George in Hungaryland

Bush is in Hungary to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, which George has always found deeply inspirational and moving since he first heard of it this morning after breakfast. He called it “the idea of a revolution that celebrated the notion that all men and women should be free.” Celebrated? He does know it was crushed, right? Of course Bush being Bush drew from the events of 1956 his usual conclusion about the universal desire to be free, without quite noticing that they were about the desire of a small nation to be free from the occupying army of a large imperial power attempting to impose its ideology on them. That might have been a less comfortable lesson, and Bush doesn’t like those.

Caption contest:


What is Hungarian PM Ferenc Gyurcsany explaining to George?
Unfortunately for Ferenc, the last toast has put George in one of his “frisky” moods
I’d title this one “Bush’s brain just broke” except 1) You could use that caption for most pictures of Bush, 2) It assumes that his brain ever worked.

You don’t normally engage in conversations by threatening to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles

The WaPo has a new detail about the Afghan secret police’s helpful editorial suggestions to the press: the correct term is not “warlord” but “freedom fighter.”

8 Marines are charged with killing an Iraqi and planting a “throw-down” shovel and an AK-47 on his body to make him look like he was planting an IED (how that works without also planting an IED on him, I don’t know). That Iraqi’s name? “Awad the Lame.”

But remember, 99.9% of American troops are killing people only in approved ways, so why focus on 0.1%? Unless it’s the richest 0.1% of Americans. Those people need a tax cut.

(Update: more details this morning. The Marines, after a fruitless night staking out some holes, waiting for someone to put an IED in them, went looking for someone named Gowad, but figured Awad [the Lame] was close enough. Hat tip to Zeynap, who hasn’t been posting enough lately.)

For 9 months, the Pentagon kept from the families of two dead soldiers that they had been killed, deliberately, by Iraqi soldiers. As they stand up, we stand down, or at least duck.

After threatening to shoot down North Korea’s missile if it is tested and then realizing, Oh yeah, we can’t actually do that, the US is refusing NK’s offer to forego the test if direct talks resume. The US rejects that because it’s just not polite. Sez John Bolton, the poster boy for polite, “You don’t normally engage in conversations by threatening to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles.” No, you “refuse to rule out any of our options” – isn’t that what we always say about Iran?

George in Europeland

Reuters: Thousands of people have been flocking to worship a man in West Bengal who can climb trees in seconds, gobbles up bananas and has a “tail”. They believe that Chandre Oraon, 27, is an incarnation of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god.

Speaking of monkey gods, George Bush is visiting Austria for the very first time. He keeps looking for kangaroos. He had a press conference with his good friend, Austrian Chancellor Schüssel (“I call him Wolfgang, he calls me George W.”). Near as I can figure it, Bush was in Europe to send messages to non-Europeans. He told Iran, which says it will respond to the nuclear proposal by August 22: “It seems like an awful long time for a reasonable answer -- for a reasonable proposal, a long time for an answer.” Yeah, George, like you’re such a fast reader. He told North Korea it should “not fire whatever it is on their missile.” Kimchee? Bush was shocked and offended to hear that Europeans consider the US the biggest threat to global stability. “Absurd” he called it, chuckling. “It’s a -- we’re a transparent democracy. People know exactly what’s on our mind.” And you don’t see any correlation between people knowing what’s on your mind and them considering you a threat to global stability, George? He added, “For Europe, September the 11th was a moment; for us, it was a change of thinking.” And, let’s face it, a change of underwear.

Then there was a round-table thing with students. One of whom was from Kosovo, the daughter of a murdered professor, who asked George about whether a politically independent Kosovo could achieve financial independence through foreign investment... and asked Laura to describe a family day in the White House. George said you need “good law, good practice, and anti-corruption.” Oddly enough, Laura gave the same answer.

Some pictures. I like this one of Wolfgang and George W. because of the chairs.


Wolfgang brought along his giantess of a foreign minister, Ursula Plassnik. Is it wrong of me that my first thought was that she could take Condi in a fight?


That’s George and Laura at the far end, out of focus. Reuters photographer Larry Downing seems to have been distracted by something.


Sorry, I don’t know if that’s the Kosovar student. Nor do I have her number.

All right, you’ve covered your ass

The Department of Homeland Security put the secret hotline numbers it uses to communicate with state governors on the Do Not Call Registry.

China, switching its form of executions from firing squads to lethal injection, is buying death vans from a private company which someone tricked into thinking that a really good name for the website for its English-speaking customers would be bigbigbozo.en.ec21.com (couldn’t find the van listed on the site).


