You cannot tackle terrorism with the lawbook in your hand

Silvio Berlusconi, defending a football player who gave his fans a fascist salute: “Fascism in Italy was never a criminal doctrine. There were the racial [i.e., anti-Jewish] laws, horrible, but because one wanted to win the war [along side of] Hitler.” So that’s all right then. In the very same event (a dinner with foreign correspondents), he used the very same logic to defend Italy’s complicit role in America’s extraordinary renditions: “When hundreds of thousands of lives are at risk, countries have to use the secret methods... You cannot tackle terrorism with the lawbook in your hand. If they fight with a sword, you have to defend yourself with a sword.”

Israel will stop the January Palestinian elections being held in East Jerusalem, and not for the usual God-gave-Jerusalem-to-the-Jews reason (they didn’t stop voting the last time around), but explicitly because they don’t like the probable results of those elections, a sweeping Hamas victory. So the Palestinian government will probably cancel them.

The Russian Duma gives the government the absolute right to close down any NGO, giving no reason and with no appeal (the provisions applying to foreign NGOs like Human Rights Watch were watered down, but only slightly; they won’t be banned immediately, but the government can shut them down on vague grounds).

Scott McClellan accused Democrats filibustering the renewal (and making permanent) of the “Patriot Act” of “playing to certain special interests within their party that want to see authorities within this legislation killed,” without saying who those special interests might be. Could it be.... Satan?

We hardly knew ye, algae miracle worker

California has settled a suit, promising to stop segregating prisoners by race. They will now interview new inmates to determine their compatibility with members of another race, AP says.

Contest: suggest, in comments, sample questions (I may regret this).

The Canadian Supreme Court rules that group sex in clubs (in private rooms) is legal. Plan your vacations accordingly.

Funniest sounding obit headline of the day: “W. J. Oswald, 86, Algae Miracle Worker, Dies.” His big breakthrough came when he poured water on the algae while tracing the word for water on it...

Rumsfeld, looking for Hot Lips

I believe in a strong, robust executive authority. And the fascism fairy.

American ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzhad says that 2006 will be the “Year of the Police.” In Iraq, that is. He meant it to be reassuring.

Speaking of the Year of the Police, outgoing (thank God) Iraqi interior minister Bayan Jabr says the death squads in police uniform aren’t actually policemen: “Anyone can go to the store and buy a police uniform.”

The UK has been experiencing its own spying crisis, one with more wide-ranging implications than our own. 20 years ago, the security services began blackmailing a top Sinn Fein official, Denis Donaldson, into cooperating with them in ways that haven’t been fully revealed yet, but seem to include the fabrication of a scandal 3 years ago in which Sinn Fein was supposed to have been spying on other parties in Northern Ireland’s self-rule Stormont government, which was promptly abolished and direct rule from London restored. Still a lot of unanswered questions, but this is as good a primer as any other.

Opening sentence to a WaPo story: “Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) could barely conceal his anger.” Not exactly man-bites-dog, is it?

Frist is barely concealing his anger about the filibuster of renewal of the “Patriot Act.” At the risk of spoiling the surprise, let me tell you now that the Patriot Act will not expire, that there will instead be a deal for a 3-month extension, that Bush won’t carry out his threat to veto it, and that everyone in the Senate knows it.

On Monday, Condi Rice reacted to the election of Morales in Bolivia, saying “We have good relations with people across the political spectrum in Latin America,” which would be news to Chavez and Castro. But of course the state of relations will be “a matter of behavior.” Theirs, not ours, of course, we’re always perfectly behaved little angels. Also, “The issue for us is will the new Bolivian government govern democratically”. Faithful readers will remember that this is the new standard whereby the US deems democratically elected governments, such as Venezuela’s, to be undemocratic, based on subjective criteria determined not by the people of the country in question, but by the Bush administration.

Many have quoted Cheney saying yesterday, “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it,” “Either we’re serious about fighting the war on terror or we’re not,” and that the period after Watergate and Vietnam marked “the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy,” but he also cited actual examples of what he considers illegitimate limitations on a robust (dictionary definition: “uncompromising and forceful; not subtle; strong and rich in flavor or smell”) executive authority: the War Powers Act, natch, the limitation on the president’s ability to impound funds authorized by Congress, and Iran-Contra – he thinks Reagan had the authority to do all that Iran-Contra stuff. Other examples of the legitimate authority of the presidency: his own secret energy policy task force, and NSA warrantless surveillance. After all, “It’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years.”

Rumsfeld goes to Afghanistan in a surprise photo op (he met with American troops, but, running behind schedule, decided to skip the actual work portion of the trip, a meeting of the Combined Forces Command - Afghanistan staff) (Xinhuanet calls it a “surprised visit to Afghanistan”). Says the US plans to reduce troop levels from 19,000 to 16,000 doesn’t mean fewer troops, because we’re sending in NATO troops. Notice there’s no talk of Afghans taking responsibility for their own security, standing up so that Americans may stand down etc. Says the reduction won’t affect the hunt for bin Laden, which will continue with just as much success. Asked whether the US runs secret prisons in Afghanistan, as has been reported this week, Rummy gave this reassuring response: “Not to my knowledge.”

Where can I get me one of those hats?

Not accepting a relationship of submission

State Dept spokesmodel Sean McCormack said of the election of Evo Morales as president-elect of Bolivia, “We’ll see what policies that person pursues. And based on that, we’ll make an evaluation of what kind of relationship we’re going to have with that state.” I’m guessing a frosty one, when one partner in the “relationship” can’t bring himself to utter the name of the other. “That person” is also thinking about what kind of relationship we’re going to have: the WaPo says

On Sunday, [Morales] repeated some of his more provocative assertions, saying he would never accept a relationship of “submission” with Washington.

Provocative! Hell, that’s downright uppity. How dare he provoke us like that!

I’ve looked it up now, and provocative means “deliberately arousing sexual desire or interest.” Well, if Morales wants to maintain Washington’s sexual desire or interest, he’d better put those shackles and the hood and the assless leather pants back on and resume that relationship of submission at once. At once I say!

OK, that was just disturbing.

The WaPo neatly explains why democracy in the under-developed world is a sham:

The question, say both Bolivian and U.S. observers, is whether the socialist candidate will use that mandate to follow through on pledges for radical economic and political change -- pledges that won him support among indigenous and poor voters -- or whether he can demonstrate enough pragmatism to reassure foreign governments and investors, whose support he needs for economic development.

The WaPo quotes the egregious Bernard Aronson (who was Bush the Elder’s Assistant Secretary of State for Fucking up Latin America, the direct successor to Elliot Abrams in that post) who says that the “old threat in Latin America was that of military coups,” (which he used to support; in 1990 he said about the Salvadoran army, “I don’t think it indicts the armed forces if a unit commits an atrocity.”), but “The new threat is that of authoritarian democracies -- leaders who get elected and then use the state to repress opponents, push through social change and stay in power.” Yes, authoritarian democracies, right, whatever. Aronson is afraid that Morales will follow the path of Hugo Chavez, who has dared to stay in power (Aronson is now a partner in ACON Investments LLC, which manages investments in Venezuela).

Britain registered its first civil partnerships today, in hippy-dippy, uh, Belfast. There were protesters. And there were counter-protesters, like this one.


OK, that was just disturbing.

So the FISA court can issue warrants 72 hours after the actual bugging has begun. Obvious question, but I haven’t seen an answer to it: what happens if the court turns down the request for a warrant (not that that court ever does)?

