Month: March 2007

Crossposted from Town Called Dobson & My Left Wing

click to enlarge
Last Wednesday as I was heading home from work, I saw a “Colbert 08″ bumper sticker. Keep in mind, this is in a small rural town in North Carolina. That is when I knew Colbert has really reached out to the masses.

I am beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that more people than I realized, or hoped, are now becoming political active… maybe. Colbert Nation, Daily Show, and Bill Maher all have growing audiences. In traditional media, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper are getting more traction. Lou Dobbs has been trashing the Bush administration for the past three years and it gets worse every night (well, so does Bush). Even Joe Scarborough is cutting Bush no slack as he continuously goes for Bush’s throat.

Then there is social media. On Technorati, “Bush,” and “war” have been on the top tags list for years and YouTube is now the defacto place to go for candidate announcements, ads and user created mash-ups. (Bash-ups?)

Either way, we now may be living in a true Colbert Nation.

Everyday we read of the escalating tensions between the United States, Britain and Iran. From Russia comes the headline that American forces in the region will be ready to implement an attack on Iran’s air defense systems, command and control centers, and nuclear facilities by April 6th:

Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran’s borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.

“The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran,” the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.

The proposed military action against Iran even has an official operation name assigned to it, according to a report posted at Al-Arabiyya on Thursday:

Al-Arabiyya reported on its Web site on Thursday that the Bush administration is preparing to launch a military operation, dubbed “The Sting,” to strike 20 Iranian nuclear plants, disabling Iran’s atomic program for at least five to seven years.

So what the hell is going on? Are we just a few weeks away from the war with Iran that people have been warning us about since at least 2004?

(cont.)
Who Benefits from the British Hostage Crisis?

Diplomatic positions are hardening between the US, the UK and Iran regarding the 15 British sailors and marines taken hostage by Iranian forces last week in the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway. Not surprisingly it’s the US which is talking the toughest, and trying to conflate the hostage crisis with the conflict over Iran’s nuclear program:

A week after 15 British sailors were arrested by Iranian authorities on the Iran-Iraq border, the United States has ruled out a deal to exchange five Iranian officials captured in Iraq for the British hostages.

US State department spokesman Sean McCormack said that reports the US would consider a swap were erroneous.

“The international community is not going to stand for the Iranian government trying to use this issue to distract the rest of the world from the situation in which Iran finds itself vis-a-vis its nuclear program,” McCormack said. […]

Meanwhile, Iran’s ambassador to Moscow was quoted as telling a Russian television station that the 15 British sailors and marines may face trial and legal moves have already been launched.

“It is possible that the British soldiers who entered into Iranian waters will go on trial for taking this illegal action,” Ambassador Gholamreza Ansari told Russian television channel Vesti-24, according to Iran’s IRNA news agency.

Sounds like hardliners in the US and Iran want this crisis to continue, but if I had to point the finger at one side, I’d pick the US Government. Clearly our diplomats are trying to fan the flames of the conflict, even as the British attempt to resolve this matter peacefully. But then, it suits the Bush administration’s purposes to paint Iran as the Mother of All Evil in the Middle East.

The Phony Nuclear Crisis

First off, it’s important to remember that the Iranian “nuclear crisis” has been substantially hyped by the Bush administration and various media sources with right wing ties which have conflated Iran’s actions into an imminent threat of nuclear war with Iran allegedly to be unleashed by Iran against Israel and/or the United states. There is no imminent threat of an Iranian atomic bomb anytime in the near future, whatever Iran’s intentions may be regarding its uranium enrichment program. As highlighted by many reports such as this one (from a story that originally appeared in The Washington Post in September 2006), Iran has been experiencing setbacks and technical difficulties with its enrichment program for the last year or so, and is years away from enriching enough bomb grade uranium to produce even one primitive nuclear device:

Western analysts had expected that the Iranians would move quickly to expand the enrichment effort to meet their near-term goal of having six cascades of 164 centrifuges each, or a total of nearly 1,000 centrifuges. The danger here was technological mastery rather than raw output of uranium. Even with 3,000 centrifuges operating, intelligence analysts estimate that it would take two to three years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for one bomb. Iran’s eventual goal is a massive array of more than 50,000 centrifuges at Natanz.

But problems surfaced this summer. The Aug. 31 IAEA report, marked “Restricted Distribution,” noted that since June, Iran had been feeding uranium into a small 20-centrifuge test cascade “for short periods of time,” and that it had conducted various tests in June, July and August of the initial 164-centrifuge cascade. “The installation of a second 164-machine cascade is proceeding,” the report noted, but it added that Iran planned to test the second cascade in September without injecting uranium.

What happened to slow the expected pace? IAEA analysts have told U.S. and European officials that it appears the centrifuges are overheating when uranium gas is injected. “The Iranians are unable to control higher temperatures, and after a short period they must stop because of higher temperatures. So far they haven’t been able to solve this,” says one Western intelligence official who has been briefed on the IAEA findings. In addition, this official said, some centrifuges “are simply crashing — 10 or so have broken down and must be replaced.”

Even now, despite the new UN sanctions approved by the Security Council, the IAEA continues to monitor Iran’s nuclear facilities, and Iranian officials have promised continue their cooperation with the IAEA’s inspection regime:

TEHRAN, March 31 (Xinhua) — A top Iranian nuclear official said on Saturday that his country would not keep the disputed nuclear activities secret but continue to allow the UN atomic agency to monitor its program, the state radio reported.

“Inspection and cooperation (with the International Atomic Energy Agency) will continue and there’s no change or suspension,”Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Tehran’s representative to the IAEA, was quoted as saying.

“There’s no problem, IAEA inspectors have supervised all Iranian nuclear activities, including enrichment work,” he added.

So, the idea that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are an imminent danger that requires immediate military action on the part of the United States is simply a fabrication promoted by the Bush administration, and certain elements within the media who support regime change in Iran by any means necessary. The Iranians may not have been entirely forthcoming about their intentions regarding their nuclear program, but the idea that they will shortly possess the capability produce nuclear weapons is a myth fostered by those who want to involve the US military in another, much more dangerous military conflict in the Middle East.

Who’s provoking Whom?

The Blair government (with respect to the current hostage crisis) and the United States over the past few months have accused Iran of provoking the current tensionbs in the region. The American government has particularly pushged this line, with its allegations (mostly unproved and undocumented) of alleged Iranian skullduggery in the supplying of arms to “terrorists” in Iraq which are being used to kill American troops. Ignoring the fact that most US military deaths are the result of attacks by the Sunni insurgency, of which our reputed ally, Saudi Arabia is the primary financier, President Bush and various administration and Pentagon sources have pushed the claim that Iran is the primary bad actor in Iraq, responsible for much of the violence that is occurring there.<p.

It is almost certainly true that Iran has been supplying arms and supporting various Shi'a militias in Iraq, However, the primary beneficiary of Iranian largesse is reputed to be SCIRI, the Shi’ite militia which is Prime Minister Maliki’s principal supporter. It’s unlikely SCIRI is going out of its way to attack Americans when their man is in charge of US supported regime in Iraq.

Indeed, a case can easily be made that the United States is much more the provocateur than the victim of Iran’s actions, as this article in the Guardian documents:

The extent of covert US operations against Iran is unquantifiable. There is no evidence that Britain is involved, although some knowledge must be assumed given the key role of British forces along the Iraq border. But the impact of Washington’s and its proxies’ activities is increasingly measurable.

Iran’s complex ethnic makeup renders it especially vulnerable to external disruption. The population is 50% Persian, 24% Azari, 8% Kurd. Iranian officials maintain Sunni Arab, oil-rich Khuzistan, abutting the Shatt al-Arab, is a high-value target for CIA and British subversion using agents linked to exiled resistance groups.

Terrorist bomb attacks and other ostensibly separatist violence are a regular occurrence. There were unconfirmed reports in January last year of an attempt to assassinate President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Ahvaz. The unrest has produced harsh reprisals, including executions. It is perhaps Iran’s most sensitive border area – as the British captives have discovered.

But Iran also accuses Pakistan’s pro-western government and others of complicity in recent attacks on security personnel in mostly Sunni, south-eastern Sistan-Baluchistan province.

Apart from strengthening internal opposition, the supposed American aim is to block a gas pipeline that would cross Baluchistan en route to India. The US has been pressing Delhi to scrap the project, as it is urging Turkey, European countries and oil companies to cut Iranian energy ties. […]

Iranian officials place the row over the British captives in the context of escalating, multi-dimensional pressure on Tehran orchestrated by the US.

Acknowledged, as opposed to covert, American policy avenues include bilateral and UN sanctions relating to the nuclear issue; ongoing attempts to choke development of Iran’s oil and other industries by curtailing access to the international banking system, foreign investment and (mostly European) export credits; and this week’s unsubtle demonstration of US naval and aerial power on Iran’s doorstep in the Gulf.

The US exercises went ahead despite the delicate position of the British captives, underscoring fears that Washington may try to exploit the situation even as London tries to defuse it.

For Iranian officials, all this, coupled with US squeezing of Iranian interests in Iraq and Washington’s attempts to build anti-Tehran Arab alliances, looks like undeclared warfare. Whether it was pre-planned or not, their handling of the Shatt al-Arab incident may be their way of saying: enough.

It’s understood that are media in America will not report the true nature or extent of the Bush administration’s actions to provoke the Iranian regime, but to observers in Britain and around the world those activities are well known, and not well regarded. It’s why Russia continues to issue official government statements warning the United States not to attack Iran, and which are probably behind the recent disclosures in Russia’s government controlled press of American military readiness and plans for an April strike by US forces. Its why Russia has also been busy selling air defense missiles to Iran, as well.

So what will happen? Is it War?

I’ve thought long and hard over this question the past several weeks. Would the Bush administration really take such a precipitous step in the face of ever decreasing domestic support for its policies in Iraq? Would they really order military strikes now despite the ever widening domestic political scandals that threaten to ensnare senior White House officials, including the President and Vice president? Will they ignore the warnings of Russia and China not to use military force to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis? Would Bush really unleash yet another war despite the reports that several senior Generals and Admirals will resign in protest if or when he issues the attack order?

Sadly, I have to conclude Bush would, and without a moment’s hesitation. For the time being, I believe he is merely ratcheting up the pressure on Iran and is not yet ready to pull the trigger on this insane and foolish plan to pull Iran into his ever more delusional “War on Terror.” At least that’s what I sincerely hope is true.

But based on his past practice of lying this country into the quagmire that is Iraq, his increasing political isolation, and his messianic belief in his appointment by God Almighty to remake the Middle East in America’s image (i.e., Exxon’s and Halliburton’s image) I certainly have no confidence in that belief. At some point, unless events conspire against him in some way I can’t yet foresee, I remain convinced that he will issue that order. God help us all when that day comes.

Iran

George W. Bush

Iran War Plans

What are you doing for spring break?

Once you have seen tanks on the streets, you are never the same.

I was born into genocide and I grew up a witness to terrorism. I am scarred by man’s inhumanity to man. Killers have laid their filthy hands on my head, smiling as they gave me life advice. I took a different advice – that of my father. I believe in human rights and the rule of law, I believe in due process and I believe in the cause of justice – even if justice is delayed.

Three decades delayed. My hair is grayer, my hair is thinner, but my resolve is strong.

On August 15, 1975 I woke up to a violent day. My older brother brought the news of tanks on the streets. The radio brought the news of the murder of Bangladesh’s founding father and his family. The Washington Post reported the news to the world outside:

At 12:30 a.m., the plan began to roll. Led by officers of the 1st Lancer Regiment, 13 Soviet-built tanks, donated to Bangladesh by Egypt last year, rumbled out of the military cantonment just a few miles from Dacca airport on the outskirts of the capital.

…

The tanks fanned out, three of them going to Mujib’s modest bungalow in the Dhanmundi section of the capital, one tank and an artillery piece to the home of his nephew, Sheikh Falzul Huq Moni, and a company of infantry-men to the home of Mujib’s brother-in-law, Serniabat Abdur Rab, the minister for flood control.

…

At Mujib’s house, the scene was bitter and bloody. A senior officer loyal to the president, Brig. Gen. Jamil Ahmed, rushed to tell Mujib of the approaching troops. Minutes after he got to the house, it was surrounded. He went outside to argue with the officers and was shot dead with three machine gun rounds in his chest.

According to some sources, the officer leading the troops at the president’s house, a major named Huda, handed Mujib a document of resignation to sign. Mujib, in a characteristic outburst, refused and roundly abused the young officer.

At that point, according to these same sources, one of Mujib’s sons, Sheikh Jamal, burst into the room with a pistol in his hand and was shot dead. Mujib again cursed the officer. Then another son, Sheikh Kamal, stumbled into the room, shouting for help from the Rakkhi Bahini. Huda, armed with a Sten gun, cut down the son.

Then, as one source put it, “the real massacre began.” Soldiers rushed into the house and began searching the rooms. In quick succession they opened fire on Mujib’s wife, who was sobbing hysterically, their two new daughters-in-law and their youngest son, ten year-old Russell.

The soldiers discovered Mujib’s brother, Sheikh Nasser, hiding in a second-story bathroom and they stabbed him to death with bayonets. They also killed two servants.

At Sheikh Moni’s house, also in the relatively comfortable Dhanmundi section, a tank opened fire and a large shell missed the building and impacted in the neighboring Mohammedpur section, killing a dozen people. The soldiers also killed Moni’s wife and a child.

Flood Control Minister Rab was killed in his home and his wife was shot, too, but she reportedly survived and is hospitalized.

At 5:15 a.m. in the morning of August 15, 1975 a Major Dalim announced over Radio Bangladesh that the army had taken control of the country and changed the name of the country from the People’s Republic of Bangladesh to the Islamic Republic of Bangladesh. Major Dalim, and his co-conspirators, mostly Majors and a few Colonels, disgruntled members of the Bangladesh Army, took control of the country and arrested the major political leaders of the country, including four surviving leaders of Bangladesh’s war of independence. These officers became known as the “seven Majors”.

The Islamist-leaning Majors ran Bangladesh until they were forced out of the country on November 3, 1975 by senior officers of the army. However, the night before they fled, they managed to enter Dhaka Central Jail and murder the four leaders they had previously jailed:

Four former top aides of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, imprisoned since the president was killed in a bloody coup Aug. 15, were killed Monday morning in Dacca’s central jail, Bangladesh Radio announced Wednesday.

…

The broadcast came as a group of Bengali officers in Bangkok, ejected from Bangladesh after Monday’s coup, charged that the coup and the killings were part of a move toward military dictatorship.

…

Khalid took control after it had been decided that Farook [the August 15th coup leader], 14 other young officers, 2 top noncommissioned officers and 12 wives and children would leave Dacca for Bangkok.

Farook and Lt. Col. Khandakar Abdur Rashid said the officers left Bangladesh to “avoid widespread bloodshed.” Their departure for Bangkok apparently diffused a 21-hour standoff in the squalid streets of Dacca between infantry troops led by Khalid and armor and artillery forces loyal to President Mushtaque.

“Our main guns would have caused a bloodbath among the diplomats, their wives and children,” said Farook. Asked if there wasn’t a certain irony in his concern after he and his fellow junior officers had cold-bloodedly murdered Mujib and his entire family on August 15th, he replied, “We killed only those who had to be removed. Our original plan was to kill just Mujib, but we had no choice. We had to kill the others too, although we’re very sorry about that.”

Before the “seven Majors” and their co-conspirators fled, they managed to pass the Indemnity Act giving them immunity for the killings they were involved in. The events of 1975 began a 16-year period of military rule in Bangladesh. After democracy was restored in Bangladesh in 1991, the Indemnity Act was finally repealed in 1996. Finally, more than two decades after their crimes, in 1997, the government of Bangladesh began criminal proceedings against the participants in the murder of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in August 1975. Initially, of the 20 charged, 15 of the coup plotters were convicted and sentenced to death in November 1998, after a two-year trial. Only five of the accused were in court for the hearing – the rest were absconding abroad and tried in absentia. Of the five present, three were convicted and two were acquitted. On appeal, the High Court of Bangladesh in 2001 upheld 12 of the 15 original convictions.

One of those convicted and sentenced to death, in absentia, was Major (relieved) Mohiuddin A.K.M. Ahmed, one of the “seven Majors”. He was specifically convicted of being one of the killers of Sheikh Mujib and his family. He had enjoyed the life of a diplomat during the period of military rule in Bangladesh. However, in 1996, he permanently fled Bangladesh and sought political asylum in the United States. He has resided in the United States since then. Soon after his arrival in the United States, the Bangladesh government requested the extradition of Mohiuddin from the United States.

In 2002, the United States issued a deportation order against Mohiuddin. Mohiuddin appealed his deportation order. In February 2007, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied Mohiuddin’s appeal of the deportation order. On March 13, 2007 Mohiuddin was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

Mohiuddin now claims that he was just manning a roadblock near the house where Sheikh Mujib was killedand that he was not involved in any violence. It is an argument the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected:

Ahmed, then an army major, says that although he manned a roadblock a mile from President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s home, he thought the leader would be arrested peacefully.

“Myself and others believed that the orders we received were lawful,” Ahmed said. “At no time was I, or my troops, involved in any violence.”

But Rahman and seven family members, including his wife and 10-year-old son, were killed, and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ahmed had participated in terrorist activity.

“Even his own account of his actions established that he assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of persons on account of their political opinion,” a three-judge panel of the federal court said last month.

Mohiuddin is now playing victim and he has at least one taker in Congressman Dana Rohrabacher:

Ahmed’s family and lawyer want him deported to another country where he could seek political asylum and fight his conviction. His lawyer, Joseph Sandoval, said Ahmed cannot appeal in Bangladesh because he was not in the country during his trial.

“Essentially, they want to take him from the plane to the gallows,” Sandoval said. “We think that is fundamentally unfair.” He added that his client is not the “heinous person” the U.S. and Bangladesh governments have made him out to be.

But time is running out. Ahmed was to have left the country Monday night, but Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) called Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s office and requested a delay.

“Amnesty International and our State Department has questioned the integrity of the Bangladeshi judicial system,” said Tara Setmayer, a spokeswoman for Rohrabacher.

“And because of that, Dana felt as though there would be no harm in trying to buy some time for his legal counsel to find a country” where he would not be put to death.

“Given the circumstances, he said he’d be willing to place a phone call or two to buy some time and figure things out,” she said.

Rohrabacher is trying to pressure the U.S. government not to deport Mohiuddin to Bangladesh. If he is successful, a terrorist, by the U.S. government’s own account, will continue to evade justice.

Three decades later, we who lived in Bangladesh at the time still remember the names and faces of the murderers. We remember their public boasts about the killings. We remember how they plunged a secular republic into military rule and allowed Islamists to infiltrate the country. We know where they are hiding: in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, the United States and Canada. We keep our list of the killers close at hand.

Notwithstanding Dana Rohrabacher’s support for a convicted terrorist, it should be noted that Mohiuddin has received significantly more due process than any detainee at Guantanamo Bay. He received a two-year trial and an appeal to Bangladesh’s highest court that took another three years. He has been found guilty by a legitimate court of law.

In hiding in the United States, Mohiuddin has shown the cowardice that led him and his cohorts to murder women and children, in cold blood, including a 10-year old boy. He has lived three decades that he denied his victims. In his case, justice has not been swift. It has been delayed but deliberate. In the end, however, Mohiuddin will have to face his cowardice.

Additional Resources:

• Read the decision of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denying Mohiuddin’s petition to stop deportation proceedings.
• Sajeeb Wajed Joy, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s grandson, retells the story of the massacre by Mohiuddin and his cohorts. His mother and her younger sister, who were in Germany on August 15 1975, are the only two members of Mujib’s family who survived the massacre.
• Read today’s Los Angeles Times article on the latest developments in the case.

[Cross posted at my blog.]

This free speech success story was posted by Cecilie Surasky of MuzzleWatch with permission.

http://www.muzzlewatch.com/?cat=12

See the ad that CBS didn’t want you to read is the subject line of an email sent out yesterday by the US Campaign to End the Occupation. The Campaign is organizing a June 10-11 mobilization in Washington DC to mark the 40th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/

They created an ad (below) to run on the DC metro system. Briefly, here’s how events went down.

CBS Outdoors, which manages advertising for the Washington, DC metro rail system, originally rejected our ad. However, after our friends at the ACLU intervened and defended our right to freedom of speech, CBS relented and DC commuters will view this ad almost 9 million times starting in May!

Muzzlewatch is operated by the peace activist group, Jewish Voice for Peace. Become a member of Muzzlewatch (click on the link above) and sign up to receive updates on their work to combat censorship and propaganda in how information related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is disseminated to the American public.

Welcome back.

This week we’ll be continuing with our painting of the used car lot, featuring a 1959 Volvo.  The photo which I am using is seen directly below.

When last seen here, the painting appeared as it does directly below.

Since that time I have continued working on the painting.  I have worked extensively on the Volvo.  The front end/grille is now just about done, and I’ve redone the wheels.  The wheels are now more consistent with the refinements of the vehicle.  The white/chrome bits now have shading.

I’ve continued the dark shadow under the vehicle to the left.  I’ve also begun to refine that vehicle.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

That’s it for now, see you next week.

One of the things that has emerged from the USA scandal is that many high-level administration figures have been using common consumer email and messaging services such as those of Blackberry and AOL for communications that include official business. This was done expressly to evade subpoenas. There has been some debate about whether this is even legal, but I have no insight into that, so I’ll leave that question aside. The fact is that any high-level executive branch electronic communications that take place outside of trusted systems can seriously threaten to expose classified matters to hostile forces. After all, the fate of Valerie Plame has made clear that this administration is, in the most generous possible interpretation (more generous than is really sustainable), careless with vital national secrets. Congress should therefore subpoena all email, IM, cell phone texting, and other electronic communications from high-level executive branch staff since the beginning of the Bush administration that has gone outside of trusted carriers.
The US government has elaborate procedures to protect the security of communications, and enforces these by requiring all sensitive or potentially sensitive communications to take place on what are called “trusted” systems. These are systems that have been certified by the NSA as meeting well-defined security standards that the NSA itself spells out in its various “color books”. Companies like AOL and Blackberry, at least in their common consumer manifestations, are not examples of trusted systems. There is a serious danger that internal communications could have been intercepted by terrorists, a hostile foreign power, or rogue forces willing to sell information to either of these.

The only way to check this, however, is to have all the communications inspected. It all must be evaluated for security leaks, but there is no easy global search, as we are not searching for any specific matter, but rather for anything that might be a violation.

This is going to be very hard-to-do with millions of pages of emails, and will not be finished quickly, probably not during this administration, but the work must start. A document dump on the Internet, though it would be an effective way to carve through the material more quickly, has to be ruled out precisely because of the potentially sensitive nature of the data. The Congress will have to create a task force of people with the appropriate clearance to direct the examination. The first step will, I imagine, simply be searching for keywords, possibly in conjunction with context info, such as key dates. For example, what was said about the intelligence case for WMD’s in Iraq while that case was being made? What was said in response to the various warnings of imminent terrorist attack before 9/11? What was said over unsecured channels about warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition? Any such conversations could have serious national security implications and could have involved the exposure of classified information.

The Republicans and the MSM will no doubt scream that this is the “mother of all fishing expeditions” , “the witch hunt to end all witch hunts” and suchlike blather. But how else can the security of our communications be verified? Does national security matter or doesn’t it?

The subpoenas should go in three directions. 1) To the people with the accounts themselves, who should be required, first of all, to identify all accounts that they may have used for official communications during this period. 2) To the various providers they have used. This provides a useful secondary check on what comes from the parties, as well as offering some recovery for genuinely lost data. 3) The NSA. Since it evidently has been monitoring electronic communications extensively, it may well have a great deal of this material. The potential for the NSA to use its wiretapping powers to engage in political surveillance of the Watergate variety, is, of course, one of the potential problems of the monitoring. It will be very helpful to know how much of this has been going on.

To counter accusations of partisanship, a bipartisan commission should be established to direct the search through the emails and such. This should be bipartisan in the same way the Baker/Hamilton commission was, where the Democrats were represented by centrists well-liked by Republicans, such as Lee Hamilton, who did much to minimize the damage to Republicans from Iran/Contra by explicitly refusing to investigate Reagan or Bush 1 “for the good of the country”. Yes, it can be bipartisan, but we will choose the Republicans. Linc Chaffee might be a good bet.

A version of this originally appeared at West Virginia Blue.
What Meteor Blades said:

The British government did not attempt to write itself out of the Geneva Conventions. However, as America’s chief ally in the war Tony Blair helped George Bush concoct, it certainly tainted itself with abuses of the sort given the seal of approval by Gonzales. So the cognitive dissonance that sounds when we hear Tony Blair trying to take the moral high ground in this matter is deafening. As Ronan Bennett writes in this morning’s Guardian:

Turney may have been “forced to wear the hijab”, as the Daily Mail noted with fury, but so far as we know she has not been forced into an orange jumpsuit. Her comrades have not been shackled, blindfolded, forced into excruciating physical contortions for long periods, or denied liquids and food. As far as we know they have not had the Bible spat on, torn up or urinated on in front of their faces. They have not had electrodes attached to their genitals or been set on by attack dogs.

They have not been hung from a forklift truck and photographed for the amusement of their captors. They have not been pictured naked and smeared in their own excrement. They have not been bundled into a CIA-chartered plane and secretly “rendered” to a basement prison in a country where torturers are experienced and free to do their worst.

That is one of the many reasons why we at West Virginia Blue write so much in opposition of U.S. torture policies.

This is one of the many reasons why Senator Jay Rockefeller should hold a Senate investigation on the torture of prisoners by U.S. forces — either by the CIA, private contractors or military services.

As chairman, Mr. Rockefeller has promised to conduct more vigorous oversight of the spy agencies than did his Republican predecessor. He is asking whether having a separate CIA detention and interrogation system is necessary and worth the toll on the American image abroad.

“The widespread reports about secret prisons and torture, whether accurate or not, have damaged the United States’ reputation around the world and hindered counterterrorism efforts with our allies,” he said.

Senator Rockefeller, torture and degradation of prisoners are never appropriate for intelligence gathering.

The Iranian acts against these British sailors and Marines should be condemned. It is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to parade captives before a camera and to require them to write propaganda letters under duress. When Rush Limbaugh described the abuse of captives at Abu Ghraib as no worse than a “fraternity prank,” I thought of how I would have reacted if U.S. prisoners had been treated in such a manner. I would have been outraged and demanding we fought and annihilated any country that would treat our people in such a manner. I knew when Abu Ghraib happened, we had lost in Iraq and no “victory” on the battlefield would make up for the abject surrender of our morals. The crimes at Abu Ghraib were not the work  of a “few bad apples” like West Virginia’s Lynndie England. The crimes at Abu Ghraib (see wvblueguy’s diary here) were the result of official U.S. policy from the so-called commander in chief who approved “alternative interrogation techniques” and the vice president who told the people under them to “take the gloves off.”

When a top administration official like Alberto Gonzalez  writes that the Geneva Convention is a “quaint” document that no longer applies to the United States — a country that had been a beacon of justice and liberty — would conduct itself, it sends a signal to the rest of the world that such reprehensible and immoral acts are acceptable.

The United States is a world leader and look where we’ve lead.

Instead of being able to take the high moral ground — the ground where that beacon once shone — we have to look at how such a tyrannical country as Iran abuses its captives and know that we are worse than Iran in how we treat our captives. We cannot look down from the moral high ground on Iran because we’re sunk even deeper in the muck than they are.