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Monday, May 31, 2004 I'm glad Anna Quindlen is pointing out to Newsweek readers that attacks on politicians by bishops of the Catholic Church seem to be selective -- no denial of communion for death penalty support or hard-heartedness toward the poor -- but why is she so cautious in this statement? And sanctions for Democratic candidates have far outnumbered those for Republicans, even Republicans who favor legal abortion. "Far outnumbered"? That's an understatement. Can Quindlen name a single Republican pol who's felt the heat? (Link via Angry Liberal.) posted by Steve M. | 6:21 PM | CHALABI'S OFFICE WAS RAIDED BY MERCENARIES The Baltimore Sun reported this over the weekend. When Iraqi police raided the Baghdad home and offices of politician Ahmad Chalabi on May 20, U.S. officials hurried to distance themselves, saying that the operation was an Iraqi affair and that no U.S. government employees were involved. But eight armed American contractors paid by a U.S. State Department program went on the raid, directing and encouraging the Iraqi police officers who eyewitnesses say ripped out computers, turned over furniture and smashed photographs. And they weren't just mercenaries, but mercenaries with no manners: Some of the Americans helped themselves to baklava, apples and diet soda from Chalabi's refrigerator, and enjoyed their looted snacks in a garden outside, according to members of Chalabi's staff who were there. Nice. Some of you may already be able to guess what company they work for: The contractors work for DynCorp, a subsidiary of California-based Computer Sciences Corp. and the company in charge of training and advising Iraqi police through a State Department contract.... You remember DynCorp: DynCorp personnel contracted to the United Nations police service in Bosnia were implicated in buying and selling prostitutes, including a girl as young as 12. Several DynCorp employees were also accused of videotaping the rape of one of the women. When Dyncorp employee Kathy Bolkovac blew the whistle on the sex ring she was dismissed by the company for drawing attention to their misbehaviour, according to the ruling of a British employment tribunal in November. ...A group of Ecuadorean peasants have filed a class action against the company alleging that herbicides spread by DynCorp in Colombia were drifting across the border, killing legitimate crops, causing illness, and killing children. The company denies the charges. And, according to the Sun, the Iraqis and DynCorp workers reportedly misidentified themselves at Chalabi's office: When one of Chalabi's guards asked who the Americans were, an Iraqi police officer answered, "FBI and CIA," said a second INC official, who asked not to be named. posted by Steve M. | 6:05 PM | Saturday, May 29, 2004 That's all for now. See you sometime late Monday. posted by Steve M. | 9:12 AM | Intelligence agents encouraging abuse at four Iraqi prisons that aren't Abu Ghraib? Interrogators sent from Guantanamo to Iraq? Just another Friday afternoon embarrassing news dump.... posted by Steve M. | 9:09 AM | Swopa at Needlenose looks back on The New York Times's bimonthly Democratic hand-wringing report -- actually Adam Nagourney's monthly Democratic hand-wringing report. I'm glad someone else has noticed. posted by Steve M. | 9:05 AM | Friday, May 28, 2004 Both Charles Colson (God's Own Felon) and Megan Basham of National Review Online are delighted by the new movie Raising Helen. In the movie, Kate Hudson plays a carefree young trendoid who learns and grows as she takes custody of three children and falls in love with a Lutheran minister. Colson and Basham are particularly pleased at the portrayal of the minister -- he's "a real man who cares about others and is strong enough to lead those he loves to do the right thing," "the antithesis of the metrosexual party boys Helen's used to dating." Well, that's nice. Just don't tell Colson and Basham that this is the guy Kate Hudson married in real life, or that his rock band once put out an album with this cover. posted by Steve M. | 11:52 PM | Paul Krugman wonders why the press portrayed Bush (until recently) as a straight shooter; his theories reference 9/11. I think Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler knows 9/11 isn't the reason, although 9/11 made the press that much more skittish about criticizing Bush. Somerby's been saying for years that the press portrayed Gore as a liar in the 2000 campaign (which was payback to the Democrats for Clinton's decision to tell fibs about his sex life). If Gore was a liar, Bush, for dramatic effect, had to be his opposite. And that's how the press portrayed Bush, until just a few months ago. posted by Steve M. | 5:17 PM | Dogma, meet karma: Judge Questions Whether Unborn Child Is U.S. Citizen KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A federal judge issued a stay on Thursday to a pregnant woman scheduled for deportation while attorneys look into whether her unborn fetus might be a U.S. citizen, affiliate station KMBC's Donna Pitman reported. Myrna Dick went to renew her papers with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service last month, and she wound up in custody. Officials accused her of lying to border patrol officers in 1998 and said it was grounds for deportation to Mexico. But Dick, who is married to an American citizen, is pregnant with her husband's child. Judge Scott Wright wants to know if the fetus is a U.S. citizen, and if so, whether it can be deported. The judge asked attorneys for both sides to search for relevant precedents before he would rule.... --NBC4, Washington, D.C. In a situation like this, what's a politically correct right-winger supposed to think? (UPDATE: Court TV notes that, in deciding to issue the stay, the judge cited the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, otherwise known as "Laci and Conner's Law" -- the law the right-to-life movement succeeding in passing after Laci Peterson was murdered.) posted by Steve M. | 3:25 PM | I believe this invalidates every "pop sociology" essay and book David Brooks has ever written: New York City, NASCAR Discuss Speedway NASCAR is thinking about building a speedway in a city better known for traffic jams and taxicabs than for motorsports. Racing promoters have held preliminary discussions with city economic officials about constructing a NASCAR track on Staten Island, the mayor's office said Friday.... --AP Some might say this doesn't invalidate Brooks -- they'll note that Staten Island's always been far more Republican than the rest of New York City. Well, that's true. And guess what? We liberal thugs don't hijack a ferry at night and kill all those GOP-voting, traditional-values-valuing Staten Islanders in their beds. We live in the same city with them, and they live in the same city with us. Hell, we all root for the Knicks and the Nets, the Rangers and the Islanders, the Jets and the Giants, the Mets and the Yankees. (Well, a few of us malcontents who grew up not far from Fenway Park have a little trouble rooting for the Yankees.) If we were all effete, latte-swilling aesthetes here in New York, why would sports thrive here at all -- or in Boston, home of Ted Kennedy, fer Pete's sake, and John Kerry, who has an even more liberal voting record? Sports! In Taxachusetts! Shouldn't pro sports have long since been banned by conflict-averse limousine-liberal gay-marriage supporters who live in Cambridge town houses with Corian countertops? posted by Steve M. | 11:51 AM | Thursday, May 27, 2004 CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: OBJECTIVELY PRO-CHALABI AND OBJECTIVELY PRO-THEOCRATIC IRAN? Well, there's no need to play "Gotcha!" to make the first point: Hitchens's latest Slate column is called "Ahmad and Me: Defending Chalabi" ("I first met Dr. Ahmad Chalabi in the spring of 1998....Chalabi impressed me...") On the second point -- after a laughable attempt to refute the charge that Chalabi fed secrets to Iran's mullahs (Hitchens says "a very 'senior government official,'" unnamed of course, told him it just wasn't so) -- there's this: As for Iran, it is the most significant of Iraq's neighbors, and no aspiring politician can avoid the responsibility of conducting relations with it. Chalabi has never made any secret of his closeness to Tehran, and he operated a headquarters there, with the full encouragement of the U.S. government, during the run-up to the intervention. This necessarily involves a managed compromise between competing Shiite forces in both countries, at a time when both populations are anxiously awaiting developments in each other's societies. If any Iraqi is "brokering" relations with Iran, I hope it's Chalabi. But wait -- Iran's evil! The president whose war Hitchens deeply admires said so. And isn't a willingness to allow evildoers to stay in power precisely what Hitchens most chastised liberals for in the period before the Gulf War? Well, Hitch doesn't think the mullahs are really evil. They're just "bankrupt," able to be rebuffed by a "riposte." That's what he wrote in The Boston Globe back in September of '02: ...it seemed insane to include Iran in the "most-wanted" category. The Iranian people, with no interference from outside, have in the past few years developed their own civil-society riposte to the archaic and bankrupt rule of the mullahs. With its dress and its music and its thirst for contact with the outside world, a generation has begun to repudiate theocracy and to insist that election results be respected. A free press is exploding from under the carapace, and electronic communications are eroding superstition.... So it's almost as if the mullahs really don't run Iran -- even though they do. It's almost as if they're not really repressive -- even though they are. It's almost as if they don't really have a bad human rights record -- even though they still do. It's almost as if they respect free speech and a free press -- even though they don't. It's almost as if they're not theocrats -- even though they are. Here's Hitchens in The Nation, in November '01, not at all worried about Iran's "anti-American mullahs" because "the Shiite street" doesn't like the Taliban. And here's Hitchens in Slate, a year later, happily noting that the mullahs "hate Saddam" (they "hate America more," but it's OK because "Iranian public opinion" is "much more pro-American"). So, really, Iran's practically ready for NATO membership. Oh, sure, last October Hitch did entertain the notion of a U.S. invasion of Iran -- but only when it was proposed to him by Ayatollah Khomeini's grandson (who is now, apparently, a favorite of the American Enterprise Institute). Hitch seems to have a bit of a manly crush on Hossein Khomeini. He asks about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the Iranian nuclear program, and as he listens to the replies of Khomeini, who "operates within an entirely Quranic frame of reference," Hitchens, the atheist and cleric-hater, is bedazzled: I could not resist asking his opinion of the famous fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I cannot say that I understood all of his reply, which was very long and detailed and contained some Quranic references and citations that were (to me at any rate) rather abstruse. But the meaning was very plain. A sentence of death for apostasy cannot really be pronounced, or acted upon, unless there is "an infallible imam," and there is no such thing. The Shiite faithful believe in a "hidden imam" who may one day be restored to them, but they have learned to be wary of impostors or false prophets. In any event, added Khomeini, there was an important distinction between what the Quran said and what an ayatollah as head of state might say. "We cannot nowadays have executions in this form." ... That reminded me to ask him what he thought of the mullahs' nuclear program. He calmly said that there was no physical force that was stronger than his faith, and thus there was no need for any country to arm itself in this way.... This is pure doubletalk, and Hitch swallows it whole. Look, I don't want to go to war against Iran -- but I'm a quisling liberal, and Hitchens is a fearless Speaker of Truth to Power. I think it's crazy to think that the proper response to every unsavory government on the planet is a U.S. overthrow -- and that's precisely the attitude Christopher Hitchens claimed to despise in opponents of Bush policy as the war in Iraq approached. But here he is, taking the same attitude himself toward Iran -- and, at the same time, defending a crook, liar, and double-crosser from Iraq, as well as a bunkum-spewing mullah-wannabe from Iran. posted by Steve M. | 11:44 PM | The New York Times has two stories about abused Iraqi prisoners who didn't have a damn thing to tell us in the first place. You may have already read one of the stories -- "Prison Interrogations in Iraq Seen as Yielding Little Data on Rebels": The questioning of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners last fall in the newly established interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison yielded very little valuable intelligence, according to civilian and military officials. ...civilian and military intelligence officials, as well as top commanders with access to intelligence reports, now say they learned little about the insurgency from questioning inmates at the prison. Most of the prisoners held in the special cellblock that became the setting for the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently were not linked to the insurgency, they said..... But there's also this, about Colonel Allen West. Colonel West was told a man named Yehiya Kadoori Hamoodi was part of a plot to kill him and endanger his men; the colonel had Hamoodi arrested. During the interrogation, [Hamoodi] said, the translator kicked him in the shin and told him he needed to confess before Colonel West showed up to kill him. Mr. Hamoodi said he felt relieved to hear the colonel was expected. He considered Colonel West to be "calm, quiet, clever and sociable." When the colonel first entered the interrogation room, Mr. Hamoodi said, he thought, "Here is the man who will treat me fairly." Then, he said, Colonel West cocked his gun. Colonel West said that he did not then put a round in the gun's chamber but that he did place the pistol in his lap. He asked Mr. Hamoodi why he wanted to kill him. Mr. Hamoodi said that he protested, "I've worked with you, I like you," but that Colonel West silenced his protest. Colonel West pressed for the names and locations of those involved in the supposed plot, and he got no answers. Soon, the soldiers began striking and shoving Mr. Hamoodi. They were not instructed to do so by Colonel West but they were not stopped, either, they said. "I didn't know it was wrong to hit a detainee," a 20-year-old soldier from Daytona Beach said at the hearing. Colonel West testified that he would have stopped the beating "had it become too excessive." Eventually, the colonel and his soldiers moved Mr. Hamoodi outside, and threatened him with death. Colonel West said he fired a warning shot in the air and began counting down from five. He asked his soldiers to put Mr. Hamoodi's head in a sand-filled barrel usually used for clearing weapons. At the end of his count, Colonel West fired a shot into the barrel, angling his gun away from the Iraqi's head, he testified. According to the interpreter, Mr. Hamoodi finally "admitted there would be attacks, and called out names." Mr. Hamoodi said that he was not sure what he told the Americans, but that it was meaningless information induced by fear and pain. At least one man named by Mr. Hamoodi was taken into custody, according to testimony, and his home was searched. No plans for attacks on Americans or weapons were found. Colonel West testified that he did not know whether "any corroboration" of a plot was ever found, adding: "At the time I had to base my decision on the intelligence I received. It's possible that I was wrong about Mr. Hamoodi." We all go to movies and watch TV. We all "know" that you can "get someone to talk." But sometimes what we know just ain't so. posted by Steve M. | 1:48 PM | Amazing: ...The Vatican press office released a statement Thursday morning announcing that Cardinal Bernard F. Law was chosen for a new job in the Holy City. The Vatican statement said Pope John Paul II named Law archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome, one of four churches under direct Vatican jurisdiction. Law will now be responsible for the financial management of that church.... Sources say St. Mary's is one of the biggest churches in Rome. Law, 72, resigned as archbishop of Boston on Dec. 13, 2002, over the clergy sex abuse crisis and his failure to protect children from sexually abusive priests.... --WCVB, Boston But he's undoubtedly anti-abortion, so it's OK. The person who tipped me to this is a former monk who forwards an e-mail from a friend: I don't know if you saw the news item, but we now have confirmation both that "zero tolerance" does not apply to negligent bishops and that Rome is really out of contact with sentiment on the street...Today, John Paul II (or at least the people around him) appointed Bernard Law as Archpriest of the Patriarchal Liberian Basilica of St. Mary Major. As archpriest not only will he get a handsome income of over 10,000 euros a month, a baroque apartment that runs the length of the basilica on its gospel side (I was once the guest of the previous archpriest, Cardinal Furno), and the right to pontificate at a gem of a church, he'll also be able to attend all the curial meetings, including those of the Congregation of Bishops, on which he sits, and influence policy with regard to America. Ah... (The reader comments at WCVB are quite negative also.) posted by Steve M. | 12:26 PM | Not only does Kerry beat Bush 49%-41% in the latest New York Times/CBS poll, but Kerry-Edwards beats Bush-Cheney 50%-40% and Kerry-McCain beats Bush-Cheney 53%-39%. So where does this leave Adam Nagourney? Even he can read his own newspaper's polls. He can't credibly say that Kerry is in trouble now, but if Adam Nagourney can't detect trouble for Democrats, he simply has no reason to live. So today, on the front page of the Times, he suggests that there might be trouble for Kerry in the future: ...Some [Democratic] party officials say that with three new polls showing President Bush more embattled than he has ever been, Mr. Kerry's wisest course would be to take few chances and turn the election into a referendum on a struggling president.... But other Democrats warn that such a strategy entails risks of its own, banking on the proposition that Americans would be willing to fire an incumbent during war time and replace him with someone they know little about. "I don't think anybody in their right mind is going to run for president on a strategy of 'people hate the other guy and that's enough for our guy to win,' " said Douglas Sosnik, the White House political director for President Bill Clinton.... Yikes! He might not win if he never tells us why he'd be a better president! Does any rational person (i.e., any person outside the political-insider demimonde) think that's what Kerry's going to do for the duration of the campaign? That's ridiculous. In due course, he'll speak up. Right now, though, the election isn't for five and a half months. And Bush is floundering. As many of the people Nagourney quotes quite correctly point out, it's good for Kerry if the focus is on Bush's floundering. I don't think Kerry is merely letting Bush hang himself without his own ineptitude -- I think he's triangulating. Here's Al Gore giving a fiery speech that has right-wingers foaming at the mouth. (David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine: "Al Gore or Al Jazeera?") Here's Nader, calling for Bush's impeachment. Here's Bill Clinton, about to go all flamboyant and mediagenic on us -- his huge book is coming out a week early (in less than a month). On the other side, there are the Bushies, flapping their arms, insisting everything's under control (except that they have no plan for Iraq and those pesky al-Qaeda people whose asses we supposedly kicked seem to be planning massive stateside terrorist strikes that are, apparently, nearly inevitable). And in the middle, there's Kerry. If he stays low-key for a while, he might really start to seem like the one grown-up on the political scene, the guy in the "sensible center." Then, maybe, we'll really hear his side. posted by Steve M. | 11:01 AM | Who's Chalabi's biggest American pal? Perle? Wolfowitz? Libby? Think bigger. Cheney. Back on March 17, 2003 Skimble quoted a Wall Street Journal article on the buildup to the Iraq War: ...with little public notice, Mr. Cheney began working on the Iraq issue with a new dedication. He quietly sought out experts on the politics and culture of the country. He reached out to Iraqi exiles such as Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile whose family led the country decades ago and who seeks to lead a post-Hussein Iraq... State Department and CIA officials mistrust the wealthy, American-educated Mr. Chalabi, who was convicted in a Jordanian banking scandal more than a decade ago. But Mr. Cheney and his senior staff have remained stubborn advocates of Mr. Chalabi, a man they first got to know in the mid-1990s at the barbecues and golf games held at private seminars hosted by groups such as the Aspen Institute.... Thanks, Dick. posted by Steve M. | 8:03 AM | A couple of days ago I was writing about Susan Sontag's comments on the Abu Ghraib photos and I said the movie Dazed and Confused, which she cited, was set in 1978. I've heard from SullyWatch and I stand corrected -- it was set in 1976. posted by Steve M. | 7:59 AM | Wednesday, May 26, 2004 Actually, neither President Bush nor his aides ever said anything about "stockpiles" in describing the Iraqi weapons threat. The Times just made that part up. --John Hinderaker of the Claremont Institute, at Power Line Blog ("The blog is excellent--I'll make it regular reading!" --Rich Lowry, editor of National Review) United Nations' inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons. --President's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly, September 12, 2002 For the sake of your children's future, we must make sure this madman never has the capacity to hurt us with a nuclear weapon, or to use the stockpiles of anthrax that we know he has, or V-X, the biological weapons which he possesses. --President Presses Congress for Action on Defense Appropriations Bill, Remarks by the President at Bob Beauprez for Congress Luncheon, The Adams Mark Hotel, Denver, Colorado, September 27, 2002 In defiance of pledges to the United Nations, Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons. --President's Radio Address to the Nation, October 5, 2002 The inspectors concluded that Iraq likely produced two to four times that amount. That's a massive stockpile, and it's never been accounted for and it's capable of killing millions. --Excerpts from the Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer, January 15, 2003 Iraq has also failed to provide United Nations inspectors with documentation of its claim to have destroyed its VX stockpiles. --"Why We Know Iraq is Lying," A Column by Dr. Condoleezza Rice, New York Times, January 23, 2003 Second, as with biological weapons, Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents.... Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. --U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council, February 5, 2003 United Nations' inspections revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons. --pre-war "fact sheet" The outlaw Iraqi regime's chemical and biological weapons stockpiles, its continued pursuit of nuclear weapons and its ties to global terrorists are a threat to the US, our allies and friends and to the Iraqi people. --"Global Message," February 18, 2003 (All quotes from whitehouse.gov. Thanks to Pandagon for the Power Line link.) posted by Steve M. | 4:57 PM | Nick Berg deserved to die. He was war-loving scum. I'm glad they chopped his head off. No, I don't believe any of that. And it would be an outrage if I, a lefty and critic of the war, said something like that in all seriousness. But apparently it's OK for Lucianne Goldberg, or whoever ghost-writes for her Web site, to say this about the dead man: Sorry, but Nick Berg sounds like a nutball to us This is a reference to the long story about Berg in today's New York Times. I'm trying to figure out what's making Ms. Goldberg's nose wrinkle. Maybe it's this: ...his defining semester came in a small Ugandan village, where he spent the spring of 1998 in an exchange program. There he was exposed to poverty he had never imagined, friends said. He turned his inventiveness to good use, fashioning a brick-making machine to help villagers stabilize mud huts. Or this: He seemed particularly attracted to the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam -- healing the world through social action. "He went to Iraq to see if he could combine his professional skill with his desire to heal the world," said Ruth W. Messinger, the former Manhattan borough president who leads the American Jewish World Service. Or this: ... he visited Kenya for two weeks in March 2003, working on water projects ... Seriously, I don't get it. He supported the war (as the humanitarian removal of a dictator). Friends who cleaned out his apartment found, among other things, "an American flag made of red and white duct tape on blue cloth." But Lucianne doesn't like him. Why? Too idealistic? Too scrupulous? Yeah, the article doesn't make him seem ordinary. He liked climbing (rocks, radio towers) -- I know people like that, people who crave that level of danger. I don't share the aficion, but I'd never criticize it. He liked inventing things, and he had a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon in his apartment -- so he was a geek. Fine by me -- and a hell of a lot better than being a hack literary agent turned political hatchetwoman, Lucianne. (By the way, to those who think Berg may have had a secret life -- yeah, I've wondered too, and, well, maybe there was more below the surface. But after seeing the text and photos at this radio Web site run by a man named Scott Fybush, I'm convinced that, whatever else Nick Berg may have been, he was the tower-climbing gearhead his friends remember so fondly.) posted by Steve M. | 1:32 PM | A couple of days ago, Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and one of the right wing's gray eminences, wrote about teachers who showed images of the Nick Berg beheading in class. If I read Weyrich correctly, he thinks we're kind of lucky that the beheading was recorded for posterity -- after all, the images might be just the thing to keep all of America's youth from turning into Cuban socialist gun-grabbers. Or something like that: ...One of the students who heard the audio and saw still pictures, which didn't show the worst of it, said he had no idea such things like this went on in the real world. It is time he learned. For decades now in many of our school systems, students have been shielded from reality, while a false utopian society was pushed in social studies classes, which feature all of the liberal constructs. Ah yes, the wonderful UN guiding us to enlightened world government where, to paraphrase a just-arrested drunk, "We can all just get along." ... Guns are to be hated because guns, not people, kill. War is caused by the United States because we steal the world's resources. War can be avoided because the UN is ready, willing and able to bring peace forever more. There is no need to worry. There is no effort to kill Americans for who we are. Right. Still, just in case we might be tempted to demonstrate our "learned male aggressiveness" and want to defend ourselves, guns should be confiscated -- especially in this country, of course. No need to confiscate them elsewhere. After all, if we would just ratify the Kyoto treaty and scrap our capitalist free enterprise system, we would no longer be stealing the world's resources so no one would want to kill us any more. Besides, it doesn't matter. We are all going to die from global warming anyway. Heard of Omaha Beach? Not that place of fame during World War II. No, this is in Omaha, Nebraska where the oceans will at last surround a narrow strip of land. Maybe, just maybe, we could save ourselves if we just adopted Socialism and turned over all governance to those beloved peace-oriented diplomats at the UN. Peace is so comforting. Just ask those in a nearby cemetery. Freedom is so messy...so unpredictable. You can't always plan the outcome. Besides there are risks involved with freedom and risks are unacceptable in a utopian society. The one value we maintain is equality. Not equality of opportunity, but equality of result. In a Socialist world, risks are unnecessary because without freedom there is no need for such outmoded thinking. If you doubt that such a utopian society can exist, then you need only look to Cuba, a mere 90 miles from our shores where in our textbooks the Cuban healthcare system is touted as a model for the world. This is the nonsense our youth are being fed.... There's no mention of gay marriage or gangsta rap, but I imagine they fit in here somewhere. Maybe they'll be the topic of a subsequent column. posted by Steve M. | 1:00 PM | I learn from this Newsday article that the U.S. is still holding people in Iraq who were arrested in Iraq only because they're related to other people the U.S. wants to arrest. Yes, it's a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions, and no, the U.S. doesn't seem to care. The story focuses on Jeanan Moayad, whose husband was arrested (and has been held for four months) because Americans want to arrest her father, a scientist and former Baath party member. But this practice was noticed -- and denounced -- back in November, when American troops arrested the wife and daughter of a Saddam insider, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. The Newsday article notes that Al-Douri's wife and daughter are still in U.S. custody, although rights monitors say they have not been charged with any crime. Something tells me this isn't the fault of "a few bad apples." (Newsday link via Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly.) posted by Steve M. | 11:29 AM | So The New York Times is apologizing for running "scoops" and other stories based on lies from the likes of Ahmad Chalabi. Well, that's nice. Now, can we un-fight the war, un-occupy the country, un-brutalize the prisoners, un-screw up the reconstruction? It's my understanding that these aren't viable options. So the only possible good this apology can do is to correct the record for posterity -- but I think it was already clear to posterity that everything linked to Chalabi bears the stink of corruption. So, nice apology, but I don't see what difference it makes now. posted by Steve M. | 9:29 AM | "A few bad apples": Abuse of Captives More Widespread, Says Army Survey An Army summary of deaths and mistreatment involving prisoners in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan shows a widespread pattern of abuse involving more military units than previously known. The cases from Iraq date back to April 15, 2003, a few days after Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in a Baghdad square, and they extend up to last month, when a prisoner detained by Navy commandos died in a suspected case of homicide blamed on "blunt force trauma to the torso and positional asphyxia." Among previously unknown incidents are the abuse of detainees by Army interrogators from a National Guard unit attached to the Third Infantry Division, who are described in a document obtained by The New York Times as having "forced into asphyxiation numerous detainees in an attempt to obtain information" during a 10-week period last spring.... --New York Times General Is Said To Have Urged Use of Dogs A U.S. Army general dispatched by senior Pentagon officials to bolster the collection of intelligence from prisoners in Iraq last fall inspired and promoted the use of guard dogs there to frighten the Iraqis, according to sworn testimony by the top U.S. intelligence officer at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to the officer, Col. Thomas Pappas, the idea came from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who at the time commanded the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and was implemented under a policy approved by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. military official in Iraq.... Pappas said, among other things, that interrogation plans involving the use of dogs, shackling, "making detainees strip down," or similar aggressive measures followed Sanchez's policy, but were often approved by Sanchez's deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, or by Pappas himself... ...Pappas ... said "policies and procedures established by the [Abu Ghraib] Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center relative to detainee operations were enacted as a specific result of a visit" by Miller, who in turn has acknowledged being dispatched to Baghdad by Undersecretary of Defense Stephen A. Cambone, after a conversation with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.... --Washington Post posted by Steve M. | 8:03 AM | Tuesday, May 25, 2004 The future of Iraq? Fallujah Emerging As Islamic Mini-State With U.S. Marines gone and central government authority virtually nonexistent, Fallujah resembles an Islamic mini-state -- anyone caught selling alcohol is flogged and paraded in the city. Men are encouraged to grow beards and barbers are warned against giving "Western" hair cuts. "After all the blood that was shed, and the lives that were lost, we shall only accept God's law in Fallujah," said cleric Abdul-Qader al-Aloussi, offering a glimpse of what a future Iraq may look like as the U.S.-led occupation draws to a close. "We must capitalize on our victory over the Americans and implement Islamic sharia laws." The departure of the Marines under an agreement that ended the three-week siege last month has enabled hard-line Islamic leaders to assert their power in this once-restive city 30 miles west of Baghdad. Some were active in defending the city against the Marines and have profited by a perception — both here and elsewhere in Iraq — that the mujahedeen, or Islamic holy warriors, defeated a superpower.... --AP In spite of the Bush fairytale (Rid the world of the evildoer and everything will turn out swell!), Iraq was always a massive risk, if not a hopeless cause, a place that was going to be extremely hard to put back together again after Saddam -- too many factions, too few people who understand governing. And then, of course, we've screwed up so much of the putting back together. Maybe this is what we'll get. posted by Steve M. | 6:12 PM | In the speech last night, President Bush said, as he so often does, that "Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror." But did you notice the context in which he said it? We've also seen images of a young American facing decapitation. This vile display shows a contempt for all the rules of warfare, and all the bounds of civilized behavior. It reveals a fanaticism that was not caused by any action of ours, and would not be appeased by any concession. We suspect that the man with the knife was an al Qaeda associate named Zarqawi. He and other terrorists know that Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror. And we must understand that, as well. Curiously, the president made no mention of the fact that the four people arrested in the beheading apparently aren't affiliated with Zarqawi or al-Qaeda -- Iraqi police say they're former members of Saddam's Fedayeen. Saddam = al-Qaeda. Mustn't let ourselves get confused with the facts. posted by Steve M. | 4:19 PM | So there's a report that some of the civilian contractors in Abu Ghraib and other Iraq prisons weren't civilian contractors at all -- they were Israeli intelligence agents. Now, here's the thing: This report didn't come from Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya; it didn't come from that gathering horde of lefty anti-Semites you've heard so much about recently; nor did it come from Pat Buchanan. It came from the passionately pro-Bush NewsMax site. NewsMax, of course, is notoriously lacking in credibility -- it's home to fable-spinners and truth-fudgers such as Gary Aldrich, Christopher Ruddy, Dick Morris, and Notra Trulock. I don't believe much of what I read there. But what the hell -- here's an excerpt: "Israelis have been to Abu Ghraib and other prisons [in Iraq]," says one source familiar with the U.S. operations. It was explained that the Israelis involved have been assigned as "civilian contractors" to work with Coalition forces in interrogating Iraqi POWs. The "contractors" are said to be veterans of Israel's domestic intelligence unit, Shin Bet, as well as the more famous international intelligence agency, the Mossad.... It was explained that several of the "interrogation" techniques used by U.S. forces in Iraq have in fact been used by Israel "for years." The technique of stripping Arab prisoners naked, to embarrass and humiliate them, has been used by Israelis, according to Arab diplomats at the U.N. You want a conspiracy theory? You got one now. posted by Steve M. | 2:38 PM | According to David Brooks, if we continue screwing up everything we're supposedly trying to do in Iraq, Iraqis (and others in the non-Western world) won't be angry at the screw-up -- they'll be angry at freedom itself. Apparently -- if I read Brooks correctly -- Iraqis and other non-Westerners have some sort of Oliver Sacks-style brain defect that makes them incapable of grasping such notions as "freedom," "self-government," "civility," and "the rule of law." They've never heard of these things, they can't imagine them, and they think what Iraq has experienced in the past year is the embodiment of them. So if we give up now, Iraqis will think, Hey -- that was freedom? That sucked! Freedom really sucks! No one on earth should ever have to live in freedom! Death to all believers in freedom! And this aphasia is apparently shared by everyone on the planet, or at least by all non-Westerners. You think I'm exaggerating? If so, it's not by much. Here's Brooks: ...let's face it, we don't know whether all people really do want to live in freedom. We don't know whether Iraqis have any notion of what democratic citizenship really means. We don't know whether they hear words like freedom, liberty and pluralism as deadly insults to the way of life they hold dear. We don't know who our enemies are. Are they the small minority of Baathists and jihadists, or is there a little bit of Moktada al-Sadr in every Iraqi's breast? ...if this gamble fails, it won't be only the competence of our officials that will be called into question -- it will be the American creed itself. Since before the nation's founding, Americans have thought of themselves as the great democratic champions of the globe. If this gamble fails to come off, then that mission will seem, to many, false. Perhaps democracy and freedom are not really universal values, some will say. Perhaps they are just the outgrowths of a specific culture. People on the left and right will race to withdraw from the world. It will become difficult to take on the tyrants who will menace the world. What do you think? You think it's really true that Iraqis and other non-Westerners can't separate freedom from the Bush administration's actions in the name of freedom? Or do you think it's David Brooks who can't make the distinction? posted by Steve M. | 11:42 AM | Thanks for making the world so safe by prioritizing Iraq, George: Qaeda Has 18,000 Militants for Raids - Think Tank Al Qaeda has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden's network, a leading London think-tank said on Tuesday. Al Qaeda's finances were in good order, its "middle managers" provided expertise to Islamic militants around the globe and bin Laden's drawing power was as strong as ever, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said.... "Galvanized by Iraq if compromised by Afghanistan, al Qaeda remains a viable and effective network of networks," it said. The IISS said al Qaeda lost its base after the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001 but had since adapted to become more decentralized, "virtual" and invisible in more than 60 countries.... "A rump leadership is still intact and over 18,000 potential terrorists are at large with recruitment accelerating on account of Iraq," the IISS said. It gave no source for the figure.... "Bin Laden's charisma, presumed survival and elusiveness enhance (al Qaeda's) iconic drawing power," the IISS said.... --Reuters posted by Steve M. | 10:36 AM | Monday, May 24, 2004 A minister who serves California legislators says Jesus wants some of the dames back in the kitchen: Several state senators donned kitchen aprons and scarlet "M"s Monday to protest remarks by a pastor who said female lawmakers with small children at home were "sinful." Sen. Debra Bowen ... and other lawmakers said they were furious to learn that the Rev. Ralph Drollinger, who leads a Bible study class for lawmakers, wrote in a Bible lesson that women lawmakers with young children at home are sinners. "It is one thing for a mother to work out of her home while her children are in school," wrote Drollinger. "It is quite another matter to have children in the home and live away in Sacramento for four days a week. Whereas the former could be in keeping with the spirit of Proverbs 31, the latter is sinful."... The Bible says God has given men and women different roles, Drollinger said. "Man's is, primarily, to be a breadwinner, and women's is to be at home nurturing their children."... Capitol Ministries is a nonprofit organization that offers Bible study classes for lawmakers. In Sacramento, about a dozen lawmakers attend the Wednesday morning classes _ most of the regular attendees are Republican.... About a dozen senators -- both male and female -- joined the protest, including the usually bombastic Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, who presided over the Senate while adorned in a pink flowered apron.... --AP/Sacramento Bee posted by Steve M. | 10:14 PM | BUSH He can't even pronounce "Abu Ghraib." He stumbled over it twice in the speech tonight. Badly. posted by Steve M. | 8:48 PM | A National Guardsman portraying a Guantanamo prisoner says he was badly hurt by fellow soldiers, according to this story from the NBC affiliate in Lexington, Kentucky: ...In January 2003, [Sean] Baker was a member of the 438th Military Police company in Operation Enduring Freedom at Guantanamo Bay, where he says he was "given a direct order by an officer in the U.S. Army" to play the role of a detainee for a training exercise.... Baker says what took place next happened at the hands of four U.S. soldiers - soldiers he believes didn't know he was one of them - has changed his life forever. "They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down," said Baker. "Then he - the same individual - reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breath. When I couldn't breath, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.'" But, Baker says, the beating didn't stop. "That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me," he said. "Somehow I got enough air, I muttered out, 'I'm a U.S. soldier, I'm a U.S. soldier.'"... "I sustained an injury to my brain a traumatic brain injury which has caused me to have a seizure disorder I deal with daily," said Baker. Baker's traumatic brain injury is outlined in a military document in his possession, which says the injury "was due to soldier playing role as a detainee who was uncooperative."... Baker, by the way, looks as if he'd be pretty tough to hurt. What were we training these guys to do? And don't tell me they gave this guy a permanent brain injury because they watch too much Internet porn. posted by Steve M. | 6:51 PM | Last night I deleted part of what I posted about Susan Sontag's New York Times Magazine cover story on Abu Ghraib. I don't know why I backed off. Even though Sontag means to indict American society, some of what she says is all but indistinguishable from blame-shifting nonsense uttered by Rush Limbaugh, Charles Colson, and others on the right -- people who want you to believe that Abu Ghraib happened because of bad individual morals rather than bad government policy: Colson: Why did it even occur to our soldiers today to molest and embarrass these prisoners sexually? I think it is in part because we live in a pornography-soaked culture. You can’t turn on the television without seeing it. The number of movies that you can watch is minimal because so many are filled with moral rot, four-letter words, and brazen sex acts. The Internet is full of pornography, and when we make efforts to curb it, the courts strike them down. And so our kids are raised in this kind of garbage. Limbaugh: ...here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography, the Britney Spears or Madonna concerts or whatever... Sontag: ...most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate. Rich Lowry in National Review: ...it was shocking to see a large gloved man smiling in a picture with his arms crossed as he stood over a pile of naked Iraqi detainees, but there was something familiar about it too. The apotheosis of the strong. There was something familiar in the picture of Lynndie England, with a cigarette dangling from her lips, pointing her finger at the genitals of a naked detainee. We know what she's doing in that picture — she's trying to seem cool. She thinks that cruelty is a game, that the strong engage in it casually. Sontag: Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more -- contrary to what President Bush is telling the world -- part of ''the true nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life... Oliver North: ...for 13 or 14 days now, all we have seen on the front pages of America's newspapers is a group of obviously twisted young people with leashes and weird sex acts, the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus nowadays, being perpetrated by people in uniform. Roger Hedgecock, substitute host for Rush Limbaugh: ...I mean the more -- you know, I know this was the first day or two, I guess, that Rush was getting into this -- the more I think about it, the more he was right the first time. He said, "This is like -- this is like a, a, uh, a prank; this is like college; this is like fraternities; this is -- this is just these people. This is how they were raised." Sontag: From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's 1993 film, ''Dazed and Confused'' -- to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun.... To ''stack naked men'' is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on the mark. Is the culture at fault? Find me the violent video game (or action film or XXX Web site) with naked male monkey piles offered as entertainment or porn. Is modern life at fault? Shipboard flogging and precinct-house brutality predate Tarantino movies and Internet porn by a hell of a lot of years; even a couple of Sontag's examples date from before most of the Abu Ghraib MPs were born -- frat hazing goes way back, and Richard Linklater's semi-autobiographical Dazed and Confused is set in 1978.