I’m posting a second piece today — and that will do it ’til next week when I’ll be back in the [cold, snowy] Pea Patch. Meanwhile, Mel is still with us, bless her.
This is a collection on Jose Padilla — we have driven him insane; there will never be, in my estimation, a rationale for this conduct on the behalf of our government. It’s a low point among many … but Jose is, no matter what else, a United States citizen … and that makes him OUR BUSINESS, in spades!
Reprehensible stuff, below … this is shame that, once corrected … and I keep hope … must NEVER be forgotten in this nation.
Jude
Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation
DEBORAH SONTAG, NYT
December 4, 2006
One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C.
That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.
“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”
Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.
Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.
The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to Mr. Padilla’s lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla’s electronic court file late Friday.
To Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their client during his military detention from mid-2002 until earlier this year, when the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami. He now awaits trial scheduled for late January.
Together with other documents filed late Friday, the images represent the latest and most aggressive sally by defense lawyers who declared this fall that charges against Mr. Padilla should be dismissed for “outrageous government conduct,” saying that he was mistreated and tortured during his years as an enemy combatant.
Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said Sunday that the military disputes Mr. Padilla’s accusations of mistreatment. And, in court papers, prosecutors deny “in the strongest terms” the accusations of torture and say that “Padilla’s conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his safety and security.”
“His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment when necessary,” the government stated. “While in the brig, Padilla never reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel.”
In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”
Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.
Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, “There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement.”
Ali al-Marri, a Qatari and Saudi dual citizen and the only enemy combatant currently detained in the United States, has made similar claims of isolation and deprivation at the brig in South Carolina. The Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Vician, said Sunday that he could not comment on the methods used to escort Mr. Padilla to the dentist. Blackened goggles and earphones are rarely employed in internal prison transports in the United States, but riot gear is sometimes used for violent prisoners.
One of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said, however, that Mr. Padilla was a “completely docile” prisoner. “There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience,” said Mr. do Campo, who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender’s office.
In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”
Federal prosecutors and defense lawyers are locked in a tug of war over the relevancy of Mr. Padilla’s military detention to the present criminal case. Federal prosecutors have asked the judge to forbid Mr. Padilla’s lawyers from mentioning the circumstances of his military detention during the trial, maintaining that their accusations could “distract and inflame the jury.”
But defense lawyers say it is unconscionable to ignore Mr. Padilla’s military detention because, among other reasons, it altered him in a way that will impinge on his trial.
Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June and September, said in an affidavit filed Friday that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.”
“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.
Mr. Padilla’s status was abruptly changed to criminal defendant from enemy combatant last fall. At the time, the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention — and thus the issue of the president’s authority to seize an American citizen on American soil and hold him indefinitely without charges — when the Bush administration pre-empted its decision by filing criminal charges against Mr. Padilla.
Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.
Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a “North American terror support cell” that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist “global jihad” in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas “to participate in violent jihad” and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan.
Michael Caruso, a public defender for Mr. Padilla, pleaded “absolutely not guilty” for him to charges of conspiracy and of providing material support to terrorists. Mr. Padilla faces two charges that each carry a maximum penalty of 15 years.
Over the summer, Judge Marcia G. Cooke of United States District Court in Miami threw out the most serious charge, of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country, saying that it replicated accusations in the other counts and could lead to multiple punishments for a single crime. This was a setback for the government, which has appealed the dismissal.
Mr. Padilla’s lawyers say they have had a difficult time persuading him that they are on his side.
From the time Mr. Padilla was allowed access to counsel, Mr. Patel visited him repeatedly in the brig and in the Miami detention center, and Mr. Padilla has observed Mr. Patel arguing on his behalf in Miami federal court.
But, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit, his client is nonetheless mistrustful. “Mr. Padilla remains unsure if I and the other attorneys working on his case are actually his attorneys or another component of the government’s interrogation scheme,” Mr. Patel said.
Mr. do Campo said that Mr. Padilla was not incommunicative, and that he expressed curiosity about what was going on in the world, liked to talk about sports and demonstrated particularly keen interest in the Chicago Bears.
But the defense lawyers’ questions often echo the questions interrogators have asked Mr. Padilla, and when that happens, he gets jumpy and shuts down, the lawyers said.
Dr. Hegarty said Mr. Padilla refuses to review the video recordings of his interrogations, which have been released to his lawyers but remain classified.
He is especially reluctant to discuss what happened in the brig, fearful that he will be returned there some day, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit.
“During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body,” Mr. Patel said. “The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.” ++
Padilla photos shocks military expert
UPI
WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 (UPI) — Newly released photographs of U.S. terror suspect Jose Padilla wearing sensory deprivation devices have outraged a Washington military expert.
The photos came from a Defense Department video of Padilla, 36, being escorted from his cell at a South Carolina brig where he was held for 3 1/2 years without being charged. He is shown wearing noise-blocking headphones and blacked-out goggles, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday.
Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told the newspaper he found the images “extremely disturbing” and called it “outrageous government conduct.”
Mary Ellen O’Connell, a torture expert at Notre Dame Law School, agreed.
“It looked extraordinarily excessive,” O’Connell said. “He’s only a suspect — he hasn’t been convicted of anything.”
