Category Archives: War on Terror

Desperation

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If you missed seeing Countdown last night, there’s a video of the first two segments here. If you’ve already seen the presser, featuring David Gregory’s beautiful moment, you can fast forward the tape to about 5:57 for remarks by Howard Fineman. I transcribed just a snip:

Fineman: It’s not just John McCain, a known maverick; it’s not just Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham, a known maverick; it’s not even Colin Powell, who is very popular in the country but sort of outside the system right now. The key guy here is Senator John Warner, the Republican of Virginia, as well as Colin Powell. The thing about Warner is he is the establishment man; he is the very symbol of the Pentagon establishment, the defense establishment, in a way the intelligence establishment over there in northern Virginia, and if HE is taking the side of the rebels on this, the Republican rebels, it’s a very serious division in the party, and one the Democrats ought to sit back and watch.

But the best part begins at 9:43, when Olbermann gets into the legal and ethical implications of President Bush’s proposed “let’s torture!” law. Olbermann interviewed Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law professor at George Washington University. Boldface is added:

Olbermann: … is he [Bush] covering his own backside with this?

Turley: Quite frankly, I think that there is evidence to say he is. You know, the thing that is ticking here in terms of a clock, is the fact that these fourteen guys that were recently transferred, just arrived not that long ago in Gitmo, in Cuba. They are going to be or have been interviewed by the Red Cross. Most people believe that they will reveal that they were subject to waterboarding, where you are held under water until you think that you are going to drown. That is undeniably torture under the international standards. If that occurs in the coming days, the United States and specifically the President will be accused of committing a very serious violation of international law. Torture is one of the top three or four things that the international law is designed to prevent. And so the reason there is this move to try to get legislation as fast as possible is because I think I think this administration senses that there is a lot of trouble coming down this mountain.

Then Olbermann asked how the proposed law would protect Bush legally.

Turley: Well, he would retroactively define what he did not to be a violation. That’s pretty good if you are going to commit a violation of law, to go and get the legislature to retroactively say what you did was not a violation. But remember, the President stands accused of thirty felonies in the NSA controversy; many of us believe he committed felony crimes there. If now he’s going to be accused of intentionally and knowingly ordering serious violations of international law, it’s not going to go well for the United States. We’re already viewed as a rogue nation around the world. But here’s something the President most likely knew about and condoned.

Olbermann read a bit from this Washington Post editorial that explains what the Bush Administration wants:

[WaPo:] It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

We might note that WaPo says “it” wants rather than “the President” wants.

The editorial is titled “A Defining Moment for America.” Olbermann asked Turley if this is indeed a defining moment, adding, “If the President gets his way, have we just become what the terrorists want us to become?”

Turley: Well, I’m afraid it would be, but this is really a redefining moment. You know, I always tell people — the president used that term as well — that our defining moment came in 1787, when we defined ourselves in a constitutional document that committed us to the rule of law. And what would happen here, if we embraced torture at the President’s invitation, would be to redefine ourselves, and we would become something that we have long fought against.

[Update: See also Billmon.]

If there is one point I would like to see written in the sky in 100-foot-high letters, it’s this: President Bush and his enablers went down this road not because they are strong, but because they are weak.

On last night’s Hardball — I believe it was last night — Jack Murtha told Chris Matthews that the fight over the proposed “permission to torture” legislation is going on between Administration civilians — the overwhelming majority of whom never served in uniform and have no personal experience with war — and the military. It’s Weenies versus Warriors, in other words, and Bush is the chief Weenie.

Most of the Bushies and the neocons generally are hothouse flowers who were either born into privilege or have been firmly entrenched in the power establishment for many years. They don’t know what real strength is; if you have power and privilege up the wazoo, bullying others around to get your way takes no strength at all. People who are physically and emotionally abusive of others are weak people who can’t control their own fears and impulses.

Bush and his followers think cruelty is “smart” and that people who hesitate to be cruel are weaklings. But time and time again, people with experience at war and intelligence; people who see the bigger picture; say that torture of prisoners and abuse of civilian populations is hurting our cause — assuming our cause is security and peace — more than helping it. I say that the torturers are the weak ones, because their actions are determined more by fear than by reason.

Bush and his followers think they are being “strong” by their cruelties and deceptions, which they hide in the dark, but in fact that is weakness. Strength involves keeping your integrity and being true to your principles no matter what the circumstances.

Indeed, if you toss your principles out the window as soon as they are less than expedient, they were never your principles to begin with.

Too many (although not all) “conservative” bloggers are siding with the torturers here. There’s something I want to say to them and to Captain Ed, in particular. He writes,

We have yet to fight against a wartime enemy that followed the GC with any consistency at all. The Germans routinely violated it even before Hitler began issuing orders to shoot captured pilots, and the massacre at Malmedy only crystallized what had been fairly brutal treatment at the hands of the Nazis for American prisoners (the Luftwaffe was one notable exception). The Japanese treatment of POWs was nothing short of barbaric, both before and after Bataan. The same is true for the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War, and McCain himself is a routine example of the kind of treatment our men suffered at the hands of the Vietnamese.

I have in the past written about an uncle who was a POW of the Japanese from December 8, 1941 to August 1945. It’s true that the treatment of the POWs was cruel and barbaric. My cousin, David Faries, wrote his master’s thesis in military history about my uncle and other U.S. Marines who had been U.S. embassy guards in Peking when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Here’s a quote:

… at the time of the Guadalcanal Invasion in 1942, much of the Japanese populace believed that Americans tortured prisoners. Rumors circulated that the barbarians churned tanks over those Japanese captured in the Solomon Islands. These of course were untrue, but they were widely believed. Japan, unlike the United States, was not bound to treat its prisoners under international law because she failed to ratify the Geneva Convention articles on prisoners of war. Japan claimed, however, she would observe its stipulations.

The Vatican, of all places, broadcast to the world Japan’s kindness to its captives. Prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese occupied territory, the Holy City reported, received ample supplies of soap, cigarettes, and money to purchase other items from their captors. Those who knew the truth but were unable to speak because of their plight meanwhile learned to avoid the wrath of an Ishihara or to “stand fast or move fast” when suddenly face to face with a “menacing bayonet or rifle butt.” Behind the cold wire walked death, hatred, and hunger. [David Oran Faries, “Home Is My Only Destination: William Harold Thomas, North China Marine, 1940-1945” (Master’s Thesis, Department of History, Western Illinois University, August 1985), pp. 69-70.]

In other words, the Japanese falsely believed Japanese prisoners were being treated barbarically by Americans, and they felt this gave them license to treat their American prisoners barbarically.

And now the American Right is following the same ghastly “logic”: They broke the rules first! Why do we have to be the ones who play by the rules? Only weaklings and children think that way.

We have to be the ones who play by the rules because that’s who we are. Or, at least, that’s who we used to be.

Update: Read Robert Kuttner in today’s Boston Globe:

My father was a machine gunner with the Army’s 28th Infantry Division, which was among the first units to march down the Champs-Elysées after the Allied liberation of Paris . In December 1944, having landed at Normandy and fought across France and Belgium, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and sent hundreds of miles through northern Germany in an unheated boxcar in the dead of winter to a prison camp at Muhlberg in the east.

My father survived the war not because of the generosity of the Nazis to Jewish soldiers. The Germans must have been tempted to send captured Jewish American soldiers to Auschwitz along with Polish, German, and Dutch Jews and kindred human garbage. But they did not. My father survived because, amazingly, even the Nazis respected the reciprocal agreements on humane treatment of prisoners.

Not every enemy thinks this way, of course, but that doesn’t mean we have to become just like our worst enemies.

Yay, TEAM!

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Peter Baker wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post:

President Bush said yesterday that he senses a “Third Awakening” of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation’s struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as “a confrontation between good and evil.”

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln’s strongest supporters were religious people “who saw life in terms of good and evil” and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.

“A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me,” Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. “There was a stark change between the culture of the ’50s and the ’60s — boom — and I think there’s change happening here,” he added. “It seems to me that there’s a Third Awakening.”