* These abuses happened because people who have far more power than the MPs wanted them to happen. ------ *Correction: It was set in 1976. (Thanks to SullyWatch for pointing that out.) posted by Steve M. | 2:33 PM | The Guardian reports on an Iraqi who was beaten to death in prison, probably because he wouldn't get interrogators off his back by making up stories about massive buried stockpiles of WMDs: ...The US military claimed ... that Dr [Mohammed Munim al-] Izmerly, a distinguished chemistry professor arrested after US tanks encircled his villa, had died of "brainstem compression". Dr Izmerly's sudden death after 10 months in American custody left his family stunned, not least because three weeks earlier they had visited him in the US prison at Baghdad airport. His 23-year-old daughter, Rana, recalled that he had seemed in "good health". The family commissioned an independent Iraqi autopsy. Its conclusion was unambiguous: Dr Izmerly had died because of a "sudden hit to the back of his head", Faik Amin Baker, the director of Baghdad hospital's forensic department, certified. The cause of death was blunt trauma. It was uncertain exactly how he died, but someone had hit him from behind, possibly with a bar or a pistol, Dr Baker confirmed yesterday.... He died sometime between January 11 and February 19, 2004. Think the autopsy will help the family get justice in "self-governing" Iraq? ...The family presented its autopsy findings to an Iraqi judge. "He told us, 'You can't do anything to the coalition. What happened is history,'" Ashraf said. We can argue till we're hoarse about the likelihood that torture will generate useful, accurate intelligence, and about the morality of torturing people to get such intelligence. But there's no disputing the fact that you can't learn very much from someone you've beaten to death. (Oh, and the family insists he was not a Saddam crony -- just a scientist who had to play ball with the Mukhabarat if he wanted permission to attend international conferences.) posted by Steve M. | 9:39 AM | Sunday, May 23, 2004 Yes, it was a damn wedding: AP: Video Shows Iraq Wedding Celebration A videotape obtained Sunday by Associated Press Television News captures a wedding party that survivors say was later attacked by U.S. planes early Wednesday, killing up to 45 people.... "There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. "There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too." But video that APTN shot a day after the attack shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around the bombed out tent. The wedding videotape shows a dozen white pickup trucks speeding through the desert escorting the bridal car — decorated with colorful ribbons. The bride wears a Western-style white bridal dress and veil.... The singing and dancing seems to go on forever at the all-male tent set up in the garden of the host, Rikad Nayef, for the wedding of his son, Azhad, and the bride Rutbah Sabah.... As expected, women are out of sight - but according to survivors, they danced to the music of Hussein al-Ali, a popular Baghdad wedding singer hired for the festivities. Al-Ali was buried in Baghdad on Thursday.... posted by Steve M. | 11:50 PM | Atrios linked this, so you may have already read it, but it's just astonishing: Did the Iranians feed the U.S. false information so we'd invade their enemy, Iraq? (And did Iran get secret information in the process?) Newsday says so: "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents. The Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing" by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years. How fast would the articles of impeachment be drawn up if it appeared that President Clinton or President Gore had sent young Americans to die on behalf of the Iranian mullahs? posted by Steve M. | 11:40 PM | I wasn't particularly impressed with Susan Sontag's New York Times Magazine cover story on Abu Ghraib, but I did appreciate this: Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession." (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3 -- common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 -- and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention declares, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." Has any journalist bothered to tell us this -- namely, that the U.S. has signed a convention specifically declaring that there can be no such thing as "a new kind of war" in which the rules against torture and degradation don't apply? **** (I've cut the rest of this post because I think I was misreading a portion of the article.) posted by Steve M. | 11:04 PM | Now that polls show that even Catholics are disgusted by this sort of thing, a bishop pretends he didn't really say what he said: Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark said on Friday that he was "deeply disappointed" that his recent criticism of Roman Catholic elected officials who supported abortion rights had been interpreted by some New Jerseyans as a political slap at Gov. James E. McGreevey. In an interview, Archbishop Myers said Mr. McGreevey was not the target of statements he had made in a pastoral letter saying that Catholic officeholders who did not share the Vatican's opposition to abortion should not seek communion. He said he had apologized to the governor for any misperception by the public. "I didn't name him specifically in the letter," Archbishop Myers said.... Here's the archbishop's problem: He and other like-minded bishops want to attack Kerry specifically, because Roe will be overturned if Bush wins. But they can't pinpoint Kerry because that gets into dodgy church-state issues. So the archbishop does what all the others have done: He conceals his attack on Kerry as an attack on a category of people. Then, when people come to the obvious conclusion that he's attacking the most prominent person in his state who falls into that category, he's simply horrified. Sorry, Padre -- I'm not sure I see a way around this one. posted by Steve M. | 10:31 PM | A New York Times story today reported this: Adel L. Nakhla, an Egyptian-American computer technician, found himself at Abu Ghraib prison last fall, working as a translator for the first time in his life. All around him, he witnessed fellow Arabs suffering humiliating abuses.... One of the Abu Ghraib photos that has been made public shows Mr. Nakhla, a big, beefy man who is 49 years old, standing over several naked prisoners stacked in a pile. He is reaching down, and his hand is shown on or near a prisoner's neck.... The Army report on the prison ... lists Mr. Nakhla as a suspect... But what I'm interested in is something Nakhla said that was quoted in Saturday's Times: "Why did you not report what you felt was abuse toward the prisoners?" an investigator asked Mr. Nakhla in January, after Specialist Darby had handed over the discs with photographs. "I have seen soldiers get in trouble for reporting abuse," Mr. Nakhla replied, "and I was scared. I didn't want to lose my job." Who? Who were the soldiers Nakhla saw get in trouble? Who punished them for reporting abuse? Shouldn't we be asking him that now? Shouldn't we be getting the names of everyone who saw abuse and was afraid to report it? Shouldn't the book be thrown at anyone who responded to reports of abuse with punishment for the whistleblower? That's what would be done if we really wanted to get to the bottom of this. posted by Steve M. | 10:17 PM | Friday, May 21, 2004 This week's late-afternoon-on-Friday announcement: The Pentagon has begun criminal investigations of at least 37 deaths involving detainees held by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials said Friday. There are 33 cases involved, the officials said, eight more than the military reported two weeks ago. The officials said they could not immediately say for sure the exact number of deaths involved. Eight pending cases have been classified as homicides involving suspected assaults of detainees before or during interrogation sessions, a senior military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Of the total number of cases, 30 were inside U.S.-run detention facilities and three were outside. Fifteen of the 30 cases were declared by U.S. authorities to be deaths by natural cause or of undetermined cause, the senior official said. Of the 15 other cases that happened inside detention facilities, four were categorized as justifiable homicides, two as homicides, and nine were still under active investigation, the official said. Eight of those nine have been classified as homicides involving suspected assaults on detainees before or during questioning. Six of the nine unresolved cases happened in Iraq including two at Abu Ghraib prison and three were in Afghanistan. The 33 total cases date from December 2002 to the present.... --AP Keep saying it to yourself: Just a few bad apples ... just the MPs in the pictures ... just for that short period of time ... just in that one prison ... posted by Steve M. | 7:14 PM | A Hooters restaurant in Florida is apparently holding a Little Miss Hooters contest. (Go to the link to see the billboard.) More information is here: We called this evening, asked for details. The contest is for girls 5 and under, and will require they be dressed in little orange spandex shorts, and a tied up Hooters t-shirt. Write to hooterspr@hooters.com if you find this as disgusting as I do. (And I'll give a rare thumbs-up to the folks at Free Republic who were appalled by this.) posted by Steve M. | 2:52 PM | Four people have been arrested for the Nick Berg beheading, AP reports. Not Zarqawi or other al-Qaeda allies -- these guys are Fedayeen Saddam: Four people have been detained in the killing of American Nicholas Berg, whose decapitation was captured on videotape, an Iraqi security official and a U.S. military official said Friday. The Iraqi official said the group that killed Berg was led by a relative of Saddam Hussein. The suspects were former members of Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen paramilitary organization, the Iraqi security official said on condition of anonymity.... Well, that suggests a simple explanation for why the blade-wielder in the video said he was Zarqawi but wore a mask: Maybe he was a Saddam loyalist trying to pin the blame on another group. (Another possibility, I guess, is that the Iraqi police are rounding up the usual suspects.) (Of course, folks like William Safire are going to reach yet another conclusion: See? Zarqawi claimed responsibility -- and Saddam loyalists were arrested! They're working together! Told ya! Baathists = jihadists! Saddam = 9/11! Q.E.D.! Sigh.) The alleged ringleader is named in the AP story: The group that was involved in the killing of Berg was led by Yasser al-Sabawi, a nephew of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi security official said.... Al-Sabawi was not among those arrested, the Iraqi official said. I Googled Al-Sabawi and all I found was this, from April 29, 2004: CPA Releases Former Regime ‘Criminals’ (Al-Adala) -- The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has freed some criminal of the former regime. They include former Minister of Interior Sameer al-Sheikhli, former head of intelligence Sadoon Shakir, and former private security officer and [sic] Yasir al-Sabawi. Also released were other symbols of the old regime like the former head of security office and some high ranking police and army officers. Some of the freed men immediately fled to Syria, close sources said. So did we let this guy go mere days before he and/or his associates killed Berg? posted by Steve M. | 10:53 AM | So, about the wedding party: Do you remember an earlier attack at Iraq's border with Syria? Do you remember how that turned out? Here's the Washington Post story from last June: ...U.S. officials backed away from their initial assessments of whether the attack early Thursday near the village of Dhib killed top officials in the former Iraqi government, saying they had picked up no indications since the attack that Saddam Hussein or his sons, Uday and Qusay, had been in the convoy.... Dhib, about 70 miles southwest of Qaim, is one of a handful of villages that dot Iraq's western desert... It sits just five miles from Syria, a border sufficiently porous for lucrative livestock smuggling that has permitted Dhib's residents to buy satellite dishes, generators, Toyota and Nissan pickups and about five satellite phones to facilitate their trade. Residents said that the village was abuzz with that trade last Wednesday.... Hamad said he recalled "continuous firing," targeting what the villagers said were four trucks used to transport livestock about five miles from the village, along the Syrian border.... ...At about 1:30 a.m., as the four trucks burned, the first of about five missiles struck Hamad's brick house, he said. Although everyone was sleeping outside, debris killed his sister-in-law, 20-year-old Hakima Khalil, and her daughter, Maha. ... Yup -- the military was trying to kill Saddam and his sons and instead was attacking sheep smugglers. Notice where the village is -- 70 miles southwest of Qaim. The wounded in that incident were taken to a hospital in Qaim. According to this story from today's L.A. Times about the attack on the wedding party, the wounded were taken to a hospital in Qaim. So it's the same region. Now, maybe the intel has improved in the past year, but the U.S. track record there doesn't seem very good. posted by Steve M. | 10:12 AM | And beyond Abu Ghraib, there's NBC's report (which Atrios linked last night) about another prison in Iraq: ...a top-secret site near Baghdad’s airport. The battlefield interrogation facility known as the “BIF” is pictured in satellite photos. According to two top U.S. government sources, it is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq’s prisons. A place where the normal rules of interrogation don’t apply, Delta Force’s BIF only holds Iraqi insurgents and suspected terrorists — but not the most wanted among Saddam’s lieutenants pictured on the deck of cards. These sources say the prisoners there are hooded from the moment they are captured. They are kept in tiny dark cells. And in the BIF’s six interrogation rooms, Delta Force soldiers routinely drug prisoners, hold a prisoner under water until he thinks he’s drowning, or smother them almost to suffocation.... ***** And, for balance, The Washington Post reports on this new release of what are apparently horrifying videos of Saddam-era brutality: Prisoners were shown being flogged and having fingers chopped off. One is shown being thrown from a roof, another about to be beheaded by a man wielding a sword. The full video shows the beheading and a man placing the severed head on the victim's prone body. Another scene shows a man's tongue being cut out. The next sound you hear, of course, will be conservatives attacking the "liberal media" for not showing every last frame of these videos. I think it would be reasonable to show some of this now. But remember: The right-wing argument sounds an awful lot like "Everybody does it" -- precisely the argument they denounced as immoral during Monicagate. posted by Steve M. | 8:08 AM | I gave you the Washington Post link below in haste last night. There's more -- a gallery with six newly obtained photos, some video of abuse, and a description of the video: The video begins with three soldiers huddled around a naked detainee, his thin frame backed against a wall. With a snap of his wrist, one of the soldiers slaps the man across his left cheek so hard that the prisoner's knees buckle. Another detainee, handcuffed and on his back, is dragged across the prison floor. Then, the human pyramid begins to take shape... The article describes more violence than is shown in the online video: In one video clip, five hooded and naked detainees stand against the wall in the darkness, each masturbating, with two other hooded detainees crouched at their feet. Another shows a prisoner handcuffed to the outside of a cell door. He repeatedly slams his head into the green metal, leaving streaks of blood before he ultimately collapses at the feet of a cameraman. Unfortunately, we're no closer than we've been to getting to the bottom of this -- we can't seem to establish who's really responsible, and I worry that cover-up will continue to succeed. This release of images may well reinforce the "few bad apples" message from the right. And these pictures aren't going to stop people on the right from talking about "frat hazing" -- the images are brutal, but once again the mainstream press declines to show us real blood. The words are worse, but it's the images that will have impact. posted by Steve M. | 7:29 AM | Thursday, May 20, 2004 Friday's Washington Post has horrific descriptions of Abu Ghraib brutality from prisoner statements taken in January. Not just Naked Monkey Pile. Rape of a teenage boy. Instrumental rape. Real violence and cruelty. It's what you knew went on in the prison, in detail. posted by Steve M. | 11:36 PM | Early on, we hired some really nice guys for the Iraqi prison system: A number of former state prison commissioners chosen by the Bush administration to establish a prison system in Iraq left their old posts after allegations of neglect, brutality and inmate deaths, an investigation by ABCNEWS has found. For example: Last year, the former head of Utah's prison system, Lane McCotter, was hired by the U.S. government to help set up Iraq's new prison system and train guards. He even led a tour of Abu Ghraib for U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who attended the reopening of the Baghdad prison. But in 1997, guards at a Utah prison, then under McCotter's charge, made a videotape showing the abuse of Michael Valent, a mentally ill inmate who allegedly would not follow orders. Valent was stripped naked, marched down the halls and, under an approved procedure at the time, placed in a special restraint chair, where he was left for 16 hours. "By the time he was finally released from that restraint chair, he developed blood clotting and, through a pulmonary embolism, died," said Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson.... John Armstrong, another member of the team sent to Iraq, served as head of the Connecticut prison system from 1995 to 2003. The tactics used by prison guards during his tenure were blamed in three inmate deaths. Videotapes made by guards showed prisoners who did not follow orders being restrained, smothered and beaten by guards during the time Armstrong ran the corrections department.... Read the story to find out more. (McCotter does note that he "was back in the United States before any inmates ever arrived" at Abu Ghraib.) posted by Steve M. | 9:40 PM | Syndicated right-wing columnist and talking head Cal Thomas lies about the media, apparently, in this column about our supposed anything-goes culture: The former governor of Oregon, Neil Goldschmidt, admits to having had sex with a 14-year-old girl when he was mayor of Portland. In most places that’s called statutory rape, but the Oregonian newspaper at first chose to categorize it as adultery. I went here for the collected Oregonian articles about the Goldschmidt scandal. Goldschmidt's own statement ran in the paper on May 6; it acknowledges that the girl was "a high-school student" and never uses the word "adultery" or any form of it. Apart from that, this is the earliest Oregonian story, from May 7: Goldschmidt confesses '70s affair with girl, 14 Former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt admitted Thursday that he had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl when he was 35 and mayor of Portland ... The Oregonian, as a general policy, doesn't identify victims of sex crimes. According to Oregon laws in effect in 1975, sexual intercourse with a girl under age 16 constituted third-degree rape, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. The statute of limitations at that time was three years from the commission of the crime.... No form of the word "adultery" appears anywhere in this article. A Google News search for "goldschmidt adultery" finds only the Cal Thomas column and this, from the May 9 Oregonian: When Gary Hart left the Democratic presidential race in 1987 after he was accused of adultery, Goldschmidt stayed out of public sight while reporters trolled the Capitol looking for local comment. "I remember a lot of speculation," said Chuck Bennett, an education lobbyist who was around during the Goldschmidt administration. "It was just a lot of people talking." Bennett said the talk was about rumored adult affairs. He said he heard nothing about Goldschmidt's involvement with an underage girl. Unless there's an earlier Oregonian piece on Goldschmidt that's not online, Cal Thomas is a liar. posted by Steve M. | 4:25 PM | INCAPABLE OF SHAME The Bush administration wants the U.N. Security Council to renew a controversial resolution exempting American peacekeepers from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court. Two years ago the same resolution was adopted unanimously after the United States threatened to veto U.N. peacekeeping missions, one by one.... ... the measure will probably reach the minimum nine votes needed for adoption in the 15-nation council, diplomats said. The draft resolution, introduced by the United States on Wednesday, would place U.S. troops and officials serving in U.N.-approved missions beyond the reach of the court. Specifically, it would exempt "current or former officials" from prosecution or investigation if the individual comes from a country that did not ratify a 1998 Rome treaty that established the tribunal.... --Reuters (Thanks to INTL-News for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 3:34 PM | I've been reading about the raid on Ahmad Chalabi's offices -- the New York Times story, the AP story, blog posts by Juan Cole and Kevin Drum. The U.S. is souring on Chalabi -- his intel was lousy; he's doing outreach to Iran. American money isn't going to him anymore. The stories suggest that there's a dispute about an investigation he's doing on his own into the UN's Oil for Food program. But I'm thinking of something else. This is wild speculation, but remember that, as was reported a year ago, Chalabi has 25 tonnes of intelligence documents detailing Saddam Hussein's relationship with foreign governments and Arab leaders. The files [were] seized by his Iraqi National Congress supporters from Ba'ath party offices and secret police stations... And recall that Chalabi's nephew, Salem Chalabi, is heading the Iraqi tribunal that will try Saddam Hussein and other aides. Is it possible that computers and documents were seized at Chalabi's offices out of fear that those files might contain something that's very embarrassing to the Bush administration, or members of it, or former GOP administrations? Something that would make the famous 1983 Rummy-Saddam handshake seem like the tip of the iceberg? Something we could count on Chalabi to keep under his hat back when he was our friend? Something especially embarrassing now, with Abu Ghraib fresh in our minds? Just a thought. posted by Steve M. | 1:15 PM | This is beyond belief: It's McCain vs. Hastert on meaning of sacrifice A 2-month-old House-Senate standoff over the 2005 budget burst into public acrimony Wednesday, when House Speaker Dennis Hastert questioned Sen. John McCain's credentials as a Republican and suggested that the decorated Vietnam War veteran didn't understand the meaning of sacrifice. ... On Tuesday, McCain gave a speech excoriating both political parties for refusing to sacrifice their tax cutting and spending agendas in a time of war. At the Capitol on Wednesday, Hastert shot back: "If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed (Army Medical Center) and Bethesda (Naval Hospital). There's the sacrifice in this country." ... --Washington Post via Omaha World-Herald McCain, of course, spent five and a half years being brutalized in a Vietnamese prison camp. Hastert? "...no Cheney, no Lott, no Hastert, no DeLay, none of them ever served." --Mark Shields on PBS, 2/11/04 Hastert, who has a book coming out in a couple of months and is already publicizing it, also snarked off about McCain to reporters: ...a reporter asked: "Can I combine a two issues, Iraq and taxes? I heard a speech from John McCain the other day..." Hastert: "Who?" Reporter: "John McCain." Hastert: "Where's he from?" Reporter: "He's a Republican from Arizona." Hastert: "A Republican?" And by astonishing coincidence, a new column entitled "Kerry, McCain Alleged to be 'Fast Friends' of Vietnamese Communists" just appeared at TownHall.com and CNSNews.com, which are widely read on the right. The article accuses McCain and Kerry of being complicit in Vietnamese human rights abuses -- though the ultimate accusers apparently don't have the guts to speak on the record: ..."Senators have complained to us that these guys are the fast friends of the Vietnamese and they've blocked any real attempt at reform or punishment for these types of abuses, and so Vietnam continues to get away with murder," [International Christian Concern President Jeff] King told CNSNews.com. When asked to name the senators who had complained, King quickly replied, "No way." But he added that, "It's not a political thing."... Oh, of course not. UPDATE: Oops -- almost left this out, from Maureen Dowd: Then Senator John Cornyn of Texas weighed in, suggesting that [Senator John] Warner, a Navy officer in World War II, a Marine lieutenant in the Korean War and a Navy secretary under Nixon, and Mr. McCain, who lived in a dirt suite at the Hanoi Hilton for five years, were not patriotic. Their "collective hand-wringing," Mr. Cornyn sniffed, could be "a distraction from fighting and winning the war." posted by Steve M. | 7:33 AM | Wednesday, May 19, 2004 William Bennett essentially lies about the media: Why is it that when shocking images might stir Americans to favor war -- like the beheading of an American citizen -- the journalists show great restraint? When those images have the opposite effect, why do journalists let them fly? Let me put this in context: The very day that the Muntada al-Ansar website distributed the images of the slaughter of Nick Berg, almost every media outlet went on record to say they would not show that slaughter. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC all said this, according to AP Television writer David Bauder.... ...Why do we not see the plastic shredders that humans were placed in under Saddam Hussein, sometimes head first, sometimes feet first? Why do we not see Hussein's torture chambers, which were operated as a matter of policy, and see instead only our abuse, which was an aberration? Why do we not see the mass graves of al-Hilla? Why do we only see our abuse and not their terror? Well, to answer the questions in the last paragraph first: We don't see the shredders because they may not have existed and they've only been described by one eyewitness. Whether or not you believe that witness, it's incontrovertible that neither he nor anyone else has an image of the shredder to offer. As for why we didn't see the torture chambers on the nightly news, I guess reports like this aren't enough for Bennett: On The Scene: An Iraqi House Of Horrors BAGHDAD, April 14, 2003 CBS' Dan Rather is in Baghdad, where he filed this report. U.S. soldiers are searching what remains of one of the biggest and most elaborate prisons in the world, one of Saddam Hussein's most notorious prisons, 18 miles west of Baghdad. Saddam Hussein never cut corners when it came to punishment.... "Prisoners were taken to watch executions. Anyone who cried was executed too," said a former political prisoner who spent nine years at Abu Ghraib. He recounts how he was tortured. "First the left hand and then the foot. Then a black hood on my head. Then they applied electricity." The apparatus is still in the prison.... And I guess stories like "Buried Horror in Babylon: Mass Grave Found South of Baghdad, Relatives Identify Loved Ones," which ran on ABC's World News Tonight a year ago, don't satisfy Bennett's thirst to see mass graves. But they wouldn't, would they? Bennett doesn't care that these stories ran just after Baghdad fell; he wants them to run all the time. As for the Nick Berg video, Bennett implies that the networks refused to show it. He cites David Bauder's article to prove this. Here's what Bauder actually said: The ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast networks said they did not plan to show anything beyond the opening shot of Berg alive on their evening news programs. "It's a pretty clear call for us," said Jon Banner, executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight." "I think the viewer will understand what happened to Mr. Berg. They won't have to sit through the graphic images." Bennett wants you to believe that we're seeing everything there is to see of abuse by Americans, while we see bowdlerized images when Americans are the victims. That's nonsense. The standard is the same: When blood is shed, the mainstream media make us all avert our eyes, whether it's a blade going into Nick Berg's neck or a dog's teeth going into an Iraqi prisoner's leg. posted by Steve M. | 3:52 PM | American culture is visual -- we respond far more readily to images than to words. As a result, an awful lot of Americans still think the prison torture scandal is just about a few bad apples who forced prisoners to play Nude Monkey Pile. And after the Nick Berg beheading, it's taboo to publish more prison images. So it almost doesn't matter that the words continue to be appalling, like these from the Denver Post: Brutal interrogation techniques by U.S. military personnel are being investigated in connection with the deaths of at least five Iraqi prisoners in war-zone detention camps, Pentagon documents obtained by The Denver Post show. The deaths include the killing in November of a high-level Iraqi general who was shoved into a sleeping bag and suffocated, according to the Pentagon report. The documents contradict an earlier Defense Department statement that said the general died "of natural causes" during an interrogation. Pentagon officials declined to comment on the new disclosure. Another Iraqi military officer, records show, was asphyxiated after being gagged, his hands tied to the top of his cell door. Another detainee died "while undergoing stress technique interrogation," involving smothering and "chest compressions," according to the documents. Details of the death investigations, involving at least four different detention facilities including the Abu Ghraib prison, provide the clearest view yet into war-zone interrogation rooms, where intelligence soldiers and other personnel have sometimes used lethal tactics to try to coax secrets from prisoners, including choking off detainees' airways. Other abusive strategies involve sitting on prisoners or bending them into uncomfortable positions, records show. "Torture is the only thing you can call this," said a Pentagon source with knowledge of internal investigations into prisoner abuses. "There is a lot about our country's interrogation techniques that is very troubling. These are violations of military law."... This is an important story. It's being discuused in blogs, but I'm afraid it's doomed to obscurity, for two reasons: no pictures accompany it and it wasn't published in New York or Washington. So read it and talk about it. posted by Steve M. | 2:05 PM | CHUTZPAH From a Reuters story titled "U.S. Military Vows to Keep Afghan Jails Secret": Accused of failing to tackle prison abuses in Afghanistan while rushing to contain the scandal in Iraq, the U.S. military in Kabul said it would review its secretive jails but vowed to keep them shut to the outside world. The families of two Afghans who died from wounds sustained in a U.S. detention center at Bagram, just north of Kabul, 18 months ago, are still waiting for the outcome of a U.S. investigation.... U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Tucker Mansager ... said the U.S. military had yet to respond to a May 10 request from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which has collected more than 40 recent complaints of mistreatment, for access to the main jail at Bagram. He also said journalists would not be allowed to see it, despite reporters being given access this month to Abu Ghraib, depicted in images of abuse of prisoners by American soldiers that sparked a backlash across the Arab world. "It's the coalition's continued policy to treat persons under confinement in the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. "Part of that spirit is to ensure that the persons under confinement are not subject to any kind of exploitation. It is the coalition's position that allowing media into the facilities would compromise that protection." The unmitigated gall. posted by Steve M. | 10:19 AM | The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. --Seymour Hersh Cambone graduated from Our Lady of Lourdes High School, in Poughkeepsie, in 1970 and later [attended] Catholic University... --Poughkeepsie Journal, 5/15/04 Think any bishop will ever suggest that Stephen Cambone should be refused communion? posted by Steve M. | 7:37 AM | Tuesday, May 18, 2004 Gay marriage? The editor of a Catholic newspaper says it's all your fault, you sick heterosexual sex maniacs, because you use birth control: Catholic World News Editor Cites Acceptance of Contraception as Leading to Current Gay Unions Situation Phil Lawler, editor of the Boston based Catholic World News and author of five books and numerous articles, has responded to today's beginning of legally sanctioned homosexual unions in Massachusetts. In his Phil's Forum for today, Lawler lays out the case that Christians themselves are to a large degree responsible for this logical outcome of the acceptance of contraception. Lawler writes, "The degradation of marriage did not begin with a Massachusetts court decision late last year. It began a few decades ago, when 'ordinary' married couples… began routinely using contraceptives. At that point, the typical American marriage-- which might have looked, from the outside, very much like that beautiful old union-- was itself based on acts of sexual perversion."... Lawler argues that because of the norm of contracepted sex Massachusetts citizens and others are "having a difficult time coming up with a persuasive argument why same-sex couples should not be entitled to their own preferred form of sterile sexual expression." His suggestion for the long term solution to reversing gay 'marriage' legalization is to "Go through your medicine cabinets, dressers, and bedside-table drawers. Gather all the contraceptives. Throw them in the trash, where they belong. If you're Catholic, go to Confession. Then, having put our own houses and homes in order, we can begin the long trek toward restoring the true meaning of marriage." Sorry I can't link to the article itself -- Catholic World News is a subscriber-only site. But please click the link above -- Lawler cites Freud, Gandhi, and a 1930 Washington Post editorial to make the case that sex without babies is perversion. posted by Steve M. | 5:25 PM | Well, you just knew Chuck "From God's Lips to My Ears" Colson would blame Abu Ghraib on porn: Why did it even occur to our soldiers today to molest and embarrass these prisoners sexually? I think it is in part because we live in a pornography-soaked culture. You can’t turn on the television without seeing it. The number of movies that you can watch is minimal because so many are filled with moral rot, four-letter words, and brazen sex acts. The Internet is full of pornography, and when we make efforts to curb it, the courts strike them down. And so our kids are raised in this kind of garbage. Then when they become MPs in a prison in Iraq, they don’t pull out the fingernails or set off loud radios to harass prisoners. Instead they strip them and make them pose in pretend sex acts -- just like pornography. And then they film it -- incredible. Yeah, right. Trained interrogators didn't tell the MPs how to sexually humiliate the prisoners. The MPs just made it all up on their own. I guess it's all the fault of that "nude rugby scrum" porn the kids are so into these days. posted by Steve M. | 2:16 PM | Martin Sieff of UPI suggests that the floodgates are opening, and explains why: Army, CIA want torture truths exposed ...three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it's payback time. Those three institutions are: The United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency and the old, relatively moderate but highly experienced Republican leadership in the United States Senate. ... intelligence and regular Army sources have told UPI that senior officers and officials in both communities are sickened and outraged by the revelations of mass torture and abuse, and also by the incompetence involved, in the Abu Ghraib prison revelations. These sources also said that officials all the way up to the highest level in both the Army and the Agency are determined not to be scapegoated, or allow very junior soldiers or officials to take the full blame for the excesses. ... [Seymour] Hersh has spearheaded the waves of revelations of shocking abuse. But other major U.S. media organizations are now charging in behind him to confirm and extend his reports. They are able to do so because many senior veteran professionals in both the CIA and the Army were disgusted by the revelations of the torture excesses. Now they are being listened to with suddenly receptive ears on Capitol Hill. Republican members in the House of Representatives have kept discipline and silence on the revelations. But with the exception of the increasingly isolated and embarrassed Senate Republican Leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, other senior mainstream figures in the GOP Senate majority have refused to go along with any cover-up.... Rumsfeld and his team of top lieutenants have therefore now lost the confidence, trust and respect of both the Army and intelligence establishments. Key elements of the political establishment even of the ruling GOP now recognize this.... posted by Steve M. | 12:03 PM | Oh, this is pathetic -- from Joel Mowbray's latest syndicated column, an attack on Seymour Hersh's article in the current New Yorker: The article is quite damning, that is, until the reader gets to the obligatory disclaimer. Buried 3,300 words inside a 4,500-word article is the following exoneration: "Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable." And farther down near the end was another: "The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or Gen. (Richard) Myers knew that atrocities were committed." "Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable"? Yes, Hersh says that. Is this exoneration of Rummy and the Bushies? Er, not exactly. Here's that statement in context: In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. "The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to [Undersecretary of Defense Stephen] Cambone," he said. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program." When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, "but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means." "The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or Gen. (Richard) Myers knew that atrocities were committed"? Yes, Hersh says that, too. But here's the context for that: The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, "it was their permission granted to do the SAP, generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses." ("The SAP" is the "special-access program" set up to conduct clandestine operations against al-Qaeda and unsavory interrogations of captured prisoners, a program Hersh says was extended to Iraq by Rumsfeld's Pentagon.) Come on, Joel -- can't you do better than that? posted by Steve M. | 9:32 AM | Monday, May 17, 2004 ABOUT THAT SARIN... From the BBC: ...a senior coalition source has told the BBC the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction or the escalation of insurgent activity. He said the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war and coalition officials were not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained. Iraq made this stuff year ago. No one disputes that. And the forgoing of the WMD programs was clearly done with extreme reluctance. Where are the stockpiles? If they existed, why weren't they used during the march to Baghdad? And why haven't they been carefully deployed since? posted by Steve M. | 8:28 PM | This story ran a week ago, but I just spotted it: State senate leader says he'll quit Catholic church Only days after the Newark archbishop called it dishonest for Catholic politicians to take communion if they favor abortion rights, a legislative leader said he will leave the Catholic church. State Senate Majority Leader Bernard Kenny, D-Hudson, 57, a former altar boy who regularly attended Ss. Peter and Paul Church in Hoboken until about a year ago, said he had considered leaving the church about two years ago because his views on several issues, including abortion, conflicted with the church.... ...he said he opposes church doctrine against abortion, stem-cell research, civil unions for gay people and the death penalty.... Archbishop Myers' five-page pastoral letter said it is "objectively dishonest" for Catholics who publicly dissent from church doctrine on abortion to receive the Eucharist.... Kenny said he met with the monsignor of Ss. Peter and Paul two days after learning of Myers' letter, asking what would happen if he approached the altar to receive communion there. "He said he would give me communion, but that he then would have asked to have met with me and ask me not to come again (for communion)," Kenny said.... --Jersey Journal The article says that Kenny's wife is staying in the church and receiving communion. I know what she's going through -- the Catholic Church scares the crap out of you practically from birth by saying you'll burn in hell for all eternity if you reject the True Faith -- but I'm sorry to hear she's staying. If a church were using a member of my family as a political football to help one party win elections, I absolutely would leave in solidarity. posted by Steve M. | 6:30 PM | FLASHBACK Christopher Hitchens, wagging his finger at anti-war liberals in Slate, December 31, 2002: ...many countries maintain secret police forces and inflict torture on those who disagree.... [R]elatively few states will take photographs or videos of the gang-rape and torture of a young woman in a cellar and then deposit this evidence on the family's doorstep. This eagerness to go the extra mile, as is manifested in Saddam Hussein's regime, probably requires an extra degree of condemnation. And if we are willing to say, as we are, that the devil is in the details, then it may not be an exaggeration to detect a tincture of evil in the excess. We could have a stab at making a clinical definition and define evil as the surplus value of the psychopathic -- an irrational delight in flouting every customary norm of civilization. posted by Steve M. | 4:57 PM | Worse and worse: They called it "bitch in a box". On a baking hot day last August, a black Mercedes sedan pulled up at the US army base in Ramadi and two US interrogators dragged an Iraqi man out of the boot. He was gasping for air. "They kind of had to prop him up to carry him in. He looked like he had been there for a while," said a US soldier who witnessed the Iraqi's arrival in the custody of American interrogators wearing desert camouflage but no identifying insignia.... The soldier who watched the gasping Iraqi emerge from the Mercedes said he saw a similar episode later in August. "That was the normal procedure for them when they wanted to soften up a prisoner: stuff them in the trunk for a while and drive them around," said the soldier, who asked not to be named. "The hoods I can understand, and to have them cuffed with the plastic things, that I could see. But the trunk episode, yes, I thought it was kind of unusual." He added: "It was like a sweatbox, let's face it. In Iraq, in August, it's hitting 120 degrees, and you can imagine what it was like in a trunk of a black Mercedes." ... --Guardian ***** ...For one period of about a month last year, he said, guards would take him every day to an interrogation room in chains, seat him, chain him to a ring in the floor and then leave him alone for eight hours at a time. 'The air conditioning would really be blowing - it was freezing, which was incredibly painful on my amputation stumps. Eventually I'd need to urinate and in the end I would try to tilt my chair and go on the floor. They were watching through a one-way mirror. As soon as I wet myself, a woman MP would come in yelling, "Look what you've done! You're disgusting." ' Afterwards he would be taken back to his cell for about three hours. Then the guards would reappear and in Guantanamo slang tell him he was returning to the interrogation room: 'You have a reservation.' The process would begin again. Dergoul also described the use of what was known as the 'short shackle' - steel bonds pulled tight to keep the subject bunched up, while chained to the floor. 'After a while, it was agony. You could hear the guards behind the mirror, making jokes, eating and drinking, knocking on the walls. It was not about trying to get information. It was just about trying to break you.' ... --Observer The second link is especially harrowing -- it's an interview with Tarek Dergoul, a British citizen who was released without charges after being held at Guantanamo for nearly two years. He says some of the abuse was videotaped. The spokesman for the Guantanamo Joint Task Force says such tapes exist. Senator Pat Leahy has said he wants to see them. (Links via Cursor.) posted by Steve M. | 1:47 PM | They're high-fiving and breaking out the champagne in Neocon Land: Sarin Nerve Agent Bomb Explodes in Iraq A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. Two people were treated for "minor exposure," but no serious injuries were reported. "The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy. "A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent," he said. The incident occurred "a couple of days ago," he said.... "The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War," Kimmitt said.... --AP Now, I did think Saddam had WMDs before the war -- I opposed the war in the belief that Saddam clearly wanted to play ball with the West and was no longer giving any thought to attacking the West with such weapons (and was boxed in anyway). But that isn't the point. Kimmitt implies that these are old Saddam weapons. If so, why weren't they used as U.S. forces approached Baghdad? Why weren't they used in the past year? Why only now? What reason do we have to believe that this is old sarin? Abu Musab Zarqawi, headquartered in the essentially autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, was reportedly making WMDs (ricin and cyanide) before the war (when it appears we chose not to attack him because he made such a nice smoking gun). Zarqawi seems to be rampant now in the anarchic failed state that is post-Saddam Iraq. Why shouldn't we suspect this is his sarin, made fresh? Of course, we're also free to wonder why the WMDs conveniently show up -- but apparently do no harm -- in the darkest moment, poll-wise, of Bush's presidency. ******** UPDATE: The CNN story is a bit clearer about Kimmitt's reason for believing this is a Saddam-era weapon: Kimmitt said the artillery round was of an old style that Saddam Hussein's regime had declared it no longer possessed after the Persian Gulf War.... Kimmitt said it appeared that whoever set up the roadside bomb was unaware that it contained the chemicals. "It was a weapon we believed was stocked from the ex-regime time," Kimmitt said. "It had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell, set up like an IED. When it exploded, it indicated that it had some sarin in it." I don't know what to make of this. U.S. analysis of Iraqi technology has been so off base that I'm deeply skeptical. There is some evidence that the administration and its allies want to revisit the WMD question -- a reader has pointed to this article by Kenneth Timmerman at David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine, which argues that there are WMDs in Iraq and a media conspiracy is concealing the truth. The articles sources are nearly all anonymous, and the story doesn't seem to have been picked up by mainstream right-wing media. So I remain a skeptic -- though maybe we are now encountering scattered, decrepit, decade-old Saddam WMDs. posted by Steve M. | 11:41 AM | WHILE ROME BURNS This is apparently a real press release: RNC Chairman Gillespie to Join WWE Superstars in Kicking Off 'Smackdown Your Vote' 5/17/2004 9:28:00 AM To: National and Assignment desks, Political Reporter Contact: Christine Iverson of the Republican National Committee, 202-863-8614 News Advisory: The Republican National Committee announced today that Chairman Ed Gillespie and "Reggie the Registration Rig" will be at the World Wrestling Entertainment's "Smackdown Your Vote!" event in San Diego Sports Arena today (May 17). Gillespie will attend a press conference with WWE stars at 2 p.m. PDT today (May 17) to highlight the Republican Party's commitment to registering new voters and reaching out to young Americans. Following the Press Conference, the RNC's 56-foot 18-wheeled voter registration rig will help register those attending WWE's Monday Night RAW Event. At the Press Conference, Gillespie will be joined by WWE Superstars Shawn Michaels, Ric Flair, Randy Orton, The Hurricane, Shelton Benjamin and Women's Champion Victoria. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. posted by Steve M. | 10:30 AM | This should make you angry: Angela Cabral lost her soldier son to a roadside bomb in Iraq - and now the U.S. government is trying to deport her.... The problem: She pleaded guilty to possession of drugs, thinking her only punishment would be 90 days in jail and probation. Instead, she is likely to be returned to Mexico and permanently barred from re-entering the United States. Cabral is one of a growing number of legal immigrants facing deportation after they had struggled to earn a "green card" with the precious promise: "Entitled to reside permanently and work in the U.S." They are being caught up in a post-Sept. 11 drive to clear the country of foreign criminals, legal or illegal. In many cases, including Cabral's, immigration judges are barred from showing mercy. The law requires deportation for most drug possession charges, even for the mother of a dead hero.... Her two youngest children, ages 14 and 9, will have to choose between living with their mother or in their native United States. For now, they are staying with their 21-year-old sister, Rosio, in Kansas.... And before anyone starts asking what the hell all these damn immigrants are doing in our country in the first place, you should know this about the dead soldier: He was the only one of Angela's five children not born in the United States. "He extended his enlistment in January to get his citizenship," said his widow. Juan planned a career in the Army. He left two children; a third died last year at the age of 6 months. (Link from Today in Iraq.) posted by Steve M. | 10:00 AM | Once you know (from Newsweek and The New Yorker) just how long it's been official U.S. policy that the Geneva rules on prisoner torture are "obsolete" (because 9/11 Changed Everything), the timing of this seems a bit easier to understand: (New York, May 6, 2002) ...In an unprecedented diplomatic maneuver, Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman is expected to announce today that the Bush administration does not consider itself bound by President Clinton's December 31, 2000 signature on the treaty to create a permanent war crimes tribunal.... The U.S. government has said that it fears U.S. servicemembers or officials could be brought before the court in politically motivated cases.... Oh, and Frank Rich made a nice catch yesterday, even though as he wrote he presumably didn't know what The New Yorker and Newsweek were about to report: In one particularly embarrassing illustration of American hypocrisy, we're reminded of how Donald Rumsfeld berated the Arab channel for violating the Geneva Convention by broadcasting pictures of American prisoners of war. By the time of his outburst -- March 2003 -- we were very likely already violating the Geneva Convention ourselves. posted by Steve M. | 9:35 AM | Sunday, May 16, 2004 Yikes -- I can't even read my own links properly: I mentioned a couple of days ago that Kerry leads Bush 49%-42% in Ohio, according to one poll -- but I reversed the 2000 Ohio result: Bush beat Gore there 50%-45% in 2000. So Dems are 12 points ahead of where they were in 2000 in Ohio. (Thanks to the readers who caught this.) posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | In his recent review of Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud in The New York Times Book Review, Bush-backer Jonathan Tepperman ignored the book's most dramatic episode. Odd? Not really, Tepperman insists. In the letters column of today's Book Review, Tepperman defends the omission: I chose not to mention Unger's account of the emergency evacuation of Saudi royals from American soil following Sept. 11 not because of any political agenda, but because he provides no proof that there was anything untoward about the White House's helping prominent Saudis leave the country during a dangerous time. Yeah, golly, without proof that it was "untoward," why would anyone find that suspicious and feel it was worth writing about? posted by Steve M. | 9:58 PM | I heard Bush's radio address yesterday. Sometimes I think he does this stuff just to piss me off: Good morning. This week, our nation was sickened by the murder of an American civilian, Nicholas Berg. The savage execution of this innocent man reminds us of the true nature of our terrorist enemy, and of the stakes in this struggle. The terrorists rejoice in the killing of the innocent, and have