The Hit Man
When Nixonites go bad.
This guy wrote the book. He will be reprising his role as GOP character assassin in a state near you over the next few months, you can bet on it.
"what digby sez..."
The two times I think I have been most humiliated in my life was standing in a big room, naked as a jaybird with about fifty others and they were checking us out, now that was humiliating. It was humiliating showering with sixty others in a public shower. It didn’t kill us did it? No one ever died from humiliation.
Gee Zell, did they also make you stick your finger in your ass and then taste it? Did they throw a towel over your head and then force you to jerk off in front of the cheerleading squad?
Man, high school was a lot tougher back in the 1800’s than when I went to school…
Insufficient Dedication
That Political Animal (who’s celebrating his 13th wedding anniversary today) writes about Wes Clark’s interesting article in the Washington Monthly, which I have linked before:
Clark’s point is a simple one: Neither Reagan nor any of the seven Cold War presidents before him ever attacked either the Soviet Union or one of its satellites directly. This wasn’t because of insufficient dedication to anticommunism, but because it wouldn’t have worked. In the end, they knew that democracy couldn’t come at the point of a gun; it had to come from within, from the citizens of the countries themselves.
Is this right? To argue otherwise is to suggest that our Cold War strategy was also wrong. Perhaps we should have rolled our tanks across the Iron Curtain after World War II, when the Soviet Union was exhausted and weary. Or attacked China instead of accepting a truce in the Korean War. Or sent NATO troops into Hungary in 1956.
Of course not. Even if we had “won,” we wouldn’t have won. In the end, the patient strategy of military containment and cultural engagement was the right call, and it’s the right call for the war on terror as well. Too bad George Bush doesn’t seem to get this.
Too bad George Bush doesn’t seem to get how to eat a pretzel without passing out either, but that’s just who he is. The problem, of course, is the Republican intelligensia[sic] who wanted to play Risk with real soldiers.
The Neocons have always been wrong about everything. Remember, Paul Wolfowitz wanted to invade Russia after the Berlin Wall came down. They are, and always have been, nuttier than fruitcakes.
Bad Apples Stinking Up The Whole Country
Reuters Staff Abused by U.S. Troops in Iraq
By Andrew Marshall
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. forces beat three Iraqis working for Reuters and subjected them to sexual and religious taunts and humiliation during their detention last January in a military camp near Falluja, the three said Tuesday.The three first told Reuters of the ordeal after their release but only decided to make it public when the U.S. military said there was no evidence they had been abused, and following the exposure of similar mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
Two of the three said they had been forced to insert a finger into their anus and then lick it, and were forced to put shoes in their mouths, particularly humiliating in Arab culture.
All three said they were forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers laughed, taunted them and took photographs. They said they did not want to give details publicly earlier because of the degrading nature of the abuse.
The soldiers told them they would be taken to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, deprived them of sleep, placed bags over their heads, kicked and hit them and forced them to remain in stress positions for long periods.
The U.S. military, in a report issued before the Abu Ghraib abuse became public, said there was no evidence the Reuters staff had been tortured or abused.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, said in a letter received by Reuters Monday but dated March 5 that he was confident the investigation had been “thorough and objective” and its findings were sound.
The Pentagon has yet to respond to a request by Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger to review the military’s findings about the incident in light of the scandal over the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
[…]
Schlesinger sent a letter to Sanchez on January 9 demanding an investigation into the treatment of the three Iraqis.
The U.S. army said it was investigating and requested further information. Reuters provided transcripts of initial interviews with the three following their release, and offered to make them available for interview by investigators.
A summary of the investigation by the 82nd Airborne Division, dated January 28 and provided to Reuters, said “no specific incidents of abuse were found.” It said soldiers responsible for the detainees were interviewed under oath and “none admit or report knowledge of physical abuse or torture.”
“The detainees were purposefully and carefully put under stress, to include sleep deprivation, in order to facilitate interrogation; they were not tortured,” it said. The version received Monday used the phrase “sleep management” instead.
