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This blog is dedicated to removing George W. Bush, the worst president in history, from office. I also sometimes discuss other political and social issues. Please feel free to leave comments. Click on "Comment" under any post to do so. In addition to the blog, check out my comprehensive lists of anti-Bush links and resources and book recommendations.
 
The reasons for my assessment of Bush are here under "Why this blog?" But don't just accept my opinion that he's the worst president in history! Ask former Republican Senator Lowell WeickerProfessor George Akerlof, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, and Senator (and former Florida Governor) Bob Graham. Or preeminent left bloggers Atrios and Kos. Or even the folks who've voted here and here! (OK, I grant you the question at the latter site might be a tad leading . . . .)
 
You can print out your own "Worst. President. EVER." bumper sticker here and buy "Worst President Ever" products here.

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  • Wednesday, June 30, 2004

    Iraq's infrastructure worse than before the war
    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]

    |
    6:50 pm cdt

    Deserter
    The AWOL Project has posted a lengthy draft report on Bush's military service. Bottom line:

    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]

    |
    1:56 pm cdt

    Clarke on "Imperial Hubris"

    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]

     |
    9:22 am cdt

    More on Moore
    [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.
    Indeed. For a long time the prevailing view seemed to be that expressing any of the above ideas bordered on treason. Look what happened to the Dixie Chicks because one of them had the temerity to say that she was ashamed that the president was from Texas.
     
    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.

     |
    3:54 am cdt

    Be afraid. Be very afraid.

    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?

     |
    3:01 am cdt

    Lying sleazebags
    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").

     |
    2:07 am cdt

    Tuesday, June 29, 2004

    Tidal wave 2:25 pm cdt

    Balkin on SCOTUS
    Yale Law Prof. Jack Balkin has some thoughts on the Supreme Court's decisions yesterday in the detention cases.
    |
    1:57 pm cdt

    Krugman
    Krugman today:
    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. 
     |
    9:06 am cdt

    Monday, June 28, 2004

    Bush approval rating falls to 42% in NYT/CBS poll
    The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows that Bush's approval rating has dropped to 42%, his lowest rating ever in that poll. The poll shows Kerry leading by only 1% (45% Kerry-44% Bush) in a head-to-head matchup. However, 40% say that they have no opinion of Kerry.
     
    As I have previously noted, conventional wisdom is that an incumbent's approval rating approximates the percentage of the vote he will receive, and any rating below 50% thus bodes ill for an incumbent.
    |
    9:40 pm cdt

    "Fahrenheit 9/11" more successful than projected

    "Fahrenheit 9/11" ended up grossing $23.9 million in its first weekend, $2.1 million more than projected earlier in the weekend. It has already become the No. 1-grossing documentary in history, breaking the $21.6 million record that "Bowling for Columbine" achieved over a nine-month period.

    F9/11 was the No. 1 movie at the box office this weekend. No previous documentary had even cracked the top five. The No. 2 movie this weekend was "White Chicks," which grossed $19.7 million, running on more than thrice as many screens (2,726) as F9/11’s 868 screens. Most striking is F911’s $27,558 in receipts per screen. "White Chicks" was more than $20,000 behind at $7,218 per screen, little more than a fourth of F9/11's per-screen take.

    Is F9/11 just preaching to the choir? Undoubtedly it's doing a lot of that, but maybe it's winning over some hearts and minds, too:

    In theaters nationwide, many viewers said they couldn't imagine loyal Republicans coming to see a movie the Bush administration had dismissed as a twisted montage of misleading innuendo and outright falsehoods. But for all the partisan hooting, the movie did appear to draw at least a strong smattering of the Republican and the undecided voters that Moore most desperately hopes to reach.

    And some of them said they were deeply moved.

    Moved enough, perhaps, to consider voting for Kerry in November.

    For Richard Hagen, 56, it was the footage from Iraq: the raw cries of bombed civilians, the clenched-teeth agony of wounded American troops. A retired insurance agent from the wealthy River Oaks neighborhood in central Houston, Hagen described himself as a lifelong Republican. But then, standing by his silver Mercedes, he amended that: A former lifelong Republican.