promised similar violence against Americans, against all free peoples, and against any Muslims who reject their ideology of murder. Their barbarism cannot be appeased, and their hatred cannot be satisfied. There's only one way to deal with terror: We must confront the enemy and stay on the offensive until these killers are defeated.... "Enemy" -- singular. As if everyone who's fighting us is part of one unified terrorist force. He's unfit to hold office just for continue to spread this lie. (By the way, Kerry gave the response. It was good.) posted by Steve M. | 9:45 PM | Friday, May 14, 2004 Limbaugh really is a pig, isn't he? Senator Kennedy, ladies and gentlemen, said that he didn't need to look at any of these other [Iraq prison] pictures. He can just have Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi act them out for him. I'm making that up. It's a joke. posted by Steve M. | 6:21 PM | This is odd: Ashcroft: No Berg Terror Link As the family of slain American Nicholas Berg gathered for the memorial service at a West Chester synagogue Friday, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that U.S. authorities investigated Nicholas Berg for a possible connection to terrorists but determined there was no link. CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports U.S. officials said the FBI questioned Berg, a 26-year-old American civilian who was beheaded in Iraq, in 2002 after a computer password Berg used in college turned up in the possession of Zacarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative arrested shortly before Sept. 11 for his suspicious activity at a flight school in Minnesota.... "The suggestion that Mr. Berg was in some way involved in terrorist activity, or may have been linked in some way to terrorist activity, is a suggestion that we do not have any ability to support and we do not believe is a valid one," Ashcroft said at a news conference. The 2002 investigation determined that an e-mail address once used by Berg apparently was obtained by the Moussaoui acquaintances while Berg was briefly an engineering student at the University of Oklahoma in 1999.... And for what it's worth, they actually met: The slain man's father, Michael Berg, told reporters that his son met Moussaoui while riding the bus to classes, and had allowed the suspect to use his computer.... Strange coincidence -- I guess. posted by Steve M. | 6:10 PM | I guess this is just tasteless silliness, but I'm here to report that, for whatever it's worth, both Pravda and Al Jazeera have questioned the authenticity of the Nick Berg video (as has this guy). The thesis? Zarqawi has a prosthetic leg, but the tape's alleged Zarqawi seems limber. Zarqawi identifies himself by name on the tape but wears a mask, presumably to hide his identity. There's not enough blood. And more -- go to the links if you want the whole rundown. (And here's a site where you can see the beheading, if you can bear it.) (UPDATE: That link doesn't work. Try this if you must.) And on a less conspiratorial note, there's Miles O'Brien's interview with Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs, which I guess a lot of you have already seen. First, on the question of Zarqawi's accent: O'BRIEN: Well, let me ask you this. You've had a chance to really listen to this tape and get a sense who might be responsible, just by deciphering, say, accents. And certainly, there in the Arab world, they're very attuned to that. And given the fact of who this may or may not be, does that have some effect on how it is being played? NASR: Yes, and if you listen to these voices that we're hearing on Arab networks, Iraqis are condemning this execution. And they're saying these are foreigners. These are not Iraqis. They do not represent us and so forth. Now, of course, the original claim was that Zarqawi is the actual man who performed this execution. Our experts listened to the accent, as you said, and they determined the accent is not Jordanian... O'BRIEN: He is a Jordanian who is working supposedly, allegedly, at the behest of al Qaeda in Iraq. So go ahead. NASR: Right, he is very close to bin Laden, and works, you're right, as an agent of al Qaeda in Iraq. Now, the accent is not Jordanian so that takes the Jordanian element out of the story immediately. And on the question of the U.S. translation of the tape: O'BRIEN: ... You did a very careful translation of your own, of the statement. And in it, you see no reference to al Qaeda. And yet the official U.S. government translation does. Explain how that happened. NASR: Oh, I find it very interesting, because out of the blue, there is a mention of al Qaeda on the U.S. government translation. It says: "Does al Qaeda need any further excuses?" Any speaker of the Arabic language is going to notice a difference between the word al Qaeda, which means "the base," and al qaed, which means "the one sitting, doing nothing." My translation says: "Is there any excuse for the one who sits down and does nothing?" Basically they're telling people, you have no excuse for not doing anything, for not acting and defending Islam and so forth. Whereas the U.S. government translation has this factual error, I'm sure it's an honest mistake, but basically it sort of adds al Qaeda to the statement, which is not on the statement. Zarqawi has a presumably easily recognizedfacial scar as well as a prosthetic leg. That would explain the need for a mask, if the beheader wasn't Zarqawi. I think whoever produced this tape wants us to believe Zarqawi did the killing, but Zarqawi didn't. Does his organization want us to feel awe at his brazenness, to believe that he killed an American with his bare hands even as America has a price on his head? That's one explanation that doesn't require you to believe that the U.S. government taped a hoax execution as a sick way to try to drive Abu Ghraib from the front page. posted by Steve M. | 4:50 PM | I don't know if the Colorado Springs bishop quoted in the post below is really representative of church thinking -- the New York Times article suggests he isn't (gratifyingly, L.A.'s Cardinal Mahony is resisting the politicization of communion, as is D.C.'s Cardinal McCarrick), but if this keeps up, at a certain point it will seem as absurd to stay in the Catholic Church if you support abortion rights, gay rights, or stem cell research as it is to stay in the Republican Party if you're gay. We liberals sometimes snicker at gay conservatives who feel shocked and betrayed when members of "their" party, the GOP, attack them -- but is it any less absurd to stay in a church that hates your beliefs? I've heard all the talk about the importance of staying in a community of faith; well, I left the Catholic Church when I was fourteen and I'm doing just fine, thank you. A line is being drawn in the sand -- it really might be time for non-conservative Catholics to think about taking their spiritual business elsewhere. posted by Steve M. | 3:01 PM | The Roman Catholic bishop of Colorado Springs has issued a pastoral letter saying that American Catholics should not receive communion if they vote for politicians who defy church teaching by supporting abortion rights, same-sex marriage, euthanasia or stem-cell research.... "Anyone who professes the Catholic faith with his lips while at the same time publicly supporting legislation or candidates that defy God's law makes a mockery of that faith and belies his identity as a Catholic," Bishop Sheridan wrote.... --New York Times Funny thing -- this bishop apparently never noticed that it was a sin to vote for pro-choice, pro-stem-cell-research candidates until the last year of the last term of Colorado's pro-choice, pro-stem-cell-research senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell. Who just so happens to be a Republican. posted by Steve M. | 2:13 PM | Following the sterling example of Senator James Inhofe, another GOP member of Congress shrugs off Abu Ghraib: U.S. Rep. Steve King of Iowa said Thursday that Iraqi prisoner abuse amounted to little more than "hazing" and called for Democrats to stop criticizing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.... "What amounts to hazing is not even in the same ballpark as mass murder," said King, who has gained a reputation as an outspoken conservative in the Iowa Legislature and in Congress.... --Des Moines Register Once again, for those, like Congressman King, with bad reading-comprehension skills: JACK REED: ...Let me put it this way. 72 hours without regular sleep, sensory deprivation which would be a bag over your head for 72 hours. Do you think that's humane? And that's what this says, a bag over your head for 72 hours. Is that humane? --question posed to Paul Wolfowitz in Senate hearings yesterday The now-former prisoner, Saddam Saleh Aboud, 29, said that escalated into a threat of rape by an American soldier named Ivan in the 1-A block of Abu Ghraib prison. Then, he said, he was chained in a sitting position to the bars of a cell for 23 hours in a day. Loud music thumped, he said. He urinated where he sat. Every few days, he said, he was uncuffed for other treatments: douses of cold water, barking dogs, something called "the scorpion," in which his arms were cuffed to his legs, behind his back.... Mr. Aboud's allegations of the methods of abuse largely squared with those in General Taguba's report.... --New York Times today Lawmakers who viewed hundreds of images of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners said Wednesday that the photographs were even more graphic than they had expected, and included pictures of forced sexual acts between male detainees... ...Among the most shocking images, several said, was a video of a male detainee repeatedly banging into a cell door, until he collapsed. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said it appeared that the man had a rope lashed around his waist and that someone was pulling him toward the door.... ...Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell... said the photographs also showed dogs snarling at cowering prisoners; other lawmakers said some prisoners appeared to have dog bite wounds and abrasions.... --New York Times yesterday posted by Steve M. | 11:48 AM | So, if Zarqawi is now more of a menace than bin Laden, as Arlen Specter suggests, how did we get to this point? After all, Zarqawi was in Iraq while Saddam was in power. Yes, he was in the essentially autonomous Kurdish region, but still: if Saddam was the most dangerous sponsor of terror, and Zarqawi was in his country, and now Saddam is gone, why is Zarqawi evidently more dangerous now? Why wasn't Zarqawi a bigger threat than bin Laden before the Afghan war? After all, it's an article of faith for Cheney and Wolfowitz and Perle and their ilk that terrorism on a large scale requires a state sponsor -- a state like Saddam's Iraq. But instead we now seem to have Zarqawi's rise -- here he is, apparently beheading Nick Berg and masterminding suicide bombings in Iraq -- despite the fact that he's not occupying comfortable digs in a state run with pitiless efficiency by an evil dictator. In fact, if Zarqawi is more dangerous now, it's because he's headquartered in a failed state -- Iraq, the Iraq we made. Iraq is now, for Zarqawi, what Afghanistan (and the Sudan before it) were for al-Qaeda (and what, presumably, the no-man's-land on the Afghan-Pakistani border is for al-Qaeda now) -- a lawless place where it's possible to operate a lawless enterprise. So we went to Iraq to stop terrorism, and we made Iraq a nice little failed state where Zarqawi can thrive. posted by Steve M. | 9:25 AM | Thursday, May 13, 2004 It doesn't seem that long ago that a confession and a DNA match proved that the young men convicted in the Central Park Jogger case had given false confessions. At the time, a number of reporters talked to experts and found that false confessions are fairly common -- even when, as in the jogger case, there was no violence or abuse in the questioning. So if even nonviolent interrogations can produce suspect results, why the hell are we abusing, and in some cases apparently torturing, prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo, and (as The New York Times reported today) the "places unknown" where we're holding those suspected of being al-Qaeda higher-ups? Are we getting anything out of this? The Times, for instance, describes "water boarding" -- "a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown" -- and says it's been done to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. There's a strong suggestion that similar cruelties are being doled out to other al-Qaeda suspects. Is it helping at all? It didn't stop Bali. It didn't stop Madrid. And abuse in Iraq and Gitmo and parts unknown has done nothing to curtail the activities of al-Qaeda ally Zarqawi and others hostile to U.S. interests. Beyond moral questions, what the hell good does it do? Some fearful suspects, like the Central Park Jogger suspects, will say whatever they think will end an interrogation. If you can't trust the results of interrogations under moderate duress, what's the point of torture -- other than, perhaps, to show that, in the Muslim world, we're the alpha dogs now? posted by Steve M. | 11:16 PM | An American Research Group poll says Kerry's beating Bush in Ohio, 49%-42%. That's a bigger lead than Gore's 2000 lead in Ohio. (Gore beat Bush 50%-46%.)* Oh, and this is gratifying: Kerry does better among Democrats than Bush does among Republicans Isn't the conventional wisdom that Democrats are lukewarm about Kerry while Republicans think Bush can heal the sick and raise the dead? *(UPDATE: Damn -- I can't even read my own links. Bush beat Gore 50%-46% in Ohio in 2000, not the other way around.) posted by Steve M. | 6:12 PM | There's some new criticism of the Bush administration's missile defense system (which, as you may know, was the focus of a speech Condoleezza Rice planned to give on 9/11). This is from the Reuters story: The multibillion-dollar U.S. ballistic missile shield due to start operating by Sept. 30 appears incapable of shooting down any incoming warheads, an independent scientists' group said on Thursday. A technical analysis found "no basis for believing the system will have any capability to defend against a real attack," the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a 76-page report titled Technical Realities. ...The Missile Defense Agency "appears to be picking numbers out of thin air," the report said of past Pentagon assertions of a high probability of shooting down targets.... The Union of Concerned Scientists has more here. I haven't read the full text of the report, but I glanced at the executive summary and this critique of the missile tests jumped out: ... the endgame conditions have been unrealistic. Since the tests used a prototype two-stage interceptor, the closing speed between the kill vehicle and mock warhead was artificially low by as much as a factor of two. The defense used information from either a GPS receiver or a C-band beacon on the mock warhead to determine its position, and this was used to provide the kill vehicle with very accurate tracking data. The new Pacific test bed, coupled with the new three-stage interceptor, will allow the MDA [Missile Defense Agency] to conduct tests under more realistic conditions. However, the test bed alone will not address the lack of realism in flight testing, nor is it needed to address the key realism issues: testing without a priori information, under unscripted conditions, and against realistic countermeasures. The MDA flight test program through September 2007 will not include countermeasures that the Pentagon’s director of operational testing and evaluation has identified as simple for the enemy to implement. In fact, the MDA has no current plans to conduct tests under unscripted conditions, nor is it clear that such operationally realistic testing will ever be conducted. Sounds pretty fraudulent to me. posted by Steve M. | 12:14 PM | G.O.P. Got Most Money From Drug-Card Company Workers Employees at 28 firms and their parent companies certified by the Bush administration to be national distributors of discount prescription drug cards contributed about $1.8 million to Republican candidates in this year's election, a study by a group that monitors campaign donations has found. The contributions, which included $275,000 to President Bush's re-election campaign, represent about 71 percent of the $2.5 million these companies gave to candidates from both parties, according to the study, done in March by the Center for Responsive Politics.... Officials at the department said there was no connection between contributions and approvals. "There's no connection here whatsoever," said William A. Pierce, a department spokesman..... --New York Times Surprised? posted by Steve M. | 11:07 AM | Why does Bush hate the troops? From yesterday's Newsday, via AP: Wounded soldiers say slow Army trucks left them exposed to attack When Troy Mechanick and Robert Hemsing left for Iraq, they were told their New York Army National Guard unit would be equipped with fully armored vehicles. Instead, the two men found themselves last month traveling in a slow-moving five-ton diesel truck that, they say, made them vulnerable to an Iraqi ambush that left them seriously wounded and claimed the life of one of their friends. "We were lied to, and I'm saying that not for myself but for the others still over there," said Mechanick, a sergeant from Hudson Falls, N.Y. While questions about insufficient armor for troops in Iraq have centered around unarmored Humvees, Mechanick and Hemsing say the use of Army five-ton trucks to transport personnel leaves soldiers even more exposed to attack. Mechanick and about a dozen soldiers were ambushed Easter Sunday when a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, struck their diesel truck. Killed in the attack was Pfc. Nathan Brown of South Glens Falls, N.Y., a friend of both men.... The soldiers said when they first arrived in Iraq, they had armored Humvees. But those vehicles were switched to other units, and Mechanick began riding in Army five-ton trucks, which are bigger, slower, and offer less protection. "Our nickname for the five-tons was `RPG magnets,"' said Mechanick, 32. "It was only a matter of time before we were hit, and we knew it." ... "A slow-moving big vehicle like that? You've got to be an idiot not to be able to hit it with an RPG," said Hemsing, 21, of Glens Falls, N.Y.... "The fact is, the five-ton is very, very slow," said Mechanick, who suffered extensive injuries on his left side and lost a finger in the attack. "I'm angry that Nate died," said Hemsing, who expects to spend months at Walter Reed recovering. "I'm not supposed to be in a friggin' hospital. I should be in Iraq with my buddies," he said.... Either we should fight this damn war with adequate troops and materiel or we should get the hell out. posted by Steve M. | 10:08 AM | All of a sudden, it's conventional wisdom that John Kerry has a very good chance of winning. Mark Mehlman, in The Hill yesterday: "So Mark, how well is John Kerry doing?" "Better than any challenger in modern times has ever been doing at this point in this race!"... In the latest Gallup poll, John Kerry leads George Bush by five points among registered voters when Nader is included, and by 6 when he is not. How do we know just how strong a showing that is for Kerry? ...No challenger has ever done as well against an elected incumbent at this point in the cycle. Howard Fineman in Newsweek: ...politics is a game of comparison in which timing and context are all. And given where the war in Iraq is right now, the Kerry flips may matter less than where he flopped. In the new Gallup survey, Kerry and Bush are running neck and neck on the question of who can better handled the situation there. If the president can't handle it - and the doubts are growing - then what choice will voters have come November? Why not a guy with personal experience on a real battlefield who sounds like he can deal with the diplomats? That’s the theory. And it’s one that Bush operatives are worried about more than they say.... Andrew Kohut, in yesterday's New York Times: ...There is no reason to expect a one-to-one relationship between public disaffection with the incumbent and an immediate surge in public support for his challenger. President Jimmy Carter's favorable rating in the Gallup surveys sank from 56 percent in January to 38 percent in June, yet he still led Ronald Reagan in Gallup's horse-race measures....It was not until the two men held a televised debate eight days before the election that Ronald Reagan gained legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate. Similarly, in May 1992 President George H. W. Bush had only a 37 percent approval rating according to a Times Mirror Center survey, but the same poll showed him with a modest lead, 46 percent to 43 percent, over Bill Clinton. Only the Democratic convention and the debates brought about an acceptance of Mr. Clinton (even though his negative ratings were higher than Mr. Kerry's are now). It took a long time for him to be seen as an acceptable alternative to Mr. Bush.... Mr. Kerry's lack of progress should not, for now, be cause for concern to Democrats. Public opinion about Mr. Bush is the far more important barometer - and if it remains low, Mr. Kerry will have a chance to make his case. But at the New York Post, Eric Fettmann is still on the island fighting for the Emperor: DEM PANIC ON KERRY May 13, 2004 -- JUST 10 weeks ago, when John Kerry came out of nowhere to vault ahead of the Democratic presidential field and leave his rivals choking in his dust, conventional wisdom had it that President Bush was certainly a goner and that Kerry should start writing his inaugural address. Now, with Bush showing surprising resiliency in the face of probably the most politically damaging months of his presidency, some Democrats are starting to push the panic button... His sources? A 2003 quote from The Boston Globe, a 2002 quote from Bill Keller of The New York Times ... yeah, that all seems up to date, right? Plus that same damn Village Voice article every other Kerry basher quotes (er, James Ridgeway's pretty far to the left -- he hates Democrats as much as Rush Limbaugh does). Move on, guys. "Kerry panic" is so last month. posted by Steve M. | 7:42 AM | Wednesday, May 12, 2004 Bush approval rating: 44%. Has any sitting president ever been elected with an approval rating this low six months before November? posted by Steve M. | 7:17 PM | BOYKIN A Senate hearing into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was told on Tuesday that Lt. Gen. William Boykin, an evangelical Christian under review for saying his God was superior to that of the Muslims, briefed a top Pentagon civilian official last summer on recommendations on ways military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners. Critics have suggested those recommendations amounted to a senior-level go-ahead for the sexual and physical abuse of prisoners, possibly to "soften up" detainees before interrogation -- a charge the Pentagon denies. Boykin has declined comment.... --Reuters (Link via Seeing the Forest.) posted by Steve M. | 2:36 PM | Remember hearing that Bush and the Republicans had coopted the Medicare issue with their snazzy prescription-drug plan, delighting seniors and thus dealing a critical blow to Democrats' election hopes in 2004? Well, things are working out a bit differently, as The New York Times reports: 73 Options for Medicare Plan Fuel Chaos, Not Prescriptions ..."Even the person who came to explain it to us didn't understand it," said Mary Shen, 77, at the Whittaker Senior Center on Manhattan's Lower East Side. "It's not fair to expect seniors, who have enough difficulties already, to have to figure this out." Shirley Brauner, 75, pushed a metal walker through the center's lunchroom. "All I've got to say is they confuse the elderly, including me," she said. "I'm furious. They're taking advantage of the seniors. How can the seniors understand it?" ... "What it's like is a bunch of confusion," said Katharine Roberts, 77, who said she had not been to a movie in six years, in part because of her drug expenses. "You might find you really need three cards, and you can only choose one." ...[Eighty-five year-old Florence] Daniels did not use the government Web site to compare drug cards, in part because she cannot afford a computer. "I'm trying to absorb all the information, but it's ridiculous," she said. "Not just ridiculous, it's scary. If there was a single card and it was administered by Medicare, and it got the cost of drugs down - wonderful, marvelous. But with these cards, the only thing we know is that we'll have to pay money to other people to administer what we can get and can't get."