"what digby sez..."
The Littlest Neocon
Just in case there’s anyone who isn’t getting the hint in Josh Marshall’s post this morning about which of the numerous neocon chumps is the most likely suspect to have given Chalabi the Iranian code info, here’s who I think he’s talking about (lifted from my post last week on the subject):
Michael Rubin is one of the youngest neoconservative figures to gain prominence within the George W. Bush administration. A Yale graduate whose dissertation focused on modern Iran, Rubin has traveled extensively in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan.
Rubin, an AEI scholar, was involved in several meetings and conferences officiated by Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode at AEI as part of the Bush transition team. One of the objectives of these meetings was to reshape the top leadership at the Pentagon, sidelining or removing those who were regarded as moderates. Out of these discussions came the idea for the creation of the Office of Special Plans (OSP).
Between 2002 and 2004, Rubin worked as a staff adviser for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in which capacity he was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Rubin was assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which was fold into the Northern Gulf Affairs Office after the unit was implicated in cooking intelligence information to justify the Iraq war and occupation.
In a National Review article, Rubin discusses sentiments expressed whenever Secretary of State Colin Powell and Special Envoy Anthony Zinni would visit Israel.
“While working at Hebrew University this past year, I took the bus to campus each day. Whenever U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell or Special Envoy Anthony Zinni was dispatched to Israel, colleagues would urge me to stay home until after the suicide bombing. Middle Easterners understand the lesson those in the U.S. and Europe are still learning: When governments engage dictators, civilians suffer.”
Yes. Europe knows nothing about engaging dictators and civilian suffering. Quite the brilliant insight, especially coming from somebody studying at Hebrew University. (I was going to mention that a Yale degree isn’t quite what it used to be, but then I remembered our preznit, so never mind.)
Laura Rozen says that one of her contacts refutes the notion that this person had access to the info. All that means to me is that loose OSP lips sink INC ships. They’re a tight little bunch of crazy mixed up kids. Anybody from Perle to Wolfowitz himself could have spilled those beans to lil’ Mikey. At which point, it looks like Chalabi might have gotten Mikey all likkered up and he told old kindly Uncle Ahmad some things he shouldn’t have.
Note: I posted this earlier and for reasons unknown it disappeared. So, here it is again…
A Hard-Fought War
Obviously, I believe that the unlawful enemy combatant designation is unconstitutional and unnecessary. I don’t happen to think this terrorist threat is really a “war,” as the word is commonly defined (outside of marketing circles anyway) so the whole thing is moot in my mind. However, even if I were to stipulate that it is a war then I would argue that we should officially declare it, then hold prisoners under the Geneva conventions and quit this nonsense that we will always be at war with Oceania…err…terrorism. It seems silly to have to point this out, but that is quintessential propaganda in case anybody’s forgotten.
Nobody ever knows going in when a war will end, so this idea that this is unprecedented is nonsense. When the government starts using this “open-endedness” to justify circumventing the constitution, one should be just a little bit skeptical of its motives.
And even if I were to agree that we have no choice but to throw out habeus corpus on an ad hoc basis at the discretion of the president, is there any reason to believe that the enemy combatant issue would be handled by this administration with more competence than they handle anything else? (This is the reason, of course, why you don’t do this. Sometimes leaders bad and stupid — not good and smart.)
This article from the April 26th Newsweek gives a little window into the professional approach they take in deciding who is and isn’t an “enemy combatant.” Let’s just say it validates the concerns of Enlightenment thinkers about the rule of men vs the rule of law:
The Yemeni-born men from Lackawanna, N.Y., were accused of training at a camp in Afghanistan, where some had met Osama bin Laden. The president’s men were divided. For Dick Cheney and his ally, Donald Rumsfeld, the answer was simple: the accused men should be locked up indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” and thrown into a military brig with no right to trial or even to see a lawyer. That’s what authorities had done with two other Americans, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. “They are the enemy, and they’re right here in the country,” Cheney argued, according to a participant. But others were hesitant to take the extraordinary step of stripping the men of their rights, especially because there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist acts. Instead, John Ashcroft insisted he could bring a tough criminal case against them for providing “material support” to Al Qaeda.
