Bush Administration: evil or stupid?

I once served temporary duty onboard the USS Hunley (AS-31) as it went down to Florida to do something about Hurricane Andrew (1992), we had a big blue generator aboard to power all of the ship's electrical devices. Normally, the Hunley's engines produced all of the power the ship needed, but technology had outstripped the capacity of the ship to keep up. Wild, off-the-top-of-my-head guess is that the generator was about 20'x20'x70'. Well, it seems the NSA is in a bit of a bind that a spare generator can't fix. The NSA covers 350 acres (A football field is a little less than an acre) and they knew a decade ago that they were short of electrical power.

The NSA is already unable to install some costly and sophisticated new equipment, including two new supercomputers, for fear of blowing out the electrical infrastructure, they said.

Yeah, yeah, I know, that means Clinton was in office for four of those years, so we can properly blame him for not getting right on that. Nevertheless, Bush has been in office for almost six years, so its kinda hard to blame the last guy for the continued failure to see to it that the supersecret spy agency had enough electrical power to perform its mission.

Y'know, it's things like this that make one wonder whether the Bush Administration is evil or stupid. My tendency of course, is to consider them evil. But this latest bollixing up makes me wonder.

So, how was the Iraq War going again?

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Hundreds of thousands of Shiites chanting "Death to
Israel" and "Death to America" marched through the streets of Baghdad's biggest Shiite district Friday in a massive show of support for Hezbollah in its battle against Israel.

Say, wasn't that the place we just liberated?
D'oh!

Interesting items on 9-11

A fellow named Andrew Bard Schmookler wrote letters to about a dozen relevant individuals and suggested that as around 42% of Americans consider the official investigations and conclusions about 9-11 to be incomplete and unsatisfactory, that perhaps these individuals might wish to re-start those investigations, to assure the public that they were indeed serious abut the issue. BTW, a third of the public believes that there was a conspiracy.

His answer? (crickets chirping)

Wonder why this is? Wonder why no one wishes to defend the conclusions of the 9-11 commission?

We might also notice that Ann Coulter's criticism of the 9-11 Widows (Known popularly as the "Jersey Girls") was a completely ad hominem, fact-free attack that obsessed on their characters, but said absolutely nothing as to the merits of their case. Please note also what Media Matters pointed out about her appearance with Matt Lauer of the Today Show:

Given Coulter's history of inflammatory and offensive rhetoric, why does Today continue to grant her solo interviews, and why did Today grant her a forum to promote a book containing similar statements?

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz and ABC News senior national correspondent Jake Tapper have been critical of Coulter's rhetoric, but have complained, along with Coulter, that the status of the 9-11 Widows made them invulnerable to criticism by opponents. Media Matters investigated and found that in none of the cases cited by Kurtz and Tapper was criticism squelched, inhibited or even at all restrained. In no cases did "their personal tragedies...shield them from rebuttal."

Also,

On the June 7 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, Fox News contributor Sandy Rios stated that Coulter's "words are laser-focused on the truth"
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On the June 7 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country, Republican strategist Jack Burkman defended Coulter's statements "[a]ll the way," asserting that Coulter "understates the point" and is "telling the truth."
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During a fawning interview on the June 7 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, host Sean Hannity asked Coulter a series of leading questions -- paraphrasing her attacks on the 9-11 widows...
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Also on the June 7 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, Republican strategist Karen Hanretty asserted that Coulter's attacks on the 9-11 widows were not "mean spirited," but rather "tongue-in-cheek," "satire," and examples of "Ann's own personal style."

So yes, we can legitimately say that Ann Coulter is a terrible person for attacking the widows, but notice that Coulter is hardly alone. She was supported by a whole phalanx of Republican supporters. She's hardly a "rouge agent" and was clearly supported by the Republican Party.

And now we have a book by two members of the 9-11 Commission that claim, surprise, surprise, they don't really agree with all of the conclusions of their commission! As AmericaBlog points out:

Well here's a thought. Rather than telling us this in a book years too late, why didn't the book's authors stand up at the time and make a difference when it mattered?

The website 911Truth defends

Specifically, the good and dedicated lower-level military people [who] were confused by the events of 9/11 because 9/11 occurred at the same time as the multiple war games with their live fly exercises, plane into building scenarios, false radar inserts, and apparent interference by Cheney.

But that:

Norad has already changed its story numerous times, apparently to address impossibilities with the official story pointed out by 9/11 skeptics.

I think there's a WHOLE lot more to the story than we, the public, have been told!

Wow! Even Friedman says Iraq is lost

Even Tom Friedman, he of the "The next six months will be crucial" fame (Because he kept saying that so often, bloggers refer to six months as "A Friedman") finally admits that:

When our top commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, tells a Senate Committee, as he did yesterday, that “the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it,” it means that three years of efforts to democratize Iraq are not working. That means “staying the course” is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B -- how we might disengage with the least damage possible . . .Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, democracy is not emerging in Iraq, and we can’t throw more good lives after good lives. (emphasis added)

So what does America's glorious Commander-in-Chief do? Obviously, he goes to Crawford TX to clear brush! I mean, dude, the prez has to have his priorities, eh? I mean, whoever heard of actually working at a job, huh? With Iraq collapsing and with Israel bogged down in Lebanon (Billmon has claimed that the fighting there now resembles Iwo Jima.) well, y'know it's not like the US really needs a full-time president, now is it?

Abdul Khaleq Abdulla, a U.S.-educated political scientist at Emirates University in the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. ally in the Iraq war, said the news coverage of Lebanon is deepening Arab hatred of the United States.

'People hold America morally and politically responsible for this. They hate America at this point, and it will last,' he said. 'They see the destruction of Iraq and Palestine on a daily basis. And now they see destruction in Lebanon on a daily basis. The blame leads through Tel Aviv and straight to Washington.'

The Arab media emphasize that Israel's bombing of Lebanon is being carried out with U.S.-made F-16 and F-15 warplanes dropping U.S.-made guided bombs _ paid for with American tax dollars. This week, front pages splashed reports that Washington was rushing an emergency shipment of 'bunker buster' bombs to Israel's air force.

And where is Karen Hughes, our Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the U.S. Department of State? One would think that the fighting in Lebanon would be something she'd be involved in, considering that her job description reads that she is "...to promote America's values and confront ideological support for terrorism around the world." Or, as Fred Kaplan of Slate puts it: "The main task of this posting is to improve America's image in the Muslim world." For an Administration official to be in the position she's in and to be AWOL at a time like this is just amazing.

Joe Lieberman and "Heckuva job, Brownie"

At the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The result was an absolute disaster for the citizens of that city and as of January 2006, the city was still a complete mess. During the disaster, President Bush visited the city and spoke with the head of FEMA and declared: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Michael Brown's main concern, while the people of New Orleans were trapped on their roofs with no food, clean water or shelter from the late-summer sun was:

Sharon Worthy, Brown’s press secretary, to Cindy Taylor, FEMA deputy director of public affairs, and others, Aug. 31, 2 p.m.:

“Also, it is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner. Given that Baton Rouge is back to normal, restaurants are getting busy. He needs much more than 20 or 30 minutes. We now have traffic to encounter to get to and from a location of his choice, followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc.”

What can we say? Here was a guy who knew his priorities! After the crisis, we then heard:

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel published an editorial comment on September 8, 2005: "[N]othing can restore FEMA's full functionality so long as the agency's incompetent director, Michael Brown, remains at the helm. Brown, a patronage appointee with no previous disaster management experience, embarrassed himself last year with his attempts to justify FEMA's waste of more than $31 million in hurricane relief given to areas not affected by a hurricane." (emphasis added)

How is Joe Lieberman involved with Brown's disastrous performance? Well, it turns out that Lieberman was the chairman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs when the Democrats were briefly in the majority in 2002 and he approved Brown's appointment to be Deputy Director of FEMA in a whopping grand total of 42 minutes. What is the point, we can ask, of an opposition Senator who acts as a rubber stamp for the Chief Executive? The President has plenty of Republican Senators who will do that for him. There's absolutely zero need to keep a Democratic Senator around who will simply wave through an obviously unqualified applicant.

