Bush: War not inciting terrorists
Reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which the Iraq War has affected terrorism recruitment and incited the Arab and Muslim world. Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not the benefits of the Iraq War justify the propaganda tool and rallying point that is the American occupation there. But claiming that the war has not incited terrorists suggests a state of denial that defies credibility.
Does anyone have a transcript of the Bush's exact words that led to this headline?
By now, most of you will have read somewhere or another that Rush Limbaugh is getting divorced. Hopefully we won't be hearing any diatribes from Rush about how liberals are the source of the breakdown of the family unit and all that tripe. But in the meantime, I have a message for the Left: enough with the supercilious schadenfreude.
As I posted on dKos, I think we're in danger of losing perspective here--not to mention a bit of our soul. The man is getting divorced. This is unfortunate, but to hear some of the people in the comments sections at the two sites I linked, you'd think we were a bunch of freepers crowing over some liberal notable's divorce and pointing to it as an example of how America had lost its values.
I realize that much of this reaction comes from the fact that Rush is a dishonest, moralizing blowhard who has recently been revealed as a hypocrite on most of what he's been lecturing his fans about for years. Pointing this out as an example of his hypocrisy is understandable (although it'd be nice if even one person could cite a /quote/ from Rush about divorce--I've been looking, and I can't seem to find one; searchable transcripts are hard to come by).
But then I read crap like this, this, this, this, and this--a representative but by no means exhaustive list. I am not exaggerating or kidding you here when I say that this kind of shit makes us sound like freepers. And whatever you think of Rush--tanj knows my own opinions of him are pretty nasty--that is not a comparison that should make any of us comfortable.
Divorce sucks. But when we react like this to some right-wing hypocrite's divorce, we do two things: we give legitimacy to the stigma that the moralizing right tries to level on divorce and divorcees, and we lower ourselves to the level of the hyena pits over at the Free Republic.
For this reason it was already announced, in an addendum to the Armed Forces report Of 7th October, 1942, that, in the future, Germany in the face of these sabotage troops of the British and their accomplices, will resort to the same procedure, that is, that they will be ruthlessly mowed down by the German troops in combat, wherever they may appear.
Via Josh Marshall, yet another disturbing story on the torture front:
....
Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four U.S. soldiers in another company that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures.
Baker, of Georgetown in central Kentucky, said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American.
The first is the fact that there was a training exercise at Gitmo which involved practicing beating uncooperative detainees. Think about that for a minute: this isn't a case of a few privates going overboard absent supervision. If this story is true, they were being trained to break the law.
Also disturbing is the attitude revealed by the second passage. To me, it epitomizes the disregard the Bush administration has for universal human rights as anything more than a card to play when it offers a strategic or diplomatic advantage. They only stopped beating him in this training exercise when they realized he might be American.
It does make me wonder--why would these soldiers not know that Baker was American? How many other such "exercises" are there where the subject is a real live detainee who drew the short straw? And why should it be any way acceptable that we are not only training our soldiers to beat uncooperative prisoners, but possibly using real prisoners as unwilling training dummies?
I suspect we haven't seen the end of this.
UPDATE: Apparently Nicholas Kristof broke this story in the NY Times a few days ago--and his column has much more information than the wire articles. First of all, we learn that this was in fact a planned exercise, and that the soldiers participating in it were told he was a real prisoner:
At a bare minimum, this officer needs to face a court martial. I can conceive of no explanation for this which is not incredibly damning. If he sent these soldiers in there to extract what they were told was a violent prisoner and gave them no guidance or supervision on how they were to act, then he's guilty of criminal negligence. If, as I suspect, he presided over the exercise himself, then we have a much more serious problem.
A few days ago, Winds of Change posted one of its regular "Sufi Wisdom" parables, and invited comment. I spotted it a bit too late to get in on the discussion, but it spurred me to write about a point I'd been meaning to make for a while. The parable:
The lawyer is horrified. 'You do that,' he says, 'and he'll find against you for sure - you might even be arrested for attempted bribery!'
