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Bernard Weiner's Blogs -- The Archives

June 28, 2004

Vacation Lazing & No Escape from Politics

Here I am sitting in a hammock, laptop on my knees, under some shade trees in the blistering California sun. Technology has made it so easy to connect to the world -- and so tempting not to. All I have to do is to push the "escape" ("escapist") button, and I can remain blissfully unaware of what's happening outside my vacation purview.

We just took the golden retriever we're "dog-sitting" on a long walk, where we cooled off in the bracing Russian River here in California's Sonoma wine country.

The cares of the world were far away. I could just relax and open myself to the glories of nature, the warm sun, the refreshing river, the lush vegetation, the great meals in downtown Healdsburg, and so on.

It felt good to know that others, in print and online, are dealing with the crimes of commission and omission by the current Bush/Cheney administration: the death and destruction in Iraq as a result of American's neocon theoreticians, the tortures committed in our names, the destruction of our Constitutional guarantees of due process of law and a commitment to the Bill of Rights, the strangulation of social programs so necessary and desired by so many Americans, the saddling of our economy (and our children) with humongous debt, etc. etc.

You may have just noticed that it's impossible for me to stay in that blissful vacation mode for long.

I am dedicated to the defeat of Bush&Co. on November 2, and the restoration of legitimate power in the United States. My soul tells me -- and a lot of others like me -- that there can be no permanent time-out. Breaks now and then for refreshment of one's soul and commitment, yes. But no surcease from the fight itself.

So, before we get on our bicycles to tour the backroads and visit some wineries, let's take a quick look at some of the news of the day.

CONTROLLING THE FLOW

As with everything else in their Administration, BushCheneyRove cannot accept criticism of their actions -- especially not when the most current polls show them losing ground daily to Kerry.

So they're a little, how shall we say, hyper sensitive these days as the stress levels mount.

* Cheney, on the floor of the Senate, tells Sen. Leahy to go "fuck yourself" -- in those words -- after Cheney objected to Leahy and his fellow Democrats pointing out Halliburton's various corrupt practices in Iraq and elsewhere.

* Bush, after being sharply questioned by an Irish reporter about the morality and incompetence of his Iraq policies, goes whining to the Irish Embassy about his treatment and then withdraws an exclusive interivew the reporter was supposed to have with Laura Bush. Oh, by the way, as Atrios notes,   Bush was supplied the reporter's questions three days in advance of the interview.

* Bush&Co., which already has set up a stealth organization to deride Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" film, is trying to keep Moore from advertising his documentary in the Fall, as the election draws nearer.

Moore's film, meanwhile -- which focuses on Bush Administration actions and non-actions on September 11, 2001 -- is doing turnaway business at the box offices across the country. This news may explain why, as a form of long-range protection, a group of GOP-supporting investors, including The Carlyle Group (long associated with the Bush Family), has purchased the huge Loew's movie-theater chain.

* Bush may be having trouble handling the pressure -- the accelerating meltdown in Iraq, being questioned by prosecutors in the Valerie Plame scandal, his falling poll numbers , being abandoned by many key Republican officials who denounce his policies, facing more aggressive journalists, etc. A report in a Washington, D.C., insider newsletter says his aides are starting to wonder about his mental health as he exhibits erratic, paranoid behavior in private.

* Reporters keep asking him about America's torture policies, specifically about the fact that the tortures and abuse continued long after Bush's 2002 memo that seemed to say -- wink, wink, nod, nod -- that the U.S. troops shouldn't do such bad things to prisoners in their care. Unless, of course, "military necessity" dictates such torture, and then it's OK.

Enough from me. Below are some excellent blogs that delve even further into some of these issues, along with other matters.

BIDEN, BALLS & BULLFROGS

I've always wondered whether Democrats have any balls whatsoever when they meet in private with Bush in the White House. At least one, Sen. Joe Biden, does -- at least according to the senator himself. Check this out from Kevin Drum www.washingtonmonthly.com:

Via Jack O'Toole, here's an excerpt from a Rolling Stone round table about Iraq:

Surely the Abu Ghraib prison scandal didn't help. Should Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or other Bush officials resign?

Rand Beers: The Navy has a custom -- if a ship runs aground, the captain is relieved regardless of who is responsible. That's how Abu Ghraib should be handled.

Joe Biden: I was in the Oval Office the other day, and the president asked me what I would do about resignations. I said, "Look, Mr. President, would I keep Rumsfeld? Absolutely not." And I turned to Vice President Cheney, who was there, and I said, "Mr. Vice President, I wouldn't keep you if it weren't constitutionally required." I turned back to the president and said, "Mr. President, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are bright guys, really patriotic, but they've been dead wrong on every major piece of advice they've given you. That's why I'd get rid of them, Mr. President -- not just Abu Ghraib." They said nothing. Just sat like big old bullfrogs on a log and looked at me.

Big old bullfrogs. Yeah. Here's one more quote from Biden:

Biden: About six months ago, the president said to me, "Well, at least I make strong decisions, I lead." I said, "Mr. President, look behind you. Leaders have followers. No one's following. Nobody."

This is one of Bush's problems: he honestly thinks that the mere act of making "strong decisions" makes him a leader. It doesn't even occur to him that a leader is someone who makes good decisions and then persuades other people to support them.

CHANGING THE TONE IN WASHINGTON

Billmon explores the Dick Cheney F-word incident in a more historical context:

Now we know what Bush was talking about. I mean you can say "fuck yourself" in many different tones of voice - angry, joking, whiny, etc. Cheney's tone, of course, is a snarly bass growl.

And if you think he's even going to think about apologizing, then you don't know Dick:

Cheney said he "probably" used an obscenity in an argument Tuesday on the Senate floor with Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and added that he had no regrets. "I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it," Cheney told Neil Cavuto of Fox News. The vice president said those who heard the putdown agreed with him. "I think that a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue."

Ironically enough, it was only last Thursday that Al Hunt, the Wall Street Journal editorial page's house liberal, dug up a quote from Cheney dating back to the late Cretaceous period (circa the mid-1980's), in which the Laramie Lineman complained about the lack of "comity" in the Democratic Congress.

Cheney: No fucking comity at all. Fucking Democrats.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank and Helen Dewar do a nice job of digging up a few quotes from Bush's past - specifically, from his campaign promise to be a "uniter, not a divider."

President Bush had made his vow to "change the tone in Washington" a central part of his 2000 campaign, calling bipartisan cooperation "the challenge of our moment."

"Our nation must rise above a house divided," he said in his victory speech in December 2000. "I know America wants reconciliation and unity. I know Americans want progress. And we will seize this moment and deliver."

To be fair, you never heard Cheney talking that way - then or now. In his own calm but gruff way, the veep is very much on the same wave length as the rest of the conservative ultras - men who understand, as Grover Norquist memorably put it, that bipartisanship is just another name for date rape.

Unlike Shrub, Cheney doesn't bother pretending otherwise. Nor has he really needed to, given his status as the ultimate conservative insider. Wyoming congressmen and Texas oil industry executives don't usually have to worry too much about bipartisanship, since they're both products of what amount to ideological monocultures.

I don't remember Dick Cheney being such an asshole when he was Secretary of Defense, but then the Pentagon wasn't my beat, and Cheney wasn't exactly the kind of guy who attracted a lot of attention outside the military-industrial complex and its media camp followers. Of his attitude and personality in the Ford White House, I can say nothing. That was before my time - and, anyway, part of the pre-Cambrian era when it comes to the "comity" of U.S. politics.

There's been speculation that the Veep's surliness, like his current neoconservative extremism, is a byproduct of his bypass surgery, which has been known to induce dramatic personality changes in the patient (turning him or her into a "pump head," to use the vernacular.)

Personally, I doubt it - the heart doesn't seem to have ever been a particularly important organ in Cheney's psychology. (A man who produces an offspring nine months and one day after learning that only fathers will qualify for a student draft deferment can't exactly be called someone who is ruled by his emotions.)

No, I think what we have here is a byproduct of the enormous stress and growing panic that appears to be engulfing the neocons (and their maximum leader) as everything they've touched over the past two years turns to absolute shit. Cheney, the rock of the Rockies, the ultimate unflappable man, may finally be cracking.

What set the Veep off, apparently, was Leahy's attempt to make small talk - or, as Big Dick put it, "act like, you know, everything's peaches and cream" - at a ceremonial Senate photo shoot. Cheney wasn't having any of it, not when the Democrats are doing such a aggressive (and effective) job of trashing his beloved former employer, Halliburton. Apparently, publicizing the Pentagon's own findings about the exceptionally close interest taken in Halliburton contracts by Cheney's staff (including his chief of staff) is considered hitting below the belt.

It's ridiculous, really, for one of the reigning dons of the conservative mafia - which practically invented the modern art of negative campaigning back in the late 1970s (the heyday of the National Conservative Political Action Committee) to suddenly develop such a thin skin about the practice. It's a sensitivity that certainly wasn't on display when the Christian right's golden boy, Ralph Reed, labeled Max Cleland an ex officio member of Al Qaeda, or when the RNC morphed Paul Wellstone's funeral into a Nuremberg rally, or when Bill Frist accused Richard Clarke of perjury on the Senate floor - without having read one word of Clarke's testimony.

Wellstone's son has told the story of Frist coming up to him at the funeral, and offering not the slightest apology for having attacked his father's patriotism in a Senate speech not long before the 2002 elections. "That was just politics," Frist supposedly said, echoing Bush's non-apology to John McCain after the 2000 South Carolina primary - not to mention Sal Tessio's classic line from the Godfather: "Tell Mike I always liked him. It was just business."

So, OK, that's the way the game is played now - hard and rough. And when a company like Halliburton makes itself (and its former CEO) a fat, juicy target by exporting Enron's management techniques and business ethics to the war in Iraq, does anyone really believe the opposition - in an election year - isn't going to go after the story with hammer and tongs??

The problem, as is so often the case, is the classic bully's syndrome: They can dish it out, but they can't take it. To me, that's a valuable strategic weakness in an opponent. Cheney, in a completely spontaneous way, has just shown the Democrats where his sore spot is. So instead of making a big deal about Big Dick's use of the f word, the Dems should simply crank up the Halliburton-bashing. Instead of Halliburton Week, make it Halliburton Month.

After all, getting even is always better than getting mad.

WINK & A NOD AT TORTURE

Over at Corrente, here's a discussion of the major Bush&Co. push to defuse the torture scandal:

The WhiteWash House is now in full stonewall mode on the torture memos it commissioned, and is now working the cover story hard: Doing the usual managed release of "all" (ha) the documents, which in this case turn out to be full of loopholes ("military necessity").

