Month: September 2006

Woodward concurs with the bulk of the reporting: this president’s war-management has been criminally negligent:

Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.

It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.

This president knew what was required to win in Iraq and he refused to provide the resources or adjust his strategy. He is responsible for one of the biggest strategic disasters in recent history. And when confronted with the incalculable cost of his incompetence and hubris, he tries to change the subject and plays politics with torture. If the American people don’t punish this record in the mid-terms, then we are truly lost.

A free press is now becoming obsolete in Iraq. Each day, countless torture victims and beheaded corpses are discovered on the streets. 7,000 civilians have died in the past two months alone, according to the U.N. There is a simple empirical question here. Are more innocent people being murdered and tortured in Iraq now than under Saddam? I don’t want to get into all the policy and moral questions this raises. I’mjust interested in an empirical answer. I fear it’s not a good one.

"According to an email published by Jonah Goldberg, the bill doesn’t just apply to aliens. That conflicts with the report above, and with my understanding, and with a piece I heard on NPR this morning. But if it’s true, it’s a major problem with the bill, one that increases the likelihood ofits being found unconstitutional, and one that would make me much more unhappy with the bill," – an allegedly "libertarian" law-professor, on the ball with respect to Congressional threats to individual liberty.

No worries, Glenn. The law’s passage is inevitable now, so the Bushies won’t be mad at you. Vigilance is the eternal price of … whatever. Back to Porkbusters!

A case-study at YouTube. And I’m not embedding this one because he might find out and beat the crap out of me.

A reader explains:

States’ rights and balanced budgets are fine things, no doubt, but in the context of our time, they are secondary issues. One’s conservatism must be defined by one’s posture to the one overarching cause of our time, the war against Islamic Fascism.

You have made increasingly insincere noises regarding your support for this war. You act wounded if anyone suggests that attacking the commander in chief in time of war is anything other than a patriotic act of dissent that should be lauded. There were those who thought and behaved exactly as you did during the Civil War: they were called Copperheads. There were many, of the McLelland camp, who believed Lincoln was waging war with criminal incompetence and that a change needed to be made. Thank God McLelland’s people didn’t get the ‘change’ they were seeking!

Just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbour these same practioners of this so-called noble patriotic dissent were known as Isolationists, and they were vocal about FDR’s barely suppressed desire to enter the war on the Allied side. Except that few – if any – prominent Isolationists continued a relentless attack on FDR’s comptence after the loss of the Philippines and the battle of the Kasserine pass.

How can somebody as superficially bright as you miss the fact that, for all his shortcomings, Bush is our current leader in this fight, and if he may not be the most inspiring leader at times, attacking him as you do effectively removes you from the list of ‘conservatives’.

And please stop wasting your time on the ‘torture’ issue! It’s not resonating at ALL among the people. They see what happens when an American soldier is caught by these animals, and are not impressed by people like you and McCain who want to Mirandize them and appoint them an ACLU lawyer.

A reader writes:

It may interest you to know that the New York Daily News has already used the slogan "You have no civil liberties if you’re dead" in an editorial endorsing the Bush bill.

And that takes me back to a point I’ve mentioned before: Bush’s supporters will inevitably use the fact that virtually all of us can think of some emergency exceptions to an absolute "no torture" rule. ("Ace of Spades" has been yelling for some time about the need to enable it to expose plots that "endanger thousands of lives", and specifically cites the London airliner bombing plot in that regard.)  This argument has real teeth in it, and the only way to counter it is to point out that – in any case where torture really was necessary to stop such a plot – there is no way in hell that the torturer would ever actually go to jail for it; the jury would certainly not convict him, even if the prosecutor indicted him.  (To say nothing of the President’s power to pardon.)  It would fall into the category of "justifiable assault". So it’s time we all started bringing that little fact up – and pointing out that therefore the only reason to actually legalize torture is if you want to make its use utterly routine, for cases in which there’s a serious chance that a jury would regard its use as indefensible.

The fallback argument that the Bushites may then use is: "We can’t allow a public jury trial because it would give away too many intelligence secrets."  In that case, what we obviously need is an equivalent of the FISA Court – with its members being approved by a large super-majority of either the US Senate or the US Supreme Court, thank you very much – to approve torture in those rare cases when its use may be justifiable, rather than letting one man (the President, the Defense Secretary, whoever) decide that entirely on his personal whim.

If the Democrats make that argument and the voters still back the Bush policy, then the country really is doomed.

Cherry Grove, New York, 9.15 am.

Here’s a list of the top 100 pages in Wikipedia this month. Humans appear to be a very horny species. Oh, and Steve Irwin. Then there’s a sequence like this in the top 30s and 40s:

36. Buggery Act 1533
37. Tupac Shakur
38. Masturbation
39. New York City
40. Penis
41. Canada
42. World War I
43. Vagina
44. Germany

Canada?

David Corn has posted some pictures that help illuminate one of the techniques directly authorized by this president for use against military detainees. Check them out. Here’s one:

You can see how the CIA’s official description makes sense now. Here it is:

"The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt."

Where do the photographs come from? David explains that they

are photographs taken by Jonah Blank last month at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The prison is now a museum that documents Khmer Rouge atrocities.

This is America under this president. Look at it.