Losing the War on Terror

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Via Altercation, I see Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have a new book called The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right. Simon and Benjamin were respectively Director and Senior Director of Counter-Terrorism on the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration, and they had publicly warned of a massive terrorist strike against the United States before September 11. Their earlier book The Age of Sacred Terror is, IMO, a must-read.

Altercation has an excerpt from the new book:

A core part of the case that Bush and his advisers made was that Saddam might collude with terrorists because it would allow him to hurt the United States “without leaving fingerprints,” but it appears that a large part of the reason Iraq—like Iran and Libya—stopped targeting the United States was the belief that it could not carry out an attack without detection. (Iran, under its newly elected president, Muhammad Khatami, may have also changed its policy after the Khobar Towers attack because terrorism was not advancing its goals. The Iranian regime appears to have supported the attack because of a desire to drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia, but the bombing’s only effect was to cause Washington to move the troops stationed in Saudi Arabia to a more secure location.) Since detection carries with it a strong likelihood of retaliation, as Iraq learned in 1993, when U.S. cruise missiles destroyed the country’s intelligence headquarters, the calculus did not make sense—it was just no longer worth the risk to attack America. That cruise missile strike was derided by conservative critics of the Clinton administration as a “pinprick,” but Saddam seemed to have gotten the message.

No rightie will admit to that in a million years, of course.

Beyond the matter of whether the Iraqi regime was likely to attempt a terrorist attack against the United States, the administration’s argument raised the further question of whether Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden were likely to collaborate. In fact, Iraq and al Qaeda were anything but natural allies. A central tenet of Al Qaeda’s jihadist ideology is that secular Muslim rulers and their regimes have oppressed the believers and have plunged Islam into a historic crisis. Hence, a paramount goal of Islamist revolutionaries for almost half a century has been the destruction of the regimes of such leaders as Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, the military government in Algeria ,and the Saudi royal family. To contemporary jihadists, Saddam was another in a line of dangerous secularists, an enemy of the faith who refused to rule by Islamic law and who habitually murdered religious leaders in Iraq who might oppose his regime. Perhaps the best summation of the jihadist view of Saddam’s Iraq was given during the Persian Gulf War by Omar Abdel Rahman, the radical sheik now imprisoned in the United States. When he was asked what the punishment should be for those who supported the United States in the conflict, he answered, “Both those who are against and the ones who are with Iraq should be killed.”

Simon and Benjamin go on to say that the few contacts made between bin Laden’s and Hussein’s camps, which mostly occurred in the early 1990s, were part of a “Middle Eastern tradition of keeping tabs on all groups, friendly or not.” Further, it was the consensus of the intelligence community that neither Iraq nor Iran were having much to do with bin Laden.

In 1998, in an effort to ensure that the U.S. government was not becoming complacent in this judgment, Richard Clarke asked his staff to evaluate the available intelligence to see if these conclusions were justified. After reviewing a large amount of intelligence, they too endorsed the intelligence community’s verdict. After a lengthy investigation of its own, the 9/11 Commission arrived at the same understanding in 2004 and noted in its final report, “We have seen no evidence that [the contacts] ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

I brought that up because we’re seeing so much crapola from the Right these days about how “even Bill Clinton” though Saddam Hussein was dangerous. Maybe he did, but Bill Clinton didn’t think Saddam Hussein posed much of a threat to the United States. And by 1998 the Clinton Administration had realized that al Qaeda and other radical Islamic jihadist groups were far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein was. But the righties never get around to mentioning that.

This is from a New York Times review of the same book:

Like the CIA officer Michael Scheuer, the author (under the pseudonym “Anonymous”) of the 2004 book “Imperial Hubris,” Benjamin and Simon regard the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a kind of Christmas present to Osama bin Laden: an unnecessary and ill-judged war of choice that has not only become a recruitment tool for jihads but that has also affirmed the story line that Qaeda leaders have been telling the Muslim world – that America is waging war against Islam and seeking to occupy oil-rich Muslim countries.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq toppled one of the Mideast’s secular dictatorships, the authors write, and produced a country in chaos, a country that could well become what Afghanistan was during the years of Soviet occupation: a magnet for jihads and would-be jihads from around the world.

Do tell.

