Google Bombs…Away!

(image: Project for the Old American Century)

Majikthise notes this from MyDD: each of the following links reports a story that illustrates the cretinous behavior and "values" of the associated rethuglican candidate. HTML source code to put this list on your blog is here.

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04: Geoff Davis
--MD-Sen: Michael Steele
--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
--MN-06: Michele Bachmann
--MO-Sen: Jim Talent
--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
--NV-03: Jon Porter
--NH-02: Charlie Bass
--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
--NM-01: Heather Wilson
--NY-03: Peter King
--NY-20: John Sweeney
--NY-26: Tom Reynolds
--NY-29: Randy Kuhl
--NC-08: Robin Hayes
--NC-11: Charles Taylor
--OH-01: Steve Chabot
--OH-02: Jean Schmidt
--OH-15: Deborah Pryce
--OH-18: Joy Padgett
--PA-04: Melissa Hart
--PA-07: Curt Weldon
--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
--PA-10: Don Sherwood
--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
--TN-Sen: Bob Corker
--VA-Sen: George Allen
--VA-10: Frank Wolf
--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
--WA-08: Dave Reichert

In Syria, Iraq’s Fate Silences Rights Activists

from WaPo:

By Ellen Knickmeyer

DAMASCUS, Syria—Horror at the bloodshed accompanying the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Iraq has accomplished what human rights activists, analysts and others say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been unable to do by himself: silence public demands for democratic reforms here.

The idea of the government as a bulwark of stability and security has long been the watchword of Syrian bureaucrats and village elders. But since Iraq’s descent into sectarian and ethnic war—and after Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, on the other side of Syria—even Syrian activists concede that the country’s feeble rights movement is moribund.

Advocates of democracy are equated now with supporters of America, even “traitors,” said Maan Abdul Salam, 36, a Damascus publisher who has coordinated conferences on women’s rights and similar topics.

“Now, talking about democracy and freedom has become very difficult and sensitive,” Salam said. “The people are not believing these thoughts anymore. When the U.S. came to Iraq, it came in the name of democracy and freedom. But all we see are bodies, bodies, bodies.”

After Pat’s Birthday

from truthdig:

By Kevin Tillman

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after.  It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military.  He spoke about the risks with signing the papers.  How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people.  How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition.  How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is.  Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them.  Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet.  It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people.  So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity.  Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy.  People still have a voice.  People still can take action.  It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman

Jailed Journalist Sami al-Hajj: Shame on the U.S.

from the NYT via Welcome to Pottersville:

By Nicholas D. Kristof.

There is no public evidence that Sami al-Hajj committed any crime other than journalism for a television network the Bush administration doesn’t like.

But the U.S. has been holding Mr. Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera, for nearly five years without trial, mostly at Guantanamo Bay. With the jailing of Mr. Hajj and of four journalists in Iraq, the U.S. ranked No. 6 in the world in the number of journalists it imprisoned last year, just behind Uzbekistan and tied with Burma, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This week, Bush is expected to sign the Military Commissions Act concerning prisoners at Guant�namo, and he has hailed the law as “a strong signal to the terrorists.” But the closer you look at Guant�namo the more you feel that it will be remembered mostly as a national disgrace.

Mr. Hajj is the only journalist known to be there, and, of course, it’s possible that he does have terrorist connections. If so, he should be tried, convicted and sentenced.

But so far, the evidence turned up by his lawyers and by the Committee to Protect Journalists — which published an excellent report on Mr. Hajj’s case this month — suggests that the U.S. military may be keeping him in hopes of forcing him to become a spy.

Mr. Hajj, 37, who attended university and speaks English, joined Al Jazeera as a cameraman in April 2000 and covered the war in Afghanistan. He was detained on Dec. 15, 2001, and taken to the American military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.

“They were the longest days of my life,” Mr. Hajj’s lawyers quoted him as saying. He told them he was repeatedly beaten, kicked, starved, left out in the freezing cold and subjected to anal cavity searches in public “just to humiliate me.”