Question for your Republican buddies:

Here's a question you can ask your Republican or conservative friends:
"How many soldiers from the Iraq War have you assisted with their post-traumatic stress disorder?"
Watch 'em squirm!

Simplicity

Y'know, it's really kind of frightening to read someone whose view of the world is so dogmatically simplistic, so utterly black & white, so completely devoid of any shades of grey. Back during college, I was rummaging through the library to find material on the French Revolution. I found a book by an elderly aristocratic lady who blamed the revolution on various bad people. It was the fault of this scheming person and that bad person and that awful person. She had no thouught that perhaps the French peasants had real and serious grievances against the French government, no thought that perhaps the French people had reason to be dissatisfied with the way they were governed.

Bush demonstrates no thought that perhaps the Arab people of the Mideast might have grievances against the Israeli occupation of land that belonged to the Arabs a few decades ago. He has no thought that perhaps the American occupation of Iraq, the complete failure of the US to raise living standards even up to where they were in February 2003, the chaos that never fully stopped since the "Mission Accomplished" speech of May 2003 and has gotten considerably worse since then, the US Army that is apparently roaming about, abusing Iraqis at will everywhere they go, it never occurs to our President that perhaps Iraqis have some very real and serious grievances against the US.

As to the very real complications that Bush seems determined to ignnore:

Juan Cole points out that there are four distinct wars going on in just Iraq simultaneously:

1) The Sunni Arab guerrilla war to expel US troops from the Sunni heartland

2) The militant Shiite guerrilla war to expel the British from the south

3) The Sunni-Shiite civil war

4) The Kurdish war against Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk province, and the Arab and Turkmen guerrilla struggle against the encroaching Peshmerga (the Kurdish militia).

It's very difficult to square this description with Bush's assertion that: "Isn't it interesting, as a democracy takes hold in Iraq, that Al Qaida steps up its efforts to murder and bomb in order to stop the democracy?"

Well, it would be interesting, if al Qaeda had any serious presence in Iraq. I would point out that the death of that e-e-e-villl mastermind Zarqawi doesn't seem to have caused even so much as a blip in the violence in Iraq.

Also, an excellent overview of how the White House's simplistic view of their opponents has served to undermine it's credibility.

Pardon me, but I'm a bit confused here...

First, we have this poll that not only says things are going badly, but that only 27% of the population thinks we're even headed in the right direction. Whyever could that be? Well gee, part of the reason might be that the highly respected American Bar Association concludes that "President Bush's use of so-called 'signing statements,' which, the report concluded, 'weaken[s] our cherished system of checks and balances and separation of powers.' " Or maybe it's that even a prominent neoconservative now concludes that the Iraq War, Bush's signature foreign policy initiative, one that defines his presidency more than any other, is hopelessly lost.

So what is the response of Hillary Clinton, the current frontrunner for the Democratic Presidential nomination? What exactly is she planning to do about these horrible policies that so obviously, desperately need to be changed?

Both Clintons think that it is more important to focus on beating Republicans than it is to have intraparty litmus tests over Iraq, choice, and Supreme Court judges.

This might, concievably, possibly be a defensible choice. Of course, we'd have to have something dramatic to attract the attention of the voters, something that would make them sit up and take notice that there's a new game in town and that the Republicans are gonna lose.
So what've we got?

On government spending, do the Clintons and the DLC challenge the waste and growth in the Pentagon budget? Nope. Instead, they offer this:

-Create an independent, non-partisan commission to scrutinize and propose the elimination of wasteful, outdated business subsidies.
-We should increase transparency over government by making information on contracts and grants available to the public so they have a better sense of whether their tax dollars are being spent wisely.

Good grief!!! More studies?!?!? Still more studies?!?! We have no idea as to what to cut right now?!?! I mean, I have zero objection to doing these things, but these are preliminaries, these are precursors to taking any real action. Remember too, that the much-ballyhooed National Task Force on Health Care Reform (PDF) in the beginning of Bill Clinton's first term was also preceded by a great deal of study and finally landed into the public sphere with a dull thud, never to move anywhere. 'Fraid I have zero confidence that these fine words are going to lead anywhere.

On retirement security, do the Clintons and the DLC start from a point of insisting that Social Security be protected from privatization and strengthened in its current form? Incredibly, nope. Instead, we hear about new mandates upon employers for required IRAs

Now consider that President Bush spent pretty much all of 2005 trying to dismantle Social Security, consider that he got nowhere, consider that Senator Joe Lieberman's failure to strongly support Social Security is one of the many charges against him that challenger Ned Lamont is beating him fiercely about the head and shoulders with and I'm just absolutely flabbergasted as to why Clinton is taking such an incredibly weak position here.

LeftCoaster continues:

This is a preview of the Clinton/DLC domestic policy agenda for 2008: relatively small, bite-sized initiatives that will not displease Corporate America too much.

There is nothing here about public financing of congressional campaigns.

There is nothing here about election reform.

There is nothing here about actually closing personal or corporate tax shelters or abuses, or real tax reform.

There is nothing here at all on preserving the environment.

There is nothing here on expanding health coverage to uninsured adults.

Immigration reform is never mentioned. Neither is infrastructure investment on a day when the nation's power grid is collapsing.

Hillary Clinton has nothing to offer Democrats. She has nothing to offer liberals who are considering becoming Democrats. Personally, I'm not sending her campaign a penny. Why bother? What's the point? What is it that she plans to change? Are we just going to get more of the same-ol', same-ol'?

Wishful thinking

ThinkProgress looks at Bill Kristol's predictions before the Iraq War:

We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam’s regime. … History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.

Well, he was right about one thing, History did inded render a verdict. The editor of the Weekly Standard was wrong about the WMD, was wrong to assume anything about the aspirations of the Iraqi people, and the "truth" about Saddam Hussein's regime was pretty much what everybody thought it was before the war started, i.e., that he was an evil dictator who nevertheless posed no real danger to anybody outside the borders of Iraq.

KRISTOL:...the Iranian people dislike their regime. I think they would be – the right use of targeted military force — but especially if political pressure before we use military force – could cause them to reconsider whether they really want to have this regime in power. There are even moderates – they are not wonderful people — but people in the government itself who are probably nervous about Ahmadinejad’s recklessness.

This is why standing up to Iran right now is so important. They’re overreached. They and Hezbollah have recklessly overreached. They got cocky. This is the moment to set them back. I think a setback to Hezbollah could trigger changes in Iran. People can say, wait a second, what is Ahmadinejad doing to us. We’re alone. The Arab world is even against us. The Muslim world is against us. Let’s reconsider this reckless path that we’re on.

Sigh! So how many times must we hear this endless talk about how "The people will rise up" and "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

Bruce Sharp of Mekong.net brings up an extremely good point (In late March 2003):

It seems obvious that the Bush administration underestimated the willingness of the Iraqis to fight for Hussein. After all, why would they fight for a despicable tyrant? Maybe the only reason they need is that he is their tyrant. They fought for him against the Iranians. One would expect that, given the terrible state of the country, the Iraqis would hate Hussein deeply. But how much of Iraq's misery do they blame on Hussein? During the Iran-Iraq war, he could blame the country's woes on the Iranians. After the fiasco of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he got a new scapegoat: the U.S.

