The Obama Administration looks as if it is heading down the same destructive path as the Bush Administration when it comes to Gitmo prisoners:

Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that an order, which would bypass Congress, could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

… The other half of the cases, the officials said, present the greatest difficulty because these detainees cannot be prosecuted in federal court or military commissions. In many cases the evidence against them is classified, has been provided by foreign intelligence services or has been tainted by the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques.

I realize that the Obama Administration is in a very difficult position. In many cases, the Bush Administration tortured and otherwise abused these people. Trying them may be impossible with that evidence — since, obviously, evidence obtained under torture is of exactly the same quality as the evidence provided in Soviet show trials. That does not excuse the Obama Administration’s rumored plans. Hilzoy says it better than I:

I also don’t envy him the politics of it. Obviously, if some released detainee commits an act of terror against the US, all hell will break loose. And the costs of that will not be purely political: people might not get health insurance, or we might be unable to act on global warming, if some released detainee decides to blow himself up in an American city. I wish that my fellow citizens were also moved by the wrongness of keeping people who might be innocent locked up without recourse, but apparently not enough of them are.

But that doesn’t make it right. Obama does not have to do this. The rule of law is one of our most basic values. It underwrites the freedoms that we go on and on about, but are apparently unwilling to risk much of anything to preserve.

Shame on him if he does this. And shame on us.

There must be another option aside from the destruction of the presumption of innocence and the Great Writ. I haven’t heard, for example, why these people cannot be held as prisoners of war. In any case, no matter how difficult it is, no matter how deeply Bush and Cheney poisoned the process, it is the Obama Administration’s responsibility to find a way out of Bush’s mess without jettisoning the rule of law.

I don’t care if the task is hard. They knew, or should have known, it would be hard going in. If they didn’t want this responsibility, they shouldn’t have taken the job.

But then again, he usually does:

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

…snip…

Credit where credit is due. Some figures in the conservative media have refused to go along with the big hate — people like Fox’s Shepard Smith and Catherine Herridge, who debunked the attacks on that Homeland Security report two months ago. But this doesn’t change the broad picture, which is that supposedly respectable news organizations and political figures are giving aid and comfort to dangerous extremism.

What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”

And that’s a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.

As always, read the whole thing.

Holy crap! I knew Frank Schaeffer - son of widely-read drippy evangelical apologist Francis Schaeffer - had publicly broken with the right-wing religious extremists, but I never expected to see him take a clue stick and beat the living shit out of them like he did today. Man, I don’t often find myself wishing I had gone as far as a prominent conservative evangelical, but, damn . . . brother drops some serious science!

As a former lifelong Republican from an influential family of religious right leaders, I look at the national village idiot that the Republican Party has become the way I’d contemplate a demented cousin pissing on the picnic basket at a family reunion. If it is fair to blame the years of Wahhabist hate that spewed from Saudi clerics for at least part of the 9/11 outcome (and it is) then it’s also going to be fair to blame their American equivalent when domestic terror ramps up here. . . .

No, I’m not saying [Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney] or anyone in the public eye is planning violence. I’m talking about the culpability of smart people knowingly or unknowingly playing to the lowest common denominator and stirring up trouble in a sort of scorched-earth policy since they lost out politically. I’m talking about creating a climate where violence seems “logical” and maybe inevitable when set against a backdrop of insane talk.

The leaderless Republican Party — or should I say the dwindling rabble of know-nothing reactionaries who still identify themselves as Republicans — is not just politically leaderless, they are also morally leaderless. . . .

[Their] “lynch mob” mentality is the context in which Dr. Tiller was murdered. A lot of this emerging domestic terror has to do with a larger story. It has to do with what becomes thinkable under a barrage of hateful words. . . .

The 20-year-plus agitation in and around Dr. Tiller’s Wichita clinic (egged on by evangelicals, Fox News and other commentators) eventually turned into a little pro-life industry with four groups raising funds and opening headquarters in that city attracted to Dr. Tiller’s clinic the way cheap motels spring up around Disneyland and feed off the crumbs. So today a whole far right industry, led by Fox News, Limbaugh, the evangelicals, right wing Roman Catholics, Palin, the former vice president and his daughter — etc. — is growing up and into a permanent, negative and profitable hate-Obama industry. It is catering to the deluded, the paranoid, the fearful and - let’s be frank - none too bright rube underbelly of white America.

There’s another thing too: President Obama allows closeted racists to be open racists again. His name is now code for the “other.” Because Obama is black, lived abroad and is educated, a professor and part of that hated world of higher learning that the right wing feels is a threat to their willful ignorance (and profitable misinformation campaigns), the mere utterance of his name alone by Limbaugh, Fox News etc., is the new “N” word. . . .

