Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Gitmo Betta Blues

For the full FUBAR take on the Gitmo disaster, read this article in the NY Times today.

I am beginning to think that the throwaway line in David Rose’s Gitmo article in Vanity Fair last December may actually be correct:

Guantanamo may even be “a bit of a front,” designed to distract al-Qaeda, he says. “It takes everybody’s attention away from locations where big fish are being held. The secrecy surrounding it makes everybody think that very serious stuff is going on there.”

On the other hand, that is making an assumption that the Bush administration had a plan, which in no other instance in this war has been the case. So, it’s probably just the usual FUBAR.

This alone will make your hair stand on end:

American and foreign officials have also grown increasingly concerned about the prospect that detainees who arrived at Guantánamo representing little threat to the United States may have since been radicalized by the conditions of their imprisonment and others held with them.

”Guantánamo is a huge problem for Americans,” a senior Arab intelligence official familiar with its operations said. ”Even those who were not hard-core extremists have now been indoctrinated by the true believers. Like any other prison, they have been taught to hate. If they let these people go, these people will make trouble.”

How could such a thing happen?

In late summer 2002, a senior C.I.A. analyst with extensive experience in the Middle East spent about a week at the prison camp observing and interviewing dozens of detainees, said officials who read his detailed memorandum.

While the survey was anecdotal, those officials said the document, which contained about 15 pages, concluded that a substantial number of the detainees appeared to be low-level militants, aspiring holy warriors who had rushed to Afghanistan to defend the Taliban, or simply innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Senior military officials now readily acknowledge that many members of the intelligence team initially sent to Guantánamo were poorly prepared to sort through the captives. During the first half of 2002, they said, almost none of the Army interrogators had any substantial background in terrorism, Al Qaeda or other relevant subjects.

Meanwhile:

In interviews, the officials said at least five prisoners released from Guantánamo since early 2003 had rejoined the Taliban and resumed attacks on American and Afghan government forces. Although two American officials said only one of the former detainees had turned out to be an important figure, Afghan officials said all five men were in fact commanders with close contacts to the Taliban leadership.

The most notorious of the former Guántanamo detainees, Mullah Shahzada, had been a lieutenant to a senior commander when he was first captured in the war, an American military intelligence official said. After his return to Afghanistan in March 2003, he emerged as a frontline Taliban commander, Afghan officials said, leading a series of attacks in which at least 13 people were killed, including 2 aid workers.

Senior Pentagon officials refused to explain how Mr. Shahzada had talked his way out of Guantánamo. But two other military officials with knowledge of the case said he had given a false name and portrayed himself as having been captured by mistake.

”He stuck to his story and was fairly calm about the whole thing,” a military intelligence official said. ”He maintained over a period time that he was nothing but an innocent rug merchant who just got snatched up.”

[…]

Afghan officials blamed the United States for the return of the five men to the Taliban’s ranks, saying neither American military officials nor the Kabul police, who briefly process the detainees when they are sent home, consult them about the detainees they free.

”There are lots of people who were innocent, and they are capturing them, just on anyone’s information,” said Dr. Laghmani, the chief of the National Security Directorate in Kandahar. ”And then they are releasing guilty people.”

Do you suppose there is another country to whom we can sub-contract the War on Terror? Because ours is obviously too incompetent to do the job right. At every single step of the way we are making things worse rather than better.

If we do find a country willing to take on such a complex challenge perhaps we could just write one little clause into the contract that could make a huge difference: they must be required to listen to people other than half-wit neocon Republicans, their sycophants and minions. That’s all. If they do that alone, we will at least be in a position to make a damage assessment and try to figure out what the hell to do to get us out of this mess.

Seeing as nobody sane would touch this quagmire with a ten foot pole, let’s just make sure that John Kerry wins and that he immediately embarks on a fact finding mission to root out every single wrong decision and action and put absolutely everything on the table. We are going to have to start from scratch. And, sadly, because they’ve screwed this up so royally, the United States may never be able to recover our credibility, no matter how hard we try.

