The Best War Ever

Activism Is in the Eye of the Ideologist

from the NYT:

Conservatives like to divide judges into liberal “activists” and conservative nonactivists who interpret the law rather than making it. Anyone who follows the courts knows that conservative judges are as activist as liberal judges —just for different causes. A new study of Supreme Court voting patterns confirms this and suggests that the conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are actually more activist than their liberal colleagues.

Lori Ringhand, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, examined the voting records of the Supreme Court justices from 1994 to 2005. Because judicial activism is a vague concept, she applied a reasonable, objective standard. In the study, which is forthcoming in Constitutional Commentary, justices were considered to have voted in an activist way when they voted to overturn a federal or state law, or one of the court’s own precedents.

The conservative justices were far more willing than the liberals to strike down federal laws — clearly an activist stance, since they were substituting their own judgment for that of the people’s elected representatives in Congress. Justice Thomas voted to overturn federal laws in 34 cases and Justice Scalia in 31, compared with just 15 for Justice Stephen Breyer. When state laws were at issue, the liberals were more activist. Add up the two categories, and the conservatives and liberals turned out to be roughly equal. But Justices Thomas and Scalia, who are often held out as models of nonactivism, voted to strike down laws in more of these cases than Justice Breyer and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court’s two Clinton appointees.

By the third measure, overturning the court’s own precedents (for which data were available only up to 2000), the conservatives were far more activist. Justice Thomas voted to overturn precedent 23 times and Justice Scalia 19 times, while the court’s four liberals did so in 10 cases or fewer.

Activism is not necessarily a bad thing. The Supreme Court is supposed to strike down laws that are unconstitutional or otherwise flawed. Clearly, all nine justices, from across the political spectrum, believe this, since they all regularly vote to strike down laws. What is wrong is for one side to pretend its judges are not activist, and turn judicial activism into a partisan talking point, when the numbers show a very different story.

What we lost

Joan Walsh writes at Salon:

Five years later, I remember odd fragments from Sept. 11, 2001. The kindness in the voice of the co-worker who called to tell me about it; the care and concern I saw everywhere that day, in fact. At my daughter’s school-bus stop in the near-dark that morning (yes, many of us sent our kids to school in California, only to have them sent home), not all of the parents knew about the tragedy yet, but I’ll never forget the sadness and compassion in the eyes of those who did—for ourselves, for our children, and also for the people in our group who hadn’t seen the television yet. We already knew: Nothing would ever be the same.

We had no idea. As awful as our losses were that day, five years later they’re almost incalculable. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said something that moved me at the time—that the losses were likely to be “more than we can bear.” In fact, he was right, even though the death toll was ultimately lower than first expected. The losses from 9/11 may still ultimately be more than we can bear.

The number of Americans who died that day at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa.—2,873—has been surpassed by the number of American soldiers who’ve died in the so-called global war on terror, the vast majority—almost 2,700—killed on the utterly unrelated battleground in Iraq. Add in almost 30,000 U.S. military casualties and a reported 46,307 dead Iraqi civilians, according to Iraq Body Count, and the tragedy is staggering—more than we, or the Iraqi people, should have had to bear. The quick victory in the Afghan war against the Taliban, which had broad national and global support, now seems on the verge of being reversed; every week brings more killing, more repression. This week alone the New York Times reported that the Afghan city known as Little America is now the capital of Taliban resurgence and opium production. Global sympathy in the wake of the attack has turned to global distrust and disdain.

Maybe the loss I regret most was the shimmer of national and international unity we enjoyed after the attack—the warmth I felt from friends and acquaintances and even strangers those first raw days, a seriousness and purpose I felt more broadly in the following weeks. Like most Americans, I didn’t vote for this president. To me, Dec. 12, 2000, the day the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount that Al Gore would have won, is another day of infamy in U.S. history. But I was willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt in the weeks after 9/11, let him build on the global support we’d won and do something thoughtful and effective about al-Qaida. His response in those early weeks seemed uncharacteristically measured; he warned against targeting Muslims, he took almost a month before striking Afghanistan.

Since that time, though, we’ve seen hubris beyond imagination. We’ve watched an unbridled executive-branch power grab, warrantless wiretaps, the curtailing of privacy rights; a pervasive smog of secrecy descended to obscure our government. Outrage about torture, rendition and secret prisons here and abroad is dismissed with a flippant “We don’t torture” from the president. And all of it has been shellacked with an ugly culture of bullying in which dissent equals treason, shamelessly, five years after the attack. Last week it was Donald Rumsfeld comparing war critics to people who appeased Hitler; this week we had Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying they’re the sort who would have ended the Civil War early and let the South keep its slaves. Their intimidation is meant to say that the very freedoms worth fighting for—the right to dissent, the right to question our government—might have to be abridged while we fight. Politically, that truly is more than we can bear.