The amazing thing will be, as usual, that Bush will think his maneuvers to shirk responsibility are subtle and secretive, when in fact they are amazingly clumsy and obvious. Oh well. Nobody ever went broke—even the blogosphere—by underestimating the crassness of the Bush administration.

Here at Corrente, we've argued that although torture will probably not be shown to have been ordered through the official chain of command (that would be the cover story, right), it is extremely likely that it was ordered (and managed, and concealed) by an apparatus we've called The Fog Machine. Kinda like discovering a new, hitherto unseen planet, by looking at the motion of the planets we know, eh? After all, we know these guys (good former Trots all) set up back channels whenever the official ones get in the way (exhibit 1: The Office of Feith-based intelligence).

And we've also argued that the orders for torture were conveyed through "nods and winks" — much as the orders for the Final Solution were conveyed to Hitler's willing executioners. (There. I've used the H word.) The lack of a clear chain of command, the removal of military insignias, the confusion between contractors, the military, and "other agencies", is by design: The chaos enables the operation of the Stanford Effect, where people given power over others surrender their scruples.

But where do the "nods and winks" come from? Bush himself, of course, and also Rumsfeld. But I think we've been ignoring the biggest torture meme propagator of all: Rush Limbaugh. [Check out this essay by actor/activist Mike Farrell:]

[Limbaugh called the torture] "a brilliant maneuver" and compared it to a college fraternity prank: "This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation," he said.

[Limbaugh] excused the actions of our soldiers this way: "You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?"

One full hour of "The Rush Limbaugh Show" is broadcast [by AFRTS] every weekday directly to our soldiers in Iraq and around the world -- to nearly 1 million U.S. troops in more than 175 countries and U.S. territories. Moreover, it is the only hour-long partisan political talk show broadcast daily to the troops.

AFRTS provides stateside radio and television programming, 'a touch of home' to U.S. service men and women.

Why should American taxpayers pay for the broadcasting of such inexcusable views to U.S. troops? Why, at a combustible moment like this one, would we be funneling Limbaugh's trivializations to our men and women at the front? Does Limbaugh's pro-torture propaganda really qualify as "a touch of home"?

Limbaugh's comments, and their tacit endorsement by the U.S. government, send a message to U.S. servicemen and servicewomen that torture is not a subject to be taken seriously and that these are actions that can be excused. Nothing could be more wrong than that. (via LA Times )

Another piece of the For Machine puzzle falls into place. The genius of the Bush administrator has been to privatize the "nods and winks" process.

Limbaugh's willing torturers....

June 25, 2004

Bush's Torture Scam: Behind the Documents Deceit

Here's the way it works. Bush&Co. are so secretive that they will never, ever, release internal decision-making documents to the public. And certainly not classified documents, never, ever.

Oh, yes, there is a teeny exception: when the Bush Administration is taking such heat on one scandal or another that, in order to deflect attention and limit the political damage, suddenly stacks of documents are delivered to the press.

But, in this self-serving schema, the Administration makes sure not to release all the relevant documents. It engages in what the Nixon crew during the Watergate scandal called a "modified, limited hangout" -- that is, releasing selectively those pieces of paper likely to help the Administration's case, and keeping secret those likely to reveal truths that should not see the light of day.

That's what happened, you remember, with Bush's AWOL scandal: for years it was claimed there weren't any such Texas National Guard records, but when the heat got too intense, a whole sheaf of documents suddenly materialized. But, of course the dump didn't include the more relevant, medical ones; the Associated Press announced a few days ago that it is suing to obtain the entire lot.

And now the same "modified, limited hangout" is operative with regard to the Bush Administration's torture-scandal.

Anything to Stop the Bleeding:

The political fallout from those torture-memos made public in the past several weeks -- those prepared for Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and the White House -- was simply too damaging. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said the documents were released because the Administration "felt it was harmful to this country in terms of the notion that we may be engaged in torture." In other words, the documents were made public not because torture is illegal and immoral (and usually counter-productive to boot), but because of the public-relations damage this whole torture brouhaha was bringing to the United States. (And, left unsaid, "to our election chances in November.") The political bleeding had to be stopped.

Those torture memos were designed to give Bush legal justifications for state-approved torture, plus they asserted that he, as Commander-in-Chief, was above the reach of the law.

So a few days ago, in a clear effort to counter those damaging revelations, the Bush Administration went public with the secret papers in order to prove that Bush never authorized torture and that he did not approve his attorneys' torture memos. Not only that, but Bush unequivocally told the press: "I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being."

Behind the headlines -- designed to make Bush look like a force for morality and decency -- was the fact that even though he claimed the Administration had "rescinded" the torture memos for reworking, he did not renounce the philosophy behind them; Gonzales said: "The analyses underpinning the president's decisions stand and are not being reviewed."

And he gave himself a number of outs that would keep in place many of the controversial interrogation techniques.

Loopholes to Permit Torture:

For example, it turns out that he still asserts the right to place himself above the law -- out of reach of Congress and the courts -- whenever he feels the need to do so. Bush said in the Feb. 7, 2002 memo: "I accept the legal conclusion of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice that I have the authority to suspend Geneva (conventions) as between the United States and Afghanistan. I reserve the right to exercise this authority in this or future conflicts."

In addition, Bush's written command in that 2002 letter -- ordering U.S. forces to obey all the laws of humane treatment of prisoners -- contains a huge, glaring caveat. Here's the key command: “As a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.”

In other words, if the head jailer at one of the many U.S. prison camps around the world determines that "military necessity" requires violations of the anti-torture laws or anti-torture conventions, he would be justified in carrying out what is euphemistically called "harsh interrogation techniques," to wit: torture. It has been so ordered by a written command of the President of the United States.

Attorney Michael Froomkin notes: "It’s also important to keep the confusing timeline straight. The OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] torture memo was delivered in August 2002, i.e. several months after this [Bush] order. Thus, it is clear that this command, in Feb. 2002, to be 'humane' was not the last word on the subject in the minds of all policy makers, including the President’s closest advisors, such as his Legal Counsel. And we know that the Walker Group [the Pentagon lawyers working to draft their now-infamous torture memo] was still chewing on the torture question in March 2003..."

So, one can reasonably view Bush's 2002 letter as little more than a cover-my-ass document, designed so that Bush later could assert: See, I told them what to do, and somehow by the time the order went down the chain of command, there were distortions and bad behavior by a few "bad apple" officers and troops. I'm in the clear.

But it also seems clear that none of the Bush Administration lawyers -- in the White House or in Ashcroft's Justice Department or in Rumsfeld's Defense Department -- paid the slightest attention to the Bush commands, because they were aware that Bush's letter was not to be taken seriously as policy. After all, three departments of the Bush Administration had been ordered to work for more than a year and a half, well past the time when Bush's letter was written, to devise justifications precisely for harsh interrogation techniques.

And so, over the objections of the State Department lawyers, the Ashcroft/Rumsfield working group continued trying to hammer out ways around the anti-torture laws and treaties, and eventually came up with all sorts of horrific justifications for torture and for turning Bush into a dictator beyond the reach of the law.

The word went down the chain of command and the torturing took off big time in Afghanistan, Iraq and no doubt at other U.S. prisons around the world -- with more than 37 detainees (that we know of) dying while in U.S. custody, many of them during or after harsh interrogations.

Tortured Definitions of "Turture:"

Let us conclude with a variant on what the definition of "is" is. Let us not forget that the Bushies prefer to use the term "abuse," because they've altered the common-sense meaning of the word "torture."

Torture, according to them, is pain so intense as to come close to death. The August 1, 2002, legal memo concluded that "the ban on torture is limited to only the most extreme forms of physical and mental harm," which the document defined as akin to "death or organ failure." Behaviors other than that -- lighter beatings, threats to kill their families, humiliations, near-drownings, etc. -- are not automatically "torture," under the Bush Administration definition, even though such acts are expressly forbidden under the Geneva Convention.

In short, the Administration's partial release of torture-related documents, plus Bush's statement about never authorizing "torture," amounts to a disgraceful scam:

* First, the publicizing of the documents is highly selective, showing us only that which they want to highlight and hiding the rest.

* Second, Bush asserts the right to authorize "torture" anytime he, in his wisdom as Commander-in-Chief, decides that it's called for -- which effectively puts him above the law, out of the reach of Congress and the U.S. and international courts. And his underlings can violate the torture laws and treaties anytime they decide that "military necessity" requires it.

* Third, the definition of "torture" is so...um, tortured, that it gives interrogators a fairly open field when terrorizing those they are questioning, which pretty much means they can do what they want with a prisoner up to the point of excruciating, near-death pain or organ-damage.

Now, do we all feel "comforted" by that?

June 23, 2004

Down the News Shaft for Political Ore

This past week's news provides a rich vein for mining. Not sure I have a lot of firm answers, but do have some informed guesses:

Why at this late date did Putin claim Russia told the Bush Administration that Saddam Hussein was planning to attack the U.S. mainland? He says now that this intelligence was provided sometime between 9/11/2001 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in early-2003.

Two theories are circulating: One is (if you believe this intelligence dump really happened) that Putin knew he could easily roll the naive Bush, and so, for his own geopolitical reasons, supplied the U.S. with false data in order to get the U.S. bogged down in an Iraqi quagmire while Russia surreptitiously built up its alliances in oil-rich Central Asia.

Sort of a Russian variant of the Chalabi exiles who, to realize their own political goals, fed Bush&Co. false and embellished "intelligence" about how easy it would be to conquer Iraq. In both cases, the naive neocons -- anxious for their own geopolitical reasons to get a strategic foothold in the Middle East -- swallowed the bait whole.

The other theory is that Putin was attempting to help out his good buddy Bush, who recently has been assaulted on all sides by evidence that he had no justifiable reason for attacking Iraq. I mean, all Bush's rationales have been proven false: no WMDs, no mushroom clouds over America, no drone planes attacking the Eastern Seaboard, no nuclear weapons program, no ties to the 9/11 attacks, and now, even Bush/Cheney's claim of Saddam's close connections with Al Qaida has been blown apart by the 9/11 Commission. (We won't even mention the latter-day claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq because Saddam was a cruel ruler who tortured and killed Iraqi prisoners in his care. The pot calling the kettle black and all that...)

So, either on his own or as a result of a gentle request from someone in the Bush camp, Putin last week reveals that maybe the U.S. had a solid reason to attack Saddam first. Doesn't pass the smell test in the slightest, but maybe that's not the point.

