Good News
Election Panel Won’t Impose New Spending Limits on Groups
We need al the help we can get. Bush is spending like a sailor and there’s always more where that came from. He’s a very sound investment for people with money.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Sowing The Seeds Of Our own Demise
I honestly don’t know what to say about this asshole. Media Matters is now transcribing the vitamin hustler Michael Savage’s show. Read the whole thing an e-mail it to your relatives who think that the liberal media is biased and that you are exaggerating the level of hate and violence that comes from right wing radio.
Savage is heard by six million people every day:
Savage on what should be done to the Iraqi prisoners:
And I think there should be no mercy shown to these sub-humans. I believe that a thousand of them should be killed tomorrow. I think a thousand of them held in the Iraqi prison should be given 24 hour — a trial and executed. I think they need to be shown that we are not going to roll over to them. It won’t happen. It won’t happen because of the CBS Communists. It won’t happen because of the CNN traitors. I won’t happen because of the MSNBC empty heads. And we the people are the ones who are going to suffer today. …
Instead of putting joysticks, I would have liked to have seen dynamite put in their orifices and they should be dropped from airplanes. How’s that? You like that one? Go call somebody that you want to report me to, see if I care. They should put dynamite in their behinds and drop them from 35,000 feet, the whole pack of scum out of that jail. Thank you CBS. Thank you New Yorker. Thank you Carl Levin. Thank you Ted Kennedy. Thank you Hillary Clinton. I’m sure that Mr. Berg’s parents appreciate what you’ve done for them. I’ll be right back.
Six. Million. Listeners. A. Day.
Update:
Via Atrios, I see that Yglesias has posted about one of those six million, apparently, a writer for tech central station:
Many Americans simply wish the Arabs would go away; others wish to blow them away — and wish to blow them away not because they see this step as inevitable and tragic, but because they rejoice at the prospect of getting them back for what they have done to us. Most normal Americans today just don’t care any more about the Arabs and their welfare, or about their humiliation, or about their historical grievances, simply because all the images that come to us from their world horrify and appall us, including the disturbing images of Americans doing things that no normal American would ever dream of doing to other people back at home, if only because they would never be given the opportunity.
This is how most normal Americans now feel, but they dare not express it in public. But make no mistake, this feeling will be expressed — somehow, somewhere: a fact of which our leaders and the world must be made aware before it occurs.
“The arabs.” “Normal people.” “Most.”
This tracks with one of Limbaugh’s recent whines where he claims that everybody in America feels the same way he does but political correctness prevents them from expressing it. There is nobody more ugly than a violent wing nut embracing his victimhood.
Atrios explains the psychology of the “101st Fighting keyboarders:
I’m not sure who “most normal Americans” are supposed to be, presumably that means “most other members of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders.” But, yes, the transformation from “Saddam is an evil omnipotent overlord who will kill us all” to “we are there to save the poor Iraqi people” to simply “they’re the enemy” is all going according to schedule.
The sad thing, of course, is this basic bloodlust is mostly because they invested themselves emotionally in this, somehow feel responsible for it, and all along the MO has been to turn the big guns on anyone who disagreed. Well, now the people they went to liberate disagree, so the guns will be turned on them.
And it certainly helped their delusion to have a cartoon character president who strutted around with a 560 lb codpiece pretending that he could shoot lightning bolts from his fingertips in the name of loving yer neighbor like you’d love to be loved yerself.
Matt concludes:
I’m foreseeing an ugly future. Kerry wins the election and begins the slow, painful process of rebuilding the American military, American alliances, and American global credibility. Meanwhile, on the right a new “stab in the back” theory has already emerged and the forces of resentment are growing. “We came to help them and they turned on us — now they must pay!”
That will be just one element of the wild-eyed fury on the Right when they lose the election. Their sanity is obviously hanging by a thread as it is. See, that’s what Democrats were talking about when they said they were glad Al gore wasn’t president on 9/11. Trumped up GOP impeachment hearings would have definitely interfered with the immediate needs of the victims and the response to terrorism. Don’t think they won’t do it in 2005.
Wing-Nut Confusion
Oh fer gawd’s sake. Roger Ailes reports that the Fighting 101st Keyboarders (thanks TBOGG) have their sans-a-belt-Dockers in a wad because the media refuses to show the entire Berg video on television on a loop.
I’m telling you, this is the sickest damned thing I’ve ever heard. Maybe people who have sat through The Passion more than 50 times are inured to this kind of thing, but most of us aren’t. This is a video of an actual brutal murder in living color. Still pictures don’t have 1/100th of the power of these scenes. It is a horrible, horrible sight to see.
