This psychiatric report on the torture at Abu Ghraib is partly white wash and partly true, I think. But at least he brings up the big brown-skinned elephant in the room, which I think is long overdue:
At the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, “the worst human qualities and behaviors came to the fore” in an atmosphere of “danger, promiscuity and negativity” within a closed environment, wrote Nelson, a member of the Army’s investigating team. He noted training lapses, as others have, but also said that soldiers’ unfamiliarity with Islamic culture, their pervasive sense of danger and the indefinite nature of their tenure were factors that wore them down.
[…]
In highlighting psychological and cultural factors underlying the abuses, Nelson noted that soldiers sent to Iraq were immersed in Islamic culture for the first time and said “there is an association of Muslims with terrorism” that contributed to misperceptions, fear and “a devaluation of a people.” He reported that one military police platoon leader was openly hostile to Iraqis, and that a police dog handler was ‘disrespectful and racist’ — attributing to his dog a dislike of Iraqi “culture, smell, sound, skin tone (and) hair color.”
Gosh, I wonder where they could have gotten these ideas? It’s not like anybody was saying Iraq was the central front in the War on Terror or anything. And, it’s not as if anybody ever said the War on Terror as nothing less than the battle between Good vs Evil. Where would Goober and Gomer get the idea that the government would sanction them torturing the Iraqi terrorist evildoers in retaliation for 9/11?
The good news is that they pipe in Rush Limbaugh daily so they should be straightened out on all these misconceptions really soon.
Matt Yglesias said that the tide will turn on the Bush debacle when a hard liner turns on him, not some sort of mushy “bipartisan” type like Chuck Hagel. Atrios doesn’t think it’s possible because the party has morphed into a Crusader Codpiece cult in the last three years.
I agree that it won’t happen, but for different reasons. The “movement” is virtually defined by its take no prisoners stance. It’s not about philosophy or ideology, although that’s how it started out. It’s about power. And until the power players like Tom Delay and Grover Norquist are purged from GOP there will be no challenging the party line by anyone who wants to keep their seats.
A case in point is Dick Armey, hardly a goodie-two shoes himself, who has made the mistake of crossing the Nazicans.
And in a symbolic obliteration of Armey’s influence, DeLay took over a Web site Armey had used to promote his prized flat-tax proposal when he was in Congress. The URL — www.freedom.gov — remains the same. But now the site contains propaganda about the “Victory in Iraq.”
Armey opposed the invasion. In August 2002, he met separately with Bush and Vice President Cheney in an attempt to talk them out of it. “I said, ‘This has the potential to be an albatross at election time.’ I was so desperate that I quoted Shakespeare instead of Jimmy Buffett,” he said. “I don’t know the exact quote. Something like, ‘Our fears betray us,’ or ‘Our fears make cowards of us all.'”
While he believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist organizations, Armey did not agree with the administration’s assessment of a dire and imminent threat. He said he told Bush and Cheney that it was “against the character of our nation” to strike a country that had not attacked first. Liberating the Iraqi people was the more resonant argument, Armey said, because it was in keeping with American principles. But that, of course, was not the stated reason for the war; had it been, it’s unlikely Americans would have supported the invasion.
Similarly, Armey said Congress probably would not have approved the Medicare bill had all relevant information been known before the vote last fall. Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard Foster, revealed after the vote that the Bush administration had threatened to fire him if he informed Congress of his true, higher cost estimate: not $400 billion but as much as $600 billion over 10 years.
If, by speaking out, Armey hopes to embolden his former colleagues to stand up to DeLay’s bullying, it’s not clear he will succeed. In interviews last week, several of the conservatives who voted against the Medicare bill were reluctant to say anything that might draw DeLay’s wrath. And Armey’s critiques do not sit well with others among his former Republican colleagues, some of whom view him as a hypocrite. “What did Armey do when he was in office to restrain the growth of government?” asked Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill. “He led the floor debate to create the Department of Homeland Security. I would say he contributed to the growth of government.”
