bookofdays

rummy's boys

A quick one, while I finish a longer piece to post tonight:

Better (and certainly bigger) bloggers than I have already noted General Geoffrey Miller's truth-telling session before the Senate this week, which proved satisfactory in a perverse way to those of us who'd been agonized at his level of impunity -- even as he got off without a reprimand:

WASHINGTON - Interrogators subjected a suspected terrorist to abusive and degrading treatment, forcing him to wear a bra, dance with another man and behave like a dog, military investigators reported Wednesday, saying that justified their call for disciplinary action.

They said  they recommended that Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller be reprimanded for failing to oversee his interrogation of the 9-11 suspect at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, commander of U.S. Southern Command, said he overruled their recommendation and will instead refer the matter to the Army's inspector general. Craddock concluded that Miller did not violate any U.S. laws or policies, according to officials familiar with the report.

The alert may remember this spanky-new commander at USSC: a  name like Craddock, a bit more distinctive than the generic Miller or even Sanchez, certainly rang my bell.

and continues.

OK, now it's official what we've all suspected for some time. It's Karl Rove who committed treason by acting like the campaign operative he is, smearing an opponent in that opponent's softest spot. In this case, the opponent was an expert on  national security issues - and the soft spot was the cover of a CIA agent.  And rumors from across the blogosphere blast that the dude is about to be indicted.

God knows I'm less surprised than awed by the beauty of it all. It may indeed be, as Lawrence O'Donnell has it, that Rove was just stupid -- not realizing that criminal laws prevented what to him was a far less devilish smear than "McCain has a black child" or "John Kerry is a coward." After all, this one was just the truth, and something he may have even learned from his equally clueless preznit. (Full disclosure: I just heard O'Donnell on the radio, and the latter inference is borrowed from him.)

All of that has the sleepy White House press corps finally in a minor snit: I've never heard them harass young Scottie as they did today, trying to get him to admit that he'd lied to them:

QUESTION: Do you stand by your statement from the fall of 2003, when you were asked specifically about Karl and Elliot Abrams and Scooter Libby, and you said, "I've gone to each of those gentlemen, and they have told me they are not involved in this"?

QUESTION: Do you stand by that statement?

MCCLELLAN: And if you will recall, I said that, as part of helping the investigators move forward on the investigation, we're not going to get into commenting on it. That was something I stated back near that time as well.

QUESTION: Scott, this is ridiculous. The notion that you're going to stand before us, after having commented with that level of detail, and tell people watching this that somehow you've decided not to talk.

You've got a public record out there. Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not?

and so it begins.

Wasn't going to post today, until the following headline blared at me. (If you're so inclined, read  the title of this post to  yourself using the voice-over from Ambassador Kosh from Babylon 5.)

Newspaper Withholding Two Articles After Jailing
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

The editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer said last night that the newspaper, acting on the advice of its lawyers, was withholding publication of two major investigative articles because they were based on illegally leaked documents and could lead to penalties against the paper and the jailing of reporters.

The editor, Doug Clifton, said lawyers for The Plain Dealer had concluded that the newspaper, Ohio's largest daily, would probably be found culpable if the authorities were to investigate the leaks and that reporters might be forced to identify confidential sources to a grand jury or go to jail.

"Basically, we have come by material leaked to us that would be problematical for the person who leaked it," Mr. Clifton said in a telephone interview. "The material was under seal or something along those lines."

In an earlier interview with the trade journal Editor & Publisher, which published an article on its Web site late yesterday, Mr. Clifton said that lawyers for The Plain Dealer and its owner, Newhouse Newspapers, had strongly recommended against publication of the articles.

"They've said, This is a super, super high-risk endeavor and you would, you know, you'd lose," Mr. Clifton told Editor & Publisher. "The reporters say, 'Well, we're willing to go to jail,' and I'm willing to go to jail if it gets laid on me, but the newspaper isn't willing to go to jail."

This is what we've all feared, even those of us who (like me)  found ourselves deeply conflicted about  the spectacle of Judith Miller being turned into a First Amendment heroine -- Miller, who is so influential that her role in causing the Iraq war almost crossed over into culpability (on the level of the Rwandan radio station RTLM.:

Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters.” complained {Columbia Journalism Review editor Michael] Massing.

When[Massing] personally asked Miller why she had not included more comments in her stories from experts who contested the assertions made by Iraqi defectors and the White House, she offered the following explanation:

“My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal."

Back to J-school with you, girl.  (Update: as  a prime player in the 1986 Reagan-Administration infowar against Libya, Miller has been at this for 20 years at least.)And besides, as Ambassador Joseph Wilson and  others have noted and Mike Malloy on Air America yowled, "She's covering up a crime!"

This morning, David Ignatius at the Washington Post summarized the dilemma neatly:

werewolves and london

"Four Blasts in London, 50 dead." All of yesterday, aside from teaching, the only words that mattered. As if Thomas Pynchon had reached out from beyond his scrim and sent the screaming not from across the sky but underground in this oldest of all mass transit systems. His words, from Gravity's Rainbow, still feel a possible glimpse of the tunnel confusion:

Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light only great invisible crashing....Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city. . . .

Vaulting from  a morning with Voltaire's commedia on state evil (see previous post) to an evening escorting my creative writing students over the Brooklyn Bridge  and the Staten Island Ferry,  I didn't see (though I read some of) the coverage and commentary. I've therefore spent far too much time trying  to make sense of it this morning from my web sources, and finding either solace, insight, or good snark that helps defend one from the sense that this incident is about to be used to play us, badly.

• Juan Cole's piece on Salon is a don't-miss. In addition to pointing out, as he does on his own site today, that what happened in London was what Iraqis go through every day, he actually analyzes the "al-Qaida" communique (from a group with no previous links to OBL or Zarqawi) and paints the bombs as direct blowback from the Iraq war:

in the presence of a doctor

  The Romans never used torture except on slaves, but then slaves were not regarded as men. Nor does it appear that a judge in the criminal court regards as a fellow human being a man whom they bring to him haggard, pale, defeated, eyes downcast, his beard long and dirty, covered with the vermin that  gnawed at him in his cell. He gives himself the pleasure of applying the great and the little torture, in the presence of a doctor who takes his pulse, up to the point where he could be in danger of death, after which they start again; as they say, "It helps to pass an hour or two."
    The grave  magistrate has bought, for a certain amount of money, the right to carry out these experiments on his fellow-man, will tell his wife at dinner what happened that morning. The first time Madame was revolted; the second, she acquired a taste for it, for after all women are curious; and then the first thing she says to him when he comes home in his judicial robes is, "My little heart, haven't you had the question applied to anyone today?"

  I feel like we are all turning into Madame Magistrate. Except that instead of judges, those asking that question are military psychologists.

As I mentioned in comments to Jeanne, who beat me to first mention of what's below, I feel like I should have seen this coming long ago.

The reports from U.S. detentions centers, from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Guantanamo, have from the beginning echoed the excesses inside U.S. military training bases - a drill sergeant near-lethally kicking a trainee at Fort Benning or Knox, the horrific 1993 battery and sexual humiliation of Air Force Academy cadet Elizabeth Saum, or the reports of cigarette burns to the genitalia of Marine trainees undergoing SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As someone familiar with these reports, I felt like an idiot when a SERE graduate, commenting on Juan Cole's site a few weeks back about abuse of the Koran, noticed how much the setup at Gitmo echoed what he experienced at Bragg.

Had I the resources and time, I'd have done what Jane Mayer has done, and chased down the actual,  logistical connection between the two. In "The Experiment," in this week's New Yorker (not online yet),  she confirms that the SERE training, used to help GI's resist what Joseph Lelyveld calls " coercive interrogation" should they be captured., is now being turned inside out -- with psychologists, as confirmed separately elsewhere, assisting interrogators:

looking for (a) justice

As I started writing a different post, the news came over the radio: a Supreme  Court retirement. But not Rehnquist, which would have been bad enough, since any vacancy allows for one of the Top Neocon Suspects to be put through. But no, it's the worst. It's Sandra Day  -- the swing vote.

God knows I've held enough against her -- not least her role in Bush v. Gore, when she's described by Vanity Fair as "overheard expressing her dismay [on Election Night] over Gore's apparent victory":

"This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore's reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois.

Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years. O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor. Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to Newsweek. Responding through a spokesman at the high court, O'Connor had no comment.

(Thanks to Digby for the extended quotation.) O'Connor was viewed as  "emotionally fixated on stopping a recount" -- because she  knew she would want to retire! Still, in the years since she said that she's been an important bulwark in stemming the damage from Bush v. Gore.

Her vote has been crucial in so many of the SCOTUS rulings we've counted on in this administration: protecting choice in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decriminalizing private sex acts between consenting adults in Lawrence v, Texas,  recognizing the basic civil rights of Guantanamo detainees in Rasul v. Bush. SCOTUSblog, which is worth checking every five minutes right about now, notes a few:

These are among the cases in which Justice O'Connor's has been the decisive vote or opinion, and in which a more conservative Justice might well vote to overrule the governing precedent. (Post in progress. Please suggest additional cases.)

Note: Because most Justices consider stare decisis a more serious obstacle in cases of statutory construction, those cases (e.g., the Davis and Jackson Title IX decisions) might be more secure, even if Justice O'Connor's replacement would not have agreed with her as a matter of first impression.

McCreary County v. ACLU (2005) -- Ten Commandments displays

Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Educ. (2005) -- Title IX Liability for Retaliation

Rompilla v. Beard (2005) -- standard of reasonable competence required on the part of defense counsel by the Sixth Amendment

Johanns v. Livestock Marketing (2005) -- assessments for government speech

Smith v. Massachusetts (2005) -- double jeopardy

Small v. United States (2005) - felon firearm possession ban doesn't cover foreign convictions

Tennessee v. Lane (2004) -- Congress's Section 5 power

McConnell v. FEC (2003) -- campaign finance

Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) -- affirmative action

Mitchell v. Helms -- direct aid to religious schools

Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) -- "partial-birth abortion" ban

Davis v. Monroe County Board of Educ. (1999) -- recognizing school district liability under Title IX for student-on-student sexual harrassment

Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network (1997) -- injunctions against abortion-clinic protestors   

Morse v. Republican Party (1996)

Zadvydas v. Davis

Brentwood -- state action

Hunt v. Cromartie -- race-based redistricting

Rogers v. Tennessee -- "judicial" ex post facto

(UPDATE: For those with a subscription or willing to sit through a quick Absolut ad, Salon has a list with more detail, as well as an article that explores possible scenarios -- quoting Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University Law School, as saying "It's going to be a long, hot summer." And one reads with a grimace references Noah Goldberg's thoughtful piece on the front page of the Times Magazine, "God's Country?", which speaks explicitly of the "O'Connor compromise" on church-state issues.)

And as Nina Totenberg just said on NPR. at 75 she's been "at the top of her game intellectually." But her husband is desperately ill, and she's making the kind of decision women who are responsible for their families do.

Speculation about her replacement already includes Alberto Gonzales, about whom I feel I have written as much as I can stand (here's my final stand on the eve of his confirmation hearings), seen by some nervous folks as ethnically appropriate and adequately vague on abortion. The thought of someone who cut his teeth trampling the constitutional rights of Texas' death row, going on to solicit opinions that could provide legal cover for torture becoming a Justice makes me physically ill.

Though in checking referrers just now, after the first time I threw up my response, I found someone searching for "Supreme Court" and "Royce Lamberth." Now that's an intriguing prospect, given that Lamberth has been the judge demanding justice for the plaintiffs in Cobell v. Norton.

Bush just issued a quick list of vague concepts about a replacement and shot out a demand for "a fair vote."  If there was a need for the mother of all filibusters, any set of "extraordinary circumstances," this is it.

The post I was going to write was about Maher Arar, who wants the U.S. officials who kidnapped him and shipped him to Syria to be subject to Canadian criminal charges. The extradition battle alone will dominate the headlines, or should.

Meanwhile, Arar's suit against Gonzales and John Ashcroft may ultimately come to the Supremes this year; so may the ultimate constitutional challenge to the so-called Defense of Marriage Act  and various challenges to the Patriot Act.

SCOTUSBlog gives this useful list of upcoming cases:

No. 04-623, Oregon v. Ashcroft – assisted suicide
No. 04-1084, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal – religious use of drugs
No. 04-1152, Rumsfeld v. FAIR – military recruiting on campus and gay rights
No. 04-1144, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood – abortion parental consent
No. 04-1244, Scheidler v. NOW – abortion protests

Given that last, and O'Connor's outstanding role in Casey, NARAL has plunged into the fray, and MoveON has a new ad (quicktime link) that focuses on Schiavo (which seems odd to  me). The games have begun, indeed -- or rather, La commedia riprendere.

I'll let Arar have the last word for now:  his question applies to so many of the questions that the Senators looking at the new justice need to keep in mind.

"Are there any controls on these people?" he asked, referring to authorities. "Is this the way to fight
terrorism -- by abolishing due process, by abolishing justice?"

what we owe them

Yesterday morning, I spent  a few hours on the complex and interactive site compiled for the World Tribunal on Iraq after their indictment had been handed down. Many of you may have heard Arundhati Roy (jury foreman) summarize the findings:

The Jury defined this war as one of the most unjust in history: ‘The Bush and Blair administrations blatantly ignored the massive opposition to the war expressed by millions of people around the world. They embarked upon one of the most unjust, immoral, and cowardly wars in history. The Anglo-American occupation of Iraq of the last 27 months has led to the destruction and devastation of the Iraqi state and society. Law and order have broken down completely, resulting in a pervasive lack of human security; the physical infrastructure is in shambles; the health care delivery system is a mess; the education system has ceased to function; there is massive environmental and ecological devastation; and, the cultural and archeological heritage of the Iraqi people has been desecrated.’

On the basis of the preceding findings and recalling the Charter of the United Nations and other legal documents, the jury has established the following charges against the Governments of the US and the UK:

• Planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.
• Targeting the civilian population of Iraq and civilian infrastructure
• Using disproportionate force and indiscriminate weapon systems
• Failing to safeguard the lives of civilians during military activities and during the occupation period thereafter
• Using deadly violence against peaceful protestors
• Imposing punishments without charge or trial, including collective punishment
• Subjecting Iraqi soldiers and civilians to torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment
• Re-writing the laws of a country that has been illegally invaded and occupied
• Willfully devastating the environment
• Actively creating conditions under which the status of Iraqi women has seriously been degraded
• Failing to protect humanity’s rich archaeological and cultural heritage in Iraq
• Obstructing the right to information, including the censoring of Iraqi media
• Redefining torture in violation of international law, to allow use of torture and illegal detentions

The Jury also established charges against the Security Council of United Nations for failing to stop war crimes and crimes against humanity among other failures, against the Governments of the Coalition of the Willing for collaborating in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, against the Governments of Other Countries for allowing the use of military bases and air space and providing other logistical support, against Private Corporations for profiting from the war, against the Major Corporate Media for disseminating deliberate falsehoods and failing to report atrocities.

The indictment of the Security Council is particularly interesting, given that the United Nations proper just had a milestone birthday -- one that everyone ignored. And that this proceeding might be said to belong in the building on First Avenue.

now the ghosts will mosh

So exactly a week after my plea to preachers, politicians and military men to stop taking the names of the dead in vain, the 9/11 rhetoric has ratcheted up to levels we've not seen since last summer's Republican Convention. And the newest, most blatant, and most obscene offender is Karl Rove, who previous to placing his protege in the White House rarely left Texas. While  writing this, I learn that the Families of September 11 have risen to rebuke him:

As families whose relatives were victims of the 9/11 terror attacks, we believe it is an outrage that any Democrat, any Republican, any conservative, or any liberal stakes a "high ground" position based upon the September 11th death and destruction. Doing so assumes that all those who died and their loved ones would agree. In truth, some would and some would not. By definition the conduct is divisive and, because it is intended to be self-serving and politicizes 9/11, it is offensive. We are calling on Karl Rove to resist his temptations and stop trying to reap political gain in the tragic misfortune of others. His comments are not welcome.

Such calm, measured words: I can onlyapplaud them. And, perhaps, help voice the rage they've suppressed in order to get results.

Like the clown with the bullhorn, whose White House jumped to defend his words yesterday, Rove used the image of the flaming towers to assert that the simplistic worldview he's been so busy selling now reigns supreme:

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble."

And reading that makes me angry all over again.  On September 11, Rove wasn't watching the Towers crumble, except in TV replays. He was on Air Force One, flying all over the South after the "My Pet Goat" fiasco,  and that morning may have been the first time he, who'd rarely left Texas before placing his pet in the White House,  spoke of New York except in scorn. He didn't stand, as I did, on First Avenue and watch the plume of smoke from above my head suddenly drop to my feet, didn't hear the shout - "The second tower's down!" He didn't spend time in the ER at Bellevue, as my roommate Dianne did (see comments on this post). It was all a movie to him, one in which he immediately thought to star his boy, who had so far been tanking in the polls. Restraint was not what he felt. But neither, at bottom, was grief or even rage.

journalists in chains, now in iraq

Dahr Jamail doesn't blog that often,  and now I know part of what's kept him lately. Who among us has remembered about the World Tribunal on Iraq? 

While the sponsors are sort of usual suspects, they're my kind of usual suspects. From the A-C list:  Act Now for Harmony and Democracy (ANHAD) / India, Action Indict Bush-Blair / Japan,  AEPGN (Association des étudiants pour la prévention de la guerre nucléaire) / Belgium,  American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee - NY Chapter / US,  Asian Women's Human Rights Council , Asr Resource Centre Istitute of Women's Studies / Pakistan, Bastaguerra / Italy Bergen County Green Party, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation / UK/ US,  Center for Constitutional Rights / US,   Center for Development Studies / India.

Time to go read the foreign press, since we're hearing bupkis about it in our dear U.S. press. ( I love the name of that Italian peace group so much, I'm tempted to change my name.)

In any event, I'll let Dahr take the stage (as I finish drafting my response to Karl Rove's 9/11 atrocity).  He's reminding us that the White House actions against journalists ain't nothing to what they attempt overseas.   

Censorship

At long last, the culminating session of the World Tribunal on Iraq is upon us. As a witness providing testimony, like the other witnesses I’m being interviewed by many outlets. Today, one of them was by reporters for one of the larger newspapers in Turkey, the Yeni Safak Newspaper.

I’ll leave the reporters nameless, for reasons you’ll soon see.

The newspaper has been translating various articles of mine into Turkish and running them, particularly those concerning the most recent Fallujah massacre. The report who was interviewing me today told me that the former American consulate here, Eric Edelman, asked the Prime Minister of Turkey to pressure his paper to not run so many of my stories.

“Why did he do this,” I asked him.

“Edelman said it was the wrong news,” he told me with a smile.

Turns out Edelman also asked that articles by Robert Fisk and Naomi Klein not be run so often in Yeni Safak either.

He smiled at me while he watched the wheels turning in my head before I smiled back and said, “That makes me very happy, it means I’m doing my job as a journalist.”

We laughed heartily together at this, as did everyone else at the table.

Reminds me of the obtuse hate mails I sometimes receive-confirmation that I am doing my job-they always make me smile.

So the American government is pressuring foreign countries to censor their news. Aside from the fact that this act is the height of arrogance by the United States, it makes it exceedingly clear why so many Americans who rely on the corporate media for their news continue to be so misinformed/un-informed about the goings on in Iraq. If the American government is attempting to censor the news in foreign countries, you can imagine what they are doing at home.

journalists in chains: russia and new york?

And here I was going to talk about some pleasant news, regarding a new, growing consensus on same-sex couples and immigration -- when I come across two stories about our old/new bugaboo, that First Amendment,  that feel oddly similar. While neither is on its own particularly surprising,  if disheartening, they made too much of a perfect pair not to set before you, Think of them as demented bookends, or Mad Queens in a chess set with "checkmate" meaning a ticket to Guantanamo.

The first was  a new example of  he relentless targeting of journalists in parts of the world whose leaders are welcome at the White House. And it found its echo in Bill O'Reilly (easy target, I know, but he's powerful)  demanding the arrest of the Air America staff, and doing so with my favorite 9/11 obscenity.   Perhaps I'll make like Billmon and leave the parallel quotes to speak for themselves:

When journalist Nikolai Goshko went on the air the next day to suggest the then local governor and two other top-ranking officials might have been involved in the murder [of the director of Smolensk's independent Radio Vesna], he might have thought he was asking for trouble.

But he probably didn't suspect that his words would cost him five years in prison.
However, a court in Smolensk recently sentenced Goshko to 61 months in prison for defamation after the three officials pressed charges against him.

The sentence has deeply concerned media watchdogs both in Russia and abroad, particularly since the prosecution had only requested a one-year suspended sentence.

Goshko's sentence has deeply concerned media watchdogs both in Russia and abroad, particularly since the prosecution had only requested a one-year suspended sentence.

----------------