The U.S. military never interviewed the three for its investigation.
On February 3 Schlesinger wrote to Lawrence Di Rita, special assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying the investigation was “woefully inadequate” and should be reopened.
“The military’s conclusion of its investigation without even interviewing the alleged victims, along with other inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the report, speaks volumes about the seriousness with which the U.S. government is taking this issue,” he wrote.
This was in Fallujah at some bullshit camp. It wasn’t in a high level prison where they supposedly held the “worst of the worst.”
It’s now an official cover-up all the way to Sanchez at a minimum. The managing editor of one of the two biggest wire services in the world gives them transcripts of his employees’ statements and offers them as witnesses all the way back in January. They say that nothing untoward happened. The managing editor of one of the two biggest wire services in the world then writes directly to the Pentagon and complains about the “investigation.” This is after the Taguba investigation was underway. He hears nothing further. The managing editor for one of the two biggest wire services in the world then receives a letter on May 17th, dated March 5th from General Ricardo Sanchez saying that he is confident the investigation was sound.
For the first time, I think it may be worse for us to stay than leave. If this sick shit was so widespread it was happening in every detention camp in Iraq, we are lost.
And George W. Bush Is The Best President We’ve Ever Had, Too
Michelle Cottle in TNR observes the right wing meltdown, in particular the desperate assertions by the ladies of the Right, (Coulter, Nooner and Chavez) that the fault for Abu Ghraib lies with the “babes in uniform.”
… I nonetheless feel a pang of sympathy for all those Bush fans who increasingly find themselves laboring to defend the indefensible (e.g., the continued employment of George “Slam Dunk” Tenet or Donald “Don’t Show Me the Torture Pics” Rumsfeld). Whatever outrage-related stress I’m suffering, it’s clearly negligible compared with the complete mental meltdown occurring on the right, particularly in regards to the torture of Iraqi internees at Abu Ghraib.
As photos (and maybe even video!) trickle out documenting the misdeeds of American soldiers, conservatives are scrambling to find an acceptable party to blame. A few, like George Will, have risen brilliantly to the occasion, offering the administration a tough-love critique. But most have treated the two most logical candidates–the Pentagon and the White House–as off-limits.
For them, the current unpleasantness must be somehow pinned on a reassuringly liberal villain. You can actually hear the gears whirring in their heads as they cycle through the usual suspects: Bill, Hillary, unions, tree-huggers, taxes, the French–surely some left-wing bogeyman can be found to take the heat off poor Rummy!
Fortunately, a trio of right-wing chicks–Linda Chavez, Peggy Noonan, and the perennially unbalanced Ann Coulter–have leaped into this breach, peddling the ideologically soothing notion that Abu Ghraib is the sad, but predictable, by-product of permitting women in the military.
[…]
Behind all the novel theories is this basic truth: The Bush administration never makes a mistake. Sure, American personnel in Iraq have been stretched dangerously thin thanks to a certain defense secretary’s reluctance to call up more troops. It’s also true that terrified, inexperienced reservists received virtually no training in preparation for sensitive postings. And military intelligence probably did ‘request’ that internees be softened up a bit to aid interrogations. But all of this was part of a brilliant plan that would surely have succeeded if not for some misguided lefty notion about gender equality. Which is why the most important task the Pentagon faces these next few months isn’t upping our troop count, or investing the international community in Iraq’s future, or even ferreting out who ordered the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. It’s drumming every coarse, vulgar, uppity, sexually corrupting woman out of the military. And, if that doesn’t work, we can always blame the gays.
Let’s face it. The feminazis are clearly culpable. But, it’s liberals in general who are at fault. They must be. They always are. And something should be done about it. Then, as Rush says, “we should keep just one around in a museum somewhere, so people can see what they looked like.”
I know that most readers of this blog never watch Fox, and for good reason. But, it’s kind of fun watching Fred Barnes’s head explode after trying to resolve its internal contradictions. Give it 5 minutes. You’ll enjoy yourself.
