Kabuki Show at Naval Academy

When I was an Insurance person, one of the things I learned was that when you have a big shindig coming up, you plan it out with plenty of time. All these many weeks I have been waiting to get information about when the Annapolis Conference on Israel and Palestine would be held. Not that I am a prospective invitee, of course, but just so I could KNOW.

Finally, today, I read a piece in Reuters that says that the conference will be held on the 27^th of November (next Tuesday) with meetings the days before and after. If anyone I know in business had decided to call a conference of that magnitude a week before the conference, they would have been lucky if one of the principle invitees showed up. How long has this been going on? Since Bush made a speech back on July 16, 2007. This is the responsibility of the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and she has “funked it.” Badly. In business, she'd get fired or be put on probation.

But note how Reuters reports it: the US said on Tuesday it “has told other nations it will soon send out invitations to the Middle East peace conference it plans to hold in Annapolis, Maryland, but none have gone out yet.” When are they going to send them? Wednesday? Thanksgiving? (Maybe some undocumented alien in the State Department can work all day Thanksgiving to prepare the FedEx packages so the invitations get there by Saturday. After all, she or he is not a real Amurcan and really doesn't need to celebrate Thanksgiving, right?)

In a larger context, of course, the conference has long been seen as a Kabuki Dance, with no real intention on the part of Israel to make any concessions and to stop their illegal expansion of the settlements in the Occupied Territories. Take the report of a prior planning meeting that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on October 19, 2007. Rice left the Mideast after a meeting in Jerusalem after having “shot down the primary Palestinian demands after several days of back-and-forth meetings with Israeli and Palestinian Authority leaders.” (p. A4) Her visit was so bland that it barely received coverage, and an editorial in Ma'ariv quoted by the LAT said “she made it clear that she in fact agrees with most of Jerusalem's demands.” (ibid.)

“During Rice's visit, Palestinian officials took every opportunity to publicly list the issues they wanted addressed before the conference: Palestinian prisoners, the borders of a future Palestinian state, the West Bank barrier being constructed by the Israelis, as well as refugees and Jerusalem.” (ibid, loc.cit.) I'm not Palestinian, but I could add to that a time line for withdrawal and the dismantling of the settlements. No, Rice and her entourage “rarely, if ever” referred to those items, preferring to speak of “core issues”(ibid.) So you can see, the fix is probably in, and the Palestinians will get a ride on the merry go round to nowhere once again.

Rice and Tony Blair, now the international envoy to Israel and Palestine, passed through the separation wall and visited Bethlehem. Sam Bahour, the Palestinian-American businessman and developer, who runs an email service giving news about the Palestinian side of the struggle once or twice a week, was quoted in the Financial Times as saying after the visit: “These moves are not unimportant but I don't want us just to become a university for people to learn how bad things are in Palestine. Palestinians are beyond statements. The Palestinian reality is overwhelming any real hope.”

Syria may or may not come. They have been marginalized, of course, and they know they have a target on their back and are in the rifle sights of the neo-cons. I saw a travel ad in the Los Angeles Times monthly magazine this past Sunday (actually a slick hundred plus pages of advertisements for the West side beautiful people—party hosts, snazzy law firms to hire, slinky models and French fashions. And, oh yes, the crossword puzzle, which everyone use to look forward to doing every week). The ad was of a cowboy in Israel. Yep, the cowboy and his family work a cattle ranch—and the grassy plains and hills in the background make you wonder—where is this? Not out in the desert. Not near the Jordan River. Nope, on the Golan Heights, don't you know, which obviously Israel has now settled. I wonder what the cowboy and his family will do if Israel ever negotiates with Syria to give the Golan Heights back? What's that you say, annexation of territory gained during war is illegal? Well, who cares, pardner, this is Israel!

So there is something to watch the week after Thanksgiving, the Kabuki dance in Annapolis. It will make the news and take your eyes off what going on down in Venezuela.

Venezuela? Yes, according to the press, Chavez is about to take over the country as a real dictator, and there is a popular uprising, a lot of opposition. It's all bullshit. More on that later. There's a real chance that another coup is in the offing. Just a hunch.

Fragen

The title means "questions" in German. Just pretend that these are the questions at the end of today's lesson.


If Pakistan's "President" Pervez Musharraf has declared marshal law and put the constitution in "abeyance," because he fears a threat from terrorists and radicals who will take over Pakistan, why is he arresting lawyers and charging them with treason and the death penalty? Why is he placing judges under house arrest? Why has he arrested supporters of Benazir Bhutto and placed the former prime minister under house arrest?


If President Bush decried violence by the military junta in Myanmar/Burma a few weeks ago and called for sanctions, why isn't he doing the same to Musharraf?


Does President Bush wish that he had a uniform to go along with being Commander-in-Chief?


Why did Vice President Cheney's office hold up the publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran last year in order to suppress information that did not support the worst case scenario about Iran's nuclear program?


If terrorists really are going to blow up the Beverly Center or the Glendale Galleria sometime during the Christmas holidays--as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are saying--am I going to let my daughters shop there? Will I do my usual Christmas Eve panic buy there?


Does Condoleezza Rice really think that Israel will take any action to help move in the direction of a two-state solution? If so, why has Israel continued to expand the settlements in the Occupied Territories?


If Israel wants the Palestinians to recognize its right to exist, how come the Israeli government does not recognize the right of Palestine to exist?


