Author: dday

The deceitful actions of this Administration have permanently harmed the fabric of America, particularly in the area of detainee treatment and abuse.  I was hopeful after the 2006 elections that we would be bringing in a new majority committed to overturning the worst abuses and returning a basic respect for Constitutional law.  News that Senate Democrats were moving to restore some of the most basic judicial practices to the awful military tribunals compact that they barely lifted a finger to fight last year gave me some hope, although the most important part, the restoration of habeas corpus, is absent from the bill.  But this action on a different piece of legislation returned me to my depression, and my belief that our torture policies, which are now ingrained into law by default, will always be a feature of 21st-century American life, at great cost to our collective souls.

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday questioned the continuing value of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program for terrorism suspects, suggesting that international condemnation and the obstacles it has created to criminal prosecution may outweigh its worth in gathering information.

The committee rejected by one vote a Democratic proposal that would essentially have cut money for the program by banning harsh interrogation techniques except in dire emergencies, a committee report revealed […]

In a closed session on May 23, two Democrats, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Dianne Feinstein of California, proposed barring spending on interrogation techniques that go beyond the Army Field Manual, which bans physical pressure or pain.

Under their proposal, the only exception would have been when the president determined “that an individual has information about a specific and imminent threat.”

The amendment failed when Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, joined all the Republicans in voting no.

So tough talk about the uselessness of torture, how it damages our moral standing, weakens our relationship with our allies, puts our soldiers at risk and doesn’t pay off with decent information… but when the rubber hits the road, Bill Nelson must retain the culture of permanent fear and ensure that such tactics will continue without limits.  And this isn’t about Bill Nelson, per se.  In our political system and especially in our political age, it’s nearly impossible to undo a vote once it’s been codified.  There’s no enthusiasm for right and wrong, just for winners and losers.  And once that’s been sorted, everybody moves on to the next thing.  There’s no examination of the underlying reasons, no testing the assumptions, no call to sanity and morality.  Even a horrific policy like torture GAINS in stature the more it’s allowed to operate.  The Republican Party wants to nominate Jack Bauer at this point.  And even Democrats like Bill Nelson won’t do anything to get in the way.  When the McCain Amendment came up for a vote, 90 Senators opposed torture as it’s defined in the Army Field Manual.  With this vote, every Republican and one Democrat refused to deny funding to a CIA program if it’s not in compliance with that same Field Manual.  The consensus is going TOWARD, not away from, sanctioning torture as an acceptable policy in this country.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here.  The United States reverse engineered programs designed in the Cold War era based on Soviet techniques like “prolonged use of stress positions, exposure to heat and cold, sleep deprivation and even waterboarding.”  These techniques were migrated to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and given a euphemistic title of “enhanced interrogation techniques” which is a term that is directly out of Nazi interrogation manuals, although even they objected to things like hypothermia and waterboarding.  While military interrogators at Gitmo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib used these new tools, despite the fact that leading intelligence experts have concluded that the techniques are “outmoded, amateurish and unreliable,” the CIA enlisted private companies to help them with rendition flights of terror suspects plucked off of the streets in foreign countries, in essence making the private companies, like Boeing, an accessory to “the forced disappearance, torture and inhumane treatment” (the ACLU is now suing Boeing over this).  All the while conservatives cheer on this barbarism in the name of “getting tough with terrorists,” claiming that any critic of this policy “doesn’t understand the nature of the threat we face” (something Paul Waldman does an excellent job of rebutting, pointing out that, considering the leading GOP candidates are routinely conflating Iraq and Al Qaeda and grouping everything Muslim into one enemy, “understanding terrorism” must mean knowing as little as humanly possible about it).  And yet these are the same people who will find some random news item about terrorists torturing and kidnapping people, and try to make the argument that critics of US torture policies are being hypocritical because they don’t point out terrorist torture policies.  Conservative with a brain John Cole makes quick work of this argument:

It isn’t news because they are terrorists, you fucking simpletons. Yesterday, my cat scratched himself then shit in a box. The media didn’t report that, either.

But it really shows an insight into the modern-day conservative mind that the best argument they can think of for the wholesale torture of detainees – at great peril to our moral standing, international cooperation, and troop safety – is that Al Qaeda does it too.  There’s never any thought to the notion that Al Qaeda should not be the human rights measuring stick for a country supposedly committed to freedom and liberty such as this one.  Here’s Glenn Greenwald.

The reason that it is news that the U.S. tortures, but not news that Al Qaeda does, is because Al Qaeda is a barbaric and savage terrorist group which operates with no limits, whereas the U.S. is supposed to be something different than that. Isn’t it amazing that one even needs to point that out? […]

And with that twisted equivalency bolted into place, they have dragged our country on a path where that premise is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our own interrogation methods are reverse-engineered from the most brutal and barbaric countries and groups on the planet. And the policies and practices we have adopted over the last six years embody everything which this country, for decades, vocally deplored. But all of that happened because of this “belief” — which is really just a self-justifying rationalization — that we not only have the right to be, but that we must be, exactly like Al Qaeda, do what they do, in order to defeat them.

That is what leads to such indescribably inane though revealing protests: “Hey, you reported that the U.S. tortures, so why aren’t you reporting that Al Qaeda does? Whose side are you on?” That is the rancid depth to which our public discourse and our national standards have descended, and those who brought it to that point have designs on dragging it far lower still.

And that’s a slippery slope which is unlikely to be able to scale.  A country that uses “enhanced interrogation techniques,” that denies basic rights of habeas corpus and evidentiary grounds for detention, is what we are right now.  We have a Democratic Congress and this continues.  We will have a Democratic President, maybe by January 2009, and yet this will still continue.  There is little outrage and less principled opposition to the road these authoritarian zealots have taken us down.  The conservative base, while abandoning the original messenger, is still whipped into a frenzy of fear and vengeance that is unlikely to dissipate.  And there remains a foreign policy consensus that trusts American power to manage the world’s conflicts and wage war on Islamic radicalism.  It’s a genie that’s been out of the bottle for many decades, and I would suggest that naivete guides the thinking of anyone who thinks we can immediately put it back inside.  Or that our leaders in Washington even want to.  Sometimes I think the only thing that raises the ire of anyone in Congress about torture is that news of it leaked out publicly.