FOG, MIRRORS & BLOWING SMOKE

Which leads to the point. The 9/11 Commission is pretty adamant in its staff report that Iraq had no operational tie or close collaboration with Al Qaida, or even much of a relationship at all. But why, then, do Bush and Cheney keep insisting that there was such a connection? Why on earth would they want to look foolish still spouting that nonsense?

My theory is that Bush&Co. are throwing out confusion chaff. They've been telling those lies and deceptive remarks for so long now, and it was working well -- at one point, up to 70% of Americans believed Saddam was somehow connected to 9/11 -- that they figure it can't hurt to keep making the Iraq/Al Qaida assertions. That way, their minions in the mass-media can refer to the "confusion" and "controversy" surrounding the issue, implying that both sides are equal in their point of view.

It's the old Big Lie, smoke-and-mirrors trick. Throw some fog out there, blow some more fog, keep the fog coming; for a good many would-be voters, the truth gets all gets dim and puzzling -- and so they stick with the government's consistent version, Big Lie or no Big Lie.

Reminds me of the friendly science panel Bush appointed several years ago to back him on the global-warming "controversy"; the scientists did their research and shocked their boss by saying the situation was even worse than most scientists had imagined and something had to be done immediately to cut carbon monoxide emissions from cars and trucks. Bush denounced his own panel as "bureaucrats," removed the conclusions from the EPA annual report, and bowed to the desires of the polluters when rewriting emission standards.

BUSH QUOTE TYING SADDAM TO 9/11

Bush says he never overtly tied Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attack. He and his spokesmen for months intimated, hinted, conflated, deceived but, he insists, never came right out and included Iraq in the 9/11 charge. Whoops! He forgot that records are kept. Here's at least one claim he made where he went over the line that he said he never crossed. (Hurrah for blogger David Sirota, who posted the quote on June 18, 2004, first noted by USA Today on June 16, 2004.)

"In a letter to Congress on March 19, 2003 -- the day the war in Iraq began -- Bush said that the war was permitted under legislation authorizing force against those who 'planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001'."

Whoops, indeed.

WHAT, WHEN & WHAT ACTION TAKEN?

The 9/11 Commission's staff report focused on the utter chaos, bumbling mistakes, unpreparedness, shoddy chain of command structure and so on within the government. Doesn't this let all the air out of the balloon of conspiracy at the top? In this view, what happened on 9/11 was merely the to-be-expected, normal screwups of any government and military bureaucracy during a major crisis.

Admitting that there always was, and in this case certainly was, chaos and confusion in the lower ranks, this does not detract from the central questions in the investigation, still to be definitively answered: What did Bush and his closest advisors know about an impending major attack? When did they know it (from the intelligence reports, many of them quite detailed, coming into the White House from various countries in the summer of 2001)? What did they do about it, or what should they have done about it, given their pre-knowledge?

It's possible that when the Commissioners produce their own final report next month, they might well fault Bush for not acting on those fairly specific warnings by calling together the various department heads and getting them energized and alerted for a coming major Al Qaida terrorist attack. Might have saved some lives. Bush's dereliction of duty -- whether by incompetence or by design -- is manifold.

Also interesting: With George Tenet becoming a civilian shortly, after years as CIA chief, he may well be, or at least should be, recalled to testify outside the strictures of government service. If so, and if placed under oath again, he may have some very interesting tales to tell.

THE BUSH CENTER IS NOT HOLDING

How should one interpret the high-powered diplomats, military officers and other former Bush/Reagan officials who have banded together to denounce Bush policy and urge his defeat in November?

Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, a bipartisan group of 27 retired ambassadors and senior military officers, last week unequivocally condemned Bush's foreign policy, contending Bush has failed at "preserving national security and providing world leadership."

A possible interpretation: The corporate/conservative elite -- including Bush's own father -- is sending the message to the Republican Party to abandon Dubya or risk going damage to their own political and economic interests.

These are no liberal pantywaists, no peaceniks, talking. These are heavy-hitter insiders, who have clout in GOP and political/military circles around the country. Just look at some of the names: Admiral William Crowe, former Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan; Admiral Stansfield Turner, former head of the CIA under Carter; General Joseph Hoar, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East under President Bush 1; Jack F. Matlock Jr., ambassador to the Soviet Union under Reagan and Bush 1; William Harrop, ambassador to Israel under Bush 1; and so on.

If Bush and Cheney and Rove don't take the hint, and choose to continue on their self-destructive and America-destructive course, one can expect that more big-name defections will follow. (Might we hope that Colin Powell has been biding his time, waiting for the most effective moment to make his leap for freedom? Oh, let it be so.)

SCANDAL ERUPTIONS

How close are the various scandals to erupting into indictments? Here are my guesstimates. For the outing of a covert CIA agent Valerie Plame by "two senior Administration officials": very close. For Cheney (on various Halliburton and energy schemes), getting closer. For Enron's Kenneth Lay (and what then might be revealed about BushCheney ties): very close. For 9/11 Commission on Bush's nonchalant attitude toward pre-9/11 knowledge: about a month away. The torture-memo scandal implicating BushCheneyRumsfeld: unfolding in more ugly ways each day. Chalabi scandal (who fed the Iraqi national highly-classified U.S. secrets?): not likely to yield much anytime soon.

The GOP still controls the levers of power in the House and Senate, so impeachment is unlikely in the short run. But if the scandals keep erupting, and if more and more of the business/military elite see Bush as a liability, and he won't leave or drop out of the race on his own, the word may go out to the House and Senate leaders to initiate hearings on possible impeachment. Not likely, but things are moving so fast in Washington these days that it's not outside the realm of possibility.

The Democrats have to keep up the pressure, and, where necessary, initiate hearings on their own on some of these scandals, trying to unearth the truth. Kerry has to start weighing in more forcefully on these matters, and tying them together in a meaningful way -- similar to what Al Gore has been doing in his recent, hard-hitting speeches. Kerry hasn't got all that much time to play nicey nice.

The election is only four-plus months away, John.

For more on some of the issues raised above, see bloggers:

Josh Marshall www.talkingpointsmemo.com
Billmon www.billmon.org
Digby http://digbysblog.blogspot.com
Corrente http://corrente.blogspot.com
Robert Dreyfuss www.tompaine.com/archives/the_dreyfuss_report.php
Kevin Drum www.washingtonmonthly.com
Steve Gilliard http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com

And check out this week's Best of the Blogs in The Crisis Papers.

June 14, 2004

Bush Answers Torture Question -- NOT!

Now that the official "It's Mourning in America" period is over, it's back to the real world of politics and shame.

Read this colloquy between a BBC reporter and George Bush at this weekend's G-8 Summit press conference:

Q. Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?

THE PRESIDENT: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. If I -- maybe -- maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions out of -- from me to the government.

The first thing that strikes one (at least the "one" writing this blog) is the willingness of the reporter to get out on the record a serious charge against Bush. He knew he wasn't going to get an answer -- and that he might not be permitted to ask any more questions of the U.S. President again -- but it's so important to bring certain issues into the public arena, so that others will start talking about them.

Here, the British reporter went to the heart of a major problem for Bush and his lackeys involved in the huge-and-growing torture scandal, one that could well result in impeachment charges being brought against Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rumsfeld.

That is: If your Administration's lawyers have altered the definition of the "rule of law" to make the President the final arbiter of what that "law" is, then when you say your Administration has nowhere violated the "law," you make logical sense -- even if your policy is totally immoral and, when the courts get through with it, may well be ruled to be illegal.

The second thing that I find striking in the press-conference exchange above is that Bush -- in addition to hiding behind the new, improved meaning of "law" supplied him by his lawyers -- evades the thrust of the question. He stays away from the "moral" reference, and ignores the question of when torture might be justified.

In short, a a classic non-answer, with touches of chicanery about it, since the meaning of the "law" has been shifted -- without most American citizens even being aware that, according to Bush&Co. attorneys, the President and the President alone, since he's the Commander-in-Chief in "wartime," now gets to make and interpret all the laws, and no court and no Congress is (according to the Bush interpretation) permitted to interfere.

Sounds like dictatorship to me. I'm not comforted in the slightest. As a matter of fact, I'm frightened and immensely angry at this illegal, unconstitutional usurpation of all power into the hands of one person. (See my new essay out tomorrow on The Crisis Papers, as well as my previous blog: "The Bush Dictatorship Revealed: L'etat c'est moi," below on this page).

RON-RON TAKES ON BUSH

For me, 95% of the chock-a-block TV coverage of the Reagan death and funeral, while moving in spots, was pretty much a waste of time, filled with unwarranted adulation and sycophantic rightwing coverage designed to canonize the 40th president into political sainthood.

Bush's eulogy was more subtle than might have been expected in trying to wrap himself in the Reagan shroud, by highlighting aspects of Reagan policy that bear an amazing resemblance to Bush's own actions. But, even in this watered-down version, the attempt was a bit too obvious, read like it came from a speechwriter and not from the heart, and didn't work in any case. The most recent polls indicate that, if anything, Bush lost ground when folks could measure him against Reagan and against the other political heavyweights in attendance.

But the entire orgy of Reaganiana was worth it for one moment of courage and truth. Ron Reagan Jr., standing in front of his father's coffin, the world's elite mourners, and all of us out there in TV land, came down hard on the current pretender to the throne in just a few sentences. He nowhere mentioned Bush's name or his foreign policy, but everyone knew exactly what was being said and about whom.

"Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference."

On the one hand, Ron Jr. was saying, you've got this good man, my father, who was very religious but never used his faith as a holier-than-thou weapon in the political arena; God had given him this heavy responsibility and he was going to try to exercise it to the best of his ability. On the other hand, we've got this fundamentalist guy in charge who constantly beats the drum for his religious interpretation as the only one that's true. Not only that, but he believes God has talked to him directly and mandated that he start wars for no good reason, and young men and women and countless innocent civilians are being killed as a result.

Thank you, Ron-Ron, for your courage and your wisdom -- and for your writing skills: "He came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference." That is a model of compact, impressive, subtle prose. A budding young politician in the making?

GOODBYE TO AN EXCEPTIONAL BLOGGER

I write these blogs twice a week, and it's difficult work. I can't imagine doing it every day; the hard, never-ending slog would be debilitating. But there are wonderful, politically-savvy bloggers out there who do the job, day after day, mostly for little or no compensation. (For just a few of the best, check out our Recommended Blogsites). They do it because someone has to do it, has to find the truth amid the garbage, has to keep the crimes and buffooneries of this Administration before the American voters.