It’s my understanding that the business of dividing the Cosmos up into Good and Evil started with Zoroaster, a guy who (probably) lived sometime between the 18th and 6th centuries BCE in that part of the world we now call Iran. The notion that Good and Evil will duke it out in a final Judgment Day battle, plus most popular beliefs about angels and demons, are Zoroastrian in origin, also. Here’s a pretty good article about Zoroastrian influences on right-wing Christianity, from CounterPunch.

The President’s assumption that “religious devotion” somehow depends on accepting Zoroastrian dualities is, IMO, a tad peculiar. It also reveals a deep and vast ignorance of the spectrum of human philosophies, experiences, and practices that might be considered “religious.” But that’s another post.

As near as I can figure, this view of good-evil duality sees Good and Evil as distinctive forces or powers, and people are said to be “good” or “evil” not because of what they do, but because of which side they root for. I say this because of what Bob Herbert wrote in his column today.

The invasion of Iraq marked the beginning of the change in the American character. During the Cuban missile crisis, when the hawks were hot for bombing — or an invasion — Robert Kennedy counseled against a U.S. first strike. That’s not something the U.S. would do, he said.

Fast-forward 40 years or so and not only does the U.S. launch an unprovoked invasion and occupation of a small nation — Iraq — but it does so in response to an attack inside the U.S. that the small nation had nothing to do with.

Who are we?

Why, we’re the Good team! And we had to go to Iraq to get Saddam Hussein, who was a major player with the Evil team. If the invasion, directly or indirectly, ends up causing as much death or suffering as Saddam did, that’s a mere technicality. In BushWorld, actions or consequences don’t have anything to do with who is Good or who is Evil.

Another example: There was a time, I thought, when there was general agreement among Americans that torture was beyond the pale. But when people are frightened enough, nothing is beyond the pale. And we’re in an era in which the highest leaders in the land stoke — rather than attempt to allay — the fears of ordinary citizens. Islamic terrorists are equated with Nazi Germany. We’re told that we’re in a clash of civilizations.

Clearly, Herbert does not understand the nature of Good or Evil. When you’re playing against Evil, rules and principles are for wimps. And appeasers. It’s OK to do terrible things in the name of defeating Evil. What’s not OK is disloyalty to the Good team.

If, as President Bush says, we’re engaged in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” why isn’t the entire nation mobilizing to meet this dire threat?

That’s an excellent question that I wish someone would press Bush to answer. Another question is, how do you win an ideological struggle by military means? Bush’s rhetoric notwithstanding, World War II was not a struggle between ideologies but among nations. Most people chose sides in that conflict based on loyalty to their nations, not to a belief system. Victory was achieved not by changing peoples’ minds but by compelling the enemy nations to surrender.

The president put us on this path away from the better angels of our nature, and he has shown no inclination to turn back. Lately he has touted legislation to try terror suspects in a way that would make a mockery of the American ideals of justice and fairness. To get a sense of just how far out the administration’s approach has been, consider the comments of Brig. Gen. James Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines. Speaking at a Congressional hearing last week, he said no civilized country denies defendants the right to see the evidence against them. The United States, he said, “should not be the first.”

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative South Carolina Republican who is a former military judge, said, “It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them.”

How weird is it that this possibility could even be considered?

I’ll tell you how weird it is; it’s so weird that the Right Blogosphere isn’t discussing it at all. So far, based on google and technorati searches, I don’t believe anyone’s come up with talking points to support executing someone without producing evidence at trial.

If Bush continues to push this issue, however, team loyalty will inspire expedient frames and phrases eventually. And if the Good Team is doing it, it can’t be Evil.

The character of the U.S. has changed. We’re in danger of being completely ruled by fear. Most Americans have not shared the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very few Americans are aware, as the Center for Constitutional Rights tells us, that of the hundreds of men held by the U.S. in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, many ‘have never been charged and will never be charged because there is no evidence justifying their detention.’

Even fewer care.

We could benefit from looking in a mirror, and absorbing the shock of not recognizing what we’ve become.

On the Right, of course, there’s a hazy faith that if someone’s being held at Guantanamo there must be a good reason. However, I have said before, and I still believe, that someday when the full story of Guantanamo is told, a whole lot of Americans are going to be shocked and sickened and want to know why no one spoke out sooner.

And some of us will say, we did speak out. Why didn’t you listen sooner?

What’s Next?

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John Aravosis is planning an “all-out war” against Disney/ABC. I’m glad to see that he’s come up with a number of ideas beyond boycotts of Disney – ABC programs and products. I’ve never heard of a boycott against a product or company that had any impact other than a little media attention.

Jennifer Nix, posting at firedoglake, has more. Three of her suggestions merit special attention, IMO. Briefly,

1. Work to get the widest possible distribution and viewing of the film 9/11 Press for Truth.

2. Urge media to cover the 9/11 Press for Truth press conference with the filmmakers and 9/11 families at the National Press Club. Meke noise to advocate more investigation.

3. Work to get “Press for Truth” learning materials into schools.

Nix fills in more details.

I want to say something about Scholastic’s role in the “Path” scandal. I used to work for Scholastic and know a little about how these things happen. I suspect it went down this way:

Somebody, probably ABC, contracted Scholastic to produce and distribute the classroom materials. And that somebody probably provided Scholastic with a script and graphics to work with. (Disney publishing could have produced the classroom materials just as well as Scholastic; ABC probably approached Scholastic because of its public school distribution chops.)

However, it’s unlikely Scholstic staff did all the actual work. The writing of the materials was almost certainly subcontracted to a “packager,” a company that will do any or all tasks from writing/editing through warehousing and distribution for a fee. Scholastic (and most textbook/ educational publishers) work with packagers a lot because publishing textbooks or other school materials doesn’t keep keep a full-time, permanent staff busy on a regular basis. There will be long periods of big, complex, tight-deadline projects followed by (sometimes) months with not much to do but re-arrange paperclips. So it’s common for the big educational publishers to keep a minimum in-house staff to provide editorial and artistic direction, hire by short-term contract as needed during crunch periods, and farm out the rest of the work to packagers.

When I was a production manager for Scholastic the biggest part of my job was coordinating the work of several different packagers and vendors scattered all over the country. Work would come into Scholastic at various stages to be reviewed by the in-house team, but it was actually being written and put together by people other than Scholastic employees.

I’d bet money that whoever in upper management worked out the contract details with ABC didn’t spin his wheels much over the content of the project. It was income, it was Disney/ABC, how bad could it be? The in-house editorial-production staff may have given the project no more than a cursory glance, requested bids from packagers, and farmed out the whole thing. It’s possible Scholastic staff acted only as brokers, passing the produced material on to ABC for review and back to packagers for revision.

I don’t know that’s what happened; I’m just saying that’s how these things usually work.

My entire department, from the Vice President down, was laid off in 2000, which is why I’m not still there, and I don’t believe anyone I used to work with is working there now. So I have no reason to be loyal. But Scholastic’s main office building is on Broadway between Prince and Spring streets, which places it in the Soho section of Manhattan. It was well within the area barricaded from all but essential workers after September 11. I’m sure there are people on the Scholastic staff who care about the truth deeply.

See also: Tom Shales, “ABC’s Twisted ‘Path to 9/11′”

Gitmo Roundup

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A tag team view of yesterday’s Gitmo news:

Editorial, Washington Post:

PRESIDENT BUSH took major steps yesterday toward cleaning up the mess his administration has made of the detention, interrogation and prosecution of those captured in the war on terrorism. …

… Yet as Mr. Bush took these constructive steps, he also undermined them. He delivered a full-throated defense of the CIA’s “alternative set of procedures” that the world properly regards as torture. With an election pending and families of Sept. 11 victims as his audience, he demanded legislative action on issues of enormous complexity in the few remaining days of the congressional session. And the bill he sent to Congress would authorize the administration to resume some of the worst excesses of the past five years….

…the detention and interrogation regime that Mr. Bush wants Congress to sanction is almost as bad as the one the Supreme Court forced him to set aside in the Hamdan case. Mr. Bush has no regrets about the interrogation tactics used on high-value detainees, which he did not name but which others have said included simulated drowning. He described the techniques as “tough” but “safe and lawful and necessary.” But they were not “lawful” — at least not as the Supreme Court has articulated the law. On the same day that U.S. generals were describing abusive techniques as ineffective and counterproductive, Mr. Bush insisted that the CIA’s program of secret detentions and coercive interrogations needs to continue.