The End Of The Modern Era
Robin Wright is one cool customer. I’ve been reading her work for many years — before she went to the Washington Post, she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, my daily paper. She regularly appears on The Newshour and is an acknowledged mid-east expert from whom I have never seen or read any trace of hysteria or even much emotion. She’s a real journalist.
Her analysis today of how the Iraq war has changed everything in the region — for the worse — and how the consequences are much more serious than anything that’s gone before in the region, brought me up short. This is not a writer who is given to hyperbole, yet she writes today:
Over the past quarter-century, I’ve covered the rage of the Islamic world, witnessing much of it up close, losing friends who became victims to its extremist wings and watching its furies swell. But I’ve never been scared until now.
The stakes in Iraq — for which the Abu Ghraib prison has tragically become the metaphor — are not just the future of a fragile oil-rich country or America’s credibility in the world, even among close allies. The issues are not simply whether the Pentagon has systemic problems or whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon brass or even the Bush administration can survive The Pictures. And the costs are not merely the billions from the U.S. Treasury to foot the Iraq bills today or the danger that Mideast oil becomes a political weapon during tumultuous days down the road.
The stakes are instead how the final phase of the Modern Era plays out.
That 500-year period, marked by the age of exploration, the creation of nations and the Enlightenment that unleashed ideologies designed to empower the individual, faces its last great challenge in the 50 disparate countries that constitute the Islamic world — ruled by the last bloc of authoritarian monarchs, dictators and leaders-for-life. The Iraq war was supposed to produce a new model for democratic transformation, a catalyst after which the United States and its allies could launch an ambitious initiative for regional change.
But now, whatever America’s good intentions may have been, that historic moment may be lost for a long time to come.
Funny, that. We find today that the Bush administration is making policy based upon the apocalyptic fantasies of a bunch of crazed American fundamentalists . And on a political level, rejection of the Enlightenment has been in the works in the Republican Party for a long, long time. I doubt they quite had this in mind, however.
Over the past dozen years many factors favored transformation in the world’s most volatile region. The buzz among students at Tehran University, editorial writers in Beirut and Amman, the leading human rights activist in Cairo, a feminist leader in Rabat, intellectuals in Lahore and teenage girls in Jakarta has increasingly been about democratic reforms and how to achieve them. New public voices, daring publications, occasionally defiant protests in widely diverse locales gave shape to an energetic, if somewhat disjointed, trend.
Thanks to satellite dishes, shortwave radios and the Internet, Muslims have longingly watched societies from South Africa to Chile to the former Soviet republics shed odious ideologies and repressive regimes. Many haven’t wanted to be left behind; they’ve wanted much of what we’ve wanted for them.
[…]
The bottom line: The primary battle for the majority of Muslims has not been with us. Their jihad — or struggle, as the word is accurately translated — has been against their own autocratic governments. A surprisingly small minority of extremists, from Lebanon’s Hezbollah to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, have gone after us most often because we were seen as the prop for corrupt and immoral regimes, or we deployed troops on their land to achieve suspect objectives.
Yet I am scared because the foundation for the region’s democratic transformation has steadily eroded over the past year. Whether the U.S.-led occupation was wise or well-handled, the way it unfolded in Iraq has profoundly disappointed many Muslims both near and far from Iraq’s borders. The accumulation of events threatens to undo rather than remake the region, in turn delaying or diverting the course of the Modern Era’s final phase.
The occupation of Iraq has affirmed the worst fears of the Islamic world, reinforcing distaste for America and what it represents, and spawning wild conspiracy theories about the motives of the West. Many Muslims now see the American intervention as a devastating betrayal, starkly reflected by the Red Cross’s recent conclusion that 70 to 90 percent of all Iraqis who were “deprived of their liberty” — by the world champion of democracy — “were arrested by mistake.” Others in the region react with fury to the symbolism of a naked Arab male on a concrete floor tethered to a female American soldier looking down with disinterested arrogance on her prisoner at Abu Ghraib.
“Beyond those frolicking soldiers, there is a certain cavalier attitude toward Arabs and Muslims that has created a sense that Arabs are guilty until proven otherwise,” reflected Hisham Melham, a Washington correspondent for al-Arabiya television. So while America’s ambitious postwar initiative to promote democracy in the “greater Middle East,” — which includes imaginative proposals, such as training 100,000 female teachers to instruct and empower girls by closing the gender gap — will probably still make its debut at three international summits next month, it’s unlikely to generate much traction anytime soon.
This is where George W. Bush and his facile cowboy talk really fomented the hell that is unfolding in Iraq. I hold him (and the speechwriters like David Frum and Mark Gershon, whom everybody extolled for providing the moron with such stirring oratory) responsible. The purposefully and for craven political purposes unleashed the beast.
But what I fear most is that frustration over Iraq and disgust with Abu Ghraib will give common cause and a rallying cry to far-flung Muslim societies. Until now, al Qaeda — with its global reach — has been the exception. Most Islamic groups have had local causes and operated at home or very nearby. And they’ve always been a distinct minority.
The worst-case scenario is that the Cold War of the 20th century is followed in the early 21st century by a very warm one, with no front lines, unpredictable offensives and a type of weaponry from which we’re not yet sure how to protect ourselves. This time the majority could become involved, either by empathizing, sympathizing or actively participating in a cause they see as righting a wrong against them.
The unintended consequence of the Iraq experience could well produce a third generation of militants — a cadre that didn’t fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s or train in bin Laden’s camps in the 1990s — who will launch a conflict whose tactics, targets and goals will be even more amorphous. Their conflict will be more than an intensified or expanded war on terrorism. And, I fear, we’ll be groping for a long time to figure out how to counter it — and how to get back to finishing that final chapter of the Modern Era.
I’ve always maintained that we couldn’t have designed a better recruitment plan for bin Laden than invading Iraq. It looks as if it’s working. And, like Robin Wright, for the first time I feel truly scared.
Calling All Ombudsmen
The press in this country is unbelievably bad. So bad that I am tempted to say it is urredeemable.
Everybody is all excited by Newsweek’s revelation of the “Gonzales Memo” like they’ve just uncovered the Rosetta stone. Michael Isikoff claims right there in the article:
The memo—and strong dissents by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his chief legal advisor, William Howard Taft IV—are among hundreds of pages of internal administration documents on the Geneva Convention and related issues that have been obtained by NEWSWEEK and are reported for the first time in this week’s magazine.
In light of all this hoopla, one of my readers wrote me asking who might have leaked this memo. It’s an excellent question. Who leaked it and why right now?
Well, I don’t know who just recently gave Isikoff the copy of the memo, but the fact is that it was leaked more than two years ago to the Washington Times (likely as a shot at Powell) and was written about in the NY Times by none other than William Safire. Even a googling blogger like me referred to it in a post last week as a “famous early skirmish” in the Bush administration’s ongoing civil war because of Colin Powell’s vociferous objections to Gonzales’s recommendations. The Washington Times story contains the “quaint” quote and everything.
Here’s the Washington Times article for January 26, 2002, one day after the memo was written. Powell urges POW status
Here’s Safire’s column from January 29, 2002.
Jayzuz.
Housekeeping
Please update your RSS readers with my new site feed, shown at left or here.
Due to popular request, I’ve changed to Feedburner, which should theoretically provide a feed to the following:
Bloglines/2.0
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FeedReader
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Shrook/51
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Xpyder
YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (on behalf of My Yahoo)
Now leave me alone. I’m a techno-phobe and this stuff makes me feel all icky.
House of Bush, House of Borgia
Fred Kaplan in Slate says:
The White House is about to get hit by the biggest tsunami since the Iran-Contra affair, maybe since Watergate. President George W. Bush is trapped inside the compound, immobilized by his own stay-the-course campaign strategy. Can he escape the massive tidal waves? Maybe. But at this point, it’s not clear how.
