I was here
I said I’d be here for you over the weekend. I didn’t say I’d actually write anything. After all, that porch wasn’t going to fix itself (dammit). And speaking of the porch, while we didn’t get as much done as we planned, we did replace the deck and make it safe for postal employees, visiting kin, and cookie selling kids. Next free weekend, we make it pretty. My middle-aged, out of shape body hurts all over.

Supporting the troops
Over the last week or so, a few in Left Blogistan have been gnashing their teeth over the fact that the drug-addicted, fat idiot is carried on Armed Forces Radio while no counter balancing voice of the Left is carried. I agree, this bites big time. We’re spending taxpayer money to tell our boys and girls in beige camo that one political party is a bunch of traitorous dogs who hate them and the president can do no wrong. But if we try to object Rush’ presence, the trolls come out of the woodwork to call us pro-censorship, hypocrites. This also bites. If we try to demand equal time for one of our own, they call us PC, thought-controlling hypocrites. And yes, this too bites.

Those nice folks over at Salon have come up with a philosophically consistent and emotionally satisfying response. They are giving free subscriptions to their premium service to all active military (existing military subscribers get a free year). I hope other lefty sites jump on this bandwagon.

Okay, it’s not as emotionally satisfying as dropping an anvil on Rush, but we can’t drop an anvil on him because anvil dropping is wrong.

You can count on me
Those other blogs will be leaving you for the holiday weekend, leaving you without the obsessive coverage of and sarcastic commentary on everything those bad conservatives do that you count on to keep your blood pressure up.. But I won’t leave you. I’ll be here for you. I do it because I care and, like SZ, I don’t have a life. As a contract worker (not a mercenary, a temp. Although, if you prefer, you can think of me as an office ronin), I don’t make enough to take vacations. I also don’t make enough to hire a carpenter (as the weekend progresses I might mention several things that I can’t afford). I’ll be spending the weekend here at home fixing the decking and rails on my porch so they will be safer and more attractive for my sickly and aged mother to visit and make cookies. This is the kind of attention you can count on here at archy. Tell all your friends to read me and write Janeane Garafalo to demand she have me as a guest on her show.

Death to seditious Democrats
As reported by Atrios, Sean Hannity on his Wednesday night show equated speaking to Move On with speaking to the Klan.

HANNITY: Should -- why would Al Gore associate with a group that is that left wing and that radical? What if he spoke before the Klan? Would that -- would we not hold him in judgment for that?

Is this a fair comparison? Let's look at the two groups.

The Klan is a shadowy, semi-criminal organization with a very real criminal past that includes arson, assault, bank robbery, and murder all focused on the goal of intimidating and disenfranchising racial and religious minorities. This pattern would be called hate crimes and terrorism by any rational standard, except that the Ashcroft Justice Department feels that white Protestants are not capable of these crimes.

Move On is a legally formed political action group that registers voters and buys television ads critical of the president.

Hannity seems to feel that murder and criticizing Bush are equivalent crimes. Does he also think they should have equivalent punishments? Good thing he's not one of those hate filled Democrats, because then he might have said something outrageous.

Not impressed with his offer
The Iraqi Governing Council said no thanks to Bush's offer to tear down Abu Ghraib and build a new prison in its place.

President Bush's offer to demolish Abu Ghraib prison — made in a speech Monday night — found little support among Iraqis, with the head of the Governing Council yesterday calling the idea "a waste of resources."

[...]

Bush told an audience Monday night at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., that Abu Ghraib, scene of prisoner abuse by U.S. troops and notorious for torture under Saddam Hussein, will be destroyed "as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning."

[...]

Interior Minister Samir Shaker Mahmoud al-Sumeidi said he understood Bush's desire to "remove the memory and the stain" of the prisoner-abuse scandal. Still, he argued it would be better to change the way the prison is managed rather than construct a new building.

Don't they understand that all crises must be treated as an opportunity to send sweetheart contracts to Bush's friends? What will Bechtel and Halliburton stockholders do without the several hundred million that the prison construction job would have brought? If the Iraqis can't grasp as fundamental s principle of democracy as pork, how can they be said to be ready for self rule? Good thing the turn-over of power is a cosmetic sham; they need more time.

Snort. Good for them.

We need some clarification
A comment string at Pandagon brings to mind some questions for which I would like to have more information.

Abu Ghraib prison is a huge complex, over two hundred acres. The unit where the abuses that we have heard about took place is supposed to be the high value prisoner unit. What sort of process was used to decide who ended up in this unit? Most of us on the Left focus on the Red Cross report that more than 70% of the prisoners at Abu Graib were picked up in sweeps and not accused of anything specific. The Right has been focusing on the fact that this was the high value prisoner unit and therefore these guys must be guilty of something and deserving of violence (a chain of logic that does considerable violence to a couple of centuries of common law respect for due process). If we had a better idea of who the men in the high value prisoner unit were and how they got their we might be able to have a more productive debate.

There have been stories of humiliating little old ladies and raping women. There are no women in this unit of the prison. We need better explanations of where, when, and under what circumstances each abuse took place. Right now all we have is a bunch of anecdotes that are blended together in the public imagination and lacking context.

Another aspect of the confused blending of incidents is the eliding of interrogations and recreational violence. The Right narrative is of getting information from bad people in order to save lives (we're tough enough to do what needs to be done). Again, it's macho bullshit, but it allows them to remain on the side of the comic book heros. The Left narrative is of beating the crap out of innocent people for the heck of it. My feeling is that most of what has been revealed so far has been recreational violence and that the interrogation violence (torture) is still mostly covered up. I know there was some blurring of the borders at the prison, with guards asked to soften prisoners up for interrogation, so again, we need more context to make sense out of all of these horrific anecdotes.

The official excuse is to try and scapegoat the blame onto "a few bad apples." Our problem is that there were bad apples as well as sanctioned violations of international law. If we are going to nail those higher up the food chain, we need clarity about the different crimes committed, and we need to communicate it to the public in a sound-bite way.

Show no mercy
Al Gore pulls no punches when he says what's on all of our minds.

[From the Move On press release] Former Vice President Al Gore delivered a major foreign policy address in New York City today, sponsored by MoveOn PAC, linking the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to deep flaws in President Bush’s Iraq policy and calling for the resignation of 6 members of the Bush Administration team responsible for the failed policy and abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The members include Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor, George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence Agency, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and Stephen A. Cambone, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

"George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.

"He promised to “restore honor and integrity to the White House.” Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.

"Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.” He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins.

"How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words “We Are All Americans Now” and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib."

There are too many good and powerful lines for me do do justice to with a mere sequence of quotes. Go read the whole speech. We need more of this kind of honest and even harsh criticism. Bush has brought shame on the entire country. He has undermined our moral standing in the world, endangered our citizens, and abused his power. He does not deserve a polite benefit of the doubt. He deserves the kind of criticism that Pelosi and Gore are giving him. We need more of this.

Who authorized this crap?
I have always believed that once you sell your soul it is very hard to get it back. That goes equally for individuals and for groups. The national equivalent of selling my soul is the embrace of ideas like trading rights and freedoms for security and the philosophy of "to defeat the enemy, we must become the enemy." Macho posturings about getting tough and "doing what needs to be done" or declarations that "everything changed on 9/11" don't change anything. If America sells its soul, that soul is gone, and America is no longer America; it is just a line on a map filled with people who are just as bad as any other.

This administration would have us turn our back on a two-hundred-thirty-year history of defending human rights. They want us to embrace vile, outmoded, and un-American concepts like indefinite imprisonment by executive order, collective punishment, hostage taking, permanent suspension of due process and judicial oversight, and torture. In effect, they want to sell our soul for us. These things don't just happen because someone at the top wants them to. We are still a society of laws and processes; we have not yet succumbed to the feuhrerprinzip, whether the administration likes it or not. And so, there is a trail that leads to torture.

Eric Muller is asking some very pointed questions about that trail and the steps that must have been taken for even sham legality.

In which executive departments have attorneys been called upon to review the legality under American and international law of interrogation methods such as "water boarding" (in which people are dipped into water to make them fear they're about to be drowned) and multi-year confinement of people in total isolation? (On the strategy of permanent solitary confinement, see the Declaration of Lowell Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, on which the administration has relied in court.)

What conclusions did these attorneys reach on the legality of these methods?

How were disputes among attorneys or departments about the legality of these methods resolved? By whom?

Was DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel ever asked to opine on the lawfulness of any specific methods of interrogation? On whether any specific method of interrogation or approach to interrogation constituted "torture" within the meaning of any federal statute or treaty, or a violation of any provision of the Geneva Conventions? Who prepared any such opinion? What conclusion did he or she reach? Did DOJ's position on any such question conflict with an opinion rendered in another executive department? If so, how was the dispute resolved?

Given that there was no explicit congressional authorization for techniques of this sort, was there discussion within the executive branch about whether any congressional act even implicitly approved of them? Or about whether it was necessary to inform Congress in any way about the more aggressive methods of interrogation? What position did lawyers take on these questions? How, and by whom, were any disputes on these questions resolved?

These are questions that any investigation into this horror needs to ask. This is the way we identify those who want to sell our soul and fire the bastards.

Fortunately, one person, one leader, or even one administration cannot sell our collective soul. They can only sell their own. If we repudiate them, we are saved; America is saved. If we embrace them, we are doomed; America is doomed. It's as simple as that.

I shouldn’t need to mention this, but…
I was not able to see our President’s speech tonight but I see from the headlines that he made the predictable promise to raze Abu Ghraib prison. Considering the foresight and competence that this administration has shown in all things relating to Iraq, I hope someone reminds them to take the prisoners out before they start knocking the walls down.

Questions about the Chalabi brou-ha-ha
Now that Chalabi has been cast into the outer darkness and is no longer our best friend. I don't think he'll find many defenders in Left Blogistan. Most lefties who have followed his career (I'm not part of that group, so catching up over the last couple months has been very interesting for me) have had no trouble at all assembling lists of reasons for cutting him off. But now that the right has discovered to their shock that he is a bad person, I think we need to go over that list and ask some questions.

The reasons for getting rid of Chalabi boil down to three points, he's corrupt, he sold us worthless intelligence, and he's in bed with the Iranians.

• His corruption has been well reported in the press; why has the administration tolerated him for so long?
  
  
• When an audit showed $22 million in his care missing, why did the administration continue to pay him and trust him?
  
  
• When his intelligence turned out to be worthless, why did the administration continue to stand by it?
  
  
• We are accusing him of passing classified information to the Iranians; who gave him (a foreign civilian) access to that information?
  
  
• How long has the administration known he was in bed with the Iranians?
  
  
• Why did they choose this moment to break relations with him?
  
  
• Is the administration trying to scapegoat all of their failures in Iraq on to Chalabi and the Iranians?
  
  
• Will this result in new investigations of the administration or just add flavor to the existing investigations?
  
  
• Is the administration setting the stage for some election-time saber-rattling at the Iranians?
  
  
• Are we still stupid enough to fall for that?