Indeed, the bill he sent to Congress would largely authorize the system the administration created on its own after Sept. 11, 2001. It would allow military commission trials modeled principally on the ad hoc ones the military set up unilaterally. It would define compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions — which prohibits certain cruel and humiliating treatment of detainees — so as to allow categories of conduct the article clearly forbids. It would limit war crimes prosecutions for violations of Common Article 3 to certain specified serious violations. And it would eliminate most judicial review of detention policies. The administration seems to want a system in which the military keeps its hands clean while the CIA does the dirty work of violating international law and humanitarian norms.

And the president wants this system created in a matter of a few short days. “Time is of the essence,” he said. “Congress is in session just for a few more weeks, and passing this legislation ought to be the top priority.”

Editorial, New York Times:

Mr. Bush’s urgency was phony, driven by the Supreme Court’s ruling, not principle. This should all have happened long ago. If the White House had not wanted to place terror suspects beyond the reach of the law, all 14 of these men could have been tried by now, and America’s reputation would have been spared some grievous damage. And there would be no need for Congress to rush through legislation if the White House had not stymied all of its attempts to do just that before.

The nation needs laws governing Guantánamo Bay, not just for the 14 new prisoners, but also for many others who have been there for years without due process, and who may have done no wrong.

Last month, for example, The Washington Post wrote about some of the first arrivals at Guantánamo Bay in 2002: six men, born in Algeria but living in Bosnia, accused of plotting to attack the United States Embassy in Sarajevo. Two years after their capture, Bosnian officials exonerated them. Last year, the Bosnian prime minister asked Washington to release them. But The Post said the administration has decided the men will never be returned to Bosnia, only to Algeria, and then only if they are confined or kept under close watch. Even the Algerian government won’t go along with that.

Mr. Bush could have prevented this sort of miscarriage of justice if he had not insisted on creating his own system of military tribunals, which the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Even now, the legislation he is proposing to handle Guantánamo prisoners would undermine key principles of justice. It would permit the use of evidence obtained through coercion, along with hearsay evidence, and evidence that is kept secret from the accused. The military’s top lawyers have all publicly opposed these provisions.

Mr. Bush also wants to rewrite American law to create a glaring exception to the Geneva Conventions, to give ex post facto approval to abusive interrogation methods, and to bar legal challenges to the new system.

Some of the most influential Republican voices on military affairs, Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are sponsoring a more sensible bill that would bar the use of coerced testimony and secret evidence. Members of this Congress have a nasty habit of caving in to the White House on national security, and there’s a looming election, but it is vital that they stick to their principles this time.

Glenn Greenwald:

This announcement may appear superficially to constitute a reversal, or even a capitulation, by the Bush administration, but there are significant political benefits to be gained from the White House’s maneuver, including election-season pressure on lawmakers to support policies the administration has pursued all along for the “war on terror.” …

…Republican strategists have made explicitly clear that their strategy for the midterm elections, now just two months away, is to highlight the terrorist threat to the fullest extent possible. Accordingly, top Bush officials, including the president, have spent the last week giving a series of extraordinary speeches about terrorism, featuring highly charged accusations of “appeasement,” along with escalated rhetoric equating the threat from al-Qaida to that posed by the Nazis during World War II and by Communists under Lenin and Stalin. Republicans clearly want the news dominated by alarming discussions of the terrorist threat, as opposed to the highly unpopular war in Iraq, which has receded from view in recent weeks despite continued grim developments.

Publicly showcasing the most dangerous and prized al-Qaida suspects, as the White House did Wednesday, has already provoked exactly the visceral reminders of the 9/11 attacks that the administration believes will provide it the most political punch. As the so-called 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed is one of the best-known and most ominous terrorists of all. Virtually every news Web site and cable news program is now repeatedly displaying the photograph of a bedraggled, angry Mohammed, taken after he was dragged out of bed in Pakistan in the middle of the night and detained by American soldiers in March 2003. Short of capturing Osama bin Laden, it is difficult to imagine what could bolster the administration’s political objectives more than having such a vivid and alarming image associated with the 9/11 attacks once again filling television and computer screens everywhere.

The transfer of these detainees to Guantánamo is also certain to provide the administration with a powerful new weapon as Congress debates various legislative proposals designed to regulate military commissions and interrogation techniques in the wake of the Hamdan ruling. The Bush administration is insisting that Congress do nothing more than simply endorse, legislatively, the military commissions that the administration already created. The administration is also seeking authorization for the CIA to employ controversial interrogation techniques such as prolonged sleep deprivation and waterboarding — a policy Vice President Cheney in particular has fought for fiercely on Capitol Hill. …

… In the past, the administration has depicted such efforts to protect fundamental principles of due process as “giving rights to terrorists.” By announcing that Mohammed himself is now to be one of the detainees to be tried before a Guantánamo tribunal, the administration is sure to argue that the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks does not deserve such privilege. Particularly for those in Congress facing tough reelection battles, the prospect of being depicted as an advocate for Khalid Sheik Mohammed is sure to give them pause when deciding if they will insist on greater safeguards for Guantánamo detainees.

Josh Marshall:

So here’s where we are. It now seems clear to just about everyone that the other shoe has now dropped. We know the president’s final strategy to keep the subpoenas at bay in 2007 and 2008. Put the worst al Qaida bad guys at Gitmo and force a rushed debate over legislation over how they will be tried. An up or down vote, either the president’s kangaroo courts or nothing.

Dare Democrats to vote for nothing. If they do, mutilate them with 30 seconds. If they don’t, sow dissension among the opposition.

It’s hardly a surprise. This whole White House is the fruit of the poison tree. Their national security policy has always been essentially political. Nothing has changed. It’s what all of us have always predicted.

Ezra Klein:

Meanwhile, the Corner is collapsing in paroxysms of glee over Bush’s brilliant move on detainees today. For reasons I don’t quite understand, Mario Loyola seems to think Bush “stole the terms of debate from the Democrats, and rewrote them, all in a single speech. It will be delightful to watch in coming days and hours as bewildered Democrats try to understand what just hit them, and then sort through the rubble of their anti-Bush national security strategy to see what, if anything, remains.” I’m not terrifically sure what the political implications of today’s move are, but it seems to me that Bush was forced by the Supreme Court to stop holding detainees illegally, and by Congress to stop torturing people. That he’s decided to say he’ll do these things is being greeted as a victory of epic proportions by the Corner crowd. The soft bigotry of low expectations, I guess.

Marjorie Cohn, ZNet:

Bush said his administration had “largely completed our questioning of the men” and complained that “the Supreme Court’s recent decision has impaired our ability to prosecute terrorists through military commissions and has put in question the future of the CIA program.”

He was referring to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the high court recently held that Bush’s military commissions did not comply with the law. …The Court also determined that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to al Qaeda detainees. That provision of Geneva prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity” and “humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Bush called on Congress to define these “vague and undefined” terms in Common Article 3 because “our military and intelligence personnel” involved in capture and interrogation “could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act.”

Congress enacted the War Crimes Act in 1996. That act defines violations of Geneva’s Common Article 3 as war crimes. Those convicted face life imprisonment or even the death penalty if the victim dies.

The President is undoubtedly familiar with the doctrine of command responsibility, where commanders, all the way up the chain of command to the commander in chief, can be held liable for war crimes their inferiors commit if the commander knew or should have known they might be committed and did nothing to stop or prevent them.

Bush defensively denied that the United States engages in torture and foreswore authorizing it. But it has been well-documented that policies set at the highest levels of our government have resulted in the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of U.S. prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo….

…Throughout his speech, Bush carefully denied his administration had violated any laws during its “tough” interrogations of prisoners. Yet, the very same day, the Pentagon released a new interrogation manual that prohibits techniques including “waterboarding,” which amounts to torture.

Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith, The Nation:

The US War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a felony to commit grave violations of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration is quietly circulating draft legislation to eliminate crucial parts of the War Crimes Act. Observers on The Hill say the Administration plans to slip it through Congress this fall while there still is a guaranteed Republican majority–perhaps as part of the military appropriations bill, the proposals for Guantánamo tribunals or a new catch-all “anti-terrorism” package. …

…As David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center pointed out in the August 10 issue of The New York Review of Books, the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rusmfeld “suggests that President Bush has already committed a war crime, simply by establishing the [Guantánamo] military tribunals and subjecting detainees to them” because “the Court found that the tribunals violate Common Article 3–and under the War Crimes Act, any violation of Common Article 3 is a war crime.” A similar argument would indicate that top US officials have also committed war crimes by justifying interrogation methods that, according to the testimony of US military lawyers, also violate Common Article 3.