I am at the point tonight in which only questions appear to be useful.

Another Little Bit to Add to the Dossier

Postscript on torture and the Bush administration. Thanks to Scott Horton and his own research. Well, who knows how he found it in the archives. I find it stunning. In a post on his blog, “No Comment” entitled “‘We Do Not Torture’: The Lies Started in 1967” Horton provides an article from the New York Times, “Branding Rite Laid to Yale University,” Nov. 8, 1967. Here are the last two paragraphs:

The charge that has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus is that Delta Kappa Epsilon applied a “hot branding iron” to the small of the back of its 40 new members in ceremonies two weeks ago. A photograph showing a scab in the shape of the Greek letter Delta, approximately a half inch wide, appeared with the article.

A former president of Delta said that the branding is done with a hot coathanger. But the former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound is “only a cigarette burn.”

Practical joker. Ah yes, and then there's that smirk, and that attitude. Lovely guy to be around.

Cowards, Orwell, and Pogo

New York's Senator Schumer--who sends regular emails soliciting funds for the Senatorial campaigns, and California's so-called Democratic Senator, Diane Feinstein formally announced over the weekend that they would support the nomination of Judge Mukasy to be attorney general, despite his refusal to do the right thing and denounce water boarding as torture.

Feinstein's argument, as I am sure she will repeat until her death--was that Mukasy was the best candidate we could expect from the President, who would probably fall back on an interim emergency appointment when Congress closes its current session. Rather than demand a good candidate, she will settle for second best, and act with condescension towards the idealists who hoped that she would have been able to help send a message to the Bush administration that breaking the law is unacceptable behavior.

Like all cowards, she will rationalize her decision as "practical wisdom," not understanding that she--and Schumer for that matter, since he gave the same reasoning, not having the courage to admit that he had made a mistake to support Mukasy because of New York political friendship--stood at one of those moments that would have perhaps earned her a place in an updated Profiles in Courage. But no, she is incapable of courage, bound as she is, and has been, to the military industrial complex through through the business connections of her husband, bound as she is to ordinary go along to get along thinking, bound as she is to interests other than her constituents. She actually turns out to be the Republicans' senator in California, and would be seen as such if the Republicans had not transmogrified themselves into something else over the past few decades and didn't understand that they have an ally in the Senate. Her votes have more often than not on political and security matters, blindly followed the wishes of the administration.

Feinstein won re-election in 2006, and it is a shame that she ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination and against an extremely weak Republican cypher Richard Mountjoy. She has $3.2 million cash in hand and raised $8.3 million for the 2006 election. Thus she has five more years in office, and I am sure she will continue to disappoint Californians who are looking for some intellectual and moral leadership from a senior member of the senate.


Don't support any of her efforts to raise money for herself. Protest her decision silently or loudly when she participates in the national elections six months from now. She does not provide the leadership we need so sorely at this point in our country's history. Her cooperation with the Bush Administration's continuing erosion of the Constitutional rights of the citizens of the United States is a bitter thing to contemplate. Her decision will provide footnote in the history of shame that will be written eventually about these times.

Obliquely related to that--well, perhaps directly related to that--is George Orwell, who has been on my mind for the last few years now. I used to teach "Politics and the English Language" to my students many years ago, and the failure of journalism to play its proper role as the fourth estate during the past two decades plays off nicely against that brilliant essay. In fact, upcoming this week--Wednesday, at the New York Public Library--is a symposium on Orwell, called There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America. Check out its website.

In case you still have the Los Angeles Times "Opinion" section from this Sunday laying around, don't toss it until you have had a chance to read the four small essays on George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" (and after you read the essays, refresh your mind with rereading the essay). One, by Mark Danner, is excellent, elaborating on the presentation of the Medal of Freedom to Tommy Franks, L. Paul Bremer III, and George Tenet in December 2004, and Danner's meditation on the quotation from Orwell:

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.

And when I re-read those familiar lines, I thought immediately of the Bush administration poobah telling a journalist that they create reality and the rest of us comment on it. And then comes Orwell's kicker:

But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.

And of course, that raises all kinds of wonderful parallels, like the joke about the Russians, when there still was a USSR, that they "rewrote" history, or how they excised figures from photos when they had been sentenced to the Gulag, or had been "liquidated." That's the terrible version of the revisions in the story. Positively Pogo-esque.

Tipping Point

Yesterday Senator Kennedy came out against the nomination of Judge Mukasy to be the next Attorney general. Today, Senator Leahy came out against the nomination. President Bush's argument that Mukasy has "not been read into the program" is bogus. According to Bruce Fein, the Constitutional lawyer, nominees and contractors are "read into the program" all the time in order to be informed of what the demands of the position or contract are. If Mukasy has not been briefed, we can pretty accurate surmise that it is to give him cover and to keep him from condemning torture and doing something about it.

Because the Democrat's margin is so thin, all the Democrats must vote against the nomination. You can blame Chuck Schumer for proposing Mukasy to begin with and setting himself up. Schumer talks a good line and acts like a wuss when pushed into a corner. Write him, if you live in New York, to vote against the nomination. I don't trust Diane Feinstein to vote against Mukasy and so have written her to help add to the courage she needs to vote against the nomination.

Dear Senator Feinstein:

I am writing to you with regard to your deliberations on the appointment of Judge Mukasy to be the next attorney general. I refer you to the position of Bruce Fein, who was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. The president's position is that Mukasy has not been briefed on the matter of whether or not water boarding is used in our current arsenal of torture techniques. The president's argument is bogus, as Fein points out, since contractors and candidates are "read into the program" on many occasions.

I suspect that Judge Mukasy already knows what the position of the administration is. His waffling and obfuscation on the matter, and his creation of "a loophole big enough to drive a truck through" (as Senator Leahy commented during the Judge's testimony) regarding the President's ability to bring someone "within the law" are danger signs for all of us. Given his testimony, not to mention his previous judicial rulings in regard to legal rights, I fear that he will be worse than Gonzalez as an attorney general, because he is a skillful jurist, and more intelligent. To stay in the shadows and operate in the dark side, as the Vice President has called it, does nothing to advance our standing in the world or to defeat terrorism. The Vice President is misguided, and Judge Mukasy, instead of correcting this misguidance, will only perpetuate and institutionalize it.

We are at a tipping point in our struggle to keep the Constitution's integrity, and you, Senator Feinstein, are one of the very few citizens of the country who can keep us from tipping into an American version of totalitarian rule. Plant yourself in front of this juggernaut and stop it courageously. I urge you to vote against the approval of Judge Mukasy and to bring your influence to bear to convince your colleagues, especially Senators Schumer, Kohl, Feingold, and Cardin to do the same. The President will always bully people into submission. It is the moment to tell him that you will fight for the rights of your constituents under our Constitution.

Sincerely yours--

Write to Schumer, put the pressure on him. Mukasy's judicial rulings have gone against habeas corpus, and because he is more intelligent and more of a manager than Gonzalez ever could be, he will be even worse.

By the way, pick up a copy of Naomi Wolf's The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. It's a pretty chilling and historically informative rationale for pushing back against what is happening. People who read it find it incredible, but I figure just reading her summary article in The Guardian can't hurt to heighten consciousness. Bruce Fein's recent article in The Washington Monthly, "Restrain this White House" on the danger of Presidential signing statements is a good companion read. When very conservative Reagan partisans become alarmed, you need to pay attention, no matter which direction you come from. Go for it.

P.S. 2:47 PM Pacific time, I just heard on the news that both Feinstein and Schumer will vote for Mukasy. Maybe they can be turned around. Bring the pressure to bear!

ABSURDITY ON THE FACE OF IT

AP reports that Senator Kennedy will oppose the nomination of Judge Mukasy, Lindsey Graham and John McCain will support it, Charles Schumer is undecided, and President Bush comments on the process:

Bush said it was unfair to ask Mukasey about interrogation techniques on which he has not been briefed. "He doesn't know whether we use that technique or not," the president told a group of reporters invited into the Oval Office.

Further, Bush said, "It doesn't make any sense to tell an enemy what we're doing."

Without saying whether interrogators use water boarding, a technique that simulates drowning, Bush said, "The American people must know that whatever techniques we use are within the law." Asked whether he considers water boarding legal, Bush replied, "I'm not going to talk about techniques. There's an enemy out there."

But let's take a look at those statements. We have heard them before—or ones similar to that. I call it the “big secret” excuse. On its face it appears to be judicious and smart. It is always logical to keep secret that which you do not want your enemies to know, but in the case of water boarding, who exactly would benefit from the knowledge that we are or are not using water boarding as part of our interrogation techniques?

Let's be logical. Start with the “enemy” in this so-called “War on Terror.” Are we really trying to keep our enemies from knowing whether or not we use water boarding? Imagine yourself a terrorist, with ready access to stories from Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, rendition sites, the various information that has naturally leaked already from published documents, interviews, word of mouth from survivors of these places, the tales of rendition victims, in addition to which is a whole literature regarding the torture techniques of the Syrians, the SAVAK under the Shah of Iran, the infamous Egyptian and Pakistani secret services. This of course, is not to mention documented cases from human rights groups like Amnesty International, court documents, etc. All of this information is in the public sphere.

Additionally, we know that our armed services use water boarding as part of the training for members of our military who might be captured . In fact, as has been sufficiently documented over the past few years, survival training has included water boarding as a way of preparing our airmen, for example, for the kind of treatment they may receive. We know for example, that psychiatrists are present at interrogation sessions to counsel on the mental damage that could result.

Since water boarding has been known about and documented since the time of the Spanish Inquisition and has been condemned as torture by any number of religious and state authorities, there is no question that the technique is torture. Further, since we have punished both Japanese, German, and—in rare instances--our own military for using the technique, there is hardly any doubt as to its general condemnation. Do I need to remind us that in addition to treaties we have signed, we also have our own domestic anti-torture statutes?

Furthermore, we have ample evidence that torture of any kind tends to produce whatever information the torturer wants to hear, and for that reason is unreliable as a source of information. Torture victims may indeed go one step further and confess to things they did not do, or fabricate information which they think the torturer may want to hear. (At which point the torturer is then forced to vet the information and waste further valuable resources.)

Since this information is not only available to terrorists but also to their training officers, and in fact to the rest of the world, the matter of secrecy about whether or not we use water boarding is an illogical one to use. One would expect that any terrorists (or spy or ordinary sophisticated world traveler for that matter) always act on the basis of the philosophy of assuming the worst treatment will be applied by a torturer.

No, if George Bush truly thinks that not admitting whether water boarding is being used protects the people of the United States from terrorists, he is either disingenuous, stupid, or ignorant. Make no mistake about it, however, he knows the truth. No, I think he is being disingenuous. He is in fact attempting to keep information not from the terrorists but from the people of the United States. What he does not want is to make a statement that can be used to show that our government policy has been in fact illegal.