One would think that this would have been considered by the Bush administration. Maybe the Iraqis hate Hussein, but they hate the U.S., too. A few commentators have written about the fear of the U.S. of being drawn into urban warfare, and they've invoked Stalingrad as an example of the horrors of such close combat. Stalingrad provides an excellent historical example here, and not just because it demonstrates the horrible toll of house-to-house fighting. In defending Stalingrad, the Russians were defending the regime of Josef Stalin. They fought against overwhelming odds, successfully... and they did it to preserve a totalitarian dictatorship that was every bit as brutal as the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Before dragging the U.S. into a supposed war for democracy in Iraq, wouldn't it have been wise to show that we're actually capable of implementing democracy in a country that lacks a democratic tradition? In Afghanistan, for example? Does anyone in the Bush administration remember Afghanistan? The Taliban are gone, and that is truly cause for celebration... but the country isn't really a functioning democracy yet, is it? Bush might claim that he has sown the seeds for democracy. I don't think I'd put it quite that way. It's a little more like spitting the seeds of an apple that you've just eaten onto the bare dirt, and then claiming that you've planted the field.

As in 2003, neoconservativs appear to be engaged in wishful thinking. They forgot in 2003 that the US had long supported the brutal sanctions against Iraq that had cost Iraqis up to 500,000 children:

Critics of the sanctions say that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, disproportionately children, died as a result of them, [2] although certain skeptics claim the numbers to be less.[3] [4][5] UNICEF has put the number of child deaths to 500,000.[6] The reasons include lack of medical supplies, malnutrition, and especially disease owing to lack of clean water.

In other words, the idea that the US was seen as a "white hat" that was interested purely in helping the poor Iraqi citizens in achieving "democracy" was never a very credible claim. Iraqis were pleased to have their dictator overthrown and if the US had promptly withdrawn, might have grown friendly towards the American people. But Iraqis were not looking forward to a long-term American occupation and it's very highly doubtful the Iranians will be any more welcoming.

Mideast situation 17Jul06

Back in 1916, Irish revolutionaries hit upon a very good method for getting the civilian population radicalized against their occupiers. A small group rose up and seized a few key locations in Dublin. They were quickly defeated, court-martialled and executed. A few months after World War I ended, many Irish people remembering the Easter Rising, the military lessons learned and led by some veterans of that event, rebelled against their British occupiers.

Although some republican leaders, notably Éamon de Valera, favoured classic conventional warfare in order to legitimise the new republic in the eyes of the world, the more practically experienced Michael Collins and the broader IRA leadership opposed these tactics that had led to the military débacle of 1916. The violence used was at first deeply unpopular with the broader Irish population, but most were won around when faced with the terror of the British government's campaign of widespread brutality, destruction of property, random arrests and unprovoked shootings. Events began slowly, but by 1920 widespread violence was the rule.

British overreaction was the spark that really radicalized the Irish and made their separation in 1921 more or less inevitable. If that was the idea behind the kidnapping of two Israel soldiers and missile attacks by Hezbollah and if provoking a massive overreaction by Israel was the objective, then Hezbollah has succeeded brilliantly. As LeftCoaster puts it:

As I said yesterday, Israel did overreact, but it is easy for me to say that from thousands of miles away when their soldiers were fired upon by Hezbollah in Israeli territory and were taken hostage by Hezbollah.

LeftCoaster also relays a message from retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner that:

An individual with former connections to the CIA told me the current situation is all is about the Iranian nuclear program. I was skeptical of that explanation until I heard Zal Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Iraq, on CNN late in the day. He said, "It is about the Iranian nuclear program."

In other words, Iran did not wait for the US preemptive strike. It conducted its own.

Of course, observers like Billmon are having none of it:

This is fascinating as well as terrifying. It suggests that Bush and his faithful water carrier both really believe their own bullshit -- not just in terms of viewing Hezbollah and Hamas as the mindless tools of Syria and Iran, but also in their rosy-lensed assessments of how things are going in the Middle East these days.

Problem of course, is that the Bush Administration has so little credibility that no one believes them. It's clear that conservatives and Neocons in general began talking of Iran being to blame long before they had any evidence to that effect.

LeftCoaster also claims the Bush Administration did not see this problem coming. They were caught flat-footed. Sure enough, there have been surprises.

Whatever else we can accuse President Bush of (And that category includes lots and lots of things) we can't accuse him of inconsistency. In December 2005, Bush said:

"Freedom in Iraq will send a message to the reformers from Damascus to Tehran."

And at the G8 Conference on the 17th:

Bush referred to the "root causes" of instability seven times in his brief remarks with Blair on Sunday morning. His point: "One of the interesting things about this recent flare-up is that it helps clarify a root cause of instability in the Middle East -- and that's Hezbollah and Hezbollah's relationship with Syria, and Hezbollah's relationship to Iran, and Syria's relationship to Iran. Therefore, in order to solve this problem it's really important for the world to address the root cause."

The problem was Iran and Syria then and it's Iran and Syria now. Dan Bartlett demonstrates that he understands:

"Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, said failures to address the deeper issues in the Middle East had ultimately led to the creation of Al Qaeda. . . .

"Mr. Bartlett's comments appeared to be part of a White House effort to link all Middle East militant groups together, and to suggest that strangling all of them -- from Hezbollah to Al Qaeda -- was critical to establishing a long-term peace."

Linda McQuaig of the Toronto Star smells a plot to attack Iran and Glenn Greenwald notes that right-wingers and Neocons seem to be absolutely delighted over the turn of events.

Ann Coulter on 9-11

COULTER: Yeah. When I'm wrong, I admit I'm wrong. I think it's cruel to be foisting a 9-11 Commission on the nation, making terrorist attacks more likely by turning it into a Clinton whitewash committee. I think it's cruel to be endorsing John Kerry for president in the middle of a war on terrorism, the guy who voted for funding the troops before voting against it. I think it's cruel to be going around claiming the president of the United States is responsible for these women's husbands' deaths. I think that's cruel because it's going to put a lot of other women at risk for becoming widows. And there are a lot of 9-11 widows out there, Norah, and I'm hearing from a lot of them who think I wasn't harsh enough.

Under the very best-possible-case scenario (911Truth has a different view), the Bush Administration on and before 9-11 was guilty of negligence, incompetence and dereliction of duty. Bush was in office for over eight months before 9-11 and took a month-long vacation shortly before it occurred. Could we make the claim that Ronald Reagan tried to fix the awful situation that Jimmy Carter left the US military in? (I'm not sure we could make an accurate charge that Carter left the US military in bad shape, but that's another issue.) Yes, we could. Reagan took immediate action to pump up the US military budget and to make it clear that he was going to pursue a more aggressive policy. Had the Soviets charged through the Fulda Gap in September 1981, they would have met a military that was on the mend, that was enthused and that was energetically rebuilding.

Did Clinton leave the US military in awful shape? Actually, he's widely credited with rebuilding it. In late 1998, Clinton was able to threaten Iraq with a fully intact and functioning military and as Barney Frank pointed out in November 2001:

Number one, our military has performed superbly. There has been all this huffing and puffing in the Republican Party about how Clinton weakened our military. Well, that's ridiculous. George Bush just pulverized the Taliban with the military that he inherited from Bill Clinton.

Granted, Col. David Hackworth didn't feel that the military that Bush inherited was all that great:

* In the [1991] war with Iraq, it took the Pentagon five months to field a tank-heavy army that, once deployed, refought World War II -- mass bombing, units on line and virtually every movement controlled by the top. In the end, Saddam Hussein and his army escaped.

But gee, that sounds to me like exactly what the Army did in 2003! If Bush and Rumsfeld felt that the military was outmoded or inadequate, then what exactly did they do to fix it? (Matter of fact, how come the Army was still considered understrength in early 2004?) The point is, nobody has been able to point out what, if anything, Bush and Rumsfeld did to fix an allegedly broken military in the eight-plus months before 9-11.