    "Seeing [the war] brings it home in a way you don't get from reading about it," he said. "I won't be voting for a Republican presidential candidate this time."

    Mary Butler, too, may not bring herself to punch the ballot for Bush.

    She didn't vote for him in 2000. But Butler, 48, said until this weekend, she was leaning strongly toward supporting him this year. "In a war situation, I figured it was too hard to switch horses midstream. I thought the country would be too vulnerable," she said.

    Butler, a librarian from suburban St. Louis, said one sentence in Moore's film made her rethink.

    After showing faces of the men and women of America's military, Moore reminds his audience that they have volunteered to sacrifice their futures for our country. We owe them just one obligation, he says: to send them into harm's way only when we absolutely must.

    That got Butler. She doesn't feel the war in Iraq fits into that category. And that one sentence — a filmmaker's accusing voice-over — might cost Bush her vote in the pivotal swing state of Missouri: "This is probably the strongest I've ever felt about voting against him," she said.

    Their tears reflected in the bluish light of the movie screen, many viewers here and elsewhere seemed especially moved by the story of Lila Lipscomb, the mother at the heart of "Fahrenheit 9/11." When Moore first encounters her in Flint, Mich., she speaks with pride of her children's military service, of all the opportunities the armed forces can give them. Then her son was killed in Iraq.

    |
    9:15 pm cdt

    "Fahrenheit 9/11" smashing box office records
    The New York Times reports:
    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.

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    3:20 pm cdt

    Bush AWOL on 9/11
    The Angry Liberal writes at BuzzFlash:

    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.

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    2:41 pm cdt

    Happy Perfect Number Day!
    Today is 6/28, the only day of the year where the month and day are different perfect numbers.
     
    A perfect number is one that is equal to the sum of its divisors other than itself. Six (1+2+3) and 28 (1+2+4+7+14) are the two smallest. The next two are 496 and 8,128. No odd perfect numbers are known. All even numbers are of the form (2 to the n power, minus 1) times (2 to the n-1 power), where (2 to the n power, minus 1) is a prime. For example, 6 is (2 to the second power, minus 1) times (2 to the (2-1) power), i.e., 3 times 2.
     
    A prime number of the form (2 to the n power, minus 1) is known as a Mersennes prime. There are 41 known Mersennes primes (which give rise to 41 known perfect numbers). The seven largest known prime numbers are all Mersennes primes. The largest discovered to date is 2 to the 24,036,583 power, minus 1, which Josh Findley discovered May 15, 2004. Its 7,235,733 digits are here for download. You  can join GIMPS (the Great Internet Mersennes Primes Search) if you want to participate in making history by using your computer to search for Mersennes prime number 42.
     
    The largest known perfect number is thus the product of (2 to the 24,036,583 power, minus 1) times (2 to the 24,036,582 power).
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    11:43 am cdt

    Supreme Court: terror detainees can challenge detentions
    Today's Supreme Court rulings in the detention cases are pretty good for our side. In the Rasul case, the Court ruled that foreign nationals held as "enemy combatants" in Guantanamo Bay can sue to challenge their detentions. In the Hamdi case, the Court ruled that a United States citizen seized in Afghanistan and held in the United States as an "enemy combatant" is entitled to an attorney, and to bring suit to challenge his detention.
     
    Unfortunately, the Court, as Jeralyn Merritt puts it, "weaseled out" of deciding the Padilla case, the most outrageous of the three cases. The government seized Jose Padilla (a U.S. citizen) at O'Hare Airport, labeled him an "enemy combatant," and claimed that he has no right to see an attorney or bring suit. The Court held that it could not decide Padilla's case because he had sued the wrong person: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld rather than the person who has actual physical custody of him.
     
    I don't have time to read the decisions now, but look at the coverage by Prof. Froomkin (here and the two preceding posts); TalkLeft (here and the two preceding posts).
     
    UPDATE: Here are links to PDF files of the Hamdi, Padilla, and Rasul decisions. Be sure to read SCOTUSBlog's analysis here and here. Also at SCOTUSBlog, Heather Lloyd has links to newspaper articles, and Amnesty International's press release, here. Tom Goldstein writes:
    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.” 