On that day, at least, the attorney general won the debate, and the Lackawanna Six eventually pleaded guilty. It wasn’t the first time, or the last, that top Bush officials would spar over such weighty legal issues.
[…]
…the administration hadn’t anticipated that U.S. citizens might occasionally turn up in the mix. In the months after 9/11 there were fierce debates—and even shouting matches—inside the White House over the treatment of Americans with suspected Qaeda ties.
On one side, Ashcroft, perhaps in part protecting his turf, argued in favor of letting the criminal-justice system work, and warned that the White House had to be mindful of public opinion and a potentially wary Supreme Court. On the other, Cheney and Rumsfeld argued that in time of war there are few limits on what a president can do to protect the country. “There have been some very intense disagreements,” says a senior law-enforcement official. “It has been a hard-fought war.”
It’s far from over. Officials say they eventually settled on “informal” rules to decide whether a detained American should be thrown into the brig or brought to trial.
So, the policy is carried out by “informally” deciding between Cheney and Rumsfeld’s omnicient talents as judge, jury and executioner or John Ashcroft’s need to bask in the spotlight. Who needs that old relic, the rule ‘o law, when you have a faultless sytem such as this? It’s especially edifying that that politics never enter into any of this. It’s always about keeping those babies safe:
In a speech earlier this year, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales tried to reassure critics, saying the White House had an “elaborate” and “painstaking” system to identify enemy combatants. But it didn’t start out that way. In truth, the enemy combatants policy evolved in fits and starts. In the spring of 2002, U.S. soldiers discovered Hamdi, a Louisiana-born, Saudi-raised U.S. citizen, among the hundreds of ragtag Taliban fighters sent to Guantanamo. They realized they had a problem. The other detainees could be tried before military tribunals. But Bush’s order authorizing the tribunals had exempted U.S. citizens a decision intended to disarm critics. Hamdi was flown to a naval brig in Norfolk, Va., while administration lawyers tried to figure out what to do with him. When a local public defender who read about Hamdi in the newspaper petitioned to meet with him, an assistant U.S. attorney made a novel argument in court: Hamdi was an “unlawful enemy combatant,” and had no right to counsel.
Administration lawyers concede that there was a seat-of-the-pants quality to the way events unfolded. “There is a sense in which we were making this up as we went along,” says one top government attorney. “You have to remember we were dealing with a completely new paradigm: an open-ended conflict, a stateless enemy and a borderless battlefield.”
Yes. They were swimming in totally uncharted waters. Americans involved in terrorism was simply unprecedented. Nothing in our legal system could possibly deal with people who were involved in such an operation. (Well, except for the first World Trade Center bombers or Tim McVeigh or the Lackawanna Six or Lind and those guys in Oregon. But still…) If only we had the option of a charge like conspiracy to commit murder carrying life in prison or even the death penalty, maybe we could effectively deal with ruthless potential killers like Padilla. Our only choice was to have Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft hash it out among themselves. Our legal system just can’t handle this sort of thing.
Before long, administration officials would extend the battlefield to Chicago’s O’Hare airport, where agents picked up Jose Padilla on May 8, 2002. The Muslim convert was arrested while returning home from Pakistan, where he had allegedly met with a top Qaeda operative and planned to set off a dirty bomb in the United States. He was named a material witness and appointed a lawyer. But prosecutors soon realized they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with any crime.
Doesn’t that seem odd? The evidence cited today certainly sounds chilling.
To avoid releasing him, Bush decreed on June 9 that Padilla, too, was an enemy combatant. He was sent to a military brig in South Carolina. At first, administration officials saw no problems with Padilla’s treatment. But as the months wore on, Justice lawyers became increasingly uneasy about holding him indefinitely without counsel.
Again, why? If this guy is a huge danger and these people have all seen the evidence that makes that so, what is the problem? They’re all signed on to the program, I assume. No, ACLU sissyboys in this bunch, right?
Solicitor General Ted Olson warned that the tough stand would probably be rejected by the courts. Administration lawyers went so far as to predict which Supreme Court justices would ultimately side for and against them.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little office betting pool. These guys needed to blow off some steam. (Consider how much worse that could have been.) And old Ted would never advise the administration to do anything for purely political reasons. He just doesn’t think that way.
But the White House, backed strongly by Cheney, refused to budge. Instead, NEWSWEEK has learned, officials privately debated whether to name more Americans as enemy combatants—including a truck driver from Ohio and a group of men from Portland, Ore.
I know I feel a lot safer. I just worry that Cheney didn’t get the last word on that truck driver. He’s a man who knows a terrorist when he sees one.
Turkey In The Straw
I like this article by Dana Milbank about Bush’s tendency to make straw man arguments. The problem is that Junior isn’t really making straw man arguments. He’s spouting lies and half truths that were spoon fed to him by his staff in small bites that he can understand and remember. By saying that Bush has any awareness of the concept of a logical fallacy serves only to make him seem to have some sort of mental agility when, in fact, he is barely sentient. If Laura circled this article in red crayon for him this morning and he had a look at it between counting the box scores on his fingers and toes, I have no doubt that his response was “Ya’ mean like a scarecrow?”
Sacred Cows
I have finally come around to the administration’s way of thinking on this unlawful combatant thing. Here we have an American who was trained to blow up apartment buildings and maybe set off dirty bombs, but the only way we could get the information that he was trained to blow up apartment buildings and maybe set off dirty bombs was by denying him his right to counsel and holding him until he confessed to those potential crimes — which means we can’t use that “confession” in court. We simply could not take even the smallest chance that an apartment or dirty bomber might not tell all by allowing him due process. Surely, everyone can understand that.
That whole fifth amerndment thing was only put there because back in the olden days we had kings who would falsely imprison people for political reasons. Needless to say, that could never happen now. Great americans like John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney would never take advantage of the American people’s fears by saying that they have captured a dangerous terrorist soldier who was trying to kill them unless it were true. And they do not make mistakes about things like that. They are good people. There is no reason to fear the misuse of government power against its citizens so let’s take that off the table right now.
All of which makes me wonder how much better off we’d be if we didn’t have to deal with those inconvenient legal rights and due process to begin with? I know that potentially blowing up an apartment building is a heinous act of terrorism, but suppose we arrested a member of a criminal gang who was planning to blow up the very same apartment building for the insurance money? That would just be considered plain old murder so we’d have to let the guy speak to a lawyer and face a judge. But, the result would be exactly the same. A bunch of innocent people would potentially be dead and we would not have been able to stop this heinous mass murderer because our stupid constitution forced the government to allow him due process. Not to mention that we couldn’t have sufficiently leaned on him to extract a confession in the first place! I’m hard pressed to see how the families of the victims would see the distinction between a normal old “crime” and terrorism.
Why should any potential murderer or informant be allowed to use this excuse of “due process” simply because he hasn’t been to Afghanistan? Why should innocent people ever be put at risk?
If there’s one thing the Jose Padilla case is teaching us is that it’s long past time we started calling all criminal suspects what they really are — unlawful combatants. All criminals disrupt our way of life and hurt innocent people for their own gain. Is that not the very definition of terrorism?
The founders obviously just didn’t comprehend what problems they would cause when they wrote the bill of rights. Of course, they didn’t have crime and terrorism in those days to deal with, so they couldn’t have known how restrictive their naive little document was going to be on future generations. I’m just glad we finally have a government that’s willing to show some moxie for once and ignore these outdated sacred cows in our constitution. I would imagine they’d have the founders deep respect for doing so.
You have to admire the loyalty among Republican hitmen. Even when confronted by a fellow traveller with irrefutable evidence of their pal’s depraved thuggery, they simply refuse to acknowledge that it even happened. This is a rare thing. In fact, I think it happens only in the Republican Party and the mafia.
O’REILLY: Now are you buying into the — this is just a hazing thing at Abu Ghraib?
