Author: Jeff Huber

Do a majority of Americans really think unlimited government access to phone records is okay by them?

If the Washington Post can be believed, “Most Americans Support NSA’s Efforts.”  

Below the fold: who are these “most Americans?”…

In an overnight poll conducted by WaPo and ABC News, “63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort,” Not surprisingly, WaPo doesn’t tell us what the poll questions actually were or what the multiple choice answers were.  It does, however, admit at the bottom of the article that: “A total of 502 randomly selected adults were interviewed Thursday night for this survey. Margin of sampling error is five percentage points for the overall results. The practical difficulties of doing a survey in a single night represents another potential source of error.”

I want to talk to the statistician who claims that 502 randomly selected adults, called at home at night, who may or may not have been familiar with the story or the issues involved, or have understood the questions. can give an accurate snapshot of what “Americans” actually think within any margin of error.  What pool of “adults” were the 502 polled selected from?  The same pool that logs online to vote in those instant polls that ask, “Do you believe Nancy Holloway is still alive?”      

WaPo’s Richard Morin is on MSNBC with Natalie Allen echo chambering the poll results.  He’s making all kinds of claims about what the poll says without giving any granularity as to how it was conducted.  And the rest of the talking heads are citing the poll results as if they were Gospel truth.  

We need to start insisting on transparency in poll reporting.  Who was polled, what questions were asked, what the answer choices were, and an honest assessment of any given poll’s statistical accuracy.

As best one can tell from the information WaPo has provided, the overnight poll on the NSA call database story has no scientific legitimacy whatsoever.  

Shame on them for even publishing it, and shame on the news networks for giving it legitimacy.  

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Hey, here’s a poll question for you: who has less credibility, WaPo or the Bush administration?    

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

As Patriot Daily at My Left Wing points out, young Mister Bush has apparently decided to change the name of the “Global War on Terror” to “World War III.”  It’s fairly certain that even Bush realizes renaming his war isn’t going to make it go any better, so he has to be fishing for a way to keep the American public from voting his party out of control of Congress this fall.  We’ll see how that goes.

Below the fold: world war from here to eternity…

This is not, of course, the first time the Bush propaganda machine has used patriotic sounding allusions to previous American wars–and cheesy pop culture references–to sell the administration’s neoconservative agenda.  In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the “axis of evil,” an invocation that combined the “axis powers” of World War II (Germany, Italy and Japan) and Ronald Reagan’s Cold War description of Russia as the “evil empire,” which itself was drawn from the Star Wars movie series.  

During the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Bush friendly media outlets like National Review began echoing the mantra that compared Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler.

The term “generational war” recalled misty eyed accounts of American sacrifice in the Second World War as described by Tom Brokaw in his book The Greatest Generation.  

“Fighting them over there” comes from the World War I propaganda song “Over There.”  

“Mission Accomplished,” that piece of Rovewellian theater in which Mister Bush played Navy fighter pilot on the USS Lincoln, provided imagery drawn from visual media pieces ranging from the television program Victory at Sea to newsreels of the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri to the feature film Top Gun.

And boy, when Donald Rumsfeld decided to change the name of the Global War on Terror to the “Struggle Against Global Extremism,” Mister Bush put the kibosh on that right away.  We were in a doggone war, doggone it, and Bush wasn’t going to be remembered as no “struggle-time” president.  

Does anybody else remember the time Rumsfeld talked to the troops Iraq and answered a question (an obviously staged one) regarding criticism of Mister Bush over the war?  Rumsfeld said that Abraham Lincoln had suffered scathing rebukes in the press over his handling of the American Civil War, drawing not only an absurd comparison of that war an the Iraq war, but between Lincoln and (gasp) George W. Bush.  

Still Going  

Like the Energizer Bunny, the Bush machine continues to bang the war drum long after its dream of global domination by armed force has proven itself delusional.  

Divine Strake, the bunker buster test scheduled for June in Nevada, will ostensibly send a signal to Iran and North Korea that no matter how deeply they bury their bunkers, we’ll find a way to bust them.  But the signal we’re liable to send by showing them how deep a bunker we can bust is how much deeper they need to bury their bunkers so we can’t bust them.

But that makes no never mind, because Divine Strake’s real target audience isn’t Iran, or North Korea, or China, or Russia.  It’s the American public.  When the Bush administration was garnering support for the invasion of Iraq, Condi Rice and Mister Bush made scare noise about “mushroom clouds.”  Now they’re going to give us more than just talk.  

Divine Strake is expected to create a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, and boy, do you think that’s going to get play on the cable news channels?