Still, we’ve seen nothing so brazen as the president’s “war on terror” victory lap this 9/11 anniversary week, three speeches to tell us he’s made us safer though there’s still more to be done, and pay no attention to the carnage in Iraq. Bush’s 2006 anniversary shtick is an eerie inversion of his first anniversary shtick in 2002, another election year, when he used the sad occasion as a platform to sell the Iraq war. Back then, you’ll recall, he’d changed the subject from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein at least partly because we’d blown our chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at the end of 2001. So he went months without mentioning the man he’d once vowed to capture “dead or alive.” The normally quiescent White House press corps was moved to ask him about it at a March 2002 briefing, and here’s how Bush replied:

“Who knows if he’s hiding in some cave or not; we haven’t heard from him in a long time. And the idea of focusing on one person is—really indicates to me people don’t understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person ... So I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him ... to be honest with you. I’m more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied; that the strategy is clear; that the coalition is strong.”

“I just don’t spend that much time on him.” Fast-forward four years, and suddenly he’s spending time on him again—Bush mentioned bin Laden 17 times in a 44-minute speech Tuesday—and the reason is obvious: In both Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers aren’t well supplied, our strategy isn’t clear, the coalition isn’t strong. And so this week: Osama is back! And he’s as bad as Stalin or Lenin! But we’re winning the war on terror anyway! And those secret prisons we wouldn’t admit existed? They’re out there, all right, but now we’re moving the guys we had stashed there to Guantánamo, at least the ones we’ll tell you about. (They probably won’t talk anymore anyway.) Now we’re readying the military tribunals, where you can’t see the evidence against them, or how we obtained it. But rest assured, we’ve gotten a ton of intel out of them that’s kept you safe. But we don’t torture!

I thought I lost my capacity to be shocked at this administration a long time ago, but Bush’s decision to declassify information about our “war on terror” “successes” just in time for the midterm elections is craven and deeply offensive, even for an administration that’s made an art form of craven and offensive political cheap shots.

Four years after the first 9/11 anniversary, I have an eerie sense of déjà vu. Back in 2002, some liberals already had anniversary fatigue, since it was clear the administration was going to use the tragedy to gin up support for the Iraq war and demagogue Democrats who opposed it (and even some who supported it). I argued at the time that ignoring the anniversary, being callous about the losses we suffered that day, was wrong. This year I feel even more strongly that it’s important to take stock, because of all we lost that day, but more important, all we’ve lost since.

Despite my disturbing déjà vu, there’s reason to believe 2006 will turn out differently from 2002. This time around the midterm elections are looking grim for the GOP, thanks to the war in Iraq, high gas prices and overall gloom about the country’s direction. A CBS News/New York Times poll reported Thursday that when asked if the government had done “all it could reasonably be expected to do” to prevent another terror attack, nearly two-thirds of Democrats and Independents said no. Even among Republicans, only 56 percent said yes. Bush’s campaign to convince us we’re wrong is just beginning, and maybe it will work as it did in 2002 and 2004, but it won’t be easy. The great thing about freedom and democracy is we have multiple chances to get things right. Given the erosion of our liberties in the last four years, though, it doesn’t seem too much to suggest that getting it wrong again could threaten that very freedom and democracy.

Have you no sense of decency, sir?

Kieth Olbermann on MSNBC:

It is to our deep national shame—and ultimately it will be to the President’s deep personal regret—that he has followed his Secretary of Defense down the path of trying to tie those loyal Americans who disagree with his policies—or even question their effectiveness or execution—to the Nazis of the past, and the al Qaeda of the present.

Today, in the same subtle terms in which Mr. Bush and his colleagues muddied the clear line separating Iraq and 9/11—without ever actually saying so—the President quoted a purported Osama Bin Laden letter that spoke of launching, “a media campaign to create a wedge between the American people and their government.”

Make no mistake here—the intent of that is to get us to confuse the psychotic scheming of an international terrorist, with that familiar bogeyman of the right, the “media.”

The President and the Vice President and others have often attacked freedom of speech, and freedom of dissent, and freedom of the press.

Now, Mr. Bush has signaled that his unparalleled and unprincipled attack on reporting has a new and venomous side angle:

The attempt to link, by the simple expediency of one word—“media”—the honest, patriotic, and indeed vital questions and questioning from American reporters, with the evil of Al-Qaeda propaganda.

That linkage is more than just indefensible. It is un-American.

Mr. Bush and his colleagues have led us before to such waters.

We will not drink again.

And the President’s re-writing and sanitizing of history, so it fits the expediencies of domestic politics, is just as false, and just as scurrilous.

“In the 1920’s a failed Austrian painter published a book in which he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany and take revenge on Europe and eradicate the Jews,” President Bush said today, “the world ignored Hitler’s words, and paid a terrible price.”

