First Draft

Take Them at Their Word

Why is it that if you actually assume everything Bush-Cheney et al say is true, it makes things worse, not better?

It was asassinations of Al Qaeda operatives. Okay, awesome! Who doesn't want to hunt down and smoke out and hang high our nation's fearsome enemies? Tell Congress all about it! It's not like any of them have Osama on speed dial, no matter what Rush says, so for fuck's sake, what's the problem here? Right after 9/11 congressmen were falling all over themselves (and most of them still are) to cross the finish line of Most Hardcore first. You really think they'd have had an issue with it?

It was even more illegal spying than the illegal spying we already knew about. Well damn, hooker, shit. That clearly would have been tough for Congress to accept, considering that they totally gave retroactive immunity to everybody who went along with the illegal spying we knew about and have prosecuted exactly no one for any of the previous lawbreaking. A little more might have pushed them over the edge? Honestly? They might have used adjectives in their sternly worded letters? You might as well tell Congress basically as a DARE.

I realize that I am presently arguing that Congress is such a bunch of stupendous pussies that it really doesn't matter what sick and twisted shit Herr Cheney was up to in his secret bunker, that they would have agreed to it completely. Yet, no one who has been paying attention could argue this wasn't the case.

Sure, a couple of speeches might have been given, and Feingold might have told the entire U.S. Senate to suck him once your mom was done, but in the end anything and everything would have been authorized lest Bill O'Reilly make fun of Democrats or some imaginary voter living in Chris Matthews' head have concerns you might be the kind of pansy who drinks the wrong thing at the diner. They should have just owned up to it. Nobody would have stopped them.

Even with this major scary new revelatory whatever, no matter what it ends up being about, in about two weeks we're going to have a resolution declaring it's all okay, and nobody needs to go to jail or apologize or anything. I'd love to be proved wrong, by the way, but I don't think I will be.

A.

Rule of Journalism, Politics, World in General

It is always worse than you think:

President George W. Bush authorized other secret intelligence activities — which have yet to become public — even as he was launching the massive warrentless wiretapping program, the summary said. It describes the entire program as the "President's Surveillance Program."

The report describes the program as unprecedented and raises questions about the legal grounding used for its creation. It also says the intelligence agencies' continued retention and use of the information collected under the program should be carefully monitored.

I suppose that is AP-speak for "the report basically had a whole page that said SERIOUSLY GUYS WHAT THE SEVEN HELLS?" And I love this paragraph:

Many senior intelligence officials believe the program filled a gap in intelligence. Others, including FBI, CIA and National Counterterrorism Center analysts, said intelligence gathered by traditional means was often more specific and timely, according to the report.

Many people think it was great, except the FBI, CIA, NCC, NSC, all three branches of government, the military, the SEIU, Donald Duck, some dude in a tinfoil beanie waving a sign around, your mom, Paris Hilton, and Bo the First Dog. Other than that, it was universally praised.

The Bush White House acknowledged in 2005 that it allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without court orders.

AFTER THE NEW YORK TIMES EXPOSED THEM FOR THE LIARS THEY ARE. It wasn't like Bush got up one day, went out into the Rose Garden, stretched, belched, and said, "Just so you all know, I've been breaking the law for years heh heh heh."

Five former Bush administration officials refused to be interviewed, including former CIA Director George Tenet and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The others: former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card; former top Cheney aide David Addington; and John Yoo, who served as a deputy assistant attorney general.

Perhaps they can address questions for Yoo to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The report suggests Yoo ignored an explicit provision in the FISA law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.

SO AWESOME. Way to be, PI!

Dodd hasn't weighed in on this yet, according to his site, but Feingold, who back during the FISA immunity fight said basically, "I know all this stuff and trust me, it's worse than you think," has beseeched the rest of Congress and the White House to BITE HIM SO HARD:

“This report leaves no doubt that the warrantless wiretapping program was blatantly illegal and an unconstitutional assertion of executive power.  I once again call on the Obama administration and its Justice Department to withdraw the flawed legal memoranda that justified the program and that remain in effect today.”

A.

Robert McNamara Dies

Obit:

Finally, in 1993, after the Cold War ended, he undertook to write his memoirs because some of the lessons of Vietnam were applicable to the post-Cold War period "odd as though it may seem."

"In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" appeared in 1995. McNamara disclosed that by 1967 he had deep misgivings about Vietnam — by then he had lost faith in America's capacity to prevail over a guerrilla insurgency that had driven the French from the same jungled countryside.

Despite those doubts, he had continued to express public confidence that the application of enough American firepower would cause the Communists to make peace. In that period, the number of U.S. casualties — dead, missing and wounded — went from 7,466 to over 100,000.

Too little, too late. But of course, it was those filthy hippies who screwed that glorious war adventure all up.

A.

This Isn't Yours

Hey, Mr. President. This doesn't need to be your problem.

The Justice Department argues that the volume of material it needs to go through in the CIA’s 2004 inspector general report is just too great to meet any pre-August 31 timetable. Not only is the IG report itself 200 pages, that’s just one of 319 documents under review as part of the case.

The ACLU replies that the CIA and the Justice Department have already missed three deadlines for the agreed-upon disclosure, and lawyer Amrit Singh writes that she’s “disturbed by the clear trend emerging in the government’s repeated delays in disclosure of documents critical to a complete understanding of the CIA’s interrogation program.” She says that instead of delaying, Judge Alvin Hellerstein should order the “expediting the reprocessing and release of all CIA documents at issue.”

This is the previous administration's fuckup. This is the previous administration's regime of total and complete and nonstop fuckuppery. All this report will reveal is how Bush and his people fucked up, from day one, from the day they were handed a joystick and the keys to a Humvee. How they tortured people, for hours, for months, for no good reason, to the detriment of the very things they purported to be trying to accomplish. That's all that's in here.

So this isn't your deal, this won't make you or even the America of the present look bad. It'll just remind us all how grateful we are that that administration, the one that authorized such things, is no more. It'll just remind everyone that we no longer do shit like this, and won't we all — Americans, everybody all over the world — be happy to hear that?

Unless you make it your deal. Unless you make yourself complicit in this and every other Bush atrocity by continuing to cover up their crimes. Unless you continue to deny and delay and flap around with excuses and have your people blither on about how it's hard to read books really fast, like that's the biggest problem here. Every day you sit on things like this, and send your lawyers into court to argue that people can't handle pictures, or hearing about torture, or how it's hard to do the right thing really, is a day you get in deeper. The more time you spend hanging out with the horrors, the harder they become to disavow.

This isn't yours unless you make it yours. Stop making it yours.

A.

What It's Going To Take

You know, there are days ... I just ... you need a NUCLEAR TERRORISTIC STRIKE KILLING THOUSANDS to get your rocks off? Really? I can't ...

It's finally happened. They broke my brain.

A.

Kip's Another One

Dear Jeffrey Goldberg,

Welcome to the Internet. This is known as concern trolling:

The attacks in Arkansas and Washington are both manifestations of a radical type of intolerance, and they are linked in very deep ways. The left, generally speaking, doesn’t want to acknowledge Muslim intolerance, and the right, generally speaking, doesn’t want to acknowledge white, Christian intolerance. But they both exist, and they should both be acknowledged.

First of all, not going batshit crazy does not equal refusing to acknowledge intolerance. It's liberal groups like Amnesty International, after all, who've been on about human rights violations in totalitarian regimes for years, but I suppose that just means Teh Left is full of pussies. If we REALLY acknowledged Muslim intolerance we'd get behind blowing some Muslims up, instead of writing letters and making phone calls and trying to actually improve conditions for the desperate and impoverished. After all, Iraq is a monument to tolerance today, thanks to our glorious intervention. Jesus bugfuck Elvis CHRIST.

Second, I so hate this fucking nonsense, you guys. Like you can't look at the Tiller murder and the Arkansas murders and the Washington murder and conclude, "Basically the world is burning down, which, WTF? and shut up, Hannity." and leave it at that. In Goldberg's world, I guess you have to Sister Souljah somebody before you earn your street cred, but out here we just talk about the stuff we care about without worrying that it doesn't rack up Conservative Points that we can redeem for a little plastic frog at the skeeball ticket counter.

Third, the right is perfectly happy to acknowledge Christian intolerance. They call it their base.

A.

Obama's Fault

Our president has managed to drive racists insane.

Because the fact that they might want to shoot up a museum dedicated to remembrance of brutal murders isn't a sign they were nuts ANYWAY.

Also: You stay classy, Free Republic:

Especially since it sounds like he was one of you, or at least found a warm reception among you.

By the way, if TV commentators want to start talking about the Freepi, let's not forget Bush invited them to the White House to party with him.

A.

Holy Shit, Does This Thing Still Work?

Hey hey, everybody.

Sorry I've been a ghost lately.  Things have taken a turn for the busy, and I don't really have lots of computer time for a bit. 

Oh, I've had things I've wanted to comment on.  From the usual right-wing stupidity, to what-the-fuck stories regarding economics, or various statistical illiteracies.

But I couldn't not say something about George Tiller.

And, right now, I don't have full-throated outrage to share.  I'm not even really shocked.

I'm just sad.

That will change, I know, because there's work to be done.

But I'm sad that this bullshit still goes on.  That a group of fucking busybodies have decided that people that they've never met making decisions about potential people they'll never meet is the worst sin ever in the history of the universe.  And they wave their bloody fetus pictures, and shout that "abortion is murder," and feel smug and righteous because, basically, they've never (by and large) had to make any hard decisions in that arena themselves.

Dr. Tiller was one of three late-term abortion providers--not in Wichita, not in the state of Kansas, but in the fucking United States of America.  Roughly speaking, that means there was one late-term abortion provider for every 50 million women (of all ages) in the US. 

Listen, anti-abortion people.  Late-term abortions aren't frivolous things.  Nobody says to themselves, "You know, I've been meaning to get an abortion, but then it was football season, and things picked up with my social life, and I just couldn't get around to it.  I think today I'll go get my nails done, get that late-term abortion, then go shopping for a new swimsuit."

Okay?  It's not a trivial consideration.  It's a serious medical procedure, and entails no small risk to the woman who has to undergo it.  But, sometimes, it's the least worst option people face.  That you can't see that--that you can't understand that these are human beings making painful and unpleasant choices about their own lives--indicates that you have no empathy (to use a lately much-maligned word), and no understanding that women are, in fact, humans with decision-making agency.  Killing doctors will not, ever, change those underlying conditions.  What you are doing (apart from making spouses, friends, and relatives grieve unnecessarily) is making life far, far more difficult for people who already have enough difficulties to last a lifetime.

This needs more fleshing out, but I have to be off to my job now.

So I'm sad.

But that'll pass.  There's more work to do.

So What?

I don't get this idea that if Pelosi knew about torture it makes torture okay. It doesn't. It just makes Pelosi suck. You do not get a free pass if you knew about it and did nothing as a Democrat. You do not get a free pass if you knew about it and approved as a Republican. You do not get a free pass AT ALL. The stupid right-wing fuckmooks pushing this argument can't comprehend that this isn't a partisan issue to those of us who truly give a shit about the rule of law.

If Pelosi knew about torture and did nothing to stop it that doesn't mean anybody arguing against torture loses the argument and should go home and we should keep torturing. It isn't about Republicans torturing, it's about America torturing, and anybody who approved of it and/or knew and didn't stop it should be drummed out of public life forever.

Any other stupid bullshit need dealing with today? Oh, yeah, there's this:

The tribunal system — set up after the military began sweeping detainees off the battlefields of Afghanistan in late 2001 — has been under repeated challenges from human rights and legal organizations because it denied defendants many of the rights they would be granted in a civilian courtroom.