- 'Are you sure?'
'Quite sure, I know that judge!'
The case was heard, and the Mulla won.
'Well,' said the lawyer, 'you did get justice after all, you can't deny that...
'Mind you, said Nasruddin, 'the gold pieces also helped...'
'You mean you actually sent the judge money?' howled the lawyer.
'Oh yes,' said Mulla Nasruddin - 'but of course, I sent the gold in the other man's name!"
When I first read this parable, I found myself thinking of the case the Bush administration made for the invasion of Iraq. Then I read this line by AST, and the reason for this otherwise incongruent bit of mental association crystallized.
That Saddam Hussein is no longer in control of Iraq is an indisputable Good Thing. That invasion of Iraq was necessary in order to accomplish this is a questionable but not unreasonable position. That Iraq, at some point, still had WMD-related program activities is a fact. That it was a threat sufficient to require us to invade is an opinion that is reasonable, but debatable.
The Bush Administration, for whatever reason, judged that the merits of their case were insufficient to guarantee the outcome they desired. Perhaps they felt they had a dishonest judge (the UN). Perhaps they felt that Americans would not support the invasion if given an honest and open evaluation of the facts. We can conjecture, and such conjectures will always be flavored by our own partisan predilections, but any serious examination of the facts and the administration's public statements reveals that they deceived the American people to get the outcome they desired. This does not invalidate the good that has been accomplished, and should our policies result in a stable and democratic Iraq, they deserve credit for that.
But in seeking what is arguably a noble end, they engaged in a systematic deception of the American people, and indeed, the world.
We also now find new evidence to suggest that they condone pushing the envelope of what is considered torture--or simply of what they can get away with in the pursuit of extracting intelligence:
First of all, let's get one thing out in the open: the memo is genuine. Nobody in the Bush administration has disputed that.
This memo, by itself, is not enough to bury the Bush administration, or anyone in it. This is a draft memo presenting a legal opinion, not a statement of policy. But take it in context, and compare it with the other facts available: the record of abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Bush administration's arguments in favor of holding "enemy combatants" indefinitely; the rendering of suspects (innocent and otherwise) to countries which use torture in order to get around the law; the dishonest, shifting, and often contradictory justifications offered for invading Iraq; the intimidation, threats, and bending of House rules to pass the Medicare bill... and a whole host of issues (such as Florida voting irregularities) which I decline to offer as examples because the facts are sufficiently under contention.
Some would argue that these are not in any way related. I disagree. Taken in context, they reveal an unmistakable pattern: the Bush administration apparently believes that the legality, ethics, and morality of the means to their ends are irrelevant except as a component of risk/benefit analysis.
One of my favorite authors, Daniel Keys Moran, wrote to me and in one of his books that killing is wrong--that even when it's necessary, it's wrong. When you kill, he wrote, you "remove a possibility from the world". I believe that there are some acts which, regardless of necessity or justification or circumstance, rip something away from the soul of the actor. Something which, once lost, can never be regained. The methodical, deliberate torture of another living creature is one such thing. And if human beings can be said to have souls, so can nation-states--for the soul of a nation is its sense of national identity, its raison d'etre, its ideals and driving purpose.
The Holy Trinity of our nation, the three documents which most embody our national soul, are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. In declaring independence from the tyranny of King George, our forefathers famously wrote that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." They did not write that "all men of these colonies" are endowed with these rights. Their visionary belief was that equality and these "unalienable rights" were the birthright of all men. We strive to embody those principles in our laws and actions--sometimes successfully, and sometimes not--not because they are written in the Constitution, or because of an oath to serve it, but because they are right.
The Bill of Rights, Geneva Conventions, Torture Convention, and relevant portions of the UCMJ were all written in that same spirit: a recognition that some rights, dignities, and notions of right and wrong were and should be universal amongst all mankind. That there are some things you simply don't do. The Bush administration demostrates a consistent pattern of using means which defile the spirit and soul of America--and indeed, of civilized nations of laws.