    Marty Lederman writes that "Hamdi and Padilla appear to be a huge loss for the government," explaining:

    In Padilla, it appears that only four Justices reach (or even discuss) the question of the lawfulness of the detention. Justice Stevens writes that "the Non-Detention Act, 18 U. S. C. Β§4001(a), prohibits -- and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution, 115 Stat. 224, adopted on September 18, 2001, does not authorize -- the protracted, incommunicado detention of American citizens arrested in the United States." He continues:

    "At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society. Even more important than the method of selecting the people's rulers and their successors [evidently a reference to Bush v. Gore] is the character of the constraints imposed on the Executive by the rule of law. Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber. Access to counsel for the purpose of protecting the citizen from official mistakes and mistreatment is the hallmark of due process. Executive detention of subversive citizens, like detention of enemy soldiers to keep them off the battlefield, may sometimes be justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure. Whether the information so procured is more or less reliable than that acquired by more extreme forms of torture is of no consequence. For if this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny." [emphasis and bracketed material added by BeatBushBlog]

    In Hamdi, four Justices, including Justice Scalia, conclude that Hamdi's detention itself is unlawful -- a result that Hamdi himself barely argued for (his briefs being more focused on the opportunity to challenge his enemy-combatant status). Four other Justices -- Justice O'Connor, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Kennedy and Breyer -- conclude that Congress's 9/18/01 authorization of military force (AUMF) authorizes detention of a "narrow" category of persons: those who are "part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners" in Afghanistan and who "engaged in an armed conflict against the United States there." They read the AUMF to authorize detention of such persons "for the duration of the particular conflict in which they were captured" (because, says the plurality, such detention "is so fundamental and accepted an incident to war as to be an exercise of the 'necessary and appropriate force' Congress has authorized the President to use").

    The plurality goes on to emphasize, however, that the detention must be "to prevent a combatant's return to the battlefield," which the plurality views as "a fundamental incident of waging war." This means that Hamdi can be held, the plurality concludes, not until the end of the "war on terror," which the plurality acknowledges may not come in Hamdi's lifetime, but only until the end of the "active combat operations in Afghanistan." And here's the key sentence: "Certainly, we agree that indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized."

    This should mean that Padilla's detention -- which the Government acknowledges is principally for the purpose of interrogation -- likewise is not authorized. Even if Justice O'Connor's opinion might not conclusively dictate that result, there are (at least) five votes for it: the four dissenters in Hamdi, as well as Justice Breyer, who joins the Stevens dissent in Padilla.

    As Atrios says, "Contrary to the press spin, [these decisions are] a pretty solid defeat for the Bushies. Not a complete one, but still a good smack in the face."

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    11:29 am cdt

    Top 10 Conservative Idiots! 2:37 am cdt

    FreeCell 2:17 am cdt

    Sunday, June 27, 2004

    The Bushes and the Saudis
    "Fahrenheit 9/11" explores at length the relationship between the Bushes and the Saudis (including various members of the large, wealthy bin Laden family). Following up on this, the Center for American Progress helpfully provides "The Complete Saudi Primer," a "guide to everything you always wanted to know about the Bush-Saudi connection but were afraid to ask." (link via Mark A.R. Kleiman)
     
    Among other things, the primer links to Salon's excerpt from Craig Unger's book, House of Bush, House of Saud, where Unger discusses how dozens of Saudis (including about two dozen members of the bin Laden family) were hurriedly flown out of the United States shortly after September 11.
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    5:08 pm cdt

    Torture update
    The WaPo has a new article on torture today:

    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.

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    3:56 pm cdt

    Who's undermining family values?

    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.

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    2:46 pm cdt

    Bush campaign lies
    I just learned of Bush Campaign Lies, which has undertaken to document and count all the lies told by Bush's 2004 campaign (hat tip to Michael Froomkin, IIRC). This is no doubt an overwhelming task, so they seem to have fallen behind -- but as of June 2, they had counted 62 lies.
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    2:32 pm cdt

    Saturday, June 26, 2004

    Hail to the Moon king
    In an article with the above title in Salon, John Gorenfeld addresses the bizarre spectacle of assorted congressment attending the "coronation" (in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, no less) of a religious nut case who thinks he is the Messiah: