Month: June 2007

Don’t miss the second installment in the WaPo Cheney investigation. If you had any doubt that torture was in fact policy endorsed at the highest levels of government, against the law and against our treaty obligations, then read it. Now recall that almost all of the abuses at Abu Ghraib were in conformance with the new policy, adopted by the president himself:

The vice president’s lawyer advocated what was considered the memo’s most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA – including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

The story of how Addington and Cheney gutted the key protections against torture in the Detainee Treatment Act is fleshed out by Gellman and Becker with convincing clarity. They helpully chart Cheney’s and Addington’s tireless campaign to oppose all restrictions and then to get around the restrictions with legalistic loopholes, inserted at the last minute.

The only defense by Bush and Cheney against charges of war crimes is that a president definitionally cannot commit war crimes, if he’s acting as he sees fit in the defense of the nation. It cannot even be deemed restricted to foreign lands – because Cheney’s view of the war on terror includes American soil and allows the president to detain and torture American citizens. As such, it is a doctrine completely toxic to democratic self-government and to the entire principle of a president obedient to the rule of law. It is tyranny – enabled by lawyers. It is really stunning in retrospect how adamant Cheney is on this, and how utterly contemptuous of public and world opinion he is. It is almost as if torture is his primary weapon in the war. You get the distinct sense that, in wartime, he finds democracy itself repugnant. The feeling, Mr Vice-president, is mutual.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

Jim Fallows, who knows about these things, says this new study matters:

    * 69.6% of Google’s [first page results] were unique to Google.
    * 79.4% of Yahoo’s were unique to Yahoo.
    * 80.1% of Live’s were unique to Live.
    * 75.0% Ask’s were unique to Ask.

My valedictory defense of Blair is here.

The parameters of the September decision on Iraq are beginning to come into sharper focus. The posturing begins with quiet feelers from the White House for some kind of face-saver from the Congress:

White House officials have not indicated how a compromise might look. Administration officials and some Democrats favor shifting U.S. forces to a support role: fighting insurgents, training Iraqi forces and providing other backup. Many Democrats want such a shift in the next few months, but Bush has said Iraq must become more stable first. In a news conference last month, Bush said he "would like to see us in a different configuration at some point in time."

But when you examine the idea of merely providing training, it falls apart upon inspection. By all accounts, the Iraqi army is in no shape to take the lead with US training:

The American commander in Baquba, Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, and his counterpart south of Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, pointed to a variety of problems with the Iraqi forces, including a shortage of trained troops and a lack of basic supplies like ammunition, radios and trucks.

"They’re not quite up to the job yet," General Bednarek said in an interview with The Associated Press in Baquba.

At the same time, the surge has, in fact, a de facto expiration date of next April, whatever the politicians’ spin:

The reality, officials said, is that starting around April the military will simply run out of troops to maintain the current effort.

By then, officials said, Mr. Bush would either have to withdraw roughly one brigade a month, or extend the tours of troops now in Iraq and shorten their time back home before redeployment. The latter, said one White House official, "is not something the president wants to do" and would likely become a centerpiece of the 2008 presidential campaign.

What Bush is hoping for, obviously, is that by next April he will have enough of a facade of "progress" to start withdrawing troops without looking like the man who lost a war. The Democrats therefore have two options. They can begin to cut off funding in September. If they don’t get a veto-proof majority, and the president refuses to budge, they can still argue that they are doing all they can. Or they can try to provide cover for the president in crafting some kind of bullshit exercize in which "training" becomes the public goal, while withdrawal is the reality.

At this point, it seems to me, their political and moral objective should be simply to withdraw as many troops from a self-defeating occupation as swiftly and as shrewdly as possible. After the brutal partisanship with which they have been treated, why should they help Bush now? That’s why, I think, Cheney is trying to extend the war. He can’t win in Iraq or Washington under the current conditions. So he’s trying to extend it by a game-changing expansion of the conflict.

(Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty.)

The barbarism called female genital mutilation, in which the clitoris is cut or removed from young girls, is on a different scale of horror than male circumcision. Which is why it's good news that Egypt's Grand Mufti has just pronounced that Islam forbids it. Pity a young girl had to die for him to speak up.

The continuation of the neoconservative campaign to extend the losing war in Iraq to Iran can be read in the words of Josh Muravchik today:

The apparent meaning of all of this pointless provocation and bullying is that the axis of radicals – Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah – is feeling its oats. In part its aim is to intimidate the rest of us, in part it is merely enjoying flexing its muscles. It believes that its side has defeated America in Iraq, and Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. Mr. Ahmadinejad recently claimed that the West has already begun to "surrender," and he gloated that "final victory … is near." It is this bravado that bodes war.

A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. Often democracies have fed such beliefs by their own flaccid behavior. Hitler’s contempt for America, stoked by the policy of appeasement, is a familiar story. But there are many others. North Korea invaded South Korea after Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that Korea lay beyond our "defense perimeter." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait after our ambassador assured him that America does not intervene in quarrels among Arabs. Imperial Germany launched World War I, encouraged by Great Britain’s open reluctance to get involved. Nasser brought on the 1967 Six Day War, thinking that he could extort some concessions from Israel by rattling his sword.

I think Josh believes that the US, with 150,000 troops in Iraq, thousands more in Afghanistan, and massive hardware in the Persian Gulf, is currently being "flaccid".

She’s an extraordinary woman and it does not surprise me she has the courage that so few other leading Democrats (or, of course, Republicans) have when it comes to acceptance of gay humanity and civil equality.

… believes that most of the 9/11 highjackers were Iraqis.

A reader writes:

Gay Pride Parades may seem unnecessary in the US; this isn’t so everywhere. Last Thursday, I participated in the Jerusalem Gay Pride March. It is a very subdued affair – people are marching with placards and rainbow flags, none of the glamour you see in the Tel Aviv parades – yet for the last few years, there has been a strange coalition of rabbis, imams and priests against it.

Consider it for a moment: Israeli extremist rabbis, who call for the desecration of churches and the deportation of Muslims, find common ground with them for just one day in the year. Imams who routinely denounce Jews as "sons of pigs and apes", put that aside for one day. Every year, Jerusalem is engulfed in riots, as the ultra-Orthodox set trash wagons on fire and clash with the police in the days before the parade.

The parade includes both Israeli and Palestinian gays, as well as many straight people, who, like me, think it is a battle front which must not be abandoned. In 2005, an ultra-Orthodox nutjob stabbed three of the marchers, screaming he did so in the name of God; he is now a minor hero of the ultra-Orthodox community. As a result, in 2006 the police have all but said they cannot secure the parade, and instead of it, a happening took place – in a secure, remote location, surrounded  by thousands of policemen.

This year the parade marched – for 500 meters. The police said they couldn’t guarantee anything more than that. The marching route was considered a "sterile zone", and was cordoned; snipers took positions on many roofs along the route; helicopters kept buzzing over it. And the police seized an ultra-Orthodox wiho attempted to get near the paraders, having in his position an improvised pipe bomb.

"Anachronistic relic"? In New York, perhaps.

This, we now know, is how the U.S. came to endorse the torture of military and CIA detainees. It was done by stealth, with none of the customary legal and constitutional safeguards. It was done by vice-president Dick Cheney in what may by historians be regarded as an internal coup – against the country, and against the law:

Three days after the Ashcroft meeting, Cheney brought the order for military commissions to Bush. No one told Bellinger, Rice or Powell, who continued to think that Prosper’s working group was at the helm. After leaving Bush’s private dining room, the vice president took no chances on a last-minute objection. He sent the order on a swift path to execution that left no sign of his role. After Addington and Flanigan, the text passed to Berenson, the associate White House counsel. Cheney’s link to the document broke there: Berenson was not told of its provenance. Berenson rushed the order to deputy staff secretary Stuart W. Bowen Jr., bearing instructions to prepare it for signature immediately – without advance distribution to the president’s top advisers. Bowen objected, he told colleagues later, saying he had handled thousands of presidential documents without ever bypassing strict procedures of coordination and review. He relented, one White House official said, only after "rapid, urgent persuasion" that Bush was standing by to sign and that the order was too sensitive to delay.

And so the US effectively withdrew from the Geneva Conventions. Enemy combatants would never have been granted full POW Geneva status, but they would have been assured minimal Article 3 protection, which would have safeguarded them from the torture Cheney was clearly determined to conduct. As it happened, of course, the torture did not only occur at Gitmo, and it did not only occur to those detained in Afghanistan. It spread throughout the theater of war, in Iraq and beyond – in part because torture, once approved, always spreads, and in part because of the anonymous and unaccountable way in which it was initiated.

No vice-president has the right to do this, to change the basic morality of the United States, to undermine its laws, withdraw from its treaty obligations, and do so without even consulting other individuals within the executive branch, let alone the Congress.

And yet Cheney, in a vice-presidential power-grab unparalleled in U.S. history, didn’t only do it; he did it in such a way as to deny his own accountability and responsibility.

Stealth is among Cheney’s most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney’s office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."

The phrase "law unto himself" comes to mind.

(Photo: Stephen Chernin/Getty.)