Bush said last night that “right now we’re doing hard work in Iraq.” Which is funny because he wasn’t actually in Iraq but in Washington DC at something called the President’s Dinner Gala (Gala >noun. A festive entertainment or performance. From the Old French galer ‘to make merry’.) I guess there’s hard work and then there’s hard work.

Speaking of hard work in Iraq, I’m so looking forward to hearing exactly how those two soldiers – no, let’s give them their names, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker – were tortured and killed. I’m sure this won’t make American soldiers even more trigger-happy.

Anyway, Bush’s Gala was to raise money for Republican candidates, because “It is important to have members of the United States Congress who will not wave the white flag of surrender in this war on terror.” He continued:

There is a debate here in Washington, and there should be. And I welcome the debate, and we should welcome the debate. But I want to remind you of the consequences if those who want to withdraw from Iraq happen to prevail in the debate. An early withdrawal would be a defeat for the United States of America. An early withdrawal would embolden the terrorists. ... An early withdrawal would embolden al Qaeda and bin Laden.

I guess there’s welcome, and then there’s welcome.

He said, twice, how important it is to keep Hastert and Frist in their positions. Other bloggers have pointed out that Kitty Killer is retiring.

Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (reviews in NYT & WaPo today; I’ll probably wait for my library to get it) (Update: my review here), has one especially good interesting-if-true anecdote: that a CIA guy flew out to Crawford in the summer of 2001 because they were afraid “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States” was too subtle a title to strike Bush’s interest. Bush heard him out and said, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

I guess there’s a covered ass, and then there’s George W. Bush.

Devastation

Freedom, Ain’t It Grand: the Afghan secret police have issued an order that journalists may not criticize American and other foreign troops, may not portray the Afghan military as weak, may not interview or film insurgent leaders, may not make militant activities their lead story. Journalists were called to a meeting and issued their new marching orders.

Speaking of dark, secretive thugs meeting journalists, Dick Cheney went to the National Press Club today, and defended his “last throes” remark (Think Progress has the video). Evidently when we look back on it in ten years we’ll realize that he was right. Something to look forward to.


He did admit not having anticipated that the invasion of Iraq might result in, you know, violence, nor did they anticipate “the devastation that 30 years of Saddam’s rule had wrought, if you will, on the psychology of the Iraqi people. Very, very hard to go from the way they were forced to live for a long period of time to a situation in which they have the opportunity for self-government, for setting up and operating their own free and democratically-elected society.” Given the format of the event, there was no follow-up, so it was unclear what events, specifically, he was blaming on the devastated psychology of the Iraqi people or what the nature of that devastation is. Remember when Bush kept saying that Some People were saying that maybe certain peoples weren’t prepared for democracy and I asked who, in the real world, was actually saying that? Turns out it was Dick Cheney.

There’s never a duffel bag around when you need one

Headline from the Pentagon’s website: “Mountain Thrust Continues in Afghanistan.”

Bush went to the United States Merchant Marine Academy to give the commencement address. He informed the midshippersons that when Andy Card went there, he’d been stuffed in a duffel bag and run up the flagpole. Other than that not much decent blog-fodder in the speech. He did have a message for the Iranian people (although I’m assuming relatively few Iranian citizens were in the graduating class of the United States Merchant Marine Academy): evidently the US respects Iranians, and especially Cyrus the Great, who Bush has admired since he first heard about him, from his own mouth as he read the name off the teleprompter.

And then... ah screw it: let’s just show the pictures.

Transparent

I haven’t seen the “Formica report” (or as much of it as wasn’t censored) yet (why isn’t it on the ACLU website?), but on Saturday there was a story about it on the Pentagon website, which quoted various military officials praising the secret report as showing “that [DoD] is committed to transparency.” Those officials were speaking anonymously. One said that the report “is not new news.” You don’t really get to say that after keeping it secret a year and a half. Saying that its recommendations had all been implemented, he/she said, “This is an excellent example of the [Defense Department] doing the right thing; an excellent example of the department implementing the recommendations. You can’t ask for more from your government.” Except maybe not torturing & abusing prisoners in the first place. But then in all this talk, if the DOD is “transparent,” the prisoners are actually invisible. Gen. Formica himself seems to have interviewed only “soldiers, commanders and medical personnel.” Iraqis are evidently only worth listening to when they’re speaking between screams of pain.