As to "foisting a 9-11 Commission on the nation," how exactly is the US supposed to fix anything if nobody knows what went wrong in the first place? If no one has been able to answer the question of why the Air Force didn't adequately respond, then how can responses be assured in the future? 911Truth claims that the Air Force was busy running war games on that date. Did those war games interfere with responding to 9-11? Can future war games be better planned?

We simply can't fix these problems without a thorough investigation into what went wrong.

Whaaa?!!?

True confession: I was a history major back in college and still read the occasional history book for the fun of it (I'm reading Lapdogs right now. Strongly recommend it!) and the turkey James Wolcott quotes is a history professor! I'm embarrassed for the whole profession! The argument this guy makes is SOOO incredibly stupid, I can't even bear to repeat it. Read at your own peril!

The Geneva Conventions

On the same day, my local paper printed a column by Charles Krauthammer and a letter, both of which suggested that the Supreme Court had gone too far in its Hamdan v Rumsfeld decision. Krauthammer starts by claiming that the WOT (War on Terror) is sort of like America's own Civil War and World War II because all three started on the first year of the decade (1861, 1941 & 2001) and all three had legal challenges after about five years (Habeas Corpus, Japanese-American internments, Hamdan v Rumsfeld).

Then Krauthammer has to explain why this war has dragged on past the customary five-year mark: "But, of course, the war on terror is different. The enemy is shadowy, scattered and therefore more likely to survive and keep the war going for years." In other words, the WOT is not really a war in the traditional sense that we normally have when we have organized units of troops clashing on battlefields. It's also not traditonal in the sense that we can't identify an endpoint to it. We're not going to end it by signing surrender documents on the deck of a battleship, nor are we going to have the leader of the bad guys make a radio announcement. The US might produce a corpse, but as we've seen with Zarqawi, that doesn't mean much.

Nevertheless, Krauthammer thinks it's just awful that President Bush has failed to account for the traditional five-year mark by not having any legal defenses ready for when the Supreme Court inevitably roused itself and issued its customary end-of-war, back-to-normal dictates. He thinks the Court should have held off for however long Bush thought necessary and, well, Americans should simply do without a functioning Constitution until that happy day arrives.

My real problem with his column is that he proposes that Geneva Convetnions protections:

...were never intended to apply to unlawful combatants, terrorists of the al-Qaeda kind. The court tortures the reading of Common Article 3 to confer upon Hamdan - and by extension the man for whom he rode shotgun, bin Laden - the kind of elaborate legal protections that one expects from "civilized peoples."

and as our letter-writer states:

...the court had the temerity to extend Geneva Conventions protection to al-Qaeda even though the conventions do not apply to nonnational, nonuniformed terrorist organizations.

Problem: Once the US President starts making unilateral decisions as who does and who does not merit the protections of the Geneva Conventions, where does it stop? Another country could make the claim that the US began the war against Iraq without UN Security Council approval and that the war was clearly not in self-defense

"...Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, 'Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they've found -- then we'll figure out what we're going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq -- which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter."

Sooooo, if the US really wants to play the game of who is and who isn't a "lawful combatant," it might not be a very good idea. US soldiers could very easily find themselves on the wrong side of a war-crimes prosecution. The Geneva Conventions will not suffer very much, if at all, by adding al Qaeda to the list of those entitled to its protections. The Geneva Conventions will suffer horrible, perhaps fatal damage, by having countries pick and choose, in an arbitrary and unilateral fashion, which of their enemies do or do not get the protections it specifies.

Just as Bush & Co are perfectly willing to see untold numbers of young Americans and far greater numbers of Iraqis consigned to death or dismemberment in order to fight the Iraq War, so too am I willing to see all the members of the Bush Administration serve life sentences for the war crimes committed over the past five years. Wouldn't bother me a bit.

Iraqi withdrawal options

Someone told me today that she didn't like a particular peace plan for Iraq because it advocated what she felt was an overly hasty withdrawal. I thought about it and realized PRAWN doesn't have a peace plan. We've never discussed any withdrawal timetables. I don't think we will or should discuss any such measure. As I wrote here, the Bush Adminisration has completey messed up the diplomatic track for dealing with North Korea and there simply are no good military options. So when it comes to the question of "So, how would you deal with North Korea, Mr Smartypants?", my only real answer is that the very first thing that has to happen is that the Bush Administration and all of the related NeoCons must be out of office.

There is simply no possible way for any practical problem-solving to take place while Bush is the President. As we have seen with the Hamdan case decision by the Supreme Court, the Bush Administration doesn't appear to be inclined to take the advice of anybody, even when that advice is worded as a direct and lawful order.

Robert Kuttner points out in the Boston Globe that there are simply no good options for Iraq. As the advocates of peace were correct in late 2002-early 2003 in saying that Iraq did not pose a serious threat to the US or even to the immediate region, I would recommend that we be given the Iraq portfolio and, left to our own devices, I'm confident that we could come up with a reasonably effective solution. The major roadblock to any solution, though, is the Bush Administration. As long as they're in office, there's really very little we can possibly hope to accomplish. As Talking Points Memo points out: "If you need help getting your car out of a ditch, would you turn to the guy who just drove it in there or to the stranger who stops to help?"

The best strategy I think the peace movement can pursue just now is, in my humble opinion, to convince people that Bush & Co need to turn over the reins to people who can do the job.

Norah O'Donnell vs Cindy Sheehan

Y'know, there are times when someone who is angry can come across as really attractive, when that slow burn can come across as a really compelling aura around that person. When the comicbook artist Gil Kane gave an extensive interview for the Comics Journal, I realized that he was making a lot of criticisms that I had already heard from many other people, but..but this was Gil Kane, the famous, very highly competent draughtsman who penciled great adventure after great adventure. This was someone who knew what he was talking about! Accordingly, his views on comicbook art and writing at the time made a deep impression on me.

Norah O'Donnell's interview of Cindy Sheehan, on the other hand, left me favorably impressed with Ms Sheehan, but quite cold towards Ms O'Donnell. Yeah, partially it's because O'Donnell is a hard-line, right-wing conservative, but largely it was because O'Donnell was more interested in simply trashing Sheehan than she was in drawing out any useful or interesting informationt. O'Donnell demonstrated about a year ago that her demeanor was not at all what one would expect from an ostensibly objective journalist. She claimed that Coleen Rowley, who was running for Congress, was aligning herself with "anti-war extremists." Rowley immediately corrected O'Donnell, pointing out that her anti-war supporters were by no means extremist. O'Donnell's answer? " 'But, Coleen,' O'Donnell snapped back, 'they do oppose the war in Iraq, do they not?' " So apparently, according to O'Donnell, all one needs to be an "extremist," is to "oppose the war in Iraq."

Here is her first question on Hardball to Cindy Sheehan:

O'DONNELL: Let me begin by asking you, you know, Americans may hate the war, but they don't necessarily hate the president. How do you expect to get change by going around the world and trashing the president of the United States?

This is very clearly not the statement of someone who is in any way, shape or form an objective reporter. This is the statement of a staunch, hardline partisan-advocate. Nothing wrong with that per se, but she never mentioned her political affiliation and her position is theoretically one that calls for objectivity.

Sheehan goes on to explain that her calling President Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world" does not mean she hates him or is trashing him. She does mean that he fits his own definition of a terrorist.

SHEEHAN: Well, you know, he says a terrorist is somebody who kills innocent men, women, and children, and there has been over 100,000 innocent men, women, and children killed in Iraq on his orders.

After Sheehan points out (Correctly - the June 22-26 ABC News poll on Iraq policy shows 37% approval to 62% disapproval.) that "two-thirds of America disapprove[s] of George Bush and his policies in Iraq", O'Donnell replies with:

O'DONNELL: And nor, quite frankly, do you see members of Congress -- and you claim to not be in the fringes, to not be an extremist, and yet what members of Congress support you in your policy?