Unlike DeLay, Armey, who now demands simon-pure conservatism, voted for final passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush-backed education reform much reviled by many on the right as meddling by the federal government in state and local matters.
To his critics, Armey says that’s precisely why he left his job as majority leader. He was having to make even more serious compromises on policy under a Republican president than he did under Clinton, and he no longer wanted to have to take party positions contrary to his philosophy.
The conservative revolution is bigger than George W. Bush. But, the presidency isn’t and he’s the incumbent so they are stuck with him. They’ll do whatever it takes to keep the executive branch in Republican hands including administering a few knuckles de sandwiches to members who stray from the reservation. Since they have held power they have solidified the most important powerbase in Washington, K Street:
For two years, the assistant who answered Rove’s phone was a woman who had previously worked for lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close friend of Norquist’s and a top DeLay fundraiser. One Republican lobbyist, who asked not to be named because DeLay and Rove have the power to ruin his livelihood, said the way Rove’s office worked was this: “Susan took a message for Rove, and then called Grover to ask if she should put the caller through to Rove. If Grover didn’t approve, your call didn’t go through.”
If you don’t play ball with Rove, DeLay and Norquist, you don’t play.
Grover Norquist is probably the most influential Republican the country has never heard of and he is a true believer in power politics:
“…in the November 1992 American Spectator, he [Norquist] wrote an article titled “The Coming Clinton Dynasty,” in which he admitted that “any vision of conservatism as the ultimate winner in a two-steps-forward, one-step back Leninist march, is a flawed one.”
Instead, Norquist explained, the way a party ensures its perpetual dominance is by controlling the levers of power. In 1974, Watergate led to the election of 75 new Democrats in the House. In Norquist’s view, “this liberal band of congressmen” was “willing to change the rules to ensure their continuation in power.” Without the benefits of incumbency (bigger staffs, larger budgets, taxpayer-funded mail, pork, and the ability to “extort campaign contributions from industries”), Norquist argued, the Democrats could not have remained in office for the subsequent 18 years. Power perpetuates itself. The correctness of conservative ideas paled before the ruthless “minority ideological cabal” in Congress.
[…]
…these predictions illuminate Norquist’s profound respect for the power of the state. (They also show how closely Norquist’s politics track with the “paranoid style” described by the historian Richard Hofstadter.) Governments, if they are willing, can maintain themselves in power forever. This reverence for the state’s nearly limitless power explains both Norquist’s desire to dismantle the state as well as his insistence on using it for propagandistic ends, such as his Soviet-esque obsession with building monuments to the Great Leader (Ronald Reagan—including a campaign to replace Alexander Hamilton with Reagan on the $10 bill).
None of the above sounds that different from this (possibly apocryphal) quote:
“We must establish a Brezhnev Doctrine for conservative gains. The Brezhnev Doctrine states that once a country becomes communist it can never change. Conservatives must establish their own doctrine and declare their victories permanent…A revolution is not successful unless it succeeds in preserving itself…(W)e want to remove liberal personnel from the political process. Then we want to capture those positions of power and influence for conservatives. Stalin taught the importance of this principle.”
If there is anyone left in the GOP (besides the five “moderates” in the Senate) who has even a shred of integrity or independent thought left, I’m unaware of them. When we are hurling insults about the pussy Democrats we might give that some thought. It’s not like the other side is overrepresented with courageous, independent warriors for freedom. They are as whipped as whipped can be.
The General blows the lid off the greatest threat to family values since Jermaine Jackson tried to hit Michael’s high notes on the Motown 45th anniversary show — “widow on widow” marriage. According to Dr Dobson, this is another in a long line of the horrors that await us at the bottom of that astroglide-drenched slope where the doggies and donkeys line up for dates. The General explains why:
You see, widow women are experienced women. They know what it’s like to know a man in a biblical sense. They are also privy to the secret all married women share–sex with a man is never enjoyable. It’s true. I’ve been told this by every woman with whom I’ve shared my passion–yes, I sinned often in my younger days, but I’ve asked for and received our Lord’s forgiveness.
