Recently in War on Terror Category

"When the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, we would be giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected,' Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor Wednesday...'[Any delay would] increase the risk of a retaliatory terrorist strike against the homeland and hamper our ability to deal a truly fatal blow to al-Qaida."

Honestly, what is this horseshit? In a disturbingly complete 180 from his comments the last time this came up back in 2006 -- although, to be fair, he eventually folded like an accordion then too -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dusts off the Cheneyite talking points to call for an immediate, unamended extension of the PATRIOT Act. (It passed the Senate today, 72-23.)

Contrast this with Reid in 2005: "'We killed the Patriot Act,' boasted Minority Leader Harry Reid...to cheers from a crowd at a political rally after the vote." Ladies and gentlemen, our Democratic Senate Majority Leader. And, yet, however hackadocious Reid is being in this instance, let's remember -- this is coming from the top, from the constitutional scholars at the White House. After all, as Mike Riggs notes in Reason: "If the PATRIOT Act lapses, and a sarlacc does not swallow LAX immediately after, it'll be that much harder to convince Americans that those provisions are necessary."

"An executive at a small defense contractor recently joked to me, 'Afghanistan is our business plan.' I asked him what he would do if the war ended. He stared at me for a moment and said, 'Well, then I hope we invade Libya.'"

Proving Chalmers Johnson's maxim in Why We Fight that "when war becomes that profitable, you're going to see more of it," PBS's Joshua Foust looks at the economic implications of withdrawal in Afghanistan for our standing army of Hessians defense sub-contractors. "Ten years of war have established a discrete class of entrepreneurs, mid-level workers and administrators who are completely reliant upon the U.S. being at war to stay employed." I somehow doubt we'll be freezing their pay anytime soon.

"I don't mourn the loss of any terrorist's life. What I do mourn is what we lose when by official policy or official neglect we confuse or encourage those who fight this war for us to forget that best sense of ourselves. Through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss, we are always Americans, and different, stronger and better than those who would destroy us."

Showing a flash of his 2000 self in today's WaPo op-ed page, John McCain argues anew that torture is un-American -- and that Bush water-carriers like Michael Mukasey are lying about its efficacy in the Bin Laden hunt. He then followed up with a Senate speech to the same effect:

""In fact, not only did the use of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads on bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed; it actually produced false and misleading information...In short, it was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden."

"For over two decades, bin Laden has been al Qaeda's leader and symbol, and has continued to plot attacks against our country and our friends and allies. The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat al Qaeda. Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort. There's no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must -- and we will -- remain vigilant at home and abroad."

So, yes, as you may have heard, we finally found Osama Bin Laden, fulfilling a key promise President Obama made during the 2008 campaign. While I would have preferred to see the perpetrator of 9/11 captured alive and brought to trial -- cause that's how we do justice here in the US of A -- congrats to the president's team, the analysts who did the hard work, and the men and women who executed the operation, on finally getting their man.

All that being said, the second half of the president's statement above is troubling. The death of Bin Laden should mark the beginning of the end of the 9/11 decade. With the splinter finally removed, it is time to take a long hard look not just at our continuing war in Afghanistan -- after all, Osama was eventually found in Pakistan, mainly through what the Bunk would call good po-lice work -- but at all the questionable and/or extra-constitutional actions we have taken in the name of fighting the terr'ists since September 11th. (Newsflash: Torture had nothing to do with capturing OBL.) If the death of Bin Laden doesn't move us to this reconsideration, what then ever will?

Unfortunately (and of course), that doesn't seem to be what's happening. Instead, Congress is laying the foundation for a wider war: "Contained in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 is a new authorization to use military force that would grant the executive branch the power to 'address the continuing and evolving threat posed by these groups.' In practice, that means the president could use military force against any suspected terrorist across the globe -- indefinitely."

Indefinite war? No thanks. There's been an eerie touch of Emmanuel Goldstein in the way Bin Laden was used to justify all manner of extraconstitutional actions and civil liberties violations under Dubya -- actions that have been ratified and continued under Obama. Now that the Bogeyman is dead, it's time to stand down. It's time to start acting like America again.

"After the Anonymous attacks and the release of Barr's e-mails, his partners furiously distanced themselves from Barr's work. Palantir CEO Dr. Alex Karp wrote, 'We do not provide -- nor do we have any plans to develop -- offensive cyber capabilities...' But both of the Team Themis leads at these companies knew exactly what was being proposed...They saw Barr's e-mails, and they used his work. His ideas on attacking WikiLeaks made it almost verbatim into a Palantir slide about 'proactive tactics.'"

Strange powers have our enemies, and strange weaknesses! In Wired, Nate Anderson of Ars Technica fdelves into the story behind the highly troubling HBGary leaks. Among other things, these leaks have already revealed that:

1. Bank of America contemplated hiring private-intelligence goons -- the aforementioned HBGary, the aptly-named Palantir Technologies, and third-wheel Berico Technologies -- to spread anti-Wikileaks disinformation discredit Salon's Glenn Greenwald.


2. The Chamber of Commerce has been using their services to conduct surveillance on and smear progressives and unions.


3. These organizations are manufacturing sock-puppets wholesale to create an "illusion of consensus" on behalf of their clients.


4. Private security firms like the aforementioned ones above are, as Marcy Wheeler puts it, deploying "intelligence techniques developed for use on terrorists [against] citizens exercising their First Amendment rights." And


5. These morons actually tried to charge their clients $2000 a day for what amounts to trolling services.

As HBGary target Glenn sums it up: "What is set forth in these proposals for Bank of America quite possibly constitutes serious crimes. Manufacturing and submitting fake documents with the intent they be published likely constitutes forgery and fraud. Threatening the careers of journalists and activists in order to force them to be silent is possibly extortion...Attacking WikiLeaks' computer infrastructure in an attempt to compromise their sources undoubtedly violates numerous cyber laws. Yet these firms had no compunction about proposing such measures...and even writing them down. What accounts for that brazen disregard of risk? In this world, law does not exist as a constraint."

In other words, they do not fear the law because it has forsaken these lands. And, hey, when you consider that nobody has yet gone to jail for lying the American people into a trillion-dollar war, setting up an illegal, unconstitutional, and inhumane torture regime, or fraudulently abetting or even precipitating a multi-trillion-dollar economic meltdown, their brazen calculation seems like a pretty safe bet.

"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

Sigh. In the WP, Dana Priest and William Arkin attempt to survey the breadth and depth of our post-9/11 intelligence complex, and the results are troubling, to say, the least. Basically, nobody, not even the SecDef, has any clue how big some of these programs are, or what the armies of private contractors are up to half the time. "After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine...'Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.'" If you have to ask...

For a good overview of the Post's laudable coverage, check out this worthwhile post from Wired's Danger Room and Glenn Greenwald's pithy summation of the problem. "This world is so vast, secretive and well-funded that it's very difficult to imagine how it could ever be brought under control...[Meanwhile] The Drudge and Politico sewers still rule our world -- 'fights over nothing' -- and happily distract us from Top Secret America, what it does and what it takes." But, hey, what's Sarah Palin been up to?

"The bottom line is this: Current procedures under the CSRT are such that a perfectly innocent individual could be held and could not rebut the Government's case and has no way of proving his innocence. I would like somebody in this Chamber, somebody in this Government, to tell me why this is necessary." Me too, Senator Obama, me too.

In a decisive break with his campaign stances and the best indicator yet that this administration is now happily perpetuating deeply troubling Bush-era policies, the President wins the right to hold detainees indefinitely in Bagram -- the difference from the Boumediene decision on Gitmo being that Bagram is a "war zone." (And Ben Franklin's admonition aside, that's an excuse you hear quite a bit these days.)

FWIW, Politico's Josh Gerstein -- while bending over backwards, as per the Village norm, not to call torture "torture" -- suggests civil liberties concerns are overblown here, but check out his reasoning: "The Obama administration...has, so far, resisted seeking a full-scale preventive detention law that would apply to future captives. Instead, it has pleaded with civil liberties and human rights groups not to oppose some legal mechanism to allow the continued detention of Al Qaeda captives, at least some of whom may be untriable because of aggressive interrogations many view as torture."

Oh, please. We have to hold them forever because we tortured them? How utterly and completely effed up is that? As Stephen Colbert well put it: "It's essentially the same stance taken by George Bush. With one important difference: Obama makes the kids like it."

"Things in that unhappy country are going badly -- much worse, of course, than Team Obama had to pretend this week but quite a bit worse than even a sensible skeptic might think. And unless Karzai takes to heart the lectures he heard (someone must have given him a stern talking-to amid all the bonhomie), things are only going to get worse still."

After perusing an unclassified DoD report released last month, Slate's Fred Kaplan sees ominous trends unfolding in Afghanistan. "[T]he full report is a hair-raiser. The news is almost all bad; and the few bits of good news turn out, on close inspection, to be extremely misleading...[T]he report states, 'The insurgents perceive 2009 as their most successful year.'"

"All across Washington, the doors, terraces and plazas of our essential public buildings have been closed off to the public, likely forever. But the closing of this front door, which will now be used only for exiting the building, is not just another front door lost to paranoia. It is the loss of what may be the nation's most important portal."

In the WP, architecture critic Phillip Kennicott lambasts the Supreme Court for closing its front doors in fear of the Big Bad Terr'ists. "The justices, with Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissenting, have made their priorities known, as clearly as if they had they had sold naming rights to the Great Hall to the highest corporate bidder. They stand on the side of security -- a regime of absolute and irrevocable decisions often made by unelected officials and not subject to any meaningful public appeal. Beauty, architecture and the need for a democratic people to experience inspiring symbolic public space weigh lightly, if at all, in the scales." (See also Paul Goldberger's similar case in The New Yorker.)

"In her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, self-taught urban scholar and activist Jane Jacobs observed that sidewalks and their users are 'active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism' (by "barbarism," she meant crime) and that a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there -- 'the natural proprietors of the street' -- provide 'eyes upon the street.' Jacobs, who died in 2006, would not have been surprised to learn that it was two street vendors who first notified police of the suspicious Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just off Broadway."

In surveying the recent foiled Times Square car-bomb attempt, Slate's makes the case for the prescience of Jane Jacobs, and explains why Dick Cheney is, yet again, wrong. (Kaplan also makes a case for security cameras which I'm less sanguine about -- but, hey, two out of three ain't bad.)

Speaking of the Times Square situation, Twitter wag pourmecoffee had some arch responses to the near-disaster: "Somebody saw something in Times Square. If Cheney were still around, he'd torture entire Lion King cast for answers," and "When we catch this Times Square guy, I assume he will be too scary to try in New York." Ah, Twitter.

"'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war,' General McChrystal dryly remarked." By way of a friend in the office, our military at the highest levels has apparently been infiltrated and subdued by Powerpoint groupthink. "'PowerPoint makes us stupid,' Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina...'It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,' General [H.R.] McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. 'Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.'"

The first thing that came to mind when I saw that ungainly graph above: The Daughters of the American Revolution's "spider chart" in the 1920's, which aimed to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the women's peace and disarmament groups of the time were in fact the fifth column of international socialism. What goes around, comes around, I guess.

"Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth...[T]o keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session - a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding - the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus."

But it's not torture or anything: Recently-released CIA documents explain exactly how we went about waterboarding suspects during the Dubya era. "'It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water,' Nance wrote in the New York Daily News. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning."

Update: Oh, by the way, Karl Rove is "proud" of these despicable acts.

"'This is probably the best example of violation of the separation of church and state in this country,' said Weinstein. 'It's literally pushing fundamentalist Christianity at the point of a gun against the people that we're fighting. We're emboldening an enemy.'"

I like Saving Private Ryan as much as the next guy, but this, in a word, is ridicky-goddamn-diculous. Apparently, our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are routinely outfitted with sniper rifles etched with New Testament verse. "Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon...said the inscriptions 'have always been there' and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is 'not Christian.'"

Newsflash: Given that we're currently engaged in multiple wars and are strongly trying to avoid any appearance of being involved in any sort of anti-Muslim Crusade, arming our soldiers with "Jesus rifles" and crafting bible-thumping war reports for the Commander-in-Chief isn't just catastrophically stupid. It's basically writing the Al Qaeda recruiting posters for them.

Update: Also, "They started it!" is not an appropriate response to this dismal revelation.

Update 2: Trijicon stands down -- Jesus rifles are hereby discontinued, most likely because of quotes like these: "General David Petraeus also addressed the scopes this morning, calling the matter 'disturbing and a serious concern for me.'"

"As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths 'suicides.' In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. "I believe this was not an act of desperation," he said, 'but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.'"

In Gitmo, no one can here you scream. After chatting with four members of a military intelligence unit on the premises, Harper's writer Scott Horton makes a compelling case that three Gitmo suicides in 2006 were in fact covered-up murders, occurring as a result of the Dubya-era torture regime. "All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners' deaths."

Update: Slate's Dahlia Lithwick calls out the press for its deafening silence. "The fact that three Guantanamo prisoners--none of whom had any links to terrorism and two of whom had already been cleared for release--may have been killed there and the deaths covered up, should be front-page news. That brand-new evidence of this possible atrocity from military guards was given only the most cursory investigation by the Obama administration should warrant some kind of blowback. But changing what we allow ourselves to believe about torture would change the way we have reconciled ourselves to torture. Nobody in this country is prepared to do that. So we have opted to ignore it."

"First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.

And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now -- and to rely only on efforts against al-Qaeda from a distance -- would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies."

This is a bit late by now, but regardless: As you all know, President Obama made the case last week for sending 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan. At this point -- and like Fred Kaplan -- I'm conflicted about our continued involvement there...but I'm leaning toward withdrawal. Everything I've heard about the war lately has had that "Vietnam in '66" sense to it: A corrupt government as our ally; trouble winning "hearts and minds"; The US stepping half-blindly into a conflict that's been simmering for centuries (in Southeast Asia, it was the endless Vietnamese war against interlopers; here it's long-simmering ethnic rivalries between the Pashtuns and everyone else.) And now, our new progressive-minded president tells us: If we just commit X more troops (where, now X=30,000), we can win, close up shop, and go home. Uh, really? I think I've already seen this movie a few times.

Obama's shout-out above to basically token international support doesn't assuage my fears. And, as far as the threat posed by Vietnam: True, Tonkin never happened, but obviously policymakers of that era were less sanguine about a Communist victory in South Vietnam than we are today -- The threat of the Enemy can always gets unduly amplified in the heat of the moment. (Speaking of said Reds, it should sober us to acknowledge that all we've done so far in Afghanistan is basically manage to re-create the Soviet experience in the region. Iirc, that didn't end so well.)

Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan, yes, and if we could weed them out and destroy their capacity to attack again, all the better. (And always remember: If Dubya, Rummy et al had just finished the job properly in 2002 rather than salivating over Iraq, we would be in a lot better position right now.) But Al Qaeda is also in Somalia, Tajikstan, Yemen, the Philippines, Kosovo...all over the place. We don't have the resources to play whack-a-mole in all these nations anymore, particularly when every whack usually just works to create new moles. (You'd think we learn that the Hydra sprouts two more heads every time you cut off the wrong one.)

The biggest argument in favor of increasing our military position in Afghanistan would be the continued stability of neighboring Pakistan. (There's Vietnam again -- it's another variation of the Domino Theory.) But, there's a good amount of evidence to suggest that more troop increases by us will only inflame the situation and further destabilize Pakistan. In which case, I'm not sure what we're doing over there, and what we could possibly accomplish in 18 months that we haven't gotten done the last seven years.

In short, it seems to me like we had our shot in Afghanistan, and Dubya blew it. I could be wrong, of course. But, to my mind, now feels like a good time to recognize that fact and stop chasing good money after bad.

"Obama needed to regain control quickly, and he started by jettisoning liberal positions he had been prepared to accept -- and had even okayed -- just weeks earlier." TIME's Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf examine the recent ousting of Greg Craig, a slow death by leaking, as a telling indicator of how the Obama administration has fallen so far astray on civil liberties. "[Obama] quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by [Rahm] Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right." Uh, what? As Nick Baumann points out in Mother Jones, what business do the politicos have in overseeing legal matters? That's rather Rovian, isn't it?

On target as usual, Salon's Glenn Greenwald puts this Craig story and the KSM trial into broader perspective: "As even Time now recognizes, many of the policies once widely declared by Democrats to be a grave threat to the Constitution are now explicitly adopted by the Obama administration. And it's flatly inconsistent to invoke 'the rule of law' to defend Obama's decision to give trials to a few Guantanamo detainees without pointing out that he's violating that very same precept by denying trials to so many." (Pic via the MJ article linked above.)

"Farmer's verdict: 'History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation's response to the 9/11 attacks.'" To paraphrase Mark Twain, a lie gets halfway 'round the world before the truth can put its boots on...or any plane can get off the ground. In his new book The Ground Truth, 9/11 Commission Senior Counsel John Farmer points out yet more lies from Cheney and the Dubya administration, this time about their behavior during that fateful morning.

To wit, waist-deep in My Pet Goat at the time, they didn't know their ass from their elbow when the attacks were happening: "Yet both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military's readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington. Planes were never in place to intercept it. By the time the Northeast Air Defense Sector had been informed of the hijacking, United 93 had already crashed." Well, they've lied about just about everything else -- can't say this is much of a surprise.

"'We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded,' he said at the time. 'They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone.'" The Obama administration backs away from the new preventive detention law they've been floating in recent months. This is a clear victory for civil liberties advocates, but, as The Prospect's Adam Serwer makes plain, only a partial one: "'It may be one of the better results we could hope for, but in reality indefinite detention continues,' said Michael W. Macleod-Ball, Chief Legislative and Policy Council for the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. 'That's antithetical to the American justice system.'"

Indeed, the administration's fallback position is one long held by Dubya -- that the authority for preventive detention already exists in the post-Sept. 11 blank check written by Congress. That's not change we can believe in. See also Glenn Greenwald today on this and recent developments on the state secrets front: "[T]he Obama administration has proven rather conclusively that tiny and cosmetic adjustments are the most it is willing to do. They love announcing new policies that cast the appearance of change but which have no effect whatsoever on presidential powers."

In the NY Review of Books, meanwhile, Garry Wills takes the long view of all this: "[T]he momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch...Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order."

Wills concludes his essay on a worthy, if fatalistic, grace note that holds for a lot of ideals in this troubled age: "Nonetheless, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made. As Cyrano said, 'One doesn't fight in the hope of winning' (Mais on ne se bat pas dans l'espoir du succès)."

Following in the footsteps of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Press Secretary Scott McClellan, former Department of Homeland Security head Tom Ridge becomes the latest ex-Bushie to pen a troubling tell-all: The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege...and How We Can Be Safe Again.

According to US News: "Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was 'blindsided' by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over." Good of you to bring this all up years down the pike, Gov. Ridge -- truly a profile in courage.

'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.' 'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?' 'Really to see them.' 'Again,' said O'Brien. Perhaps the needle was eighty -- ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again. 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?' 'I don't know. I don't know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six -- in all honesty I don't know.' 'Better,' said O'Brien.

Hard to believe, but, this morning, the recent grisly revelations of Dubya-era torture practices became even more horrifying. As we've gleaned more info over the past few days, certain obvious and troubling questions kept popping up. Why, as indicated here, would higher-ups insist on additional waterboarding sessions for Zubadayah, even after the CIA agents at hand thought the suspect "had given up all the information he had"? Also: Mind you, even one session of torture is reprehensible -- and illegal -- enough. But what more did the powers-that-be think they were going to get out of these suspects after ten waterboardings? Twenty? One hundred?

Well, now we know. Not only did Dubya apparachiks conceive a torture regime well before it was approved (and before they had any prisoners on hand -- see also the new and unredacted Armed Services Committee report), but they tortured their suspects into the ground because they were trying to prove a false positive, i.e. that there was some serious operational link between Iraq and Al Qaeda that could be used to sell the second Gulf War. (See also the forged Habbush letter.)

"'There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,' the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity. 'The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.'"

So, in short, it would seem the suspects held by the CIA were tortured over and over again because they would not concede that two plus two equals five.

Really, how much lower can these assholes sink? What could they possibly do that would cause more violence to our ideals, or that would make our cherished role as a beacon of freedom seem any more ridiculous in the eyes of the world, than what they've already done?

Once again, I'm reminded of Lincoln's famous remark to the Indiana 14th: "'Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.'" At the very least, somebody, or somebodies, better go to jail for a loooong time for this. Anything less is simply unacceptable.

"'It's the deepest kind of corruption,' said a recently retired longtime national security official who was closely involved in the AIPAC investigation, 'which was years in the making. It's a story about the corruption of government -- not legal corruption necessarily, but ethical corruption." In a fascinating (and depressing) must-read, Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein lays bare a byzantine corruption scandal involving AIPAC, the Dubya WH, and Jane Harman, former Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee and, some grumbling aside, basically a "team player" for Dubya during the illegal and warrantless wiretaps episode. (Irony of ironies, it appears Harman's misdeeds were caught on -- a court-approved -- wiretap.)

Talking Points Memo offers a handy timeline of the case here. Basically, on one level it's your basic political quid-pro-quo. Harman told an unnamed suspected Israeli agent that she would "waddle into" a federal espionage case then extant against two members of AIPAC and gum up the works somehow. In return, "the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi...to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections." (It didn't take: Pelosi instead chose Silvestre Reyes.) "Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, 'This conversation doesn't exist.'"

Sordid enough. But what's a mid-oughts scandal without the Dubya angle? After she had been caught on said wiretap, a federal investigation into Harman was approved...for awhile. But it seems Attorney General Alberto Gonzales now knew he had Harman in his pocket, and took advantage accordingly. "According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he 'needed Jane' to help support the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times. Harman, he told [CIA Director Porter] Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program. He was right. On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, 'I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.'"

Not that I need to remind anyone here, but Dubya's use of illegal and warrantless wiretaps would, in more cases, be recognized as an impeachable offense. As it was, the Senate GOP (then in the catbird seat) held firm against hearings, and many of our congressional Dems -- Feingold, Leahy, and a few other lonely souls notwithstanding -- folded like a house of cards. Now, at least in the case of Harman, we know why.

Update: The NYT weighs in with their side, and it's TLDR'ed by TPM. And Salon's Glenn Greenwald has a good bit of snarky fun with Harman's recent "road to Damascus" moment regarding wiretaps.

"The Times article, based on information from former intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Abu Zubaydah had revealed a great deal of information before harsh methods were used and after his captors stripped him of clothes, kept him in a cold cell and kept him awake at night. The article said interrogators at the secret prison in Thailand believed he had given up all the information he had, but officials at headquarters ordered them to use waterboarding." Perusing last week's sordid torture memos, eagle-eyed blogger Marcy Wheeler discovered an unsettling statistic: two suspects -- Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- were waterboarded by the CIA 266 times. Zubaydah "revealed no new information after being waterboarded, the article said, a conclusion that appears to be supported by a footnote to a 2005 Justice Department memo saying the use of the harshest methods appeared to have been 'unnecessary' in his case."

Meanwhile, as right-wing stooges like former CIA director Michael Hayden and Mike Allen's anonymous friend excoriate the president for breaking tradition and revealing the illegalities of the Dubya era, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel ventured onto the Sunday shows to tamp down talk of any prosecutions, even for the higher-ups. "[P]eople in good faith were operating with the guidance they were provided. They shouldn't be prosecuted...those who devised policy, he [Obama] believes that they were -- should not be prosecuted either, and that's not the place that we go -- as he said in that letter."

Wrong answer, Rahm. And, unless President Obama were to grant full pardons to the architects of Dubya-era torture, it's not even his call whether or not they should be prosecuted. In fact, choosing not to prosecute them would constitute a violation of international law.

Update: The White House doesn't necessarily agree with Rahm. "[A]dministration officials said Monday that Mr. Emanuel had meant the officials who ordered the policies carried out, not the lawyers who provided the legal rationale. Three Bush administration lawyers who signed memos, John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury, are the subjects of a coming report by the Justice Department's ethics office that officials say is sharply critical of their work. The ethics office has the power to recommend disbarment or other professional penalties or, less likely, to refer cases for criminal prosecution."

Update 2: "With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that." President Obama opens the door further for prosecution.

"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing, Winston could not see what the thing was. "The worst thing in the world," said O'Brien, "varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by implement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal...In your case," said O'Brien, "the worst thing in the world happens to be rats."