In June 2002, Mr. Hajj was flown to Guant�namo, where he says the beatings initially were brutal but have since subsided somewhat.

At first, interrogators said Mr. Hajj had shot video of Osama bin Laden during an Al Jazeera interview, but it turned out that they had mixed him up with another cameraman of a similar name. When that assertion fell apart, the authorities offered accusations that he had ferried a large sum of money to a suspicious Islamic charity, that he had supported Chechen rebels, and that he had once given a car ride to an Al Qaeda official.

One indication that even our government may not take those accusations so seriously is that the interrogations barely touched on them, Mr. Hajj’s lawyers say.

“About 95 percent of the interrogations he went through were about Al Jazeera,” said one of the lawyers, Zachary Katznelson of London. “Sami would say, ‘What about me? Will you ask about me?’ ”

He added, “It really does seem that the focus of the inquiry is about his employer, Al Jazeera, and not about him or any actions he may have taken.”

Mr. Katznelson also says that interrogators told Mr. Hajj they would free him immediately if he would agree to go back to Al Jazeera and spy on it. He once asked what would happen if he backed out of the deal after he was free.

“You would not do that,” Mr. Hajj quoted his interrogator as saying, “because it would endanger your child.”

The Defense Department declined to comment on Mr. Hajj’s case.

While Mr. Hajj is unknown in the U.S., his case has received wide attention in the Arab world. The Bush administration is thus doing long-term damage to American interests.

Mr. Hajj’s lawyers say he has two torn ligaments in his knee from abuse in his first weeks in custody, making it exceptionally painful for him to use the squat toilet in his cell. The lawyers say he has been offered treatment for his knee and a sitting toilet that would be less painful to use — but only if he spills dirt on Al Jazeera. And he says he has none to spill.

And while Defense Department documents indicate that he has been a model inmate at Guant�namo, he protests that he has been called racial epithets (he is black) and that he has seen guards desecrate the Koran.

When Sudan detained an American journalist, Paul Salopek, in August in Darfur, journalists and human rights groups reacted with outrage until he was freed a month later. We should be just as offended when it is our own government that is sinking to Sudanese standards of justice.

This doesn’t look like a war on terrorism, but a war on our own values.

Study Finds Iraq’s Excess Death Toll Has Reached 655,000

from WaPo:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

Due Process, Bulldozed

from the NYT via truthout:

By Bob Herbert

Until five months ago, Bilal Hussein was part of a team of Associated Press photographers that had won a Pulitzer Prize for photos documenting the fighting and carnage in Iraq.

Now he’s a prisoner, having been seized by the U.S. government.

You might ask: What’s he been charged with?

The answer: Nothing.

There was a flurry of interest last week in the case of Maher Arar, a terror suspect who was shipped to Syria and tortured before it was learned that, alas, he was not a terrorist. Mr. Hussein got a little news coverage last week, as well. People who still think there is a place in this world for fairness, justice and due process are calling on the authorities to either charge him with a crime or release him.

Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi hired by The A.P., was taken into custody by U.S. forces in Ramadi last April 12. As in many similar cases, U.S. officials have been saying - without disclosing evidence to back up their comments - that he had improper ties to the insurgents.

But neither the Americans nor the Iraqis have officially charged Mr. Hussein with anything.

Scott Horton, a prominent New York lawyer called in by The A.P. to work on the case, said: “The administration always starts with a broad-brush tarring of these individuals. You’ll have officials saying: ‘Oh, they’re bad dudes. They’re evil. We have evidence we can’t show you that would demonstrate just how terrible these people are.’

“Well, sometimes they do. But very frequently, alarmingly frequently, they don’t.”

Mr. Hussein’s case closely resembles that of Abdul Ameer Hussein, a cameraman hired by CBS News who was wounded while covering an attack on an American convoy in Mosul on April 5, 2005. He was shot by a U.S. soldier, a sniper who was more than 200 yards away.