In a statement late Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called Obama's decision to revamp and restart the tribunals a step toward strengthening U.S. detention policies that have been derided worldwide.

"I continue to believe it is in our own national security interests to separate ourselves from the past problems of Guantanamo," said Graham, who has been working with the administration on issues related to detainees. "I agree with the president and our military commanders that now is the time to start over and strengthen our detention policies. I applaud the president's actions today."

Graham was an Air Force lawyer and is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Another member of the panel, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., welcomed Obama's decision, saying the president "has reinforced that we are at war, and that the laws of war should apply to these prisoners."

You know, in the reality-based community, when you've pleased Linds and Holy Joe, you're having a pretty shitty week.

A.

Department of Well This Had Better Be a Joke of Some Kind

It's not April Fool's and this shit isn't funny. What is it, Piss Off Everybody Week in the White House? We're celebrating International Suck and Fail Day? Seriously, this is even an option?

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The proposal being floated with members of Congress is another indication of President Barack Obama's struggles to establish his counter-terrorism policies, balancing security concerns against attempts to alter Bush-administration practices he has harshly criticized.

[snip]

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who met this week with White House Counsel Greg Craig to discuss the administration's plans, said among the proposals being studied is seeking authority for indefinite detentions, with the imprimatur of some type of national-security court.

Sen. Graham said he wants to work with the administration to pass legislation to increase judicial oversight of military commissions, but noted the legal difficulties that would arise.

"This is a difficult question. How do you hold someone in prison without a trial indefinitely?" Sen. Graham said.

YOU DON'T YOU FUCKMOOK.

Any other questions?

Before the day is out somebody better nip this shit in the bud. What the hell is going on over there?

A.

America Needs Proof

This is particularly sad and pointless:

The Defense Department was set to release hundreds of photographs showing alleged abuse of prisoners in detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the images we remember from Abu Ghraib," the president said on the South Lawn of the White House. "But they do represent conduct that didn't conform with the Army manual."

Obama said the publication of the photos would not add any additional benefit to investigations being carried out into detainee abuse -- and could put future inquires at risk.

"In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would further flame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger. ... I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse," Obama said.

I'll say to this president what I would have said to the last one. Do you really think they don't know what we're doing? I'll grant you they haven't seen images, not the new ones, anyway, but since when was proof of monstrosity ever required to turn someone, something, somewhere, into a monster to frighten children? Do you really think keeping back the photos will keep back the hatred of America that power-hungry lunatics use to subvert poor and desperate people and turn them to violence? Do you really think this is going to make any difference at all?

Do you really think that, having seen proof after proof after proof in the past eight years that we are not remotely who we say we are that a bunch of new photos will be the straw that breaks it? I'm taking your argument at face value here, Mr. President, do you really believe this is how it works? That having heard there are terrible photos of terrible things, terrorists will only react and use such information if they actually see the photos released? You think this isn't already in the recruiting brochure, that they're holding the printing pending artwork? Seriously? Not for nothing, but if American commanders were so concerned about the consequences of images of brutality getting out, they might have worked a little harder to make sure that a) there was no brutality and b) people weren't taking snapshots of it like they were at fucking Disneyland.

I ask this in the face of all the experts with their expert knowledge, I ask this because to a girl with a web site who doesn't consider herself exceptionally intelligent or anything this is a really, really, really incredible argument to ask the American people to swallow. Maybe you're making it in all sincerity. I don't really care. It's a bullshit argument and it's insulting to all of us. I say this as someone who voted for you. I say this as someone who voted for you and fully expected to be disappointed by you, many times, and I expected to tell you so, loudly and often, because that's how this works. In some cases you've done better than I would have hoped, in some cases you've done worse. This isn't me saying OH WOE IS ME I WUZ BETRAYED BY DEMOCRAT SOCIALIST JESUS. This is me saying, you blew this fucking call.

Al Qaeda may not need proof of our perfidy to use our misdeeds against us; those predisposed to hate us may not need proof to be enraged. America needs proof of what's been done because our national capacity for self-delusion has not yet reached its zenith, and until you shove something in our faces a thousand times we're pretty damn happy to pretend it doesn't exist. America needs proof because until we see it we don't believe it, and we need to believe this if we're ever to stop it from happening again. You're not in the job of protecting people from the consequences of their country's history, you're in the business of serving this country, and we need to see what happened. Do you really think the Taliban are the ones that need the proof?

A.

Some Other Mother's Son

Richard Cohen asks several stupid questions:

But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it.

You comfortably situated loudmouthed ponce. The point wasn't that it worked or didn't work. The point wasn't that Jack Bauer sometimes had to torture people to stop a ticking time bomb. That was NEVER the point. It was, on occasion, an addendum to the point which is YOU DO NOT DO THIS EVER, whether it works or not. Not because your enemies don't deserve to get it but because you don't deserve to dish it out. Among "those on the political left," who by the way have been right about everything in the past eight years while you sat on your hands for fear of looking like a pussy, the point wasn't about the efficacy of torture, it was about the rule of law.

Dumbass. I don't care whether the CIA tortured people because they really thought it would work or they really thought there was a ticking time bomb or because it was Tuesday and they were bored and yes, they wanted to do it for the hell of it. I am supremely uninterested in the why of what they did. I'm interested in the what, and the who, and the when, because that's the sort of stuff you need to know to know if they BROKE THE LAW.

Cheney is a one-man credibility gap. In the past, he has said, "We know they [the Iraqis] have biological and chemical weapons," when it turned out we knew nothing of the sort. He insisted that "the evidence is overwhelming" that al-Qaeda had been in high-level contact with Saddam Hussein's regime when the "evidence" was virtually nonexistent. And he repeatedly asserted that Iraq had a menacing nuclear weapons program. As a used-car dealer, he would have no return customers.

Still, every dog has his day, and Cheney is barking up a storm on the efficacy of what can colloquially be called torture. He says he knows of two CIA memos that support his contention that the harsh interrogation methods worked and that many lives were saved. "That's what's in those memos," he told Schieffer. They talk "specifically about different attack planning that was underway and how it was stopped."

You know, I've met people who can't commit to a job, or a house, or a person. People who dither over the menu and fret about what to order at the bar. I know people with commitment issues but I swear to Peanut Butter Jesus that I have never seen anybody as unwilling to commit to a conviction as the premiere "liberal" columnist of the Washington Post.

Cheney sucks and has always been wrong about everything, but maybe he's right about this, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt I do not deign to extend to any of his dreadlocked pot-smoking protester critics, because they're not real men like Dick and me.

Inescapably, it is about life and death -- not ideology, but people hurling themselves from the burning World Trade Center. If Cheney is right, then let the debate begin: What to do about enhanced interrogation methods? Should they be banned across the board, always and forever?

YES.

Next?

In political terms, Cheney has been a free man ever since he eschewed any presidential ambitions. He became the most impolitic of politicians and continues in that role, taking neither a vow of penitence nor a vow of silence in his vice presidential afterlife.

How selfless of him. How kind of Dick to continue to favor us with his impartial insights now that all he has to care about is his immortal, noble soul. It's so sweet, it almost makes me forget how he GOT A LOT OF PEOPLE DEAD AND LIED ABOUT IT. And all he has to care about is that his reputation is now somewhere on the global scale of ick between chlamydia and genocide, so naturally he has no interest in anything but making America better with his magic words.

Kill me now. Really, what the fuck does he have to care? It won't be Richard Cohen's children being waterboarded. It won't be Dick Cheney's children under the lights, in a box with bugs, hooked up to electrodes and made to scream for his amusement and estimation of his manhood. It'll be other people, who they will never have to meet, so it will be perfectly all right for them to continue to talk about how it's noble to torture people and have them deported in secret because their imaginations make it okay. They'll never have to know the cost. I think even if you shoved the bill under their noses, they'd just push it away.

A.

Torture

What Diane said.

A.

Like Watching a Dog Do a Math Problem

Richard Cohen, ladies and gentlemen:

On April 16, President Obama released the now-infamous torture memos along with a covering statement that said the CIA's old interrogation methods not only failed to "make us safer" but undermined "our moral authority." A week later, a woman holding the hand of a child walked into a throng in Baghdad and blew herself up. Apparently she had not heard of our new moral authority.

So, wait, releasing the memos was supposed to stop all terrorism ever? DAMN, no wonder people are so upset about them, because that hasn't worked at all!

If the threat of torture works -- if it has worked at least once -- then it follows that torture itself would work. Some in the intelligence field, including a former CIA director, say it does, and I assume they say this on the basis of evidence. They can't all be fools or knaves.

Why not? There's no shortage of them at the Washington Post.

But it is important to understand that abolishing torture will not make us safer. Terrorists do not give a damn about our morality, our moral authority or what one columnist called "our moral compass." George Bush was certainly disliked in much of the world, but the Sept. 11 attacks were planned while Bill Clinton was in office, and he offended no one with the possible exception of the Christian right.

Hah hah hah ... wait. What? This argument is stuffed so full of straw you might as well stand it up in a field to scare the crows away. Obama didn't say releasing the memos would make us safer, he said torture didn't make us safer. Does a girl with a web site really have to explain the difference to a Washington Post columnist? Also, I just have to jump in to juxstapose a few sentences here:

If the threat of torture works -- if it has worked at least once -- then it follows that torture itself would work.

[snip]

If Obama thinks the world will respond to his new torture policy, he is seriously misguided. Indeed, he has made things a bit easier for terrorists who now know what will not happen to them if they get caught.

Follow all that? The threat of torture may or may not work, so knowing all the horrible things that might happen to you or not happen to you at American hands if you do terrorism will make you more likely to do terrorism, because that's not in any way the threat of torture. I don't want to hear one more word about standards and rigorous edting of newspapers from anybody at the Washington Post.

The horror of Sept. 11 resides in me like a dormant pathogen. It took a long time before I could pass a New York fire station -- the memorials still fresh -- without tearing up. I vowed vengeance that day -- yes, good Old Testament-style vengeance -- and that ember glows within me still.

SO GO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT or shut the hell up. God. The world is not a vengeance buffet from which you can either choose an option or bitch that there's nothing there you like. I'm sorry if the torture served up by Head Chef Bush didn't tempt your appetite, Rich, but there's plenty of places down the street for you to nosh.

I mean, really, you want vengeance? Teach some Afghan school children to read. Hell, teach some children around here to read. I don't know what the hell it is with guys like this, who seem to be waiting for the proper avenue for their holy rage, but the world is not short of stuff you can do to piss the Taliban and Al Qaeda off, not the least of which would be to stop being such a wanker all the time.

I know it is offensive to compare almost anyone or anything to the Nazis, but the Bush-era memos struck me as echoes from the past. Here, once again, were the squalid efforts of legal toadies to justify the unjustifiable. Here, again, was a lesson that needs constant refreshing: Before you can torture anyone, you must first torture the law. When that happens, we are all on the rack.

This whole column is just so typically Cohen: "I'm against torture, but not like a pussy or anything about it, because I swore eternal vengeance the likes of which the world has not seen, said vengeance to be expressed mostly in writing about how hippies suck. Torture works, in fact the threat of torture works, but releasing memos that basically point out you're fucked if Americans catch you terrorism-ing willl never work, because Obama hasn't stopped all suicide bombings ever. So there."

Schmuck.

A.

Projection

I really think I hate this about our pundit class more than anything:

To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.

So I’m wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America’s checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

Well hey, so long as everybody screwed up, it's all fine! So long as there wasn't a single voice raised in opposition to what was done, so long as we didn't shout down anybody who had a different idea of things, so long as nobody who spoke up against this bullshit was punished, drummed of public life, called a traitor on national television or demonized for daring to opine that instituting a regime of torture was pretty fucking stupid, so long as we are all equally complicit in this there's no need to punish anybody. Because if it's all of us, then it's none of us really, and isn't it funny how that always works out so beautifully?

