WASHINGTON — In a few key areas — electricity, the judicial system and overall security — the Iraq that America handed back to its residents Monday is worse off than before the war began last year, according to calculations in a new General Accounting Office report released yesterday.

The 105-page report by Congress' investigative arm offers a bleak assessment of Iraq after 14 months of U.S. military occupation. Among its findings:

• In 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, electricity was available fewer hours per day on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26 million people live in those provinces.

• Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to rebuild Iraq has been spent, with $10 billion more about to be spent. The biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations.

• The country's court system is more clogged than before the war, and judges are frequent targets of assassination attempts.

• The new Iraqi civil-defense, police and overall security units are suffering from mass desertions, are poorly trained and ill-equipped.

• The number of what the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) called significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May.

The report was released the same day the CPA's inspector general issued three reports that highlighted serious management difficulties at the CPA. The reports found that the CPA wasted millions of dollars at a Hilton resort hotel in Kuwait because it didn't have guidelines for who could stay there, lost track of how many employees it had in Iraq and didn't track reconstruction projects funded by international donors to ensure they didn't duplicate U.S. projects. [link via Atrios]

New York Times:

More than a year into an aid effort that American officials likened to the Marshall Plan, occupation authorities acknowledge that fewer than 140 of 2,300 promised construction projects are under way. Only three months after L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator who departed Monday, pledged that 50,000 Iraqis would find jobs at construction sites before the formal transfer of sovereignty, fewer than 20,000 local workers are employed.

Inside the high-profile Doura plant, American-financed repairs, originally scheduled to be completed by June 1, have dragged into the summer even as the demand for electricity soars and residents suffer through nightly power failures.

At the same time, an economy that is supposed to become a beacon of free enterprise remains warped by central controls and huge subsidies for energy and food, leaving politically explosive policy choices for the fledgling Iraqi government.

While the interim government has formally taken office, the reconstruction effort — involving everything from building electric and sewage plants to training police officers and judges — is only beginning. [link via Daily Kos]

An examination of the Bush military files within the context of US Statutory Law, Department of Defense regulations, and Air Force policies and procedures of that era lead to a single conclusion:  George W. Bush was considered a deserter by the United States Air Force. [link via Atrios]

Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror

By Anonymous. Brassey's.320 pp. $27.50

For those Americans who had begun to doubt whether the Central Intelligence Agency could produce good analysis, Imperial Hubris clearly demonstrates otherwise. It is a powerful, persuasive analysis of the terrorist threat and the Bush administration's failed efforts to fight it. The CIA carefully vetted the book to ensure that no "sources and methods" were exposed, but the anonymous author -- a current CIA official -- draws effectively on the years he's spent carefully studying detailed intelligence reports from several U.S. and many foreign spy agencies. His criticism is damning.

The writer, author of the 2002 book Through Our Enemies' Eyes, declares that the U.S. war on terrorism is a failure. While admitting that President George W. Bush is technically correct when he says that "two-thirds of the known al Qaeda managers have been caught or killed," the author points out that other leaders have emerged to take their place. The president's often-repeated "two thirds" claim is based on an assessment of al Qaeda Shura Council members in September 2001. Some of them, like Muhammad Atef, are dead; he was killed by a CIA-controlled Predator flying over Kabul. Others, like Khalid Sheik Muhammad, are in U.S. custody; he was arrested in Pakistan. Many are under "house arrest" in Iran, in large part because the United States refused to bargain for their handover. Others, notably bin Laden and his deputy, are alive and apparently well, issuing audio tapes to the faithful.

The original al Qaeda, as the author points out, has been overtaken by a series of regionally based, autonomous jihadist terrorist groups, which carried out post-Sept. 11 attacks in Bali, Riyadh, Madrid, Istanbul, Casablanca, Chechnya, the Philippines, Thailand and Iraq. Despite the initial claim of State Department analysts -- in the annual report on terrorism -- that attacks have gone down, this new network of al Qaeda spinoffs has actually staged twice as many attacks since Sept. 11 as al Qaeda had prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. (The State Department has now withdrawn its report and corrected its error, admitting that 2003 marked an all-time high for the terrorist incidents.)

Anonymous writes that the conduct of U.S. military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan has left both countries "seething with anti-U.S. sentiment, fertile grounds for the expansion of al Qaeda and kindred groups." This CIA officer believes the U.S. invasion of Iraq was exactly what bin Laden and his associates had hoped would happen -- a belief that many counterterroism experts privately share. The Iraq invasion gave a new cause to the jihadists and new evidence to Arab militants that Americans are the "new crusaders" -- i.e., foreign infidels bent on conquest. The result has been more recruits, more suicide bombers and more money to the jihadists.

Anonymous underlines a central point: The United States must realize who the enemy is. "The one thing accomplished by refusing to admit a war exists with an enemy of immense durability, manpower, and resources is to delay design of a strategy for victory."

Anonymous has painted a detailed picture of that enemy -- and, despite the administration's ubiquitous phrase, it is not "terrorism," faceless and abstract. Terrorism is a tactic. The enemy is "an Islamic insurgency," a multinational movement to replace governments in the Islamic world with fundamentalist theocracies. Jihadist leaders believe they must eliminate the American presence in the region and U.S. support for existing governments there so that they can seize power. Later, some of them may fight to establish Islamist governments in Europe and America. For now, their combat against the "far enemy" (i.e., us) is designed merely to kick out the struts supporting the "near enemy" (governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere). Like President Bush, Anonymous argues that we have made the mistake in the past of thinking about these enemies as criminals. But unlike Bush, Anonymous argues that having thus isolated the threat as an Islamic insurgency, the appropriate response is to fight not just with bullets and warrants, but also with ideas -- politically and socially. [link via Pandagon]

[T]he reason Michael Moore's movie is so popular is mostly because he's presenting a certain point of view which is almost entirely missing from mainstream media. Basically, it's 3 things - 1) Bush isn't such a great leader, 2) It's fair to question Bush's motives, and 3) The Iraq war was a really bad idea. Now, whatever the rightness or wrongness of those perspectives, they aren't being articulated in the mainstream.

I thought Fahrenheit 9/11 was a bit mediocre even as polemic, but the thing that really struck me about the film was the almost poetic parallellism between its own slanders and cheap shots and the slanders and cheap shots of pro-war supporters themselves over the past couple of years. If Moore had done this deliberately, it would have been worthy of Henry James.

Take the first half hour of the film, in which Moore exposes the close relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud. Sure, it relies mostly on innuendo and imagery, but then again, he never really makes the case anyway. He never flat out says that the Bush family is on the Saudi payroll. Rather, he simply includes "9/11," "Bush," and "Saudi Arabia" in as many sentences as possible, thus leaving the distinct impression that George Bush is a bought and paid for subsidiary of the Saudi royal family.

Which is all remarkably similar to the tactic Bush himself used to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11. He never flat out blamed Saddam, but rather made sure to include the words "9/11," "Saddam Hussein," and "al-Qaeda" in as many sentences as possible, thus leaving the distinct impression that Saddam had something to do with it.

Or take Afghanistan. In a lengthy and nearly unreadable screed in Slate, Christopher Hitchens takes Moore to task for arguing in 2002 that the war in Afghanistan was unjust but then arguing in the film that Iraq was a distraction from the real war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Surely I'm not the only one who's reminded by this of the ever shifting rationales for war from the Bush administration itself? In 2002 it was mostly about WMD. But there was no WMD. So then it became al-Qaeda. But there were no serious al-Qaeda ties. How about liberation? Maybe, except the Iraqis don't seem especially happy with their liberators. Democracy? Stay tuned.

Finally, the last half hour of the film includes a piece of street theater in which Moore accosts congressmen on Capitol Hill and asks if they'll try to get their sons and daughters to enlist in the military. It's a brutally unfair question, but one that echoes a standard debating point of Hitchens and others: "Would you prefer that Saddam Hussein was still in power?" It's a question that's unanswerable in 10 words or less, and about as meaningful as Moore's ambush interviews with congressmen.

So is Fahrenheit 9/11 unfair, full of innuendo and cheap shots, and guilty of specious arguments? Sure. But that just makes it the perfect complement to the arguments of many in the pro-war crowd itself. Perhaps the reason they're so mad is that they see more than a little of themselves in it.

I think Kevin is being a little too harsh. Contrary to the Bushies' insinuations, there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and no meaningful connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. By contrast, there really is an extraordinarily close relationship between the Bushes and the Saudis, one that raises a lot of questions given that Bush 43 is President of the United States, and Bush 41 used to be. And Dubya has given exceptional treatment to Saudi Arabia in various ways, including flying 140 or so Saudis out of the United States immediately after September 11, and redacting 27 pages of the 9/11 report (purportedly on grounds of national security) that apparently pertained to Saudi Arabia. But I agree that Moore ought to more explicitly state his claim instead of relying on innuendo.

Moore failed to score some points that he should have. His footage of Bush reading to the schoolchildren for seven minutes after he knew that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center is shocking, but could have been even more effective. As Randi Rhodes has said on Air America, Moore could have used a split screen to show what was going on (1) after he entered the classroom knowing that the first plane had crashed into the WTC and (2) after he continued to read to the kids, knowing that the second plane had crashed. Moore never makes the key point that Bush never ordered the remaining planes shot down, and that it was Cheney who did so -- after all four of them had crashed. Bush froze like a deer caught in the headlights, while a leader would have acted, and possibly saved hundreds of lives and one of the Twin Towers.

This story is well known to those of us in the left blogosphere, but the media have inexcusably ignored it. So did the Democratic leadership, as far as I know. If President Gore or President Clinton had done this (especially after spending the previous month on vacation, despite having been told that there was a high likelihood of an imminent terrorist attack in the United States), Republicans would have been howling and rightly demanding his impeachment.

Link:

WASHINGTON — The government needs to establish guidelines for canceling or rescheduling elections if terrorists strike the United States again, says the chairman of a new federal voting commission.

Such guidelines do not currently exist, said DeForest B. Soaries, head of the voting panel.

Soaries was appointed to the federal Election Assistance Commission last year by President Bush.

"Canceling elections"? I can conceive of circumstances where rescheduling elections might be appropriate, but what legitimate reason would there be for canceling them?

White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales assembled reporters in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building last week for what has become an administration ritual: disavowing the conclusions of official documents.

Administration memos -- some of which appeared to sanction torture of prisoners -- were "unnecessary, over-broad discussions" and "not relied upon" by policymakers, Gonzales said. "In reality, they do not reflect the policies that the administration ultimately adopted."

A week earlier, it was Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's turn to step away from an official document, this one State's "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, which showed the number of terrorist incidents worldwide falling to the lowest level in more than three decades. "Unfortunately, the data that is within the report, the actual numbers of incidents, is off, it's wrong," Powell said. "And I am regretful that this has happened." A revised report showed that 625 people died in terrorist attacks in 2003, not 307 as first reported.

Before that, the administration publicly disavowed -- or at least tiptoed away from -- a budget memo calling for spending cuts next year, unrealistically upbeat reports about job growth, Medicare prescription costs and minority health care, and optimistic assumptions in a proposed regulation governing mercury emissions.

Democrats say this is no accident. "It's either political manipulation or incompetence," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a former top aide to President Bill Clinton. "I know it's not incompetence." [link via Tristero]

Dana Milbank deserves a Pulitzer. Time and again, he has documented the lies of the Bush regime (which early on tried to get him fired for not being a compliant media whore, like 99% of "journalists").

Let's say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor. 

LOS ANGELES, June 27 — Michael Moore's anti-Bush "Fahrenheit 9/11" became the highest-grossing documentary of all time on its first weekend in release, taking in $21.8 million as it packed theaters across the country this weekend.

The movie, mocking President Bush and criticizing his decision to go to war in Iraq, was No. 1 at the box office, beating out the popular comedies "White Chicks" and "DodgeBall," which were playing on almost triple the number of screens.

Theater owners in large cities and smaller towns reported sellout crowds over the weekend, with numerous theaters declaring house records.

The phenomenal opening represented a decisive victory for Mr. Moore and for the Miramax movie executives Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who released the film independently after it was rejected by Miramax's corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, as too political.

"We sold out in Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg," in North Carolina, Mr. Moore said on Sunday. "We sold out in Army-base towns. We set house records in some of these places. We set single-day records in a number of theaters. We got standing ovations in Greensboro, N.C.

"The biggest news to me this morning is this is a red-state movie," he said, referring to the state whose residents voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. "Republican states are embracing the movie, and it's sold out in Republican strongholds all over the country."

Harvey Weinstein said: "It's beyond anybody's expectations. I'd have to say the sky's the limit on this movie. Who knows what territory we're in."

Mr. Moore's 2002 film, "Bowling for Columbine," had held the record for the highest-earning documentary until this weekend, taking in $21.6 million in its domestic run.

Market research leading up to the weekend had shown that the documentary would rank second or third at the box office after the two mainstream comedies. But "White Chicks" took in $19.6 million for the weekend on 2,726 screens, while "DodgeBall" took in $18.5 million on 3,020. "Fahrenheit 9/11," rated R, was released on 868 screens.

The author of the article does display a touch of innumeracy in claiming that 2,726 and 3,020 (the number of screens "White Chicks" and "Dodge Ball" are playing on) are "almost triple" 868. Thrice 868 is 2,604.

In Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, we are treated to . . . videotaped footage of George W. Bush taken on September 11, 2001. In this sequence, Bush, having just been told that a passenger plane struck one of the World Trade Center towers, enters a Florida classroom and begins reading "My Pet Goat" with a group of kids. At this point, you've got to be struck by the fact that, having been informed of an incident that at the very least involves the deaths of hundreds of airline passengers and tower employees, Bush decides to proceed with a cheap photo op staged to convince America that he's interested in education. But the kicker . . . comes a few minutes later. One of Bush's aides walks into the room and whispers to our fearless leader that a second plane has hit the other tower. At this instant, there is no doubt that America is under a large, coordinated terrorist attack. So what bold, decisive action does Bush take? None. He just sits there like a dumb sh*t. And he does so for almost seven minutes before he finally leaves the room.

Now, Bush is spending $200 million to convince Americans that he's a leader. That he's decisive. That he can and will take bold action in the face of a crisis. But thanks to the videotape shot on September 11, we know it's a lie. Fahrenheit 9/11 shows us what all the misleading advertising in the world couldn't cover up: When faced with a real emergency, George W. Bush, with nobody to tell him what to say or how to act, simply froze. For almost seven minutes on September 11, America was paying a $400,000 yearly salary to an ice sculpture. I dare any pundit, any handler, anybody who supports this loser to explain this away.

The game is up. In an era when this administration's policies have made America the most hated country on the planet, our very survival requires that we have a strong leader at the bridge. And Americans now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that George W. Bush is no leader. We have the videotape to prove it.