Scary, huh kids?  Next time, it’ll be them nasty old terrorists setting off that there bomb, and ground zero will be Vegas itself!

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now being cast as Hitler.  And oh, I see where some sources are starting to describe Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez as playing “Mussolini to Iran’s Hitler.”  

Rewriting the War Story

A glance through the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century’s paper trail going back to 1997 clearly shows that the Bush administration’s foreign policy was based on a desire to establish a global American hegemony.  Its ambitions for the Middle East were to establish an increased military footprint in the Middle East for the purpose of protecting Israel and other allies in the Gulf region and ensure continued U.S. access to the region’s oil.  The policy had nothing to do with terrorism.  And it only tangentially had to do with the threat from weapons of mass destruction or Saddam Hussein.  The 9/11 attacks were a convenient excuse to execute “the plan,” and Saddam Hussein was a convenient bad guy to go after.  But, as the PNAC’s September 2000 “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” revealed, 9/11 was the cataclysmic “new Pearl Harbor” needed to execute the neoconservative plan, and “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf” transcended “the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

On September 20, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, PNAC wrote a letter to Mister Bush that said, “…even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”

What’s It All About, Condi?

One way to track how the war story has changed over the course of the Bush administration is to take a look at statements made by Condi Rice.

Back in 2002 she said, “The prospect of Saddam Hussein acquiring [weapons of mass destruction] is a very powerful moral case for regime change.”

In September 2003, Condi Rice, defending the Iraq invasion, Condi said, “Iraq, if it is prosperous and stable, in a different kind of Middle East, is going to be the death knell for terrorism.”  (Since Hussein’s ouster, Iraq has been anything but prosperous or stable, and terrorism incidents have increased.)

In October 2005, well after the WMD and terrorism claims regarding Iraq had been disproven, she said, “…the liberation of the Iraqi people was long overdue.”

Compare that pattern with Condi’s rhetoric on Iran:

In December 2005 she told Fox News that Iran could not be trusted with technology that could lead to nuclear arms.

In March 2006, she described Iran as “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.”  

Later in March she said, “We do not have a problem with the Iranian people. We want the Iranian people to be free. Our problem is with the Iranian regime.”

I’m guessing she can repeat that pattern indefinitely.  

World Wars from Here to Eternity

Some experts, including ex-CIA director James Woolsey, say that the Cold War was World War III and that the war on terror was World War IV.  Since we now know that the Iraq war had little if anything to do with terrorism–at least, not until we invaded that country–we might as well call that World War V.  If they work it right, the Bush crowd can liberate the freedom loving people of Iran (VI) and Venezuela (VII) before the end of big brother’s term of office.  And if we can replace big brother George with little brother Jeb in 2008, we’ll be off to the races.  Jeb, after all, was one of the original PNAC members.  He’s all on board with this Hitler bashing and terror crushing and WMD eliminating and freedom loving people liberating.  

With any luck at all, we can be well into the World War Xs by 2016!  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Not only is the Next World Order already here, we’re already seeing a typical example of how power plays will be executed in it.  

Under the fold: lions and tigers and bears, oh my!…

Last week, the New York Times carried a story by Nazila Fathi titled “Iran Threatens Retaliation if Attacked.”

The main story concerns warnings by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Iran will respond “two fold” to an invasion of Iran.  That’s the scare noise that makes the story sell (and don’t think Khamenei doesn’t know that), but the more germane aspect of the Iran situation is at the bottom of Fahti’s article.

Iran has been relying on the vote of two its economic allies, China and Russia, at the Security Council meeting, hoping they would use their veto power to stop any punitive measures against it.

Moscow has helped Iran build its first nuclear reactor in the southern city of Bushehr and Iran has extensive oil deals with China.

Earlier in the Next World Order series, we discussed the emerging multi-tiered matrix of major powers, balance powers, regional powers, wild cards, and others.  As the Iran nuclear saga unfolds, we see a loose economic and energy coalition forming between a major power (China), a balance power (Russia) and a wild card seeking to achieve the status of a regional power (Iran).  Russia stands to profit by assisting Iran in develop its nuclear program.  The more Iran can draw on nuclear power as a source of energy, the more it has to sell to China, a nation aggressively developing its industrial and infrastructure base.  Russia and China already have a dozen or so other dope deals going on on the side, including a mutual dislike of the idea of the United States dictating terms to the rest of the world on every issue under the sun.  

On the other side of the fence we have the declining hegemon (U.S.) that has alienated it’s traditional allies in the European Union.  Even the prime minister of our traditional balance power friend England has informed Mister Bush that it will not support any military strike on Iran.