The mainstream media aren’t showing the pictures of the bloody leg of the prisoner who was tortured with police dogs, nor will they likely show the video of the prisoners being raped when it eventually comes out (and it will.) They should not. Berg’s killing is horrible documentary footage that should not be seen by children or anyone else who doesn’t make a special effort to see it and who knows what they are going to see. It gave me nightmares and I’m a middle aged cynic. I can’t imagine what it would do to a kid who happened to be watching TV unsupervised.
This is not political in any way. I don’t think the video should be suppressed. People can access it on the internet and if my “search” traffic stats are any measure, a hell of a lot of people are. It’s not being censored.
Jayzuz. These people are very confused. On the radio Rush can talk his eliminationist trash from dawn to dusk, but if Stern talks about sex he’s dirty and must be suppressed. The still pictures of sadistic sexual humiliation should have been withheld from the media but an actual filmed death should be widely seen. Pictures of American soldiers torturing prisoners are wrong only to the extent they are shown on television. In reality they show a needed “emotional release” like hazing initiations at a frat party. Janet Jackson’s nipple is cause for outrage.
The vaunted moral clarity of the right wing is looking more and more like presidential pretzel logic every day.
There has always been a unique conflation of sexual and violent imagery among fascists. It would appear that those who lean Right just have some problems in this area.
The Little Handful
Via wood s lot, from America’s greatest writer of all time, Mark Twain:
“I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think they were.
‘Still, it is true, lamb,’ said Satan. ‘Look at you in war, what mutton you are, and how ridiculous!’
‘In war? How?’
‘There has never been a just one, never an honorable one on the part of the instigator of the war.
I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful as usual will shout for the war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously object at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, ‘It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.’ Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers as earlier but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation pulpit and all will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
Thanks to Stephen Duncan for the link.
The Cat Was Already Out Of The Bag
Skeptical Notion makes the important point that despite what the right wing hacks say, the release of the pictures didn’t change perceptions among ordiary Iraqis because they already knew:
I often wonder how stupid Kaus really is. Then I read his blog, and I remember: Very.
Today he’s joined the Goldberg “Sixty Minutes II should never have printed those pictures, and we should never show any more” bandwagon, using the logic that “Because they showed the pictures, now the Iraqis know — on a visceral level — what we were doing, and now they’re really pissed.” and suggests that they should have done a verbal story (yes, that Red Cross report got so much attention) instead.
I’m still shocked by the unspoken assumption that the Iraqis — and the rest of the Arab World — are fundamentally stupid. I’m not sure why, but it appears to be an article of faith that “If you don’t speak English, it’s because you’re retarded” among a great many of the movers and shakers.
News flash for you, Kaus: The Iraqis already knew.
Yes they did.
The 38cm sculpture with the words “We are living American democracy” inscribed on its base was fashioned two months ago.
Berg Central
Susan at Suburban Guerilla has an impressive collection of posts that shed some light on the Nick Berg story. Something is definitely rotten in Baghdad.
First of all, the claim that the US military didn’t have him in custody is bullshit:
Also:
And while you’re over there taking advantage of her editor’s eye that cuts through the crap, send a little cash Susan’s way so that she can attend the conventions. It will be worth our while, I have no doubt.
Update:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — An American who was beheaded by militants had told friends he was arrested by Iraqi police in Mosul because he had an Israeli stamp in his passport. The Mosul police chief Thursday denied having arrested him.
The body of Nicholas Berg, 26, was found last weekend in western Baghdad. Three days later, a videotape posted on an al-Qaida-related Web site showed Berg decapitated by hooded, armed men.
Questions about Berg’s stay in Iraq remain, including the time and place of his abduction. U.S. and Iraqi officials have offered varying accounts of their contacts with the self-employed telecommunications businessman from West Chester, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb.
U.S. officials said Wednesday that Iraqi police arrested Berg in Mosul on March 24 because they believed he may have been involved in “suspicious activities.”
U.S. spokesman Dan Senor would not explain those suspicions but insisted that Berg was held by Iraqi — and not American — authorities. He said, however, that the FBI visited Berg three times before he was released April 6.
In e-mails released by his family, Berg wrote about his experiences in trying to track down and later meeting an in-law in the Mosul area. Berg also described his work in seeking to repair communications towers in Iraq.
In Mosul, police chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi insisted his department had never arrested Berg and maintained he had no knowledge of the case.
“The Iraqi police never arrested the slain American,” al-Barhawi told reporters. “Take it from me … that such reports are baseless.”
[…]
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Berg was detained by Iraqi authorities “for his own protection” because his behavior in Mosul seemed unusual for a Westerner.