It's hardly fair to acknowledge that two-thirds of the American people support Sheehan's position, but to then go leaping to the conclusion that Sheehan is "in the fringes" because politicians are too cowardly to openly agree with the American people. If not many politicians are with Sheehan, that speaks very poorly of them. It says nothing about the rightness and justice of Sheehan's cause. If two-thirds of the American people are with Sheeehan, then how is Sheehan "in the fringes" or "an extremist"? By what criteria does she fit either definition?

After Sheehan lists the Congresspeople on both sides of the aisle who support her position, she is asked about Senators and comes up with John Kerry (D-MA):

O'DONNELL: John Kerry supports an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Did he tell you that?

This is one of those "When did you stop beating your wife?" questions. Sheehan has at no point said that she "supports an immediate withdrawal from Iraq." O'Donnell is pulling this question out of thin air. Sheehan then made it clear that she, Kerry and the " 'Out of Iraq' Congress[ional caucus] that has 70 members" are all in favor of a prompt withdrawal, but they all agree with O'Donnell that "There is no one in the United States Congress, Democrat, Republican, or Independent who would" support an immediate, precipitous withdrawal. But O'Donnell suggested that Sheehan wants just that.

O'Donnell calls Hugo Chavez (President of Venezuela) a "dictator." Sheehan replied that he has been elected eight times Sheehan didn't mention these other facts, but Chavez was thrown out of office in a coup and restored by the people of Venezuela and his current approval rating of 82.7% is only ten points lower than Bush's rating after 9-11 of 92%.

He has helped the poor people of America. He has sent aid to New Orleans. He has sold heating oil to disadvantaged people in America, in the United States of America at low cost, and he -- the people of his country love him.

O'Donnell had no answer for Sheehan's recitation of Chavez's good qualities and immediately switched the subject. Interestingly, O'Donnell points out that Saddam Hussein was also "democratically elected." Hussein was indeed supposedly elected, but victory margins close to 100% are normally due to tricks played by dictators. As Bush's last victory in 2004 was very considerably closer and far more questionable than Chavez's was, it might not be a good idea to push THAT idea too far, that elections can be manipulated.

Overall, O'Donnell took a scorched-earth approach, a highly combative attempt to make Sheehan look bad, to not give Sheehan the slightest credit (She immediately changed the subject every time Sheehan made a good point) and to try to get Sheehan flustered. She clearly approached the interview as a battle. Granted, Jon Stewart can be a tough interviewer, see his interviews of Bill Kristol and Rick Santorum (To name the most aggressive liberal interviewer on TV, and yes, it's pretty sad that a guy who recites fake news is more of an aggressive interviewer than most of the newspeople out there.), but Stewart's guests are generally given a fair chance to respond and Stewart tends to stick closely to the actual facts involved. Stewart doesn't go around simply making up wild accusations out of nothing. Stewart is more interested in generating light than heat, more interested in getting his guests to reveal things that are important and interesting than he is in simply attacking his guests and putting them down.

I strongly object to O'Donnell's mischaraterizations of Sheehan's positions, but I'd probably have to agree that my objection to her style is rooted in a personal preference for informative interviews as opposed to slash'n'burn attacks. I don't mind some aggressiveness, as I said earlier, some righteous anger can make the interviewer more attractive. The interviewer doesn't have to agree with the person being interviewed, but I think there's a bit of a difference between tough and demanding and between being just plain abusively nasty towards one's guest.

Rape in Iraq

Juan Cole's precis/commentary on the article from Al-Zaman is well worth quoting in full:

Al-Zaman/ AFP say that a firestorm of protest is building in Iraq over the alleged rape and killing of a 15 year old Iraqi girl in Mahmudiyah, and the murder of her family, by a US GI. MP Safiyah Suhail, a woman representative from the National Iraqi List in parliament, demanded that P[rime] M[inister] Nuri al-Maliki and Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani present themselves to parliament for questioning in the matter. She demanded that the Iraqi government be involved in the investigation. She said that this was a matter that touched on the honor of the Iraqi nation and the female MPs had a special role to play in demanding an accounting.

Suhail is former ambassador to Egypt of the new Iraqi government and stood against the imposition of Islamic law on Iraqi women. That a secular person is so stirred up about this suggests to you what the Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists are thinking. For most Iraqis, honor is bound up in the chastity of their women, at least in public, and a foreigner raping an Iraqi girl is a profound humiliation for the entire country. This matter is not going to go away quietly and if the Bush administration thinks it is just a matter of disciplining unruly troops, it has another think coming. Entire colonial empires have been shaken by such incidents in the past.(emphases added)

And from Iraq's Prime Minister:

KUWAIT CITY - Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Wednesday he wants an independent Iraqi investigation, or at least a joint investigation with coalition forces, into the alleged rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by U.S. troops.
-------------

"We are going to demand an independent Iraqi investigation or at least a joint investigation between us and the multi-national forces," al-Maliki said.

He said crimes against Iraqis were not acceptable and that coalition troops' immunity from Iraqi prosecution should be reviewed.

"We believe that the immunity given to members of coalition forces encouraged them to commit such crimes in cold blood — the thing that makes it necessary to review it," he said.

Also, Chris Floyd tells us how it all looked from the American soldier's side.

AJ in DC has still more. He thinks Cole has it right. The story "is creating shockwaves throughout the country, not just among the masses, but within elite political circles as well."

Good news, an interesting item and two negative items

1. Hillary Clinton came out and said what the high-ranking Democratic Party members (Especially those from the DSCC) needed to say from Day One of the Joe Lieberman-Ned Lamont primary (Joe has served three terms as Connecticut's senator, Ned is challenging him for that seat) "...that it's important to respect the will of Connecticut voters and that she will commit to support the Democratic candidate -- whoever that is -- in November." Three cheers for someone who usually displays a tin ear for important issues like this!

2. Conservative bloggers very grudgingly concede, with all sorts of caveats and qualifications (David Horowitz is especially amusing, Billmon comments on Horowitz's ramblings. See note at bottom.) that well, gee, er, they might, possibly, conceivably have been a bit, er, WRONG about the NY Times endangering the security of VP Cheney and SecDef Rumsfeld by photographing the entrances to their vacation homes in Maryland. Many right-wing bloggers have not admitted to any sort of error. Greenwald points us to an especially amusing televised rant by the blogger who writes Atlas Shrugged. Whoooo! This woman actually contests the idea that Bush's is the most secretive Administration since Nixon's!

3. 07-03-2006, 12h27
BAGHDAD (AFP) -- Iraqi Shiite leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the head of parliament's largest bloc, has told AFP that he favours extending an amnesty to insurgents who may have killed US troops. (Emphasis added)

"Yes, they should be covered regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliations," Hakim said in an interview when asked if he would support extending a reconciliation and amnesty plan unveiled by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to those who may have attacked US-led troops in Iraq. Hakim's position would contradict that of his government ally Maliki, also a Shiite, who said on Wednesday that there would be no amnesty to those who killed US troops, foreigners or journalists.

Iraqs largest single political grouping wants American troops to depart their country. The "Battle for Hearts and Minds" is long since over and the US has decisively lost. It's time to go. It's long since been time to go. And in what I guess is good news:

At the same time Hakim said he would categorically oppose any dialogue with "Saddamists and takfeeris", catchall terms used by hardline Shiites to refer to loyalists of ousted leader Saddam Hussein and extremist Sunni Arab militants who regard Iraq's majority Shiites as apostates. Hakim, who also heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) party, visited Tehran last month where he met with the top leadership of the Islamic republic.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called on US and other foreign troops to leave Iraq following his meeting with Hakim.

They have no use for any thought of returning to their Saddamist past. Cool! The Iranian leader agrees with them. Hmm.


4. In grimmer news, Orcinus points out that the use of "eliminationist" language among conservatives is getting louder and louder and is being voiced more and more insistently.