Back in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s home town of Graz, Austria, there is a move afoot to remove his name from the local stadium in reaction to the execution of Tookie. So Arnold sent a petulant letter demanding that they remove his name from the stadium, and by the end of the year, or else. Or they could hold public executions in the stadium, that would be “fantastic” too. Also, “in the future, the use of my name to advertise or promote the city of Graz in any way is no longer allowed.” Also, he sent back a “ring of honor” the town had awarded him, saying he didn’t want it anymore, and it didn’t fit his cock anyway (steroid shrinkage).

OK, that was just disturbing.

The wacky new president of Iran bans Western music. Which gives me an excuse to quote a Daily Telegraph article from May 7, 1996:

THE appearance of smuggled Barbie dolls in shops in Iran has prompted Islamic hardliners to dub them “satanic” in an attempt to dissuade people from buying them.

Hardliners say that the “unwholesome flexibility of these dolls, their destructive beauty and their semi-nudity have an effect on the minds and morality of young children”.

OK, that was just disturbing.

Bush press conference: There’s a lot of work to get rid of the past

Jeez, Bush gives a press conference. Isn’t there some brush that needs clearing? The only thing more annoying than Bush not doing his job is Bush doing his job.

On NSA surveillance: “The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.” Also says they’re not listening to domestic calls under the secret NSA program, the FISA courts are evidently sufficiently speedy to deal with those calls, but not foreign ones. And if that weren’t murky enough, he want on to draw a distinction between “detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring,” a distinction he didn’t actually explain. (Click here for the very plausible theory that Bush avoided the FISA courts because the calls he was intercepting were those of journalists).


Says democracy in Iraq is developing really fast, though “I know with all the TV stations and stuff in America, two-and-a-half years seems like an eternity.” And of course it’s so much faster than in our crappy old country, where “our road to our Constitution... was pretty bumpy.” Yeah, there was all that violence between the Sunnis of Massachusetts and the Shiites of New Hampshire.

And what you’re seeing now is an historic moment, because I believe democracies will spread. I believe when people get the taste for freedom or see a neighbor with a taste for freedom, they will demand the same thing because I believe in the universality of freedom.

Bush went on, “It’s pretty much like the way I saw Rummy with his new Xbox 360 and I asked Laura over and over if I could have one too...”

And it’s not going to be easy. It’s still going to be hard, because we’re getting rid of decades of bitterness. If you’re a -- you know, you find these secret prisons where people have been tortured, that’s unacceptable. And, yet, there are some who still want to have retribution against people who harmed them.

Unacceptable, huh? Makes it sound like putting your elbows on the table. And you’ll notice he’s talking about Saddam’s secret prisons where people were tortured, not the American secret prisons where people were tortured, or the Interior Ministry secret prisons where people are tortured.

My only point to you is there’s a lot of work to get rid of the past, yet we’re headed in the right direction. And it’s an exciting moment in history.

History which he’s planning to abolish.


Asked a rather good question by the WaPo’s Peter Baker about whether he sees any limits to the powers of the president in time of a war which may go on for decades, Bush rejected the term “unchecked power,” citing, among other things, the fact that people in the executive took an oath to uphold the law (here he mimed taking an oath),


and added that there is oversight, because they briefed a few members of Congress. Secretly. About powers they have claimed Congress has no right to modify because they are part of the president’s “inherent authority.” So Congress can’t talk about it, and they can’t stop it. Some oversight.

Slow learners

Guardian headline: “Warlords and Women Take Seats in Afghan Parliament.” So the seating is like, boy girl boy girl?

Alberto Gonzales, the man at the pinnacle of the American legal profession: “Our position is that the authorization to use military force which was passed by the Congress shortly after Sept. 11 constitutes that authority [to conduct warrantless surveillance].” Interesting definition of military force. Since this was an interview by Katie Couric, there was no follow-up question as to whether he’s claiming that even a single member of Congress believed that they were granting such a power to the president.

Returning to last night’s fireside chat (because Americans are burning their furniture, unable to afford any other form of home heating) and Bush’s reference to critics as defeatists. Or, actually, as Defeatists. The initial cap makes clearer the tactic of Stalinist-type categorization of the enemy, as in his denominating the insurgency in Iraq as Rejectionists.

Dick Cheney went to Afghanistan to condescend to the troops: “It’s good to be back at Bagram Air Field... I’m only sorry I didn’t come earlier this month. Somebody told me I missed a chance to meet Vince McMahon, Big Show, and Triple H.” And to condescend to the “Taliban die-hards who apparently are slow learners. (Laughter.)” They’re still operating four years after their country was invaded and occupied by the most powerful army in the history of the world, and they’re slow learners?

I also want you to know, ladies and gentlemen, that I was in Iraq yesterday... Your comrades are doing fantastic work over there. On occasion they receive mixed signals from politicians about whether America has what it takes to stay in the fight.

On the other hand, you guys, here in Afghanistan, most Americans have completely forgotten you’re even here.

Where can I get me one of those hats?

There are only two options before our country — victory or defeat

Yet another Bush speech about Iraq. I can’t have been the only one mesmerized by Bush’s hands, which were constantly in motion, to no particular effect, in part because they were positioned awkwardly on the desk in front of him because his chair was too low.


The speech struck me as more defensive than he’s been, the message being essentially that it’s not as bad as you think it is. “For every scene of destruction in Iraq, there are more scenes of rebuilding and hope.” Is that the standard? that the number of “scenes” (it’s all just pictures on the tv to him) of bombs blowing up are outnumbered by other scenes in which people are rebuilding after the last time bombs blew up.


The people of Iraq and Afghanistan must be wondering why Bush keeps calling them allies of the US in the war on terror. Hey, we already did our little bit, they must be saying, we gave at the office. I’m pretty sure no candidates in either countries’ elections ran on a platform of being allies of the United States in The War Against Terror (TWAT).


He admits that “This work has been especially difficult in Iraq — more difficult than we expected.” No fucking kidding. That’s what will be praised by the right-wing pundits as welcome honesty.

“Saddam Hussein, captured and jailed, is still the same raging tyrant — only now without a throne.” Raging tyrant? Didn’t Robert DeNiro gain a lot of weight for that one?

“We invite terrorism by ignoring them.” They just don’t take the hint, do they? We’ve all got relatives like that.


He’s perfectly willing to listen to “honest criticism” but not to “defeatists.” So if you oppose the war or think it is going badly, he doesn’t have to listen to you because you are dishonest (and a partisan, he says in the next sentence, and “giving in to despair,” he says later, as if his view of the war is rational and fact-based while differing views arise entirely from emotion).

Now, he says, “there are only two options before our country — victory or defeat.” The more he paints withdrawing troops from Iraq as a defeat, the more he makes it impossible ever to say that it’s time to do so, given the unlikelihood of the country calming down to the point where even he can credibly declare victory. So there is in fact a third option: permanent military occupation and never-ending warfare.

Then he finished with what he called a Christmas carol (and misquoted), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Christmas Bells,” which was about how God would defeat those fucking Confederates.

Cheney of Arabia

Dick Cheney told American troops, during his 10-hour trip to Iraq, “We’re in this fight to win. These colors don’t run.” And they didn’t frag him on the spot. You have to admire the discipline. He also visited some Iraqi troops, who couldn’t frag him:

U.S. forces guarded Cheney with weapons at the ready while Iraqi soldiers, who had no weapons, held their arms out as if they were carrying imaginary guns. (AP)

I so want a picture of that. Anyone seen one?