Widows who marry each other are making a statement. They’re exposing the married woman’s secret and telling the world that we’re just not all that good when it comes to lovemaking. We need to prevent that from happening. Otherwise, we might as well store our essence in mason jars, because that’ll be the only place left for us to put it.
Well said. I think we can see the result of this permissiveness in the strange behavior of the 9/11 widows. They have obviously strayed from the true path to salvation by questioning the actions of our Dear Leader, Reverend Codpiece. It’s only a matter of time before they reject men altogether.
They must be stopped. Personally, I think the hindu method is a good one. Only instead of throwing themselves on the funeral pyre, they should submit to some good old-fashioned fratboy hazing and then have their frozen bodies photographed to raise funds for the Republican Party. That would be the moral thing to do.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last year personally approved a series of aggressive interrogation techniques for suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and help prevent future ones, Pentagon officials said Thursday.
Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 a request five months earlier by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had arrived at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in November 2002 to oversee prisoners. Miller sought permission to use a broad range of extraordinary “nondoctrinal” questioning techniques on an Al Qaeda detainee, a general with the Pentagon’s Judge Advocate General’s office said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
[…]
The effort to define how far interrogators can go in pressuring detainees for information without violating international law exposed the rift between interrogators and JAG lawyers, who considered some of the techniques Miller proposed to be illegal.
“You had intelligence officials that might have been pulling in a direction that was different from the lawyers,” Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said. “It’s a competitive process.”
[…]
Rumsfeld trimmed the list of requested interrogation techniques by about one-third, and he insisted that he personally approve a “handful” of techniques, the senior Pentagon lawyer and the JAG official said. Rumsfeld approved the revised proposal in April 2003.
I’m just wondering what that “handful of techniques” are. And the article isn’t clear, but it sounds as if Rumsfeld also insisted that he approve particular instances of their use. If that’s the case, you have to wonder how many cases of torture Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on.
That’s the kind of evidence that war crimes trials are made of.
Ezra Klein agrees with Matt Yglesias that Bush making a speech a week is not exactly an inpired way of pressing his new PR campaign called “Iraq-is-a-quagmire-instead-of-the-cakewalk-I -promised-but-I’m-resolutely-stupid-so-you-should-vote-for-me-anyway,” because his speeches only make him look bad.
To me, his speeches have always been laughable — not for the content, which is quite often very well done, if completely wrong — but by the overblown and obviously coached delivery combined with the totally blank look in his eye. He’s like a Japanese speaking actor playing a role in phonetic English. No matter how passionately he delivers the lines, the inflection and the rhythm are always off because he doesn’t understand the language he’s speaking.
But as much as I find his speeches to be ridiculous (the one where he evoked the words of Pericles is a particular side splitter) I always remind myself that the bobble-head pundits’ favorite description of any speech he has ever delivered is “he hit it out of the park.”
The mediatools have been hard on Junior these last couple of weeks. They are sure to feel uncomfortable about that and be overcome with the desire to give him a little love. So, don’t be surprised if they blissfully gasp and squirm with heavy lidded Noonanesque pleasure at his masterful masculine prowess tomorrow night.
But, if they do, do not despair. They are mediawhores, after all, and there is so much juicy stuff, from dirty pictures to Iranian spies to Republican civil war going on, that they’ll be easily distracted from their codpiece slobbering.
And it’s always possible that the fact his face looks like he spent the night in a gutter (again) will make even Nooner see him less as a mythic cowboy and more like the inbred frat boy he really is.
What a fitting illustration of a world leader who has fallen flat on his face.