5. And yes, we have more bad news to report from Iraq about US soldiers raping and killing a 15-year-old girl and "Before leaving, the attackers fatally shot the four family members -- two of Abeer's brothers had been away at school -- and attempted to set Abeer's body on fire." Very interestingly, Iraqi Justice Minister demands UN oversight of rape-murder prosecution (Emphasis added). Gee, Iraqis not trusting American investigators? I wonder why that is?

Note: Bwah-hah-hah!! "David Horowitz, an important American writer and thinker since the 1960s, has been called “the Left’s most brilliant and articulate nemesis.” Oh mannnn! If ol' Davey is the most brilliant...ha, ha,ha!!!

Language is not neutral

The latest Media Matters analysis of how the media discusses the Iraq War (Lengthy piece at 40 kilobytes) illustrates a very old problem. Language is not neutral. It takes a considerable amount of time, thought and conscious effort to describe issues in a truly neutral or even in an effectively partisan manner. This would not be such a serious problem if it were not the favorite pose of the media, which can be described as "A pox on both your houses!" The mainstream media likes to pretend to be the harried housewife in the driver's seat who turns back to the two squabbling kids in the back seat (The Democrats and the Republicans.) and says "Stop fighting! You're both at fault!"

During the case of Jack Abramoff and his extensive political contributions to the Republican Party, several media outlets tried to claim that the scandal was a bipartisan one, with both Democrats and Republicans being equally at fault. Problem is, this framing of the story had a "Procrustean bed" quality as the Democratic connections to Abramoff had to be invented wholesale. As Howard Dean pointed out, there simply were no such connections. Wolf Blitzer, who was interviewing Dean when Dean claimed this, was obviously upset to hear this because it messed up his nice, neat storyline and required that he adjust his story to account for reality. The story as a whole really took a bizarre turn when the Ombudsman of the Washington Post not only refused to correct a reporter who had claimed that "both sides were to blame," but even insisted that Abramoff was an equal-opportunity giver. "L'il Debbie," as she was sarcastically named, finally admitted that she was wrong to defend her thesis and that Abramoff made contributions exclusively to Republicans.

So, when mainstream "respectable" media outlets use Republican "talking points," these points take on a more persuasive air as they appear to be coming from neutral, objective reporters who have taken a "pox on both your houses" attitude. When these reporters describe an anti-war speaker as being against "the troops," or as being "anti-military" when the speaker is actually just against the Iraq War (Not all anti-war speakers are pacifists, many of them just oppose this particular war.) it's a way to put down the speaker without blatantly, openly taking sides.

Point number three is especially pernicious. The claim that Republicans make is that "Iraq is the central front in the war on terror." When we actually consider what that phrase might mean, it appears to suggest that if that "front" goes well and Iraq calms down and US casualties decrease, then America is winning the WOT (The War on Terror). If on the other hand, Iraq continues to be a chaotic mess (As it has in the aftermath of the elimination of Zarqawi, formerly the "Emmanuel Goldstein" of Iraq), then the WOT must be going poorly.

Clarification: Back during World War II, it was meaningful to say that Okinawa was the "central front" in the War in the Pacific because the loss of Okinawa severely hurt Japan's ability to continue fighting and enabled American B-29 bombers to more easily hit Japan. Would the loss of Iraq impact worldwide terrorist activities in the same fashion? It's not at all clear that it would.

The first point, that "victory" in Iraq would mean that terrorists worldwide would have to ratchet down their deadly activities, is plainly false. If the Iraq War goes poorly for the other side and order is brought to that frantic country, any foreign fighters, whether they are jihadists or terrorists or whatever else one wishes to call them, would simply disperse to their countries of origin or they would assemble in whatever country they felt was the next target.

There is no reason whatsoever to presume that they'd all go down fighting and that the ranks of the jihadists/terrorists would therefore be thinned. An Egyptian has absolutely no reason to sacrifice himself to hang onto territory in Iraq. He'll remain in Iraq as a jihadist only for as long as he feels he's helping "the cause" and hurting "the enemy." If and when the Iraq War ever ends, the rest of the world will probably experience an upsurge in terrorist activities. The collapse of the "central front" for the enemies of America's efforts there would very likely be bad news for other regimes in the Middle East as many thousands of now-seasoned fighters would then be freed up for fighting elsewhere.

It's very bad news for Americans that mainstream media persons feel obliged to mindlessly parrot Republican talking points like this. The talking point that Iraq is a "central front" gives American citizens the impression that the fighting there is contributing to peace efforts elsewhere. Actually, as BTC News points out, terrorist activities worldwide have increased every year since 2002. Whatever else the Iraq War is accomplishing, it is clearly not making the world safer.

Hip-hip-hooray for Supreme Court!!

Good for the decision of the Supreme Court to slap down the illegitimate treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay!

To clarify what the choice in Guantanamo Bay was, talk show host Bill O'Reilly delivered his opinion of the matter:

During the "Talking Points Memo" segment (12 June 06) opening the program, O'Reilly asserted: "The Guantánamo controversy is easy to define. The Bush administration sees the 460 detainees as prisoners of war. The liberal press and some human-rights groups believe they are criminals entitled to due process."

This is incorrect. The choice facing the Bush Administration was never between treating the Guantanamo detainees as prisoners-of-war versus treating them as ordinary criminal suspects. The choice was between treating them as belonging to either category versus using a third, wholly made-up-on-the-spot category that had no meaning in either domestic or international law. "Unlawful" or "enemy" combatant has no legal meaning either nationally or internationally as it was invented by the Bush Administration and has never been defined by the passage of a law or backed up by any judicial decisions.

What the Supreme Court has done has been to return the Guantanamo detainees to a place where the rule of law has some relevance. Unfortunately, as Atrios points out, the story isn't over yet and we'll see what the Bush Administration does in response.

Santorum's accusation

Senator Rick Santorum's (R-PA) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra's (R-MI) claimed on June 21st that there were indeed "Weapos of Mass Destruction" in Iraq shortly before the March 2003 invasion, pointing to a stash of degraded chemical weapon shells that Iraq had produced and then lost track of during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. The Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out that the report specified that the chemicals were in a degraded state and it has long since been apparent to opponents of the Iraq War that there was no serious chance that Saddam Hussein would have passed along any serious weaponry to terrorist groups as 1. They would have been traced back to him and his country and 2. Saddam Hussein exercised a Soviet-style chain of command over his army. Control was very tight and very explicit. There was simply no room for free agents in his war-fighting doctrine.

Buzzflash explains how the "Iraq-al Qaeda link" idea works and thoroughly debunks it.

Nevertheless, Media Matters tells us how right-wing news sources, from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh, have kept the Santorum story of Iraqi WMD alive. Even though, as Media Matters points out:

The Washington Post also reported June 22 that "[n]either the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons."

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld demonstrated that Santorum was not acting along when he went on Fox News to confirm the charge:

ANGLE (video): Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is the first administration official to comment publicly on the declassified report that some 500 chemical weapons have been found in Iraq.

RUMSFELD: They are weapons of mass destruction. They're harmful to human beings. And they have been found and they had not been reported by Saddam Hussein as he inaccurately alleged he had reported all of his weapons, and they're still being found and discovered.

The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), characterized the shells as "old, fairly toxic stuff," but was misquoted as saying the shells were "less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point." A folksier, but less accurate rendition.

Rush Limbaugh has now stated that he is determined "to get the truth out on weapons of mass destruction" so we can look forward to hearing much, much more on the issue.

Attytood wonders what the "terror alert level" must be now and links to Vice President Cheney making a speech that sounds like it's cribbed directly from speeches on the alleged Vietnam "Domino effect" in the late 1960s-early 1970s.