Fundamentally inconsistent with achieving victory

A London Sunday Times reporter visits Fallujah and reports that it’s still a depressing concentration camp with rubble and raw sewage and really pissed off residents. She is the first independent reporter (i.e., not escorted and watched over by American soldiers) in Fallujah in over a year; she had to sneak in.

Bill Frist has an AIDS charity, World of Hope Inc. It raises money from corporations with legislative agendas, and spends large amounts of money on “consultant” fees to Frist’s cronies, as a way of keeping them on the payroll during non-election years. (World of Hope doesn’t seem to exist on the web, which doesn’t really suggest “legitimate charity” to me. It’s not these people, or these.)

The House of Reps has voted 279-109 for a resolution claiming that “setting an artificial timetable” for leaving Iraq would be “fundamentally inconsistent with achieving victory.” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) asked, “What is victory? Nobody has defined what victory is.” Silly Jim, defining victory is fundamentally inconsistent with achieving victory.

Speaking of achieving victory, Dick Cheney made his first trip to Iraq since 1991, and would no doubt have been greeted as a liberator by the Iraqi people, had he met any below the rank of prime minister, with whom he shared a jolly, but evil, laugh.



They gave him his very own fake-military jacket, but would only let him eat with a plastic spork.

There’s an enemy that lurks

Yesterday, in a News Hour interview I’ve just caught up with, Bush refused to confirm the existence of illegal surveillance, “and the reason why is that there’s an enemy that lurks, that would like to know exactly what we’re trying to do to stop them.”. And this made all sorts of sense, because clearly the Enemy That Lurks wouldn’t cease discussing their nefarious plans and dastardly lurkery on the telephone just because they read on the front page of the New York Times that such conversations were being intercepted; no, they’d wait until the president of the United States confirmed the story. Terrorists don’t believe what they read in the newspapers, but they do take the word of George W. Bush as gospel.

So imagine my surprise today when Bush used his weekly address
on the talking-type wireless to take responsibility for having ordered just such a program of interception. Doesn’t he remember that there’s an enemy that lurks? He didn’t make his grand confession without taking a few swipes at those who “improperly provided” the story to the media, and the media who reported on it, eventually. “As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk.” Tut tut tut. “Revealing classified information is illegal. It alerts our enemies.” By which I assume he means the New York Times.

He assured us that the only people whose rights were violated had “known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations” and that there were reviews every 45 days or so by our nation’s top legal officials, including the Attorney General and the Counsel to the President.” Alberto and Harriet, those crack legal eagles. Swell.

He demonstrated the necessity of such surveillance by citing how the 9/11 hijackers had communicated with each other and with others outside the country. Yeah, but they also took over planes with pen-knives, but no one would expect to get away with that after 9/11 either. Bush said he plans to continue authorizing the program as long as there was a single bad person anywhere in the world.


Back to the McNeil-Lehrer interview. He seems to say that he never got an estimate for casualties, either American (excuse me, “coalition”) or Iraqi, before making the decision to invade. “I knew there would be casualties. I never tried to guess.” Nevertheless, “I’ll never forget making the decision in the Situation Room [or possibly making the situation in the Decision Room], and it affected me. I mean, it was -- I got up out of the chair and walked around the South Lawn there”. Whooa, dude, enough with the girly-girly emotions! This ain’t Oprah!

We run a danger of trying to say the casualties are less than other wars or more than expected. It’s just everybody matters, every person matters, and what really matters is having the strategy and the will to make sure any death is not -- is honored by achieving an objective.

Sure, one dead, 2,100 dead, 30,000 dead, 100,000 dead, same dif.

Nor do I think you don’t sit around in a planning session and say, gosh, I wonder how many-- how many people are going to die because of suicide bombers or because of politics or-- I know this, that when we went in we had a plan to target the guilty and spare the innocent and with our precision weaponry and a military that is a humane group of people that we did a good job of that.

Target the guilty. Bush not only thinks he has the power to see into people’s souls, he thinks his rockets can too.

Says that when he said on Fox about Tom DeLay,

HUME: Do you just — do you believe he’s innocent?

BUSH: Do I? Yes, I do.

what he was conveying “is that people are innocent till proven otherwise.” Quite right, in this country we determine guilt or innocence through precision weapons, as set down in the Constitution.

I want my security first. I’ll deal with all the details after that.

Trent Lott, supporting illegal surveillance of Americans: “I don’t agree with the libertarians. I want my security first. I’ll deal with all the details after that.” As Benjamin Franklin said in his blog in 1759: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

The House voted to condition future aid to Palestine on Hamas being banned from parliamentary elections. So I suppose we won’t be hearing any more about spreading democracy throughout the Middle East. Oops, my bad, of course we will: Tom Lantos, one of the sponsors, says that Hamas “has nothing but contempt for democracy, though it is more than happy to exploit democracy for its own nefarious ends”. And Rep. Ileanna Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the House International Relations subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, accuses Hamas of trying to “hijack” the elections by, you know, being more popular than other parties and winning more votes.

On a very special episode of The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly interviews Secretary of War Rumsfeld, and tv’s all across America blow themselves up in suicidal despair. I missed seeing it myself, as I was talking my tv off a ledge at the time, but it reads like the Wimbledon of Stupid; when they get a volley of asininity going, it is a thing to behold, if you have the stomach for it.

O’REILLY: Is [Iraq] the best battlefield?

RUMSFELD: It is central front of the global war on terror.

O’REILLY: Even more than Iran?

RUMSFELD: Iran is not a battleground today. Iran is very busy financing Hezbollah and Hamas and the various terrorist groups that they fund with Syria to go in and try to — you heard what the new president...

O’REILLY: He’s a nut. All right. But I don’t know. You could make a case in Iran.

RUMSFELD: They said Hitler was a nut.

O’REILLY: I would have. And they should have stopped him in the Rhine.

Rummy on American Iranian influence in Iraq: “And what we’ve got to count on is that the Iraqi people are, even the Shia, are more Iraqi than they are Shia and that they’re not going to want Iran influencing their elections.” Rummy on the torture bill: “from the Defense Department’s standpoint, the arrangement that’s been made does not have implications, because we have had requirements for humane treatment from the beginning.” And that’s worked out just swell.

And here’s a photo from the Iraqi elections I haven’t been able to think of an excuse for using:

Inherent authority

The Bushies are using the same smokescreen on domestic eavesdropping that they used for torture: saying they didn’t break the law, in an area where they also say (but not at the same time, so no one notices, they hope) that the law simply doesn’t apply. In today’s Gaggle, Scottie McClellan repeatedly insisted that they are abiding by the law while repeatedly refusing to answer if it is legal to spy on Americans. The Bushies believe (or claim to believe) 1) that the 2001 Congressional resolution on the “war against terrorism” gives them authorization to do literally anything, 2) that “the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance... of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority” (according to a brief they filed in a 2002 case). “Inherent authority” = above the law.

Making it clear to the world that this government does not torture

Dumbest quotes of 2005.

An amusing Clive James memoir of his youthful “literary education in sludge fiction” in the Times Literary Supplement.
“Bulldog Drummond arrived in my life like a descending testicle”.

Speaking of descending testicles, George Bush has come out in favor of the legal ban on torture he fought (and threatened to veto) for so long, after he realized that even Dick Cheney couldn’t stop it (at the White House ceremony yesterday in which Bush symbolically surrendered his cattle prod to John McCain, Cheney was conspicuous by his absence).



