Saturday, April 08, 2006

ONE PART OF SEYMOUR HERSH'S current New Yorker piece that I did not comment on in my immediately preceding post is Hersh's revelation that the Bush administration is including the possible use of nuclear weapons in its planning for war against Iran.

One of the military's initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.
[...]
There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for "continuity of government" -- for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the U.S. knows about it remains classified. "The 'tell' " -- the giveaway -- "was the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised," the former senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that "only nukes" could destroy the bunker. He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. "We see a similarity of design," specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.

A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to "go in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure -- it's feasible." The former defense official said, "The Iranians don't have friends, and we can tell them that, if necessary, we'll keep knocking back their infrastructure. The United States should act like we're ready to go." He added, "We don't have to knock down all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the ground, too, but it's difficult and very dangerous -- put bad stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep."

But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence official, "say 'No way.' You've got to know what's underneath -- to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And there's a lot that we don't know." The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. "Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap," the former senior intelligence official said. " 'Decisive' is the key word of the Air Force's planning. It's a tough decision. But we made it in Japan."

He went on, "Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout -- we're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don't have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out" -- remove the nuclear option -- "they're shouted down."

In other words, and once again, U.S. military planning will be driven by policy, not intelligence. And once again, just as in World War II, the decision of whether, when, and how to use nuclear weapons is being made by military and political types without the input of the scientists whose initial discoveries led to the development of such weapons and who have a better understanding about the full human consequences of nuclear bombs than do senators, generals, and even presidents.

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog tells us, Just because bunker busters don't appear to act in the same way as atomic bombs, doesn't mean they can't have similar effects.

Now, this isn't a big mushroom-cloud-producing nuke we're talking about. This is a nuke that's supposed to go below surfaces and not release radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. But if one scientist quoted in this Popular Mechanics article from 2002 is right, that's far from a guarantee:

Rob Nelson, a physicist with the Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security, and an expert on nuclear weapons design, ... argues that the ... deep penetrator ... would, in fact, release rather than contain radioactive fallout. While it is true that most material would remain within the blast area, a radioactive cloud seeping from the crater would release a plume of gases that would irradiate anyone in its path.

He has calculated that a weapon with a yield of about 0.1 kiloton--about one two-hundredth the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima--would have to penetrate to a depth of 230 ft. to fully contain the explosion...

And how deep does the B61-11 penetrate?

The only ground penetrator in the current nuclear arsenal is the 1200-pound B61-11 gravity bomb.... It can penetrate about 20 ft. into a dry lakebed.

Gulp.

And this is precisely why scientists should be making the damage assessments, not politicians or military commanders.

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ERIC SCHMITT AND EDWARD WONG of the New York Times write:

An internal staff report by the United States Embassy and military command in Baghdad provides a sobering province-by-province snapshot of Iraq's political, economic and security situation, rating the overall stability of 6 of the 18 provinces "serious" and one "critical. The report is a counterpoint to some recent upbeat public statements by top American politicians and military officials.

In 10 pages of briefing slides, the report, titled "Provincial Stability Assessment," underscores the shift in the nature of the Iraq war three years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Warnings of sectarian and ethnic frictions are raised in many regions, even in those provinces generally described as nonviolent by American officials.

There are also alerts about the growing power of Iranian-backed religious Shiite parties, several of which the United States helped put into power, and rival militias in the south. The authors also point to the Arab-Kurdish fault line in the north as a major concern, with the two ethnicities vying for power in Mosul, where violence is rampant, and Kirkuk, whose oil fields are critical for jump-starting economic growth in Iraq.

The patterns of discord mapped by the report confirm that ethnic and religious schisms have become entrenched across much of the country, even as monthly American fatalities have fallen. Those indications, taken with recent reports of mass migrations from mixed Sunni-Shiite areas, show that Iraq is undergoing a de facto partitioning along ethnic and sectarian lines, with clashes -- sometimes political, sometimes violent -- taking place in those mixed areas where different groups meet.

Jonathan Finer reports in the Washington Post on the growing power of Shiite militias:

Shiite Muslim militias pose the greatest threat to security in many parts of Iraq, having killed more people in recent months than the Sunni Arab-led insurgency, and will likely present the most daunting and critical challenge for Iraq's new government, U.S. military and diplomatic officials say.

Assassinations, many carried out by Shiite gunmen against Sunni Arabs in Baghdad and elsewhere, accounted for more than four times as many deaths in March as bombings and other mass-casualty attacks, according to military data. And most officials agree that only a small percentage of shooting deaths are ever reported.
[...]
Militias last emerged as a top U.S. concern in 2004, when the American and Iraqi armies spent months putting down violent uprisings by the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, in Baghdad, Najaf and other cities. But the problem is far thornier now, U.S. officials say, because the militias have added thousands of foot soldiers and gained new political stature.

Two years ago, the Iraqi government was largely under American control and led by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite. Iraq's next parliament will be dominated by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a religious party that oversees a militia called the Badr Organization, and by followers of Sadr. Together the two groups claim nearly a quarter of the legislature's 275 seats and will likely hold several cabinet ministries.

"It's a far more serious problem now than it was then because of who is in power," said a U.S. official who worked on the militia issue with the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council two years ago and spoke on the condition that he not be named. "Until there's a commitment on the part of the government, there will be no solution."

Shiite militiamen are believed to number in the tens of thousands. Maj. Gen Rick Lynch, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said in a recent interview that the Mahdi Army -- formed by Sadr from the long-oppressed Shiite underclass in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion -- was believed to have about 10,000 members. The Badr Organization, created in Iran in the 1980s to fight Saddam Hussein's rule, has roughly 5,000, he said.

Other estimates for the groups, both accused by the United States of receiving backing from Iran, range far higher.

So, to sum up: Iraq is in danger of Balkanization along ethnic lines; rival Shiite militias are growing in power; and next-door, overwhelmingly Shiite Iran is the big winner.

Now, having read these two articles, we come to Seymour Hersh's new piece in The New Yorker about Iran's plans for becoming a nuclear power and the Bush administration's plans for making Iran the next war zone:

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

The disastrous Iraq invasion is repeating itself; and what is so astonishingly difficult to comprehend is that Pres. Bush and other top officials are engaging in the same pattern of deception and using the same set of ground rules and assumptions as they did before the Iraq war. And no one is questioning these assumptions. Maybe that's because the people in Congress with whom Bush is sharing his plans are the same ones who were gung-ho to invade Iraq:

In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been "no formal briefings," because "they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They're doing the Senate, somewhat selectively."

The House member said that no one in the meetings "is really objecting" to the talk of war. "The people they're briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?" (Iran is building facilities underground.) "There's no pressure from Congress" not to take military action, the House member added. "The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it."

