ROVE: Taking, for example, the memoranda about the enhanced interrogation techniques and making them public has been a value to our enemy. It has served, frankly, I think, as a recruiting tool. They can now take these memoranda and go to prospective, you know, recruits and say, This is the worst that the enemy, the United States, would ever do to you, and they've even forsworn these things. We can help you, prepare you to deal with these things, but even the enemy is so weak they're not going to use these techniques on you. And it's given them a tool to make it more attractive to recruit people, and you know, this kind of thing is harmful to us over the long haul.
Basically, he's confirming what Andrew Sullivan conjectured, that the Bush administration used torture as a tool to intimidate would-be terrorists, not to extract ticking-bomb information.
I find it strange that Rove et al, think that extreme authoritarian tactics like this will discourage people from opposing the US? I mean, doesn't he realize this kind of sh*t fires people up? Didn't they ever watch "Red Dawn," fer chrissakes?
But then consider the war records of the people who made the decision to torture. Bush - his daddy got him a nice gig in the reserves so he could avoid active duty in Vietnam - and he still went AWOL. Cheney had "other priorities" than enlisting. Rove sought deferment after deferment, and slipped past Vietnam without firing a single shot in anger. And these men supported Vietnam. You'd hate to think what they'd have done to get out of a war they opposed.
And you wonder why they think the treat of physical harm would discourage al Qaeda recruits...
Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality.
Is it me, or does this fit a pattern with revelations about the Bush administration and Iraq? Some information leaked out, a few journalists and bloggers followed the trail, shocking revelations came to light...which the media ignored for two to four years until an authorized government report admits to what we knew all along.
Does it bother anyone else that most mainstream media outlets are passive when it comes to challenging the government?
This stuff that's coming out about the Bush administration is huge. The implications about the executive branch are enormous. But...will anything happen? Where's the pressure to right the wrongs that have been committed?
Today's news that a Spanish court is mulling criminal charges against Bush administration lawyers for violating international treaties "by providing the legal framework to justify torture" should remind folks of British lawyer Phillipe Sands' warnings on Fresh Air, that signatories of the treaties banning torture are obligated by law to investigate and prosecute torturers in other countries. And in that interivew, Sands identified LiTW favorite kicking boy, John Yoo, as someone who's in especial danger of prosecution because his opinions supporting torture reek of a lawyer looking to justify an administration policy without regard to law. A big no-no.
John Yoo was named as a person of interest in the Spanish investigation.
It's embarassing, to say the least. Our government's failure to hold former government officials accountible for their reprehnsible and illegal actions is more than just an embarassment, it's dangerous. While the Obama administration appears to have backed off the more egregious policies enacted by the Bush administration, it does so of its own power. In other words, the government has stopped these policies because the president has decided to, not because the people and their representatives demanded that our laws be upheld and those that broke them be held accountible.
In short, the precedent for the unitary executive and its associated powers still exists.
Jay already touched on one of the best political columns (Frank Rich in yesterday's times) that I have read in recent memory. How does this all sit for Dennis Rehberg?
Well, Denny is out there trying to make the GOP Congressional talking points stick to the wall.
My favorite quote: "This is not free money," Rehberg said.
Well, Denny, were the Bush tax cuts for the richest of the rich free money? Was the Iraq War free money? Tax cuts for the rich? Good. A couple trillion to "free Iraq"? Good. $300 billion in middle class tax cuts? Bad. $600 million in fiscal relief for the state of Montana? Bad.
The most interesting part of the interview is that Congressional Republicans are offering no solutions. Their talking points amount to: This is bad.
I also found his analogy comparing a rail-system to link Las Vegas (2 million people) to greater LA (14 million) to the bridge to nowhere to be completely absurd.
Montanans are losing their jobs. The GOP made a political gambit that if the stimulus worked Obama would get the credit, so they opposed it, or they thought it needed more tax cuts for the richest of the rich, so they opposed it.
As Mr. Rich noted on Sunday:
Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn't happen either.
Americans are expecting a new, New Deal. The modern day ideology of GOP, their own echo chamber-swirling with Russ Limbaugh's voice and their own talking points, are running the party off a cliff.
Thank God, they are in the minority now: for the past 8 years they ran the country off a cliff, at least now, it is just their own future.
British lawyer Phillipe Sands was on Fresh Air yesterday, claiming that there's likely to be some sort of investigation into "high-ranking government officials and top military figures" over the use of torture during the Bush years. Essentially the pressure to investigate isn't likely to stem from any sense of righteousness on behalf of the Obama administration, but from international pressure. Torture is one of the few crimes -- alongside genocide and war crimes -- that can be prosecuted within any country that's a party to the international agreements to ban torture. In short, if the U.S. government doesn't do something to look into its use of torture, another government probably will. Like, say, Britain. Needless to say, a major international incident between the U.S. and the EU is something the Obama administration wants to avoid, given its public commitment to end our nation's diplomatic isolation in the world community.
Anyhow, it's a great interview and well worth a listen. But here's the part I'd like to quote, about administration lawyer, John Yoo:
I think the author, the principle author, of the infamous torture memo -- that's to say, John Yoo -- must be at serious risk of possible investigation. I mean, he is, in a sense, impressively unapologetic...he sticks by what he has done, I fundamentally disagree with what he has done. But he has said he believes he has done the right thing.
His legal opinions are truly appalling. There's no one I know -- and respect -- who supports them. It appears he was essentially used to rubberstamp a predetermined policy. And that, I think, takes him across a line. It's not just bad lawyering, it's not just unprofessional legal advice, it takes you into the realm of complicity.
And I think if evidence emerges from further investigation that abusive techniques of interregation had already been embarked upon without appropriate legal authorization, and they needed to find someone to sign off on it, and he was the person to sign off on it, then I think it becomes particularly certain.
I have to admit, I've long found John Yoo one of the morecontemptablemembers of the Bush administration, precisely because of his willingness to distort U.S. law and the Constitution into politically convenient opinions. And, yes, administration lawyers have a history of doing so -- Renquist and Scalia greased their path to the SCOTUS by being the legal bag carriers for Nixon. But Yoo subverted the law for torture.
For a while, Yoo furiously penned op-eds defending the administration's incredibly weak legal basis for breaking the law, but recently broke tradition-- after the election of a Democrat to the nation's highest office, coincidentally -- by opining (along with "loyal Bushie" sidekick, John Bolton) that the president should give up power to the Senate on trade matters.
That's right: Yoo's arguing for something less than absolute powers for the executive branch, and by doing so, enters Bill Kristol territory, crassly and ineptly carrying water for the GOP. If there ever was any doubt that Yoo isn't simply a misguided ideologue, it's this op-ed. I'm not sure what he's after -- a consulting gig? an eventual appointment to a federal court by some future, grateful conservative president? a shot at political office? -- but it's weak and infuriating. Let's hope investigations do occur, and Yoo gets swept up with them...
Okay, in all the hubub of the election and Obama's transition and Rick Warren's honored position in the inauguratiobn is forgotten the Bush administration. The reason - let's face it - for the Democratic sweep of Congress and the presidency.
It was bad. In fact, it was just as bad as many of us had feared.
Take Dick Cheney. Last week on the talk show circuit, he defended the belief that the presidency has absolute powers and admitted he authorized the use of torture, in response to which Dahlia Lithwick appropriately quoted John MacKenzie:
MacKenzie shows how a scholarly constitutional claim about the right of executive branch officials to interpret the Constitution morphed into the aggressively ahistorical interpretation of executive power that Cheney parrots with such perfect confidence. As MacKenzie writes: "The unitary executive has come a long way for a theory that has a hole in its heart and no basis in history or coherent thought. It simply is devoid of content, not expressed or even strongly implied in foundational documents such as The Federalist, not to mention the Constitution."
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.
The Bush administration: just as bad as we said it was.
You know...how many of these stories were shrugged off by traditional media for so long, and are now openly admitted to by the vice president? And what consequences will there be?
I'm betting none.
Honesly, everybody should be enraged by this - conservatives and DC insiders, too. But conservatives are busy coming up with intellectual justifications for the Bushies' actions and the media is busy coming up with reasons why it's a bad idea to punish any of these *sshats, the real reason being that they identify with the Cheneys of the world more than the dirty hippies...ie, the rest of us.
Merry friggin' Christmas.
Speaking of which, I'll be posting lightly for the next few days, because I'm on vacation!
Thanksgiving is next week, and President Bush could make it a really special holiday by resigning.
The idea is to allow Obama to start ruling as soon as possible. According to Collins, Cheney would have to resign, making Pelosi the president - she'd "obviously" defer to Obama, and the Obama administration would be underway.
Brian Beutler has an even more convoluted succession plan: Rice resigns, Bush appoints Obama as SoS. Bush resigns and Cheney resigns and - voila! - Obama is president!
This, of course, is a little far fetched, to say the least. And maybe not even a good idea. First, Bush probably doesn't want to go - as seen recently, the administration wants to get a lot accomplished before it vacates the White House, including rolling back environmental and economic regulations. Without real political pressure from Congress and the public in the form of impeachment, the administration certainly feels no rush to leave. And does anyone believe Bush agrees with the rest of us, that he's an incompetent who does more harm than good in office? Seems to me, he still thinks his "genius" is misunderstood.
Then there are the little awkward details that make the plan unlikely. As Beutler points out, Pelosi would have to resign as Speaker of the House to become president - powerless, and for a single month. Not likely to happen. Beutler's plan has a little hitch, too: if Obama ascended to the presidency through succession as SoS, wouldn't the next month count as a "term," and prohibit him from running again in 2012?
And, of course, there's the little matter of the constitution and the normal transfer of power from one government to another. Sure, this election was extraordinary, there are a number of crises to consider, and the vast majority of the electorate prefers Obama over Bush...but without any clear reason to jerryrig the transfer, it seems like we'd better off following the normal chain of events, especially if what we're trying to do is separate ourselves from the jerryrigging of rules that the present administration is famous for.
We all know about the Bush administration's myriad efforts to politicize government, to use the government as a propaganda and ideological arm of the Republican party, from suppressing scientific research that contradicts party claims, to screening Justice Department workers based on their allegiances to the president and party.
Just weeks before leaving office, the Interior Department's top lawyer has shifted half a dozen key deputies -- including two former political appointees who have been involved in controversial environmental decisions -- into senior civil service posts.
The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions, called "burrowing" by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs.
The Department of Labor and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are following similar tactics.
As if the incoming president didn't already face enough challenges, but one of the biggest may be that he will have to fight off political attacks coming from within his own government.
And, no, the fact that other outgoing presidents, including Bill Clinton, used this trick of switching appointees into career civil-service jobs does not make this practice any less obnoxious. Honestly, were any of us impressed by the manner in which Clinton left office?
But let's not kid ourselves that the Clinton appointments and practices were anywhere near as virulent as what happened under the Bush administration, okay? Just remember the "loyal Bushies"...
I've been meaning to write something up on the politics surrounding Libby, Montana, and its asbestos problem. Well, "problem" is too mild a term. Crisis? Disaster? What word evokes the horror of the industrial "accident" that is slowly killing the town?
But there's too much. It's one of those topics that a blog post can't even begin to touch. Read "An Air that Kills," by Andrew Schneider and David McCumber, an account written by the Seattle P-I journalist who broke the story.
What you do need to know, is that the one politician who's been in Libby's corner is Max Baucus. You can say whatever you want about his history in the Senate and his politics, but you can't deny this: Max has battled for Libby against WR Grace and the upper administrative echelons of the EPA. That's why you saw uncharacteristic anger from our senior Senator at a recent hearing on asbestos contamination in Libby, when he forbid two EPA officials from testifying.
What's made clear in "An Air that Kills" is that mining officials in Libby knew that its vermiculite was killing miners and townspeople -- and probably customers, too. And what's worse is that EPA officials knew, too, but helped block any regulation or investigation that would have exposed the problem. And in the book, the authors speculated whether the Bush administration had a hand in the most recent EPA stonewalling.
(I should hasten to add that the site workers and response teams from the EPA were not at all culpable, but took extraordinary actions to try to remediate the asbestos in Libby, all the while fighting the agency's upper levels of bureaucracy. That is, the boots-on-the-ground wanted to do what was right, but were constantly butting heads with the political apointees.)
U.S. Sen. Max Baucus has accused White House and Environmental Protection Agency officials of orchestrating a "conspiracy" by squashing a decision to declare a public health emergency in Libby three years after it was revealed more than 200 people died and another 2,000 fell ill because of asbestos exposure.
On Sept. 25 the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) held a hearing to discuss a report released the previous day by Baucus, D-Mont., that describes a scenario in which top-level officials from the national Office of Management and Budget prevented the EPA from declaring Libby a public health emergency. Such a declaration would have authorized the EPA to do extensive clean-up work along with providing Libby residents increased health screening, basic services like oxygen - which many people need because of asbestos-related complications - and long-term medical health care.
At the hearing, the EPA's Assistant Inspector General for Investigations Stephen Nesbitt suggested that federal officials persuaded the EPA to cancel its plans to declare a public health emergency in fear that such a declaration would start a sweeping and costly national effort to clean up asbestos.
Asbestos is a nation-wide problem. It kills millions of Americans. It's responsible for billions in health-care costs. (And why doesn't anyone mention the financial burden that industrial pollution puts on our health-care system?) We should start a sweeping and costly national effort to clean up asbestos. It's in our best long-term health and economic interest. And those companies that knowingly released a product that's harmful to human health should be obligated to help pay for that effort.
But also Baucus' investigation should remind us how pervasive and pernicious the Bush administration's influence into every aspect of our government continues to be. Don't be fooled by all the attention being paid to Obama and McCain: the Bush administration is still alive and well. More will no doubt come out after Obama occupies the White House, and ridding the federal government of its incompetent and partisan operatives is going to be a years-long problem.
(Just a quick reminder from Bob that some strange sh*t's going on; just like the Bush administration to use the cover of the Conventions to advance its agenda, leaving a mess for President Obama to untangle. - promoted by Jay Stevens)
Montanans:
US (Bush admin, not us) has made incursions into Pakistan 3 times in the last week and killed civilians. Another war front? US media--silence.
Things go quick and fast, and ugly. Cold war rekindled. 3 or 4 front war in the mideast (Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan, Iran, based on when Israel attacks Iran to make it official-before Nov. 4). Hundreds jailed and charged with felony riot under Minnesota PATRIOT act in St. Paul, including press. Dispensationalist vp candidate, and few know what that term means. Police state rulemaking in full swing here in the USofA.
There's much buzz about Fred Kaplan's Slate piece on the Russia-Georgia war, and for good reason, especially in the context of the current cease-fire which coincided (was spurred by?) with a visit to Moscow by French President Sarkozy.
Kaplan:
Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?
It's heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times-officials, soldiers, and citizens-wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It's infuriating because it's clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia's separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions-for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia-with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.
Now, there's some speculation that the US gave "tacit" support to a Georgian incursion into South Osesetia; for the record, Robert Farley's take seems more reasonable, that "motivated bias on the part of Saakashvili may have led him to believe that the Americans were making encouraging noises, because he wanted to believe the Americans were encouraging him."
Frankly, I don't think even the idiots in the Bush administration would green light a provocation of the irritated superpower on Georgia's border. Then again, I've been wrong about these folks before.
Now, this won't come as much as a surprise for anyone who's been following the scandals wrapped around Alberto Gonzalez' Department of Justice, but the DoJ's inspector general (pdf) found that several DOJers repeatedly broke the law "by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs" as immigration justices and prosecutors.
Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson were the main culprits. "What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?" asked Goodling, regularly, to candidates for career jobs.
As Steve Benen points out, this is the second of four reports being prepared by the DoJ's Inspector General, and that the first report "documented six years of illegal hiring practices" in the department, so it's hardly anything new. Still, it contains some egregious behavior.
Is the Bush administration really considering pre-emptive pardons? Conservative jurists hope so, wanting Bush to head off any impending investigation of illegal government activities during the Bush years by a future administration.
The money quote:
"The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations," said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. "If we don't protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances."
Sounds a lot like the Nuremberg Defense, eh? Yes, I'm aware of Godwin's Law - but we're talking about a government that was involved in illegal spying, illegal detention, torture, and kidnapping, and that reintroduced pre-emptive war to the world. At this point, we're entering a rarified arena and running out of suitable analogies. Is Pinochet a better comparison? South Africa's Apartheid state? Brezhnev?
And who here thinks the pardons will be for the regular joe spooks and other agents in the trenches? Me, neither. We've seen from the Abu Ghraib fallout how the administration rolls: throw the little guy under the bus while dodging any and all accountability.
The point here, the idea of pre-emptive pardons is odious. I don't want the government to "take chances" with my civil liberties. I want them to stay within the law, and I want accountability for those that don't, regardless of rank or station.
For the Fourth, Ochenski penned a brilliant column comparing Jefferson's complaints against the English King justifying American independence to contemporary infractions wrought by the Bush administration.
Here's something I've neglected and probably shouldn't have: Sen. Baucus' efforts to postpone a large cut in Medicare payments to doctors, part of the Bush administration's efforts to sabotage government programs that work.
So, House Democrats passed a bill that would prevented the cut.
Senate Republicans (naturally) blocked the bill's passing. But Senate Democrats, led by Baucus, are working to find 60 votes for the bill. Even so, President Bush is threatening a veto. Why?
Mr. Bush and many Republicans oppose the bill because it would finance an increase in doctors' fees by reducing federal payments to insurance companies that offer private Medicare Advantage plans as an alternative to the traditional government-run Medicare program.
(You remember Medicare Advantage. That's the boondoggle for private insurers. And, no, I didn't say that, the GAO did.)
So if the pay cut goes through, doctors will be less willing to treat Medicare patients, making it harder to find providers if you're on Medicare, pushing people towards private insurers and Medicare Advantage, which...well...benefit insurance companies, but, as most of us with private insurers know, not seniors.
Not a sexy issue - like FISA! -- but critical to millions of seniors. Keep your eyes peeled...
As someone who came to politics through writing, I was struck by Jim Webb's "First Person Singular" interview in the Washington Post:
The most disciplined thing I've ever done in my life is probably the act of writing a book -- and novels are harder than nonfiction. People tend to think, Oh, novels, you just start writing a story, and, you know, let the muse take you. But there's enormous discipline in writing novels. I wrote my first one cover to cover seven times. I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, and then I couldn't get it published.
[snip]
I've never felt more natural than when I'm doing this sort of stuff, when I feel like I'm leading -- from the Marine Corps to working on the Hill, to working in the Pentagon, to working in the Senate. But nothing gives me greater pleasure than to write something that I believe is really good. Writing is what I will always do, no matter what. My mind always writes. You never stop writing if you're a writer.
Obviously, as a blogger, everything political I read, see, or experience is massaged by my inner writer's voice, which constantly searches for a story, a narrative, a way to frame the issues I care about.
David Sirota considers Webb not your typical politician. Webb's claim that he came back to politics because of outrage over Katrina and Iraq rings true, and mirrors my own experience. I never would have picked up the blog if it weren't for the various degradations against the republic by Bush & co - in fact, I think it was wireless wiretappng that set me over the edge. (Which explains my constantly coming back to the FISA "compromise." Is "compromise" a good word to describe sh*tting on the Constitution?) And I suspect that my own foray into politics mirrors the experience of thousands of other bloggers and millions of new voters and newly active political volunteers.
I suppose it took a monumental crisis like the Bush administration to make it happen, dislodge us all from our normal, personal pursuits. And I suppose we need those once a generation or so to keep people on top of things. But - and you can read it in my intro on the b'birds written more than two years ago -- I started this business with the intention of eventually returning to my "normal" life.
Not sure if that's going to happen. If anything, to get the needed reform on electioneering, civil liberties, and health care, I need to get more involved. And so do you.
Oh well. Guess I'll have to pen that novel later. Maybe when the kids go off to college.
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. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, "Any time is a long time when you're breathing water." I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Also of note, Hitchens lists four reasons why we should not waterboard: it's a torture technique we've prosecuted; if we use it, expect it and other torture techniques to be commonly used against our own people; the information extracted by its use is "junk"; it justification leads to other, worse, torture techniques.
(Which may explain why a number of civilian and military leaders are calling for a ban on torture. Those among the protesters include George Schultz and Richard Armitage.)
This is a pretty significant change of heart for Hitchens, who earlier claimed waterboarding was not torture.
And then there was this report by the New York Times' Scott Shane that revealed the military prepared a class on "coercive management techniques" for prisoners at Guantanamo based on Communist Chinese techniques used on US servicemen in the Korean War to extract filmed "confessions" to wartime atrocities. (And which inspired the Manchurian Candidate.)
The techniques were lifted from a 1957 Air Force study intended to prepare US military members for why they might expect at the hands of our enemies.
So Reagan's alleged heir came to follow the moral strictures of Communist totalitarians. And note: the torture methods were designed to elicit false confessions. We have no assurance that the intelligence conjured up by this brutality is anything more than what Dick Cheney wanted it to be. (That's how he likes his intelligence, of course. Whatever he wants reality to be.)
It's interesting that many Bush-backers don't either see the irony that we've appropriated some of the worst from Communist regimes, or don't care. If it's the latter - and I'm assuming these conservatives were also virulent anti-Communists - it makes one wonder what it was, exactly, about the Communist dictatorships they didn't like?
In the first case to review the government's secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims.
With some derision for the Bush administration's arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark": "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
"This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true," said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
And now you know why the administration was so dead-set against giving detainees hearings on their incarceration.
At this point, it seems the only reason to oppose habeas corpus for detained foreign nationals is to avoid embarrassing the Bush administration and its supporters.
In short, the rationale for the unitary executive and the extreme national security powers given it are unraveling before our eyes. The question is, will these new powers go unchallenged, even as they're shown to be arbitrary and capricious?
Update: As usual, I don't know what the h*ll I'm talking about. CharleyCarp explains in the comments:
Parhat isn't a habeas corpus case, it's review under the Detainee Treatment Act. That is, this is the thing that the Bush Administration had Congress set up, thinking it couldn't lose. Although the opinion was written by Judge Garland, it's worth noting that Chief Judge Sentelle and Judge Griffith also sat on the case, and neither dissented from either the result or the reasoning. Griffith, as folks might recall, was one of the judges in the Gang of 14 Compromise. Sentelle is a very reliable conservative. That this is too much for them is really saying something.
Probably not much of a surprise to anybody that's followed the ins and outs of the Iraq War, but the Iraqi government is about to negotiate a deal that would give no-bid contracts to Exxon, Shell, Total, and BP to "service Iraq's largest fields":
The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.
It's pretty obvious what's going on here. As Andrew Sullivan writes, "You don't get to conquer a new province and not get any spoils, do you? Who needs ANWR or a carbon tax when you can drain Iraq at record high oil prices?"
Not only do Exxon and Mobile get a sweet, no-bid deal from the Iraqi government, they'd get a fantastic boost from McCain's proposed corporate tax cuts and loopholes, which may have something to do with massive donations from the industry to McCain's campaign.
There's another connection in the no-bid deal to McCain's candidacy, explained by Matthew Yglesias:
The oil money more plausibly comes into play in explaining the desire to stay at war forever. After all, these companies (or their corporate ancestors) had oil contracts in Iraq in the past and now they're getting them back "36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power." Nationalization, you see, is a substantial risk of doing business -- especially natural resource business -- in unstable countries. But a given government is much, much, much less likely to nationalize western countries' assets if it's dependent on external U.S. military support and especially if its security services are nicely enmeshed with the U.S. military.
McCain, of course, wants to stay in Iraq - a hundred years, if need be. His Iraqi policy ties in neatly with ensuring that the Iraqi government - now, or in the future - never gets the pesky idea that it actually owns the oil found in its territory and has a right to determine its fate.
You can almost hear the squeals of delight - hey, this means cheap oil again! But these are people who don't care if burning oil (a) is creating a massive ecological and economic disaster, (b) spews harmful pollutants into the atmosphere, (c) and destroys irreplaceable, pristine wilderness. What's establishing an overseas colony with a permanent military presence to fight an endless war in comparison with cheap gasoline prices?
I admit the economy is bad enough for working families without factoring in rising gas prices, especially in the rural areas of our state. But shouldn't we be doing something about it, instead of pushing the problems off on others that will follow us? I wouldn't be averse to find some short-term temporary relief for gas consumers -- if we simultaneously applied ourselves to finding real long-term solutions to our oil-based economy.
I'm fine with leaving all the policy-making to the left. I know we can get us out of these scrapes. But I guarantee that many rigthies won't like the results...especially if they work.
You know what I think about the revelations found in Scott McClellan's new book?
Yawn.
Is there anything revelatory in this thing? The only surprise is that someone who worked as an insider in the Bush administration would actually admit to the stuff they pulled.
The most interesting part of book from the reports so far, are the following passages excerpted in yesterday's Politico report:
McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush's liberal critics and even charges: "If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
"The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."
That's right; Bush's former spokesflack just called out the media for not being hard enough on the administration!