COULTER: What, the media is hazing the American people by seeing how much we can take?
O’REILLY: Some of the right wing commentators say it’s just hazing, what’s the big deal? Are you buying into that?
COULTER: No, I don’t think anyone is.
O’REILLY: No, they are. You know that. I’m not going to embarrass people but on the radio, talk radio you have right wing commentators say it’s just hazing, what’s the big deal?
COULTER: If I know what you’re referring to, there were two hours and 59 minutes not saying that and at one point making fun of liberals for making fun of — if you’re talking about Rush, but Rush went on…
O’REILLY: …program and he said it’s not a big deal, it’s just hazing.
COULTER: If you’re talking about Rush, he definitely didn’t say that.What other talk radio hosts say…
O’REILLY: I compete against him every day on the radio and I know what he says. He said many, many times and not only him that it wasn’t a big deal.
COULTER: No, he didn’t say that, but whatever — no.”
Ann, of course, has other ideas about what caused the torture:
I think the other point that no one is making about the abuse photos is just the disproportionate number of women involved, including a girl general running the entire operation.
I mean, this is lesson, you know, one million and 47 on why women shouldn’t be in the military. In addition to not being able to carry even a medium-sized backpack, women are too vicious.
And that makes a certain amount of sense coming from her. Ann probably believes that she is a normal woman rather than the shrill, shrieking succubus that she is. It’s an understandable mistake.
Strictly Business
This must be one of those good news stories the media have overlooked.
Kidnappings Bleed Iraq of Doctors
For two months, someone has been kidnapping the best doctors in Iraq. Health officials and doctors estimate that as many as 100 surgeons, specialists and general physicians have been abducted from their homes and clinics since the beginning of April. Some were beaten and tortured. Most were released after the payment of between $20,000 and $200,000 in ransom.
[…]
The list of kidnapping victims and those who have fled the country is a who’s who of Iraq’s medical establishment. A pioneer in renal transplants. Saddam Hussein’s former plastic surgeon. And Khalily, who was voted Best Arabic Doctor in 1998 by the Pan Arab Medical Union.
The top cataract surgeon at a leading eye hospital in Baghdad, Dr. Jawad Shakarchi, moved to London after being abducted from his garage in April.
“He was a genius,” said a hospital manager, Amira Salman. “Now his students are doing his job.”
Many of the doctors also taught at Baghdad University’s College of Medicine. Officials there said a quarter of the school’s surgeons have gone or have requested temporary leaves next year.
“A lot of doctors are planning to quit for a year, and we don’t have enough teachers for the clinical studies,” said Dr. Hassan Rubaye, deputy dean of the medical school.
Some schools are having to limit enrollment for advanced studies until they can be sure there will be enough doctors to teach.
The good news is that 14 clinics have fresh paint and 8 have new office chairs. The chairs were donated by Halliburton for only $22,000 apiece, which they said only represented their cost.
Mark Kleiman notes that the raid on Chalabi’s headquarters was based in part on these charges and wonder whether it was a pure money making scheme or if they were trying to deliberatly create chaos, perhaps even on behalf of Iran.
I wouldn’t put it past them but I think it was probably the former. Although they did not see eye to eye on the timetable for invasion, Chalabi and GOP tough guy Dick Armey surely see eye to eye on Armey’s view of power — to the victor shall go the spoils. Ahmad was just taking the taste he deserved. Doctors have money, therefore they are lucrative kidnapping victims. It’s not personal. It’s not even political. It’s strictly business.
Show Everybody What You Got For Christmas, Junior
As I read this absurd story of the childlike preznit showing everybody Saddam’s gun like he’d won first place in the spelling bee (fat chance) I was reminded of another illustration of the lil’ guy’s statesmanlike maturity, that I posted earlier
President-elect Bush asked some practical questions about how things worked, but he did not offer or hint at his desires.
The Joint Chiefs’ staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen’s mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.
‘N he has pitchers ‘o the bad guyz in his desk, ‘n evertime we killz one of ’em, he crossus out there faces, cuz there ded.