The parallels are frightening. It's like Iraq never happened for these guys, and all the catastrophic pre-Iraq invasion thinking is recurring:
  • Iran is an oil-rich country and the Bush administration wants to make sure that any Iranian government is friendly to U.S. economic interests.
  • "There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush's ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change."
  • "One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that 'a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.' "
  • Pres. Bush's mindset on Iran is driven by a "messianic vision."
  • Warnings from cooler heads in the government that airstrikes on Iran could provoke waves of terrorist attacks and increase anti-American feeling among Muslims all over the world are ignored or dismissed.
  • U.S. claims of working toward a "diplomatic solution" are a sham, because the Bush administration's underlying assumption is that nothing Iran's leaders say can be trusted. One official from the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told Hersh, "[T]here's nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It's a dead end." Another source told Hersh that the Bush administration's dismissive attitude toward the I.A.E.A. makes war inevitable: "He said, 'If you don't believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an inspection system -- if you don't trust them -- you can only bomb.' "

Of course, all of this only makes it less likely that Iran will want to give up its nuclear ambitions:

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror [told Hersh], "This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war," he said. The danger, he said, was that "it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability."

Hersh quotes the same source later in the article:

"The whole internal debate is on which way to go" -- in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans -- and forestall the American action. "God may smile on us, but I don't think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen."

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IT'S A SHAME THAT WHEN two well-known online columnists criticize Jill Carroll's critics for leaping at her throat in response to statements she made immediately after her kidnappers released her, both columnists sabotaged their own messages -- one of them by being overly broad, and the other by being a dissembler.

In her Boston Globe column today, titled "Bloggers Owe Jill Carroll an Apology," Ellen Goodman writes:

I AM SURE that Jill Carroll and her family are too busy inhaling the sweet spring air of freedom to spend time sniffing out the pollution in the blogosphere. Anyone who spent three months imagining the grimmest fate for this young journalist in the hands of terrorists can't get too upset when a little Internet posse goes after her scalp.

Nevertheless, this is not a good moment for the bustling, energetic Wild West of the new Internet media. Remember when a former CBS executive described bloggers as guys in pajamas writing in their living rooms? Well, it seems that many have only one exercise routine: jumping to conclusions.

In the hours between captivity and true freedom, Carroll was seen in one propaganda film describing the mujahideen as "good people fighting an honorable fight" and in another interview saying she was never threatened. An online jeering section bought it hook, line, and sinker without waiting to hear that the videos were made under threat. As Alex Jones of Harvard's Shorenstein Center said, "They were gulled by a clever piece of propaganda and ought to be ashamed of themselves."

I have no argument with the way Goodman characterizes Carroll's critics. They did jump to conclusions -- almost as if they wanted to believe the worst of her -- and they were played for fools by the propaganda Carroll's kidnappers forced her to say. Anyone who takes the first public utterances of a just-released hostage at face value -- especially when those utterances seem to be the opposite of what the former hostage would be expected to feel -- has no capacity to imagine what it means to be held captive and threatened with death for three months; has no sense of compassion or empathy; and most certainly is severely lacking in brainpower.

But instead of laying the blame for this extraordinarily cruel and mean-spirited response to Jill Carroll's initial statements where it belongs -- on an array of right-wing media figures, which included but was by no means limited to bloggers -- Goodman dumps the entire load on the blogosphere. She does mention one non-blogger source of poison -- Don Imus's executive producer, Bernard McGuirk -- but she makes it clear that she sees McGuirk as one nasty individual, while toxic, go-for-the-jugular, unprofessional personal attacks are in the very nature of blogging.

The blogosphere was not the only source of pollution. Indeed, the oil-spill prize goes to Don Imus's producer, Bernard McGuirk, who described this young reporter as ''the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. . . . She may be carrying Habib's baby." But in the short, volatile, and powerful life of the Web log, the Jill Carroll debacle may be a turning point.

Web logs have been around barely a half-dozen years. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that a quarter of Internet users now read blogs and 9 percent write one. Most of the 28 million blogs are online diaries such as those on MySpace. But there is also the feisty political corner of this zone.

The political bloggers first flexed their muscle in 2002 when they trumped the MSM -- blogspeak for Mainstream Media -- by forcing Trent Lott out of the Senate speakership after he toasted the good old segregated days of Strom Thurmond. In 2004, they proved the power of the Internet as a great equalizer when they confronted the house of CBS and Dan Rather over Bush's military records.

Two years later, we have -- ready, fire, aim -- the Jill Carroll affair. These attacks raise the question of what bloggery is going to be when it grows up. An Internet op-ed page? Or a polarized, talk-radio food fight?

And then there is Howard Kurtz. Media Matters for America outs him for hypocrisy in a piece dated April 3:

On the April 2 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources, host Howard Kurtz noted that Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, released on March 30 by Iraqi insurgents who had held her for 82 days, had "been criticized and had her motives questioned by skeptics, critics, and conspiracy theorists here at home." The criticism in question concerned a pair of video interviews that showed her praising the insurgency, criticizing the Bush administration, and asserting that her captors had not harmed or threatened her. In an April 1 statement, Carroll renounced these remarks and said that she had been under duress when she made them. But in calling attention to the earlier criticism of Carroll as the work of "skeptics, critics, and conspiracy theorists," Kurtz seemed to have forgotten that he had joined numerous right-wing media figures in questioning the motives behind her statements.

Here is Kurtz's March 31 WaPo column in which he wrote, in a particularly oily way, how "odd" it was that Carroll said good things about her captors in her first post-release interview:

This is a courageous young woman.

I must say, though, that I found her first interview yesterday rather odd. Carroll seemed bent on giving her captors a positive review, going on about how well they treated her, how they gave her food and let her go to the bathroom. And they never threatened to hit her. Of course, as we all saw in those chilling videos, they did threaten to kill her. And they shot her Iraqi translator to death.

Why make a terrorist group who put her family and friends through a terrible three-month ordeal sound like they were running a low-budget motel chain?

Now perhaps this is unfair, for there is much we do not know. We don't know why Carroll was kidnapped and why she was abruptly released. She says she doesn't either, but surely she must have gotten some clues about her abductors' outlook and tactics during her 82-day captivity. Maybe she was just shell-shocked right after being let go. Maybe she won't feel comfortable speaking out until she's back on American soil.

As my colleagues in Baghdad point out, when that interview was taped, Carroll was still in the custody of a Sunni political party with ties to the insurgency. It may have just made sense for her to be especially cautious. And they tell me that Carroll did cry -- off camera -- when the subject of her murdered translator came up. Still, people are buzzing because her taped remarks have been played over and over again on television. I hope she'll be able to share a fuller account of her ordeal soon.

Jill Carroll is courageous, but her first interview was odd. She cried about her translator, but she did it off-camera. Perhaps this is unfair, but people are buzzing about it.

Can you get any more sanctimoniously snide?

As Editor & Publisher makes clear, it would definitely have made sense to cut Carroll some slack, because all the "maybe's" and "we do not know's" and "perhaps's" and "may have's" in Kurtz's column turned out to be spot on:

Not surprisingly, an article in the Christian Science Monitor revealed later Friday that making the first video was a condition of her release and did not represent her beliefs.