[…]
Seymour Hersh seems to be on his hottest roll as an investigative reporter in 30 years, and the editors of every major U.S. daily newspaper aren’t going to stand for it. “We’re having our lunch handed to us by a weekly magazine!” one can imagine them shouting in their morning meetings. Scoops and counterscoops will be the order of the day. [this is key. ed]
All of these hound-hunts will be fueled by the extraordinary levels of internecine feuding that have marked this administration for years. Until recently, Rumsfeld, with White House assistance, has quelled dissenters, but the already-rattling lid is almost certain to blow off soon. As has been noted, Secretary of State Colin Powell, tiring of his good-soldier routine, is attacking his adversaries in the White House and Pentagon with eyebrow-raising openness. Hersh’s story states that Rumsfeld’s secret operation stemmed from his “longstanding desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA.” Hersh’s sources—many of them identified as intelligence officials—seem to be spilling, in part, to wrest back control. Uniformed military officers, who have long disliked Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew for a lot of reasons, are also speaking out. Hersh and Newsweek both report that senior officers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps went berserk when they found out about Rumsfeld’s secret operation, to the point of taking their concerns to the New York Bar Association’s committee on international human rights.
The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.
Read the whole thing. It features a particularly nice, concise chain of events.
E-mail it to your friends. It makes a lovely graduation gift.
The War Of The Worlds
The Political Animal brings up a point that I agree should get a full airing before we go any further in our discussion of America’s behavior in the GWOT:
Gonzales concluded in stark terms: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”
This strikes me as an issue that everyone — pro-war and anti-war alike — ought to take a firm stand on: should the Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners captured in the war on terror or not?
Gonzales’ reasoning is appealing but misguided, I think. After all, every generation believes at one time or another that the enemies they face are so savage, so fundamentally different from any that have come before that old rules of conduct no longer apply. Every generation also turns out to be wrong. The reality is that the Taliban is not more dangerous than the Cold War Soviets, who in turn were not more dangerous than the Nazis. If we were willing to treat prisoners decently in those conflicts, why not now?
The ability to “quickly obtain information” from captured prisoners has been a critical part of every war, but we nonetheless agreed half a century ago to place this under strict limits. This was not because we felt the wars of that era were unimportant, or because we deluded ourselves into believing that our enemies would always follow suit, but because we wanted to set a standard of simple human decency for ourselves and others.
It was also viewed as counter-productive to our own troops when they, inevitably, get captured. It helps to be able to say ‘we don’t do this and you’d better not do this either.” Just ask members of the military these days how happy they are with the prospect of throwing out the Geneva Conventions.
The larger issue is what’s important, though. The 9/11 attacks were extremely dramatic and horrifying spectacles. That was, of course, the point. But, Islamic terrorism, per se, is not a threat to the nation on the scale of WWII or the Cold War. Indeed, its greatest threat to our survival is the extent to which we allow our fear to blind us to the possibility of creeping totalitarianism from within. It does not threaten our sovereignty or our way of life as those earlier wars did, despite our very understandable fear of further attacks.
I have thought since the beginning that stoking our bloodlust, while emotionally satisfying, was exactly the wrong thing to do. I thought that the correct response to 9/11 was to observe the appropriate period of mourning for the victims and then quietly, calmly and systematically set about working the problem from a number of different angles — particularly using the unprecedented outpouring of international support — to mitigate the threat and secure our own country. It seemed to me that the most powerful statement would be to quickly and cleanly unseat the Taliban and then be menacingly mysterious about what else we were doing behind the scenes. We should have openly and obviously embraced international institutions and foreign countries and touted their cooperation as a way of marginalizing Islamic fundamentalism as much as possible to keep terrorists wondering who was friend or foe.
