Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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And in other news, the sun came up this morning:

Republicans have adopted a scorched-earth strategy toward Democrats who challenge the wisdom of the way the war in Iraq is being conducted. Such critics, GOP officials say, are not merely misguided but are craven cut-and-runners who help the enemy and put politics ahead of U.S. troops’ safety.

Democrats say the Republicans are twisting facts and trying to stifle debate through intimidation. Not so, say the Republicans, who insist they are not questioning Democrats’ patriotism, only their judgment and resolve. If accuracy and nuance sometimes fall victim to all this rhetoric, well, there’s a war on, folks.

The ruckus began May 6, when Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) — a hawkish, longtime defender of the Pentagon — told reporters he believed the war in Iraq could not be won without sending in significantly more troops and equipment, which he advocated. “Our failure to surge in terms of troop level and resources needed to prevail in this war” has resulted in “what appear to be unattainable goals in our current path,” Murtha said at the news conference, hosted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

House Republicans responded within minutes. “This morning, in a calculated and craven political stunt, the national Democrat Party declared its surrender in the war on terror,” said Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). “Out of sheer, brazen partisanship,” House Democrats have “undermined our troops.” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.) said Democrats “are basically giving aid and comfort to our enemies.”

Reporters pointed out that Murtha has consistently said the war was unsustainable only under the current policies, and that he urged massive troop buildups as a remedy. DeLay was unmoved. “If you don’t give solutions,” he said, “that is saying, ‘Cut and run.’ ”

The focus turned to presidential politics Monday, when Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie accused Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) of using the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq — and a mass e-mail calling for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s resignation — as a fundraising vehicle.

Kerry campaign spokesmen said the online invitation to donate was a link in virtually all campaign e-mails and similar to one on the “national security” page on President Bush’s campaign Web site.

On Wednesday, Bush-Cheney campaign chairman Marc Racicot said Kerry had suggested all U.S. troops in Iraq are “somehow universally responsible” for the Abu Ghraib prisoner mistreatment. Kerry had said essentially the opposite. The reported abuse, Kerry had said, “is not the behavior of 99.9 percent of our troops.”

House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), noting that DeLay sharply criticized the Clinton administration’s military intervention in Kosovo, said Friday: “The hypocritical attacks on legitimate calls for an inquiry [into the prison abuses] and thoughtful critiques of the administration’s Iraq policy . . . represent a purely political calculation designed to silence debate and undercut Democrats.” Pelosi, picking up the theme, said Republicans “will not silence us with these personal attacks.”

Joe Biden said this morning on Meat The Press that we have to “heal Red ‘n Blue, man” and everybody’s begging Kerry to put McCain on the ticket and golly gosh, can’t we all get along?

All I can say is good luck.

There is only one way to heal red ‘n blue and that is to so thoroughly repudiate the Republican party at the polls that they will be forced to purge assholes like DeLay from their leadership and start putting their country before their party. Then we can talk. Unless that happens, it’s brass knuckles political warfare because when you give these guys an inch they always take a thousand miles and move the destination even farther to the right.

We have to hold the line.

And while I don’t think it would be a bad idea to put a Republican or two in the cabinet and to try to reach out to the congress (no matter which party holds the leadership) we’d also better have eyes in the back of our heads because they will slip in the shiv the first chance they get.

We’ve been down this road before. In the 90’s the “third way” experiment was designed to mitigate the polarization of the left and right, both in politics and policy. On a policy level there was some limited success. But it was a political disaster because of the very same scorched earth tactics employed by the noxious Tom DeLay and his Godfather Newt Gingrich. You cannot compromise with people like that. I sincerely hope that we do not have to relearn that lesson.

Black Ops

Seymour Hersh’s latest reveals the existence of a black operation put into high gear after 9/11 that was stupidly pushed into Iraq due to frustration and impatience at the Pentagon.