Formica’s approach to various forms of abuse is time-dependent. He says that keeping prisoners in cells too small (4 X 4") to stand up or lie down in is okay for two days, but not for seven. Good to know. He says that keeping a prisoner on bread & water for 17 days is too long, but not so long as to create major medical problems. Incidentally, I was wondering about those “cells,” specifically whether US forces had actually built them for this purpose, but it seems that they were actually crates of some kind.

Raindrops keep falling on his chimp-like head

The absence of posting, if anyone was wondering, was due to a quaint annual tradition here at Casa del WIIIAI, the Running of the Blogger to The Computer Repair Store. My hard drive was corrupted. But you probably suspected that already.

Speaking of corrupt, Genentech is trying to prevent a colon cancer drug, Avastin, being used to prevent blindness because such tiny amounts of the drug do the trick that it’s just not very profitable. So it won’t test the drug or apply for licenses for it to be used for that purpose. What it will do is sell the drug to people with wet macular degeneration under a different name at, say, one hundred times the price. (There was an even better story a few years ago: a drug that cures sleeping sickness was taken off the market because Africans couldn’t pay enough to make it profitable, but production was later resumed when it was discovered that it also eliminated unwanted facial hair in rich white women.)

Israel’s claim that the shell that blew up all those people at the beach wasn’t its shell is based on 1) conveniently having failed to mention many of the shells it launched at Gaza that day, 2) lying about the timing of the blast.

Compare and contrast that with the Pentagon’s attempt to exonerate some Special Ops guys, who they say tortured prisoners only because they were given the old manual, which said they could.

Hell we all know what that’s like, just blindly following IKEA directions that seem to have been translated from Swedish into Korean and then into one of those African clicking languages and then into English, and you’re wondering why you’re attaching electrodes (a) to genitals (b) with Allen wrench (c) when you’re supposed to be building a media center, but that’s what it says in the instructions, so you just do it.

And then the military covered up the report – the “Formica report”! – for more than a year and a half. Now that it’s been released (heavily censored, natch) due to the FOIA and the ACLU, they say we should view it as a “historical document” from the old-timey days of 2004, a nostalgic look back on a free-wheeling time, like “Deadwood,” but with fewer mustaches.

“Too stupid to come in out of the what now?”

But before “it” became a number, “it” was a living, breathing human being

Tony Insert-Snow-Related-Pun-Here, asked if Bush had a reaction to the 2,500th dead service member military personnel in Iraq, replied: “It’s a number”. And Bush doesn’t do fuzzy math, much less bloody math.

The Supreme Court rules that the fruits of a poisonous tree are in fact delicious, refusing to use the exclusionary rule to enforce its own ruling against no-knock warrants. Scalia writes that the “social cost” of enforcing the Fourth Amendment is too high if it means guilty people might not be convicted because the evidence against them was illegally obtained. Why is the exclusionary rule no longer necessary? Scalia says that the police now “take the constitutional rights of citizens seriously.” In other words, in 1961 this remedy was required because the cops didn’t care about civil rights, but they are now so sensitive to them that all that is required is a stern talking-to, whereupon they invariably burst into tears and promise to do better.

This is how the Constitution dies a quick death: the Roberts Court doesn’t have to laboriously overturn rights one at a time if it eliminates at a stroke penalties for violating those rights.

An anonymous Republican strategist explains the thinking behind the Iraq resolution: “It is better when we debate other people instead of debating events.”

Dennis Hastert in that debate: “When our freedom is challenged, Americans do not run.” Let’s all pause to picture Hastert running. “We in this Congress must show the same steely resolve as those men and women on United Flight 93; the same sense of duty as the first responders who headed up the stairs of the Twin Towers.” Let’s all pause to picture Hastert heading up a flight of stairs.

If Iraq is free, why do I feel like I’ve been overcharged?

That Pentagon briefing book is available here with the format and pretty pictures in WordPad or here in html without. Thanks to alert readers KEn and Bodo. Nothing hugely interesting beyond the fact that it was issued, as I said 3 posts ago, by the Pentagon. Just the usual talking points: we were right to go to war, we’re winning the war, really we are, stay the course, Saddam bad, 9/11, etc. There’s less of the usual spreading-freedom happy talk, although what there is of it is especially vainglorious: “A free Iraq will change the world.”

It indeed crosses the line into the political, using pre-war quotes from Kerry, Gore, Hillary Clinton, Carl Levin etc. and says “The Terrorists Draw Hope from American Defeatism.”

Things misspelled by the experts at the Pentagon: Osama bin Landen, Talban...

Oh no she dinnt!