And, sometimes, here in our own Room 101, it's insects. As breaking everywhere this afternoon, the President authorizes the release of four long-awaited CIA memos that detail the rationalizing and application of Bush-era torture policies. [No. 1 | No. 2, No. 3a/3b | 4a/4b.] And, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes, they seem to suggest that even the parties-that-be knew what they were doing constituted torture. ("Each year, in the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the United States condemns coercive interrogation techniques and other practices employed by other countries. Certain of the techniques the United States has condemned appear to bear resemblance to some of the CIA interrogation techniques...The State Department's inclusion of nudity, water dousing, sleep deprivation, and food deprivation among the conduct it condemns is significant and provides some indication of an executive foreign relations tradition condemning the use of these techniques.") But, they approved these already-condemned practices as legal anyway, with the caveat that they "cannot predict with confidence whether a court would agree with this conclusion." Yeah, you think?

Well, let's hope the courts get a chance to decide either way. While releasing these documents today, Pres. Obama and Attorney General Holder also made clear that the CIA interrogators involved will not be prosecuted for these acts. "'It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,' he said in a statement." Um, I'm of the opinion that it would be unfair to get strung up in a, cough, "stress position" by a bunch of Cheney-authorized CIA yahoos and then see no legal recourse for it. (And, hey, "just following orders" -- what a novel legal defense. Who were the ad wizards that came up with that one?)

On the other hand, as the WP points out: "Today's carefully worded statement left open the possibility, however, that agents and higher-level officials who may have ventured beyond the strategies approved by Bush lawyers could face legal jeopardy for their actions." That still closes too many legal doors, imho. The strategies approved by Bush lawyers are horrible -- and illegal -- enough. But, at least we can still hold out the minute possibility that the real, top-level architects of Dubya-era torture policy will face some sort of prosecution for their crimes, above and beyond their inevitable condemnation in the history books. (President Obama may argue that "[t]his is a time for reflection, not retribution," but, the law is the law. And, as he should know, pardoning Nixon didn't do Gerald Ford any favors.)

Either way, let's be clear: These memos prove beyond a shadow of a doubt -- as if there were any doubt left -- that it was the stated and directed policy of the Dubya-era CIA to engage in acts they knew to be torture. That is unacceptable, completely antithetical to our ideals, and exceedingly worthy of a criminal investigation. If, in the name of national unity or CIA morale or whatever, the president wants to give a pass to the flunkies who actually held the victims down as they flailed, choked, or writhed in agony...well, that just means somebody else higher-up has to pay. Fine. But, if the rule of law means anything anymore, and I believe it does, the people responsible must be held to account.

"Even for the hardest-core Obama loyalists, it's rather difficult to attribute these increasingly harsh condemnations of Obama's civil liberties, secrecy and executive power abuses to bad motives or ignorance when they're coming from the likes of Russ Feingold, Talking Points Memo, the Center for American Progress, Nancy Pelosi, EFF, the ACLU, The New York Times Editorial Board, Keith Olbermann, Jonathan Turley, The American Prospect, Bruce Fein, Digby, along with some of the most enthusiastic Obama supporters and a bevvy of liberal law professors and international law experts -- those who were most venerated by progressives during the Bush era on questions of the Constitution and executive power."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald surveys the growing progressive consensus that something is rotten at Holder's DOJ with regard to state secrets and the continuation of Bush-era policies antithetical to, if not downright contemptuous of, civil liberties. (In case you missed it here or here, I'm not happy either.) "That the Obama DOJ has repeatedly embraced the very legal theories responsible for much of the intense progressive rage towards the Bush/Cheney regime is now beyond dispute. The question of motive -- of why Obama is doing this -- is far less clear."

Now, obviously, the president has a lot on his plate these days, and a finite amount of political capital with which to achieve an enormous number of objectives. Still, it's well past time that the administration explain what's going on on the civil liberties front from start to finish, akin to Obama's economic overview speech at Georgetown this morning. These are not piddling matters.

"After Gates was confirmed as George W. Bush's defense secretary in December 2006, he gave several speeches outlining major reforms that his successor should undertake--in weapons procurement, promotion policy, and the whole careerist culture inside the Pentagon. (With only two years in office, combined with a plateful of crises in Iraq and elsewhere, he knew he wouldn't have time to take those steps himself.) When he stayed on at Barack Obama's request, and thus became his own successor, many wondered whether he would turn his words into action. With this budget, he has begun to do just that."

A holdover from the bookmarks of last week: Slate's Fred Kaplan offers a concise overview of the proposed Obama-Gates military spending reforms. (These are not spending cuts, by the way, despite what you may have heard -- just some much-needed and long-overdue reprioritizing over at the Pentagon. I also like the idea of phasing out defense contractors in favor of presumably much more cost-conscious civil servants.) "This budget will not go down easily in the Pentagon or in Congress. The F-22, the DDG-1000, and the Future Combat Systems are the favored systems by much of the Air Force, Navy, and Army brass, respectively...The F-22 in particular is also a favorite of many legislators -- the result of politically shrewd subcontracting that spread out production of the plane to key districts in 46 states."

"It's a debate that the Bush administration never seriously had in the seven years following the post-9/11 invasion. Now, by contrast, in the wake of three major strategic reviews, Obama is extending and deepening the discussion of Afghanistan, because the outcome of this debate may set the course of American foreign policy for the remainder of his presidency." Counter-terrorism (CT) or counter-insurgency (COIN)? In Slate, Fred Kaplan discusses the major decision on Afghanistan before Obama this week.

Update: "'We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future,' Obama said. 'That is the goal that must be achieved.'" The president announces our new Af-Pak strategy. Sounds like the COINS won out. Update 2: Or did they? Call it CT-plus.

"'Any way you look at it, it's pretty remarkable,' said Jon B. Eisenberg, an attorney for al-Haramain. 'This is an executive branch threat to exercise control over a judicial branch function.'" Rather than Chuck Todd and Ed Henry falling over each other with illl-thought-out, gotcha garbage that conforms to GOP talking points, here's a question I'd like to have heard the president answer last night: What the hell is going on at the Obama Justice Department, vis a vis the state-secrets privilege? "Civil liberties advocates are accusing the Obama administration of forsaking campaign rhetoric and adopting the same expansive arguments that his predecessor used to cloak some of the most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs of the Bush White House." That is not at all what we voted for, and it's nigh time we got a good explanation of why Holder et al are continuing to play by the Dubya playbook.

"I have often said that history will look back and determine that which could have been done better, or, you know, mistakes I made. Clearly putting a 'Mission Accomplished' on a aircraft carrier was a mistake. It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake. I've thought long and hard about Katrina -- you know, could I have done something differently..."

After eight long years, the end is in sight, and the Idiot Wind is at long last subsiding. For the 43rd president of these United States, George Dubya Bush, gave his final press conference today, during which he finally conceded that "there have been disappointments." Why, yes, yes, there have. "Abu Ghraib obviously was a huge disappointment during the presidency. Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment. I don't know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were -- things didn't go according to plan, let's put it that way." Um, yeah.

At any rate, don't worry: I'm sure we'll be getting one last round of 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 before closing time, when Dubya delivers his "farewell address" on Thursday. One can only hope that it turns out to be Eisenhoweresque, and not one more final, futile attempt to rewrite the history books. But I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

"The good news is that, seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks and nearly three years after the resumption of full-scale war with the Taliban, we are finally beginning to formulate a strategy -- and we have officers in place who think strategically. As history shows, however, smart generals and shrewd strategists don't necessarily yield victory -- especially in Afghanistan."

As the incoming administration correctly looks to reprioritize Afghanistan, Fred Kaplan summarizes the current situation in our "other" war, and the potential pitfalls ahead. "[T]here is a paradox: More U.S. troops are needed to provide security to the Afghan people; but these troops may, at the same time, fuel the insurgency -- which will require more troops, and on the cycle goes."

"'The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own,' the panel concludes. 'The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees." A new bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee lays the blame for detainee abuse squarely on Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputies. "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

Also of note, the statement today by Sen. John McCain, the ranking GOP member who signed off on the investigation: "The committee’s report details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody. These policies are wrong and must never be repeated." It's good to be on the same page again, Senator.

"Announcing the closure of the controversial detention facility would be among the most potent signals the incoming administration could send of its sharp break with the Bush era, according to the advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak for the president-elect. They believe the move would create a global wave of diplomatic and popular goodwill that could accelerate the transfer of some detainees to other countries." In the WP today, unnamed Obama advisors make the case for the president-elect closing the Gitmo gulag next-to-immediately. (The ACLU has echoed similarly, and the UN Human Rights Commission suggested thus back in 2006.)

Nevertheless, while agreeing Gitmo is a catastrophic mistake that needs to be rectified pronto, Slate's Jonathan Mahler and Newsweek's Dan Ephron sense some implementation problems ahead. "[T]he prisoner mess created by Bush with the stroke of a pen in November 2001, and made messier over seven years, will take time and resourcefulness to clean up...[T]he controversial facility will probably still be open for business a year from now."

However the national embarrassment at Guantanamo is handled by the new administration, it seems a safe bet that some of the intelligence officials that have carried water for Dubya on Gitmo, torture, warrantless wiretaps, and other issues will soon be sent packing, namely Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA head Michael Hayden. "McConnell and Hayden, both career intelligence professionals, interpret the Obama team not reaching out to them as a sign that they will not be kept on, intelligence officials said." But, hey, heck of a job, Mikeys.

"'If you think of this as sort of a combination of [the hunt for] Eric Rudolph, who was the Olympic bomber, and the movie 'Deliverance,' multiplied by a factor of 10, that's really what you're focusing on in trying to find bin Laden,' said Robert Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan." Also high on the foreign policy to-do list for President-elect Obama: bringing the war on terror back to Osama bin Laden.

Alas, despite Dubya's occasional bouts of half-hearted bluster, it seems the bin Laden trail may well have gone ice-cold over the past few years, while we've been focused on Iraq. "Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer, told CNN he's talked to 'a dozen CIA guys who've been on the hunt for him, and half of them told me they assumed he was dead, the other half said they assumed he was alive, but the key word here is assume. They don't know.'...[Commander of special operations at Tora Bora Dalton] Fury says the best route for the president-elect to take would be to change the dialogue about bin Laden...He believes taunting the al Qaeda leader may force him to prove he's relevant and, in the process, lead the United States right to him."

"That it was a forgery can no longer be doubted; that it originated with the White House may be harder to prove. Two former CIA officials -- Rob Richer and John Maguire -- have gone on record as saying they were personally charged with carrying out the forgery, but their marching orders, if they existed, came directly from Tenet (who has fiercely denied the story). The closest thing Suskind has to a smoking gun is Richer's memory, five years later, of 'looking down at the creamy White House stationery on which the assignment was written.'"

In his review of Ron Suskind's The Way of the World, Salon's Louis Bayard tells the tale of the Habbush letter, a forgery fabricated by the CIA to tie Iraq to Al Qaeda (and, thus manufacture a casus belli for the War in Iraq.) In other words, George Tenet -- perhaps on higher authority -- signed off on an illegal black op aimed against the American people. If this goes up the food chain -- and, at this point, who'd be surprised if it didn't -- this is definitely an impeachable offense. Where's the outrage?

Update: Politico has more.

"You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it 'simulates' the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning -- or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure." By way of Dangerous Meta, Hitch gets waterboarded. [Video.]

"Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia...[I]f waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

"Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terror camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States...'The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today that is comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,' said Seth Jones, a Pentagon consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation."

In the NYT, Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde explore how, despite all their endless bluster and unconstitutional behavior, the Dubya administration is losing the war against Al Qaeda, and has apparently given up on catching Bin Laden. "By late 2005, many inside the CIA headquarters in Virginia had reached the conclusion that their hunt for Bin Laden had reached a dead end...'You had a very finite number' of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. 'Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.'"

"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for a five-member majority clearly impatient that some prisoners have been held for six years without a hearing." In a setback for the Dubya administration and a victory for the American way of life, the Supreme Court grants habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees. (The decision in Boumediene v. Bush is now the fourth time the Court has reaffirmed the rule of law over Dubya's monarchial anti-terror policies.)

In vicious dissent, the conservative bloc: Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, with Scalia in particular scowling and ranting like a Batman villain. "'America is at war with radical Islamists,' he wrote, adding that the decision 'will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.' He went on to say: 'The Nation will live to regret what the court has done today.'" To which I say, "Get over it." I highly doubt we'll regret it as much as your being put on the Court in the first place, Justice Scalia.

"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel." (Nor, apparently, does the Fourth Amendment apply.) An unsettling memorandum by Dubya stooge John Yoo which advocates both dictatorial rule and the legality of torture is released to the public, five years later. "'The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority,' Jaffer said. 'The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did.'"

More than anything, I'm reminded of Lincoln's remarks to the Indiana fourteenth: "'Whenever I hear anyone arguing over slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.'"

And, just in case anyone was under the impression that this sort of thing only happened in the dark days of 2003, witness Attorney General Mukasey last week getting publicly verklempt and making up 9/11 tales as he goes along, all to help preserve the NSA's warrantless wiretaps. At this point, Chuck Schumer has a lot to answer for.

"Five years have gone by since that fateful decision. This war has now lasted longer than World War I, World War II, or the Civil War. Nearly four thousand Americans have given their lives. Thousands more have been wounded. Even under the best case scenarios, this war will cost American taxpayers well over a trillion dollars. And where are we for all of this sacrifice? We are less safe and less able to shape events abroad. We are divided at home, and our alliances around the world have been strained. The threats of a new century have roiled the waters of peace and stability, and yet America remains anchored in Iraq."

-- Sen. Barack Obama, 3/19/08. (Photo by Sgt. Luis R. Agostini, via here.)

"Senator Clinton says that she and Senator McCain have passed a 'Commander in Chief test' – not because of the judgments they’ve made, but because of the years they’ve spent in Washington. She made a similar argument when she said her vote for war was based on her experience at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. But here is the stark reality: there is a security gap in this country – a gap between the rhetoric of those who claim to be tough on national security, and the reality of growing insecurity caused by their decisions. A gap between Washington experience, and the wisdom of Washington’s judgments. A gap between the rhetoric of those who tout their support for our troops, and the overburdened state of our military...We have a security gap when candidates say they will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, but refuse to follow him where he actually is."

On the fifth anniversary of the war, Sen. Obama delivers a speech on Iraq and national security in Fayetteville, NC, and takes time to poke McCain for his apparent and frightening misunderstanding of Mideast affairs. "Just yesterday, we heard Sen. McCain confuse Sunni and Shiite, Iran and Al Qaeda. Maybe that is why he voted to go to war with a country that had no Al Qaeda ties. Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America’s enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades." Really, McCain's oft-repeated error smacks of Dubya-level incompetence, and would be all over the news today if we were in general election mode, rather than collectively continuing to assuage Sen. Clinton's vanity, by assuming she still has a chance. For shame.

"The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world." The Director of National Intelligence announces a project to uncover terrorists in World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs. It seems the US government has finally awakened to the catastrophic dangers posed by Bin Laden's vast army of h4x0rs and ninjas. (Via Yglesias, where the game-savvy commenters are already having a good deal of fun with it.)

It was announced earlier in the week that a new Pentagon study was set to confirm the obvious: "An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network." Big surprise there.

Well, apparently, even the obvious must be suppressed in the Dubya regime. According to ABC News, the report is now being hastily buried. "The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online." Instead, it seems, the report will be on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard."

Update: ABC News asks for and receives a snail-mailed copy of the report, after which they promptly scan it and post it online as a PDF. Bang-up job suppressing that one, guys.

"Hayden said Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003. Hayden banned the technique in 2006, but National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell told senators during the same hearing Tuesday that waterboarding remains in the CIA arsenal -- so long as it as the specific consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general."

Not to be lost in the Super Tuesday shuffle (as intended): CIA Director Michael Hayden admits that we've waterboarded at least three high-level detainees. "Human Rights Watch, which has been calling on the government to outlaw waterboarding as a form of illegal torture, called Hayden's testimony 'an explicit admission of criminal activity.'"

"'I think he represents the kind of leader that we need for the future of the country,' Sebelius told The Associated Press. 'I think he brings the hope and optimism that we really need to restore our place in the world, as well as to bring this country together and really tackle the challenges that we have.'" Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius endorses Barack Obama for president. (Sebelius also gave the Democratic SOTU response last night, and her upcoming endorsement was one of DC's worst-kept secrets last week.)

And another intriguing endorsement via the Daily Dish: Obama gets the support of 80 volunteer lawyers of Gitmo detainees: "Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue." (Their full statement is here.)

So, as you may have heard, George W. Bush delivered his final (a lovely word, isn't it?) State of the Union address last night. [Transcript.] I actually saw it two and a half times, as I had CNN running in the background while I websurfed well into the evening. And, maybe I've been getting ruined by the recent slew of memorable Obama-related speeches but, for the life of me, it didn't make an impression at all. Right around the time Dubya made that goofy and somewhat undignified joke about the IRS accepting checks and money orders, something in my brain went *click*, and all I could hear was a lame duck quacking. So, if Dubya actually managed to say anything of substance, or discuss a program that might actually happen this year, please let me know. Update: Sen. Obama's response. Update 2: James Fallows offers his usual worthwhile post-mortem.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida...In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

A new study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism counts up the staggering number of falsehoods made by the Bush administration in the lead-up to Iraq. "The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period...Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida." (Via Dangerous Meta.)

Republican ex-Congressman and lobbyist Tom Siljander is indicted for money laundering, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy, based on his ties with the allegedly terrorist-connected Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA). "According to the indictment, the money was stolen from the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Siljander lied to federal agents about his role." He is apparently pleading not-guilty. "Siljander, a favorite of religious conservatives, declared war on abortion, pornography, the Equal Rights Amendment and school busing. But he lost his 1986 reelection bid after urging clergy members to support him in order to 'break the back of Satan.'"

You heard it here first: Barack Obama's campaign has abandoned its message of hope, and, with Larry David, is now waging the politics of fear: "David is...quoted threatening the Dartmouth students who are undecided between Obama and Edwards. 'Okay, alright,' he said. 'If you don't vote for Obama, I'm never doing the show again.'" Sigh, it's a sad day...no wonder Cheryl left him. Still, don't say you weren't warned.

Which reminds me, in case you missed Senator Clinton's Hail-Mary Giuliani-ism of Monday, Ted of The Late Adopter posted it in an earlier comment thread. Said the Senator, speaking of Gordon Brown: "I don’t think it was by accident that Al Qaeda decided to test the new prime minister. They watch our elections as closely as we do, maybe more closely than some of our fellow citizens do...Let’s not forget you’re hiring a president not just to do what a candidate says during the election, you want a president to be there when the chips are down.” Hard to call that a message of change. In fact, take out that weird stab at "our fellow citizens" who haven't swarmed to Clinton's candidacy, and it sounds like all the usual terror terror terror garbage we've been hearing from the GOP for years.

"The grim truth is, not much has changed. The Bush administration continues to limit our basic freedoms, conceal its own worst behavior, and insist that it does all this in order to make us more free." As a follow-up to her 2006 list of civil liberties violations, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick surveys The Bush Administration's Top 10 Stupidest Legal Arguments of 2007.

Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007. It seems all too many christmases of late has been marked by grim news on the global front, from the devastating tsunami to the botched Saddam execution. This year, obviously, it was the assassination of the former prime minister who, while no angel, nevertheless embodied for many hopes for a stable, democratic Pakistan. Her murder -- in the military stronghold of Rawalpindi, no less -- further destabilizes a nuclear-armed nation already teetering on the brink, and roils significantly the Dubya administration's fatally flawed approach to the country. Let's just hope Bhutto isn't remembered as the next Franz Ferdinand.

"[H]ere's a different thought experiment: How would the national debate over torture have changed if we'd known about the CIA tapes all along? How would our big terror trials and Supreme Court cases have played out? Yes, this is also a speculative enterprise, but it's critical to understanding the extent of the CIA's wrongdoing here." In light of the recent revelation that the CIA destroyed video evidence of their abusive interogation procedures in 2005, well after they'd become relevant both in many different legal cases and in the national discussion about torture, Slate's Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick survey the wreckage the CIA has made of our legal process. "Video of hours of repetitive torture could have had a similarly significant impact -- the truism about the power of images holds. If we are right about that -- and we think we are -- this evidence that has been destroyed would have fundamentally changed the legal and policy backdrop for the war on terror in ways we've only begun to figure out." If nothing else, an independent counsel should be named immediately. Even given the criminality and contempt for the rule of law we've come to expect from this administration, this sort of thuggish, gangland behavior is shocking news.

The ranks of Team Dubya dwindle further as chief terrorism adviser Frances Fragos Townsend announces her resignation. "Townsend has been a key player in Bush's circle, earning the president's trust despite initial suspicion among Republicans because of her background in the Clinton Justice Department...As gatekeeper for intelligence wiretap requests [in the Clinton era], her office fought efforts to invoke the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in matters that could result in criminal cases, fearing that prosecutors would use warrants under that law instead of amassing the evidence needed to cross the more difficult threshold for obtaining a criminal wiretap...Townsend later said she fought 'tooth and nail' against information-sharing restrictions."

"'The train is derailed and off the tracks,' said Stephen P. Cohen, author of 'The Idea of Pakistan.' 'We have to give ourselves a share of the responsibility for this. We placed all of our chips on Musharraf.' At this point, Cohen added: 'I don't think there is anything we can do. We are not big players in this anymore.'" Dubya diplomacy takes another huge hit as a power-hungry President Musharraf declares martial law in Pakistan to ensure his continued reign, sparking nationwide protests and leaving the Bushies between a rock and a hard place. "One adviser traveling with Rice saw a silver lining in the rapid turn of events. 'Thank heavens for small favors,' the official said. Compared to Pakistan, 'Iraq looks pretty good.'" Oh, joy.

Update: Slate's Fred Kaplan weighs in. "The state of emergency in Pakistan signals yet another low point in President George W. Bush's foreign policy -- a stark demonstration of his paltry influence and his bankrupt principles. More than that, the crackdown locks us in a crisis -- a potentially dangerous dynamic -- from which there appears to be no escape route...The Bush foreign policy was neither shrewd enough to play self-interested power politics nor truly principled enough to enforce its ideals."

"Will we join that gloomy historical line leading from the Inquisition, through the prisons of tyrant regimes, through gulags and dark cells, and through Saddam Hussein's torture chambers? Will that be the path we choose?" As a result of his continued inability to define waterboarding as torture, Michael Mukasey's chances of becoming AG grow murkier. "'If we are going to restore the image of the United States of America, the highest law enforcement officer should be clear, firm, unequivocal: that waterboarding and torture are unacceptable, un-American, illegal and unconstitutional,' Durbin said." Update: But, of course, key Dems capitulate, namely Senators Schumer and Feinstein. Good God, our party is pathetic at times.

"In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid 'physical labor' and wrote of the need to 'keep elevating the threat,' 'link Iraq to Iran' and develop 'bumper sticker statements' to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war." The WP surveys the "snowflakes" composed by ex-SecDef Donald Rumsfeld during his tenure. "Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said." Uh, Rummy, get a blog.

"'The administration can't have it both ways,' Rockefeller said in a statement. 'I'm tired of these games. They can't say that Congress has been fully briefed while refusing to turn over key documents used to justify the legality of the program." Claiming only that the US "does not torture people," the White House refuses to turn over Justice Department documents on torture policy, "contending that their disclosure would give terrorist groups too much information about U.S. interrogation tactics." Those documents, announced by the NYT on Thursday, "provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures, and "show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics."

Paging Yuri Orlov: By way of Dangerous Meta, a new Congressional study finds the US atop the leaderboard in terms of selling weaponry to the developing world. "Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers...The study makes clear also that the United States has signed weapons-sales agreements with nations whose records on democracy and human rights are subject to official criticism."

"Bush has long taken solace in the example of Harry S. Truman, whose foreign policy was deeply unpopular in his time but is now recalled as far-sighted and sage. Now Bush is stretching the comparison still further beyond the historical pale." After (Dem strategist?) Dubya hints that a forthcoming Clinton presidency will play Ike to his Truman, Slate's Fred Kaplan cries foul. If the next prez channels Eisenhower, Kaplan contends, "it would be not as a continuation of Bush's Truman but rather as a reversal of Bush's Dulles."