The Australian detainee at Guantanamo, David Hicks, pleaded guilty to a charge of “supporting terrorism” and was released from Guantanamo to serve out the balance of the agreed sentence in Australia. Part of the agreement was that he was not to make any statements about his treatment by the United States, and that he was not to be released from prison until after the next Parliamentary election. What a strange agreement! What a strange deal. And why do it unless you have something to hide?

This morning on the radio, I heard the President insist that since Mukasy had not been briefed on confidential matters yet, it was wrong of the Senators to expect him to answer their questions. But that too is disingenuous, because the matter the Senators are investigating is not one of confidentiality but definition: is water boarding torture? That Mukasy refuses to answer means only one thing: he knows—or at the very least strongly suspects that water boarding is being done. On a practical matter, he knows that if he declares water boarding to be torture, he will enter the position as an adversary of the president. But he wants the job, and the President wants him for the job. Mukasy has a chance to become a patriot here, but I suspect that he will not.

This is a very distressing state of affairs. Congress, especially some Republicans, had better stand up against this administration. I won't hold my breath. The world will stand up and cheer after January 19, 2009. If we ever get there with our Constitutional form of government intact.

Iran Attack (ack ack)

Alternet yesterday provided a translation from the original German article in Der Spiegel on the leak of a note from the White House indicating that Vice president Cheney 's strategy for striking Iran begins with an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The article is pretty frightening, but no more than what we have been reading and seeing in the news for the past 10 months, ever since the Russian Federation and China begin resisting strongly the saber rattling of the Bush Administration.


As for there being a leak in the White House, I don't believe it for a minute. These “leaks” often turn out to be just trial balloons to see what the world opinion would be; and since the Israelis have a number of German-built nuclear powered submarines now trolling around in the Persian Gulf area, capable of firing nuclear missiles (and with Germany footing 1/3 of the bill for the last two) what fitter place than in a well-known member of the German Press than to plant the leak? Who knows. When it comes to media these days and "white House leaks" I have no trust at all. Someone in the press room should ask Dana Perino about this in order to get her to deny it, since you never want to trust any fact until it's officially denied.


In one of those Pogo the Possum ironies (“We have met the enemy and he is us.”), the Der Spiegel article refers to the crazed neo-con Norman Podhoretz (aka Rudi Giuliani's senior foreign policy adviser) making his usually insane comparisons of the Iranian government to Hitler's Nazi Germany.


Podhoretz wrote, in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that he "hopes and prays" that Bush will finally bomb Iran. Podhoretz sees the United States engaged in a global war against "Islamofascism," a conflict he defines as World War IV, and he likens Iran to Nazi Germany. "Is it 1938 again?" he asks in a speech he repeats regularly at conferences.


Well, yes, it kind of is, I guess, except if you really want to make the analogy, which is ridiculous to start with, the forces of Nazi Germany do not appear to be massing their tanks and their Luftwaffe on the Iranian side of the borders. Now that the IAEA has formally come out and said that Iran does not appear to be making nuclear bombs, although to be fair, it still reserves the possibility that further information should be forthcoming, the Bush administration has found itself in a position of only minimal credibility on the nuclear weapons charge. (Note how Bush weaseled a bit in his WW III speech; now it has become "the knowledge to make nuclear weapons" that he is afraid of.) So they are now playing hard on "fixing" their casus belli around the “terrorism” of the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards and will probably—as Hitler did with the Poles the night before the attack—try to create a scenario to be used as the cause for war. Of course, that is absurd as well, another irony of history.


It really is a shame that you have to point out things like this. Those analogies are not useful--just like the Vietnam=Iraq one this past summer, and the stupid absurdities of the far right should have been laughed out of existence years ago. There is no analogy, of course, and those like Podhoretz who have become trapped by their analogous thinking are just weaving themselves in the fantastic silk of their own paranoia. "Islamofascism" indeed, showing especially a total misunderstanding of the word fascism. The worms have eaten the brains of that intellectual class that Norman Podhoretz used to represent. And the people listening to Podhoretz, like Rudi Giuliani, and the people controlling this government, are fools.


No, if anyone is likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the analogy, it is our country, not Iran. We are the ones threatening a first strike. Ironically, under the laws of the United Nations, which we consistently fail to follow, and using the logic of our war of aggression, which we carried out in supposed "pre-emption" of an "immanent" attack ( "Immanent." There's another word they are incapable of understanding), we, by our continuing threats over the years, are giving Iran the justification for initiating war. Perhaps that's what the Jack O' Lanterns in the White House want them to do?


The Herald (UK) on October 29 reports that the hangar infrastructure for stealth bombers based on the island of Diego Garcia (a British colony--though that is another story) in the Indian Ocean is being fitted for bunker buster bombs in preparation for the strike on Iran. And according to Jonathan Karl on ABC news on October 25, 2007, the Pentagon has ordered

$88 million to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator, or, in military-speak, the MOP.The MOP is the the military's largest conventional bomb, a super "bunker-buster" capable of destroying hardened targets deep underground. The one-line explanation for the request said it is in response to "an urgent operational need from theater commanders.

What urgent need?

The Pentagon referred questions on this to Central Command.ABC News called CENTCOM to ask what the "urgent operational need" is. CENTCOM spokesman Maj. Todd White said he would look into it, but, so far, no answer.