Richard Clarke wrote in his book Against All Enemies that something like the Iraq War was bin Laden’s plan all along. At least a decade before 9/11, according to Clark, Osama was hanging out in the Sudan dreaming up an Iraq scenario–

The ingredients al Qaeda dreamed of for propagating its movement were a Christian government attacking a weaker Muslim region, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from many countries to come to the aid of the religious brethren. After the success of the jihad, the Muslim region would become a radical Islamic state, a breeding ground for more terrorists, a part of the eventual network of Islamic states that would make up the great new Caliphate, or Muslim empire. [p. 136]

So, George, Dick, Condi, Rummy, Dougie, Wolfie, and the rest of the crew–Osama bin Laden sends a big thank you!

Simon and Benjamin acknowledge that it was widely believed that Saddam Hussein did have biochemical WMDs, although not nuclear weapons. But they say the critical question that should have been asked before the invasion was not did he have them, but would he use them?

…The answer to these questions is the same: no. Saddam is an execrable man and one of the most loathsome national leaders in a century in which there was plenty of competition. He had miscalculated badly on a number of occasions, most notably by invading Kuwait in August 1990. But he was not insane. He wanted to avoid obliteration. As far as the United States and its vital interests were concerned, he was deterred.

Now let’s repeat a snip from the last post, taken from yesterday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. The speakers are Michael Scheuer, Rand Beers, and Matthews.

MATTHEWS: Michael, just to think outside the box, would we be better off with Saddam Hussein still running tyrannically that country of Iraq, right next door to Jordan? Would Jordan be more secure in that environment?

SCHEUER: No doubt about it, sir.

MATTHEWS: No doubt?

SCHEUER: There‘d be … many fewer dead Americans,[*] and we would have many more resources available to annihilate al Qaeda, which is what we have to do. Without a doubt, in the war against al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein was one of our best allies.

MATTHEWS: How so?

SCHEUER: He was not going to permit Iraq to become a base, as it is today, for Sunni fundamentalists.

MATTHEWS: Why did he let them come in for that training, that chemical training, whatever the hell they did up north?

SCHEUER: They didn‘t control the area, so that was in the no-fly zone. They were in an area that was in Kurdistan.

MATTHEWS: OK.

SCHEUER: And they were Shia.

* Note: Scheuer stumbled on his words and said “more dead,” then he corrected himself. The transcript reads as if he said there would be more dead, which is not what he meant.

See what kind of information you can get when people who know something don’t get shouted over by rightie goons and Bushie shills? I’m listening to today’s Hardball now, as I keyboard. All this week Matthew has been doing a pretty good job of presenting the arguments against the war that we should have heard before the invasion. Before the invasion, Matthews’s guests tended to consist of an occasional liberal meekly asking why we had to invade right now–can’t we give the inspectors more time?–and a mess of righties screeching that everybody knows leaving Saddam Hussein was dangerous and every moment we delayed put America at terrible risk. Thanks, Tweety.

BTW, this rightie blogger linked to the dialogue and commented:

And what about this idea that Saddam Hussein was one of the best allies the U.S. had in the war against al Qaeda? This is leftist propaganda dished up to be adopted and amplified by others who believe that Bush went after the wrong guy. Poor Saddam was after all, a bad guy, but a bad guy who could have been made good with a few simple diplomatic meet-ups and pressure from the United Nations. HEH!

Righties tend to be literal. Obviously Scheuer was using “ally” in a metaphorical sense, as in “ladybugs are our best ally against aphids” or “rain is our best ally against drought.” He was not saying that Saddam Hussein would have been cooperative with the U.S., but that leaving him where he was worked to our advantage vis à vis al Qaeda for reasons throughly explained in the remainder of the dialogue. No “diplomatic meet-ups and pressure from the United Nations” were required, any more than with ladybugs.

Listen to Him Next Time

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Is the chaos in Iraq crossing over the border into Jordan? Before the Iraq invasion, King Abdullah of Jordan tried to warn the White House this might happen.

From the memory hole courtesy of His Majesty’s web site, an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan from August 2002, conducted by Glenn Kessler & Peter Slevin of The Washington Post.

Abdullah, speaking in an interview in his suite at the Four Seasons hotel, said an invasion of Iraq could splinter the country and spread across the Middle East. He commented as the Senate held its first hearings on the wisdom of a military campaign to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Abdullah said a reluctance by allies to confront the Bush administration over Iraq may have left U.S. policymakers falsely believing that there is little opposition to a war. Many also may have believed that the prospect of war was far in the distance, though Abdullah said “all of the sudden this thing is moving to the horizon much closer than we believed.”