First, let me say that I am not all that surprised that such a program existed nor that it was given greater ability to operate independently after 9/11. As Hersh points out, these clandestine operations had been used during the cold war and I certainly assumed that dealing with the assymetrical threat of terrorism would probably require at least some element of high risk spook style activity. It would be naive to think it wouldn’t. In the hands of these unbelievable incompetents in the Bush administration it naturally turned into a complete disasater.

Moral questions aside (and there are many), as the article details, the problem is that if you use these techniques in anything but the most secret and rarest of ways and it comes into the hands of regular people instead of highly trained specialists using real intelligence, then it is not only ineffective in obtaining useful information, it is dramatically counterproductive in terms of compromising long term policy goals.

The CIA sources, perhaps covering their asses, tell Hersh that even they backed off of this stuff when it came to using it against regular people in Iraq. Some in the Pentagon apparently maintain that they had been getting good intelligence on the insurgency using these harsh measures until the “hillbillys” got involved and took pictures, which I find hard to believe. If anything the insurgency got stronger over the period they were sweeping innocent people off the streets and then torturing them in prisons so it doesn’t track that they were really getting anywhere. In fact, it looks as if it may have contributed to the US military’s problems. If they mean that they managed to get Saddam, I hardly think that was such a big coup. After all, he had terrorized the population for over 30 years so it’s not unlikely that someone would have dropped a dime on him eventually.

The fact is that these torture techniques in anybody’s hands are a terrible way to get information. People will say anything under torture. I suspect that the “historical information” that General Ripper is so proud of obtaining in Gitmo is probably bullshit. Certainly, after being down there for more than 2 years those prisoners don’t know shit today. Believing their own hype about Gitmo, these people inexorably came to believe that if they just inflicted a little more pain and humiliation in Iraq they’d get the answers they wanted. Meanwhile, bin Laden is still at large and Iraq has blown up into a nightmare.

So, it is a case of macho overstepping and making things worse than they already were, much as the march to Iraq itself was a case of macho overstepping and making things worse rather than better. Evidently, the events of 9/11 released some testosterone rush in the pinched, unfulfilled systems of the ivory tower neocons and they lost the ability to reason and plan.

Hersh’s article pretty much confirms that the person who gave the orders to take off the gloves in Abu Ghraib is Don Rumsfeld gofer, Steven Cambone, the man most uniquely unqualified to hold his office since well…President Bush. Of course, Cambone being the ultimate micromanager’s clerk means that Rummy himself was well aware of everything that went on and approved it.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that the White House was intimately involved in these issues, regardless of their plausible deniability. As I point out in my post below, one of the main reasons they wanted to create the “unlawful combatant” designation was to allow unfettered interrogations. The White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, led that argument. The Newsweek article shows that Cheney and Rumsfeld were deeply involved in the Padilla and Hamdi cases and argued forcefully that they (and any other American they deemed a threat) should be considered unlawful combatants, without the protections of even the constitution, much less the Geneva Conventions. They believe in harsh measures without regard to human rights. They have both shown a remarkable propensity to overlook the long term strategic damage of any given decision in favor of some short term emotional satisfaction or political gain.

They knew.

He Never Learns

In a bid to get American bloodlust refocused, Crusader Codpiece lied yesterday again about terrorist ties to Iraq prior to the war. Apparently unhappy that the torture at Abu Ghraib has been temporarily halted, the president wants to re-inflame and confuse members of the military and the American public so that they will continue to support the idea that Iraq had something to do with the events of 9/11 and therefore believe killing and torturing Iraqis is an act of revenge (while he spouts sophomoric bromides about peace and freedom.)

President Bush on Friday blamed al Qaeda supporter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for beheading American Nicholas Berg and cited him as an example of Saddam Hussein “terrorist ties” before the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Bush’s revival of accusations linking Saddam to terrorism comes as the president faces growing doubts among Americans over his Iraq policy.