There were an array of opinions from the bench in the detention cases today. By far, the most striking and passionate were those of Justice Scalia concurring in Hamdi and Justice Stevens dissenting in Padilla. Justice Scalia argued forcefully that the government must charge Hamdi with treason in court, and the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus has a vital tradition and could be suspended only by Congress through democratic means. Justice Stevens, using exceptionally strong rhetoric, argued that the detention of Padilla incommunicado amounted to the “tools of a tyrant.” 

The CIA has suspended the use of extraordinary interrogation techniques approved by the White House pending a review by Justice Department and other administration lawyers, intelligence officials said.

The "enhanced interrogation techniques," as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries. The tactics have been used to elicit intelligence from al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Current and former CIA officers aware of the recent decision said the suspension reflects the CIA's fears of being accused of unsanctioned and illegal activities, as it was in the 1970s. The decision applies to CIA detention facilities, such as those around the world where the agency is interrogating al Qaeda leaders and their supporters, but not military prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.

"Everything's on hold," said a former senior CIA official aware of the agency's decision. "The whole thing has been stopped until we sort out whether we are sure we're on legal ground." A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the issue.

CIA interrogations will continue but without the suspended techniques, which include feigning suffocation, "stress positions," light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and making captives think they are being interrogated by another government.

The suspension is the latest fallout from the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and is related to the White House decision, announced Tuesday, to review and rewrite sections of an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department opinion on interrogations that said torture might be justified in some cases.

Although the White House repudiated the memo Tuesday as the work of a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department, administration officials now confirm it was vetted by a larger number of officials, including lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office.

The memorandum was drafted by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to help the CIA determine how aggressive its interrogators could be during sessions with suspected al Qaeda members. The legal opinion was signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the office and now a federal judge. The office consists mainly of political appointees and is considered the executive branch agencies' legal adviser. Memos signed by the head of the office are given the weight of a binding legal opinion.

A Justice Department official said Tuesday at a briefing that the office went "beyond what was asked for," but other lawyers and administration officials said the memo was approved by the department's criminal division and by the office of Attorney General John D. Ashcroft.

In addition, Timothy E. Flanigan -- then deputy White House counsel -- discussed a draft of the document with lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel before it was finalized, the officials said. David S. Addington, Cheney's counsel, also weighed in with remarks during at least one meeting he held with Justice lawyers involved with writing the opinion. He was particularly concerned, sources said, that the opinion include a clear-cut section on the president's authority.

Professor Froomkin says that there are so many scoops in this story that "there's a danger some may get lost." He cites (1) the CIA's cessation for the time being of "extraordinary interrogation techniques" (whatever that term means); (2) the August 1, 2003 opinion was approved at the highest levels of government; (3) the "royalist" notion that the president has the right to violate laws and treaties, and to empower others to do so, was not only approved, but requested, at the top; (4) in practice, the government has approved actions that must be called torture, including "selective" administration of painkillers to a prisoner who had been shot in the groin in order to induce his cooperation; and (5) despite what ex-administration people say, the government lawyers' actions don't strike Froomkin as "scholarly" or "lawyerlike."

Froomkin (who has become a real "one-stop shop" for analysis of torture memoranda) also directs us to this New York Times article that notes that, "Legal scholars asked to assess the recently released Justice Department memorandums concerning torture all but unanimously agreed that the quality of the legal work in them is poor." I heard incoming Yale Law School dean Harold Hongju Koh, one of the legal scholars cited in the article, and others savage the torture memoranda at the American Constitution Society National Convention last weekend. The ACS says at its site that it will be posting streaming video and transcripts from the conference. I'll let you know if they post the video and/or transcript of the remarks of Dean Koh and others.

I'm going to go out on a limb and declare my homosexual union to be morally superior to a lot of heterosexual marriages. My boyfriend and I have been together 10 years and, unlike Mr. Limbaugh and his three lucky exes, we're still going strong. If longevity is any measure of a relationship's success--and it is, according to religious conservatives who insist that gay men aren't fit for marriage due to the alleged instability of our relationships--our homosexual union is not only morally superior to Limbaugh's three failed marriages but to all of J.Lo's marriages combined.

One could also mention Jack Ryan, who divorced Jeri Ryan after eight years of marriage. Ironically, Ryan opposes gay marriage, civil unions, and even registries, which he suggests somehow undermine the institution of marriage:

I believe that marriage can only be defined as that union between one man and one woman. I am opposed to same-sex marriages, civil unions, and registries.

I believe that we are all equal before God and should be before the law. Homosexuals deserve the same constitutional protections, safeguards, and human dignity as every American, but they should not be entitled to special rights based on their sexual behavior.

The breakdown of the family over the past 35 years is one of the root causes of some of our society’s most intractable social problems-criminal activity, illegitimacy, and the cyclical nature of poverty.

One would have thought that Jack would have learned to construct better arguments than this when he went to Harvard Law School. If homosexuals deserve the same "constitutional protections, safeguards, and human dignity" as other Americans, doesn't that mean that they should be allowed to marry?

Jack's further statement that gays "should not be entitled to special rights based on their sexual behavior" also does not assist his position. Gays are not asking for "special rights," but for the same right to marry that straight couples enjoy. And as far as I know, a couple's sexual behavior plays no role in their right to a marriage license. As long as they meet the age, residence, waiting period, and other requirements for marriage, what sex act(s), if any, they prefer is irrelevant. For example, Jack's alleged desire to screw his wife in front of other people neither entitles him to a marriage license nor disqualifies him from one.

Jack's decrying of "[t]he breakdown of the family over the past 35 years" is a nonsequitur, since he makes no attempt to tie that alleged phenomenon to gay marriages, civil unions, or registries. Is he suggesting that his divorce was somehow caused by gay marriages and/or civil union and/or registries? My wife and I will celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary next month. The recent availability of gay marriage has not tempted us to divorce or otherwise undermined our marriage.

You probably imagine your congressman hard at work in the Capitol debating legislation, making laws -- you know, governing. But your newspaper probably didn't tell you that one night in March, members of Congress hosted a crowning ritual for an ex-convict and multibillionaire who dressed up in maroon robes and declared himself the Second Coming.

On March 23, the Dirksen Senate Office Building was the scene of a coronation ceremony for Rev. Sun Myung Moon, owner of the conservative Washington Times newspaper and UPI wire service, who was given a bejeweled crown by Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill. Afterward, Moon told his bipartisan audience of Washington power players he would save everyone on Earth as he had saved the souls of Hitler and Stalin -- the murderous dictators had been born again through him, he said. In a vision, Moon said the reformed Hitler and Stalin vouched for him, calling him "none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."

To many observers, this bizarre scene would have looked like the apocalypse as depicted in "Left Behind" novels. Moon, 84, the benefactor of conservative foundations like the American Family Coalition -- who served time in the 1980s for tax fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice -- has views somewhere to the right of the Taliban's Mullah Omar. Moon preaches that gays are "dung-eating dogs," Jews brought on the Holocaust by betraying Jesus, and the U.S. Constitution should be scrapped in favor of a system he calls "Godism" -- with him in charge. The man crowned "King of Peace" by congressmen once said, according to sermons reprinted in his church's Unification News: "Suppose I were to hit you with the baseball bat to stop you, bloodying your ear and breaking a bone or two, yet still you insisted on doing more work for Father."

What, exactly, drew at least a dozen members of Congress to Moon's coronation? (By the Unification Church's estimate, 81 congressmen attended, although that number is probably high.) The event was the grand finale of Moon's coast-to-coast "tear down the cross" Moonification tour, intended to remove Christian crosses from almost 300 churches in poor neighborhoods -- the idea being that the cross was an obstacle to uniting religions under Moon. Yet the Dirksen ceremony was sold as a celebration of world peace. According to a cheery promotional video released by Moon's International and Interreligious Federation for World Peace, the ceremony marked the dawn of "the era of the Eternal Peace Kingdom, one global family under God." Moon's coronation also cured God's pain, the announcer explains.

As tristero put it so succinctly:

The GOP: home of public sex orgy lovers (Ryan), high-stakes gamblers (Bennett), drug addicts (Limbaugh), adulterers (Gingrich, Hyde), avowed Hitler admirers (Schwarzenegger) and racists (Lott).

(I'd have to put the Governator in the public sex orgy lovers category as well...)

It's pretty obvious that Republicans don't actually care about sexual morality or any other measure of personal character. So, what do they care about? Easy. It's power. All the rest is a sideshow.

'Fahrenheit' overheats Friday B.O.
Boffo sales put doc in running for No. 1 spot
 
By GABRIEL SNYDER

Buzz works.

After weeks of debate and media coverage, "Fahrenheit 9/11" opened today far better than expected.

. . . .

"Fahrenheit" is crushing both expectations of those involved in the film as well as industry rivals.

[Lions Gate President Tom] Ortenberg said that while tracking data did not predict sales this strong, the trends had been encouraging.

"The most important thing in the tracking is the trend. Every day our numbers keep going up for awareness and interest," he said.

[Head of IFC Films Jonathan] Sehring added, "It would be great if it held for the weekend. It could break the documentary box office record in just one weekend."

That record is, for the moment, is $21.6 million cume for Moore's 2002 doc, "Bowling for Columbine." But, that pic played for 25 weeks before it crossed $20 million. [For the full Variety article, go here and scroll down to the comment by VermontProg.]

A one-term senator from Michigan, Spencer Abraham was the No. 1 recipient of campaign contributions from the automotive industry, receiving more than $700,000 for his failed Senate run in 2000 from contributors like General Motors, Ford and Lear Corp. One of his top contributors, DaimlerChrysler, is introducing an extra large SUV to the U.S. market this year. Daimler’s SUV, considered a "military spin-off," is a foot longer than the SUVs currently on the road and will only get about 10 miles per gallon. . . . Daimler is one of 139 companies that joined the Coalition for Vehicle Choice, a lobbying group that opposes setting fuel economy regulations. (The current standard for SUVs is 20.7 miles to the gallon.) The coalition gave Abraham $178,674 in 1999-2000. [substituted link for defunct link in original]

Illinois Republican senatorial candidate Jack Ryan, his candidacy in turmoil over sex club allegations, decided to quit his quest for Congress on Friday. "I am today withdrawing from the race," he said in a statement prepared by his campaign.

I'll have to admit there is no easy way out for the Bush administration in explaining how it could have been snookered from first to last about Saddam Hussein. I'm not suggesting you ask to meet with the President and tell him he should go on TV and tell the American people he made a Bigtime Boo-Boo. I'm only suggesting you go back to your law books and, for your own good, get a good grip on why Saddam Hussein is behind bars when it now turns out he doesn't seem to have done anything wrong. You might then be in a better position to advise the President on how to proceed in the best way to avoid further Bigtime Boo-Boos.

I don't know whether Wanninski is right about Saddam's innocence, but it sure would be nice to charge him with something. The United States has had Saddam in custody for over six months now, but no one has filed any charges against him. In a free nation, which we claim to be, the government is supposed to charge people with wrongdoing and bring them to trial, not hold them indefinitely without charges. (This is pretty basic and you wouldn't think it needed to be pointed out, but it seems to be a novel idea for the Bush regime. See also "Guantanamo Bay," "Abu Ghraib.")

Who is this Saddam lover Jude Wanninski, you ask? Some pinko liberal? A radical Islamicist and al Qaeda sympathizer? Not exactly. The biography on his website states:

As an associate editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1972 to 1978, Jude Wanniski repopularized the classical theories of supply-side economics. His book, The Way The World Works, became a foundation of the global economic transformation launched by the Reagan Administration. [links via Sadly, No!]

Jack Ryan, GOP Senate candidate for Illinois, in public, from the Chicago Sun-Times in April:

Still, every day, at some point, Ryan can be found in one of the back pews of a church, praying.

"People ask me, 'Why do you go to church every day?…I'm not very effective in my home. Too many distractions…

"I believe in God," he says. "The order of priorities is no revelation here: God, family, country. That's how I try to think about my life, in that order."

And he believes in prayer, he says, explaining that he doesn't recite specific prayers. He has a conversation with God.

Discussions of C.S. Lewis, St. Thomas More, St. Francis of Assisi and his calling from God to enter public service follow.

Here's the divorced Jack writing "ON THE DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE" (in which he states his opposition to gay marriage):

The breakdown of the family over the past 35 years is one of the root causes of some of our society’s most intractable social problems-criminal activity, illegitimacy, and the cyclical nature of poverty.

Pictures of the ex-Mrs. Ryan (Jeri Ryan) are here, here, and here.

Jesus' General makes an excellent point:

Ryan is a very bright guy. He saw the lavender menace infiltrating the centers of power in our country. He knew that the day was coming soon when there would be a great political battle fought between the forces of heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Ryan wanted to fight in that battle as a Senator. Given the direction society was heading, he worked quickly to establish his heterosexual bona fides. That's why he pressured his wife to have sex with him in front of an audience.

I wish other Senate candidates should do the same. That way, we could ensure that we're not electing Senators with dual loyalties as we consider the Homosexual Discrimination Constitutional Amendment.

Michael Moore leaves no turn unstoned. There are multitudes of shattering, seminal moments in his brilliant Bush-whacking documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, that reveal more about the cynicism, greed and ineptitude in the U.S. government than you will ever learn from any sound bite on the right-wing late-night cable-channel blabfests, but one will stay with me forever. Forget about the "official" reports from the White House about the activities of George W. Bush on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, insisting he learned about the Al Qaeda attacks while meeting with Florida pre-schoolers and quickly dashed from the room to save the country. The truth, it is now revealed, is that he was informed of the first attack on the World Trade Center before he even entered the schoolroom, and he decided to continue with his photo-op anyway. There he is on camera when Andrew Card informs him of the second plane and utters the fatal words, "We’re under attack!"—but he continues to read My Pet Goat for another seven minutes, his eyes sliding sideways in his puzzled face, like a moron looking for a bathroom, until his staff insists that he leave. (He stayed for another half hour.) If nothing else, that defining moment says volumes about what we can expect from the President of the U.S. in the center of a supreme, history-altering crisis: He’s just clueless.

Newsweek continues the narrative a little bit later:

America was under attack, and somebody had to make a decision. Dick Cheney, huddled in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House, had just urged the traveling George W. Bush not to return to Washington. The president had left Florida aboard Air Force One at 9:55 a.m. on 9/11 "with no destination at take-off," as last week's 9-11 Commission report noted. Nor had Bush given any known instructions on how to respond to the attacks. [emphasis added; link via Atrios]

Newsweek relates that Cheney, apparently acting without any input from the president, ordered any remaining hijacked planes to be shot down. Unfortunately, by that time all four planes had already crashed. So 3,000 people died, and the World Trade Center was destroyed. If Bush had issued a timely shootdown order, some or perhaps even all of those people might have been saved, and one or both of the twin towers might have remained standing.

But at least Bush got his photo op. That's apparently what mattered to him. What does it take for people to realize that this man is utterly unqualified to be President of the United States?