In response to call for patience

The Inquirer published an article today (Jun 23rd) entitled: “Key to success lies in patient, united America" that posited that the "center of gravity" in the Iraq War was the US population and that things were going well in an unquantifiable way, in small-scale, personal experiences. The artcle asserts the need for Americans to have patience and to hang in there until victory.
My answer was as follows:

I believe that Lt. Col. Glen Butler is incorrect when he asserts that the “center of gravity” in the Iraq War is the American population. That center always was and always will be the Iraqi poulation. Non-US journalists interviewed Iraqi civilians after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 and found a very wary, skeptical population. Iraqis were, in general, pleased that their dictator had been removed from office, but very suspicious as to US motives for having done so.

The fact that “The undermanned Iraqi army and police units are challenged by corruption, desertion and enemy infiltration” is no accident and relates directly to suspicion over US motives for having invaded in the first place. No matter how many individual success stories occur, it's clear after more than three years of occupation that those suspicions remain as strong as ever.

The US Army cannot remain indefinitely where it is not wanted and Iraqis as a whole have made it clear through the people they have elected that the US is an unwelcome presence in their country. The Bush Administration laid out a detailed plan involving many “purple finger moments,” but the fact that those plans have been successfully accomplished with all the proper checkboxes checked off and the fact that Iraqis are still very sour on the idea of being occupied by US troops indefinitely means those plans have failed.

It's time to call an end to the experiment and to bring US troops home.

WaPo reviews Lapdogs

The Washington Post's Michael Getler reviews Eric Boehlert's Lapdogs and makes a point I found rather bizarre:

One obvious failing is that a book by a journalist attacking the press ought to have included some responses from editors and reporters who disagree with Boehlert's conclusions. There is basically none of that here.

First off, blogger's criticism's have been made out in the open and most lefty blogs have comments. Right-wing blogs have email addresses for readers to contact writers with, so it's not like papers and magazines and TV studios hav been unable to respond. Being from a group with a smaller audience, bloggers would be happy to feature defenses by mainstream media people as to their rolling-over for Bush & company. Had the mainstream folks had any defense or excuse for their conduct, we readers of blogs would have read of their defenses a long time ago.

Laying this out, he writes, "makes the conclusion -- that the press rolled over for Bush -- inescapable." But there is no way to prove that this is "inescapable," which would mean knowing what was inside the heads of producers and editors at the time their news decisions were made.

"...knowing what was inside the heads of producers and editors" is what the advice columnist Miss Manners derisively refers to as "mind-reading," a feat that's generally impossible in any event and that's an activity best avoided by serious people. Usually, it's quite enough to observe the words and actions of a person, which normally tell one all that one needs to know.

So does that mean that the editors who made those calls were pro-Bush or cowed by the aftermath of Sept. 11, fiery right-wing bloggers, conservative broadcasters and a mean White House press strategy? Or did some editors simply exercise poor news judgment or lack the experience or determination to make sure that nothing was left unsaid, unchallenged or uncovered? Or were they convinced that a war with Iraq was coming and were too focused on getting ready to cover it?

Interesting questions all, but going into them would require getting the inside scoop on still-ongoing matters. It reminds me of the continual discussions about "Is torture justified if there's a ticking time bomb...?" Sure, you can torture the bad guy, but there's no way to confirm that the bad guy is telling you the truth. Just because he appears to break down and appears to desperately gasp out the location of the bomb doesn't mean you're finally getting the truth. Likewise, as long as media people have any motivation to not tell us the truth about why they write what they do, we the public will not get the truth.

Generally, it's a good review, but I think Getler misses the boat on these questions.

Ann Coulter's question

Yeesh! I need to disinfect after slogging through the muck and the mire of reading right-wing partisans attacking the Jersey Girls, four women from New Jersey who have very serious questions about 9-11 and who have publicly asked why their husbands died in the conflagration of the World Trade Center towers 1 & 2 on that day.

First off, let's look at one of Ann Coulter's statements on them:

COULTER [video clip]: Why can't we hear these half-baked liberal bromides from Howard Dean? Why do liberals always choose spokesmen like the "Jersey Girls," like Cindy Sheehan, like Joe Wilson, who, because of some personal aspect of their life, we are not allowed to respond.

To begin with, pro-Bush Administration people ARE allowed to respond. It's just that we owe these women and Joe Wilson a fair hearing, we can't simply say "Oh, pish tosh. Poor silly women, you know not whereof you speak." and wave them away. Their criticisms should be taken seriously and discussed in a serious manner. The problem for the right wing is that the criticisms made by the Jersey Girls are thoroughly legitimate and are not easily answered. Before September 11, it was thoroughly routine for jet fighters to go up and check out anything happening in the air that didn't seem right. For a plane to be a half of a degree off course or for a pilot to not answer a radio call, was reason enough to scramble jets and get them up there. The hijacked planes on 9-11 starting going off course around 8:30 and didn't start crashing into the twin towers until around a half-hour later. There was no sign of any fighter planes in the sky. The Jersey Girls have asked "Why not?" No satisfactory answer has been supplied nearly five years later.

Why can't we send Howard Dean or some other spokesperson without an emotional stake in the issue to speak for us? Not our fault that the media only heeds certain spokespeople. Not our fault that Democrats don't want to take the risk of being seen as conspiracy theorists. We'd be happy to take the heat for them. We have zero problems with being their lightning rods and taking some grief for views they dare not express themselves. I attended the 9-11 Truth Convergence and I feel that we have nothing to be embarrassed about in terms of the quality of the speakers we can present.

As to the purely ad hominem attacks launched by the right wing partisans (Nowhere in the Media Matters quotations are there any hints of substantiative policy questions or disagreements. If anyone has come across any substantiative disagreements, please let me know.) the charge has been made that the Jersey Girls are seeking to make money off of the deaths of their loved ones in the WTC towers. Consider the comments on the 9-11 compensation fund:

Leslie Dimmling of Garden City, who lost her husband, Bill, said she feels many in the public have lost sight of the fund's original purpose.
"The victims' families never asked for this money," she said. "This is not free money. This is money given in lieu of giving up the right to sue."
---------

"The reason I opted out of the fund and chose to litigate was because 9/11 represented a massive failure and there was no avenue for accountability," said Monica Gabrielle of Manhattan, who lost her husband, Richard, an insurance broker.

Gabrielle said the Sept. 11 Commission has been a disappointment. "I have a legal right to litigate to find out where the responsibility lies," she said. "If that means people are fired, if it means a financial penalty, so be it."

The Jersey Girls could have made a great deal more money if they had remained quiet. That they did not is their right as US citizens "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances". In other words, in order to "petition the government", i.e. to put pressure on the various 9-11 commissions to seriously and truthfully examine the evidence, they had to give up lots and lots in compensation. In stark contrast to the charges of the partisans, the Jersey Girls made the less profitable choice, a choice that has opened them to wildly irresponsible attacks.

For more on 9-11, see an excellent overview (Quite lengthy at 74 kilobytes), or check out 911Truth.org

Zarqawi has perished

Over in Glenn Greenwald's blog, Anonymous Liberal adds an update to his or her blog post:

UPDATE: The big news this morning is that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was apparently killed in an airstrike. That rare bit of good news (and it certainly is good news) comes just in time for people like Blankley, who have entirely run out of coherent things to say.

What is A.L.'s purpose in explicitly declaring that the news is good? Well, obviously, A.L. is concerned about right-wingers suggesting that we lefties are pleased when US forces meet deadly setbacks: and that many people on our side were secretly rooting for Zarqawi. For example, take the right-winger who was earlier quoted by A.L.:

But what further cuts is to listen to media people casually perpetrate libel against not just the still- presumed-innocent Marines [In Haditha, where a number of Iraqi civilians were butchered] but against our services more generally. To see the gleam in the eyes of reporters happily cackling on about "other possible incidents" -- about which they know not whether they even exist -- is to be filled with a fury that we have a system of journalism that permits people with such mentalities to poison the minds of the world with their malice.