The Queen. Of England. Quoted Groucho Marx today. The Queen did. Thusly: “As Groucho Marx once said ‘Anyone can get old - all you have to do is to live long enough.’”

Oh, it’s on.



It’s all about the hats.

Hard

Speaking of election-year pandering, they just had a little ceremony to sign the bill allowing the FCC to impose, ahem, stiffer fines on broadcasters for what Bush called “obscene, profane and indecent material.” He praised the Congressmen (I use the term advisedly: there were ten men and no women present. I noticed that too in a picture a week or two ago of sponsors of the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment) three times for “working hard” on the bill. Although these days Ted Stevens (seen here wearing a white suit to represent his purity) has to take a little blue pill to work hard.


That’s Rep. Joe Barton of Texas sucking his thumb, or whatever the hell he’s doing.

Nobly struggling

On this day when American deaths in Iraq have hit 2,500, the House of Representatives is debating, if that’s the word for this empty-headed grandstanding, a resolution against setting a deadline to remove troops from Iraq and which “declares that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the noble struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.” (Purple emphasis added) I may or may not have more to say about this tripe-fest later, but it seems the Pentagon put together a 74-page debate prep book which attacks the notion of a deadline as “cut and run” and warns of the dire consequences of leaving “before the job is done.” This is a gross breach of the rules of democracy: the military does not get to dictate to the elected representatives of this nation what its job is or when that job is done.

Naturally, I want to read this thing, which the AP seems to be keeping to itself. If anyone sees it online, please share with the rest of the class in comments or by email.

Bush press conference: I sense something different happening in Iraq

Transcript.

Number 869 on the list of phrases that Bush uses over and over that grate on my nerves until I snap: “killing innocent lives.” It’s either 1) killing innocent people, or 2) taking innocent lives. FUCKING CHOOSE ONE AND STOP KILLING THE INNOCENT ENGLISH LANGUAGE!

Sorry. All better now.


Darn dangerous: “I’d like to close Guantanamo, but I also recognize that we’re holding some people that are darn dangerous”. And we have to recognize the real victim here: him. “Sometimes we get criticized for sending some people out of Guantanamo back to their home country because of the nature of the home country. It’s a little bit of a Catch-22.” Yup, damned if you torture them yourself, damned if you give them to someone else to be tortured. And Gitmo “provides an excuse, for example, to say the United States is not upholding the values that they’re trying to encourage other countries to adhere to.” Note how he tries to delegitimize criticism with that word “excuse.”


There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear: “I sense something different happening in Iraq.”

You gotta want it: “I appreciated very much the agenda [Maliki]’s laid out. In other words, he’s got a plan to succeed. And I appreciated their determination -- it’s not just his determination, but their cabinet’s determination to succeed. In other words, part of the success in Iraq depends upon the Iraqis and their will and their desire.” And later: “one of the reasons I went to Iraq was to be able to sit down with an Iraqi government to determine whether or not they have the will to succeed... [to] expel any doubt in my mind as to whether or not we have a partner that is going to do the hard work.” That’s why he brought his trusty will-o-meter. To misspell expel any doubt in his mind.


I like these kids; they got moxie: And rappel repel expel them he did: “And so doubts about whether or not this government can -- has got the will to go forward was expelled. That’s why I went. In other words, sitting here in America, wondering whether or not these people have got what it takes can create uncertainty. I’ve eliminated that uncertainty.”


Condescend much?: “I made it clear to the government there that it’s up to them to succeed.”

But it’s not all will and desire. Another part of success, at least for Bush, is defining success downwards. He said there won’t be “zero violence” in Iraq. Indeed, if you use violence to measure whether this is “a successful experience” (!), “then it’s not going to happen. All that does is give the power of -- a handful of murderers to determine success.” Don’t get him wrong, though: “Obviously, we’d like violence to go down” (phew), but “the reason why I said that we shouldn’t use the level of -- have a zero-violence expectation is because there are other measures to determine success, starting with political measures.” Also, cheese production.

Asked how much less violence he wanted, in, like, round numbers: “Enough for the government to succeed. In other words, the Iraqi people have got to have confidence in this unity government, and reduction in violence will enable the people to have confidence.”


Al Qaeda philosophy watch: “But al Qaeda is real; their philosophy is a real philosophy; they have ambitions.” You’ll remember that on Monday they didn’t have a philosophy.


On addressing the troops: “You know, when you’re in a theater like that, it’s important to hear words of congratulations sometimes, to hear that their efforts are appreciated and doing hard work. And I got to do that.” The congratulating part, he means, he got to do that, not the hard work part.

I have come today to personally show our nation’s commitment, and say is that the time?

Maliki is implementing security measures, a crackdown, martial law, call it what you will, in Baghdad. They’re calling it “Advancing Forward Together,” unless of you course you want to advance forward in a car on a Friday, or after 8:30 at night. Oh, and advance forward slowly and carefully when approaching the numerous checkpoints now being established. Freedom, ain’t it grand. Baghdad residents will have noted that George Bush can still just swan in whenever he feels like.

They will also have noticed that when he said “I have come today to personally show our nation’s commitment to a free Iraq,” he was on a five-hour visit.

Just saw the video of Bush in Baghdad, and there’s a priceless visual you can’t get from a mere transcript: when he talked about looking Maliki in the eyes, he literally turned to look him in the eyes, and this meant that Maliki, who was seated next to him, had to turn his head towards Bush. (The moment is 80 seconds into this Fox video clip, after a [sigh] 15-second commercial.)

Bush goes to Baghdad: And all of it makes sense to me

In retrospect, the ruse seems painfully transparent: Bush was going to spend two days discussing Iraq policy. Two days! Policy!

No, the only thing these clowns plan in that sort of detail is a photo op. We’re informed this one took a month of planning. And what a plan it was! Wheels within wheels: oh sure, when Bush started fake yawning at 7:45 and saying he was going to turn in and read. Of course no one was fooled – read! what a kidder! – but they just figured that any second Condi was going to make some similarly lame excuse to absent herself – have to brush my teeth, takes a really long time with the gap, you know! – and then the boys could get on with the traditional game of “Deliverance,” in which Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns, who’d been wondering why he’d been invited, is jumped, stripped naked, told he has a purdy mouth, and given a two-minute head start.

So it’s off to the Green Zone for George Bush! In a fleet of helicopters and, despite what CNN may have told you, Bush wore the same flak jacket as these guys, though perhaps without the pee smell Tony Snow detects arising from Dan Barlett’s.


I said perhaps. Funnily enough, there seem to be no pictures of Bush in that get-up.

It was Bush’s first meeting with Nouri Maliki, seen here having an attack of the vapors.


Who, by the way, was the genius who positioned Maliki in front of an American flag?


(Update: Bob of Bob’s Links and Rants has an uncropped version of the picture above this one, which shows that he’s standing in front of an even bigger American flag. Maybe he just likes standing in front of American flags. Maybe he thinks they’re pretty or something.)

It was all going swimmingly, until Bush started speaking. “I appreciate you recognizing the fact that the future of this country is in your hands.” “We discussed the security strategy. We discussed an economic strategy, a reconstruction strategy. And all of it makes sense to me.” “[I]f given the right help, I’m convinced you will succeed, and so will the world.” The world will succeed if given the right help? From where, Rigel 7?

Hey sparky, no one walks in front of the king.
Then he went to speak to the troops. He told them, “I thank you for your sacrifice... Your sacrifice is noble and your sacrifice is important.” How reassuring. Still, being ordered to sit through a pep talk by George Bush is quite a sacrifice.

He told them that he’d given Maliki his patented ophthalmological test: “Today, I have come to not only thank you, but to look Prime Minister Maliki in the eyes -- to determine whether or not he is as dedicated to a free Iraq as you are, and I believe he is.” Yay, he passed the eye test! Just like Putin!

“We don’t expect the Iraqi government to look like the American government.” Except for that one squat, squinty guy. Oh, and their agriculture minister has a purdy mouth, just like Mike Johanns. “We expect an Iraqi government to honor its traditions and its histories and its religious faiths. But we do expect the Iraqi government to honor the right of every man, woman and child to live in a free society.” Dude, it’s one or the other.

Treated better in death

Gen. William Caldwell, waving the military’s autopsy of Zarqawi, says, “The Iraqi people deserve the facts, to know that the personal threat of Zarqawi was eliminated and the fact that he was treated better in death than he treated others in life.” I’m not sure what, if anything, that actually means, although I know I’d feel better-treated if I were only autopsied when I was actually dead.

Another in our ongoing series, “Real News or The Onion?”: The United States Marines and the Iraqi Army are going around to mosques delivering air conditioners and prayer rugs, in what is called Operation Cool Carpet.

Bush dragged various generals and members of the Cabinet out to Camp David to strategerize about Iraq. Including, for some mysterious reason, the secretary of agriculture. Chimpy eloquently summed it all up for the press: “We all agree that we have got to continue to help this new government move forward.” Do you suppose there was a lot of discussion about that? Or about this: “The message to the Iraqi government is, is that we stand with you, that what you’re doing is important”.