He had been seen traveling in taxis and moving about the dangerous city without any escort, the official said. He added that Berg, who was Jewish, had in his possession texts that were “anti-Semitic” in tone, the official said without elaborating.
In his e-mail quoted by the Times, Berg guessed the FBI agents in Mosul had questioned him about Iran because he was carrying some literature in Farsi and a book about Iran.
He also wrote that U.S. military police who were supervising the Iraqi police had heard some of his fellow prisoners referring to him as an Israeli and suggested he be moved to a separate cell.
Make Your Mark
Please sign this Petition if you are inclined to do such things. It’s to tell that drooling vulture they call the Senator from Oklahoma that he doesn’t speak for you.
Of course, if you agree that the Iraqi prisoners should be grateful all they got was a little forced sodomy with a chemical light then don’t sign. It’s not like we are quite as bad as Saddam or anything.
Big Baby
Another round of applause for David Brock’s Media Matters. They are now running a TV spot in DC highlighting Limbaugh’s putrid statements about the torture scandal.
You really need to check out Limbaugh’s latest on MM every day and circulate it widely. I’ve always known that the best way to expose the right was simply by letting normal people see what they actually say.
He’s never had to answer for the nonstop lies and character smears of the last 12 years. He isn’t handling the pressure very well. All these tough guys on the right who enjoy seeing a grown man cry must be loving Rush these days:
They can’t destroy me, folks. The media didn’t make me. The media can’t destroy me. The media didn’t make me who I am. I did that along with you. So if the media didn’t make me, if the media didn’t — if they’re not responsible for building me, they can’t tear me down. They can try.
And I don’t know that that’s what they’re doing, but nevertheless, don’t sweat it. That’s — I just — I felt compelled to answer this, because there must have been over the last three or four days a whole bunch of e-mails from people who think I ought to be angry about it and want me to fight back and this sort of thing. And I’ve also learned that over the years, that fighting back is not the right way to handle this. You just keep doing what you’re doing. Just be who you are and let that be the fight.
Don’t — if you start responding to these people, that’s all you’re going to end up doing, which is why I was reluctant to even do this. But I wanted to do it one more time, get it out of the way, get it on the record. And let’s just see how much of this, this total explanation, including the context of the Skull and Bones comment, let’s see how much of this ever shows up in any of these places which have used that quote as a means to be critical, disparaging, discrediting, whatever.
The context is that a pill popping fascist gasbag who popularized Republican hatespin and character assassination is getting a taste of his own medicine. He’s been spewing this stuff for years. Finally somebody is calling him it. Bravo.
Children’s Crusade
Maureen Dowd has an unusually good column up in which she reports something I hadn’t heard before:
In a public relations move that cheapens the heroism of soldiers, the Pentagon merged the medals for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving the G.W.O.T. medal, for Global War on Terrorism, in both wars to reinforce the idea that we had to invade Iraq to quell terrorism.
Can you believe that crap? I realize that we are always calling things “Orwellian” but actually dubbing Afghanistan and Iraq as the Global War On Terrorism makes the slightly Nazi-esque term Homeland Security sound a little bit delicate.
More importantly, this is another one of those never-never land dipshit political moves that piles one disasaterous decision on top of another. In honor of Karen Hughes, we’ll call them Catastrophies With Consequences.
Dowd continues:
The truth is that our invasion of Iraq spurred terrorism there and around the world.
That initial deception — and headlong rush to throw off international conventions and old alliances, and namby-pamby institutions like the U.N. and the Red Cross — led straight to the abuse of Abu Ghraib. Now the question is whether the C.I.A. tortured Al Qaeda operatives.
Officials blurred the lines to justify ideological decisions, calling every Iraqi who opposed us a “terrorist”; conducting rough interrogations, perhaps to find the nonexistent W.M.D. so they would not look foolish; rolling all opposition into one scary terrorist ball that did not require sensitivity to the Geneva Conventions or “humanitarian do-gooders,” to use the phrase of Senator James Inhofe, a Republican.
One of my arguments against the invasion was the entirely predicatable blowback. It seemed to me that after 9/11 and the whole worldwide Jihad thing that we should be a little bit more cunning and wily and a little less full of shit.
I could never see the logic in unnecessarily opening this Iraq front, particularly when it was obvious that it was going to make matters worse without any discernible benefit. We had enemies enough already and smarter and simpler ways to combat terrorism than crashing around the mid-east like an uncontrolled, enraged beast.
And it doesn’t take a Phd from the University of Chicago to realize that when you go around making things up— like we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq “because of terrorism” — there might be some glitches in the president’s crusade for peace, love and understanding. Politicians should remember that children are listening. And I’m talking about fully grown Americans who may be confused by the president’s clear message that we invaded Iraq to liberate a bunch of terrorists.