Mr. Hussein was taken to a hospital. His camera and videotapes were seized. And despite his CBS press credentials, which were checked out and found to be legitimate, he was arrested by U.S. authorities and imprisoned. Much of his time over the course of the next year was spent in solitary confinement at the Abu Ghraib prison, where he was subjected to coercive interrogation and other indignities.

For what?

American officials were telling reporters, without offering any evidence, that Mr. Hussein had been collaborating with insurgents. He hadn’t been. It turned out he was completely innocent. In fact, he was a kind of timid guy who was less than thrilled about having a job that required him to shoot combat footage.

This is a spooky time in history. It’s one thing for tyrannical regimes like the old Soviet Union and Communist China to bulldoze the very idea of human rights and human decency by engaging in such atrocities as detention without trial, torture and other forms of state terror. It’s something else completely when the United States, the greatest symbol of liberty that the world has ever known, begins to head down that hellish road.

Abdul Ameer Hussein ultimately was able to escape the clutches of the authorities because of the persistent legal effort pushed by CBS News on his behalf. Scott Horton was part of that effort. A year after he was taken into custody, Mr. Hussein, manacled and wearing an orange jumpsuit, was walked into a Baghdad courtroom for a trial. It was quickly determined that the case against him was ludicrous.

“There was absolutely no evidence against this guy,” said Mr. Horton. “Even the attorney general of Iraq said there was no basis for proceeding against him.”

The case was dismissed.

Several Iraqi journalists working for international news organizations have been held without charge by American and Iraqi forces. The absence of concrete evidence in so many of the cases is disturbing, to say the least.

“I am absolutely convinced,” said Mr. Horton, “that the ton of bricks fell on these two guys - Bilal Hussein and Abdul Ameer Hussein - because they were working as professional journalists. They were the eyes of the world, covering things that the Pentagon doesn’t want people in America to see.”

A legitimate news organization can’t help but experience a shudder at hearing that one of its employees may have been collaborating with the enemy. It’s a chilling, devastating allegation. To make that charge recklessly is reprehensible.

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

from the NYT:

By MARK MAZZETTI

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

[full text...]

Look into the Face of Terror

Of Immoral Acts and Stampeding Congress

from the NYT:

We’ll find out in November how well the White House’s be-very-afraid campaign has been working with voters. We already know how it’s working in Congress. Stampeded by the fear of looking weak on terrorism, lawmakers are rushing to pass a bill demanded by Bush that would have minimal impact on antiterrorist operations but could cause profound damage to justice and the American way.

Yesterday, Bush himself went to Capitol Hill to lobby for his bill, which would give Congressional approval to the same sort of ad hoc military commissions that Bush created on his own authority after 9/11 and that the Supreme Court has already ruled unconstitutional. It would permit the use of coerced evidence, secret hearings and other horrific violations of American justice.

Legal experts within the military have been deeply opposed to Bush’s plan from the beginning, and have formed one of the most influential bulwarks against the administration’s attempt to rewrite the rules to make its recent behavior retroactively legal. This week, the White House sank so low as to strong-arm the chief prosecutors for the four armed services into writing a letter to the House that seemed to endorse Bush’s position on two key issues. Congressional officials say those officers later told lawmakers that they did not want to sign the letter, which contradicts everything the prosecutors, dozens of their colleagues, former top commanders of the military and a series of federal judges have said in public.

The idea that the nation’s chief executive is pressing so hard to undermine basic standards of justice is shocking. And any argument that these extreme methods would be used only against the most dangerous of international terrorists has been destroyed by the handling of hundreds of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, many of whom appear to have been scooped up in Afghanistan years ago with little attempt to verify any connection to terrorism, and now are in danger of lingering behind bars forever without a day in court.