... Sydney Bild, 81, a retired doctor in Chicago, ... said his main objection to the new plans was that companies could change prices on drugs, or change the drugs covered. Medicare requires plans to cover only one drug in each of 209 common categories. Consumers can change cards only once a year. Committing to a card is "like love - it's a sometime thing," Dr. Bild said. "What if I chose one? They could drop my drugs two weeks later." ... Domestic mission accomplished! posted by Steve M. | 2:26 PM | NEW YORK POST CONDEMNS BUSH ADMINISTRATION FOR IGNORING AL-QAEDA Well, not exactly, but that's an unintended subtext of this Post editorial about the beheading of Nick Berg: Some people - some Americans - have forgotten about 9/11. ...folks truly have lost sight of what the war is about. Yesterday they got a shocking reminder. And now they know: This war cannot be waged with half-measures. It can end only with the total annihilation of those who practice butchery and barbarism. Those who have set as their goal the destruction of America. There is no negotiating with such people. There can be no compromise with those who mean to destroy us. Last March, of course, NBC reported that the Bush administration did, in fact, "compromise" in 2002 and 2003 in the case of Abu Musab Zarqawi, who's now claimed responsibility for the Berg beheading -- and the administration did so because going after Zarqawi would interfere with Priority #1, the campaign against the non-terrorist Saddam: In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide. The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council. "Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn't do it," said Michael O'Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution. Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe. The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq. "People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president's policy of preemption against terrorists," according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey. In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq. The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it. Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam. The real point of the Post editorial, of course, is to bash us liberals for failing to support the war against Saddam. But I certainly support an ongoing all-out war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. And my government apparently doesn't. (NBC link via Daily Kos.) posted by Steve M. | 11:19 AM | Prison torture -- yes, less horrific than beheading, but absolutely not "horseplay" -- is apparently standard operating procedure in prisons run by our Iraqi allies: Iraqi guards are torturing prisoners in the south of Iraq and see such brutalisation as part of the job, an Italian military commander was quoted as saying on Wednesday. Italy, which has some 2,700 troops in Iraq, has said it was unaware of U.S. abuse of prisoners, but the military chief acknowledged that abuse in Iraqi-run prisons was common knowledge. "We sometimes saw detainees who were half dead with iron burns on their bodies and terrifying bruises from beatings," Colonel Carmelo Burgio said in an interview with Corriere della Sera newspaper published on Wednesday. Asked if Italian forces complained to the Iraqi guards he said: "Of course, but they were amazed that we were scandalised. For the Iraqi police it is normal practice to greet detainees with 30 lashes".... --Reuters The beheading of Nick Berg seems to be effectively (and inappropriately) rendering prison torture a non-story, but this is shameful nonetheless. posted by Steve M. | 10:57 AM | MORAL CLARITY Governor George E. Pataki and First Lady Libby Pataki today took part in New York’s 10th Annual Governor’s Prayer Breakfast at the Empire State Plaza Convention Center in Albany.... Program participants at this year’s 10th Anniversary Prayer Breakfast included: ... Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight, Knights of Columbus.... --press release at Governor Pataki's state Web site, May 11, 2004 Knights Of Columbus Leader Tells Member Families To Vote Pro-Life Catholics not only have a right to join in the discourse on public policy issues like abortion, says Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson, they have a duty to do so. "Whether it is in the halls of Congress, in Parliament, in state capitols or city halls, we must speak out and encourage others to speak out." As Catholics and as citizens, he said, we must "work for the common good of society." Anderson made his remarks to more than 2,000 Knights from throughout the United States and elsewhere gathered in Anaheim for the Catholic fraternal service organization's 120th annual meeting. The Knights of Columbus has been a leader in the pro-life movement for more than a quarter-century. Anderson is a member of the Vatican-based Pontifical Academy for Life, appointed to the group by Pope John Paul II in 2002. The Knights also underwrites the annual budget of the education and information office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Pro-Life Secretariat.... --Catholic Exchange story, August 11, 2002 Apparently Anderson's bishop forgot to tell him not to participate in the prayer breakfast with the pro-choice, pro-gay rights Pataki. (And, by the way, apparently no Catholic bishop has chastised Laura Bush, who gave the keynote address at the breakfast.) posted by Steve M. | 8:15 AM | Tuesday, May 11, 2004 Can someone please explain to me what language this sign is written in? It certainly isn't English. Bushese, perhaps? posted by Steve M. | 11:09 PM | I'm not grasping this -- why was Nick Berg held in custody by Americans shortly before his al-Qaeda captors beheaded him? Michael Berg [Nick's father] lashed out at the U.S. military and Bush administration, saying his son might still be alive had he not been detained by U.S. officials in Iraq without being charged and without access to a lawyer. Nick Berg, a small telecommunications business owner, spoke to his parents on March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30. But Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days. His father, Michael, said his son wasn't allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer. FBI agents visited Berg's parents in West Chester on March 31 and told the family they were trying to confirm their son's identity. On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day Berg was released. He told his parents he hadn't been mistreated. Michael Berg said he blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son's death. He said if his son hadn't been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave the country before the violence worsened. "I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights this thing has caused," he said. "I don't think this administration is committed to democracy." The Bergs last heard from their son April 9, when he said he would come home by way of Jordan. --AP I have nothing to add -- I don't understand.... posted by Steve M. | 7:00 PM | Media Matters for America tracks Rush Limbaugh's learning curve: LIMBAUGH: Even this latest picture of a dog and a nude Iraqi -- you seen that one? A couple of Americans are holding -- it looks like German Shepherd, some kind of vicious big dogs, the dogs are barking, bow wow arf arf arf, this big dog -- you know and the Iraqi prisoner is cowering there in fear, he's all nude. And the picture caption "Dog attacks Iraqi." No, the dog isn't attacking anyone, the dog's on a leash. The dog is scaring an Iraqi prisoner. [gasp] "No! We're scaring them, too? Is that allowed in the Geneva Convention?! We're scaring then with dogs?" Yes, my friends we are. The dog didn't attack anybody. The dog's not attacking anybody. The dog's on a leash. Both of them are. I've seen the pictures. ... [... about 35 minutes later ...] LIMBAUGH: Apparently, ladies and gentleman, I need to offer a modification. Apparently, the pictures that are, the picture going around of the uh, the nude Iraqi picture cowering in fear of a couple of dogs. The caption of that picture that I've seen going around, uh, intimates that the dog was on the verge of attacking this guy, and he was very scared and so forth. In the picture that I saw the dogs were leashed and the correct caption would be "Nude Iraqi picture scared of dog but not attack [sic]." Apparently -- there's not a picture of it -- but apparently uh, well, there's another picture later where the nude Iraqi prisoner no longer cowering, um, in the corner against his cell, he's writhing on the floor with a pool of blood. Apparently, the dog did bite his leg, but there's no picture of that. I have just been, uh, informed of this. So I wanted to, uh, pass that on to make sure that the pass that on to make sure that the facts are out there. There's no picture of that, but apparently that's what uh, what happened. Sorry for the error. ... posted by Steve M. | 3:28 PM | Stephen Carbone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, is testifying before Congress today. The L.A. Times notes, Already, he has acknowledged that he tapped the commander of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to go to Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad last August in an effort to improve collection of intelligence from thousands of Iraqi prisoners held there. Lawmakers will probably pursue that lead today in trying to determine whether Cambone encouraged or approved of policies enlisting military police to help soften up prisoners for interrogation. Weeks after those policies were implemented, seven Iraqi prisoners were abused and sexually humiliated by MPs whose behavior was recorded on pictures since beamed around the world. And who's Carbone's deputy? "Somewhere at the bottom of this you'll find Cambone and his deputy, Boykin," said a former military intelligence official, referring to Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, Cambone's top deputy. "I think Cambone and Boykin are reflective of the whole neoconservative philosophy that these prisoners are undeserving of treatment as prisoners of war." Yup -- Boykin. Mr. "I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” That guy. ****** Of course, when you read in Newsweek that Donald Rumsfeld likes to be in total control. He wants to know all the details, including the precise interrogation techniques used on enemy prisoners. Since 9/11 he has insisted on personally signing off on the harsher methods used to squeeze suspected terrorists held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The conservative hard-liners at the Department of Justice have given the secretary of Defense a lot of leeway. It does not violate the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, the lawyers have told Rumsfeld, to put prisoners in ever-more-painful "stress positions" or keep them standing for hours on end, to deprive them of sleep or strip them naked. According to one of Rumsfeld's aides, the secretary has drawn the line at interrogating prisoners for more than 24 hours at a time or depriving them of light. and then see the lines from Rummy to Carbone and from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, you know this fish stinks from the head. posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM | Red Cross Found Abuses at Abu Ghraib Last Year Do you know where The New York Times placed this story today? Page A13. Never mind the fact that it's one of the most important prison-abuse stories because it strongly suggests that abuse was policy and that officials were informed about it quite a while ago. The Times buried it. I guess it wasn't considered as important as the front-page story on fish-shooting in Vermont. (Yes, The Wall Street Journal reported the story yesterday -- but that's no excuse. The Washington Post, by the way, put its Red Cross story on page 1.) posted by Steve M. | 9:40 AM | Pollster John Zogby is predicting a Kerry win. I have made a career of taking bungee jumps in my election calls. Sometimes I haven't had a helmet and I have gotten a little scratched. But here is my jump for 2004: John Kerry will win the election. Zogby cites poor numbers for Bush now, poll respondents' preference for Kerry on the economy, which they cite as their top issue, Kerry's history as a "good closer," and this, which is new to me: ...Kerry leads by 17 points in the Blue States that voted for Al Gore in 2000, while Bush leads by only 10 points in the Red States that he won four years ago. And CNN/USA Today/Gallup now has Kerry ahead of Bush, 50%-44%, among registered voters (though Bush is up by 1 among likely voters). I'd love to think this will reduce the number of "floundering Kerry campaign" stories, but I'm betting it won't. ***** Then again, there's this Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll, which has Bush up by 5%. But that's still damn close six months out. One point made in both the CNN/USA Today/Gallup and Investor's Business Daily/TIPP polls is that Bush has a lead in battleground states -- 51%-45% in the former, 49%-40% in the latter. Bloody hell -- what if it happens again? What if, as Zogby predicts, undecideds tip to Kerry and he wins the popular vote -- but Bush's lead in battleground states holds and he wins the damn electoral college again while losing the popular vote? OK, I'm calming down. It's really, really early. posted by Steve M. | 7:19 AM | Monday, May 10, 2004 It becomes more and more obvious to people who are reading about prisoner abuse that these aren't the isolated acts of a few rogues. The problem is, people aren't reading about this. People are looking at pictures. I'm afraid the pictures may be so powerful that they focus the public's attention too much on the perpetrators, and not enough on the people who formulated the policies and saw to it that they were carried out. "Isolated" still wins overwhelmingly over "systemic" in every poll that asks the public for a judgment on how this all happened. If narrative doesn't take over from visual imagery soon, the general public is never really going to grasp the truth of what's been going on. posted by Steve M. | 11:32 PM | Oh, and while we're at it, what the hell -- why don't we deny Saddam due process, too? Saddam Hussein's defense lawyers said Monday they had received no response from the U.S. administration in Iraq and the International Committee of the Red Cross to repeated requests to see their client.... "We are willing to take legal action against the U.S. administration and the Red Cross if they don't allow us to see President Saddam," said Jordanian lawyer Mohammad Rashdan, one of a 20-member legal team appointed by Saddam's wife to represent him. Rashdan told Reuters in Amman his team had received no response so far to requests to visit Saddam.... --Reuters This Australian story says that after seeing the abuse, Rashdan is worried about possible mistreatment of Saddam. From these and other stories I've read, it seems that Rashdan i's a bit of a grandstander -- but can you say for sure that we wouldn't rough the old bastard up? posted by Steve M. | 5:29 PM | Remember "Hillary the enabler"? Well, when Hillary enabled, nobody was stripped naked and attacked by angry dogs: ‘Can’t Bear to Look’: First Lady Says She and President Are ‘Anguished’ Over Abu Ghraib Prison Images As the Bush administration braces for the anticipated release of more images revealing the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners, first lady Laura Bush says her husband, along with most Americans, struggles with each new image that surfaces. The first lady told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America that she and the president are "very anguished" over the issue. "To be perfectly frank, I can't bear to look at the ones [pictures] that have been in the newspaper," she said.... That's from ABC's story about the interview. AFP quotes more, and we see that (a) Laura's pretending this was some inexplicable aberration and (b) she's feeding us the standard Bush line, which is that it's just so unfair to criticize us when we've built so many schools, darn it! "Those photographs don't represent America. They don't represent our troops. And they don't represent the way people in the United States of America think or act, Laura Bush added. "It is not a fair picture of the United States military" "When we look at what we have done in Iraq where -- you know they have water, they have electricity, schools have been refurbished. I'm working on building a children's hospital in Iraq," the US first lady said. "In Afghanistan), where little girls are in school for the first time in their lives because they have been liberated from the Taliban, I think all of those are the really good things that the United States military and the actions of the United States government have taken. We need to remind the world of that as well," Laura Bush said.... posted by Steve M. | 5:06 PM | HEARTS AND MINDS Pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by US troops and vengeful inscriptions were found on desecrated graves of British soldiers of World War I in Gaza City, the cemetery curator said. "Eight to ten men smashed 32 tombstones Sunday night," said Issam Jaradah, who is in charge of the northern Gaza City cemetery's maintenance. Some of the infamous pictures depicting scenes of mistreatment inside the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were found stuck on the tombs, some of which also bore the Nazi swastika and the inscription in English "Revenge.... --AFP posted by Steve M. | 2:38 PM | Howard Kurtz has yet another roundup of Democratic handwringing over Kerry in The Washington Post. You can tell this is in the Post and not The New York Times because the obligtory "Bafflingly, the pathetic Democratic weiner is still in the race" disclaimer appears in paragraph #2 rather than 7/8ths of the way through the article. Otherwise, it could have easily have borne the byline "Adam Nagourney." A little perspective here, people: Ever since FDR beat Hoover in '32, sitting presidents have appeared on the November ballot twelve times. Of those twelve elections, they won nine: FDR ('36, '40, '44), Truman, Ike, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton. The only losers were Ford, Carter, and Bush the Elder. And most of those nine victories were blowouts. So the fact that Kerry has a chance at all this year is impressive in and of itself. If Kerry were seventeen points down in every poll, it would still be inappropriate for Democrats to express their doubts every time a reporter calls -- there's no damn moral obligation to run your own party down in public; this is not corruption or torture, not covered by "the people's right to know." But Kerry has a reasonably good chance to win. Why the whining? posted by Steve M. | 12:53 PM | TORTURE INSPIRES SADR ..."The wild card is the reports of [American] torture and humiliation," says Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the US Institute of Peace in Washington. "Until that came out, [Sadr] was definitely on the decline. Now he is championing the case of the prisoners." ...Sadr countered with his own firebrand sermon at his home mosque in Kufa, where he rallied his thousands-strong Mahdi army with anti-US vitriol. "What sort of freedom and democracy can we expect from you when you take such joy in torturing Iraqi prisoners?" Sadr asked.... Sadr supporters opened new fronts against British forces over the weekend, to try to take over parts of Basra and Amarah. Sunday in Amarah, British troops reportedly responded to mortar strikes with helicopters. Those attacks came a day after a Sadr chief said jihad was required to avenge tortured detainees.... --Christian Science Monitor posted by Steve M. | 11:09 AM | ARMY TIMES: TIME FOR RUMSFELD TO GO? The Army Times, and affiliated private newspapers widely circulated in the military, was to say in an editorial on Monday that Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were responsible for "a failure that amounts to professional negligence" and that "accountability is essential, even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war," CBS News reported. --New York Times posted by Steve M. | 7:44 AM | Sunday, May 09, 2004 Reporters covering the war, the economy, and other real-world issues for The New York Times apparently have the ability to process new information. That's apparently not the case for the Times reporters who are covering the election -- they have their story and they're sticking to it. Their story: Kerry's campaign is floundering. Bush has succeeded in defining him and now it may well be too late for him to define himself. What's happening to him is just what happened to "another Massachusetts liberal," Michael Dukakis. Never mind the fact that Kerry is tied with Bush in the Gallup poll, that he has tied or beaten Bush every day this month in the Rasmussen tracking poll, and that, in every other poll tracked by Polling Report, he ranges from a mere 5 points behind Bush to as much as 3 points up (with six months to go). Here's the latest Times recitation of the Same Old Song, by Robin Toner: There are, at times, eerie echoes of 1988 on the campaign trail these days. For two months, many Democrats have watched, queasily, as the Republicans roll out another disciplined campaign against their nominee as a flip-flopping Massachusetts liberal who is soft on defense, with a huge wave of paid advertising backed up by legions of Republicans and surrogates, all firmly on message. The commercials rattle off some weapon systems Mr. Kerry opposed financing at one time or another, just as they did against Mr. Dukakis in 1988. Moreover, Democrats have discovered - once again - that a candidate can win a party's nomination, make the covers of the national magazines and still be unknown to many voters, who are only intermittently paying attention right now. With a $25 million advertising campaign launched last week, the Kerry forces are scrambling to fill in the blanks, before the Bush campaign does, and to regain control of the candidate's story - "a lifetime of service and strength," as they put it.... Does this bear any relationship to actual voter reaction to Bush and Kerry? No -- but it's clear that Times political reporters don't give a damn. Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler says Beltway reporters prefer to settle on "a story they like" and don't care if the facts contradict it. Clearly, this is the story New York Times campaign reporters like this year. posted by Steve M. | 12:23 PM | Saturday, May 08, 2004 I said this morning that I thought the Bush administration would weather the torture scandal -- and, alas, it's happening, says The Washington Post: A large majority of Americans believe that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld should not resign over the Iraq prison scandal.... Seven in 10 Americans said Rumsfeld should not be forced to quit, a view held by majorities of Republicans, Democrats and self-described independents.... ...six in 10 believe these were isolated incidents, while fewer than a third said such abuse was more widespread. The Buhies weather big scandals well, I'm afraid. But as I said this morning, if anything's going to be their undoing, it's the slow grind of ongoing failure: Even though overall attitudes remain essentially unchanged, the proportion who believe the administration has a clear plan in Iraq stands at 38 percent, down 7 percentage points in the past three weeks, while a growing majority -- 57 percent -- see the administration adrift, a new high in Post-ABC News polling. posted by Steve M. | 6:05 PM | Yesterday's New York Times had an article on a proposed Methodist schism, which would have separated the church's gay-friendly and anti-gay wings. Here's something I didn't know: The conservative movement [in the Methodist Church], whose members call themselves orthodox or evangelical, has also been bankrolled by some of the same conservative foundations that give money to conservative political causes. The Institute for Religion and Democracy, which backs a move to the right for the Methodists and other Protestant churches and coordinates initiatives to influence several mainline denominations, has received funding from Richard Mellon Scaife and the John M. Olin Foundation, which also fund conservative political causes, according to a recent book, "United Methodism at Risk," researched and written by church members concerned about a conservative takeover. Scaife. Olin. Good grief. These people are a menace. And they're everywhere. (The church rejected the schism, by the way.) ***** Oh, and here's an article posted today at the Times Web site about Teresa Heinz Kerry's philanthropic work. It's not particularly negative, but three times the article mentions criticism of Mrs. Kerry's work by the Capital Reasearch Center, before finally -- in the forty-fourth paragraph -- noting that The Capital Research Center counts as one of its biggest backers the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which reports that it has donated $700,000 to the center from 1998 to 2002. It and two other foundations that have contributed to the center have as their chairman Richard Mellon Scaife.... And even then there's no mention of Scaife's heavy involvement in right-wing causes -- all we learn is that Mrs. Kerry is a close friend of Richard Mellon Scaife's wife and that a cousin of his is chairman of one of Mrs. Kerry's foundations. If you didn't know anything about Scaife, you'd find it baffling that one of his enterprises bashes her. posted by Steve M. | 1:34 PM | From yesterday's New York Times: As American troops secured the governor's office, L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, announced the appointment of the new governor, Adnan al-Zurufi, and promised the restoration of American-backed authority in Najaf.... For his part, Mr. Zurufi also said his goal was to disarm the militias and restore American-backed authority there. He also promised to bring economic development and tourism to the city. Tourism? Tourism? You've got to hand it to our guys in Iraq -- they never stop thinking that the glass is half full. posted by Steve M. | 12:47 PM | The headlines about the prisons look awful for the Bush administration, but I think the Bushies are going to get through this. This moment reminds me of the moment when Enron and other corporate scandals broke. Then, as now, the Bushies elbowed their way to the front of the outrage parade -- they persuaded the American people that no one was more appalled by the crimes and abuses than they were; they boasted of multiple investigations and embraced proposed reforms. It worked. Remember that the Bush administration is run by businessmen, and big business has been very, very good at damage control of this kind ever since the Tylenol poisonings of 1982. The Bushies will flood the zone with mea culpas and remorse until this goes away. We shouldn't expect a big scandal to bring Bush down all at once. Besides the Bushies' skill at damage control, a lot of people like Bush and rally to him when he seems to be under attack. What seems to damage him far more is slow, relentless, ongoing failure -- the day-to-day Iraq quagmire, ongoing job weakness, relentlessly high gas prices. posted by Steve M. | 10:02 AM | Friday, May 07, 2004 Now they're attacking the D.C. cardinal because he won't issue a fatwa against Kerry. Here's the story from today's Washington Post: A Roman Catholic antiabortion group launched an advertising campaign against Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington yesterday, attacking him for saying he is not comfortable denying Communion to Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and other Catholic members of Congress who support abortion rights. The Virginia-based American Life League said the advertisements are the beginning of a $500,000 print ad campaign targeting bishops who are reluctant to punish Catholic politicians for taking policy positions that defy the church. The first ad shows Jesus in agony on the cross and asks: "Cardinal McCarrick: Are you comfortable now?" ... Here's the shrill ad (in PDF form). It has all the subtlety of Mel Gibson's Jesus movie. And it ticks off the names of the guilty: "John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy and the 68 other pro-abortion 'Catholic' politicians in Congress." Guess what? They're all Democrats! As are all the politicians subject to similar recent fatwas, according to the Post: On Wednesday, New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey, a Democrat, said he would voluntarily refrain from taking Communion. Three of New Jersey's bishops have said in recent days that politicians who support abortion rights should not take Communion, and two of them mentioned McGreevey by name. Last year, Bishop Robert J. Carlson of Sioux Falls, S.D., reportedly warned Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle not to call himself a Catholic because of his stand in favor of abortion. Sacramento Bishop William K. Weigand made a similar remonstrance to Gray Davis, the former Democratic governor of California. And Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, of St. Louis and formerly of Wisconsin, went the furthest in January, instructing all churches in his former diocese to deny the Eucharist to three local politicians, including Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), because of their voting records on abortion. Another Wisconsin politician who received the letter was State Senator Julie Lassa -- a Democrat. I haven't found the third name. (Deal W. Hudson, editor of a Catholic magazine and a Bush ally, has the gall to go even further: He tells the Post that, in the Post's words, "denial of Communion should begin, and end, with Kerry. Even better, he said, would be if priests would read letters from the pulpit denouncing the senator from Massachusetts 'whenever and wherever he campaigns as a Catholic.' ") Someone needs to ask -- perhaps in full-page newspaper ads -- two questions: * If it's so appalling to be a pro-choice Catholic, why doesn't the church have the guts to say that anyone who's pro-choice should be denied communion, whether or not it results in a mass exodus of parishioners? If the church really believes abortion is murder, why give communion to (or accept donations from) anyone who finds abortion acceptable? * And if this is about unwavering moral law, why are only pro-choice Democrats being targeted? posted by Steve M. | 6:39 PM | GOD'S GENERAL From Josh Marshall: In many of the articles on this emerging Iraqi prisoners story, it has been claimed that some of the key instigators or enablers of bad acts were military intelligence officers. Now, who's the head of military intelligence? 'Head' is too vague. There's no such post per se. But what comes pretty close is the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. And who's that? Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin. Remember him? He's the one who got in trouble last year for describing his battle with a Muslim Somali warlord by saying "I knew that my God was bigger than his God. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol", saying President Bush was chosen by God, and generally that the war on terror is an apocalyptic struggle between Christianity and Satan. Last fall, after Boykin's efforts to channel Charlemagne or perhaps Urban II became known, he asked Don Rumsfeld to initiate an 'investigation' into whether his comments "violated any Pentagon rules or procedures" whatever that might mean. Just this week it was reported that the 'investigation' still continues; and Boykin has not been disciplined in any way.... Yikes. But if this is accurate and he takes a fall, I'll shed no tears. posted by Steve M. | 4:46 PM | YOUR LIBERAL MEDIA New York City is determined to show the nearly 14,000 Republican National Convention delegates and their guests a grand old time when they arrive in August. For starters, conventioneers will be treated to one of eight Broadway musicals during special performances on Aug. 29, the day before the convention formally kicks off, courtesy of The New York Times, which is footing the bill.... --South Florida Sun-Sentinel Oh, by the way, Disney is giving tickets for one show gratis. (Link via INTL-News.) posted by Steve M. | 4:05 PM | A former Oregon governor and transportation secretary under President Carter has admitted to a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl in the 1970s, when he was mayor of Portland. Neil Goldschmidt, 63, who served as governor from 1987-1991 and earlier as Carter's transportation secretary, told The Oregonian about the relationship for a story in Friday editions. --AP OK, here's a bet: Over the next year, I'll pay you a dollar for every reference to Abu Ghraib on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show, in the New York Post, and at National Review Online, TownHall.com, Free Republic, and Lucianne.com -- and you pay me a dollar for every reference to Neil Goldschmidt in those media outlets over the same time period. All money payable a year from today. Anyone want to take that bet? posted by Steve M. | 3:11 PM | "HILLARY'S SECRET POLICE" This isn't really germane to today's news, but I wanted to post it for anyone who's still unfamiliar with the depths of Clinton-hate in this country. It's an interview (in David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine) with Richard Poe, author of Hillary's Secret War. An excerpt: Poe: The operations of Hillary’s secret police have been copiously documented, to the point where the topic can hardly be called controversial any longer. During the Clinton years, journalists who probed too deeply into Clinton scandals ran terrible risks. Journalists were beaten, wiretapped, framed on criminal charges, fired and blacklisted. They experienced burglaries, IRS audits, smear campaigns and White-House-orchestrated lawsuits. Some may have paid the ultimate price. In February, 1998, just as the Clinton impeachment was gathering steam, Sandy Hume, the 28-year-old son of Fox News anchorman Brit Hume, suddenly turned up dead of a gunshot to the head. He was covering the U.S. Congress for the magazine The Hill, and was known for his excellent sources among Republican insiders. Sandy Hume supposedly committed suicide, but friends and associates have questioned the official story. ...Many of these people are still in place, and still doing the Clintons’ dirty work. I call them the Shadow Team. FP: How does Hillary fit into all this? Poe: Hillary is the muscle end of the Clinton mafia. It was she who organized and led the Shadow Team. Her role as White House enforcer was first revealed by the late Barbara Olson.... Odd that such a vast criminal enterprise has gone utterly unchecked, despite endless investigations of the Clintons (Ken Starr, "a timid bureaucrat, afraid of his own shadow, ... shrank from investigating any of the truly serious Clinton scandals," Poe says), and despite the fact that the husband of the now-departed writer who uncovered the enterprise is now the solicitor general of the United States. And odd that the person Poe blames is not the man who was President when all of this evil allegedly took place, but the person in his circle who is believed (by right-wingers) to pose the greatest political threat to GOP hegemony now. But why am I even rebutting this? These people are nuts. And David Horowitz gives this Poe guy a forum. Remember that the next time you see him slithering up to a college campus with his quota scheme for conservatives, aka the "Academic Bill of Rights." ****** One more thing from the interview: Unitl I read it, I wasn't aware of this: J.J. Johnson’s SierraTimes.com acted as a central command post for Operation Truckstop 2000 – a nationwide, general trucking strike that would have gone into effect had Gore succeeded in stealing the election. And it's true -- or at least that was the plan: Operation Truck Stop 2000-11/25/2000 There are plans in the works for a nation-wide halt of trucking on December 18, 2000 as a protest against what some people are calling the theft of the 2000 election. J.J. Johnson, Editor-in-Chief of the Sierra Times wrote a call to action on his website that laid the foundation for this protest. Fearing America has been taken over by Gore, Johnson has asked not only over-the-road trucker to cease driving, but he has also encouraged the rest of the country to call in sick with the "flu." ...It is quite possible that this election free-for-all could lead to martial law. Johnson feels Clinton could easily clamp down on the country. The chances that some groups will resort to bloodshed are greater every day. Sources blame a growing restlessness and fear about what is to come. Although Johnson does not advocate violence of any sort, he certainly concedes that some groups may use serious means to stop what they see as a coup d'etat.... Like I said -- nuts. posted by Steve M. | 1:17 PM | From a Cal Thomas column published last week: Bill Clinton's book "My Life" (it's always about him)... In an autobiography? Er, yeah, it usually is. posted by Steve M. | 12:46 PM | Nice: A Wall Street Journal survey "casts doubt on Bush campaign efforts to discredit Democrat Kerry's Vietnam service. Some 71% of Republicans join big majorities of Democrats and independents in saying Kerry served 'honorably'..." And this is also nice: "...just 25% of Democrats and 43% of independents say Bush did." --Taegan Goddard's Political Wire posted by Steve M. | 12:01 PM | So I guess now Rumsfeld's apologizing, too. But meanwhile, right-wing commentators from The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and elsewhere are blaming Hillary Clinton, feminists, liberal academics -- everyone but the people involved and the people responsible. (Media Matters for America provides excerpts, though, for the blaming of Hillary, you'll have to go here.) Whether thought out or otherwise, we're seeing a two-track strategy from the GOP and the GOP-friendly media: The Bush administration embraced Bob Woodward's book while right-wing pundits attacked it; the Bush administration professes anguish at the torture photos while right-wing pundits laugh it off as "horseplay" or shift the blame. If Bush's base actually agreed with Bush about Abu Ghraib, there'd be howls of outrage at the shrugging off of the torture in the right-wing press. But Bush's hardcore supporters know the drill: Bush & Co. have to seem contrite, but really, this is no big deal. posted by Steve M. | 10:50 AM | I'm pleased that Rumsfeld is being called on the carpet, but I wonder if we're going to see an uptick in Bush's poll numbers as a result. As we learned last month, hearings and accusations seem to solidify Bush's support, apparently by making people feel he's being unfairly attacked. In the minds of his supporters and people inclined to like him, I guess it all looks like the Passion of the Bush -- sadists and evildoers engaging in a horrible, endless scourging of a mournful-eyed embodiment of Good. That's no reason not to go after Bush or Rumsfeld, or to continue talking about Abu Ghraib (or the rest of the ongoing screw-up in Iraq), but let's not be surprised if doing so shores Bush up politically. posted by Steve M. | 9:59 AM | Thursday, May 06, 2004 "Rumsfeld not only preferred clarity and order, he insisted on them. That meant personally managing process, knowing all the details, asking the questions, shaping the presidential briefing and the ultimate results...In other words, Rumsfeld wanted near-total control." --Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, page 16 (Quote courtesy of Judd C. Legum at the center for American Progress.) posted by Steve M. | 11:34 PM | Ann Coulter and other conservatives complain about pro-liberal, pro-Democratic bias in various media outlets, but it's really hard to recall any "straight news" story in the mainstream media that cast a sitting Democratic officeholder in as favorable a light as this Cincinnati Enquirer story: Bush pauses to comfort teen: 'This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9-11' During his visit to the Golden Lamb Inn in Lebanon, President Bush stops to hug Ashley Faulkner, who lost her mom in the Sept. 11 attacks. In a moment largely unnoticed by the throngs of people in Lebanon waiting for autographs from the president of the United States, George W. Bush stopped to hold a teenager's head close to his heart. Lynn Faulkner, his daughter, Ashley, and their neighbor, Linda Prince, eagerly waited to shake the president's hand Tuesday at the Golden Lamb Inn. He worked the line at a steady campaign pace, smiling, nodding and signing autographs until Prince spoke: "This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9-11." Bush stopped and turned back. "He changed from being the leader of the free world to being a father, a husband and a man," Faulkner said. "He looked right at her and said, 'How are you doing?' He reached out with his hand and pulled her into his chest." Faulkner snapped one frame with his camera. "I could hear her say, 'I'm OK,' " he said. "That's more emotion than she has shown in 21/2 years. Then he said, 'I can see you have a father who loves you very much.' " "And I said, 'I do, Mr. President, but I miss her mother every day.' It was a special moment."... If you haven't clicked on the link, click on it -- you have to see the photo. Now, a word about Lynn Faulkner. He's a grieving 9/11 widower, yes, but he's a politicized 9/11 widower, on the conservative side. A while back, he criticized both Democrats and Republicans: "...Bill Clinton and President Bush, they had to know that additional attacks would follow and that the only way to keep terrorists ... out of our country was to screen the people who seek to enter...'' He became a director of the anti-immigration group 9/11 Families for a Secure America. More recently, his political focus seems to have changed somewhat. He was heard calling Rush Limbaugh to defend Bush ads that included 9/11 imagery. And now he happens to catch Bush at a campaign appearance and happens to capture on film the moving moment when Bush hugs his daughter. Look, there's nothing wrong with a 9/11 widower becoming a visible Bush supporter -- except that when survivors of 9/11 victims criticized Bush, they were denounced by conservatives ("their sense of victims' entitlement") and the press was admonished to remind an easily duped public that their agenda was partisan. And this despite the fact that none are showing up at Kerry rallies or defending Kerry in the media. It's interesting that Faulkner got through to the well-protected Bush and managed to snap the hug picture. It's also interesting that the meeting occurred at "the place [Lynn Faulkner] and his wife, Wendy Faulkner, celebrated their anniversary every year until she died," according to the Enquirer. And I imagine it's usually not that easy to get through to Rush. So maybe Lynn Faulkner is now part of the campaign, now part of the Republican machine, but nobody wants to say so overtly. That wouldn't be the worst thing -- if there hadn't been so many right-wingers claiming that the Bush skeptics among the 9/11 widows have a sinister agenda. posted by Steve M. | 5:45 PM | THIRTEEN MONTHS AGO Q: Iraqi TV has shown what appear to be American POWs, and also what appear to be American dead. Your reaction? GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The POWs I expect to be treated humanely, and just like we're treating the prisoners that we have captured humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals. --Bush press availability, March 23, 2003 (Via INTL-News.) posted by Steve M. | 4:04 PM | Family values: Bush, wife plan to skip daughters' college graduations President Bush and first lady Laura Bush will skip their twin daughters' college graduations later this month to avoid creating a distraction at the respective schools, the White House said Thursday. "There are no plans at this time to attend these ceremonies," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for Laura Bush. "The Bushes felt the focus should be on the students, and not how long the lines are to go through the metal detectors." Jenna Bush is slated to graduate May 22 from the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor's degree in English. Barbara Bush graduates May 24 with a bachelor's in humanities from Yale University.... --AP The family is the foundation of this society. And here's what I know. It's the place where we find deep human fulfillment, and where we find love. It is where character of our nation is shaped, and where values are forged. Families provide us with comfort and encouragement, compassion and hope, mutual support and unconditional love.... We all know that children who are surrounded by love have a strong foundation for success as adults. When someone thinks a child is the most important person in the world, that child will grow up to be confident in their self, and loving toward others.... --President Bush, January 7, 2002 (By the way, here's a picture of the Clintons attending Chelsea's graduation. Ex-Presidents, needless to say, continue to receive Secret Service protection.) posted by Steve M. | 2:36 PM | Bush Approval on Iraq, Economy, and Terrorism at Low Points; Presidential contest a dead heat ...Satisfaction with the way things are going in the country is tied for the lowest level of Bush's presidency, as is his overall job approval rating. Bush's approval ratings on his handling of the economy, foreign affairs, the situation in Iraq, and terrorism are all at the lowest levels ever. The presidential contest is now a dead heat among likely voters, though Bush led Sen. John Kerry by five to six percentage points in mid-April.... --Gallup So, with regard to that five- or six-point gain in the presidential contest (in less than a month), The New York Times and other media outlets will now publish a lot of stories about how well the Kerry campaign is going, despite party leaders' doubts ... right? posted by Steve M. | 11:53 AM | New Jersey's Governor McGreevey caves: Gov. James E. McGreevey yesterday bowed to pressure from several Roman Catholic bishops by agreeing not to receive communion at public Catholic Masses. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts they're trying to reinstate the death penalty (AP story here). Have any of the pro-reinsatatement Catholics listed here been threatened with denial of communion? Coppola? Sullivan? Rodrigues? Keenan? Petrolati? Murphy? Sounds as if at least some of these folks are members of the True Church. Any of them get threatened yet? It's true -- the Catholic church isn't absolutely against the death penalty. But here's what was said in 1997 when the Vatican issued modifications to the catechism: Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm--without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself--the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are rare, if not practically non-existent." (NT: John Paul II, Evangelium vitae 56) Go look at the AP story. There's a lot of talk about limiting the death penalty to horrific crimes and about establishing absolute certainty of guilt (a "no doubt" standard), but there's nothing about establishing whether the public could be protected by non-lethal means. posted by Steve M. | 8:55 AM | Wednesday, May 05, 2004 While you weren't looking, torture apparently became OK for the CIA and military, ex-CIA agent Robert Baer said on ABC tonight: The CIA inspector general is now investigating the deaths of three prisoners during CIA interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan, ABCNEWS has learned.... If the allegations are true, it would represent a huge departure from what had been CIA policy on the use of torture. "It was absolutely barred," said Bob Baer, a former CIA officer who was one of the first outsiders into Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison last year after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "Not only that, before we went overseas, we were made to read regulations. No torture. You don't participate, you don't do it, you don't watch it." Baer said the rules changed after the 9/11 attacks. "It was systematic and the policy has changed since I was in the CIA, and it's changed in the military as well," he said. The U.S. Army's own report on the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison found that Army military police "were directed to change procedures" to "set the conditions" for military interrogations.... posted by Steve M. | 11:20 PM | I've added David Brock's fine new site Media Matters for America to the links. Go poke around there, if you haven't already. Marvel at the debunking of Dick Morris's Hillary-hate book Rewriting History -- I love the fact that Morris not only slants the truth but sometimes can't even manage to agree with himself. (Alas, in spite of this, his book is #3 at Amazon as I write this.) posted by Steve M. | 5:00 PM | Excellent debunking of the anti-Kerry Swift boaters in today's Daily Howler. Note that the man who now says that Kerry got his first Purple Heart for a "scratch," and who claims he objected to the award at the time, is the same commander who gave Kerry high marks -- two weeks after he allegedly told Kerry he was making too much of his wound. posted by Steve M. | 2:44 PM | The inept, hapless, stumbling, bumbling, all-thumbs Kerry campaign you've heard so much about is building a lead on Bush, according to the latest Rasmussen tracking poll -- a lead of 4 percentage points now, up from 3 yesterday and the day before: This is the first time Kerry has held a three point edge for three straight days since March. ...If a candidate, in this case Kerry, is able to hold a lead for more than three days, it could signify a trend. (Link via Pandagon.) posted by Steve M. | 2:08 PM | NADER SAYS, "I OBJECT!" To what? Iraq prisoner abuse? Attempts to curtail overtime pay? The federal marriage amendment? Nope. Ads on baseball uniforms. Presidential candidate Ralph Nader called the advertisements on uniforms during major league baseball's season-opening series an "obscene embarrassment" and sent a letter of protest Tuesday. "This overcommercialization is sapping the fun out of being a fan of major league baseball," Nader wrote in his letter to commissioner Bud Selig. "Now, you have sunk to a greedy new low."