UPDATE: Billmon has a new post up on the Bush administration's torture issue. There's too much to except. Read it all.
And another: Kevin Drum asks some very good questions and makes some excellent points. Among them, the Pot and Kettle angle:
I'm working on a Reagan post. I was going to hold off on even commenting on Reagan this week out of respect, especially since some of the more classless folks on the left can't seem to refrain from taking a steaming dump on Reagan's grave for even 24 hours. But seeing as how the GOP and right-wing blogdom are falling over themselves to lionize, deify, and distort Reagan's life and presidency for nakedly partisan purposes, I'm not exactly feeling charitable towards the Republican party about Reagan right now. My condolences and respect are reserved for his surviving family.
So, I'll have a longer Reagan post up soonish. But not now.
It's official: George Tenet is resigning. Those following Washington politics closely have been wondering when this was going to happen--and whether he would go quietly or be fired outright. And let's face it: while the Bush administration has their share of culpability for the mis(dis?)information which took us to war in Iraq, Tenet's CIA holds its own share of blame for rubber-stamping bogus intel that anyone (and everyone) with Google and some free time can and did debunk.
Whether he was pressured into it or a willing dupe, Tenet shares responsibility for Iraq and the WMD embarassment. He also shares responsibility for 9/11, in the same way that everyone else who dropped the ball in the months leading up to it did.
Unfortunately, Bush is not framing this as a dismissal based on the quality of his work--as with Rumsfeld, he's inexplicably singing the praises of someone who deserves little:
"I send my blessings to George and his family and look forward to working with him until he leaves the agency," Bush said.
As usual, no accountability for those who screwed up. What doesn't make sense now is why--the consistent theme for Team Bush has been loyalty. I don't see where there's any love lost between Bush and Tenet, or between their respective organizations. The only thing I can think of is that Bush (or Rove) feels that censuring Tenet would incur blowback on the administration by association.
Anyone else hear about the meteor over the Pacific Northwest? At least, the initial assumption was that it's a meteor.
Toby Smith, a lecturer in astronomy, said scientists were looking into the cause of the skybursts reported over a wide area about 2:40 a.m.
Witnesses along a 60-mile swath of the sound from near Tacoma to Whidbey Island and as far as 100 miles to the east near Ellensburg said the sky lit up brightly, and many also reported booming sounds as if from one or more explosions.
More later when I can put a finger on this feeling. It's not just me.
Rumors have been flying since the raid on Ahmad Chalabi's home a few weeks ago--the most persistent of which is the allegation that Chalabi was feeding sensitive intel to Iran. As if the degree to which the WMD intel he fed us was bogus was not enough reason to cut ties and wash our hands of him, this at least would seem to be a reasonable rationale for cutting off his $300k+ per month allowance and sending him to his room.
Now via War and Piece, Atrios, and about a dozen other places, we have what appears to be confirmation: Chalabi did, apparently, pass intel to the Iranians, the precise nature of which US intelligence had requested the various news organizations not disclose due to its sensitivity.
The cat's out of the bag now, though--and boy, is he pissed.
Laura at War and Piece seems to have some inside sources that could be valuable for getting a jump on this story. And Josh Marshall has some good analysis and informed speculation.
So far, there's been near-total silence from the sane right, the hawkish left, and notable neocons about Chalabi--although where the latter is concerned, there are a few paragraphs of interesting musings which suggest that the Chalabi-Iran allegations are a non-story designed by American intelligence agencies to discredit Chalabi.
Plausible, but Darling's defense of Chalabi is pretty high in "doth protest too much" and carries more than a faint undercurrent of denial. This is understandable if true; hawks and neo-conservatives who put their eggs in the INC basket are facing one of two highly unpalatable scenarios: either this is an elaborate inter-agency plot to discredit their white knight of Iraqi democracy, or he really is as big of a crook as we've been telling them, and their naive faith in Chalabi is about to bite them in the ass.
If I were them, I'd be holding out for option #1 too.
Stay tuned for more. I have a feeling this story's about to take off in a hurry.