I am just so violently opposed to the idea of transferring your moral cowardice onto the country at large to get it to share the blame for your own wussitude on the fundamental questions of our time. It is just so incredibly cheap and small and mean. Fact of the matter is, not everybody lost their damn minds, and it is a profound dishonor to those who held to their convictions in the face of overwhelming public pressure to go all kill-crazy that we lump them in with the nutballs painting their chests red, white and blue and high-fiving their buddies while they beat up Arab shopkeepers.

Cohen would like us to think of this time in our nation's history in the passive voice, or at the very least with the royal we. He refers to Sept. 11 and its aftermath as a "national trauma," and declares "There but for the grace of God go I." No. Absolutely not. We didn't all go mad and even if we had, collective madness is still madness. You are not exempt from responsibility because your neighbor went nuts too. That isn't how this works. There not but for the grace of God but for the love of country and ironclad devotion to its principles went many, and to pretend you could just as easily have gone the other way, to pretend it was something akin to luck or a miracle you didn't ... it's monstrous. For all his canting about forgiveness in that piece, Cohen's not advocating reconciliation. He's simply expanding the blame.

Via Balloon Juice.

A.

9-12 People

So I was watching the re-run of the Colbert Report last night and they were playing this bit that Scout linked to earlier:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The 10/31 Project
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From the site of the crazy:

The 9-12 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.

That same feeling – that commitment to country is what we are hoping to foster with this idea. We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.

You do? Really? God, I know it shouldn't surprise me at this point but the narcissism, honestly. It took 3,000 dead people to make Glenn Beck and his fellow freaks feel like they had a purpose in life and were I his or their therapist I might feel inclined to explore that further but as someone who was walking around on Sept. 12, 2001 all I can say is it's completely fucking sick.

How self-involved do you have to be to make a terrorist attack about how you felt about your inner Republican? How tiny and selfish and pathetic do you have to be to need a national disaster, a terrorist attack, to give your life meaning? What on EARTH are you doing all day every day if it takes THAT to wake you up? We heard this over and over starting about two weeks after, a parade of jackoffs on the local news autowittering on about how 9/11 made them go back to church or love their families more, and all I could think then and now was what the chocolate croissant fuck is the matter with you that you don't love your family now?

(And hey, maybe your family sucks. Should all their suckitude go away because somebody else's family got dead? Is that how it works?)

Tragedies that happen to othe people can be wake-up calls to us all, sure, but to cant about it in public, to make that tragedy out to be some kind of benefit to you and thus make it okay? To talk about the silver lining of a mass murder? Think, people, reason. Is that ever something anyone should do? In front of the people who actually did suffer? That's fucking parasitic. Take your neediness elsewhere. To your shrink's couch, maybe. That's the only person obligated to give a shit.

If your life doesn't have meaning, if you don't value the people who love you, if you lack purpose in the world and a sense of dedication and direction, Glenn Beck can't fix that for you and 9/11 sure as shit can't. And if you need reminding what you are all about, you need to carve out some space in your schedule to figure it out without picking up a burning Twin Towers T-shirt at Ground Zero.

More than that, I really do dispute the idea that we've all lost our way here somehow. News to the north, but a pretty healthy portion of Americans have always valued their lives and their work and the people who loved them, have always loved their country and always felt closely tied to its purpose and their own. The critical assumption Beck and his mouthbreathing followers are making is that everybody sucks as much as they do, and I think I can speak for the rest of America when I say thanks for your concern but we're doing just fine with our sense of self-worth out here.

A.

ps. Oh, and some of us, on 9/12? Were fucking assholes.

Time To Think About Torture

It's becoming an exercise in masochism, reading back over what was said in the early days of the Bush administration, back when many people still thought the president was due the benefit of the doubt. Jonathan Alter, who still gets invited to all the right parties, for example:

In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren't talking at all.

Couldn't we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly "Sept. 10"--living in a country that no longer exists.

[snip]

We can't legalize physical torture; it's contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.

I got pointed back to Alter's toolier prose (yes, he was at one time toolier than he is now, though I know it's hard to fathom) by this:

"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists. "I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA...."

This lengthy article, by Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, appeared in The Washington Post on December 26, 2002, only months after the capture of Abu Zubaydah. A similarly lengthy report followed a few months later on the front page of The New York Times ("Interrogations: Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World"). The blithe, aggressive tone of the officials quoted—"We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them"—bespeaks a very different political temper, one in which a prominent writer in a national newsmagazine could headline his weekly column "Time to Think About Torture," noting in his subtitle that in this "new world...survival might well require old techniques that seemed out of the question.

The reason we here left blogtopia get so het up over faux-liberal put-upon pussitude like Alter's is that we've been listening to it nonstop for like nineteen thousand fucking years, for fuck's sake. It's been going on forever, it's the same dumb pose it always was, and Mark Danner's piece demonstrates pretty clearly that it bore real consequences in the form of people having the shit kicked out of them. People Jonathan Alter has never met, probably doesn't care to meet, and has forgotten he wrote about them in the first place, if his current crop of columns bemoaning the death of true bipartisanship are any indication.

Either it never occurred to them that if they were wrong about this whole badass Manly Men Kick Tied-Up Dudes For Fun pose they'd look like just the world's biggest dicks, or they didn't care because eight years later we'd all be freaked out about something entirely different and thus wouldn't give enough of a shit to try to get them fired for being the world's biggest dicks.

Either way, seems to be working out pretty nicely for Alter. Not so much, for others:

A naked man chained in a small, very cold, very white room is for several days strapped to a bed, then for several weeks shackled to a chair, bathed unceasingly in white light, bombarded constantly with loud sound, deprived of food; and whenever, despite cold, light, noise, hunger, the hours and days force his eyelids down, cold water is sprayed in his face to force them up.

Nobody said this was going to be pretty.

A.

The Challenge

WaPo:

Once detainees are sent home, even to friendly nations, the United States has very little influence over what happens to them. Convictions are not guaranteed. Neither is surveillance by home countries. And for those allowed to go free, assistance in resuming a normal life is rare.

Although the United States may never say so publicly, it is likely to want more explicit promises from the countries where detainees are repatriated, and the administration will seek the establishment of rehabilitation programs, along the lines of one in Saudi Arabia, that provide former jihadists with jobs, homes and money to pay for dowries.

But there is also a view in some quarters of the U.S. government that cases such as Ajmi's are the inevitable result of locking up 779 foreigners in an austere military prison, without access to courts or consular representation, and subjecting them to interrogation techniques that detainees say amount to torture. Some of them are bound to seek revenge, these officials believe. The challenge is figuring out which ones.

That's the challenge, huh? Locking up 779 foreigners in an "austere" military prison and subjecting them to interrogation "techniques" that the GENEVA CONVENTIONS say amount to torture, and our "challenge" is figuring out which ones we need to keep torturing after we "release" them?

God.

While we're at it, thanks a bunch, President Obama, for making me agree with Right Wing News and its ilk that this is some bullshit. Of course, they think about this primarily in terms of how liberals owe them an apology for being so OMG MEEN:

All statements from Barack Obama come with expiration dates. That's something that the HopeandChangizoids have begun to learn just a month after the dawning of the Age of Obama. A lot of them owe Bush -- and us -- apologies.

Yes, you're absolutely right. Pwned booyah foam finger that's how we do things downtown bitches, because the rule of law was never a matter of principle, or we would have voted for John McCain.

We are torturing people in secret lawless prisons, and the Washington Post thinks the challenge is to figure out who we need to keep torturing and who we need to buy off, and the wingnut brigade thinks the challenge is that people need to send them Hallmark cards. It's 8:34 a.m. Monday where I am and I am already exhausted.

A.

Impossible

An impossible position?

Not really. You just have to do the right thing, the thing you promised to do, the thing you know is the right thing to do, no matter how the wingnuts howl and the Very Serious People lecture and your desire for political expediency nags you. It's not that impossible. You have to be willing to override every idea of the past eight years, that "what if" is enough to violate someone's rights, that secrecy is always better than openness, that the benefit of the doubt is always due government in these cases. But it's not impossible.

Let's not begin the Obama administration by setting the bar so low we might trip over it and calling something impossible when it's just very, very, very hard and painful. I say this all the time: Don't tell me you can't do that. Tell me you don't want to, or you don't feel like it, and at least I'll respect your honesty and know what I'm arguing with is just laziness and not blindness, but don't insult both of us but claiming something's impossible when it's not.

The nightmare scenario in cases like these, by the way, is not that those on the side of openness are wrong, and someone somewhere is proved to be a terrorist let go on a technicality. The nightmare scenario is that those on the side of openness are right, and let their fear of a mistake dictate their actions, thus keeping an innocent or unjustly accused person from freedom.

A.

May the Road Rise to Meet You in the Face, You Treasonous Son of a Bitch

A couple of weeks ago I posted up a site that allowed you to post your goodbye letters to Bush.

This is mine: 

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

As you ride off into the sunset of whatever life is left to you, I find myself wishing many things. I wish, for example, that I believed in the afterlife described by my childhood priests, so that I could imagine the orderlies in Hell preparing you a bed. Which would be chained to the wall by the way, and you chained to it, as a hurricane bore down upon you.

I wish I believed in the courage of Congressional Democrats to investigate and prosecute the wrongs you directed be done in America's name.

I wish I thought we'd figured this out, and would be smarter the next time some shallow snake-oil salesman comes by to tell us government sucks and we should elect him so he can prove it. 

I wish I could cling to some notion of cosmic justice that would give you yours threefold back again, so that at least you wouldn't get to stand around and smirk that once again, you lazy, fratty asshole, you've gotten away with something.

Most of all, though, I wish you had been a better president. I wish you had done the job well. Contrary to the arguments made by your defenders, I didn't root for you to fail. I never did. I greeted your installment by the Supreme Court with exhaustion and resignation, and your first few months in office with general skepticism, but I never thought, "Boy, I hope he just falls on his face and kills a lot of people and wrecks our economy and blows holes in the sand for five years." I thought, "Maybe it'll be okay. Maybe it won't be so bad."

And when 9/11 happened I said to myself and those around me, Democrats all, "Well, let's see what he does now." My life has not been devoid of stories about unlikely heroes arising from feckless halfwit princelings, so I was prepared for that to happen. Hopeful, even. Who doesn't want everything to be okay? Who doesn't recognize that you being a terrible failure would hurt us far more than it would hurt you?

I wish you had done the job. I wish you had found and tried and executed Osama bin Laden, and rebuilt Afghanistan the way we should have decades ago. I wish you had given us real security, not this dance of removing our shoes and putting lotion in a baggie. I wish you had told us to conserve and sacrifice, not spend and eat. I wish you had listened to those in the armed forces and those in Congress and those on the street when they said, don't invade Iraq. I wish you had listened to Iraqis, afterwards, when they said, help us stop the looting and violence.

I wish you had listened to the Gulf Coast's people when they called out for help. I wish you had listened to the sick and their doctors when they asked you to grant research to cure their disesases. I wish you had listened to women when we said, we value our autonomy.

I wish you had listened to us all when we said we are more than this, we are better than this, ask us and there's nothing we won't give you. I wish you had had faith in us equal to that which we placed in you. And I wish you had been worthy of what we wanted from you, and from ourselves.

I wish you had done and been all of this, but you didn't and you weren't, and so what we're left with are the memories of the dead, the horrors of the living, with boarded-up houses and empty streets, a place so broken we barely recognize it anymore. It's hard to imagine punishment fitting for that. It's hard, having wished all this for you, to wish anything more, but I do:

May you live a life of quiet contemplation of every single one of your failures. May you live a life hemmed in by those you hurt, in a cell physical or otherwise, papered with the faces of your dead. May you be  sheltered from the rain of rotten tomatoes and sour heads of cabbage by a small, broken umbrella. May you be gnawed upon by the hunger you fostered in the poor, chilled by the cold from which you refused to shield the homeless, beset by the illnesses you refused to help cure, subjected to the indignities you inflicted upon others.