To lend his lobbying an utterly false sense of urgency, Bush announced last week that he had taken 14 dangerous terrorists from the secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons where he had been holding them for years and sent them to Guantánamo to stand trial. But none of the prisoners is going anywhere, and the current high-pressure timetable is related only to the election calendar.

The Geneva Conventions

One section of the administration bill would put American soldiers in grave jeopardy by rewriting the Geneva Conventions, condoning the practice of hiding prisoners in secret cells, and permitting the continued use of interrogation methods that violate the Geneva Conventions at the C.I.A. prisons.

Bush has made it clear that he plans to continue operating the C.I.A. camps. And he wants Congress to collaborate by exempting the United States from a provision in the Geneva Conventions that prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” Bush says this wording is too vague, but that’s a dodge. What he really wants is Congressional authority to go on doing things to prisoners in C.I.A. jails that are clear violations of international rules.

He also wants Congress to rewrite the War Crimes Act, which makes it a crime to violate the Geneva Conventions. The administration’s goal here is to avoid having C.I.A. interrogators, private contractors or the men who gave them their orders called to account for the immoral way the administration has run its terrorist detention centers.

The opposition to these provisions by legal scholars, military lawyers and a host of former top commanders of the armed forces has been overwhelming. In recent days, two former chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff, Colin L. Powell, and John W. Vessey, wrote to Senator John McCain urging him to go on fighting the White House. “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” General Powell wrote.

More than two dozen former military leaders and top Pentagon officials, from both parties, wrote to Senator John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, expressing “profound concern” about undermining the Geneva Conventions. Their objections involve a simple equation: The Conventions protect captured American soldiers. If America mistreats its prisoners, American soldiers are in danger of the same, or worse.

Defining the Enemy

Senators Warner, McCain and Lindsey Graham have formed a principled spine of resistance against their party’s attempt to steamroller the White House legislation through Congress. But their own bill — the only competing proposal to emerge so far — shares some big problems with Bush’s. One is its scope. Both bills draw the definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” so broadly that it could cover almost anyone that a particular administration decides is a threat, remove him from the judicial system and subject him to a military trial.

The law should cover actual terrorists and those who engage in hostilities against American forces outside an army or organized resistance group. But the White House bill also includes anyone who gives “material support” to a terrorist group or anyone affiliated with a terrorist group. Legal experts fear this definition could cover people who, for example, contribute to charities without knowing they support terrorist groups, or that are not identified as terrorist fronts until later. It could be used to arrest a legal resident of the United States and put him before a military commission.

It also could be used to capture foreign citizens in their native countries, or anywhere else, a concern that America’s allies have raised repeatedly. This is not just a theoretical problem. This sort of thing has already happened.

Stripping the Courts of Power

The White House wants to strip the federal courts of any power to review the detentions of the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. This provision has no real bearing on the handful of genuine terrorists who were recently shipped there from abroad. Their cases are likely to be brought before military commissions, whose judgments could be appealed to higher courts, including the Supreme Court. But it has a profound impact on the hundreds of others at Guantánamo Bay. Many of them, perhaps the majority, committed minor offenses, if any. The administration has no intention of trying them, and wants to prevent them from appealing for help in court.

This week, nine current and former federal judges, including a former F.B.I. director appointed by Ronald Reagan, begged Congress not to give in to White House pressure on this point. “For 200 years, the federal judiciary has maintained Chief Justice Marshall’s solemn admonition that ours is a government of laws, and not of men,” their letter said. “The proposed legislation imperils this proud history.”

•

The nation is in this hideous mess because Bush ignored the advice of people like this when he tried to set up prison camps beyond the reach of the law. It’s hard to believe their warnings will be ignored again, but the signs are ominous. Last week, the military’s top lawyers told the House Armed Services Committee that they strongly opposed the rules of evidence and other due-process clauses in the White House’s bill. The committee just went ahead and passed it anyway. Only eight of the 28 Democratic members had the courage to vote “no.”