The moron class of Americans who stocked up on guns and ammunition when President Obama was elected, because of fears that he would “take our guns away;” the willful fools to whom Glenn Beck is a hero, are the same population that — right now - have their TV remotes set on Fox News 24/7. They are listening to Rush Limbaugh too as they rattle around in their pickup trucks driving to wherever they’re practicing on targets but fantasizing about putting the president, or other people they hate, in their scope’s cross hairs.

These are the same folks on the fringe of the “pro-life” movement who are waving huge signs wherein Obama’s name is plastered on the picture of a dead fetus’ and the word “murderer” is scrawled in bloody letters over our President’s picture. Read the signs that were being waved by pro-lifers at Dr. Tiller’s funeral. “God Sent the Killer!” Is it hard to imagine these people cheering if our president (who they all call “an abortionist”) was killed?

It is time to tell the loudmouth profiteers from hate that we ordinary Americans who voted for and love our President and our country know who they are and that we will not forget what they said and said again and again and again. When some fool’s fool takes them at their word and tries to do “God’s will” by taking a shot at our president we will remember who put them up to it.

Good on him. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Political discourse, as it were: Kevin notes that the recent official vice-presidential candidate of the Republican Party refuses to describe religiously-motivated anti-choice murders and clinic bombings as terrorism. One of our resident wingers responds almost immediately with . . . a totally irrelevant rant about a completely different issue – because, between open rationalization of terrorist murder and your petulant fantasies about the “liberal media”, it’s obvious which is more important.

MSM . . . dared pursued and exposed . . . relationship and connection with the terrorist Bill Ayers . . . of course not! . . . attack Palin . . . blah, blah . . .

Humoring him, we might try to take this nonsense seriously. But, characteristically, and portentously, it can’t be done.

Read the rest of this entry »

So the latest right-wing meme around the murder of Dr. Tiller is that liberals should be at least as upset about the Little Rock murder of an Army Private outside a recruiting station by a recently-converted Muslim (see, for example, here, and also here). Let me first state for the record: Murder is wrong, period, and the shooter should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But that said, this new right-wing meme is bullshit. While any murder is tragic, the two cases are far from equivalent. I was trying to put together a good explanation as to just why it’s bullshit, but then I found that commenter Jeff Eaton has already done it for me. I quote his comment almost in its entirety:

One of the aspects of the Tiller case that was most troubling was the twenty year campaign of personal, focused demonization and harassment that he endured. That campaign included death threats, assassination attempts, routine participation in public threats by mainstream members of the pro-life movement, and the ongoing stalking of anyone associated with Tiller.

And Sunday, someone who took the movement’s words seriously killed him. In his church, while he was ushering.

That, to me, is the most troubling aspect. Imagine that this particular army recruiter had been the focus of Muslim anger since the early 1980s. Imagine that a generation of American Muslims had grown up being told by their parents that he was literally like Hitler. Imagine they were told that every day he continued to work, hundreds of innocent children would die directly due to his actions.

Imagine that in any discussion of the morality of war, said recruiter was used as a quick and easy shorthand for “Raping and pillaging, and violation of the Geneva convention.” Imagine his office received regular threats, that anyone assigned to work with him was stalked and harassed. Imagine his office had been bombed. Imagine that he had been shot twice simply for going to work.

Now imagine that water cooler conversation among average liberals included the words, “It was definitely terrible. But, you know… kids in that city can sleep safer tonight, because he’s not recruiting.” Or, perhaps, “It was terrible, but the unpleasant truth is that he was a monster.”

Now imagine that his murder was followed by press releases from CAIR, saying “We condemn this senseless murder — but it is also important to note that recruiters are responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent victims of war, and war must be stopped.”

Now you’ve got a bit of what Tiller’s life and death were like.

Also, channeling KTK’s earlier posts, commenter Nell notes:

[N]ot a single story about the assassination of Dr. Tiller raised any question about whether his killer was acting alone, even given his documented participation in a highly organized, ongoing, long-term campaign of harassment and terror against Tiller, his co-workers, and the clinic.

But a guy who lives near a recruiting station shoots two soldiers outside it, and “it’s not clear whether he was acting alone.” Also:

Mr. Muhammad will be charged with one count of capital murder and 15 counts of terroristic acts, one for each person who was hit or endangered by the shots he fired. Thirteen people were in the recruiting office at the time.

Think the assassin in Wichita will be charged with anything but the murder of George Tiller? I don’t.

And cleek:

reporters (and some supposedly high-minded bloggers) are still shy about calling it “terrorism”, even though it absolutely meets the legal definition, as well as the plain-sense definition.

go! go! liberal media!

There are many other such comments over here, but those were the most poignant, I thought.

