It's not a myth, really. In the beginning of this year, President Bush, at the advice of Gen. David Patraeus, sent 30,000 more troops into Iraq to try to quell some of the violence there. At the time, Rolling Stone reported that the surge is not what people believe it to be. To be honest, John McCain is right that the surge worked: violence has gone down. But it hasn't gone down because of an increased troop presence:

The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq -- it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."

That's right: the U.S. government is paying Sunni militias to join their side. That's your "surge." Sadly, it's the same strategy the government has used again and again, including when the U.S. backed a group of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, which including a younger Osama bin Laden. Back then, they were our best friends because they fought guerilla battles against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Then we promptly abandoned them. And the rest is history.

Posted by Mark at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Wall Street Journal published a particularly nauseating opinion piece yesterday — so nauseating, in fact, that I felt compelled to talk about it. It's called "Why We Went to Iraq," and it is authored by Fouad Ajami, someone who bills himself as a foreign policy expert.

Ajami's complaint begins with Scott McClellan, who last week suggested that the Iraq War was one of choice, not necessity. Ajami argues:

The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America's grief, taunted its power.

While lamenting the way that war critics have "launched a new attack on the origins of the war," Ajami simultaneously creates a brand-new justification for the Iraq War. Previous justifications provided by the Bush administration for invading Iraq included:

• Saddam Hussein provided material support to al-Qaeda
• Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa
• Saddam Hussein was developing biological and chemical weapons
• Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons
• Saddam Hussein was in violation of U.N. Resolution 1441
• Saddam Hussein is trying to take over the Middle East
• Saddam Hussein threw the weapons inspectors out before they had finished their job

Points one, two, four, six, and seven have been debunked outright. Saddam stopped his nuclear program exactly when we thought he did: after the Persian Gulf War. Saddam never had any desire to take over the Middle East; he was perfectly content to run his ego-centric dictatorship. What most Republican students of foreign policy don't understand is that not all dictators are the same. Different dictators have different reasons for ruling. Some, like Saddam, or Turkmenbashi the Great, want to have their own personality cult. Others, like Adolf Hitler, wanted to take over the world. It is for the reason above that Saddam did not cooperate with al-Qaeda: Saddam's was a crazy secular dictatorship; al-Qaeda wished to impose a crazy theocratic dictatorship on the Middle East, which would have been a threat to Saddam's power; thus, the enemy of Saddam's enemy was not his friend simply because they had a shared enemy. It's not as simple as that.

Bush claimed, per point seven, that Saddam threw the U.N. weapons inspectors out before their job was done. It was actually President Bush who told the U.N. weapons inspectors to leave Iraq, and then claimed it was Saddam who had thrown them out, providing another wonderful pretense for war. Bush, the brilliant conflict resolver, felt that the time for diplomacy had ended.

With regard to point three, Saddam did use chemical weapons — but they were chemical weapons the United States gave him back when we were best buddies in the 1980s. (Here's a picture of Saddam Hussein shaking hands with Reagan Administration special envoy Donald Rumsfeld in 1983.)

As for U.N. Resolution 1441, Iraq was in violation of that, but so were some ninety other countries.

Now, back to the op-ed. In three sentences, Ajami syntatically links "9/11" and "Saddam Hussein" the same way the Bush administration did in 2002. First, he invokes "9/11" and the "gathering dangers" thereafter. 9/11 provides the rationale for the War on Terr'. It was not enough, says Ajami, to go after the people that attacked us; we then needed to go after the Arabs that didn't attack us! What a brilliant military strategy: attack people who haven't attacked us! Let the Canadian, Australian, and Azerbaijanian Wars begin!

Okay, okay, so the real policy at work here is preemptive warfare, and in the history of war, it hardly ever goes well. Saddam Hussein is a metonymy for "Arab radicalism," therefore he must be attacked. Why him specifically? Ajami isn't quite clear on this; he suggests that Saddam "had drawn the short straw," leading one to believe that we picked Saddam at random after blindfolding Paul Wolfowitz, spinning him in a circle, and then giving him a thumbtack to place on a giant world map. Too bad he didn't stick the tack into Micronesia; that mission against someone who never attacked us would have been accomplished much faster!

There's one problem with the idea that Saddam Hussein represents "Arab radicalism." This problem is that he doesn't. Conservative theologians have struggled for six years to come up with a word to describe the kinds of people who want to attack us. Because these conservatives want democracy to be rammed into the Middle East like a battering ram, their requirements for a word to describe the people who attack us must relate to the Middle East; if we used the word "terrorist," we'd have to invade the Basque country of Spain. Ajami uses the phrase "Arab radicalism," which sounds great, but doesn't describe very much. Iranians, for example, aren't ethnically Arab, but their government still doesn't like us very much. Also, what qualifies an Arab as radical? Saddam Hussein is a crazy dictator like any other crazy dictator. It just so happens that he's in the Middle East and sits on a honking pile of oil.

And what about the ethnic Arabs who aren't Muslim? Another important &em and implicit — requirement of a definition of "terrorist" is that it must refer to Muslims. Enter the phrases "Islamofascist" and "Islamist," the latter of which Ajami uses in his op-ed. "Islamofascist" has very little meaning; it's a P.R. term designed to conflate Islam and fascism, the latter of which Americans know (or think they know) a lot about. "I may not know what an Islamofascist is, but I know what a fascist is! It stands to reason that they're the same thing! Let's kill them!"

The word "Islamist" similarly has no meaning and is actually insulting to Muslims. What is an Islamist? Someone who believes in Islam? Does it follow, therefore, that people who believe in Islam are terrorists? Would we have called Timothy McVeigh a "Christianist"? Using Ajami's logic, we should, since McVeigh's attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 was terrorism based in his "radical" Christian faith.

Ajami suggests that the United States' policy of preemptive warfare has frightened enough Arab states into combatting terrorism in the Middle East: "If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq." Ajami has here created a conditional statement: "If X conditions are met, then Y results follow." The counterfactual of a conditional statement is a defense against that statement: "If X conditions were not met, then Y results did not follow." Ajami's statement is, "If Islamism is on the ropes [and] if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, [then] no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq."

The question is: are Arab states showing greater resolve in fighting terrorism? Well, we have Iraq, which is currently engaged in its own in-fighting, notably Muqtada al-Sadr against the rest of the government. In Iran, we have Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, who materially supports Shi'a fighters in Iraq. We have Lebanon, which elected members of the terrorist group Hezbollah to the Lebanese Parliament in 2005. We have Saudi Arabia, which, as far as we know, still supports terrorism. In July, 2006, Lebanon and Israel got involved in a war in which Hezbollah scored a moral victory merely by surviving the onslaught of the Israeli military. We have ignored Afghanistan since 2002, and as a result, the Taliban as just as powerful there as they ever were. So — has "this American project in Iraq" put "Islamism on the ropes"? Certainly not. If anything, it has reduced America's diplomatic credentials abroad. America is now not the country of reasoned talks and brokering, but the country of swaggering, militant ignorance that shoots first and asks questions later. Thanks, Iraq War.

Even in numerical terms — in which Ajami claims that terrorists have been "bloodied in Iraq" — reports from the CIA, NSA, and Department of State show that terrorist activities have increased since the start of the Iraq War. Terrorists don't seem to be particularly intimidated by a country whose military is stretched paper-thin in a country in which it doesn't seem likely it will ever leave gracefully.

Ajami also takes a new tack on the WMD argument: "The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith." So we were wrong, but we meant well. The road to Hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. Also, there is plenty of indication that the claims about WMDs were made in bad faith, with the administration picking intelligence that it liked and ignored the intelligence it didn't, regardless of how correct this intelligence was.