Lo and behold, the legislation the Administration has circulated on Capitol Hill would decriminalize such acts retroactively.


Maura Reynolds, Richard B. Schmitt and David G. Savage, The Los Angeles Times:

It is not clear whether the president’s plan will gain traction on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have been working for weeks on their own proposals for military commissions to try terrorist suspects.

Two of the leading authors of a nearly complete Senate bill, Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said their bill differs from the administration plan in key areas — including the use of classified and coerced evidence — but also said that differences may not be insurmountable.

“The goal for me is to take the committee bill and the administration bill and find middle ground so we can get commissions authorized in a way that will withstand judicial scrutiny, get congressional buy-in, and be a form we can be proud of as a nation to render justice to terrorists,” Graham said.

Details of the Senate-drafted bill are expected to be released in the next two days, Warner said.

Democrats adopted a wait-and-see posture Wednesday, indicating they were more likely to support the Warner-Graham bill than the administration’s plan. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee’s top Democrat, said he had “serious concerns” about the Bush bill.

Many Democrats described the policy outlined by Bush as a retreat for the administration. “This is a major reversal from past Bush administration policy, which held that no new law was needed. It is essentially a mea culpa, cloaked in rhetoric,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

In the House, where Republican members largely have supported the administration’s approach to detainees, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, planned to convene a hearing on the administration’s proposal today. The administration’s proposed system would incorporate many procedures used for U.S. military personnel in court-martial proceedings — but with several major distinctions. It would allow hearsay evidence and confessions obtained through coercive interrogations, assuming a judge found the information to be probative and credible.


Atrios:

Since this is going to get nasty very quickly let me try to write it as slowly as I can:

It’s important to respect human rights because of what it says about us, not because of what it says about some of the assholes in custody.

Bush Admits to Secret Prisons

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BBC News:

President Bush has acknowledged the existence of secret CIA prisons and said 14 key terrorist suspects have now been sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

These would be the same secret prisons Dana Priest wrote about, I take it.

The suspects, who include the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have now been moved out of CIA custody and will face trial.

Mr Bush said the CIA’s interrogation programme had been “vital” in saving lives, but denied the use of torture.

Sure.

He said all suspects will be afforded protection under the Geneva Convention.

But they weren’t afforded such protection before.

In a televised address alongside families of those killed in the 11 September 2001 attacks, Mr Bush said there were now no terrorist suspects under the CIA programme.

Mr Bush said he was making a limited disclosure of the CIA programme because interrogation of the men it held was now complete and because a US Supreme Court decision had stopped the use of military commissions for trials.

I wonder what brought this on?

Update: Thanks to merciless for the tip — at Crooks and Liars, Digby writes that this is a classic Rove maneuver to trap the Dems into appearing soft on terrorists. He quotes Mario Loyola at The Corner:

The President just pulled one of the best maneuvers of his entire presidency. By transferring most major Al Qaeda terrorists to Guantanamo, and simultaneously sending Congress a bill to rescue the Military Commissions from the Supreme Court’s ruling Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the President spectacularly ambushed the Democrats on terrain they fondly thought their own. Now Democrats who oppose (and who have vociferously opposed) the Military Commissions will in effect be opposing the prosecution of the terrorists who planned and launched the attacks of September 11 for war crimes.

The military tribunals that were operating at Guantanamo were not normal trials or even normal courts martial. President Bush declared that non-citizens whom he determined were terrorists would be “tried” by a military commission, which differs from a normal court in several ways. According to Wikipedia:

  • The accused are not allowed access to all the evidence against them. The presiding officers are authorized to consider secret evidence the accused have no opportunity to refute.
  • The presiding officers are authorized to consider evidence extracted under torture.
  • The presiding officers are authorized to consider evidence extracted through coercive interrogation techniques.
  • The general in overall charge of the commissions is sitting in on them. He is authorized to shut down any commission, without warning, and without explanation.
  • Secretary Rumsfeld has said that even an acquittal on all charges is no guarantee of a release; that he may choose to keep any detainee.

    • For all the articles written about the military tribunals I haven’t found one that explains exactly how they work or who has access to the proceedings or records of the proceedings. If anyone could help me out with that I’d appreciate it.

    Very simply, the Hamdan decision said that the President doesn’t have the constitutional authority to establish military tribunals. However, the ruling doesn’t prevent Congress from passing legislation allowing tribunals at Guantanamo. The plan seems to be to use tribunal legislation as a wedge issue to hurt Democrats; if they hesitate to approve whatever nonsense the Republicans come up with, Republicans will claim the Dems are “soft on terrorism.” Dumping famously bad guys like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into Gitmo ups the ante considerably.

    However, Digby says the Dems can avoid the trap by advocating public trials à la Nuremberg. Considering all the World War II rhetoric coming out of the White House lately, this is a natural. And I have a feeling the White House really does not want public trials under Nuremberg rules —

    Under the Nuremberg Charter, each defendant accused of a war crime was afforded the right to be represented by an attorney of his choice. The accused war criminals were presumed innocent by the tribunal and could not be convicted until their guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, the defendants were guaranteed the right to challenge incriminating evidence, cross-examine adverse witnesses, and introduce exculpatory evidence of their own.

    I say if it was good enough for Hermann Goering, it’s good enough for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Anyway, back to Digby:

    The Republicans are gleefully assuming that Bush has cornered the hapless Democrats once again with this clever move. I don’t think so. Bush and Rumsfeld just repealed Godwin’s law and that means this WWII analogy goes both ways. The Democrats should insist that if it was good enough for the Nazis to have public trials with normal rules of evidence, it is good enough for Al Qaeda.

    Without public trials, there will never be any proof of guilt and the United States will create martyrs in a movement that reveres martyrdom — secret trials play directly into the hands of the terrorists. At the very least, these accused terrorists must be tried under rules such as those used at Nuremberg that cannot be construed as unjust by reasonable people. Without that, we will have given the terrorists another excellent recruiting tool and more reasons for the Islamic moderates we desperately need as allies to mistrust us. It seems to me that we have done quite enough of that.

    So if the Republicans try to use opposition to tribunal legislation (I am assuming Dems will oppose it), all the Dems have to do is holler NUREMBERG! and HERMANN GOERING! That should do it.

    Which Side Are We On, Again?

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    The President ended his remarks today by saying “All civilized nations are bound together in this struggle between moderation and extremism.”

    Could be. But I fear most of the moderate world thinks the U.S. is playing in the “extremist” league.

    I gave the transcript and the New York Times synopsis a skim. A couple of paragraphs from the latter that leaped out at me —

    Mr. Bush said Al Qaeda terrorists now consider Iraq “the central front” of a war that they hope will end in a “caliphate” governed by the dictates of “violent Islamic radicalism” across the entire Middle East. Destroying the new democratic Iraq is essential to their evil aspirations, he said.

    That depends on which violent Islamic radicals we’re talking about. If we’re talking about Shi’ite violent Islamic radicals, they don’t need to destroy the Iraqi government. They can control the Iraqi government.

    If we’re talking about Sunni violent Islamic radicals, on the other hand, I ‘spect they think Iraq is just fine the way it is — violent and occupied by Americans. The billions we’re dumping into Iraq fits in nicely with bin Laden’s “bleed until bankruptcy” plan, which Bush mentioned in his speech without noting how well White House policies fit bin Laden’s agenda.

    “It is foolish to think you can negotiate with them,” Mr. Bush said. No one in either major party has suggested negotiating with terrorists, although many Democrats and some Republicans have criticized the conduct of the war in Iraq. Some critics have called for a phased withdrawal of American troops from the country.

    I believe that in Bush World, disagreeing with Bush is the same thing as negotiating with terrorists, even though no negotiating with terrorists actually takes place. See previous post on the rightie definition of “appeasement.”