A suspect was arrested only a few hours after the Tiller killing, and to absolutely no one’s surprise he’s a white male Christian with a long history of affiliation with the extreme fringe, anti-government and militia groups, and anti-abortion activism, including links to Operation Rescue.

---

Operation Rescue itself issued a statement condemning the murder, but, as several people pointed out, it was posted on their Web site right next to a graphics block with a picture of Dr. Tiller, labeling him “America’s Doctor of Death”.

Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry issued a statement claiming to regret the murder of Dr. Tiller because “he did not have time to prepare his soul to face God”, but saying nothing about the actual murder.

---

It’s interesting to recall the right wing’s panicked reaction to the recent “Homeland Security” report correctly noting that right-wing extremism is a common source of violence and terrorism in the US, and that single-issue extremists such as anti-choice fanatics are a particular danger. Right Wing Watch has a selection of choice quotes from Christian wingers condemning the report. It is presumed that none of them will issue statements noting that DHS was right all along.

---

As for the issue of terrorism, it’s hard to be more stupid or mindless than Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom, but his is typical of right-wing commentary on the issue:

This was an act of terrorism, as well as of murder.

OK . . . good start.

It was no more or less an act of political assassination than any of the bombings advocated by Bill Ayers.

Well, it was obviously much less “an act of political assassination” inasmuch as the Weather bombings didn’t actually kill anyone (other than the people preparing the bombs), and it’s clear that the bombs that were set were designed not to (though the one that went off accidentally may have been, the ones actually used were not). That would seem to be a fairly obvious point of distinction between compared “acts of political assassination” - the “assassinations” where somebody dies are worse than the ones not intended to kill anybody that do not in fact kill anybody. Am I going too fast for you, Dan?

It was no more or less a violation of civil rights than the New Black Panther polling intimidation

Shooting a man to death in a terrorist act is “no more a violation of civil rights” than standing outside a polling place scowling while black? Exactly how entitled, oblivious, and ghoulishly indifferent to terrorism do you have to be to make a statement as maliciously stupid as that?

There is either one justice for all, or there is justice for none.

I have no idea what this means, and neither does Dan Collins.

Let’s ask ourselves whether there’s been a hate crime committed here. Has there?

Um, no. Does that help? “Hate crime” is legally defined as an ordinary crime motivated or heightened by prejudice. This was straightforward terrorism - it was political violence intended to deny women their rights and liberties by killing and intimidating those who work to guarantee them. It was the same sort of thing as killing schoolteachers in Afghanistan, or voter registrars in the US South. You can easily posit misogynist prejudice as a root cause, as it is in Afghanistan or as race prejudice was in the South, but the crime itself is simple terroristic murder.

If so, aren’t Islamists guilty of hate crimes?

Leaving aside the fact that “Islamist” is a made-up word that is only applied by critics to people they disapprove of, not an objectively-definable category, whether or not any such person is guilty of a hate crime would obviously depend on what they did, and why. Since he offers no examples or discussion, the question is unanswerable, but this claim can’t possibly be true of all “Islamists” if such people even exist.

It’s certainly true that many religious fanatics use terroristic violence as a means of promoting their causes - the entire history of Christian anti-abortion violence makes that clear. Timothy McVeigh is another example, as is the Christian militia movement. That’s not the same as “hate crimes”, but clarity of thought doesn’t seem to be Collins’s forte, so maybe this is what he is thinking of.

Should the fact that they commit such crimes largely against minority believers in their own countries be cause for more stringent sanctions and severer punishments?

Well, not under US law, since it doesn’t apply to foreign countries.

Do the continuous legal assaults on Sarah Palin constitute a hate crime?

Since they don’t constitute a crime at all, they can’t constitute a hate crime. Seriously, how can you be this stupid and be listened to? Or, more to the point I guess, where else but the American right wing could you do so?

---

As for the impact of this act of terrorism, the most obvious and immediate is that America has lost one of the few doctors who would openly and regularly provide service - under continuous threat to his own life, and unremitting legal and personal harassment - to women facing the most critical and harrowing needs. Hilzoy has assembled the heart-wrenching statements of patients who were personally treated by Dr. Tiller at times of terrible crisis, as well as one who was forced to suffer endlessly, at risk to her life, because she was denied the same liberty.  It’s an absolute must-read, and a crushing indictment of the vicious misogyny that drives the anti-choice movement and its terrorist wing.

NB: Normally we tolerate a lot on this blog, but I’ve been deleting comments from our resident obnoxious anti-choice troll because, frankly, I’m not in the mood at this time.

UPDATE [tgirsch]: Added a link to the suspect ID, since at least one commenter questioned KTK’s classification.

The news today reports that Dr. George Tiller of Kansas, a long-time target of continual legal and terrorist harassment because of his refusal to deny legal and safe late-term abortions to patients who needed them, was shot to death by an apparent terrorist while serving as an usher at his family church in Wichita. A suspect has been arrested but his identity has not been released. Tiller was one of the few providers of late-term abortion in his part of the country, and for years had been the target of harassment by Christian anti-choice groups, as well as a campaign of legal harassment by anti-choice Kansas prosecutor Phil Kline, who lost a series of legal battles, and his own re-election campaign, while attempting to bring empty charges against Tiller and  penalize his patients by invasions of their privacy. Just two months ago Tiller was resoundingly acquitted of all charges in a case originally instigated by Kline in an attempt to have Tiller’s medical license revoked. Today he was murdered. Apparently the misogynists think of the rule of law as just a tactic, not a principle.

This was the 8th or 9th terrorist killing of abortion clinic workers, continuing a decades-long campaign that has seen over a dozen more people survive attempted murders, as well as over 1,200 hoax anthrax poisonings, hundreds of real bombings and arsons (some of them fatal), thousands of cases of death threats and threatening or libelous letters, constant harassment of clinic staff and patients, harassment of staff and their families at their private homes, and uncountable acts of vandalism and other crimes. Dr. Tiller himself had survived a previous shooting by another anti-choice terrorist, yet continued to provide service to patients at the risk of his life for another 15 years.

It has to be said that, at this time, we don’t know exactly what the murderer’s motivation was, or what groups he may be affiliated with. But there’s no reason to be coy about it. Tiller has been a target of the anti-choice crusaders literally for decades. They have tried everything possible, including harassment, public villification, abuse of the law, and even attempted murder, to stop him before. And, as with every anti-abortion murder or attempted murder in the past, the perpetrators have always been conservative Christians, convinced that their religious beliefs justify terrorism. If this most recent murder, of someone openly targeted by terrorists and their supporters year after year, should somehow prove to be down to some unrelated cause, it would be a staggering coincidence. Nobody believes that. Anti-abortion violence is and always has been the product of Christian terrorists, and it has received widespread support from networks - sometimes informal, often well-organized - of other right-wing Christians who operate Web sites targeting women’s rights supports for death; circulate written manuals giving explicit instructions for methods of terrorism and violence; recruit and encourage terrorists using religious inducements; publicize, defend, and praise, in Christian terms, terrorists who commit murders or violence; and actively provide, food, money, shelter, and other support to Christian terrorists on the run after their crimes. Even if, as is almost unimaginably unlikely, this particular murder turns out to be unrelated to the ongoing Christian terrorism campaign against women’s health and liberty rights, it will certainly feed and encourage the terrorism network that has long existed.

As Matthew Yglesis points out quite correctly, Christian anti-woman violence has proven itself to be “a kind of terrorism that works“. The chilling effect of anti-choice terrorism on abortion service providers is quite real, and significant. In addition to the many doctors killed or injured, scores were coerced by threats of death against themselves and their families to sign public statements vowing to abandon their patients and refuse to continue providing services. The total number of provicers nationwide has declined steadily, and terrorism is undoubtedly a large part of the reason why.

For years this violence was ignored by the government, and the FBI seemed uninterested in catching the people responsible. (Most of the terrorists were caught by accident, and to this day only a handful of their active supporters have been prosecuted, though eventually the FBI did get a little more active.) In fact, it was almost never named for what it was - terrorism - the use or threat of violence to coerce behavior by non-combatants for political ends.

There is one thing different, now, however. The most recent previous anti-choice murder was pre-9/11. Today, people are less inclined to take that kind of thing lightly. And, after years of silent acquiescence, mainstream Christian groups did finally begin issuing statements of disapproval regarding Christian terrorism; some have already done so regarding the Tiller murder. Just as they were getting a good hate on for Muslim terrorists, it’s inconvenient for Christians to be reminded of Christian terrorism. The debate over torture by US personnel makes the issue a bit dicey, too - the torturers have been arguing that what they did is not really torture, but shooting people to death in a church is clearly over the line, so they’ve got to distance themselves from this one as fast as possible in order to maintain the pretense that “real” terrorism is not something we do. So the Christian terrorists are going to find themselves somewhat less well supported this time around, at least on the open level.

The real question is what the government will do about this. A clear-cut, open, terrorist murder on US soil, by undoubtedly a homegrown US terrorist, virtually undobutedly a right-wing Christian terrorist acting on religious impulses, right at the height of a much-ballyhooed “war on terror” also aimed at religious terrorists: are they going to let this go? Or are they going to come down on it the way they would if this were a Muslim or non-American killer?

Are they going to call it terrorism?

Are they going to make the link to the ongoing terrorist campaign that has been underway for almost 30 years?

Are they going to pressure the instigators to stop the harassment and incitement?

Are they going to charge the suspect with terrorism and treat the trial as a domestic security issue?

Are they going to acknowledge that US women are the specific and explicit targets of religious terrorism, motivated by misogyny and aversion to women’s sexuality, justified by right-wing Christian ideology, and culminating in wide-spread, long-standing organized violence and murder?

Are they going to act as if an all-out terrorist campaign aimed directly at the specific and personal liberties, and explicit legal rights, of more than half the population, and their supporters, is something that matters?

Are they going to acknowledge that the right-wing Christian politicians who have consistently used the legal system to impose cynical and disingenuous barriers to women’s rights and freedom are in fact carrying water for the terrorists who seek the same goals by other means?

At long last, is the government of the United States going to engage the campaign of terror against US women, even as it fights a manufactured and aimless “war on terror” in distant parts of the globe, and finally take an open and direct stand against those who use terrorism and violence to constrain women’s freedom, against those who cheer, encourage, and support the terrorists, and against their fellow travelers inside the system?

UPDATE, and SOME RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

RE-UPDATE: i was going to add the “random observations” here, but decided to move them to a separate post (above). Somehow the text wound up in both places. I blame the Republicans.

We desperately need someone in the Obama administration to step up and do the right thing, because the President has allowed the Pentagon to cow him with their “supporting the troops” universal coverall cliche.

Obama has reversed his own decision to release some of the remaining Abu Ghraib torture photos. (Note that these are photos that were ordered released 4 years ago, photos of which Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said “we’re talking rape and murder”, Senator Ron Wyden said were “significantly worse than anything that I had anticipated. . . . Take the worst case and multiply it several times over”, and even Donald Rumsfeld said: ““I mean, I looked at them last night, and they’re hard to believe. [They show acts] that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane. If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse.”) The Pentagon is complaining that if people know how they behave, it will create a backlash against US troops - that it is actually unAmerican to tell the truth about US military’s moral and practical standards, because that would bring negative consequences, truth apparently being something the military and its behavior cannot withstand. It seems the only way to support the troops is to hide the facts about the things the troops do that no one will support.

The federal courts at every level have rejected this nonsense, and for a time it appeared that Obama was going to stand firm. Now he has caved. The real reason, of course, is that making the truth known and unmistakable will force Obama to hold at least some of the guilty accountable.

[O]ne congressional staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the photos, said the pictures are more graphic than those that have been made public from Abu Ghraib. “When they are released, there will be a major outcry for an investigation by a commission or some other vehicle,” the staff member said.

It is obvious that the truth will only be known if someone breaks the law.

It’s time for someone to break the law.

Read the rest of this entry »

Powerline is beside himself that “liberals” want to put criminals in jail. Turns out the old law-’n-order is not such a good idea when it applies to everyone.

Displaying the typical conservative projection of their own faults onto others, he opens with this ludicrous claim:

Many liberals don’t just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail. Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences.

Uh, dude . . . find me examples of liberals jailing conservatives on purely ideological grounds (not grounds of, you know, actually breaking the law) that are anything whatsoever like, say . . . warrantless arrest and incarceration without trial for “terrorists” who haven’t committed a crime. Then there’s . . throwing people out of their jobs, and blacklisting them within entire industries, for belonging to, or attending meetings of, or even just being acquainted with members of legal political organizations; or the same for being gay; or wiretapping and harassing them for the same reasons; or arresting them for teaching evolution in science classes; or selectively prosecuting only those draft resisters who spoke out against the draft; or using the IRS to harass critics of the Nixon administration, and on and on. Hell, find an example of liberals doing any of those things, at all.

But, even if it’s a complete lie that this is a common occurrence, exactly what fresh new hell are these Republican martyrs facing today?

President Obama hinted at another step in that direction when he said today that he is open to the idea of bringing criminal charges against the Justice Department lawyers who wrote opinions to the effect that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods could legally be used on al Qaeda detainees.

Oh. They’re facing legal consequences for planning, justifying, authorizing, administering, and covering up crimes against humanity. Right. That can happen.

The idea of prosecuting a lawyer because a wrote a legal analysis with which the current Attorney General disagrees is so outrageous that I can’t believe it would be seriously considered.

Yeah, you and Rudolph Hess both. Turns out that planning and systematizing inhuman atrocities can get you jail time. It’s a travesty!

Still, President Obama and his party may achieve another objective by publicly making this kind of threat: deterring Republicans from serving in public life. For many Republicans considering whether to accept an appointment to government office, the prospect that they may be subjected to criminal prosecution if the next administration is Democratic could well tip the balance in favor of remaining in private life.

I’m absolutely certain he’s right about this. But let it be noted: he’s the one who’s claiming that Republicans can’t enter government without breaking the law or embroiling themselves - and the nation - in war crimes. It’s true - but it’s the conservatives themselves who are saying so.

Nothing resulting from the torture memos has anything to do with “ideology”. We knew what kind of people they were when they took office - and there were thousands of them, at all levels. The ones who are being prosecuted are the ones who broke the law, or connived at and covered up those breaches of law - and only a tiny fraction of those. They aren’t being prosecuted for “disagreeing” with the Attorney General, except in the sense that they believed they were entitled to commit atrocities, he believes they’re not, and they’re wrong. They are being prosecuted for their “opinions” about torture in exactly the same way that Charles Manson was prosecuted for his opinion about stabbing people to death - they thought it up, whipped up some perverse gibberish to rationalize it, and sent their minions out to commit the crimes, then helped them cover it up.

I have no problem believing that conservatives are doomed to jail because of their “ideology”. I just think there’s an obvious lesson in that - one that anyone moral enough not to be a conservative would have no problem grasping.

PS: Hint to Powerline: somehow, your blog text is formatted so that selected text is identical to normal text in Firefox (but not in IE - I don’t know why). Makes it almost impossible to select text for quoting , because it doesn’t look like you’ve selected anything.

UPDATE: Powerline’s text is OK in Firefox on my home computer, but not at work. I dunno what’s going on.

There’s an unofficial “Conservatives for Palin” Web site that exists to extol all things Sarah. Bizarrely enough, this is not run by people paid by or related to her. That’s not to say they’re not nutty as all get-out, though.

Current “Featured Posts”:

• Who is Sarah Palin?
• Despite It All, Palin’s Got “It”
• Anything They Can Do, She Can Do Better
• Another Attempt to Marginalize Governor Palin
• How Is Track Palin Doing?
• “My Cyber Day” by Gov. Sarah Palin

And, #1 with a bullet . . .

• Associated Press of Mordor Attacks Palin Once Again

These be some freaky-ass mofos, fo’ real!

Man, nothing says “self-parody” like a Palin supporter!

Not even close:

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Gee, who wold have thought that a tortured person would tell his captors pretty much anything to get them to stop? I mean, aside from all us dirty hippies and, gosh, you wouldn’t want to listen to them would you. Wouldn’t be serious, that.

The Bush Administration destroyed whatever American moral authority there might have been and helped turn soldiers and operatives into the kind of monsters Pinochet would have been proud to employ and for what? Literally nothing.

Martin Kramer is a “fellow” of the usual assortment of right-wing full-employment societies (Olin Institute, etc.). He suffers from a textbook case of Conservative Reading Comprehension Disorder. Right now he’s all het up because he’s got the goods on “Chas Freeman”, specifically regarding Freeman’s position on whether or not resentment over US policy toward Israel is really a motivating cause of Muslim terrorism:

Freeman, 1/2004:
The heart of the poison is the Israel-Palestinian conundrum. When I was in Saudi Arabia, I was told by Saudi friends that on Saudi TV there were three terrorists who came out and spoke. Essentially the story they told was that they had been recruited to fight for the Palestinians against the Israelis, but that once in the training camp, their trainers gradually shifted their focus away from the Israelis to the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and to the United States. So the recruitment of terrorists has a great deal to do with the animus that arises from that continuing and worsening situation.

Freeman, 10/1988:
Mr. bin Laden’s principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.

Yeah, so?

Well:

Does Freeman really believe that Israel’s actions caused Bin Laden’s terror? Who knows? He’s put forward two completely contradictory explanations. One would like to believe that in his heart of hearts, he still knows what he knew in 1998, that Bin Laden’s “campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel.” One would like to believe that in 2006, he was cynically shilling for the Saudis when he blamed 9/11 on “our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel’s approach.” Because if he wasn’t just cynically shilling, he’s gone off the rails.

Or there’s a third alternative, which is that, aside from being more than 5 years apart, the quotes aren’t contradictory, and Kramer’s question is pointless because Freeman didn’t say Israel’s actions caused Bin Laden’s terrorism.

It’s no more than a basic question of reading comprehension to note that the first quote deals with the mechanisms by which terrorists are recruited while only the second deals with Bin Laden’s underlying reason for hostility to the US. You can tell this because he uses confusing and evasive language like “the recruitment of terrorists” in the first quote, and “bin Laden’s principal point, in [his] campaign of violence against the United States” in the second. And in fact both quotes posit US intervention in Saudi Arabia as the actual reason for Bin Laden-sponsored terrorism, not anything to do with Israel - thus making Kramer’s question unnecessary for anyone with better reading skills than Kramer. The fact that there is widespread resentment over Israel (does Kramer seriously contend there is not?) is not incompatible with the claim that that is not bin Laden’s personal main concern, or with the claim that it still serves as a useful recruiting tool for him nonetheless (before re-directing the recruits’ focus onto Saudi Arabia). And if Freeman did change his mind, it’s hardly puzzling that things might have changed in 5 years, and after 9/11, notwithstanding that the two quotes are perfectly compatible to begin with.

So where does Kramer get off with his “completely contradictory explanations”, “cynically shilling”, and “gone off the rails”? Well, by being a second-rate right-wing hack, basically. This is nothing more than the Noise Machine grinding its clanky, ill-engineered gears, yet again.

I’m embarrassed to admit I have no idea who “Chas Freeman” is. Apparently old Chuckles was nominated to some sort of diplomatic or security position and has got the wingers into an uproar over the suspicion he might not be a total toady about Israel. And for all I know, he’s not, though dudes who allow themselves to be called “Chas” and are not actually signers of the Declaration of Independence are not exactly my epitome of backbone-having mo-fo’s. But I digress. The point is, there’s nothing in these quotes to substantiate any such claim, and, even more to the point, saying there is makes you an idiot. These wingnuts, whether neo- or paleo-, are simply mentally incompetent, in the literal sense. They cannot handle basic tasks of thought or language. Yet they take themselves, and each other, seriously as analysts and thinkers, and somehow are given credit as such by the media, simply because they are endorsed by the Remedial Party.

Quote of the day, from Mary Mitchell, about racial slurs used by Al Qaeda representatives to imply Obama is some kind of black sellout:

Obama isn’t going to the White House to serve the man. He is the man.

Da-a-a-a-a-mn right!

Marc Lynch, in Foreign Policy’s online mag, criticizes both Bush and Israel for the recent spasm of violence in Gaza, rightly noting that it throws the Middle East into an uproar just days before Obama inherited the whole mess. But for some reason he has to describe this as “poisoning the well”.

The phrase appears both in the headline and the second sentence of the article; he repeats the term “poisonous” further down. His point is reasonable enough - and it appears he aims his terminology at Bush as much as at Israel - but did he have to couch it in such classically anti-Semitic language? It’s ugly, it derails the article, and it only feeds the professional whine-for-Israel front.

Nice going.

I think we have all agreed, in the previous few posts and their comments threads, that Obama represents the first new, and so long overdue, reason for optimism that America has seen for a long time, and many of us understandably hope for much to come from that - and that, also, taken objectively, he is far from an aggressive progressive or even much of a really strong liberal on many issues, and there is much room for disappointment in that, too. Just having something to feel good about in one’s government, for a change, can be intoxicating after the lacerating horrors of the last 8 years, but I think we all realize Obama’s election is far from the entry gates to the promised land.

But still, you want him to at least be making an effort. And sometimes his “centrist” inclinations can leave him in an embarrassingly unoriginal postion. Like . . .

http://msunderestimated.com/2009/01/21/daily-show-what-differences-between-bush-obama-video/

As Jon Stewart says: “I don’t like it either!”

(NB: Do recall that the same speech included some pointed digs at Bush’s war crimes and disgracing of the nation. It’s not like Obama doesn’t have a very different take on all these things - a fact underscored by his shut-down of the Guantanamo military tribunals after less than 24 hours in office. But still . . .)

All is not well.

I was recently the victim of a great fraud, resulting in serious bodily harm and likely permanent psychological trauma. I believed things told to me by people I respected, and relied upon advertising text promulgated by a corporate entity consumed, without my knowledge, by depraved indifference to human dignity. Misled by misrepresentations beyond my control I acquired - as a Christmas gift, no less - a device so dangerous and of such shoddy design as to constitute a willful malfeasance in and of itself, and employed, in good and unsuspecting faith, that device upon my person to woeful and grievous consequence.

Having been misinformed by positive reviews of this device, obviously written by persons concealing a deep self-loathing, and by the text prominently displayed on its box asserting “You Can’t Mess This Up!”, I took it upon myself to use the diabolical instrument in the manner prescribed, and did thereby mess it up.

I post this as a warning to all others deceived by transient dreams of efficiency and cost-savings: Do-It-Yourself Haircuts are Not a Good Idea, no matter what it says on the box.

BEFORE
AFTER

Woody Allen has an amusing short story about a man who goes to the theater and accidentally falls out of the balcony into the Orchestra seats below. He therefore goes back to the same theater every night for a month and deliberately throws himself out of the balcony, just to prove the first time wasn’t a mistake.

George Bush is now raising money to spend the rest of his useless, failed life doing the same thing in the Middle East.

In a desperate bid to make his Iraq fiasco look less like a completely incompetent blunder, Bush’s babysitters are designing an “institute” - carefully staffed with hand-picked sycophants and devoid of scholarly expertise - to promote similar policies in the region after he leaves office. The idea is apparently that if he keeps yammering about the situation he created, and something eventually goes right there, he wasn’t wrong to cause the problem in the first place.

Bush and his handlers are mapping out this phase of the president’s post-White House years. Plans are well under way for a “Freedom Institute” that will aim to promote democracies abroad.

The institute, where Bush is expected to play a significant role, is expected to be unaffiliated with an academic institution. Its members are expected to be analysts whose views are in line with the neoconservative outlook that shaped the president’s approach to foreign policy.

“This is going to be Bush vision.” Brinkley said of the institute. “Bush has never liked the academics, and this is a nonacademic institute aimed at cutting to the core of things: only pro-democracy foot soldiers who are green-lit by George and Laura Bush are in the mix.”

It’s under the auspices of this think tank that the president might try to improve his legacy, in hopes that Freedom Institute might reveal virtues in the foreign policy vision that led to the most defining decision of his presidency, the invasion of Iraq.

“This president’s low approval rating is overwhelmingly connected to Iraq. It will rise and fall depending what turns out to be the history of that country and that part of the world,” said Stephen Hess, a former Eisenhower aide and a scholar at the conservative Brookings Institution. “That really is what his legacy for future historians is all about.

For God’s sake, can’t he just leave? Take his oil-company-and-mercenary-contractor payoff, retire to his fake ranch, fuck off and die quietly? He and Jeb can sit on the porch together and whine “I coulda been a contendah!” to each other to the end of their days. But please, spare us - and the more misfortunate who have to live in the hell-holes he creates in his toy sandbox world - any more of his stupid meddling and self-pitying justifications.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been seven years since that terrible day.

The silver lining here is that we can rest easier knowing that Osama bin Laden has been captured, that the Taliban has lost their influence in Afghanistan, and that the newly-completed Freedom Tower on the WTC site stands proudly as a symbol of American resilience.

Oh, crap, never mind…

(Bitter? You bet I am!)

Andrew Sullivan is making unprecedented amounts of sense lately. I wonder if he’s thinking of coming into the light? Anyway, he’s got an Atlantic.com column today which is not very original in its basic idea, but is a remarkably clear and well-expressed statement of some of the most horrid truths about BushCo. and, sickeningly, John McCain. Good writing.

The torture that was deployed against McCain [in Vietnam] . . . involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. . . . McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of “long-time standing” that victims of Bush’s torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely “enhanced interrogation.”

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the “intelligence” we have procured from “interrogating” terror suspects. Feel safer? . . .

[T]he government of the United States now practices the very same techniques that the Communist government of North Vietnam once proudly used against American soldiers. When they are used against future John McCains, the victims will know, in a way McCain didn’t, that their own government has no moral standing to complain.

Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.

This is the utterly repulsive level at which our current government leaders operate. And this is what even Republicans of “integrity”, as we are always told McCain is, will do, for military expediency or just personal political gain. This is the shame they don’t mind bringing upon their country, the indifference they show at abandoning the legal prohibition on torture that formerly offered at least some deterent protection to our own citizens, the gleeful moral emptiness inside them that fouls their country and everything they touch.

Does McCain even know what he has done? Does he ever make the connection in his mind, as he runs around the country constantly telling his POW stories, to what he himself has authorized to be done to others? Does he still think anyone should care what was done to him, given that - as he tell us - we are not required to care that the same things are done openly, in our name, to others?

If the people who tortued McCain now stood openly in the highest offices of the Vietnamese government, would we be entitled to draw any moral conclusions from that about that government? If the official who authorized torturing McCain now said openly that it was a good thing and he would choose to do it again to others if he felt the need, and that person happened to be a candidate for the top political office in that country, would we feel that those facts in any way impinged upon his fitness for that office, or in any way impugned the political party that put him forward as their leader?

It’s hard to believe any of the creeps, perverts, and sadists who connived at and then defended torture by the US military and intelligence services under the Bush administration can still maintain their dismissive and amoral charade. Over and over we have heard the reality of waterboarding and other shameful abuses. Over and over we have heard that these torture techniques were adopted from practices used by the most lawless enemies of the US, practices the US had formerly denounced as war crimes and had refused to countenance within our own doctrine. (Just today it was revealed that specific training materials for torture had been lifted wholesale from a Korean-war-era review of Chinese military torture techniques intended to elicit false confessions.) And over and over we have heard how inhumane and unbearable these techniques are, while smug psychopaths like Jay Baybee, John Yoo, and Alberto Gonzales dismissed such complaints and sickeningly passed off torture and abuse as some kind of game or inconvenience.

As if it has to be said again - and apparently it does - Christopher Hitchens volunteered to undergo a mild form of waterboarding and report his experiences in this month’s Vanity Fair.

more…
Read the rest of this entry »