Whatever the true nature of al Qaeda and other international terrorist threats, to ceaselessly compare them to the Nazi State of Germany serves only to embolden them.

More over, Mr. Bush, you are accomplishing in part what Osama Bin Laden and others seek—a fearful American populace, easily manipulated, and willing to throw away any measure of restraint, any loyalty to our own ideals and freedoms, for the comforting illusion of safety.

It thus becomes necessary to remind the President that his administration’s recent Nazi “kick” is an awful and cynical thing.

And it becomes necessary to reach back into our history, for yet another quote, from yet another time and to ask it of Mr. Bush:

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Lie By Lie: History of the Build-Up to the Iraq Debacle

MotherJones has put up a very thorough and educational timeline of the lies and deceits of the Cheney administration regarding the Iraq war of greed.

Feeling morally, intellectually confused?

from MSNBC:

by Keith Olbermann

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis—and the sober contemplation—of every American.

For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence—indeed, the loyalty—of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants—our employees—with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as “his” troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.

It is also essential.  Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril—with a growing evil—powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the “secret information.” It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s—questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England’s, in the 1930’s.

It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.

It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.

It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions — its own omniscience—needed to be dismissed.

The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.

Most relevant of all — it “knew” that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic’s name was Winston Churchill.

Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening.  We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.

History — and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England — have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty — and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.

Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.

Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.

His government, absolute—and exclusive—in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis.

It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.

But back to today’s Omniscient ones.

That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.

And, as such, all voices count—not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

The confusion we—as its citizens— must now address, is stark and forbidding.

But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note—with hope in your heart — that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism.”

As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that—though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.

But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: “confused” or “immoral.”

Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”

And so good night, and good luck.

Is our Presidents Learning?

Steve Benen writes on AlterNet:

In January 2005, George W. Bush sat down with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, longtime host of Booknotes. When Lamb asked Bush how much reading he does on a given day, Bush replied, “I read, oh, gosh, I’d say, 10, maybe, different memoranda prepared by staff.” When Lamb clarified that he was asking specifically about books, Bush explained, “I’m reading, I think on a good night, maybe 20 to 30 pages,” before segueing into an explanation about his rigorous exercise schedule.

Given the history, it came as something of a surprise this month when the White House began a not-so-subtle public-relations campaign suggesting that Bush not only has a great fondness for books, but has actually become a voracious reader who finishes challenging texts at a stunning clip.

It began when the White House noted that Bush’s summer reading list included Albert Camus’ existentialist novel The Stranger. Press Secretary Tony Snow was cagey about details, but told reporters that Bush “found it an interesting book” that ultimately led to discussions with aides about “the origins of existentialism.” Bush once famously said, “I don’t do nuance,” but apparently he does do absurdist philosophical parables.

The Bush-the-bookworm narrative became more aggressive when Bush aides leaked word to U.S. News & World Report’s Ken Walsh that Bush “wants it known that he is a man of letters.” Walsh reported that Bush has allegedly entered a “book-reading competition” with Karl Rove, with Bush currently in the lead, having read 60 books so far this year, 10 more than his controversial aide.

Around the same time, C-SPAN published a list of more than two-dozen titles provided by the White House Press Office, purporting to show Bush’s “summer reading list.” It had its share of breezy baseball titles, but the list also included plenty of serious, thought-provoking books, including John Barry’s The Great Influenza, Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters, and two Shakespearean classics, “Macbeth” and “Hamlet.”

Driving the public-relations offensive is a newfound desire to boost perceptions of Bush’s intellectual prowess. U.S. News’ Walsh wrote that “portraying Bush as a voracious reader is part of an ongoing White House campaign to restore what a senior adviser calls ‘gravitas’ to the Bush persona.” It’s not an unreasonable goal. When MSNBC’s Rick Scarborough did a 10-minute segment on Bush’s dimwittedness two weeks ago, with an all-caps “Is Bush An ‘Idiot’?” caption along the bottom of the screen, it reinforced the fact that Bush’s lack of intellectual depth undermines his credibility.

Exaggerated reading lists and a phony presidential interest in books, however, are hardly going to help. For one thing, the White House’s claims about the notches on Bush’s literary bedpost are almost certainly false. Using lists provided by the White House, the 60 books Bush is alleged to have read since January total tens of thousands of pages. (The Stranger may be fairly short, but many of the titles on the list were lengthy treatises. Kai Bird’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for example, is almost 800 pages.)

The boasts simply strain credulity. We’re talking about a man who, by his own admission, likes to get to bed early, insists on a two-hour midday exercise break, and reads maybe 30 pages of book text a day. He also ostensibly oversees the executive branch of government during a war. If we expand the definition of “read” to include Cliff’s Notes, abridged books on tape, and skimming over a book’s jacket, then maybe the claims are plausible. Otherwise, they’re demonstrably ridiculous.

But even if political observers are willing to accept this public-relations gambit as little more than election-year spin, and even if everyone assumes that Bush didn’t actually read The Stranger or much else from his reading list, the image makeover itself makes very little sense.

Bush’s aides, led by Bush’s book-reading competitor Karl Rove, have worked tirelessly for more than six years to cultivate Bush’s image as that of a “regular guy.” Al Gore told Oprah that his favorite novel is Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, but Bush has always wanted the nation to see him as folksy and simple. Reading was never part of the narrative. For years, Bush has practically reveled in anti-intellectualism, routinely mocking people with Ph.D.s. At one recent forum, Bush introduced an economics professor to his audience by saying, “It’s an interesting lesson here, by the way. He’s an adviser. Now, he is the Ph.D., and I am a C-student—or was a C-student. Now, what’s that tell you?”

Indeed, Bush’s facade has never been about reading much of anything. He has admitted that he doesn’t read newspapers, telling Fox News’ Brit Hume, “I glance at the headlines just to kind of [get] a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are [sic] probably read the news themselves.” He’s not even fond of reading government reports—Newsweek noted a year ago that the seriousness of the Hurricane Katrina crisis “sunk in,” not when Bush pored over FEMA reports, but when communications aide Dan Bartlett put together an easy-to-understand video montage for Bush on a DVD, a few days after the levees in New Orleans broke.

The public is now supposed to believe that Bush is a book-reading machine, picking up French existentialism in his leisure time between brush-clearing and bike-rides? The fact that the White House gang is experimenting with a new persona at all reeks of desperation. Bush isn’t supposed to be about book learnin’; he’s about governing by instinct and relying on the advice of aides who tell him what he wants to hear.

For Bush to open a new chapter, characterizing himself as a learned “man of letters” is not only literally unbelievable, it’s pointless. Bush may not like the ending, but the book on his intellectual aptitude has already been written. 

Triumph of the Authoritarians

from the Boston Globe via truthout:

By John W. Dean

Contemporary conservatism and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners’ bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest - none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today’s so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a “Goldwater conservative,” and am thoroughly familiar with the movement’s canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon “imperial presidency” on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?

How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate tradition, which has been the institution’s distinctive contribution to our democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely judicial appointments).

Today’s Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik’s classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham’s guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in “conserving” this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs through abstinence.

Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede - usually only when not speaking for attribution - that they are not truly conservative. They do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it. Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers, over a decade of questioning.

I started my inquiry in the mid-1990s, after a series of conversations with Goldwater, whom I had known for more than 40 years. Goldwater was also mystified (when not miffed) by the direction of today’s professed conservatives - their growing incivility, pugnacious attitudes, and arrogant and antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who challenge their thinking. He worried that the Republican Party had sold its soul to Christian fundamentalists, whose divisive social values would polarize the nation. From those conversations, Goldwater and I planned to study why these people behave as they do, and to author a book laying out what we found. Sadly, the senator’s declining health soon precluded his continuing on the project, so I put it on the shelf. But I kept digging until I found some answers, and here are my thoughts.

For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research, we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, “enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral.” And that’s not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism’s impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they’ve often been supplanted by authoritarians.

John W. Dean, former Nixon White House counsel, just published his seventh nonfiction book, Conservatives Without Conscience.

The Real Agenda

from NYT via truthout:

It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, Bush and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

One result has been a frayed democratic fabric in a country founded on a constitutional system of checks and balances. Another has been a less effective war on terror.

The Guantánamo Bay Prison

This whole sorry story has been on vivid display since the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions and United States law both applied to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. For one brief, shining moment, it appeared that the administration realized it had met a check that it could not simply ignore. The White House sent out signals that the president was ready to work with Congress in creating a proper procedure for trying the hundreds of men who have spent years now locked up as suspected terrorists without any hope of due process.

But by week’s end it was clear that Bush’s idea of cooperation was purely cosmetic. At hearings last week, the administration made it clear that it merely wanted Congress to legalize President Bush’s illegal actions - to amend the law to negate the court’s ruling instead of creating a system of justice within the law. As for the Geneva Conventions, administration witnesses and some of their more ideologically blinkered supporters in Congress want to scrap the international consensus that no prisoner may be robbed of basic human dignity.

The hearings were a bizarre spectacle in which the top military lawyers - who had been elbowed aside when the procedures at Guantánamo were established - endorsed the idea that the prisoners were covered by the Geneva Convention protections. Meanwhile, administration officials and obedient Republican lawmakers offered a lot of silly talk about not coddling the masterminds of terror.

The divide made it clear how little this all has to do with fighting terrorism. Undoing the Geneva Conventions would further endanger the life of every member of the American military who might ever be taken captive in the future. And if the prisoners scooped up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo had been properly processed first - as military lawyers wanted to do - many would never have been kept in custody, a continuing reproach to the country that is holding them. Others would actually have been able to be tried under a fair system that would give the world a less perverse vision of American justice. The recent disbanding of the C.I.A. unit charged with finding Osama bin Laden is a reminder that the American people may never see anyone brought to trial for the terrible crimes of 9/11.

The hearings were supposed to produce a hopeful vision of a newly humbled and cooperative administration working with Congress to undo the mess it had created in stashing away hundreds of people, many with limited connections to terrorism at the most, without any plan for what to do with them over the long run. Instead, we saw an administration whose political core was still intent on hunkering down. The most embarrassing moment came when Bush loyalists argued that the United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners for more than half a century, was too vague. Which part of “civilized peoples,” “judicial guarantees” or “humiliating and degrading treatment” do they find confusing?

Eavesdropping on Americans

The administration’s intent to use the war on terror to buttress presidential power was never clearer than in the case of its wiretapping program. The president had legal means of listening in on the phone calls of suspected terrorists and checking their e-mail messages. A special court was established through a 1978 law to give the executive branch warrants for just this purpose, efficiently and in secrecy. And Republicans in Congress were all but begging for a chance to change the process in any way the president requested. Instead, of course, the administration did what it wanted without asking anyone. When the program became public, the administration ignored calls for it to comply with the rules. As usual, Bush’s most loyal supporters simply urged that Congress pass a law allowing him to go on doing whatever he wanted to do.

Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced on Thursday that he had obtained a concession from Bush on how to handle this problem. Once again, the early perception that Bush was going to bend to the rules turned out to be premature.

The bill Bush has agreed to accept would allow him to go on ignoring the eavesdropping law. It does not require the president to obtain warrants for the one domestic spying program we know about - or for any other program - from the special intelligence surveillance court. It makes that an option and sets the precedent of giving blanket approval to programs, rather than insisting on the individual warrants required by the Constitution. Once again, Bush has refused to acknowledge that there are rules he is required to follow.

And while the bill would establish new rules that Bush could voluntarily follow, it strips the federal courts of the right to hear legal challenges to the president’s wiretapping authority. The Supreme Court made it clear in the Guantánamo Bay case that this sort of meddling is unconstitutional.

If Congress accepts this deal, Mr. Specter said, the president will promise to ask the surveillance court to assess the constitutionality of the domestic spying program he has acknowledged. Even if Bush had a record of keeping such bargains, that is not the right court to make the determination. In addition, Bush could appeal if the court ruled against him, but the measure provides no avenue of appeal if the surveillance court decides the spying program is constitutional.

The Cost of Executive Arrogance

Bush’s constant efforts to assert his power to act without consent or consultation has warped the war on terror. The unity and sense of national purpose that followed 9/11 is gone, replaced by suspicion and divisiveness that never needed to emerge. Bush had no need to go it alone - everyone wanted to go with him. Both parties in Congress were eager to show they were tough on terrorism. But the obsession with presidential prerogatives created fights where no fights needed to occur and made huge messes out of programs that could have functioned more efficiently within the rules.

Jane Mayer provided a close look at this effort to undermine the constitutional separation of powers in a chilling article in the July 3 issue of The New Yorker. She showed how it grew out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s long and deeply held conviction that the real lesson of Watergate and the later Iran-contra debacle was that the president needed more power and that Congress and the courts should get out of the way.

To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans’ deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Americans’ civil liberties have been trampled. The nation’s image as a champion of human rights has been gravely harmed. Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we know about, while other prisons operate in secret. American agents “disappear” people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands. Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guantánamo Bay without charges or rudimentary rights. And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being painted as pro-terrorist at election time.

We still hope Congress will respond to the Supreme Court’s powerful and unequivocal ruling on Guantánamo Bay and also hold Bush to account for ignoring the law on wiretapping. Certainly, Bush has made it clear that he is not giving an inch of ground.

Bush to the media: Shut up and wave the flag

from Salon:

By Mark Goodman

The war of words rages on about words of war. President Bush and his supporters have reintroduced a standing government tactic when things aren’t going well on or below the battlefield: Shoot the battlefield messenger. As soon as the New York Times and three other newspapers published reports of government surveillance to ferret out al-Qaida funding, backers of the war in Iraq began crying, “Betrayal! Treason!” Some have insisted that the Times’ press credentials be revoked and a few have even suggested, hysterically, that editor Bill Keller be tried for espionage.

Their claim, of course, is that the report somehow subverts the war on terror. Really? Not necessarily so. The first order of battle in combating terror of any stripe is to expose it. It’s a common intelligence gambit to let the enemy know you’re onto their networks because the revelation will often roll them up of its own momentum. If, God forbid, I were running a surveillance operation like the one the White House has instigated, the first thing I would do is leak it to the New York Times. Then I’d sit back and watch as the subterranean bankers and money launderers clambered to the surface. If those terror-backers have in fact been flushed to the surface by the Times, I wonder if this administration will ever give credit where it’s due.