• Ashcroft may have committed perjury when he testified that he had not dismissed a July 12, 2001 warning by Acting FBI Director Tom Pickard about the threat of a terrorist attack in the United States. Oh, well, what's a little perjury by the chief law enforcement officer of the United States? And of course lies about national security and terrorism don't rise to the level of lies about one's sex life. (link via Atrios)
• Professor Froomkin addresses the significance (or lack thereof) of the torture policy-related documents the administration released yesterday, and Billmon discusses how the policy played out in practice (torture, and lots of it).
• Billmon collects polls showing that Clinton is a much more popular president than the miserable failure is.

Kerry is required to speak in extremely precise terms because if he doesn't, Ed Gillespie and his coven of shrieking talk show harpies will blast their faxes directly up his ass. (Ask Al Gore about that.) Bush, on the other hand, whom everyone knows is a total idiot, is applauded if he is able to string more than 5 words together without drooling on his tie. [link via Atrios]

Presidential elections present us with choices about our nation's future. We support John Kerry for President and urge you to join us.

The prosperity, health, environment, and security of Americans depend on Presidential leadership to sustain our vibrant science and technology; to encourage education at home and attract talented scientists and engineers from abroad; and to nurture a business environment that transforms new knowledge into new opportunities for creating quality jobs and reaching shared goals.

President Bush and his administration are compromising our future on each of these counts. By reducing funding for scientific research, they are undermining the foundation of America's future. By setting unwarranted restrictions on stem cell research, they are impeding medical advances. By employing inappropriate immigration practices, they are turning critical scientific talent away from our shores. And by ignoring scientific consensus on critical issues such as global warming, they are threatening the earth's future. Unlike previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, the Bush administration has ignored unbiased scientific advice in the policy-making that is so important to our collective welfare.

John Kerry will change all this. He will support strong investments in science and technology as he restores fiscal responsibility. He will stimulate the development and deployment of technologies to meet our economic, energy, environmental, health, and security needs. He will recreate an America that provides opportunity to all at home or abroad who can help us make progress together.

John Kerry will restore science to its appropriate place in government and bring it back into the White House. He is the clear choice for America's next President.

The complete list of signatories is here.

WASHINGTON - The Associated Press sued the Pentagon and the Air Force on Tuesday, seeking access to all records of George W. Bush's military service during the Vietnam War.

Filed in federal court in New York, where The AP is headquartered, the lawsuit seeks access to a copy of Bush's microfilmed personnel file from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin.Bush's military service during the Vietnam war. [link via Atrios]

I made it clear to [Jack Ryan] that our marriage was over for me in the spring of 1998. On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York and one to Paris, [he] insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. These were surprise trips that [he] arranged. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways.

The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. [He] had done research.

[Jack Ryan] took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. . . . It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.

[He] wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused.

[He] asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset.

We left the club and [he] apologized, said that I was right and he would never insist that I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system.

Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill.

[He] became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.

I could not get over the incident, and my loss of any attraction to him as a result.

Ryan was already trailing Democratic candidate Barack Obama by 20% in the polls. Now Ryan is definitely, er, going down. One wonders if he will stay in the race. I'm sure that Republican leaders in Illinois are urging him to drop out. The Tribune quotes Congressman Ray LaHood (R-Peoria), who warns that Ryan's candidacy won't play in Peoria:

"In the interest of saving further embarassment for him and his family, he needs to immediately withdraw from the race," [LaHood] said. "There is no way Republicans in Illinois will vote for somebody with this kind of activity in their background."

Ryan's opponent's first name, Barack, means "blessed by God" in Swahili. I'm starting to believe it. In his primary race, the campaign of one of his opponents, multimillionaire Blair Hull, fell apart after it was revealed that his ex-wife had accused him, during their divorce proceedings, of abusing her. Hull was leading in the polls at the time. Now the candidacy of Obama's current multimillionaire opponent is being torpedoed by statements made by his ex-wife during their divorce proceedings.

Obama, to his credit, did not in either instance divulge the information or seek to exploit it. The Sun-Times writes today that Obama "has said he is not interested in the allegations and that he would prefer to stick to issues."

In an ideal world, politicians' sex lives would have little or no bearing on voters' election decisions. But this is not an ideal world. In this world, the Republicans campaign as the "party of family values," and condemn Democrats as promiscuous libertines; and Republicans impeach a Democratic president for lying about blowjobs, but ignore the Bush regime's repeated criminal acts. Under the circumstances, I don't mind at all seeing a Republican get his comeuppance for this sort of thing.

UPDATE: The Smoking Gun has a photocopy of Jeri Ryan's declaration. The relevant pages are pages 2 and 3.

Amid rising disenchantment with the war in Iraq, President Bush has lost significant ground on the issue on which he's staked his presidency: fighting terrorism.

For the first time in ABC News/Washington Post polls, more than half of Americans, 52 percent, say the Iraq war was not worth fighting. Seven in 10 call U.S. casualties there "unacceptable," a new high. And there's been a steady slide in belief that the war has enhanced long-term U.S. security; 51 percent now say so, down 11 points this year.

Bush, moreover, has weakened in his once-strongest area. Approval of his handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism has fallen to 50 percent, its lowest yet —— down eight points in the last month and 29 points below its immediate postwar peak. In a hazardous turn of fortune for Bush, Democrat John Kerry now runs evenly with him in trust to handle terrorism; Bush had led by 13 points on this issue a month ago, and by 21 points the month before.

While Kerry's pressing hard on an issue Bush once owned, the president has not entirely relinquished his advantage on terrorism. On a personal level, the public by a 14-point margin picks him over Kerry to keep the nation safer and more secure. And the Massachusetts senator may be vulnerable on specifics; only four in 10 say he has a "clear plan" on terrorism, while Bush does better.

But Kerry is scoring against Bush elsewhere as well, running ahead in trust to handle five of nine issues tested in this poll, from taxes to education to health care; Bush doesn't lead significantly in any of them. And personally, while Americans broadly see Bush as more consistent, they see Kerry as more honest and trustworthy, by a 13-point margin, and more in touch with their problems, by 20 points.

Evaluating Bush's overall job performance, 47 percent of Americans now approve while 51 percent disapprove, inching over half for the first time in ABC/Post polls. [via Daily Kos] 

BAGHDAD -- The American occupation of Iraq will formally end this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority.

The ambitious, 15-month undertaking stumbled because of a series of mistakes that began with an inadequate commitment of resources and was aggravated by a misunderstanding of Iraqi politics, religion and society in occupied Iraq, these participants said.

"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."

. . . .

In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who come to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. entity that has administered Iraq, cites many successes of its tenure. Nearly 2,500 schools have been repaired, 3 million children have been immunized, $5 million in loans has been distributed to small businesses and 8 million textbooks have been printed, according to the CPA. New banknotes have replaced currency with ousted president Saddam Hussein's picture. Local councils have been formed in every city and province. An interim national government promises to hold general elections next January.

But in many key quantifiable areas, the occupation has fallen far short of its goals.

The Iraqi army is one-third the size U.S. officials promised it would be by now. Seventy percent of police officers have not received training. When violence flared across the country this spring, many soldiers and policemen refused to perform their duties because U.S. forces had failed to equip them, designate competent leaders and win trust among the ranks.

About 15,000 Iraqis have been hired to work on projects funded by $18.6 billion in U.S. aid, despite promises to use the money to employ at least 250,000 Iraqis by this month. At of the beginning of June, 80 percent of the aid package, approved by Congress last fall, remained unspent.

Electricity generation remains stuck at around 4,000 megawatts, resulting in less than nine hours of power a day to most Baghdad homes, despite pledges from U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer to increase production to 6,000 megawatts by June 1.

Iraq's emerging political system is also at odds with original U.S. goals. American officials scuttled plans to remain as the occupying power until Iraqis wrote a permanent constitution and held democratic elections. Instead, Bremer will leave the Iraqis with a temporary constitution, something he repeatedly promised not to do, and an interim government with a president who was not the Bush administration's preferred choice.

. . . .

On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.

Within the marble-walled palace of the CPA's headquarters inside Baghdad's protected Green Zone, there is an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. "Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?" a senior CPA official said. "Nobody here believes that."

Across the country, evangelical Christians are voicing frustration and puzzlement that there has not been more of a political outcry since May 17, when Massachusetts became the first state to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

Evangelical leaders had predicted that a chorus of righteous anger would rise up out of churches from coast to coast and overwhelm Congress with letters, e-mails and phone calls in support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

But that has not happened.

"Standing on Capitol Hill listening, you don't hear anything," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, one of the country's most vigorous Christian advocacy groups.

. . . .

[A] few skeptics on the Christian right, as well as many on the Christian left, are beginning to conclude that there is more fervor for a constitutional amendment in America's pulpits than in its pews. And politicians of both parties say the issue has had less grass-roots sizzle than they had expected.

"So far, it's really been a top-down issue," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a strong opponent of gay marriage who has used his chairmanship of a Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution to hold three hearings on the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.

. . . .

Senate Republican leaders said last week that they plan to bring the amendment to a vote in mid-July, a move that evangelicals hope will energize supporters around the country even though the amendment appears headed for defeat. Despite President Bush's endorsement, it is at least 15 votes short of the 67 needed for passage in the Senate, congressional staffers said.

. . . .

In an effort to rouse the grass roots, more than 700 churches showed a 90-minute medley of sermons by famous evangelists, called "The Battle for Marriage," in a May 23 satellite television broadcast.

Organizers said that hundreds of people turned out for the Sunday evening broadcast in some churches, but that attendance was light in many. "It was pretty disappointing," said [Rev. Gary F.] Smith, who estimated that 35 of his 200 Leesburg [, Virginia] congregants showed up. . . .

. . . .

The Rev. Jim Wallis, head of Call to Renewal, a coalition of religious groups devoted to fighting poverty, said he believes the Christian right is "out of touch" with most Christians' concerns. "Do we really think that Jesus's primary concern in this election year would be a marriage amendment? With the poverty rate rising, with one in six of all U.S. children and one in three children of color living below the poverty line, with more than a billion people around the world living on less than $1 a day?" Wallis asked.

"The truth is, the religious right is not even a majority among evangelicals, but they have very loud voices that presume to speak for a lot more people than they really do," he said.

President Bush yesterday defended his assertions that there was a relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, putting him at odds with this week's finding of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," Bush said after a Cabinet meeting.

• The New York Times editorializes about Bush's peddling of the bogus Iraq-al Qaeda link.
• Frozen French fries are now a fresh vegetable.
• Kerry out-fundraises (to coin a word) Bush for the third month in a row.
• Reviewer at Fox News says everyone should see "Fahrenheit 9/11" (via The Sideshow).

The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy. I further urge governments to join America and others in supporting torture victims' treatment centers, contributing to the UN Fund for the Victims of Torture, and supporting the efforts of non-governmental organizations to end torture and assist its victims.

I'm with you, George. Especially on that "prosecuting" part. As I've said before, Shrub would be well-advised to issue a blanket pardon to himself and his henchmen (and women) before he leaves office. Notice, by the way, how Bush properly distinguishes between the "United States" and "the community of law-abiding nations."

Imagine there is some weapon of mass destruction planted by terrorists in the heart of a city, ready to go off - a "ticking bomb," if you will. Would it be wrong to torture a terrorist to find the location of such a device and save the millions of lives at risk? Hardly. Now, what if instead of torturing a terrorist, interrogators had to torture a confederate of that terrorist - some associate who would know where the terrorist was so they could locate that ticking bomb? Is that dirtying of our hands such a high price to ask in the goal to protect millions? I think not. Now, what if instead of a terrorist's comrade, interrogators have a terrorist's relative or neighbor? Is it still justified to go as far to save innocent lives? I should hope so! And what if that terrorist has a lot of relatives and neighbors - hundreds, even? Would it be wrong to grant blanket authority to torture hundreds of prisoners knowing full well that any of them could have the crucial information required to save a city? Certainly not! And what if the threat we're faced with is not a bomb at all but an even more pernicious threat - a rogue nation with the potential capability to someday construct that bomb? Would it not be America's right - no, her duty - to invade that country, occupy it, and set up a system of torture-like interrogations to rid that country of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction once and for all? Absolutely!

Indeed, the most unsettling question being raised by these latest news items is not the issue of torture itself, but the question of whether America will be strong enough to use that torture to defeat the enemies of life and liberty. The Medium Lobster can only hope that this great nation will retain its nerve. [link via Atrios]

With a keen analytical mind like that, the Medium Lobster surely warrants appointment to the next Court of Appeals vacancy that opens up.

A couple of posts below that, Fafnir in "memos, hypotheticals, motorcycles" shows the speciousness of arguments that Bush and company knew that Americans were torturing prisoners.

One of the biggest problems facing Afghanistan's first elected post-Taliban government will be the country's illicit cultivation of opium poppies, which satisfied almost three-fourths of the world's opium demand last year. The trade, 20 times that during the Taliban's last year, brought in $2.3 billion, more than half Afghanistan's gross domestic product. Experts expect plantings to be bigger this year to a record level.

Documents recently obtained by the press reveal White House anxiety about how to protect President George W. Bush and members of his cabinet from going to prison for ordering, authorizing or deliberately permitting systematic torture of persons in their control, but technically outside formal American legal jurisdiction. The question put to lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it.

Thus, according to these reports, the president last year obtained from his lawyers an opinion that he is not bound by U.S. laws or by international engagements prohibiting torture and that Americans committing torture under his authority cannot be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

This opinion rests on the argument that national security considerations override both U.S. law and international treaties. As one of the military lawyers who took part in these discussions has said, it was an assertion of "presidential power at its absolute apex."

It deliberately overrode the norms the military had previously been trained to regard as mandated by the Geneva Conventions. The world now knows how overriding the norms at the top overrides them all down the line.

The Bush administration's civilians had been complaining about how law, international treaties and conventions, and military norms and inhibitions, were interfering with their determination to seize and hold anyone they pleased in secret prisons, declare them without legal rights even when they were American citizens, torture them whenever they wanted and keep them forever, if they liked (a totalitarian ambition, obviously). They wanted these obstructions removed.

Their complaints sounded like the complaints of Adolf Eichmann, when he described during his trial in Israel the irksome bureaucratic and legal obstacles he ran into in wartime Germany in carrying out his genocidal responsibilities.

High U.S. administration figures reportedly lingered - with delectation? - over what exactly was to be done to the unfortunate prisoners - for how long, in what position, with what pain inflicted.

(There was also - whoops! - the problem of what to do when things went wrong, and the torturers had a dead man, or woman, on their hands.)

And when all this began to come out, what did the administration have to say? The president said on May 24 that "a few American troops ... disregarded our values." Civilians in the Pentagon, speaking informally to the press, blamed the Abu Ghraib scandals on "a few hillbillies."

. . . .

The vast majority of those in Iraqi prisons have turned out to be people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time, or had a name resembling someone else's name, or were related to someone whose name was on a U.S. list. They were tortured because that had become the practice. They might know something. When higher commanders complained that they weren't getting enough intelligence, the same prisoners were tortured again.