    Here’s some more from the New York Times:

    In the case of Iran, which the report singles out as “the most active state sponsor of terrorism,’’ Mr. Bush is also currently seeking to win agreement at the United Nations Security Council for sanctions to punish Iran for refusing the council’s request that it halt nuclear enrichment.

    “Most troubling is the potential WMD-terrorism nexus that emanates from Tehran,’’ the report said.

    The possibility that Saddam Hussein might develop “weapons of mass destruction” and pass them to terrorists was the prime reason Mr. Bush gave in 2003 for ordering the invasion of Iraq.

    Are the neocons fixin’ to attack Iran? Is the Pope German?

    I’m all out of blogging time, so in conclusion — what Dam Froomkin says. Feel free to discuss among yourselves.

    Appease This

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    Eugene Robinson demonstrates why he’s one of my favorite columnists.

    Ever since the president settled on “Islamic fascists” as the enemy in his war on terrorism, he has taken every opportunity to evoke the specter of World War II. We are engaged in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” Bush told the Legionnaires. …

    … Rumsfeld went furthest of all in claiming that it is, in fact, 1939 — that the jihadist terror movement presents the same kind of threat to the world that Hitler did when he invaded Poland. He set up a straw man, warning that those who do not see the threat as clearly as he does are as blind as those who tried to appease Hitler. But he doesn’t specify who he’s talking about. Who wants to appease terrorists? Is it Democrats? Nervous Republicans who’ve seen the latest polls?

    Nobody wants to appease terrorists. But some people have a different idea of how to fight them. The president is right when he says this conflict is unlike other wars, but he seems to miss the essential difference: It has to be fought in a way that doesn’t create two new terrorists for each one who is killed.

    That’s not what the president wants to talk about, though. Between now and November, he wants to talk about a war that we can all agree on, even if it has no bearing on the war being fought today. Yes, Mr. President, Hitler was bad. And your point would be?

    Here’s a maha rule: Labeling something isn’t the same thing as understanding it.

    Some years ago I got into a flame on a U.S. Civil War usenet forum when someone wrote that all you need to know about antebellum slaveowners was that they were fascists. And I wrote back, no, they weren’t. The political and economic philosophies of the old plantation class differed in several significant ways from those of Hitler or Mussolini. Calling the slaveowners “fascists” doesn’t tell you anything about them at all. (Then, of course, I was accused of defending slavery because I said slaveowners weren’t fascists.)

    The two of us were using the word fascist for different purposes. I was using it to refer to a particular ideology defined here as “A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.” Whatever else you want to say about the antebellum slaveowners, they sure as shootin’ didn’t like centralization of authority under a dictator. They were rabid antifederalists and anti-statists, and in many ways they were the forefathers of today’s libertarians.

    But the other writer was using fascist as a synonym for demon. I suspect that if I had pressed him to define fascism as a political/economic ideology (I may have; I don’t remember) he couldn’t have done it. Demonization absolved the writer from understanding how and why a particular group of human beings oppressed another group of human beings.

    It makes about as much sense to call Islamic jihadists “fascists” as it does to say that all those Mississippi plantation owners were fascists. As Eugene Robinson says,

    Perhaps because the term “fascist” doesn’t really describe the transnational jihadist movement, Bush went further with the Legionnaires. He called the jihadists “the successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians” as well. The fact is that the jihadists are pretty much sui generis — they aren’t fascists or Nazis and certainly aren’t communists, but yes, you could make a good argument for “totalitarians.” I guess one out of four isn’t bad.

    If you spend much time on Internet forums or blogs at all, sooner or later you’ll run into the “fascism is socialism” theory common among mal-educated righties. The theory works this way: Since fascism is totalitarian, and since socialism is just watered-down communism (according to rightie ideology), and communism is totalitarian, then socialism and fascism are exactly the same thing. And they all belong on the Left, with liberals, which means liberals are totalitarians. And since totalitarianism is on the Left, then the Right stands for freedom and democracy. And, of course, the next step after that is to claim that we must allow the President to break wiretap laws and violate the Fourth Amendment to preserve our freedom.

    People who think this way judge action to be good or evil not by what is done, but who does it. What “they” do is evil. What “we” do is good. (Even if it’s the same thing “they” did.)

    What Jimmy Carter said about fundamentalists could be true of any group of people. He said:

    The fundamentalists believe they have a unique relationship with God, and that they and their ideas are God’s ideas and God’s premises on the particular issue. Therefore, by definition since they are speaking for God anyone who disagrees with them is inherently wrong. And the next step is: Those who disagree with them are inherently inferior, and in extreme cases — as is the case with some fundamentalists around the world — it makes your opponents sub-humans, so that their lives are not significant. Another thing is that a fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality. And so this administration, for instance, has a policy of just refusing to talk to someone who is in strong disagreement with them — which is also a radical departure from past history. So these are the kinds of things that cause me concern. And, of course, fundamentalists don’t believe they can make mistakes, so when we permit the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, it’s just impossible for a fundamentalist to admit that a mistake was made.

    Let’s change a few words–

    The [nationalists] believe they have a unique relationship with [their nation], and that they and their ideas are [the only legitimate ideas] on the particular issue. Therefore, by definition since they are [correct] anyone who disagrees with them is inherently wrong. And the next step is: Those who disagree with them are inherently inferior, and in extreme cases — as is the case with some [nationalists] around the world — it makes your opponents sub-humans, so that their lives are not significant. Another thing is that a [nationalist] can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality. And so [nationalist leader], for instance, has a policy of just refusing to talk to someone who is in strong disagreement with them — which is also a radical departure from past history. So these are the kinds of things that cause me concern. And, of course, [nationalists] don’t believe they can make mistakes, so when we permit [atrocities], it’s just impossible for a [nationalist] to admit that a mistake was made.

    You could substitute any knee-jerk ideology, Left or Right, for “nationalists.” You could substitute any religion that insists on orthodoxy, which is most of ’em. Unquestioning and fanatical acceptance of just about any belief system will take you to the same place — where “we” are righteous and “they” are demons.

    Ironically, that’s the place where “demons” are born. The first step in becoming a perpetrator of oppression and atrocities is to start making judgments about who’s fully human and who isn’t.

    Studying the political, historical, cultural, social, and economic factors that foster oppression could help us learn how to prevent oppression, or at least recognize when a society is moving into the danger zone in which systemic oppression can occur. However, such study requires acknowledging that one’s enemies or oppressors are human. The Right fosters a rhetorical culture in which such recognition is a sign of weakness and “appeasement.”

    Appease, btw, is another word that has a different meaning to righties than to the rest of us. The dictionary says it means —

    1. To bring peace, quiet, or calm to; soothe. 2. To satisfy or relieve: appease one’s thirst. 3. To pacify or attempt to pacify (an enemy) by granting concessions, often at the expense of principle.

    For our purposes that third definition is the most operative one. And offhand I can’t think of anyone suggesting that terrorists will leave us alone if we grant them concessions.

    But to a rightie, “appease” doesn’t mean making consessions or buying off our enemies. It means being soft. For example — Sean Hannity said,

    But in all seriousness, it drives you crazy when we talk about being weak on defense, you’re appeasers, the NSA program you don’t want, the Patriot Act program you don’t want, data mining you don’t want. You want to close Guantánamo Bay. I think that’s weak on the most important issue of our time: our national security. I think the Republicans, if they get that message out, and the president started that today, we will win.

    I don’t see how any of that translates into “concessions” to terrorists. And (as Alan Holmes rebutted) I am not aware of anyone who doesn’t think potential terrorists shouldn’t be under surveillance or that that government shouldn’t pursue any possible source of intelligence. We want these things done, but we want it done under the law. Nobody says that apprehended terrorists shouldn’t be locked up, but we need to be careful that the people we are locking up really are dangerous terrorists.

    If anything, it’s righties who fit the dictionary definition of “appeasers.” They are appeasing their own worst instincts at the expense of long-established American principles about liberty and justice.

    Of course, the real purpose behind demonization — or the fascistization, if you will — of Islamic radicals is to clothe anti-Muslim bigotry as righteousness and claim entitlement to do anything we want to Muslims and Muslim nations in the name of fighting terrorism. It also enables demonizers to deny the reality that “anything we want” might incite once-moderate Muslims into violence against us. Even to consider that our actions might have unfortunate political consequences is tantamount to “appeasement” as righties use the word.