The New York-born Padilla, a convert to Islam, was declared an “enemy combatant” after he was arrested in 2002 and prosecutors alleged he was conspiring to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a U.S. city. When he was eventually charged in 2005 with conspiring in a minor terrorism case but there was no mention of a dirty bomb in the indictment, the newspaper said. ++
Breaking The Furniture
by digby
Sunday, December 03, 2006
This [the NYTimes piece] is going to keep me up tonight:
[... posted above]
When I was a kid I read “The Count Of Monte Cristo” and it had a profound affect on me. It is a book about horrible injustice, terrible solitary confinement and the natural human response to suffering it. Every time I read about these prisoners being thrown into these high tech dungeons, isolated and dehumanized I think of that book and the descriptions of madness to which Edmund Dantes nearly succumbs until his mind is saved by the presence of another person to talk to. I think isolation and lack of a sense of time and strange repetitive interrogations may be even more cruel than physical punishment. The belief that it will never end, that you’ve lost all normal sense of personhood and control — that your mind is being stripped away and there’s nothing you can do about it — must be terrifying.
I get the sense that a lot of this stuff was rank experimentation. We have known for years that Guantanamo became a guinea pig farm very early on in which they trained green interrogators in “new” techniques. This was probably part of a similar program.
From a January 2004 article in Vanity Fair by David Rose:
Reporters are not allowed to speak with interrogators or anyone else who deals with intelligence at Gitmo. The only testimony I hear is from General Geoffrey Miller, the task-force commander. “We are developing information of enormous value to the nation,” says Miller, a slight, pugnacious man said to be a strict disciplinarian. “We have an enormously thorough process that has very high resolution and clarity. We think we’re fighting not only to save and protect our families, but your families also. I think of Gitmo as the counterterrorism-interrogation battle lab.”
But Miller’s background is in artillery, not intelligence, and senior intelligence officials with long experience in counterterrorism, who spoke to Vanity Fair on condition of anonymity, question his assessment
[...]
General Miller, however, sees no cause for concern. “I believe we understand what the truth is. We are very, very good at interrogation… As many of our detainees have realized that what they did was wrong, they have begun to give us information that helps us win the global war on terror.”
Spies and psychiatrists may have their doubts, but Donald Rumsfeld is convinced that even the mere foot soldiers imprisoned at Gitmo are “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” All, he has said, “were involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans.”
You read some of this stuff now and it’s like these guys were all running lines from some cheap 1950’s era B-Movie script. Yet the press corps called this nutcase Rummy a “rock star.” It was some sort of mass delusion.
Somewhere they came up with the idea that every single person detained by the military as an enemy combatant was not just guilty, he was not even a human being. And so they did this stuff almost as if to make sure the person was not treated as a human being in any way. Perhaps it tested their own assumptions too much if they were seen as people instead of pure personifications of evil.
And it worked:
In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”
This “piece of furniture” had to have blackout goggles and earphones, manacles and a force of men in riot gear in order to go to the prison dentist. I do not know if they made him wear the goggles and earphones when he had his root canal. But I’d be willing to bet they did. It would be so much more punishing not to be able to see and hear, but be able to feel. Why waste an opportunity to further dehumanize the furniture?
Oh, and be sure to read the whole article to remind yourself of just what a pathetic, absurd case the government is bringing against this guy. ++
Becoming What We Despise
Robert Scheer
Wednesday, December 6, 2006 by truthdig
Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, has been tortured by his own government for the better part of three-and-one-half years, suffering years of systematic sensory deprivation documented in his attorneys’ filings and supported by photos of the prisoner published this week by the New York Times.
In that time, Padilla, who has been judged by professionals as mentally ill as a consequence of his brutal treatment, has been denied his Constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial and was permitted no legal representation for 21 months. The Bush administration’s excuse for this betrayal of our legal system was that Padilla was a dangerous al Qaeda agent, a big fish caught in the administration’s successful pursuit of its much ballyhooed war on terror. In the words of then-U.S. Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft, Padilla was “a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.” Those lurid claims were abandoned when the government, faced with a belated U.S. Supreme Court censure, finally charged Padilla with vague and lesser crimes carrying a maximum 15-year sentence.
Were this some isolated case of officially condoned sadism, say in a rural county jail, it could be minimized as an aberration. Instead, it is an all-too-accurate reflection of a presidential policy of dehumanizing anyone even suspected of being an enemy. The Times photos, taken from a government video, give evidence of a heavily manacled prisoner with masked eyes and muffled ears being walked down a corridor within a Navy brig, lending physical evidence to Padilla’s lawyer’s claims of a pattern of disorienting isolation. “There is nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement,” Philip D. Cave, a former Navy judge advocate general, told the Times.
Obviously, a prisoner who has been deliberately disorientated for so long is no longer in a position to exercise his right to confront his accusers. An examining psychiatrist wrote that “as the result of his experience during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness … complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.”
The excuse for this heinous treatment of a U.S. citizen is the same as that given for an entire orgy of despicable treatment of prisoners held in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and a gulag archipelago of secret military facilities around the world: Our enemies, all linked through sophistry to the 9/11 terror attacks, are so vile and dangerous that the limitations on government power enshrined in our guiding documents and political culture no longer apply. Once the Twin Towers were knocked down, supposedly, we could no longer afford to be “nice guys”—as if the rule of law is an indulgence of only the most secure nations.
By that standard, any tyrant can justify the cruelest of actions by citing enemies, real or imagined, be it King George III blockading Boston Harbor to teach the rebellious colonists a lesson or Saddam Hussein killing Kurdish villagers after an assassination attempt on his life. The very uniqueness of our national experiment was the checks and balances put upon the government to prevent such convenient rationalizations for abuse of the individual. The Founding Fathers won a war, but their true contribution to human history was to tackle head-on the reality that humans and their institutions can so easily become that which they despise.
Even when an American is suspected of a “capital or infamous crime,” as was Padilla, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically says he still cannot “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” That is why the Supreme Court finally forced the Bush administration to give Padilla his day in court.
In the end, the administration has retreated from its hoary claims; Padilla’s trial, set to begin on Jan. 22, does not include any reference to dirty bombs, al Qaeda, or any specific plans to attack America. Instead, he faces lesser charges claiming he was the recruit of a “North American support cell,” whose interest was in jihad in Bosnia and Chechnya. As if it had no bearing on the disoriented state of mind of the defendant, the Bush administration’s lawyers have argued in motions that his treatment as a prisoner should not be presented before the jury.
The more important question now, however, is when will those who, like Ashcroft, used this case to shamelessly exploit our fears for political purposes face their own day of accountability in a court of law? ++
Was Jose Padilla Tortured?
A video of the accused terrorist shows he was subjected to unduly harsh treatment, his lawyers claim, leaving him psychologically damaged and unfit to stand trial
ADAM ZAGORIN/WASHINGTON — TIME
Monday, Dec. 04, 2006
Jose Padilla was the first and only American citizen to be held without charge after being labeled an “enemy combatant” by President Bush. A 36-year-old former Chicago gang member, he was arrested in June 2002, following his arrival at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. The U.S. claimed he had been sent by al-Qaeda to blow up a radioactive “dirty bomb” in an American city.
Now, after more than three years in custody, Padilla’s lawyers are claiming that new images taken from a government video show that he received unduly harsh treatment while being held at a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. The pictures, still shots from an unclassified Department of Defense video, show his hands and feet shackled as he wears headphones and blacked-out goggles while being escorted by three guards dressed in helmets and riot gear to a dental appointment.
The new material was filed in federal court in Miami late last week, and was first reported by the New York Times . The filing comes as part of an attempt by Padilla’s lawyers to win dismissal of criminal charges against him for supporting terrorism. The lawyers argue that Padilla was subjected to the equivalent of torture while in U.S. military custody, and that the experience has left him psychologically damaged and unable to participate in his own defense.
After his lawyers contested the government’s right to hold him without trial, Padilla last January was transferred from military to civilian custody. He is set to go on trial Jan. 22 in Miami, along with two codefendants, on charges of supporting terrorism . The charges do not include the “dirty bomb” allegations, which the government appear to have dropped.
“The extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged, both mentally and physically,” said one court filing by Orlando do Campo, one of Padilla’s lawyers. Padilla’s filing also says that he was subjected to sleep deprivation and extremes of heat and cold, forced to stand in “stress positions” that can be painful, and given “truth serum” to make him talk.
The filing includes an affidavit from a psychiatrist who said that he apparently is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, and cannot adequately assist his own lawyers in preparing his legal defense. According to the psychiatrist’s affadavit in the court filing: “When approached by his attorneys, he begs them, ‘please, please, please’ not to have to discuss his case. ” The psychiatrist also reported that Padilla “refuses to watch the videos of his interrogation and he refuses to answer questions pertaining to aspects of the evidence in his case.”
U.S. officials and spokespersons for the Department of Defense have long insisted that Padilla never faced torture, arguing in their own legal filings that he never experienced anything but “humane” treatment consistent with his safety and security. ++
Padilla Padilla Padilla
Jane Smiley
12.06.2006
I haven’t been posting much lately, because every time the Bush administration puts me in a rage, other posters beat me to it. This is a good thing. I want there to be an avalanche of rage pouring down on the Bush criminals. I want my own now-six-year-old rage to be just the palest
imitation of all the rage there is.
Nevertheless, when I read Robert Scheer’s eloquent post about Jose Padilla this morning (”Becoming What We Despise”), I thought, “He is too kind.” In fact, as shocking as the treatment of Padilla has been, and as horrifying as Padilla’s condition now is, and as terrifying as the fact that Padilla, a US citizen, was stripped of all of his constitutional rights and tortured without recourse just exactly as if he lived in South Africa during apartheit, or in Russia in the Stalinist period, or in any South American dictatorship you could name is, the most vile, stinking, contemptible, debased, and humiliating fact about the whole episode is that yesterday, when Padilla’s condition was reported on AOL, 75% of AOL’s poll responders voted FOR the government’s treatment of Padilla. Apparently they did not know that he is no longer being accused of the dirty bomb crime, and apparently they didn’t care ANYTHING about their constitutional rights as Americans. Gosh. I thought the Democrats won the election and that the Bush administration’s policies had been repudiated.
I have to say that I can’t find the poll today, so perhaps those folks who voted yesterday were a small, skewed sample, and perhaps it was Mary Cheney, whom I now discover works for AOL, who kept voting repeatedly (personally, I voted twice against the government) (and now that I know that AOL gave Mary Cheney a job, I will have to rethink having anything to do with AOL) (but on the other hand, AOL is in big trouble, so maybe Mary will lose her job before her pregnancy leave kicks in), but WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?