I suspect not. The real source of the administration’s ire is not the information or even this particular revelation, but media criticism of the war itself. The Times is simply the most visible target. Governments expect nothing less of the press than that it function in times of conflict as a kind of national cheerleading unit. I heard the same angry trumpets during the Vietnam conflict. I was a young staffer at Time magazine when the Nixon administration was firing almost as much ammo at the press as it was at the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. I was privy to one such salvo when I was invited to Washington, along with some ranking editors, for a nose-to-nose with John Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s strong-armed assistant for domestic affairs. Ehrlichman lit into us for not supporting the war effort. He took the wondrously paradoxical view that while America was accomplishing its mission in Vietnam, the press was subverting that mission and preventing its accomplishment. He was in effect staging for our benefit the White House version of the Army’s daily Saigon press briefings—which by then even military officers were calling the Five o’clock Follies.

My point, then and now: There is ample historical precedent to provide cover for the administration’s position. Let’s go back to August 1914, when Lord Beaverbrook, Britain’s most powerful press baron, laid down the law for Allied reporters. There was to be no criticism of the Great War, no blood-soaked accounts of the scope of the mayhem or the full horror wrought upon the fields of Flanders. Instead, the press was advised to focus its attention on stirring accounts of valor in the air and on the field, and, of course, lurid, largely apocryphal tales of little Belgium ravaged by The Hun. The press—including the New York Times—fell nimbly into lockstep, grateful that reporters and editors were not to be executed as traitors, as many critics and conscientious objectors indeed were.

So truth, as J.B. Priestley aptly wrote, became the first casualty of World War I. Over the ensuing four years of terrible carnage it was joined by 20 million dead soldiers and civilians and countless more gruesomely wounded. The Great War, before it ended, made the Russian Revolution possible—unless one imagines Kerensky and his handful of zealots could have subdued Moscow were the czar’s armies not frozen to their machine guns on the Eastern Front. It also caused the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which spawned a Balkan conflict that continues to this day, and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, beginning but surely not ending with the creation of an artificial state, Iraq, whose warring nationalities and sects have been at one another’s throats for a thousand years, yesterday inclusive. And finally, Germany’s defeat forced the abdication of the Kaiser, which was followed by the inevitable collapse of the feeble Weimar Republic, which in turn begat Nazi Germany and World War II, which left 50 million dead and gave rise to the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam.

My question, then and now: Would it have come to all this if the London Times and Le Monde and the New York Times—even the German press—had published authentic accounts of the horrors at Ypres and Passchendaele and the Somme? We’ll never know, but of this I’m sure: The press is duty-bound to report, factually and fully to the body politic, on the operations launched by its government against all enemies, foreign and domestic. For if it does not, the government may itself become the enemy while we sleep.

Nation Parks Funding Slashed by Bush

from PEER:

The Bush administration has directed the National Park Service to substantially decrease its reliance on tax-supported funding, according to internal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). In a turnabout from the last two presidential campaigns when candidate Bush promised greater funding of parks, new “talking points” distributed last week to all park superintendents urge them to begin “honest and forthright” discussions with the public about smaller budgets, reduced visitor services and increased fees.

Using a new approach called Core Operations Analysis, each park is asked to develop budgets based on a 20 to 30% reduction in appropriation support. In this “exercise”, park superintendents decide which visitor services or other functions can be jettisoned (“staffing and funding alternatives based on realistic funding projections,” in the words of the Park Service). Whatever shortfalls in support for essential operations that remain must be made up for with fee hikes, cost shifting or increased reliance on volunteers.

Once the Core Operation Analysis is finalized, each park is then put on a “glide path” to implement the agreed upon reductions during the next five years.

In the talking points memo issued on April 11, 2006, park public affairs and budgetary staff provide coaching as to how individual parks should spin shrinking budgets and reduced visitor services, including:

* “The National Park Service, like most agencies, is tightening its belt as our nation rebuilds from Katrina, continues the war on terrorism and strives to reduce the deficit” and
* “Our satisfaction rating is over 96 percent nationally, and has remained high for several years. That’s a clear indicator that budgets have not reduced visitor enjoyment.”

By contrast, prior to the 2004 election, park officials were ordered to avoid mention of cutbacks and instead use the euphemism “service level adjustments.” In talking points distributed on April 7, 2004, park managers were instructed to counter charges of lower budgets by declaring “NPS has fared well under President Bush.”

“Rather than being honest about planned budget cuts, the Bush administration once again makes stealth policy decisions cloaked by management reform mumbo jumbo,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “If our national parks are going to be reduced to performing only the bare minimum of ‘core operations’ the public ought to be given some say as to what is considered essential.”

On Publishing Classified Information

from Secrecy News:

“It’s not a crime to publish classified information,” explained Washington Post reporter Dana Priest in an electric moment on last Sunday’s NBC Meet the Press, even though “[commentator William] Bennett keeps telling people that it is.”

Mr. Bennett, who was sitting right next to Ms. Priest, had declared last April that reporters like Ms. Priest who publish classified information “against the wishes of the President” should be “arrested.”

“I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award,” Mr. Bennett had said, referring to the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting by Ms. Priest and two New York Times reporters—“I think what they did is worthy of jail.” (Editor and Publisher, 04/18/06).

But Mr. Bennett was wrong and Ms. Priest was correct: There is no comprehensive statute that outlaws the publication of classified information.

(As Ms. Priest went on to explain, there are several narrow categories of classified information, such as communications intelligence, covert agent identities, and a few others that are protected by statute.)

A new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service describes the legal framework governing the disclosure and publication of classified national security information.

“This report provides background with respect to previous legislative efforts to criminalize the unauthorized disclosure of classified information; describes the current state of the laws that potentially apply, including criminal and civil penalties that can be imposed on violators; and some of the disciplinary actions and administrative procedures available to the agencies of federal government that have been addressed by federal courts.”

“Finally, the report considers the possible First Amendment implications of applying the Espionage Act to prosecute newspapers for publishing classified national defense information.”

Can’t Win the War? Bomb the Press!

from NYT via truthout:

By Frank Rich

Old Glory lost today,” Bill Frist declaimed last week when his second attempt to rewrite the Constitution in a single month went the way of his happy prognosis for Terri Schiavo. Of course it isn’t Old Glory that lost when the flag-burning amendment flamed out. The flag always survives the politicians who wrap themselves in it. What really provoked Mr. Frist’s crocodile tears was the foiling of yet another ruse to distract Americans from the wreckage in Iraq. He and his party, eager to change the subject in an election year, just can’t let go of their scapegoat strategy. It’s illegal Hispanic immigrants, gay couples seeking marital rights, cut-and-run Democrats and rampaging flag burners who have betrayed America’s values, not those who bungled a war.

No sooner were the flag burners hustled offstage than a new traitor was unveiled for the Fourth: the press. Public enemy No. 1 is The New York Times, which was accused of a “disgraceful” compromise of national security (by Geoge W. Bush) and treason (by Representative Peter King of New York and the Coulter amen chorus). The Times’s offense was to publish a front-page article about a comprehensive American effort to track terrorists with the aid of a Belgian consortium, Swift, which serves as a clearinghouse for some 7,800 financial institutions in 200 countries.

It was a solid piece of journalism. But if you want to learn the truly dirty secrets of how our government prosecutes this war, the story of how it vilified The Times is more damning than anything in the article that caused the uproar.

The history of that scapegoating begins on the Friday morning, June 23, that The Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal all published accounts of the Swift program first posted on the Web the night before. In his press briefing that morning, Tony Snow fielded many questions about the program’s legality. But revealingly, for all his opportunities, he never attacked the news media.

Far from Swift-boating the Swift reportage, he offered tentative praise. “It’s interesting,” he said, “because I think there’s a fair amount of balance in the story in that you do have concrete benefits and you do have the kind of abstract harms that were mentioned in there.” He noted that there had been “no allegation of illegality” in the Times article.

This was accurate. The story was balanced, just as Mr. Snow said. And it was no cause for a national-security alarm for the simple reason that since 9/11, our government has repeatedly advertised that it is following the terrorists’ money trail, a tactic enhanced by the broad new powers over financial institutions that Mr. Bush sought and received. In November 2002, he and the Treasury secretary at the time, Paul O’Neill, even held a televised event promoting their Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center, established expressly, in Bush’s words, to “investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks.” As for Swift, Dan Froomkin of washingtonpost.com points out that it can’t resist bragging on its own Web site that it “has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities,” including treasury departments and law enforcement agencies, in trying “to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities.”

Only a terrorist who couldn’t shoot straight would assume that Swift was not part of the American effort to stalk terrorist transactions; that’s tantamount to assuming that cops would track down license plate numbers without enlisting the Department of Motor Vehicles. But, unfortunately for us, terrorists are not so stupid: it’s been reported as far back as 2003 (in The Washington Post) and as recently as this month (in Ron Suskind’s must-read best seller, “The One Percent Doctrine") that our enemies long ago took Bush at his word and abandoned banks for couriers, money brokers, front companies and suitcases stuffed with cash and gold. Tom Brokaw summarized the consensus of terrorism experts last week when he told Chris Matthews of MSNBC: “I don’t know anyone who believes that the terrorist network said, ‘Oh my God, they’re tracing our financial transactions? What a surprise.’ Of course, they knew that they were doing that.”

The real news conveyed by The Times and its competitors was not the huge program to track terrorist finances, but that per usual from the administration that gave us Gitmo, the program was conducted with little oversight from the other two branches of government. Even so, the reporting on the pros and cons of that approach was, as Mr. Snow said, balanced.

Or so he said Friday morning, June 23. By Monday, Bush had entered the fray and Mr. Snow was accusing The Times of putting the “public’s right to know” over “somebody’s right to live.” What had happened over the weekend to prompt this escalation of hysteria? The same stuff that always happens when the White House scapegoats the press (or anyone else): bad and embarrassing news that the White House wants to drown out.

One such looming embarrassment was that breathless arrest in Miami of what federal authorities billed as a “homegrown terrorist cell.” This amazing feat of derring-do had all the melodramatic trappings of a carefully staged administration P.R. extravaganza. On June 22, the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, just happened to be on “Larry King Live” speaking about his concerns about “homegrown terrorists” when, by a remarkable coincidence, Larry King announced a “report just in” from a Miami station on a federal terrorism investigation. The next day - the same day the Swift story was published - brought the full-dress dog-and-pony show by the intrepid attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.

But rain soon started to fall on this parade. The seven men accused of plotting to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago and collaborate with Al Qaeda on a “full ground war” turned out to have neither weapons nor explosives nor links to Al Qaeda; both the F.B.I. and the Chicago police said there was no operational threat. By Saturday the administration’s overhyped victory against terrorists was already deflating into a national punch line, a nostalgic remembrance of John Ashcroft orange terror alerts past.

Sunday brought another unwanted revelation (from Michael R. Gordon of The Times): Gen. George Casey Jr., the commander in Iraq, was drafting a plan for sharp troop reductions there, some of them to precede this year’s election. Inconveniently enough, the Casey approach was a virtual double for the phased withdrawals advocated by Senate Democrats days earlier and incessantly slurred as “cut-and-run” defeatism by Republicans.

By the time of the Bush-Snow eruption on Monday, the Democrats were holding hearings on the Hill about prewar intelligence. It was better that Americans hear tirades about traitors in the press than be tempted to listen to the testimony of Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, who described Mr. Powell’s February 2003 United Nations presentation on Iraq’s W.M.D. as “the perpetuation of a hoax.”

It’s not only the White House that has a vested political interest in concocting a smoke screen by demonizing the fourth estate as a fifth column. The Democrats were holding their hearing because Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, has for two years been stalling his panel’s promised investigation into how the administration used intelligence before the war. Hoping that we’d forget about that continuing cover-up, Mr. Roberts last week made a big show of calling for an investigation into the Swift story’s supposed damage to national security.

Representative King, so eager to label others treasonous, has humiliating headlines of his own to counteract: he’s the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee who has so little clout and bureaucratic aptitude that he couldn’t stop the government led by his own party from stripping New York City, in his home state, of 40 percent of its counterterrorism funding. If there’s another terrorist attack, he may be the last person in New York who should accuse others, as he did The Times on the House floor on Thursday, of having blood “on their hands.”

Such ravings make it hard not to think of the official assault on The Times and The Washington Post over the Pentagon Papers. In 1972, on the first anniversary of the publication of that classified Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, The Times’s managing editor then, A. M. Rosenthal, reminisced in print about the hyperbolic predictions that had been made by the Nixon White House and its supporters: “Codes would be broken. Military security endangered. Foreign governments would be afraid to deal with us. There would be nothing secret left.” None of that happened. What did happen was that Americans learned “how secrecy had become a way of life” for a government whose clandestine policy decisions had fomented a disaster.

The assault on a free press during our own wartime should be recognized for what it is: another desperate ploy by officials trying to hide their own lethal mistakes in the shadows. It’s the antithesis of everything we celebrate with the blazing lights of Independence Day.

WWJD?

from HuffPo:

Reporters invited to Guantanamo, then sent home by Rumsfeld

from MoJo:

The admiral in charge of the prison at Guantanamo Bay invited the news media to come to the base on Saturday to cover the suicides of three of the prisoners. Reporters responded, but on Tuesday night, the Pentagon sent an email citing a directive from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

Media currently on the island will depart on Wednesday, 14 June 2006 at 10:00 a.m. Please be prepared to depart the CBQ [quarters] at 8:00 a.m.

A flight had already been arranged to expedite the reporters’ exit from the base, and though they protested the change of plans, they had to leave.

Editors of the Miami Herald and the Charlotte Observer said called the reversal “bad public policy” and “a panicked move.”

A Pentagon spokesman, J.D. Gordon, said that the reporters were sent home because other media outlets were threatening to sue to get equal access.

In the meantime, George W. Bush as stated that he would like to close the Guantanamo Bay facility as soon as he has a plan to deal with the “darn dangerous” prisoners there.