    Eugene Robinson:

    To those who point out that Iraq wasn’t a nexus of terrorism until we invaded, Cheney responds, “They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway.”

    Huh? The terrorists who attacked on Sept. 11 didn’t come from Iraq. Except in Cheney’s mind, I don’t know where the fact that we were attacked by terrorists trained in Afghanistan (and sent by Osama bin Laden, who’s probably now in Pakistan) somehow mitigates the fact that we’ve made Iraq a hotbed of terrorism.

    Yet Cheney’s words reflect a common logical fallacy on the Right. Again, this is all about assuming entitlement to do whatever we want in the Middle East; our actions don’t have consequences, after all.

    Related stuff to read:

    Fareed Zakaria, “The Year of Living Fearfully,” Newsweek

    “Will Fear Strike Out?” Buzzflash editorial

    Jason Miller, “Inalienable Human Rights are not Privileges,” Thomas Paine’s Corner

    Matthew Schofield, “Mideast strife is bad news for peacemakers, good news for extremists,” McClatchy Newspapers

    Mark Hosenball, “Iraq: A Sweeping, Secret New Report,” Newsweek

    H.D.S. Greenway, “Hypocrisy in sowing democracy,” The Boston Globe

    David Rohde, “In Afghanistan, a Symbol for Change, Then Failure,” The New York Times

    Why Righties Piss Me Off

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    A rightie blogger describes how he thinks liberals remember 9/11:

    I gotta tell ya, the mind of a liberal is a scary place.

    They want to live in a pre-9/11 world, pretend it all didn’t happen. Close to 3,000 of our citizens died that day but since it wasn’t one of them…who cares.

    One of them? Who is the “them” here? Is he saying that liberals can’t be citizens, or that no liberals died in the 9/11 attacks? Considering that the WTC towers were in New York City, in fact it’s probable a majority of the victims leaned more Left than Right.

    A large part of the population of New York City is made up of survivors, eyewitnesses, and those who lost a close friend or loved one that day. And New Yorkers live under a greater threat of terrorism than any other Americans outside Washington, DC. (If you go by the DHS’s terror alert system, in fact, I believe New York has had more “orange” alert days than Washington.) Believe me, New Yorkers are ever aware of this. Yet in 2004 New Yorkers preferred Kerry over Bush, 74.3 percent to 24.5 percent.

    New Yorkers did not reject George W. Bush because none of “them” died on 9/11. They did not reject George W. Bush because they live in a pre-9/11 world. Memories and emotions about 9/11 remain raw here. (Reminders of the day still are all around us; we can no more “pretend it all didn’t happen” than we can control the weather.) And New Yorkers did not reject George W. Bush because they don’t understand the threat of terrorism. Few Americans fully comprehend, on a personal and intimate level, what terrorism is better than New Yorkers.

    In fact, New Yorkers rejected George W. Bush because they’re not rubes. They caught on faster than the rest of the nation that the strutting little pissant in the White House is not defeating terrorism, but growing it.

    I wrote about how I remember September 11 here. There’s another eyewitness account by Lynn Allen in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

    Five years ago, I was at Ground Zero, teaching a class in the Marriott Hotel, WTC 3, the third building on the World Trade Center Plaza.

    After what felt like a huge earthquake, we were ushered out of the building by the Marriott staff and stood watching in fascination the fire burning in the upper reaches of WTC 1. It was hard to believe the story that was circulating: A helicopter had crashed into the building on this very clear morning. Then we saw the second plane come in, belly angled slightly toward us, and crash into WTC 2. This was a terrorist attack! We bought water and talked strategies for survival. We decided to head toward the Brooklyn Bridge and began making our way through the people running in every direction.

    Just as we began going up the ramp to the bridge, WTC 2 collapsed, sending clouds of debris and hundreds of screaming people in our direction. We continued on, single file, covered in a fine, gray dust, like refugees in a war zone. Eventually, we reached Brooklyn and sunshine, and the beginning of a new phase in our personal and national history.

    Five years ago, Allen says, she imagined writing a book about September 11 with alternate endings. In the first ending, the United States first identified and punished those responsible for the September 11 attacks. Then, working with moderate Muslims, the U.S. looked for ways to reduce rage and alienation in the Middle East and “pull the bulk of the hate-filled Islamists back to a responsible participation in the world.” In addition, we initiated “a massive national energy conservation and alternative energy program.”

    And then there was the other ending:

    The other version of the book foretells a war-wracked world where the West is drawn into conflicts it does not understand and cannot win. The most fanatical Muslims would be strengthened in an already torn Muslim world. The position of women in Muslim nations would be set back a generation or more. We would be advised (as would our “enemies”) that we could only be safe by fighting others. Conflicts would go unattended in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. We would be no closer to safety but we would deplete funds that would otherwise go to educational and health care systems. Access to oil resources would be curtailed, but by that time we would lack the financial muscle to fund alternatives easily. The economic dislocation would be severe and our quality of life would suffer.

    The Bush Administration’s “global war on terror” is creating more violence and less safety, Allen says. Is that what we want?

    I would add to Ms. Allen’s list that we need vast improvements in our intelligence gathering and analysis. But instead of confronting what’s wrong with our intelligence agencies, the Right wastes time with phony, straw-man claims that liberals don’t want to wiretap al Qaeda. (Yes, we do. That’s not the issue. This is the issue.)

    As I wrote last year, I agree with President Bush when he says (note emphasis on says) this:

    The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end. By standing for the hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more secure. [President G.W. Bush, October 6, 2005]

    The problem is that what Bush says and what Bush does are light years apart. The Administration’s course of action in the Middle East is taking us in exactly the opposite direction from where Bush says he wants to go — it is growing hatred and resentment, not reducing it. And instead of being marginalized, radicals have become more powerful and influential as a result of Bush actions in the Middle East. And don’t get me started on what Bush is doing that is not making “our own freedom more secure.”

    And you want to talk about pre-9/11 thinking? This week the damnfool Bush Administration was selling the fantasy we are re-fighting World War II. And no end of righties continue to complain that we’re not pursuing a “total war” strategy without confronting the fact that World War II-style total war theory can’t be applied to the kind of enemy we’re facing now.

    I’ve written before that I think the 9/11 attacks represent something very different for those of us who were there and those who watched on television. People watching from a distance could indulge in feeling victimized. New Yorkers had to face and overcome their fears and sense of victimization to get on with their lives. This is why, IMO, there is more, not less, irrational hysteria about terrorism the further one goes from New York.

    This is not to say there isn’t some hysteria on the Left as well. The “inside job” conspiracy theorists probably infuriate me more than they do righties. Those of us who are serious about answering the many unanswered questions do not appreciate having the issue of what happened on 9/11 turned into a joke. I agree with John Homans that the “inside jobbers” suffer from the same infantile daddy complex as the Right, albeit with an evil daddy instead of a strong daddy who protects his children from monsters.

    The rightie blogger quoted at the top of this post displays a YouTube video that presents scenes of September 11 as an episode of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” It is utterly disgusting. Naturally, the rightie blogger and his readers conclude the video is representative of liberal thinking, never mind that it isn’t. To righties, we liberals are the Boogieman. They hate us more than they hate al Qaeda.

    Righties also are still blaming 9/11 on Bill Clinton, and I see I will have to do a blog post soon on how bogus that is. For now I will point out only that Bill Clinton is not the one who fought the Clinton administration’s air travel security proposals (airline industry lobbyists were the principle perps). Bill Clinton is not the one who kneecapped recommendations of the Hart-Rudman Commission. (That was one of the first things Dubya did when he took office.) Bill Clinton is not the one who decided Osama bin Laden could be downgraded as a threat; Colin Powell made that announcement in April 2001 (CNN Transcript):

    The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there’s no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and “personalizing terrorism.”

    Still, Secretary of State Colin Powell says efforts to fight global terrorism will remain consistent.

    (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

    POWELL: The results are clear: state sponsors of terrorism are increasingly isolated; terrorist groups on under growing pressure. Terrorists are being brought to justice, we will not let up. But we must also be aware of the nature of the threat before us. Terrorism is a persistent disease.