At a fund-raising lunch in Bridgeton, Missouri, Bush said Zarqawi was an example of the threat posed by the ousted Iraqi leader. “We knew he (Saddam) had terrorist ties. The person responsible for the Berg death, Zarqawi, was in and out of Baghdad prior to our arrival, for example,” Bush said.

It’s obvious that Bush doesn’t give a shit about this country. At every step of the way he has made this country less safe by his words and actions and he continues to do it without even a second thought. Every time he utters one of these proven lies he prolongs this madness and puts our lives in greater danger.

He is showing unprecedented gall in this case,however, because it has been shown that the only reason he didn’t kill Zarqawi when he was holed up in Kurd territory before the war was because it was his only evidence of terrorism in Iraq (even though outside Saddam’s control) and his death would have impeded his blind determination to invade at all costs.

To use Berg’s murder as an excuse to lie about this once again is obscene.

And He Wept With Happiness

Kate “yes, I’m really this desperate” O’Beirne defends her Big Boy:

Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.”

Yes. That’s what it says. Even the quotes.

We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.

That’s very special. But, you might want to keep an eye on him when he’s around old ladies or a medicine cabinet. Word to the wise.

100=2.5 to 3 days of the little blues[oxycontin] You know how this stuff works…the more you get used to the more it takes. But, I will try and cut down to help out. But remember, this is only for a little over two more weeks. Just two weeks….I understand your challenge and will do all I can to help. But I kind of want to go out with a bang if you get my drift. Hee hee hee.

Yes. He certainly has excellent judgment.

As for his decency, I guess old Kate shares his excitement about “babes and torture” which isn’t altogether surprising.

Link via Media Matters

Taking Off The Gloves

Matt Yglesias points us to law professor Eric Muller’s post about the possibility that the Solicitor general lied to the Supreme Court. Matt says:

The subject is Clement’s contention in oral arguments on the Padilla and Hamdi cases that the US government doesn’t engage in even “mild torture” to try and secure information from detainees. This is going to wind up hinging on whether or not various “stress and duress” interrogation techniques count as torture — certainly this stuff sounds a lot like torture to me.

I agree that this particular argument is going to rest on whether these techniques are considered “mild torture” but it should be noted that both General Pace and Wolfowitz of Arabia agreed yesterday that these acts are inhumane and they would consider them violations of the Geneva Convention if used against US troops. (Civilians are accorded even greater protections.)

As to whether the solicitor general’s office knew about it (however it is defined) it would certainly appear that Ted Olson was brainstorming in the White House about the case, right along with Cheney and Rummy:

The president’s men were divided. For Dick Cheney and his ally, Donald Rumsfeld, the answer was simple: the accused men [the Lakawanna Six] 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… “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…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.”

[…]

But as the months wore on, Justice lawyers became increasingly uneasy about holding him [Padilla] indefinitely without counsel. 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.

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.

Did the administration lie to the Court? Ted Olson almost certainly understood the mindset of the administration as it dealt with these “unlawful combatants” which is characterized by a total willingness to throw aside the rule of law. (Cheney is quite obviously out of his mind on these issues. Remember the smallpox freak-out?) Whether the lawyer Paul Clement was aware that the White House had taken a no hold barred approach to the treatment of prisoners is unknown. In any case, as Matt says, if that argument is ever broached it will hinge on the question of whether these admitted techniques, like holding someone under water until they think they’re drowning, can be called torture. In the Bizarro World in which we now live, it’s entirely possible that Scalia and gang will find it perfectly acceptable.

But, there is another little problem with the legal situation pertaining to prisoner treatment. Rumsfeld effectively locked out the JAG office in making all these decisions and the military lawyers have been complaining about it for months:

A group of senior military lawyers were so concerned about changes in the rules designed to safeguard prisoners during interrogation that they sought help outside the Defense Department, according to a New York lawyer who headed a recent study of how prisoners have been treated in the war on terrorism.

The military lawyers were part of the Army Judge Advocate General’s office, which in the past has played a role in ensuring that interrogators did not violate prisoners’ rights.