May your life be long, and healthy, and full of everything you gave to America and the world. May you come to know exactly who you are. May you come to recognize the face in the mirror each morning.

May it give to you a fraction of the nightmares you deserve.

No love at all,

A.

As we do bid Bush farewell, however, Echidne reminds us that it isn't just Bush to whom we need to say goodbye:

Of course the real blame must be shared. Shared by voters who wanted a leader who would never, ever change his mind for any reason whatsoever, and who confused that with leadership. Or voters who wanted a godly man as a leader, which turned out to be a man who thinks that god talks to him in private. Or voters who decided that they would never vote someone smarter than themselves into that office and that beer and hot dogs was the way to judge someone's suitability in leading the so-called free world.

The blame must also be shared by those in the Republican Party who let a fanatic and out-of-touch neoconservative faction take over all practical policies, thus turning them into one the greatest engineered social and political experiments of our times, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands (at least). That fanatic and out-of-touch neoconservative faction, with its free-market religion, also had its hands in kneading the dough from which our current recession was baked. So when we don't get our daily bread, remember why not and avoid that same mistake in the future.

And the blame must surely be shared by the Democratic Party, too, those who sat quietly, triangulated furiously and cowered helplessly in the shadows while trying to save their own political careers from oblivion. Never mind that the country itself has turned towards Oblivion on its arc through history.

Last but not least, the media (with few exceptions) has spent the last eight years pressing Bush's head against its collective bosom, instead of alerting us to the dangers of the heedless policies of the government. It took several major disasters for any of that to change. I hope the media stays on their toes and aggressive in the future, even though it will look as if Obama is getting a shabbier treatment than Bush did. Indeed, I hope that all future presidents will get a shabby treatment from the press, if by 'shabby' we mean a vigilant and critical stance.

An informed, engaged, empowered, energetic citizenry would not have allowed this to happen. Could not have allowed this to happen. I'm not calling everybody lazy; I'm calling the club of the most of us paralyzed, so unaccustomed to such staggering incompetence that when it came, all we found ourselves able to do was stand open-mouthed in shock at the brazenness of it.

And when the shock wore off, when it became "okay" to express doubt again, to express opposition again, to say things like Bill Maher and Natalie Maines said, well, by then it was too late, wasn't it? By then they were dug in, and those of us who did stand up, who did yell and scream, who did march and write and call, who did actually vote, especially in 2004, who did try to stop this from continuing, didn't stand a chance. Understand I'm not saying I'm not glad we did it, because people, on balance you're gonna get screwed anyway so you might as well act like grown-ups if for no other reason than you need to be able to look at yourself in the mirror in your cell, but we were pushing against the granite cliffs of the earth trying to move it, by the time we tried at all.

I hesitate to make lessons out of the Bush presidency. I don't think horrific things that happen are supposed to be assigned a purpose that makes them okay. That's cheap, and exculpatory, and gross, when those who truly paid for Bush's folly are still coming home in boxes, still trying to rebuild their houses, still learning how to walk again. I don't think I get to tell them, "Here's what you suffered for, this greeting card I'm about to impart." But if we do not learn, then why go on? Why keep working and fighting and marching and calling and writing if we do not change and grow and push upward?

If there is a lesson here, it is that hesitating, even for two seconds, in the aftermath of a crisis and granting extraordinary deference to those who we should always regard with skepticism, to hold back even for a moment, is to hold back too long. To talk even for a moment about political expediency in matters of lives and war, imprisonment and torture,  to talk even for a moment about it being unwise to speak out against injustice, to advise anyone even for a moment to hold his or her tongue because it would upset people, is to blight the soul of this country, no more, no less.

There have been examples of great courage in the past eight years. Examples that I cannot forget. I remember the week before the Iraq war began, and protesters shut down Lake Shore Drive here in Chicago, stopping traffic with their bodies to try to stop what was coming. I remember being jammed into the Cook County Clerk's office, covering the marriage equality march that had begun outside and ended with people sitting on the floor, holding hands, quietly insisting, "Marry us, or marry no one." I remember standing outside a polling place in 2004, having cast my vote for John Kerry, thinking, "This man has taken a lot of crap on our behalf and I do not feel like we deserve it." As it turned out, we didn't. I remember watching Richard Clarke testify before the 9/11 commission. I remember hearing Chris Dodd stand up against FISA. I remember readers of this blog slamming hammers into drywall. I remember Denver and Grant Park and Washington, DC. I remember this.

But the examples that will stay with me are those of great cowardice. Great hatred. Great fear. Smallness. Divisiveness. Rage. Contempt.

I remember watching, horrified, as Katrina struck on the Gulf Coast, and as Bush strummed his guitar and ate cake with John McCain. And I remember driving around in a van with Scout and Mr. A and the First Draft Krewe, around the streets I'd seen on television, two years after the storm, and I remember how quiet it was. I remember asking someone, are you allowed to take down the markings on the doors, that say if bodies were found inside the houses or not, and a man who lived there responded, "allowed?" and laughed, because there was no one to tell anyone the outlines of this world anymore.

I remember pulling a fax off the machine, at my newspaper, that said the Bush administration's legal argument in an INS case was that the judicial branch of government had no jurisdiction to "second-guess" the decisions of the executive in matters of national security. I remember handing it to a colleague to read, asking, "Does this say what I think it says?" I remember it being 2003, and nobody caring all that much that the administration was breaking the law. I remember it being 2005, and suddenly everyone discovered separation of powers and the administration's lawlessness, and I remember thinking, "This has been going on so much longer than you think it has." I remember that being the beginning of the end of it, for me, the end of being able to convince myself it was going to be okay.

I remember hearing Michelle Malkin and John Hinderaker call journalists murderers and terrorists. I remember Liberal Hunting Permits. I remember Rope, Tree, Journalist. I remember the Freepi calling me an ugly whore. I remember all the fights I had with people I thought were my friends. I remember all the fights I had with my family. I remember how it became okay to say that war heroes shot themselves, families of the dead were hookers and pimps, interfaith marriage was weird, gays and atheists were evil, poor people were whiners, and most of all how there was nothing, literally nothing, you couldn't say and get away with it, so long as it was meant to silence somebody trying to speak out.

The heroism doesn't erase that. It doesn't salve or soothe it. It doesn't make it okay, and you know why? Because we barely know who the heroes are yet. There are stories that haven't been told because they can't be and won't be, for years. My grandchildren will be hearing the recently declassified tales of all those who were silenced and stifled these long eight years, and coming home from school and saying, "Did you know?"

Did I know? No. I hoped. I believed. But I didn't know the full fury of what had been done in my name. These things stain forward in time, discoloring everything. We can't absolve anyone today. Bush may be getting on a helicopter and he may be flying away from us, but what he's leaving behind we hardly know about yet. I am not happy, today. I am not relieved, today. I am still enraged. I am still afraid. I am still jumping every time the national phone rings, still jerking away every time somebody reaches out, still sure that, like the last eight years, the next eight will be a trick of some kind.

If Bush leaves a legacy, at all, that is it: The after-image of fear and suspicion, like the ghost of a light bulb lingering in the darkness after you close your eyes, like a national retina burn. 

A.

Gitmo: Closed

Quit fucking around:

They've just successfully moved the goalposts. We are now engaged in a battle to persuade Obama that he must unequivocally and publicly disavow what those two jaded, decadent sadists just suggested was necessary lest he risk Americans being killed. Good luck to us on that. Considering Obama's propensity for consensus, I would guess that he will find some way to appease them. (Maybe he'll vow to make sure that the torturers don't enjoy it, as a sop to the liberal freaks.)

But I would suggest that Obama contemplate one little thing before he decides to try to find "middle ground" on torture. It is a trap. If he continues to torture in any way or even tacitly agrees to allow it in certain circumstances, the intelligence community will make sure it is leaked. They want protection from both parties and there is no better way to do it than to implicate Obama. And the result of that will be to destroy his foreign policy.

If the man who represents the second chance this country's been given around the world to repudiate the horrors of the Bush years is revealed to have perpetuated the same horrors, his credibility and foreign policy will be in shambles. And there are many people buried in the intelligence and military establishments who would be happy to make sure that happens.

I'm going to be more blunt about this than Digby is. Quit imagining there's a way around this that doesn't make you the jerk. Quit trying to figure out how to do this without being accused of setting known terrorists free by sticky Republican pusbags who are trying to get work in the wake of Norm Coleman's office being Krazy Glued shut. There is no way out of this that doesn't make you the guy that has to say this:

We have had the debates over our justice system over 200 years. Those debates continue to an extent, but we have endlessly tried to perfect it so that they offer fair trials based on evidence without compromising civil liberties. There is simply no need to invent anything new. To the extent that "evidence" against detainees has been tainted because it was extracted through torture, that probably should have been considered before the torturing. Evidence obtained by torture is inadmissable in every civilized court in the world, and it would simply be unconstitutional to create a system that allowed it, not to mention distasteful.

So the new president had best just say that, get it over with, let the monkeys fling shit at each other until they run out of shit or their arms get tired, whichever comes first, and then get back to work. Enough already. There's no other way out of this that makes sense.

A.

'A Unified, Unifying, Pearl Harbor Sort of Purple American Fury'

My bookshelves were a mess.

I worked at a used bookstore right after college and they basically paid me half in money, and half in pages, so I left Madison, Wisconsin ten years ago with fourteen boxes of books, to marry a pack rat with ten boxes of his own. We lived first in a town with a limited library but with proximity to the great bookstores of the city, so we added to our collection accordingly. Friends wrote books, gave us books, lent us books, we lent books back, and when we last moved, six years ago, we had forty boxes. I shudder to think what will happen if we ever move again.

I do not organize books. I take them down and put them back and count on my increasingly faulty memory to tell me where I put them. I lend books, books are lent to me. I read history, mystery, novels, poetry, plays, I save newspapers and magazines and they all wind up piled on the shelves in our spare bedroom until the place looks like what arsonists dream about. The shelves were messy, and today, when our brunch plans were canceled by a friend's unfortunate cold, I decided to make myself useful, yank every single volume down, dust, straighten and organize.

In the process of which, I was going through all the magazines we saved after 9/11, or rather the magazines Mr. A saved; I was too busy writing then to read. And so I'd never really sat down with Time's 9/11 Tribute or Memorial or Whatever issue until this afternoon. Good God. I mean, good vanilla chai buttercream God. Here's Lance Morrow:

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage. What's needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury—a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J. … Elián … Chandra …) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism (as has happened in the recent past, when, for example, you might hear someone say, "Terrible what he did, of course, but, you know, the Unabomber does have a point, doesn't he, about modern technology?").

Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness—and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred.

Which is, incidentally, exactly what happened. Lots of people got good and righteously pissed off. Then about a third of them, unfortunately the third on TV, decided to have a little contest to see if anybody was insufficiently angry, and to use one or two people who weren't amped up enough about a war to smear the two-thirds of the country that wasn't still functionally insane two years later.

Anybody who said, "Erm, about Iraq, shouldn't we try not to blow it up if we can't un-blow it up afterward ..." was the equivalent of a dolphin-fucking vegan, or something, meanwhile we were torturing people in secret prisons and it was gauche to mention it. The New York Times politely withheld a story about how we were illegally wiretapping ourselves and Bush got re-elected, just so nobody was offended or "political," and Natalie Maines said fuck your war, except she didn't, but you have to wonder if after they bulldozed her CDs she wished she had. It was like that thing they put the bingo balls in, that goes around and around, and every number they pulled was worse than the one before.

Morrow goes on:

It is not a bad idea to repeat a line from the 19th century French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: "The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the prudence of statesmen." America, in the spasms of a few hours, became a changed country. It turned the corner, at last, out of the 1990s. The menu of American priorities was rearranged. The presidency of George W. Bush begins now. What seemed important a few days ago (in the media, at least) became instantly trivial. If Gary Condit is mentioned once in the next six months on cable television, I will be astonished.

I would like to ask Morrow if he is astonished today.

The mistake they made, the mistake all those people who so solemnly declared the age of triviality over made, is assuming the new solemnity wasn't a reality show all its own, wouldn't become the new Gary Condit topic, wouldn't get just as trivialized as everything else gets, when you put these fucking morons in charge of presenting it to us on TV every night. Assuming that everything that came with a chyron and a soundtrack wasn't the same, wouldn't start to sound the same after a while. And couldn't be treated the same, then, trivialized, until we'd believe anything we were told so long as it appeared on the program as scheduled.

The presidency of George W. Bush did indeed begin then. It ends next week, and in the interim? The intervening eight years? You sons of bitches. You motherfuckers, who did this to us. I wish I had something better than that to say. Maybe I will, later on, as we get closer to this being over, I think, but then I think about the people whose stories we don't even know, and I can't think it will be over, ever, ever be over.

I looked at the newspapers, the magazines, everything we saved from that week, as I was organizing my bookshelves. Magazines from the days after 9/11, from the start of the war. And I felt the fury Morrow was asking us in his column to find.

A.

Column: Shut Up, Alberto

You morally tone-deaf jackass:

Coburn said he ought to quit his job. I can see why Gonzales was so hurt. Why, it's just like he spent the past four years walking point in Fallujah and came home with fewer limbs than he left with. It's just like he saw all his friends die in pieces around him. It's just like he will spend the rest of his life haunted by the images that passed before his eyes.

It's just like he came home in a box covered with a flag, to a family that will never see his beloved face again. It's a wonder he can feed and dress himself each day, it really is. He's so upset by all this, he told the Wall Street Journal, that he's - gasp! - writing a book about the experience, about how horribly wronged he's been. Just so his children - of course it's about the children - know the truth of his story. That all those mean people who called their dad names were meanies.

Now look, I'm not denying it must have been difficult to sit there and listen while such luminaries as Coburn and Specter - two of the biggest tools in the country's biggest toolbox - said they'd lost confidence in your job performance. But really, to compare oneself to the war dead because of a bad day at work is simply rude. Did no one in his childhood ever recite to Gonzales that line about sticks and stones?

Perhaps one of the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers who are the living, breathing consequences of his and his president's actions, the true casualties of the war on terror, could clue him in, in between physical therapy sessions, of course.

Perhaps a member of the thousands of families of the dead could give Gonzales a quick lesson not just in humility, but in the kind of reality that recognizes there are casualties that come with being called incompetent in public, and casualties that come with headstones.

The consequences Gonzales has faced during and since his tenure are those faced by anyone who did a rotten job: criticism, difficulty finding other employment, people sort of moving away from you when you sit down in the food court lest you get your stench on them. It's not pleasant, sure, but a casualty of war?

If he's a casualty, Gonzales got off with something less than a scratch.

A.

Bush Who?

On the Bush Redemption Circuit:

Lowry: I just want to go back to Richard’s point about the no attacks on U.S. soil. U.S. soil is a big caveat. I mean, that is a key thing. And in our exit interview with President Bush, you’re just struck by the extent to which he was a war president. I mean, that’s what drove him most passionately. And when you talk to him about it, you feel as though he’s just sort of been left behind by the public and by history. And I think that’s because of the very success in preventing another attack on U.S. soil...

Oh, they are so fucking tiresome. It's the same as every other bit of nonsense that they spout, taking a deliberately nasty position and expecting some kind of kudos for it. "Nobody else is willing to say that 'Barack the Magic Negro' is just funny, and I know it's not popular but THERE I SAID IT BOW BEFORE MY COURAGE." They make me want to lay down.

And I think the rest of the country agrees. When Bush leaves office there may in fact be a short burst of affection for the chewy little creep, along the lines of how when Nixon died people struggled to find something nice to say for a minute before shrugging and going, "Eh, asshole." I don't think it's anything to be terribly upset about. The only reason the TownHall and Corner fucktards need to go on their BUSH REUNION TOUR 09 MOTHERFUCKERS trip is that fluffing up Bush gave them the strength of purpose they needed to make catty remarks about liberals without the excuse of The Clenis.

The rest of the country? Already thinks Obama is president, likes him just fine, and anyway does not depend on the opinions of those at the Corner for a reason to get up in the morning.

A.

Forget Jesus. What Would You Do?

'To the bitter end.'

I had this conversation once with my mother, about why "those people" can't stop killing each other. If someone killed me, I asked her, would you forgive him?

No, she said.

Never?

Never.

Why do they hate us? Why do they hate each other? Why do we hate each other? If someone killed you, would I forgive him? No, no, never, never. The point isn't who's right and who's wrong, the point isn't even in the neighborhood of who started it, either, so the arguments about provocation and response are pointless. What would you do, someone killed your children? Your friends? Your neighbors? Your family? What would you do to him? To his children? To his friends? To his neighbors? To his family? This is the oldest story there is, and it isn't a foreign one, no matter what the names on the news tell us. We have our blood feuds here, too. What would you do? If you say you know, you're a liar.

This piece argues Israel and Palestine can't solve this on their own. I'd go further, spin it out to its end: Nobody can solve this on their own. Don't look at what's happening there and say it's particular to there, don't stop yourself from considering it as if in the mirror. They aren't them. We aren't us. It's all one thing.

Be honest. I'll start. There are things about which I am not rational. There are matters on which you can argue until you are blue in the face with me and you will get nowhere because shut up, that's my family you're talking about, somebody who sat at my dinner table and fought my fight and fuck you, basically, you might be right but you might as well be talking to a wall. Those things I'm not rational about, it would take somebody physically shoving me backward, chaining me up, to get me to stop. It would take someone convincing me that I couldn't be the one convincing others, and that would be hard, but it would need to be done.

What would you do? The lure of history and family and loyalty, what would you if it was you? Would you forgive? No, my mother said, never. Multiply by thousands and you have a war. Multiply by millions and you have the human race, loving one's enemies be damned. We say there's a we and a they and an us and a them? How dare we? When we casually declare every day that you ruin the life of somebody I love and I'll spend the rest of my life ruining the rest of yours, is it any more civilized we do it with economics instead of with rockets? Are we really so different, over here?

I'm barely talking about Israel and Palestine, is that making sense? I'm talking about how we as Americans watch this shit on the evening news and think to ourselves, "Why can't those people stop killing each other?" Why don't they just nuke each other into oblivion? Why don't we let them? Hell, why don't we help? I'm talking about how we look at this, how we separate it.

How we say we know what we'd do.

How we lie.

A.

FISA Lawsuit Hope

Department of Hell Yeah.

And for old time's sake:

A.

Homeland Security

From SusanG:

In addition to the prepared remarks, the Obama transition team sent out bios of today's appointees, and it's interesting to note what's emphasized (and what's not) in these official life stories. Particularly intriguing is the fact that Napolitano's bio is longer than that of Gates -- and that it emphasizes quite a few domestic policies that at least on the face of it have little to do with Homeland Security as we know it.

Possibly because Homeland Security as we know it is utter bullshit. Take off your shoes in the airport, make sure you report any suspicious behavior like walking around, say, in a veil or speaking a foreign language, but if your home is washed away in a flood and you're standing on your neighbor's roof and dying of thirst, well, just fuck you, okay?

If I have any hope at all for an Obama presidency, and I'm a professional pessimist so I'm saying, if I have any hope at all it's that we as a country can come to recognize that safety is about more than we've been told it's about for the last eight years.

A.

Homeland Security

Heckuva job, Joe:

Dubois, IN - The Indiana National Guard says two soldiers exposed to a deadly chemical in Iraq now have cancer. The Guard is trying to contact more than 600 soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 152nd Infantry who may have been exposed to sodium dichromate.

"The Battalion Cdr (commander) was diagnosed with cancer last summer and there is another soldier who came home on leave from this deployment who has been diagnosed with rectal cancer," LTC Deedra Thombleson wrote in an email to Channel 13.

A third soldier, Sergeant First Class David Moore, died in 2008 from a mysterious illness after returning from Iraq.

Moore's daughter, 10-year-old Rylee Weisheit, squeezes a teddy bear on the front porch of a home in Dubois, Indiana. The bear has a t-shirt with her dad's picture. When she squeezes the arm, the voice of her father can be heard.

"Hi, my little sweetheart. I love you. Sleep tight and have sweet dreams. Daddy misses and loves you very much."

[snip]

Ed Blacke claims KBR knew sodium dichromate was at the plant.

"They knew about this in May," says Blacke. "Everything seemed to be focused on we made a commitment, we're going to get this done, we're going to get it done in this time frame, hell or high water, we're gonna get it done," added Blacke. "They (KBR) just had an attitude - they were focused on that finish line and they didn't care how they got there."

I read that when Jules sent it to me, then I read this:

The Senate is a collegial place, largely because any one Senator can go to great lengths to hold up virtually any piece of legislation and thus no Senator wants to get on the bad side of another Senator for want of not having their own bills obstructed. It is likely a result of this fundamental aspect of the chamber that just a small handful of Democratic Senators have gone on the record in opposing Lieberman's bid to maintain control over the Senate's oversight panel. But as the vote on his chairmanship will be secret, and thus Lieberman will not know for certain who voted against him, Lieberman's ability to retaliate against individual Senators will be greatly curtailed.

Because, okay. I get it. We're all nice friends here and it's very warm and fuzzy. JOE LIEBERMAN HELPED BUSH DO THIS. And he wanted to help John McCain make it worse. Forget all the palace intrigue and coffeehouse crap. Forget all the Agincourt language about betrayal and loyalty and whatnot.

What Joe did that's objectionable isn't that he said mean things about Barack Obama (President Badass can take it, I think) or Hillary Clinton or anybody. What Joe did was to perpetuate a fraud against the American people that led to a lot of them getting dead in increasingly horrific ways, and to this day, unlike many of his colleagues, he has yet to regret a second of it, and he's shown himself willing to do just about anything to continue being wrong. Including act like a very public asshole. Or a wingnut blogger.

Forget the RNC and every Sunday show on which he stroked his junk and talked about how only he alone among Democrats was brave enough to stand up for the above. His monumental ego and his shaky sense of party loyalty isn't my problem. Forget all that. Joe is as responsible as anyone who cozied up to Bush in 2003 for the horrors now coming home with our troops, and that's the real issue here.

A.

Middle Way

Tim over at Balloon Juice:

We cannot justify holding on to virtually any of our detainees without charging them in a legitimate court. However, as the Hamdi case illustrates, fairly charging tortured and illegally kept detainees is essentially the same as freeing them. Then the liberated detainees can file lawsuits. If the new government shows a few scruples about using the State Secrets card more honorably then, like the pending suit by Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian tortured for a year in Syria, the civil suits alone could be catastrophic.

We already know that discovery will uncover prosecutable crimes in practically every case. Ergo, prepare for the greatest fletchering ever seen by man. If levied honestly, damages could collectively rank in legal history with the tobacco settlement. I do not have the training to guess how much one year of a life is worth, or five years. If those five years included relentless abuse that left you physically scarred and psychologically damaged, how much would you ask for?