“In all the years I have seen in the international community, everybody is saying this is a bad idea,” he said. “If it seems America says we want to hit Baghdad, that’s not what Jordanians think, or the British, the French, the Russians, the Chinese and everybody else.”

While Blair is frequently seen as a close partner of President Bush, Abdullah said, “Blair has tremendous concerns about how this would unravel.”

Abdullah dismissed the assertion of some U.S. officials that the rise of a democratic Iraq would lead to better prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. “In an ideal world, that could be a possibility,” he said. “Life being as it is, and so uncertain, very few people are convinced that that attitude would happen so easily. Our concern is exactly the opposite, that a miscalculation in Iraq would throw the whole area into turmoil.”

This wasn’t the first time King Abdullah had expressed misgivings about invading Iraq. A quickie google turned up a March 2002 CNN article in which the King told the Dick

that a U.S.-led military campaign against Iraq would be disastrous for the region and would undermine the broader coalition in the war on terrorism.

During a weekend meeting with an Iraqi official, King Abdullah said a U.S. military confrontation with Iraq would be a “catastrophe” for the region.

On the other hand, here are remarks by President Bush to King Abdullah from May 2004:

The fall of Saddam Hussein removed a source of instability and intimidation from the heart of the Middle East. All of Iraq’s neighbors, including Jordan, are safer now. And the emergence of a peaceful, prosperous, and free Iraq will contribute to Jordan’s security and prosperity.

Hmm, who turned out to be right? …

Note to lurking righties who always need everything explained to them multiple times: Nobody, including King Abdullah, is opposed to a peaceful, prosperous, and free Iraq. Nor does anyone deny that a peaceful, prosperous, and free Iraq would contribute to the security and prosperity of the Middle East. What King Abdullah said–and it appears he had a clue–is that a U.S. invasion of Iraq had little chance of resulting in a peaceful, prosperous, and free Iraq and a big chance of making the Middle East even more unstable than it already was.

Some background: Abu Musab Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for yesterday’s bombings in Jordan. This is from an article just posted on the Time magazine web site:

Zarqawi, born Ahmad Nazzal Fadil al Khalayilah (his nom de guerre is an adaptation of Zarqa, his industrial hometown in northern Jordan) has been engaged in a long-running struggle with Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Their duel began immediately after Abdullah ascended the throne in 1999, when he freed the Jordanian militant from prison in a general amnesty. Zarqawi, 39, had been jailed in the early 1990s on sedition charges after joining an Islamic fundamentalist group. He repaid Abdullah’s royal gesture by starting a relentless terrorism campaign against Jordanian monarchy. In turn, Abdullah has stood firm against Islamic extremism and sought to bring Zarqawi to justice, cooperating ever more closely with the Bush administration’s War on Terrorism.

In hindsight, we might say that King Abdullah made a mistake letting Zarqawi go. But not as big a mistake as the Bushies, who passed up at least three chances to terminate Zarqawi before the invasion of Iraq.

The Amman attacks fit a now-familiar pattern of terrorism that began after the U.S. war in Iraq in 2003: simultaneous blasts against Western targets hit housing and office compounds in Saudi Arabia in 2003 and 2004, hotels in Morocco in May 2003, and tourist resorts in Egypt in October 2004 and July 2005. In each case, the targets were in Arab countries led by pro-American governments.

But Zarqawi had his sights on Jordan long before the Iraq war. Jordanian officials accuse him of directing the so-called Millennium Plot to hit tourist sites, including the Radisson Hotel in Amman, on New Year’s Eve 1999. Last year, a Jordanian court sentenced Zarqawi to death for instigating the assassination of an American diplomat in 2002. In 2004, Jordanian officials said they foiled a chemical bomb attack directed by Zarqawi that could have killed up to 20,000 people; he is currently standing trial in absentia for the plot.

Here’s the most alarming part:

Wednesday’s attacks suggest that Abdullah’s worst fears about the Iraq war may be coming to pass. Though the King has been a staunch ally in the War on Terrorism, and provided key logistical support in the Iraq invasion, he strongly opposed the war on grounds that a conflict could further destabilize the Middle East.