Let’s Get One Thing Straight
The wing nut talking points, after an obligatory “yeah, yeah, it’s icky yada, yada, yada” is that the victims of the bad apples at Abu Ghraib were the worst of the worst, the terrorists, the murders, the ones who are trying to KILL YOUR BABIES in their sleep, so let’s not get our panties in a bunch because this is war, mister!
Inhofe: “The idea that these prisoners — you know, they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners — they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”
It has been noted elsewhere that the Red Cross report and The Taguba report estimated that somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the prisoners held at Abu Ghraib were innocent.
Inhofe said several times over the last few days that the innocent were processed and let loose immediately but numerous news reports say they were generally held for about three months before they were freed with some cigarettes and $10.00.
Unsurprisingly, Inhofe is full of it. But, like our president, I doubt that he reads anything but his picture Bible and The Moonie Times so he is unaware that there have been a number of news accounts over the past week or so from those who are in the pictures and they are not terrorists, insurgents or murderers. They are poor innocent schmucks who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fact that they are free today should suggest that they were not the “worst of the worst,” who, if you believe the president in his State of the Union address are either in custody or “have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way — they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”
The NY Times had this on May 5:
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
“That is Joiner,” he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
“That is Miss Maya,” he said, pointing to a young woman’s fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a “thumbs up” and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
“That is me,” he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
[…]
He was arrested in June at a military checkpoint, when he tried to leave the taxi he was riding in. He was taken to a detention center at the Baghdad airport, he said, and then transferred to a big military prison in Um Qasr, near the Kuwaiti border. He said he had stayed for three months and four days.
The treatment in Um Qasr, he said, “was very good,” adding: “There was no problem. The American guards were nice and good people.”
After the three months, he said, he was transferred to Abu Ghraib, a sprawling prison complex 20 miles west of Baghdad, where Mr. Hussein incarcerated and executed thousands of his opponents.
[…]
Finally, after an ordeal of what Mr. Abd believed to be about four hours, it was over.
The soldiers removed the beds from their cells, he said, and threw cold water on the floor. The prisoners were forced to sleep on the ground with their hoods still on, he said.
“I was so exhausted, I fell asleep,” Mr. Abd said. “These were the same walls where Saddam Hussein used to interrogate people. We thought we would be executed.”
But the next morning, he said, doctors and dentists arrived to care for their injuries. Beds and pillows were brought back in. They were fed. Everyone was nice, Mr. Abd said. Then at night, the same crew with “Joiner” would return and strip them and handcuff them to the walls.
About 10 days after it started, the nightly abuse ended, for no explained reason. “Joiner” just stopped coming to the cell block, and about a month later, Mr. Abd and two others among the seven were transferred to a civilian Iraqi prison in Baghdad.
It is a horrible story that is well documented in the Taguba report and verified by people who saw it. This innocent man was caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare(or perhaps Saddamesque nightmare is the correct term)
It’s interesting that Inhofe and Limbaugh and the rest who are trying to concoct some sort of narrative that their non-sadist base can live with, are unaware that this fellow claims that he was never interrogated, thus supporting the yesterday’s fading talking points about “bad apples.” Of course, the soldiers involved are now saying that the pictures of the torture were ordered up by their superiors as part of some sort of psy-op interrogation plan, so who knows?
Now, Inhofe and his cronies can say that there is no proof (except for the matching scars and paperwork proving his incarceration at the same time.) But, there is more:
From the Washington Post May 6, 2004:
Hasham Mohsen Lazim traded used tires for a living in the Shiite slum of Sadr City. He had been in trouble only once in his life, he said, a desperate time six years ago when he deserted Saddam Hussein’s army to support his wife and four small children.
Then on one warm night in August, a taxi ride home ended in a U.S. Army holding cell, the first stop in what he described as a hellish four-month journey through the U.S. military prison system in Iraq. His experience veered between anguish and confusion, abuse and fury, before culminating in a series of pictures, broadcast worldwide in recent days, that memorialized his 24-day stay in the grimmest precincts of Abu Ghraib prison.
“Something awful happened to me,” Lazim said during a two-hour interview broken by long pauses of silent despair. “I will never forget it until the day I die.”
The story is very much like the NY Times account. It is hard to see how they could have come up with so much detail that matches the reports, the pictures and the testimony of Americans who were questioned for the investigation.
He too is now free, which puts the lie to this latest attempt to defend the indefensible. If he was a terrorist with American blood on his hands, I don’t think it’s likely that he’d have been set free to kill some more.
Inhofe and his crew of sadistic freepers had better have a back-up plan.
x-posted on American Street