As far as I can tell we will either geld Geneva or else we will release the vast majority of our muslim prisoners (possibly all of them, innocent and otherwise), pay them for their time and prosecute the torturers whom the president fails to pardon. If a middle way exists I fail to see it.

There is no middle way. That's the point, really. The point of this was that there is no middle ground. This is the With Us or Against Us strategy; there's no way out of this that doesn't involve being the asshole, and in fact the whole system is predicated on the idea that politicians are too cowardly to ever accept that somebody's just gonna have to be the asshole.

The war worked the same way; if we leave things will be bad and we'll have screwed the Iraqis over and killed lots of them for no good reason. Things are bad anyway, not likely to get any better, and we broke this country and screwed it all up, and I hate as much as anybody being the asshole who says, "Nothing we can do to unbreak it, let's get the hell out" because that sucks, but there's no way to stop it anymore. Same with this, our "detainees." Somebody's gonna have to be the guy who says okay, and opens the prison doors.

Somebody's gonna have to be the asshole here. It's why the Republicans name things like No Child Left Behind and The Protect America Act and Operation Iraqi Freedom; so that by raising your hand and going, "Erm, 'scuse" you're the jerk. Not them, for filling a bag full of crap and handing it to you to hold while they raid the global convenience store, but you, for dropping it on the doorstep rather than standing there with it in your hands, hoping they come out of the 7-Eleven and take it back.

A.

Every Day, Every Day

I put this up every year because it was the first thing I read after 9/11 that made sense to me.

I remember I was doing this stupid story, about three weeks later, interviewing this comic. I can't find the story and I can't remember his name. I feel bad that I can't remember his name because I've never forgotten what he said when I asked him about humor, and tragedy, "Every day is 9/11 for somebody."

And the Buckingham Palace Guard played our national anthem:

And, Molly Ivins wrote:

I was in Paris on Sept. 11, 2001. The reaction was so immediate, so generous, so overwhelming. Not just the government, but the people kept bringing flowers to the American embassy. They covered the American Cathedral, the American Church, anything they could find that was American. They didn't just leave flowers, they wrote notes with them. I read over 100 of them. Not only did they refer, again and again, to Normandy, to never forgetting, there were even some in ancient, spidery handwriting referring to WW I: "Lafayette is still with you."

A.

"The heavy-footed hoped to silence us"

Once, years ago, on a sunny afternoon, I almost died.

It was a boating accident, three teenagers miles offshore in a 16-foot Kestrel, a speedy British-built centerboard racing boat. It was an exhilaratingly windy day. The tall redheaded boy at the tiller was an experienced sailor, he knew how to make his boat fly. The other girl was my best friend, a star athlete.  Our feet tucked under the hiking strap, we were giddy with the speed, straining to lean back and out as far as we could over the wet chop, getting sprayed with each bounce, laughing our salty asses off. Then the hiking strap snapped.

We flew like watch springs in three separate directions, backwards. Tumbling over and down, then underwater forever.  Then up, gasping for air, separated from each other and unable to see over the whitecaps for more than a second at a time. It turned out that the Amazon athlete had lied to everyone for years about knowing how to swim. We were 16, of course we hadn't worn the life jackets.

We all made it. The redhead kid managed somehow to keep the jock from drowning them both in her hysteria, I still don't understand how I was able to swim back to the half-sunken boat, dive underneath the limp sail and through the mess of floating ropes, find the life vests, then swim back against the current to the others. We had to float the six or seven miles back in, it was close to midnight by the time we made it, falling and stumbling ashore, our legs like jelly from being in the water so long. Ironically, all our parents were completely oblivious, each thinking their kid was at one of the other's houses. By the time they found out, we were safe home, loopy and tired, full of teenage bravado.

But in that first slow-motion half hour, out there fighting those waves, nothing had been certain.

And here's the thing. It doesn't matter what you're doing, where you are, flailing and drowning on the open sea, or asleep on your couch. It doesn't matter how old, young, smart, dumb, poor or rich you are, on skid row or behind a huge desk in the corner office.  Nothing ever is certain, ever. Merrily fucking merrily, life, and safety, is but a fake out, a total illusion. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  He doesn't know how to get back to Kansas either, no matter what he says.

'Regard all dharmas as dreams'.

That also applies to politics and presidential elections. What, you disagree? Don't argue with me, argue with an esteemed poet. In 2007, Adrienne Rich was honored by the organization Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), a New York non-profit that singles out deserving activists working for social justice to receive their annual Risk-Taker Awards:

This campaign? This election? It's today. It's tomorrow. Wherever the edge of your envelope is, it's time to push it. It's time to be a risk taker. No matter what they tell us otherwise, no matter how they try to scare the crap out of us, or lull us into trusting their version of reality, it's time, our time. We have a choice every day to stay scared when they get the best of us, or to keep breathing through it, trusting ourselves in the midst of the uncertainty.  Because it's all uncertainty.

That's the other other thing. You already know this, all of you, but the conventions, then the election, and then... we have to keep it up.  Even when/if our guy wins, we have to keep it up.  We're going to have to fight him, and we are going to have to fight the other guys, and they will never give up. Every cabinet appointment, every agency head, every judge, every anybody, every bill, every vote, every anything. None of it is certain.

"Thank you demons, for coming today. Come again tomorrow then. And from time to time, we will converse."

Rich lays it out for us, the true risks of silence, what it costs to speak, and why we have to pay that cost, have to make that choice to remain fully conscious of the nature of realities both internal and external.

The second poem is one of Rich's own, and by all means, go watch her read it, in the original video here.

For more information on the work of JFREJ, visit their website

Stupidest. Terrorists. Ever.

Dumbfellas. Unwise guys.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel accused six Arabs on Friday of trying to set up an al Qaeda cell in Israel and said one of them had proposed attacking helicopters used during a visit by President George W. Bush.

Israel's Shin Bet counter-intelligence agency said one of the suspects had used his mobile phone to film helicopters at a sports stadium in Jerusalem that was used as a landing site for Bush's delegation.

The suspect then posted queries on Web sites frequented by al Qaeda operatives, asking for guidance on how to shoot down the helicopters, the agency said in a statement.

Emphasis mine.

I think we need to start putting it on T-shirts: EVERYONE CAN SEE THE INTERNET.

A.

The Jurisdiction Argument

Not our problem:

A federal appeals court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Syrian-born Canadian man who had accused the United States of violating the law and his civil rights after he was detained at Kennedy Airport and sent to Syria under what he claims was an act of “extraordinary rendition.”

The man, Maher Arar, tried to win civil damages from United States officials in his suit, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York ruled that because he was never technically inside the United States, his claims could not be heard in the federal courts.

A.

His Most Awesome Responsibility

More law-breaking from the Bush Assministration.

Ten months after Congress passed a law establishing a White House coordinator for preventing nuclear terrorism, President Bush has no plans to create the high-level post any time soon, according to the National Security Council.

The provision - suggested by leading members of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - was contained in 2007 legislation designed to improve homeland defenses. Congress passed it by a wide margin, with bipartisan support.

Some congressional leaders said Bush's failure to fill the job nearly a year later marks an outright evasion of the law, and called on the president to fill the position swiftly, even though his administration has only seven months left in office.

"Congress and a range of bipartisan experts, including 9/11 commissioners, clearly judged that such a position would help strengthen the effectiveness of the administration's handling of [weapons of mass destruction] proliferation matters," the office of Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who sponsored the legislation in the Senate, said in a statement. "The Congress passed and the president signed into law this requirement."

When asked this month why the position remains unfilled, the National Security Council described it as an internal matter still under deliberation.

[snip]

The White House opposed creating the position from the start. In a January 2007 letter to Congress - six months before the law was adopted - the Bush administration wrote that the appointment of a nuclear antiterrorism chief "is unnecessary given extensive coordination and synchronization mechanisms that now exist within the executive branch," citing a 2006 strategy document that lays out the responsibilities of numerous government departments.

But in the past, Bush has tried to bypass provisions of laws he disagrees with by issuing "signing statements," documents singling out those parts of statutes that White House lawyers advised would infringe on his constitutional powers as chief of the government's executive branch. Bush has used this practice more than any prior president.

This time, however, the White House seems to be ignoring the nuclear terrorism coordinator requirement not for constitutional reasons but simply because the administration thinks it is a bad idea. It is a stance some legal scholars called an even more blatant disregard of the checks and balances on presidential power.

You've Got Someone To Blame

Thanks. Thanks a million.

A comment exchange over at the Great Sherbert Satan I found interesting:

[At any rate, it's the Blue Dogs, not Pelosi] who should be blamed, and maybe not even Hoyer, from what I can see. What's the matter with those guys - how could they possibly want to let this slip by without action against the violators? This is like a big fat completely undeserved gift for Bush and Cheney. Did you notice that even the Republicans were surprised they were able to get so much in the negotiations? Disgusting.

The blame for this absolute travesty and capitulation of the lowest order rests squarely on Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Harry Reid's shoulders. The blue dogs don't get to determine what bills are brought to the floor to be voted on. That's the House Leadership's job. This is all their (Hoyer in particular) fault and every last one of them or any other Dem. who votes for this fascist bullshit should be ridden out on a rail, tarred and feathered and then prosecuted to the full extent of the law for violating the Constitution and lying to the American people.

Follow the ladder upward. Pelosi and Hoyer are supposedly grown-ups, displaying an astonishing level of self-absorbed crap for which a 12-year-old would be grounded for a week. I just heard Hoyer say on the floor that "this was the best bill we could get in the current environment." What environment would that be? The one in which the president who pushes this bill has a 24 percent approval rating? The one in which Republicans can't hang on to seats in Mississippi? The one in which the Republican nominee can't find his ass with a searchlight and a posse? That environment? Is that the one you're talking about? The environment of stunning electoral pwnage marred only by the lack of realization on your part that you're fucking in charge right now?

Wait. No. Silly blogger. You mean the environment in which your "Blue Dogs" are able to tell you, Mr. Majority Leader, Madam Speaker, what to do. You mean the environment in which a couple dozen members of your party are able to do whatever the fuck they like because you, and Speaker Pelosi, and Sen. Reid, lack the ability to tell them to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down on issues of fundamental importance to Constitutional authority in this country. That's the "current environment." That's where you're at, scared of your own shadows. Unable to get your own people to follow you.

Nice job, really, nice job. What did you want to be when you grew up? And why, for the love of heaven, aren't you that?

Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold, it's in your hands now. Fuck this up and I will be writing you both letters asking for my $50 back.

And speaking of my $50, anytime Sen. Obama would like to come striding back into the halls of power with righteousness in the soles of his shoes and give a blistering, thundering, lift-the-house-off-the-ground speech (something I'm told he's good at, just a rumor I heard) in support of the rule of law and in defiance to the president whose policies he opposes every day on the campaign trail, that would be appreciated:

At this point, Barack Obama is the nominal leader of the Democratic Party. He's opposed to retroactive immunity for the telecoms, and everyone who was opposed to it before this so-called "deal" was struck is, you'll notice, still opposed to it, though some have opted to throw up their hands and pretend they're being forced to vote on it.

But a word from Barack Obama at this point would have the potential to change everything. A word from him saying that this "deal" stands in direct contradiction to the agenda he's bringing to the presidential race would weigh heavily on Majority Leader Harry Reid, who's really only getting heavy pressure from Intelligence committee chairman Jay Rockefeller on this, and thus is likely to be inclined (despite his own opposition to immunity) to grease that particular squeaky wheel. There could be a counterbalance from Judiciary chairman Pat Leahy, but so far, we haven't heard that squeak. He's issued a statement saying he opposes the "deal," but he's not pushing the way Rockefeller is pushing. And though Reid is the Majority Leader, that's as much a service position as it is a leadership position. His membership just isn't telling him no. The voices that are speaking with conviction are the voices saying yes.