But we've lost a major one. The blogger who goes by the name of "Hesiod" a few days ago announced to his readers that he was quitting the blogging rat-race, after two years of daily reporting and commentary. I don't know what brought him to his decision, perhaps just simple burnout. Whatever the reason, Hesiod has earned all our plaudits and thank-yous for a job well done. Wherever and whoever you are, Hesiod, all the best to you. Your nose for news and winning sense of humor will be much missed.

Below are excerpts of commentaries by other bloggers on some of the issues raised here.

Josh Marshall www.talkingpointsmemo.com carries on the torture-memos discussion:

..."What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law," Bush told reporters at the close of the G-8 summit in Savannah, Ga.

Asked if torture is ever justified, Bush replied, "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. ... The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you."

When addressing this topic, President Bush placed great emphasis on the fact that whatever may have happened would have been consistent with his order that "anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations."

But that statement has a certain, shall we say, tortured ring to it when we've just seen this lengthy Pentagon memo, which describes novel and improbable legal interpretations by which actions that seem on their face to violate US laws and international treaties actually do not because of the president's plenary powers as commander-in-chief and grand interrogation muckety-muck.

And one other thing: can we have a show of hands of those who still think those half-dozen reservists weren't following orders?

Even back home they're starting to wonder. This from an editorial in yesterday's Houston Chronicle:

The United States' moral authority to call for the rule of law and respect for human rights has been undermined by legal machinations the Bush administration undertook to justify torturing prisoners taken in the war on terror.

Administration officials have attempted to downplay the significance of a March 6, 2003, Justice Department memorandum that concluded that, as commander in chief in time of war, President George W. Bush is bound neither by federal law nor the tenets of the Geneva Conventions that ban torture as a means of extracting information from detainees.

...The March memo asserts that interrogators could inflict severe pain on a detainee with impunity as long as the intent was something other than to torture. An interrogator would be culpable only if he knew his actions would inflict suffering that is severe enough to induce "prolonged" physical or mental effects. An interrogator would be immune from punishment if he believed he acted to prevent a larger harm, the lawyers determined.

The memos were obviously concocted to defend acts that are clearly beyond the bounds of a civilized nation.

The memos support the view that the prisoner abuses uncovered at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were not merely the grave mistakes of a few soldiers, but resulted from policies formed at the highest levels of government. They strengthen concerns about how detainees at Guantánamo and in Afghanistan are being treated.

As I suggest in The Hill, I think we're actually pretty far past that point.

We're like contestants on Wheel of Fortune with a long phrase spelled out in front of us with maybe one or two letters missing. We know what the letters spell. It's obvious. We just don't have the heart to say it out loud.

Digby also gets the point:

Ronald Reagan is still dead. In other news, America is now officially a Rogue State. (For the full compendium of news stories, opinion and blogorama on the subject: Sisyphus Shrugged - torture link dump.

In the president's beautiful mind, he didn't order torture because he told the lawyers to make a legal finding that torture was ok and so they found that what we call torture is legal now but it isn't called torture anymore because torture is still illegal. So the president followed the law.

And lots of people pitched in to make it all possible.

Xymphora chimes in with a joke and a damn good question about legal liability:

A legally astute joke from Jay Leno found here:

"According to the New York Times, last year White House lawyers concluded that President Bush could legally order interrogators to torture and even kill people in the interest of national security - so if that's legal, what the hell are we charging Saddam Hussein with?"

By the way, shouldn't the lawyers who signed the torture opinions, knowing they were wrong in international and domestic law, and knowing they were to be used to justify breaches of international and domestic law, be disbarred; and charged under those same international and domestic laws for conspiring to facilitate the use of torture by American troops?

Corrente spots a sentence worth further exploration, and discusses a whores-"vaccine" story:

The key words from the Terror Q&A and the G8 press conference: "The authorization I issued." This is a document that must be brought out into the light of day (by way of a subpoena from Sen. Warner's committee?).

Unless, of course, the document doesn't really say anything. If the administration really is operating on fuhrerprinzip, it won't.

Vaccine We all know the theory of how vaccine works, right? You give a little tiny bit of the real disease, or else a watered-down version of it, and all yer little immune system cells whomp it up good. Then when you get exposed to a full dose of the real disease in all its awfulness, it doesn't bother you a bit. You're immune.

My guess is that the videos Sy Hersh talked about, the photos of Abu Graihb guards "having sex" with Iraqi women prisoners, should be coming out in the next few days. Here's the vaccine you're being given ahead of time. It's a two-stage dose:

(1) It's no big deal, the women were whores. Can't rape a whore, right?

(2) It's even less of a big deal because the guys were drunk. We've all done stupid things when we're drunk, right? Peered at the person next to us in the harsh early morning light and gnawed off our arms to escape? Wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean? Awful things happen in wartime. Boys will be boys. Frathouse pranks.

That's not what I was thinking when I first saw this story from the ## LATimes. I'm sure Greg Miller had no idea he was being set up to provide cover for worse things to come.

Finally, Juan Cole, using the Matrix characters, takes a look at recent polls and demographics and how they might work against Bush, since he looks like a leader Not In Control:

California and Florida: Polls and Demographics work against Bush; Has W. morphed from Neo to Smith?

Ron Fournier of the Associated Press has a fascinating article on the changes in Florida's political geography since the last election. He points out that over 700,000 voters have moved into Florida, which now has over 9 million voters, and the immigrants are disproportionately African-American and Latino. His sources think this non-trivial population movement could well throw Florida to Kerry. The Iraq quagmire appears to loom large for Floridians as a reason to vote against Bush, even among voters who supported him the last time.

It seems to me that there is a bottom line for presidents. They have to at least look like they are in control or getting control. One of the reasons Dwight Eisenhower was so angry at the Israelis, French and British for attacking Egypt in late October, 1956, was that they had not told him about the plot and it made him look like he was not in control, on the eve of an election. Ike knew about the Control factor. He called up British PM Anthony Eden and cursed him out "like an old sailor." Jimmy Carter looked like he wasn't in control because of the Iran hostage crisis, and he was thrown out. Voters can forgive momentary lapses in control. Most people don't hold September 11 against President Bush the way former security czar Dick Clarke does.

But to rally around the president in a crisis is a temporary sentiment. After the first bloom is off the problem, he has to show that he is in control again. Bush did that well in Afghanistan, though apparently reluctantly, since he wanted to go after Iraq first but Tony Blair dissuaded him. But now Bush is stuck in Iraq and he looks like he is not in control. The charade of a "transfer of sovereignty" (when there is no Iraqi army and there are 138,000 US troops in Iraq) is not going to restore the sense of control. As long as you have that kind of troop strength in Iraq, I don't believe most Americans will buy the argument that it is now Allawi's show.

A new Los Angeles Times poll indicates that a majority of Americans now thinks it was not worthwhile going to war in Iraq (53%). This is up from 43% in March. And over 60% of Americans think the US is bogged down in Iraq. This Reuters article says that 52% of Americans still thought that the US was winning the war and less than a quarter thought the insurgents were winning. But you could read that statistic the other way around and conclude that almost half of Americans do not believe that the US is winning, even if they are reluctant to admit that the insurgents are. If over half think the enterprise not worthwhile and nearly half think we are losing, it becomes clearer why Iraq shows up as so important in Floridians' attitudes toward Bush. The two taken together equal A President Not in Control.

The poll also found that Kerry leads Bush nationwide by 51 to 44 percent. By 51% to 16%, they felt that Bush is "too ideological and stubborn." Over half of Americans think Bush is too ideological and stubborn? This is a remarkable statistic. It is important because it helps explain why they think he is not in control. He is perceived as having a tragic flaw, like a Greek or Shakespearian tragic protagonist, which prevents him from being in control and gets him into messes. Hamlet was indecisive, Macbeth over-ambitious, etc. OK, for Americans probably one should think in terms of a flawed character in some recent film. But my rhetorical analysis would remain the same.

(Here's a try: Neo and Smith in The Matrix are actually similar in many ways. Both of them want to overturn the Matrix status quo, both of them use violence, both of them are seeking to become something more than they are, are seeking to escape the trap of the pods in which the machines have imprisoned them. But Neo is open to reality, is willing to question, to go where the leads take him. Perhaps most Americans saw Bush as like Neo in the months immediately after September 11. Smith is "too ideological and stubborn," and as a result over-reaches at a crucial moment. It seems to me that his Iraq misadventure, Abu Ghuraib, Torturegate, the proto-fascist memos of the counsels to the president--all this has made Bush look increasingly Smith-like. If you are running for office, you want to be seen by the young people as like Neo, and not at all like Smith.)

June 11, 2004

The Bush Dictatorship Revealed: L'etat c'est moi

There's only one issue to discuss right now: the extra-constitutional rules and philosophy of the Bush Administration, as revealed in the legal briefs and memos drafted for Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Bush on the torture question.

Joke: Ronald Reagan really died two months ago, but word was not released until the torture memos-scandal erupted this week. Humor or not, the Reagan death and funeral wiped everything else out of the news. So, as a corrective, we'll devote this blog only to the memos topic, and hope that once the conservative mass-media's orgy of funeral coverage is over, once the attempted elevation of Reagan into political sainthood is finished, the country can return to the ramifications of these memos and start the required investigations for real.

And start the moves toward impeachment as well, of Rumsfeld and Ashcroft for starters, the Big Boys shortly thereafter.

We used to make light of Bush's jokes about his fondness for running the show as a dictator; little did we know that shortly after 9/11 (and perhaps even before), his Administration would begin moving precisely in that direction.

The underlying philosophy behind the legal briefs and memos in question can be summarized thusly: The President is the Commander-in-Chief. The President says we're in a war. The Commander-in-Chief in a time of war can lay aside all laws and treaties, and do whatever he feels he has to do, in the name of national security.

What this means in practice is: Since in a war against terrorism, there is no definitive end, what the U.S. is waging is permanent war -- against the Al Qaida network and against those nation-states that the president deems worthy of being invaded, for real or invented reasons. Since the president is permitted to establish his own set of laws for the duration of the war, it follows that anyone who criticizes his actions ipso facto is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and can be dealt with at any time by the police agencies of the state. Don't mess with us.

Can't get much closer to dictatorship than that. This is the world, and philosophy, of Pinochet, Stalin, Hitler. Or, closer to home, Richard Nixon, who claimed that when a president takes any action, because he is the president, by definition his actions are not illegal.