We instead reared up on our hind legs like a wounded animal and began thrashing about, enraged and unhinged, stoking bloodlust and fear. Rather then dealing with the problem with seriousness of purpose we responded with vomitous bromides about our superior morality and behaved as if 9/11 was s unique threat to our survival instead of an asymmetrical challenge — the asymmetry of which accrued to our benefit, not theirs. If we had resisted the impulse to demonstrate our power like a Moscow May Day Parade circa 1965 and engaged the world against what should have been conceived as a common enemy, we might have been able to deal with this threat over time without catastrophic results.
But we did exactly the wrong thing. We inflamed the situation with the “bring it on” and “you’re with us or agin’ us” macho rhetoric and, stunningly, even went so far as to invade an uninvolved Arab country. The president told our troops they were fighting for the survival of the nation in Iraq and encouraged them to believe they were exacting revenge for the acts of 9/11 even though it wasn’t true.
We continue to lose hearts and minds everywhere. As Josh Marshall’s Iraq correspondent reports today:
Also it is no secret that ON THE STREET the US Army was and remains openly kicking Iraqi asses whenever and wherever they want to.
About the Army – Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968. I knew we were finished when I had a soldier point his Squad Automatic Weapons at me and my bodyguard detail for driving down the street when he decided he would cross the street in the middle of rush hour traffic (which was moving at about 70 MPH) … He made it clear to any and all that he was preparing to shoot drivers who did not stop for his jaunt because speeding cars are “threats.”
I also once had a soldier from a squad of Florida National Guard reservists raise weapons and kick the door panel of a clearly marked CPA security vehicle (big American flag in the windshield of a $150,000 armored Land Cruiser) because they wanted us to back away from them so they could change a tire … as far as they were concerned WE (non-soldiers) were equally the enemy as any Iraqi.
Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit. I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.
From the beginning we have behaved as if this was a threat so unprecedented that we didn’t have to observe any previous notions of civilized behavior — as if it were War of The Worlds and aliens were trying to colonize the planet rather than a bunch of clever criminals armed with box-cutters and a suicidal excuse to kill in the name of God. We invaded Iraq with too few trained troops, no help or input from the experts in nation building and peacekeeping and now we find ourselves in the worst possible situation. We are seen as unsympathetic, arrogant, violent and inept. This should be expected when the government and the likes of Rush Limbaugh (who is piped in every day on Armed Forces Radio) encourage our military to act like barbarians by lying to them and the public about the nature of the threat and the identity of the enemy.
We may not be facing aliens from a foreign planet, but we have now sown the seeds of an anti-American backlash that encompasses this planet and may well last for generations. And America is demonstrably weaker in the world than we were before this cock-up. For no good reason, we have boldly demonstrated for all to see that our intelligence operations are virtually useless and that we don’t even have enough troops to invade and occupy a third rate dictatorship. I know I feel safer knowing that. And I have no doubt that the rest of the world has made a note of it too.
I have long said that these neocon Bushies have always been wrong about everything. But, they have never been as wrong as this.
Nobody should be surprised. They advertised their intentions quite openly. In their Pax Americana Manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses they clearly state that it would probably take a catastrophe on the scale of Pearl Harbor to rally thecountry to their classic comic Imperial wet dream. Despite the fact that they do not understand the concept of terrorism in the least, they nonetheless realized that 9/11 would work very well to advance their plans. All of the breast beating and sabre rattling was ultimately in service of their starry-eyed ivory tower vision of The New American Cakewalk and the triumphant erasure of the asterisk that sits next to George W. Bush’s name in the history books.
Since making that first fundamental error, they made every single mistake it is possible to make, starting with pissing off the entire world and ending with Abu Ghraib. Their dream is dead, but we will be paying the price for their arrogance and vanity for decades to come.
If anyone but the airheaded George W. Bush and his terminally incompetent neocon/Team B cabal had been in office, the idea that the threat of Islamic fundamentalism was so unprecedented that it meant America must discard all of its values and morals would have been laughed out of the oval office for the absurdity it is. Sadly for America and the world, bin Laden got lucky.