Bill Frist, the majority leader, has already introduced the horrible White House bill on the Senate floor. Senators Warner, McCain and Graham have come up with a serious alternative, and they deserve enormous credit for standing up to Bush’s fearmongering — something many Democrats seem too frightened to do. (It was good to see the Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats join them in rejecting Bush’s bill yesterday.)

But their bill still has serious shortcomings, and should not be rushed through Congress in the current atmosphere, which has very little to do with stopping terrorists and everything to do with winning seats in November.

There is no urgency. Bush could have tried the 14 new inmates of Guantánamo Bay at any time if he had just done it legally. It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the White House is really worried about a swift resolution of their cases. Many members of Congress who succumb to the strong-arming will know, in their hearts, that they were doing the wrong thing out of fear for their political futures. Perhaps the voters will not judge them harshly this fall. But history will.

US nuclear study of Iran is dishonest

from the Sydney Morning Herald:

by Dafna Linzer, in Washington

UNITED NATIONS inspectors investigating Iran’s nuclear program have angrily complained to the Bush Administration and a Republican congressman about a report on Iran’s capabilities, calling parts of the document “outrageous and dishonest”.

International Atomic Energy Agency officials, who produced evidence to refute the report’s main claims, said in a letter on Wednesday that the report contained “erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements”.

The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Peter Hoekstra, the chairman of the House of Representatives intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy also was hand-delivered to Gregory Schulte, the US ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna.

The agency noted five significant errors in the committee’s report, which claimed Iran’s nuclear capabilities were more advanced than either the agency or US intelligence had shown.

The report said Iran was producing weapons-grade uranium. The IAEA called that “incorrect”, noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of at least 90 per cent; Iran had enriched uranium to 3.5 per cent, and done so under agency monitoring.

The UN letter surfaced as the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said he was open to new conditions to resolve Tehran’s standoff with the West over its nuclear program and believed talks could end the dispute.

“I am announcing that we are available, we are ready for new conditions,” Mr Ahmadinejad said yesterday, before leaving for a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Cuba.

A meeting between the European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and the Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani, set for yesterday, was postponed.

The IAEA had openly clashed with the Bush Administration on pre-war assessments of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program on forged documents.

After no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the agency came under criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is trying to build nuclear weapons in secret. At one point, the Administration orchestrated a failed campaign to remove the agency’s director, Mohamed ElBaradei.

Wednesday’s letter was the first time the IAEA has publicly rebutted US allegations about its Iran investigation.

When the congressional report was released last month, Mr Hoekstra said it was “to help increase the American public’s understanding of Iran as a threat”. The report is still to be voted on and has not been discussed by the full committee.

Several intelligence officers privately said the report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate.

“This is like prewar Iraq all over again,” said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. “You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that’s cherrypicked, and a report that trashes the inspectors.”

The report’s author, Fredrick Fleitz, is a one-time CIA officer who had been a special assistant to John Bolton, the Administration’s former point man on Iran at the State Department. Bolton, now US ambassador to the United Nations, had been highly influential during George Bush’s first term in crafting a policy that rejected talks with Tehran.

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.

A Self-Defeating “War”

from the WSJ:

By GEORGE SOROS

The war on terror is a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies. Five years after 9/11, a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts—Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia—a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world. Yet al Qaeda has not been subdued; a plot that could have claimed more victims than 9/11 has just been foiled by the vigilance of British intelligence.

Unfortunately, the “war on terror” metaphor was uncritically accepted by the American public as the obvious response to 9/11. It is now widely admitted that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder. But the war on terror remains the frame into which American policy has to fit. Most Democratic politicians subscribe to it for fear of being tagged as weak on defense.

What makes the war on terror self-defeating?

• First, war by its very nature creates innocent victims. A war waged against terrorists is even more likely to claim innocent victims because terrorists tend to keep their whereabouts hidden. The deaths, injuries and humiliation of civilians generate rage and resentment among their families and communities that in turn serves to build support for terrorists.