“They were extremely upset. They said they were being shut out of the process, and that the civilian political lawyers, not the military lawyers, were writing these new rules of engagement,” said Scott Horton, who was chairman of the New York City Bar Assn. committee that filed a report this month on the interrogation of detainees by the U.S.

[…]

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the rules had been examined and approved by lawyers for the administration.

On Tuesday, Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, “issued any number of statements and directives to the effect that detainees in Iraq, civilian or military, were to be treated under the provisions of the Geneva Convention.”

[…]

Horton said the military lawyers told him that Feith pressed for looser interrogation rules and won approval for them from the administration’s civilian lawyers earlier in the U.S. war on terrorism.

Which lawyers? They don’t refer to these decisions as coming from the Justice Department but rather more broadly from “the administration’s civilian political lawyers.”

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales openly defends the White House’s decision to call the Guantanamo prisoners “enemy combatants” largely because the Geneva Convention would limit their ability to interrogate the prisoners.(It’s comforting to know that they promise to operate in guantanamo in the “spirit” of the Geneva Conventions, though. Trust Us)

In a famous early skirmish in the Bush administration’s ongoing civil war, Gonzales sent around a memo trying to persuade the national security council to reject Colin Powell’s request to give the Guantanamo prisoners POW status. (Condi later said it was just a draft…)

It’s possible these military lawyers are referring to Justice, but it’s just as likely that the rules were debated and decided right in the White House. History suggests that Cheney and Rumsfeld are always in favor of the harshest possible treatment. They gave in only when Ashcroft argued to protect his own turf (and profile) in the US. (That’s what passes for compromise in the Bush administration.)

In other words, it is likely that the rules for the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, just as they were in Guantanamo, were not created in some obscure Justice Department or CIA office as is stated in this NY Times article today. The history of this issue leads to the White House Counsel’s office and the Office of the Vice President.

As I wrote earlier, they were frantic to get intelligence on the whereabouts of the apparently vaporized WMD. They believed from the beginning that this was such a “different kind of war” that they needn’t adhere to the rule of law or war.

Somebody needs to ask which civilian “political” lawyers were making the interrogation rules in the War On Terrorism.

There Isn’t A Big Enough Tent In The World

Ok. Somebody needs to find out what Rove has on Zell. He has now become a serious danger to the Democratic Party because he is either crumbling under the stress of the blackmail or he has gone completely insane

“…I worry that the HWA – the Hand-Wringers of America – will add to their membership and continue to bash our country ad nauseam. And in doing so, hand over more innocent Americans to the enemy on a silver platter.

“So I stand with Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, who stated that he’s “more outraged by the outrage” than by the treatment of those prisoners. More outraged by the outrage. It’s a good way of putting it. That’s exactly how this Senator from Georgia feels.”

Surely, he is not privy to any private Democratic meetings, is he? They don’t speak in front of him in the elevator or anything, do they? Might as well hand over their computer passwords to the Republicans.

Oh wait…

The Big Swinging Dems

Yo Wolfie, you wanna piece ‘o me?

Senate Democrats lit into the Bush administration’s Iraq policies yesterday, using an uncharacteristically contentious hearing on additional war spending to attack the Pentagon’s number two official in personal and bitter terms.

[…]

Warner seemed briefly to lose control of the committee yesterday, faced down by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) over whether Wolfowitz could be questioned on broad matters of Iraq policy or only the narrower issue of additional spending for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which together are costing about $4.5 billion a month.

When Warner admonished him to keep his questions to the budget issue, Kennedy erupted. “I’ve been on this committee for 24 years, I’ve been in the Senate 42 years, and I have never been denied the opportunity to question any person that’s come before a committee, on what I wanted to ask,” he said. “And I resent it and reject it on a matter of national importance.”

Warner persisted, provoking a formal challenge from Kennedy. “Well, Mr. Chairman, then you’re going to have to rule me out of order, and I’m going to ask for a roll call of whether the committee is going to rule me out of order,” he snapped.