You think your gas and oil bill is high now, wait until the next Bushinator "shock and awe." Of course, the oil companies don't really care. All they do is increase the prices as the market goes up. But I have a feeling that high oil prices will be the least of our worries if we act on that insanity of attacking Iran.


Here is one rational response to the situation quoted in the Der Spiegel piece:

Former presidential adviser [Gary] Sick thinks Iran would strike back with terrorist attacks. "The generals of the Revolutionary Guard have had several years to think about asymmetrical warfare," says Sick. "They probably have a few rather interesting ideas."

According to Sick, detonating well-placed bombs at oil terminals in the Persian Gulf would be enough to wreak havoc. "Insurance costs would skyrocket, causing oil prices to triple and triggering a global recession," Sick warns. "The economic consequences would be enormous, far greater than anything we have experienced with Iraq so far."

Because the catastrophic consequences of an attack on Iran are obvious, many in Washington have a fairly benign take on the current round of saber rattling. They believe the sheer dread of war is being used to bolster diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis and encourage hesitant members of the United Nations Security Council to take more decisive action. The Security Council, this argument goes, will be more likely to approve tighter sanctions if it believes that war is the only alternative.

But that's what we would all like to think is a reasonable response to the news, and we hope that the saber-rattling is all a ploy. One then has to rely on the reasonableness and rationality of the president, the vice-president, and their supporting conservative fanatics. I don't think the reasonableness and the rationality are there.


Given this information--especially the gearing up with the bunker buster bombs--I believe the decisions have already been made and the 'deciders' as they did with the Iraq war, are merely waiting for the scenarios to play out, fixing the facts around the intention. I hope that this is wrong, I hope that at the end of January, 2009, I will be breathing a sigh of relief and laughing at my fears. It would be nice to think so, wouldn't it?

Updates on Torture and the Cheney Calculus

First, on torture. Breaking story on Democracy Now! this morning when Juan Gonzalez interviewed Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Jeanne Sulzer of the International Federation of Human Rights: these human rights groups filed a lawsuit in France today charging former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with ordering and authorizing interrogation techniques that led to abuses at US-run prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo and which were in fact torture.

Rumsfeld had to be in France in order to allow for the filing of the suit. He is there—or was there this morning for a conference. However, the suit is being reviewed by the authorities. My bet is that the Sarkosy government will not allow the suit to proceed and papers to be served on Rumsfeld. France, of course, has an obligation under the international agreements to prosecute those responsible for torture. It was the Spanish prosecutor who snagged Pinochet and set up the situation for him being detained in Great Britain, for example.

The United States has a similar obligation, but has refused to honor it in the case of Luis Posada Carriles, the anti-Castro terrorist, who is still being protected by the U. S. government in Florida despite extradition requests from Venezuela. Posada Carilles was responsible for the destruction of Cuban Airlines plane flying from Venezuela. The 1976 bombing killed 73 people and Cariles was tried and convicted in absentia. Ah, the rule of law. How we insist on it and then, when push comes to shove, we fail to uphold it.

My position all along is that, although some punishment has been meted out to low-ranking front line soldiers (the ones Rumsfeld referred to as the “bad apples”) for abuses, it was the command structure, those in positions of responsibility, who established the general instructions and atmosphere for torture, beginning with Rumsfeld. They have gone unpunished. In fact, enough evidence has come to light about his involvement in specific cases to enable material for the lawsuit to be gathered. The CIA has not been held to account. Our so-called leaders have been protected against responsibility for the violations of the Geneva convention and U.S. Law. As usual, one of the perks of higher management and office is cowardice and avoidance of responsibility.

The SECOND update refers you to some excellent information on the Iraqi oil situation in a great piece on Tom Dispatch by Jack Miles (Author of God: A Biography). The piece should be read in conjunction with the earlier one I referred to in my post of October on the calculus of blood for oil—Cheney's game, in other words.

In his very well researched piece, Miles puts together some interesting information that suggests that the Bush administration has its gonads over the grinder. “Baghdad to Bush: you have Fourteen Months.”

It discusses information that the MSM has not been paying attention to, particularly the decision by the Iraqi government that the UN mandate allowing the multinational force to stay in Iraq will be renewed only for one more year, after which, the Iraqi government insists, the United States will have to enter into a mutual defense arrangement with Iraq. That doesn't necessarily guarantee the removal of the U. S. forces, but it suggests that the Iraqi government is beginning to assert itself, though not in a way that the United States wants. Another assertion of power centers around their moves to eliminate the ukase of Paul Bremer under the Occupation regime that contractors could not be prosecuted. It also looks like the oil management boondoggle will not be put into effect. There is too much opposition to it from all factions. Remember, or well over two years now, polls have indicated that an overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people want the United States out of their country.

Read the article and follow up with the references and links in it. This is well-written analysis, grounded in fact. You won't find a discussion like this in the main stream media.

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!

Comic Books

I loved them when I was a kid, those comic books, and although I abandoned them in high school they have grown and matured within the culture of the world, not only the United States. I have not been able to keep up with the development of the genre, but it certainly has burgeoned over the past three decades. We now have illustrated novels and stories, and the cartoon and the illustrated narrative have firmly established themselves. Firmly. They have even influenced contemporary cinema as in Sin City where the "illustrated" qualities of each shot overlay the cinematic qualities to produce a visual experience that is memorable.