By next week, he’ll be saying it was all his idea. This week, it’s still only half his idea: he’s willing to give McCain half-credit for “work[ing] very closely” with him on their “common objective” “to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture”. Note that he’s more concerned with the appearance of not-torturing than with actually not torturing. His previous (and let’s face it, current and future) policy has been to achieve the same objective, convincing the world that the US doesn’t torture, by torturing but lying about it. McCain is too much of a partisan at heart to be trusted with ownership of this issue, but he did mischievously push some boundaries, strategically rephrasing what Bush had said: “now we can move forward and make sure that the whole world knows that, as the President has stated many times, that we do not practice cruel, inhuman treatment or torture.” Of course, Bush has said no such thing, confining himself to denouncing torture, as defined into non-existence by Alberto Gonzales.

So now that we have a law against torture, that should settle it huh? Moving on: the other big civil liberties story was of course Bush’s authorizing the NSA in 2002 to break the law by spying on Americans’ phone calls and electronic communications. The WaPo, which may not have recognized the implications of its own story, says “A senior official reached by telephone said the issue was too sensitive to talk about. None of several press officers responded to telephone or e-mail messages.” Ix-nay on the elephone-tay.

On the torture bill, there were some little loopholes written in: if torture somehow accidentally happened, the “evidence” arising from that torture could be used by military panels to decide whether to hold people forever in Guantanamo. Oh, and people held not on US soil couldn’t actually enforce the ban on torturing them in US courts. Little stuff like that.

Little ink-stained fingers

Bush met with some overseas Iraqi voters, “And you might notice, they’ve got their -- got the little ink-stained fingers there.” Yes Bush was just fascinated by the little ink-stained fingers.


Maybe a little too fascinated.

Now wait, wait, did I vote too?

83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry

The White House says Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s description of the Holocaust as a “myth” shows why Iran shouldn’t be allowed to have nukes. Not sure I’m following the logic. I should have said in my last post that in the interview with Fox, Bush revived the phrase “Axis of Evil” when discussing Iran, which he called (speaking of myths) a “theocracy that has little transparency.”

And someone from the Israeli foreign ministry who really must not be paying a lot of attention said, “The combination of extremist ideology, a warped understanding of reality and nuclear weapons is a combination that no one in the international community can accept.”

Enigmatic no longer: emotion recognition software says that the Mona Lisa is 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry.

The chimp and the fox

Just when I thought I was out, they drag me back in: with the last of the 4 Iraq speeches, I’d hoped I was done with Dumbya until after Christthelordandyoubetternotforgetitmas. Then he went and got interviewed by Brit Hume on Fox.

Says Rumsfeld is doing “heck of a job.” Twice. Says Cheney is good because he’s secretive: “when he discusses a topic with me and he gives me his advice, I never read about it in the newspaper the next day. And that’s why our relationship is so close and his advice is so valued.” Also means no one else can correct any mistakes, give him a differing perspective; just the way Bubble Boy likes it.

Says Abramoff was “an equal money dispenser” to people in both parties. So it cancels out, I guess.

Says DeLay is innocent.

Says the number he gave, 30,000 dead Iraqis, was “speculative,” just “a number that was in the press.”

What’s important for the American people to know is that our mission in Iraq is to target the guilty and protect the innocent. That’s what you go over with precision weapons and good intelligence. The terrorists’ mission in Iraq is to target the innocent.

What is he, 6? Also, is that “good intelligence” like the intel you just cited, a speculative number that was in the press?

Denies believing that God picked him to be president.

Says “I hope to be remembered, from a personal perspective, as a fellow who had lived life to the fullest and gave it his all.” Jeez, that was your all?

Marginalized

Another day, another Bush speech on Iraq. Convinced yet? He says that democracy in Iraq will inspire a freedom caliphate “from Damascus to Tehran.” OK, he didn’t use the word caliphate.

What’s remarkable about his justifications for the invasion of Iraq is how little it’s changed in 3 years. Various elements drop out – no smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud – but the rest remains unchanged. He still says “The United States did not choose war -- the choice was Saddam Hussein’s,” who refused to “disclose and disarm,” even though there was nothing to disarm. Bush admits now that much of the intelligence was wrong, but Saddam was still “a threat,” and still at fault, presumably for failing to acquire some arms in order to disclose and disarm them, or something.

I’ve been asking what Bush means by “marginalizing” the “rejectionists.” Evidently it will happen when Sunnis vote, because that will mean the system will be all inclusive and shit. Oh, c’mon, I vote in every election and I’m pretty marginalized, and the Sunnis of Anbar province voted 97% against this constitution. Bush still thinks it’s impossible for an Iraqi to both vote and fight, in the same way that he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. By the way, in Monday’s speech and today, he called it a “bold constitution.” As opposed to a shy constitution, I suppose.



As in every one of these speeches, he quotes the forged Zawahiri-Zarqawi letter, without being challenged by anyone for lying about intel yet again. Zawahiri is supposed to have decided that Americans are weak because of the way they left Vietnam. Maybe George Bush isn’t the person to be talking about that.

He speaks up again for the right to debate the war, unless you say something he considers “irresponsible” or “pure politics,” such as “that we act because of oil, that we act in Iraq because of Israel, or because we misled the American people.” Yeah, irresponsible, pure politics, whatever, I’ve done four of these godawful speeches and I just don’t care anymore, my brain has been marginalized.

I understand political expediency

As the Canadian election process gets underway, the American ambassador, David Wilkins, issued this little threat warning fatwa bit of helpful advice, directed especially at Prime Minister Paul Martin: “It may be smart election politics to thump your chest and constantly criticize your friend and your Number One trading partner. But it’s a slippery slope and all of us should hope it doesn’t have a long-term impact on our relationship.” “I understand political expediency,” Wilkins, the former speaker of the South Carolina House of Reps added. Diplomacy, however, he’s a little fuzzier about. Canada is so pleased to be treated to the same ham-handed electoral intervention as Nicaragua or Venezuela receive. The Toronto Star compares Wilkins to Archie Bunker telling Edith to stifle. Before he was named ambassador earlier this year, Wilkins had only been to Canada once, decades ago.

Speaking of get-out-the-vote campaigns, the decision on whether to grant the UN’s request for the United States to contribute 10 helicopters to assist in the Haitian elections will be made by... Donald Rumsfeld. The secretary of defense gets to decide the value to the US of elections in Haiti.

Condi Rice, in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, said “When America leads with principle in the world, freedom’s cause grows stronger. We saw this when Ronald Reagan spurned friendly dictators and supported freedom’s cause in Latin America.” Spurned... friendly dictators... head... hurt. She also accused unnamed countries of “boycotting” the trial of Saddam Hussein, saying participation (whatever that means) is a special obligation for those who support human rights. Asked to clarify her remarks, a State Dept official “pointed out that many nations had opposed the fact that Hussein, if found guilty, faced the death penalty”. Oh, those human rights.

Tookie taken

California has indeed executed Tookie Williams, despite his years of good work on death row educating people to the fact that Tookie was his middle name rather than a nickname. Governor Terminator’s statement about his decision suggests that he denied clemency less because of the 4 killings than for his failure to apologize for them. Very Emily Post of the governor; I’m too lazy to look up his non-apology apologies to all the women he sexually harassed or assaulted, but you get the idea. He also said that Williams’s anti-gang work, often cited as a reason he should be granted clemency, had failed to end any and all gang violence, so that was another reason to execute him. The next scheduled execution in California is of a 75-year old blind guy, recovering from a heart attack, in a wheelchair. Is the death chamber wheelchair-accessible? His last meal will also be his birthday dinner; what gifts do you get for a guy who’s going to die at 12:01 that day? And doesn’t that sound like the worst birthday party in the history of the world?