Barack Obama, though, is the heavyweight in the arena right now, and his voice, properly applied, could be worth a dozen chairmen. But he's not using it, and in fact, there's no guarantee he ever will.

But get us into next week, pitch a fight in the Senate, back the Congress up against the recess wall, and call in the biggest gun we have, and we just might have that snowflake's chance in the hot place.

Yes, I know he's spoken against telecom immunity before, and it was appreciated muchly. This is professional short-attention-span theater. He needs to do it again, and he needs to do it now, and he needs to pick up the chair and he needs to hit 'em again, harder, harder. Five months until the election. Crunch time. Chair's right in front of you.

A.

You're Allowed To Screw Us

The judiciary once again says it's okay with not really being a branch of government so much:

WASHINGTON, June 16 (UPI) -- A U.S. judge Monday dismissed a government watchdog's lawsuit seeking records on missing White House e-mails.

In dismissing the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said she concluded the White House's Office of Administration, which held the records, wasn't subject to the Freedom of Information Act, The Washington Post reported.

She said she agreed with the office's argument that it does not meet a key requirement be subject to FOIA, concluding the Office of Administration doesn't employ "the type of substantial independent authority that the D.C. Circuit has found sufficient to make an (executive office of the president) component an agency under the FOIA."

The group filing the lawsuit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it would appeal.

"We are disappointed in the ruling and believe the judge reached the wrong legal conclusion," CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan said in a statement. "The Bush administration is using the legal system to prevent the American people from discovering the truth about the millions of missing White House e-mails."

Until CREW asked for the documents, Sloan said, the office frequently processed FOIA requests.

One of the great mysteries of the last eight years, for me, has been why federal judges are for the most part pretty okay with being given the finger by their two brethren branches of government. It has staggered me for years watching the Bush Administration submit filings that basically say, "We don't have to show you shit, so just lay back and take it and give us our change," and judge after judge says, "You know, you're right, I really should learn to appreciate the nuances of your point of view." I had always thought that once you've achieved a seat on the federal bench, you'd developed a healthy amount of self-esteem and so even if you lined up with someone ideologically, you wouldn't be open to that person telling you you're his butler basically, but clearly, as about so many other things, I was very, very wrong.

A.

Got No Excuse

Is that all right with you?

WASHINGTON - In a stinging rebuke to President Bush's anti-terror policies, a deeply divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign detainees held for years at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have the right to appeal to U.S. civilian courts to challenge their indefinite imprisonment without charges.

[snip]

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the 5-4 high court majority, acknowledged the terrorism threat the U.S. faces — the administration's justification for the detentions — but he declared, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

Of course they were, Justice Kennedy, may you live a thousand years. Of course they were. This isn't supposed to be easy. We aren't supposed to get a free pass to act like assholes. Our laws were not designed to protect the pure, the innocent, the perfect, the good. They were designed to protect us all, and no matter how many anecdotes you tell me about somebody somewhere what got off on a technicality, no matter how many times you tell me I only believe this because I've never been victimized, no matter how many "Oh YEAH, well what about THIS" tales you pull out of your ass, you won't come up with something to equal the beauty of the law that says to us all, you come to this table all of you the same.

The hope of innocent people everywhere -- and don't even, Feepers, I can hear the gerbil starting its reluctant course around the wheel, just put that shit to bed -- is that somewhere, sometime, a judge will hear their case against their accusers. It's a poor resort, really, given how often we find the innocent locked up anyway, but at least you have that. In the end, at the very bottom of everything, you have that. You can say, "I have rights" and someone will hear you.

It is hard to overstate what a terrible miscarriage of justice the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was; it is hard to be hyperbolic about a law which enshrined in our national conduct the idea that the powerless have no right to challenge the great. That an accusation is enough to finish you. That you are nothing. That you have nothing to say that could change anything. It's hard to overstate that. It's hard to make too much of it.

And for the life of me I fail to understand why those who wax poetic about the land of the free and the home of the brave are willing to grant that we are neither. Are willing to put on the line absolutely no possibility of being wrong, of being taken, of being incorrect. Are willing to take no risk at all, that at a trial the evidence you present will not bear out your case. It's funny, almost, the constant "you hate America" diatribe: I look around me and I see, on a day so hot your feet cook on the asphalt and the ice cream truck trills down the street, I see a country that can withstand so much more than the meager estimation the Republican party gives it. I see a place that has rebuilt from disaster after disaster, that has gotten back up from the unimaginable time after time, and yet they want me to believe that this, this right now, what we're going through, will break us, and do not see their words as the most staggering statement of cowardice. It astonishes me. It really does.

(I used to give these people the benefit of the doubt. I used to think, way back when, they must have something, because I cannot fathom a world in which we just do this. Then the last half-decade happened, and the benefit of my doubt has hit its maximum deductible.)

Our president has said he will obey the law, which is a relief, which is kind of really fucking unbelievably sick, actually, that that has to be SAID, but trust me, they'll find some way around doing the right thing in the next 222 days. They'll find some way to shove something in sideways and one can only hope that the upcoming election will make our Democratic Congress less cowardly. Because the best argument they've got is the one their faithful servant Scalia made:

In a blistering dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said the decision "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

To which I would like to add which war, and Jesus fuck is that all they've got, and I can't believe this guy's a Supreme Court justice, but also this: The point was never to make the war easy on us. That isn't the law. That's not what it's for.

A.

Have You Seen Me?

If seen, please contact the proper authorities.

What did happen to this dumb-ass three-level terror alert system, anyway?

Yes, I know that, technically, there are five levels, but if you never use two, then you effectively have a three-level system. 

We haven't heard anything about this dipshittery since the last election cycle.  Somehow, I think we may become reacquainted with this bad idea in the near future.  Whaddya think?

Show Me Something

They think it's for their benefit:

I am in no way unhappy with the outcome of Nuremberg, but my understanding is that most international lawyers regard them basically as show trials. I’m not sure they’re a great example to use.

[snip]

[The Nuremberg Trials] may well be the most significant action taken by the American government in the 20th to establish ourselves as defenders of the rule of law. The Bush administration has done immeasurable damage to our standing in the world by approving policies of torture, extraordinary rendition, and secret prisons - among many, many other things. McArdle’s glib dismissal of history and law is only shocking to the extent that she purports to be a libertarian. Otherwise such a passive acceptance of the abandonment of the rule of law in America is fairly indicative of what we have seen from the American press, a fact that goes a long way to explaining why the Bush administration has not been held accountable for their lawlessness.

You know, we are rapidly getting to a point where people cannot conceive of anything being done because it's right, is the truly frightening thing about all this. For years we've had these structures, these assurances, these ways of pulling ourselves back from the edge, and now we think, let's just declare "game over" and say it's time to "move on" and not worry so goddamn much about the "past" and all that, because it's just a show, really. It's just something to watch on TV. It's just something we can all look at, from the outside, from the other side of the plexiglass window, and watch, and feel things about. It doesn't really mean anything. Show trials. Jesus Marie Antoinette Christ, show trials, she says.

Because this is the end result of all our focus on how we, as a nation, fucking feel today. This is the result: people seriously advancing the argument that the Nuremberg Trials were for show, because ... what else could they be for? Justice? Mercy, even? Fuck no. The only purpose of anything is to make us feel a certain way, nothing is real, the cake is a lie, it's all just a dream Sue Ellen had and Bobby's in the shower or something. Show trials. SHOW trials.

A.

Two Years After

They're letting Bilal Hussein go.

The U.S. military said Monday it will release Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, more than two years after he was detained by U.S. Marines on suspicions of links to insurgents. The military said it has determined Hussein is not a threat and plans to free him Wednesday.

In the past week, Iraqi judicial committees dismissed all allegations against Hussein and ordered his release. The last allegations were dropped Sunday — a day after Hussein marked his second full year in custody.

The AP and Hussein, 36, have denied any improper contacts and said he was only doing his job as a journalist working in a war zone.

AP President Tom Curley expressed relief.

"In time we will celebrate Bilal's release. For now, we want him safe and united with his family. While we may never see eye to eye with the U.S. military over this case, it is time for all of us to move on," said Curley.

A statement by Multinational Forces-Iraq said Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, commander of coalition detention facilities in Iraq, signed the release order after confirming the Iraqi committee's decision to grant Hussein amnesty — a ruling that drops legal proceedings but does not assume or determine guilt or innocence.

Hussein — who had been held since April, 12, 2006 — was never brought to trial.

I don't hold out any hope, any at all, that Michelle will issue an apology. She and her band of hsyterical assclown admirers have secret e-mail, after all, proving them right, and so will go right on making their little "Rope, Tree, Journalist" cracks without fear of looking idiotic, because really, it's not like accuracy or fairness or human decency are important to anyone who signs her paychecks. It's not like she has a reputation to uphold. It's not like she has a soul to worry about losing. After two years, it's not her, being sent out into the sunlight with a pat on the shoulder and a "Hey, our bad."

Still, I find it curious. These are some of most advanced paranoids on the planet, who wake and sleep beneath their Star Wars sheets with visions of Islamofascist invasion dancing in their heads like sugarplums. These are people who see boogeymen around every corner, who think about nothing except how to be well-armed for the 28 Days Later sitch that only THEY can see coming. Why the hell don't things like this make them wonder about the karmic blowback, the roar of which I can hear from my house, surely coming our way?

Think of all the people we've imprisoned (sorry, I'm not saying "detained," it makes it sound like the waiter was slow with your fucking lunch) and all the people we've tortured and all the people we've blown into itty bitty little pieces. Think of all the people who knew those people, every single one of them, think of all their friends and family. And then think, if it was you? What would your parents want, for the people who'd done that to you? What would your friends want, your sister and brother, your spouse, your lover, your neighbor, your fucking garbage collector? What would all those people think, about the people who'd done things to you?

If you can't hate what has happened to this country because you love this country, if you can't hate it because you love the rule of law or because you love your freedoms or because you believe yourself bound to it by history and blood, maybe you can hate what has happened to this country for fearful, selfish reasons. It always amazes me that Michelle and her freakboys don't think what I think, FUCK SHIT JESUS IF THEY WEREN'T TERRORISTS WHEN WE THREW THEM IN JAIL FOR NO REASON THERE'S ONE HELL OF A FUCKING GOOD CHANCE THEY WILL BE BY THE TIME WE ADMIT WE'RE FULL OF SHIT AND LET THEM GO JESUS GOD.

A.

Circling Like Sparrows

War is a crime:

Old hands in the intelligence community remembered vividly how past covert operations, from the Vietnam War-era "Phoenix Program" of assassinations of Viet Cong to the Iran-Contra arms sales of the 1980s were painted as the work of a "rogue agency" out of control.

But even after the "Golden Shield" was in place, briefings and meetings in the White House to discuss individual interrogations continued, sources said. Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal.

According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.

"It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time," said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. "They'd say, 'We've got so and so. This is the plan.'"

Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.

Of course they approved. Of course they knew. Did anyone sincerely believe otherwise? Did anyone sincerely believe they were kept in the dark? The CIA knows better. The CIA wasn't going down for this alone. Jesus Christ, of course they approved.

For years, they've been governing on the principle that the lies they tell are so gigantic, the crimes they commit so outrageous, that we're too utterly freaked to call them on it. For years, they've been governing like public opinion and the rule of law don't matter because honestly, who's there to convince them it does matter? Chris Dodd had to fucking threaten to filibuster his own party's bill to convince people the Constitution was still worth giving a fuck about, for fucking fuck's sake. Jesus tits, what on earth would make them scared? What have we ever done to make them think there'd be consequences to their actions?

And now? Now what?

A.

A Certain Satisfaction

File this under "God, I wish it was still April Fool's Day so I could write this off as a joke."