Every once in a while, I have run across a memorable one, a combination of illustration, narrative, and commentary that leaps off the page and into my consciousness--the Art Spiegelman MAUS I and Maus II were real discoveries; R. Crumb's the "Short History of America" was another, and today, after a few hours of reading some history and then a few disheartening articles on Iran and Palestine, I ran across another classic in seven parts, David Horsey's "Empire Rising, A Satirical History."

It will make you laugh out loud or at least chuckle, if the news of the weird world gets too heavy. Horsey is a cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and has won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of times. It's a delightful translation of the history of the current Bush administration into parodic Roman History, and filled with wonderfully literate puns (John Kerry is "Kerriolanus" for example).Each of the installments can be viewed in .pdf format, or the individual frames of the comic panels can be viewed individually.

The Cheney Calculus

In one of the more interesting pieces on the Iraq War that I have read recently, Jim Holt (“It's the Oil” in the London Review of Books ) suggests that Bush and Company are right where they want to be, sitting on top of 115 billion barrels of oil reserves—and more importantly—on top of 220 to 300 billion more of unexplored and undetermined potential.

If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Thus, all of the lives, lost or shattered or traumatized, of American soldiers, Iraqi citizens (both dead and fled, innocent and insurgent), living and oppressed under an occupation and a puppet democratic government, according to this ugly Cheneyesque calculus, appear to be worth it. One can imagine Cheney and his oil cronies back in the early part of 2001, shortly after the inauguration, with their oil survey maps spread out before them, doing the rough calculations. And when you imagine it, there comes more of a frightful feel to the vision. No wonder they want to protect the details of the meeting from the prying eyes of the journalists who lost the FOIA request for the minutes. It was "executive privilege," remember? And of course, no one in attendance would ever dare spill the beans. No need to swear secrecy there in that meeting, since revealing the slightest detail would produce an immediate denial and a snarling smirk, though even a smidgen of truth would clearly make them out to be the international pirates we all suspect they are.

According to Holt, this is the reason for the permanent bases, this is the reason for the largest embassy ever built by the US, this is the reason for the projections that the troops will be in Iraq for another 5 to 10 years. This is the reason that the top three Democratic Party candidates refused to commit to the troops being out of Iraq by the end of a first term in their presidency. This is a vision of colonialism for the 21rst century. Below the bullshit of the WMDs, people of Iraq wanting freedom from a dictator, and the military intentions to bring security to the government, you have the need to possess someone else's resources under the guise of a free market system. I always wondered why the one recommendation of the Iraq Study Group that Bush and the Administration latched on to was the need for the oil sharing agreement. He rejected everything else almost out of hand. But of course, the oil sharing agreement was part of the ISG because the old way of doing business, as exemplified by James Baker, helped to produce the report. No matter the difference in the means, the end is still the same.

Holt points out the winners of this oil play: the oil companies, the US voters/oil consumers,Europe and Japan, even Osama Bin Laden(!), and in the end the U.S. also contains Iran, Russia, China, and even that pesky Venezuela. (If that doesn't make you read Holt's article, well, you are no Iraq War junkie and you really will be missing out on a good think piece.) Holt's article is a wonderful session of cynical speculation, and I recommend you read the full essay. Even better—run off a copy and keep it with you to study the details.

There's only a few things I can see that might suggest that the plan might not work: the desire for revenge on the part of the Iraqi people, the ummah or the sense of community of all Muslims, and the terrible pressures of the world's largest forced immigration now under process in the surrounding countries. Despite the fact that Iraq has only been in existence since 1920, perhaps there is a true sense of nationhood that may motivate its citizens against the foreign colonial power.

Forgive me if I seem to be going along with the cynicism of the article. I just finished watching John Pilger's newest film, The War On Democracy. One scary thought is that we have been perceiving this administration as being incompetent as well as ruthless. But what if we are flat out wrong? What if the perceived incompetence is really just a manifestation of the hard miserable truth that deliberately planned colonialism in this day and age is very expensive, bloody, gruesome, and sloppy, but that in the end there is, to borrow a very scary phrase, a “triumph of the will”? And then there is the thought that follows: What alliance will be powerful enough to fight against this axis power reaching out so far from its homeland?

Some Observations on Foreign Affairs

So the House Select Committee on Foreign Affairs has passed on to the floor of the House the bill formally recognizing the Armenian Genocide, and the Turks are annoyed and threatening to hold off on air and transport rights for supplies to our troops. Speaker Nancy Pelosi supports passing the resolution calling the killing of Armenians during World War I a genocide.

However, George Bush thinks now that it is wrong finally to recognize the Armenian genocide (which he kind of supported, you may remember, back in February 2002 when he first ran for president. At first you want to call the man a hypocrite again and remind him of his pledge. But he only pledged in a letter to two Armenian Activists, two college friends, who then passed it on to the Armenian National Committee of America:

History records that the Armenians were the first people of the last century to have endured these cruelties. The Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension and commands all decent people to remember and acknowledge the facts and lessons of an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people.

(The text of the Texas Governor's letter is here.) How many Armenian votes did he pick up for that one? The paragraph is sly prose—it has Republican Spin Meister glycerin all over it—because it never really says that Bush would ensure that this country properly recognize the “tragic suffering” as genocide, only that he will make sure it is “properly“ recognized. Weasel me this, weasel me that.