Via Susan at Suburban Guerrilla I am vastly relieved to learn that when the Bush administration says its going to put an end to the problems in Iraqi prisons and elsewhere, they mean it:
Mobile phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported today.
Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.
“Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq,” it said, adding that a “total ban throughout the US military” is in the works.
The chain of command was obvious to Liang, who came home in January after fulfilling her 22-month active-duty contract with the Reserves. MPs were directed by OGAs and military intelligence officers, she said. But orders were couched as repeated suggestions on how to ‘break down’ prisoners: ‘[Play] loud music, yell at them, scare them, give them cold showers and don’t let them have towels or clothes,’ Liang told NEWSWEEK. The OGAs would disappear only to return hours later for a new round of interrogation. ‘He’s still not talking,’ Liang recalls an OGA saying to her. ‘Do something more.’ This was the drill, day and night.
The bad stuff happened after dusk, she said. While daylight brought a string of visitors — medics, Red Cross officials, high-ranking officers — the dogs came out at night. The second-shifters brought in DVD movies to watch on their computers. Liang said she saw an image on the laptop of Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr. —one of those awaiting trial after investigators described him as one of the ringleaders in the alleged prisoner abuses. The photograph was of a snarling military dog held inches from a prone Iraqi prisoner’s face. At the 4 a.m. shift change, she asked, ‘Why dogs?’The prisoner had been handcuffed and scared with the dogs so he’d break, someone told her. It was common to arrive at work and see a prisoner standing on a box, naked, shivering and wearing a hood, she told NEWSWEEK. One morning she came in and saw blood on the walls, although nobody could explain exactly how it got there.
Pummeling and humiliating and photographing Iraqi prisoners, Liang said, was the product of vague guidance, poor discipline, frustration that came with open-ended deployment, and boredom run amok. “I think it was just out of curiosity and boredom and anger,” she said. “You’re there 12 hours a day, every day, and you’re pissed off at everything going on around you. We were told we were going home in September. You want to take out your anger against other people in the unit, but you can’t do that. So some people took it out on the prisoners. What they [the MPs] did was wrong, but not everyone realizes that everyone in there attacked the Coalition forces and tried to kill us.”
Some abuse photographs lacked context, Liang told NEWSWEEK. Take the widely-published image of a prisoner with his arms pulled behind his back and handcuffed to a bed, women’s underwear pulled over his head. He was called “S–tboy,” for his habit of smearing excrement on himself and the walls. “People don’t know what kind of people were put inside that cellblock,” Liang said. “They were crazy people. ‘S–tboy’ would smear it all over himself. That was the reason he was handcuffed.” Liang said he spit on her as she tried to feed him. The underwear? “Just to make a joke,” she said, adding that she can’t recall who was responsible for it.
Another “crazy” man, in his late 20s, was brought in for allegedly looting. His refusal to eat meant the MPs fed him intravenously. He would babble over and over again: “I refuse to eat! Saddam’s going to come back and kill us!” The guards invented nicknames for prisoners based on movie and television characters, Liang said. There was “Gilligan,” a tiny, dim guy. There was “The Claw,” whose birth defect made one hand resemble a bird claw. There was “Froggy,” a man with bulging Marty Feldman eyes. And there was “Mr. Clean,” who bathed obsessively. (After Mr. Clean tried to kill a guard with a pistol someone had slipped into his cell, his nickname became “Trigger.”)
[…]
“I’m not embarrassed,” she said, “but I don’t tell people that I’m with the 372nd [MP Company] because people are going to ask questions.”
Well, as long as she’s not embarrassed. That’s all that matters. Because “people don’t understand” that those guys like “shitboy” and the mentally ill looter who refused to eat because Saddam was coming to kill him were dangerous terrorists who deserved what they got.
I’m glad she’s home now, nice and snug, going to college on the GI bill, looking forward to a long and happy life. Since she’s both brainless and soulless, I’m sure she’ll make a fine little Republican.