All of this is a ghastly scandal, one of the worst in American history. It is evident cause for impeachment of this president, if Congress has the courage to do it, and for prosecution of cabinet figures and certain commanders. However in view of the partisan alignment in Congress, quite possibly nothing will happen before the November election.

What then? It also is quite possible that George W. Bush will be elected to a second term. In that case, the American electorate will have made these practices its own. Now that is something for our children to think about.

By many measures, today's older workers appear better equipped for retirement than any previous generation. Their homes are worth more than their parents' homes were. Their bank accounts are fatter. And study after study suggests that typical late-middle-age employees have accumulated more wealth than their counterparts did a quarter-century ago.

But virtually all of these studies have a flaw, a crucial asset that is left out of the equation. Add it back in, and the rosy picture suddenly darkens.

That asset is the traditional pension, an employee benefit that was widely available until the early 1980's but has been vanishing from the American workplace ever since. More than two-thirds of older households - those headed by people 47 to 64 - had someone earning a pension in 1983. By 2001, fewer than half did. The demise of the old-fashioned pension has been much discussed, but the effect on family finances has not. That is because the impact has been hard to measure.

New evidence suggests, though, that the waning of the pension has, imperceptibly but surely, stripped older workers of an immense store of wealth - much more than they probably guessed, if they thought about it at all. Retirement benefits today, particularly the 401(k) account, simply are not worth as much as the older kind of benefits. Some studies suggest otherwise, but they tend to rely on average balances of retirement accounts, and the averages have been skewed upward by the extraordinary gains of a few wealthy households.

When the holdings of more typical households are tracked instead, today's near-retirees turn out to be a little poorer, in constant dollars, than the previous generation was when it approached retirement in 1983. The sweeping change in employee compensation appears to be the reason, according to new research by Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University who analyzed 18 years of household financial data collected by the Federal Reserve.

Mr. Wolff found that the average net worth of an older household grew 44 percent, adjusted for inflation, from 1983 to 2001, to $673,000. But much of that growth was in the accounts of the richest households, which pushed the averages up. When Mr. Wolff looked at the net worth of the median older household - the one at the midpoint of the economic ladder, a better indicator of what is typical - the picture changed. That figure declined by 2.2 percent, or $4,000, during the period, to $199,900.

For a generation to emerge from two bullish decades with less wealth than its parents had "is remarkable," Mr. Wolff said. Based on economic growth and market returns over those 18 years, he said, their wealth "should be up around 30 or 40 percent."

The Fed's household-finance data also show that when pensions were more common, they served as a social leveler. Companies that offered them had to use the same pension formula, involving years of service and salary, for all workers in a plan; otherwise, the companies risked losing their tax break. The rich in those days bought big houses and invested in stocks and other assets that were out of reach for the middle class. But pensions would offset, to some degree, the difference between how these groups lived in old age. Traditional pension plans were part of a system that reduced the poverty rate among the elderly to just 1 in 10 in 2002, the lowest in half a century.

The advent of self-directed retirement plans, by contrast, is giving rise to an elite minority who are well prepared for retirement, and a majority who are falling behind, the numbers show.

"The people at the top did better than they ever would have under the old system," Mr. Wolff said. "Basically, they made out like bandits." [link via Nathan Newman]

My father gets three pensions in addition to Social Security: a State of Illinois pension, a Cook County pension, and a widower's pension from the Chicago Board of Education. When I retire in 25 years, I'll primarily be dependent on Social Security and my 401(k) for retirement income.

The best reason for abiding by the Geneva Convention (and other prohibitions on torture) is NOT the prevention of reciprocal violations. Even if the Iraqis began torturing our troops, there is a very good strategic reason for treating our prisoners properly: We want those still at large to surrender.

If an Iraqi militiaman thinks he is going to be mistreated by the coalition, or shipped off without rights to a Caribbean island for indefinite detainment, he is much less likely to surrender. Why not simply fight to the death?

The best historical example is the final assault on Germany. German POWs were treated well by American and British forces, and our forces received relatively good treatment in return. But even more importantly for present purposes, as the German regime began to crumble, Germans were willing to surrender to American and British forces. By the end of the war we had over 400,000 POWs in America (German and Italian), not to mention thousands of prisoners still in Europe.

Not so on the Eastern front. Years of brutality and summary execution of prisoners on both sides convinced Germans (probably correctly) that they would be mistreated or killed if they surrendered to the Russians. Thus they fought to the last man, inflicting significant Russian casualties in the process. That, or they fled west in hopes of surrendering to British or American forces. [link via Pandagon]

During his June 4 visit, Bush asked the Vatican to push the American Catholic bishops to be more aggressive politically on family and life issues, especially a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

A Vatican official told NCR June 9 that in his meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano and other Vatican officials, Bush said, "Not all the American bishops are with me" on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism.

. . . .

Sources say Bush made the remark after Sodano thanked him for his stand on the issues of family and life. They also said that while Bush was focusing primarily on the marriage question, he also had in mind other concerns such as abortion and stem cell research.

Bush supports a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and has urged Congress to take swift action. Since polls show that in several battleground states in the fall election a majority of voters is opposed to gay marriage, some Bush analysts think an aggressive push on the issue will help the president’s prospects. [link via Talking Points Memo]

I still remember the olden days when we had that "separation of church and state" thing. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had to assure worried voters that he wouldn't be taking marching orders from the Vatican. Forty-four years later, Bush wants the Vatican to intervene in our elections. WTF?

Bush's aggressive war in Iraq and his zeal for the death penalty contravene the Catholic Church's teachings. Bush's own United Methodist Church (and virtually every other church in the United States besides the Southern Baptists) also opposed his Excellent Iraq Adventure. But Bush evidently figures that he deserves the Church's support as long as he sticks to killing already born human beings, rather than fetuses and embryos. Makes perfect sense.

Under pressure from [Roman Catholic anti-abortion] groups and from the Vatican, a small but growing number of U.S. bishops have said they would deny the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body and blood of Christ, to elected officials such as Democratic presidential candidate Kerry and the governor of New Jersey.

. . . .

Many in both camps question where those who begin denying Communion to elected officials will draw the line.

Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, said her organization believes that all priests and lay Eucharistic ministers who hand out Communion are obligated -- with or without instructions from their bishops -- to refuse Communion to any federal, state or local official who is known to disagree with church teaching on abortion, contraception, stem cell research, euthanasia or in vitro fertilization.

Karl Maurer, vice president of Catholic Citizens of Illinois, a conservative grass-roots group, said he would add sodomy and gay marriage to that list. Some liberal grass-roots groups have said they believe the church's teachings against war and the death penalty are worthy of equal treatment.

"Once you open this door, what's going to come rolling through it?" asked Deal W. Hudson, editor of the magazine Crisis and a key Catholic ally of the Bush administration. "Pretty soon, no one would be taking Communion."

Hudson said he believes the 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." [emphasis added; link via Talking Points Memo]

I'm not familiar enough with AGs past to know, but it's hard to imagine that one could get much worse. Ashcroft is corrupt. He's stupid. He's incompetent. He loves the spotlight. He believes laws don't apply to Republicans. He's obsessed with porn, pot, and prostitution.

When he did his latest "WE'VE ARRESTED A TERRORIST!!!!!" news conference yesterday I thought that finally there was a bit of skepticism on the part of the press. Maybe I was just projecting, but I sensed a bit of subliminal eyerolling coming from the CNN anchordesk.

WASHINGTON -- Former Halliburton Co. workers are raising new allegations about company waste and mismanagement in Iraq, including abandoning an $85,000 truck because of a flat tire, paying $45 for a case of soda and providing laundry service for a cost equivalent to $100 per 15-pound bag.

The Halliburton whistle-blowers accused the company of ruining expensive equipment by failing to provide basic maintenance, turning a blind-eye to theft and retaliating against workers who tried to control costs.

. . . .

The House Government Reform Committee is slated to hold a hearing today on contracting issues in Iraq. No Halliburton executives are slated to testify, and there was some wrangling yesterday over whether the company was ever invited.

Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, wanted to call [Marie] deYoung [who dealt with Halliburton subcontractors while working in Kuwait] and the other former employees to testify.

Republicans, who control the panel and thus the witness list, refused, arguing they had not had enough time to evaluate and verify their stories.

Refusing to wait, Waxman made their statements public yesterday. The former employees portray a work environment in Iraq and Kuwait rife with waste and neglect.

David Wilson, a former convoy commander, alleged, for instance, the company kept no spare tires.

"When one of our trucks got a flat tire on the highway, we had to leave it there for the Iraqis to loot, which is just crazy," Wilson wrote. "I remember saying to myself when it happened, 'You just lost yourself an $85,000 truck because of a spare tire.' "

Remember: the lawyers who wrote this memo were guilty of a lack of moral sense, and extreme tunnel vision fueled by a national panic. The people who asked them to write it, who read it, and especially any who may have acted on it — they’re people who really have the most to answer for.

Lawyers are supposed to give their clients sound legal advice, and must tell them, when appropriate, "you can't do that; it would illegal." This memo, like the March 6, 2003 Working Group Report, displays an extreme, untenable, and immoral reading of the law. It also betrays a fundamental, and dangerous, misunderstanding of the limits the Constitution, and treaties entered into pursuant to it, place on executive power.

This is inexcusable, especially coming from supposedly brilliant attorneys (Froomkin writes that the Office of Legal Counsel is "an elite bureau in the Justice Dept. staffed by very very intelligent and highly credentialed people"). No doubt the Third Reich had some smart attorneys, too -- and I do not draw such comparisons lightly. But when one starts claiming that the president has the power to override all laws and treaties, such comparisons are appropriate.

The actions of Bybee and other lawyers who participated in writing this atrocity are utterly indefensible. Although I am normally no Bush apologist, the actions of Bush and other non-lawyers who requested, reviewed and/or acted on the memo are closer to being defensible. Clients should in general be able to rely on their attorneys’ advice. Particularly given that Bush is no legal (or any other kind of) scholar, I can somewhat understand him (and other non-lawyers in his administration) saying, "hey, they're the legal geniuses and they said this was fine."

It is appalling that Bybee is now on the Ninth Circuit. He should be impeached, convicted, removed from office, and disbarred.

WASHINGTON —— Pentagon officials have acknowledged that a political appointee was behind the controversial decision to have Halliburton Inc. plan for the postwar recovery of Iraq's oil sector and had informed Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff before finalizing the deal, a Democratic lawmaker said Sunday.

The decision, overruling the advice of an Army lawyer, eventually resulted in the awarding of a $7-billion, no-bid contract to Halliburton, which Cheney ran for five years before he was nominated for vice president.

. . . .

Cheney repeatedly has denied having any influence over the decision to award the massive contract in March 2003. "As vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts let by the [Army] Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press" last fall.

. . . .

Contracting experts said that the determination of which companies are able to compete for a contract is usually made by career civil servants to avoid any appearance of political influence in the outcome. "The suggestion that political appointees would be directing that type of investigation does not seem consistent with maintaining the appearance of propriety," said Steven L. Schooner, a government contracting expert at George Washington University's Law School.

. . . .

Defense Secretary Donald H. "Rumsfeld's political lawyers steamrollered the career guys to push through Halliburton's secret deal," said Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who recently wrote a book on government contracting. "It creates a disturbing appearance of influence when Cheney's lawyers are told several times Halliburton is getting special deals, and they never say, 'Make sure the career people agree this is being done right.'"

Call me crazy, but circumventing normal bidding procedures in order to give a $7 billion no-bid contract to Dick Cheney's company seems a tad more significant than the Whitewater non-scandal. Incidentally, MoveOn PAC is soliciting money to run an ad about this and other Halliburton sleaziness. You can view the ad here (and contribute money if you're so inclined).

WASHINGTON —— A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November.

The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush's foreign policy, according to several of those who signed the document.

"It is clear that the statement calls for the defeat of the administration," said William C. Harrop, the ambassador to Israel under President Bush's father and one of the group's principal organizers.

Those signing the document, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, include 20 former U.S. ambassadors, appointed by presidents of both parties, to countries including Israel, the former Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia.

Others are senior State Department officials from the Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations and former military leaders, including retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East under President Bush's father. Hoar is a prominent critic of the war in Iraq.

. . . .

It is unusual for so many former high-level military officials and career diplomats to issue such an overtly political message during a presidential campaign.

. . . .

"We just felt things were so serious, that America's leadership role in the world has been attenuated to such a terrible degree by both the style and the substance of the administration's approach," said Harrop, who served as ambassador to four African countries under Carter and Reagan.

"A lot of people felt the work they had done over their lifetime in trying to build a situation in which the United States was respected and could lead the rest of the world was now undermined by this administration —— by the arrogance, by the refusal to listen to others, the scorn for multilateral organizations," Harrop said.

Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was appointed by Reagan as ambassador to the Soviet Union and retained in the post by President Bush's father during the final years of the Cold War, expressed similar views.

"Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. has built up alliances in order to amplify its own power," he said. "But now we have alienated many of our closest allies, we have alienated their populations. We've all been increasingly appalled at how the relationships that we worked so hard to build up have simply been shattered by the current administration in the method it has gone about things."

. . . .

[Phyllis E.] Oakley [the deputy State Department spokesman during Reagan's second term and an assistant secretary of state under Clinton] said the statement would argue that, "Unfortunately the tough stands [Bush] has taken have made us less secure. He has neglected the war on terrorism for the war in Iraq. And while we agree that we are in unprecedented times and we face challenges we didn't even know about before, these challenges require the cooperation of other countries. We cannot do it by ourselves."

The article also quotes a Bush supporter, who responds with the "9/11 changed everything"-type response we can expect from the White House:

A Bush administration ally said that the group failed to recognize how the Sept. 11 attacks required significant changes in American foreign policy. "There's no question those who were responsible for policies pre-9/11 are denying what seems as the obvious —— that those policies were inadequate," said Cliff May, president of the conservative advocacy group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

"This seems like a statement from 9/10 people [who don't see] the importance of 9/11 and the way that should have changed our thinking."

This can't hurt, but I doubt it will help much. The public seemed to pretty much shrug off attacks on Bush's competence by Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and Anthony Zinni. It's hard to believe that this statement will have more impact, particularly since most of the signers aren't exactly household names.

AUSTIN, Texas –– When, in the future, you find yourself wondering, "Whatever happened to the Constitution?" you will want to go back and look at June 8, 2004. That was the day the attorney general of the United States –– a.k.a. "the nation's top law enforcement officer" –– refused to provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with his department's memos concerning torture.

In order to justify torture, these memos declare that the president is bound by neither U.S. law nor international treaties. We have put ourselves on the same moral level as Saddam Hussein, the only difference being quantity. Quite literally, the president may as well wear a crown –– forget that "no man is above the law" jazz. We used to talk about "the imperial presidency" under Nixon, but this is the real thing.

. . . .

When members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Ashcroft about his department's input, he simply refused to provide the memos, without offering any legal rationale. He said President Bush had "made no order that would require or direct the violation" of laws or treaties. His explanation was that the United States is at war. "You know I condemn torture," he told Sen. Joe Biden. "I don't think it's productive, let alone justified."