The signs that the insurgency in Iraq was spilling on to Jordanian territory became apparent right after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, when Zarqawi’s men launched a massive bomb attack on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. Just over two months ago, Zarqawi claimed credit for shoulder-fired rocket attacks on U.S. warships in Jordan’s port of Aqaba. The shots missed their targets, killed two bystanders and served as a warning that more Zarqawi attacks may be on the way.

Worse from Jordan’s perspective, large numbers of young Jordanian men have gone to Iraq to join Zarqawi’s cause, raising the concern of another generation of young Zarqawis.

This is from yesterday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: … I want to bring in former CIA officer, Bob Baer, who joins us by phone. Mr. Baer, what do you make of this? We are looking at the earmarks of this in the early going here, three hotels hit simultaneously in the tourist areas of Amman, suicides apparently involved.

ROBERT BAER, FMR. CIA OFFICER: Well, Chris, I think to say first, that General Downing has hit the nail on the head, and I would like to even go farther in that what we are seeing is the chaos in Iraq slopping over the border into Jordan. Jordan has a long border with Iraq; weapons can come across very easily.

You have a majority population is Palestinian. They are very proinsurgency in Iraq. And you also have a strong Hamas and Islamic Jihad presence, which uses suicide bombings. In addition to Zarqawi, and until we can stabilize Iraq, I bet you we are going to be seeing more of this in the future.

MATTHEWS: How does that work? … Is it out of towners, the foreigners, or is it the Iraqis?

BAER: It‘s both. It‘s both support coming out of Saudi Arabia, from the fundamentalists, the Salafists. It is Sunni fundamentalists in general, who can foresee re-emergence of caliphate, which would include Syria, Lebanon, Anbar Province in Iraq, probably Baghdad and Jordan, and these people are after power.

They think that this is a domino, and you can bring down these capitals one after another, and they would especially like to go after King Abdullah. His mother is English. He is western educated. Jordan is a very sophisticated, westernized country.

MATTHEWS: Right.

BAER: And they want to bring it down. And that would be a huge feather in their cap, the fundamentalists.

If you continue reading the transcript, you run into some commentary I’ve seen elsewhere–that al Qaeda and the Iraq insurgency are not seeing eye to eye these days. Al Qaeda does not want a Shia-Sunni war, which is where the Iraq insurgency might be heading. This is a development that bears watching.

Close to the end of the transcript are remarks by Michael Scheuer and Rand Beers:

MATTHEWS: …Michael Scheuer served as chief of the CIA‘s bin Laden unit. He also wrote the book, Imperial Hubris, why the West is losing the war on terror.

Rand Beers served as a special assistant to President Bush on combating terrorism. He was also a member of the national security council during the Clinton administration.

Gentlemen, Michael and then Rand, what does this tell us about where we stand in the world, the war in Iraq, it‘s relevance to this, et cetera?

MICHAEL SCHEUER, FORMER COVERT CIA OFFICER: By invading Iraq, we‘ve basically signed the death warrant of Jordan and much of the Levant. bin Laden, it‘s another example, Chris, of no one reading what bin Laden said. bin Laden prizes contiguity about all things. An area where he can operate from safe haven into another country.

MATTHEWS: Now his save haven is war-torn Iraq?

SCHEUER: Exactly right, sir. We created his bastion to get to an area he‘s never been able to work against, which is the Levant, Israel, Egypt. He now has safe haven to operate from there.

MATTHEWS: He couldn‘t operate from his home country of Jordan. He couldn‘t attack Jordan from within?

SCHEUER: Well, al-Zarqawi could have. But for bin Laden, what we are seeing is al Qaeda move forces to Iraq to be able to move in against the Jordanians, against the Syrians, and eventually into Lebanon and into Israel.

MATTHEWS: What is the goal of the bombings tonight as you understand it? Why did people do it, who apparently committed suicide to do so, what drove them to that, what‘s their mission?

SCHEUER: Well, part of it was to destabilize Jordan. Part of it was to finish the job they failed to do in 2000. You remember, the Radisson was in the Millennium attack, was a target. And so it‘s meant to further the spread of the Jihad.

It‘s a very nice operation. There‘s going to be tremendous casualties there, and once again, the president and the secretary of defense will whistle past the graveyard saying this is, al Qaeda‘s back is broken, this is some kind of a new organization out there.

MATTHEWS: Is this meant, this attack on Jordan, meant to make life in Jordan so unstable that people say, we might as well try something new?

RAND BEERS, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL STAFFER: Well, it‘s certainly designed to do as much to destabilize the current government there as possible.

MATTHEWS: What does destabilize mean?

BEERS: What it means, is basically force the government to use its security forces to go after cells there, and in so doing, create a sense of repression.

MATTHEWS: It makes them feel like an occupying force.

BEERS: That‘s right.

MATTHEWS: And that‘s what the terrorists want to achieve, to make the Hashemite government, King Abdullah, seem like a Western power put on top of them.

BEERS: That‘s right. And taking the longstanding relationship with Jordan, with the United States, this makes them an extension of the United States in the eyes of al Qaeda, have been for some time. That‘s why Zarqawi started there. That‘s why he was involved in some attacks there. That‘s why he has had a cell structure there that preexisted what he did in Iraq.

MATTHEWS: Michael, just to think outside the box, would we be better off with Saddam Hussein still running tyrannically that country of Iraq, right next door to Jordan? Would Jordan be more secure in that environment?

SCHEUER: No doubt about it, sir.

MATTHEWS: No doubt?

SCHEUER: There‘d be … many fewer dead Americans, and we would have many more resources available to annihilate al Qaeda, which is what we have to do. Without a doubt, in the war against al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein was one of our best allies.

MATTHEWS: How so?

SCHEUER: He was not going to permit Iraq to become a base, as it is today, for Sunni fundamentalists.

MATTHEWS: Why did he let them come in for that training, that chemical training, whatever the hell they did up north?

SCHEUER: They didn‘t control the area, so that was in the no-fly zone. They were in an area that was in Kurdistan.

MATTHEWS: OK.

SCHEUER: And they were Shia.

MATTHEWS: Do you buy this argument that if had we not gone into Iraq, Jordan would be safer to live in right now?

BEERS: Oh, I think in near term, that‘s absolutely true. You can‘t dispute that.

MATTHEWS: And these fellows, who were just on trial who now—I shouldn‘t call them fellows, like they are pals of mine. These guys who are the terrorists are under down in Australia now, saying the reason they went to the plan, at least, to blow up areas and use their explosives, was they are anger about the war in Iraq. Do you believe that that‘s the true motive?

BEERS: I think that that was certainly a large part of it, and I would say, let‘s remember what people have said recently. The spokesman for al Qaeda, a guy named Gadahn, who is an American citizen, said that there would be attacks in Australia and at Los Angeles. If you go back and you think about the original Radisson plot, the original Radisson plot in the millennium was also what Rassam was doing coming into the United States when we caught him at the border.

MATTHEWS: From Canada.

BEERS: From Canada. He was going to LAX. So I have to say here, we had better pull up our socks and be looking very carefully within our own borders at this time.

MATTHEWS: You think this is a sign of something to come here …

BEERS: Well, we do know …

MATTHEWS: … what was happening Jordan tonight?

BEERS: Well, we do know that they come back to the scene of operations that they failed to complete. They have come back to the scene with the Radisson. That was partly …

MATTHEWS: They came back to the scene of the World Trade Center, 1993, back in 2001.

BEERS: Right. That‘s right. They did the Cole after the missed the Fitzgerald in Aden, so we know that there is this pattern of coming back for failed operations.

SCHEUER: I think what you‘re seeing too, Chris, is we haven‘t heard from bin Laden for a year. The last time we heard him, and he said that‘s the end of it, I am not warning you anymore. I think the next time we see Osama bin Laden is after there‘s an attack in the United States.

Juan Cole has more.

McClellan Meltdown

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See First Draft for the transcript of yesterday’s Scott McClellan smackdown. Dan Froonkin adds:

Later, when American Urban Radio reporter April Ryan took up the question again, McClellan accused her of “showboating for the cameras” and told her she needed to “calm down.”

Surprisingly, there’s no outcry in today’s coverage over McClellan’s tactics. But it does make you wonder how much longer he can trade on his accumulated good will with the press corps.

In any other White House it would be time for the press secretary to “spend more time with his family.” But who else are the Bushies gonna get to do that job for them? Karen Hughes, maybe, if she weren’t so busy trotting around the globe to remind people why they don’t like us.

Judy Miller “Retires”

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MSNBC just announced that Judy Miller has “retired” from the New York Times. Reuters has a slightly different take:

New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a journalist at the center of the CIA leak controversy that led to the indictment of a White House aide, will leave the paper, the New York Times said on Wednesday.