Carroll's captors approached her the night before her release, saying "they had one final demand as the price of her freedom: She would have to make a video praising her captors and attacking the United States," the Monitor said. According to her father, Jim Carroll, "she felt compelled to make statements strongly critical of President Bush and his policy in Iraq."

In another interview he suggested that three machine guns had been trained on her.

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Friday, April 07, 2006

IMAGINE FINDING OUT, AS AN ADULT, that the parents who raised you from an infant are not your parents at all. Imagine finding out that you were stolen from your true mother and father, and your real family, before you were a year old.

Now imagine finding out that your real parents were kidnapped by your own government, tortured, and murdered -- and that the man you call daddy worked with the people who tortured and murdered them.

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RIGHT-WING BLOGGER "LAWHAWK" writes about the suicide bombing inside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, which killed at least 74 people and injured about 140. He notes that the terrorists chose to attack people who were defenseless, rather than choosing a target that could fight back:

Note that the terrorists aren't going after US targets that can defend themselves or even the Iraqi forces that are becoming more efficient on a daily basis. They're purposefully targeting civilian targets -- mosques full of people engaged in prayer.

Two points here:

First, I find it ironic that Lawhawk is disturbed by the asymmetrical nature of the suicide bombers and the worshippers inside the mosque. Isn't that exactly the nature of the Iraq war in general? A country that was essentially defenseless attacked by the most powerful country in the world? The United States did not "go after" a country that could defend itself, or even a country that was in the same ballpark as the United States in terms of military capability. Indeed, if Iraq had actually been able to do any harm to Americans inside the United States, Bush would never have invaded.

Second, if the Iraqi forces are "becoming more efficient on a daily basis," then why is Iraq's Interior Ministry refusing to deploy the U.S.- and U.K.-trained police; and why is Iraq's Defense Ministry telling Iraqis not to cooperate with Iraqi army or police forces unless they are accompanied by Americans or Brits?

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SCOTT McCLELLAN'S RESPONSE to questions from the White House press corps about yesterday's news that Pres. Bush authorized the leaking of classified information to the press:

"The president can declassify information if he chooses," McClellan told reporters. "It's inherent in our Constitution. The president would never authorize the disclosure of information that he thought could compromise the nation's security."

Inherent in our Constitution, eh? Meaning, not written in the Constitution but implied, like the right to privacy? Tell me: Where is it written in the Constitution that the president of the United States can selectively release classified information whenever he wishes, without informing anyone or going through standard declassification procedures? Once again we see that Pres. Bush becomes a believer in the "living Constitution" when it suits his purposes.

Josh Marshall gives us McClellan's response to a reporter who asks whether Pres. Bush thinks it appropriate to unilaterally declassify information given how critical he has been of administration leakers in the past.

The President has been critical about the leaking of classified information. And that view has not changed. Leaking classified information that could compromise our nation's security is a very serious matter. The President would never authorize disclosure of information that could compromise our nation's security.

So, the reporter follows up, no harm done, right?

QUESTION: So no harm done, is what you're saying?

Scott McClellan: Now the disclosing, the unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to a program like the terrorist surveillance program is harmful to our nation's security. It provides the enemy our play book, and the enemy can adapt and adjust when they learn about our tactics. And General Hayden has talked about how that is harmful to our nation's security. Others in the administration have talked about how that has been harmful to our nation's security. So there's a distinction --

QUESTION: So you're specifically saying no harm done --

Scott McClellan: -- there's a distinction between declassifying information that is in the public interest and the unauthorized disclosure of classified information that could compromise our nation's security.

Note how McClellan parses his language. When the president gives his staff permission to leak classified information to the press, he is "declassifying information that is in the public interest." When administration insiders leak classified information to expose presidential wrongdoing or a pattern of public deception, they are engaging in "the unauthorized disclosure of classified information that could compromise our nation's security."

McClellan declares that Bush was only trying to counter charges that he used flawed intelligence to justify war; that he was only trying to prove that the prewar intelligence on Saddam's contacts with Niger were true:

... McClellan ... said a decision was made to declassify and release some information to rebut "irresponsible and unfounded accusations" that the administration had manipulated or misused prewar intelligence to buttress its case for war.

"That was flat-out false," Mr. McClellan said.

Mr. McClellan was barraged at a news briefing by questions over assertions by I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, that President Bush authorized him, through Mr. Cheney, in July 2003 to disclose key parts of what was until then a classified prewar intelligence estimate on Iraq.

At the time, the Pentagon had hardly finished basking in the easy military victory when it was caught up in questions over the failure to find deadly unconventional weapons in Iraq -- the main rationale for going to war.

One of the findings in the prewar intelligence data was that Saddam Hussein was probably seeking fuel for nuclear reactors.

Mr. McClellan said the Democrats who pounced on Mr. Libby's assertions, contained in a court document filed on Wednesday, were "engaging in crass politics" in refusing to recognize the distinction between legitimate disclosure of sensitive information in the public interest and the irresponsible leaking of intelligence for political reasons.

But if it was "in the public interest" to reveal classified information to "rebut" allegations that prewar intelligence was false, then why was it not in the public interest for Bush to support what he claimed the intelligence showed before the war, by leaking the classified documents then? Why is exactly the same information too sensitive for the public to know about in March 2003, but important for the public to know three years later, after the president's key justification for the invasion was shown to be groundless?

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AND THE SHAME DEEPENS. Alberto Gonzales yesterday told the House Judiciary Committee that he would not rule out the possibility of warrantless wiretaps on purely domestic communications, if the Bush administration believed such communications had a connection to Al Qaeda.

In response to a question from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Gonzales suggested that the administration could decide it was legal to listen in on a domestic call without supervision if it were related to al-Qaeda.

"I'm not going to rule it out," Gonzales said.

In the past, Gonzales and other officials refused to say whether they had the legal authority to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on domestic calls, and have stressed that the NSA eavesdropping program is focused only on international communications.

Gonzales previously testified in the Senate that Bush had considered including purely domestic communications in the NSA spying program, but he said the idea was rejected in part because of fears of a public outcry. He also testified at the time that the Justice Department had not fully analyzed the legal issues of such a move.

In fact, if I'm interpreting this language correctly, warrantless spying on phone calls and e-mails inside the United States between two parties who are both American may already be happening:

In yesterday's testimony, Gonzales reiterated earlier hints that there may be another facet to the NSA program that has not been revealed publicly, or even another program that has prompted dissension within the government. While acknowledging disagreements among officials over the monitoring efforts, Gonzales disputed published reports that have detailed the arguments.

"They did not relate to the program the president disclosed," Gonzales testified. "They related to something else, and I can't get into that."

Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos played down Gonzales's remarks, saying he "did not say anything new" about the NSA program.

"The Attorney General's comments today should not be interpreted to suggest the existence or non-existence of a domestic program or whether any such program would be lawful under the existing legal analysis," Scolinos said in a statement.

I could not stop staring at the photograph of Gonzales accompanying this article. Look at his expression: I would call it calm contentment. He's smiling slightly, and he looks totally relaxed. Just another day in the office, helping his boss to subvert the Constitution and end the American experiment with democracy.

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YOU WANT TO SEE COURAGE IN ACTION? Read this CNN article about a man named Harry Taylor who stood up at a public forum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and told Pres. Bush he was ashamed of and frightened by his country's leadership. There is a link in the article to a video clip; go and see for yourself. It's awesome to watch an ordinary citizen say these things to Bush's face.

I'm sure someone will point out that the president told the audience, when they started booing Taylor, to let him finish. I'm glad he allowed Taylor to have his say, although he could hardly have done anything else with the cameras on him. More important, though, is how the president responded to the man's comments. Did he take them seriously and attempt to address them in a substantive fashion? Absolutely not. Bush let the man speak, and then simply repeated all the shallow platitudes he's said hundreds of times before: that he will not apologize for monitoring communications between American citizens and suspected Al Qaeda terrorists; that the spy program is legal and limited; that it's constantly reviewed to make sure it's within the law, blah blah blah. All lies. But more to the point in this particular context, is that, instead of at least trying to respond to this man in a fresh, original, thoughtful way, he chose to use the same pat cliches he uses at every press conference, in every speech, and at every opportunity.

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Thursday, April 06, 2006

SO TODAY'S BOMBSHELL IS THE NEWS that Pres. Bush okayed the leaking of classified information about Iraq, which resulted in the outing of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative (although that was not Bush's motivation for authorizing the leak).

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule. However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter.

Mr. Fitzgerald's inquiry initially focused on the alleged leak, which occurred after a former ambassador who is Ms. Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times questioning the accuracy of statements Mr. Bush made about Iraq's nuclear procurement efforts in Africa.

After Joseph Wilson's visit to Niger cast doubt on the administration's linchpin argument for invading Iraq -- that Iraq had been trying to purchase uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons -- the president approved the release of classified information to prop up the White House's claims.

Technically, Bush declassified the information as soon as he authorized its leaked release to the press -- so it was no longer classified by the time it was published. This is according to administration lawyers. But it's not clear that the president has the legal standing to unilaterally declassify documents -- and even if the president did have that authority, it's pretty sleazy to declassify only the information that will tend to support your administration's policy choices.

Even Ace of Spades, who is as uncritically pro-Bush as they come, allows as how this might not be the correct way to declassify information -- right before he lets Bush off the hook for doing it:

Libby says that Cheney told him the disclosures were legal, as by authorizing the disclosure, Bush had effectively declassified the documents.

I'm not sure if that's correct legally, though administration lawyers supposedly approved it. Certainly it's not the preferred method of declassification, which would be to, you know, officially declassify the document (or parts thereof) and make it public, rather than selectively leaking it to reporters.

But given the nature of the war between the CIA and Bush Administration, perhaps Bush thought the CIA and other intelligence services were claiming that anything that helped him were "classified" and could not be made public, while meanwhile leaking like sieves anything that cast the Administration in a bad light. [Emphasis added.]
After Cheney, via Bush, gave Libby the okay to leak the classified information, Libby met with Judith Miller, then with the New York Times. But Murray Waas writes in today's edition of National Journal that Bush and Cheney may also have given Libby the green light to leak classified information to several journalists -- Bob Woodward among them -- when they felt that information would buttress the administration's case for war.

Although not reflected in the court papers, two senior government officials said in interviews with National Journal in recent days that Libby has also asserted that Cheney authorized him to leak classified information to a number of journalists during the run-up to war with Iraq. In some instances, the information leaked was directly discussed with the Vice President, while in other instances Libby believed he had broad authority to release information that would make the case to go to war.

In yet another instance, Libby had claimed that President Bush authorized Libby to speak to and provide classified information to Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward for Plan of Attack, a book written by Woodward about the run-up to the Iraqi war.

Via Pacific Views, here is the complete text of the court papers filed by Patrick Fitzgerald.

Barbara O'Brien posts the meatiest section of the filing, and helps us understand it.

Josh Marshall theorizes that Bush did not declassify anything; he merely allowed classified information to be given to reporters. And then Josh suggests a simple test to see if his theory is true:

After the president authorized Libby, did anyone else in the government know that the Iraq NIE was no longer classified? Was there any change in the NIE's official status?

Kevin Drum effectively answers Josh's question.

You might think that the White House press corps would be interested in this story. But if you did, you would be wrong.

The Raw Story has Jane Harman's reaction to today's revelations:

"If the disclosure is true, it's breathtaking. The President is revealed as the Leaker-in-Chief.

"Leaking classified information to the press when you want to get your side out or silence your critics is not appropriate.

"The reason we classify things is to protect our sources - those who risk their lives to give us secrets. Who knows how many sources were burned by giving Libby this 'license to leak'?

"If I had leaked the information, I'd be in jail. Why should the President be above the law?

"The President has the legal authority to declassify information, but there are normal channels for doing so. Telling an aide to leak classified information to the New York Times is not a normal channel. A normal declassification procedure would involve going back to the originating agency, such as the CIA, and then putting out a public, declassified version of the document.

"I am stunned that the President won't tell the full the Intelligence Committee about the NSA program because he's allegedly concerned about leaks, when it turns out that he is the Leaker-in-Chief."

Juan Cole thinks that if you used a computer program to meld the faces of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the resulting visage would be that of George W. Bush.

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A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO, Iraq's Interior Ministry announced that it plans to hire its own private police force instead of using the police force trained by the U.S.

Not a good sign, given that the two prisons raided by U.S. troops in November and December, where more than 120 Iraqi detainees had been severely tortured, were run by the Interior Ministry.

The Bush administration made the obligatory clucking noises:

"You can't have in a democracy various groups with arms -- you have to have the state with a monopoly on power," Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said yesterday, at the end of her two-day visit to Baghdad.

"We have sent very, very strong messages repeatedly, and not just on this visit, that one of the first things ... is that there is going to be a reining in of the militias ... It's got to be one of the highest priorities."

Uh-HUH.

The weirdness continues. Riverbend tells us that the Defense Ministry is warning Iraqis not to cooperate with the police or the military forces unless they are accompanied by Coalition troops.

I was trying to decide between a report on bird flu on one channel, a montage of bits and pieces from various latmiyas on another channel and an Egyptian soap opera on a third channel. I paused on the Sharqiya channel which many Iraqis consider to be a reasonably toned channel (and which during the elections showed its support for Allawi in particular). I was reading the little scrolling news headlines on the bottom of the page. The usual -- mortar fire on an area in Baghdad, an American soldier killed here, another one wounded there ... 12 Iraqi corpses found in an area in Baghdad, etc. Suddenly, one of them caught my attention and I sat up straight on the sofa, wondering if I had read it correctly.

E. was sitting at the other end of the living room, taking apart a radio he later wouldn't be able to put back together. I called him over with the words, "Come here and read this -- I'm sure I misunderstood. ..." He stood in front of the television and watched the words about corpses and Americans and puppets scroll by and when the news item I was watching for appeared, I jumped up and pointed. E. and I read it in silence and E. looked as confused as I was feeling.

The line said [translated from Arabic]:

"The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area."

That's how messed up the country is at this point.

Riverbend and her family try to parse the meaning of this new warning:

"So what does it mean?" My cousin's wife asked as we sat gathered at lunch.

"It means if they come at night and want to raid the house, we don't have to let them in." I answered.

"They're not exactly asking your permission," E. pointed out. "They break the door down and take people away -- or have you forgotten?"

"Well according to the Ministry of Defense, we can shoot at them, right? It's trespassing -- they can be considered burglars or abductors ..." I replied.

The cousin shook his head, "If your family is inside the house -- you're not going to shoot at them. They come in groups, remember? They come armed and in large groups -- shooting at them or resisting them would endanger people inside of the house."

"Besides that, when they first attack, how can you be sure they DON'T have Americans with them?" E. asked.

We sat drinking tea, mulling over the possibilities. It confirmed what has been obvious to Iraqis since the beginning -- the Iraqi security forces are actually militias allied to religious and political parties.

But it also brings to light other worrisome issues. The situation is so bad on the security front that the top two ministries in charge of protecting Iraqi civilians cannot trust each other. The Ministry of Defense can't even trust its own personnel, unless they are "accompanied by American coalition forces."

It really is difficult to understand what is happening lately. We hear about talks between Americans and Iran over security in Iraq, and then American ambassador in Iraq accuses Iran of funding militias inside of the country. Today there are claims that Americans killed between 20 to 30 men from Sadr's militia in an attack on a husseiniya yesterday. The Americans are claiming that responsibility for the attack should be placed on Iraqi security forces (the same security forces they are constantly commending).

All of this directly contradicts claims by Bush and other American politicians that Iraqi troops and security forces are in control of the situation. Or maybe they are in control -- just not in a good way.

They've been finding corpses all over Baghdad for weeks now- and it's always the same: holes drilled in the head, multiple shots or strangulation, like the victims were hung. -- police or special army brigades. ... Some of them were rounded up from mosques.

Given these conditions, it's not hard to see how Iraqis could detest the Americans, yet still prefer to be searched or arrested by U.S. troops. But the irony is: We're the ones who are training these gangsters and proclaiming how much more professional they are getting every day.

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CONDI RICE ON WHETHER THE U.S. is planning to keep permanent military bases in Iraq: No. Well, maybe.

"The presence in Iraq is for a very clear purpose, and that's to enable Iraqis to be able to govern themselves and to create security forces that can help them do that," Rice told the House Appropriations Committee's foreign operations panel.

"I don't think that anybody believes that we really want to be there longer than we have to," the chief U.S. diplomat added.

However, Rice did not say when all U.S. forces would return home and did not directly answer Rep. Steven Rothman, ... D-N.J., when he asked, "Will the bases be permanent or not?"

"I would think that people would tell you, we're not seeking permanent bases really pretty much anywhere in the world these days. We are, in fact, in the process of removing base structure from a lot of places," Rice replied.

"I can't foresee the future of whether or not there will be some need for American forces for some period of time," she added. "But I can tell you that our discussions with the Iraqis are about getting them capable to defend, not just against their internal insurgency and internal enemies, but also to be able to be a responsible and defensible state within the region."

The truth, as usual, can be found at the end of the path marked "Follow the money."

Via Cursor.org.

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DAN FROOMKIN ON MURRAY WAAS:

Slowly but surely, investigative reporter Murray Waas has been putting together a compelling narrative about how President Bush and his top aides contrived their bogus case for war in Iraq; how they succeeded in keeping charges of deception from becoming a major issue in the 2004 election; and how they continue to keep most of the press off the trail to this day.

What emerges in Waas's stories is a consistent White House modus operandi: That time and time again, Bush and his aides have selectively leaked or declassified secret intelligence findings that served their political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would tend to discredit them.

The latest entry in Waas's saga came yesterday in the highly respected National Journal. Waas writes: "Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration."

This happened, Waas writes, after "then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true."

The aluminum-tube allegation was perhaps the strongest, most concrete piece of evidence the White House had in its campaign to drive the American public into the proper frame of mind to go to war against a country that had never before been seen as a threat to the national security.

In a March 2 story, Waas documented how Bush had been explicitly informed that the aluminum-tube allegation might not be true well before his State of the Union Address.

Yesterday's new twist is that Rove apparently understood that if American voters found out how Bush had intentionally misled them, the election might be lost. He was intent on not letting that happen.

Talking up democracy in Iraq and subverting it at home.

Via Cursor.org.

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Wednesday, April 05, 2006

PRES. BUSH LOVES TO TALK about promoting democracy in Iraq and spreading it throughout the Middle East. But talk is cheap; and as Peter Baker reports in the Washington Post, Bush is taking money away from the very organizations that could teach Iraqis how to build democratic institutions:

While President Bush vows to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, his administration has been scaling back funding for the main organizations trying to carry out his vision by building democratic institutions such as political parties and civil society groups.

The administration has included limited new money for traditional democracy promotion in budget requests to Congress. Some organizations face funding cutoffs this month, while others struggle to stretch resources through the summer. The shortfall threatens projects that teach Iraqis how to create and sustain political parties, think tanks, human rights groups, independent media outlets, trade unions and other elements of democratic society.

The shift in funding priorities comes as security costs are eating up an enormous share of U.S. funds for Iraq and the administration has already ratcheted back ambitions for reconstructing the country's battered infrastructure. While acknowledging that they are investing less in party-building and other such activities, administration officials argue that bringing more order and helping Iraqis run effective ministries contribute to democracy as well.

Sounds to me like the Bush administration wants to help Iraqis run the trains on time. But even if they succeed in that, it will not create democracy -- just as holding elections, stirring as it may be to watch the images of Iraqis walking to the polls and holding up purple fingers, will not build democracy in the absence of democratic institutions.

Kevin Drum writes that Bush has demonstrated his lack of interest in democracy promotion many times and in many ways, and gives us the links to back this up:

Is democracy promotion really something that George Bush cares deeply about? Let's review the bidding.

During the 2000 campaign, Bush derided the very idea of nation building. Promoting democracy in foreign countries was simply not something he believed was a high priority for the United States.

Did 9/11 change fundamentally change George Bush's worldview? The record says no. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, Bush barely even mentioned democracy promotion as a reason for war. In the 2003 State of the Union Address he devoted over a thousand words to Iraq and didn't mention democracy once. Paul Wolfowitz specifically left out democracy promotion as a major goal of the war when he later recounted the administration's internal decision making process for Sam Tannenhaus.

Nor did the invasion itself envision democracy in Iraq as its goal. Rather, the plan was to install some favored exiles as proconsuls and reduce our military presence to 30,000 troops almost immediately.

Later, when Ayatollah Ali Sistani insisted on elections, Bush resisted as long as he could, throwing up excuse after excuse until it became clear he had no choice. In the end, he punted the whole issue to United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who finally created a credible plan for Iraqi elections.

What's more, in the surrounding regions, Bush has shown himself to be exactly the type of realist he supposedly derides. Hamas won elections in Palestine and he immediately tried to undermine them. Egypt held sham elections and got nothing more than a bit of mild tut tutting. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia remain our closest allies.

And now this. A man who is supposedly passionate about democracy can't rouse himself to bother funding it. Instead the money is going into security.

These decisions may or may not be defensible, but they are plainly not the decisions of a man dedicated to spreading democracy -- and the fact that he repeatedly says otherwise doesn't change this. So once and for all, can we please stop hearing about democracy promotion as a central goal of the Bush administration? It's just a slogan and nothing more.

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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

VIA CURSOR.ORG, AP'S VANESSA ARRINGTON reports that 13 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since April 1, including the nine who died today -- and April 1 was only three days ago. But as usual, it's much worse for Iraqis.

Although U.S. casualties have been on the decline, deaths among Iraqis have increased because of rising tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. At least 1,038 Iraqi civilians died last month in war-related violence, according to an Associated Press count.

The AP count showed at least 375 Iraqi civilians killed in December, 608 in January and 741 in February. Most of the increase appeared a result of a sharp rise in the number of civilians found dead throughout Baghdad -- apparent victims of sectarian reprisal killings.

The alarming rise in civilian toll has put new urgency into efforts by Iraqi politicians to form a new national unity government following the December elections. That message was delivered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw during a two-day visit that ended Monday.

"First and foremost, the purpose of this trip is to encourage and to urge the Iraqis to do what the Iraqis must do because the Iraqi people deserve it," Rice said. "But yes, the American people, the British people ... need to know that everything is being done to keep progress moving."

But progress from whose point of view? If you're an Iraqi living in Baghdad, like Riverbend, progress would be U.S. troops leaving Iraq before 2010 and not leaving permanent military bases behind. If you're Condi Rice or Dick Cheney, though, progress would be success in molding a government in Iraq that serves U.S. interests without looking too blatantly like a colonial outpost. This has been the goal all along, of course; neither nuclear armageddon nor the slaughter of Shiites or the gassing of Kurds ever had anything to do with why the U.S. invaded Iraq. But now Bush administration officials are getting bolder about using geopolitical rationales to justify the Iraq invasion. And Robert Parry at Infoshop News writes that the last time a country claimed a "right" to invade and occupy other countries for strategic reasons, the U.S. led the movement to defeat that country and make sure no other country could wage a purely aggressive war again.

During the three years of carnage in Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has shifted away from her now-discredited warning about a "mushroom cloud" to assert a strategic rationale for the invasion that puts her squarely in violation of the Nuremberg principle against aggressive war.

On March 31 in remarks to a group of British foreign policy experts, Rice justified the U.S.-led invasion by saying that otherwise Iraqi President Saddam Hussein "wasn't going anywhere" and "you were not going to have a different Middle East with Saddam Hussein at the center of it." [Washington Post, April 1, 2006]

Rice's comments in Blackburn, England, followed similar remarks during a March 26 interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" in which she defended the invasion of Iraq as necessary for the eradication of the "old Middle East" where a supposed culture of hatred indirectly contributed to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

"If you really believe that the only thing that happened on 9/11 was people flew airplanes into buildings, I think you have a very narrow view of what we faced on 9/11," Rice said. "We faced the outcome of an ideology of hatred throughout the Middle East that had to be dealt with. Saddam Hussein was a part of that old Middle East. The new Iraq will be a part of the new Middle East, and we will all be safer."

But this doctrine -- that the Bush administration has the right to invade other nations for reasons as vague as social engineering -- represents a repudiation of the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter's ban on aggressive war, both formulated largely by American leaders six decades ago.

Outlawing aggressive wars was at the center of the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II, a conflagration that began in 1939 when Germany's Adolf Hitler trumped up an excuse to attack neighboring Poland. Before World War II ended six years later, more than 60 million people were dead.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who represented the United States at Nuremberg, made clear that the role of Hitler's henchmen in launching the aggressive war against Poland was sufficient to justify their executions -- and that the principle would apply to all nations in the future.

"Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions," Jackson said.

"Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose, it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment," Jackson said.

With the strong support of the United States, this Nuremberg principle was then incorporated into the U.N. Charter, which bars military attacks unless in self-defense or unless authorized by the U.N. Security Council.

This will probably sound weird, but the Bush/Rice/Cheney doctrine is like a twisted version of Harold and the Purple Crayon. The Bushies want to take a walk through the Middle East and draw their own brand-new landscape, using guns, bombs, threats, and political arm-twisting as their tools rather than an oversized purple crayon.

But even young Harold had the sense to think ahead and the flexibility to change the plan when it wasn't working.

"One night, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight." So begins this gentle story that shows just how far your imagination can take you. Armed only with an oversized purple crayon, young Harold draws himself a landscape full of beauty and excitement. But this is no hare-brained, impulsive flight of fantasy. Cherubic, round-headed Harold conducts his adventure with the utmost prudence, letting his imagination run free, but keeping his wits about him all the while. He takes the necessary purple-crayon precautions: drawing landmarks to ensure he won't get lost; sketching a boat when he finds himself in deep water; and creating a purple pie picnic when he feels the first pangs of hunger.

The 50th Anniversary Edition is only $6.99. Might make a good gift for George's birthday.

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THE THREE-PART SERIES by David Zucchino in the Los Angeles Times -- about the physical and emotional struggles experienced by U.S. soldiers who are wounded in Iraq -- is well-worth reading in its own right. But it becomes even more interesting when read in conjunction with Brian MacQuarrie's piece in today's Boston Globe about what happened when students at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, set up a display in front of the main dining hall on campus to raise awareness about the human cost of the war. Wooden stakes painted green and white were planted in the ground to represent fatalities in Iraq. Green stakes stood for Iraqis killed; white stakes stood for U.S. troops killed. Each stake represented 100 people killed.

There were 26 white stakes in all -- and 1,000 green stakes.

Less than two days later, all of the green stakes had been ripped out of the ground by people who obviously objected to the stark message they conveyed. That in itself, of course, sends a message -- and the student organizers of the project decided to let that message speak for itself.

... Organizers and college officials decided to leave the stakes where vandals tossed them. It is a new display, in a sense, and one the original organizers hope will fuel a broader debate of the war and freedom of speech.

"We think it's important that students see this," said Molly Haglund, a sophomore who helped organize the project. "We need to show the intolerance that exists on campus."

Haglund, 20, of Portland, Ore., said the idea grew out of a concern that Holy Cross students were not paying attention to the bloody conflict half a world away. "We didn't think people were talking about the war enough or thinking about it enough," said Haglund, who helped plant the stakes just before sunrise last hursday. "People are dying right now, and people need to pay attention to that."

Unlike similar displays that mark only US military fatalities, this display brings stark attention to Iraqi civilians killed in the three-year-old conflict as well. One thousand of the stakes -- representing the estimated Iraqi deaths -- are green; just 26 are white. That disparity, Haglund said, was intended as a reminder that "we need to think of all who died."

No reliable independent figures exist for the number of Iraqis killed in the war. More than 2,300 American soldiers have died.
[...]
Although Haglund said the display was not intended to be anti-American, some students apparently thought otherwise. On Friday morning, the day after the stakes were hammered into the grass, an American flag had been draped on a nearby fence, and a sign posted that read: "Freedom is not free." The slogan is frequently used by supporters of the war effort and veterans -- especially those who were wounded or killed -- and their families.

The discussion organizers hoped to promote with the stakes had begun, but neither Haglund nor fellow organizer Sarah Fontaine of Somers, Conn., was prepared for the mass vandalism that greeted students Saturday morning. The few stakes left standing were nearly all white ones representing US fatalities.

"I was just really, really offended when this happened," said Andrew Jaico, 20, a junior from Livingston, N.J., who helped paint the stakes. "All we hear is American deaths, and you can see the amount of green sticks."

By yesterday, organizers had pulled all the remaining white stakes from the ground and laid them with the green stakes. "We expected some to be taken," Fontaine said. "But it was very powerful seeing only the white ones. Do we only value the American lives?"

Which brings us back to the LAT series about how more and more American soldiers with serious combat injuries are being saved by modern medical techniques; and about the struggle they face after they leave the battlefield. I'm thinking that articles like these are crucial to understanding the real damage being done to human lives and families at home. I'm also thinking that it would be a good idea to see the same kind of series done about the save rate in Iraq for wounded Iraqis, and how that affects the lives of Iraqi families.

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LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN THINKS the New York Times's new website design looks terrible. I don't know -- I kinda like it, myself. The site looks much more lively and readable now. The old design seems stodgy and unimaginative by comparison.

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Monday, April 03, 2006

GASOLINE PRICES ARE GOING UP AGAIN, and Americans are cutting down on nonessential car use, buying older cars instead of new, eschewing the Sherman tank-sized SUVs for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, and resisting the temptation to move into custom-built mansions on acres of land out in the country, because they don't want to increase their dependence on their car. As usual, wealthier Americans are more than willing to sacrifice some of their fancy toys and luxurious lifestyles -- to help make their country less dependent on foreign oil, certainly; but also to send a message to young men and women who are fighting and dying in foreign countries that if they can risk their lives for us, we can give up some of our stuff, too -- knowing that no matter how much we sacrifice, it will never be even one-tenth of what they and their families sacrifice.

Okay, dear readers, that was your nightly fairy tale.

Now, here's the real story.

High gasoline prices have had only a modest impact on the driving habits of American motorists, who have done relatively little to moderate their gasoline consumption. Ever since oil prices soared last September after Hurricane Katrina, gasoline consumption has been within 1.5 percent of the previous year -- some months lower, some months higher, according to figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Gasoline deliveries in January, barely lower than a year earlier, ran 13.3 percent higher than January 1999, when crude oil prices were a fraction of current levels.

"People are wealthier, they've been enticed into buying homes further from work, and the auto industry has been enticing them into buying very inefficient vehicles," said Philip K. Verleger, an oil consultant. He estimates that it takes a 20 percent increase in price to trim consumption by 1 percent today while a 10 percent price increase in the 1970s would have an identical effect.

Nonetheless, angry motorists are already sending e-mails to AAA complaining about the higher prices. One accused local gasoline stations of "price gouging" and claimed prices go up twice a day at some places.

Night night, everyone. Sleep tight.

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DWIGHT MEREDITH AT WAMPUM made special mention of Chris Clarke's "Life and Death," which was one of the nominees for a Koufax Award in the Best Post category. Another blogger won in that category; nevertheless, "Life and Death" is so stunning -- both in the story it tells and in the way it is written -- that I want to share it with others who may not have read it.

Here it is, in its entirety:

One morning twenty years ago this month, I opened the front section of the Washington Post and read that my friend Stephen Peter Morin had been executed by the state of Texas for capital murder.

There are two reasons that that sentence, while accurate, felt awkward to write.

First reason: it has been a long time since I thought of Morin as a friend. He was a twisted, manipulative and malevolent person, and if I hate anyone in the world or out of it I hate him.

Second reason: I knew him as Ray Constantine.

But Morin was his real name, and for a number of months in 1981 I spent just about every day with him, generally enjoying his company.

"Ray Constantine" rode up to the front porch of my mother's house on his bicycle one day to ask whether she knew of apartments he could rent. Her current partner is one of my favorite people in the world, but my mother had phenomenally, staggeringly bad judgment in men in those days: by that evening or the next, it seemed, he had moved in with her.

"Ray" was a smooth talker, and closer to my age than to my mother's. My mother had had a string of failed relationships with a string of increasingly sleazy men, the previous one ending just a week or two before. Full of the self-righteousness only a twenty-one-year-old boy with a disintegrating mother truly knows, I exploded at her in mortified fury, telling her that she was being incredibly stupid and allowing herself to be set up for another romantic disaster.

She said he'd be moving in and that I'd better get used to the idea. So I did. "Ray" decided to work his way into my good graces by getting me a job - always in short supply in 1981 Buffalo. He lied his way onto a union painting crew and then vouched for me. I joined the union and worked with him all summer.

Three things about that summer stand out in my mind, aside from the monotony of paint, hauling kegs of tar to roofs, and a story about a ladder that will come a bit later.

The first was heading to DC to the giant march in support of the striking air traffic controllers.

The second was finding out that my mother had ordered a copy of my birth certificate to give to Ray so that he could get ID with a different name on it. I intercepted it in what was likely the luckiest moment of my life.

The third was just before Ray and my mother left for their trip across country in her van. I wandered by her house one humid night - I'd moved out to my own place, what with my union paycheck - and found Ray sweating, attaching carpet to the walls and ceiling of the van. He was struggling to hold the carpet up as he put rivets into metal; I stepped up and helped him.

My mother is a hero, by the way, though she treated her children shamefully in the process. She and Ray went from town to town, San Francisco, Denver, Las Vegas, and into Texas. In each town Ray would disappear for a day or two and then show up again, a worried look in his eyes, insisting they leave town right away. The third or fourth time it happened, she realized she'd heard news in each town of a local woman disappearing and then found murdered. [Mom offers a slight correction to that last sentence in comments, below.]

There was an uncomfortable period in Texas in December after he found out she'd turned him in to the police, and before they caught him. And then they did catch him, and he went to trial and pled guilty to capital murder and asked for the death penalty. On March 13 1985, after the executioner probed veins for 45 minutes looking for one that wasn't collapsed - raising the ire of the ACLU for a time after - Stephen Peter Morin was put to death by the state of Texas for the murder of Carrie Marie Scott, whom he was attempting to rob.

There's a way in which Scott was lucky: he did not rape and torture her the way he did some of his other victims, some of them in the van I helped him soundproof.

In the van I helped him soundproof.

Morin's last words, as reported by the state of Texas, are a marvel of manipulative sociopathy:

Heavenly Father, I give thanks for this time, for the time that we have been together, the fellowship in your world, the Christian family presented to me [He called the names of the personal witnesses]. Allow your holy spirit to flow as I know your love as been showered upon me. Forgive them for they know not what they do, as I know that you have forgiven me, as I have forgiven them. Lord Jesus, I commit my soul to you, I praise you, and I thank you.

Covering up amoral, murderous violence with a coat of Jesus? Too bad for poor Ray. A little later, with better PR, he could have risen rather high in the Texas GOP.

I find myself unwilling to grant the possibility that the sick fuck said a single truthful thing in his miserable life. He sent me a letter from death row, calling me the closest thing he'd had to a brother. I destroyed it after one reading. Who tries to get ID with his "brother's" name on it to use on his murder spree? He told his attorney he didn't remember killing anyone. Why the fake IDs, the soundproofing of vans, the sudden desires to leave town? He wanted to manipulate the cloying, puling conservative Christians in the Texas penal system: what better method than ostentatiously coming to Jesus?

If ever there was a person who deserved the death penalty -- and still I do not believe there ever was -- Stephen Peter Morin was that person. The world is far better off without him, and I find some consolation in the fact that his putative hopes of forgiveness in the hereafter dissolved into the permanent blackness of non-existence. I only wish he had died before he could have killed Janna Bruce, Sheila Whalen, Carrie Scott, and as many as thirty or more other young women. Twenty years later, and his memory still brings me to a shaking rage.

And yet.

A wooden forty-foot ladder is a heavy thing. Set it against a house on ground saturated by a week of summer rain, and it will tend to slide. Climb that ladder with a two-gallon bucket of paint, and if the ladder is leaning against freshly-primed clapboard three stories up, it will tend to slide quickly. A quarter-century of exploring the precipitous landscapes of the West has thoroughly blunted my acrophobia, but that morning, thirty-five feet up a heavy ladder that was sliding rightward at about half an inch a second, I froze. And watched myself slide.

And "Ray" saw, and got from the yard to the third-floor window in about five seconds. Speaking calmly while he hung out the window, he persuaded me that I was unafraid. His words filled me with an odd strength. He persuaded me that I could take the ends of the ladder I was on -- which I could barely lift in the best of conditions -- and jump it back to the left and verticality.

And I did it: I pulled back violently on the ladder and slammed it back into place. In reach of the window now, I helped Ray tie the ladder securely to the window frame as I sobbed in relief, then descended on increasingly shaky legs. Ray met me as I reached the bottom, grabbed me in a bear hug, kept me from slumping to the ground.

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THE 2005 KOUFAX AWARD WINNERS have been announced, and:

The winners list:

Best Blog -- Non Professional
Crooks & Liars

Best Blog -- Professional or Sponsored
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo

Best Blog Community
Daily Kos

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition
Echidne of the Snakes

Best New Blog
Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory

Best Writing
Digby of Hullabaloo

Best Single Issue Blog
Jordan Barab of Confined Space

Best Expert Blog
Pharyngula by P.Z. Myers

Best Group Blog
Shakespeare's Sister

Best Post
Bag News Notes for Katrina Aftermath: And Then I Saw These

Best Series
FireDogLake for Plame coverage

Most Humorous Blog
Jesus' General

Most Humorous Post
Dood Abides for The Wizard of Oil

Best State or Local Blog
Bluegrass Report and Tennessee Guerilla Women

Best Commenter
Georgia10

Congratulations to all the winners!

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THE SUPREME COURT, IN A 6-3 VOTE TODAY, decided not to decide whether the Bush administration had the legal right to hold "enemy combatants" in the "war on terror" in indefinite detention without charges or other basic constitutional rights. They did this by declining to hear arguments in the Jose Padilla case.

Six justices were apparently persuaded, at least for the time being, that Mr. Padilla's appeal is moot, since he was transferred from military custody to a civilian jail several months ago and is to go on trial. The federal government indicted him last fall on terrorism charges that could bring him a sentence of life in prison if he is convicted.

The administration had argued that since Mr. Padilla was going to get a trial, there was no need for the Supreme Court to rule on his appeal of a lower court order upholding the administration's authority to keep him in open-ended military detention as an enemy combatant.

The six justices who agreed today to defer consideration of the finding of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The Bush administration's entire reason for deciding to take Padilla out of the military brig and give him a trial in a civilian court was to prevent that larger issue of arbitrary, indefinite detentions from being resolved. The fear, of course, is that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of the Bill of Rights.

So Roberts, Stevens, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito gave the White House what it wanted -- but only in part. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog explains:

The decision was a victory for the Bush Administration in one significant sense: by not finding the case to be moot, the Court leaves intact a sweeping Fourth Circuit Court decision upholding the president's wartime power to seize an American inside the U.S. and detain him or her as a terrorist enemy, without charges and -- for an extended period -- without a lawyer. The Court, of course, took no position on whether that was the right result, since it denied review. The Second Circuit Court, at an earlier stage of Padilla's own case, had ruled just the opposite of the Fourth Circuit, denying the president's power to seize him in the U.S. and hold him. That ruling, though, no longer stands as a precedent, since the Supreme Court earlier shifted Padilla's case from the Second to the Fourth Circuit.

The Administration was so eager to have the case out of the Supreme Court that it was willing to let the Fourth Circuit decision be erased, which would have been the result of a dismissal of the appeal on mootness grounds.

The victory for the government was not an unqualified one, however. The Court implied that Padilla has a legitimate concern that the government -- which repeatedly changed its handling of his status -- may again return him to military custody; it said that his case raised major issues -- including the role of the courts in dealing with presidential power, and it told all courts to stand ready to react quickly if the government again shifted Padilla's status or custody, in order to protect the writ of habeas corpus.. It even indicated that he would have a right to pursue a new appeal solely in the Supreme Court if his status were to change again. None of those comments would seem to be welcome to the Administration.

Kevin Drum is not inclined to see a silver lining; he called today's ruling "a disgrace" -- because of the indifference it implies about the Justice Department's toying with the law to keep Padilla from getting his day in the Supreme Court.

Aside from the substantive issues at stake, the trial record made it crystal clear that the Bush administration has been playing games with Padilla solely for the purpose of creating legal technicalities that would prevent the Supreme Court from hearing his case. Even if the court doesn't care about Padilla, they sure ought to care about the executive branch playing transparently disingenuous games to flout the authority of the judicial branch.

Just another example of this administration's willingness to manipulate, bend, and break the law to get the outcomes it wants.

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BETWEEN THE BOOKSTORE JOB, seeing to the myriad tasks involved with getting ready for my teacher training in mid-June, and obsessively posting comments at right-wing blogs, I haven't had much time to blog at Liberty Street.

Please don't give up on me, faithful readers. I'm doing my best to get back to you.

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