Next, here is John Boehner, the Republican hack from Ohio, calling the resolution “irresponsible" on Fox News Sunday (as quoted in an AP article):

"Listen, there's no question that the suffering of the Armenian people some 90 years ago was extreme. But what happened 90 years ago ought to be a subject for historians to sort out, not politicians here in Washington."

Funny, it sounds just like Ahmadinejad last month (and last year after his "Anti-holocaust Convention") commenting on how historians still need to sort out the facts of the matter. Maybe Boehner actually paid attention to the President of Iran during the latter's recent visit to the US.

The subject of the Armenian genocide has in fact has been settled by historians in nearly one hundred years of research and scholarship. Legal opinions have been issued. And we, that is to say, we Americans, knew of it in 1915 as it happened, when Ambassador Henry Morgenthau sent reports early in that year to the State Department. Morgenthau later related the mass killings in an account of his years as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire published in 1919. The documentation is clear, and for a horrifying account, consult Robert Fisk's monumental The Great War for Civilization, chapter 10.

But now, the Bush Administration is scrambling, caught on the horn of an unintended consequence of our illegal war in Iraq. You may recall Turkey did not support the war effort and in fact pissed off Donald Rumsfeld before we struck in March of 2003 by refusing to allow its airbases to be used for the initial attacks. It appears that pressure, over the past four years has been applied and Turkey has been helping us out. Now the gonads of the war are in a vise of our own making: about 70% of the supplies for the war are being transported through Turkey, and Turkey is threatening to deny access.

It will be interesting to see how the situation plays out. Turkey is plenty mad at us for failing to stop the raids and terrorist acts of Kurdish rebels. Turkey is sending artillery shells into northern Iraq now and they are are especially ticked that some of those missing assault rifles are showing up in the Kurdish terrorists' hands. Of course, Turkey has been in a state of denial about the Armenian genocide since it happened—probably even more obsessively than our denial of genocide of native American Indians—and it is probably about time it learned to live with its past.

A really interesting sidebar on this whole matter is how Israel has failed to support the recognition of the Armenian genocide as strongly as it could. Of course, Israel has good diplomatic relations with Turkey to begin with, but according to Leonard Fein in the Jewish Daily Forward, the State of Israel's position was expressed in 2001 when “Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, could say, 'We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not genocide.'” Fein goes on to point out that while the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Reform Jewish movement apparently recognize the Armenian genocide, “the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and B’nai B’rith International . . .have steadfastly refused to endorse [the] bill currently before Congress that would formally acknowledge the fact of the Armenian genocide.”

Well, actually, there has been some movement at the ADL, though it took them a long while to “agree”:

New York, NY, August 21, 2007 … Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti- Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement:

In light of the heated controversy that has surrounded the Turkish-Armenian issue in recent weeks, and because of our concern for the unity of the Jewish community at a time of increased threats against the Jewish people, ADL has decided to revisit the tragedy that befell the Armenians.

We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as massacres and atrocities. On reflection, we have come to share the view of Henry Morgenthau, Sr. that the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide. If the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide.

For years the ADL position had been to deny that the Armenian Genocide was a genocide, and in fact it was only after a conflict in New England this past summer that the above statement was produced. But look carefully: it has all the slipperiness of the Bush letter to his graduate school chums: Abe Foxman agrees with Morgenthau (at last! How long has Henry Morgenthau been dead? Since 1946 you say? No kidding!) that those actions were “tantamount to genocide” and then Foxman shimmies a little in the last sentence, “if the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide.” And so, can we get a witness here, can you, Abe Foxman, say it's actually genocide? Nope, not quite.

The analysis of the letter and the brouhaha is nicely given by Rory Finnin in “The Anti-Defamation League and the Armenian Genocide” on the website History and Reconciliation. And although Finnin concludes his piece by saying that the ADL on the next day eliminated the ambiguity, a search of their website and press releases still shows a bit of rhetorical disingenousness:

Although independent scholars may have reached a consensus about the genocide, in an effort to help accomplish the reconciliation there is room for further dispassionate scholarly examination of the details of those dark and terrible days.

It sounds like Boehner, it sounds like—dare I say it again?--Ahmedinijad, asking for more scholarly investigation of what everyone agrees on already, playing for time, weaseling out of admitting that the word genocide is justified when the facts are there for everyone to examine. There really is a good deal of support in the US for the resolution on the Armenian Genocide. Well over 50 mainstream ethnic, human rights, civic, and religious organizations support it.

However, no one in the Administration wants to anger the Turks any further, threaten the outbreak of a a wider conflict in the Middle East, or choke the supply lines. The Bush Administration is scrambling here and finding out again the flaccid and impoverished quality of its imagination and strategic thinking.

Who knows, if Congress finds it can really skeeve the Turks, maybe it can also begin to see that it can anger the Israeli government by suggesting that they stop building illegal settlements, move their walls back to the 1967 Green line, pay reparations to people for the destruction of their houses and farmland, make restitution of their water rights, recognize the Palestinian State's right to exist, open Jerusalem as an international city, and come to a fair and equitable settlement for the Palestinian refugees.

Well, it's nice to hope, anyway.

Intelligent Responses to the Propaganda Campaign

"Every person is entitled to his own opinion. He is not entitled to his own facts, " said Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Great quote, great notion to hold to.

Have you been watching the media blitz supporting War with Iran? It will be continuing. A war hawk, Reuel Marc Gerecht, from the American Enterprise Institute in Newsweek; a Washington Post editorial attacking Mohammed el Baradei as if he were in league with the Iranians against the United States rather than a man trying to establish a rational alternative to another war of aggression; a few "expert" interviews on NPR.

(The people NPR calls upon for commentary on foreign affairs these days are so supportive of administration policy, almost all of them from the more conservative side of the spectrum. I don't see what the right wingers are so concerned about these days. NPR hath capitulated. The one exception was Terri Gross's interview with Charlie Savage about his new book on how the Bush administration has usurped the Constitution and re-created an "Imperial Presidency." You will remember that phrase. It was used during Nixon's era--I can remember he once had personally approved--or may even personally have designed some uniforms for the marines who guarded the White House--his own Eastern European braided and beribboned "palace guard." Or was it a design for the Washington, DC police? Funny what you remember and what you don't.)

So with Charlie Savage putting the usurpation in context, it is also good to have solid facts and common sense to go against the grain of the propaganda. Thus, I recommend that you read these, even go so far as to print them out, and make your own talking points against the supporters of the invasion of Iran--those who have had their consent manufactured by the Main Stream Media ("MSM" as I learned to call it in Memphis back in January).

First, some common sense about the Iranian (and Syrian threats) from Michael Scheuer, ex CIA analyst who is no defender of terrorism but is smart enough to see fanaticism when it appears in Washington, DC: read his article "Syria and Iran: The Threats that aren't" at Antiwar.com. It's worth a few excerpts:

And then there is Iran. How does one explain the U.S. governing elite's fear of Iran? Here we have a country that admittedly is led by one of the world's more histrionic politicians, but one that also is ringed by U.S. military bases and surrounded by an overwhelmingly more numerous Sunni world that hates Shi'ites far more than it hates Westerners. Iran‘s Islamic regime, moreover, is helplessly watching the final stages of the march of its energy resources toward oblivion, and preparing for the impoverishment and resulting internal political instability that event will usher in.

And his analysis of the real threat to the United States:

So where in this portrait is the threat to the United States? While Iran is a threat to Israel, there is surely no threat to America in Iran's less-than-impressive military forces, nuclear development program, or unattractive public diplomacy. No, the threat to the United States comes from two sources. First, the relentless "Iran is the new Nazi Germany" propaganda pushed by Israel and the American citizen Israel-firsters, and, second, the multi-decade failure of the U.S. Congress to seriously address the national-security issues of energy, borders, and immigration.

Second, another great riposte by Paul Craig Roberts, "Who Are the Fanatics?" defining further the real enemies in this conflict, the warmongers who refuse to pay attention to reality:

If Americans did rely on reason, tolerance and deliberation, they might free their minds of shrill propaganda long enough to consider the "Muslim threat." Muslims are disunited. Their disunity makes them a threat to one another, not to the West. . . .There is no such thing as Islamofascism. This is a coined propaganda word used to inflame the ignorant. There is no factual basis for the hatred that neoconservative Islamophobes instill in Americans. God did not tell America to destroy the Muslims for the Israelis. . . .In America today, blind ignorant hate against Muslims has been brought to a boiling point. The fear and loathing is so great that the American public and its elected representatives in Congress offer scant opposition to the Bush administration's plan to make Iran the third Middle East victim of American aggression in the 21st century.

Third, if any of your friends tries to adopt Bush's idiotic comparison of Iraq to Vietnam, here's ammunition from Andrew Bacevich, a man who actually fought in Vietnam, rather than hanging out in a National Guard unit based in Texas after Daddy pulled some strings in order to avoid getting sent to fly combat missions--a soldier who was a real conservative and supporter of the military until he began to study US Imperialism. And, sadly, a man who just this year, lost his officer son in the Iraq War. The man knows what he is about, and his thoughts can be heard on Antiwar radio, interviewed by Charles Goyette, the wonderful conservative voice of conscience down in Phoenix.

And finally, some more ammunition from Barnet Rubin, the Middle East scholar who I first referred to a few days back talking about how the propaganda machine was cranking up. His latest piece appears in the "Informed Comment Global Affairs" blog entry for Wednesday, September 5, 2007: "Theses on Policy toward Iran." Rubin talks about "regime change" as the motivating factor for any attack on Iran, posits some results that might come from an attack, and suggests two strategies Congress might adopt in order to avoid a conflagration. (Don't hold your breath.)

Armed with the facts and some common sense thinking, you are now ready to face the bizarre fantasies of the warmongers. Go and be gratified.

The First Installment of an Orderly Withdrawal

Flash from the Evening Standard in London, September 3, 2007: British Troops leave the government palace in Basra, congregate at the airport, under cover of darkness. Apparently bringing supplies to the soldiers in the center of the city has been more dangerous than stationing them together at the airport, which is always under mortar attack. This looks to be significant. Watch it. Bush is said to be really pissed off. It's about time he has to confront somebody not doing his bidding.

What I also found interesting is that--as you will see in the article--the British generals are continuing to be really disturbed by our failure to plan the aftermath of the invasion. I'm telling you, if you haven't been to see Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight yet, find it and see it. It's in limited run. You can find the listed theaters on their site. This is what has the generals so upset and you don't have to be a military historian to see why.

I still think the war is a war of aggression and therefore an international crime. The incompetence and disastrous lack of common sense on the part of the Bush administration in executing their dreams does nothing but confirm the bankruptcy of their morals and their vapid intelligence.