Miller’s lawyers and the paper negotiated a severance package, terms of which were not disclosed. As part of the agreement, the paper will publish a letter from Miller explaining her position, The Times said on its Web site.

That doesn’t sound like “retired.” It sounds like “terminated.”

Miller, 57, who covered national security for The Times, had faced criticism for stories she wrote on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that turned out to be based on faulty information supplied by Iraqi exiles.

According to The Times’ web site, Miller wrote in her letter, to be published in The Times on Thursday, that she had become a “lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war” and wanted to leave the paper because she had “become the news.”

Executive Editor Bill Keller was quoted in The Times as saying the paper had been hurt by delays in “coming clean” over lapses in its reporting that supported U.S. allegations of Iraqi weapons programs, much of which was written by Miller.


Katharine Q. Seelye writes for the New York Times:

Lawyers for Ms. Miller and the paper negotiated a severance package, the details of which they would not disclose. Under the agreement, Ms. Miller will retire from the newspaper, and The Times will print a letter she wrote to the editor explaining her position. Ms. Miller originally demanded that she be able to write an essay for the paper’s Op-Ed page challenging the allegations against her. The Times refused that demand – Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page, said, “We don’t use the Op-Ed page for back and forth between one part of the paper and another” – but agreed to let her write the letter.

In that letter, to be published in The New York Times on Thursday under the heading, “Judith Miller’s Farewell,” Ms. Miller said she was leaving partly because some of her colleagues disagreed with her decision to testify in the C.I.A. leak case.

“But mainly,” she wrote, “I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be.”

She noted that even before going to jail, she had “become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.” She said she regretted “that I was not permitted to pursue answers” to questions about those intelligence failures.

I suspect she was not permitted to pursue “answers” because she had lost all “credibility.” Anyway, I hope she “enjoys” her “retirement.”

The critical question: Will her book advance reach six figures? That would have been possible a few years ago, but the book publishing biz is not all that flush these days.

Texas–It’s Like a Whole ‘Nother Planet

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CNN just reported that Texas’s highest criminal court let stand a lower court ruling that threw out Andrea Yates’s murder conviction for drowning her children in June 2001.

With no qualms about wasting taxpayer money, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Alan Curry said the case would be retried if Yates’s attorney won’t settle for a plea bargain.

Andrea Yates has remained in prison since the lower court overturned her conviction in January. Essentially, Yates’s attorney figured that since the massively psychotic Yates is receiving psychiatric medical treatment in prison, she might as well be there as anywhere else.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the husband and attorney agree to a plea bargain, in fact, because it is unlikely Yates will ever be well enough to be set free, and a trial would just be unnecessary stress as well as cost. Also, they have good reason to want her to stay in prison, explained at the end of this post. But a humane justice system would not have tried her in the first place.

I’ve written about Yates before; this is a repeat from May 2003:

I followed the Andrea Yates trial closely, and came to the conclusion that Texas is not only like a whole ‘nother country. It’s also stuck in a whole ‘nother century, sometime in the Dark Ages. The Texas justice system does not recognize brain disease; to them, insanity is a character flaw, or maybe devil possession.

The early news stories about Andrea Yates called her illness “postpartum depression,” but the truth is that she was a five-alarm schizophrenic. She had been sinking deeper and deeper into psychosis for several years, had attempted suicide, and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. In the months before the killings, one of her friends was so alarmed at her behavior she was keeping notes.

Two weeks before she killed her children, a bleeping incompetent psychiatrist took her off the antipsychotic meds — cold turkey — that had propped her up and kept her functional. A couple of days before she killed her children, her husband Randy took her back to this psychiatrist and begged him to put her back on her meds; the doc refused.

Once in county jail, the psychiatric staff proclaimed she was the most psychotic inmate they had ever seen. Several of the prison psychologists and psychiatrists — people who worked with her for many weeks — testified at trial that Yates was massively delusional. A prominent neuropsychiatrist tested her and diagnosed severe schizophrenia, noting major frontal lobe impairment. During her trial, Yates had to be drugged into catatonia so she could sit in her seat and not try to catch flies with her tongue.

The jury was told, over and over, that Yates had a disease of the brain. They were not told that, if found not guilty by reason of insanity, Yates would not have gone free. The court would have ordered her to be hospitalized, not to be released without another court order.