"In making this selection, I think President Bush has made a very...deliberate effort to choose someone who would not be controversial," Sidestepping the political firestorm a Ted Olsen nod would have unleashed, Dubya chooses retired judge Michael B. Mukasey to be Gonzales' replacement at the Justice Department. While conservative, particularly on national security issues, Mukasey is "'not an ideologue for the sake of being an ideologue,' said Andrew Ruffino, a former law clerk of the nominee's. Said Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor who was a classmate of Mukasey's: 'He is not a hyper-charged Federalist Society type. He is not a glad-hand networker.'" (He does, on the other hand, have strong ties to Rudy Giuliani.)

Another brick from the wall...A US District judge in New York declares that the FBI's secret use of "national security letters" (NSLs) under the Patriot Act is unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment and the separation of powers clause. "Marrero wrote in his 106-page ruling that Patriot Act provisions related to NSLs are 'the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.'"

"We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop," Addington said at one point." The Terror Presidency, a new book by disgusted conservative and former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith, further details the role played by Cheney henchman David Addington in this administration's rolling back of the rule of law."'We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,' Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004."

"Call it the 'special relationship'; call it, as Churchill did, the 'joint inheritance'; call it, when we meet, as a form of homecoming, as President Reagan did. The strength of this relationship...is not just built on the shared problems that we have to deal with together or on the shared history, but is built...on shared values." Wanna know who (is Mr Brown)? So does Dubya...The new British prime minister and Bush held their first joint press conference yesterday (transcript), and -- so far -- it's all smiles. Still, "[t]he British leader did not hide his differences with the president, describing Afghanistan as 'the front line against terrorism.'...[He also] avoided using the phrase "war on terror" in describing the effort to hunt down and defeat Islamic radicals. He referred to terrorism 'as a crime' and 'not a cause,' though he went on to say that 'there should be no safe haven and no hiding place for those who practice terrorist violence or preach terrorist extremism.'"

"'We're sitting on the doorstep of a definitional moment,' said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus." Faced with their own low poll numbers, the Democratic Congress readies a flurry of late-term legislation involving homeland security (implementing most of the 9/11 commission recommendations), ethics (gift bans and increased disclosure requirements), and child health care (expanding insurance coverage for children of the working poor.) "Republican leaders plan to stand in the way...But against such philosophical stands, there is a stark political problem: How many Republicans are really going to oppose legislation expanding insurance coverage for children, tightening ethics rules and bolstering homeland security?" More than one might think, I'd wager.

"If one of them gets elected, it sounds to me like we're going on the defense. We've got a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. We're going to wave the white flag there. We're going to try to cut back on the Patriot Act. We're going to cut back on electronic surveillance. We're going to cut back on interrogation. We're going to cut back, cut back, cut back, and we'll be back in our pre-September 11 mentality of being on defense." Meanwhile in related news, Rudy Giuliani lapses into aggro fearmonger mode to try to shore up his right-wing cred. That accompanying giant sucking sound you might hear is all of Hizzoner's legitimately-earned but now hopelessly squandered Churchillian cred going right out the window...He seems to have reverted to his true colors much earlier than I anticipated. Said Barack Obama, correctly, of Rudy's pathetic stunt, "[Giuliani has] taken the politics of fear to a new low...We know we can win this war based on shared purpose, not the same divisive politics that question your patriotism if you dare to question failed policies that have made us less secure. The threat we face is real, and deserves better than to be the punchline of another political attack." Touche.

"The bar for inclusion is low, and once someone is on the list, it is virtually impossible to get off it. At any stage, the process can lead to 'horror stories' of mixed-up names and unconfirmed information, Travers acknowledged." The WP plunges into the rising TIDE (Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment), a.k.a. the terrorist watch list that has quadrupled in size over the past four years. (And, here I thought we were winning the war on terror.) "Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said last year that his wife had been delayed repeatedly while airlines queried whether Catherine Stevens was the watch-listed Cat Stevens."

Upholding a Democratic promise from the 2006 elections, the Senate passes long-overdue legislation to implement the 9/11 commission suggestions. "In a sign of how far the politics of homeland security have shifted since the Democrats seized Congress, senators voted 60 to 38 -- with 10 Republicans and no Democrats crossing ranks -- to force a fresh national security confrontation with President Bush, who has threatened to veto the bill over a provision to expand the labor rights of 45,000 airport screeners."

"'We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI's national security letter authorities,' Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report." A Justice Department audit finds the FBI has been systematically misusing NSA letters to procure personal information without a court order, prompting a mea culpa from director Robert Mueller and the prospect of possible hearings into the matter. "'It appears that the administration has used these powers without even the most basic regard for privacy of innocent Americans,' [Sen. Dick] Durbin said in a statement."

"Gilliam came nearest to inventing his own country with Brazil (1985), one of the key political films of the late 20th century. Brazil is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized images, which belongs to Gilliam alone." In Slate, critic Clive James assesses Brazil's take on torture, and what Michael Palin's Jack Lint does and doesn't tell us about the men usually holding the implements.

"Faust's interpretation helps explain the way the US responded to the 9-11 terrorist attacks with a war on Iraq. 'Even a war against an enemy who had no relationship to September 11's terrorist acts would do,' she notes. People supported war not just because of the rational arguments offered by the White House, but also 'because the nation required the sense of meaning, intention, and goal-directedness, the lure of efficacy that war promises.' It was especially necessary to restore a sense of control after the terrorism of 9-11 had 'obliterated' it. The US, she concludes, 'needed the sense of agency that operates within the structure of narrative provided by war.'" In the pages of The Nation, Jon Wiener evaluates new Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust's work on war mania.

"In some sense, the president is now as much a prisoner of Guantanamo as the detainees...The endgame in the war on terror isn't holding the line against terrorists. It's holding the line on hard-fought claims to absolutely limitless presidential authority." Slate's Dahlia Lithwick discerns the method in Dubya's madness on the civil liberties front: "expanding executive power, for its own sake."

In not-unrelated news, the Dubya White House shuffles its deck to make ready for divided government, replacing failed Supreme Court bid Harriet Miers as White House counsel (likely in favor of someone more aggressive, so as to counter Dem subpoenas), kicking national intelligence director Nicholas Negroponte over to State (to be replaced by Vice Admiral Mike McConnell), appointing Thomas D'Agostino as new nuclear chief (the old one, Linton Brooks, seems to have been of the "Brownie" school of management), putting Iraq ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in John Bolton's former position at the UN (his job goes to Ryan Crocker), and overhauling their top military team in Iraq. As the WP's Dan Froomkin reads the tea leaves, "I see a possible theme: A purge of the unbelievers."

"'The administration is playing games about warrants,' Martin said. 'If they are not claiming new powers, then why did they need to issue a signing statement?'" New year, more of the same. Channeling Albert Sidney Burleson, Dubya creates consternation among civil liberties advocates with another recent signing statement reinvoking the right to read anyone's mail. Let me know if y'all figure out what the best student loan consolidation plan is.

"Whenever the courts push back against the administration's unsupportable constitutional ideas...the Bush response is to repeat the same chorus louder: Every detainee is the worst of the worst; every action taken is legal, necessary, and secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no regrets. This legal and intellectual intractability can create the illusion that we are standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in 2001, even as that ground is sliding away under our feet." Slate's Dahlia Lithwick surveys the top ten most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006.

The buck stops here? Not hardly. Grasping for historical validation wherever he can find it, Dubya has apparently begun to fancy himself a modern-day Truman. "James G. Hershberg, a Cold War historian at George Washington University, said he doubts that history will judge Bush as kindly as it has Truman, saying Truman's roles in fostering European recovery and building the NATO alliance were seen as solid accomplishments at the time. 'Bush, by contrast, lacks any successes of comparable magnitude to compensate for his mismanagement of the Iraq war and will be hard-pressed to produce any in his last two years'."

After suffering some bad press for backing away from the 9/11 recommendations last week, Speaker-Elect Pelosi announces two new oversight committees as a form of compromise: "a new panel within the Appropriations Committee to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies [thus maintaining Murtha's fiefdom] and a House task force to examine establishing an outside ethics panel." And, in related news, the House Dems announce their proposed rules changes. They "include a ban on gifts and travel from lobbyists, preapproval from the ethics committee on all lawmakers' travel funded by outside groups, a ban on the use of corporate jets, and mandatory ethics training."

"As [Harry] Truman said, 'We must, once and for all, prove by our acts conclusively that right has might.' That's why this country has historically been in the vanguard of the global human rights movement. But that lead can only be maintained if America remains true to its principles, including in the struggle against terrorism. When it appears to abandon its own ideas and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused." As Kofi Annan bids farewell to his post at the UN, he offers some words of wisdom to America -- and to Dubya -- on our nation's role in the world.

"Historians are loath to predict the future. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history." Columbia's Eric Foner makes the case for Dubya as the worst president ever. Also weighing in on the question: Columbia PhD (and Slate columnist) David Greenberg, Douglas Brinkley, Michael Lind, and Vincent J. Cannato. (I discussed Dubya's ranking briefly here.)

"We think this is extremely crucial...[but there are] a lot of old bulls in both parties who just don't want to do it." Speaking of which, paging Tommy Carcetti...Finding it's harder to shake out the old system than anticipated, the incoming Dems are already backing away from a key 9/11 panel suggestion, one that would centralize congressional oversight and funding of intelligence matters in the intelligence subcommittee (to be chaired by Reyes, a.k.a. not-Hastings/Harman) at the expense of the armed services and appropriations defense subcommittees (the latter of which will be chaired by also-ran Murtha.) "Democratic leadership dust-ups this month severely limited the ability of House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) to implement the commission's recommendations, according to Democratic aides."

Christmas in November continues for the reality-based community: Along with recent editorials in the Army Times, the Dem's Election 2006 takeover claims another high-profile GOP victim in Donald Rumsfeld. He'll be replaced by former CIA chief Robert Gates -- an old papa Bush hand and current member of the Baker-Hamilton commission -- for Dubya's last two lame duck years. Dubya claimed in his press conference that Rumsfeld would've been gone regardless of the election returns...I'm not sure I buy that. Still, this is a very welcome move -- one that should've happened years ago.

Every single Dem incumbent returned to office. At least 26 more seats in the House. The nation's first woman Speaker. Six new governorships. At least four Senate seats. And, if all goes well in Virginia (which, at 5am EST, is looking likely -- Webb's up 8,000, which is a pretty solid lead heading into a recount) and Montana (which seems positive for us, albeit less so -- Tester's up 5,000 with 85% reporting), perhaps even control of Congress...Yessir, all-in-all, it was a pretty grand night for us. So, Dubya and Karl...how you like them apples? Update: Make that 28 seats in the House and 5 in the Senate....soon to be six. Congress is ours!

It's true in the West, it's true in the Southwest, it's even true among the reddest of the red. And, in perhaps the final straw for the GOP this November, a new poll puts independents breaking for the Dems 59%-31%. Yes, y'all, it looks like a wave is coming...(provided, of course, Diebold doesn't ride to Dubya's rescue.)

For the increasingly factious and terrified GOP, it's second verse, same as the first: Terror, terror, terror, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11...

Wasting no time after signing the godawful terrorism bill into law, Dubya tells the US District Court that it has lost jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions filed by Gitmo detainees. "What's being blocked and what the government is opposing tooth and nail is the most simple thing of all: a hearing before a district court judge,' said Jonathan Hafetz, who handles many detainee cases for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. 'The government will do anything to prevent Guantanamo detainees from being able to present evidence in court.'"

"So, here we are. The two major powers in this confrontation are led by blunderers; the provocateur is a chronic miscalculator. It doesn't look good." Oh, so there's the WMD: As John Bolton pushes for aggressive sanctions at the UN against the Kim Jong-Il regime, Slate's Fred Kaplan parses several ugly scenarios that could unfold after North Korea's nuclear gamble on Monday (the same day, coincidentally, that South Korean Ban Ki-moon won official Security Council backing to replace Kofi Annan. Looks like he'll be working overtime right out of the box.) By the way, if you're keeping score at home, Dubya & co. now seem to have grievously mishandled all three prongs of the "axis of evil" trifecta. Sigh. That's great, it starts with an earthquake...

As longtime readers might know (or might've adduced from some of the site banners above), I've always been a big Terry Gilliam fan, and will pony up for films considerably worse than The Brothers Grimm to repay the man for making Time Bandits, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and one my all-time favorite movies, Brazil. (In fact, "Ghost in the Machine" is the name of this site partly for the Brazil reference.) So it was a real treat yesterday when I and a friend from high school got to see Terry Gilliam live in the flesh last night at the IFC Center on 4th St. After making the rounds in front of The Daily Show yesterday afternoon, Gilliam showed up as part of IFC's Movie Night series, in which a director of some repute screens one of his favorite films. (In fact, he showed up with the sign he'd been lugging around outside all day: "STUDIOLESS DIRECTOR -- FAMILY TO SUPPORT -- WILL DIRECT FOR FOOD") Apparently, Gilliam had wanted to show One-Eyed Jacks, the 1961 western directed by Marlon Brando, but the Brando estate wouldn't deliver a print or somesuch.

So, the film we got instead was Jaco von Dormael's Toto le Heros (Toto the Hero), a bizarre Belgian concoction of 1991 that's part Prince and the Pauper, part Singing Detective, part Citizen Kane and very Gilliamesque. A movie that's hard-to-explain but that's definitely worth renting, Toto follows the story of one Thomas van Haserbroeck (Don't call him van Chickensoup), an imaginative young boy unsettlingly in love with his sister, a lonely man contemplating an affair with a mystery woman, and a deeply depressed senior citizen looking to exact revenge for a life-long grievance. Y'see, Thomas (or Toto, as he's called in his dream life, where he's a film noir gumshoe) insists he remembers being switched with another baby -- his wealthy next-door neighbor, Albert Kant -- during a fire at the hospital, and therein, in his mind, lies the source of most of his troubles. As the story switches back and forth in time, Toto and Albert's lives keep butting against each other in strange doppelganger fashion, while old-Thomas enacts a plan to reclaim his stolen life...

After the movie, Gilliam returned to the front for a wide-ranging Q&A session, which involved questions both probing ("Did you borrow from Toto in 12 Monkeys?" [No, don't think so.]) and peculiar ("Where'd you buy your shoes? Where's the worst place you ever spent the night?" [Birkenstocks, some backwater hut in India]) Along the way, Gilliam told tales of first meeting the Python guys, photographing Frank Zappa in 1967, choosing his various directors of photography, and, the battle of Brazil notwithstanding, generally enjoying the constraints of studio heads and limited budgets. (They focus him.) Speaking of which, he also said Good Omens still seems to be moving forward, and Quixote may still happen someday. (He also mentioned The Defective Detective briefly, but it seemed in the past tense.) And these days he's digging the new Dylan album, as well The Arcade Fire's Funeral and The Flaming Lips' At War with the Mystics.

At one point, he also said he was considering suing Bush, Cheney, et al for making an unauthorized remake of Brazil. With that in mind, I asked him whether his views on Brazil had changed at all now that we're kinda living it. (I mean, what with Cheney playing Mr. Helpmann, Canadian citizens getting Buttled, and the Dubya team now fully sanctioning Jack Lints, what's a good Sam Lowry to do, other than await his turn in the chair or on the waterboard?) He noted that, obviously, Brazil-type stuff was going on around the world at the time (in the Soviet bloc, Argentina, etc.) but that he watched the film the other day (to check out the new Criterion HD-DVD version) and was amazed at both how prescient and topical it was.

Throughout, Gilliam was amazingly friendly and personable, and came across a remarkably humble and down-to-earth guy. He kept taking questions well after the IFC-suit tried to close down the affair, and hung around the nearby cafe afterwards to sign various items. I ended up being the second guy in line, and got him to sign the Brazil still above (one of five I have framed in my hallway.) When he asked me my name for the signature, he lit up, "Kevin! Time Bandits Kevin!" I told him I was right around that age when I first saw Time Bandits, and he's definitely got a lot to answer for.

"We don't blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they'll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won't remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration. They'll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation's version of the Alien and Sedition Acts." Abu Ghraib becomes standard operating procedure as Dubya's terror bill -- horrifying as it is -- passes the House 253-168 (roll call) and the Senate 65-34 (roll call.) Twelve Senate Dems (well, eleven Senate Dems and Lieberman) voted for the bill: Carper, Johnson, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Menendez, Nelson, Nelson, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Stabenow. Chafee was the only Republican to vote against it, Snowe abstained.

Shameful, pitiful, demoralizing, pathetic. What else is there to say? As Rebecca Blood sums it up (via Medley): "We have lost the war on torture. It's devastating."

"Four underlying factors are fueling the spread of the jihadist movement: (1) Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness; (2) the Iraq 'jihad;' (3) the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and (4) pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims -- all of which jihadists exploit." In a sorry attempt at a document-dump diversion, the precis of the National Intelligence Estimate report cited over the weekend has been declassified by order of the Dubya administration, so as to help blur one of its central contentions in the public mind (point #2 above): The Iraq War has served to fuel the expansion of terrorism against the US and its allies. (Update: If you're here from Daniel Drezner's blog, welcome, and have a look around.)

"I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him." While talking of the War on Terror on FOX News, Bill Clinton gets mad as hell and decides not to take it anymore. "'So you did FOX's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me,' he said to [Chris] Wallace, occasionally tapping on Wallace's notes for emphasis. 'I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of?'"

"'It's a very candid assessment,' one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. 'It's stating the obvious.'" A new classified report written by US intelligence agencies and unearthed by the NYT declares that Dubya's Iraq sideshow has made us weaker in the War on Terror. Gee, you think?

"Eliminating habeas is tantamount to letting hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners rot in jail." After striking a somewhat nonsensical compromise with the McCain-Graham faction, Dubya gets most of his desired detention and torture bill, one which gives him the authority to interpret the Geneva Conventions by fiat and disallows detainees from either invoking the Conventions or challenging their treatment in any court. "'It replaces the old broken' military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court with 'a new broken commission system,' said Marine Corps Col. Dwight Sullivan, the chief defense counsel for the Defense Department's Office of Military Commissions. He said 'it methodically strips rights' guaranteed by laws and treaties and appears to be unconstitutional." Update: The House GOP get gleeful about the torture bill.

A new intelligence report, which the French and Saudis are currently trying to confirm, suggests Osama Bin Laden may be dead or dying as a result of contracting a "serious water-borne illness" while on the run. I suppose that's good news, although it'd be vastly more preferable if he were brought to justice alive. The lack of a body means Bin Laden could easily become a Zapata-like rallying symbol for aspiring terrorists for decades to come. Update: No confirmation as of yet.

"Purely from a strategic point of view, this is another mess...Every time Republicans think they have an issue to unite them and divide the Democrats, the Republicans end up spending most of the time fighting among themselves." As fear-mongering and falling oil prices perhaps help the GOP get back in the race this November, the WP surveys the political implications of the recent stand of principle by Senators Warner, McCain, Graham, and Snowe against Dubya's grotesque tribunal plan. Politics or no, Dubya's proposed gutting of the Geneva Conventions must be stopped: "'What is being billed as "clarifying" our treaty obligations will be seen as "withdrawing" from the treaty obligations,' Graham said. 'It will set precedent which could come back to haunt us.'"

"'Saddam only expressed negative sentiments about bin Laden,' the former Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, told the Federal Bureau of Investigation when he was asked about Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda's leader...'He specified that if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with North Korea or China,' says a passage in the nearly 400-page report." A new Senate intelligence report confirms what has become patently obvious: There was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda before the war. "Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a member of the committee, said the long-awaited report was 'a devastating indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration's unrelenting, misleading and deceptive attempts' to link Saddam to al-Qaida."

After fierce debate among the neocons, Dubya comes clean about the CIA's secret prisons (outed by the Post last November) and moves the detainees held therein to Gitmo. But don't think this moment of clarity means King George is playing it straight just yet: He's also asking Congress to sidestep recent court decisions and grant him power to continue wiretapping without warrants and to torture alleged evildoers with impunity. And even moderate Republicans and military lawyers have issues with his recent attempts to deny suspected terrorists due process.

Update: Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has more: "The speech teemed with all the rhetorical wizardry you might expect of a do-over. Bush justified torture and extraordinary rendition while denying that they exist. He stuck a fork in the eye of the Supreme Court while agreeing to be bound by the majority's decision. He conceded that Congress should play a role in creating military tribunals while demanding that it greenlight his plan."

Two recent history-minded links courtesy of the NYT: National Review's Richard Brookhiser evaluates the marginalia of John Adams, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg examines the recent revival of Munich among the Bushies (as does the WP's Eugene Robinson.)

"As for Iraq, it's no news that Bush has no strategy. What did come as news -- and, really, a bit of a shocker -- is that he doesn't seem to know what 'strategy' means." Slate's Fred Kaplan tears apart another dismal Dubya press conference. At this point, it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, isn't it?

"[P]ublic interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of the Constitution." In a strongly worded decision that minces no words about the Dubya administration's "obviously" unwarranted powergrab, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor finds the NSA warrantless wiretaps blatantly unconstitutional. "It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights...There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all 'inherent powers' must derive from that Constitution." Elsewhere in the opinion, Taylor found that the wiretap program "violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III." Update: As per the norm, the GOP try to shoot the messenger.

A day after Scotland Yard announces it managed to prevent a major terrorist incident (with the help of Pakistan), terror is back on the menu here at home, with the GOP invoking 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 and Lieberman -- absolutely wallowing in shamefulness now -- actually calling Lamont's recent victory a boon for plane-bombers. This was a terrifying near-event indeed -- were it not for top-notch intel work by British authorities, the world might've experienced another horrific day akin to September 11 in very short order. But, look closely, and you'll find this plot by homegrown British terrorists bears the likely marks of Al Qaeda, which, last I recall, we left somewhere near Afghanistan to go dink around in Iraq. Crossover Joe and the GOP can shout terror to the heavens, but the fact is that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are more of a threat to us today because of Dubya's non-sequitur Iraq sideshow. Make no mistake: America is less safe because Dubya and the neocons chose to cut and run in Tora Bora so they could prosecute their war of choice in Baghdad.

"There's a broader lesson here, and it speaks to the Bush administration's present jam throughout the Middle East and in other danger zones. If the British had adopted the same policy toward dealing with Pakistan that Bush has adopted toward dealing with, say, Syria or Iran (namely, it's an evil regime, and we don't speak with evil regimes), then a lot of passenger planes would have shattered and spilled into the ocean, hundreds or thousands of people would have died, and the world would have suddenly been plunged into very scary territory." In light of yesterday's foiled plot, Slate's Fred Kaplan points out one of the critical flaws of Dubya Diplomacy (which, thankfully, the British do not share.)

"[I]f Specter's bill prevails, it will amount to a White House masterstroke, precisely what James Madison had in mind when he described the dangers of unchecked rule by one branch of government: 'the very definition of tyranny.'" Having read the legislation in full, author and wiretap expert Patrick Radden Keefe discovers, perhaps not surprisingly, that Specter's recent NSA "compromise" is a complete capitulation to executive power. And, in very related news, file this under "repeated injuries and usurpations": Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified under oath this week that it was Dubya's personal decision to close down the Justice Department's probe into the NSA's warrantless wiretaps (the one, you may recall, that couldn't get the security clearances to do its job.)

As the legislative and judicial branches struggle to rein in Dubya's excesses, recent Senate testimony on the treatment of Gitmo detainees reveals fissues within the administration's approach to the Hamdan ruling: "The testimony has shown that the Justice Department -- which had insisted on the legality of the existing policy -- is eager to sharply limit the impact of the Supreme Court's decision, while military lawyers and some other Pentagon officials are celebrating it as a vindication of their long-held concerns about U.S. detainee policy." Update: "The President is always right?" (Via Looka.)

Meanwhile, in another recent reversal -- one likely precipitated by both the Hamdan case and pending lawsuits by the ACLU and others -- the Dubya White House agrees to a deal put forth by Arlen "paper tiger" Specter that would put the NSA warrantless wiretaps to a constitutional review by the FISA court. But the trick, as many Dems have pointed out, is under this deal the FISA court would only do a general review of the wiretap program, rather than conduct the individual case-by-case reviews that the law has always demanded: "Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) criticized the agreement, saying he will oppose 'any bill that would grant blanket approval for warrantless surveillance of Americans, particularly when this administration has never explained why it believes that current law allowing surveillance of terrorist suspects is inadequate.'"