Next World Diplomacy

We’ve thrown the diplomatic process on Iran into the United Nations Security Council, where Russia and China hold all the high cards.  All they have to do is say “no.”  And how are convincing them to play along with us?  Vice President Dick Cheney accuses Russia of being a “bully” and young Mister Bush blames China for the spike in oil prices.  

And who’s our man in the UN we’re relying on to smooth all the bruised feelings and broker a bargain?  John Bolton.  Calling Bolton a “diplomat” is like calling a Doberman a lap dog.

But say, by some miracle, the U.S. manages to convince China and Russia to vote for sanctions against Iran.  Iran’s already ahead of that contingency: they’ll just drop out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Teaty. The treaty contains a provision for signatories to withdraw by giving the UN and other treaty members three months notice.

Then what do we do?  North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003, and admitted up front that they had developed nuclear weapons.  Iraq still insists that it has no interest in having nuclear weapons.  We’ve promised North Korea we won’t attack them.  How do we justify keeping an attack of Iran on the table?

The Bush administration could pull the Israel card, citing Iran’s bellicose rhetoric regarding the Jewish state.  But Iran’s threats against Israel are pure trash talk.  Nearly a thousand miles separate Tehran and Tel Aviv.  Iran is not capable of effectively projecting conventional sea, air or land power that far.  There’s no conclusive evidence that Iran’s new Shabat 3 ballistic missile actually works, or if it does, that it can reach or accurately target Israel.  But even if it can hit a target in Israel, what kind of warhead would it carry?  An envelope full of anthrax?  That will do less harm than a car bomb would.  Even if Iran actually is pursuing a nuclear weapon, it won’t have one for many years, and if it ever does manufacture one, the consequences of using one on Israel would be devastating.  

(And don’t buy the nonsense that says Iran’s leadership is crazy.  They’re crazy like North Korea’s Kim Jong Il is crazy–like a fox.)

Next World Congitive Dissonance

The greatest failing of the neoconservative philosophy is that we’ve become so reliant on armed force as our primary tool of foreign policy we’re nearly incapable of competently employing diplomatic and economic leverage.  And as our expeditions in Afghanistan and Iraq have illustrated, military action has become a profoundly counter-effective means of conducting policy.  Every time we pull the trigger, we shoot ourselves in the foot.

One hopes that the Bush administration has at long last learned the fallacies of its core ideology.  But those hopes could well be in vain.  We’re already hearing the same kinds of rhetoric from the White House that we heard during the run up to the Iraq.  Calling Iran our biggest challenge.  Comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler.  (Remember when Saddam Hussein was Hitler?)  Drawing conclusions about Iran’s intentions based on negative proof (they’re not telling us everything, therefore they must be developing nuclear weapons.)  

We’re also hearing about hoping to solve the problem through diplomatic efforts through the UN.  But as we’ve discussed, the odds of those efforts are stacked on the side of probable failure.

If they fail, the Bush administration can say, “we tried the diplomatic route,” and blame the UN because diplomacy didn’t work.  That will be a hard position to sell, though, considering that President Ahmadinejad has now sent Mister Bush a letter thought to be an overture for direct Iran-U.S. diplomatic talks.  

We’ll see what happens, but if the administration is as hell bent for leather to pull the trigger on Iran as they were on Iraq, they’re going to pull that trigger.  If they do, lamentably, this time, they’ll shoot off something far more precious than a toe.

And it may be that end of American neoconservatism will not end with another Watergate, but another Waterloo.  

Not with a whimper, but with a bang.  

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The Next World Order Series

Part I: America’s 21st Century Military

Part II: Network-centric Warfare

Part III: America’s Military Industrial Complex

Part IV: The Revolt of the Retired Generals

Part V: What Good is War?

Part VI: Body Count

Part VII: Order in the Next World Order

Part VII; The Cost of War and Peace in the Next World Order

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Promoted by Steven D.

Raw Story brings us new revelations on the Abu Ghraib torture affair.

Under the fold: more outrage than the human nervous system can absorb…

New Army documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union today reveal that Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez ordered interrogators to “go to the outer limits” to get information from detainees. The documents also show that senior government officials were aware of abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke…

… Among the documents released today by the ACLU is a May 19, 2004 Defense Intelligence Agency document implicating Sanchez in potentially abusive interrogation techniques. In the document, an officer in charge of a team of interrogators stated that there was a 35-page order spelling out the rules of engagement that interrogators were supposed to follow, and that they were encouraged to “go to the outer limits to get information from the detainees by people who wanted the information.” When asked to whom the officer was referring, the officer answered “LTG Sanchez.” The officer stated that the expectation coming from “Headquarters” was to break the detainees…

The ACLU said the document makes clear that while President Bush and other officials assured the world that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of “a few bad apples,” the government knew that abuse was happening in numerous facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 62 cases being investigated at the time, at least 26 involved detainee deaths. Some of the cases had already gone through a court-martial proceeding. The abuses went beyond Abu Ghraib, and touched Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other detention centers in Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Tikrit, as well as Orgun-E in Afghanistan.

It always was a stretch of the imagination to believe that Sanchez, then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, was entirely out of the loop in the goings on at Abu Ghraib.  Back in May of 2004, Sanchez told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Abu Ghraib interrogation rules had been written at the company commander level, and that he had no role in preparing or approving them.  

We now know that the interrogation practice paper trail leads back to the highest levels of the Bush administration.  Steven Shafersman of Texas Citizens for Science has compiled a fairly encompassing collection of links and articles on the subject here.

Janet Karpinski is the senior officer to have been punished over the Abu Ghraib abuses.  President Bush demoted her from brigadier general to colonel and she subsequently retired.  Her punishment was “administrative,” and such did not amount to a conviction on criminal charges.  A number of junior officers and enlisted personnel, like Private Lindie England, have been criminally charged and convicted.

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Our war on terror torture record is disturbing at so many levels it’s difficult to know where to begin describing them.  What perhaps disturbs me most is that I can’t feel outrage over this matter any more because I’m all outraged out.  Once again, I’m seeing a smoking gun that proves what I more or less already knew, and chances are that this story will fall off the radar thanks to the electronic interference from the other outrageous stories I’m already out of outrage over and the all outrages we haven’t heard about yet that will seem tame because the outrage threshold has been set so high that it’s impossible to get outraged about anything any more.  The human nervous system can only absorb so much.  

Here’s another thing I can’t get outraged about any more.  We’re never going to get to the bottom this outrage or any other outrageous act of this administration as long as the only investigation of the administration’s outrages are conducted by the outrageous administration itself.  

Yeah, there’s a good chance the Democrats will wrest control of both Houses of Congress come November which would give them control of all the investigative committees.  But if they try to conduct an honest investigation of every Bush administration outrage, they’ll never get anything else done.  

So they’ll have to prioritize, do a “triage” of outrage, if you will, and pick and choose who and what they can actually bring to justice.  

Let’s hope they focus on the apples at the top of the barrel, and not on the Lindsie Englands at the very bottom of it.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

The longer the fiasco in Iraq drags on, the more we hear the folks who cooked up the idea of invading that sand dune republic denying that they had anything to do with it.  Crooks and Liars provided this John Bolton quote from a press conference televised last week on CNN.

We did not violate the UN charter in the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and that plan was not drawn…at the Project for the New American Century.

John’s memory must be slipping, what with all those responsibilities he has as Ambassador to the United Nations now.  Maybe it’s time to help him refresh it.

Under the fold: a stroll down Selective Memory Lane…

Let’s take a hike down the PNAC Paper Trail.

June 3, 1997: PNAC issues its Statement of Principles.  “American foreign and defense policy is adrift,” it states at the beginning, and goes on to criticize the Clinton administration.  This document contains no specific mention of Iraq, but does admonish that, “America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East,” and that “we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future[.]”

Among the signatories are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, as well as PNAC co-founders Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan.  

January 19, 1998: John Bolton publishes “Congress Versus Iraq” in Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard.  He slams President Clinton for being soft on Iraq, and exhorts Congress to force Clinton into taking more aggressive action against Saddam Hussein.  

January 26, 1998: PNAC sends a letter to President Clinton urging military action to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power.  A key passage states that if America continues its containment policy, “…the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.”

Keep that in mind the next time young Mister Bush says invading Iraq wasn’t about Israel or oil.  (Please note that I have no problem with America keeping Israel under its protective umbrella.  But we didn’t need to invade Iraq to do it.)

And, oh, one of the signatures on that letter belongs to a guy named John Bolton.  

A copy of the letter appears in the Washington Post on January 27.  

January 30, 1998: PNAC founders Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan publish “Bombing is not Enough” in the New York Times.  “Saddam Hussein must go,” it says.  “If Mr. Clinton is serious about protecting us and our allies from Iraqi biological and chemical weapons, he will order ground forces to the gulf. Four heavy divisions and two airborne divisions are available for deployment. The President should act, and Congress should support him in the only policy that can succeed.”  

There’s no question: PNAC was specifically calling for an armed invasion of Iraq by ground forces.  How many teams of lawyers do they need to talk their way around that?

February 2, 1998: Robert Kagan publishes “Saddam’s Impending Victory” in Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard.  Kagan again calls for removal of Hussein by force and compares him to Hitler.  

February 26, 1998: Kristol and Kagan publish “A ‘Great Victory’ for Iraq” in the Washington Post.  “Unless we are willing to live in a world where everyone has to ‘do business’ with Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, we need to be willing to use U.S. air power and ground troops to get rid of him.”

March 9, 1998: Bolton publishes “Kofi Hour” in the Weekly Standard and criticizes the Clinton administration for working through the UN to deal with Hussein.

September 18, 1998: PNAC’s Paul Wolfowitz testifies before the House National Security Committee on Iraq during which he condemns the Clinton’s Iraq policy.  “The Clinton Administration repeatedly makes excuses for its own weakness…”

September 28, 1998: Robert Kagan’s “A Way to Oust Saddam” appears in the Weekly Standard.  “It has long been clear that the only way to rid the world of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction is to rid Iraq of Saddam.”

November 16, 1998:  An non-attributed editorial in the Weekly Standard titled “How to Attack Iraq” says, “It now seems fairly certain that some time in the next few weeks the Clinton administration will have to strike Iraq. There really are no acceptable alternatives.”

January 4, 1999: Robert Kagan’s “Saddam Wins-Again” appears in the Weekly Standard.  More castigation of UN and Clinton administration efforts to contain Saddam Hussein.

Skip Ahead

There’s much more.  You can read the entire PNAC literature on Iraq at the group’s website, starting here.  

But let’s take a close look at two key PNAC documents from the 21st century.  

Rebuilding America’s Defenses was published in September 2000, just before the presidential election that brought George W. Bush into power.  This neoconservative manifesto revealed that the PNAC’s ambitions in the Middle East were only obliquely related to Saddam Hussein.

The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.  (Page 14.)

In other words, Hussein was merely the convenient excuse for establishing permanent military bases in the heart of the Middle East and controlling the flow of the region’s oil.  

But the PNACers realized that the road to achieving their dream of a global American empire was “…likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event–like a new Pearl Harbor.”  (Page 51.)

On September 11, 2001 PNAC got its Pearl Harbor, and a significant portion of its membership held key policy making posts in the Bush administration, some of the most notable among them being Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bolton.  

On September 20, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, PNAC wrote a letter to Mister Bush that said, “…even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”

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DNA evidence couldn’t provide better proof that the PNAC formulated the Bush administration’s Iraq policy than the paper trail the PNAC itself provides.  For Bolton to deny that the PNAC “planned” the Iraq invasion goes beyond irony, beyond the absurd, beyond the Orwellian.  

There’s a temptation to shrug one’s shoulders and say, “Why dwell on this?  It’s in the past.”

But it’s not in the past.  We’re living with the neoconservative nightmare today and there’s no telling how long it will take to undo their damage, partly because they’re still in power and they’re still doing damage.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

I’m having one of those Mondays when I wonder if I’m still living in the United States of America, and if I am, what happened to it?

It seems we have a country where illegal immigrants have constitutional rights, retired military officers have none, and the commander in chief isn’t subject to any law whatsoever.  

Under the fold: the law of the land of the loony…

A Boston Globe story from Sunday tells us that:

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

I’ve written quite a few articles about Mister Bush’s outrageous claims of absolute powers in his capacity as America’s executive officer and the commander in chief of its military, but I hadn’t realized that he’s told the legislature to pack sand more than 750 times.  

Is it legal for him to do that?  

Apparently so, if he’s decided it’s up to him to decide what’s legal and what isn’t.  The GOP controlled Congress isn’t likely to tell him otherwise, and the Supreme Court seems too busy looking into whether Anna Nicole Smith is entitled to pursue a share of her late billionaire husband’s estate to make any judgments on whether Mister Bush’s arbitrary fiats on constitutionality are constitutional.  

Filling the vacuum left by the Supreme Court is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Mister Bush’s lawyer in chief, whose job appears to be to tell his boss that whatever he wants to do is legal.

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How many wars are we in now?  Are Iraq and Afghanistan separate wars, or are they part and parcel of the so-called Global War on Terror?  What’s Iran going to be?  

I see now where the friends of the Bush administration are starting to liken Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler.  I recall a time not so long ago when Saddam Hussein was being compared to Hitler.  How many Hitlers is it legal to have at the same time?  Is there a rule on that, where once you have one Hitler in custody and on trial that somebody else can become Hitler?

I also see where Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has compared Mister Bush to Hitler.  How does that work?  Is it one of those deals where each side of a conflict is allowed to have one Hitler?  I guess that makes sense, in a world where the “evil doers” are squared off against the “Great Satan.”

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There’s been quite a bit of discussion in the wake of the retired generals who have called for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation over whether retired retire military officers are subject to discipline under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for publicly criticizing Mister Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other “officials.”  At the crux of the issue is whether or not military retirees receive “pay” or “pension,” and whether or not commissioned officers who retire are still commissioned officers.  

Commander Jeff Huber, United States Navy, had quite a few legal authorities under the UCMJ.   Commander Jeff Huber, United States Navy (Retired) has none.  So does that make the retired commander subject to discipline under the UCMJ article that states:

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present, shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

Hard to say, but the whole issue becomes moot in light of the fact that Mister Bush appears to be able to apprehend and hold any and all American citizens, retired military or not, as an enemy combatants, and deny their rights to due process.

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In a separate but related issue:

Illegal immigrants are staging demonstrations across the country today to protest America’s immigration policy.  Apparently, it’s legal for the illegals to do that.

What kind of country do we live in when illegal immigrants can protest government policies, but retired military members who are U.S. citizens–and who have done as much as anyone to earn their rights of citizenship–cannot?  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

A Department of Defense directive released on April 18 of this year states that Donald Rumsfeld has the authority to call military retirees back on active duty.

Under the break: thou shalt not criticize…

The Practical Nomad reports that:

Exhausting all means of getting people into uniform short of a draft, yesterday the USA Department of Defense published new regulations on Management and Mobilization of Regular and Reserve Retired Military Members (32 CFR 64, 71 Federal Register 19827-19829, 18 April 2006)…

…The only time in the last 40 years, before the current wars, that military retirees were recalled to active duty was during the crisis in military staffing in medical professions in the first USA-Iraq war in 1990-1991, when the call-ups of retirees began with retired physicians’ assistants. The new regulations provide for the possible call-up of any and all retired soldiers, but the first call-ups of retirees are likely to be of those with medical or perhaps other specialized skills.

The DoD directive does, in fact, make anyone drawing military retirement pay eligible to be recalled to service at the pleasure of the Secretary of Defense, and they can be assigned to virtually any federal “wartime” position that the government deems fit.  No further permission of Congress is required because such measures are already allowed under Title 10 of U.S. Code.  It is not subject to review under numerous federal laws such as Unfunded Mandates Reform Act or the Regulatory Flexibility Act because, among other reasons, the cost isn’t expected to exceed $100 million in any one year.

In other words, the life of every American citizen who retired honorably from the United States military is under the direct control of one Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Why Now?

We’re over three years into the Iraq war and almost five years into the Global War on Terror.  Why is the Secretary of Defense just now deciding he needs to draw on the retired military community?  Why does the entire retired community need to be in the eligible pool?  Why wasn’t this directive announced at the DoD website, and why hasn’t the mainstream media covered it?

A number of possible answers to these questions exist, of course, but the release of the directive on the heels of the well publicized revolt of the retired generals is timing too close to dismiss as pure coincidence.

While the retired generals critical of the war and Rumsfeld have received the most attention in the media, scores of military retirees of lower pay grades have voicing their displeasure with the administration and the Pentagon for years.  As dissenting voices began to disappear from traditional military publications–rumored to have been by the order Rumsfeld himself–many retired war critics took refuge in the Internet.  My personal experience and anecdotal evidence shared by fellow military affairs writers indicate that numerous government agencies have been keeping tabs on web sites that regularly publish articles unfavorable to the war effort by military retirees and other veterans.

Just Because You’re Paranoid…

Up until about two years ago, I’d have considered the kind of thing I’m suggesting is going on to be a wild eyed conspiracy theory.  But given the Bush administration’s track record for ruthlessly suppressing any and all political opposition, I find the notion that it is tracking retired military war critics more likely than unlikely.  

According to the just released directive, if the Department of Defense finds retirees it wants to shut up, all it has to do is call them back to active duty.  It doesn’t really matter how old or disabled the retirees are, or whether they have any specialty the DoD could possibly use, because Rumsfeld has essentially written himself a blank check to tap anyone he wants to.

Once retirees are back on active duty, they come under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and their constitutional rights–including the right to freedom of speech–are essentially stripped from them.

If retirees resist a call back to active duty, they’ll be in violation of federal law and subject to criminal prosecution either under the UCMJ or civilian law.  This would likely lead to, at the very least, loss of all retirement pay and benefits.

Does this sound like a trick too dirty for even the Bush administration to pull?  Not to me it doesn’t.  

I doubt that Rumsfeld would pull this kind of number on the retired generals who have publicly called for his resignation.  Their cases are already too high profile to sneak under the radar.

