Monthly Archives: January 2006

Deja Vu

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Is it just me, or does it seem to you the Right is more frantic than usual these days?

This week, through the media echo chamber, the VRWC has fallen back to snapping at the Clintons. They’re on the third day of a rampage because Hillary Clinton said Congress is run like a plantation — Chris Matthews has been wanking over Hillary and the P word since Tuesday — and they managed to place “Clinton” and “Cover-Up” together in a headline in today’s New York Times. On page 1, right under the masthead, no less. Seems like old times.

Like the plantation flap, the Times‘s story — “Inquiry on Clinton Official Ends With Accusations of Cover-Up” — is one that begs the question, “What is it about the Clintons that drives righties batshit crazy?” Here’s the lede:

After the longest independent counsel investigation in history, the prosecutor in the case of former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros is finally closing his operation with a scathing report accusing Clinton administration officials of thwarting an inquiry into whether Mr. Cisneros evaded paying income taxes.

Yes, indeed; the investigation of Henry Cisneros, which cost taxpayers $21 million and lasted more than a decade, is finally closed.

You might recall that in the long-ago days of the Clinton Administration, Cisneros was indicted on 18 felony counts, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of lying to investigators, and eventually was pardoned by President Bill C. Yet the prosecutor, David M. Barrett, has been toiling away these six years since trying to pin more indictments on Cisneros, and he blames a Clinton cover-up for his inability to do so. (It couldn’t possibly be because Barrett is an incompetent investigator or that there wasn’t any more wrongdoing by Cisneros for an investigation to uncover, huh?)

Barrett’s final report will be made available today. The Times says is “reveals little new about the accusations that led to Mr. Barrett’s appointment” in the 1990s.

But, sure enough, the report was “leaked” to the New York Times early — “A copy of the report was obtained by The New York Times from someone sympathetic to the Barrett investigation who wanted his criticism of the Clinton administration to be known.” And it worked, too; the righties got their “Clinton Cover-up” headline.

In spite of the Times’s compliance with the VRWC program, some rightie bloggers are screaming about liberal bias. Makes me wonder what the Times would have to do to appease them.

The rest of the article consists of Barrett accusing the Justice Department and IRS officials of hiding evidence that would have incriminated Cisneros, and JD and IRS officials saying that Barlett is too incompetent to sort his own socks. The ever-optimistic Captain Ed writes that the story “will prove explosive to the 2006 re-election effort of Hillary Clinton, but even more damaging to her expected run at the Presidency in 2008.” So some good may come of it after all. However, seems to me that unless Barrett has actually uncovered something new it’s going to be hard for the Right to sustain this story long enough to impact the elections, no matter how hard the VRWC flogs it.

But, no question, today the VRWC wins on points. These are some of the stories not on the front page of the New York Times: “White House won’t discuss meetings between officials, Abramoff“; “Congressional Agency Questions Legality of Wiretaps“; and “Going Nuclear: Iran and North Korea seem determined to build up arsenals of nuclear weapons.” I say righties should enjoy success when they’ve achieved it.

SCOTUS Punts on Abortion

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Just posted at the New York Times, by the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that a lower court was wrong to strike down New Hampshire abortion restrictions, steering clear of a major ruling on they placed an undue burden on women. …

… Justices said a lower court went too far by permanently blocking the law that requires a parent to be told before a daughter ends her pregnancy.

An appeals court must now reconsider the law, which requires that a parent be informed 48 hours before a minor child has an abortion but makes no exception for a medical emergency that threatens the youth’s health.

The opinion was written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The AP points out this may be the last SCOTUS opinion she will write.

An appeals court must now reconsider the law, which requires that a parent be informed 48 hours before a minor child has an abortion but makes no exception for a medical emergency that threatens the youth’s health.

I’d like to read the decision before writing much about it. The AP story highlights the fact that the justices had been asked to decide if the Nebraska law had put an undue burden on young women seeking an abortion. Instead, the court punted the decision back to lower courts.

Update: Carnival of the Feminists at Feministe.

Update update: Written decision here (PDF).

More Liberal Bias

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Seems to me that if the dreaded “MSM” were really hellbent on making the Bush Administration look bad, this story would have been more widely reported in the U.S. press. Had I not spotted it in The Guardian (UK) today I might not have noticed it at all —

Julian Borger of The Guardian writes,

An official assessment drawn up by the US foreign aid agency depicts the security situation in Iraq as dire, amounting to a “social breakdown” in which criminals have “almost free rein”.

The “conflict assessment” is an attachment to an invitation to contractors to bid on a project rehabilitating Iraqi cities published earlier this month by the US Agency for International Development (USAid).

The picture it paints is not only darker than the optimistic accounts from the White House and the Pentagon, it also gives a more complex profile of the insurgency than the straightforward “rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists” described by George Bush.

The USAid analysis talks of an “internecine conflict” involving religious, ethnic, criminal and tribal groups. “It is increasingly common for tribesmen to ‘turn in’ to the authorities enemies as insurgents – this as a form of tribal revenge,” the paper says, casting doubt on the efficacy of counter-insurgent sweeps by coalition and Iraqi forces.

Meanwhile, foreign jihadist groups are growing in strength, the report said.

The Guardian said this story was first reported in the Washington Post. Sure enough, it was — yesterday, buried on page A13. Walter Pincus wrote that the dire report was an annex to a request for contractors to bid on a $1.32 billion project to help stabilize Iraqi cities.

To prepare potential bidders for the task, USAID included an annex with the contractor application. It describes Iraq as being in the midst of an insurgency whose tactics “include creating chaos in Iraq society as a whole and fomenting civil war.” Many of the attacks are against coalition and Iraqi security forces, the annex says, and they “significantly damage the country’s infrastructure and cause a tide of adverse economic and social effects that ripple across Iraq.”

Is that supposed to encourage bidders?

Although President Bush and senior administration officials tend to see the enemy primarily as Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists, the USAID analysis also places emphasis on “internecine conflict,” which includes “religious-sectarian, ethnic, tribal, criminal and politically based” violence.

The Sunni-vs.-Shiite violence goes back centuries. Today, the differences are being exploited on both sides as Sunni bombings of Shiite sites along with kidnappings and killings have been matched by Shiite retaliation and revenge killings of Sunnis.

“It is increasingly common for tribesmen to ‘turn in’ to the authorities enemies as insurgents, this as a form of tribal revenge,” the paper says.

The activities of religious extremists against secular Iraqis were also noted by USAID. The paper describes how in the southern part of Iraq, which is dominated by Shiites, “social liberties have been curtailed dramatically by roving bands of self-appointed religious-moral police.” In cities, women’s dress codes are enforced and barbers who remove facial hair have been killed, and liquor stores and clubs have been bombed.

Get this:

The USAID paper describes some findings that in the past were carried only in classified briefings, congressional sources said.

In other words, it’s not like the White House and Congress are utterly unaware of this. They just aren’t telling us. And neither is most of the “liberal” media.

Which leaves us with getting the truth from Riverbend, who posts today about Iraqi reconstruction, then and now.

In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, southern Iraq was badly damaged.

What happened in the south in 1991 is similar to what happened in Baghdad in 2003- burning, looting and attacks. The area fell into chaos after the Republican Guard was pulled out to different governorates for the duration of the war. Meanwhile, the US was bombing the Iraqi army as it was pulling out of Kuwait and the Tawabin were killing off some of the Iraqi troops who had abandoned their tanks and artillery and were coming back on foot through the south. Many of those troops, and the civilians killed during the attacks, looting, and burning, were buried in some of the mass graves we conveniently blame solely on Saddam and the Republican Guard- but no one bothers to mention this anymore because it’s easier to blame the dictator.

But I digress- the topic today is reconstruction. Immediately after the war, various ministries were brought together to do the reconstruction work. The focus was on the infrastructure- to bring back the refineries, electricity, water, bridges, and telecommunications.

The task was a daunting one because so many of Iraq’s major infrastructure projects and buildings had been designed and built by foreign contractors from all over the world including French, German, Chinese and Japanese companies. The foreign expertise was unavailable after 1991 due to the war and embargo and Iraqi engineers and technicians found themselves facing the devastation of the Gulf War all alone with limited supplies.

Two years and approximately 8 billion Iraqi dinars later, nearly 90% of the damage had been repaired. It took an estimated 6,000 engineers (all Iraqi), 42,000 technicians, and 12,000 administrators, but bridges were soon up again, telephones were more or less functioning in most areas, refineries were working, water was running and electricity wasn’t back 100%, but it was certainly better than it is today. Within the first two years over 100 small and large bridges had been reconstructed, 16 refineries, over 50 factories and industrial compounds, etc.

It wasn’t perfect- it wasn’t Halliburton… It wasn’t KBR…but it was Iraqi. There was that sense of satisfaction and pride looking upon a building or bridge that was damaged during the war and seeing it up and running and looking better than it did before.

So how does the U.S. reconstruction measure up?

Now, nearly three years after this war, the buildings are still piles of debris. Electricity is terrible. Water is cut off for days at a time. Telephone lines come and go. Oil production isn’t even at pre-war levels… and Iraqis hear about the billions upon billions that come and go. A billion here for security… Five hundred million there for the infrastructure… Millions for voting… Iraq falling into deeper debt… Engineers without jobs simply because they are not a part of this political party or that religious group… And the country still in shambles.

Let’s skip back to Walter Pincus in WaPo.

Paul Pillar, the CIA’s former national intelligence officer for the Middle East and now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, said the analysis conveyed “the reality that the violence in Iraq is complex and multi-faceted.”

One weakness of the paper, Pillar said, is the underplaying of the “resentment of the foreign occupation.” He said there are Iraqi “nationalists” beyond just the Sunnis who resent the presence of U.S. and other foreign troops. “There is a valid basis for some of the pro-withdrawal arguments,” he said, referring to recent statements by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.).

Seems to me Riverbend makes a case for putting Iraqis in charge of Iraqi reconstruction, also, and then getting out of their way. However, given the mess the U.S. has made of nation-building, and the fact that the Iraqi government is still trying to get on its feet, one wonders if the Iraqis could bring the same focus to rebuilding infrastructure this time.

(Cross-posted to The American Street)

Update: See Jeanne at Body and Soul.

Responsibility

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A few days ago, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, President Bush talked about responsible debate. “The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it,” he said.

So what did Mr. Responsibility’s spokesman do today? He attempted to deflect criticism of his policies with smears and lies. Yeah, real responsible.

Alleged journalist for the Associated Press Nedra Pickler wrote today,

The White House accused former Vice President Al Gore of hypocrisy Tuesday for his assertion that President Bush broke the law by eavesdropping on Americans without court approval. …

… [White House Press Secretary Scott] McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.

“I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds,” McClellan said of Gore.

Pickler, uncharacteristically, did some fact-checking.

But at the time that of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

In December I wrote about this new variation on the righties’ favorite excuse — “Clinton did it too!” — and linked to a report on the Ames investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that says the FBI had obtained the required search warrants and was in compliance with the FISA law in effect at the time. What the righties have done is take part of Jamie Gorelick’s (admittedly confusing) testimony out of context as “proof” of warrantless wiretapping, in spite of other documentation that shows the Clinton administration acted within the law. See also Jack at Ruminate This.

Alberto Gonzales also repeated the lie on last night’s Larry King Live; Think Progress provides a smackdown. See also Steve Soto.

You know righties; once they got some excuse for bad Bush behavior in their heads, no amount of debunking will flush it out. But usually the White House has surrogates spread these little stories, to create some distance between the lie and the President. It seems they’re getting reckless.

In other smear news, E.J. Dionne admits that he “underestimated the viciousness of the right wing.”

Last November, Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat and a decorated Marine combat veteran, came out for a rapid American withdrawal from Iraq. At the time, I wrote: “It will be difficult for Bush’s acolytes to cast Murtha, who has regularly stood up for the military policies of Republican presidents during his 31 years in Congress, as some kind of extreme partisan or hippie protester.”

No, the conservative hit squad didn’t accuse Murtha of being a hippie. But a crowd that regularly defends President Bush for serving in the Texas Air National Guard instead of going to Vietnam has continued its war on actual Vietnam veterans. An outfit called the Cybercast News Service last week questioned the circumstances surrounding the awarding of two Purple Hearts to Murtha because of wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War.

The only surprise, of course, is why a smart guy like E.J. is surprised. Here’s the essential part:

What’s maddening here is the unblushing hypocrisy of the right wing and the way it circulates — usually through Web sites or talk radio — personal vilification to abort honest political debate. Murtha’s views on withdrawing troops from Iraq are certainly the object of legitimate contention. Many in Murtha’s party disagree with him. But Murtha’s right-wing critics can’t content themselves with going after his ideas. They have to try to discredit his service.

Like duh, E.J. Those of us out here in the leftie blog trenches spend most of our time countering rightie smear and disinformation campaigns. Not that it does any good. But it’s a damn shame that, with all the serious problems we face, we can’t have civilized debates based on facts.

And you know what’s funny? Right now I’m listening to Chris Matthews chrip away on Hardball. And he’s asking if Hillary Clinton should apologize for a speech she made yesterday. It’s OK to smear and lie to undermine the Constitution and deceive the American people, but you don’t dare insult the gawdallmighty Republican Party.

Update: Tweety dedicated his entire bleeping program today to Hillary Clinton’s speech, just because she used the word “plantation” to describe Congress. The day after the former vice president of the United States accused the president of breaking the law; and after the White House, through the press secretary and the attorney general, issued lies to smear that former vice president — Tweety spends an hour talking about Hillary Clinton and the “P” word. Bleeping unreal.

Update update: Nice quote by Thomas Frank in the February 2006 Harper’s (not online):

Get a conservative talking about the importance of character” and before long the word “strength” will come up. This is a quality treasured by the right, both on the battlefield and in the risk-taking world of business, and yet the distinguishing stylistic feature of the anti-liberal genre is precisely the opposite: irritability, a keen sensitivity to every last little insult. … Not only is conservatism the ideology of the powerful but conservatives are in command of all three branches of government. And yet the offense taking persists. Outrage is the melodramatic resolution to which all the action inevitably leads, the canned emotional response that every anecdote generates. …

… A convenient rhetorical benefit of this emphasis on electronic speech is that it solves the difficult problems of real-world power – by which I mean a problem that is difficult for conservatives populists who like to depict themselves as society’s victims. If offensive speech is the raw material of politics, then things like ownership or wealth distribution are not worthy of consideration. Nor can the threat posed by liberals be minimized or made to mean less dire by pointing out those liberals’ inability to win elections: as long as liberals exist, getting their ten seconds on TV or posting their liberalisms on the Internet, the danger to America is clear and present.

Staggering Incompetence

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Today’s New York Times story by Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane and Don van Natta Jr. — “Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends,” is not the first to question whether the once-secret NSA wiretapping program was effective. On January 4 Mark Hosenball posted a Newsweek web exclusive that asked the same question — illegal or not, did it work?

Hosenball writes,

Did the National Security Agency’s controversial eavesdropping program really help to detect terrorists or avert their plots? Administration officials have suggested to media outlets like The New York Times–which broke the story–that the spying played a role in at least two well-publicized investigations, one in the United Kingdom and one involving a plan to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.

But before the NSA’s warrantless spying program became public, government spokesmen had previously cited other intelligence and legal tactics as having led to major progress in the same investigations. In the Brooklyn Bridge case, officials indicated that the questioning of a captured Al Qaeda leader had led to investigative breakthroughs in Ohio. In the British case, Justice Department officials told NEWSWEEK a year ago that investigators had made progress by using a controversial provision of the Patriot Act which allows authorities to monitor potentially suspicious activities in public libraries.

In other words, if next week we learn the White House has been getting intelligence from a Ouija board, expect the Bushies to claim the Ouija board helped save the Brooklyn Bridge.

NEWSWEEK reported extensively on these cases when government investigations were coming to fruition. In both instances, officials originally indicated that key investigative developments came from sources other than NSA electronic eavesdropping–then still a closely guarded secret.

And if we’d had that Ouija board before 9/11 — the WTC towers would be standing today.

In the New York Times story linked above, Bergman et al. report that the FBI found the NSA “intelligence” to be a nuisance — “tips” that required a lot of legwork to check out but led to dead ends.

F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips “would always say that we had information whose source we can’t share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Qaeda operative.” He said, “I would always wonder, what does ‘suspected’ mean?”

“The information was so thin,” he said, “and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up.”

More critically, Bergman et al. reveal that the NSA did too snoop on communications that were entirely within the United States.

Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. …

… in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more “calls to Pizza Hut,” one official, who supervised field agents, said.

I’m assuming nobody was ordering pizza from Pakistan.

The New York Times article raises several more questions. One, was the NSA program in fact counterproductive because it wasted FBI time and resources playing Trivial Pursuit?

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators.

And, of course, we are still arguing over the legality of warrantless snooping on American citizens. One argument from the Right is that the nature of data mining makes warrants too cumbersome. On last night’s Hardball someone with expertise in FISA regulations (transcript not yet available) said that it has always been understood that warrants are not necessary for keyword searches, because they don’t involve people. But once the keyword search identifies a “U.S. person,” then law clearly requires a warrant. Seems to me that the process of applying for a warrant, as time consuming as that might be, would have forced the NSA to distinguish dead ends from genuine risks, thereby saving the FBI considerable time. Sort of the old “measure twice, cut once” principle.

Further, it is obvious the NSA program was not limited, or controlled, as the White House claims. We’re being lied to again. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you …

18 Deaths Cancelled!

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Rightie blogger Thomas Lifson says the New York Times ran a fake photo on its web site. A fake staged photo, even.

Is a fake staged photo fit to print? What if it staged in a way that makes the US forces fighting the War on Terror look cruel and ineffective? The evidence argues that yes, it can run, and in a prominent position – at least in the case of the New York Times website.

I did some detective work and learned more about where the fake staged photo came from. But first let’s let Mr. Lifson rant for a while about media bias.

The photo has since been removed from the home page, but still can be seen here.

The picture shows a sad little boy, with a turbaned man next to him, a little bit further from the camera, amid the ruins of a house. Other men and boys peer in from the background. The photo is captioned

    “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border.”

The story it accompanies is about the apparently failed attempt to take out al Qaeda’s #2 man al Zawahiri, with a missile attack from a Predator drone.

“How sad!” readers are encouraged to think. “These poor people are on the receiving end of awful weapons used by the clumsy minions of Bush. And all to no avail. Isn’t it terrible? Why must America do such horrible misdeeds? Bush must go!”

The only problem is that the long cylindrical item with a conical tip pictured with the boy and the man is not a missile at all. It is an old artillery shell. Not something that would have been fired from a Predator. Indeed, something that must have been found elsewhere and posed with the ruins and the little boy as a means at pulling of the heartstrings of the gullible readers of the New York Times.

I’ll take Mr. Lifson’s word about the artillery shell; I don’t know artillery shells from spinach. But I do know something about photograph attribution, and this one clearly says “Getty Images” in the lower right-hand corner.

This means that Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., did not personally order up a staged fake photo from New York Times photographers. Rather, it was purchased (probably for one-time use) from Getty Images. I found the image (Image #56593062) in the News database. The Getty Images caption reads,

Bajur, PAKISTAN: Pakistani tribesmen stand by a unexploded ordinance at their house which was damaged in an alleged US air strike the day before in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border, 14 January 2005. Thousands of tribesmen protested against an alleged US air strike targeting Al-Qaeda’s second in command that killed 18 people near the Afghan border, witnesses said. AFP PHOTO/Thir KHAN (Photo credit should read THIR KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)

How This Stuff Works is that Getty purchased the photograph from photographer Khan, who is probably a freelancer or stringer, and added it to its database for view and purchase. Some web site editor at the Times pulled the photo off the Getty database with a company credit card and put it up on the web site to accompany the story. I couldn’t find it in yesterday’s or today’s print edition, so I assume it only went on the web site.

If indeed the image was fake staged by the photographer, it seems both Getty Images and the New York Times were scammed. There were other heartstring-tugging photos in the database that possibly were not fake staged. See, for example, # 56596136, which I think is a better photograph on an artistic level than #56593062. But no; the Times went with #56593062. Too bad.

Mr. Lifson comments,

So the formerly authoritative New York Times has published a picture distributed around the world on the home page of its website, using a prop which must have been artfully placed to create a false dramatic impression of cruel incompetence on the part of US forces. Not only did the editors lack the basic knowledge necessary to detect the fake, they didn’t bother to run the photo past anyone with such knowledge before exposing the world to it.

The fact is that the drones who throw the web site and most of the newspaper together do not routinely run anything by the big shots, at the New York Times or any other newspaper; there’s no time. The Times web site editors trusted Getty Images. I would have made the same mistake, since Getty Images is a long-established source of news photos and is usually reliable.

Although I think Getty Images is more at fault than the Times, I notice the New York Times caption writer called the ordnance in question “the remains of a missile,” whereas the Getty caption calls it “unexploded ordinance [sic].” I suspect sloppiness on the part of the New York Times web caption writer, no doubt a recent English Lit graduate, who just guessed the pointy-ended thing was a missile. After the web editors got some complaints about the photo, they pulled it. Again, that’s How This Stuff Works.

I see at Memeorandum that the righties are having fits about the New York Times, however. Hugh Hewitt says the shell destroyed “what’s left of the New York Times‘ Reputation.” Scott at Power Line posted the image and commented,

The Times’ caption said: “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border.” Only it’s not the remains of a missile, it’s an old artillery shell. Which means the photo was deliberately faked by the people depicted, probably with the knowing aid of the AFP photographer. I think the villagers were lying about not hosting members of al Qaeda, too.

ONE MORE THING: The photo is still up at Yahoo News Photos, but with a changed caption that now says the men are shown standing next to “a unexploded ordnance.” Yes, probably from the 1980s. No doubt the picture will be reproduced in many newspapers around the world.

One, Getty Images says the photo was taken 14 January 2005 [update: I guess we’re a year off, aren’t we], although I ‘spect they were taking the photographers’ word on that. Two, Yahoo News credits the image to Agence France-Presse (AFP). They didn’t get it from the New York Times and apparently not from Getty Images either. I don’t think AFP and Getty are subsidiaries; possibly the photographer sold the same image to both agencies. Maybe AFP got scammed, too.

But the good news here is that because (I trust) there is one fake staged photo, the entire news story about 18 innocent people being killed has been cancelled. The villagers were faking the story; they were probably lying about not hosting al Qaeda also. We can now dismiss the whole episode as so much spin, as if it never happened. I know you are relieved.

Lessons of History

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Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, attorney general during the LBJ administration, writes in today’s Los Angeles Times about the perils of unchecked power. Specifically, he writes about J. Edgar Hoover’s crusade to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King.

These days Hoover has become almost a comic figure; the tough guy in ladies’ underdrawers. But for a time he was so powerful even presidents were afraid to go after him. “Some of that support was based on admiration,” writes Katzenbach, “some on fear that he had damaging personal information in his files.” Although on paper he reported to the attorney general, in fact he operated outside anyone’s control. In the eyes of the nation Hoover was a hero who had fought organized crime and Communists. But by the 1960s, Katzenbach writes, Hoover was getting old.

He believed the world was questioning and rejecting the values he held out as fundamental — patriotism, respect for law and order, sexual mores grounded in marriage and family, the work ethic. He detested what he saw as a growing culture of permissiveness, and, as a conservative Southerner, he seriously questioned the idea of racial equality.

Hoover convinced himself that MLK was working for Communists. Lack of evidence thereof would not dissuade him. In 1963, Hoover went to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy for approval for a wiretap on Dr. King’s phones. Bobby Kennedy feared that Hoover’s accusations would destroy the Civil Rights movement.

When Hoover asked for the wiretaps, Bobby consulted me (I was then his deputy) and Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights Division. Both of us agreed to the tap because we believed a refusal would lend credence to the allegation of communist influence, while permitting the tap, we hoped, would demonstrate the contrary. I think the decision was the right one, under the circumstances. But that doesn’t mean that the tap was right. King was suspected of no crime, but the government invaded his privacy until I removed the tap two years later when I became attorney general. It also invaded the privacy of every person he talked to on that phone, not just Levinson.

But what we didn’t know during this period was that Hoover was doing a lot more than tapping King’s phones. As King’s criticism of the FBI continued, and as Hoover became more and more convinced there must be communist influence even though no evidence ever materialized, he determined to discredit and destroy King. He went further, putting bugs in King’s hotel bedrooms across the country. (He claimed that Atty. Gen. Herbert Brownell had authorized him to use such listening devices in cases involving “national security” back in the 1950s, and that he did not require further permission from the current attorney general, who in any case had no idea that the FBI was doing it.)

The FBI recorded MLK having extramarital affairs, which it used to try to destroy him. The FBI played the tapes for journalists and other influential people. At one point tapes were mailed to MLK with the suggestion he commit suicide.

This is appalling, to be sure, but Katzenbach makes an essential point — Hoover believed he was doing the right thing . He believed his acts were justified to protect the United States. “Perhaps because of age accompanied by virtually unchecked power, he lost any sense of proportion in law enforcement, using his authority in what he thought was a righteous cause.”

And here’s the conclusion:

Today we are again engaged in a debate over wiretapping for reasons of national security — the same kind of justification Hoover offered when he wanted to spy on King. The problem, then as now, is not the invasion of privacy, although that can be a difficulty. But it fades in significance to the claim of unfettered authority in the name of “national security.” There may be good and sufficient reasons for invasions of privacy. But those reasons cannot and should not be kept secret by those charged with enforcing the law. No one should have such power, and in our constitutional system of checks and balances, no one legitimately does.

Forcing the executive to explain its reasons for intrusive law enforcement is essential to maintaining not just privacy but freedom itself. A congressional committee must exercise oversight. So too must an independent court because Congress is also subject to possible political pressure.

Our freedom is too precious, and too much blood has been shed to preserve it, to entrust it to a single person, however sincere and however well intentioned.

At Newsweek, Jonathan Alter describes the peril we face now:

Any rational person wants the president to be able to hunt for Qaeda suspects wherever they lurk. The “momentous” issue (Alito’s words) is whether this president, or any other, has the right to tell Congress to shove it. And even if one concedes that wartime offers the president extra powers to limit liberty, what happens if the terrorist threat looks permanent? We may be scrapping our checks and balances not just for a few years (as during the Civil War), but for good.

And, once again, in the Civil War Lincoln made emergency use of a power given to Congress (to suspend habeas corpus) to deal with riots and unchecked lawlessness in some of the border states while Congress was not in session. When Congress came back into session, Lincoln went to Congress, acknowledged this power rightfully belonged to Congress, and asked for their retroactive approval even while the Civil War was still heating up. He didn’t just declare he could do whatever he thought necessary because there was a war on.

Alter continues,

The NSA story is an acid test of whether one is a traditional Barry Goldwater conservative, who believes in limited government, or a modern Richard Nixon conservative, who believes in authority. Alito is in the latter category. His judicial opinions suggest a deference to executive power, and he once pioneered presidential “signing statements” that are meant to help judges come down on the president’s side. Just recently, Bush attached such a statement to John McCain’s bill banning torture in which the president reserved the right to ignore the law if he wants to.

Alito embodies the inherent contradiction of the conservative movement. The nominee is an “originalist,” which means, as he said last week, that “we should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption.” But at that time, the 18th century, the Founders could not have been clearer about the role of Congress in wartime. As James Madison put it, “In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislative and not to the executive branch.”

No honest reading of the writings of the Founding Fathers, in or out of the Constitution, justifies Bush’s wartime ‘inherent authority” theory. The fact that so many “conservatives” accept this theory even as they babble about “strict construction” of the Constitution is proof that they’ve gone off the deep end, the charts, the scale, and any other measure of rational thought. The Right has become a virtual mob.

As John McGowan wrote here, “To pay the law heed is to accept that one’s own virtue is doubtful.” The ideologue who has no doubts he is right also has no qualms about setting the law aside when it gets in his way. But the person who would do such a thing is the same one whose judgment is too skewed to be trusted to do it — like J. Edgar Hoover.

Update: See Glenn Greenwald, “Bush followers are not conservatives.”

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This

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Sometimes, from diverse news stories, a shaggy dog emerges.

Item one: The recent drone attack that failed to kill al Qaeda’s “number two” guy had the unfortunate side effect of killing 17 other people, including six women and six children. According to Griff Witte and Kamran Khan in the Washington Post:

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis staged an angry anti-American protest near the remote village of Damadola, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, where Friday’s attack took place. According to witnesses, the demonstrators shouted, “Death to America!” and “Death to Musharraf!” — referring to Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf — and the offices of at least one U.S.-backed aid organization were ransacked and set ablaze.

Jason Burke and Imtiaz Gul of the Observer write that relations between the U.S. and our GWOT “ally,” Pakistan, have been stretched to the breaking point.

Tensions between Washington and Islamabad have grown in recent weeks as American troops have stepped up operations against militants. Pakistan has already lodged a protest with the US military six days ago after a reported US airstrike killed eight people in the North Waziristan tribal region, an almost deserted area of mountains 300 miles south of Damadola. In Damadola itself, locals said they had never sheltered any al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders, let alone al-Zawahiri, an instantly recognisable 54-year-old Egyptian-born ex-doctor.

Even if the raid had taken out Ayman Zawahiri, one might still argue that the price of the capture was far too high. “This is war, and unfortunately war results in collateral deaths by mistaken targeting,” say the warbloggers. But let’s take a step back and ask a fundamental question.

Why are we at war? Aren’t we supposed to be fighting to end (or, at least, significantly discourage) terrorism? If our focus on eliminating people on a shopping list of bad guys results in making more bad guys, is this not a tad self-defeating? Like curing someone’s headache by cutting off his head? Are we not missing the big picture here?

Jane Hamsher has more on what we might call the inconsistency of righties on this issue, but let’s move on to the next story …

An editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times says we’d better pay attention to Afghanistan.

MORE THAN FOUR YEARS AFTER the invasion that overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan remains a dangerous place. A suicide attack 10 days ago — presumably targeting the U.S. ambassador, who was attending a nearby ceremony — killed 10 people. Days earlier, there was the beheading of a high school principal by suspected Taliban militants who broke into his home and forced his wife and eight children to watch.

The violence followed a year in which nearly 1,600 people were killed in insurgent attacks and suicide bombings. The latter are an especially troubling development because such attacks were previously rare in Afghanistan. Last year’s death toll included more than 80 American soldiers, making the year the bloodiest for U.S. forces there since the invasion.

Yet the U.S. plans to reduce the number of troops stationed in Afghaistan this spring. NATO will take up some of the slack, but one might ask why President Bush is so determined to “finish the job” in Iraq but not in Afghanistan.

But what’s this? Doug Smith and Borzou Daragahi write in the Los Angeles Times that Bush’s “Marshall Plan” for Iraq is fading.

After more than 2 1/2 years of sputtering reconstruction work, the United States’ “Marshall Plan” to rebuild this war-torn country is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding.

The $18.6 billion approved by Congress in 2003 will be spent by the end of this year, officials here say. Foreign governments have given only a fraction of the billions they pledged two years ago.

With the country still a shambles, U.S. officials are promoting a tough-love vision of reconstruction that puts the burden on the Iraqi people.

“The world is a competitive place,” Tom Delare, economics counselor at the U.S. Embassy, said this month during a news briefing. “You have to convince the investor that it is worth his while to put his money in your community.”

In other words, Halliburton et al. has decided there isn’t enough profit in Iraq reconstruction. The White House insists it remains committed to Iraqi reconstruction. They’re just not going to put any more money and effort into it.

Meanwhile, we’re on the way to a nuclear showdown in Iran.

Now, here’s the punch line: In response to their crumbling Middle East policy, some in the GOP have pulled out all the stops … to smear John Murtha.

Those that can, do. Those that can’t — smear.