More grim news in the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket department: So, obviously, there now seems to be a full-fledged firing war going on between Israel and Hezbollah, one which has already set back Lebanon years and threatens to bring in Syria and Iran as official combatants (a.k.a. Hezbollah's main backers) if it keeps up. For his part, other than having Bolton spike a UN resolution condemning Israel for "disproportionate use of force," Dubya has been basically AWOL in terms of world leadership -- in fact, he's been more effusive about a German pig of late than he has a conflagration that threatens nothing less than full-scale war across the Middle East. Where have you gone Bill Clinton, our nation turns it lowly eyes to you?

"'It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald's Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified 'Beach at End of a Street.'" A report by the Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General finds that the government believes Indiana is the most target-rich state in the nation for terrorists: "The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212)" In addition, New York "lists only 2 percent of the nation's banking and finance sector assets, which ranks it between North Dakota and Missouri. Washington State lists nearly twice as many national monuments and icons as the District of Columbia. Montana, one of the least populous states in the nation, turned up with far more assets than big-population states including Massachusetts, North Carolina and New Jersey."

Vince Vaughn as, um, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill? Casting begins for Paul Haggis' film version of Against All Enemies, with Sean Penn purportedly up for the Richard Clarke role. Does that mean we'll get the rest of the Frat Pack playing Dubya admin officials? Ben Stiller as Ari Fleischer, Owen Wilson as Scooter Libby, and I think we can all guess where Will Ferrell would fit in...

"'It's difficult to think of many other times and many other presidencies when so many dangerous events were happening at once,' says Wendy Sherman, a State Department official under President Clinton. 'But there's so much going on in every global hot spot because the Bush Administration really opened up Pandora's box with little-to-no plans to support their actions.'" TIME Magazine composes a cover story obit for the Bush doctrine. Good riddance: "As it turns out, Iraq may prove to be not only the first but also the last laboratory for preventive war. Instead of deterring the rulers in Tehran and Pyongyang, the travails of the U.S. occupation may have emboldened those regimes in their quest to obtain nuclear weapons while constraining the U.S. military's ability to deter them."

In a happy day for the rule of law, and following the Supreme Court's recent decision in Hamdan, the Dubya White House and Pentagon reverse themselves and announce that the Geneva Conventions will now apply to Guantanamo detainees. Yes, good news indeed...Still, given that this administration can so rarely be taken at its word, vigilance will be required to see if the treatment of detainees actually changes at all: "Neither the White House nor the Pentagon provided any immediate details as to what would be done differently or how the decision would effect the controversial policies on interrogation, which have provoked an international outcry as well as considerable domestic controversy."

In a blow to the monarchial presidency that may also affect future rulings on warrantless wiretaps and torture policy, the Supreme Court strongly rebukes Dubya for his Gitmo tribunals, declaring they "were not authorized by any act of Congress and that their structure and procedures violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949." As Justice Stephen Breyer summed it up in a concurring opinion: "The Court's conclusion ultimately rests upon a single ground: Congress has not issued the Executive a 'blank check.'"

"The real question here, as with so many other programs run by this Administration, is whether they are obeying the laws we have on the books to protect Americans from unnecessary invasions of their privacy." Dubya & co. opt for the Shoot the Messenger offense once again and try to eviscerate the NYT for exposing their monitoring of banking records since 9/11. Well, sure, it's entirely possible that this surveillance has been conducted legally and with proper respect to the civil liberties of ordinary citizens, but somehow I don't think this administration has earned the benefit of the doubt.

"The idea that Truman and Dean Acheson could be hauled out as exhibits for preventive war in Iraq against 'abject pacifists' such as myself made me feel that I was living in Oceania, and the Ministry of Peace had rewritten the textbooks to prove that the legacy of a president who rejected preventive war in fact constituted the best justification for it!" By way of my friend Mark, Peter Beinart and Michael Tomasky go toe-to-toe over the legacy of '48 at Slate's Book Club. I'm inclined to agree with the latter.

Listen up, Cornyn: "There never was a more vicious or insidious doctrine announced for the consideration of a free people than the doctrine that our constitution or any part of it is suspended during a state of war. Our constitution was made for war as well as peace. Equally vicious is the doctrine that you must disregard the guarantees of the constitution and trample upon our civil liberties in order to save the constitution...[W]e can never get anywhere if we resort to the theory that the minority has no rights which the majority is bound to respect or that the constitutional rights of the citizen must give way to some supposed emergency. I think the greatest service the true American can render to the cause of orderly liberty is to demonstrate in this critical situation that we can deal with every confronting situation and meet every emergency without violating or disregarding to the individual citizen any of his rights under our constitution. If we have reached the point where we cannot take care of the situation without resorting to arbitrary methods, to undefined official discretion, then the enemies of this government may well say that our system has proved a failure." -- Sen. William E. Borah, "Letter to Austin Simmons," January 21, 1920.

"This is an act of desperation because they have no way to prove their innocence. A system without justice is a system without hope." Three detainees at Guantanamo commit suicide by hanging themselves in their cells, a tragedy to which the U.S. camp commander, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, responds with freakishly bizarre war-on-terror gibberish: "They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." Say what? "'They are smart. They are creative, they are committed," he said." Um, they're dead, by their own hand, after being indefinitely detained for years. How about a little perspective here?

I was traveling yesterday during the big news: With the aid of cellphone surveillance and an Al Qaeda informer who suggested tracking "spiritual adviser" Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, the US military dropped two 500-lb bombs on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leading Iraq insurgent (and Al Qaeda poster boy for the administration.) Undoubtedly good news for our efforts in Iraq (and, lord knows, Dubya needed some good news in the worst way, particularly in the wake of Haditha.) Still, this big kill obviously doesn't answer the big questions about Iraq's stability, or our continued involvement in the region: "'The immediate aftermath of this will probably be an upsurge of violence' as Sunni insurgents hurry to show that Zarqawi's killing has not broken the resistance, said Michael Clarke, an expert on terrorism at the International Policy Institute of King's College London. 'In the medium term, in the next month or two, it will probably help to downgrade sectarianism,' Clarke said by telephone. 'But the dynamic of sectarian violence is probably past the point of no return.'" And, of course, while this strike will hopefully be a stunning blow to Al Qaeda in Iraq, what of the original Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and around the world? We're nearing five years since 9/11, and Osama's still out there...

Whether or not the world really needed a film about the events that took place on United Flight 93 the morning of September 11, 2001 is, I suppose, still an open question. I can see both sides of the argument: that it's too soon for a movie about 9/11 and that our current involvement in the war on terror demands we come to terms with what happened that day. (As my father pointed out, the WWII generation saw plenty of war flicks come out while the conflict still raged in Europe and the Pacific.) For my own part, even despite the stellar reviews for Paul Greengrass' film, it took me a few weeks to crank up the nerve to sit through a movie that I figured would be at best chilling and heart-rending and at worst deeply exploitative and repellent. That being said, having run the gauntlet earlier this week, I can now happily report that United 93 is magnificent, and arguably the best possible film that could've been made about this story. Both harrowing and humane, it's the movie of the year so far.

United 93, like 9/11, begins like any other day. For most of the first third of the film (the opening scenes, where we watch the four terrorists make their final prayers and preparations, notwithstanding) we simply follow people beginning their work day: air traffic controllers look at the weather and discuss possible delays, pilots make small-talk on their way to the cockpit, flight attendants prepare the cabin, and sleepy, anonymous passengers sit around Newark airport, making phone calls or waiting with blank, thousand-yard-stares for their turn to board. It looks exactly like every single airport terminal you've ever seen, and, if you had no sense of what's to come next, you might be deadly bored by all this reveling in mundanity. But, there's a method to Greengrass's madness -- not only do these early scenes root the film in our world (as well as foster some sickening suspense -- we're obviously waiting for the other shoe to drop), but they take us back to what Karl Rove might call a "pre-9/11 mentality."

It's no small testament to the film's intricate set-up that, when quintessentially Bostonian and New Yorker ATC guys start noticing some planes acting quirky, we sense their palpable confusion even though we know exactly what's going on, and -- when the second plane hits the World Trade Center (which is never shown, except on CNN or in long shots from the Newark control tower) -- we feel as shocked as they do, all over again. From there, the film's second act involves civilian and military air traffic officials (some of whom are played by the real people involved) struggling to make sense of a increasingly horrifying situation for which everyone was totally unprepared. ATC men feverishly watch the wrong planes for signs of a hijacking, FAA authorities put together a board of possible suspect flights and try to track down an AWOL military attache for some answers, a plane that was thought destroyed pops up again on the radar dangerously close to Washington, unarmed fighters (the best anyone could find on short notice) scramble in the wrong direction over the ocean, and NORAD waits desperately for the presidential authorization to fire on hijacked airliners, to no avail. (Think My Pet Goat.)

And, in the meantime, United 93 begins its own hellish journey, as the four terrorists on that plane (who, to Greengrass' credit, are portrayed as multifaceted as they could be, given their vile plan), after some silent soul-searching, spring into action: They take over the cockpit, scare into submission the passengers (all of whom are played by relative unknowns, although some -- such as David Rasche of Sledge Hammer -- look vaguely familiar), and set a course for the Capitol. Thrust to the back of the plane by a "bomb"-carrying hijacker, having little-to-no sense of what's going on in the cockpit, and wracked with fear, grief, and confusion, the passengers of United 93 -- operating with even less knowledge than the people on the ground -- eventually piece enough to discover that they must act. This all takes place in real time, and isn't played as cheap film heroics in the slightest. Like everything else in United 93, it all feels terrifyingly real, making the passengers' final, collective, desperate lunge for survival one of the most visceral and cathartic movie sequences in years -- it, like the final shot, will linger in your memory for days to come.

In short, United 93 is undeniably hard to watch at times, and I can see why many folks out there would steer clear of it like the plague. Still, if you feel like you can handle the subject matter, United 93 is a must-see film. While it doesn't even really attempt to offer a broader perspective on the events of 9/11, it's hard to imagine a movie that could reconstruct the emotional experience of that day as faithfully and without cynicism or exploitation as this one.

As seen on Medley's Furl, Columbia PhD, Rutgers professor, and Slate "History Lesson" columnist David Greenberg reexamines the current divide between liberal internationalists and anti-imperialists among the Dems -- and seems to think more of Peter Beinart's recent "Cold War Liberal" argument and the protective camouflage DLC-types than I do -- in the Boston Globe.

"The State party should cease to detain any person at Guantanamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to judicial process or release them as soon as possible, ensuring that they are not returned to any State where they could face a real risk of being tortured, in order to comply with its obligations under the Convention." A day after an ugly prisoner uprising, the UN Committee Against Torture implores the US to close the prison at Gitmo. The report (PDF) also calls for the US "to expressly ban controversial interrogation techniques, and to halt the transfer of detainees to countries with a history of abuse and torture."

"Unlike so many of the hacks placed in charge of important government agencies during the past six years, Hayden possesses powerful qualifications for the job...By the admittedly dismal standards of the Bush administration, then, Hayden is an unusually good appointment." As former NSA head and probable CIA director-to-be Michael Hayden navigates the confirmation process (leaving all his Snoopgate-related answers for the secret session), he procures an endorsement from an unlikely source: Salon's Joe Conason: "[D]espite his military uniform, Hayden is likely to be more independent of the Pentagon and the White House than Goss was. It will help that, unlike Goss, he actually knows what he's doing." Hmmm. Update: Hayden is through committee on a 12-3 vote. (Feingold, for his part, voted no: "Our country needs a CIA Director who is committed to fighting terrorism aggressively without breaking the law or infringing on the rights of Americans."

"''When the president nominated Porter Goss [as CIA director in September 2004], he sent Goss over to get a rogue agency under control,' Steven Simon, a colleague of McCarthy's at the National Security Council from 1994 to 1999, said Goss's aides told him. Simon said McCarthy's unusually public firing appeared intended not only to block leaks but also to suppress the dissent that has 'led to these leaks. The aim was to have a chilling effect, and it will probably work for a while.'" The WP delves deeper into the firing of CIA officer Mary McCarthy last month, and discovers it may well have been due to both her opposition to secret gulags and her anger over CIA lies on the subject.

"In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. 'In other words,' Bush explained, 'one end of the communication must be outside the United States.' As a result, domestic call records -- those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders -- were believed to be private. Sources, however, say that is not the case." USA Today unleashes a firestorm in Washington today after the paper uncovers a NSA plan to "create a database of every call ever made." (Q&A) "With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information."

Dubya's response? As expected, we're only going after the bad people. Nevertheless, Dems and even moderate Republicans in Congress are livid over these new revelations, to the point of possibly spiking the Hayden bid for CIA chief. For his part, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Arlen Specter says he'll chair hearings on the matter, but, really, what else is new? For all his tough talk in the past, so far he's remained a paper tiger when it comes to curbing Dubya's imperial pretensions. Still, one would think this stunning leak might breathe new life into Sen. Feingold's censure resolution, as well as strong congressional legislation that might finally help to redress this administration's startling contempt for civil liberties. After all abuse and torture, secret and/or illegal gulags, indefinite detentions without cause or charges, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretaps are all one thing...but now you're hitting most Americans where they live. Update: Or not -- A new poll shows Americans surprisingly sanguine about NSA data-mining. Update 2: Or are they?

"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them." In very related news, the Justice Department closes its investigation into the NSA warrantless wiretaps because the NSA denied them the necessary security clearances. "We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program...Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation."

"The most important aspect of the president's comment isn't just that he acknowledged, at least tacitly, that Gitmo is a disaster and must be closed; or even that he acknowledged that detainees have a basic right to some adjudicatory process. These two concessions are momentous, but they pale next to his admission that he is in any way bound by the decision of the high court -- that the court will have the last word on anything to do with the war on terror." Slate's Dahlia Lithwick dissects some surprising recent comments by Dubya on Guantanamo Bay, and ponders the future of the Gitmo Gulag. "[Recent] silent mass releases do suggest that Donald Rumsfeld's famous 2002 claim, that the then-760 prisoners at Guantanamo were 'the worst of the worst,' was something of an overstatement. They were probably closer to 'the best of the worst,' or as I've suggested, 'the least lucky of the middling.' The actual worst of the worst have been relegated to a whole other secret prison system that actually makes Guantanamo look rather attractive."

"Officers are told to look for individuals who wear bulky clothing in the summer, pace back and forth, fidget with something beneath their clothing, fail to make eye contact, wear too much cologne, or have strange hair coloring. The indicators are also contradictory and inconsistent. Officers are told, for example, to look for individuals who are nervous and individuals who are calm, individuals who are overtly Muslim (those who mumble as if praying or who wear scented water for "ritual purification") and individuals who seem to hide their Muslim identity so as to blend in. In sum, the guidelines are meaningless to officers who only have a few seconds to decide whether an individual constitutes a real threat before deploying lethal force." A new report by NYU's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice finds suspect racial profiling at work in police anti-terror initiatives that can -- and does -- lead to fatal error. "The identification of suspects cannot be based on confusing indicators, or on the assumption that all Muslims, or those perceived to be Muslim, are potentially terrorists...If people can be shot on the basis of these assumptions, mistakes are bound to be made."

"Many of us are disturbed by the calls for investigations or even impeachment as the defining vision for our party for what we would do if we get back into office." Concerned about the desire for possible investigations of Dubya (as well as calls for withdrawal from Iraq) among the party's grassroots and left-wing, the Democratic hawks of the DLC make a case for running on national security issues. I dunno..at first glance, it sounds like the same-old stale brand of warmed-over protective camouflage that the DLC's been pushing on us for years...first you'd have to convince me that calling Dubya out for his multiple civil liberties violations and breaches of the public trust, as well as putting the brakes on our badly mismanaged foray into Iraq, aren't national security issues.

Dubya officially nominates Michael Hayden to replace Porter Goss at CIA, despite bipartisan criticism of Hayden's military background. "U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said, 'This appointment...signals that we are not that concerned about having an independent intelligence community independent of the Department of Defense.'" Nevertheless, some top Dems, including the House Intelligence Committee's Jane Harman and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, have indicated that they're both ok with the pick and will, likely, avoid the NSA wiretaps issue like the plague during the hearings.

As y'all have probably heard by now, controversial CIA chief Porter Goss was forced to quit his post yesterday, no doubt to much rejoicing at Langley. "As the normally mild-mannered Ivo Daalder, a former staff member at the National Security Council under Bill Clinton, put it, 'Porter Goss was such an absolute disaster for the agency and our national security that his departure comes not a day too soon.'" Goss chalked up his abrupt dismissal as "just one of those mysteries," but other reports suggest the real reason -- bribes, poker, and prostitutes -- is less mysterious than it is just plain unsavory. "'It's all about the Duke Cunningham scandal,' a senior law enforcement official told the Daily News in reference to Goss' resignation." As for his replacement, Dubya has tapped former NSA chief Michael Hayden, which may mean the warrantless wiretaps may soon get another hearing in the Senate.

Looking for political cover in the wake of Dubaigate, the House passes a $7.4 billion port security bill 421-2, with money included for "new port security inspectors, nuclear weapons screening and the development of an automated system to pinpoint high-risk cargo. The 421 to 2 vote came just hours after the White House expressed strong misgivings over the cost and feasibility of the bill."

"'Institutionally, the presidency is walking all over Congress at the moment.' Specter, R-Pennsylvania, told the panel. 'If we are to maintain our institutional prerogative, that may be the only way we can do it.'" Fed up with White House stonewalling regarding the illegal NSA wiretaps (and likely emboldened by Dubya's grotesquely bad poll numbers), Arlen Specter threatens to cut off the program's funding.

"The eight-month, bipartisan investigation's central finding is that FEMA should be replaced by a new National Preparedness and Response Authority. Its head would report to the secretary of Homeland Security but serve as the president's top adviser for national emergency matters, akin to the military role played by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." As hurricane season nears, the future of FEMA becomes a political football between the Senate (who favors abolishing it) and the White House (who doesn't.) The Senate report also "singled out President Bush and the White House as appearing indifferent to the devastation until two days after the storm hit."

"'The current debate over our national security by a series of retired generals -- some critical, some supportive of the present leadership in the Department of Defense -- is an important exercise of the right to freedom of speech,' he said. 'Another valued tenet is the right of the president to select the members of his own Cabinet.'" Senate Armed Service Committee chairman John Warner (R-VA) makes noise about holding Senate hearings on Rumsfeld. I'll believe it when I see it.

I'm a bit late on this one: In an ugly confluence of several of this administration's shady dealings, CheneyCo.'s KBR/Halliburton -- its attempts at continued war profiteering faltering -- recently won a $385 million contract to build immigrant detention centers for the Dept. of Homeland Security. "The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs." Um, new programs? (By way of Supercres.)

US officials find repeated instances of detainee abuse at six more Iraqi prisons, and -- unlike last time -- are not removing all the tortured prisoners from their place of custody, thus violating a promise made by Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace last November. "Pace said at a news conference Nov. 29 with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, 'It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it.' Turning to Pace, Rumsfeld responded: 'I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it.'" Now, why make that distinction, Rummy?

"This plan details 'what terrorists or bad guys we would hit if the gloves came off. The gloves are not off.'" The Pentagon's Special Operations Command (SOCOM) devises a new and classified campaign to fight the war on terror, one that apparently relies heavily on special forces getting involved around the world. "[I]n a subtle but important shift contained in a classified order last year, the Pentagon gained the leeway to inform -- rather than gain the approval of -- the U.S. ambassador before conducting military operations in a foreign country, according to several administration officials. 'We do not need ambassador-level approval,' said one defense official familiar with the order."

"It's an odd thought, but a military coup in this country right now would probably have a moderating influence. Not that an actual coup is pending; still less is one desirable. But we are witnessing the rumblings of an officers' revolt, and things could get ugly if it were to take hold and roar." Fred Kaplan assesses the considerable contempt of US military leaders for Donald Rumsfeld. Update: While Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace attempts damage control, more retired generals pile on: Maj. Gen. John Batiste, former commander of the 1st Infantry Division (2004-2005), and Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, former head of the 82nd Airborne (also an Iraq war veteran.)

Oof, and y'all thought shoplifting was bad...I don't really want to get into the sad and horrifying story of Homeland Security flak and child molester Brian Doyle. Suffice to say, is this what "restoring honor and dignity to the White House" looks like? Ok, that may be a cheap shot, but if this sick tale had happened on Clinton's watch, we would never hear the end of it.

'Even if the Court were to rule in Padilla's favor,' Kennedy went on, 'his present custody status would be unaffected. Padilla is scheduled to be tried on criminal charges. Any consideration of what rights he might be able to assert if he were returned to military custody would be hypothetical, and to no effect, at this stage of the proceedings." By a margin of 6-3 (Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter dissenting), the Supreme Court punts on Padilla, on the grounds that Padilla's dilemma has been rendered "hypothetical" now that he's been transferrred into the normal justice system.

Justice Ginsburg disagrees: "This case...raises a question of profound importance to the Nation. Does the President have authority to imprison indefinitely a United States citizen arrested on United States soil distant from a zone of combat, based on an Executive declaration that the citizen was, at the time of his arrest, an 'enemy combatant'? It is a question the Court heard, and should have decided, two years ago. Nothing the Government has yet done purports to retract the assertion of Executive power Padilla protests."

"'We know the president broke the law,' Leahy said. 'Now we need to know why.'" With the Dems -- except for Feingold and Leahy -- AWOL yet again, the Senate Judiciary Committee debates Feingold's censure resolution and hears testimony from former Nixon counsel John Dean, who is back before Congress for the first time since Watergate. Said Feingold at one point: "If you want the words 'bad faith' in [the censure resolution], let's put them right in, because that's exactly what we have here...The lawbreaking is shocking in itself, but the defiant way that the president has persisted in defending his actions with specious legal arguments and misleading statements is part of what led me to conclude that censure is a necessary step." Said the rest of the committee Dems (Kennedy, Biden, Kohl, Feinstein, Schumer, Durbin): Nothing.

"The president's consistent refusal to try the Guantanamo detainees before criminal courts or courts-martial leads a reasonable observer to conclude that the government's case would fail if it were subjected to scrutiny by an impartial adjudicator. And if that is the only justification for military tribunals, it must be rejected. No one denies that the war on terror presents new challenges to the rule of law. But prosecuting someone with a crime that does not exist, before a commission that does not have rules, simply does not constitute justice under any set of circumstances." Slate files several dispatches on the important case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which the Supreme Court (without Chief Justice Roberts, who has recused himself...as should probably Scalia) will hear today. Emily Bazelon finds that GOP Senators Kyl and Graham seem to have tried to deceive the Court about the legislative history of their Detainee Treatment Act, while Ariel Lavinbuk suggests a compromise solution: the Supreme Court could "find that 'conspiracy' -- the only charge against Hamdan -- does not violate the law of war."

Update: The Court hears the case, and it seems a majority -- Scalia and Alito notwithstanding -- are not amused with the Dubya administration: "Without Chief Justice John Roberts...the argument seemed lopsided against the government." Still, as was expected to be the norm on the Roberts Court,"the outcome of the case will likely turn on moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy."

"It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world's most powerful nation upon that fiction." In a must-read LA Times editorial, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright witheringly dissects Dubya Diplomacy. (Via Medley.)

The new trailer for United 93 is now online. This idea of this film feels really unnecessary and verges on exploitative...but, as I said with the teaser, Paul Greengrass is a pretty darned good director, so I'm still curious to see what he makes of it.

"Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, 'NO BLOOD, NO FOUL.' The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: 'If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it.'" In related news, the NY Times exposes more allegations of shameful and disturbing Abu Ghraib-like detainee abuse conducted by "a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26." "Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future...Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit."

"In all the years I have been on the bench, I have never seen such an egregious violation of a court's rule on witnesses." In keeping with this administration's penchant for cutting corners on civil liberties (and playing right into the hands of America's critics), the trial of Al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker," appears on the verge of mistrial after it comes out that government lawyer Carla Martin blatantly coached witnesses. Said Judge Leonie Brinkema: "This is the second significant error by the government affecting the constitutional rights of this defendant and, more importantly, the integrity of the criminal justice system in this country." Update: Slate's Dahlia Lithwick tries to explain the strange "medical malpractice" reasoning at work in this death penalty case.

"This conduct is right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors....We, as a Congress, have to stand up to a president who acts like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution were repealed on Sept 11." On This Week, Senator Feingold calls for a censure of Dubya for, "openly and almost thumbing his nose at the American people," continuing the NSA warrantless wiretaps. (The censure resolution is here.) Catkiller Frist -- flush from his straw poll win over the weekend -- responded by calling the censure a "terrible, terrible signal" to give the evildoers. It's "terrible" to show respect for the rule of law? Get real. It's about time somebody in the AWOL Senate stood up to this administration's repeated abuses of power. Update: Feingold writes more on the censure. (Via Medley.)

By way of a friend, the State Department releases its mandated yearly human rights report for 2005 (here), finding cause for alarm in Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, Burma, North Korea, Belarus and Zimbabwe and (surprise, surprise) progress in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report doesn't delve into human rights violations here at home (although China tries to fill that gap in response every year), but it does unequivocally state -- in bold, no less -- that "countries in which power is concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers tend to be the world's most systematic human rights violators." Hey y'all might be on to something. Deadpans the head of Amnesty International: "The Bush administration's practice of transferring detainees in the 'war on terror' to countries cited by the State Department for their appalling human rights records actually turns the report into a manual for the outsourcing of torture."

Soon after GOP leaders tell Dubya the port deal is dead, Dubai Ports World pull the plug themselves by announcing they will divest all American interests, including operation of the six ports in question. Well, I guess it's healthy to see Congress finally stand up to Dubya...but, frankly, this Dubai takeover has been a sideshow issue from the beginning. If only our reps demonstrated a similar spine on any number of other, more significant administration policies: the NSA wiretaps, the Patriot Act, prewar intelligence, our newfound proclivity to torture, bankruptcy legislation, you name it...including the still-extant question of port security.

"'Listen, this is a very big political problem,' said House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), explaining that he had to give his rank-and-file members a chance to vote. 'There are two things that go on in this town. We do public policy, and we do politics. And you know, most bills at the end of the day, the politics and the policy kind of come together, but not always. And we are into one of these situations where this has become a very hot political potato.'" Content to curl up like lapdogs when civil liberties are on the table, Republicans remain livid over Dubaigate, with House leaders setting up a voice vote to kill the port deal in the next few days. Update: It has begun -- the House Appropriations Committee votes 62-2 to add a block of the deal to a war funding measure.

"I am only a chicken farmer in Pakistan." With the recent release of detainee names, the NYT looks more closely at exactly who's being held at Guantanamo Bay, including several folks, it seems, who were guilty of the heinous crime of wearing the wrong timepiece, a "Casio model F-91W watch. According to evidentiary summaries in those cases, such watches have 'been used in bombings linked to Al Qaeda.'"

As Randy "Duke" Cunningham faces sentencing today, federal investigators take a closer look at his connections to the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), "the Pentagon's newest and fastest-growing intelligence agency." "In pre-sentencing documents filed this week, prosecutors said that in fiscal 2003 legislation, Cunningham set aside, or earmarked, $6.3 million for work to be done 'to benefit' CIFA shortly after the agency was created. The contract went to MZM Inc., a company run by Mitchell J. Wade, who recently pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Cunningham." Update: 8 years, 4 months.

"'These allegations...describe disgusting treatment, that if proven, is treatment that is cruel, profoundly disturbing and violative of' U.S. and foreign treaties banning torture, [U.S. District Judge Gladys] Kessler told the government's lawyers." So what happened to "we don't torture?" Lawyers for the administration fight allegations of abuse at Gitmo (involving force-feeding and a restraint chair) -- not by saying it didn't happen -- but by arguing instead that the recent McCain bill doesn't apply there. "'Unfortunately, I think the government's right; it's a correct reading of the law,' said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. 'The law says you can't torture detainees at Guantanamo, but it also says you can't enforce that law in the courts.'"

"I did not and could not address...any other classified intelligence activities." In a letter clarifying his recent Senate testimony on the NSA wiretaps, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hints at a broader warrantless spying program than has yet been acknowledged. "'It seems to me he is conceding that there are other NSA surveillance programs ongoing that the president hasn't told anyone about,' said Bruce Fein, a government lawyer in the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations." Update: Gonzales tells Jane Harman that's all there is.

"'The die has now been cast,' acknowledged the law's chief opponent, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis....'Obviously at this point, final passage of the reauthorization bill is now assured.'" As expected, most Senate Dems -- no doubt aiming to protect their national security flank in the upcoming elections -- join in voting 84-15 to end another Feingold filibuster, thus sending the barely-revised Patriot Act along for likely passage. "'No one has the right to turn this body into a rubber stamp,' said Feingold, the leading opponent of the law in Congress. 'The White House played hardball and the decision was made by some to capitulate.'" Good God, our party is pathetic at times. Update: The Senate passes the Patriot Act, 89-10.

"V for Vendetta may be--why hedge? is--the most subversive cinematic deed of the Bush-Blair era, a dagger poised in midair. Unlike the other movies dubbed 'controversial' (Fahrenheit 9-11, The Passion, Munich, Syriana), it doesn't play to a particular constituency or polarized culture bloc, it's working on a deeper, Edgar Allan Poe-ish witch's brew substrata of pop myth." Vanity Fair's James Wolcott seems to really like V for Vendetta. (Via Blivet.)

According to a new poll by CBS News (whose sampling, admittedly, might be skewed left), Dubya's numbers have hit a new low, with only 34% of the country approving of his performance and 59% disapproving. Well, on the bright side for this administration, at least they've got Bin Laden's vote, which, as Dubya himself now admits, helped him out in 2004.

Arlen Specter, who has clearly given up on his oversight and impeachment talk of a few short weeks ago, tries at least to bring future NSA wiretap inquiries before the FISA court. Meanwhile, the White House nixes a call by 18 House Dems to appoint an independent counsel to delve into the NSA matter, opting instead for more of their patented Shoot-the-Messenger defense: "'I think that where these Democrats who are calling for this ought to spend their time is on what was the source of the unauthorized disclosure of this vital, incredible program in the war on terrorism,' White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. 'I really don't think there is any basis for a special counsel. ... But the fact that this information was disclosed about the existence of this program has given the enemy some of our playbook.'"

"A behind-the-scenes reconstruction of the ports deal's rapid evolution from obscurity to uproar shows how Bush was blindsided by the same emotion-laden politics of terrorism that he used to win elections in 2002 and 2004. It also raises anew questions of why the White House message machine, so sharply effective in the first term, seemingly has gone dull in the second." As the Dubai Port World deal goes under 45-day review, the Post assesses the Dubya administration's dismal PR performance during Dubaigate.

"There are many, many problems that we face in maritime security -- and they're not the United Arab Emirates." Dubaigate continues to have legs, with both parties in an uproar and the port takeover now on hold so Dubya can convince Congress it's a good idea (or at the very least get his story straight.) Well, as Dan Froomkin noted, inasmuch as this story draws attention to the broader issues of outsourcing, port security, and questionable White House decisionmaking, I'm all for it. But, given all the shadiness this administration has been up to of late, I'm a bit surprised that this relatively innocuous UAE deal has blown up as it has. (I mean, when Dubya recently decided he'd eviscerate our constitutional system of checks and balances, the Senate just rolled over.) Well, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, I suppose.

"America, your head's too big, because, America, your belly's too big, and I love you, I just wish you'd stay where you is." Oops...watch yourself, Morrissey. On the eve of a new album, the former Smiths frontman says the FBI and British Intelligence have come 'round his door.

Members of both parties, including now the GOP governors of New York and Maryland, question government approval of the sale of a British port security firm (which operates six major U.S. ports) to Dubai Ports World, a company based in the United Arab Emirates. "Dubai Ports will not 'own' the U.S. facilities, but will inherit the P&O's contracts to run them, with no changes in the dockside personnel or the U.S. government security operations that currently apply to them." Hmm. The transaction should be looked at carefully, sure, but, as the TIME article notes, the fact that this company is based in Dubai is much less important than the broader issue of port security standards. Update: Strange bedfellows: Carter backs Dubya, Frist doesn't. Update 2: Port security link via Medley.

The WP surveys the recent White House campaign to prevent Senate oversight into the NSA wiretaps. "Hagel and Snowe declined interview requests after the meeting, but sources close to them say they bridle at suggestions that they buckled under administration heat." Well, then, Senators, what do you want to call it?

"[T]errorism is not the only new danger of this era. Another is the administration's argument that because the president is commander in chief, he is the 'sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs.'" From the Right, George Will makes the conservative case against Dubya's "monarchical" pretensions regarding the NSA wiretaps. (Via Cliopatria.)

"We've always said that Guantanamo Bay was something that shouldn't have happened." A report by the UN Human Rights Commission argues that the US should shut down the Gitmo gulag immediately, a conclusion shared by Kofi Annan and -- apparently -- the British government. As to be expected from this gang, the White House is shrugging the criticism off.

"Treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be." As feared -- the Senate GOP, including supposed "moderates" Snowe and Chafee -- vote down hearings into the NSA wiretaps. And also as feared, the Senate Dems completely collapse on the Patriot Act renewal, joining the Republicans to end the Feingold filibuster 96-3. (Only Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Jim Jeffords (I-VT) sided with Russ.) So, with the Senate in effect abdicating its responsibilty as an independent and coequal branch of government, it looks like it'll be up to the judiciary to check Dubya's executive powergrab.

"It took a long time for Democrats to step up and challenge the administration's baseless assertions that the Patriot Act could not be changed without threatening the security of the American people. When we finally did so, when we decided to make the case that we can fight terrorism and protect our American principles at the same time, it looked like Democrats were finally ready to stand on principle and offer strong leadership. Instead, too many Democrats have folded, and momentum for critical changes to the Patriot Act to protect our freedoms has been squandered." In Salon, an angry Russ Feingold calls out his party for capitulating on the Patriot Act extension. Ugh. Are the Democrats irreparably broken at this point? Does our party leadership lack all conviction? At this point, the evidence is piling up against them, and, if we don't get our act together, we're going to lose our best chance in a decade to take back Congress this November. Update: Feingold filibusters alone.

"If some kind of inquiry would be beneficial to getting a resolution to this issue, then sure, we should look at it. But if the inquiry is just some kind of a punitive inquiry that really is not focused on finding a way out of this, then I'm not so sure that I would support that." Bad news for congressional oversight and the rule of law: After an "all-out" campaign of White House arm-twisting, crucial Senate Republicans -- including Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel -- appear on the verge of folding up the tent on the proposed NSA hearings. The critical vote will come tomorrow, but it's iffy. "Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it."

"'I can't believe I'm in a conservative hall listening to him say [Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States,' Sorcinelli fumed." As a result of his questioning Dubya's NSA powergrab, right-wing civil libertarian Bob Barr finds himself persona non grata at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Similarly in the doghouse with the powers-that-be is right-wing pollster Frank Luntz, due to a longstanding feud with John Boehner -- Luntz backed the wrong horse in '98. And, speaking of Boehner, the new Majority Leader is apparently causing mild tremors along another GOP faultline, the one between evangelicals and pro-business stooges. (Boehner numbers among the latter.) Could this all be the prelude to a '06 crack-up of '94 proportions?

As critics in both parties poke more holes in Dubya's flimsy NSA defense, Republican congresswoman Heather Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, calls for a "complete review" of Dubya's wiretapping program.

The Specter hearings into the illegal NSA wiretaps begin, and, so far despite Specter's tough talk on Sunday, they've been pretty much a sideshow. For one, as they did with Big Oil, the GOP ensured by a 10-8 party-line vote that Gonzales didn't have to testify under oath. For another, Gonzales has been falling back on the ridiculous Article 2 defense and saying little of import as of yet. Still, at least Republicans like Specter and Lindsey Graham are joining Feingold and others in calling out the administration's dubious rationale for the Imperial Presidency, so perhaps these hearings may be of some service yet. Update: As the NYT points out, we've been here before. Update 2: Dahlia Lithwick is not amused.

A quick note on Tuesday's State of the Union: I actually think Dubya has delivered some well-crafted speeches (1/23) in the past, even if I disagree with almost all of their content. This wasn't one of them. Except for the "America is addicted to oil" line (which Jimmy Carter basically said over 25 years ago) and the "human-animal hybrid" goofiness (which, as Crooked Timber points out, might mean trouble for diabetics), there wasn't a single memorable moment throughout, just more of the same "9/11" and "freedom, yeah" grandstanding. (And Kaine was no better -- I like to think I'm more interested in politics than most people, and I was bored stiff after a minute or two. Nice fireplace, tho'.) If the White House was looking for this address to reverse their ailing fortunes, a la Clinton in '98, my guess is that they failed. (Pharyngula link via Now This.)

With a tip-off from the Progressive Patriots Fund, I had the opportunity yesterday to catch Sen. Russ Feingold speak on the Patriot Act and the NSA wiretapping scandal over at Cardozo Law School. (Their pics are a lot better than mine -- I forgot to charge my batteries, and thus only got in 2 or 3 shots before my camera died on me.) And how was he? Well, all-in-all, he came off as a convincing candidate for the election ahead, as well as an impressive, informed, and personable fellow. To be honest, I found his remarks a bit lawyerly (then again, he's a lawyer speaking before a law school, so that's not really a fair criticism), but, taken in full, he seemed a committeed progressive and a refreshingly candid leader, the type of dynamic, independent thinker the Senate should be teeming with, if the system came anywhere close to working these days.



The gist of Sen. Feingold's remarks was thus: Al Qaeda is the central threat facing America and has been since 9/11. Yet, instead of bringing the nation together to eliminate this terrorist organization, the Dubya White House has chosen time and time again to endanger our national security and compromise our most fundamental American values for their own ideological or power-hoarding purposes. (Iraq, Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, secret gulags, you name it.) Along those lines and as we now all know, the Patriot Act, which only Feingold voted against in 2001, contains some terrible provisions therein, the most notorious example affecting Middle America being Section 215 (which gives law enforcement, among other things, the right to see what you've been reading.)

Yet, as per the norm, Dubya has refused to admit that it's even possible that something might be wrong with the Patriot Act now that it's up for renewal -- only that it's necessary to defeat the evildoers and that any microscopic change in the statute could rend the fabric of freedom irreparably. (Despite this now-somewhat hoary ploy, Feingold and others have succeeded in blocking a permanent blanket extension for now, as y'all know if you've been visiting here lately.) And, of course, Dubya has taken this same tack of obfuscation and fear-mongering to cover up his brazen wiretapping power-grab -- which, according to Congress's own research arm, broke at least two laws and counting.

Again, this story is not news to many Dems out there, but Feingold laid it out in clear, comprehensible, and systematic fashion. (The only "breaking news" made was the Senator announcing this letter to Gonzales, asking him why he, in effect, lied to the Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings about the NSA wiretaps.) And he had some good lines throughout -- In reply to Rove's ridiculous claim that Dems were "pre-9/11", Feingold quipped that the GOP suffered from a "pre-1776" mentality these days. (He also retold the recent Patrick Henry exchange.) To be honest, I'd liked to have heard more in this vein -- In terms of breaking down the legislative legerdemain and legal issues at hand, Feingold was superb. But I thought the speech needed more narrative sweep and rhetorical grandeur, more explanation of why this battle matters so much to the workings of the republic. He doesn't have to turn into Robert Byrd overnight. Still, I thought the remarks could have benefited from more dramatic heft and historical resonance: Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Lincoln, Wilson...they're all relevant here. (Then again, as I said above, I was an historian sitting in a room full of lawyers, so I was a tougher sell than most.)

Along those lines, if there was a problem with this presentation, it's that the Senator, while clearly outraged, at times seemed much less livid about all this than many in the audience, who occasionally sounded ready to hoist the black flag. (In fact, many will no doubt be happy to hear that Feingold was asked twice "why Democrats are so lame." As he noted (and as the blogosphere can attest this week), if a crowd in New York City is this irate with the party, the Dems might be in serious trouble nationwide in November. Still, he also emphasized that the Democrats could be more effective fighters if they actually controlled a house of Congress -- You can't hold hearings if you're in the minority.

In terms of other questions, Feingold said he supports and will take part in the very late-developing (and now already defunct) Alito filbuster (Roll Call.) In fact, he thought the Dems made a crucial mistake in capitulating to the original "Gang of 14" compromise, arguing cogently that Dems have seen nothing for it and may well have had the votes to win Catkiller's game of nuclear chicken. Since Casino Jack and lobbying reform seemed too big a subject to address competently in the time allotted, I asked him a question about his thoughts on the NYT decision to spike the NSA story for a year, his general view of the mass media's performance in serving as a check on these types of executive abuses, and ('cause it seemed apropos) his thoughts on the burgeoning blogosphere's role in all this. He didn't really go after the Times decision, and said that, in terms of the recent Patriot Act debate, he thought the press had actually done an ok job. Regarding blogs, he called the Internet "a miracle for populist politics," which was a good enough soundbite that everyone in my row dutifully wrote it down at the same time.

And, of course, Sen. Feingold was asked -- a couple of times -- whether or not he was running for President in 2008. Naturally, he played it coy -- After all, we still have just under two years before the Iowa caucus. But, for what it's worth, I was impressed by him -- He's not a first-class emoter like Edwards or Clinton, of course. Instead, he comes across as a highly intelligent, capable, and nuanced thinker, a la Bradley, Kerry, or Gore on his better days. But unlike those three, he also seemed much more comfortable in his own skin, more naturally himself at the podium, and -- most importantly -- more content to play the maverick if his lefty principles dictate thus. (Although, as I said, I'd like to see him tone down the lawyer-ese and rev up more Wellstone-ish fire if he does make a White House run.) I suppose there's a small, bordering-on-infinitesimal chance that Rodham Clinton, Biden, Warner, or someone else might drop all the "New Democrat" protective camouflage this time around and begin loudly and undefensively proclaiming progressive principles to the Heavens. But, until that unlikely event, my candidate in the 2008 Democratic primary is Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. (Update: 1776 link via Medley.)

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." That flaming liberal Dwight Eisenhower's somber farewell address to the nation is the historical and thematic anchor for Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We Fight, a sobering disquisition on American militarism and foreign policy since 9/11. In essence, Why We Fight is the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 should have been. Like F911, this film preaches to the choir, but it also makes a more substantive critique of Dubya diplomacy and the 9/11-Iraq switcheroo, with much less of the grandstanding that marred Moore's earlier documentary (and drove right-wing audiences berzerk.)

Sadly, the basic tale here is all-too-familiar by now. Ensconced in Dubya's administration from the word go, the right-wing think-tank crowd (Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol, etc.) used the tragedy of 9/11 as a pretext to enact all their neocon fantasies (spelled out in this 2000 Project for a New American Century report), beginning in Iraq. Taken into consideration with Cheney the Military-Contractor-in-Chief doling out fat deals to his Halliburton-KBR cronies from the Vice-President's office, and members of Congress meekly signing off on every military funding bill that comes down the pike (partly because, as the film points out, weapons systems such as the B-1 or F-22 have a part built in every state), it seems uncomfortably clear that President Eisenhower's grim vision has come to pass.

To help him rake this muck, Jarecki shrewdly gives face-time not only to learned critics of recent foreign-policy -- CIA vet Chalmers Johnson, Gore Vidal (looking unwell) -- but also to the neocons themselves. Richard Perle is here, saying (as always) insufferably self-serving things, and Bill Kristol glows like a kid in a candy store when he gets to talk up his role in fostering Dubya diplomacy. (Karen Kwiatkowski, a career military woman who watched the neocon coup unfold within the corridors of the Pentagon, also delivers some keen insights.) And, when discussing the corruption that festers in the heart of our Capitol, Jarecki brings out not only Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity but that flickering mirage of independent-minded Republicanism, John McCain. (In fact, Jarecki encapsulates the frustrating problem with McCain in one small moment: Right after admitting to the camera that Cheney's no-bid KBR deals "look bad", the Senator happens to get a call from the Vice-President. In his speak-of-the-devil grimace of bemused worry, you can see him mentally falling into line behind the administration, as always.)

To be sure, Why We Fight has some problems. There's a central tension in the film between the argument that Team Dubya is a corrupt administration of historical proportions and the notion that every president since Kennedy has been party to an increasingly corrupt system, and it's never really resolved satisfactorily here. Jarecki wants you to think that this documentary is about the rise of the Imperial Presidency across five decades, but, some lip service to Tonkin notwithstanding, the argument here is grounded almost totally in the Age of Dubya. (I don't think it's a bad thing, necessarily, but it is the case.) And, sometimes the critique seems a little scattershot -- Jarecki seems to fault the Pentagon both for KBR's no-bid contracts and, when we see Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas salesmen going head-to-head, for bidding on contracts. (Still, his larger point is valid -- As Chalmers Johnson puts it, "When war becomes that profitable, you're going to see more of it.")

Also, the film loses focus at times and meanders along tangents -- such as the remembrances of two Stealth Fighter pilots on the First Shot Fired in the Iraq war, or the glum story of an army recruit in Manhattan looking to turn his life around. This latter tale, along with the story of Wilton Sekzer, a retired Vietnam Vet and NYPD sergeant who lost his son on 9/11 and wants somebody to pay, are handled with more grace and less showmanship than similar vignettes in Michael Moore's film, but they're in the same ballpark. (As an aside, I was also somewhat irked by shots of NASA thrown in with the many images of missile tests and ordnance factories. Ok, both involve rockets, research, and billions of dollars, but space exploration and war are different enough goals that such a comparison merits more unpacking.)

Nevertheless, Why We Fight is well worth-seeing, and hopefully, this film will make it out to the multiplexes. If nothing else, it'll do this country good to ponder anew both a president's warning about the "disastrous rise of misplaced power," and a vice-president's assurance that we'll be "greeted as liberators."

"This extremity of Bush's position emerges most clearly in a 42-page document issued by the Department of Justice last week. As Andrew Cohen, a CBS legal analyst, wrote in an online commentary, 'The first time you read the "White Paper," you feel like it is describing a foreign country guided by an unfamiliar constitution.' To develop this observation a bit further, the nation implied by the document would be an elective dictatorship, governed not by three counterpoised branches of government but by a secretive, possibly benign, awesomely powerful king." As Dubya embarks on another weeklong campaign of fear and distortion (as per standard Rovian operating procedure), Slate's Jacob Weisberg gapes at the audacity of Bush's brazenly unconstitutional ploy for power. "[I]n his white paper, Bush as much as declares: 'I determine what my words mean and I alone determine what yours mean, too.'...Bush's message to the courts, like his message to Congress, is: Make way, subjects."

In related news, Senate opposition to the Patriot Act -- All the Dems and only four measly Republicans -- seems to be holding firm for now, meaning that the old, unrevised version will remain in effect for the time being. Of course, if King George actually possessed the powers he's arrogantly allocated to himself of late, there would be no need for a Senate vote on the Patriot Act at all. Hopefully, Arlen Specter understands the danger in these breathtaking assertions of unconstitutional power by Dubya, and will make his forthcoming Senate Judiciary hearings count for something. After all, given this administration's blatant power grab, it's no longer hyperbole to say that our republic is at stake.

"Judge Alito's record and his testimony have led me to conclude that his impulse to defer to the executive branch would make him a dangerous addition to the Supreme Court at a time when cases involving executive overreaching in the name of fighting terrorism are likely to be such an important part of the Court's work." Although the Senate Judiciary Dems (including Feingold) lined up against him, Sam Alito made it out of committee on a 10-8 party-line vote. Now, with his nomination before the full Senate, and with Nebraska Dem Ben Nelson joining the GOP majority, it seems, unfortunately, that the "worst nightmare of liberal democrats" will come to pass, and Alito will join the Roberts court. (For what it's worth, Nelson wasn't alone in his apostasy: Santorum challenger Bob Casey also came out for the judge.) Well, let's hope Justice Alito takes a less forgiving look at executive encroachment than has Judge Alito. (Casey link via Medley.) Update: While the NYT says filibuster, Dems Robert Byrd and Tim Johnson back Alito. (Of course, if the NYT hadn't sat on the NSA story for a year, perhaps we could have nipped Alito in the bud back in November 2004.)

""The curtain got pulled aside, and there's not even a wizard behind it...these people are incompetent." As you probably heard, Karl Rove emerged from hiding to offer his blueprint for Republican resurgence in 2006. Yep, you guessed it: terror, terror, terror, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, garnished with a smattering of tax cuts. But, to their credit, it sounds like Dems are relishing this coming fight, with Intelligence Committee Dem Jane Harman pushing back once more on the illegal wiretaps, and, in keeping with the recent trend of presidential also-rans finding their voice, John Kerry taking off the gloves on the Sunday shows. "Osama bin Laden is going to die of kidney failure before he's killed by Karl Rove and his crowd."

"So, here's the big question: If diplomacy is the only rational solution to this problem yet the Iranians just want nukes -- in other words, if there is no deal (or at least no deal that the United States would realistically offer) that would compel them to give up their dream -- what's the next step?" Slate's Fred Kaplan admits to being stymied on the troubling question of Iranian nukes.

The non-partisan Congressional Research Service finds -- again -- that Dubya's warrantless wiretapping was illegal. In this case, the Dubya White House violated the 1947 National Security Act, by neglecting to inform the entire House and Senate intelligence committees of their shenanigans. Put it in the impeachment file, Sen. Specter.

"> EXAMINE CHAIRS

They are two several chairs arranged around the center of the room, along with two couches. Under one couch you find Clinton's shoes.

> FILL SHOES

You are unable to fill Clinton's shoes."

This may be the funniest political Internet post I've seen since the Cheney poker game: By way of WebGoddess and from the brain of Defective Yeti, it's the George W. Bush text adventure. Beware of lurking grues, special prosecutors, and that goshdarned Constitution.

The second half of last night's double-feature, Michael Haneke's Cache, offered a moral universe in many ways diametrical to that of Match Point -- here, even the long-buried sins of the upper crust are eventually exposed before the Great Eye. As I said in the 2005 round-up, last year was a banner year for politically-minded movies, and Cache, both an unsettling thriller of personal surveillance and a timely rumination on First World comforts and complicity in an age of terror, definitely ranks among them. With its inordinately protracted (and sometimes intentionally confusing) shots and its refusal to answer many of the questions it poses (including the plot device driving the film), Cache isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, and I'm sure some will write it off as just a pretentious and inscrutable foreign film. Nevertheless, I thought Cache was well worth seeing. It's a film that, both visually and politically, will put you ill at ease.

Cache begins with a long, steady image of a Parisian street, held throughout the very slowly typed-out credits and beyond. Well after the normal amount of time our movie-conditioned eye allots for a basic establishing shot (by now, Tony Scott would have had an embolism), the image is suddenly paused, and then rewound. As it turns out, we've been viewing a tape, one featuring --and sent to -- the home of the Laurents, along with a scrawled picture of a child vomiting blood. (Yes, it starts like Lost Highway, but they're very different movies.) Georges (Daniel Auteuil), the host of his own popular Charlie Rose-ish television show, is nonplussed by this bizarre tape, and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), a successful book agent, is driven to distraction, particularly as more cassettes (with more information) arrive, and it becomes increasingly clear that Georges has some sense of why this is happening. Soon, for the sake of his wife and 12-year-old son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), Georges is forced to follow the path prescribed by these strange missives, and to confront a dark moment in his past that he, his parents, and arguably his nation have purposefully forgotten.

What that dark moment is is for you to discover, although it's one that (as political analogy -- it doesn't work quite as well in terms of straight narrative) hearkens to the French-Algerian conflict and, more broadly, the war on terror and the hidden costs and benefits of colonialism. Georges rages and fumes throughout the movie, insisting over and over that he and his family are being terrorized. But by whom, and for what? Is Georges really blameless, and, that question aside, are his responses appropriate? Some very brief flashes of didacticism aside (for example, the scene involving CNN), Cache generally posits troubling questions about national memory, the dividends of empire, and the state of the world today without telling us how to feel about them.

Another layer of unease in the film involves the aforementioned camerawork. Cache returns to that exterior view of the Laurents' home several times, and we never know if we're watching "just" an establishing shot or indulging in the stalker's-eye-view. (The likely answer, a la Rear Window, is that we're doing both.) This goes for almost every scene in the film, and the cumulative experience of "stalking" the Laurents for two hours adds to the apprehension and foreboding of Cache. We begin to feel complicit in this crime of surveillance, just as, in time, we come to feel complicit in the Laurents' sins. (Sure, the question of "the gaze" is a hoary staple of any Film 101 class -- still, Haneke manages here to move past arthouse histrionics and create something that feels genuinely creepy.)

Finally, as I said above, Cache is disarmingly open-ended, particularly by the "explain-everything-several-times" standard we're used to. Yes, one character's arc is made clear, I think, by his/her womb-like retreat from the world, and that maddening last shot, if you caught the action (screenshot spoilers here), does suggest a possible answer to the cassette issue. But, ultimately, the bullet-points of the thriller story aren't all that important. The plot mechanics of Cache may remain hidden, but the unsettling impressions of guilt and complicity it leaves linger in plain sight.

By way of LMG, an online exhibit on the response in comics to 9/11, featured on an intriguing site in its own right: The Authentic History Center: Primary Sources from American Popular Culture.

"It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here,' the authors of the CRS report wrote. The administration's legal justification 'does not seem to be...well-grounded.'" A 44-page nonpartisan report by the Congressional Research Service finds Dubya's dubious reliance on presidential prerogative to explain away the NSA wiretaps doesn't hold up.

Unable to defeat the Feingold-led filibuster, the Senate GOP instead decide to punt with a six-month extension of the Patriot Act. Dubya originally said he'd veto a three-month stopgap, and the Republicans have been fervently against previous Democratic calls for a temporary extension...but at this point it sounds like the White House and GOP will take what they can get. (Feingold's reaction: It's "a victory for the American people.") Update: Make that a month.

Is the FBI searching for Al Qaeda...or the Army of the 12 Monkeys? In yet another example of scary overreaching by intelligence organizations of late, the ACLU disclosed today that the FBI has been spying on several innocuous activist organizations since 9/11, including PETA, Greenpeace, and the Catholic Workers' Group.

Team Dubya spent the weekend on the offensive regarding the recent disclosure of illegal NSA wiretaps, with Bush saying over and over again that disclosing the wiretaps was "a shameful act" that "damage[d] our national security." Sheah. That Dubya and his cronies would try to pass off these egregious violations of civil liberties and due process with more dissent is disloyalty garbage (and a frisson of 9/11, 9/11, 9/11) speaks once again to how corrupt and out-of-control this administration has become. Let the investigations commence. Update: Newsweek's Jonathan Alter weighs in: "Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story -- which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year -- because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker...If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced."

"I don't want to hear again from the attorney general or anyone on this floor that this government has shown it can be trusted to use the power we give it with restraint and care." Aided by today's shocking revelation that the NSA has been monitoring thousands of international calls without a warrant since 2002, a group of Senators led by Russ Feingold -- and including four Republicans (Craig, Hagel, Murkowski, and Sununu) -- succeed in defeating an extension of the Patriot Act. At this point, I might as well put a Feingold 2008 banner over on the sidebar -- Ever since the McCain-Feingold days, the Senator from Wisconsin has continued to rise in my esteem, and this once again proves his mettle as our most forthright and committed progressive standard-bearer. Bravo!

An ugly day for American values around the world: In Iraq, an investigation inaugurated after the recent discovery of secret prisons in Baghdad uncovers at least 120 victims of torture and/or abuse in prisons run by the new Iraq Interior Ministry. "Prisoners had their bones broken and their fingernails pulled out, were subjected to electric shocks and had burning cigarettes crushed into their necks and backs, said the Iraqi official." And, elsewhere, a European investigation suggests that the CIA were in fact holding prisoners illegally in Europe, until they were surreptitiously moved to North Africa after the story broke. Charming. So is this what Dubya meant when he said "we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty" to the world? If so, I'd remind him of the Lincoln quote he used in the same inaugural address: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."

As the State Department stalls for time, the European Union considers suspending the voting rights of those member nations which were home to secret CIA gulags. (Human Rights Watch has said that Poland and Romania are the most likely suspects, although many other nations may have witnessed CIA flights go to and fro.)

"After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that 'God put me here' to deal with the war on terror. The President's belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that 'he's the man,' the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose." By way of Salon's War Room, The New Yorker's Sy Hersh scrutinizes the terrifying dogmatism and tone-deafness at work in the White House with regards to Iraq.

Here's more: "[Rove and Cheney] keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official said. Bush's public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. 'Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,' the former official said, 'but Bush has no idea.'"

Update: According to the Daily News, who published a similar story yesterday, the White House won't comment on the Hersh piece.

As seen at many fine blogs this past Thanksgiving week (including FmH & Medley), some nice visual data to be thankful for (and for all those red state/blue state dualists to ponder): One year after Election 2004, America's blue over Dubya.

"It almost doesn't matter whether withdrawing or redeploying the troops is a good idea; it's simply going to happen because there is no way for it not to happen (short of a major act of political will, such as reviving the draft or keeping troops on the battlefield beyond reasonable endurance). This is what Murtha meant when he told Russert, 'We're going to be out of there, we're going to be out of there very quickly, and it's going to be close to the plan that I'm presenting right now.' Cutting through the congressional anger and the "cut and run" cheapshots, Slate's Fred Kaplan explains exactly what John Murtha called for last week, and why. "John Murtha's proposal leaves open a lot of questions, but -- seen for what it really says, not for how it's been portrayed -- it's a start."

"This was a huge 'Congress getting into the ballgame' week,' Mr. Graham said. Mr. Warner said wryly, 'You know, Congress is a co-equal branch.'" Well, make no mistake: They're no Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. Still, the NYT takes a gander at the self-named "Little Triumvirate" of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, three "Gang of 14" members who've become the locus of GOP discontent with Dubya in the Senate.

Apparently the House and Senate have decided on a compromise over the Patriot Act, one that will theoretically reduce the disturbing number of FBI terrorism inquiries via fuller reporting. The bill is now being put on the fast track by the GOP, so as to give Dubya a much-needed boost on his terror credentials, which means the Patriot Act, warts and all, may be made permanent by Thanksgiving. Update: Feingold leads a bipartisan charge against the bill.

"Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done. It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors ... one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country." On the day after the GOP-controlled Senate tightened the reins on Dubya, President Clinton reasserts his contempt for this administration's rank amateurism in Iraq and the Middle East.

Another week, another secret torture center...anyone else sensing a pattern? Tensions in Iraq simmer to a boil as a secret prison holding 173 Sunnis is uncovered in Baghdad. "The discovery...created a new aura of crisis for American officials and Iraqi politicians who hold power in the Shiite-led transitional government. For many Iraqis, the episode carried heavy overtones of the brutality associated with Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated government."

Whatsmore, the head of the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia suspected of pulling the strings and wielding the implements in this center, says: "This bunker is run by the Interior Ministry, the Americans are there every day." Whether or not that's true (and for the love of Pete, let's hope not), it's obvious that recent events, from Abu Ghraib to the Frist-sanctioned CIA black sites to the al-Jamadi murder, have seriously damaged our credibility as opponents of torture, in this prison and around the world.

"Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he is more concerned about the leak of information regarding secret CIA detention centers than activity in the prisons themselves...'I am not concerned about what goes on [in the prisons] and I'm not going to comment about the nature of that,' Frist replied." Unbelievable. The same guy who blew a gasket over a closed-door Senate session last week couldn't care less what goes on behind closed doors in secret, illegal CIA gulags. (I guess he figures it couldn't be much worse than your average day at the Frist family animal shelter.)

Another terror strike: This time, a series of bombs in Amman kill 67 and wound 150, many of them guests at a wedding celebration. No one's claimed responsibility yet, but Al Qaeda is obviously a good bet...word is they've tried to hit Jordan before. Update: Al Qaeda it is.

"Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in [C.I.A. officer Mark] Swanner's custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated...Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency." So, as the New Yorker's Jane Mayer reports, "we do not torture"...we just crucify. Sweet merciful Jesus, what have we become? (Via Malice Aforethought.)

As our GOP Congress looks to shoot the messenger over secret prisons, England's House of Commons rejects an anti-terror bill pushed by Prime Minister Blair -- his "first defeat" after 8 years in office -- which would allow terrorist suspects to be held for 90 days without charge. Meanwhile, France approaches the two-week mark of youth rioting, despite curfews, increased jail time, threats of deportation, and the shutdown of instigating blogs, and the rest of Europe looks on with trepidation...

Republicans...they never stop surprising me. The nation discovers that, contrary to our most basic principles, the CIA has a series of secret, illegal gulags around the world, and how do GOP leaders respond? They want to know who told the press. (Mind you, this is after stonewalling investigations into prewar intelligence and the Plamegate leak for many a year.)

To be fair, not all GOP Senators are with them on this. Said Gang of 14 member Lindsey Graham (R-SC): "Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. The real story is those jails...I'd like to know why we've got secret prisons and what oversight precautions we have." And Trent Lott (R-MS) believes that a Republican is likely responsible for the leak, after hearing about the prisons from Mr. Torture himself, Big Time Dick Cheney. "'Every word that was said in there went right to the newspaper,' Lott said. 'We can't keep our mouths shut.'" But, perhaps Catkiller knows this, and suspects one of his probable primary opponents? (LA Times story via Quiddity.) Update: Wheels within wheels...Was the leak investigation letter accidentally leaked? Regardless, Pat Roberts has put the kibosh on a congressional investigation...for now.

Typical Dubya Doublespeak: Just as Bush tells the world, "We do not torture," his vice-president continues his quest to exempt the CIA from a congressional torture ban, which would obviously be an unnecessary action were Dubya's remarks truthful. In related news, the Dems want a wide-ranging inquiry into pre-war intelligence, and members of both parties are concerned about increased "terrorism" inquiries under the Patriot Act.

"After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long." The NY Times editorial staff come out swinging against Dubya.

Seen tonight with Jarhead: The trailer for Stephen Spielberg's Munich, with Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, and Daniel Craig, on the aftermath of, and Israeli response to, the murders at the 1972 Olympics. From this brief clip, it looks to be a very timely meditation on means and ends in the war on terror.

As the Cheney-Addington gang work to strip the Geneva Convention from prisoner treatment manuals, the Washington Post uncovers an overseas network of CIA "black sites," a.k.a. gulags, some of which actually use old Soviet compounds in Eastern Europe(!) "It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas...Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing."

Whatsmore, these gulags, created under this administration since 9/11, "were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen on the program's generalities." There's no other way to look at this: By appropriating the tactics of our enemies, as John McCain warned earlier this month, we have abandoned our most fundamental principles and shamed our nation. Evildoers? Please. Dubya need look no further than his own White House and CIA. Update: Congress and the EU want answers.

As if the revelations of Syria's role in the Hariri assassination weren't disturbing enough, now the recently-elected president of Iran, a state with nuclear ambitions, is making nightmarish and freakshow statements reasserting the goal of Israel's destruction. With rhetoric escalating and five years of Dubya's "with-us-or-against-us" diplomacy helping to shore up hardliners across the Middle East, it seems Iraq may soon be the least of our problems in the region.

"We are Americans, and we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be. To do otherwise undermines our security, but it also undermines our greatness as a nation." Behind Sen. John McCain, who knows as well as anyone why we must set limits on our interrogation policies, the Senate votes 90-9 to rebuke the White House and constrain future interrogation abuses at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and around the world. For his part, Catkiller Frist earlier tried to smother the amendment, but ultimately ended up voting for it. Wouldn't want a vote for torture on our 2008 transcript now, would we?

"President Bush's speech this morning, billed as a major statement about Iraq and the war on terror, was a sad spectacle -- so ripe with lofty principles, so bereft of ideas on what to do with them. He approached the podium amid growing disapproval of his performance as a war president, ratcheting chaos and violence in Iraq, continuing terrorist attacks worldwide -- and pleaded for nothing more than staying the course, with no turns or shifts, for a long, long time to come." Slate's Fred Kaplan surveys, and bemoans, Dubya's "big" Iraq speech this morning.

"It's a significant breakthrough. But it could easily have been accomplished two and a half years ago, had President George W. Bush been willing...Had he signed this rather innocuous joint statement back then (it wouldn't have harmed our national interest to forgo an option -- invading North Korea -- that we were never going to exercise in the first place), the next steps toward an arms-control treaty would have been much easier than they will be now." Slate's Fred Kaplan realistically assesses the good news -- and work ahead -- in North Korea.

With the administration's numbers in a continuing death spiral ever since their sheer incompetence, blatant cronyism, and general heartlessness was exposed by Katrina, several recent anti-Dubya speeches of note:

President Clinton: "Now, what Americans need to understand is that means every single day of the year, our Government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts. We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else...We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense. I think it's wrong."

John Kerry: "'Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq, what George Tenet is to slam-dunk intelligence, what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad, what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy, what Donald Rumsfeld is to basic war planning, what Tom DeLay is to ethics and what George Bush is to 'Mission Accomplished' and 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'"

John Edwards: "I might have missed something, but I don't think the president ever talked about putting a cap on the salaries of the CEOs of Halliburton and the other companies . . . who are getting all these contracts...This president, who never met an earmark he wouldn't approve or a millionaire's tax cut he wouldn't promote, decided to slash wages for the least of us and the most vulnerable."

Bill Maher: (I forgot where I saw this one first, but it's a toss-up between Booknotes and Follow Me Here.) "On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: 'Take a hint.' "

Striking a blow against those terrorist conspirators who orchestrated the Fourth Amendment, a federal court headed by conservative Supreme Court contender Michael Luttig declares that US citizens can be held indefinitely without charges. " For his part, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, another big-time Court contender, "hailed the ruling as reaffirming 'the president's critical authority to detain enemy combatants who take up arms on behalf of al Qaeda.' Oh, yes, they will destroy this village in order to save it.

"'It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11,' said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. 'We are so much less than what we were in 2000,' added another senior FEMA official. 'We've lost a lot of what we were able to do then.'" As Team Dubya scrambles to scapegoat state and local officials, the WP turns an eye to the dismantling of FEMA on Dubya's watch (as noted previously here.)

To be honest, I've only had one eye on the news the past few days, as I've been busy relocating back to NYC. But what I have seen...oh my word. While the world looks on with a mix of horror, sympathy, and schadenfreude, New Orleans has fallen into almost-total anarchy. Other bloggers have been keeping up with the madness much better than I, so I'll defer to them: As I noted earlier, Looka and Ed Rants are both doing a particularly good job covering the catastrophe, and Breaching the Web and Medley, among others, have ably drawn attention to both the Dubya administration's culpability for the extent of this crisis and its grotesquely inappropriate and insufficient response. I assumed I couldn't think any less of Dubya and his cronies after four years, but watching their sneering at desperate people, their mealy-mouthed evasiveness, and, most of all, their sheer, blatant incompetence -- while Americans are suffering and dying in their homes -- it's disgusting. They've been exposed before all as pathetic, self-absorbed fuck-ups...at the cost of hundreds to thousands of lives and one great American city. Update: Also, by way of Booknotes, Wesley Clark weighs in on Dubya's failure.

"What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism...Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists...The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism." Via Breaching the Web, author Douglas Burgess makes an intriguing case in Legal Affairs for using long-standing anti-piracy laws to fight terrorism. Definitely worth a read, and not only because I have pirates-on-the-brain after finishing the literary (and highly-condensable) exploits of Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds earlier this week.)

Much to the consternation of the Dubya White House, a handful of GOP Senators, including Gang of 14'ers John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), are trying to establish congressional oversight over prisoner treatment at Guantanamo and elsewhere. McCain's proposed amendments include restricting interrogation techniques to what's in the Army field manual, stopping the practice of "extraordinary rendition," forcing the government to register all detainees with the Red Cross, and prohibiting "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody no matter where they are held." For his part, Graham's amendment appears just to rubber-stamp the current Dubya policies...but apparently even that's too much legislative oversight for Cheney, Rummy, and the rest of the admin whip-hands, who are trying to enlist their Senate allies to offer up a watered-down, smoke-and-mirrors version instead. For shame.

Based in Chesapeake at the moment, I've been missing out on all the madness in NYC these days, such as bus evacuations and the new, already-infamous subway searches. Others such as Medley have already ripped this new policy to pieces, but, really, what are they thinking? Any actual, honest-to-goodness terrorist with a bomb on their person will refuse the search request, turn around, and make the 5-7 minute walk to another subway station. These searches are totally pointless and at best produce nothing more than a hassle for commuters and the fleeting illusion of security. At worst, they're flirting with unconstitutionality and give the impression of police state search-and-seizure tactics becoming omnipresent in American life. Isn't that what the "evildoers" want?

"'Reasonable people always suspected these techniques weren't invented in the backwoods of West Virginia,' said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. 'It's never been more clear than in this investigation.'" A new report by military investigators finds the tactics of Abu Ghraib in full use at Guantanamo. "The report's findings are the strongest indication yet that the abusive practices seen in photographs at Abu Ghraib were not the invention of a small group of thrill-seeking military police officers...they were used on Qahtani several months before the United States invaded Iraq."

"This is a war of the unknown warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty." Only a day after Olympic euphoria, London suffers its worst attack since the Blitz, resulting in 38 dead and 700 wounded. Many condolences to the people of London and the families of the fallen, and I hope these cowardly and reprehensible bombings won't overly divert Tony Blair and the G8 from their larger agenda (even if Dubya refuses to play ball on global warming.)

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers...I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground." No, Karl, you felt confusion and stark abject terror...or is there some other reason why our Fearless Leader spent that fateful day (post-Pet Goat, of course) AWOL in the skies over Louisiana and Nebraska, leaving Mayor Giuliani to rally the nation?

At any rate, I'm sensing a pattern here...Soon after a GOP rep invokes 9/11 to flog a flag-burning amendment, White House strategist Karl Rove wallows in 9/11 and liberal-bashing before a GOP crowd here in NYC. Phew, talk about a Hail Mary. That dated soft-on-terror swill isn't going to get lame duck Dubya's domestic agenda off the ground, Karl. So you'd best start scroungin' through that bottomless bag of dirty tricks for a different silver bullet. This outrageous claptrap is sad, pathetic, and demeaning...even coming from a right rotten bastard like Rove. Update: The Dems respond, and the White House digs in.

"Taken in context, Durbin's premise -- that the techniques characterized in the FBI memo are consistent with those deployed by 'mad regimes' -- is worth debating. But of course, such invocations are never debated in their precise context." In light of Senator Dick Durbin's recent apology for bringing up Nazis to discuss Gitmo, the WP discovers Godwin's Law.

"When is it time to start referring to Bush as an unpopular president? When his approval ratings are solidly below 50 percent for at least three months? Check. When his approval ratings on his signature issues are in the red? Check. When a clear majority of Americans say he is ignoring the public's concerns and instead has become distracted by issues that most people say they care little about? Check." Dubya's numbers continue to plunge. Want some unsolicited advice, Mr. President? Let's hear more about Third World debt relief, and fewer blanket endorsements of the Patriot Act. Update: In not-unrelated news, faith in the newsmedia also hits a low.

Last Friday, the Pentagon admitted that a Quran -- and detainee -- were in fact urinated on by a guard at Guantanamo. But, according to the eagerly dismissive White House, there's no need to court-martial anybody or anything. (Heck, you should hear about Dubya's crazy pledge days.) In the meantime, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) took time off from castigating Howard Dean to call for the closing of Guantanamo.

"Now in terms of the requests for the documents, I view that as just another stall tactic, another way to delay, another way not to allow Bolton to get an up or down vote." As per his usual my-way-or-the-highway approach, Dubya announced he's decided to stonewall the Dems by withholding the requested intelligence documents bearing on Bolton. Given that this UN appointment seems a done deal in terms of votes, you'd think our "uniter, not a divider" prez might've relished an opportunity to appear magnanimous and thus replenish some of his squandered political capital. But perhaps he didn't want to put another feather in McCain's cap so soon after the nuclear compromise...or perhaps these documents confirm anew that Bolton is unfit for his post. (Video link via Freakgirl.)

Even more troubling, in keeping with the administration's attempts to make Amnesty International this week's Newsweek, our president also put the blame for the "absurd" recent Amnesty report about our dismaying recent proclivity for torture squarely on the shoulders of "people who hate America." As Sidney Blumenthal notes, "It may be of minor ironic interest that before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration cited Amnesty International's reports on Saddam Hussein's violations of human rights as unimpeachable texts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld often claimed Amnesty as his ultimate authority."

"'Frankly, I was offended by it,' Cheney said in the videotaped interview. 'For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously.'" Awww. Our thin-skinned veep's feelings are hurt by an Amnesty International report claiming all is not kosher at Guantanamo Bay. Well, as a colleague of mine noted, perhaps someone should fill Dick in on Abu Ghraib (or, for that matter, countless other episodes in US history, from chattel slavery to the Trail of Tears.) For his part, the president of Amnesty responded: "It doesn't matter whether he takes Amnesty International seriously. He doesn't take torture seriously; he doesn't take the Geneva Convention seriously; he doesn't take due process rights seriously; and he doesn't take international law seriously. And that is more important than whether he takes Amnesty International seriously." Touche. (That being said, the WP cried foul as well.)

The Bush administration announces they're going to reevaluate their anti-terrorism strategies. To put it mildly, "[t]he policy review marks what many experts regard as a belated shift." Well, perhaps a good place to start would be looking harder at who we sell weapons to, so we as advocates of freedom around the world aren't forced to explain away situations like the recent massacre in Uzbekistan. (2nd link via Looka.)

While the toilet incident that got Newsweek in trouble was emphatically denied, the Pentagon announces -- after the release of FBI interviews obtained by the ACLU -- that there have in fact been incidents of Koran mistreatment at Gitmo. (Surprise, surprise.) While "the interviews underscore that U.S. government officials were made aware of allegations of prisoner abuse and Koran mistreatment within months of the opening of Guantanamo Bay in early 2002", just last week "Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. Di Rita said the Defense Department had received no credible claims of such abuse."

"'Everyone was standing in line with their silver bullets to make us more secure after Sept. 11,' said Randall J. Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and former government adviser on scientific issues. 'We bought a lot of stuff off the shelf that wasn't effective.'" Yep, unfortunately we purchased billions of dollars of defective garbage in the post-9/11 rush to defend the homeland, a mistake that will cost several billion more to rectify. "After 9/11, we had to show how committed we were by spending hugely greater amounts of money than ever before, as rapidly as possible," said Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican who is the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. "That brought us what we might expect, which is some expensive mistakes."

Clinton aide Sandy Berger pleads guilty to taking (and shredding) classified papers concerning Clinton-era anti-terrorism efforts. Um, what the hell was he thinking? His actions were unconscionable, unacceptable, and downright dumb. Thanks for feeding the freak-show Vince-Foster-conspiracy types, Sandy.

Second verse, same as the first...New Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez outlined Justice Department priorities in his first policy speech yesterday, and it looks to be more of the same: extending the Patriot Act, strengthening anti-obscenity laws, deporting immigrants, and fixing the "broken system" whereby Senate Dems fulfill their constitutional obligations and vote up or down on Dubya's freak-show judicial nominees. So, as we all feared, it's Ashcroft all over again. But will Gonzalez at least undrape the Justice Department statuary?

Despite inducing peals of laughter with his "ridiculous" doublespeak on Iran, Dubya's "We're Team Players" European tour continues to generate mostly good international press for the administration. Along those lines, I particularly liked this gem from the LA Times: "Talk of Bush is often imbued with suspicion. But unlike two years ago, German critics are less likely to compare him to Hitler." Hey now, that's progress.

"We must not allow the passage of time or the illusion of safety to weaken our resolve in this new war." Dubya uses the swearing-in of crony Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General to pull a Two-Minutes-Fear and shill for a blanket extension of the Patriot Act. With even GOP conservatives against some provisions of the Act at this point, not bloody likely.

I was at the movies during Dubya's State of the Union address -- I tried to watch it online this evening after my Radicalism sections, but Quicktime died in mid-sentence, so I just ended up reading it. And, while I thought it was very well-written as per the norm, my thoughts on the address have been colored even more than usual by the punditocracy. So, with that in mind, I'll avoid being derivative and just direct y'all to the following:

• Fred Kaplan: "Some of the president's statements on national security were simply puzzling. Again on Iran, he said, 'We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium-enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing.' This is just false."



• Chris Suellentrop: "You could call Bush's idea the Screw Your Grandchildren Act...This was the Greatest Love of All speech, in which Bush asserted that The Children Are Our Future. But before you sign on to Bush's proposal, be aware that what he's offering is pretty tough love."



• Will Saletan: "Tonight's State of the Union Address demonstrated again that President Bush is a man of very clear principles. He's just flexible about when to apply them."



• Joe Conason: "Although George W. Bush and the White House aides who craft these public spectacles become increasingly adept at manipulating the feelings of his audience every year, their underlying method remains the same: to shade inconvenient realities with rhetorical vagueness and outright deception."



• E.J. Dionne: "Our country could profit from an honest debate about the future of Social Security. Judging from President Bush's State of the Union address, that is not the kind of debate we are about to have."

"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." After outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft showed his true colors one last time, incoming Homeland Security head (and former admin torture guru) Michael Chertoff promises to keep an eye to civil liberties at his confirmation hearings. Hmm...I'd have more faith in his espoused concern if he hadn't already ignored the in-house Justice Dept. ethics office (and lied about it) in the past.

In a boon for civil liberties, federal judge Joyce Hens Green declares that the incarcerations at Guantanamo are illegal, since the military tribunals set up by the Bushies violated due process. "In today's decision, Green said the hearings, called Combatant Status Review Tribunals, are stacked against the detainees, and deny them crucial rights. She said some detainees may indeed be guilty and pose a danger to the United States, but the government must first give them a lawful hearing on the evidence against them." The judge also called out the Gitmo Gulag on its torture policies and excessively broad definition of "enemy combatant."

Rick Perlstein's recent comparison of Dubya and The Sopranos is given more credence with the revelation that Homeland Security nominee Michael Chertoff also vetted torture law for the Bushies in 2002-2003. "While the details remain classified, one method that he opposed appeared to violate a ban in the law against using a 'threat of imminent death'...But Mr. Chertoff left the door open to the use of a different set of far harsher techniques proposed by the C.I.A." Hmmm...and you thought Tom Ridge knew some crazy uses for duct tape.

"America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." Really? Well, dang, that was easy. But who's going to break the news to China, Russia, and the Saudis, for starters? As per many of Michael Gerson's Big-Moment speeches, Dubya's Second Inaugural was a well-crafted piece of prose with some nice rhetorical flourishes and an eye to history. But, stylistic flair aside, Dubya might as well have been declaring himself the President of Mars, for all the grounding this speech had in contemporary reality.

"The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." Freedom...I can dig it. Reminds me of the end of Braveheart. But, as Slate's Fred Kaplan already aptly questioned, "What is this thing called 'freedom'?...Does 'freedom' always mean a Western-style, or pro-American, democracy? Whatever freedom is, how do we go about spreading it?" And, for that matter, isn't this the guy who once told us there "ought to be limits to freedom?"

I know we shouldn't expect nuance from this president, but today's speech was even worse than usual (as well as being somewhat distasteful, given the very real problems with "freedom" Iraq is facing right now.) The only things I learned from Dubya's speech are that freedom rains down like a benediction (in fact, exactly like a benediction) on the peoples of the world, and, whatsmore, that evildoers hate them some freedom. And that was about it. Seriously, he sounded like he was kicking off that goofy rave in the second Matrix.



On the domestic side, I was somewhat surprised that Bush didn't push the Ownership Society meme a little harder -- he only mentioned it once -- but I guess that'll probably get more run in the upcoming State of the Union. (Perhaps he didn't want anyone reminded of Colin Powell's "You Break it, You Own it" Pottery Barn rule when they were supposed to be drinking in the sweet, sweet freedom.) That being said, Bush did manage to squeeze in some Grade-A chum for the pro-lifers -- "always remember that even the unwanted have worth" -- which he then half-heartedly tried to mask with a plea to end racism. (Freedom, yeah! Bigotry, no! Serenity now! I think I got it.)

All in all, the inaugural wasn't an embarrassing speech as delivered -- Gerson's too good at his job for that. But, like too much in this administration, it was all style and no substance, offering false simplicity and sanctimony in the place of good ideas or hard-won truths. In short, it was just like Dubya.

Monica who? On the eve of Dubya II, Salon's Peter Dizikes offers a short but comprehensive list of this administration's scandals thus far. Thirty-four and counting...not that you'd know it from watching the evening news.

"Sometimes, words have consequences?" So do actions, Mr. President. The CIA has at last uncovered an indisputable link between Iraq and terrorism...Unfortunately, we created it. "[A]s instability in Iraq grew after the toppling of Hussein, and resentment toward the United States intensified in the Muslim world, hundreds of foreign terrorists flooded into Iraq across its unguarded borders. They found tons of unprotected weapons caches that, military officials say, they are now using against U.S. troops." (Apparently, we were too busy not finding WMD to spend any time securing these conventional caches.) My, oh my, this administration has really done a bang-up job of making Americans safer, haven't they? Just think how safe we'll be after four more years.

In a boon for conspiracy theorists the world over, Rumsfeld refers to the 9/11 Pennsylvania plane as "shot down." Said Rummy during one of his usual rambling Two Minutes Fear-type screeds, "I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten -- indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that." Freudian slip or slip of the tongue? Either way, it was a bonehead mistake.

After a long and tortuous road, including some last-minute GOP balking, Dubya signed the intelligence bill into law today. "The new law, which grew out of last summer's report of the national commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, brings together the 15 separate intelligence agencies into a single command structure, legislates creation of a National Counter Terrorism Center, increases border security and establishes a civil liberties board to serve as a check on excesses in the war on terrorism." Sounds good...now let's get that bastard Buttle.

Break out the duct tape...Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge joins the ranks of the Dubya-departed, "noting that he feels exhausted from the grueling hours required for the work and that he wants to make more money now that he has two children reaching college age." Current names being bandied about as replacements include "former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Frances Fragos Townsend, current White House homeland security adviser." Given the recent trend to promote Dubya loyalists throughout the cabinet, I'm surprised they haven't found a new gig for Marc Racicot yet...he's been the flunky's flunky.

Stick a fork in him, and say goodbye to what semblance of multilateralism has existed in the Dubya era. To Rummy's relish (and to no one's surprise) Colin Powell's ignominious tenure at State is through. Seemingly well-intentioned but weak and sidelined most of the time, Powell's tour at State will probably be best remembered for his losing battles with the Neocons and his embarrassing and misleading performance before the United Nations in 2003.

Following Powell out the door are Education Secretary Rod Paige, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Margaret Spellings, Dubya's domestic policy advisor, is taking Paige's gig...I dread to think who else will sign on for Dubya II. Ken Lay at Energy? John Danforth has been mentioned as a possible Powell replacement, but, heck, why not pull Helms out of mothballs? Update: Looks like it's Condi...and more of the same.

"'The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House,' said a former senior CIA official...'Goss was given instructions...to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats.'" Newsday reports that the recent spate of resignations at the CIA is no accident, but rather a direct attempt by the Bushies to cleanse the agency of their enemies. Great...now I feel much safer.

"But there's one thing I know, though I'm younger than you -- Even Jesus would never forgive what you do." By way of a friend of mine (and in a striking confluence of the music and civil liberties posts earlier today), a high school band in Colorado -- Coalition of the Willing -- has the Secret Service sicced on them for practicing Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." Hmm...I've been known to belt that one quite loudly in the occasional times I plug in around here (It's basically A-minor throughout.) I guess I'd better begin with a disclaimer from now on to assuage the neighbors.

"'It's the worst roiling I've ever heard of,' said one former senior official with knowledge of the events. 'There's confusion throughout the ranks and an extraordinary loss of morale and incentive.'" Apparently, Dubya's newly-appointed CIA chief Porter Goss is throwing the Agency into disarray and sparking a wave of resignations, mainly due to the actions of his heavy-handed lieutenants. Is now really the best time to hamstring our intelligence agency with bumbling, partisan hackery?

On his way out the door, John Ashcroft calls out judges for judging. "'The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war,' Ashcroft said." Well, maybe now that he's got some time on his hands, perhaps someone can explain to him that whole checks-and-balances thing.

It's official...John Ashcroft is out at Justice. I have no doubt Dubya's second-term replacement will be comparably grotesque. Still, can't say I'm sad to see him go. Update: Dubya chooses White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, who, despite his loyalty to Bush, seems like a step up...although his signing off on the Abu Ghreib terror memos gives me pause.

One bright spot concerning the next four years: Apparently, John Ashcroft isn't sticking around for a second Dubya term. His possible replacements include deputy Larry Thompson, Dubya stooge Marc Racicot, or White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez (the torture memo guy...he'll fit right in.)

Hope is on the...wait, what's this? Oops, sorry about that. Turns out Hope took a wrong turn and got lost somewhere back there in Idiotville. Welcome to Despairtown, baby.

So, that's that, then...the Idiot Wind blows anew. The American electorate has spoken and -- despite all the shadiness and incompetence of the past four years -- has given Dubya and his cronies the imprimatur to go hog-wild. 51-48%...this is pretty much a mandate, folks. (Big of those Red Staters to ensure that we will be woefully unprepared for the next terrorist attack on a Blue State.) Y'know, H.L. Mencken's whole Tyranny of the Booboisie schtick has always grated on my lefty sensibilities, but at this point I have to admit he may have been on to something.

Ugh. I'm too young to remember 1984 very well, but I'm curious as to how last night and this morning compared for America's Left. (I've since been reminded by several people I trust that 1968 and 1972 were much more grievous blows.) Thing is, 2004 started out with such promise over here. But, right around the time I ended up on crutches in May, events personal and political took a nasty turn, and the past few months have been some of the most dismal I can remember. Now, it seems, I may just look back on this time as relatively calm and worry-free.

But, ok, enough wallowing...let's start taking it frame-by-frame. Given the war, the economy, and Dubya's obvious incompetence, how on Earth did we lose this election? Well, give credit where credit is due...all this exit-talk of "moral values" proves that Karl Rove pulled off his gambit: He got the extra 4 million evangelical votes he was targeting, partly, it seems, by judiciously invoking rampant anti-gay hysteria. Yet, for some reason or another -- a lousy ground game, perhaps? -- the Dems inexplicably didn't counter with extra votes of our own.

Where do we go from here? The Dems are facing an ugly Rule of Four...We lost four seats in the Senate, at least four seats in the House, and likely four seats in the Supreme Court. Whatsmore, we now appear officially dead in the water in the South and Midwest. And, with Kerry and Daschle gone, our standard-bearers now appear to be Hillary Clinton (about whom the country has already made up its mind), John Edwards (whom I still admire, but he couldn't carry his home state), and Barrack Obama (who's probably too inexperienced to make much headway in 2008.)

Obviously, it's now well past time for the serious party overhaul we should've began last cycle, when Al Gore had an election stolen from him that he should have won hands down. Daschle & Gephardt are already in the dustbin of history, and Terry McAuliffe should probably follow them there. I for one don't think Howard Dean was or is the answer, but he's one of the only people injecting new blood and enthusiasm into the party right now, so he should have a seat at the table. Right now, I think Edwardsian populism is our strongest ideological card, but as I said, it didn't seem to make much headway last night.

Silver lining? Yeah, right. Well, as this Washington Monthly forum noted in September, second terms are notoriously scandal-prone (Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica), partly out of press boredom, and Dubya's ilk seem particularly scandal-worthy...perhaps we'll finally hear a little more about Halliburton. I'm sure there'll be no shortage of horrifying policy decisions emanating from this administration that'll keep lefty blogs like this one in business. And, on a purely selfish note, my likely dissertation topic on the fortunes of progressivism in the twenties is now seeming much more sexy in the wake of last night's 1928-like cultural divide. Of course, none of these are really any consolation at all.

At any rate, I generally believe that America tends to get the president it deserves. So, God help us, we've brought this upon ourselves. And now, for we 48%, the hard work begins...we have to lick our wounds, get our act together, and figure out how we can best combat the rightward drift that's afflicting our nation. Alas, I fear Dubya will do much of the heavy lifting for us, by running the nation further into the ground over the next four years. Still, we gotta keep on keeping on, y'all. I do not believe this darkness will endure.

By way of Looka and The Nation, 100 Facts and 1 Opinion: The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration. If you know any undecideds out there, this might be a good one to share.

A NYT report finds mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo is much more widespread than earlier suggested by Rumsfeld and other administration officials. "One regular procedure...was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels...Such sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks."

Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor and consigliere to Bush I, decries Dubya's diplomacy in the Financial Times, calling Iraq a "failed venture" and questioning this administration's penchant for unilateralism.

Well, to no one's surprise, I think John Kerry won again. But, while I'd like to say that the Senator knocked this final debate in Tempe, Arizona out of the park, frankly, he didn't. In the early going, I thought he seemed tired and slightly discombobulated, and, at times when a concise rebuttal could have scored some serious points, Kerry's answers often seemed more wordy and circuitous than necessary. On the other hand, I thought this was Dubya's best performance - he was still smirking and guffawing too much, still distorting the facts, still running from his record, and still demonizing his opponent like the best of 'em, but at least he seemed in full possession of his faculties this time around (perhaps the wire was working tonight.) I did think that Kerry warmed up in the middle third, but he lost focus again during the final questions (Native American blessings? Idears?) That being said, given the relative lack of drama tonight and the playoff baseball on FOX, I highly doubt this final debate will end up altering the current campaign dynamic much.

So there you have it, folks. Barring an October Surprise in the next three weeks, it now all comes down to the ground game, and -- given what we've been hearing regarding voter registration, given the white-hot contempt towards Dubya held by Dems and the ambivalence with which fiscal conservatives and many veterans view this administration, and given the usual tendency of undecideds to break towards the challenger -- turnout is a factor which John Kerry should win handily (barring Diebold shenanigans.) It ain't over yet, to be sure, but right now I'd say that, despite tonight's missed opportunities, John Kerry and John Edwards have put themselves in a solid position to win with their cumulative debate performance. The election is too close to call, definitely, but at this point I feel pretty confident our nation will make the right decision on Nov 2.

Well, to my partisan eye, Dick Cheney proved time and time again in tonight's sole veep debate that he's not only an inveterate liar but a major-league asshole. (Yeah, big time.) Iraq ("It's going great!"), Osama ("We never stopped going after him!"), the homefront ("Things are looking up!"), you name it...the guy just seems to have no compunction about dissembling flat-out to the American people. Said the veep early on, "The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." Really, Dick? How were we supposed to take Saddam "had long-established ties with Al Qaeda" then? Similarly, the audacity of Dick Cheney attacking John Kerry for voting against weapons systems he himself opposed is simply staggering.

From lies to misdirection. How did Cheney try to explain away Halliburton's sweetheart no-bid Iraq contracts, and the subsequent looking askance at their egregious overbilling of the American people? "Um, John, I've never seen you around the Senate before." (Not true, of course, but nice of Dick to send voters to the Soros-run FactCheck.com rather than FactCheck.org, though.) And, when Edwards skewered the veep with his own voting record from back in the day -- no to Head Start, Meals on Wheels, and the Education Dept, no to MLK Day and to condemning apartheid(?!) -- what was Cheney's answer? "Oh, I think his record speaks for itself." You're damn right it does, as does yours.

All that being said, I thought Edwards missed a few chances to put the hurt on Cheney in the early going, and should have responded harder to the ridiculous "facing-up-to-Howard Dean" riff. And he didn't really hit his stride until the domestic-policy-oriented second half, when less-interested swing voters out there had probably started tuning out. (Conversely, I thought Cheney self-destructed for awhile there, mumbling about No Child Left Behind in a question about jobs.) So, while my gut (and the insta-polling) say Edwards took this one, I'm guessing the numbers in the next few days will show a draw, if only because Cheney seemed at least somewhat cognizant of the world around him, unlike his running mate. Next stop: Friday.

Well, to give credit where it's due, Dubya has clearly improved as a debater since 2000. While occasionally flustered and often seeming petulant, he never seemed as confused and inarticulate as he did in his jousts with Gore...in fact, I'd go so far to say that he even occasionally seemed wily. Still, given the artifice of the format, it's hard to see how John Kerry could have done much better in tonight's first debate. After the first question or so, Kerry seemed calm, collected, forceful and resolute, and he managed to make succinct and readily understandable distinctions between he and Dubya throughout. For undecided voters who imbibed all the RNC's garbage a month ago and were expecting another Dukakis Dem in John Kerry, I suspect they may have begun reevaluating him tonight. And, when you consider that the terrain of this debate most facilitated Dubya's "9/11, 9/11, 9/11" strategy, Kerry's got nowhere to go but up.

"While President Bush campaigns with an upbeat message that a second Bush administration will keep Americans safer, Cheney speaks like Darth Vader, as the ticket's voice of fear." On the day after our criminally inept Speaker of the House suggests yet again that a vote for Kerry is a vote for Bin Laden, the Post probes Dick Cheney's frequent fear-mongering.

The assault weapons ban expires tonight at midnight and, while it may not have been very effective anyway, somehow I get the sense that our homeland would be more secure with it in place. Shame on Dubya, and that goes double for the GOP Congress.

While the Senate (led by Senators Lieberman, McCain, Bayh, and Specter) has crafted a bipartisan security bill that encompasses all of the 9/11 commission's suggestions, Tom DeLay and the House GOP are, as per usual, off the reservation. "DeLay said the House will rely largely on its own expertise and insights, adding that 'we have plenty of experts on our committees.'" Well, what was the point of having a commission, then? And, I don't care how big the roaches are in Sugarland, Texas, Tom. Your "expertise" as a bug exterminator just isn't going to cut it.

It seems that, for the Republicans, nothing says Homeland Security quite like easy access to assault weapons. "I think the will of the American people is consistent with letting it expire, so it will expire," notes GOP Senate Majority Leader Bill "Catkiller" Frist of the decade-old assault weapons ban set to end on Monday, despite the fact that 68% of Americans (and 74% of voters, in a separate poll) want to see it renewed. On the House side, perennial GOP freakshow Tom DeLay "dismissed the ban as 'a feel-good piece of legislation' and said flatly that it would expire Monday, even if Mr. Bush made an effort to renew it. 'If the president asked me, it would still be no,' Mr. DeLay said." Don't worry. I doubt he'll ask ya, although the electorate just might come November.

"[I]f we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States"...Um, say WHAT?!? You heard it straight from the mouth of the Vice-President, folks: vote for John Kerry and the terrorists will kill you. Cheney's remarks are so low and un-American that I'm almost at a loss for comment. (Plus, since we've broached the subject, it's also flat-out wrong...it's Dubya's missteps and budget cuts on Homeland Security, to say nothing of his idiotic and isolating diplomacy, that are more likely to add up to fatal embarrassment for our nation.) And this coming from a sitting veep...I mean, you must be joking. We're through the looking-glass now, people.

"Don't listen to the filter, or the facts -- listen to the words." By way of One Good Move and The Daily Show, the RNC Campaign Film George W. Bush: Words Speak Louder than Actions. It's been making the rounds for a couple of days now, but still, this is a must-watch. (And there's a transcript at Trenchant.)

"Democracy matters are frightening in our time precisely because the three dominant dogmas of free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism are snuffing out the democratic impulses that are so vital for the deepening and spread of democracy in the world. In short, we are experiencing the sad American imperial devouring of American democracy." By way of Rebecca's Pocket and DangerousMeta, Princeton philosopher (and Matrix Elder) Cornel West weighs in on the dangers of Dubyaism.

Well, with talk of deregulation, privatizing Social Security, tax code "simplification", anti-gay and pro-life rhetoric, "Hollywood value" and "activist judge" hectoring...all punctuated by that off-putting and consistently out-of-place chimp smirk, you can't say Dubya didn't warn us about his plans for a ultra-conservative second term last night. (And for a man who was heroic enough to stop circling Nebraska and venture down to Ground Zero three long days after 9/11, he seemed amazingly ready to bolt-and-run at the sign of one measly protestor.)

Not much was said about Dubya's first four years in office, of course, aside from 9/11 (9/11, 9/11) and the usual conflation of Al Qaeda and Saddam. But, really, what can he say? Deficits through the roof, the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover, 1000 men and women dead in a needless diversion of a war...His administration has been an embarrassment of historic proportions. And it is time for him to go. (Dubya video via I'm Just Sayin'.)

As the dust settles from the GOP convention and Tom DeLay emerges from hiding, the truth starts coming back to light. Naturally, Dubya's speech had serious problems with reality and the GOP severely distorted Kerry's voting record. Obviously, Cheney and the Zellout were full of it. More surprisingly, however, Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently doesn't know Austria from a hole in the ground.

"If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the government, then you are a Republican." If you believe that rich people deserve tax breaks while the middle-class struggle harder and the poor send their kids to war, then you are a Republican. If you believe that cutting First Responder, Homeland Security, and Nunn-Lugar funding, lying bald-faced to our allies before the UN, letting Osama Bin Laden disappear into the caverns of Afghanistan, and contriving a casus belli to start a war in Iraq that has further alienated the moderate Muslim world is sound anti-terror strategy, then you are a Republican. If you believe an extramarital blow job is an impeachable offense, but dissembling to the American people about war is hunky-dory, then you are a Republican. If you believe God loves you, but He hates gays, liberals, and foreigners, then you are a Republican. If you're an immigrant bodybuilder who made it to the top of his field through hard work, discipline, and the judicious application of enough steroids to kill a small horse, then you are a Republican. And if you're a serial groper who was befuddled enough to think Nixon was a good idea in 1968 and who somehow earnestly believes that the GOP hasn't moved much further right since the days of Tricky Dick, then you are Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So, Dubya, are we going to win the war on terror or not? Short answer: Not with you in the saddle we won't. (I liked the Kerry campaign's riposte -- "Bush: Against Winning the War on Terror Before He Was for It.")

"It just outrages me that someone who got five deferments during Vietnam and said he had 'other priorities' at that time would say that...When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil...He'll be tough, but he'll be tough with someone else's kid's blood." Iowa Senator Tom Harkin lashes out at Cheney for the "sensitive war" bit he was banging into the ground last week. I don't much care for the notion that not serving in Vietnam makes anybody a coward...but, then again, the veep had this coming. He should've known better than to push the tough guy thing so hard. After all, he's a war profiteer, not a warrior.

"Clinton says in 1999 to General Hugh Shelton, 'You know, it would scare the s**t out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of a helicopter into the middle of their camp,' 189." N+1 indexes the 9/11 Commission Report, so you can get straight to the good parts.

Filming on the new Doctor Who runs afoul of British anti-terrorism forces. The article also has one of the first pics up of Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor. Between this and the Batman post above, I know I'm starting to sound like the fanboy Joan Rivers...but what's up with the lousy costume? Surely, any Time Lord worth his salt would wear something a mite more quirky.

"Although these events concern different legal issues and different sets of detainees, they share a common denominator: a legal strategy to keep the rule of law out of the war on terrorism by whatever procedural, legal, or administrative means are available." According to Slate's Phillip Carter, the Dubya administration is obstructing and/or ignoring the recent Supreme Court decisions on the Gitmo Gulag. Sadly, I guess we couldn't expect any less from this crowd.

So apparently the information that led to Sunday's terror alert dates to before 9/11. Hmmm. I hereby retract my fearmongering retraction.

Lock the doors and watch the neighbors...it's terror time again. That being said, given the specifics doled out this time, I'll waive the usual charge of fear-mongering. This targeted approach seems a much better way to increase public vigilance without needlessly causing panic, as has been the case with previous Orange alerts.

Postponing Election Day?!? You must be joking. Are "the terrorists" going to infiltrate every middle school gymnasium and public library in the country, counting extra votes for Kerry and offsetting Dubya's Diebold advantage? We held elections in this nation in 1864, 1944, 1968...surely we can handle 2004.

Whatsmore, what's all this talk of terrorists determining the election anyway? When are the Bushies going to realize that Osama Bin Laden and his ilk probably prefer Dubya in office? No other man could have so brazenly squandered the enormous international reservoir of post-9/11 goodwill, so thoroughly fractured the natural alliance of the West against terrorism, or so decisively set the moderate Muslim world against the United States. For Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush is a godsend. For three and a half long years, he's been a divider, not a uniter.

Postponing Election Day...my Lord, what tripe. Yes, I know Homeland Security is covering its bases by arguing that they're just thinking out loud. Well, it's still a terrible idea, and a particularly tone-deaf one coming from an administration who came into office so ignominiously with Bush v. Gore. Forget Warren Harding or even Richard Nixon -- this presidency has earned its place since that 5-4 decision as the most corrupt in our nation's history. They have to be shown the door on Election Day, and not a day later.

Partisanship 1, Civil Liberties 0. The House GOP ride to the administration's rescue and, by means both fair and foul, block a critical challenge to the Patriot Act with a 210-210 tie vote. "Rep. C.L. Butch Otter (R-Idaho), a conservative and an advocate of the defeated provision, told reporters after the vote: 'You win some, and some get stolen.'"

Similarly, GOP Senator Pat Roberts covers Dubya's back by making Tenet the fall guy for the WMD fiasco in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, while preventing any further investigation into White House efforts to arm-twist the CIA into the right conclusions. "'The Republicans ultimately and effectively, at the end of the day, controlled this investigation. There's no doubt about it. And they tried to put a bipartisan patina on it, but anybody who accepts that on face value is out of touch,' said [a] former Democratic aide."

Aigh! Attack, attack! No, we don't know when. No, we don't know where. No, we're not raising the threat level. No, we're not sorry we let Osama slip away so we could dink around Iraq. Just be afraid, and, remember, the terrorists want to "disrupt the democratic process" and make you vote Kerry-Edwards. You have been warned. Good day.

Well, I'm a bit behind on this one, but I finally got out of the apartment to catch Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday afternoon. And the verdict? Well, it's undoubtedly an extremely powerful piece of cinema. And, judging from the reactions of the afternoon crowd, it looks as if it might do some real good in crystallizing popular discontent with the Bush administration outside of the blog-world echo chamber. Still, even though I know Moore is playing by the rules set by right-wing freak shows like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, I found myself wishing at times that he had played F911 a little straighter. Simply put, Dubya and his cronies are guilty of so much blatant incompetence and documentable malfeasance that it's disappointing that Moore feels he has to rely on cheapshots and push-button emotions some of the time.

If you've been keeping up with pretty much any lefty blog since 2000 (including this one), the central and most powerful allegations made here -- that Dubya and the Neocons played bait-and-switch on the American people in Iraq and used 9/11 as a pretext for all kinds of terrible legislation, while doing pathetically little to minimize the actual threat of terrorism -- will not come as a surprise. Still, when the data is laid out before you here like ducks in a row, from the Florida fiasco in 2000 through to the recent stonewalling of the 9/11 commission a few weeks ago, the continued pattern of incompetence and mendacity that has characterized this administration becomes unmistakably clear. As the story unfolds, Moore offers plenty of intriguing footage -- Bush's 7 minutes of Pet Goat superfluousness may perhaps be overemphasized by now, but it's still out-and-out eerie. Equally damning is footage of Dubya at the ranch a month prior to 9/11, in which he has absolutely no clue what his agenda is for the day and, whatsmore, doesn't seem to much care (particularly when contrasted with his obvious enthusiasm for armadillos exhibited a few scenes later.)

But while there are plenty of blows landed, I ultimately thought that Fahrenheit 9/11 would have been much more impressive if it had focused more closely on the facts and avoided the more obvious attempts at sentiment. For example, instead of examining in detail the clear civil liberties transgressions occurring at the Gitmo Gulag and elsewhere under the Patriot Act, or noting the discrepancies in its enforcement (no gun checks?) under Attorney General-cum-balladeer John Ashcroft, Moore spends too much time interviewing an aging weightlifter and various Fresno peace activists -- all of whom have run afoul of goofy anti-terrorist inquiries -- for laughs. Similarly, instead of talking about Dubya's spiking of the Nunn-Lugar act or his continued cutting of First Responder funding, the film dinks around Western Oregon with two underfunded deputies - as a result, I thought the larger point about Bush's failure to protect the homeland was lost.

As the film moves overseas, the problems with F911 become more evident. Regarding the war in Afghanistan, Moore talks about a proposed UNOCAL pipeline to the exclusion of virtually anything else, which I think invites charges of shrillness (Exhibit A: The Bonanza riff) and blurs one of the most serious charges against this administration - that it gave up a chance to catch Osama Bin Laden in order to play regime change in Iraq. Speaking of Baghdad, I think Moore would have done better to talk more about missing WMD and lies to the UN and spent less time with Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a deceased US soldier. This last section of the film is undeniably powerful, but it also feels extremely manipulative, particularly as it's hard to envision very many situations where a mother's grief wouldn't be harrowing to behold. (The same goes for the grisly scenes of charred bodies and horrifically wounded Iraqi children.)

Still, what do I know? Perhaps Fahrenheit 9/11 needs these human touches to get its point across to a larger audience, a goal which it so far seems to be accomplishing with great aplomb. The fact is, Michael Moore can undoubtedly be a blowhard with grating populist pretensions, but if we had any semblance of a functioning national media these days, Fahrenheit 9/11 would have been a non-event. In the absence of anything like an independently critical television press, and given the existence of such a well-oiled, well-funded right-wing propaganda machine these days, perhaps somebody out there had to co-opt conservative talk-radio techniques to get the message out. I'm more of a "destroy the ring" than a "use the ring" kinda guy, but, as I said, what do I know? I could write in this space a hundred times over and still never reach an infinitesimal fraction of the people who will see this film and be newly angered by the idiotic and unethical behavior of this administration.

In short, if a picture is worth a 1000 words, this film is worth 10,000 blogs - by stringing so many of the Bush-bashing beads together in such entertaining and moving fashion, Fahrenheit 9/11 should bring the heart of the anti-Dubya critique right to the Heartland. I just wish it had covered its flank a little better by sticking to the cold, hard facts about the national embarrassment of historic proportions that is George W. Bush, rather than indulging every so often in cheap laughs and reflexive sentiment.

Unfortunately, the diplomatic savvy on display in this surreptitious Iraq transfer hasn't extended to other world hotspots, as Kaplan notes with North Korea. "By his own careless arrogance," writes Kaplan, Dubya "has stunningly mishandled this confrontation. He has allowed North Korea—the most rickety spoke on his "axis of evil," a dangerous regime by any measure -- to reach the crest of becoming a nuclear power. He has dismissed numerous opportunities to nip this disaster in the bud. And now he comes up with an old formula that evades the recent shift in the balance." (The disarmament deal proffered by the Bushies now is insubstantially different from the one suggested by President Clinton a decade ago, the one pooh-poohed by Dubya upon his arrival into the Oval Office.)

The NYT reports that the prisoners of the Gitmo Gulag are at best small potatoes -- most having nothing to do with Al Qaeda at all -- and that the Pentagon and Dubya administration have continually overstated the detainees' level of knowledge about Al Qaeda in order to justify the continued existence of the Guantanamo camp. "'It's like going to a prison in upstate to find out what's happening on the streets of New York,' a counterterrorism official with knowledge of Guantánamo intelligence said. 'The guys in there might know some stuff. But they haven't been part of what's going on for a few years.'" When it comes to the War on Terror, is there anything the Bush administration doesn't lie about anymore?

The 9/11 commission concludes that Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda and the planning of the September 11 attacks. Wow, are you serious? Who knew?

"Never in the two and a quarter centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted." A bipartisan group of 26 diplomats and military men call out Dubya Diplomacy for causing irreparable harm to the republic, and the statement is heady stuff. "The Bush Administration has shown that it does not grasp these circumstances of the new era, and is not able to rise to the responsibilities of world leadership in either style or substance. It is time for a change."

While authorization for attack dog intimidation techniques implicate intelligence higher-ups in the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Bush gets legalistic to (not) explain the pro-torture policies emanating from his administration. Hmmm. I bet the White House is wishing Reagan could die every week right now.

I missed most of the recent discoveries about Dubya's pro-torture policy changes during my cable outage, but Value Judgment has birddogged a nice Washington Post editorial that sums up the story so far. "There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of 'national security.'"

Well, between Tenet's resignation and Reagan's end, my cable modem picked an eventful few days to give up on me. More to come next week, after the Time Warner technicians have ascertained and corrected the problem.

In a speech before graduates of the Air Force Academy, Dubya compares the war on terror to WWII. And, a day after being called out by Dana Milbank for his straw men, Bush is at it again: "Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours." Is that really the central argument being made by those dubious of our foray into Iraq? I don't think so.

What does $340,000 a month buy you? Treason. Ahmed Chalabi, until very recently the Neocons' favorite Iraqi, apparently tipped off Iran that we'd broken their codes. "U.S. intelligence officials two weeks ago had told CNN that Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, gave intelligence secrets to Iran so closely held in the U.S. government that only 'a handful' of senior officials knew them." So...which of the Bushies was it? Between this and the Plame affair, the Bush administration has now displayed a pattern of disregarding and betraying our intelligence community.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. And don't say we didn't warn you. Nothing changes an undesirable news cycle quite like another terror threat, does it? As the AP article notes: "The sudden warning returns the nation's attention to terrorism, the issue that President Bush has highlighted as a central theme of his re-election campaign, after intense focus on other subjects like Iraq and prisoner abuses in Iraq. Bush has lost ground in the polls, falling in approval ratings to the lowest point of his presidency."

To be fair, releasing pics of the possible suspects is probably more helpful in preventing a future attack than the usual exhortations to buy duct tape. And nobody want to see another 9/11, particularly those of us who live in NYC. Still, the very fact that news articles have to concede that Dubya may just be pushing the Panic button for political points proves how untrustworthy this president has become. And don't you love how Bush officials keep suggesting that Al Qaeda wants to "have some impact on the electoral process," as if voting Democratic means the terrorists have won? Sorry, but you'll have to count me among the many Americans who thinks that terrorists have more to fear from John Kerry than they ever would from Dubya's haphazard and crony-driven homeland security agenda.

So the word emerging from Cannes on Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is very positive so far. I'm very curious to see what kind of reaction this film will get stateside, once the distribution situation has been resolved. Hopefully, it'll end up doing more than just preaching to the converted in arthouses across America, as it sounds like it has the potential to be very big.

Jan 25, 2002: "'As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,' Gonzales wrote to Bush. 'The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.' Gonzales concluded in stark terms: 'In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.' Dismissing the Geneva Conventions, two full years before the atrocities at Abu Ghreib? That giant sucking sound you hear is the void left by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales's incredible imploding Supreme Court bid. He's probably got less chance now than Ken Starr of taking the nation's highest bench, and for good reason.

A handful of GOP libertarians join Dems in blocking reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

With Rummy on the ropes, Dubya and Cheney rush to the defense of their man in Defense. Hey, hold him to your breast as long as possible, Mr. President...maybe then, you'll all go down together come November.

"As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he's something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool." Slate writer and collector of malapropisms Jacob Weisberg psychoanalyzes Dubya's mental deficiencies and finds that Bush is less simple-minded than he is just intellectually lazy...and the Daddy issues don't help.

I don't know how we will ever recover from this. Medley aptly sums up my stomach-churning disgust at the Iraq atrocity photos now circulating around the world. If there wasn't a connection between Dubya's carnival sideshow in Iraq and the war in terror before, there assuredly is now. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, just think how many possible US-hating terrorists have been born with each one of these vile and grotesque snapshots. Our entire nation and way of life have been shamed by these depravities, perhaps to fatal effect.

Dubya and Cheney work on getting their stories straight for tomorrow's joint appearance before the 9/11 committee. If the press machinery worked in this country, there is no way on God's Green Earth Bush would be allowed to bring along his compadre for help on this one, or that the two of them would be able to testify without any recorded transcription, particularly when you consider how President Clinton was treated during his Lewinsky testimony. Absolutely pathetic.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick reports in on the Bush administration's twin attempts before the Supreme Court to lock up US citizens and hide their shady energy deals indefinitely. Update: The Times and Post weigh in as well.

Despite Justice Scalia carrying water for Ted Olson and the Bush team as per usual, it seems that a majority of the Supreme Court may not be amused by Dubya's defense of the Gitmo gulag.

Clandestine oil deals with the Saudis, secret (and quite probably) illegal misappropriation of anti-terrorism funds, Bob Woodward's confirmation that Richard Clarke was right despite the Bushies' smear machine...no matter how you cut it, the news coming out of the White House these days looks grimmer and grimmer. Now Dubya is actually running on the Patriot Act, of all things, and yet his poll numbers are rising?! I'm going to chalk up this latest bounce to sheer GOP cash flow (a funding discrepancy soon to change) and the post-primary press lull for Kerry. But, still, I find it hard to believe that anybody of an independent disposition can look at what's going on in Washington these days and in good conscience vote for Dubya. This joker can't handle the 9/11 commission without Cheney by his side, and he can't even face the national press without begging to see the questions in advance. Why on Earth would anyone think this fool should stay in office? Inept and corrupt, Bush is easily the worst president America has seen since Warren G. Harding. In fact, he's probably worse. Where's the outrage?


Dubya and his cronies have coasted on the "soft bigotry of low expectations" long enough...let's vote out these guys, already.

Sean Wilentz reviews trained historian Condoleeza Rice's sense of her field in light of her recent testimony, and finds her wanting. Notes Wilentz, "The American Historical Review's notice of her first book, a study of Russia and the Czech army after 1948, charged that Rice 'frequently does not sift facts from propaganda and valid information from disinformation or misinformation' and that she 'passes judgments and expresses opinions without adequate knowledge of the facts.')" Well, dang, no wonder the Bushies jumped on hiring her for National Security Advisor...she sounds like a great fit.

Sorry 24 and American Idol fans...Dubya takes over the airwaves tonight to "reassure" us about Iraq, and perhaps explain why he spent the day he was warned about Al Qaeda attacks just goofing off at the ranch. Hmm...I wonder if he'll only answer press questions in the presence of Cheney...after all, the Prisoner's Dilemma still holds.

Hmm...I've been so busy this week that I've completely missed out on the Clarke 9/11 testimony, but it sounds like he's not only fighting mad at the Bushies for their Iraq sideshow and failures on the terrorism front, he's deflecting their usual smear tactics quite swimmingly. Good stuff.

Did the awful 3/11 train bombing decide the recent Spanish election? Not so fast. My friend Luke of Expats against Bush happened to be visiting Barcelona during the recent attack, and his experience conforms closely with this Post article. Namely, it was Aznar's lousy spin job as much as the bombing which decided the election. And, let's be real -- Given that 90% of Spain was against continued involvement in the Iraq war prior to the attack, it's not as if the new government is coming out of nowhere with its decision to withdraw Spanish troops. Obviously, this act of terror didn't help matters for the Popular Party, but the foundation of this decision by the electorate was paved long before by George W. Bush's amateurish diplomacy. Instead of seeing common cause with our nation after a horrible terrorist attack, the Spanish people have been more repelled by Dubya's preemptive sideshow and his continued insults to international intelligence. At this point, if Bush really wants to figure out which world leaders would prefer John Kerry, all he has to do is look around.

Well, that didn't take long. In his first major ad wave, Dubya touts the endorsement of the WTC, to the anger and consternation of the families of 9/11 victims. Trust me, it's gonna get worse before it gets better: If it helps get him elected, Dubya and his ilk will be bathing in the blood of the fallen by the end.

Nat Hentoff files another dispatch on Guantanamo, and it ain't pretty. "The authority to unilaterally keep a defendant locked up?conceivably for the rest of his or her life?used to be reserved solely for kings, who could ignore any part of the realm's legal system. This monarchical power?as I've indicated in reporting on the indefinite imprisonment, without charges, of American citizens Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla?has been expanded by George W. Bush to include defendants at Guantᮡmo."

Unfortunately, I missed Dubya's flailing about on Russert Sunday morning, so I can't really venture an opinion about how that went. (The rightniks seem dour about it.) But Salon has put up an interesting presidential popularity chart, which shows that Dubya's approval rating has only spiked thrice: 9/11, the Iraq War, and Saddam's capture. Makes you wonder if Karl Rove is on the phone with Pakistan this very moment.

In case you missed the State of the Union address last night, this cartoon anticipated the upshot: terror, terror, terror, 9/11, 9/11, fear, fear, fear, steroids, thank you, good night, and God bless the USA. It's wonder they didn't pass out little bloody shirts for the Congressional GOP to wave in unison. Well, while this New York Times news analysis of the speech sounds like it was written by the Bush campaign (he "quickly turned" to domestic issues? What is Todd Purdum talking about? Dubya was blathering on about scary, scary terrorists for at least 40 minutes), I gotta think that this speech might've played badly to any voters out there concerned about the economy, and this year as always, it's still the economy, stupid.

Also in campaign news, General Clark takes a page from Bob Graham and openly faults Dubya for 9/11. Said Clark, "It goes back to what our great president Harry Truman said with the sign on his desk: `The buck stops here.' And it sure is clear to me that when it comes to our nation's national security, the buck rests with the commander in chief, right on George W. Bush's desk." Well, he has a point...and up to now Dubya has had it relatively easy on this question. Could you imagine the maelstrom of right-wing finger-pointing that would have ensued if 9/11 had happened on Clinton or Gore's watch?

Fresh off calling upon the Lord to snuff out a few justices, televangelist and former GOP Presidential nominee Pat Robertson advocates nuking the State Department. I presume John Ashcroft and the FBI are conducting a full investigation of this possible terrorist threat.

In keeping with his Judge Danforth-like predilections, Attorney General Ashcroft issued an edict that would limit plea bargains and lawyerly discretion over which charges to bring in a federal suit. Again, when will Ashcroft follow his own pronouncements, lock up his nephew, and throw away the key?

While Dubya tries in vain to muster international support for his "save the US" Iraq bailout plan, the NY Times portray the chilling consequences of his blunt unilateralism. For, in only two short years, the administration has completely squandered the considerable reservoirs of international goodwill that followed the wake of 9/11. It's troubling to think what a President with some understanding of the art of diplomacy could've accomplished in this time. Instead we've had a rank amateur at the helm, poisoning the image of our nation in the eyes of the world. In so doing, the Bushies have done America -- and American values -- a great disservice.

While he's still abusing the terrorism angle to hoodwink us on Iraq (As Howard Dean noted yesterday, the only indisputable thing Iraq has to do with terrorism is that we've now chosen it as the place where terrorists can attack us), Dubya at least admitted on nationwide television that unilaterally, we're in over our head, which I suppose amounts to what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity. Yet, with the necessary Iraq funds -- even lowballed as they are -- threatening to blow the deficit to $525 billion, I do hope that the Bushies realize that the responsibility and sacrifice they're expecting from the American people, our somewhat skeptical allies, and everyone but themselves in prosecuting this war should preclude any more discussion of a tax cut in the coming year. After all, why shouldn't America's wealthiest citizens also have to pay the heavy price for Dubya's blundering, incompetent, and hubris-ridden diplomacy on the road to war?

Looks like it's a bad day for imperious Dubya appointees. In the wake of Congress's recent decision to limit the powers of the Patriot Act, a defiant Ashcroft wants his toys back. Also facing considerable bipartisan and public criticism, Michael Powell appoints a task force on media consolidation. As Copps notes in the article, next time perhaps it'd be better to do the fact-finding before you vote.

The LA Times relates the sad story of Ansar Mahmood, who has paid a heavy price for being a Muslim in America after 9/11. In not-unrelated news, Ashcroft cracks down on lenient sentencing. Perhaps they'll reconsider his nephew's drug bust, then.

The ACLU and six Muslim groups launch the first constitutional challenge against the Patriot Act. This should be one to watch. In related news, James Ridgeway examines the Clintonian antecedents of the Act.

I know conservatives think free markets solve everything, but this is ridiculous. The Pentagon creates a futures market for terrorism in order to better predict possible attacks and assassinations. Um, somebody might want to tell the brass that these are basically called Dead Pools, and have been around for years now. Update: Well, that's that, then.

�Up through January of 2003, the cooperation was topnotch,� a former State Department official said. �Then we were going to do Iraq, and some people in the Administration got heavy- handed. They wanted Syria to get involved in operational stuff having nothing to do with Al Qaeda and everything to do with Iraq. As Dubya accuses Syria of harboring terrorists, Sy Hersh examines the rise and fall of US-Syrian cooperation after 9/11.

Not just theory anymore, an internal Justice Dept. report cites numerous civil rights violations under the Patriot Act. It was only a matter of time, wasn't it?