Anyone at all who does not find Padilla’s treatment repugnant in every way, and perfect grounds for impeachment, imprisonment, and solitary confinement of everyone in charge of our government for the last five years and ten months, has devolved from a human being to a reptile.
Those votes on AOL are the best argument for global-warming-as-the-fitting-end-to-the-failed-human-experiment that I’ve seen lately. Jose Padilla, whatever it turns out that he has done (and I bet it won’t be much) is a martyr to our Constitution, and that picture of his face in black goggles should be on the wall in every classroom and in every government building and in every church in the nation. ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
December 7th, 2006
Baker and Gates … and a pouty Dubby … and a same-old,same-old scenario. It’s not the new mandate that we wanted … but it’s the one we expected. This Pat Oliphant cartoon for 12/7 tells the tale …
Feingold tells the truth about the war, below, to Friend Keith — hope you can stream; Ray McGovern does too, on the listless Gates confirmation. We have challenges … we have moved from years of extreme emergency to a period of emergency, still … but at least there is now a Progressive voice, and the voice we use is no longer considered traitorous to any but the radical Right and the perpetually fearful.
The will of the people is still being ignored … revolution is still in the future … but the ground is being ploughed for it, day by day. [And the recently reported 100,000 contractors in Iraq are still pulling in the bucks.]
Jude
Feingold Cuts Through The ISG Hype on Countdown
Jamie Holly
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
[open for video snip]
Keith Olbermann had Russ Feingold on to give his assessment of the now very famous Iraq Study Group report.
Feingold said what I have felt all day. This report does not give us a clear path in Iraq and leaves the future of the war up in the air. Even worse is the fact that we have lost 10 more soldiers today and the administration needs more time to figure out what to do. Iraq sure doesn’t need more time
to slip into anarchy - it gets worse by the day.
Hey, We Got Beat Fair and Square
Mike Whitney
Dec 7 2006
The hearings for Robert Gates were about as weird as it gets.
Gates wasn’t asked one tough question the whole time. It was all a meaningless formality. Besides, Gates had all the qualifications the senate was looking for.
In other words, he wasn’t Rumsfeld and that’s all that mattered.
For Gates it was more like Coronation Day than a serious inquiry into past indiscretions. Did anyone care about his involvement in Iran-Contra and his propensity to “fix the intelligence to fit the policy” or were they too busy showering him with praise?
And, what happened to our tough new Democratic majority? Did the midterm elections really change anything?
Oh, yeah; we traded a rubber-stamp Republican congress for a rubber-stamp Democratic congress. Now that’s progress.
No one bothered to ask Gates how he felt about military tribunals, although that will be one of his many responsibilities as Secretary of Defense.
And, no one asked him about Guantanamo Bay, or habeas corpus, or extraordinary rendition, or deploying the military inside the US, or covert assassination programs, or collecting information on American citizens, or placing propaganda in the foreign press.
Not one senator was even curious to know if he would continue to spy on Quakers, antiwar protestors or peace activists. And what about terror suspects; will he give them a fair hearing in front of a federal judge or run them through Rummy’s Star Chamber?
These are important questions, but they never showed up on the senatorial radar.
Why?
Because the rights of “We the People” don’t amount to a hill-o-beans and the politicians don’t give a hoot if we know it or not.
What really matters is Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq. That’s why Rep. Steny Hoyer muscled out John Murtha as House Majority Leader. And that’s why the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep Silvestre Reyes, wants to send another 30,000 troops to the Iraqi sinkhole.
The Democrats won’t get us out of Iraq. They’re already arming the war-donkey for another 4 years.
And it’s no different with the Baker group either.
Sure there’s plenty of gloom and doom in the report, but its all window-dressing. We’re not pulling-out. Heck no! Baker just wants to reduce troop levels to patch up the army and bolster public support for the next big bloodbath.
“Let’s talk to our enemies,” Baker opines. “Let’s talk to Iran”.
Okay. But, I’ll tell you what they’ll say. They’ll say:
“Your time is up, George W. Bush. You just did us the biggest favor anyone could ever dream of. You crushed our enemies in Afghanistan and destroyed our arch-rival, Saddam Hussein. You’re army is overextended, your people are fed up, and you’ve spent zillions of dollars that you’ll never see again. On top of that, you’ve thrown your support behind our main agent, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who runs the most feared death squad in all of Iraq; The Badr Brigade”
“Thank you, Great Satan. How can we ever repay you?”
Baker is a smooth-talking attorney and a good diplomat, but he won’t get us out of this mess. His hands are tied. Besides, there’s nothing he can do.
There’s nothing anyone can do. Its not a matter of whether we keep 70,000 or 140,000 troops in Iraq. The troop-size is irrelevant.
The place is unraveling!
Why don’t the American people understand that?
Iran can’t fix it. Syria can’t fix it. No one can fix it.
Bush can either follow Baker’s advice or go ahead and do it his own way; it won’t make a damn bit of difference. The outcome will be exactly the same.
Events on the ground are outpacing all of the political posturing and decision-making. In fact, the Baker report is probably already obsolete.
Bush started a brushfire that’s going to zip right across the entire Middle East taking down all the US puppets on the way.
Yee-hah! Isn’t liberation fun?