He then proceeds to say, Hey, so what if we kept on changing our rationale for the war as each rationale was successively proven wrong or misguided? "The aims of practically every war always shift with the course of combat, and with historical circumstances." He cites the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's focus on slavery as an example of how a war against secession became a war against slavery.

Except that it didn't. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to piss off the Confederacy. Personally, Lincoln had no problem with slavery and he would just as soon have avoided discussion of The Peculiar Institution altogether.

Ajami closes by suggesting that our war in Iraq spared "people of threats and dangers." But it is extremely disingenuous to suggest that our Iraq War policy has preventing more domestic terrorism. There is no evidence to suggest that anything we did or did not do in the War on Terr' has prevented another terrorist attack. Using Ajami's logic, it could have been appointing John Roberts to the Supreme Court that has prevented another terrorist attack. It could have been Ruben Studdard winning American Idol that has prevented another terrorist attack. That we invaded Iraq — a country that hadn't threatened to attack us — has made us safer somehow is a dubious assumption that has little factual support.

But who needs facts? Ajami doesn't! "Five months from now, the American public will vote on this war, in the most dramatic and definitive of ways. There will be people who heed Ambassador Crocker's admonition. And there will be others keen on retelling how we made our way to Iraq." Ajami is blissfully ignorant of the extreme irony that he himself is one of those people desperately retelling how we made our way to Iraq, hoping beyond hope that people's memories are as transient as he thinks they are for them to believe newer, more made-up stories about why we got into Iraq in the first place.

Posted by Mark at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sen. Jim Webb's "Post-9/11 GI Bill" passed the Senate today by a veto-proof majority. The bill, inserted into a war spending bill, would provide higher education funding to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the same way that the GI Bill provided higher education for World War II veterans.

President Bush -- who alleges that he supports the troops, and yet who clearly does not support the troops (despite having given up golf to show his solidarity with them!), is against the legislation. Presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain is also against the legislation. McCain's reasoning? If you give enlisted men and women the choice of staying in the military or going to college for free, guess what: they'd rather go to college. This is offensive to the requirements of President Bush's ongoing War on Terr', which needs meat to throw at the nondescript enemy. Craig Newmark (of Craigslist fame) links to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report showing that enlistment would not decrease if veterans were given better access to higher education.

President Bush, for his part, is against the legislation because he thinks it would cost too much. The Veterans Administration claims the new bill would cost $5.4 billion per year. How much is that? According to the Congressional Budget Office, the War on Terror -- Iraq, Afghanistan, and other operations -- cost over $500 billion as of 2007. Spread over six years, that's roughly $83 billion per year. The president thinks that "too much" is 6.5% of the cost of the War on Terror annually. Here's another number: $50 billion. That's how much money may have been wasted in just the Iraq War.

What would President Bush do if he were faced with passing this legislation or vetoing it? The Republican P.R. machine is very talented, but it would hard for them to argue that educating war veterans is bad for our country. Bush may just take the weasel ground and attempt a pocket veto like he did over the holidays. He doesn't want to sign the bill because he doesn't want his terrorist-meat to leave him. On the other hand, he doesn't want to veto the bill because that would make it seem as though he didn't care about the troops (which he doesn't, unless "empty words" count as supporting the troops).

Posted by Mark at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My new best friend Glenn Greenwald has been liveblogging the Senate debate today regarding the extension of the Protect America Act (PAA), a piece of legislation passed last year that made temporary alterations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The temporary alterations expire Feb. 2. As Greenwald has pointed out, the president has been playing fast and loose with his alleged desire for national security ever since the bill came up for debate. Bush insists that immunity for telecom companies that complied with the administration's request for wiretapping is essential to our national security. In fact, the president cares about national security so much that he's willing to play games with it in order to get what he wants.

Wait, what?

Last August, when the original PAA was passed, Bush spun it as necessary for us to maintain our security; without it, we would be powerless to access terrorists' emails here in the 21st century. Telecom immunity is icing on the cake. Now, if the Senate doesn't vote in favor of making the PAA permanent and enacting telecom immunity, Bush will spin Democrats as the party that wants the terrorists to win. But it's not the Democrats who are using fear to their advantage. Bush has said that he will veto any bill that contains telecom immunity. If Democrats refuse to allow such a provision, and they allow the PAA to expire, Bush will be able to say that they're playing with national security for political reasons. If Democrats pass a 30-day extension to the PAA, though, Bush has said he will veto that, as well:

The administration explicitly admits that the President won't allow an extension because he wants to repeat the success of last August -- when Congressional Democrats capitulated to every Bush demand because they were told they had to act within a matter of days, i.e., before their recess, lest they cause us all to be killed by The Terrorists. "They need the heat of the current law lapsing to get this done," said a senior administration official, courteously granted anonymity by The Politico's Allen to issue these threats.

This veto threat is one of the President's most brazen acts ever, so nakedly exposing the fun and games he routinely plays with National Security Threats. After sending Mike McConnell out last August to warn that we will all die without the PAA, Bush now says that he would rather let it expire than give Congress another 30 days. He just comes right out and announces, then, that he will leave us all vulnerable to a Terrorist Attack unless he not only gets everything he wants from Congress -- all his new warrantless eavesdropping powers made permanent plus full immunity for his lawbreaking telecom partners -- but also gets it exactly when he wants it (i.e., now -- not 30 days from now).

How strange that the PAA is necessary right now so that we can go after terrorists, unless the bill includes a provision that the president doesn't like, in which case, the terrorists will apparently ... what? Wait thirty days before communicating with each other about their dastardly plans? Every American should be outraged at what's going on, here.

What is going on? Your president, while mouthing platitudes about needing the PAA for national security, is more than willing to let the allegedly necessary provisions of PAA expire so that he doesn't have to make a compromise at all. This leads us to two conclusions: one, the president doesn't care about national security; or two, the PAA's provisions aren't actually necessary for national security. If the former is true, then the president arrives at the border of pure evil, as he is willing to place American lives in danger for political expediency. If the latter is true, then PAA's provisions are for something other than national security, and what this other thing is, we don't know. In this latter case, the president is not pure evil, but is instead a schemer, claiming that he needs PAA's provisions, when in fact he doesn't. There's also the issue of telecom immunity. Telecom immunity doesn't immediately protect us from terrorists. What it does do is protect the promises Bush and friends may have made to AT&T, Verizon, et al. in exchange for their cooperation in engaging in warrantless electronic surveillance.

So far, it looks like the Senate has -- narrowly -- defeated a cloture vote. A cloture vote is a vote to cut off debate about a particular piece of legislation. Republicans wanted to invoke cloture and force a vote on the PAA extension; Democrats would have none of it, preferring to either stave the vote off until they got rid of the amendments they didn't like or keep filibustering until Feb. 2, when the PAA expires.

Hopefully they will be able to stave any vote off until Feb. 2, at which time PAA will expire, forcing the president to comply with FISA as he should have always done.

Posted by Mark at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this week, the United Kingdom announced that they would stop using the monicker "war on terrorism." Describing the bombs of last summer, Sir Ken Macdonald said, "The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers. They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way." Also, the phrase "Islamic terrorist" will no longer be used by the government.

It has been hard these past six years to wage war on a concept. "War on terrorism" is in the same vein as "war on drugs" or "war on pornography": whom are you fighting, really? We cannot have unilateral wars on ideas. Wars happen between people and should be referred to as such. Nevertheless, the word "terrorism" should not be thrown out of discourse, for it is useful to describe the actions of civilians who attempt to terrorize other civilians. Again, I refer all readers to Mark Jurgensmeyer's Terror in the Mind of God, which is an excellent primer for understanding how terrorism works.

Words are important. Dr. Robert Thurston of the Miami University history faculty makes a distinction between "terror" and "terrorism": the former is perpetrated by a government upon its own people (cf. France's "Reign of Terror," 1792-3), while the latter is perpetrated by civilians -- whether foreign or domestic -- upon other civilians for the purpose of instilling fear as a tactic of part of a larger plan for something. Furthermore, to use the word "terrorists" homogeneously as President Bush so often does is to create the belief that all terrorists engage in terrorism for the same reasons. Al-Qaeda uses terrorism to further its stated goals of: (1) U.S. withdrawal from Saudi Arabia; (2) elimination of Israel; and (3) a theocratic pan-Islamic alliance. Hezbollah is a religious terrorist group, while Hamas is not religious. The IRA never wanted to take over the world and spread its message of "evil"; it wanted Irish independence. End of story. The PLO wanted independence for Palestine, not to take over the world. The notion that all terrorist organizations have the same aspirations as Adolf Hitler is a faulty one at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst. We were led to believe, for example, that Saddam Hussein wanted to take over the Middle East. In fact, Saddam was content to rule his country with his own personality cult. His aspirations did not extend outside his borders, except when it came to Kuwait, which he thought was his to take, anyway.

The Bush administration has done a thorough job of dismantling complex discourse and replacing it with bumper-sticker slogans. There's no need to understand the intricate historical, linguistic, and religious relationships among all the Middle Eastern countries. All you need to know is that every Middle Eastern country -- except Saudi Arabia! -- wants to destroy Israel, and the United States is here to bring light to darkness. The fact that the ideal solution for Iraq would be to separate it into three states is of no concern: just understand that it's bad. This anti-intellectual and anti-curoisity attitude (don't investigate for yourself; just trust that I'm right!) is endemic of politics for the last six years. Witness it in the domestic sphere as President Bush insists that no one needs to worry about his warrantless wiretapping program because "constitutional safeguards are in place," as he said in Buffalo in 2005.

How's this for a New Years Resolution: don't be complacent with information. When an authority figure tells you something, do as the Great Reagan once suggested: "Trust, but verify."

Posted by Mark at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few years ago, Vice President Cheney articulated his theory of security, which he called “the one percent doctrine.” He said that we should treat a one percent chance of a terrorist attack as though it were a one hundred percent chance of a terrorist threat. It makes for a great bumper sticker, but as a security method, it’s terrible. Because there is an economy of time and space, we can only worry about the things that are most likely to hurt us. This is why we’re more afraid of shark attacks than falling space debris. To inflate a 1% chance of something happening into a 100% chance of something happening is ludicrous beyond ludicrous. And yet, it seems to inform the way the Bush administration deals with risk assessment. Sometimes. It’s hard enough to translate such a stupid theory into intelligible foreign policy, but what makes matters worse is that the Bush administration only adheres to this doctrine when it’s politically expedient.

So Iran might have nuclear weapons, right? Maybe. But it may also be enriching uranium for civilian power generation, which is permitted under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. One of the only reasons that we think Iran might be enriching weapons-grade plutonium is its secretiveness. Iran refuses to let anyone from any international watchdog agency inspect its facilities to ensure that it’s complying with non-proliferation agreements. This could be because it’s actually making nuclear weapons, or it could be because it doesn’t want the international community to see its massive human rights abuses. It also doesn’t want to lose face and be seen as capitulating to foreign powers. The same was true of Iraq: as it turns out, Saddam didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, but his secretiveness was because he didn’t want UN weapons inspectors to see the massive human rights abuses and because he wanted to appear powerful in front of his subjects. When you’re a dictator, you need to appear all-powerful, lest your subjects think they can overthrow you.

Half of the problem with Iran is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both he and President Bush can agree that “compromise” is a euphemism for “being a wuss.” Even if Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad certainly behaves as though it is. Two weeks ago, there was about a 50-50 chance that Iran was secretly developing nuclear weapons, not enriching uranium for civilian power generation. With the release of last week’s national intelligence estimate and the revelation that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, those odds have changed. Still, though, the Bush administration has latched on to any language it can in the NIE to support its case for war with Iran. The president has said that the NIE actually supports his position, since it says there is a “moderate” agreement among all sixteen US intelligence agencies that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons ambitions. In the Bush mindset, that means there is still a chance that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons. For Bush, any probability of something happening must be treated as though it is certainty. He’s the eternal optimist.

Unless it comes to something the president disagrees with. Take global warming. For five years, President Bush refused to believe that global warming was happening and that it was caused by human beings, despite a consensus in the scientific community that it really was happening, and humans really were causing it. When it came to global warming, the man who ignored any contrary opinions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was suddenly a multilateralist, willing to entertain all points of view. He didn’t want to make decisions too hastily, since there were still some dissenters on the global warming front. (Actually, there were hardly any at all.) The reason that Bush was loathe to believe in global warming was the solution to the problem: cut down greenhouse gas emissions. That meant cutting down fossil fuel use, spending money developing cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels, and possibly cutting greenhouse gas emissions by cutting industrial production. All of these activities are directly at odds with Bush’s personal and professional constituencies: namely, energy companies. The second solution -- spending money on alternatives -- has the double whammy of both costing energy companies revenue from fossil fuels and requiring them to spend money on technological innovation when they would rather just call up the government and have Congress pass laws exempting them from new requirements or forcing new markets to behave like old ones. They’re used to this, and they’re not going to like having to engage in actual change. Bush may have lost some cherry board of directors and/or consulting jobs.

When it came to global warming, a 1% chance that it wasn’t true was treated as a 100% chance that it wasn’t true. Let’s not be too hasty. After all, we’re only talking about the planet. It was probably the film An Inconvenient Truth that, more than anything else, catalyzed popular support for a serious look at the damage humans are doing to the environment. Hence Bush’s cold shoulder toward Al Gore when the latter won the Nobel Prize: it was Gore, whom Bush defeated in 2000, who forced the president’s hand in admitting something that he didn’t want to. Like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saddam Hussein, Bush doesn’t want to be seen as capitulating on anything. Changing one’s mind is a sign of weakness, even if you were wrong the whole time. No matter how wrong your course may be, it is more important to continue on that course than it is to change to the correct course. Only sissy girls and John Kerry change their minds in the face of new information. Even if Bush rides his horse straight into quicksand, at least they’ll say that he never wavered. He’s dead now, but that’s not the important part.

The one percent doctrine leads to paranoia, which is a hallmark of dictators. Paranoia leads to civil liberties abuses, like warrantless wiretapping and torture. Everything else takes a back seat to the probability that there will be a terrorist attack, which is necessarily one hundred percent at all times. It’s a great doctrine for keeping a populace in a state of constant fear, and using that fear to get whatever you want. Warrantless wiretapping? You got it! US citizens being denied habeas corpus? As long as it will keep me from being blown up! And while we’re at it, let’s spend billions of dollars to create a government department second only in size to the Defense Department that manages to bungle security while at the same time vacuuming up taxpayers’ money. What’s even worse is that the Bush administration itself doesn’t adhere to its own one percent doctrine -- unless, of course, there’s an election to be won or money to be made.

Posted by Mark at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s amazing what privacy a simple wall can afford. Once you’re out of sight of someone else, everything you do becomes secret. No one else knows that you’re picking your nose, not washing your hands after you use the bathroom, or walking around in your underpants. Privacy, though, doesn’t extend only to those things we’d rather people not find out about. Privacy exists as an end unto itself. There’s no reason why people need to know what television shows we watch, even if those shows are innocuous network programming. At its most important, the idea of privacy allows us to engage in conduct that hurts no one but ourselves. For a person who has been born and raised in a democratic country such as ours, the idea that external forces would care about our opinions or our sexual habits is mind-boggling. Part of what keeps a dictatorship in power, though, is controlling the private lives of its citizens and ensuring that those citizens aren’t thinking things or doing things that the dictator might see as a threat to his power. When privacy has no foes to grapple with, its existence goes unnoticed. But when privacy comes up against someone trying to peer into someone’s window or listen on someone’s phone, we find out how effective our society’s privacy laws are.

For the last six years, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their friends at the National Security Agency have been spying on U.S. citizens for no other reason than those citizens may have been making phone calls to foreign countries that are associated with terrorism. This should immediately evoke rebuke from people who understand the necessity of privacy: why does the Bush administration need to know whom I’m calling? Yes, there’s a chance that I could be calling a terrorist compatriot in Saudi Arabia and working on plans to destroy a national landmark, causing millions of dollars in damage and thousands of lives. But there’s an equally good chance that I could be calling my poor, sick Saudi grandmother. Who is to know?

Prior to 1978, no one really knew. Despite the government’s insistence that the president’s ability to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance is a no-brainer, the history of foreign intelligence surveillance in this country shows that notion to be an outright lie. The Supreme Court upheld and reversed itself at least twice over the issue of warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance. President Nixon believed that, as president, he had carte blanche to conduct surveillance on whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Over the course of two years, Church Committee pounded out several volumes of testimony regarding intelligence abuses, leading to 1978’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA codified and put into plain terms where, when, and how the executive could conduct foreign intelligence surveillance, which is defined as surveillance of foreign persons within the United States. Despite what Joe Klein may think, no one needs a warrant to conduct surveillance outside the United States upon foreign targets. Within the United States, the government is bound by normal warrant requirements if it wishes to conduct surveillance on “United States persons” within U.S. borders.

And yet, FISA wasn’t enough for the Bush administration. In 2005, we learned that the administration had been conducting warrantless wiretapping, in the process potentially capturing the communications of “United States persons” – defined in FISA as U.S. citizens or nationals – something that is expressly forbidden under FISA. Realistically, though, we don’t know what communications had been captured, since the program was secret. Our privacy laws failed us because our leader decided that FISA was too cumbersome, and therefore, used an as-yet undiscovered “inherent” authority to overstep the law and do things his way. Welcome to the Sinatra administration.

A year later, we found out that the administration had asked several U.S. phone companies to help it in its spying. “Would you please turn over customer records to us?” it said. “Well, why not?” they replied – all of them except Qwest Communications, which looked at the government’s request and said, “Gee, this looks like it invades our customers’ privacy and could open us up to litigation. No thanks; we’ll pass on this one.” But the other phone companies gleefully complied with the administration’s request. AT&T even built a secret room in its San Francisco substation where government agents could monitor Internet traffic. AT&T even wrote a program that could search voice and data records for particular keywords, assessing whether or not the results were actually relevant to terrorism. All of this without a court order; the phone companies did this voluntarily.

In the end, Qwest Communications may have done the right thing. The phone companies definitely did break several privacy laws, and now they’re the objects of several lawsuits. As it turns out, phone companies can’t give away information to people who ask for it, not even if they really, really want to help, in the same way that a Boy Scout helps an old woman cross the street. No, unlike that boy scout, phone companies must be compelled – by a court order, signed by a real, live federal judge, who has looked at actual evidence and determined that, yes, these records are necessary in order to prosecute a crime – to give up that information.

But spying may have taken a new turn. The New York Times reported Saturday that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has been monitoring phone calls between the United States and Latin America in an attempt to find information about drugs. The same article says that the government wanted access, in 2001, to Qwest’s most localized phone switching equipment, which “could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order.”

To what end?

While it may be easy to understand why the federal government would want to monitor calls overseas – it’s where our enemies are, after all – it’s much more difficult to understand why the government needs to spy on individual neighborhoods. Perhaps it wants to see if Wally and the Beaver are meeting to buy heroin from Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs. Is it concerned that Ward is running a tax-evasion ring with Fred McMurray and Sheriff Andy Taylor? (Note: I couldn’t remember offhand who Fred McMurray’s character was in My Three Sons, but who remembers that, anyway?) Spying on individual neighborhoods is no less illegal than conducting warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance, but it is a whole lot more sinister. Which brings us to the question of the week: “To what end?”

Spying is supposed to serve a logical end, beyond merely just spying. It’s almost as though listening to other people’s phone conversations is something they do in Quantico just for giggles. “Can you believe that Donna Reed is having a lesbian affair with June Cleaver?” No one’s worried about whether or not there’s a KAOS agent living undercover in Anytown, USA. They’re more fascinated that there can be such a thing as “identical cousins.”

The mundanities of our everyday lives are just as deserving of protection as our seditious political opinions, our heathen sexual orientations, and our union memberships. In some ways, discovering that the government has been listening in on our gossip is more disconcerting than if it were listening in on our conference calls to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It means that the government is willing to do things without a reason. It doesn’t make any sense. It means that we don’t know what to do if we want to put our heads down and comply with what we’re told. This is another facet of dictatorships: capriciousness. In a dictatorship, a person can be arrested for any reason, at any time, even if the person were objectively doing nothing wrong. "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged,” said Cardinal Richelieu. The trouble with the attitude of “Si no te metías con nadie, nada pasó” is that it presumes that the state intelligence apparatus behaves rationally and won’t arbitrarily prosecute, imprison, or execute someone just to “make an example” of him. In a democracy, keeping your head down and your mouth shut keeps the government out of your hair; in a dictatorship, there’s no guarantee that complying with the law will keep you alive and out of prison.

For this reason – and others – privacy is valuable in itself. It prevents the government from making up reasons why you should be prosecuted. It keeps democracy honest, and when privacy breaks down, tyranny seeps in, especially when things of no importance suddenly become a matter of great importance to the government. “The excruciating minutiae of everyday life,” as Elaine from Seinfeld called it, is our business and no one else’s. Michael Hayden, stay away from my underpants.

Posted by Mark at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

In Robert Redford's film Lions for Lambs, Tom Cruise's Senator Jasper Irving demands of Meryl Streep's reporter Janine Roth, "Do you want to win the War on Terror? Yes or no?"

It's an important question. It's also a trick question.

As most peaceniks or military wonks will tell you (given a chance), terror is an emotion and terrorism is a tactic, and the phrase "war on terrorism" is a figure of speech.

Trust me on terrorism as a tactic, and an old and widespread tactic: state terror answered with popular terrorism goes back at least to the early stages of the repression of Jewish customs under the Selucid Empire in the second century before the Christian era, answered by an insurgency led initially by the Jewish patriot Mattathias and, after his death, by his sons, notably Judah, "the Hammer" (the Maccabees, celebrated in the minor Festival of Hanukkah).

According to the First Book of the Maccabees, one royal decree ordered death for any women who had their sons circumcised, with death also "for their families and those who circumcised them; and they hung the infants from their mothers' necks" (1.60-61). The response to such decrees, the story continues, included an act of defiance in which Mattathias kills a collaborating Jew and "the king's officer who was forcing them to sacrifice" (2.23-25), possibly to King Antiochus as the god Baal Shamin. Then Mattathias "and his sons fled to the hills" (2.28), "and all who became fugitives to escape their troubles joined them and reinforced them. They organized an army, and struck down sinners in their anger," i.e., Jews who accepted Greek culture, "and lawless men in their wrath; the survivors fled to the Gentiles for safety" (2.43-44). The Maccabees and their followers won often enough and cemented enough popular support to move from guerilla warfare to open warfare and, eventually, victory, and respectability.

In the 20th century of the Christian era, terrorism was also used, at least occasionally, in the struggles for national liberation from occupiers ranging from the Nazis to the British to the earlier-annexed Boers/Afrikaners to the French and Americans: from occupied Yugoslavia to Ireland and England, to Palestine and to what was the Union of South Africa, to Algeria and Indochina.

So terrorism is a tactic – old, well-established, and nasty – and we can't literally make war against a tactic.

So let's rephrase Senator's Irving's question. I'll suggest, "Do you want to live in a world without terrorism?"

It might be a world without terrorism because no one wants to commit terrorism, or it might be a world without terrorism because no one dares: a world so well policed that terrorism is impossible.

I would like a world without state terror and non-governmental terrorism, a world where all large disputes could be resolved peacefully, or, a distant second best, with totally professional militaries fighting highly limited, set-piece battles, far from civilian populations.

Such a world would be a large step toward utopia. And with that comes a problem.

How does one get to where no groups have grievances so grave they are willing to try to right them by killing people? How does one get to a peaceful utopia peacefully? In a world of limited resources and rapidly-growing populations, in a world of nations large and small, ethnic groups, and tribes, how do you allow only current states to use lethal violence? Would it be right to limit some right to violence only to established states?

(If you celebrate the Fourth of July and the American Revolution, you should think carefully before denying violence to independence movements.)

I don't know how to get to even a modest utopia; I do know that 20th-century attempts to build immodest utopias led to such horrors as the Nazis and Stalinists, Cambodia under Pol Pot and his murderous followers.

Real-world utopianism can lead to a dystopia, to a bad world. We'd get to dystopia more directly and much faster in moving to where people might want to commit terrorism, but couldn't.

For a world kept by force totally free of terrorism, we'd need, I think, police states on a world-wide scale. For a USA free from the threat of terrorism, we'd need, I think, a totalitarian police-state here and endless "police actions" abroad.

So to "Do you want to win the War on Terror? Yes or no?" I think we should reply, No, not if you mean by victory another bloody adventure in utopia-building, or Zero-Tolerance through dystopian near-zero freedom.

For other alternatives, I'll go to the 2002 formulation of an old-fashioned Republican: retired US Air Force Lt. General and National Security Advisor to Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft. With a lot of effort, international cooperation, courage, and common sense, we can "win the war on terrorism" in the sense that "we can break its back so that it is a horrible nuisance and not a paralyzing influence on our societies" ("Remarks by Brent Scowcroft at the U.S. Institute of Peace Conference on America's Challenges in a Changed World," September 5, 2002).

Short of terrorists with nukes or, far less likely, effective biological weapons of mass death, terrorism is horrible when it happens, but unlikely to happen to most of us. Never for the victims and their families and friends, but as a social/political issue, terrorism for Americans outside of Iraq and Afghanistan is still mostly "a horrible nuisance." If we show some courage, we won't be terrorized, and the threats we face can be minimized.

So toughen up, my fellow Americans; for the foreseeable future, that is the one possible and tolerable victory.

Richard D. Erlich is an Emeritus Professor in English, now living in Ventura County, California.

Posted by Mark at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Students at a Florida high school who started a peace group were met with a level of appalling ignorance that simultaneously makes me fear for the future of this country and also doesn't surprise me, given that George W. Bush was re-elected:

The heckling began early in the school year, according to group members. They say they were putting small posters promoting peace on friends' lockers with their permission. They thought it was OK, because the cheerleaders and football players had signs on theirs. Eventually, though, group members say they were told by the school's administration they could no longer hang up the posters.

"People tore them down and drew swastikas and 'white power' stuff on them," Lauren said.

Skylar had similar things written on her posters.

"Someone taped an 'I Love Bush' sign over my 'Wage Peace' sign," she said. "So I tore it down, threw it away, and the whole commons starting booing. I walk by later and find that someone has completely tore my sign down and placed an 'I Love America, Because America Loves War' sign up.' "

I hate peace -- oh, and while we're at it, white power! Maybe Michael Moore was right when he blamed our militaristic culture for the levels of violence in America in Bowling for Columbine. Since when is peace automatically a bad thing?

Posted by Mark at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Long before I moved to California, Dianne Feinstein earned my ire for her pro-gun control stance. (Note that "pro-gun control," as used by the gun control lobby, doesn't mean "enforcing stricter gun laws," but rather "outlawing guns or making them really, really hard to obtain.")

Then I moved to California and was forced to write letters to her, as I did earlier this week. She disappointed me by being one of only two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote in favor of Judge Michael Mukasey for Attorney General. This made me upset: how, in the face of all that we have seen over the last several years, could she vote for a candidate who would not take a firm stance on torture? But even more troublesome was his stance on executive power; Mukasey does believe that some heretofore unknown "inherent" power to break the law exists in Article II of the Constitution. Where does this power exist? Ostensibly, if you play Article II backwards, you can hear the words saying, "By virtue of the fact that the president is granted the power to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president is permitted to ignore statues that infringe upon his duties to lead the armed forces, especially in times of war, though there is no guarantee that this is necessarily the case. These duties consist of, but are not limited to: foreign and domestic spying; suspension of the writ of habeas corpus; torture, even when in violation of domestic and international law; legislative authority; and judicial authority. Oh, and by the way, Paul is dead."

I find it strange that Article II, written in 1787, would predict Paul McCartney's death, but hey, when you play things backward, strange things happen.

But Friday, Dianne Feinstein earned my eternal ire, and just as I was about to write her another letter. Feinstein is in favor of legal immunity for telecommunications companies that aided the Bush administration's illegal, poorly-justified, warrantless wiretapping program:

In a statement at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering legislation to extend the Bush administration's electronic surveillance program, Feinstein said the companies should not be "held hostage to costly litigation in what is essentially a complaint about administration activities."

She endorsed a recent statement by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that companies assured by top administration officials that the surveillance program was legal "should not be dragged through the courts for their help with national security."

This is not a case of innocent telephone companies being bullied by the big, bad Bush administration. These companies voluntarily helped the administration engage in domestic surveillance. The telecom companies' lawyers claim that they were assured by the administration that the activities were legal, and furthermore, their own legal departments said that the activities were legal. "We thought it was legal!" was their claim.

But the claim falls flat when you consider that Qwest, after reviewing the administration's request, refused to comply because, in its opinion, the request was illegal! Since at least one phone company realized that what the administration was asking was illegal, the assertion that phone companies were only trying to help is invalid. If at least one company realized the plan was illegal, then it would have been possible for other companies to realize it was illegal. Perhaps they just thought they would never be caught. Perhaps they hoped that their compliance would lead to favorable legislation -- this could be a sort of in-kind campaign donation.

Feinstein, though, says that she is open to suggestions, including the suggestion that lawsuits can go ahead, with caps on damages.

That's a fine idea! (And I'm serious about this.) We don't need to litigate the phone companies out of business; rather, we just need to rule against them to (1) get a precedent set to say, definitively, phone companies may not voluntarily comply with requests for information. The US Code is clear about this, anyway, but apparently we need to say it a few times before it sinks in. Also, (2) punitive damages that are great -- but not too great -- will get the message through that violations of the law will not go unpunished. This plan is fine, but a blanket immunity only lets the administration know that it can break the law without consequences.

Posted by Mark at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rich Erlich sent me an article by Andrew Sullivan about the Bush administration's torture policies.

Sullivan argues that the Mukasey nomination goes beyond merely defining "waterboarding" as torture. The Republicans, he says, are at the end of an elaborate chess game with Democrats about what torture is and is not. On the one hand, if Democrats don't pass legislation specifically prohibiting waterboarding as torture, pro-torture Republicans like President Bush and National Review shill Rich Lowry will take that as an implicit endorsement of torture (even though, as Sullivan points out, waterboarding was used by the Nazis in World War II, and the United States prosecuted Nazis for using waterboarding). On the other hand, if Democrats do pass legislation that specifically prohibits waterboarding, then the use of torture will be normalized in U.S. law. "And so a new precedent will be set; and the torture program, already well-established, will further entrench itself into US law and practices. The current law is not in any way mysterious," says Sullivan. Current U.S. law already outlaws "severe mental or physical pain or suffering," a description that, says Sullivan, has always included waterboarding -- until the Bush administration came along. Outlawing it by name will only normalize the use of torture.

And what happens at that point? Democracy falls apart, says Sullivan. For one thing, Bush would veto any law that specifically prohibits a particular act of "enhanced interrogation." (In a Wall Street Journal op-ed of a few weeks ago, a former Reagan Justice Department official said, in the same piece, that over-broad definitions of torture that don't outlaw specific acts open our soldiers up to prosecution and we shouldn't outlaw specific acts because that hampers our ability to effectively conduct interrogations. Does this make any sense?) Or, he would attach a signing statement that gives him the right to ignore such legislation if, based on his own made-up interpretations of his powers, he decides he wants to.

Once torture becomes normalized, it can be used anytime, anywhere:

What this complacent view doesn't grapple with is that these torture techniques can be used against any terror suspect; that such suspects are not subject to due process under president Bush's understanding of his powers; that such suspects can be captured within the United States; that they can be citizens; and that the war that justifies this extraordinary power is defined as permanent. That is why combining the power to detain without charge with the power to torture is an effective suspension of the rule of law and the Constitution. And such a suspension is astonishingly broad and open-ended.

Witness the Jose Padilla fiasco. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was held incommunicado and denied his right of habeas corpus for two years for allegedly plotting to detonate a "dirty bomb" (a non-nuclear explosive that would, if detonated, release radioactive material). There was no complex legal issue to grapple with in that case, no issues of jurisdiction or standing as with Guántanamo Bay. Padilla was a U.S. citizen, captured on U.S. territory. End of story. By any measure of legality, he should have been held in a civilian prison and given his day in court like any other civilian. The Bush administration, however, wanted to prosecute him as an "enemy combatant" and strip him of his Constitutional rights. Because, you know, in this War on Terr', we can't afford to give even U.S. citizens access to courts, as that could compromise national security. (The Bush administration has also argued that the War on Terr' is so drastically different from other wars that U.S. judges shouldn't even be able to adjudicate legal issues relating to this war, because they just don't have the experience and understanding to deal with the unfathomable threats to national security that might occur.)

Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court put the kaibosh on the Bush administration and ordered Padilla to be charged with a crime or released. The Bush administration did charge him with a crime, but it wasn't even the "dirty bomb" plot for which he was originally arrested.

For Sen. Chuck Schumer to compromise on the issue of waterboarding is potentially very troubling. What are the Democrats afraid of? That Bush is going to continue to make stupid statements about their do-nothingness to the media? Why should the Democrats care what Bush thinks? The part of the country that dislikes them already dislikes them, and Bush doesn't need to convince that part of the country. The part of the country that likes them won't be swayed by Bush, since that part of the country knows that Bush is a moron. Are they afraid that Bush will shove them into a locker and take their collective lunch money? What's going on, here? It sounds as though Democrats are internalizing the statements Bush makes about them. If that's the case, we need to elect a less neurotic Congress in 2008.

Thanks, Rich!

UPDATE

Just in case you weren't sure whether or not waterboarding counted as torture, four retired JAGs (Judge Advocates General; JAGs are military lawyers) sent a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asserting that waterboarding is, according to active duty JAGs, "unanimously and unambiguously [...] inhumane and illegal and would constitute a violation of international law, to include Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions."

Furthermore, perhaps in an effort to dispel the myth of the 24 torture scenario (a scenario in which we need to torture a suspect so as to get information about an imminent threat; Rudy Giuliani has often used this falsehood as a justification for torture; professional military interrogators say that such a situation never occurs), the JAGs state that "[c]ruelty and torture -- no less than wanton killing -- is neither justified nor legal in any circumstance."

They conclude by reaffirming, unambiguously, that "[w]aterboarding detainees amounts to illegal torture in all circumstances. To suggest otherwise -- or even to give credence to such a suggestion -- represents both an affront to the law and the cores values of our nation."

Hmm, perhaps this War on Terr' isn't so different, after all? But that answer is too simplistic. The better answer, and no doubt the one that Rush Limbaugh would use, is that these former JAGs hate America and want to see the terrorists win.

Posted by Mark at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, the president continued to lambast Congress for not doing what he wants. The position he's in is understandable: from January 2001 to January 2007, President Bush has had essentially complete control of Congress. He has always been able to have it do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. Once the Democrats became in charge of Congress last January, Bush has had to compromise.

Unfortunately, that's not his style. No, Bush's style is not to give in even an iota. If anyone disagrees with him, it's the other person who is wrong. Bush knows, in his heart, that what he's doing is right, even if others don't share his vision.

To that end, Bush said, "It's hard to imagine a more cynical political strategy than trying to hold hostage funding for our troops in combat and our wounded warriors in order to extract $11 billion in additional social spending." Yes, what could be "a more cynical political strategy" than trying to tie social funding to war funding? Offhand, I might say that "starting an unjustified war on knowingly false pretenses with the express purpose of making boatloads of cash for you and a few of your friends, resulting in the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops, the wounding of thousands more, and the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, all the while professing that you care about those same troops while forcing them to scrape by with substandard equipment and healthcare" is more cynical. But then again, I didn't look up "cynical" in the dictionary. Is it some kind of motorcycle engine?

Yes, it's Congress' fault that things aren't getting done in Washington. After six years of scandals piling up on scandals, we don't need investigations into where $9 billion -- in cash -- of your taxpayer money went once it was flown to Iraq in a cargo plane. We don't need investigations into whether or not our government is torturing people in the name of fighting the War on Terr'. We don't need to know whether or not U.S. telephone companies, in explicit violation of federal law, handed subscriber information to the Bush administration without a court order and without the knowledge of anyone outside the administration. And we certainly don't need to look into the possibly intentional intelligence failures that led to this war in Iraq, the very war that President Bush wants more money to fight, framed as though it were a just, inevitable war that the Scrooge McDucks of Congress don't want to pay for. After all, it clearly wasn't the Republican Congress -- the one that has been in charge for six years -- that decided not to give our troops adequate armor all in the name of funding this war on the cheap. Clearly, that must have been the work of Democrats. Republicans Support Our Troops. (If it's a bumper sticker, it must be true.)

For Congress to exercise its constitutional power of the purse and attach conditions to presidential spending is mind-boggling! To think that Congress would want to exert power and attempt to check the president in a time of war! Do they want al-Qaeda to win? Or Saddam Hussein? Who are we fighting, again? Anyway, whoever we're fighting, it's clear that the Democrats are on their side. They should step aside and allow the president to exercise the explicit wartime powers granted him in the Constitution: powers like warrantless wiretapping, permitting torture and extraordinary rendition, and suspension of habeas corpus. I could go on, but these are very technical constitutional matters that the American people wouldn't understand, so just trust me when I say that these powers are all there. I mean, President Bush wouldn't assert that he has powers that he really doesn't! That would violate the oath he took to uphold the Constitution!

But help is on the way. The president will be enacting some policies by Administrative Order, allowing him to bypass this "do-nothing" Congress and get the people's work done. What that work is, exactly, is classified, but no doubt it's very important and will in no way benefit a small cadre of very wealthy, very connected constituents.

If Democrats were serious about compromising with the president, they'd do whatever it is that he wants. If that isn't the very definition of "compromise," then waterboarding is some kind of torture. (But even if it is, it must not be, because We Do Not Torture. I saw that on a bumper sticker, too.) Just ask Michael Mukasey: so what if the Army prohibits waterboarding? It's a trifle! So what if the president believes that he has implied, extra-constitutional wartime powers? Why shouldn't he? In a time of war, the executive trumps everyone; he knows best how to lead us, and trying to assert gobbledygook about "checks" and "balances" and "abuse of power" only serves to strengthen and embolden our enemies. What's really cynical is the belief that, if we destroy our Constitution, then there has been no point in allegedly defending our freedoms.

I mean, c'mon! That was only half the reason for the War on Terr'. The other half was the money! So even if the Constitution does get shredded, then at least Halliburton, Northrup Grumman, and United Defense have made outrageous amounts of cash. And isn't that worth dying for?

Posted by Mark at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Because if he isn't, he should be. Read his column today in The New York Times in which he dispels the myth of "Islamofascism," a philosophy invented out of whole cloth by the neoconservatives "because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t."

Much like we envisioned communism during the Cold War as a monolithic philosophy operated from an underground bunker in Moscow, Muslim extremism is all the same no matter where you go. All Muslim terrorists want the same things, they should be treated the same way, and are, in all significant ways, the same. A nuanced view of foreign relations -- one that takes into account the individual histories, geographies, economics, and politics of the countries involved -- is for pussies.

Krugman also points that bombing Iran wouldn't do very much good, and points to last year's week-long war between Israel and Lebanon as an example. "Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead," he says. The news stories out of last year's war were not that Israel successfully defended its territory, "winning" the war. The stories instead focused on how much Hezbollah was able to resist the Israeli attack and defend itself. Everyone in the international community was surprised that Hezbollah wasn't as damaged as they thought it would be. Hezbollah itself even declared a strategic victory, since they were able to take everything Israel threw at it. The international community would respond with super condemnation if the United States attacked Iran.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice believes in diplomacy in Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney wants to nuke 'em. Thankfully, it appears that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is on Condie's side. The United States couldn't handle a war with Iran; every one of our military brass has said that we're stretched too thin to afford another war -- unless we held a draft, which no civilian and no military commander wants.

In his excellent and oft-cited (by me) essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell condemns the use of the word "fascism," since its meaning has been so diluted by people who throw it around at anyone they dislike. "Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different," Orwell writes. This is particularly true of words used in politics. Though the word theory has a technical definition among scientists, it can just as easily have a pejorative meaning among like-minded creationists for whom the "private definition" of theory is "something that hasn't been found to be true," as in, "It's just a theory." Orwell offers examples of words like "democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice." All these words have technical definitions, but are manipulated so as to allow the maximum amount of demagoguery to be extracted from them.

Krugman correctly points out that "Islamofascism" is something made up by the Right to justify a continued War on Terr' -- including a War on Terr' that has nothing to do with al-Qaeda, the people who originally attacked us on September 11, leading to this War on Terr'. In fact, thanks to our neglect, al-Qaeda is now just as powerful as it ever was. As we have spent the last four years alternatively fighting in Iraq and then cleaning up the mess we caused, we have ignored al-Qaeda and Afghanistan.

The truth is that terror, as Mark Jurgensmeyer can tell you, doesn't come from a particular religion, or even a particular desire. People are motivated to terrorism in all religions, and for different reasons. It's too bad the American people aren't smart enough to understand that they're being duped. Thanks, Paul, but I fear that you're preaching to the choir. The people who read NYT already know this!

Posted by Mark at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You really know how to steal my heart. You know that I find it adorable when you suggest, like you did last month in your Senate confirmation hearings, that the president can ignore laws passed by Congress, based on national security.

Okay, you didn't say that. But you did a great runaround by saying, according to The Wall Street Journal, the president "'does not stand above the law. But the law emphatically includes the Constitution.' And that Constitutional authority, he said, includes the President's power to defend the country."

What a quandry! The president has to uphold the law, but to uphold the law, sometimes, apparently, he has to break it. But when he does break it, it's for our own good. Just trust us.

Because you'll have to trust us. Because we won't tell you how the president is breaking the law, whether or not he is breaking the law, and what plots have or haven't been foiled. Because we, as the American people, have no right to know how the Constitution is being broken by the officials we elected, or whether or not that breakage is even warranted.

You know all the right words!

There are some people who might suggest that the president is never, ever allowed to break the law, under any circumstances, because the Constitution never allows the president to break the law, and makes absolutely no distinction whatsoever between the president's powers in times of war or in times of peace, lending no credence to bogus theories that the president somehow has brand-new powers in wartime.

Those same people might use the conservative straw man of "activist judges" against you, suggesting that you might turn George W. Bush into an "activist president" who looks to non-existent laws and poorly-reasoned theories to overturn actual laws passed by Congress.

But that would be shameful of them. They don't know that you're really trying to protect the country, and that keeping us in ignorance serves only to keep our innocence about how our Constitution is being thwarted so as to prevent the terrorists from thwarting the Constitution that you already thwarted.

I love you, Mikey.

Posted by Mark at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From there "I shouldn't be surprised about this, but my mind is blown nonetheless" department comes this month's Rolling Stone feature story about the tremendous government waste in Iraq. The source of this waste is government contractors, who are given no-bid contracts independent of their qualifications. (A company called Custer Battles was awarded a $15 million contract, despite being in business for only a year, thanks to Mike Battles' political connections.)

Companies like KBR (formerly a Halliburton subsidiary) and Bechtel charged the government for services it didn't offer, and overcharged it for constructing shoddy buildings that were inhabitable. This is due largely to the "cost-plus" arrangement with private contractors: the more money they spend, the more money they make. Build a building that cost $100,000 in actual supplies and labor, charge the government $5 million, and then pocket not only that difference, but the 3% profit you're guaranteed on top of your spending.

Remember when Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, had $12 billion in cash delivered to Baghdad? Ostensibly it was to pay vendors and contractors. But of that original $12 billion, $8.8 billion -- or 73% -- is unaccounted for.

Not only is it the waste that's appalling, but it's the government's carefree attitude toward it; indeed, the government is allowing and encouraging such fraud to happen because it is deeply in bed with the contractors. Government official gives out cherry contracts; company profits; when government official leaves, he finds cherry job at company. And the cycle continues. Perhaps that person will once again join the government (as with Dick Cheney -- formerly Secretary of Defense, then CEO of Halliburton, now Vice President).

When our president says that he cares about the troops, he clearly doesn't. Let me make myself clear again: President Bush does not care about the welfare of the troops. He only wants meat to fight in his war. I'll leave you with my favorite quotation from the story:

What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

Posted by Mark at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Former New York governor Mario Cuomo has an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times in which he discusses Congress' abdication of its authority to declare war. "Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this constitutional mandate was not erased by the actions of timid Congresses since World War II that allowed eager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without a 'declaration' by Congress," he writes.

Art. I § 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress -- and only Congress -- the power "[t]o declare war." Since the Constitution is not a document of exclusion (meaning the only powers the government has are those that are explicitly delineated), no other branch of government may declare war. Over the last forty years, says Cuomo, Congress has begun to abdicate its constitutional authority to declare war, through legislation such as the War Powers Act, which allows the president to place troops in combat for up to ninety days without a formal declaration of war. It's arguable that this legislation is unconstitutional, as the Constitution does not allow Congress to delegate these powers to anyone else.

Cuomo's analysis of the possible constitutional showdown is very good: if Congress were to resist Bush's calls for war, Bush would take the issue to the courts. While it may seem dastardly for Bush to insist that he has powers that are exactly contrary to the powers given to him in the Constitution, he has done things before that are just as outrageous, such as insisting that both he and Vice President Cheney are not subject to laws governing declassification of documents in the executive branch.

While Cuomo believes that the conservative-leaning Supreme Court would back up a Bush assertion that he has the power to send troops to war, I find this hard to believe. It's very clearly stated in the Constitution that only Congress has the power to declare war, and for the Supreme Court to suggest otherwise would be reprehensible and even more of a blow to their legitimacy. Nevertheless, Cuomo is right in that Congress needs to start enforcing its own obligations, because Bush's executive branch -- the branch that selectively enforces the laws that he agrees with -- certainly won't.

Posted by Mark at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Ramirez is a right-leaning political cartoonist for the ostensibly right-leaning Investor's Business Daily, and today he really ticked me off.

The editorial cartoon comes via USA Today and its Friday wrap-up of political cartoons (Ramirez's is number 5).

I have reproduced the editorial cartoon below, pursuant to my rights of "criticism" and "comment" under 17 U.S.C. 107.

Ramirez's cartoon seems to suggest that, if we don't expand spying authority the way the president wants -- which is to say, in a way that removes or restricts judicial oversight -- then we will suffer an attack. This syllogism is just as incorrect backward as it is forward: if we haven't been attacked, then our expansion of spying authority must have worked. In both cases, the logic is flawed.

The statement "if we don't expand our spy authority, we will be attacked" is flawed because it fails to take into account the facts that (1) we can be attacked even if we do expand our surveillance powers; and (2) expansion of our spying authority doesn't necessarily mean that we will be preventing attacks. The administration has refused to release any information about specific terror plots that may or may not have been foiled due to warrantless wiretapping; the American people are expected to trust the administration's assertion that that has been the case.

Beyond logic, the Bush administration has been trying to tell us that this is a new conflict that judges aren't qualified to pass rulings on, and thus the administration -- which is the expert in all matters relating to terrorism -- should have the last word on the regulation of its own wiretapping powers.

It's very disingenuous to suggest, as Ramirez does, that an expansion of spying powers is necessary to prevent another attack. We have no idea that this is the case because we, the American people, are being purposefully kept in the dark about the activities being done by our government. Ramirez's cartoon encourages tyranny, which, strangely enough, I thought this "war on terrorism" was supposed to fight?

Posted by Mark at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have written in this space before about President Bush's illegal, warrantless, poorly-justified wiretapping program. Now, The New York Times editorializes about changes President Bush would like to make to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which governs when, how, and why the U.S. government engages in electronic surveillance. According to the Times, Bush "has submitted a bill that would enact enormous, and enormously dangerous, changes to the 1978 law on eavesdropping." I was unable to find the bill in THOMAS, the Library of Congress' searchable legislation database, so it must be a very new bill, indeed.

But the search did turn up two other bills regarding FISA. One, authored by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), would make good changes to FISA. I like Specter because he is, in Elizabeth's words, "an old-school conservative," meaning that he wants the government out of his business. Specter was livid when he learned about Bush's wiretapping program -- which is to say, when he read the newspaper in December, 2005, because Bush never informed Congress about the program. Specter was one of the program's biggest critics, and in his bill, S. 187, he makes it clear what he thinks about the president's bogus assertions that he has "inherent" constitutional powers to engage in warrantless wiretapping:

Nothing in this Act shall be deemed to amend those provisions of FISA concerning any wire or radio communication sent from outside the United States to a person inside the United States. The constitutionality of such interceptions shall be determined by the courts, including the President’s claim that his article II authority supersedes FISA.

Yeah! I have a love-hate relationship with Sen. Specter, since he will champion civil liberties, but he will also cut deals, as he did with the president over Samuel Alito (Specter agreed to pass Alito through the Senate Judiciary Committee in exchange for the promise that the same committee -- and not the Intelligence Committee -- would be allowed to hold hearings on the president's wiretapping program).

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) submitted a similiar bill, S. 1114. Hers does not contain as damning a sentence as Specter's, but it does limit the president's authority to be a jerk:

No provision of law shall be construed to implicitly repeal or modify this title or any provision thereof, nor shall any provision of law be deemed to repeal or modify this title in any manner unless such provision of law, if enacted after the date of the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Improvement and Enhancement Act of 2007, expressly amends or otherwise specifically cites this title.

This eliminates the president's assertion that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force implicitly gave him the authority to use warrantless wiretapping in his War on Terr'. If this bill were to be signed (which is unlikely, as Cheney dislikes anything that places a check on the executive), anytime the president wanted to engage in wiretapping, he would have to go through the FISA process and wouldn't be able to cite any made-up authority that he thinks he has.

Posted by Mark at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just when you thought the War on Terr' was upstanding and just, here come the communists at NPR's This American Life to kill your fetuses, give your money away to homeless drug addicts, and tell you why the War on Terr' isn't so hot.

This week's show is an update of their Peabody Award-winning 2006 show about detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The producers of This American Life wanted to find out more about Gitmo detainees.

Some highlights:

• The military and intelligence officials themselves estimate that only "a handful," up to a maximum of "two dozen," of the prisoners at Guantanamo have yielded information relating to al-Qaeda. There are 600 men imprisoned at Guantanamo. Even considering that military intelligence officials may be underestimating by half, that means that 92% of the people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay have no relationship to terrorism.
• Though President Bush and Vice President Cheney insisted that the people being held at Guantanamo were captured "on the battlefield" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only 5% of them were actually captured in combat. The vast, vast majority of them were handed over to the United States by Pakistan and Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. Some of them were turned in for a reward, which, the show points out, led to a tremendous number of prisoners being falsely turned in for the reward money.
• In the habeas tribunals that the Supreme Court commanded the administration to organize, defendants weren't allowed access to the evidence against them, as that evidence was classified as a matter of national security. One defendant's dossier was accidentally declassified, and it turned out the evidence against him consisted of five or six statements made by U.S. military intelligence, including facts that were known to be false.

The post-September 11 immigrant sweep yielded many immigrants who were here on expired visas, but practically no immigrants who had active ties to al-Qaeda. The same thing happened in Afghanistan: most people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or angered someone enough to get themselves handed over to the U.S. The Bush administration now seems keen on keeping prisoners locked up and as far away from courts as possible not because the prisoners are a threat to the United States, but because to release so many prisoners would require admitting that the administration made a huge and embarrassing mistake. What this administration cares more about than being correct is appearing not to have been wrong. Face-saving is something the Bush administration does all the time, and there is no good way to save face on the issue of Guantanamo Bay detainees, except to keep them locked up.

Posted by Mark at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Bush administration's response to critics of the USA PATRIOT Act was always something on the order of, "Don't worry; we're going after only the terrorists. We'll respect your rights. Everything's fine!"

Actually, appearing at a campaign event in Buffalo, NY in April 2004, the president said, "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."

One of the USA PATRIOT Act's requirements is that the FBI report to Congress annually on the ways in which it has used its expanded powers; specifically, the FBI must report on the number of times it has issued "national security letters," which are search warrants with built-in gag orders. If you receive a national security letter, (1) the FBI demands access to confidential information that you have about someone else; and (2) you're not permitted to discuss what information the FBI wanted, or even disclose the fact that the FBI was there and gave you a national security letter.

As of yet, however, the FBI has not fully reported to Congress on its use of national security letters, which automatically -- and without judicial oversight --