But another memo written by former Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge in California, establishes a basis for the use of torture for senior Al Qaeda operatives in custody of the CIA. I am not one to leap to conclusions, but it seems quite clear how whatever perverted standards allowed at Guantanamo Bay jumped across the water to Abu Ghraib prison. . . .

. . . .

It has been apparent for some time that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated instances –– torture from Afghanistan to Gitmo to Iraq has so far resulted in 25 deaths now under investigation. As the late Jacabo Timmermann, the Argentine journalist who was tortured during "the dirty war," said, "When you are being tortured, it doesn't really matter to you if your torturers are authoritarian or totalitarian." I doubt it helps any if they're supposed to be bringing democracy, either. And as Ashcroft said, it isn't productive.

The damage is incalculable. When America puts out its annual report on human rights abuses, we will be a laughingstock. I suggest a special commission headed by Sen. John McCain to dig out everyone responsible, root and branch. If the lawyers don't cooperate, perhaps we should try stripping them, anally raping them and dunking their heads under water until they think they're drowning, and see if that helps.

And I think it is time for citizens to take some responsibility, as well. Is this what we have come to? Is this what we want our government to do for us? Oh and by way, to my fellow political reporters who keep repeating that Bush is having a wonderful week: Why don't you think about what you stand for?

New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House.

The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly.

According to lawyers familiar with the Red Cross reports, they will contradict previous testimony by senior Pentagon officials who have claimed that the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison was an isolated incident.

"There are some extremely damaging documents around, which link senior figures to the abuses," said Scott Horton, the former chairman of the New York Bar Association, who has been advising Pentagon lawyers unhappy at the administration's approach. "The biggest bombs in this case have yet to be dropped."

. . . .

Members of Congress are now demanding access to all White House memos on interrogation techniques, a request so far refused by the United States attorney-general, John Ashcroft.

As the growing scandal threatens to undermine President Bush's re-election campaign, senior aides have acknowledged for the first time that the abuse of detainees can no longer be presented as the isolated acts of a handful of soldiers at the Abu Ghraib.

"It's now clear to everyone that there was a debate in the administration about how far interrogators could go," said a legal adviser to the Pentagon. "And the answer they came up with was 'pretty far'. Now that it's in the open, the administration is having to change that answer somewhat."

. . . .

The Pentagon has also announced an investigation into the condition of inmates at Guantanamo Bay, where more than 600 prisoners suspected of links with al-Qaeda are being held. The inquiry will be led by Vice-Adml Albert Church, who has been ordered to investigate reports that extreme interrogation techniques "migrated" from Guantanamo to Iraq. "This is not going to be a whitewash," said the Pentagon adviser. "The administration is finally realising how damaging this scandal could become."

A new investigator has also been appointed to lead the inquiry into abuse at Abu Ghraib. Gen George Fay, a two-star general, will be replaced by a more senior officer. Gen Fay, according to US military convention, did not have the authority to question his superiors. His replacement indicates that the Abu Ghraib inquiry will now go far beyond the activities of the seven military police personnel accused of mistreating Iraqi detainees.

Legal and constitutional experts have expressed astonishment at the judgments made by administration lawyers on interrogation techniques. In one memo, written in January 2002, Mr Gonzalez told President Bush that the nature of the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions".

Scott Silliman, a former US air force lawyer and the director of the Centre for Law Ethics and National Security at Duke University, said: "What you have is a culture of avoidance of law rather than compliance with it." [emphasis added]

Indeed. Nixon was a Boy Scout compared to Bush and company. This scandal will finally take down these criminals. I wonder if Bush will issue a blanket pardon (a la Ford's pardon of Nixon) of  himself and other members of his mob administration before he leaves office?

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, issued a classified order last November directing military guards to hide a prisoner, later dubbed "Triple X" by soldiers, from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters. The disclosure, by military sources, is the first indication that Sanchez was directly involved in efforts to hide prisoners from the Red Cross, a practice that was sharply criticized by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in a report describing abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Taguba blamed the 800th Military Police Brigade, which guarded the prison, for allowing "other government agencies"--a euphemism that includes the CIA--to hide "ghost" detainees at Abu Ghraib. The practice, he wrote, "was deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law." Taguba's report did not cite the November 18 directive issued by Sanchez to hide Triple X, identified as a high-ranking terrorist. It is not known if Taguba saw the directive. He declined to comment. The Army said it could not discuss a classified order.

The disclosure of Sanchez's involvement may focus more attention on him. There have been reports that his top Army lawyers sought to curb Red Cross access to Abu Ghraib, only weeks after the humanitarian agency uncovered abuses and sexual humiliation at the prison late last year. Some Army officers, including Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander of the 800th MP Brigade, have blamed Sanchez's staff for refusing to release security detainees from Abu Ghraib even when they were believed to pose no threat to coalition forces. [links via Political Animal]

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.

The U.S. policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was approved in early September, shortly after an Army general sent from Washington completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then returned to brief Pentagon officials on his ideas for using military police there to help implement the new high-pressure methods.

The documents obtained by The Washington Post spell out in greater detail than previously known the interrogation tactics Sanchez authorized, and make clear for the first time that, before last October, they could be imposed without first seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison. That gave officers at Abu Ghraib wide latitude in handling detainees.

. . . .

One of the documents, an Oct. 9 memorandum on "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," which each military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib was asked to sign, sets out in detail the wide range of pressure tactics approved in September and available before the rules were changed on Oct. 12. They included methods that were close to some of the behavior criticized this March by the Army's own investigator, who said he found evidence of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuse" at the prison.

. . . .

Wendy Patten, a lawyer and U.S. advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said two provisions in the Oct. 9 document are particularly troubling. First, she noted its reference to "dietary manipulation -- minimum bread and water, monitored by medics" as a technique permitted with the approval of the interrogation officer in charge. "This seems a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require daily food rations to have enough quantity, quality and variety to maintain good health, prevent weight loss and prevent nutritional deficiencies," Patten said.

She also expressed concern about the policy's blanket approval of "incentive item removal -- regarding religious items" as a tactic that may be used on civilian detainees, which she said appears to conflict with a Geneva Conventions requirement that detainees enjoy "complete latitude in the exercise of their religious duties."

. . . .

The list of interrogation options in the document closely matches a menu of options developed for use on detainees held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay and approved in a series of memos signed by top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In January 2002, for example, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners there; although officials have said dogs were never used at Guantanamo, they were used at Abu Ghraib.

. . . .

While that list of options was subsequently truncated on Oct. 12, some military personnel at the jail told Army investigators that they lacked awareness or understanding of the changes.

For example, Spec. Luciana Spencer, a member of the 66th Military Intelligence Group who was removed from interrogations because she had ordered a detainee to walk naked to his cell after an interview, told investigators that the military police did not know their boundaries. "When I began working the night shift I discussed with the MPs what their SOP [standard operating procedure] was for detainee treatment," Spencer said in a statement. "They informed me they had no SOP. I informed them of my IROE [interrogation rules of engagement] and made clear to them what I was and wasn't allowed to do or see."

A civilian contractor, Adel Nakhla, an interpreter for military intelligence, told investigators he was briefed on interrogation rules only after being implicated in an abusive event.

. . . .

Moreover, when intelligence officers arranged for military police to help impose some of the more severe tactics, they often failed to specify how to do so, leaving wide latitude for potentially abusive behavior. . . .

. . . .

But the atmosphere at Abu Ghraib was hardly one of strict adherence to the rules, other officials said. A photograph of the pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees -- one of the most notorious portraits of abuse -- was used as a screen saver on a computer in the isolation area where intelligence officers worked, according to Spencer's statement.

Some of the rules for U.S. military personnel at the prison made it easy for people to duck responsibility for their actions, a factor that may also have opened the door to abuse.

The acronym MI "will not be used in the area," according to an undated prison memo titled "Operational Guidelines," which covered the high-security cellblock. "Additionally, it is recommended that all military personnel in the segregation area reduce knowledge of their true identities to these specialized detainees. The use of sterilized uniforms is highly suggested and personnel should NOT address each other by true name and rank in the segregation area."

In another story, the Post reports:

The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.

Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003, said a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned "any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues."

The Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, asked Jordan whether it concerned "sensitive issues," and Jordan said, "Very sensitive. Yes, sir," according to the account, which was provided by a government official.

Did Bush approve the use of torture? Damned likely. We know of four Bush administration memoranda, most recently this this one, claiming that the president has broad power to order torture, even though the Geneva Conventions and federal law prohibit it. There would be no need to write four memos (that we know of) if Bush or other high-level officials had rejected torture at the outset. At a minimum, the administration seriously entertained the idea of torture. Nor has Bush disavowed these memos. We now know that American soldiers tortured prisoners, and all indications are that they did so on a widespread basis.

When asked whether he approved torture, Bush has given very evasive answers:

"What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law," Bush told reporters at the close of the G-8 summit in Savannah, Ga.

Asked if torture is ever justified, Bush replied, "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. ... The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you."

Another one:

"The authorization I issued was that anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations," Bush told reporters at the G8 Summit.

These are classic "non-denial denials." Bush does not say "I never approved torture," but rather that he only approved (unspecified) conduct that conformed with "international treaty obligations" and "U.S. law." These are meaningless assurances since the March 6, 2003 memorandum, which Bush has not repudiated, asserts that the authority to set aside laws is "inherent in the president" and that if Bush authorizes torture, neither he nor those acting at his direction can be held liable. If so, anything Bush authorized would conform with international treaty obligations and U.S law, since they do not constrain his conduct.

Legal Fiction adds more pieces to the puzzle:

Consider too this site (hat tip to mannyj) that reminds us that - (1) Rumsfeld personally approved "aggressive interrogation techniques" requested by General Miller in April '03; and that (2) Miller had been sent to Abu Ghraib from Gitmo months earlier to "Gitmo-ize" the prison. Let's also not forget that, according to Sy Hersh, Rumsfeld approved "Copper Green" - a top secret interrogation program designed for al Qaeda - for use in Iraq. Hersh explained:

Copper Green[] encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

In addition, remember that after General Sanchez denied knowledge of the prison abuse, one of the accused soldier's lawyers stated at a hearing that Sanchez was present "during some 'interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse.'"

. . . .

Interestingly, Ashcroft is denying that Bush ordered torture, at the same time he is refusing to provide the legal memoranda that could demonstrate that he's not lying.

With all of this, I have to agree with Josh Marshall: 

We're like contestants on Wheel of Fortune with a long phrase spelled out in front of us with maybe one or two letters missing. We know what the letters spell. It's obvious. We just don't have the heart to say it out loud.

UPDATE: I forgot about this, which strikes me as very damning:

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the focus of controversy over alleged abuse of prisoners, may have lacked a crucial safeguard because of a Pentagon decision to bar an Army Reserve lawyer who also happens to be a member of Congress from deploying as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

An internal Army investigation of the prisoner abuse says the lack of a senior judge advocate general was a factor in the mistreatment of prisoners that allegedly occurred.

Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., a Desert Storm veteran and an Army Reserve judge advocate general, was prepared to serve in Iraq and was likely to be assigned to support the 800th Military Police Brigade, the Maryland-based unit at the center of the controversy.

Buyer, 44, expected to serve as an "operational law" attorney on his voluntary mobilization. A lieutenant colonel, Buyer said he would have performed duties similar to those of the 1991 Persian first Gulf War when he was involved in interviewing Iraqi prisoners of war.

In an interview, Buyer declined to specifically identify the unit he was planning to serve with but said he expected to be working in a prison providing legal advice to guards and overseeing interrogations to make certain proper rules and procedures were followed.

Buyer said this is what he did in the 1991 Gulf War. He said his duties back then included ensuring that U.S. troops did not take personal photographs that included any Iraqi prisoners and that basic rights of prisoners were not violated, he said.

Buyer was set to deploy to Iraq again, having been approved for a leave of absence from the House, giving a farewell speech on the House floor and getting active and reserve Army officials to OK his deployment.

But before he could leave, the Army changed its mind, sending Buyer a letter stating it had been determined that his service was inappropriate because he was a sitting member of Congress and because there were other ways to fill the JAG billet. [via Respectful of Otters]

Either the people in the administration wanted prisoners tortured, or they are morons, or both. If you want to ensure that prisoners are treated humanely, you: (1) don't write memos that are how-to guides for circumventing the Geneva Conventions, (2) train guards in the Geneva Conventions, and in approved methods of interrogation, (3) make sure that prisoners know they are protected by the Geneva Conventions, (4) make prison personnel wear name tags, (5) don't have military intelligence running the prisons, (6) don't let civilian contractors who aren't subject to military law interrogate prisoners, (7) have military lawyers oversee interrogations so abuses don't occur, and (8) allow the Red Cross access to all prisoners. The Bushies did the opposite of all this, and now profess to be shocked, shocked that American soldiers and contractors tortured prisoners.

The Prime Minister last night appealed to his party to hold its nerve after it crashed to third place behind the Liberal Democrats in the popular vote.

It is believed to be the worst performance by a governing party in a mid-term election.

. . . .

As senior Labour figures rallied round to insist that his leadership was not under threat, Mr Blair said Labour could bounce back.

He said that a "shadow" had been cast over the elections by the war in Iraq.

. . . .

A BBC projection said that the figures equated to a 38 per cent share of the popular vote for the Tories, followed by the Liberal Democrats on 30 per cent, with Labour trailing in third place on 26 per cent. [link via Dohiyi Mir]

The BBC writes:

It may not have been total meltdown, but it was uncomfortably close to that nightmare, with once rock solid areas like Newcastle and Bassetlaw falling away.

And it has almost certainly left Tony Blair facing the real prospect that his leadership will now be a matter of serious debate amongst Labour MPs as they consider the consequences for their own seats in a general election.

Kevin Drum notes:

The real problem, of course, is that being an ally of George Bush is death for a foreign leader these days. In the last year and a half, Bush bashing has proven to be electoral magic in Germany, South Korea, and Spain, and yesterday it was at its most magical yet in a walloping defeat for Tony Blair's Labor Party. As a staunch Bush ally, [Italian prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi is obviously feeling like he's next on the chopping block.

That's my kind of magic. Now, how about if we bring a little of it home for our own elections in November?

Seymour Hersh spoke... at the University of Chicago.... I took some scattered notes. The remarks will be disjoined--as will be the notes--but chilling. He asserted several things that he says he didn't have nailed down enough to write, but that he was confident of....

He then turned to the 40th president, referring obliquely to 138 names, then began to list them, saying those with long memories will catch on: they were the Reagan administration figures accused, indicted, or convicted of wrongdoing....

He talked about Carl Levin (though he didn't use his name) telling him about high officials lying to him in closed hearings, and how frustrating it was to be lied to, in classified settings, when the liars know the senators know they are lying. Levin said he'd never seen such brazenness in Washington....

He waits after the My Lai story broke mid November 1969, one week, two weeks--then, by Thanksgiving 1969, other correspondents finally write about the atrocities THEY had seen in Vietnam: an outpouring that made him feel strange that it took little old him, the police reporter who had flunked out of law school, 11 years after winning his B.A. in English, to unleash this outpouring of truth....

From My Lai, the transition to the current scandals was seamless. He connected the dots, and spoke of the CIA secret prisons we haven't heard about yet: "We're basically in the disappearing business." He made the first of several criticisms of our humble profession: "there's no learning curve in America. There's no learning curve in the press corps."...

Unsurprisingly, he flagged the extraordinary importance of the WSJ memo revealing the government's plans to torture, including its assertion that it's not against the law if the president approves it, and mocked the New York Times headline "9 Militias Are Said to Approve a Deal to Disband," suggesting in its stead, "Bush Administration Offers Hoax in Hopes of Convincing U.S. There's Some Peace." His assessment of the postwar settlement: "It's going to come down to who has the biggest militia will win."...

Then a story from one of his intelligence sources, whom Hersh says didn't find it an unflattering story: some time in 1986 or 1987, Reagan was given a long chart presentation of what actually happened with Iran/Contra and began sleeping five minutes in to it, then snoring on Nancy's shoulder. After twenty minutes it was over, the helicopter was fired up for the Friday trip to Camp David, Nancy aroused him, he awoke with a start, glanced at the charts, and asked, "What's that." Sy said something like "That's MY Ronald Reagan."...

"NATO's falling apart in Afghanistan now."

And this was one of the most stunning parts. He had just returned from Europe, and he said high officials, even foreign ministers, who used to only talk to him off the record or give him backchannel messages, were speaking on the record that the next time the U.S. comes to them with intelligence, they'll simply have no reason to believe it.... He lamented of his journalistic colleagues, "I don't know whey they don't just tell it like it is."...

He said the people most horrified by the way the war was planned were the military commanders responsible for protecting their troops.... He talked about the horror of the 1000 civilian deaths in Fallujah (but was careful to note the Marines were doing their job, placing the blame with their superiors)....

He talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you disagree you're a traitor." Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health, has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney. "When these guys' memoirs come out, it will shock all of us."...

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

He looked frightened.

I stole the above from Brad DeLong (via Digby). Professor DeLong adds:

If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined--even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today.

Seymour Hersh is not insane.

NEW YORK - Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy to Iraq, announced his resignation from the post at a meeting yesterday of the Security Council and in the presence of Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The resignation, brewing for a number of days, shocked the diplomatic community at the world body.

Brahimi explained that his decision stemmed from great difficulties and frustration experienced during his assignment in Iraq. He said that he does not intend to return to Iraq.

"If the November 2004 general election for Congress were being held today, which party would you like to see win in your congressional district: the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?"

Democratic 54%, Republican 35%, Independent 1%, Neither 3%, Unsure 7% (results include leaners)

Today many Americans celebrate a ''strong'' leader who, like Woodrow Wilson, never wavers, never apologizes, never admits a mistake, never changes his mind, a leader with a firm ''Christian'' faith in his own righteousness. These Americans are delighted that he ignores the rest of the world and punishes the World Trade Center terrorism in Iraq. Mr. Bush is our kind of guy.

He is not another Hitler. Yet there is a certain parallelism. They have in common a demagogic appeal to the worst side of a country's heritage in a crisis. Bush is doubtless sincere in his vision of what is best for America. So too was Hitler. The crew around the president -- Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Karl Rove, the ''neo-cons'' like Paul Wolfowitz -- are not as crazy perhaps as Himmler and Goering and Goebbels. Yet like them, they are practitioners of the Big Lie -- weapons of mass destruction, Iraq democracy, only a few ''bad apples.''

Hitler's war was quantitatively different from the Iraq war, but qualitatively both were foolish, self-destructive and criminally unjust. This is a time of great peril in American history because a phony patriotism and an America-worshipping religion threaten the authentic American genius of tolerance and respect for other people.

The ''real'' America is still remembered here in Berlin for the enormous contributions of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift -- America at its best. It is time to return to that generosity and grace.

The strongest criticism that the administration levels at Sen. John Kerry is that he changes his mind. In fact, instead of a president who claims an infallibility that exceeds that of the pope, America would be much better off with a president who, like John F. Kennedy, is honest enough to admit mistakes and secure enough to change his mind. [via Atrios]

In a sense, Kerry was playing to his strongest asset in the eyes of many: that he is not George W. Bush. ("I don't care if John Kerry is a sack of cement," former Texas agricultural commissioner Jim Hightower said in a speech in Washington on Thursday. "We're going to carry him to victory.")

The House and Senate did not both come under Republican rule during Reagan's time.

The Berlin Wall did not come down when Reagan was in office.

Reagan is not the president who left office with the highest approval rating in modern times.

Reagan was not "the most popular president ever."

Reagan did not preside over the longest economic expansion in history.

Reagan did not shrink the size of government.

Reagan did preside over what was at the time the "biggest tax cut in history" but it was almost instantly followed up by the "biggest tax increase in history."

Reagan was not "beloved by all." He was loved by some, liked by some, and hated by some with good reason.

The V-Day is for Vote campaign wants you to know that this election "is about valuing your vagina, making it powerful and praising its power to make a difference;" please, the campaign implores, "Vote your vagina."

And you thought touch-screen voting was complicated.

Alliterative signs such as "Value Your Vagina: Vote" and "Vote to End Violence Against Women" adorned the stage, and a diverse group of young women milled around in "Value Your Vagina. Vote" T-shirts that had a list of words on the back: "Vulnerable Vintage Vision Vote Voluptuous Vibrant Velvet Vote Visceral Viva Vagina Vote Velocity Vehement Voice Vote Vessel Vexed Voice Vote Versatile Values Valid Vote Volcano Vent Verve Vote Volunteer Vigorous Village Vote Visible Vamp Variety Vote Voracious Verbal Vast Vote Venus Victory." It looked as if a concert T-shirt had mated with a game of Scattergories.

Why Did the Chicken cross the Road?

Coalition Provisional Authority:

The fact that the Iraqi chicken crossed the road affirmatively demonstrates that decision-making authority has been transferred to the chicken well in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.

Halliburton:

We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost the US government $326,004.

Muqtada al-Sadr:

The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will be killed.

US Army Military Police:

We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As part of these preparations, individual soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly and then plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken rights violations.

Peshmerga:

The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to cross the road, to show its independence and to transport the weapons it needs to defend itself. However, in future, to avoid problems, the chicken will be called a duck, and will wear a plastic bill.

1st Cav:

The chicken was not authorized to cross the road without displaying two forms of picture identification. Thus, the chicken was appropriately
detained and searched in accordance with current SOP's. We apologize for any embarrassment to the chicken. As a result of this unfortunate incident, the command has instituted a gender sensitivity training program and all future chicken searches will be conducted by female soldiers.

Al Jazeera:

The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to eye-witnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens.

Blackwater:

We cannot confirm any involvement in the chicken-road-crossing incident.

Translators:

Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request.

U.S. Marine Corps:

The chicken is dead. [link via Call of Cthulhu]

And so today, with President Reagan's body still warm, I want all the people who worshipped him to take note of the many non-superficial ways in which I just coincidentally seem so mega-similar to him. From our mutual fondness for dressing up as cowboys to hang out on our camera-ready luxury "ranches," to our firm belief in 35-hour work weeks punctuated with plenty of energy-restoring naps, President Reagan and I are cut from the very same denim. Indeed, we both delegate all the complicated stuff, can't be bothered with boring old facts, and scared America into spending billions of dollars to fight an "Evil Empire." He choose Russia, I went with Iraq – both based on solid intelligence that they were already harmlessly crumbling from within. And that is why, taken as a whole, I'd much rather have voters associate me with Uncle Ronnie than with my own daddy, who is, I'm sorry to say, just a sissy one-termer who nobody liked enough to re-elect.

In closing, as much as my fiercely competitive family may privately resent and despise that spotlight-stealing B-actor for having hijacked the throne of conservatism from its rightful Bush holders, we also know better than anyone how best to exploit death and morbid sentimentality for political gain. That is why I pledge today that the American public can count on me to invoke Ronald Reagan's so-called achievements in every speech from now until Election Day – typically within two to three sentences of the first 9/11, "evildoer," or "lovers of FREEDOM®" reference.

Ronald Reagan always told us that for America, the best was yet to come. I know, I know – leave it to a fruity actor to find a life philosophy in a Sinatra song, right? But let me tell you something – he was right. Because after him came Bushes. And one day soon, after Poppy's term and my two terms and Jebber's two terms and Marvin's two terms – and hell, maybe even Noelle's terms – we'll rename that Reagan airport and aircraft carrier after us, slap our family portrait on the zillion dollar bill, and bulldoze that geriatric asswipe's legacy right off the face of the public consciousness!

MANCHESTER music legend Morrissey sparked controversy when he announced Ronald Reagan's death live on stage during a concert - and then declared he wished it was George Bush who had died instead.

Thousands of fans at Dublin Castle, in Ireland, cheered when the ex-Smiths frontman made the announcement that the former American president, who had battled with Alzheimer's Disease, had passed away.

And an even bigger cheer followed when Morrissey - who is no stranger to controversy - then said he wished it had been the current President, George W Bush, who had died.

Fan Tony Murray said: "He commented about the death of Ronald Reagan and when he wished that it was George W instead the crowd went wild." [link via Wonkette]

WASHINGTON, June 9 — The commander of American forces in the Middle East asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this week to replace the general investigating suspected abuses by military intelligence soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison with a more senior officer, a step that would allow the inquiry to reach into the military's highest ranks in Iraq, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The request by the commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, comes amid increasing criticism from lawmakers and some military officers that the half dozen investigations into detainee abuse at the prison may end up scapegoating a handful of enlisted soldiers and leaving many senior officers unaccountable.

General Abizaid's request, which defense officials said Mr. Rumsfeld would most likely approve, was set in motion in the last week when the current investigating officer, Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, told his superiors that he could not complete his inquiry without interviewing more senior-ranking officers, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq.

But Army regulations prevent General Fay, a two-star general, from interviewing higher-ranking officers. So General Sanchez took the unusual step of asking to be removed as the reviewing authority for General Fay's report, and requesting that higher-ranking officers be appointed to conduct and review the investigation.

. . . .

Within the last several days, an important figure in the inquiry who had previously refused to cooperate with Army investigators suddenly reversed his position and agreed to work much more closely with investigators, a senior Senate aide and a senior Pentagon official said.

That important development prompted General Fay to send some of his 29-person team back into the field to conduct more interviews, the officials said. "A key witness, a key person who'd pled the military equivalent of the Fifth has changed his attitude, and Fay is reopening the investigation," the Senate official said.

. . . .

Mr. Rumsfeld's anticipated approval of General Abizaid's request would open the way for a new, senior Army investigator to question General Sanchez and other senior generals as part of a broad inquiry into questionable intelligence-gathering practices and procedures at the prison that may have contributed to the prisoner abuses.

. . . .

Among the biggest questions for General Sanchez will no doubt be his order last Nov. 19 that, according to another senior Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, put the military police at the prison effectively under the control of the military intelligence soldiers.

As a result, military police officers have said they were encouraged by military intelligence soldiers to soften up detainees before the interrogations to elicit more information from them during the formal questioning.

What does this mean for the miserable failure? Kevin Drum goes Biblical on him, quoting Galatians 6:7: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

In response to the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has repeatedly assured Americans that the president and his top officials did not say or do anything that could possibly be seen as approving the abuse or outright torture of prisoners. But disturbing disclosures keep coming. This week it's a legal argument by government lawyers who said the president was not bound by laws or treaties prohibiting torture.

Each new revelation makes it more clear that the inhumanity at Abu Ghraib grew out of a morally dubious culture of legal expediency and a disregard for normal behavior fostered at the top of this administration. It is part of the price the nation must pay for President Bush's decision to take the extraordinary mandate to fight terrorism that he was granted by a grieving nation after 9/11 and apply it without justification to Iraq.

Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke into public view, the administration has contended that a few sadistic guards acted on their own to commit the crimes we've all seen in pictures and videos. At times, the White House has denied that any senior official was aware of the situation, as it did with Red Cross reports documenting a pattern of prisoner abuse in Iraq. In response to a rising pile of documents proving otherwise, the administration has mounted a "Wizard of Oz" defense, urging Americans not to pay attention to inconvenient evidence.

This week, The Wall Street Journal broke the story of a classified legal brief prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in March 2003 after Guantánamo Bay interrogators complained that they were not getting enough information from terror suspects. The brief cynically suggested that because the president is protecting national security, any ban on torture, even an American law, could not be applied to "interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority." Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt reported yesterday in The Times that the document had grown out of a January 2002 Justice Department memo explaining why the Geneva Conventions and American laws against torture did not apply to suspected terrorists.

In the wake of that memo, the White House general counsel advised Mr. Bush that Al Qaeda and the Taliban should be considered outside the Geneva Conventions. But yesterday, Attorney General John Ashcroft assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that Mr. Bush had not ordered torture. These explanations might be more comforting if the administration's definition of what's legal was not so slippery, and if the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House were willing to release documents to back up their explanation. Mr. Rumsfeld is still withholding from the Senate his orders on interrogation techniques, among other things.

The Pentagon has said that Mr. Rumsfeld's famous declaration that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in Afghanistan was not a sanction of illegal interrogations, and that everyone knew different rules applied in Iraq. But Mr. Rumsfeld, his top deputies and the highest-ranking generals could not explain to the Senate what the rules were, or even who was in charge of the prisons in Iraq. We do not know how high up in the chain of command the specific sanction for abusing prisoners was given, and we may never know, because the Army is investigating itself and the Pentagon is stonewalling the Senate Armed Services Committee. It may yet be necessary for Congress to form an investigative panel with subpoena powers to find the answers.

What we have seen, topped by that legalistic treatise on torture, shows clearly that Mr. Bush set the tone for this dreadful situation by pasting a false "war on terrorism" label on the invasion of Iraq.

On pages 22-23 the Walker Working Group Report sets out a view of an unlimited Presidential power to do anything he wants with "enemy combatants". The bill of rights is nowhere mentioned. There is no principle suggested which limits this purported authority to non-citizens, or to the battlefield. Under this reasoning, it would be perfectly proper to grab any one of us and torture us if the President determined that the war effort required it. I cannot exaggerate how pernicious this argument is, and how incompatible it is with a free society. The Constitution does not make the President a King. This memo does.

. . . .

9. This memo is labeled "draft". Even so, if the second half is like the first, then everyone who wrote or signed it strikes me as morally unfit to serve the United States.

If anyone in the higher levels of government acted in reliance on this advice, those persons should be impeached. If they authorized torture, it may be that they have committed, and should be tried for, war crimes. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, "I was just following orders" is NOT (and should not be) a defense.

The Washington Post writes an editorial blasting the hell out of the Bush administration:

THE BUSH administration assures the country, and the world, that it is complying with U.S. and international laws banning torture and maltreatment of prisoners. But, breaking with a practice of openness that had lasted for decades, it has classified as secret and refused to disclose the techniques of interrogation it is using on foreign detainees at U.S. prisons at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a matter of grave concern because the use of some of the methods that have been reported in the press is regarded by independent experts as well as some of the Pentagon's legal professionals as illegal. The administration has responded that its civilian lawyers have certified its methods as proper -- but it has refused to disclose, or even provide to Congress, the justifying opinions and memos.

This week, thanks again to an independent press, we have begun to learn the deeply disturbing truth about the legal opinions that the Pentagon and the Justice Department seek to keep secret. According to copies leaked to several newspapers, they lay out a shocking and immoral set of justifications for torture. In a paper prepared last year under the direction of the Defense Department's chief counsel, and first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, the president of the United States was declared empowered to disregard U.S. and international law and order the torture of foreign prisoners. Moreover, interrogators following the president's orders were declared immune from punishment. Torture itself was narrowly redefined, so that techniques that inflict pain and mental suffering could be deemed legal. All this was done as a prelude to the designation of 24 interrogation methods for foreign prisoners -- the same techniques, now in use, that President Bush says are humane but refuses to disclose.

There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security." For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy -- even if it is true, as the administration maintains, that its theories have not been put into practice. Even on paper, the administration's reasoning will provide a ready excuse for dictators, especially those allied with the Bush administration, to go on torturing and killing detainees.

Perhaps the president's lawyers have no interest in the global impact of their policies -- but they should be concerned about the treatment of American servicemen and civilians in foreign countries. Before the Bush administration took office, the Army's interrogation procedures -- which were unclassified -- established this simple and sensible test: No technique should be used that, if used by an enemy on an American, would be regarded as a violation of U.S. or international law. Now, imagine that a hostile government were to force an American to take drugs or endure severe mental stress that fell just short of producing irreversible damage; or pain a little milder than that of "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." What if the foreign interrogator of an American "knows that severe pain will result from his actions" but proceeds because causing such pain is not his main objective? What if a foreign leader were to decide that the torture of an American was needed to protect his country's security? Would Americans regard that as legal, or morally acceptable? According to the Bush administration, they should. [links via Atrios]

Comparisons with the Third Reich are not out of line. The Nazis, too, flouted their treaty obligations and manufactured legal justifications for evil. And Kristallnacht didn't happen until Hitler had been in power for five years. 

We must remove the Bush regime from office. These people are lawless, evil bastards. Professor Froomkin warns, "just imagine what those guys will do if they don’t have to worry about re-election." Wake up, America, before it's too late.

Reagan talked endlessly about shrinking government while presiding over government's growth. Under Reagan, federal spending was around 22 percent of GDP. When Bill Clinton left office, it was around 18.5 percent of GDP. Starting tomorrow, Uncle Sam could insure the uninsured, subsidize a living wage of $9 to $10 an hour for the working poor, and make huge new investment in schools for poor children, all while keeping government the same size that it was under Ronald Reagan.

Yet Reagan remains an icon of "small government." Go figure.

Sec. 2340A. - Torture

(a) Offense. -

Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

The Department of Justice, at page 7 of its recently released March 6, 2003 draft memorandum, "Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism: Assessment of Legal, Historical, Policy, and Operational Considerations," takes the position that detainees at Guantanamo are within the United States and, as such, may be tortured without violating the Torture Statute (emphasis added to below):

Guantanamo Bay Naval Station (GTMO) is included within the definition of the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and accordingly, is within the United States for purposes of § 2340. Thus, the Torture Statute does not apply to the conduct of U.S. personnel at GTMO.

(Section 2340, referred to above, is the statutory section immediately preceding section 2340A, and defines "torture" for purposes of section 2340A and related provisions.)

But if the folks the United States is holding at Gitmo try to sue, it's another story entirely. The Department of Justice told the Supreme Court in the United States' brief (Summary of Argument, section I) that the Guantanamo detainees are being held outside the United States (emphasis added to below) and that the courts of the United States thus lack jurisdiction to hear the detainees' claims:

[T]he Guantanamo detainees . . . are being held by the U.S. military outside the sovereign territory of the United States. It is "undisputed" that Guantanamo is not part of the sovereign United States . . . and that conclusion is compelled by the express terms of the Lease Agreements between the United States and Cuba and the Executive Branch's definitive construction of those agreements. Accordingly, U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to consider claims filed on behalf of aliens held at Guantanamo.

Apparently, the Department of Justice's position is that the persons it's holding at Guantanamo are within the United States (and thus not protected by the Torture Statute) if it wants to torture them. But if they bring suit -- sorry, can't do that! You're being held outside the United States!

Sure, he wasn't a technocrat like Clinton. But my father was a man -- that's the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush.

The memo showed that not only lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments and the White House approved of the policy but also that David S. Addington, the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, also was involved in the deliberations. The State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV, dissented, warning that such a position would weaken the protections of the Geneva Conventions for American troops.

The March 6 document about torture provides tightly constructed definitions of torture. For example, if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith," the report said. "Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control."

. . . .

Scott Horton, the former head of the human rights committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, said Monday that he believed that the March memorandum on avoiding responsibility for torture was what caused a delegation of military lawyers to visit him and complain privately about the administration's confidential legal arguments. That visit, he said, resulted in the association undertaking a study and issuing of a report criticizing the administration. He added that the lawyers who drafted the torture memo in March could face professional sanctions.

Jamie Fellner, the director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch, said Monday, "We believe that this memo shows that at the highest levels of the Pentagon there was an interest in using torture as well as a desire to evade the criminal consequences of doing so."

The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of the anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.

From the WaPo: 

In the Justice Department's view -- contained in a 50-page document signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee and obtained by The Washington Post -- inflicting moderate or fleeting pain does not necessarily constitute torture. Torture, the memo says, "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

By contrast, the Army's Field Manual 34-52, titled "Intelligence Interrogations," sets more restrictive rules. For example, the Army prohibits pain induced by chemicals or bondage; forcing an individual to stand, sit or kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time; and food deprivation. Under mental torture, the Army prohibits mock executions, sleep deprivation and chemically induced psychosis.

Human rights groups expressed dismay at the Justice Department's legal reasoning yesterday.

"It is by leaps and bounds the worst thing I've seen since this whole Abu Ghraib scandal broke," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "It appears that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking for ways to avoid legal accountability. The effect is to throw out years of military doctrine and standards on interrogations."

. . . .

"For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture," the memo said, "it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years." Examples include the development of mental disorders, drug-induced dementia, "post traumatic stress disorder which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression."

. . . .

At the time, the Justice Department's legal analysis, however, shocked some of the military lawyers who were involved in crafting the new guidelines, said senior defense officials and military lawyers.

"Every flag JAG lodged complaints," said one senior Pentagon official involved in the process, referring to the judge advocate generals who are military lawyers of each service.

"It's really unprecedented. For almost 30 years we've taught the Geneva Convention one way," said a senior military attorney. "Once you start telling people it's okay to break the law, there's no telling where they might stop."

. . . .

A Defense Department spokesman said last night that the March 2003 memo represented "a scholarly effort to define the perimeters of the law" but added: "What is legal and what is put into practice is a different story." Pentagon officials said the group examined at least 35 interrogation techniques, and Rumsfeld later approved using 24 of them in a classified directive on April 16, 2003, that governed all activities at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon has refused to make public the 24 interrogation procedures.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum notes that we now know of four administration memos (January 9, 2002; January 25, 2002; August 2002; and April, 2003) justifying the use of torture against prisoners. If, as the Bushies claim, they never, ever authorized the use of torture against anyone, and that unpleasantness at Abu Ghraib was just an aberration committed by a few bad apples acting on their own, it's very strange that the Bushies devoted so many lawyer-hours, over a 15-month period, writing memoranda justifying torture. Kevin rightly wonders why, if torture is really anathema to Bush, he didn't just announce after seeing the first memo, "We don't do torture in this administration"? Once again, you can always tell when the Bushies are lying: their lips are moving.

A concept outlined by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf. According to this concept the new German State must be an authoritarian State with power emanating from the leader at the top. Already in 1921 Hitler insisted that the Fuehrerprinzip be the law of the Nazi party. He denounced democracy as nonsense, and argued that parliamentarism would be succeeded by the absolute responsibility of a leader and an elite of assistant leaders.

A couple of key grafs from the Journal article:

The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration's view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere.

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

Sounds a lot like Hitler, no? Billmon gives more examples from the WSJ article.

The Fuehrerprinzip model of presidential power is abhorrent to the Constitution. As Phil Carter notes, Article II, section 3 of the Constitution requires the president to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Contrary to the memo, he has no power to "set aside" those he doesn't like or finds inconvenient. The laws the president must faithfully execute include the Geneva Conventions (which, like other treaties ratified by the Senate, have the force of law) and the United States laws against torture (United States Code, Title 18, section 2340A) and other war crimes (United States Code, Title 18, section 2441).

If Bush and members of his administration implemented the recommendations in the memorandum and caused prisoners to be tortured, I agree with Professor DeLong, who writes, "IMPEACH THESE CLOWNS. IMPEACH THESE CLOWNS NOW." In addition, they should be prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for long terms. We must restore the rule of law to the United States. Or, to use Dear Leader's words, "it's important for us to have a culture of personal responsibility." That principle applies to you too, George.

Defense Department legal memorandum provided a roadmap for getting away with torture.

Jess Bravin reports in Monday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about a classified legal memorandum prepared by the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel that appears designed to find every legal workaround possible to justify coercive interrogation and torture at Guantanamo Bay. This report comes in the wake of disclosures about other memoranda — one written in early 2002 by UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo while with the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and a second written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales — justifying the White House's overall Guantanamo Bay plan. This latest memo, signed in April 2003, goes much further than those though — it specifically authorizes the use of torture tactics, up to and including those which may result in the death of a detainee.

The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities. . . .

The draft report, which exceeds 100 pages, deals with a range of legal issues related to interrogations, offering definitions of the degree of pain or psychological manipulation that could be considered lawful. But at its core is an exceptional argument that because nothing is more important than "obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens," normal strictures on torture might not apply.

The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the "necessity" of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or "superior orders," sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no "moral choice was in fact possible."

. . . .

The report then offers a series of legal justifications for limiting or disregarding antitorture laws and proposed legal defenses that government officials could use if they were accused of torture.

. . . .

The lawyers concluded that the Torture Statute applied to Afghanistan but not Guantanamo, because the latter lies within the "special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and accordingly is within the United States" when applying a law that regulates only government conduct abroad.

. . . .

[T[his DoD memo . . . is, quite literally, a cookbook approach for illegal government conduct. This memorandum lays out the substantive law on torture and how to avoid it. It then goes on to discuss the procedural mechanisms with which torture is normally prosecuted, and techniques for avoiding those traps. I have not seen the text of the memo, but from this report, it does not appear that it advises American personnel to comply with international or domestic law. It merely tells them how to avoid it.

This is devastating stuff. Can you say "war crimes"? Read the whole thing. (link via Atrios)

And go out and buy the Wall Street Journal -- it's well worth the buck, and they deserve to be rewarded for breaking stories like this. A few key grafs:

A military official who helped prepare the report said it came after frustrated Guantanamo interrogators had begun trying unorthodox methods on recalcitrant prisoners. "We'd been at this for a year-plus and got nothing out of them" so officials concluded "we need to have a less-cramped view of what is torture and what is not."

The official said, "People were trying like hell to ratchet up the pressure," and used techniques that ranged from drawing on prisoners' bodies  and placing underwear on prisoners' heads -- a practice that later reappeared in the Abu Ghraib prison -- to telling subjects, "I'm on the line with somebody in Yemen and he's in a room with your family and a grenade that's going to pop unless you talk."

. . . .

Methods now used at Guantanamo include limiting prisoners' food, denying them clothing, subjecting them to body-cavity searches, depriving them of sleep for as much as 96 hours and shackling them in so-called stress positions, a military-intellligence official said. Although the interrogators consider the methods to be humiliating and unpleasant, they don't view them as torture, the official said. [Right. Can you imagine being naked, hungry, and deprived of sleep for 96 hours? I stayed up for 48 hours once and was hallucinating before the end of that time-period.]

The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration's view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere. It concluded that neither the president nor anyone following his instructions was bound by the federal Torture Statute, which makes it a crime for Americans working for the government overseas to commit or attempt torture, defined as any act intended to "inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Punishment is up to 20 years imprisonment, or a death sentence or life imprisonment if the person dies.

. . . .

The report advised that government officials could argue that "necessity" justified the use of torture. . . . "In particular, the necessity defense can justify the intentional killing of one person . . . so long as the harm avoided is greater."

This story is absolutely shocking. Reading it, one can scarely believe we are talking about the United States. The Bush regime really does seem to believe that Bush is the King of the United States, and as such not answerable to any law.

UPDATE: The whole Wall Street Journal article is here. Billmon, Discourse.net, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, and NTodd have lots more.

SINGAPORE -- The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.

The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.

''It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,'' Rumsfeld said at an international security conference. (emphasis added; link via Atrios)

UPDATE: This quote from Rumsfeld seemed too good to be true, and evidently it is. Robert Tagorda examines the whole transcript, which seems to indicate, in context, that Rumsfeld meant that the entire world  -- not the Bush administration or the United States -- does not have a coherent approach. (link via Political Animal)

"Although previous presidents have led the nation into ill-advised wars, no predecessor managed to turn America into an unprovoked aggressor. No predecessor so thoroughly managed to confirm the impressions of those who already hated America. No predecessor so effectively convinced such a wide range of world opinion that America is an imperialist threat to world peace. I don 't think that you can do much worse than that."

"Bush is horrendous; there is no comparison with previous presidents, most of whom have been bad."

"He is blatantly a puppet for corporate interests, who care only about their own greed and have no sense of civic responsibility or community service. He lies, constantly and often, seemingly without control, and he lied about his invasion into a sovereign country, again for corporate interests; many people have died and been maimed, and that has been lied about too. He grandstands and mugs in a shameful manner, befitting a snake oil salesman, not a statesman. He does not think, process, or speak well, and is emotionally immature due to, among other things, his lack of recovery from substance abuse. The term is "dry drunk". He is an abject embarrassment/pariah overseas; the rest of the world hates him . . . . . He is, by far, the most irresponsible, unethical, inexcusable occupant of our formerly highest office in the land that there has ever been."

"George W. Bush's presidency is the pernicious enemy of American freedom, compassion, and community; of world peace; and of life itself as it has evolved for millennia on large sections of the planet. The worst president ever? Let history judge him."

"This president is unique in his failures."

And then there was this split ballot, comparing the George W. Bush presidency's failures in distinct areas. The George W. Bush presidency is the worst since:

"In terms of economic damage, Reagan.

In terms of imperialism, T Roosevelt.

In terms of dishonesty in government, Nixon.