The quoted right-winger of course fails to provide any examples of newspeople "happily cackling" because, very simply, there are none. The news is delivered by corporate newspersons who are practiced in controlling their presentations so that no one can tell what they think of the news that they're reporting and who probably have no genuine opinion in the matter anyway (They're probably more concerned with their stock options and where they are on the corporate ladder and what they'll serve their guests for dinner that night so as to impress them with their skills as a gourmet, not that I'm, y'know, generalizing or anything). If one was not a corporate newsperson, then one is most likely very self-conscious about saying or doing anything that might hurt the cause of ending the war. So it's very highly doubtful that a noncorporate person would openly approve of a killer of American troops, regardless of what one thinks of the butchery at Haditha. So, what does A.L. get for his or her trouble?

The Hidden Imam said...

The big news this morning is that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was apparently killed in an airstrike. That rare bit of good news (and it certainly is good news) comes just in time . . . .

I found this bit illustrative of a problem among the Left. A.L. -- why did you even feel the need to add the parenthetical, "and it certainly is good news?" Of course it's good news. Why would there be any doubt? Unless, of course, you recognize that many among your audience on the Left is not rooting for success in Iraq.

This website, and Glenn's writing, is often geared towards forcing people to face the truth when their entrenched beliefs and motives conflict with a reality they don't see. The target is almost exclusively the Right. I think many people on the Left would do well to face up to the fact that they are, on some level, rooting for our failure in Iraq.

11:37 AM

Yeesh! We just can't win for losing. No matter what we say about Zarqawi's death, it'll be interpreted as "Ahh those lefties aren't really happy! Their true feeling is one of despair and disappointment that one of their heroes is dead! We know what they're really feeling!"

So the heck with it. I'm gonna say what I'm gonna say and y'all will just have to take my word for it:
Good for Zarqawi dying. The US gets one cheer (Out of a possible three) because I don't see this as being significant. About three years ago, Saddam Hussein's two sons also met their deaths and those deaths were met with great cheering and celebration and predictions that the insurgency in Iraq would soon collapse and end. Obviously, no such thing ever happened. Saddam Hussein was captured in December and again, there was a great cheering and congratulating and again there were predictions of the imminent demise of the insurgency and again nothing of the sort ever occurred. The "decisive blows" and "turning points" have been so numerous and so universally meaningless, I've lost track.
My prediction is that no one will remember this "great victory" a few months from now. I'll let Yglesias have the final word:

TIME AND AGAIN (AND AGAIN!) K-Lo with an assist from David Pryce-Jones unleashes a dispatch from the Gamma Quadrant: "He calls Zarqawi’s demise both a 'collassal [sic] morale boost' for all of us but says it also has 'big operational significance.' 'When you get rid of a leader, it’s very hard to replace him.' The Israelis have proved this time and time again."

The Israelis certainly have proven a lot of things about the tactical/operational aspects of counterterrorism time and again. And, indeed, again. And again. They've proven them so often, for so long, that one might almost conclude that tactical counterterrorism accomplishes very little absent resolution of the underlying political conflicts.

Red State post

I lived for a few years down in Pensacola, FL. We had a columnist who, every few months, would write a column explaining what "The Left" was up to and how those lefties felt abou the various issues of the day. Having had subscriptions to The Nation and Z, and having Internet access to various lefty authors (Back in the ancient days of the late 1990s) I would read her columns and wonder "WHO is this woman TALKING about?!?!" She never referred to the statements or viewpoints of anybody that I was famliar with, that was for sure! I got a similar feeling reading the following:

Were this merely the activity of identifiable partisans on the far-left wing, this would arguably be a healthy part of the debate that ought to go on in any self-governing country. However, in the United States, there exists a substantial cadre of far-left partisans who cloak their advocacy as "journalism." Such people are sufficiently numerous in the companies that provide the public's news that they severely restrict the ability of voters to receive information about military affairs that has not been processed and filtered by far-left partisans wearing reporter masks. This condition is extremely dangerous in a self-governing country, for the public cannot make informed decisions if it is not so much informed as manipulated by political partisans.

The process of correcting the political imbalance in the institutions of mass communication has begun, but it is not so far along that the public could not today be stampeded into adopting far-left policies by the partisans who still control much of what the public is told about events.

Those who oppose the far left bear a special burden in these times, to make sure that they are accurately informed about these events, and that they share this knowledge with friends, family, and co-workers who are still dependent on "news" provided by "reality patriots" who seek America's defeat.

No, I have no idea what the author means by "reality patriots." It seems to be a term the author has used so many times he feels no need to further explain it. So wow! The "far-left partisans" are running the newsrooms of America, huh? Reminds me of the story of a young Russian Jew meeting an elderly Russian Jew on the train and remarking that the elderly person is reading a Tsarist paper that accuses the Jews of plotting and planning all sorts of diabolical, anti-Tsarist, anti-Russian activities. The young one asks the old one why he's reading a paper that makes such terrible accusations against their people. The elderly one replied "Oh, this paper is marvelous! It tells me that we Jews are in charge of everything and that society is but putty in our hands. We are in charge of all the ministries and bureaus. It makes me feel very powerful! I love to feel like a member of such a powerful, effective conspiracy!"

I got pretty much the same feeling reading the above complaints about "political imbalance in the institutions of mass communication." It's like "Wow, we lefties REALLY have that much influence?" Seems to me that people of my persuasion (I consider myself a member of the "center-left", well to the left of the mainstream media, but there are many buddies of mine that are more leftist than I am.) Thinking back over the past five years, the blogs didn't really have any appreciableimpact on the public until the beginning of 2003, when Democrats running for President "discovered" the Internet and the blogs. Real influence on the other media, via the radio (Air America is pretty much it), the TV (Jon Stewart's Daily Show and Keith Olbermann) and newspapers (The Knight-Ridder chain is an unusually fair & responsbile group of newspapers) and that was pretty much it until perhaps six months ago, when still more media outlets began chiming in.

Noting the pathetically feeble response by Democrats to the Censure Resolution proposed by Senator Feingold doesn't give me much hope that the Democrats are among the "far-left partisans" the author cites.

The comments by the right-wingers after the article are interesting. They're completely unable to answer the proofs supplied by liberal commenters that, yes, the Iraq War WAS primarily justified by the phantom WMDs, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech very STRONGLY suggested an Iraq-al Qaeda link (No, Bush didn't explicitly and precisely draw the connection, but the very strong sugestion is there) and no, as both the article and as one of the commenters completely overlook, the Vietnam War could not have been won short of the utter genocide of the people of Vietnam. Something like a quarter to a third of the people of Vietnam would have had to have been slaughtered in order for there to have been "peace."

So Americans left Vietnam and people in the millions died at the hands of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. OK, so what was the alternative? The idea of "stay the course" was simply not an option and no one in the 30+ years since then has come up with any reasonable answer to that question of how to achieve "victory" short of simply slaughtering huge numbers of Vietnamese.

My favorite whipping boy...

The DLC's Al From pulls through again, with a statement so incredibly stupid I just had to do a double-take:

"Most people are not satisfied with their politics and would very much like to see more politicians who just got things done," said Al From, founder and chief executive officer of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist policy group. "Most people really aren't about ideology. Most people really are about, 'Let's get something done that's going to make my life better.' "

Now I have opposed GW Bush for a long time, most especially since he announced that Iraq was a threat to World Peace and had to be dealt with, but I really have never seen him as a fellow who couldn't get things done. With both a Congress and a Senate having been controlled by his party for the last five years, the only things Bush hasn't been able to do are the things that nobody wants done. Sure, Bush can't get Roe vs Wade tossed out, but that's not for lack of competence, that's for lack of Americans willing to see it tossed in the garbage bin.

I am entirely willing to see our government come to a creaking, shuddering halt if that means that the Bush Administration can't do any more damage.