Speaking off the record, intelligence community sources have previously said they believe it “very likely” that al-Zarqawi is indeed long dead. Such a fact makes al-Zarqawi’s alleged killing of Berg difficult to reconcile, and there has been broad speculation that blaming al-Zarqawi is an administration ploy. Further anomalies surrounding Berg’s death have fueled added speculation.
The story goes on to discuss the various oddities surounding the capture and the video including some I hadn’t heard before.
I have a feeling that all the right wing hysteria about this story is going to prove extremely embarrassing to them before too long. There has been something wrong with it from the very beginning.
The other day I wrote a post about the pathetic Republican psyche and described them as “a bunch of paunchy middle aged men in ill fitting suits who never got laid when they were young, never went to war, never made a team or played in a rock band, so their dreams of masculine glory remain unfulfilled well into their 50’s.”
Remember the other day I told you nerds rule? Now, proof, from no less than the president of the United States, that they’re also very influential. You don’t believe me? Look where I’m standing!
[. . . ]
I just wish my old pals in high school could see me now: Neil the nerd, now Neil-the-invited-to-the-White-House nerd standing on the same hallowed ground as Fox super cool guys Wendell Goler, Jim Angle and James Rosen.
Take that football team captain. Take that all you cheerleaders who dismissed me as some freak of nature. Still a freak, but now a force of nature freak.
Just ask anyone. Just ask … the president of the United States.
Geez. That’s sad. The Frat Rat in chief would be the first guy in the room to give you an atomic wedgie, Neil.
Josh and Matt are teasing out the insider take on Chalabi so we don’t have to. They seem to agree that there probably isn’t anything new but rather that a power shift within the Bush administration that has caused the anti-Chalabi faction to flex its long abused muscles.
So we have really two possibilities here. One is that some piece of evidence came to light that changed the mind of Chalabi’s backers inside the beltway. The other is that there was simply a shift in the correlation of forces inside the government — no one changes their mind about Chalabi, it’s just that the anti-Chalabi forces, formerly weak, became strong. Hence the new policy.
One good piece of evidence for scenario two is the behavior of the out-of-government friends of Ahmed — David Frum and the AEI crowd. If an influential Chalabi-backer on the inside (call him, “Ronald Dumsfeld”) had changed his mind, then you would think Dumsfeld would call his fellow-travelers in the media and make his case. That might not convince all — or even most — of the media Chalabistas, but it would surely convince some of them. Instead, all of the nongovernmental Chalabi-fans seem to still be Chalabi fans, indicating that all the anti-Chalabi stuff coming out of the government is coming from traditional anti-Chalabi sources.
That’s assuming that there are any sane Chalabi backers in the first place. I think most of them are as blind about him as they are about everything else, so I doubt that they would believe there was anything wrong with their boy even if they saw him french kissing the Ayatollah Khomeni. The ties go way back and undergird the entire neocon movement and its traditional concern with Israeli affairs. After all their guru, Alfred Wohlstetter, is the one who introduced Chalabi to his bitch, Richard Perle:
Almost to a man, Washington’s hawks lavishly praise Chalabi. “He’s a rare find,” says Max Singer, a trustee and co-founder of the Hudson Institute. “He’s deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West.”
In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Chalabi’s partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon’s Middle-East policy offices — such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.
The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi’s cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). “Chalabi is the one that we know the best,” says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997. “He could be Iraq’s national leader,” says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.
What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he’s a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter’s leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called “The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq,” which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI’s 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. “The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years,” Perle told me.
The CIA despises [Ahmed] Chalabi; the State Department despises him. They did everything they could to put him out of business. Now there is a deliberate effort to marginalize him.”
“He has devoted his life to freeing his country,” Perle added. “He is a man of enormous intelligence, and I believe the effort to marginalize him will fail. They will end up looking ridiculous.”
I don’t think even Rummy could drive a wedge between those two crazy young kids in love.