In terms of affable incompetence, Harding.

In terms of corruption, Grant.

In terms of general lassitude and cluelessness, Coolidge.

In terms of personal dishonesty, Clinton.

In terms of religious arrogance, Wilson." (typo corrected by me)

McElvaine himself ranks Bush the worst President since Buchanan, "who warmed the president’s chair while the union disintegrated in 1860-61." McElvaine "is astonished that so many people still support a president who has":

• Presided over the loss of approximately three million American jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.
• Overseen an economy in which the stock market suffered its worst decline in the first two years of any administration since Hoover’s.
• Taken, in the wake of the terrorist attacks two years ago, the greatest worldwide outpouring of goodwill the United States has enjoyed at least since World War II and squandered it by insisting on pursuing a foolish go-it-almost-alone invasion of Iraq, thereby transforming almost universal support for the United States into worldwide condemnation. (One historian made this point particularly well: "After inadvertently gaining the sympathies of the world 's citizens when terrorists attacked New York and Washington, Bush has deliberately turned the country into the most hated in the world by a policy of breaking all major international agreements, declaring it our right to invade any country that we wish, proving that he’ll manipulate facts to justify anything he wishes to do, and bull-headedly charging into a quagmire.")
• Misled (to use the most charitable word and interpretation) the American public about weapons of mass destruction and supposed ties to Al Qaeda in Iraq and so into a war that has plainly (and entirely predictably) made us less secure, caused a boom in the recruitment of terrorists, is killing American military personnel needlessly, and is threatening to suck up all our available military forces and be a bottomless pit for the money of American taxpayers for years to come.
• Failed to follow through in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda are regrouping, once more increasing the threat to our people.
• Insulted and ridiculed other nations and international organizations and now has to go, hat in hand, to those nations and organizations begging for their assistance.
• Completely miscalculated or failed to plan for the personnel and monetary needs in Iraq after the war, so that he sought and obtained an $87 billion appropriation for Iraq, a sizable chunk of which is going, without competitive bidding to Haliburton, the company formerly headed by his vice president.
• Inherited an annual federal budget surplus of $230 billion and transformed it into a $500+ billion deficit in less than three years. This negative turnaround of three-quarters of a trillion dollars is totally without precedent in our history. The ballooning deficit for fiscal 2004 is rapidly approaching twice the dollar size of the previous record deficit, $290 billion, set in 1992, the last year of the administration of President Bush’s father and, at almost 5 percent of GDP, is closing in on the percentage record set by Ronald Reagan in 1986.
• Cut taxes three times, sharply reducing the burden on the rich, reclassified money obtained through stock ownership as more deserving than money earned through work. The idea that dividend income should not be taxed—what might accurately be termed the unearned income tax credit—can be stated succinctly: "If you had to work for your money, we’ll tax it; if you didn’t have to work for it, you can keep it all."
• Severely curtailed the very American freedoms that our military people are supposed to be fighting to defend. ("The Patriot Act," one of the historians noted, "is the worst since the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams.")
• Called upon American armed service people, including Reserve forces, to sacrifice for ever-lengthening tours of duty in a hostile and dangerous environment while he rewards the rich at home with lower taxes and legislative giveaways and gives lucrative no-bid contracts to American corporations linked with the administration.
• Given an opportunity to begin to change the consumption-oriented values of the nation after September 11, 2001, when people were prepared to make a sacrifice for the common good, called instead of Americans to ‘sacrifice’ by going out and buying things.
• Proclaimed himself to be a conservative while maintaining that big government should be able to run roughshod over the Bill of Rights, and that the government must have all sorts of secrets from the people, but the people can be allowed no privacy from the government. (As one of the historians said, "this is not a conservative administration; it is a reckless and arrogant one, beholden to a mix of right-wing ideologues, neo-con fanatics, and social Darwinian elitists.")

McElvaine also writes:

Who has been the biggest beneficiary of the horrible terrorism that struck our nation in September of 2001? The answer to that question should be obvious to anyone who considers where the popularity ratings and reelection prospects of a president with the record outlined above would be had he not been able to wrap himself in the flag, take advantage of the American people’s patriotism, and make himself synonymous with "the United States of America" for the past two years.

There is more good stuff. Go read the whole thing.

When George W. Bush makes his D-Day anniversary visit to the Normandy beaches on Sunday, we’re going to hear a lot of well-honed speeches trying to compare the righteous combat forced on us in World War II with the war of choice we’ve entered into in Iraq. But only speechmakers from coddled, comfortable backgrounds who’ve never heard a shot fired in anger, much less seen "dead men by mass production," would dare use the blood of those who died at Normandy 60 years ago to try to cleanse their conscience of those dying in Iraq today.

The United States entered World War II, as it had entered World War I, to defeat a proven aggressor and bring the war to an end. The Bush administration actually won its righteous war, in Afghanistan after the aggression of September 11, 2001. But that victory came too quickly, it seems, for our leaders to get much satisfaction from it. So they sent our kids to Iraq. And what is the goal there today, now that the reasons we were given at first have proved to be grand delusions? To spread democracy? To extirpate the very idea of terrorism? To work the will of God? Sixty years ago, those who thought they could teach the world how to live the only right way, which was their way, and launched unprovoked wars claiming this was the only thing could do to defend their values—those were the people we called the enemy.

But let’s be clear about the soldiers. Our soldiers. Those men and women in Iraq today are, indeed, just as heroic as those at Normandy. They have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, but that’s not their fault. They are fighting and dying and trying to build something good as soldiers, despite the most foolhardy civilian leadership in the modern history of the United States. Like any G.I. Joe in World War II, they’re making the best of a bad situation. (via Atrios)

Interestingly, this piece is only in the Web edition of Newsweek, which may be afraid of angering print subscribers who like Dubya and his adventure in Iraq. On a related note, NTodd compares how Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush took responsibility -- or failed to, in Dubya's case.

The growing sense of crisis within the Bush administration over the aftermath of the Iraq conflict deepened yesterday after it emerged that Vice-President Dick Cheney has been questioned as part of the intelligence scandals engulfing American politics.

He has been interviewed as part of a probe into the leaking last year of the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, wife of ex-diplomat Joe Wilson, a vocal critic of the administration in the build-up to the Iraq war, especially claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

News of Cheney's grilling follows the resignation of CIA chief George Tenet and will add to the pressure on a Republican party already sinking in the polls. George Bush's approval ratings are at an all-time low of 42 per cent, dangerously close to the 40 per cent level seen as the point beneath which victory is unlikely.

. . . .

[I]ntelligence sources have pinpointed the leak as coming from Cheney's office. His chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, has been named in several press reports as a possible suspect. It is also believed that the investigation has pulled phone records from Air Force One as part of their probe. Observers think that Plame's identity was deliberately leaked to conservative newspaper columnist Bob Novak as a way of punishing her husband. 'It came out of Cheney's office. These are a very serious group of people,' said Mel Goodman, a former top CIA officer.

The case is reaching high into the halls of power. Bush himself last week consulted a private lawyer, Jim Sharp, in case he is questioned. In a worrying echo of previous scandals, Sharp once worked as counsel in the Iran-Contra hearings during the 1980s scandal that almost wrecked Ronald Reagan's presidency. The probe is now the hot talk of Washington's corridors of power amid intense speculation that charges will be brought. 'If they can get the proof, someone will pay for it,' said Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent and senior counter-terrorism official at the State Department.

The case is just one of several intelligence scandals. The Pentagon is being probed over the activities of Ahmed Chalabi, who helped to provide much of the information used as a basis for invading Iraq. He is now thought to have passed secrets to Iran, including news that the US had broken Iranian intelligence codes. FBI investigators have used lie-detector tests on Pentagon officials to determine who passed secrets to Chalabi. Two other investigation reports, one from the 11 September Commission and another from the Senate, are also due in the next month and are expected to slam US intelligence-gathering in Iraq.

As negative news swamped the Bush campaign, his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, has kept a low profile. Democrat strategists believe news events alone are derailing Bush and recent poll numbers have added to the sense of Republican crisis. One survey showed almost 20 per cent of Republicans were considering not voting for Bush.

Recently, though, as the race for president heats up, we’ve been dealing with this quandary: How can we balance the perspectives and topics of our letters when many of our submissions have been coming only from one side?

We’ve been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him. We’re not sure why, nor do we want to guess. But in today’s increasingly polarized political environment, we would prefer our offering to put forward a better sense of balance.

Since we depend upon you, our readers, to supply our letters, that goal can be difficult. We can’t run letters that we don’t have.

. . . .

If you would like to help us "balance" things out, send us a letter, make a call or punch out an e-mail.

Liberal Media Conspiracy steps up to the plate:

Dear Editor:

I would like to speak up in favor of George W. Bush.

I run a rather large organization. Since he has been in office, my business has expanded greatly, particularly in the last 12 months. I have no shortage of positions for willing applicants (of which there are thousands), and thanks to the success of Bush's policies, we have been able to expand to cover most of the world.

We enjoy a great popularity that I never could have imagined. Time and time again, Bush has charted a course that matches closely with what we would have desired him to do, and our success is a testament to his wisdom.

In fact, you could say that we never could have succeeded as we have, without George W. Bush and, in fact, the entire Bush family.

In closing, I would like to say:

Four more years!

Sincerely,

Osama Bin Laden

In related news, Eric Alterman uses circumstantial evidence to make a compelling argument that Bush is actually an al Qaeda plant (scroll down). (link via The Sideshow) I think the only alternative interpretation of the evidence is that Bush is a frigging idiot. Take your pick.

Like an invisible earthquake thousands of miles away at the bottom of the sea that produces a tsunami, a growing wave of voter discontent is taking shape in Ohio, as the electorate sours on Bush's handling of the war, the economy and perhaps even the man himself. Recent Ohio polling shows the race has gone from a dead heat to a healthy seven- to nine-point margin for Kerry in the state, reflecting the movement of first-time Meetup attendees and people like my mother into the "Anybody but Bush" crowd.

At the same time, Ohio is experiencing a level of organic political activity in 2004 that I've never seen in my entire career in Ohio politics. It's happening earlier, with more intensity, and it involves more new people than ever. It's both planned and spontaneous. It is everywhere.

And every ounce of its energy is directed against George W. Bush.

A perfect storm is brewing in Ohio. The Bush road-rage bird-flippers know it's coming.

But it's worse than they think.

Microsoft has successfully patented using short, long or double clicks to launch different applications on "limited resource computing devices" - presumably PDAs and mobile phones. The US patent was granted on 27 April.

Now any US company using a variety of clicks to launch different software functions from the same button will have to change their product, pay licensing fees to Microsoft or give Microsoft access to its intellectual property in return.

British company Symbian, which makes operating systems for mobile phones that employ double clicks and has offices in the US could be affected, as could PalmOne in California, which supplies PDA software.

Several activists who oppose software patents say that Microsoft's patent is not a "sensible use" of the patenting system because the idea of the long, short and double clicks is neither novel or non-obvious.

Both the US and the UK use these criteria to decide whether or not to grant patents. "It is almost beyond parody that Microsoft has been able to do this," says Ian Brown of the Foundation for Information Policy Research in London, UK. (link via Political Animal)

Indeed. I am reminded of this piece from The Onion, "Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes": 

REDMOND, WA — In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.

With the patent, Microsoft’s rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones—the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs—unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.

"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."

The latter story really is a parody, but it's not much crazier than the true story. I'm sure there will be a legal challenge to this abomination. Absolutely  unbelievable.

Found in the 29 May issue of The Week:

An American Christian group is lobbying to have the whale reclassified as a fish, because that is how the animal is described in the story of Jonah. "the Bible is God's own words," says a spokesman for Concerned Christians for Education Reform. "If the Lord says the whale is a 'great fish', it's a fish. Period."

Remember the name Barack Obama. You'll be hearing it a lot as this election season unfolds.

Mr. Obama, a Democrat, is tall, thin, youthful and very smart, and he's running (sometimes literally, depending on the schedule) for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois.

He's got a million-dollar smile and he's charismatic. At the moment he has a substantial lead in the polls. If that lead holds and he wins in November, he'll be only the third African-American to take a seat in the Senate since Reconstruction.

His partisans describe Mr. Obama as a dream candidate, the point man for a new kind of politics designed to piece together a coalition reminiscent of the one blasted apart by the bullet that killed Robert Kennedy in 1968.

In winning the Democratic primary in March, he took a startling 53 percent of the total vote in a field of seven candidates, and he ran surprisingly well among white blue-collar voters. He told me he believes strongly that while there are powerful and persistent differences at work in society, there is also "a set of core values that bind us together as Americans."

He said the basic idea of his campaign, which he described as "an experiment," was to see whether "we could recast politics" in a way that responded to his assumption "that people want to hear an expression of those common values."

"I give the same speech," he said, "in the inner city, in rural, all-white farming communities, or up in the North Shore in well-to-do suburbs."

His politics are left of center, but he said he is committed to working honestly with officials from a wide range of perspectives.

Differences can be framed and addressed in ways that are positive and constructive, he said. He doesn't believe in the "slash and burn" tactics that have such a hold on today's politics, and he hasn't allowed any in his campaign.

"There's a certain tone in politics that I aspire to," he said, "that allows me to disagree with people without being disagreeable."

In a political era saturated with cynicism and deceit, Mr. Obama is asking voters to believe him when he talks about the values and verities that so many politicians have lied about for so long. He's asking, in effect, for a leap of political faith.

So far, at least, the voters of Illinois seem to be responding. A Chicago Tribune poll released this week showed Mr. Obama with a huge lead, 52 percent to 30 percent, over his Republican rival, Jack Ryan.

Mr. Obama has not ducked the issues. He has opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, and he delivered a stirring antiwar speech at a rally in October 2002. He supports the war in Afghanistan. He believes the Bush tax cuts went too far, and he makes that clear even in appearances before wealthy audiences. He said: "I tell them, `Look, I think we need to roll back those tax cuts that benefited you. You don't need them. Let's talk about what we could do with that money.' "

Mr. Obama, 42, is a state senator who has managed to work well with colleagues on both sides of the aisle. In a state that drew national publicity for the large number of condemned prisoners who were later found to be innocent, he was the driving force behind a new law requiring the police to videotape all interrogations in capital cases.

Mr. Obama is married and has two young daughters. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, and in 1990 was the first black person to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review. His wife, Michelle, is also a graduate of Harvard Law.

Mr. Obama has written a moving memoir called "Dreams From My Father," which details his unusual and in some ways extraordinary background. His father, who died in a traffic accident in the early 1980's, was from Kenya. He left the family early and young Barack was raised primarily by his mother, who was white and originally from Kansas. She died in 1996.

However this election goes, Mr. Obama's effort to connect in a more than superficial way with people across ethnic, economic and geographic lines should serve as a template for future campaigns in both parties. Politics that are increasingly ruthless in a country that is increasingly diverse is a recipe for disaster.

Obama is indeed an extraordinary candidate. To donate to him, click here.