Speaking of crappy gifts, in Iraq the Victorious Army Group has extended its deadline for a website design contest to Jan. 15. The winner will receive God’s blessings and the opportunity to fire 3 long-range rockets at an American military base. Enter early and often.

But it was not a peaceful welcome

WaPo headline: “FEMA Ordered to Extend Hotel Stays.” Yeah, because telling the clerk, “By the hour? We only need it for 15 minutes” is just so tacky.

When Bush in today’s speech said that this time, unlike in the January 2005 elections, seats in the Iraqi parliament would be allocated according to population, I was wondering when a census was last carried out and if there’d been something like, say, an invasion and war that might have altered the population distribution since then. Turns out, seats will actually be allocated not on the basis of total numbers, but registration for the January elections... which the Sunnis boycotted. Also, 1/6 of the seats are based on a single-national-constituency such as that used in January.

In an interview with Bush today, NBC’s Brian Williams asked about the Newsweek story that Bush lives in a bubble – big scoop for Newsweek, that one. Bush responded: “Well, I’m talking to you. You’re a person.” He went on, “I feel very comfortable that I’m very aware of what’s going on.” And added that he never reads the news magazines – a big scoop for Brian Williams, that one. Later, after Bush expresses admiration for Abraham Lincoln, Williams noted that Lincoln could meet members of the general public right in the White House. Bush says, yeah, but he’s got Air Force One, so he can meet lots of families of dead soldiers: “I’m sure Abraham Lincoln was able to do that, but I don’t think he was able to do it in cities all around the United States which I have been able to do.” “And I try to be patient and absorb the anguish of a family that’s just mourning.” Tries to be patient. The man’s a saint, I tells ya.

Says he likes Teddy Roosevelt because “He used American influence to shape history and to lay what I call the foundations for peace.” Well, unless you count the world war that started five years after he left office.

Asked why American troops were not welcomed in Iraq as liberators: “I think we are welcomed. But it was not a peaceful welcome.”

Wrestling with the profound consequences

Governor Arnold has denied clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams after “wrestling with the profound consequences.” This particular wrestling match, like so many others, was fixed. OK, I don’t really know to what extent political considerations entered into the decision, although pundits have been opining that Schwarzenegger needed to feed some raw meat, such as a dead black man, to his base after the betrayal of hiring a Democrat as his new chief of staff last week. I do know the decision he made was the path of least political resistance. I do know he waited until the last minute to make his announcement, which is pretty cruel itself. I do know that the idea of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I mean Arnold Freaking Schwarzenegger!! having the power of life and death over another human being is the height of absurdity. But then, the very belief of death-penalty supporters that they possess wisdom enough to decide whether a fellow person should live or die is evidence enough, if evidence were needed, that they don’t.

As if it meant something

Various governments continue to treat Israel as some sort of model when it comes to riot-control, a paragon to be emulated. The latest worshippers at the feet of the masters: France, which, having dealt with many days of rioting recently with a deplorably low amount of bloodshed, will be visited by the Israeli public security minister and police commissioner, who will advise them on how to do better next time.

Though Bush’s speech on Iraq today was supposed to be the 3rd in a series of 4, it contained little if any new material. Speaking in Philadelphia, he quoted someone who said in 1776, when the Liberty Bell was sounded after the Declaration of Independence was signed, “It rang as if it meant something.” Like every other Bush speech on Iraq, his words were designed to sound as if they meant something, but they didn’t. He’s still, for example, talking about “marginalizing” the “rejectionists,” and I still don’t know what, if anything, that would entail. So nothing new in the prepared speech, but this time he took questions. In response to one, he gave an estimate of 30,000 Iraqi dead. I really thought he was going to dodge the question, and I salute his bravery in actually answering. OK, with an imaginary number, but still.



Challenged directly to justify the links he insists on drawing between Al Qaeda and Iraq, he did dodge. He went on at some length about how Saddam Hussein was a threat – evidently admitting that the intel about WMDs was all wrong makes no difference to how big a threat he was. And there was this weird passage in the speech: “In a 1998 fatwa, Osama bin Laden argued that the suffering of the Iraqi people was justification for his declaration of war on America. Now bin Laden and al-Qaeda are the direct cause of the Iraqi people’s suffering.” Fuck if I know what this means.

He took another swipe at Al-Jazeera:

Look, I recognize we got an image issue, particularly when you’ve got Arabic television stations -- that are constantly just pounding America, saying ‘America is fighting Islam,’ ‘Americans can’t stand Muslims,’ ‘This is a war against a religion.’

Notice how he denies – three times – that this is a religious crusade, without addressing charges of going to war for oil, or imperialism (by the by, at one point he casually suggested that several more governments were going to have to fall in the Middle East). On the religion thing, he went on, “ours is not a nation that rejects religion. Ours is a nation that accepts people of all faiths”. Unless they don’t say “Merry Christmas” on cue, of course, in which case we will annihilate them.

Telling the US side of the story to approved targeted audiences

What the fuck sort of day is this? Today’s NYT obits page reported the death of not one but two people who wrote (very different sorts of) books I own, Roger Shattuck and Robert Sheckley, then during the day Eugene McCarthy and Richard Pryor die. How did I not know Pryor was one of the writers of Blazing Saddles?

Boy I hope no one is reading any of that for the first time here.

The Sunday Times says that the only pictures ever published in Russia of Putin’s daughters are over a decade old.

“The enemy in Anbar province is different from that in other areas of Iraq,” a Pentagon release begins intriguingly, only to crash and burn in the next sentence, when it turns out that they are all “rejectionists,” a term that made its debut in Bush’s November 30th speech, and which is remarkable for the amount of information it completely fails to convey. Is this the grand sum of 3 years of accumulated knowledge about the enemy? The Pentagon people peddling this piffle prefer to remain “on background,” as well they might; you do have to wonder about a Pentagon release in which Pentagon officials aren’t willing to be named. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of a Rejectionist Party, and I would even suggest a motto: “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” Has a ring to it, doesn’t it? But as an intellectual category, it tells you nothing about the aspirations and ideas of the people to whom you apply the category (it’s not like any Iraqis actually consider themselves to be “rejectionists”). Indeed, it denies they have any aspirations or ideas we need to pay any attention to; it’s the same dismissive taunt, “They have no ideas, they just trash ours,” the Republicans like to use about the Democrats. To call your opponents rejectionist is to stigmatize, even criminalize disagreement.

The NYT has a good long story about American semi-secret propaganda efforts in Iraq and, in the last part, Afghanistan. Says a psyops colonel, “We tell the U.S. side of the story to approved targeted audiences.” In Afghanistan, the Pentagon gives money to 30 radio stations, including one named... wait for it... Peace, and a newspaper of the same name. Without disclosing the relationship, of course. Says AID’s rep in Afghanistan, whose name is evidently also a secret, “We want to maintain the perception (if not the reality) that these radio stations are in fact fully independent.” That’s called lying. AID also funds something called Voice For Humanity, which hands out iPod-like devices (pink for women, silver for men!) in both countries with get-out-the-vote messages, which can’t be used for anything else, just like those North Korean radios that can only receive state radio.

Unless, of course, they meant stoning infidel voters

Inappropriate headline of the week, from the WaPo: “Iraq’s Mosques Rock the Vote as Election Nears.”

It’s official: according to the Patent and Trademark Office, the word “dyke” is no longer offensive. Accordingly, it has reversed an earlier decision to deny a trademark for the name “Dykes on Bikes.”

There’s some sort of lesson in this story about people with one of the most boring hobbies ever, planespotting, helped expose the secret CIA torture flights. One planespotter in Spain, who posted a picture of one plane on the web, started getting calls from reporters and... others: “One man wanted to buy up all the photos. He eventually sent me a form in which he asked for everything, including my home address. I didn’t give it to him and I never heard from him again.” Your tax dollars at work.

Simon Carr of the Indy (sub., so no link) says that David Cameron, though the 5th Tory party leader since Thatcher, still has to figure out how to “integrate Mrs Thatcher back into the Conservative story as a necessary but demented character, a creature of her time, like Joan of Arc.”

I love it when Bush scandals intersect: the key pre-war “evidence” that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and chemical weapons was provided by a single prisoner, rendered to Egypt, who lied to make the torture stop.

We’ll let the historians look back and make those judgments

Four men who stole the original manuscript of Darwin’s The Origin of Species have been sentenced to long prison terms. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere. Oh, and did I mention it was from the library of Transylvania University?

In Wednesday’s Gaggle, Scotty McClellan was asked if mistakes were committed by the US in the Iraq war. Astonishingly, he admits that there were. Less astonishingly, he says he doesn’t know what they were, and indeed, “we’ll let the historians look back and make those judgments. I don’t think you can do it in the current time.” So there you have it: the Bush admin not only doesn’t learn from its mistakes, but denies even the possibility of learning from its mistakes until decades from now, which could be a little late. On the other hand it might not be late because, due to those mistakes, we’ll probably still be fighting this war decades from now.

Speaking of lengthy contemplation, this Thai Buddhist monk is wearing the helmet because of falling rocks from the blasting at a nearby limestone quarry.


Wilkommen: Cute story in the Indy about preparations in Germany for next year’s World Cup, specifically, mega-brothels being built to accommodate the 40,000 prostitutes expected to make their way to Berlin for the event. Actually a good thing, if it cuts down on the number of prostitutes who are sex slaves. 3 million football fans are expected to make use of their services.

Speaking of remarkably accommodating and flexible Europeans, all the European officials Condi met evidently found her reassurances entirely reassuring, or say they did.

George Bush claims that all his policies come from these two. Explains so much. Now if it were two cats...

Wink winkery

In Britain, the Law Lords (the highest court) rule that evidence elicited by torture in other countries may not be used in court.

Back here in torture central, various sources explain how every word spoken by Condi about torture this week has been exquisitely polished by State Dept lawyers to mean either nothing or the exact opposite of what it’s meant to sound like. Eric Umansky in Today’s Papers points out that her statement

As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States obligations under the [Convention Against Torture], which prohibits, of course, cruel and inhumane and degrading treatment, those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States

is undercut by the Bush legal position that there are in fact no legal obligations not to torture foreigners unless they are held in the US. So they would abide by their obligations, but claim there are no obligations.

Also (and forgive the lack of links; I had assumed someone would collect all the Condi-parsings in one place, but no one has), the NYT yesterday noted that when she said the US doesn’t send prisoners to countries where they “will be tortured,” that only excludes rendition when we absolutely, positively know that they will be tortured, not that they may be, or probably will be. I believe in lawyer’s parlance, that’s called a “wink wink.” A couple of days ago, she said that the US didn’t transport prisoners “for the purpose” of torture, more wink winkery. (I just made that up. I like it.) And of course without a working definition of “torture,” no statement rejecting the practice of torture has any real-world meaning.

And someone in the Guardian, um, or the Independent, sorry again, focused on her use of the word “policy” – for example, her statement above began with the phrase “As a matter of U.S. policy...” – which is another loophole, since policies have exceptions and are a matter of presidential will (that is, they can be changed at any time); “policy” is not an iron-clad promise: she wouldn’t have used the phrase if it were. To the extent that gullible news media, and gullible congresscritters like Carl Levin, believe that some sort of change has taken place, her oh so carefully chosen words have done what they were intended to do, get critics off the Bushies’ backs. If she had really intended to rule out the use of torture, her words would not have needed to be carefully chosen.

There is perhaps a limit to gullibility among those who characterize Rice’s words as a “reversal of policy”: I’ve heard no one say that they believe that any of the practices – kidnappings in foreign countries, secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, torture by American interrogators, torture by foreign interrogators – will actually be altered, that a decision was made this week by the Bush admin to stop doing any of the things it’s been doing.

If you’re wondering about the statement by UN high commissioner for human rights Louise Arbour which provoked John Bolton to object “I think it is inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we’re engaged in in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers,” here it is. Oddly, she doesn’t mention the US specifically. Wonder how he knew she meant us?

Militias and armed gangs are exerting more influence than they should in a free society

Some snippets from Bush’s latest Iraq speech:

“Over the course of this war, we have learned that winning the battle for Iraqi cities is only the first step. ... We found that after we left, the terrorists would re-enter the city, intimidate local leaders and police, and eventually retake control.” Boy , live and learn, huh? You’d think no one had ever fought a war before.

On Najaf: “An Iraqi battalion has consumed [sic] control of the former American military base” but “There are still kidnappings, and militias and armed gangs are exerting more influence than they should in a free society.” As opposed to exerting just the right amount of influence.

Says there’s some corruption in the Iraqi government at the local and national levels, so “[w]e’ve helped the Iraqi people establish institutions like a Commission on Public Integrity and a stronger Supreme Board of Audit to improve oversight of the rebuilding process.” I’m guessing the contracts to set up the Commission on Public Integrity and the Supreme Board of Audit went to Haliburton.

As is now requisite, Bush quoted Holy Joe Lieberman approvingly. Joementum went to Iraq and wrote that he could see the signs of progress: “There are many more cars on the streets... and literally millions more cell phones in Iraq hands than before.” Of course the cell phones are being used to detonate the cars...

*

Hanukkah at the White House, or as George calls it, Jewy Christmas

California right-wingers are so upset with Der Arnold that they’re looking around for an alternative.

In Germany, Condi Rice said that she wouldn’t comment on the American kidnapping, and five-month detention and torture of German national Khaled al-Masri, all because he had a “suspicious name,” because he’s suing, and she certainly can’t talk about an issue that might be before the courts. I am getting so sick of that line. Angela Merkel came out of their meeting saying Rice had admitted a mistake in that case, but the State Dept says that Rice did no such thing and they don’t understand how Merkel could ever have gotten such an idea. Rice said something about “if” little errors occur, the US will rectify them, although she didn’t say how dumping al-Masri on a mountain road and then pressuring Germany not to talk publicly about the case fit with that.

George Bush loves him the Hanukkah. Possibly because it’s all about the oil. So he got a 19-day jump start on it.


Is the White House’s fire insurance premium paid up?

That’s the West Point Jewish Cadet Choir. Let me repeat that: the West Point Jewish Cadet Choir.

We are not tents people

Earlier this year, Robert Mugabe destroyed the houses of hundreds of thousands of people in the subtly named “Operation Drive Out Rubbish.” Now, his government has rejected an offer from the UN to provide tents because “we are not tents people.”

A Bush exchange with AP reporter Nedra Pickler today:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Insurgents in Iraq claim that they have taken a U.S. citizen hostage. We also have a U.S. peace activist who is being held. Is there anything you can do to get them back?

THE PRESIDENT: We, of course, don’t pay ransom for any hostages. What we will do, of course, is use our intelligence gathering to see if we can’t help locate them. The best way to make sure that Iraq is a peaceful society is to continue to spread democracy. And, clearly, there are some there who want to stop the spread of democracy. There are terrorists there who will kill innocent people and behead people and kill children; terrorists who have got desires to hurt the American people. And it should be -- the more violent they get, the clearer the cause ought to be, that we’re going to achieve victory in Iraq, and that we’ll bring these people to justice. We will hunt them down, along with our Iraqi friends, and at the same time, spread democracy.

Notice how quickly he slides from the individual hostages to his terrorists-are-bad talking points, never making a human connection or saying a word to the families of the hostages. The rest of us just aren’t real to him. Indeed, there’s nothing in his answer that demonstrates that he knows the hostages’ names or is following this story at all. Also, saying we don’t pay ransom is fine, but the thing about using intel to track them down just increases the chances they’ll be killed.

On Iraq, he says the troops “need to hear... that we have a strategy that will win. ... And so our strategy is two-fold” (killing people, spreading democracy). Only, the thing is, in last Wednesday’s so-called major speech, he said, “Our strategy in Iraq has three elements.” He can’t even remember how many folds/elements his strategy has. Or possibly he just can’t count that high.

About secret prisons and torture, he seems to have gotten the memo about stressing how everything we do follows American laws without mentioning the Bush admin position that American laws don’t actually apply to these detainees. Note the McClellanesque use of mindless repetition:

I can tell you two things: one, that we abide by the law of the United States; we do not torture. And two, we will try to do everything we can to protect us within the law. We’re facing an enemy that would like to hit America again, and the American people expect us to, within our laws, do everything we can to protect them.

To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks

The State Dept’s position on the Venezuelan elections, the Miami Herald notes, “was clearly closer to the opposition line” than to the government’s. Funny, that. State spokesmodel Adam Ereli says the low turnout, caused by the opposition boycott (and not even that low compared to other Venezuelan mid-term elections, Left I points out), is a sign of distrust in the electoral system, showing a magical ability to read the minds of the Venezuelan non-voters. (Response of one reporter at the press conference: Isn’t that a bit of a reach? Fifty percent of the people in this country don’t vote. You just don’t like Venezuela very much.) The Herald quotes an opposition leader saying, or possibly miming, “Silence united Venezuelans.” A little silence from the State Dept would also be nice.

Rummy Rumsfeld, criticizing the media’s peculiar habit of focusing on the negative: “To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks.” That’s one of the best Rummyisms yet. And he asked, after citing a survey showing pessimism about Iraq among American journalists, academics, think tanks, etc, “Which view of Iraq is more accurate, the pessimistic view of the so-called elites in our country, or the more optimistic view expressed by millions of Iraqis and by some 155,000 U.S. troops on the ground?” Oo, oo, I know this one, oh, I’m gonna have to go with “the so-called elites in our country.”

There are a lot of knuckleheads here that need to die

Excellent: it was time for another Neil Bush scandal. Now he’s hanging around with Sun Myung Moon.

Israel – ostensibly in response to 3 rockets, but any excuse would have done – has announced plans to a) resume assassinations in Gaza, b) fire into built-up regions, after giving the residents what I’m sure will be ample time to get out of the way.

George Monbiot on why biodiesel sucks.

Quote of the day, from Marine Col. Stephen W. Davis, about military operations in Anbar province: “This is not a hearts and minds battle. ... There are a lot of knuckleheads here that need to die. You’re just crunching heads.”

There are two kinds of people in the world: those the (London Times) headline “Saddam Trial Hears of ‘Human Flesh Grinder’” makes want to read the article, and those it makes want not to read the article.

Caption contest: Bush (circled, on the right) attends a production of The Nutcracker.

Condi the Rock Star sez: Some governments choose to cooperate with the United States

The NYT has an article on “The Man Behind the Secretary of State’s Rock Star Image.” That aide insists that all of his work in promoting her alleged rock star image is not for domestic consumption – in a story about Condi’s rock star image (no, it doesn’t get less silly with repetition, does it?) printed coincidentally on the same day she’s facing questions in Europe about secret prisons and torture.

Rockin’?
Condi the rock star tried today to implicate European countries in America’s torture flights and secret prisons (whose existence she refused to confirm or deny): “Some governments choose to cooperate with the United States. That cooperation is a two-way street. We share intelligence that has helped protect European countries from attack, saving European lives.” So if a country doesn’t “cooperate,” we don’t share any intelligence we have that it might be attacked by terrorists? She won’t say which European countries cooperate, because that would put them at risk of reprisal. Not saying, instead, puts all of them at risk, or at least the ones rumored to be involved. She defended, nay praised, the extra-judicial detention of prisoners, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge the existence of the prisons in which those prisoners are held, because to do so “would be compromising intelligence information, and I’m not going to do that”. That statement is designed to elicit the Pavlovian mouth-shutting that is the response of most of the media to claims that intel is endangered, but in fact makes no sense whatsoever. Compromised how?

Oh, and if you read Condi the rock star’s comment about respecting the sovereignty of European states too quickly, you may have missed what she was actually saying: she totally respects their right to lie about there being secret prisons on their territory.

Unprecedented democratic conditions

NYT: “The American commanders say their soldiers have largely halted combat missions and now play a training and backup role for the Iraqi forces”. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

Let’s see if we can spot a pattern. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, asked by Chris Wallace about secret overseas prisons today, said, “We respect the sovereignty of the countries with which we deal and we do not move people around the world so that they can be tortured.” Bush, last Tuesday, in non-response to a question about secret overseas prisons: “The United States of America does not torture.” McClellan, Friday, when asked about secret overseas prisons: “The President has made it very clear that we do not torture.” And we’ll see what Condi says in Europe this week. (Update: yup.) The pattern is that you ask them about secret prisons and they immediately turn the subject to torture. Which is a term none of them have ever been willing to define.

Hadley said Rice won’t comment on the CIA operations, presumably even to the people who run the countries where they take place, because “the information would help the enemy.” John McCain? The ACLU?

Hey, I just figured something out. The secret prisons are only in a couple of countries, as far as we know, Poland and Romania we think, but the flights that took prisoners there went through a lot of countries – Britain, Ireland, Germany, Italy, etc etc. I think the CIA deliberately spread them around to implicate as many countries as possible to keep them quiet.

AP headline: “US Missile, al-Qaida Death May Be Linked.” Ya think? The first story they tried to put out was that he’d been blown up accidentally by one of his own bombs. If that’s your cover story, you might use missiles without model numbers and the words “guided missile” and “US” on them.

Not surprisingly, Kazakhstan’s dictator Nazarbayev is “re-elected” for another 7-year term with 91% of the vote, in what Nazarbayev calls “unprecedented democratic conditions,” but which were, of course, undemocratic and very precedented.

Number 3

The alleged number 3 man in Al Qaeda was killed in Pakistan by a drone. At the same time, Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway gives birth to a boy who is number 3 in the line of succession. Coincidence? I think not!

Equality under God

In both his speech on immigration last month and his radio address today, Bush said that immigrants should assimilate and “we must continue to welcome legal immigrants and help them learn the customs and values that unite all Americans, including liberty and civic responsibility, equality under God, tolerance for others, and the English language.” Funny that he should be talking about assimilation and equality while proposing a guest worker program. Also, when will Mr. Patriot Act learn the customs and values of liberty; since when did the draft- and, just yesterday, jury-duty dodger believe in civic responsibility; what does this privileged member of the lucky sperm club know about equality; when did this god-bothering homophobe show a passing acquaintance with tolerance; or the English language? And indeed, which is the English language supposed to be, a custom or a value?

Also, what’s with the “equality under God” crap? Well, I know what the phrase means: that God values all souls equally. It’s a Christian thing (yeah, yeah, other religions too, but the expression is a Christian one), it is not an American thing. Indeed, just as he often says that freedom comes from God, what he is trying to do is Christianize the values that underlie American institutions, and it’s as creepy as the campaign to take that atheist Jefferson off the nickel and replace him with Jesus.

Okay, I made that up, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Like Zorro

The Pentagon has decided to brazen it out and defend the practice of secretly paying to place happy-news stories in the Iraqi press as a) perfectly legitimate “rebuttal information” to counter the “lies” of the insurgents and “get the truth out there”, b) a practice “customary in Iraq.”

Although it is widely reported that Condi Rice, who is visiting Europe next week, will answer the questions of European governments about secret prisons, Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern, who met her on a visit to the US this week, says (I can only found a paraphrase, not a direct quote) that she told him that “she expected allies to trust that America does not allow rights abuses.” Ah yes, the old “trust me” ploy.

The front-runner in Chile’s presidential elections is Michelle Bachelet, who was tortured as a dissident during the Pinochet years, and whose father was tortured to death.

On the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat, various bus systems kept a seat unoccupied in her honor and inevitably someone in New York – although a tourist, not a New Yorker – sat in it and wouldn’t get up. “I think I’ve got a right to sit here,” she said. Welcome to your place in history, Fiona Humphreys of Bristol.

The Chinese finally admit that they harvest organs from people they execute and sell them to rich foreigners, but promise to “tidy up the medical market.”

The annual Bad Sex in Fiction prize has been awarded, to Giles Coren’s novel Winkler. I didn’t think it was as funny as previous winners, so I was going to pass on posting it this time, but there’s something I rather like about the form in which the London Times (for which Coren is a restaurant reviewer) printed the award-winning passage:

And he **** **** in her ***** and his **** jumped around and ******* on her ***** and he blacked *** and she **** his **** out of her ***** and lifted ******* from his **** and ******* the pillow away and he ****** and ******* at the air, and he **** again so **** that his **** ******** out of her **** and a **** of it *** him straight in the *** and ***** like ******* he’d ever *** in *****, and he yelled with the pain, but the **** could have been ********, and as she ******* at his ****, which was ******* around like a ****** dropped in an ***** ****, she ********* his **** deeply with the ***** of both **** and he **** three **** times, in ***** ****** on *** chest. Like Zorro.

Robbie, do you like movies about gladiators?

Very clear

A couple of days ago I commented on the insanity in the White House whereby they believe that George Bush making a speech about his Iraq policy, emitting word-like sounds from his chimp-like mouth, would actually increase support for it. But it’s actually worse than that, much worse. Let me give you two quotes. Bush two days ago: “The United States of America does not torture. And that’s important for people around the world to understand”. And Scotty McClellan today, after he refused to confirm or deny the existence of secret prisons: “The President has made it very clear that we do not torture”. Now maybe this was obvious to all of you, but the concept is so alien to my way of thinking that my brain may just have rejected it out of hand before now, succumbing to audacity overload: they expect everyone, and not just Americans either, to take Bush’s word for it, to treat Bush’s say-so as if it were incontrovertible evidence, to say “Well, I’ve read all these stories about torture, and it really seemed like there was something to them, but George Bush has said that we do not torture, and that obviously clears up that little misunderstanding completely and conclusively.” They won’t let the UN into Guantanamo, they won’t admit the existence of the prisons: they are literally offering no other proof than Chimpy’s verbal denial.

Look for the union label, when you are buying that coat, dress or IED

So the Bushies didn’t realize that torturing Iraqis would look bad, or the use of chemical weapons like white phosphorus, or... Israeli commandos training Kurds in Israeli-style “anti-terrorist” techniques.

327 parties are running in the Iraqi elections, among them: the Islamic Virtue Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution In Iraq, the Assyrian Patriotic Party, the Turkmen Loyalty Movement, Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, Iraqi Dignitaries Council, Gathering for the Future of Iraq, Assyrian Independent Gathering Movement, Society of Turkmen Tribes and Elites, the Independent Cultivated League, the Arabic Unifying Front (I think not), The Sixth of January Movement, Democratic Iraqi Sons Gathering, Amal Association for Intifada Martyrs, a party simply called Consistency, the Future Party, the Future, We All For Iraq, Prisoners and Political Martyrs Gathering, Syndicate of the Honorable Gentlemen, etc.

And the insurgency ELIGgers exhibit the same fragmentation, with over 100 groups. The NYT quotes a leaflet found in Ramadi complaining about this: “We are asking people to reject any statement signed by the Sajeel Battalion of the Islamic Army that does not carry their slogan or seal.”

Singapore must have found a new hangman, because they executed the Australian drug smuggler, Nguyen Tuong Van. After intense lobbying by Australia, they allowed him to hold hands with (but not hug) his mother before they strung him up. Interestingly, his mother was a Vietnamese refugee, who escaped Vietnam the same year she gave birth to him (I don’t know whether before or after), while the victim of the 1,000th American execution since 1976, Kenneth Boyd, was a Vietnam veteran. Also, Nguyen was executed in Changi Prison, which Australians will remember as the site of a Japanese prisoner of war camp where many Australians were kept during World War II.

Texas was responsible for 355 of those 1,000 executions, and George W. Bush signed the death warrants for 152 of them.

A leading Kazakhstan opposition leader, Zamenbek Nurkadilov, has been found dead of what the police are calling a suicide. He was shot twice in the chest and once in the head, so he must have been really quite depressed.

CBS is in talks with Al Sharpton for him to star in a sitcom, possibly called “Al in the Family.”

We don’t lie - we don’t need to lie

Free at last: Nelson Mandela has been made a freeman of Salford, England, which means he has the right to herd sheep over London Bridge, be drunk and disorderly without risk of arrest, or wander the streets with a drawn sword and if convicted of a capital crime (and the combination of sheep, a drawn sword and being drunk & disorderly has brought down many a man before now), to be hanged with a silken rope. I’m pretty sure this is what he was working towards, those 27 years on Robben Island.

Back in South Africa, the Constitutional Court rules that confining marriage to heterosexuals is a form of discrimination inconsistent with the constitution.

The Pentagon admits that it is currently force feeding 22 hunger-striking prisoners in Guantanamo, but says it is doing so “humanely,” so that’s okay, then. Says Brig. Gen. John Gong, “We have a great desire to ensure they are healthy.” And, heck, says the press release, “For the most part, the feedings are not involuntary... Most agree to the procedure” (if they don’t “agree to the procedure,” they’re put in restraints). Why some of them even insert their own NG tubes into their own noses. And no you may not confirm any of this by speaking with the prisoners.

Asked about the program whereby the Pentagon paid for happy-talk stories to be printed in Iraqi newspapers, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch responded, Yeah, but Zarqawi cuts people’s heads off and stuff, “so that he gets international coverage to look like he has more capability than he truly has”. Also, Zarqawi lies and stuff, but “We don’t lie - we don’t need to lie,” he lied.