It’s with a great deal of sadness that I write this.  Sad for the country that was built on idealism but quickly descended into the business of scoundrels.  Sad for what the political system has mutated into, with its fondness for victory and defeat instead of liberty and justice.  Sad for the realization that this is a staple of American life in 2007, as much a part of things as Dancing With the Stars and congested freeways.  We have now become what we have long despised, and there’s little we can do about it except hang our heads in shame.

If we leave, they’ll follow us here.  It’s as simple as that.
-John Boehner, House of Representatives, Feb. 13, 2007

The terrorists will follow us home if we leave
-George W. Bush, The White House, Feb. 14, 2007

Some liberal bloggers believe that such a scenario is impossible.  How would terrorists be able to follow Americans 10,000 miles from Baghdad to the United States?  But to suggest that this could never happen reflects a poverty of imagination.  Indeed the tracking and following skills of the world’s most dangerous terrorists have been honed to a sharp edge over the past decade, and they are ready to pursue a variety of strategies that will result in their finding America.

on the flip…
The first and most dangerous possibility is what the terrorists refer to as “the Max Cady option”.  In this scenario, the terrorists will hold on to the undercarriage of the Chinook helicopters and the JASDF C-130 transport planes used to ferry the troops back home from Iraq.  The terrorists have studied this and concluded that, with the right tailwind and the proper gloves, they could hang on all the way to touchdown at Dover AFB in Delaware (see Fig 1-1).

(Fig. 1-1. The Max Cady Option (artist’s rendering))

Now, some would suggest that this would only get one terrorist to follow us home at a time.  But military intelligence has acknowledged that there might be room for two in the space between the wheel well.  And, as we have 140,000 troops as well as 100,000 additional security personnel serving in Iraq, and the C-130 only seats 130 passengers, you can see that Al Qaeda could be expected to transport over 1,800 terrorists using this technique, provided they don’t fall to their deaths somewhere just west of the Azores.

But this is but one of the options available to the terrorists.  And another has everything to do with the faulty design of out transport vehicles.  You see, both the C-295M Twin Turboprop Transport Aircraft and the IL-76 Medium-Range Transport Aircraft, and even the V-22 Osprey, in fact practically every vehicle in the Air Force fleet, emit bread crumbs (see Fig. 1-2).  All an enterprising terrorist would have to do is pick up the trail of bread crumbs released out of the back of the plane, and they would have no problem tracking the flight.

(Fig. 1-2. KC-767 Tanker Transport Aircraft Emission)

Now, I have no idea why this was built into the Air Force design; no doubt it’s the insidious work of Big Bread Crumb (they’re always trying to insert their products into bloated defense appropriation bills).  But the point is that we cannot backwards-engineer an anti-bread crumb device, or put “trailers” in harm’s way to pick up the bread crumbs and move them off the track, without compromising the mission and wasting valuable time.  So this is simply something we’re going to have to deal with.

Some would argue that our military, the most experienced and well-trained in the world, would surely notice if terrorists were following their bread crumb trail.  But the terrorists are way ahead of us on that.  In fact, they are diligently schooled in the fine art of hiding behind trees so as to not get spotted.  Most terrorist training camps are littered with large spruce, maple, redwood, sequoia, and larch trees (see Fig. 1-3), and would-be terrorists are taught how to make themselves small and to keep all body parts behind the tree to avoid being noticed.

(Fig. 1-3.  Terrorist training camp – approximation)

This is going to be difficult to countermand, as “finding people hiding behind a tree” was recklessly kept out of the new counterinsurgency manual being used by the military.  This was an oversight of epic proportions.

Should we fix the bread crumb problem, and should we scan the transport and cargo planes before takeoff to see if anybody’s hiding in the undercarriage, and should we become more adept at looking behind THE WHOLE TREE, not just glancing, there’s still another technique that the terrorists are sure to use.  They may ask us where we’re going.

Here’s a sample of this technique in practice:

Terrorist Disguised As Fruit Salesman: Hey, where are you going?

Unwitting American Solider (getting on plane): Oh, back to the US, why?

Terrorist: No reason.

Soldier: You’re not thinking of following me or anything, are you?

Terrorist: No, why would I do that?

Soldier: Oh, OK.  In that case, here’s an address where you can reach me.

(soldier scrawls down exact address of his base location in the United States)

Soldier: I put the address for a nearby nuclear power plant on there too, in case you want to take their tour.

Terrorist: Thank you! (smiles devilishly)

Obviously, we’re dealing with an enemy who is very proficient at extracting information that they can put to use later.  And I hear there are even maps of the United States available for the terrorists to download and use once they find out where the troops are going.

I would not be so quick to dismiss these thoughts from Republicans that the terrorists would follow us home.  They obviously have the skills and capability to do it.  We need to be very wary of this possibility, and do whatever we can to throw them off the track.  Only then will we be safe enough to win the war on terror.

D-Day is a military analyst for several websites, although not what anyone would call an “expert.”  Still, his opinions are completely valid.

I’ll probably get flamed for this by some “Nader is the devil” person, but I will second Robert Kuttner’s excellent article about the new Ralph Nader documentary, An Unreasonable Man, which I saw Saturday night.  It’s a great film that does not paint a hagiographic portrait of the 3-time candidate for President.  That’s why it’s to Nader’s credit that he presented the film at my screening.

(Side note: he was eating in the same Mediterrenean restuarant as me before the film.  I knew that he was a terrorist sympathizer!  And he’s Lebanese-American!  Deport him!  Hezbollah!)

on the flip….
He said that he “takes his lumps” in the film, but that it was important to hear all sides of the story and present a full portrait.  This stands in contrast to the megalomaniac that many Democrats consider Nader in the aftermath of his “stealing” the 2000 election.

I have a conflicted relationship with Ralph Nader.  I voted for him in 2000, volunteered, did lit drops, had many arguments with friends and at information tables.  At the time I wanted to see the Greens get 5% of the vote to qualify for ballot access and federal matching funds.  I then as now believe that third parties are generally good for democracy, though their import would be much improved by innovations like Instant Runoff Voting.  I was in a safe blue state and was involved in the “vote-trading” efforts that popped up spontaneously to deal with Nader’s impact on the swing states.  Gore won the election anyway, and Nader’s blame for the result has been exaggerated by those who needed a scapegoat.

The problem is that his performance in 2000 (and 2004, which is far less defensible) nearly wiped out a lifetime’s work:

For people younger than I, it’s too easy to forget who Ralph Nader was — and still is. As a lawyer not yet 30 years old, Nader began writing about a subject that literally did not exist as a public issue until he invented it — cars that were dangerous by design. Detroit had popularized a one-liner that the leading cause of accidents was “the nut behind the wheel.” By definition, death and disfiguring injury had be to the driver’s fault, not the automakers’.

When Nader exposed the systematic dangers in Detroit’s cars, first in magazine articles, then in his 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, General Motors Inc. put detectives on his tail, tried to set him up with women, investigated whether he might be gay or smoked pot, pretended to be conducting job reference interviews.

An incensed Senator Abe Ribicoff called GM President James Roche to testify. Roche defended GM’s “legal right to ascertain the facts.” Ribicoff shot back that Nader’s sex life had nothing to do with his criticisms of GM’s cars. Roche huddled with his lawyers, apologized to the committee and to Nader, and later settled an invasion of privacy lawsuit. The proceeds, deliciously, went to underwrite the Center for Responsive Law, soon made famous as Nader’s Raiders.

The David vs. Goliath saga, deftly shown in the film, put Nader and auto safety on the map. Just two months after the Ribicoff hearings, Lyndon Johnson signed the nation’s first auto safety bill.

In the aftermath of Nader’s abortive presidential runs, it’s easy to forget all that he accomplished. It’s also easy to forget that Nader was a relative conservative in an era of radicals. He and his raiders were the clean-scrubbed idealists determined to make the system work. Seat belts alone, according to government statistics, saved 195,382 lives over 30 years.

One by one, dozens of landmark pieces of consumer legislation resulted from Nader’s efforts. An Unreasonable Man preserves that remarkable record, in entertaining and witty fashion.

This is the finest part of the film, showing Nader’s impact on a host of consumer-protection legislation throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  He was one of the country’s most trusted men and most unassailable critics of government.

And he squandered that reputation in a 10-year permanent campaign which still continues.  The film and Kuttner make the point that big business had gelded Nader’s Raiders by the late 1970s by countering his public pressure for change.  But I can’t help thinking that all of the fine work by Public Citizen and good-government groups have been left to rot while Nader tilted at windmills.  His frustration with corporate influence in both parties led him to this decision; but Nader’s great successes came when he was OUTSIDE the tent; I don’t understand why he felt such a need to be inside it.  Who is speaking today for the American consumer?  Where is the organization that can channel grassroots energy in a positive and goal-oriented direction.  It’s almost like Nader abandoned one cause to take up another that even he knew was unrealizable.

Everybody in the film gets an opportunity to discuss the 2000 election; some favorably, others unfavorably.  My favorite moment in the film is when Eric Alterman, who pounds on Nader in soundbite after soundbite, says “I think he’s a Leninist, he believes things have to get worse before they get better.”  And you know what, that’s kind of worked out as this presumption predicts:

On the other hand, one of the memes floating about in the Nadersphere has, I think, been vindicated: Namely the basically Leninist idea that a Democratic loss and a period of Republican governance would pull the Democrats in a more progressive direction in terms of, for example, questioning “Washington Consensus” globalization. At the time, that argument didn’t make sense to me. And in some important ways I still don’t think it makes a ton of sense logically. But it does seem to be what’s happened. Now, was that a price worth paying for the dead in Iraq, the torture, etc.? I don’t really think so.

I agree that it’s too high a price to bear.  But it’s clear that we have a Democratic Party that has rejected Third-Way DLCism in favor of a politics of contrast (seems to me, though, that this came about more from the 2002 election and its aftermath than 2000).  And it’s clear that the core issues that Nader spoke about in 2000 – issues like global warming, universal health care, alternative energy, labor law changes – are the EXACT issues put forward by most of the 2008 field of Democrats.  it’s not clear that Nader cost anybody anything in 2000, nor did he apply sufficient pressure to effect this change.  He does make the good point in the film that he wasn’t let in the debates because he “wasn’t a factor,” only to be chastised by Democrats for being the deciding factor.

It’s a complex situation which makes for great drama and discussion, which is why I highly recommend the film.  It remains to be seen whether Nader will run in 2008: more than a few in the audience of my screening appeared to want to see that happen.  I would rather see him return to his roots and work with this more-progressive Democratic Congress to protect and defend the American consumer.  And maybe, just maybe, we can reverse the outcome of the 2000 election by making Al Gore President.

Well, the GOP is at it again.  First they raised eyebrows with a menacing video showing statements from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri vowing to attack the US, and announcing “These are the stakes.  Vote November 7th.”

Just when you thought they couldn’t sink any lower, here comes another exploitative ad.  Playing on America’s natural fear of marine life, they have decided to frighten the public by introducing them to the fearsome and dangerous stingrays who will stop at nothing to terrorize America.  The ad ends with the ominous line “These are the stingrays.  Vote November 7th.”  You need to watch it.

Once again, we see a Republican Party out of ideas, with nothing to promote but fear itself, willing to do anything to save their electoral majorities.  To think that they would even stoop so low as to capitalize upon random stingray attacks.  Shameful.

And we all know the truth.  We know that the Republicans have made NO ATTEMPT to stop stingray attacks until now, right before the election.  Remember when the President said “I’m just not that concerned about them?”  Of course you do.  I mean, sure, Cliff May’s been talking about the stingrays for a couple months, but who else?  When the military had a chance to corner the stingrays and finish them off once and for all in the mountains of Tora Bora, they outsourced the job to Afghan warlords who let the stingrays escape.  What kind of strong national security is that?  There’s no doubt that this ad will backfire.

You know what we have to do.  We need to send this video to as many people as possible, to make sure everybody knows just what the GOP is up to with this nonsense.  I mean, there is low and there is LOW.  And this is, um, even lower than that.

YouTube link

…ok, fine, my buddy Joe Wilson (not the ambassador) and I made the ad. So send it around!

While there’s been some movement on sanctioning North Korea, with the UN agreeing on punishment language, and Japan going all unilateral and banning all trade and closing their ports to North Korean ships, I still think the history and consequences of this nuclear test are completely muddled here in the US, and it’s important to get that right so we don’t have hypocritical opportunists like John McCain out there claiming the entire thing was Clinton’s fault on the one hand, and saying “I think this is the wrong time for us to be engaging in finger pointing when in this crucial time, we need the world and Americans united” on the other hand.  

So it’s time to lay down some facts and myths about the North Korean situation.  While a lot of this information is out there and probably familiar to you, I think it’s important to address it in a coherent, narrative fashion.  So here goes:

• FACT: The bomb that was tested is made from plutonium fuel rods.  These were the rods whose use was suspended by Pyongyang for 8 years under the Agreed Framework set up by the Clinton Administration.  After 2002, Kim Jong-Il put them back to work, and the result was what you saw this week.
• FACT: As Fred Kaplan documents, the reason the North Koreans pulled out of the Agreed Framework was because Washington confronted them over uranium enrichment, which they were slowly and gradually undertaking on the sly.

After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush–his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping “rogue regimes” from acquiring weapons of mass destruction–allow one of the world’s most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs?

* FACT: Why did the North Koreans start enriching uranium in the first place?  Well, it not-so-curiously occurred right after they were labeled part of the Axis of Evil in 2002, and they saw the saber rattling toward the other members of that club.  Kim Jong-Il is loony but not dumb and like the Iranians he sought nuclear weapons as a deterrent to regime change.  With Kim it’s all about survival of the dictatorship.

In Kim’s eyes, a nuclear weapon should prevent the United States from attempting to topple him from his post in the manner of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. And the indomitable mystique of nuclear capability could in part substitute for the charisma that Kim, unlike his late father, Kim Il Sung, is lacking.

“In the eyes of the North Korean leaders, this was very calculated and rational behavior,” said Paik Hak-soon, a political scientist at South Korea’s Sejong Institute. “Nobody invades a nuclear power. People respect nuclear power.”

* FACT: When Kim saw that he needed nukes to maintain survival, but he knew inspectors were watching over the plutonium fuel rods he needed to create them quickly, he went to the international black market and found a willing collaborator in the form of the top scientist from our putative ally Pakistan:

…Before September 11, in those weeks just after George W. Bush took office, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) personnel were told to “back off” certain targets of investigations begun by Bill Clinton. He said there were particular investigations that were effectively killed.

Which particular investigations? The agent was willing to risk his job to get this story out, but we had to press repeatedly for specifics on the directive to “back off.” The order, he said reluctantly, spiked at least one fateful operation. As he talked, I wrote in my notebook, “Killed off Conn. Labs investigation.” Connecticut Laboratories? I was clueless until my producer Meirion Jones, a weapons expert, gave me that “you idiot” look and said, “Khan Labs! Pakistan. The bomb.” Dr. A. Q. Khan is known as the “Father” of Pakistan’s atomic bomb.

He’s not, however, the ideal parent. To raise the cash for Pakistan’s program (and to pocket a tidy sum for himself), Khan sold off copies of his baby, his bomb, to Libya and North Korea–blueprints, material and all the fixings to blow this planet to Kingdom Come […]

Why would Team Bush pull back our agents from nabbing North Korea’s bomb connection? The answer in two words: Saudi Arabia.

The agent on the line said, “There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis.” Khan is Pakistani, not Saudi, but, nevertheless, the investigation led back to Saudi Arabia. There was no way that the Dr. Strangelove of Pakistan could have found the billions to cook up his nukes within the budget of his poor nation.

We eventually discovered that agents knew the Saudis, who had secretly funded Saddam’s nuclear weapons ambitions in the eighties, apparently moved their bomb-for-Islam money from Iraq to Dr. Khan’s lab in Pakistan after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.

But, said the insider, our agents had to let a hot trail grow cold because he and others “were told to back off the Saudis.” If you can’t follow the money, you can’t investigate. The weapons hunt was spiked […]

The U.S. government missed discovering Dr. Khan’s radioactive fire sale because our agents were hard at work ignoring the Saudi money trail. If the agencies had not been told to “back off” the Saudis and Dr. Khan, would the U.S. have uncovered the nuclear shipments in time to stop them? We can’t possibly know, but, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, it’s amazing what you don’t see when you’re told not to look.

So, the US doesn’t investigate A.Q. Khan’s selling off nuclear secrets.  The North Koreans have a need for those secrets after being labeled an enemy to the US and having their sovereignty threatened.  Kim Jong-Il makes a deal for technology on how to enrich uranium that he would have otherwise not had.  He starts the process, maybe wanting to be caught to have a reason to expel the UN inspectors and restart his plutonium program, which would move much quicker.  The US finds out about the uranium, gets belligerent and gives Kim exactly the opening he needs.  Four years later, they test a nuke.  But…

* FACT: The nuke didn’t work, a fact that is getting curiously less play nationwide than out in the world.

The United States believes North Korea attempted to detonate a nuclear device but that “something went wrong,” and the blast was relatively small, a U.S. government official said Tuesday.

The official confirmed North Korea informed the Chinese government before the test that it would involve a four-kiloton nuclear device, a small explosion compared with the 15-kiloton nuclear tests that India and Pakistan conducted in 1998 […]

The U.S. intelligence community is sticking by an estimate that the blast was about a half-kiloton, or even less, although it’s possible the tunnel in which the test took place could have “muffled” the seismic waves, an official said.

So basically what we have here is a situation where knuckleheads in the Bush Administration practically force North Korea into the nuclear club, and the North Koreans are such knuckleheads that they can’t even get it to work.  Which doesn’t matter, because the mere possibility of the test will likely turn South Korea and Japan nuclear and raise proliferation in Asia, making the world decidedly less safe.

You can add this to the growing sense that we’re about to lose Afghanistan, the continued reports of brutality and abuse at Guantanamo, the fact that Gaza’s in civil war, Iran’s continued bluster and defiance, the loss of Somalia to radical Islamists, and on and on, and you have irrefutable evidence that George W. Bush’s foreign policy, supposed to be his strong suit, is an unmitigated failure.  And you’ll notice I didn’t even mention Iraq.

For a final comment, and actually a summing up in two paragraphs what took me fifteen, here’s the former National Security Advisor to then-VP Bush 41, Donald Gregg:

First: Don’t panic. Kim Jong Il’s objective is survival and eventual change in North Korea, not suicide. The diplomatic situation in Northeast Asia will be immensely complicated by the North Korea test, which I think was a huge mistake on their part, but missiles are not about to start flying […]

Second: Why won’t the Bush administration talk bilaterally and substantively with NK, as the Brits (and eventually the US) did with Libya? Because the Bush administration sees diplomacy as something to be engaged in with another country as a reward for that country’s good behavior. They seem not to see diplomacy as a tool to be used with antagonistic countries or parties, that might bring about an improvement in the behavior of such entities, and a resolution to the issues that trouble us. Thus we do not talk to Iran, Syria, Hizballah or North Korea. We only talk to our friends — a huge mistake.

(x-posted at my site)

Our current homeland security is a total joke.  Five years after 9/11, after upsurges in terror attacks worldwide, we still refuse to allocate resources where they’re desperately needed.  Sure, we’ll sink hundreds of billions into Iraq, but in three distinct instances this week, the Republican-led Congress wouldn’t bother to fund our most basic security needs.
Whether they were perpetrated by Al Qaeda or Kashmiri militants in Pakistan like Lashkar-e-Taiba, the deadly Mumbai train bombings reflect a pattern of targeting public ground transportation that goes all the way back to Israeli buses.  So will the Do-Nothings in the Senate bother to increase rail security funding?

One day after the mass transit rail bombings in India, the U.S. Senate was asked to increase funding for rail security in this country. The majority said no.

The vote was 50-50, one vote shy of providing extra money to beef up security on U.S. railroads.

Republicans said there was already enough in the homeland security budget. But Democrat Joe Biden of Delaware was outraged, warning senators that if the bill didn’t pass, “We will regret this.” […]

“Twenty thousand people in a relatvely confined space at any one time, sit in a alumninum tube in tunnels where there’s virtually no protection,” says Sen. Biden.

And by the way, that includes Sen. Biden, who takes Amtrak into Washington from Delaware every day.  He keenly understands the vulnerabilities, not only to the country, but his own person.  The Do-Nothings?  They don’t care.  We spend nine dollars per passenger on airplane security, and less than a penny per passenger on rail security.  It’s like we’re running in slow motion, able to work on preventing the LAST attack while doing nothing for the one that comes next.

And then there was the Sen. Dodd Amendment to deliver urgently needed funds to first responders like firefighters and emergency personnel, paid for by reducing the tax breaks for millionaires.  Guess how the Do-Nothing Senate handled that one?

Not one Republican voted for this bill.  NOT A ONE.  That’s because it would mess with the Holy Writ of 21st-century conservative ideology: don’t make the rich pay for anything.  We all remember during the 2004 Presidential debate, when the President said in reaction to John Kerry’s plans to fully fund homeland security and protect its citizens:

“I don’t think we want to get to how he’s going to pay for all these promises. It’s like a huge tax gap.”

And it’s not only that the Do-Nothings want to cheap out on our security.  It’s not only that they would preserve every last dollar for millionaires while leaving us vulnerable to attack.  The money they DO spend on homeland security goes to exactly the wrong spots.  Just this week the Do-Nothing Senate decided petting zoos in Indiana are more threatened than the Big Apple:

The Senate refused yesterday to restore $750 million in anti-terrorism funds that have been taken away from New York and Washington and shifted to smaller cities thought to be at lower risk of attack.

By a vote of 53 to 47, the Senate killed an amendment by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and others, who protested the 40 percent funding reduction for New York this year and a 43 percent cut for Washington in homeland security grants.

“New York City and Washington, D.C., remain at the top of any [threat] intelligence we get, but they were given drastic reductions,” Clinton said. Had Clinton’s amendment been embraced by the Republican-controlled Senate, federal grants for protecting bridges, monuments and other possible targets of attack in New York and Washington would have been restored next year to their 2005 levels.

Sen. Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, acknowledged that he was “surprised and quite shocked” when he heard of the funding cuts for the two cities that were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. But he said that adding $750 million to a $32.8 billion domestic security bill for fiscal 2007 would “bust the budget.”

The current budget deficit is nearly $300 billion.  $750 million is not even 1/3 of 1% of that.  It’s far smaller in relation to the budget as a whole.  And there’s a very easy way to keep the spending budget-neutral.  Stop putting your money and attention into the Amish Country Popcorn Factory and the “Beach at the end of a street,” and shift it to the ACTUAL terror targets.

This is so completely wrongheaded and dangerous that it almost defies description.  The Republicans have worshipped at the holy altar of low taxes for so long that they literally can’t even protect the country if it means the rich won’t get their tax cuts.  And they’ve instituted so much pay-to-play and earmarks run amok on the Hill that every small town in the country is having a free-for-all with Homeland Security dollars, taking that pool of cash away from where it’s needed the most.  It’s so shocking that it almost feels like it’s by design.

They don’t want to pay to keep the nation safe.  They don’t want to inconvenience millionaires.  In fact, they want to make sure the nation is NOT safe, from a political standpoint, for only through fear do they succeed.  

(x-posted at my site)

Well, while we were sleeping or discussing bogus Fox News articles or Zinedane Zidane’s head butt (all of which are important, DGMW), World War III has broken out, in a region of the world far more strategically significant than the impetus for WWI, the Balkans.  Israel is fighting a two-front war, responding with as much force as possible because their untested leader needs to show strength.  And reports are that the Hizbollah militants are spiriting the kidnapped soldiers into Iran.  This report comes from Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mark Regev, who spent 5 years as the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington.  How convenient that someone who’s been in the US that long agitates about Iranian involvement, making justified a rocket attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

And this all comes as fantastic news to the warbloggers.
For a while there it seemed like they were out of business.  Iraq is in chaos, Afghanistan faces a Taliban surge 5 years after the start of fighting, and the American public appears to be turning away from war as a problem-solving tool.  This was anathema to the warbloggers.  

They simply had to have another war.

This begs the question of why.  It’s clear that the warbloggers, many of whom I read today cheerleading for Israel’s hits on Lebanese facilities, wanted to jettison the failures in Iraq as soon as humanly possible, and another war offers them the perfect opportunity to demagogue, demonize, and celebrate the carnage.  Iraq is SO last season.  Afghanistan is positively ANCIENT.  They’ve moved on from those wars, which weren’t successful because the US was too restrained, anyway.  It’s the familiar reason for dropping George Bush – he wasn’t ever a real conservative, anyway.  Conservatism hasn’t failed, it’s never BEEN TRIED.  And the wars of the 21st century weren’t lost, they haven’t been prosecuted with enough force.  Same argument.  Same argument as Trotskyites who aver that true Communism hasn’t been attempted either.  Well, neocons all spring from that tradition, anyway.

So shirking responsibility for one of the most disastrous foreign policy blunders in modern history, one that harmed US credibility the world over, is certainly on the agenda.  But there’s something else.  I think that the warbloggers in general legitimately believe that overriding force is the only way to stop the threat they perceive from radical Islam.  I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people of this ilk that before long descend into the definitive statement “you have to hit them hard in the mouth because that’s all they know.”  In so many ways that’s what drove this initial neocon foray into Iraq.  It’s what motivates the original PNAC document.  If you project massive American military might globally, nobody will fuck with you.  It’s the “king of the hill” bullyboy doctrine writ large.

Nobody’s saying that Israel has no right to retaliate for incursions into their territory.  But cheering it on, with spittle dropping from the corners of mouths, is the kind of bloodthirsty mania that the world could do without.  “We didn’t ask for this war, but we will finish it,” they say.  Bullshit.  You’ve been asking for war since our greatest threat was the CCCP.  You think war is a tool to solve problems.  And as there will always be problems in the world, you will always want war.  You won’t want to GO to war, mind you, but you’ll want to whoop and holler from the sidelines, reacting to the bombing of the Beirut airport with lines like “In the words of Napoleon Dynamite, “Sweet” (not linking to it, but that’s a verbatim quote).

John Dean’s study of the authoritarian impulse in what has become the conservative movement is very revealing:

JOHN DEAN: I ran into a massive study that has really been going on 50 years now by academics. They’ve never really shared this with the general public. It’s a remarkable analysis of the authoritarian personality. Both those who are inclined to follow leaders and those who jump in front and want to be the leaders. It was not the opinion of social scientists. It was information they drew by questioning large numbers of people — hundreds of thousands of people — in anonymous testing where [the subjects] conceded their innermost feelings and reactions to things. And it came out that most of these people were pre-qualified to be conservatives and this, did indeed, fit with the authoritarian personality.

[…]

OLBERMANN: And the idea of leaders and followers going down this path or perhaps taking a country down this path requires — this whole edifice requires an enemy. Communism, al Qaeda, Democrats, me… whoever for the two-minutes hate. I overuse the Orwellian analogies to nauseating proportions. But it really was, in reading what you wrote about, especially what the academics talked about. There was that two-minutes hate. There has to be an opponent, an enemy, to coalesce around or the whole thing falls apart. Is that the gist of it?

DEAN: It is one of the things, believe it or not, that still holds conservatism together. There is many factions in conservatism and their dislike or hatred of those they betray as liberal, who will basically be anybody who disagrees with them, is one of the cohesive factors. There are a few others but that’s certainly one of the basics. There’s no question that, particularly the followers, they’re very aggressive in their effort to pursue and help their authority figure out or authority beliefs out. They will do what ever needs to be done in many regards. They will blindly follow. They stay loyal too long and this is the frightening part of it.

We know that the enemy must be destroyed because we’re told their the enemy and all enemies must be destroyed.  And the footsoldiers in this movement are those warbloggers who glorify any act of war, who roar with approval at suffering and carnage, who fail to take foreign policy seriously but view it as a game where their team must utterly devastate the other side.  Meanwhile, those in power take advantage of the simple-mindedness of this approach by amping up the rhetoric, providing fresh meat for the warbloggers to blog, and giving some sort of approval to madness.

I don’t think I’m giving out trade secrets when I say that Hillary Clinton is a tactician.  What she learned from the collapse of her health care plan in 1994 is that she needs to get out in front of issues, pre-empt her opponents, and piggy-back on their popularity to transfer it to herself.  These aren’t negative traits, they’re the hallmarks of good politicians.  But in her public statements you can read between the lines and understand who she fears as a rival should there be a Presidential bid in 2008.

For a time, she was clearly triangulating conservatives like John McCain and Newt Gingrich and George Allen.  She pushed ridiculously frivilous legislation like a flag-burning amendment and regulation of violent video games.  But with yesterday’s speech at the National Press Club, it’s quite clear that nobody worries Hillary more than Al Gore.
Obviously, with gas prices at record highs, energy policy is in the news.  Gore’s movie premiere is another factor.  But more than anything, I think there’s been something of a tectonic shift at work here.  The conventional wisdom is clearly pointing in a different direction, and Hillary is looking to play to a left-leaning base that she obviously feels will be ascendant come 2008.

I don’t want to look at her speech completely through a political lens, because there were some great policy prescriptions in there.  First she framed the issue as one in where the laissez-faire policies of the virtuous free market have failed, utterly:

Now, there are no easy answers to the complexity of this problem, but I believe that we can get our arms around it. It will take a well-funded, comprehensive approach with staying power. Government has to change basically our “do nothing” policies. Businesses have to be part of the solution, not the problem, and provide accessibility, efficiency and innovation, and we, as citizens, have to do much more to reduce our dependence on oil and begin to conserve and demonstrate more energy efficiency. We can’t just point fingers and sort of place blame on anyone else. Foreigners over there, oil companies over here — the ball is in our court. It is up to us to act and to act soon. It is going to require a virtual revolution in our thinking about energy and in the actions that must follow.

This is a “common good” approach, calling for all Americans to sacrifice for a much-needed cause.  She goes further to explain how national security is severely affected by having choke points to oil in unstable regions.  She touches on how oil-rich nations blackmail oil-hungry ones.  She mentions the looming economic collapse as oil reaches a peak.  And then she says this:

And finally, our values demand that we be good stewards of the planet for our children and our children’s children. We are failing that simple moral test if we continue to stand by as the Earth warms faster than at any time in the past 200,000 years. I have seen firsthand and have heard from the natives in places from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Svalbard, Norway, about the consequences of global warming.

And now, thanks to former Vice President Al Gore, who has been a committed visionary on global warming for more than two decades, everyone can see those consequences for themselves at a local movie theater.

This is very canny, giving respect to the man who may become your main adversary while co-opting his main issue.  But Hillary’s also putting herself out on a limb here.  She’s calling for a revolution in thought, a plea to stop the status quo and shake up traditional beliefs.  Like this sentence:

We are now spending far more on military security in the Persian Gulf than it would cost to jump-start a clean energy future with all the benefits in new jobs, enhanced security and reduced global climate change…

Now, this can’t happen overnight, and it does require a major change in policy and attitude, not just in the government but also in the private sector and, indeed, in each of our lives. But we need to resist the idea that kicking the oil habit will wreck our economy. In fact the greater risk is that we will wreck our economy by failing to kick the habit.

She’s also unafraid to talk about the role of conservation and efficiency, mocked as merely a “personal virtue” by the current Vice President.  And she sets out concrete goals:

Today, I want to suggest a concrete goal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil by at least 50 percent by 2025. That would be a reduction in oil consumption of just under 8 million barrels a day. Now I believe a 50 by 25 initiative will energize our economy, not undermine it, and how will we get there? Two words — innovation and efficiency. They encompass the three major tasks that I want to discuss today.

First, we need to convert our liquid fuel base from oil to biomass. That can reduce our consumption by 4 million barrels a day by 2025.

Second, we need to change our reliance on high carbon electricity sources to low carbon electricity sources through innovation in renewables, such as solar and wind, as well as carbon dioxide sequestration.

The third task is efficiency; getting much more from the cars, buildings, power plants, manufacturing processes we have. Just by major efficiencies in cars, expanding hybrids, getting more fuel efficiency from trucks, industrial and residential sources, we can reduce consumption by another 4 million barrels a day.

Now, efficiency will start us down the road to a better energy future, but an independent clean energy future will require dramatic innovation. The possibilities are greater than ever for governments, science and industry to succeed. For example, scientists estimate that the wind potential of just three states — Texas, Kansas and North Dakota — is equal to more than half of the electricity we consume today. California could meet half of its power needs from solar alone […]

But we can’t just wait for innovation. Just like the Manhattan or Apollo projects, it takes focused and dedicated resources to make it happen. That’s why today I’ll be introducing legislation for a strategic energy fund. We need a serious commitment from government to prioritize advanced energy, and a commitment from our oil companies to reinvest their unanticipated profits into our shared energy future. I want the oil companies to be part of the solution. Last year, the top six oil companies had combined profits of $113 billion, more than the annual income of 170 countries. Now, Exxon Mobil had, you know, the highest profits in corporate history. Yet, when CEO Lee Raymond was asked about how much his company had invested in alternative energy over the last decade, his reply was, and I quote, “a negligible amount.” Well, that’s unexcusable. You know, the oil company is making $300 million a day, not because they planned on it, not because of great managerial expertise, but because of escalating world demand and, therefore, increasing prices for their commodity that they didn’t create in the first place. I think it’s time that we made sure they put a fair share of their profits toward a sound energy future.

There are outher proposals in there, but the point is made.  This most centrist of centrist senators, the master of triangulation, feels the need to triangulate to the LEFT instead of the right.  That’s remarkable given the results of the last two elections, and it shows how weakened the Republican Party truly is.  We have talk of wind power, fuel cells, mass transit (Wow!), cellulosic ethanol, biomass, an Apollo project for energy (all of which I strongly support) right out in the open, from arguably the most high-profile politician in the country outside who doesn’t live in the White House.  She mentions the fantastic proposal by Sen. Obama to trade health-care services help to the automakers in exchange for improved CAFE standards.  These things were simply not part of the debate a couple years ago.  But they must be today.  And Hillary Clinton is not one to go out on a limb like this unless she knows it won’t break.

This should come as great news to anyone who wants to hand over a better world to their children, a world that’s still somewhat sustainable, viable, and secure.

This is really a great speech on the merits.  But it’s also an historic speech of sorts, because it shows the literal shifting of the winds in Washington.  Al Gore has gone from “Mr. Ozone” to a prophet, and outside of those paid by Exxon Mobil he is being taken seriously.  Hillary’s coming aboard signals, as usual, that she is going where the country is already at.  They’re with Al Gore.

This last paragraph sums it up, and turns the ultimate Republican meme of “we’re the optimists” and turns it on its head:

…one of my colleagues came to the floor in opposition, and he just basically said: We can’t do this. It’ll ruin our economy. We’ll go backwards. It’ll destroy the American standard of living, and I just couldn’t believe what was I hearing, and I got up and I went to the floor, and I said, “Since when have Americans become so fatalistic that we go around saying we can’t do it, we can’t do it? That is not the tradition of our country. We can do it. We just need a commitment to do it, and we need the leadership in both the public and the private sectors to get it done.” And I believe that we definitely can get it done.

[Promoted by Chris]

The Washington Post editorial board has a question:

AT THE SENATE intelligence committee hearing Thursday on Gen. Michael V. Hayden’s nomination to head the CIA, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked the nominee a simple question: Is “waterboarding” an acceptable interrogation technique? Gen. Hayden responded: “Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail.” That was the wrong answer. The right one would have been simple: No.

The Congress passed a law banning this technique explicitly.  The President signed it.  Of course, then he made a signing statement that essentially said “I could bypass this ban if I, um, want to.”  Hayden gave a de facto admission that this was indeed happening.

On a day when a sergeant faces trial for threatening detainees with dogs at Abu Ghraib, we have also learned about senior official involvement in the torturing of prisoners:

As the Iraq insurgency grew rapidly in the spring of 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld complained to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in the country, that he was not seeing results from the interrogations of Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers.

“Why can’t we figure this enemy out?” Sanchez recalled Rumsfeld asking in frustration, according to a previously unreleased transcript of a July 2005 interview by senior Army investigators. “Was there intense pressure? You bet. You bet there was intense pressure” to extract more from the interrogations, Sanchez said — some of it self-imposed and some of it emanating from “different levels of the chain of command.”

Somewhere we have lost our way as a nation when we have to become the butchers we’re fighting in order to beat them, when we have to ignore the morality Americans cherish and mandate in order to satisfy some craven bloodlust, when we have to waterboard, electrify, humiliate, sodomize, kill the enemy.  This doesn’t result in good intelligence, and at some level I think these higher-ups at the Pentagon know that.  But they don’t care.  They’re under a lot of pressure from whoever their boss is, and they doubtlessly get some secret satisfaction from kicking some ass of the brown people (even if they weren’t terrorists but innocents sold to the Americans for the ransom money).  The UN has urged the closure of Guantanamo and I don’t think that would matter one bit.  You can open and close bases every couple months.  But until we root out and remove the element that considers torturing another human being to be legitimate and warranted, nothing will change.  Because in that moment, we’ve lost ourselves.

There have been about 1000 blog posts about Stephen Colbert’s sendup at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, but I think I have something extra to offer because, in some small way, I’ve been there.

I’ve been doing stand-up comedy for over a decade, primarily of the political variety. I’m obviously not at Colbert’s level, but I’ve had my share of success, however meager. I’ve also had my share of moments exactly like Stephen did on Saturday night: playing to a crowd whose worldview is actively hostile to your own.
In Indiana, Wisconsin, Sacramento, Orange County, Iowa, in small towns and even sometimes in big ones, I’ve been in that situation. I’ve come off stage to hear someone say “Why? Why did he have to say those things?” I did a show in Vacaville, CA (home of Cindy Sheehan, I believe, and it’s no slam on the city, this actually happened) where I did a joke about Shakespeare and someone in the crowd yelled “Shakespeare? We’re from Vacaville!” I’ve been in those spots where from the first second on stage I’ve known that I have nowhere to go.

Other comics have somewhere to go, a bag of tricks of dick jokes and crowd work they can tap into. I don’t want to do that. I have no problem with bombing in an effort to reach people who may not be inclined to listen to me. In fact, forcing them to listen is sometimes an end in itself.

What Stephen Colbert did the other night is a textbook example of “playing to the back of the room.” It’s all the more courageous because there actually wasn’t a back of the room there; they were all at home, a few of them watching on C-SPAN, others finding the Quicktime later. I know he was quoted as saying that the whole thing was “just for laughs,” but he clearly made a conscious effort that he was not going to change his act to satisfy the audience. He wasn’t going to the audience, he was going to let them come to him. And if they didn’t, oh well. I remember Joel Hodgson of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” fame (who I had the pleasure of meeting recently) once say “We don’t wonder ‘will people get this,’ we say ‘The right people will get this.'”

I’m not surprised that the right side of the blogosphere has come out and said “Colbert wasn’t funny,” and used the reaction of the crowd as proof. Everybody on the planet thinks they have a sense of humor and good taste in clothes. It’s mathematically impossible that everyone does. I can say from experience that some of my best shows have been the ones that could rightly be described as bombing. Almost always after one of those shows someone comes up and says “I thought you were awesome.” Certainly that is not the state of comedy today. Today’s “anything for a laugh” comedy of Dane Cook and others has at its core a belief that failure is not an option. Colbert understood that failure is not failure.

That was the edgiest, bravest set I’ve seen since the death of Bill Hicks. The only quibble Hicks would have had with it was that he did it in the first place. “Those shitheels don’t deserve to have that much truth thrown in their face,” I could imagine him saying. But it was entirely necessary, in my view. There are two different kinds of satire, Horatian and Juvenalian. Juvenalian satire attacks folly in very direct terms. Horatian satire presents folly for what it is, and is generally seen as more gentle. But it’s not in the hands of a master satirist. Colbert is a Horatian satirist, taking on the persona of the right-wing blowhard in order to expose its lunacy from within. It’s one thing to tell an anti-Bush joke, it’s another thing to espouse a pro-Bush line of reasoning and have that be the joke itself; the former is just a joke, while the latter attacks an entire worldview and crushes it.

It’s something of a relief that we live in a society where this kind of thing can happen twenty feet from the President, and nobody’s killed for it (at least not so far). In a way it hearkens back to the court jesters of old, who mocked the king and his court, but only because he was the only one allowed to do so. Through comedy and satire we can reach human truths that we normally cannot in blunt speech. It’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. The less sugar you put in, the more acrid and biting the medicine tastes. In my mind that makes it all the more brilliant. Thankfully there are still people like Stephen Colbert willing to serve that up.