The prosecutors trotted out two primary witnesses. One was the psychiatrist who had taken her off her meds and who would have been charged with murder if I’d had anything to say about it. He said he saw no sign of psychosis in Yates. One suspects this guy couldn’t find shit in an outhouse.

The other witness was a paid expert psychiatrist who is also a consultant for “Law and Order.” He said that Yates had gotten the idea for killing her children from a “Law and Order” episode. Later it was determined that there was no such episode; it had been scripted but never produced.

After several weeks of testimony, the jury took all of four hours to find Yates guilty of murder. They decided she couldn’t have been crazy because she had called 911 to report the childrens’ deaths. Yes, this makes sense. A crazy person would have made up some story about intruders to avoid punishment.

Since the Yates trial, another Texas killer mother, Deanna Laney, was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the stoning deaths of two of her children. Laney lacked Yates’s long and well documented history of psychiatric illness, but the “witness for hire” hack psychiatrist, Dr. Park Dietz, who testified for the prosecution at the Yates trial testified for the defense at the Laney trial, which should prove what an absolute whore the man is. Anyway, Laney was committed to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital, and the state of Texas expected her husband to pay the bills. I undersand Mr. Laney didn’t waste much time filing for divorce.

Many Happy Returns

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Congratulations to the voters of Dover, Pennsylvania, for booting their entire anti-evolution school board yesterday! Laurie Goodstein writes in today’s New York Times:

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

Among the losing incumbents on the Dover, Pa., board were two members who testified in favor of the intelligent design policy at a recently concluded federal trial on the Dover policy: the chairwoman, Sheila Harkins, and Alan Bonsell.

The election results were a repudiation of the first school district in the nation to order the introduction of intelligent design in a science class curriculum. The policy was the subject of a trial in Federal District Court that ended last Friday. A verdict by Judge John E. Jones III is expected by early January. …

… The vote counts were close, but of the 16 candidates the one with the fewest votes was Mr. Bonsell, the driving force behind the intelligent design policy. Testimony at the trial revealed that Mr. Bonsell had initially insisted that creationism get equal time in the classroom with evolution.

(Singing) Nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, GOOD BYE.

More good news: Yesterday California voters rejected all of Governor Schwarzenegger’s ballot proposals. Michael Finnegan and Robert Salladay write in the Los Angeles Times,

In a sharp repudiation of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Californians rejected all four of his ballot proposals Tuesday in an election that shattered his image as an agent of the popular will.

Voters turned down his plans to curb state spending, redraw California’s political map, restrain union politics and lengthen the time it takes teachers to get tenure.

I liked this part:

Dogging the governor, as it has for months, was the California Nurses Assn., which organized a luau at the Trader Vic’s in the same hotel. As Schwarzenegger’s defeats mounted, giddy nurses formed a conga line and danced around the room, singing, “We’re the mighty, mighty nurses.”

I love it. Don’t ever mess with nurses.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Peter Nicholas and Mark Z. Barabak explain why the sequel failed at the ballot box:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday met the limits of his celebrity: Even a campaign built around his action-star persona could not persuade voters to embrace his “year of reform” agenda.

Worse for Schwarzenegger, the special election he called to cement his power may have diminished it instead. All four measures he brought to the ballot — Propositions 74, 75, 76 and 77 — were rejected.

Schwarzenegger staged a campaign intended to capitalize on his once-robust box-office appeal. He largely shunned unscripted encounters with voters and face-to-face debates with political opponents, sticking instead to friendly exchanges in venues packed with admiring supporters.

His campaign echoed the strategy he employed in the 2003 recall campaign, when the product he was selling was “Arnold,” the outsider determined to “clean up” Sacramento with the same wit and resolve he showed in his movies. …

… The problem, however, was that Schwarzenegger never seemed to make the transition from celebrity to chief executive. The obvious comparison is to another actor-turned-California governor, Ronald Reagan.

Ken Khachigian, a longtime Republican strategist who was a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, said of Schwarzenegger’s rhetorical habits: “It was like, ‘OK, we’ve heard that stuff.’ This is different now. This is policy and substance, and the speeches should have used a little different rhetoric.”

While Schwarzenegger’s approach “worked well in the recall,” Khachigian said, “The problem is that it didn’t wear very well over a period of time. After a while he was a governor, not an actor, and it’s quite a different role.”