... Thanks, Ralph! And hey, how about that voting on American Idol? Any plans to protest that? posted by Steve M. | 1:22 PM | John O'Neill was Nixon's pal -- but you know that. What you may not know is what Joe Conason discusses in Salon about two other principals in "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," the allegedly independent anti-Kerry group that's all over the media. Short version: Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, the group's founder, was the commanding officer of a task force responsible for an appalling Vietnam massacre. And media consultant Merrie Spaeth is a veteran GOP operative with ties to Ken Starr, Ted Olson (her daughter's godfather), and high-rolling Bush backers who financed a smear of John McCain in 2000. By all means get the free day pass and read the article. posted by Steve M. | 12:36 PM | The post below concerns one bishop's opinion about which deviations from Catholic doctrine are troubling and which ones apparently aren't. Brian Murphy of PoliticsNJ.com reminds us of a category of violations that doesn't seem to bother the church at all: I keep coming back to a much more emotional issue: Cardinal Law. He still takes Communion, and I'm not aware of a single bishop who has denied himself the Sacrament as a punishment for participating in the child abuse scandals of recent years. ...we have a problematic message coming out of the Catholic Church these days: the Law-McGreevey Conundrum. If you are a Catholic politician who fights for equal rights and equal pay, find that scientific arguments about the benefits of stem cell research outweigh the unknowable theological objections of some, and refuse to impose a minority legal position on a majority of your constituents, there’s no room for you at the inn. But if you led conspiracy, for more than a decade, to obscure and obfuscate the ongoing sexual abuse of minors...well, all's forgiven. In fact, we may be able to find space for you in the Papal Apartments. If you don't understand that "Papal Apartments" reference, here’s a story about Bernard Law and his cozy relationship with the Vatican after he resigned as Archbishop of Boston in the wake of a massive sex-abuse scandal for which he bears an extraordinary amount of responsibility. (Heartfelt thanks to the reader who sent me the Brian Murphy link.) posted by Steve M. | 10:45 AM | ARCHBISHOP: CATHOLIC MORAL PRINCIPLES ARE INVIOLATE, BUT SOME PRINCIPLES ARE MORE INVIOLATE THAN OTHERS Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark won't quite say that pro-choice Catholics shouldn't receive communion, but he calls taking communion if you're pro-choice "objectively dishonest," according to this account of his May 5 pastoral letter. But isn't this selective enforcement of church teachings? Well, sure, but Archbishop Myers says that's OK: "Some might argue that the Church has many social teachings and the teaching on abortion is only one of them. This is, of course, correct. The Church's social teaching is a diverse and rich tradition of moral truths and biblical insights applied to the political, economic, and cultural aspects of our society. All Catholics should form and inform their conscience in accordance with these teachings. But reasonable Catholics can (and do) disagree about how to apply these teachings in various situations." "But with abortion (and for example slavery, racism, euthanasia and trafficking in human persons) there can be no legitimate diversity of opinion. The direct killing of the innocent is always a grave injustice. One should not permit unjust killing any more than one should permit slave-holding, racist actions, or other grave injustices. From the perspective of justice, to say “I am personally opposed to abortion but…" is like saying "I personally am against slavery, but I can not impose my personal beliefs on my neighbor." So there's wiggle room on, say, the death penalty, or war not waged in self-defense, or indifference to the poor and needy, but not on, say, allowing a twelve-year-old rape victim to terminate a pregnancy, or helping your grandmother die if she's terminally ill and in intense pain. (Incidentally, the link above is via SeaMax News, which is the product of an intern program at St. Joseph by-the-Sea High School on Staten Island -- an intern program sponsored by the far-right media organization NewsMax. Anyone else think it's a bit unseemly for a church high school to affiliate with a nakedly ideological group like NewsMax? And how many tax exemptions are involved here?) posted by Steve M. | 9:53 AM | The New York Times says Disney (via subsidiary Miramax) is blocking the release Michael Moore's forthcoming documentary Fahrenheit 911. Is it a coincidence that this story surfaces mere days after Nightline, on Disney's ABC network, infuriated the Right by devoting an entire program to a reading of the names of Iraqi war dead? My first thought when I saw this story prominently displayed on the Times home page was that it was good for Michael Moore that the dispute had gone public -- nasty Disney would have to back down, or at least return the movie rights to Moore so he can find another distributor. But I think both sides are going to benefit from this publicity. posted by Steve M. | 7:59 AM | Bush on Arab TV for two ten-minute interviews? OK, one is Al-Hurra, the network we set up, and the other's on Al-Arabiya, not Al-Jazeera, but still: This is the guy who couldn't be trusted to speak to the 9/11 commission solo. Can we trust him not to use the word "crusade"? Is he going to spend half of each interview backtracking to his entirely irrelevant catchall justification for everything his does ("On September the eleventh, two thousand and one, our nation was attacked...")? Is he going to eat up even more time telling viewers that "Iraqis no longer have to fear a brutal dictator" and that "we know he was pursuing chemical, biological, and nucular weapons"? Is he going to spend the rest of the time talking about "freedom"? Is he going to say it's a gift given to all people by God? Will he be able to restrain himself from suggesting that his "mission" in Iraq is God's mission? Yeah, I know these aren't likely to be appropriate responses to the questions he'll be asked. But when has he ever answered the questions he was asked? posted by Steve M. | 7:29 AM | Tuesday, May 04, 2004 Here's your Kerry campaign ad: Start with ominous music, and this voiceover: "You can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps." Then fade in on this photo. (Crop out Colson -- make it a two-shot of the young John O'Neill and Richard Nixon.) Voiceover: "The Nixon White House urged John O'Neill to attack John Kerry." Pick up some of this from the Nixon White House tapes: Nixon's secret tapes captured him fretting with aides about the political threat Kerry posed and plotting to "destroy" him. O'Neill, an articulate young vet who had criticized Kerry's anti-war speeches, was invited to the White House in 1971 and encouraged to debate Kerry. "Give it to him, give it to him," Nixon told O'Neill. (Audio would be nice, but typewriter font simulating the printed Nixon transcripts would also work,with speaker IDs prominent, especially NIXON:) Slowly close in on the picture of the young John O'Neill -- then morph it into the mature O'Neill attacking Kerry on Fox or CNN or MSNBC. Voiceover: "Now Nixon's hatchetman is attacking John Kerry again. John Kerry -- a lifetime of service to his country. John O'Neill" -- back to the O'Neill two-shot with Nixon -- "a lifetime of attacks." posted by Steve M. | 5:07 PM | A couple of reports from the far-right Cybercast News Service: Yesterday: Hundreds of former commanders and military colleagues of presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry are set to declare in a signed letter that he is "unfit to be commander-in-chief." They will do so at a press conference in Washington on Tuesday. Today: A group of 18 veterans gathered in the nation's capital asking Kerry to authorize the Department of the Navy to independently release his military records, including medical information, about his service during the Vietnam War. Many said Kerry was unfit to be commander-in-chief of the U.S. military More than 200 veterans have signed a letter from the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth seeking the release of records.... Wait a minute -- what happened to the hundreds who think he's unfit? How is that they became, in one day, hundreds who just think his complete records should be released and a few who think he's unfit? The people responsible for this Incredible Shrinking Kerry Attack will be on Fox's Hannity & Colmes and MSNBC's Scarborough Country tonight. Think anyone will ask? ***** UPDATE: Well, OK -- UPI has this quote from the letter: "It is our collective judgment that, upon your return from Vietnam, you grossly and knowingly distorted the conduct of the American soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen of that war (including a betrayal of many of us, without regard for the danger your actions caused us). "Further, we believe that you have withheld and/or distorted material facts as to your own conduct in this war. "We believe you continue this conduct today, albeit by changing from an anti-war to a 'war hero' status," the letter said. That's fairly close to declaring him "unfit." The head of this group is attacking Kerry on behalf of Bush and formerly did the same thing on behalf of Nixon. I guess I was naive to think that a hatchetman for the two sleaziest presidents of my lifetime would ever back down on character assassination. posted by Steve M. | 3:41 PM | Probe of U.S. General's Anti-Islam Remarks Drags On Arab- and Muslim-Americans are increasingly frustrated by the Pentagon's failure to discipline a top U.S. general who said Muslims do not worship "a real God," and say it raises questions about whether the so-called war on terrorism is not a war on Islam.... In one speech, Boykin, an evangelical Christian, belittled a Muslim fighter who said Allah had protected him from U.S. forces. "I knew ... that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol," said Boykin, a much-decorated veteran of covert military operations. Since then, an internal investigation into the affair has worked its way slowly through the Pentagon bureaucracy. A spokeswoman said there was no deadline for its completion.... Sources familiar with the investigation said Boykin would probably not face disciplinary action, noting that officials had signaled that Boykin's remarks fell into a "gray area" in rules governing the public speeches of military personnel.... --Reuters Let's not forget the real problem here. It's not just that Boykin hasn't been disciplined or reprimanded. It's that he still has his job, a job in which his views and the boorish way he expresses them are a liability. He is still, as NBC News put it last fall, one of the leaders of a secretive new Pentagon unit formed to coordinate intelligence on terrorists and help hunt down Osama bin Laden ... and other high-profile targets ... deputy undersecretary of defense, with a new mission for which many say he is uniquely qualified: to aggressively combine intelligence with special operations and hunt down so-called high-value terrorist targets including bin Laden.... He's a one-man clash of civilizations. And his bosses clearly don't care. posted by Steve M. | 2:26 PM | Hey, I thought John Kerry's campaign was supposed to be an unqualified disaster. How come he's tied with Bush in Arkansas, a state Bush won by 6 percentage points in 2000? posted by Steve M. | 12:18 PM | I have a message for Democrats -- Democrats like the one heard on NPR this morning disparaging the choice of Boston for the convention, then worrying aloud that the reporter would actually quote him saying that. Democrats like the ones telling tales about Bill Clinton to a Vanity Fair reporter, tales that -- inevitably -- become smears when they reach the New York Post (or, for that matter, Reuters). Democrats like the ones who wring their hands about the Kerry campaign in the presence of Adam Nagourney of The New York Times. SHUT UP. Just shut up. SHUT. UP. What takes place between Republicans and Democrats is a war, for crissakes. It's been overt war since Nixon; it's been a holy war since Reagan. Loose lips sink ships. If you don't like that image, think of it this way: This is a trial, and it's Kafkaesque; it never ends. If you're a Democrat, you should see yourself as an attorney: you shouldn't lie, you should concede what you have to concede, and, beyond that, your job is to be a vigorous advocate for your side. Don't say anything, ever, to a member of the press, or that could be conveyed to a member of the press, that is incompatible with that task. So: Don't criticize the candidate. Don't criticize the party. Don't criticize any Democrat. Just don't. It's really very, very simple. Kerry is not the problem. Clinton is not the problem. Boston is not the problem. If you run the party down in an election year and what you say goes public, you are the problem. posted by Steve M. | 10:00 AM | Monday, May 03, 2004 Classroom indoctrination in Broward County, Florida: Three Hollywood Hills High School teachers have been ordered to stop using a survey after a complaint it was designed to persuade students to become Republicans. The three teachers distributed the survey to 18-year-old students who were preparing to register to vote. Some students registered in school right after completing the survey. The survey was titled, "What Political Party Do I Agree With?" It was written by Jose Roquett, who teaches government and economics, according to parent Scott Douglas and Broward Schools spokesman Joe Donzelli. Students were asked whether they agree or disagree with a dozen statements, such as "We pay too much in taxes," "I am against abortions" or "We should be harder on criminals." If the student agrees with the statements, the survey says they are Republican.... Donzelli said 180 students were given the survey by Roquett and two other teachers.... --South Florida Sun-Sentinel Something like this happened on a much larger scale in '72 -- classrooms across the country received election guides that had a pro-Republican bias. I got one in '72, when I was a 13-year-old McGovernite, and I knew it was fishy as soon as I read it. I later learned the Nixon campaign had a hand in distributing the damn things. (Wish I could find a link about that.) posted by Steve M. | 9:41 PM | Yet another pro-choice Democrat is made the subject of the Catholic Church's election-year jihad: SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Gov. Joe Kernan's high school alma mater withdrew a commencement speaking invitation to him because the governor's stance on abortion conflicts with Roman Catholic teachings. South Bend's St. Joseph High School withdrew the invitation at the direction of Bishop John M. D'Arcy of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, who has direct authority over the school. D'Arcy said Friday that the school's theology teachers believed Kernan's appearance would directly contradict moral truths they teach and expect students to embrace.... --AP/WRTV (Indianapolis) Funny thing about those eternal, unchanging "moral truths," though: In 1998, D'Arcy did not object when Kernan, as lieutenant governor, delivered the University of Notre Dame's commencement speech. D'Arcy even shared the dignitaries' platform with Kernan, which he now says "seemed to me to be the right response in that situation." Yeah, I'm sure it did -- but it's no longer 1998, the lead Democrat is a pro-choice Catholic rather than a cheatin' Baptist, and new strategies are needed. posted by Steve M. | 3:42 PM | Ahmad Chalabi -- on America's payroll and giving our secrets to Iranian mullahs? ...U.S. intelligence agencies have recently raised concerns that Chalabi has become too close to Iran's theocratic rulers. NEWSWEEK has learned that top Bush administration officials have been briefed on intelligence indicating that Chalabi and some of his top aides have supplied Iran with "sensitive" information on the American occupation in Iraq. U.S. officials say that electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American political plans in Iraq. There are also indications that Chalabi has provided details of U.S. security operations. His pals still defend him, of course: "Rushing to judgment and cutting off this relationship could have unintended consequences," says one Pentagon official, who did not respond to questions about Chalabi's dealings with Tehran. His pals say, according to Newsweek, that Chalabi has provided information that saved American lives. On the other hand, According to one U.S. government source, some of the information Chalabi turned over to Iran could "get people killed." So I guess you win some, you lose some, right? And yes, Each month the Pentagon still pays his group a $340,000 stipend, drawn from secret intelligence funds, for "information collection." Or misinformation collection. posted by Steve M. | 12:31 PM | Michael Ignatieff picked a hell of a week to suggest (in The New York Times Magazine) that we all "step outside the confines of our cozy conservative and liberal boxes" and consider managing the curtailment of civil liberties. My favorite suggestion: Bruce Ackerman, a liberal law professor at Yale, has recently proposed a wholesale revision of the president's current power to declare a national emergency, suggesting that if terrorists strike again, the president should be given the authority to act unilaterally for a week and to arrest anyone he sees fit. After a week, Congress would have to vote to renew his powers for a period of 60 days. Thereafter, an overwhelming majority would be required to extend the term further. Better to formalize and control emergency power, Ackerman argues, than to allow the president to slowly accumulate the power of tyranny. These guys are kidding, right? Do they really believe that, in the wake of a deadly stateside terrorist attack, Congress would be ready after a week (or even after sixty days) to curtail Executive Branch power with regard to "evildoers"? Even a week is a long time for the White House to have the power to order anything it wants done to anyone it chooses, perhaps including Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee. If this proposal became law today, the current White House would break ground on one or more stateside Abu Ghraibs tomorrow, just to be ready for any eventuality. And who would the detainees be? If such a law had been in place at the time of the Olympic bombing, could Richard Jewell have been detained without judicial oversight? If that seems far-fetched, imagine something like the Olympic bombing in, as they say, "the current climate." And in the current climate, how hard is it to imagine that a splinter group's violent anti-globalization activities might lead to a widespread unsupervised roundup of even nonviolent globalization opponents? And what if, as we approach the overturn of Roe, a few pro-choicers turn violent? Do you give much money to Planned Parenthood or NOW or NARAL? posted by Steve M. | 9:15 AM | Sunday, May 02, 2004 Another pro-choice Catholic politician is being threatened with denial of communion, The New York Times says -- and surprise! it's yet another Democrat, Governor Jim McGreevey of New Jersey. But tucked in the story is this paragraph -- which suggests once again that the church is playing anti-Democrat hardball: In New York City today, the Archdiocese confirmed rumors that [John] Kerry might not be invited to the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, the charity fund-raiser sponsored by the Archdiocese of New York that is a national fall ritual, especially in an election year, for Catholic politicians and the church. I haven't researched this all the way back, but here are Republican Catholics Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki attending the Al Smith dinner in 2002, 2001, and 2000. I don't recall either one ever being turned away from the Al Smith dinner. If you look at the links, you'll see that a lot of pro-choice pols have attended the dinner in recent years -- among them Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Colin Powell, as well as Giuliani and Pataki. But the pro-choice Democrats in attendance aren't Catholic and the pro-choice Catholics in attendance aren't Democrats. This may not be exactly what you'd expect if you've been following the discussion of this subject by Atrios and others, but the fact remains: Only in the case of a pro-choice Catholic Democrat does the question of exclusion and denunciation come up. (UPDATE: Hi to everyone who came here via Atrios -- in case you don't know, this is happening again to a Democrat, this time in Indiana. Scroll up for details, or just click here.) posted by Steve M. | 11:02 PM | I don't know whether to laugh or cry: Darwin-Free Fun for Creationists PENSACOLA, Fla., April 29 -- Robert and Schon Passmore took their children to Disney World last fall and left bitterly disappointed. As Christians who reject evolutionary theory, the family scoffed at the park's dinosaur attractions, which date the apatosaurus, brachiosaurus and the like to prehistoric times. "My kids kept recognizing flaws in the presentation," said Mrs. Passmore, of Jackson, Ala. "You know -- the whole 'millions of years ago dinosaurs ruled the earth' thing." So this week, the Passmores sought out a lower-profile Florida attraction: Dinosaur Adventure Land, a creationist theme park and museum here that beckons children to "find out the truth about dinosaurs" with games that roll science and religion into one big funfest with the message that Genesis, not science, tells the real story of the creation. ...Creationist groups are also promoting creationist vacations, including dinosaur digs in South Dakota, fossil-collecting trips in Australia and New Zealand, and tours of the Grand Canyon ("raft the canyon and learn how Noah's flood contributed to the formation").... The Muslim world has madrassas. We have anti-evolutionary home-schoolers who take their kids to places like this. (Families that home-school are described in the article as part of the core market for such attractions.) (UPDATE: Atrios notes that the founder of this park is a known Catholic-hater and Jew-hater, a fact the Paper of Record somehow failed to discover.) posted by Steve M. | 10:50 PM | Adam Nagourney's latest article (on the front page of the Sunday New York Times above the fold, of course,where it will do maximum damage) may be the Guernica, the Ninth Symphony, the Blonde on Blonde of the Nagourney oeuvre. Even the title is quintessential Nagourney: Kerry Struggling to Find a Theme, Democrats Fear That's a poem, ladies and gentlemen -- eight words, four of them "Kerry," "Democrats," "Struggling," and "Fear," with Kerry's struggle causing Democrats' fear, and Democrats' fear making Kerry have to struggle. Brilliant! The New York Times pays Nagourney to say only two things in print, over and over and over: (1) Democrats are doomed and (2) we know this because Democrats say so. Here, yet again, Democrats trash a Democrat -- Kerry doesn't have a war room in Ohio, can you imagine? The fact that Kerry is neck-and-neck with an extraordinarily well-funded incumbent who a year ago was expected to be unbeatable is never mentioned. By the way, shouldn't there be a simple rule for everyone in the Democratic Party? DON'T TALK TO ADAM NAGOURNEY. EVER. Is this really so difficult to grasp? posted by Steve M. | 9:57 PM | SO-CALLED LIBERAL BOOK REVIEWS From the review of John Podhoretz's Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane in The New York Times Book Review: Podhoretz offers a sharp and considered reappraisal of a president who has been, in Bush's own mangled word, misunderestimated from the moment he entered politics, and possibly from birth.... This book is an important corrective to anyone tempted to write Bush off as a president of no consequence.... Raunchy, punchy and mischievous.... serious stuff, a line drawn in the sand with passion. From the review of John Dean's Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush in The New York Times Book Review: Dean fails to deliver the argument implied in the title.... What's more, he never really develops a coherent explanation for the administration's secrecy.... instead of trying to persuade the undecided, Dean barrages Bush with cheap shots.... This is a maddening book. In a gentler era, I'd accept this -- but Ann Coulter and others will tell you, "Why do liberals need their own radio network? They already have The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and all three major networks," and never acknowledge that these "liberal" news sources are perhaps 60%-40% liberal and regularly bash liberals. Wake me when part of the Murdoch empire bashes a right-wing book and praises a left-wing book on the same day. posted by Steve M. | 9:50 PM | That soft rubbing sound you've heard all weekend is David Brooks wringing his hands: ...sexual marketplaces are a rapidly expanding feature of society, and they are becoming more distinct from marriage marketplaces. Furthermore, as the sex markets become bigger and more efficient, people have less incentive to get married. As the scholars Yoosik Youm and Anthony Paik write, "Opportunities in the sex market act as constraints in the marriage market." The big problem here is that there is an overwhelming body of evidence to suggest that marriage correlates highly with happiness. Children raised in marriages tend to have more opportunities than children raised outside marriage. Over all, Americans are spending much less time married. They marry later and divorce at high rates, and remarry less and less. We are replacing marriage, one of our most successful institutions, with hooking up. This is a deep structural problem, and very worrying. Brooks would love to turn the clock back to a time when there was intense social pressure to get and stay married ... because married people are happier. But one reason married people are happier is undoubtedly the fact that they aren't pressured to get and stay married. If we had the society Brooks wants, in which being single is a scandal, being divorced or separated is a scandal, and being openly gay is a real scandal, a survey of married people would find a hell of a lot less happiness. posted by Steve M. | 9:29 PM | |
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