• Second, terrorism is an abstraction. It lumps together all political movements that use terrorist tactics. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sunni insurrection and the Mahdi army in Iraq are very different forces, but Bush’s global war on terror prevents us from differentiating between them and dealing with them accordingly. It inhibits much-needed negotiations with Iran and Syria because they are states that support terrorist groups.

• Third, the war on terror emphasizes military action while most territorial conflicts require political solutions. And, as the British have shown, al Qaeda is best dealt with by good intelligence. The war on terror increases the terrorist threat and makes the task of the intelligence agencies more difficult. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large; we need to focus on finding them, and preventing attacks like the one foiled in England.

• Fourth, the war on terror drives a wedge between “us” and “them.” We are innocent victims. They are perpetrators. But we fail to notice that we also become perpetrators in the process; the rest of the world, however, does notice. That is how such a wide gap has arisen between America and much of the world.

Taken together, these four factors ensure that the war on terror cannot be won. An endless war waged against an unseen enemy is doing great damage to our power and prestige abroad and to our open society at home. It has led to a dangerous extension of executive powers; it has tarnished our adherence to universal human rights; it has inhibited the critical process that is at the heart of an open society; and it has cost a lot of money. Most importantly, it has diverted attention from other urgent tasks that require American leadership, such as finishing the job we so correctly began in Afghanistan, addressing the looming global energy crisis, and dealing with nuclear proliferation.

With American influence at low ebb, the world is in danger of sliding into a vicious circle of escalating violence. We can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor. If we persevere on the wrong course, the situation will continue to deteriorate. It is not our will that is being tested, but our understanding of reality. It is painful to admit that our current predicaments are brought about by our own misconceptions. However, not admitting it is bound to prove even more painful in the long run. The strength of an open society lies in its ability to recognize and correct its mistakes. This is the test that confronts us.

Bush Blunders Roil the Mideast

from the Boston Globe via truthout:

By Robert Kuttner

The latest violence in the Middle East demonstrates the bankruptcy of the Bush administration’s grand design for the region. The Iraq war was going to display American power, promote democracy, strengthen moderates, and secure Israel. Instead, the quagmire has demonstrated the humiliating limits of US military power, fomented anarchy, recruited Islamist extremists, and strengthened a more radicalized Iran.

Palestinian moderates have been marginalized, leaving nobody for Israeli moderates to negotiate with. Hamas and Hezbollah have more support among Arabs than ever. Israel finds itself more vulnerable militarily, prone to excess, and dangerously isolated from world opinion. As for democracy, our few allies in the region are dictators and kings. Democratic Lebanon is a shambles. The democratically elected government in Iraq has just denounced Israel, and a democratic Palestinian election empowered Hamas.

Bush said you couldn’t negotiate with bad guys. In Iraq, where Saddam turned out to be telling the truth about nuclear weapons and Bush turned out to be lying, diplomacy was forsaken for war. Syria, which gave the US genuine intelligence help after 9/11, was deemed a nation not worth diplomatic engagement. As former National Security Council official Flynt Leverett documented, an overture by the then-moderate Iranian government in 2002 was blown off by the United States.

Bush insisted that we go it alone. Now, having rejected diplomacy, an isolated Bush administration is more dependent than ever on the European Union, the Russians, and the UN. In Bush’s four minutes of open-mike fame at the G-8 summit, he plaintively told Britain’s Tony Blair, “I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to [Syrian President] Assad and make something happen.”

But when UN General Secretary Kofi Annan told the Security Council Thursday that we need an immediate cease-fire and expanded multilateral peacekeeping, America’s UN ambassador, John Bolton, rejected the idea. Bolton and the other radicals in the administration want Israel to keep pummeling Lebanon a while longer. The Bush policy has produced a codependency of the most extreme elements on all sides—the party of mutual Armageddon. This is the war party of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Israeli right, the Iranian ultras, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. Right-wing strategists like William Kristol, who often reflect the thinking of Cheney, are now openly calling for war with Iran.