It’s Nightime In America
From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity
Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented — both in speeches and in advertising.
Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush’s campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads — or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate.
Amazing, isn’t it? And people wonder why Kerry hasn’t been surging in the polls as Junior systematically destroys the country. And, it has such a nice salutary effect of making Democrats feel less than passionate about their candidate, too. If it weren’t for such a strong and unyielding ABB feeling on our side, I have no doubt that these ads would have worked as effectively to reduce Dem turn-out as on the undecided voters they are supposedly trying to convince. As it is, I think they are succeeding only to the extent that they make it uncomfortable for the politically timid to publicly support Kerry — e.g. take an unequivocal stand at the water cooler and the supermarket. That is an effect that is fading fast as disillusionment with Junior grows.
Incumbent presidents often prefer to run on their records in office, juxtaposing upbeat messages with negative shots at their opponents, as Bill Clinton did in 1996.
Scott Reed, who ran Robert J. Dole’s presidential campaign that year, said the Bush campaign has little choice but to deliver a constant stream of such negative charges. “With low poll numbers and a volatile situation in Iraq, Bush has more hope of tarnishing Kerry’s image than promoting his own.”
“The Bush campaign is faced with the hard, true fact that they have to keep their boot on his neck and define him on their terms,” Reed said. That might risk alienating some moderate voters or depressing turnout, “but they don’t have a choice,” he said.
(I love it when GOP operatives actively embrace totalitarian imagery. Smells like … bad apples.)
At this point, the only way that Bush can win is by destroying John Kerry. Even if one of the much discussed “external events” take place, I doubt bush will gain from it. As a result he is forced to run the most negative campaign in modern memory. Unfortunately for the country, if there’s one thing the Republicans have perfected, it’s negative campaigns and character assassination. The Bush family specializes in it. They are the Borgias of our time.
I know that some believe political advertising has little effect on people, but the studies they cite are based upon respondent’s own perceptions. The truth is that people rarely admit to being influenced by ads of any kind, yet their buying habits and perceptions of products prove that they are.
The thing that will change all of this is a critical mass of people using TiVO type technology. Then TV advertising is going to be in a world of hurt. TV ads (political ads especially because they are almost all so bad) work mostly on a subliminal level. People rarely pay active attention after they’ve seen it the first time. The key is for people to hear and see the key memes often enough for it to be absorbed subconsciously. One thing the Bush campaign has going for it is the money to relentlessly hammer their ads home. This gives them a much greater chance of having their message seep into the collective unconscious over time.
On the other hand, their image of Kerry as a of liberal, French flip-flopper only works well as contrasted with the Omnipotent Steely-Eyed Rocket Man, an image that I’m afraid is no longer operative. They are going to switch gears, I think, although I have no idea what form of destructive lies and images they are going to haul out this time.
It is only June. Bush poll numbers are still plummeting. It is going to get uglier and uglier. It’s the only hope they have. And, don’t underestimate them. They are very good at just that kind of politics. They’re never happier than when personal destruction is job one.
The Buck? What Buck?
It really has fallen completely apart. The government, I mean. The CIA and the Pentagon are at each others throats, as we already knew. The State Department and the Pentagon, too. The office of Homeland Security is pissed at the Justice Department. Everybody hates everybody.
Now, according to Laura Rozen the White House is tacitly approving all this infighting as long as nobody directly criticizes Junior Codpiece:
Secondly, about Condoleezza Rice’s meeting with the pro-Chalabi crowd last week. I am told Rice requested the meeting with Perle, Woolsey, Gingrich, Pletka, Rubin et al, to ask them not to go off the reservation, in reaction to the White House cut off of Chalabi. And if you have noticed, they have refrained for the most part from directing their public criticism directly at the White House, attacking the CIA, DIA and State instead for a policy decision that came from the very top.
That’s how bad its gotten. Go ahead and rake our administration over the coals if you want to. Just don’t say anything bad about Junior. (Voters don’t know that the president is responsible for the whole executive branch so they won’t hold it against him.)
Did Ken Lay go to Harvard Business school too?