Magic Phone Call

When they make the real movie about 9/11, (years from now, I hope) at which point many somnambulent Americans will find out what happened on that day for the first time, I hope that they make it very clear that our supposedly strong, resolute leader-who-knows-how-to-lead-cuz’-he’s-led, sat in a second grade classroom waiting for instructions from his chief of staff while the secretary of defense — next in line in the chain of command — stood at his office podium at the pentagon, completely out of the loop. I hope the movie makes clear that the vice president, without the proper authority to do so, completely ran the (keystone kops) show, even ordering the military to shoot down commerical aircraft. And then he (and his little dog too) lied about it, under oath. Because, that is what happened:

The question of whether Vice President Dick Cheney followed proper procedures in ordering the shoot-down of U.S. airliners on September 11 is one of many new issues raised in the remarkably detailed, chilling account laid out in dramatic presentations last week by the 9-11 commission. Newsweek has learned that some on the commission staff were, in fact, highly skeptical of the vice president’s account and made their views clearer in an earlier draft of their staff report, Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Klaidman and Senior Editor Michael Hirsh report in the June 28 issue of Newsweek.

The commission’s detailed report notes that after two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and combat patrols were in the air, a military aide asked for shoot-down authority, telling Cheney that a fourth plane was “80 miles out” from Washington. Cheney didn’t flinch, the report said. “In about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing,” he gave the order to shoot it down, telling others the president had “signed off on that concept” during a brief phone chat. When the plane was 60 miles out, Cheney was again informed and again he ordered: take it out.

But according to one knowledgeable source, some staffers “flat out didn’t believe the call ever took place.” Both Cheney and the president testified to the commission that the phone call took place. When the early draft conveying that skepticism was circulated to the administration, it provoked an angry reaction. In a letter from White House lawyers last Tuesday and a series of phone calls, the White House vigorously lobbied the commission to change the language in its report. “We didn’t think it was written in a way that clearly reflected the accounting the president and vice president had given to the commission,” White House spokesman Dan Bartlett tells Newsweek. Ultimately the chairman and vice chair of the commission, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former Rep. Lee Hamilton — both of whom have sought mightily to appear nonpartisan — agreed to remove some of the offending language. The report “was watered down,” groused one staffer.

It was always fairly obvious that Cheney installed himself as “Vice” President on the orders of the oil companies who created George W. Bush to be their spokesmodel. This latest revelation — that, unauthorized, he ran the response on 9/11 — (and predictably executed badly, I might add) seals it.

Subversive Journalism

(I like it.)

Insiders shape postwar Iraq:

[Ari’s brother Michael] Fleischer said he wanted to serve in Iraq because he believes Bush had embarked on ‘a noble path’ in freeing and democratizing the country and he believed he had skills that would be helpful.

He said that from his Foreign Service stint [of 4 years in the 70’s], he was already acquainted with Paul Bremer, the presidential envoy who heads the CPA.

With an assist from his brother, Ari, who ‘got my resume to Bremer,’ Fleischer landed interviews that led to his appointment.

Among Fleischer’s key tasks was training more Iraqi businessmen in the ways of U.S.-style procurement so they can land part of the $18.4 billion in reconstruction aid the U.S. has earmarked for Iraq.

Competitive bidding “is a new world for the Iraqis,” Fleischer said. Under Saddam Hussein, “it was all done by cronies. The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review.”

3 points.

Inside Out

Billmon writes:

…the White House and its allies appear to have a backup strategy in case this particular up-is-down argument proves a little too upside down. It’s the time-tested tactic of claiming that everything – including the 9/11 Commission itself – has been contaminated by partisan politics:

The panel has become “a tool for partisan politics,” Rep. Eric I. Cantor (Va.), a member of the House Republican leadership, charged in an interview last week. “With the latest commission finding coming out that there were allegedly no ties between Hussein and al Qaeda, I think they are totally off their mission, and I think that’s indicative of the political partisanship.”

The RNC talking points on this must have gone out earlier last week, because Porter Goss, the intelligence committee chairman in our Chamber of People’s Deputies, and Dennis Miller, the anti-intelligence chairman of late night televsion, have both been yammering about that same basic theme. But Cantor’s quote is such a gem of non-logic, I’d like to look at it again more closely.

The 9/11 commission, Cantor argues, is partisan. Why? Because it went “off mission” by questioning the alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Now since the 9/11 commission was specifically instructed by Congress to “make a full and complete accounting of the circumstances surrounding the [9/11] attacks,” and to “investigate relevant facts and circumstances … including intelligence agencies … diplomacy … the flow of assets to terrorist organizations … and other areas of the public and private sectors determined relevant by the commission,” it’s fairly ridiculous to argue the commission exceeded its mandate by reviewing the evidence regarding Bin Ladin’s alleged contacts with Iraq. What Cantor is really arguing is that the commission went “off mission” by arriving at conclusions that were extremely embarrassing to the administration, and possibly damaging to the Bush-Cheney campaign.

I loved that one too.

Since Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, the commissioners were “off mission” by investigating any ties between al Qaeda, which did perpetrate the attacks and Iraq, which didn’t. The fact that the commission was working on the assumption that the administration’s repeated assertions of ties between the two were meaningful is evidence of its rabid left wing partisanship.

Civil Unrest

My darling, dear friend Julia points me to a piece in that biased Washington Post — you know, the left wing newspaper where all of those liberal reporters rouse the rabble. Here, we have a staff writer, Phillip Kendicott (of the Palm Beach Kendicotts, I wonder?) exposing the shocking incivility displayed by that rabid leftist poet, Calvin Trillin. The man simply doesn’t know how to behave, what what:

As a poet who specializes in skewering the right-wing, he works with both a poetic and a hunting license. And yet, as a poet, there’s something basically reputable about him, no matter how mean he is, that distinguishes him from the psychotic bloggers, obsessive conspiracy theorists and self-appointed prophets of extreme talk radio. Lump him in with other middle-world figures, polemicists like filmmaker Michael Moore and late-night comedians who reduce politicians to pure caricature.

Reputable? Please, I can’t even read the words “Michael Moore” without needing a good stiff Glenlivet colonic just to get through the day. Bastards, wogs and kaffirs one and all, don’t you know. Why, I was just saying to Muffy yesterday how alarmingly disreputable the hoi polloi has become lately. She said “off with their heads,” — only joking, of course. But, would that we had the power to threaten such, I believe we could make a difference.

I find that you can say a lot, so long as it rhymes,” says Trillin, from New York. For instance: Looking to rhyme the last name of former New York Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, Trillin came up with “sleaze-bag obbligato.”

“You can’t say that in prose,” says Trillin. Nor can you breezily call Elliott Abrams (the National Security Council member who pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of misleading Congress during the Iran-contra scandal, and was later pardoned by George H.W. Bush) “a felon,” or imply that the return to grace of John Poindexter (whose conviction on five felony charges after the same scandal was overturned) is a sign of the current administration’s preference for criminals among its top ranks (High-level appointments now favor the guys / With rap sheets instead of CVs).

Really now, that is beyond the pale. After all, who hasn’t committed a misdemeanor or two and been pardoned by a Bush family member? Why, Bushes of one sort or another have been pardoning members of my family for simply ages. How typically lowbrow this all is. Mr Trillin and his ilk are no better than they ought to be and someone should remind them of their place.

Trillin, 68, likes to call himself a “Deadline Poet,” a title that emphasizes his essential poetic talent: speed. More bluntly put, he is a doggerelist, toiling in the service of the poor, maligned Left, countering by example its unmerited reputation for humorlessness.

(One thing we conservatives are is unroariously funny. Why, I was at the club just the other day and I heard a hilarious joke about a jew, a negro and a monkey walking into a (slovenly, I’m sure) tavern somewhere where they said all manner of disgraceful things and we all just laughed and laughed.)

And, I could not agree more with this:

Von Dreele’s style, like his politics, contrasts sharply with Trillin’s. Von Dreele, who is just shy of 80, belongs to the old guard of the National Review. He’s a gracious relic of the magazine’s good old days, when being conservative had less to do with attack-dog politics and religious fundamentalism, and was more about a wry pessimism when it came to the frailties of Man. When you talk to von Dreele, and read his verse, you imagine a world of blue blazers and crisply pressed khakis, a world where the sun hangs low over the golf course and darts of orange light glint on the surface of your glacially chilled martini.

Yes, I remember it well. Indeed I spent just last evening dressed in crisply pressed khakis watching the sun hang low over the golf course, sipping my glacially chilled martini as I pondered the frailties of man. One very special frail man. In a speedo.

The essence of a partisan worldview — and we’re all guilty — is confidence about things that can’t be proved: the motivations of other people, their psychological makeup, the dark truths about their lives for which there is as yet no smoking gun. These speculations are supported with a mix of facts, fantasy and the guiding power of our most basic, operating truths about the world.

Dear God, man. Never say I swim in that fetid swamp. My basic operating truths about the world are simple. Some of us are meant to lead while the rest are meant to follow. You know who you are.

It is the role of the Deadline Poet (and all the other denizens of the political middle-world) to articulate the simple thoughts widely held by half the polarized electorate — e.g. Bush is a moron, Kerry is a snob — yet can’t be directly spoken in respectable journals. Coated with a sweet veneer of verbal virtuosity, these truths slip into the political bloodstream. The pleasure of the poet, and the reader, is seeing these mean little memes circulating freely, doing their damage, a leperous distilment poured into the porches of our ears.

I beg your pardon. Is he comparing one’s ears to a porch? What kind of porch? And what “leperous distilment” does one pour on a porch? Or an ear’s porch. Or a porches ears. I do believe I’ve been insulted. I may have to call him out, what what?

Do read darling Julia’s pithy response to Mr. Kendicott as well. I do believe she puts him in his place.

Huzzah!

I just noticed how much money Atrios has raised for Kerry, the DNC, DSCC and Joe Hoeffel for Senate — well over a quarter of a million dollars! Wow.

Perhaps those stories of blog triumphalism aren’t overblown after all. That is truly impressive.

Circle Jerk

Yglesias notices that the tittering panel on Meat The Press got all breathless and aroused talking about the Clinton book this morning.

“Oh goodie! A chance to talk about sex!” And it really was sex. Maybe someone, somewhere out there was really concerned with the penny-ante legal charges against Clinton, but these people — quite obviously — were interested in sex. So fun! So easy to speculate about Clinton’s dick! So much more fun than looking into the intricacies of Bush’s foreign policy deceptions or budget trickery. Look — sex scandal!

This is how they got to be known as mediawhores. Day after day we watched this drooling, sophomoric obsession with Clinton’s zipper and the hunk of manhood contained therein which they couldn’t stop yammering about long enough to consider that they were making utter idiots of themselves on national television and fools of the entire country around the world. Not to mention their functioning as amenable tools for a right wing character assassination squad whose dark sexual proclivities we don’t even want to think about.

One of the most popular cultural phenomena during the era was Beavis and Butthead. If anyone ever wanted to see what they might have become when they grew up, all they had to do was watch a couple of the middle aged men and women of the Washington press corps go on and on in great detail about Clinton’s sexual issues, the psychology behind it and whether or not the country could survive such a serious assault on its morals. It was the journalistic equivalent of Beavis and Butthead’s ” heheh..heheh…heheh…she said ‘hard’…heheh”

As Matt noticed, it was (and is) all about the sex. There is a psychology at work in the national press corps — and in the congress at the time — that is worth someone taking a long look at. The level of sexual immaturity the media consistently displayed in the way they talked about it speaks to some bizarre case of mass arrested development. It’s just not normal for grown people to be so obsessive about public sex talk, particularly when the talk itself is so embarrassingly puerile.

It was a low point of low points for the media, at least until they deified Junior Bush in their own bizarre adherence to what they consider fair play. (“We were very hard on the last president, so we have to go really easy on this one. Wouldn’t want anyone to think we’re not fair and balanced.”) Today’s tribute to the “The Starr Report: Deep Throat Two” is par for the course.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of it all is the picture of Russert, Novak, Klein and Kay sitting around a waist high table, flushed, dewy and breathless, restlessly moving about on their chairs as they opine about how immoral and depraved Bill Clinton was for accepting the fellating gifts of a young woman. I don’t want to speculate about what might be happening under that table. But, I would suggest that such a squalid public display of early adolescent sexuality might just be more inappropriate than the acts they so sternly decry.

And, lest we forget, the public was not impressed with their little game of spin the blowjob, either. Clinton left office with the highest job approval rating in history. The press, on the other hand, has never been held in lower esteem.

Cockeyed Adventure:

One outside adviser to the White House said the administration expected the debate over Iraq’s ties to Al Qaeda to be “a regular feature” of the presidential campaign.

“They feel it’s important to their long-term credibility on the issue of the decision to go to war,” the adviser said. “It’s important because it’s part of the overall view that Iraq is part of the war on terror. If you discount the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, then you discount the proposition that it’s part of the war on terror. If it’s not part of the war on terror, then what is it — some cockeyed adventure on the part of George W. Bush?”

You tell us. We’d really like to know.

They know they’ve got a couple of big fat loogies hanging out there. The lack of WMD is bad enough. They can get away with it, sort of, because a lot of people thought he had them. But, this al-Qaeda connection has always been the Tin-foil Mylroie crowds’ special little fantasy. Clearly, they are afraid that this revelation will seriously damage them, so they are employing the always dignified “you can believe me or you can believe your lyin’ eyes” defense.

Let’s face it, for many people in this country (and probably the president himself) all the high flown phony rhetoric about “freedom and democracy” notwithstanding, this war is about killing arabs. For them,the terrorists were arabs therefore all arabs are terrorists. They couldn’t care less about WMD or terrorist connections to Iraq.They wanted to make an example of somebody. It’s pretty much nothing more than straight out bigotry.

As the salt of the earth, all American boy Bill O’Reilly put it:

O’REILLY: Because look … when 2 percent of the population feels that you’re doing them a favor, just forget it, you’re not going to win. You’re not going to win. And I don’t have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they’re a prehistoric group that is — yeah, there’s excuses.

Sure, they’re terrorized, they’ve never known freedom, all of that. There’s excuses. I understand. But I don’t have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dying trying to you know institute some kind of democracy there, and 2 percent of the people appreciate it, you know, it’s time to — time to wise up.

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Just as we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain’t going to work.

[…]

They’re just people who are primitive.

There you have it. In the eyes of this sophisticated John F Kennedy School of Government alum, the Iraqi people are prehistoric and primitive.

The problem for Bush is that the few sentient people who might vote for him may just demand a little bit more than that. Military people, for instance, who believed Bush’s argument that you had to “take the fight to the terrorists” only to find out that our military is being uselessly killed and overburdened and we aren’t even in the right country. And, I’m sure there are some decent religious types who would be disappointed to find out that the president led them to believe (and they know what he was saying) that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and it wasn’t true.

And then there’s the monumental disaster of the occupation what with all the torture and imprisoning of the people we are supposed to be liberating. It’s getting hard to think of any good reasons why we did this thing.

Republicans cannot win with just their racist base. Bush and his puppet masters have to keep trying to convince non-kool aid drinkers that he knows what he’s doing. They have decided that in order to do that they have to flat out deny reality.

Update: Reading A1 examines the game being played between Kean and Hamilton and Dick Cheney on the front page of the NY Times. Strange days.

Kenny Boy’s Got Troubles

Grandma Millie was quoted as saying, “Fuckin’ A.”

Glass Houses

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops approved a statement on Friday on “Catholics in Political Life” that brands politicians who support abortion rights as “cooperating in evil” and leaves the door open for bishops to deny communion to such lawmakers.

—–

Between 100 and 200 Roman Catholic priests around the world were moved from country to country after they were accused of sex offenses against minors, according to an 18-month investigation by the Dallas Morning News.

[…]

“We have found a systematic practice of moving the most serious abuse cases on to other countries to protect the accused,” Egerton said.

Egerton also said the newspaper found that some of the priests who were shuffled between countries spent long periods of time in the United States.