Iran is the source of those Hezbollah missiles, the spawning ground of Islamist militancy, the greatest threat to Israel. So let’s just have it out. Not a ground war or an Iraq-style regime change—we blew that option-- but a war on the cheap, of missile strikes (with a risk of mass civilian casualties). That would sure make Iran think twice about supporting Hezbollah, promote democracy, and respect America.

Can these people be serious?

Bush did not create radical Islamism, but he certainly gave it a boost. The point is not that the rulers of Iran, the Baghdad suicide bombers, and the fanatics of Hamas and Hezbollah are misunderstood good folks who need only a naive olive branch from the west. On the contrary, these forces menace everything modern and democratic. They must be stopped, not appeased. The issue is the most practical and effective way of containing them.

And contain is the right word. During the “long twilight struggle” as John Kennedy called the Cold War, the Soviet Union was even more of a threat. The Soviets really did have nuclear weapons, by the thousands. There were some in the United States who wanted to have it out, in World War III. Miraculously, they never attained power. Containment worked, communism fell. When pragmatists governed, we even managed to constructively engage the baddest of the bad, Red China, now our ally in containing North Korea, our prime supplier of Wal-Mart and biggest creditor.

But today, the ideological heirs to that lunatic fringe are running the American government. Every arrogant miscalculation only leads them to more disastrous blunders.

Had Bush used diplomacy to isolate Saddam and to improve relations with Iran and Syria, had he worked as Bill Clinton did for a reduction of violence and a true peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, radical Islam would have far less appeal, the United States would have more influence in the world, and Israel would be more secure. But you can’t undo history, and the mess Bush made will haunt his successors for decades.

With a mid-term election looming and the Mideast in flames, will voters finally recognize that this crowd is delusionally incompetent? Or will cynical fear-mongering lead anxious citizens yet again to rally ‘round their [foolish and illegitimate] “president”? 

Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?

from AlterNet via truthout:

By Jan Frel

A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the “supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.”

The extent to which American exceptionalism is embedded in the national psyche is awesome to behold.

While the United States is a country like any other, its citizens no more special than any others on the planet, Americans still react with surprise at the suggestion that their country could be held responsible for something as heinous as a war crime.

From the massacre of more than 100,000 people in the Philippines to the first nuclear attack ever at Hiroshima to the unprovoked invasion of Baghdad, U.S.-sponsored violence doesn’t feel as wrong and worthy of prosecution in internationally sanctioned criminal courts as the gory, bload-soaked atrocities of Congo, Darfur, Rwanda, and most certainly not the Nazis - most certainly not. Howard Zinn recently described this as our “inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.”

Most Americans firmly believe there is nothing the United States or its political leadership could possibly do that could equate to the crimes of Hitler’s Third Reich. The Nazis are our “gold standard of evil,” as author John Dolan once put it.

But the truth is that we can, and we have - most recently and significantly in Iraq. Perhaps no person on the planet is better equipped to identify and describe our crimes in Iraq than Benjamin Ferenccz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating death squads that killed more than one million people in the famous Einsatzgruppen Case. Ferencz, now 87, has gone on to become a founding father of the basis behind international law regarding war crimes, and his essays and legal work drawing from the Nuremberg trials and later the commission that established the International Criminal Court remain a lasting influence in that realm.

Ferencz’s biggest contribution to the war crimes field is his assertion that an unprovoked or “aggressive” war is the highest crime against mankind. It was the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that made possible the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallouja and Ramadi, the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, civilian massacres like Haditha, and on and on. Ferencz believes that a “prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.”

Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:

“The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States formulated by the United States in fact, after World War II. Its says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can’t use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, ‘Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they’ve found - then we’ll figure out what we’re going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq - which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter.”