Doug Feith and the torture memo:

It comes just as the Justice Department has released a declassified memo from 2003 that outlined the legal justification for military interrogators to employ harsh interrogation techniques. That memo laid out the administration's view that members of al Qaeda and the Taliban were not protected by the Geneva Conventions.

[snip]

Feith confirms that the logic of the law was not followed with respect to Geneva, rather it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall—and that was the point. “Didn’t the administration’s approach mean that Geneva’s constraints on interrogation couldn’t be invoked by anyone at Guantánamo?” Sands asked Feith. “Oh yes, sure,” Feith replied. “Was that the intended result?” “Absolutely.” Sands writes that he asked again: Under the Geneva Conventions, no one at Guantánamo was entitled to any protection? “That’s the point,” Feith reiterated. As he saw it, either you were a detainee to whom Geneva didn’t apply (al-Qaeda fighters, because they weren’t part of a state); or you were a detainee to whom Geneva applied but whose rights you couldn’t invoke (members of the Taliban, because they hadn’t worn uniforms or insignia). What was the difference for the purpose on interrogation? Sands asked. Feith answered with a certain satisfaction: “It turns out, none. But that’s the point.”

When Sands asks Feith whether he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority, Feith tells Sands, “The problem with moral authority” was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

According to Sands, Feith’s arguments were so clever that General Richard Myers, joint chiefs chairman, continued to believe that Geneva’s protection remained in force, and was “well and truly hoodwinked,” a seasoned observer of military affairs tells Sands.

Emphases mine.

First of all, Doug Feith is who Tommy Franks described as “the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the earth.” What on earth does that say about Myers?

Second, “a certain satisfaction?” Naturally. That’s all this was to them, a little game. A little game in which they were playing Jack Bauer, and then at night they went home to their snug little houses and slept like babies while the people affected by their decisions got shot at in Fallujah and tortured in Cuba, and for all Feith’s forthcoming bullshit in his book (coming out April 8) none of this was ever about anything for the Bush crew but how wicked awesome their war was gonna be.

Third, forget that it’s the Constitution he’s wiping his feet on. Forget that. Doug Feith’s satisfactory arguments did this:

Siding with the assholes?

That’s an awfully pretty glass house from which he’s chucking rocks.

A.

Trust Us. We're the Government.

Revised and updated.

This is why you don't pass shit like the Patriot Act.

Now, before some jackass jumps up and says that drug dealers and gang members are scum, blah blah blah, remember--the fucking Patriot Act was put in place to fight "terrorism."  We already have lots and lots of laws regarding drug dealing and gang activity--activities which can only be described as "terrorism" if that term is so broadly defined as to include virtually any illegal acts.  And the government swore up and down that the powers granted to it under the Patriot Act would be used judiciously and sparingly to keep Americans safe.  Ahem.  Ha ha!

Once more:  This is why you don't trust the government, or any institution, to rein itself in.  You'd think we'd have learned that lesson by now.  Self-regulation in government always, always fails.  I think I'm gonna go drink with Scout now.

Hey, We Made The List!

Wonderful.

A training manual for Canadian diplomats lists the United States as a country where prisoners risk torture and abuse, citing interrogation techniques such as stripping prisoners, blindfolding and sleep deprivation.

The Foreign Affairs Department document, released Friday, singled out the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It also names Israel, Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Syria as places where inmates could face torture.

Bhutto Assasinated

Jesus:

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan - Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, aides said.

"The surgeons confirmed that she has been martyred," Bhutto's lawyer Babar Awan said.

A party security adviser said Bhutto was shot in neck and chest as she got into her vehicle to leave the rally in Rawalpindi near the capital Islamabad. A gunman then blew himself up.

"At 6:16 p.m. she expired," said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Bhutto's party who was at Rawalpindi General Hospital where she was taken after the attack.

Her supporters at the hospital began chanting "Dog, Musharraf, dog," referring to Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf.

A.

'I am a mother and I will wait for my son'

Our very own commenter Jules, at Sirens:

Looking back on the time between his leave and the time he was done with his tour seems so short. But it went agonizingly slow. My partner and I both had trouble sleeping. Our sleep was plagued with nightmares. As things got worse in Iraq, we dreaded coming home, afraid to find a car in the drive. We both knew what that meant.

Throughout his deployment the people around us would tell us how proud we must be. The hardest ones to take were the ones who started spouting the “fight them over there” crap. They have no idea of the sleepless nights and the struggles to maintain composure when we talked to our son, no idea just how bad things are in Iraq. Nothing would make me angrier than listening to the President give a speech. All I could think about were his daughters running around drinking and doing nothing. They are about the same age as my son. They do nothing while he is risking everything for their father’s vanity war. I have no time for supporters of this war, especially those who are content to allow others to fight it while they wave their flags.

A.

They Learned From The Master

Our pals in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies, apparently trying to avoid acknowledging an elaborate secret detention system, have quietly set free nearly 100 men suspected of links to terrorism, few of whom were charged, human rights groups and lawyers here say.

Those released, they say, are some of the nearly 500 Pakistanis presumed to have disappeared into the hands of the Pakistani intelligence agencies cooperating with Washington’s fight against terrorism since 2001.

No official reason has been given for the releases, but as pressure has mounted to bring the cases into the courts, the government has decided to jettison some suspects and spare itself the embarrassment of having to reveal that people have been held on flimsy evidence in the secret system, its opponents say.

[snip]

In one case, a suspect tied to, but not charged with the 2002 killing of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist, was dumped on a garbage heap, so thin and ill he died 20 days later. He, like one other detainee, was arrested in South Africa several years ago and released in Pakistan this year.

[snip]

In at least two instances, detainees were handed over to the United States without any legal extradition proceedings, Pakistani lawyers and human rights groups say. American officials here and in Washington refused to comment on the cases.

Under Your Bed

You have no dominion here:

The administration argued it was not obligated to preserve the videotapes and told U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy that demanding information about them "could potentially complicate the ongoing efforts to arrive at a full factual understanding of the matter."

Thing is, people bought this shit back in 2002, which is when I first became aware of it. People bought this shit because hey, you never know, and these guys might not be completely full of shit, and despite our long national nightmares with Nixon and Iran-Contra people still kind of figured there was a place where they'd stop. People were dumb, what can I say, and it was a very, very few DFH's back then who were screaming that our laws weren't designed to protect the obviously innocent, they were designed to protect us all, and if you don't think there's a big fucking difference cover the federal courts for a while. Or, you know, turn on a TV, or, like, read.

Fast-forward a half-decade. It's been definitively proven this bunch can't prosecute its way out of a paper bag, that the only thing they're counting on is being given the benefit of the doubt, and that all we can hope to have happen here is a big wide grin and a "hey, trust us!" And everybody willing to give them the benefit of the doubt is now professing shock and horror, and acting like all this crap started happening in 2005, as if the date of the beginning of the end and the date the New York Times made it okay to talk about the end are the same fucking thing.

I mean it, it drives me wild. The problem with half the crap comes out of these people's mouths isn't that it is, on its face, wrong. All the words are true, in that there are circumstances in which this defense could actually hold water. Problem is, we will never, ever, ever be able to give them the benefit of the doubt again, and that's dangerous. The point of the story about the boy who cried wolf is that the wolf actually shows up in the end.

A.

So Here's A Piece of Work

Danielle Crittenden:

I scooped up a plain black canvas carry-on bag and headed over to the security line. I had no intention of flying to New York. This was an experiment. I'd become suspicious of the lack of suspicion I'd received during my week-long veiling. I'd encountered no fear, no hostility, hardly even any curiosity. If anything, my fellow Washingtonians showed unusual courtesy to a woman in a burka.

And so it continued at the airport. The ticket agent had registered zero reaction when I'd approached the counter, except to offer an extra cheerful greeting: "Hi! Where are you travelling?"

It had been the same the day before on the Washington subway. I entered the train at morning rush hour carrying a large black backpack, which I clutched to my chest in the centre of the train. With the exception of one elderly passenger who bolted up from his seat when I got on, scurrying to the most remote end of the carriage, everyone else aboard resolutely ignored my appearance. The woman closest to my mysterious backpack glanced up and then resumed her BlackBerrying.

I can't know what they were thinking, obviously. A few must have wondered whether I was about to explode. But evidently they'd rather be blown up than exhibit any behaviour that might be construed as intolerant.

And good for them, I suppose. "The vast majority of Muslims abhor terrorism," we are frequently reminded, and of course that's true. And yet, even tolerance can be taken too far.

Via, of all places, that sewer known as Free Republic. I am spending way too much time there. There are some sacrifices one should not make for one's blog.

So let's go over David Frum's love interest's experiment here. She wears a burka, hoping to be ... yelled at? Argued with? Assaulted? Profiled? She's disappointed when people don't drag her off public transportation, throw her in jail, tear her clothes off? God, how awful for her.

It seems to escape Crittenden's notice that the point of all this is that most Americans are not as bed-shittingly scared of terrorism as the majority of right-wing nuts would like them to be. Most Americans, after all, being grown-ups with things to read and Blackberries to type on and places to get to that interfere with, you know, our entire lives being paranoid fever dreams of a world aflame from Islam and the last five white guys holed up in a basement eating Cheetos and asking where the Mountain Dew is. That's the point of her little "experiment," that most of us have now gone back to work or school or our lives, and aren't interested in a) assuming the worst of everyone different or b) jumping at every noise from under the bed.

This, however, is the part that made me get up from the table, go get some more coffee, play with the animals a bit and count to ten, several times:

He drew a red mark on my boarding pass. "You know the deal," he said, ushering me on.

I nodded, but thought, "Uh oh. What deal?" Maybe now I was to be regarded with suspicion?

Before I'd even approached the metal detector, I heard a voice over the loudspeaker say, "Female assistance in Aisle 4."

OK, now I was nervous. I wasn't sure how far I was willing to take this experiment. Certainly not so far as an internal examination …

Because that's the thing with little "experiments" like Crittenden's. That fear she had? If things got too unpleasant for her, she could just whip off her burka and say, "Hee hee, just kidding!" and it would all be okay. The minute profiling actually started to have consequences, she started to worry: What would it feel like, would she be okay, what would happen to her? Never once did she then say to herself, "Hmm, I wonder if this is the actual goddamn consequence of harrassing people who mean no harm." No, all she could think about was that maybe it was time to opt out of pretending to be someone she wasn't and go back to her world, where people like her are okay, and suspicion and brutality are for everybody else.

A.

The Code Name Didn't Give Anyone A Clue

Curveball:

WASHINGTON - The Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," whose false tales of biological weapons labs bolstered the U.S. case for war, wasn't the prominent chemical engineer he claimed to be and invented stories to help his case for asylum in Germany, a new report says.

"Curveball" is Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who did study chemical engineering but made poor grades and never managed a biological weapons facility, according to CBS' "60 Minutes," which will broadcast on Sunday a report describing how Alwan became a secret intelligence source.

Although known publicly only by his code name, Curveball has been repeatedly discredited by investigations of the United States' faulty prewar intelligence and became an embarrassment to U.S. spy agencies. A presidential intelligence commission found that Curveball, who mostly told his stories to German intelligence officials who passed them on to the U.S., was a fabricator and an alcoholic.

"60 Minutes" reports that Alwan arrived at a German refugee center in 1999 and began spinning his tales of a facility making mobile biological weapons in an effort to gain asylum. The ploy apparently achieved his goal, and Alwan is assumed to be living in Germany today under an assumed name.

Although German intelligence officials warned the CIA that Curveball's claims of mobile bioweapons labs were unreliable, and U.N. inspectors determined before the war began in 2003 that parts of his story were false, the Bush administration continued to promote the existence of such mobile labs for months after the invasion, until it was widely accepted that they could not be found.

A.