"ABOVE THE LAW" NO LONGER A METAPHOR

Note: I'm not saying or suggesting that Bush is Hitler or Stalin or Pinochet, rather that the policies and philosophies expressed, which already have been put into practice and are being defended by the Bush Administration and its supporters, clearly and inevitably takes our country down that road to political dictatorship.

("The breadth of authority in the [memo] report is wholly unprecedented," says Avi Cover, a senior attorney with the U.S. Law and Security programme of Human Rights First, formerly known as Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "Until now, we've used the rhetoric of a president who is 'above the law,' but this document makes that [assertion] explicit; it's not a metaphor anymore."
Even conservatives that are doing all they can to keep Bush in office, and thus preserve their party's majority status in Congress, are having great difficulty coming to the defense of Bush&Co. on this issue. If impeachment is initiated in the next few months, it will come with the aid of Republicans appalled by these extra-constitutional moves by Bush and his handlers to sidestep the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Congress, the courts, indeed any individual or institution that gets in their way.

Let me reiterate: What is being discussed here is not the torture of detainees or prisoners in the "war on terror." That is an important issue all its own, one that flows naturally from the philosophy being advanced in the leaked memos. (And, by the way, even though Ashcroft has asserted that he will not turn over the memos to the Congress -- which could be grounds for citing him for contempt of Congress -- some of the documents already are out on the internet.

What IS being examined here is the proclaimed right of this Administration to torture anyone, to imprison anyone, to invade any country, simply because (it is claimed) as Commander-in-Chief in a war, he has the sole right to decide who should be prosecuted, imprisoned, tortured, invaded, killed.

THE SUPREME LEADER

According to this cockamamie interpretation of how America works, the Constitution and Bill of Rights are null and void whenever the president decides to "lay aside" laws and act on his own authority. L'etat c'est moi: I am the State. No legislature, no court, no international body can, or should, get in the way. This is wartime. I am the Supreme Leader. Sieg heil!

You think I'm exaggerating, comparing this totalitarian philosophy of government with those of the Stalinist or Hitlerian states? Just read for yourself the ##52-page memo on the sordid justifications the Bush Administration lawyers thought up to allow for, even facilitate, the torture of suspects in custody.

Now the Bushies will claim that those were just working drafts, or philosophical speculations by government attorneys, never adopted into official policy, never turned into orders or laws. And, in the narrowest sense -- even though government actions to date have mirrored what was laid out in those documents -- they may be correct that Bush never explicitly signed a written order that said "go thou and torture."

But underlings understand what is being communicated by their bosses, based on their demands for information, their body language, the many discussions that have been held on the topic in question, the tone of voice in their wanting certain conclusions to be reached, etc. Hitler, for example, never had to authorize in writing the genocide of six million Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals. He didn't have to: the philosophy of maltreatment and destruction had been hammered out over the months in memorandums and discussions around tables. The word filtered down the chain of command. Everyone knew what they were supposed to do, with no written orders necessary.

In the case of prisoner-torture and abuse at Guantánamo and in Iraq and elsewhere, the memoranda commissioned by the Justice and Defense Departments (with, per usual, only the State Department objecting) laid out the attitude of this radical, extremist Administration: Find us a way that we can extract information from prisoners in our custody that will not amount to war crimes under the various conventions and treaties about torture.

HOW TO GET AROUND THE TREATIES

The ways they came up with, while morally and legally reprehensible, were ingenious. 1) We won't have "prisoners of war," which are covered under the Geneva Conventions; we'll invent new terms not covered, such as "enemy combatants." 2) We will claim a new universal right for the president: acting under his authority as Commander-in-Chief during "wartime," he can authorize whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and all will be justified under his oath to protect the national security. Therefore, whatever he authorizes is not unlawful, because he IS the law.

And, to protect those who carry out and facilitate the torture and abuse, all the president has to do is sign a document authorizing him to fulfill the orders, and, in a magic instant, they are thus immunized from war-crimes charges by any federal or international court because (drum roll, please) they were only "following orders." ("To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a 'presidential directive or other writing' that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is inherent in the president'." Click heels, arms out.

"If anyone in the higher levels of government acted in reliance on this advice, those persons should be impeached. If they authorized torture, it may be that they have committed, and should be tried for, war crimes. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, 'I was just following orders' is NOT (and should not be) a defense," writes attorney Michael Froomkin. Brazen chutzpah! These swaggering bullies simply dismiss the possible validity of any moral or legal or political judgments other than their own, and (secretly) barrel on full-steam ahead. Why? Because they and they alone know what is Good; everyone who disagrees is either Evil or inadvertently serving the cause of Evil. If the former, they can be imprisoned and/or wiped out; if the latter, they can be charged and punished, which will alert others to keep their traps shut, lest they get the same treatment.

OVERTHROWING THE CONSTITUTION

Our Founding Fathers were all too aware of that type of thinking and government, which is why they rebelled against a tyrannical monarch, and set up their own carefully thought-through system of governance, one designed to prevent any one person or faction from too easily being able to do civic damage in the name of righteousness. The checks-and-balances system of government, with a strong free press ferreting out scandals and dangerous rascals, was designed to ensure democracy and freedom.

That system of government has worked beautifully (if sluggishly) for more than two centuries. But within just a few years, acting out of greed and power-hunger, a few extremist ideologues have tried to turn that system on its head, installing what amounts to a king as president, and woe be unto those who demur or oppose.

Using fear and demagoguery after the terrors of 9/11 -- an attack they knew was coming but did nothing to prevent or ameliorate -- those ideologues manipulated the Congress and populace into giving them a blank check to go after those who perpetrated this terrorist mass-murder, and they've been riding that same horse ever since in service of their other, more extreme agenda. They even invented a non-existent tie-in to 9/11 to justify their invasion of Iraq -- and then, much later, with very little attendant publicity, Bush admitted that there hadn't been any such relationship.

IMPEACHMENT AND ELECTIONS

Friends (and any Democratic office-holders reading this), we either stop this pack of wolves here -- by impeaching them now, or in November throwing them out of the offices they've disgraced -- or we wind up living in a police-state at home, and carrying out more disastrous imperial wars abroad. Is this the country so many veterans have fought and died for? Is this the kind of government you want your kids raised under? Is this, finally, what we've come to in America because we didn't pay enough attention to what was really happening under our noses, and permitted ourselves to be snowed and manipulated so easily?

I think not. It's time for us to raise our voices in a mighty roar to our elected officials, to organize our friends and neighbors, to shout out to the rest of the world that this is not the true America and will not stand.

We will not permit a dictatorship, not matter what is claims as its reasons, to destroy our Constitution and Bill of Rights, to damage America's reputation abroad, to place our national interests in such jeopardy, to deform our economy and social system by spending hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign adventurism, to ruin our environment, to close off true learning opportunities to our children.

We've learned our lesson from Vietnam: We will not permit our country to be "destroyed in order to save it." This Administration has to leave. The sooner the better. The longer they stay in power, the worse it is for all of us.

Just go!

To read what some other bloggers have to say so brilliantly on this torture-memo issue, check out:

Josh Marshall
Billmon
Digby
Corrente
Atrios
Kos

June 7, 2004

Life Is Politics

I attended a wedding the other day of two friends who have lived together for 34 years and have three grown children in their 20s. It was a legal wedding -- with an officiating minister and all the trimmings -- but also a touching re-affirmation of their commitment to each other, with beautifully expressed vows, both comic and serious.

Why were they making their relationship legal after all these years? In addition to wanting to renew their deep love for each other in the presence of their children and friends, they had a very practical reason: To tie up the legal/financial ends.

They wanted to ensure they could access Social Security survivor benefits; to make sure doctors and hospitals would recognize their union for visitation and decision-making purposes; to remove any obstacles for their children in settling estates, etc. In short, they desired to make sure that society's laws -- per usual, several generations behind the realities about how many folks arrange their relationships -- would not, and could not, interfere in the most intimate matters of their lives.

Another couple at the wedding reception -- who also had lived together for decades -- revealed that just recently they, too, had tied the marital knot, at City Hall, for many of the same legal/financial reasons.

Someone else told me at the reception that if a same-sex married couple was traveling through Oklahoma with their children and there was a car accident, the state would not permit those parents to make health-care decisions for their injured kids. Disgraceful!

Eventually, as I say, all politics is local -- and personal. Which may be why the mood of the country is steadily shifting toward more acceptance of gay marriage and homosexuality in general. So many heterosexuals know gays -- from work or church or school or even in their own extended families -- and know these people are not "sexual perverts" with "a gay agenda," but as folks pretty much like themselves, with a different sexual orientation and the same goals for themselves and their families. Politics suddenly becomes personal.

Then, too, there is the demographic factor: the younger heterosexual generation has grown up comfortably with gays, who they know as people proud of and comfortable with their sexual orientation. It's just no big thing.

I always tear up at weddings, and this one -- of our friends finally tying the knot after 34 years -- was especially moving, as I watched their three grown kids sit there in the front row, in awe as their parents acknowledged their long and constant commitment to each other, in the past, now and into the unknown future.

Finally, though nobody even mentioned this at the reception, if Bush were to be elected in November, the self-righteous zealots who are America's homegrown Taliban might well come up with even more restrictive legislation aimed at deviance from the social norms as interpreted by the theocratic neocons. All the more reason to work for Bush&Co.'s defeat, just in case you couldn't come up with any other reasons, ha.

Another telling anecdote from the wedding reception. A friend on a recent flight, seated on the aisle, was engaged in spirited political conversation with the passenger seated by the window. After dodging the zingers flying by her, the woman in the middle eventually told my friend that she had no interest in politics and had no intention of voting in the coming presidential election.

"This was a woman with two M.A.s, a registered nurse, and had absolutely zilch knowledge of, or interest in, the political issues that were affecting her life in health care, as a woman, as a citizen," said my friend. "I couldn't believe it."

Luckily, she related, it was a five-hour flight, and she spent a good share of that time filling in her seatmate on what the Bush policy was on a woman's right to choose, on Medicare and Social Security, on health care and stem-cell research, on the lies and deceptions that led us into Iraq and that are getting our young men and women killed, and so on. By the time the plane landed in San Francisco, another anybody-but-Bush voter was born.

And that's yet another way this campaign will be won: By each of us reaching out to friends, neighbors, colleagues, fellow congregants, even strangers on planes, and letting them know what the issues are and how they affect them and their families and communities. More and more conservatives, independents, middle-of-the-roaders are peeling off from the Bush base. Let's keep the momentum building. (See also "Persuadables Are Up For Grabs -- If You Can Get Them To Pay Attention" at Kos).

Ronald Reagan has died and already the canonization moves have begun from the right -- put him on Mt. Rushmore! -- and the denunciations from the left.

There are plenty of reasons to despise the Reagan presidency, and there's no need for me to document all the crimes of commission and omission (see some of the bloggers below), but the liberal/progressive camp needs to be aware of the positive things that came out of the Reagan years as well, and which angered many Hard-Right conservatives at the time.

* Reagan rejected the hard-line approach of his hawkish advisors (who urged him not to make any deals with the Soviet "evil empire") to reach a political detente, largely on the basis of his intuition about Mikhail Gorbachev. Such action may well have averted a nuclear confrontation.

* Reagan approved a bill that, in the case of abortions, included exceptions for women who'd been raped, or victims of incest, or whose lives or personal health might be put at risk because of the operation. He signed the bill into law.

* Reagan actually raised taxes when the economy/budget made doing so a necessity, rather than letting the poor and middle-class assume the entire burden. Anathema to the government-is-the-enemy crowd.

In short, when one looks at previous Republican presidents -- especially Nixon and Reagan and George H. W. Bush -- and then at the current resident of the White House, those conservative icons look almost benign in comparison. Though locked into their own rigidities and theories -- and while carrying out all sorts of crimes and scandals -- they at least on occasion exhibited genuine compassion for others, and more understanding of the true complexities of the real world.

Those presidents were genuine conservatives, not the pretend Bush model, who with every action reveals himself as a close-minded radical, a zealot locked into dangerous simplicities -- one who is endangering our country's future with his reckless policies, both foreign and domestic. Unelected, uninformed and, at this stage by so many true conservatives, unwanted. Good riddance to bad rubbish in November.

Kos includes the following posts about Reagan:

Ronald Reagan - In Memoriam

by DemFromCT June 6, 2004

...As we watch the memorial discussions and reminiscing, some real and some (to be expected) exaggerated, I think it appropriate to wish his family peace, and to honor this American President in the most fitting way possible. Not a coin, not Mt. Rushmore, but with the memorial Nancy asked for. Whenever Reagan's name comes up, and overblown tributes are suggested that seem inappropriate, this should be the humble response.

In a rare appearance last month, former first lady Nancy Reagan spoke at an
event to raise money for embryo stem cell research. She hoped, she said, that others would benefit from research on such diseases as Alzheimer's, which had afflicted her husband, Ronald.

"Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him," she said. "Because of this, I'm determined to do whatever I can to save other families from this pain."

Reagan, 82, who was married to the nation's 40th president for 52 years, had been by the ailing president's side, particularly as the family publicly acknowledged his bout with the disease 10 years ago.

Reagan's recent public support of stem cell research, however, has put her at odds with other Republicans, including President George W. Bush, who opposes the research.

Still, Reagan, whose support carries much clout, is doing what she says she has to do. "I just don't see how we can turn our back on this," she said at the fund-raiser.

I agree with Nancy Reagan. Alzheimer's runs in my family, too. I don't see how we can turn our back on this, either.

Reagan's Great Achievement

by DHinMI June 5th, 2004

Trapper John [see below] wisely counsels us to be wary of giving fodder to the winger who are just dying for the opportunity to see us gloat about Reagan's death, and to spew venom at him and his legacy. I have no interest today in attacking Reagan's legacy; in fact, I wish to praise him for his prescience in recognizing that Mikhail Gorbachev was a dramatically different man than the line of tired apparatchiks he succeeded. Reagan recognized that this was a man that he could bargain with, a man who wanted to make the world a safer place, and place less vulnerable to a nuclear war that would destroy all life as we know it. In short, Reagan looked into Gorbachev's soul, and knew this was a man the U.S. could and should trust.

But Reagan's greatest achievement -- his work with Gorbachev, including arms reduction treaties and the resulting lowering of tensions between the superpowers, which allowed Gorbachev to begin the reforms that led the Soviets to relinquish control over Eastern Europe and paved the way for Yeltsin's final destruction of the Soviet system -- was pursued against the advice of some of the most hawkish Republicans in his administration and in Congress. So tonight, as we live in a world where the danger of nuclear war is much lower than it was in 1985, when Reagan and Gorbachev first met, let us praise Reagan for ignoring the advice of those who said bargaining with Gorbachev would endanger the safe ty of the free world, especially then-Defense Department official Richard Perle and then-Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney.

Revisionist History Time

by Tom Schaller

As addendum to Trapper John's great post below, let's keep in mind that the battle to establish Reagan's legacy is already underway. (Wolf Blitzer just said on CNN that Reagan's great timing in life continued in death, as he passed on the eve of the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the signature moment of a war that...what, Wolf?...that Reagan fought in during movie appearances?)

Now, we know conservatives hate revisionist history. So, first accord Reagan whatever period of respect you deem appropriate. But then, in the interest of making sure the historical record is as clear and full as possible, make sure you read Josh Green's article from January 2003, in which Green debunks Reagan's conservative credentials, especially how he raised income taxes and payroll taxes and grew the size of the federal bureaucracy. People at work, school, etc. will be talking about Reagan, and the simplistic "won the Cold War while cutting taxes" Cliffs-notes distillation that will no doubt be repeated as scripture.

Here are some key graphs from Green:

Reagan is, to be sure, one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history and will certainly be remembered as such. His record on the environment, defense, and economic policy is very much in line with its portrayal. But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government, radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn't stopped partisan biographers from pretending otherwise. (Noonan writes of his 1980 campaign pledges: "Done, done, done, done, done, done, and done. Every bit of it.")

A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative dogma that taxes should never be raised.

All of this has been airbrushed from the new literature of Reagan...

Ronald Reagan Is Dead

by Trapper John

Ronald Reagan died today at the age of 93. He earned the enmity of many of us on the left through his dismantling of the New Deal and enabling of a culture of greed -- but we should not forget that he was once one of us, an FDR Democrat. His journey to the far right mirrored a similar, if less dramatic, shift that occurred in the general American psyche. And while Reagan cannot be excused for his utter failure as president, we must never see him solely as a symbol of a shameful era -- because his rise was attributable in part to an inertia and lack of vision that gripped our predecessors on the left. It was in part our inability to satisfy the hunger of Americans for positive leadership that caused Reagan and other former liberals to embrace a radical ideology that was before only espoused by crackpots and the prophets of selfishness.

So while we rightly condemned Reagan for his extremism and hostility to the egalitarian ideals of his youth, perhaps we should take this occasion not only to remember Reagan's failings, but also to reflect upon the failings of the left that allowed the ascension of the extreme right. We've learned a lot about how to talk with the American people over the past few years, and we've reclaimed the fighting spirit that has characterized the best of the left through American history -- let's never again allow ourselves to become so self-satisfied that we allow another Reagan to capture the hearts of everyday Americans. And let us remember that in spite of his many faults, he was a human being, and his family is entitled to an appropriate level of decorum in their time of loss.

UPDATE: And let's ensure that the same Republican machine that cried about supposedly untoward politicization of the Paul Wellstone memorial service doesn't use Reagan's passing as an excuse to play politics. I mean, we know that they'd never do that, but . . .

Billmon takes a long view of Reagan's presidency:

...In hindsight, it's easy to see that Reagan's election was the end of many things - the end of the '70s, and the mood of experimentation that went with it (the '70s were when the '60s went mainstream); the end of the "Vietnam syndrome," and the temporary popular revulsion against imperial military adventures; the end of the political alignment that emerged from the New Deal, the end of the New Left and its hopeless ambitions -- the end, really, of the post-World War II era.

I found it hard to hate Reagan - even though I detested most of what he stood for, believed and sought to do. Yes, he was as ignorant and stubborn and incapable of rational thought as our current president, but he wasn't arrogant - or at least, he didn't come across as arrogant. He lacked Bush's infuriating sense of entitlement, and his nasty temper. Reagan smiled, he didn't smirk.

With the benefit of distance and hindsight, I can also admit that not all of Reagan's economic policies were reckless and incoherent - although his fiscal policies certainly were, and eventually had to be undone at great cost. (See David Stockman's "The Triumph of Politics.")

...I'll leave the pluses and minuses of Reaganomics for the historians. At this late date, it's hardly worth arguing about. Reagan's foreign policies, on the other hand, still make my blood boil, even after all these years. His decision to challenge the Soviets on every front - which, given the senility and paranoia of the Brezhnev-era Soviet leadership, could easily have led to war - is, of course, relentlessly promoted by the conservative propaganda machine as the masterstroke that ended the Cold War. In reality, it was the end of the Cold War (made possible by Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power) that headed off the disaster that Reagan's recklessness might otherwise have triggered.

The legacy of Reagan's policies in the Middle East, meanwhile, are still being paid for -- in blood. The cynical promotion of Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the alliance of convenience with Saddam Hussein against Iran, the forging of a new "strategic relationship" with Israel, the corrupt dealings with the House of Saud, and (perhaps most ironic, given Reagan's tough guy image) the weakness and indecision of his disastrous intervention in Beirut -- all of these helped set the stage for what the neocons now like to call World War IV, and badly weakened the geopolitical ability of the United States to wage that war.

But all this pales in comparison to Reagan's war crimes in Central America. We'll probably never know just how stained his hands were by the blood of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of defenseless peasants who were slaughtered in the Guatemalan highlands, or the leftist politicians, union leaders and human rights activists kidnapped and killed by the Salvadoran death squads, or the tortured in Honduran prisons, or terrorized by his beloved Contras.

Did Reagan's men covertly support these murders? Or did they just look the other way? Did Reagan ever know just what kind of charnel house he helped create? Or did he live completely in his fantasy world of freedom fighters and "founding fathers"? Either way, it was in Central America that Reagan most clearly earned that nickname the hippies pinned on him back in Berkeley: "fascist gun in the West."

Looking back, it's also easy to see the propaganda connections between Reagan's war in Central America and the current Orwellian nightmare in Iraq. There were the same moral oversimplifications - pure goodness versus absolute evil - the same flowery rhetoric about freedom and democracy (to be administered to impoverished campesinos with machine guns and torture chambers.) There was the same lurid hype about the dire danger to the homeland - as when Reagan famously warned that Nicaragua was just a "two-day drive from Harlington, Texas."

And of course, we're even looking at some of the same actors - Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, Colin Powell. To a large degree, the Reagan administration's covert wars in both Central America and the Middle East formed the template for how the war in Iraq was packaged, sold and - unfortunately - fought.

So, while Reagan - like the entire decade of the '80s - has faded into history, I certainly won't mourn his passing. And I suppose I'll just have to grit my teeth and do my best to ignore the glowing tributes and bipartisan praise we'll be subjected to over the next few days - just as I did when Nixon died. The ritual deification of Ronald Reagan has become one of the essential bonds that holds the modern Republican Party together - not to mention a lucrative fundraising vehicle for some of its leading lights. The rest of us will just have to make the best of it.

To me, the tremendous conservative nostalgia for Ronald Reagan is a sign of a movement that is, if not in decline, then poised on the cusp of it. It's an implicit admission that the golden age, when a conservative ideologue like Reagan could win the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans (and not just the instinctual cultural loyalty of red-state America) has passed away.

The contrast with Bush the younger - desperately scrambling to avoid defeat in a bitterly polarized electorate - is painfully clear. In its obsessive desire to glorify Ronald Reagan, the conservative movement is retreating psychologically into its own past. Its a sign that the political era that opened the night Reagan was elected may also be nearing its end.

To which I can only say: Rest in peace.

Finally, let's close the Reagan summing-up with Steve Gilliard's tough look back at the damage wrought by the conservative president:

The hagiography started as soon as they announced Reagan's death. How he ended the cold war, how he was a decisive leader, all this nonsense about Reagan which is just ridiculous.

The British have a tradition: when someone dies, their newspaper obituary tells the truth. Americans like to say something kind about the dead, no matter how scummy they were. Even Nixon got a halo in death, where only Hunter Thompson reminded people of who exactly he was and how the honors given him were, well, wrong.

This deification of Reagan began as soon as Clinton took office. There has been pressure to name everything but rest stop toilets after the man. Some right wing cranks wanted to add him to Mount Rushmore, as if FDR didn't exist. They forced his name on an unhappy Washington DC, by renaming the airport, still called by many, National.

So let's get past all the maudlin bullshit and discuss what Reagan really did.

First, Reagan rode to power on a wave of reaction to the Civil Rights struggle. California, a state with a deep well of racial resentment, supported Reagan, who would protect the establishment and call for students to be murdered on their campuses. Reagan was regarded as a crank by many on the left, but his appeal to middle America was strong. It wasn't that Reagan was a racist, as far as is known, he wasn't. But he sure could pander to them, as he did in 1984 at Philadelphia, MS. For those of you unaware, that is the place three civil rights workers were murdered by the Klan. It would be like a British Prime Ministerial candidate going to Amritsar to talk about the glory of the British Army (the site of a 1921 massacre of peaceful Indian protesters).

Reagan pandered to the racist right with ease, even as Barry Goldwater, the man he supported in 1964 with a convention speech, slowly backed away from many of his reactionary views. Instead, Reagan depicted blacks as "welfare queens" leeching off the society, when in reality, white women are the largest recipients of AFDC. Reagan used race like a club to hammer minorities and pander to the racist right.

We need to ask what hath Reagan wrought. His economic policies crippled this country, preventing the kind of long term structural changes which are still needed. How long will American businesses have to foot the bill for health insurance? How long will unequal funding for schools exist? How long will the right of women to control their bodies be subject to restrictions? This is the real, domestic legacy of Ronald Reagan. His breaking of the PATCO strike began the road to anti-Union policies across business. Once, businesses wanted labor peace, after Reagan, strike breaking was permitted, hell encouraged.

Reagan began the road of crippling America's ability to care for Americans. Now we have this failed trickle down economic policy pushed by yet another President. One that leaves Americans in record debt and record bankruptcies. Instead of tax rates which fairly distribute the burden of funding America, the rich have been encouraged to avoid their fair share. Ronald Reagan began the bankrupting of America and the creation of a super wealthy CEO class, one where their great grandchildren will never have to work, an aristocracy of trustifarians. Under Reagan hypocracy and selfishness became the rule of the road. Not just in public life, where his staff routinely lied, eventually leading to Iran-Contra.

But if Reagan started to ruin America, his foreign policy left the dead around like fallen leaves. His foreign policy was a disaster by any standard. Dead nuns in El Salvador, murdered school teachers in Nicaragua, the tortured in Argentina, the seizure of Grenade, the failed intervention in Lebanon, the aerial assassination attempt on Khaddafi, which led to the bombing of Pam Am flight 103. Reagan's policies left a trail of failure and disaster at every turn.

How to explain funding the deeply corrupt Contras? Former Somocista generals who funded their war by the drug trade? Who murdered the innocent. Or the war in Guatemala and the genocide of the Indian population. Or the war in El Salvador, where American nuns, among many others, were raped and murdered. A government so callous that it murdered an archbishop in his church.

Reagan's foreign policy left a trail of death and fear wherever it touched.

But Iran-Contra was the defining moment. Despite a congressional prohibition on aid to the Contras, a group inside the White House decided to circumvent the law, so ineptly, and so completely, we wound up arming Iran and getting few hostages held in Lebanon released. We also sold chemical and biological weapons to Iraq. While Saddam murdered thousands, the US government was his ally. Even after 34 sailors were murdered by an Iraqi exocet missile, we still backed Saddam. No governmental outrage, no demands on Saddam. Like the Liberty incident, we turned our backs and hoped for the best. Reagan and his conservative hagiographers, have wanted to claim his massive defense build up broke the Soviets, which rips the bravery and courage of the Czechs and East Germans who finally overthrew their dictatorial governments.

Reagan also embraced Angolan UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, the puppet of the racist South African regime. He repeatedly refused to back away from him, despite South Africa's notorious, and it later turned out, mad, racial policies. Not until 1988, when the Cuban army decisively defeat the SADF at Cuito Carnevale in Angola, did the war end. The US turned its back as the South African-sponsored Renamo massacred their way across Mozambique. No one knows how many Africans died in the wars of South Africa, but US complicity with the racist regime of South Africa helped extend their lifespan. At no point did Reagan do anything to stop this.

Silent complicity was the hallmark of Reagan's policy towards dictatorships. From Indonesia to El Salvador, the innocent died and the US said nothing, did nothing, except make their lives worse. We backed the guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, funding the most radical ones and then leaving the country in disarray.

Reagan's legacy is a dark one, one of backing murderers and robbing America of a fairer future. It wasn't that he was an evil man, or a bad one. It is what he believed and what he supported caused so much pain and misery for so many people, who had to live with the results of his policies.

On the 60th anniversary of World War II's D-Day, here's Christopher Dickey's "The Last Roll Call" article (via Atrios), on Bush's speech at Normandy:

When George W. Bush makes his D-Day anniversary visit to the Normandy beaches on Sunday, we're going to hear a lot of well-honed speeches trying to compare the righteous combat forced on us in World War II with the war of choice we've entered into in Iraq. But only speechmakers from coddled, comfortable backgrounds who've never heard a shot fired in anger, much less seen "dead men by mass production," would dare use the blood of those who died at Normandy 60 years ago to try to cleanse their conscience of those dying in Iraq today.

The United States entered World War II, as it had entered World War I, to defeat a proven aggressor and bring the war to an end. The Bush administration actually won its righteous war, in Afghanistan after the aggression of September 11, 2001. But that victory came too quickly, it seems, for our leaders to get much satisfaction from it. So they sent our kids to Iraq. And what is the goal there today, now that the reasons we were given at first have proved to be grand delusions? To spread democracy? To extirpate the very idea of terrorism? To work the will of God? Sixty years ago, those who thought they could teach the world how to live the only right way, which was their way, and launched unprovoked wars claiming this was the only thing could do to defend their values—those were the people we called the enemy.

>>But let's be clear about the soldiers. Our soldiers. Those men and women in Iraq today are, indeed, just as heroic as those at Normandy. They have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, but that's not their fault. They are fighting and dying and trying to build something good as soldiers, despite the most foolhardy civilian leadership in the modern history of the United States. Like any G.I. Joe in World War II, they're making the best of a bad situation.

June 4, 2004

TENET FALLS ON THE SWORD

The Bush Administration has to gamble that those it forces out don't turn around and bite them in the behind. Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill come to mind. But CIA Director George Tenet may keep his mouth shut. We don't know what promises were made to Tenet, but he made it clear several months ago that he was prepared to accept the designated-fall-guy role for a Bush&Co. in desperate need of a high-level scapegoat.

Tenet saw how his agency's intelligence analysts were ignored with regard to Iraq -- when they wouldn't and couldn't provide the WMD "evidence" to justify the Iraq invasion, Rumsfeld made sure to get it by setting up his private intelligence-gathering group inside his own office at the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans -- and how, despite his own warnings to Bush not to use the phony story about Saddam obtaining "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, Bush used it anyway in his State of the Union speech.

So Tenet, who said he is leaving for "personal reasons," knows where the bodies are buried in the Administration, and could, if he chose to, rat out Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and probably Ashcroft. But that game can be played both ways; they know where Tenet is vulnerable, and can squeeze him to stay mum. In short, we're not likely to learn much from Tenet from now until the election, although one can always hope.

That's my take.

Here's Josh Marshall's:

Word has been out for some time that the Senate Intelligence Committee report on intelligence failures is terrible for Tenet. So that could be a cause of his resignation.

For my part, Tenet strikes me as a sort of tragic figure. Under his tenure the CIA got many things wrong about Iraq -- though largely by making estimates in the direction his critics, who now want him sacked, embraced. (A person who's intimately knowledgeable about this intel stuff recently told me that their sense was that the CIA would have gotten a lot of the basic intel stuff wrong without any help from Chalabi.) Then, on top of these errors, the White House added further gross exaggerations, which in many instances Tenet tried to knock down.

Now he's the fall-guy for it all, in all likelihood made to take the fall by the true bad-actors.

Having said all that, beside the possibility that the White House's favored Iraqi exile was an Iranian agent, that the spy chief just got canned, that the OSD is wired to polygraphs, and that the president has had to retain outside counsel in the investigation into which members of his staff burned one of the country's own spies, I'd say the place is being run like a pretty well-oiled machine.

BUSH LAWYERS-UP

In another area of vulnerability -- Bush's knowledge of the Plame-outing conspirators -- Dim Son has felt compelled to begin consulting with a private criminal-lawyer. Bush may or may not be any more connected to the case than simply being called to give testimony about others (most likely about chief political advisor Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby), but the implication is clear: The Grand Jury is active and may be zeroing in on the chief suspects, with indictments to be expected in the near-future.

If Bush testifies to the Grand Jury hearing evidence on the illegal naming of Valerie Plame as a CIA covert operative -- which probably was done to exact revenge on Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, for telling the truth about the "yellowcake" scandal, and to warn other whistleblowers to keep their whistles to themselves -- presumably, if Bush lies, he could later be charged with perjury. Get that man into the witness chair, pronto!

CHALABI? BARELY MET THE GUY

It's so pitiful, it's almost funny. I'm referring to Bush's mad dance to distance himself from Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi? Chalabi? Oh yes, that guy from Iraq. Don't really know the man. I think he's a friend of Laura's. "I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line...But I haven't had any extensive conversations with him." (actual Bush quote)

[Here, courtesy Atrios http://atrios.blogspot.com is what Bush said last February to Tim Russert on Meet the Press: "I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim..."]

Talk about humiliation! Poor Chalabi must be going bonkers trying to figure out how, in the space of a few days, he could go from the Americans' choice to succeed Saddam Hussein to pariah figure and alleged Iranian spy.

Reminds one of the same dance Bush did when close buddy Kenneth Lay got his Enron gonads caught in a wringer and Bush began tap-dancing away as fast as he could from his good friend and lifelong benefactor. Kenneth Lay? Kenneth Lay? Don't really know the man that well. (Another actual Bush quote:) "I believe I met Mr. Lay when he was working for my opponent."

Right.

THE "NEW" IRAQI GOVERNMENT

It turns out that the "new" Iraqi government is, surprise!, pretty much the "old" Iraqi government, under a new title. Instead of being "provisional," now it's "interim" -- and with a political leg up to become the legitimately elected government in January of 2005.

It will be interesting to see how the various Iraqi factions deal with the involuted process where the government appointed by Americans now has appointed itself (with a few additions) as the new government, and that the Bush Administration announced its firm support immediately. It should not surprise anybody if large segments of the Iraqi populace look at this new ruling body and conclude that it's somewhat lacking in legitimacy. The Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who favors direct elections, gave his highly tentative approval, but said he would observe how the new government conducts itself before making a final judgment.

How much of the new government's occasional opposition to American policy and presence is genuine and how much feigned (to give them more street cred from ordinary Iraqis) is not clear. What is clear is that these wily Iraqi politicians created a fait accompli on the ground, acing out the U.N.'s Brahimi, who was supposed to be choosing a government unconnected to the one installed originally by the Americans.

Brahimi is pissed: Kevin Drum reports: "Asked how big a role the American administration had in forming the government and selecting the prime minister and president, Brahimi reminded reporters that American Ambassador L. Paul Bremer runs things in Iraq. 'Bremer is the dictator of Iraq,' he said. 'He has the money. He has the signature.' He later added: 'I will not say who was my first choice, and who was not my first choice...I will remind you that the Americans are governing this country'."

Oh, did you catch Colin Powell's admission that no Iraqi government will tell the U.S. what it can or can't do militarily in that country? Bush claims, with a straight face, that the U.S. is granting Iraq "full sovereignty" on July 1st, but Powell has let the cat out of the bag as to what really will happen.

"VOLUNTEERS" ARE RE-UPPED

You can bet that Bush will lose a lot of the military vote in November, based on the unconscionable way his Administration has used and abused the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now he's extended their "voluntary" duty to keep them in those two countries far beyond the time they were told they'd be there. (In other cultures and at other times, the terminology would be: "involuntary servitude" or "slavery.") Similar bait-and-switch tactics have been used on earlier troops, keeping them in harm's way in Iraq, and scams have been utilized to trick National Guard troops to re-up.

All of this is at least partially due to Rumsfeld and his fellow neo-con advisors, who thought they could carry out two major wars on the cheap, with what amounts to a skeleton crew of soldiers, because the "bad guys" in Iraq and Afghanistan would be wiped out quickly in the U.S. blitzkrieg campaigns, and insurgent forces wouldn't dare take on the mighty military of the superpower United States of America.

We should know better by now. It's shameful for Bush&Co. to take out their own failures on the backs of the young men and women who deserve far better. And, by the way, they aren't treated all that much better by the Bush Administration once they leave the service in terms of care and benefits. John Kerry, a veteran who understands better than anyone what servicemen go through, is going to eat Bush for lunch on these military issues, with passion.

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Andrew Exum, a former Army captain in Afghanistan, called the treatment of soldiers under stop-loss programs "shameful."

"Many, if not most, of the soldiers in this latest Iraq-bound wave are already veterans of several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan...They have honorably completed their active duty obligations. But like draftees, they have been conscripted to meet the additional needs in Iraq."

Senator Kerry called the move a "backdoor draft."

TO THE STREETS

Finally, a reminder that this Saturday (June 5), there will be major anti-war marches in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles. We need that oppositional energy in the streets.

Josh Marshall on Tenet and Chalabi:

Mike Allen has some good follow-up on the president and his decision to bring on a personal lawyer in the Plame matter. Allen quotes the president as saying:

"This is a criminal matter. It's a serious matter. I met with an attorney to determine whether or not I need his advice, and if I deem I need his advice I'll probably hire him."

This follows the White House line from last night. The president "consulted" Jim Sharp to advise him on whether or not he needs Sharp's advice. And based on that advice, if the president decides he does need Sharp's advice, he'll probably retain him so he can get the advice.

What about Tenet? All the chatter -- not to mention simple logic -- says he was fired. The Times gets it right when they say that the way this was announced was "almost bizarre."

Actually, here concision should be the handmaiden of precision. Drop the "almost". It was bizarre.

Thus the Times:

Mr. Bush announced the resignation in a way that was almost bizarre. He had just addressed reporters and photographers in a fairly innocuous Rose Garden session with Australia's prime minister, John Howard. Then the session was adjourned, as Mr. Bush apparently prepared to depart for nearby Andrews Air Force Base and his flight to Europe, where he is to take part in ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Normady invasion and meet European leaders -- some of whom have been sharply critical of the campaign in Iraq.

But minutes later, Mr. Bush reappeared on the sun-drenched White House lawn, stunning listeners with the news of Mr. Tenet's resignation, which the president said would be effective in mid-July. Until then, Mr. Bush said, the C.I.A.'s deputy director, John McLaughlin, will be acting director.

The president praised Mr. Tenet's qualities as a public servant, saying: "He's strong. He's resolute. He's served his nation as the director for seven years. He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He's been a, he's been a strong leader in the war on terror, and I will miss him."

Then Mr. Bush walked away, declining to take questions or offer any insight into what Mr. Tenet's personal reasons might be.

...For my part, Tenet strikes me as a sort of tragic figure. Under his tenure the CIA got many things wrong about Iraq -- though largely by making estimates in the direction his critics, who now want him sacked, embraced. (A person who's intimately knowledgeable about this intel stuff recently told me that their sense was that the CIA would have gotten a lot of the basic intel stuff wrong without any help from Chalabi.) Then, on top of these errors, the White House added further gross exaggerations, which in many instances Tenet tried to knock down.

Now he's the fall-guy for it all, in all likelihood made to take the fall by the true bad-actors.

Having said all that, beside the possibility that the White House's favored Iraqi exile was an Iranian agent, that the spy chief just got canned, that the OSD is wired to polygraphs, and that the president has had to retain outside counsel in the investigation into which members of his staff burned one of the country's own spies, I'd say the place is being run like a pretty well-oiled machine.

The [argument] from the Chalabites is that Chalabi's enemies at the CIA have seized on obviously bogus or questionable intelligence to neutralize him because of their long-standing hostility to him. Basically, they argue, this is just his enemies using an excuse to destroy him.

In my mind, two facts argue against this hypothesis. The first is that people on the inside -- people who know the relevant facts -- and who are either indifferent to or friendly to Chalabi seem to be taking this very seriously. If it was so obviously trumped up, I doubt they would do so.

The second point goes more to the root of the claim. Every charge we've ever heard about Chalabi -- going back almost a decade now -- has been answered by his friends with claims that the CIA or the State Department simply has it out for him because they don't believe he can be controlled and that they're against the 'democracy' that Chalabi represents.

They on the other hand maintained that they just thought Chalabi was a liar and a crook and that we shouldn't have anything to do with him.

At this point, who has the better part of that argument? The Chalabites or the CIA/State? Right. Pretty much answers itself, doesn't it?

One other point, the word I've heard from several Chalabi-friendly sources with good contacts on the inside doesn't throw doubt on the charges against Chalabi so much as it suggests that someone at the CIA or elsewhere in the Intelligence Community might be responsible for the leak to Chalabi. I think that's inherently implausible. But I think that tells us a lot about how seriously we should take claims that Chalabi is being set up.

Billmon www.billmon.org writes on the new Iraqi government and on the Pentagon's "Stop-Loss" plan:

President Bush on Tuesday praised the new Iraqi leaders as "strong patriots committed to a free Iraq" but warned of "increasing violence" as the United States and its allies prepare to hand over sovereignty.

The problem here is that the more the administration denies that the new Iraqi "government" is simply a bunch of U.S. puppets, the more they <i>look<-i> like a bunch of U.S. puppets. But then, these guys have never been very big on the soft sell.

There have been numerous past civilizations in which military service became a lifelong, hereditary obligation, passed down from father to son - usually in exchange for land grants or other economic benefits. Some of our soldiers must be wondering whether the United States is evolving in that same direction:

Army widens 'stop-loss' program:

>>The Army will prevent soldiers in units set to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan from leaving the service at the end of their terms, a top general said Wednesday.

>>The announcement, an expansion of an Army program called "stop-loss," means that thousands of soldiers who had expected to retire or otherwise leave the military will have to stay on for the duration of their deployment to those combat zones.

Since we've reached the point where just about every active duty unit in the Army is either in Iraq or Afghanistan, or will soon return there, it seems like it's become something of an Orwellian euphemism to speak of a "volunteer army."

When the Pentagon starts extending stop loss orders to the first-born sons and daughters of service people, I guess we'll know we've reached the next stage of feudalism.

Kevin Drum discusses the just-discovered Enron tapes, which reveal for all to hear Kenny Lay's boys chortling at the economic rape of the State of California:

CBS News has obtained tapes of Enron traders gloating about how successfully they've gamed the California energy market in 2000:

"He just fucks California," says one Enron employee. "He steals money from California to the tune of about a million."

"Will you rephrase that?" asks a second employee.

"OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day," replies the first.

There's lots more like it. Just click the link to read the whole story.

By the way, did you know that beginning in 1977 California began a comprehensive campaign to improve energy efficiency using a combination of regulation and free market mechanisms? And that per capita energy growth was flat by the mid-1990s? And that California was one of the lowest per-capita energy consumers in the nation when the 2000 crisis hit?

Just thought you'd all like to know.

David Sirota throws a little light on the Bush Administration's Medicare-discount card scam:

With the Medicare drug discount card program starting today, the Center for Americ

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