But what happens when all of our Arab gas station attendants join the resistance and turn off the oil spigot? Won’t that put a hurtin’ on our economy?
Maybe we should’ve thought about that first?
Baker thinks he can stop this madness; this worm of anarchy that is sweeping through Iraq, but he’s dreaming. “Democracy is on the march!” The entire region is sliding towards chaos. By the time the tsunami hits Saudi Arabia even the impervious Bush will be pacing the deck.
The Baker Commission is just a finger in the dike. They can keep braying about “enhanced diplomatic and political efforts”, but that’s just because they’ve run out of options?
The military option flopped. Now what; flatten every city from Baghdad to the Syrian border? It wouldn’t work anyway; just look at Falluja. The Marines want another 20,000 troops just to maintain order in al-Anbar Province and THEY’VE ALREAY REDUCED THE WHOLE AREA TO RUBBLE.
What’s next; bomb the rubble into finely-ground sand?
Hey, we got beat fair and square. Now, let’s pack it in.
Like the report says: “The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing”. The relentless aerial bombardment and the massive counterinsurgency operations have achieved their objective; the country is in a state of collapse.
Isn’t that what Bush wanted?
Iraq will never recover from this war and neither will America.
Even the strongest country can only suffer the choices of idiots for so long.
‘Centrist’ Democrats Want It Both Ways
John R. MacArthur
Wednesday, December 6, 2006 by the Providence Journal (Rhode
Island)
Sometimes it’s great to be wrong. When the Democrats took the House and the Senate — contrary to my published expectations — I breathed a sigh of relief. So what if James Webb is a pulp-fiction-writing former Reaganite. The senator-elect from Virginia and his Democratic colleagues have pledged renewed scrutiny of the Iraq catastrophe, and that’s reason enough to celebrate.
Then again, was my pessimism so misguided? I wanted the Democrats to win so they might get us out of Iraq, but I thought that they would fall short because of their steadfast refusal to condemn the war with a unified voice. Too often during the campaign, I couldn’t tell the difference between the Democratic and the Republican positions on Iraq.
Take the race in Indiana’s 2nd District, where Joe Donnelly, the Democrat, unseated the incumbent Republican, Chris Chocola. During one of their debates, Donnelly explained his position on Iraq as follows: “What we need is leadership in Washington that is as good as our troops. We can’t walk out of Iraq. We have to stabilize that country, and we have to win.” Sounds like “stay the course” to me.
Now, a month into the new Democratic majority, it’s possible to conclude that Americans voted for oversight — and the more distant hope of withdrawal from Iraq — without fully understanding how pro-war (or if you prefer, anti-anti-war) the opposition party really is.
To analyze this paradox it’s necessary to consider the work of Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D.-Ill.), the hatchetman for Bill and Hillary Clinton and boss of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Emanuel labored hard to keep strongly anti-war candidates off the Democratic line and slate Iraq equivocators instead.
Emanuel’s most publicized recruit was Tammy Duckworth, the former Army helicopter pilot who lost both her legs in Iraq. With national-party backing, Duckworth defeated the more anti-war Christine Cegelis in the primary in Illinois’s 6th District (Senator Clinton’s native grounds). But despite her martyrdom, Duckworth’s cautiously critical position on Iraq (”we can’t just pull up stakes and create a security vacuum”) wasn’t enough to defeat the Republican Peter Roskam in the general election.
Of the 22 Democratic candidates initially backed by Emanuel and his sponsors in the Clinton machine, only one, Peter Welch in Vermont, favored speedy withdrawal from Iraq. Welch won easily. Of the other 21, only 8 were victorious last month. And one of Emanuel’s original picks, Steve Filson, didn’t make it past his anti-war primary opponent, Jerry McNerney, who prevailed decisively over the incumbent Republican in California’s 11th District.
Before the election, Emanuel and his Senate counterpart, Charles Schumer, pleaded “pragmatism” — that the Democrats couldn’t be seen as the party of “cut and run” if they wanted to attract “moderate” voters. After the election, Emanuel made a quick costume change, and brazenly retailed a story to The New York Times that portrayed him as the architect of a “brilliant” strategy that exploited the mounting anti-war sentiment in the country.
Under the headline, “Democrats Turned War into an Ally” the Times’s credulous political reporters parroted Emanuel, saying that “the Democratic strategy of running against the war, which would have seemed impossibly risky three months earlier, when the White House had urged its candidates to embrace the war, was encouraged by poll after poll, not to mention regular reports of American casualties.”
Impossibly risky? What nonsense. Polls showed majority support for withdrawal in early August, and anger over Iraq dates back much further.
That’s what encouraged long-shot candidates like Webb to challenge entrenched, pro-war incumbents.
Besides, if Emanuel and the Democratic caucus have recognized the merits of opposing the suicidal American occupation of Iraq, then why did they smash John Murtha’s bid to become majority leader? Last year, Murtha courageously broke ranks with his party’s establishment by calling for a rapid pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq (he cleverly calls it “redeployment”), but his initiative attracted little congressional support. Even so, as a Pentagon insider and Marine Corps veteran, Murtha cut a high profile in the war debate, so voters aiming to protest Iraq may well have mistaken the Pennsylvania Democrat’s position with his party’s position.
Following Murtha’s defeat, the next House speaker, the increasingly anti-war Nancy Pelosi, was pilloried in the press for backing Murtha against Steny Hoyer, an early supporter of Bush’s Iraq folly. Evidently taking its cue from Emanuel, The New York Times’s editorial page declared that because of his near-indictment in the Abscam scandal, “Mr. Murtha would have been a farcical presence in a leadership promising the cleanest Congress in history” and tut-tutted that Pelosi “has managed to severely scar her leadership.”
Received wisdom is a bipartisan taste, and right-wing columnist John Podhoretz was also happy to take the Emanuel feed, calling Murtha in The New York Post Pelosi’s “sleazy born-again-peacenik buddy” and arguing that the Democrats won Congress “in spite” of Pelosi and her anti-war allies.
“Rather, [the Democratic victory] was the handiwork of Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Democrat who recruited the right candidates, raised money for them and made sure they knew what themes were working, according to Democratic polls.”
I think that Murtha would have weathered the Abscam video tape (after all he did turn down the proffered bribe), especially if it was contrasted with the corrupt awarding of vast amounts of money to Halliburton and the other sleazy defense contractors currently looting Iraq. And Podhoretz is simply wrong on the politics: Emanuel’s batting average, 9 for 22, doesn’t justify his crowning as the mastermind of victory. You could just as easily say the Democrats won in spite of Emanuel.
Of course, House Democrats haven’t suddenly become Puritans. A bigger reason for the hostility to Murtha is that he meant what he said about leaving Iraq and would have quickly forced the issue come January when the 110th Congress convenes. For now, the “centrist” Clinton wing controls the party’s agenda and wants to have it both ways — responsible critics who support the president’s alleged mission of democracy building in Baghdad.
Things are worse in the Senate. The brightest hope for the anti-war Democrats was Ned Lamont’s insurgent candidacy, which nearly knocked out Bush’s loyal war ally, Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Here I was wrong again, and this time I am sorry. I thought Lamont would carry not only anti-war Democrats, but also fiscally conservative Republicans appalled by the sheer cost of Iraq.
Unfortunately, collusion between the national Republican Party and a significant minority of the Democratic Party in Connecticut rescued Lieberman and, for the time being, Bush’s war policy. In a 51-49 Senate, Lieberman holds the balance of power on Iraq, since he can always threaten to switch to the Republicans and throw control to Dick Cheney, who as vice president can vote to break ties.
The New York/Washington power elite, dominated by Bush and the Clintons, doesn’t have the guts or the honesty to admit that Iraq is hopeless and that U.S. soldiers are being killed and mutilated for nothing more than Bush’s vainglory. The power elite’s spokesman, the champion equivocator and ace sloganeer Thomas Friedman, provides the purest distillation of the current conventional thinking on Iraq. The other day, The New York Times’s star columnist was still clinging to the fantasy that America could have “properly occupied” Mesopotamia and even now could send more troops and “crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it.”
Friedman and many Democrats haven’t figured out that lots of Iraqis view America as a dark force of colonialism and don’t want our version of “progressive politics.”
Friedman apparently doesn’t even remember that Iraq was once a British colony, since he blames the present chaos on “1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Ba’athist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions.” Nothing about the Sykes-Picot (1916) carving up of Syria and Iraq by the British and French; nothing about the destabilizing British practice of divide and rule that pitted Sunnis against Shi’ites, Arabs against Kurds; and nothing about Washington’s support for Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and ’80s.
As a senior Democratic senator told me last week in Washington, with the Democrats divided the only politician who can end the American role in the war is the executive, George Bush. That means we’re a long way from leaving Iraq, no matter what the voters want, no matter how loudly the Democrats celebrate their victory.
Question One About Iraq
Aaron B. Pryor
Dec 6 2006
I don’t know about you, but I find the release today of the Iraq Study Group report to be utterly annoying. After all, it says what Democrats have been saying for a few years now only to be pointed at and called “faggots.”
More annoying than that, though, is that its purpose is to address question three, while not even attempting for a moment to talk about question one.
Sorry, skipped ahead: There are three essential questions about Iraq.
The third question, addressed by the ISG report, is: “Well, now what?” It is obviously an important question, though I think questions one and two are just as important.
Question two is nicely discussed in Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. It is: “Well, if you’re going to do that, shouldn’t you at least do it right?”
The first question, the one that’s been resolved the least effectively but the one that’s still vital, one many Amercans have just given up on or even one that they’re ashamed for some reason to want addressed, is: “What the hell did you do that for?”
Question one should be tattooed backward onto George W. Bush’s forehead. He should have an iPod stapled to his head looping nothing but Cindy Sheehan saying “What the hell did you do that for? What the hell did you do that for? What the hell did you do that for?” (which is, essentially, what she anted to ask him in the first place). He should be forced to write a 500-word essay titled “What The Hell I Did That For,” and points will be taken off for spelling and grammar.
Because as of today, the number of Americans killed in this Dirty Big War has passed 2,900.
That’s the population of Hampshire, Ill. It’s the number of people killed in coal mining accidents in China. It’s 151 more people than were killed in the World Trade Center.
We watched George W. Bush and his closest staffers mouth like synchronized swimmers that, if we hesitated, the smoking gun could become a turnip truck. I mean, mushroom cloud. And they had to Zamboni away from that rationale and on down the road, until now, when, as noted in my first graf, all they’ve got left is to point at their opponents and call ‘em homos.
We are nowhere near coming close to answering question one. We’re not even asking it anymore; we got shamed out of asking it anymore. But we can’t just shrug our shoulders anymore and figure that we broke it and bought it and had it bagged and that we’re on our way back to the car now so we might as well not ask what happened. It’s still relevant. It’s still important. It is still indeed Question Number One. So jot it down and stick it in your wallet for in case you run into your congressman or your mayor or your president tomorrow, so you can look him right in his eyes and go, Sir, I have an important question for you: What the hell did you do that for?
James Baker’s New Test In Diplomacy
CBS
Dec. 6, 2006
WASHINGTON — For more than 30 years, James Baker has been both a behind-the-scenes political operator and a very public statesman - much of it in the service of his close friend, the first President Bush.
Baker now co-chairs the panel that will suggest a change of strategy in Iraq, CBS News White House correspondent Bill Plante reports. So here’s the question: Is Baker acting as a friend of the family, trying to help his friend’s son out of a tight spot -or is there more to it than that?
“Jim Baker is always an honest broker,” says former White House Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein. “If he can help the family and help other families, I think he really strikes a twofer.”
It isn’t the first time Baker has extended his hand to this president. Six years ago in Florida, he managed the legal strategy that delivered the White House for George W. Bush.
Baker has been White House Chief of Staff for two presidents, as well as Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State. He helped put together the coalition that joined the U.S. in the Gulf War - and knew enough then to anticipate the dangers of marching to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
“Jim Baker is one of these rare people that comes along once in a while who’s smart - smart not only intellectually and from experience, but street smart,” says former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Michael Deaver.
Back in 1990, Baker convinced Syria to join the Gulf War coalition against Saddam Hussein. Now, he wants this George Bush to talk to Syria … and Iran, too.
“It has to be hard-nosed, it has to be determined,” Baker said in a television interview in October. “You don’t give away anything, but in my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”
But this president may not be in much of a hurry to accept Baker’s ideas about that - or much else. Asked if Baker would help implement the report, a spokesman for Mr. Bush said, “Jim Baker can go back to his day job.”
The Other Iraq Study Not Getting Much Attention
Michelle Pilecki
12.07.2006
Not to imply that the report from the Iraq Study Group isn’t worth covering, but how about what’s “quickly becoming the largest” refugee crisis in the world, according to the London Guardian.
Last month, the UN estimated that 100,000 people were fleeing the country each month, with the number of Iraqis now living in other Arab countries standing at 1.8 million.
The newspaper was flagging “Iraq: The World’s Fastest Growing Refugee Crisis,” a new report from the Washington-based Refugees International.. The report’s major findings:
* The violence in Iraq has reached a deadly tipping point: Most Iraqis feel threatened.
* Neighboring countries are being overwhelmed by the massive influx of Iraqi refugees.
* The UN High Commissioner for Refugees does not have enough resources to assist Iraqi refugees in the Middle East.
* Conditions for Palestinians from Iraq and other third country nationals are especially desperate and bleak.
The group’s recommendations call for a greater role by Western nations — which, incidentally, are becoming the destination of choice among many fleeing Iraqis, legal or not. “The United States and its allies sparked the current chaos in Iraq,” the group’s president, Kenneth Bacon, told the Guardian, “but they are doing little to ease the humanitarian crisis caused by the current exodus.”
Senate Armed Services Plays Taps for the Constitution
Ray McGovern, TruthOut
Thursday 07 December 2006
It felt yesterday like paying last respects to the Constitution of the United States at the wake orchestrated by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the very reverend John Warner, gentleman for Virginia, presiding. On the surface, the ceremony was about confirming Robert Gates to be secretary of defense. But at a deeper level, it was quite a sorry spectacle, as pretentious heads and patrician manners once trumped courage, and vitiated the prerogative carefully honed by the framers of our Constitution for the Senate to advise and consent.
In other news, “a series of particularly brutal attacks across Baghdad Tuesday resulted in at least 54 Iraqis killed and scores wounded,” according to the New York Times. The US military announced that three more American soldiers were killed Monday, adding to the 13 killed over the weekend. And five Marines are expected to be charged today with the killing of 24 Iraqis, many of them women and children, in the village of Haditha in November 2005.
No such bothersome details about this misbegotten war were allowed into evidence yesterday by the stuffed shirts sitting in stuffed seats in a hearing room stuffed with 80 stenographers from our domesticated press. Rather, the ornate hearing room seemed to serve as a kind of funeral parlor for the Constitution.
That Gates would be given a free pass without serious probing was already clear in ranking member Carl Levins’s (D-Mich.) deference to lame-duck chairman John Warner’s (R-Va.) plan for a carefully scripted hearing, at which senators could disregard new, documentary evidence of Gates’s deception of Congress and the independent counsel for Iran-Contra. Holding the hearing so quickly after Gates’s nomination also made it possible for him to say, in effect, “Gosh, I just got here; didn’t know about that; haven’t read that, but I’ll put that on the top of my reading pile.”
Fully expecting that Levin’s Democratic colleagues would join him in acquiescing in the charade, anti-war activists told me before the hearing began that they had come prepared with a chant:
You won the elections. Now ask real questions!
I later learned that the activists left after only an hour, to avoid becoming physically ill at the unseemly spectacle of the courtly fawning, as troops and Iraqi civilians get blown up in Baghdad.
They said they started feeling queasy after a brief ray of hope was abruptly dashed during Warner’s introductory remarks, when he alluded to what he called the “moral obligation that our government, the executive and legislative, has to the brave men and women of our armed forces.” Moral obligation; sounded good! Oops. Its not what you might think. By “moral obligation,” Warner meant merely that the president “privately consult with the bipartisan leadership of the new Congress” before making his “final decisions” on Iraq. It gets worse: Witness the hypocrisy shining through the distinguished senator’s admonition to Gates:
In short, you simply have to be fearless, I repeat, fearless in discharging your statutory obligations.
Fearless fawning is what followed. It doesn’t matter how many times Warner and Levin have dropped into the hermetically sealed Green Zone in Baghdad. There is always the “In other news….” And despite the ample affectation yesterday, none of the senators there is affected in any immediate way by the carnage at the Green Zone gate. It is our soldiers and Iraqi civilians who are Lazarus at the gate. And, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
From Gates: Candor or Disingenuousness?
On weapons of mass destruction: Little attention is being given to the disingenuous response Gates gave to this question from Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Ohio):
Given what we know today about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, given the predicament that we’re in today, with the benefit of hindsight, would you say that invading Iraq was the right decision or the wrong decision?
Gates left it to “historians” to decide. Defending his early support for the invasion, he resorted to the tried and tested FOX News red herring: “I thought he [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction … just like every other intelligence service in the world, apparently, including the French.”
Now, please, Dr. Gates: You know better than most where other intelligence services get strategic weapons-related information on denied areas like Iraq. From us. Independent-minded intelligence analysts in the Australian and Danish intelligence services were able to see through the deception and took courageous steps to notify leaders of their governments.
On links between Iraq and al-Qaeda: Senator Levin reminded Gates that he recently told the senator that he saw no “evidence of a link between Iraq under Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.” Why then, asked Levin, did Gates say publicly in February 2002 that:
We know that at least one of the leaders of the September 11 hijackers met twice in Prague with Iraqi intelligence officers in the months before the attack.
Levin wanted to know the source of that nformation. “Strictly a newspaper story, sir,” said Gates. Now that seems odd. For Robert Gates is not used to relying on newspaper stories to make sweeping assertions on such neuralgic issues. It seems likely he would have gotten “confirmation” from his successor as CIA director, arch-neoconservative James Woolsey, who cooked up and - together with Vice President Dick Cheney - promoted that cockamamie story to a fare-thee-well.
McNamara: The No New Ideas
In one moment of genuine - perhaps unintended - candor, Gates indicated he thought there were no new ideas to be had in addressing the conflict in Iraq. The suggestions made public today by the Iraq Study Group tend to substantiate that sad conclusion.
How about old ideas? Like dispatching more training teams to work with Iraqi security forces. Gates said, “That certainly is an option.” And he vowed to show “great deference to the judgment of generals.” New emphasis on the training mission is what General John Abizaid told the committee less than three weeks ago is a “major change.” Is that the “new” strategy? It is a feckless exercise, as we know from Vietnam. Been there; done that; should have known that.
Three months after John Kennedy’s death, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent President Lyndon Johnson a draft of a major speech McNamara planned to give on defense policy. What follows is a segment of an audiotape of a conversation between the two on February 25, 1964:
Johnson: Your speech is good, but I wonder if you shouldn’t find two minutes to devote to Vietnam.
McNamara: The problem is what to say about it.
Johnson: I’ll tell you what to say about it. I would say we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. We could pull out there; the dominoes would fall and that part of the world would go to the Communists … Nobody really understands what is out there … Our purpose is to train [the South Vietnamese] people, and our training’s going good.
McNamara: All right, sir.
It wasn’t “going good” then and - as countless middle-grade American officers have now conceded - it’s not going good now, despite our having thrown our best generals at the problem. Hewing to this misguided approach betrays the “woodenheadedness” of which historian Barbara Tuchman speaks in From Troy to Vietnam: The March of Folly. Almost always, it is a forlorn hope that unwelcome occupation troops can train indigenous soldiers and police to fight against their own brothers and sisters. That the British seem to have forgotten that, as well, is really no excuse.
Speaking Truth to Power?
Yesterday’s charade at the Senate Armed Forces Committee included repeated allusion to the biblical injunction to “speak truth to power.” This has never been Robert Gates’s forte. Rather, his modus operandi has always been to ingratiate himself with the one with the power, and then recite - or write memos about - what he believes that person would like to hear. Thus, while CIA Director Bill Casey’s “analysis” suggested that the Soviets would use Nicaragua as a beachhead to invade Texas, Gates pandered by writing a memo on December 14, 1984, suggesting US air strikes “to destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua’s military buildup.”
This makes me wonder what may be in store for Iran, if Cheney solicits help from Gates in making the case for bombing.
Gates may have “fresh eyes,” but if past is precedent he will add but marginally to the flavor of the self-licking ice cream cone that passes for Bush’s coterie of advisers. What Bush has done is substitute Sugary Gates for Rumsfeldian Tart. Otherwise, the Cheney/Bush recipe is likely to remain the same as the US draws nearer and nearer to the abyss in Iraq.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
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December 7th, 2006