A Republican strategist and occasional Schwarzenegger advisor put it more bluntly Tuesday, saying privately: “The act is getting stale.”

I guess the Republicans aren’t talking about amending the Constitution so that immigrants can be president any more.

Here’s the good news roundup:

Democrat Jon Corzine beat Republican Doug Forrester in the New Jersey governor’s race.

Democrat Tim Kaine beat Republican Jerry Kilgore in the Virginia governor’s race.

Schwarzenegger was clobbered; see links above.

“Intelligent design” gets the boot in Dover, Pennsylvania; see links above.

Maine voters defeated an attempt to repeal a law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation. In other words, gay rights, yes; gay hate, no.

In Minnesota, an anti-Bush Democrat will replace a pro-Bush Democrat as mayor of St. Paul.

San Francisco Chronicle: “San Francisco voters took a stand Tuesday against military recruitment on public school campuses, voted to keep firehouses open and approved the nation’s toughest ban on handguns by making it illegal for city residents to possess them.”

Not all voters turned away from the Dark Side. Texas voters approved a ban on gay marriage, and Ohio voters rejected four constitutional amendments intended to reform their corrupt election processes.

The re-election of Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City is a wash; Bloomberg is a through-and-through RINO. A “real” Republican couldn’t get elected to squat in New York City.

Today the bobbleheads on the cable TV news shows will be explaining that yesterday’s elections don’t mean the 2006 elections will swing to Democrats. And they may be right. But they’re often wrong, aren’t they?

About Those Results …

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An editorial in Wednesday’s New York Times:

A year ago, George W. Bush said the voters of America had given him political capital that he intended to spend pursuing his agenda. While it’s always dangerous to read national lessons into local elections, everyone from political consultants to the leaders of countries in the remote corners of Asia and Africa are going to assume the same thing from the results of yesterday’s balloting: Mr. Bush’s political capital has turned into a deficit.

The election of Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine in Virginia was a surprise. Virginia has a Democratic governor now, but in national politics it is a safe Republican state. President Bush made a much-publicized last-minute campaign stop there to stump for the Republican, Jerry Kilgore. Everyone who has to make a decision about next year’s Congressional elections – from promising candidates who are mulling whether to listen to their party’s pleas to run to campaign donors – are reading bad omens for the Republicans into what happened after Mr. Bush left.

Can Bush turn it around and save his presidency?

All that could easily change. Mr. Bush could be the catalyst for change, if he had the flexibility and imagination to read the nation’s mood. Whenever this president has gotten into trouble in the past, he has reflexively turned to his right-wing base, or his trump issue of antiterrorism and homeland security. That isn’t working now. In Mr. Bush’s last crisis, over Hurricane Katrina, he made a desperate grab for popularity in the form of sweeping promises of enormous spending to rebuild New Orleans – promises that frightened his party. He is already in the process of backtracking on them.

Big surprise. Not.

William Branigin writes in Wednesday’s Washington Post:

With President Bush buffeted by low job-approval ratings, declining public support for his Iraq war policy and a federal CIA leak investigation that has reached into the White House, the Virginia governor’s race was being watched for any signs that the Republican administration’s difficulties were rubbing off at the local level. Long considered a reliable Republican state in national politics, Virginia has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in more than 40 years, and Bush won handily in last year’s presidential election with 54 percent of the vote.

It would be a mistake to look at today’s elections only as a referendum on Bush. I don’t know how much anti-Bush sentiment factored into the New Jersey election, although Corzine did run ads linking Forrester to Bush (ouch!). Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s re-election in New York City certainly doesn’t mean New Yorkers are tilting Republican. Bloomberg is a true RINO and more liberal than a lot of Democrats. New Yorkers understand the party affiliation has more to do with political expediency than ideology.

But I’d hate to be a Republican campaign strategist tonight, huh?

More Bad News for Bush

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Via Dr. Atrios, the Associated Press reports that voters don’t care for Bushies:

St. Paul voters punished Mayor Randy Kelly on Tuesday for standing with President Bush a year ago, denying the Democrat a second term in Minnesota’s capital city.

Former City Council member Chris Coleman, also a Democrat, routed Kelly by a more than 2-to-1 margin in unofficial returns with most precincts reporting. Ahead of the election, independent polls showed voters were primed to fire Kelly, and most cited his 2004 endorsement of the Republican president as the reason.