At that point, Warner backed down and said Wolfowitz’s preliminary remarks had invited such broad questioning. “You have opened it up in your opening statement,” Warner told Wolfowitz.

Hooah!

Then they let the dogs out…

After listening to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz testify before the normally stately Armed Services Committee for several hours, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said, “What I’ve heard from you is dissembling and avoidance of answers, lack of knowledge, pleading process — legal process.”

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) then hit Wolfowitz, who is seen as a major architect of the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq, with a virtual indictment. “You come before this committee . . . having seriously undermined your credibility over a number of years now,” she said. “When it comes to making estimates or predictions about what will occur in Iraq, and what will be the costs in lives and money, . . . you have made numerous predictions, time and time again, that have turned out to be untrue and were based on faulty assumptions.”

[…]

Wolfowitz … told her that in disagreeing with Shinseki’s estimates on the troop requirements for postwar Iraq, he was siding with another senior Army general closer to the action — Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Iraq and the Middle East.

(This is known in Washington as the “Tommy made me do it defense.”)

Wolfowitz did respond directly to Reed’s attack, which followed a heated and confusing exchange on whether U.S. commanders permitted military interrogators to violate the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of military prisoners of war and civilian detainees.

“I’m not dissembling,” he said. He tried to weave his way though the hypothetical questions Reed had posed about the rules of engagement for interrogations in Iraq, saying he had not been told that senior commanders in Iraq had approved questioning techniques that violate the Geneva accords.

Cutting him off, Reed said, “Well, I would suggest, Mr. Secretary, that you’re not doing your job.”

Damn sissies.

Curiouser and Curiouser

When Nicholas Berg took an Oklahoma bus to a remote college campus a few years ago, the American recently beheaded by terrorists allowed a man with terrorist connections to use his laptop computer, according to his father.

Michael Berg said the FBI investigated the matter more than a year ago. He stressed that his son was in no way connected to the terrorists who captured and killed him.

Government sources told CNN that the encounter involved an acquaintance of Zacarias Moussaoui — the only person publicly charged in the United States in connection with the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

According to Berg, his son was taking a course a few years ago at a remote campus of the University of Oklahoma near an airport. He described how on one particular day, his son met “some terrorist people — who no one knew were terrorists at the time.”

At one point during the bus ride, Berg said, the man sitting next to his son asked if he could use Nick’s laptop computer.

‘It turned out this guy was a terrorist and that he, you know, used my son’s e-mail, amongst many other people’s e-mail who he did the same thing to,’ Berg said.

Government sources said Berg gave the man his password, which was later used by Moussaoui, the sources said.

“Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.” –Jerry Falwell, 1981

Memo To Rumsfeld

TBogg has some excellent advice for how to deal with this little sticky wicket you’ve gotten yourself into:

Henceforth, being strapped to a board and submerged until you think you are drowning will be referred to as Hydro-Therapy. Being forced to simulate sex with fellow prisoners is now called Role Playing. Being made to form a naked pyramid is Job Training for the Upcoming Baghdad Cirque du Soleil. If you are stripped naked and led around on a leash you Living A Day In the Life Of Former Louisiana Congressman Bob Livingston. And if you are actually forced to have sex with a slack-jawed, clueless goober, well, now you know how Karen Santorum feels….

Are there any problems that cannot be solved with a little creative message massage? Heavens, no.

Daddy Dearest

Not that I personally give a damn, nor would I blame the daughters for begging their embarrassing parents to stay away, but I do think this catch by Avedon Carol is too good not to snipe about.

After saying he wouldn’t attend his daughters’ college graduations because he didn’t want people to have to go through security, Junior will be doing at least 3 commencement speeches.

This is a Mean Girl Special if I’ve ever seen one. Junior goes around every day lecturing people lecturing people about how they should love their children. MoDo, Tina Brown, Lisa DePaulo, Wolf, Shep, Kit — your table is ready.