It’s that simple. Ferencz called the invasion a “clear breach of law,” and dismissed the Bush administration’s legal defense that previous U.N. Security Council resolutions dating back to the first Gulf War justified an invasion in 2003. Ferencz notes that the first Bush president believed that the United States didn’t have a U.N. mandate to go into Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein; that authorization was simply to eject Hussein from Kuwait. Ferencz asked, “So how do we get authorization more than a decade later to finish the job? The arguments made to defend this are not persuasive.”

Writing for the United Kingdom’s Guardian, shortly before the 2003 invasion, international law expert Mark Littman echoed Ferencz: “The threatened war against Iraq will be a breach of the United Nations Charter and hence of international law unless it is authorized by a new and unambiguous resolution of the Security Council. The Charter is clear. No such war is permitted unless it is in self-defense or authorized by the Security Council.”

Challenges to the legality of this war can also be found at the ground level. First Lt. Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to refuse to serve in Iraq, cites the rules of the U.N. Charter as a principle reason for his dissent.

Ferencz isn’t using the invasion of Iraq as a convenient prop to exercise his longstanding American hatred: he has a decades-old paper trail of calls for every suspect of war crimes to be brought to international justice. When the United States captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003, Ferencz wrote that Hussein’s offenses included “the supreme international crime of aggression, to a wide variety of crimes against humanity, and a long list of atrocities condemned by both international and national laws.”

Ferencz isn’t the first to make the suggestion that the United States has committed state-sponsored war crimes against another nation - not only have leading war critics made this argument, but so had legal experts in the British government before the 2003 invasion. In a short essay in 2005, Ferencz lays out the inner deliberations of British and American officials as the preparations for the war were made:

U.K. military leaders had been calling for clear assurances that the war was legal under international law. They were very mindful that the treaty creating a new International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague had entered into force on July 1, 2002, with full support of the British government. Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, chief of the defense staff, was quoted as saying “I spent a good deal of time recently in the Balkans making sure Milosevic was put behind bars. I have no intention of ending up in the next cell to him in The Hague.”

Ferencz quotes the British deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry who, in the lead-up to the invasion, quit abruptly and wrote in her resignation letter: “I regret that I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security Council resolution … [A]n unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances that are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law.”

While the United Kingdom is a signatory of the ICC, and therefore under jurisdiction of that court, the United States is not, thanks to a Republican majority in Congress that has “attacks on America’s sovereignty” and “manipulation by the United Nations” in its pantheon of knee-jerk neuroses. Ferencz concedes that even though Britain and its leadership could be prosecuted, the international legal climate isn’t at a place where justice is blind enough to try it - or as Ferencz put it, humanity isn’t yet “civilized enough to prevent this type of illegal behavior.” And Ferencz said that while he believes the United States is guilty of war crimes, “the international community is not sufficiently organized to prosecute such a case.… There is no court at the moment that is competent to try that crime.”

As Ferencz said, the world is still a long way away from establishing norms that put all nations under the rule of law, but the battle to do so is a worthy one: “There’s no such thing as a war without atrocities, but war-making is the biggest atrocity of all.”

The suggestion that the Bush administration’s conduct in the “war on terror” amounts to a string of war crimes and human rights abuses is gaining credence in even the most ossified establishment circles of Washington. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling by the Supreme Court suggests that Bush’s attempt to ignore the Geneva Conventions in his approved treatment of terror suspects may leave him open to prosecution for war crimes. As Sidney Blumenthal points out, the court rejected Bush’s attempt to ignore Common Article 3, which bans “cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

And since Congress enacted the Geneva Conventions, making them the law of the United States, any violations that Bush or any other American commits “are considered ‘war crimes’ punishable as federal offenses,” as Justice Kennedy wrote.

George W. Bush in the dock facing a charge of war crimes? That’s well beyond the scope of possibility … or is it?

WWJD?

from HuffPo: