At Last, A Real Discussion

A big hat tip to Glenn Greenwald at Salon for posting in two parts (about 16.5 minutes total) a frank and rational discussion about the Middle East crisis on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (without Joe Scarborough). In addition to the MSNBC moderators and Pat Buchanan, the other participants are Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations and Queen Noor of Jordan (the California-born widow of King Hussein and step-mother of King Abdullah).

Quote from the Queen: “These people [the Palestinians] are not free and that is why there is radical resistance and not peaceful resistance.”

In addition to solid fact-based discussion, we have an admission from MSNBC that the Palestinian side of the story is never told on mainstream television, and the clear concensus that the American President will be the catalyst in bringing both sides to a peace agreement. Please watch it and pass the link on to your friends. For peace, in peace.

Jonathan Turley: The Fix is in for a "Pirate Victory"

Well, as the really patriotic defenders of the Fourth Amendment feared, the criminals in our government--and I include the Senators who failed to uphold their oath of office--have won.

I excerpt here Glenn Greenwald's comments and refer you to a You Tube clip, an interview with Prof. Jonathan Turley, who points out that a Federal judge just a few days ago in his opinion indicated clearly that President (yeah, I know, my maw churns with bile at the word) George W. Bush is an admitted multiple felon.

First Glenn Greenwald:

With their vote today, the Democratic-led Congress has covered-up years of deliberate surveillance crimes by the Bush administration and the telecom industry, and has dramatically advanced a full-scale attack on the rule of law in this country. As I noted earlier today, Law Professor and Fourth Amendment expert Jonathan Turley was on MSNBC's Countdown with Rachel Maddow last night and gave as succinct an explanation for what Democrats -- not the Bush administration, but Democrats -- have done today. Anyone with any lingering doubts about what is taking place today in our country should watch this:

Go to YouTube for the video of Rachel Maddow on Countdown last night and her interview with Professor Jonathan Turley.


And Greenwald continues:

What is most striking is that when the Congress was controlled by the GOP -- when the Senate was run by Bill Frist and the House by Denny Hastert -- the Bush administration attempted to have a bill passed very similar to the one that just passed today. But they were unable to do so. The administration had to wait until Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats took over Congress before being able to put a corrupt end to the scandal that began when, in December of 2005, the New York Times revealed that the President had been breaking the law for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by law.

Yet again, the Democratic Congress ignored the views of their own supporters in order to comply with the orders and wishes of the Bush administration.

And later: "Somehow, at some point, someone somewhere convinced [Democrats] that the best way to avoid appearing weak is to be as weak as possible."

Read Greenwald's complete article HERE.

Some observations:


1. The weak Democrats can go to hell.


2. Most citizens of the United States, including some good friends of mine, could give a rat's ass about the fact that their President is a self-admitted lawbreaker, or that the government now has the means to spy on them, their credit transactions, their emails, their telephone conversations, their text messages. They don't have anything to hide. They won't understand until a double entendre, or an incautious joke, or a monetary transaction gets looked at by a Homeland Security bureaucrat and they get called on the carpet, or fall under suspicion of being "up to something."


3. Few Americans understood that the first FISA bill in 1977 was the start of the erosion of the Fourth Amendment. In other words, we are at the bottom of the slippery slope.


4. The telecoms have spent millions to grease the palms of Democrats and Republicans alike. Change your phone to Qwest if you have their service. They refused to break the law when Bush told them to, and they refused almost nine months BEFORE 9/11/2001. So much for the national security arguments.


5. No, I revise my invective: screw the Democrats. Only 28 of them understood the meaning of their oath of office.


6. Clearly, we need to watch out for Obama. Despite his explanations and rationale for why he supports the bill, he's no fool. It gives him power to break the law if or when he is elected president. Don't rely on his good faith or integrity. He voted for it. Worse, he know it was going to fail. What would he have lost by voting against it or trying to make the arguments he gave at the end of 2007 when he didn't have the nomination? Obviously the telecoms' high regard. Just another politician. Screw him too.

6.1: Senators voting against and upholding their oath of office: Akaka - Biden - Bingaman - Boxer - Brown - Byrd - Cantwell - Cardin - Clinton - Dodd - Dorgan - Durbin - Feingold - Harkin - Kerry - Klobachur - Lautenberg - Leahy - Levin - Menendez - Murray - Reed - Reid - Sanders - Schumer - Stabenow - Tester - Wyden. Hillary Clinton voted against it!


7. Upon further reflection, fuck the Democrats. Especially the ones in the House who brought the legislation under the cynical leadership of Steney Hoyer, and violated their oath of office.


8. It will be a long haul until we purge the Congress of all of these slimy bastards.


9. Think of one good reason why Nancy Pelosi took "impeachment off the table," and why the nuclear option is still "on the table."


10. Reread Tom Paine over the summer. Or read him.

The Spirit of Torquemada

Loss of habeas corpus last year, rendition, torture—all of these things cluster around a central problem with this country's deteriorating integrity during the years of the Bush Administration. (I will leave aside for the moment the illegality of the War in Iraq—or the War in Afghanistan for that matter—no matter what authority the Congress voted to give George Bush in 2001, the war is still a war of aggression, the supreme international crime, and a violation of the supreme law of the land since all treaties we sign become the supreme law of the land. And it is the crime for which we hung and imprisoned a few Nazis in 1945 .)


No, put those aside for the moment and let us consider the candidate for attorney general, supported so happily by Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York who now, I hope, has enough guts to realize he made a mistake. I listened to the first two days of Mukasy's testimony last week; I've read a lot of commentary and have looked over the transcripts and found his exchange with the Senators on the matter of torture just a little too much to countenance.


I am mad as hell, because I think he will be worse than Gonzalez. He appears to be smarter and more competent. Remember what Mukasy said about the torture memo? Quoting some 19th century cynical politician, he said "it was worse than an error, it was a mistake." The Press picked up on "mistake" as something positive. I found the paraphrase worse, for it just reinforced the modus operandi of Cheneyism: no memos, no phone calls, no records, no paper trail, no archives, secrecy above all.


I'm not being too passionate about this matter. Those who know me well know that some of the most angry arguments I have ever gotten into with ex-friends and close family members have always centered around violations of another person's integrity and person. All of my values have at their core the belief that no one should be forced to do something against her will. In that sense, the core of my belief has a great deal in common with classic Liberalism (that of John Stuart Mill) and in contemporary politics, with Libertarianism. The violation of another person against his will is a cardinal sin in my belief system. The violation of a person's basic rights to justice is another component that flows from the same core. It makes me a Liberal, and I am proud of it.


Mukasy's refusal to make a clear statement on torture, and his comment that there might be areas of authority in which the President was not bound to the Constitution or to Congressional or Judicial oversight made him out to be just a smarter and more dangerous adherent to the unitary executive theory.

So I am most concerned and most condemn the apparently strong Judge Mukasy being unable or refusing to voice what should be a simple and just opinion on the matter of torture. Instead, he weaseled out of the questions by saying he does not know enough about the process to decide if water-boarding is really torture. Because I think what is happening is that Mukasy, as so many Americans, just cannot bring himself to understand that the very crux of American Constitutional belief centers around the matter.


After Mukasy testified, Senator Patrick Leahy promised he would communicate with him in writing on the matter of water-boarding. And so this letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee to Judge Mukasy was sent. (Thanks to TPM for the archived copy of the letter.) As the letter points out very early, a response on Mukasy's waffling was quickly given by Rear Admiral John Hutson. The former Navy Judge Advocate General and Dean of the Franklin Pearce Law Center responded to Mukasy's testimony by commenting that

Other than, perhaps the rack and pinion, water-boarding is the most iconic example of torture in history. It was devised, I believe, in the Spanish Inquisition. It has been repudiated for centuries. It's a little disconcerting to hear now that we're not quite sure where water-boarding fits in the scheme of things. I think we have to be very sure where it fits in the scheme of things.

Note the signatures on the last page. Not one Republican, even Lindsay Graham, who should know better, had the cajones to sign the letter. Not Arlen Spector.


And how does that manifest itself in other Republicans of note? Add to Mukasy testimony a fine discussion of the matter of sleep deprivation as torture and the response of Rudi Giuliani, who is such a whore for support campaigning in New Hampshire, that he even holds himself out as a Boston Red Sox fan. (As more than one person has pointed out, he spent more time in his private box in Yankee Stadium in 2001 and 2002 than he did at Ground Zero in Manhattan. No Yankee fan ever roots for the Boston Red Sox.) Anonymous Liberal, a pretty well-known and very sharp attorney, sitting in for Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, puts together some relevant quotes in his post on Giuliani's support for torture.


First, AL quotes from a BBC News article on “The Real Victims of Sleep Deprivation” which ends with an excerpt from Menachem Begin, writing about being tortured by the KGB in White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia:

In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.

I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them.

He did not promise them their liberty; he did not promise them food to sate themselves. He promised them - if they signed - uninterrupted sleep! And, having signed, there was nothing in the world that could move them to risk again such nights and such days.

And now, here's Giuliani out in Iowa on the subject of sleep deprivation:

But they talk about sleep deprivation. I mean, on that theory, I'm getting tortured running for president of the United States. That's plain silly. That's silly.

Which really shows, of course, that he does not know the first thing about it, for if he did he would take it seriously or perhaps even refrain from making the joke. In fact, his ignorance makes him out to be pretty silly himself. (I will say it's more tolerable than George Bush, who would give a condescending smirk.) I would hope that a person who was running for the Presidency and who had spent most of his career as a lawyer and a Federal prosecutor before becoming Mayor of New York City in 1993 and who holds himself forth as an expert on terrorism, would be a bit more serious about torture.


So maybe he knows more about torture when it's water boarding?

And I see, when the Democrats are talking about torture, they're not just talking about even this definition of waterboarding, which again, if you look at the liberal media and you look at the way they describe it, you could say it was torture and you shouldn't do it. . .

But is water boarding torture? asks his interlocutor, Linda Gustitus? She is the president of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. She's questioning him out in Iowa. She wanted to know how he regarded water-boarding, because Michael Mukasey, Bush’s nominee for attorney general, had “fudged” on the question of whether it is torture.

Well, I’m not sure it is either. I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it’s been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that’s the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn’t be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is. Because I’ve learned something being in public life as long as I have. And I hate to shock anybody with this, but the newspapers don’t always describe it accurately.

But look carefully, at what Giuliani noodles in his response: ”It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.” This comment is the key to the attitude. Does that mean that if the SS does it it's wrong? If the Generals in Myanmar do it, or the Chinese/North Koreans/Vietnamese/Russians in The Manchurian Candidate do it, it's wrong? And so who could possibly be right when they do it? Implied in that answer of Giuliani, of course, is the obvious. It's okay when we do it, but when “they” do it, it's torture. It's just another form of the attitude of all people with murderous power: when they blow us up it's terrorism; when we blow them up it's just response with a bit of collateral damage unavoidably thrown into the mix. The good old American exceptionalism in operation. Anonymous Liberal makes the point better than I can:

That pretty much sums up the prevailing right-wing view on this issue: It's not torture when we do it. It's American exceptionalism taken to an absurd and frightening extreme. It doesn't matter that we draft detailed reports every year chastising all other countries in the world who are known to engage in this activity. It doesn't matter that we've prosecuted people in the past for war crimes for engaging in this same activity. Somehow acts that we would all agree are torture when committed by other countries cease to be torture when they are authorized by the U.S. government (but only for us; it's still torture if others do it). If anyone thinks that the United States' standing in the world will improve if Giuliani becomes president, they're sadly mistaken.

I read things like this, and find nothing but superficiality in Giuliani's thinking; superficiality and toadying, manipulation and facile appeals to the most paranoiac and jingoistic elements in the American electorate. He is courting the vote of the fellow who calls up on a talk radio show and suggests we should just drop the nuke on Iraq, wait thirty years, then colonize it with Americans. (American expats from Arizona and New Mexico, no doubt.)

And then there's Mitt Romney, who I heard on the radio on Tuesday trying to address the comment that the War on Terror was a bumper sticker for George Bush:

Just look at what Osama--Barack Obama--said just yesterday. Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all the different types, to come together in Iraq. 'That is the battlefield. That's the central place.’

Romney's campaign said it was just a simple mistake. Obama's campaign commented something to the effect that Romney could switch names as casually as he switches positions. They lost some credibility with me there. The snide attempt to slam back at Romney for a “flip-flop” when really it signified something more important. If Romney had any class, of course, he would have apologized for the error. But you know, “never apologize, never explain,” Rule One of the hard-nosed guide to business and politics.


I have seen some comments that said the mistake was intentional, an attempt to “meld” the two names together and thereby establish an association in the minds of the American public. That's pretty cynical, I'd say, and demands a good deal more acting skill than Romney has, but who knows? After Karl Rove, who really does know? Because in fact, the mistake that Romney made on Tuesday was no more egregious than comments I have seen, read, and heard on talk shows, Fox News, and Internet troll comments, associating Obama with Osama bin Laden. Americans have a lot of trouble pronouncing names and the stranger the name—or let's be blunt and accurate, the more Arabic the name--the more the xenophobic and terror-stricken vapors swirl in their brains.

Pay attention to their language. More on this later. Republicans. Pahh!

More on Iran War Propaganda

Sara Baxter, "Pentagon 'Three-Day Blitz' Plan For Iran" reporting in the Sunday Times in the UK gives a good roundup of the information beginning to accumulate about the justification for going into war with Iran.

She picks up on a speech given at the Nixon Center by Alexis Dabat revealing that the Pentagon has strike plans against 1200 targets in Iran. He spoke at a meeting organized by The National Interest--a conservative foreign policy group. The article also sources the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) which is part of the MEK, an anti-Iranian group seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime. The MEK , and also in a supplementary order, the NCRI have both been named as terrorist groups by the State department. That seems not to matter to our government which relies on terrorist connections when in our interest to do so. According to Scott Ritter in his book Target Iran (2007) the NCRI statements in the past have been the means through which Israel's intelligence services "made public" their information.

Although the recent positive report of the IAEA saying Iran has been very cooperative is mentioned, it is immediately followed by a comment that "Washington fears" that this report will be used as a stalling tactic by Iran. The reporter is for The Times in the UK, but she might as well be working for the Washington Times, since many of the sources she refers to are on the right side of the spectrum and have been militating for war with Iran for many many months, if not years.

The final argument presented is that Iran is fighting a "proxy war" in Iraq, and the logic of that position is laid out in a report just published by the recently founded Institute for the Study of War (so recent in fact it is still, according to its web-site, applying for tax-exempt status). The report is written by Kimberly Kagan, its executive director and former professor of military history. It was published in conjunction with The Weekly Standard, whose logo appears on the bottom right of all the pages of the report.

It's impressively footnoted until you see that all of the information is completely dependent upon US forces press releases (especially those of the former advisor to the President, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, who began cranking out questionable and weakly supported anti-Iranian statements as soon as he arrived in Iraq on his fresh assignment). Other conservative groups, or people whose credibility can be legitimately questioned, are cited. That is to say, almost all the sources have an Iranian axe to grind. Most obviously, what is missing is any information which questions the facts or suggests other possible interpretation. Jim Lobe has detailed the "Kagan network" and as Lobe suggests, watch for this study to be quoted again and again by Cheney, Bush, the Weekly Standard, WSJ (on its editorial pages to be sure, and now that Rupert Murdock is taking over, maybe even the journalistic side, See if the news people begin the to use the report without looking into the full story the full story). I have read the report almost completely now and it looks to me like it will be the Bush and Cheney catechism for the pushing the justification of an attack.

(If the link to The Times is broken, you can find an reprint on International Clearing House's site.)

Three more links will help you get grounded on the context of what is going on:

First, another ripper from the wonderfully outspoken and blunt Paul Craig Roberts. He does a better job than I can of summing up the situation and the moral implications in his piece, "The War Criminal in the Living Room." Here's an excerpt:

Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening “the security of nations everywhere” and of the Iraqi resistance for “a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power.” Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration. The Pew Foundation’s world polls show that despite all the American and Israeli propaganda against Iran, the US and Israel are regarded as no less threats to world stability than demonized Iran [itself].

I love reading his things. They pin the administration's insects right through the abdomen and to the felt and let them wriggle.

Next, constitutional scholar, and a writer who is becoming a conscience for the country, Glenn Greenwald has done a fine job in Salon of studying the President's speeches and recent statements.

And finally, some incisive weapons to attack the arguments you will hear in the patriotic rush to war, from George Packer at The New Yorker. Read this short post if you do nothing else! Packer is a great reporter who has jumped on and begun to write on the propaganda campaign. He provides the questions that he thinks the press should be asking of the administration as the campaign unfolds. Here they are from his posting for Friday, August 31, 2007, "Test Marketing":

It’s one thing for the American Enterprise Institute, the Weekly Standard, et al to champion a war they support. It’s another to jump like circus animals at the crack of the White House whip. If the propaganda campaign predicted by Rubin’s friend is launched, less subservient news organizations should ask certain questions, and keep asking them: Does the Administration expect the Iranian regime to fall in the event of an attack? If yes, what will replace it? If no (and it will not), why would the Administration deliberately set about to strengthen the regime’s hold on power? What will the Administration do to protect highly vulnerable American lives and interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world against the Iranian reprisals that will follow? What if Iran strikes against Israel? What will be the strategy when the Iranian nuclear program, damaged but not destroyed, resumes? How will the Administration handle the international alarm and opprobrium that would be an attack’s inevitable fallout?

And he ends his piece with one of the most pessimistic statements we are going to read:

If this really is a return to the early fall of 2002 all over again, then I’m fairly sure that no one at the top of the Administration is worrying about the answers.

Oh, I fear that the fix in in. You can feel it. Watch carefully all of the speeches coming out of Washington, check the sources and look for cross quotes.

A good friend of mine in Sacramento sent me a wonderful excerpt from the recently departed Kurt Vonnegut, which he had read in a book quoting Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut's novel about being traumatized by the fire bombing of Dresden in WW II. In the novel, Vonnegut imagines that the film of a bombing raid over Germany begins to run backwards:

"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off
backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German
fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell
fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for
wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up
backwards to join the formation.

"The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames.
The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted miraculous magnetism
which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel
containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the
planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks.....There were
still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were
in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again,
made everything and everybody as good as new.

"When the bombers got back to the base, the steel containers were
taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States, where
factories were operating day and night, dismantling the cylinders,
separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was
mainly women who did the work. The minerals were then shipped to
specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into
the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody
ever again."

I remembered reading that many years ago, in the early seventies, when the Vietnam War, which Nixon promised to end in his campaign, was still grinding down to its terrible end. The passage really is a wonderfully peaceful thing, isn't it, almost with the grace and simplicity of scripture.

I put it up here as a wonderful antidote to the war fever that will be coming over the next few months.

More on Scooter Libby's Commutation

Glenn Greenwald writes at Salon.com in an essay on the Libby matter what I think are touchstone words:

What kind of country do we expect to have when we have a ruling Washington class that believes that they and their fellow members of the Beltway elite constitute a separate class, one that resides above and beyond the law? That is plainly what they believe. And we now have exactly the country that one would expect would emerge from a political culture shaped by such a deeply insulated, corrupt and barren royal court.

In Federalist No. 70, Alexander Hamilton described the defining power of the King which made the British monarchy intolerably corrupt: "In England, the king is a perpetual magistrate; and it is a maxim which has obtained for the sake of the public peace, that he is unaccountable for his administration, and his person sacred." Thomas Paine proclaimed in Common Sense "that so far as we approve of monarch, that in America THE LAW IS KING." But little effort is required to see how far removed we now are from those basic principles.

If you don't know Greenwald's work, go to it via the link to the right----->

Or you might start with a wonderful piece he did on the failure of the Media to do investigation and fact checking of the most basic stories. I have argued with a few of my friends over the past years--and it was one reason why I went to Memphis in January for the conference on the Media--that truth has not been and still is not given to us by most of American journalists and broadcasters. They are lazy and understaffed, slavish to the whims of their corporate owners, and cannot be bothered with checking government statements. They are indeed merely regurgitating government press releases like the drones out of Orwell's 1984 in the "Ministry of Truth. "

Reading his piece you will at least see the deep connection between the stories we are given by our major news sources and what used to be called the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the term that is no longer being used by the current administration, given that it has been burned so indelibly into our consciousness there is no more need for it. But as soon as you see the word "Al Qaeda" you unquestioningly accept it as truth, and shiver, and throw out all other important concerns out of deep fearfulness.

Read Greenwald's essay on War Reporting if you do nothing else this week, and put a little independence into your mind. His piece is priceless if for no other reason than the excerpt from David Halberstam's commencement speech at the Columbia School of Journalism on this past May 18.

Happy Fourth of July! Honk if you love Justice.