    (END VIDEO CLIP)

    And Bill Clinton didn’t piss off a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” That was President Bush’s doing, not President Clinton’s. See William Rivers Pitt for more.

    Greg Gordon, Marisa Taylor, and Ron Hutcheson write for McClatchy Newspapers that the nation remains vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

    The nation has spent more than $280 billion on the domestic side of the war on terrorism over the past five years to hire thousands more FBI and Border Patrol agents and buy high-tech devices to secure the nation’s planes, trains, ports, nuclear reactors and other potential targets. U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost $400-plus billion more.

    It’s a commitment that far exceeds the post-World War II Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe, but it’s not nearly enough to close off every possible line of attack. Some experts say part of the money has been wasted on efforts to combat nonexistent or highly unlikely threats, while other, more pressing risks, were ignored.

    In the frenzied attempt to patch holes in the nation’s defenses, government agencies seemed to buy a device for everything: from computerized fingerprinting systems to trace explosives detectors to full body scanners to sensors that pick up deadly germs and radiation. Some of it works as advertised; some of it doesn’t.

    “The problem with much of this technology is that it’s valuable only if you guess the plot,” said Bruce Schneier, author of “Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.” “We could sit here and come up with millions of identifiable risks. If we had infinite money we could address everything. But we have finite money and we should pick and choose carefully.”

    Note this:

    Independent security experts say the government should sharpen its priorities and adopt a long-term strategy that reflects a deeper understanding of the enemy.

    Instead, we dump billions of dollars into a war that didn’t need to be fought and assume that all Islamic violence is being perpetrated by the same gang. And that “they hate us for our freedoms.”

    Federal officials take pride in the fact that the United States has avoided a major terrorist attack since Sept. 11, but they’re under no illusions that it couldn’t happen again. … Some counterterrorism experts think it’s only a matter of time before terrorists unleash weapons of mass destruction on an American city.

    I hope those counterterrorism experts are wrong. But it’s a damn shame the President and his minions care less about real national security than about exploiting fear for political advantage and acting out their well-nurtured victimhood.

    Fantasy Fascists

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    If you’re as steamed as I am about Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks to the American Legion yesterday, see Keith Olbermann for a damn good rebuttal. [Update: Video at Crooks & Liars]

    While I’m keyboarding this I’m listening to Keith Olbermann explain the new name for the Iraq misadventure — “The War We Didn’t Start.” Also on Countdown — Brian Williams interviewed the President, who still says we went to Iraq because of 9/11 — “fundamentalists” attacked us, he said. It cannot be true that the Iraq War is helping recruit new jihadists, according to Bush, because we were attacked by jihadists before we invaded Iraq. (Like there can’t be more jihadists now?) Bush also claims he never even thought about attacking Iraq until after 9/11, which contradicts what Paul O’Neill told Ron Suskind.

    And how pathetic is it that Bush is refusing to take responsibility for a war the whole world knows he started? And which was utterly unnecessary?

    In his speech Rumsfeld continued the “Islamo-fascism” theme being promoted by the White House lately. Katha Pollitt writes in the current issue of The Nation about the Bushies sudden fondness for the word fascism.

    If you control the language, you control the debate. As the Bush Administration’s Middle Eastern policy sinks ever deeper into bloody incoherence, the “war on terror” has been getting a quiet linguistic makeover. It’s becoming the “war on Islamic fascism.” … The move away from “war on terrorism” arrives not a moment too soon for language fussbudgets who had problems with the idea of making war on a tactic. To say nothing of those who wondered why, if terrorism was the problem, invading Iraq was the solution. (From the President’s August 21 press conference: Q: “But what did Iraq have to do with September 11?” A: “Nothing.” Now he tells us!)

    The term Islamo-fascism isn’t new, Pollitt writes, nor is it accurate. But it sure is useful.

    “Islamo-fascism” looks like an analytic term, but really it’s an emotional one, intended to get us to think less and fear more. It presents the bewildering politics of the Muslim world as a simple matter of Us versus Them, with war to the end the only answer, as with Hitler. If you doubt that every other British Muslim under the age of 30 is ready to blow himself up for Allah, or that shredding the Constitution is the way to protect ourselves from suicide bombers, if you think that Hamas might be less popular if Palestinians were less miserable, you get cast as Neville Chamberlain, while Bush plays FDR. “Islamo-fascism” rescues the neocons from harsh verdicts on the invasion of Iraq (“cakewalk…roses…sweetmeats…Chalabi”) by reframing that ongoing debacle as a minor chapter in a much larger story of evil madmen who want to fly the green flag of Islam over the capitals of the West. Suddenly it’s just a detail that Saddam wasn’t connected with 9/11, had no WMDs, was not poised to attack the United States or Israel–he hated freedom, and that was enough. It doesn’t matter, either, that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites seem less interested in uniting the umma than in murdering one another. With luck we’ll be so scared we won’t ask why anyone should listen to another word from people who were spectacularly wrong about the biggest politico-military initiative of the past thirty years, and their balding heads will continue to glow on our TV screens for many nights to come. On to Tehran!

    RJ Eskow has a similar take on the fondness for fascism.

    The term “Islamic fascism” is demonstrably inaccurate in describing the threat we face. It’s been ginned up to stifle any genuine debate about how best to defend ourselves, and for partisan political gain. But that’s not the worst of it: it also weakens us. It uses a false historical analogy to confuse us, leaving us less able to analyze and react to the genuine dangers around us. …

    … IF [Islamic Fascism] is a propaganda creation in the classic sense of the term. Anyone with a grasp of history knows that “fascism” entails intense nationalism and collaboration with large corporations, both of which Islamists reject. They do practice intense control of individual behavior, which is hateful but not limited to fascist movements.

    So why use the term? For one thing, it evokes our Second World War enemies. There was clarity of purpose in WWII – we all knew the enemy and were united in our intent. Opposing the allies’ military strategy was tantamount to undermining the war effort. And the President’s judgment was never questioned.

    Lastly – and most importantly – the appeasement strategy of Neville Chamberlain has echoed down the years as one of history’s tragic mistakes. Calling Islamism “fascism” allows purveyors of a failed military strategy – most recently Donald Rumsfeld – to try hiding their ineptitude behind the charge that their critics are Chamberlains.

    In short, it’s subliminal sucker bait.

    Yesterday Donald Rumsfeld dangled plenty of sucker bait in front of the American Legion.

    … 1919 was the beginning of a period where, over time, a very different set of views would come to dominate discourse and thinking in the west.

    Over the next decades, a sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be appeased, then the carnage and destruction of then-recent memory of World War I might be avoided. It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among the western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis — the rise of fascism and Nazism — were ridiculed and ignored.

    Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated — or that it was someone else’s problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace — even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear.

    It was, as Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.

    There was a strange innocence in views of the world. Someone recently recalled one U.S. Senator’s reaction in September 1939, upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed:

    “Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”

    And that Senator was a Republican.

    “Can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?” Rumsfeld continues, without providing examples of anyone suggesting any such thing.

    “There was clarity of purpose in WWII,” says Eskow. “We all knew the enemy and were united in our intent.” Erich Fromm wrote that authoritarians seek escape from freedom by submerging themselves in a group or cause. At least some of our current crop of righties have adopted the conceit that they are all soldiers in a great war; their service (bloviating?) is just as vital to the cause as that of uniformed troops under fire for their country. They’ve got the world divided up into the bright, glorious Us and the dark, depraved Them, and they are warriors on the side of Goodness. This conceit gives them the illusion of clarity of purpose. True clarity would, of course, require understanding the Middle East in all its complexities, as-it-is. But this righties cannot and will not do.

    If you can put yourself in a rightie’s place for a moment (don’t stay too long), it becomes clear why they see us lefties as traitors — we’re not following the script. We’re not playing our proper role in their drama. We’re telling them that their dearly beloved fantasy life is all bullshit.

    This also explains why they refuse to understand Middle Eastern people and politics. Their fantasies demand demonic (and ethnically Middle Eastern) forces united in single purpose against Us. Reality is a lot more complicated.

    Over in Britain, Mark Seddon wonders why Americans are so worked up over Muslims when it wasn’t so long ago that a federal building in Oklahoma City was blown up by a home-grown terrorist.

