the administration’s national security strategy.

[…]

The statement suggests how much certain parts of Bush’s foreign policy do mark a break with the establishment,” said Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and a leading conservative theorist. “The simplest way to put it is that Bush thinks 9/11 was a fundamental break and we needed a new doctrine after that, and the foreign policy establishment doesn’t believe that.”

Bullshit. 9/11 had nothing to do with it and Kristol, of all people, knows that. His PNAC plans, adopted wholesale by Crusader Codpiece, were laid out long before 9/11 and should have been rendered irrelevant afterward. It was the neocons, not the foreign policy establishment who twisted the attacks to their own use without regard for the changed circumstances that 9/11 wrought. If you look at their record, they never considered terrorism a serious threat and 9/11 didn’t change that.

Just as the Bush administration argued for tax cuts for the rich, no matter the circumstances — surplus or deficit — so too have the neocons argued for unilateralisam, global military dominance and the invasion of Iraq. It made little sense before 9/11 and even less afterwards. The neocons adopting the “9/11 changed everything” mantra is chutzpah of the highest order. For them it changed absolutely nothing.

It’s not the ossified old foreign policy establishment that’s rigid and unyielding to new ideas, it’s the starry-eyed neocons and their ivory tower vision of a Pax Americana forced on the world at the end of a gun that’s out of step with the new reality.

The result of these tremors may be the most turbulence in the foreign policy landscape since the late 1970s, when a flight of hawkish Democratic thinkers known as neoconservatives migrated to the GOP in reaction to the dovish post-Vietnam foreign policy embraced by most Democratic politicians.

“I don’t know where it ends up, but clearly it is a very fluid moment like the late 1970s,” Kristol said.

Those signing the sharply worded statement included Arthur A. Hartman, ambassador to the Soviet Union for President Reagan; and Jack F. Matlock, who assumed that post toward the end of Reagan’s second term and held it under President George H.W. Bush. Others were William Harrop, the elder Bush’s ambassador to Israel; retired Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, the Air Force chief of staff during the Persian Gulf War; retired Adm. William J. Crowe, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman under Reagan; and Donald McHenry, the U.N. ambassador under President Carter.

It’s long past time for the real conservatives to speak up. Their children have gone out of control and they need to rein them in. If they can’t, then it’s time to join the other side and we’ll help put them in their place. We are dealing with serious stuff for serious people, now. It’s time for the real Republican grown-ups to take a stand.

Hair On Fire

It’s as if while we weren’t looking John Kerry stepped into the phone booth as Clark Kent and emerged as Superman. Yes, at least for one day anyway, Kerry, master of convoluted context, numbingly nuanced non-answers, and perpetually polysyllabic pentameters, has, voila! turned into a smash-and-slash, take-no-prisoners stump speaker.

A startled political press took note of the transformation in its coverage today. The Washington Post’s Lois Romano described Kerry’s speech to 800 union members gathered in Atlantic City as “passionate” and “populist.”

Romano cited this portion of Kerry’s remarks: “I’m running for president to put America back to work…I’m running for president because health care is not a benefit just for the wealthy or the elected or the connected…I’m running for president because I know that we could be a hell of a lot stronger in the world if we were to secure our freedom…”

Both the Boston Globe’s Glen Johnson and the New York Times’ Robin Toner sat upright for another part of Kerry’s sizzling New Jersey speech:

“Our tax code has gone from 14 pages to 17,000 pages. Any of you get your own page? Enron’s got its own page. Exxon’s got its own page. Looks to me like Halliburton’s got its own chapter.”

A sense of timing is a very important thing in life. I’m thinking Kerry’s got one.

Also from the Globe article :

John F. Kerry said yesterday he would appoint a prominent, independent public figure such as John McCain or Bob Dole to investigate allegations of torture by US soldiers during the war on terror, abuse that he suggested was an outgrowth of the Bush administration’s liberal interpretation of the Geneva Conventions.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, speaking with reporters for the first time in two weeks, said such an investigation is needed to assure the world that the United States remains committed to human rights and to protect its future prisoners of war from similar abuse.

“Torture is not acceptable. Period,” Kerry said after his campaign charter touched down in Covington, Ky., so he could attend a fund-raiser across the Ohio River in Cincinnati.

“I think the president is underestimating the full impact of what has happened in the world to our reputation because of that prison scandal. The president himself gave a speech in which he said, ‘Oh, it’s just a few people.’ But now, already, we’ve seen it’s not just a few people, and there are serious questions about how high it goes,” Kerry added. “I believe that it’s vital for us to prove to the world that this is really not going to be swept under the rug; . . . we’re going to prove to the world we’re willing to show that we will hold people accountable.”

Kerry suggested that the inquiry could be led by McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona and former prisoner of war, or Dole, another veteran and former Republican senator. He also mentioned Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, and former senators George J. Mitchell of Maine and Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire as possible picks.

Kerry noted that the administration “took themselves outside of even the prisoner abuse law that was passed,” which raises “very, very serious questions about the messages that went out to leadership within the military, and especially — ultimately — to the rank and file.” Around the world, Kerry said, “our moral authority has been tarnished as a consequence of what’s happened.”

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for President Bush’s reelection committee, said the criticism, as well as comments Kerry made about the economy earlier in the day, reflected the “misery and pessimism” of the Democratic campaign. ”It’s another example of John Kerry exploiting the war on terror and the prisoner abuse situation for political gain.”

From the NY Times piece:

He ended his day at a rain-soaked outdoor rally in Columbus, which drew a large crowd of supporters as well as a scattering of abortion protesters, and some Bush supporters. The Republicans blasted the theme song from “Flipper” for part of his speech to accuse him of flip-flopping on issues. As dusk fell, Mr. Kerry delivered his paean to the middle class, and the crowd held in a driving rain, cheering as he invoked the legacies of Presidents Clinton and Roosevelt.

The flipper thing is just sad. Kerry’s talking about the president of the United States ordering torture and they’re playing games.

I’m expecting to see Kerry start to ramp up the energy going into the convention where he will be introduced to the people who are only peripherally paying attention. If it’s a good convention and Kerry hits the ground running, Bush may not be able to stop him. Like I said, a sense of timing is incredibly important. It’s looking as if Kerry is a long distance runner with the instinct to know when to hang back and when to pull away from the pack.