Via Stirling Newberry, today's New York Times gets shrill:

To have the sober conversation about the war in Iraq that America badly needs, it is vital to acknowledge three facts:

The war has nothing to do with Sept. 11. Saddam Hussein was a sworn enemy of Washington, but there was no Iraq-Qaeda axis, no connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks on the United States. Yet the president and his supporters continue to duck behind 9/11 whenever they feel pressure about what is happening in Iraq. The most cynical recent example was Karl Rove's absurd and offensive declaration this week that conservatives and liberals had different reactions to 9/11. Let's be clear: Americans of every political stripe were united in their outrage and grief, united in their determination to punish those who plotted the mass murder and united behind the war in Afghanistan, which was an assault on terrorists. Trying to pretend otherwise is the surest recipe for turning political dialogue into meaningless squabbling.

The war has not made the world, or this nation, safer from terrorism. The breeding grounds for terrorists used to be Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia; now Iraq has become one. Of all the justifications for invading Iraq that the administration juggled in the beginning, the only one that has held up over time is the desire to create a democratic nation that could help stabilize the Middle East. Any sensible discussion of what to do next has to begin by acknowledging that. The surest way to make sure that conversation does not happen is for the administration to continue pasting the "soft on terror" label on those who want to talk about the war.

If the war is going according to plan, someone needs to rethink the plan. Progress has been measurable on the political front. But even staunch supporters of the war, like the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a hearing this week that President Bush was losing public support because the military effort was not keeping pace. A top general said this week that the insurgency was growing. The frequency of attacks is steady, or rising a bit, while the repulsive tactic of suicide bombings has made them more deadly.

If things are going to be turned around, there has to be an honest discussion about what is happening. But Mr. Rumsfeld was not interested. Sneering at his Democratic questioners, he insisted everything was on track and claimed "dozens of trained battalions are capable of conducting anti-insurgent operations" with American support. That would be great news if it were true. Gen. George Casey, the commander in Iraq, was more honest, saying he hoped there would be "a good number of units" capable of doing that "before the end of this year."

Americans cannot judge for themselves because the administration has decided to make the information secret. Senator John McCain spoke for us when he expressed his disbelief at this news. "I think the American people need to know," he said. "They are the ones who are paying for this conflict."

I'm stepping over copyright and using the whole editorial because I really, really want to keep it. (But please click to the New York Times web site and read some of their ads!)

 

Also via Stirling, Max and Angry Bear discuss some of the many ways we are vulnerable to China. See also this New York Times editorial.

 

Via Steve M, Dan Mitchell writes in the New York Times about all the wonderful technological progress we've made under our MBA president:

President Bill Clinton and Al Gore, his vice president, did much to encourage development of the country's technology infrastructure, writes Thomas Bleha in an article accessible on the Foreign Affairs magazine Web site (www.foreignaffairs.org).

From the 1960's until the day President Bush took office, he writes, "The United States led the world in Internet development."

No longer. The Bush administration's policies, or lack thereof, have since allowed Asia - Japan in particular - to not only catch up in the development and expansion of broadband and mobile phone technology, but to roundly pound us into the dirt....

And speaking of incompetence, Jeanne d'Arc has a follow-up to the Italian arrest warrant story that I know you will want to read.

 

...There is much merit in what Mr. Starr writes - though he and I fundamentally disagree as to why liberalism is edging toward irrelevance. I believe the reason can be seen when comparing conservatism with liberalism.

Conservatives believe in lower taxes; liberals believe in higher taxes. We want few regulations; they want more. Conservatives measure the effectiveness of government programs by results; liberals measure the effectiveness of government programs by inputs. We believe in curbing the size of government; they believe in expanding the size of government. Conservatives believe in making America a less litigious society; liberals believe in making America a more litigious society. We believe in accountability and parental choice in education; they don't. Conservatives believe in advancing what Pope John Paul II called a "culture of life"; liberals believe there is an absolute unlimited right to abortion.

But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and 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. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to… submit a petition. I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what Moveon.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be" to "use moderation and restraint in responding to the… terrorist attacks against the United States."

He said liberals. He didn't say, "MoveOn.org saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." He said liberals. The context of the remarks is clear: Conservatives are this, but liberals are that. Then he offered MoveOn as an example of liberal wussiness.

He said liberals.

Andrew Sullivan:

The rubric Rove used was the "conservative-liberal" rubric, in which the entire polity is bifurcated into one type or the other. All non-liberals are, in Rove's rubric, conservatives; and all non-conservatives are liberals. This is in keeping with the very familiar electoral tactic of describing even moderate or centrist Democrats as "liberals" with as broad a brush as possible. Rove, in other words, cannot have it both ways. He cannot both use the word liberal to describe everyone who is not a Republican and then, in other contexts, say he means it only for the hard left. Rove is a smart guy. He picked his words carefully. A simple addition of the word "some" would have rendered his comments completely inoffensive. But he left that qualifier out. For a reason. I see no difference between his generalizations and Howard Dean's unhinged rants about Republicans. Except that Rove is running an administration that is running a vital war. With that kind of power should come a tiny bit more responsibility.

It's true that there were some liberals opposed to a military response to 9/11. I believe these were a small minority, but some. I believe Michael Moore was one; Howard Dean, however, was not. In any event, I have never felt a need to "repudiate" people just for holding an opinion different from mine. On the whole, liberals put less stock in ideological purity than conservatives do. And, on the whole, liberals were behind a hard and fast response to the 9/11 attacks.    

Regarding MoveOn, it appears to me the righties are trying to conflate positions taken by individuals associated with MoveOn and the positions of the organization itself. Or not. So far they haven't shown me anything that proves MoveOn opposed military action in Afghanistan.

And Karl Rove said liberals. 

Go read what New Yorker Steve Gilliard wrote. Here's just a part:

 As a New York, I find this the equvilient of blood libel. (You know, the lie that the Jews used Christian babies blood for matzoh). No one asked what party 343 firemen belonged to when they died, or the 34 policemen. No one asked what party nine members of the 69th Regiment, New York City's own infantry regiment with a lineage going back to WW I, were when they were killed in Iraq, two of whom were immigrants, one a Pakistani muslim. No one asked and no one cared.

To say that New Yorkers, who are 5-1 Democrats, are shirking from the service of their country is an insult to them and their service. No one asked for party enrollment when they took their oath and it is wrong to suggest that it matters now. Many New Yorkers, and Califonians as well, have died in the service of their country in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But, to you. birdman, I think it makes you feel all big and manly to say that. After all, you're not going to Iraq. You're not burying anyone killed there. So why should care if they're defamed by the President's aide? It doesn't effect anyone you know. right?

Let me explain something birdman: I smelled the dead in my windows for a week after 9/11. While you sat back and worried about some Sikh blowing up your mall, every time I took a breath, burning flesh and paper filled my nose. Every day, for a year, I opened the paper to read about yet another funeral. On nice, sunny days, I get reminded of 9/11.

Then, I get to read about how Congress wants to pull $125m in aid for Ground Zero workers.

So don't fucking lecture me about defending the people who protect my city. You don't drive by the firehouse memorials on every goddamn firehouse in the city. You don't see the stories about fucked up families left behind. You live in a fantasy world where big strong men kill the brown people and make you feel like a man. We know what they did for us far better than you ever will, no matter how much you pretend to understand. You don't. And you never will and you never want to.

Amen.

There's nothing that enrages me more than the smug assumption of a lot of righties that they own 9/11. Invariably these people were hundreds of miles away at the time. Yet they think they can dictate to New Yorkers what's going to be built on Ground Zero; they think they can lecture New Yorkers about the dangers of terrorism.

I say it's time for the righties to think again.

But now the righties are trying to stand by Karl's remarks while fudging what he actually said. Don't let them get away with this.

He said liberals.

America's founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That's why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion.

 

But after 9/11 President Bush, with obvious relish, declared himself a "war president." And he kept the nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein.

In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - but she made it clear that Mr. Bush was the exception. And she was right.

And we've learned from Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill and the Downing Street Memos that the Bushies were so eager to go to war with Iraq that they manufactured the casus belli out of thin air.

No, not reluctant at all.

And here, friends, is exactly where we are now: 

The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.

On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.

We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.

Yep, that's it. That's exactly it.

Prosecutors believe the officers seized Omar as part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terror suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, according to reports Friday in newspapers Corriere della Sera and Il Giorno.

The statement said Omar was attacked by two people while walking from home to a local mosque and hustled into a white van. He was taken to Aviano, a joint U.S.-Italian base north of Venice; another American air base in Ramstein, Germany; and then Cairo.

Investigators confirmed the abduction through an eyewitness account and other, unidentified witnesses, the statement said. .

The statement said Omar was abused by interrogators in Egypt, according to phone calls made by Omar from Egypt to his wife and another unnamed Egyptian citizen in April-May, 2004.

Italian papers have reported that Omar, 42, said in the calls he was tortured with electric shocks.

On Friday, Corriere della Sera cited another Milan-based imam as telling Italian authorities that Omar had been tortured in Egypt after refusing to work in Italy as an informer.

According to the testimony, Omar was hung upside down and subjected to extreme temperatures and loud noise that damaged his hearing, Corriere reported.

The judge also issued an arrest warrant for Omar on terrorism charges.  "In that warrant, Judge Guido Salvini claimed the seizure of Omar represented a violation of Italian sovereignty, according to Italian news agency Apcom. "

I've been wondering how the CIA was getting away with snatching so many people on foreign soil. I guess maybe now they won't always get away with it.

"They haven't avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and other accusations of mistreatment and of torture," the Committee member said.

"They said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished."

The US report said that those involved were low-ranking members of the military and that their acts were not approved by their superiors, the member added.

Yeah, right.

We may be looking at a new variation on plausible deniability. I don't for a minute think the White House is out of the loop. However, I do suspect that great care has been taken not to leave a documentation trail to upper management. It's also possible the Bushies are making small admissions now to innocuate the White House from the political impact of bigger revelations to come.  Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, Jeanne d'Arc has the Annotated Quote of the Day:

"There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people. They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want." -- Dick Cheney

Kinda makes you want to send Dick the Dick to Gitmo so he can enjoy the facilities himself, huh?

Via Diane Greenhalgh at TAPPED, be sure to check out Torture and Tribunals. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Must read: Stirling Newberry, "Reality Rains Down on the Republicans"

Bush, who owns 1.8 percent of the Rangers, has been personally  enriched by using the "governing elite" and the "central bureaucracy" not only to confiscate land for private  purposes, but to get a huge public subsidy for a stadium that generates profits for himself and the Texas  Rangers. Though Bush's present ownership percentage in the team is relatively small, the asset represents  a large part of his personal wealth; moreover, Bush's deal with the team includes a provision that will  almost certainly multiply his future ownership interest to 11 percent.

Briefly, here's what happened on the Ballpark deal. Bush and his partners in the Rangers convinced  Arlington officials to:

pass a half cent sales tax to pay for 70 percent of the stadium;   use the government's powers of eminent domain to condemn land the Rangers couldn't or didn't  want to buy on the open market;   give the Rangers control over what happens in and around the stadium;  allow the Rangers to buy the stadium (which cost $191 million to construct) for just $60 million;   finally, after twelve years as the sole occupant and primary beneficiary of the stadium project, the Rangers, a privately owned business, can take title to the most expensive stadium ever built in Texas for the $60 million worth of rent and upkeep they will have already paid the city.

Between the sales tax revenue, state tax exemptions, and other financial incentives, Texas taxpayers handed the privately owned Rangers more than $200 million in public subsidies. Taxpayers didn't get a return from the stadium's surging new revenues, either. The profits went almost exclusively to the team's already wealthy owners.

Two hours southwest of Arlington, in the grimy office of his Whitney, Tex., used-car lot, Bucky Fanning puffs on a cigarette and talks about how his family got the short end of the stadium stick, how the city of Arlington seized his family's horse ranch in 1991 and gave it to the Texas Rangers. There were winners in the deal, he says - among them George W. Bush and his partners, and Tom Hicks, the wealthy real estate developer they sold the team to - and there were losers.

He was one of the losers.

"Anybody who was in their way, they just ran them over," says Fanning, a soft-spoken man whose anger rises as he talks about the ballpark. "I used to be a Rangers fan, but then they stole my property."

Fanning's grandparents bought the 10-acre spread in 1942 to raise Thoroughbreds. Now it is a little-used parking lot on the east side of the stadium. "Bush didn't need our land for a ballpark," Fanning says. "He wanted it for his own personal gain."

According to court documents from lawsuits filed by Fanning and other Arlington landowners, the Bush partnership wasn't just interested in baseball: The group hoped to profit by developing property around the new park.

A decade later, the land remains undeveloped. The riverwalk is a sidewalk next to a muddy creek in an empty park named after Greene. The amphitheater is a slab of concrete. The silt-choked lake is too shallow for sailing, and the gondolas were never built.

"They lied through their teeth," says Arlington businessman Bill Eastland, a ballpark critic.

...Bush and his partners weren't satisfied lining their pockets with average Texans' hard-earned cash. They wanted land around the stadium to further boost its value. To that end, they orchestrated a land grab that shortchanged local landowners by several million dollars. ...

...When confronted with the seamy details of the land grab, Bush professed ignorance. But Tom Schieffer, the team's president, has testified that he kept Bush aware of the land transfers. In October 1990, Bush also let slip to a reporter for the Fort Worth Star- Telegram, "The idea of making a land play, absolutely, to plunk the field down in the middle of a big piece of land, that's kind of always been the strategy."

1. The White House released the TEXT of Rove's speech today. According to my sources who know about such things, that NEVER happens. This is prima facie evidence that the White House coordinated this thing from the beginning.

2. The RNC put out talking points today about how the Democrats "blamed America" for September 11. Those detailed talking points were clearly prepared well in advance of this noon today when this thing blew up. WE BLAMED AMERICA?

3. The RNC today reportedly released a new attack web ad going after Durbin for his comments about Guantanamo Bay. Isn't that convenient that something that took at least a few days to prepare was suddenly ready today at the same time that Karl Rove made his comments that anyone who recognizes that Bush has no idea what's going on Iraq is a traitor who loves Osama.

The big question is whether we are seeing miscues by the administration or whether they are simply trying to rile up the base to change the conversation. Some signs point to a tactical decision. Bush himself recently gave quite a petulant little speech recently in which he blamed all his troubles on the Democrats (I guess having a majority in both houses just isn't what it used to be) --- although he didn't stoop to puerile Ann Coulter level snottiness as Rove did.

Karl Rove's un-American attacks on those who disagree with him deserve the condemnation they're receiving. I've known him for 20 years, and I'm not surprised he said them. He's a socially inept but patient thug whose willingness to haunt the nation's dark political alleys for years, waiting for the right time and the right victims, is too often taken for unparalleled political intelligence. ...

... Rove's a hack. His strength comes from his immorality. There are no barriers. If power didn't corrupt, Rove would have corrupted it.

I've been on the road in America for much of the last two years. I'm asked all the time about the need for Democrats to find their own Karl Rove. If we ever find such a monster in our midst, we should exile him.

I like the black hat Rove wears, but it troubles me that so many people believe he really is a political genius. He's just pathological.

For years I've suspected that Rove is stuck in an adolescent rage, taking revenge upon the Civil Rights marchers (whose courage he couldn't match), the anti-war organizers (who beat him), and those who believe in and struggle for democracy (who drove off Nixon).

I don't recommend therapy for Bin Laden. But Rove might give Dr. Laura a call.

As a veteran of eight years in therapy, and a fascinated student of the process, it should be noted that people who publicly deride it tend to actually be those who know they need it most. Latent On-the-Couch-iality or something. Somewhere from deep inside Mr. Rove is screaming "get me a shrink."

MoveOn PAC

 

Statement by Eli Pariser, Executive Director of MoveOn PAC,

in Response to Karl Rove’s Attempt to Distract Attention from

President’s Failed Iraq Policy:

 

Karl Rove is trying to change the subject on the President’s failed Iraq policy. Even members of his own party, like Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, has criticized the Administration as “...completely disconnected from reality. It’s like they’re making it up as they go along....” Recent polls show growing majorities want an exit strategy. Lying about MoveOn won't solve Rove’s problem. MoveOn did not oppose the U.S. military action in Afghanistan.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My main article focused on the separate briefing paper for those taking part, prepared beforehand by Cabinet Office experts.

It said that Blair agreed at Crawford that "the UK would support military action to bring about regime change." Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was "necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action."  

Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about "wrong-footing" Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.

British officials hoped the [UN] ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.

Plan B appears in the July 23 memo, which

...quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the U.S. had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

And let us not forget that in the summer of 2002, the Bushies siphoned $700 million from money appropriated for Afghanistan and used it for pre-Iraq War "prep."

But these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

Michael Smith is right; this is the real news that the media and politicians have not yet addressed. 

The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.

When you throw in the facts that Bush exceeded the authority given him by the 2002 Senate resolution and violated the War Powers Act, the words "impeachable offense" do spring to mind.

See also: Molly Ivins, "Dismissing Downing Street"

The "maverick" Sen. John McCain echoed one of the Left's most oft-cited and erroneous complaints about Gitmo on NBC's "Meet The Press" this weekend -- that detainees have been denied trials:

 "The weight of evidence has got to be that we've got to adjudicate these people's cases, and . . . if it means releasing some of them, you'll have to release them. Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial." (Can we put a lid on the Nazi analogies already? Crikey. A Knight-Ridder reporter was too smitten to be bothered by his Eichmann-invoking hyperbole: "McCain is emerging as a voice of conscience and nuance on the stay-or-go Guantanamo issue." Nuance?)

[And, like, what would McCain know about military detention, anyway? Vietnam is so over.]

 GOP Sen. Lindsay Graham, another newly christened "maverick" who appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball" last week, lodged similar allegations about the absence of trials for Gitmo detainees:

  "We need a procedure and process that will allow us to determine who an enemy combatant is, interrogate them to make us safer in a humane way, and set up trials for the worst offenders and repatriate those who -- who don't meet the category of a -- of a threat. That, to me, would look good to the world. It would make us safer."

 My friend, Judge Andrew Napolitano, made a similar assertion on Fox News's "O'Reilly Factor" last week: "The government is not giving them those trials."

 And now, the facts:

 Every single detainee currently being held at Guantanamo Bay has received a hearing before a military tribunal. Every one.

Two administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Vice President Cheney has made Bolton's nomination a personal priority and lobbied Bush to keep fighting for an up-or-down vote.