    The Oklahoma bombing was dwarfed by the September 11 outrage in New York and Washington DC – and despite the best attempts of the museum and its staff to provide both a memorial to its victims and to study terrorism – its effects and causes – the federal caravan has moved on. Though McVeigh and his supporting cast of survivalist desperadoes had the federal government and all this it stands for in their sights, the same government and much of the media seem only interested to foreign terrorists now. McVeigh, sadly, was from the extreme end of a not insubstantial group of Americans, who believe in nihilist religious sects, despise all forms of government, and believe themselves to be the real patriots who defend the American constitution.

    I still think it’s a damn shame they fried McVeigh before 9/11. He didn’t live long enough to experience becoming a has-been.

    In Oklahoma City I met a Republican member of the state senate who, while condemning the act that disfigured his city, wanted to explain how this home grown act of terror came about, what motivated the survivalists and why they felt aggrieved. But that was because the Oklahoma bombing came from within, rather than from without. It is difficult to imagine many American politicians, who while condemning foreign terrorists, try to understand what motivates the killers and in so doing redress some of the larger injustices those same terrorists use to feed violence thereby separating the small minority from the vast majority who seek justice through peaceful means.

    Beside the fact that McVeigh was white — it’s so much easier to think of Middle Eastern terrorists as crazed, noncognitive animals. (The flip side of that, of course, is thinking of Middle Easterners as simple brown people who will greet us with flowers and gratitude when we invade them.)

    Or else their strategy is not about fighting terrorism; Mark Seddon continues,

    Those who advocate a “permanent war on terrorism” may deliberately, or inadvertently, be seeking to justify that old Foster Dulles fear-instilling maxim that in order to persuade a people to carry a great burden it is important to create a threat. In other words, a climate of fear suits them politically. There is of course a major threat out there, but it is neither permanent nor unassailable, and neither should it be exaggerated.

    Like Olbermann said — “This country faces a new type of fascism – indeed.”

    The Mission Creep

    Posted on by

    Reactions to yesterday’s press conference, in which the President vowed repeatedly to “complete the mission” in Iraq:

    PRESIDENT BUSH EMPHASIZED no fewer than 10 times in his news conference Monday that U.S. forces would not leave Iraq “before the job is done.” It’s a clever piece of rhetoric, appealing to Americans’ sense of duty as well as their pride. Just one question: What was that job again?

    Is it to end the sectarian violence in Iraq? Prevent terrorists from flocking to the United States? Bring democracy to Iraq and thus provide a beacon for reformers throughout the Middle East? …

    … At times, the loudest noise at his news conference was the sound of mission creep. [Editorial, Los Angeles Times]

    ***

    For a moment there, I was almost encouraged. George W. Bush, the most resolutely incurious and inflexible of presidents, was reported last week to have been surprised at seeing Iraqi citizens — who ought to be grateful beneficiaries of the American occupation, I mean “liberation” — demonstrating in support of Hezbollah and against Israel.

    Surprise would be a start, since it would mean the Decider was admitting novel facts to his settled base of knowledge and reacting to them. Alas, it seems the door to the presidential mind is still locked tight. “I don’t remember being surprised,” he said at his news conference yesterday. “I’m not sure what they mean by that.”

    I’m guessing “they” might mean that when you try to impose your simplistic, black-and-white template on a kaleidoscopic world, and you end up setting the Middle East on fire, either you’re surprised or you’re not paying attention. But that’s just me. [Eugene Robinson, “President on Another Planet,” Washington Post]

    ***

    One exchange did not inspire confidence. A reporter asked,

      Mr. President, I’d like to go back to Iraq. You’ve continually cited the elections, the new government, its progress in Iraq, and yet the violence has gotten worse in certain areas. You’ve had to go to Baghdad again. Is it not time for a new strategy? And if not, why not?

    Bush responded,

      You’ve covered the Pentagon, you know that the Pentagon is constantly adjusting tactics because they have the flexibility from the White House to do so.

    The reporter–who was not asking about tactics–interrupted:

      I’m talking about strategy.

    Bush then said:

      The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and their dreams, which is a democratic society. That’s the strategy.

    Actually, that’s not a strategy. That’s a goal. A commander in chief should know the difference. A strategy is how one goes about–in a general way–accomplishing goals. Tactics are how one implements the strategy. [David Corn]


    I’ve blogged about the Administration’s confusing goals for strategy before    . It’s plain Bush does not know what the word strategy means.

    Pretty much regardless of what he was asked, Bush had the same answer: That anything short of his policies is tantamount to surrendering to terrorists and would be disastrous.

    Bush seemed much happier reframing the questions than answering them.

    “And the question facing this country is, will — do we, one, understand the threat to America? In other words, do we understand that a failed — failed states in the Middle East are a direct threat to our country’s security? And secondly, will we continue to stay engaged in helping reformers, in working to advance liberty, to defeat an ideology that doesn’t believe in freedom?” he asked. [Dan Froomkin, “President on a Mission,” Washingtonpost.com]

    In this case Bush confuses execution with intention. If you disagree with his policies, it must be because you disagree with his intentions for Iraq. He can’t admit that whatever we’re doing in Iraq shows no promise of fulfilling those intentions. I’ve written about this disconnect before, too, such as here. And here’s a Washington Post op ed from last May by law professor David Cole, who says that the President’s “war” against terrorism is all about rhetoric and symbolism, not substance. “Tough talk in news conferences, overheated charges that evaporate under scrutiny and executions for symbolic purposes will not make us safer,” Cole wrote. Yet that’s all we’re getting from this President.

    The sad thing is that he’s right about what a catastrophe it would be if Iraq became a failed state, or a satellite of Iran, but seems to me it’s heading in that direction anyway.

    The exchange I described in the last post, in which Bush tried once again to associate September 11 and Iraq, got considerable attention in the press. Jim Rutenberg writes for The New York Times,

    The White House has argued that the Iraq war remains potent politically for Republicans when they cast it part of the broader war on terror, although the administration has found it at times difficult to make that case.

    When Mr. Bush referred to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in reference to a question about Iraq today, a reporter pressed him, asking, “What did Iraq have to do with that?” Mr. Bush responded somewhat testily, “Nothing,” and added, “Nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack.”

    In the run-up to the invasion in March 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney did call attention to the theory, since discredited, that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers might have met in Prague before the attacks with an Iraqi intelligence officer.

    In general, however, Mr. Bush struck a different tone than the vice president has used in recent weeks, including Mr. Cheney’s suggestion two weeks ago that implied that Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary against Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut would embolden “Al Qaeda types.”

    I watched a little bit of Hardball last night — as flawed as Hardball is, at least it hasn’t been taken hostage by JonBenet Ramsey news, as has Countdown — on which Rick Santorum claimed there was a meeting in Prague, and we did too find WMDs in Iraq, and Chris “Tweety” Matthews sat there like a bump on a log and didn’t challenge him. Grrr. But Tweety and others pointed out Bush’s words — “Nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack,” leaves open the possibility that Saddam Hussein was associated with the attack, somehow, even though there is no proof (outside of neocons’ fertile imaginations) of such association.

    [Update: — Molly Ivins, “Let the Truth-Telling Begin,” Truthdig:

    The Bushies are having the hardest time trying to un-lie now. For example, at his Monday press conference the president asserted, “Nobody’s ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the [Sept. 11] attack.”

    How true: What Vice President Cheney in December 2001 said about links between 9/11 and Iraq was that it was “pretty well confirmed” that hijacking ringleader Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence. On June 17, 2004, Cheney said: “We have never been able to confirm that, nor have we been able to knock it down, we just don’t know. … I can’t refute the Czech claim, I can’t prove the Czech claim, I just don’t know.”

    In July 2004, the CIA’s own report stated the agency did not have “any credible information” that the alleged meeting ever took place. The CIA said the whole concoction was based on a single source “whose veracity … has been questioned” and that the Iraqi official allegedly involved was in U.S. custody and denied the meeting ever took place. The 9/11 commission had already concluded that the meeting never occurred.

    Cheney has a consistent pattern of exaggeration on intelligence related to Iraq. The tragedy is that at least half the American people believed Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 plot—and most soldiers serving in Iraq still believe this.

    Go, Molly.]

    There were several questions about Katrina yesterday, also, and I plan to elaborate in the next post.