But if any of you lesser retired beings get a call in the middle of the night, please let me know about it.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

I’m all a-chuckle over the general description of Fox News pundit Tony Snow’s appointment as the new White House Press Secretary as being part of the “White House makeover.”  Heh.  It will take a lot more than lipstick to make that pig look pretty.

Under the fold: the color of money and smoke…

We have the most transparently secretive government in the history of this country.  

We know that the Iraq policy was formulated by the Project for the New American Century in the nineties, and that the 9/11 attacks were the “convenient excuse” the neoconservatives in and around the administration were looking for to execute that policy.

We know that Cheney and others cooked the intelligence on Hussein’s WMD, and that the Rove machine used White House friendly reporters like Judith Miller to spread disinformation to the American public through the mainstream news media.

And that’s just where it starts.  

What’s more, as the polls show, the Bush administration’s line of bull has run thin.  Even American citizens who understand little to nothing about rhetoric and propaganda tricks know that every time administration officials and supporters open their mouths, they’re blowing smoke.  

Changing the color of the smoke by substituting Snow for McClellan won’t change the perceptions of anyone but already terminally brainwashed, and their perceptions don’t need changing, at least not as far as the White House is concerned.

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The Bush administration’s rhetoric has seldom reflected anything resembling reality.  In that regard, they are typical of what Princeton Professor Emeritus Harry G. Frankfurt described in his celebrated essay “On Bullshit.”

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. …The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Thus it is with the Rovewellians.  Facts and evidence matter not a whit.  If you can come up with the right talking points, and speak them forcefully enough, and echo them often enough, the truth is irrelevant.  Until, of course, you’ve bullshit your way through one too many truths, and all but the most gullible have caught on to you.  At that point, hiring a bigger and better bullshit artist to talk to the press for you isn’t going to do any good.

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Speaking of bullshit artists…

I don’t know how this happened, but I’ve gotten myself on a number of conservative publishers’ e-mail lists.  Maybe somebody was playing a practical joke on me, but whatever the case, I’m glad it happened, because all these right wing literature promos give an insight to the extent of the cognitive dissonance of the right wing mindset.  One of these outfits–Human Events Online–just sent me a promo for Ann Coulter’s upcoming book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.  

According to the Human Events promo, Ann “proves” that in The Church of Liberalism, abortion is a sacrament, Roe v. Wade is “holy writ” and Soviet spies like Alger Hiss are  martyrs.  Ann even “refutes” the sacred liberal myth of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.  

And all in one book!  

For subscribing to the Human Events book club, you can get Godless–a $27.95 value–for free!

I find it an utterly fantastic fact of the American condition that a book by Ann Coulter costs $27.95 in an age when you can buy a leather bound copy of Shakespeare’s complete works for $19.99.

A thousand monkeys pecking away at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years couldn’t come up with a single one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies.  But they could probably produce something vastly superior to the complete works of Ann Coulter.  

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I just heard former Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers say on MSNBC that Tony Snow will have to listen to “two voices in his head.”  One will no doubt tell him what incredible bullshit he’s handing out to the White House Press Corps.  The other one will be saying, “Take the money, then run to Ann Coulter’s publisher, and take more money.”

All the nonsense we’re hearing about Tony’s criticisms of Bush is, well, bullshit.  At heart, he’s a Coulter-class administration and neoconservative agenda supporter .  On his Fox News show, he toed the company line about Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson, John Kerry and the Swift Boaters, liberal justices, George W. Bush’s Vietnam era service, and much more.  

Tony Snow is just a bigger, redder cape in the Bush administration bullring.  We’ll see how effective he is at continuing to fool the mindless beasts.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

In a Fox News interview, Retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul van Riper joined the chorus of former general officers calling for Donald Rumsfeld to leave his post as Secretary of Defense.  (Hand salute to Think Progress for the link to the video.)

Under the fold: denial, distraction, dysfuncion…

Van Riper has been long regarded as a leading iconoclast in the retired flag community.  Long active in simulated war games, he resigned as commander of the opposition force during Millenium Challenge 2002, the battle experiment conducted by the United States Joint Forces Command just prior to the invasion of Iraq.  Using unorthodox tactics, van Riper managed to sink most of the simulated U.S. naval forces in the Arabian Gulf, decisively defeating the “blue force” and repudiating such Rumsfeld favored “transformational warfare” concepts as network-centric warfare, shock and awe, and effects based operations.  The game was stopped, the fleet re-floated, and the exercise continued with significant restrictions placed on the “red” force’s actions.  Van Riper resigned in disgust.  

Almost four years later, we have seen what amounts to a real world recreation of the 2002 war game in Iraq.  Except this time, Rumsfeld and his loyal generals can’t stop the clock, go back, and make the enemy fight the way they want them to.

Rumsfeld is a nightmare, and I agree that nothing is going to get better as long as he’s on the job.  I don’t think a new man in the Defense cabinet post can fix the fiasco in Iraq, and the same probably holds true for the “defeat snatched from the jaws of victory” situation in Afghanistan.  There is nothing that can constitute “winning” in those two theaters of operations.  The best we can hope for is avoidance of a complete loss.  

But we have the war on terror–the real war on terror, not the distraction in Iraq–to conduct, and to date, Rumsfeld has handled it horribly.  

Almost six years after the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon has at long last come out with a comprehensive set of plans to fight terrorism outside of the two war theaters.  We don’t know too much about the plans because they’re secret, so the only parts of it we’ll hear about are the parts Rumsfeld authorizes to be leaked.  But from what’s been officially leaked so far, it sounds like a global Special Forces operation that will be run under the direct control of Donald Rumsfeld.  And boy, isn’t that just what we need: Field Marshal Don and his Howling Commandos running roughshod over the formal military chain of command, the State Department, the CIA, and the entire universe of international law enforcement agencies.  If, by some chance, America has a genuine friend left in the world, it won’t have any after two and a half more years of Rumsfeld slapping everybody in the face with a poop pie.  

Ultimately, we’re only going to make genuine progress in defeating terrorism by repudiating the entire neoconservative philosophy and the havoc it has wrought on our foreign policy and our own military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies.  We need to get rid of a lot more people that Donald Rumsfeld–Cheney, Bolton and Rice are up at the top of my list.  

But, you have to start somewhere, and Rumsfeld is as good a place to start as any.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Ann Scott Tyson of The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has approved a comprehensive plan to fight the war on terror.  About time, huh?

Below the fold: on the eve of dysfunction…

The long-awaited campaign plan for the global war on terrorism, as well as two subordinate plans also approved within the past month by Rumsfeld, are considered the Pentagon’s highest priority, according to officials familiar with the three documents who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about them publicly.

Two things.  First, if memory serves me correctly, we’ve been in a war on terror for almost five years now.  If coming up with a plan to fight it has really been the Pentagon’s “highest priority,” I’d hate to see what happens with stuff they keep on the back burner these days.

Second, I wonder who authorized the anonymous officials not to speak about the plans publicly.  How much longer are we going to play this “official/unofficial leak” patty cake?

The program is secret, of course, which is no doubt why it had to be leaked.  

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The plans involve stepped up use of Special Forces.  General Doug Brown, head of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), began working on the plans in 2003 when Rumsfeld first designated SOCOM as the “lead command for the war on terrorism.”  

Author Tyson doesn’t speculate on why Rumsfeld waited until 2003 to name a lead command to fight terror and start putting together a plan to fight it.  One would imagine he was too busy getting ready to invade Iraq to think about fighting terror.  

One of the main reasons it took three years after that to finish the plans was tension inside the military as well as with the CIA and the State Department over who’s in charge of special force counterterrorism teams within any given theater of operations.  They don’t appear to have to answer to U.S. embassies, or even, in some circumstances, to four-star regional commanders.  

I smell trouble brewing.  

One of the most important principles of military operations of any kind is “unity of command.”  There must be a clear line of authority that extends from the private infantry soldier to the regional commander to the Secretary of Defense to the President.  Any time you have an “elite” outfit careening around in a regional commanders’ area of responsibility that the regional commander doesn’t have control of, bad stuff happens.  

But if bad stuff happens under this plan, we probably won’t know about it because it’s secret, and nobody gets authorized speak publicly about bad secret stuff.  Only the good secret stuff gets leaked.  

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You don’t need to read the secret war on terror plans to figure out they’re exactly what Rummy wanted them to be.  That’s pretty much how everything has been in the Department of Defense since early 2001.  There’s no reason to think this Rummy plan will work any better than any other Rummy plan.  

Why should we be concerned?  Because the DoD took six years to institutionalize a plan for fighting the war on terror, one that comes straight out of the box with built in warning flags.  If it doesn’t work, we won’t know about if for at least another two and a half years because Rummy doesn’t recognize any idea of his isn’t working, and Lord knows that at this point that nobody’s going to blow any whistles, and even if they do, it won’t do any good because Rummy is bulletproof and he’s not going anywhere as long as his boss is still in office.    

Come 2008, we’ll have been fighting a war for seven and a half years with no good plan for fighting it, and somebody will have to come up with a better plan, and who knows how long that might take?

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.