What else did they talk about? I know this will surprise all of you: “We spent a lot of time in talking about energy and oil.” And what about oil? “My own view is, is that the government ought to use the oil as a way to unite the country”. Sounds sticky. Now I’ve often pointed out that Bush knows only one adjective. But when he’s talking about his favorite subject, oil, that adjective has a friend: “There’s some unbelievably interesting exploration opportunities.”


Let’s talk philosophy for a minute. Bush, today: “But the enemy doesn’t stand for anything. ... They have no positive philosophy.” And in an interview with Al Arabiya last October: “They don’t have a philosophy.” But 11 days before that: “And we’re facing an enemy that is ruthless and cold-blooded, an enemy that actually has a philosophy, and the philosophy is so opposite of ours, it is the exact opposite of what America stands for.” And in February: “Ours is an enemy that has no conscience, but they do have a philosophy.” And in March: “I see them bound by a philosophy with plans and tactics to impose their will on other countries.” And 18 days ago: “They have a point of view, they have a philosophy”. So, George, philosophy or no philosophy?


In all these pictures, it looks like Condi was really excited to be invited out to Camp David, only to find when she got there that other members of the cabinet were there too.

The Interagency Team on Iraq has t-shirts now?

And don’t they look a little young? (click for larger image)

A good PR move to draw attention

Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, says that the Gitmo suicides did not value human life (click here for the 7½ minute audio clip), including their own (the valuable human life which the US still refuses even to name [Update: they are Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi, Yassar Talal Al-Zahrani, and Yemeni Ali Abdullah Ahmed; the Saudi government named its citizens), and then demonstrates her own high regard for human life by calling the suicides “certainly... a good PR move to draw attention,” a “tactic to further the jihadi cause.” She almost sorta had a point – that the actions were a statement aimed at the world, not just a gesture of despair aimed inwards – but then she just had to append that casually callous adjective “good.” Graffy knows all about good PR, because she works for Karen Hughes making the US beloved throughout the Muslim world. (Here’s an interview she gave the BBC in March about Guantanamo).

The outrageous quotes I’ve been relating the past 2 days have been about the US desperately trying prevent these people being seen as victims and martyrs, to portray as vocal, active and dangerous those from whom all voice and action had been removed. When you’ve been working tirelessly to silence these prisoners – no speeches in court, no interviews by UN inspectors, much less journalists, no letters to their families, no suicide notes – and they still manage to communicate with the outside world through the only medium left them, their dead bodies, perhaps that seems like a “good PR move.” When you’ve been trying to reduce these prisoners to entirely passive bodies, employing physical violence to break even their attempts to refuse food, only to see them retake their autonomy one last time in the only way not closed off to them, perhaps that seems like an “act of asymmetrical warfare” to you. The more totalitarian the system, the louder any act of defiance seems.

I’m feeling a little lazy and Deadwood’s on soon, so let’s assume this paragraph is something devastatingly clever linking 1) the Bushite fury that the Gitmo prisoners might be perceived as victims of a system of detention without end or hope with 2) the stuff about Zarqawi being used by the Bushies as a symbol, a more or less mythical figure only marginally related to the actually existing human being named Zarqawi.

Three Square Blocks of Kabul Afghan President Karzai will distribute guns to tribesmen, who are supposed to use them against Taliban. He will call those tribesmen “community police.” He does not see how this could possibly backfire.

Caption contest, if you’re so inclined:

Bring out your anonymous dead, in a humane and culturally sensitive manner

According to White House spokesmodel Christie Parell, Bush expressed serious concern about the Guantanamo suicides and “stressed the importance of treating the bodies in a humane and culturally sensitive manner.” Yes, I can sooooooo hear those words coming out of Chimpy’s mouth.

And all three left notes. Will we ever see them?

And the Pentagon got a fatwa from a tame imam allowing them not to bury the bodies within 24 hours, so that autopsies can be performed. Yes at Guantanamo cultural and religious sensitivity is job 1.

Speaking of nameless dead people, the Pentagon now admits the existence of a girl, aged 5 to 7, who died in the bombing assassination of Zarqawi, whose existence they’d previously denied. No explanation was given for how they could have misplaced a little girl’s corpse for just long enough that it didn’t cast a pall over the victory party.

An act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us

Although the Supreme Court has restricted the use of the death penalty to cases of murder, the governor of Oklahoma has signed a bill for the execution of repeat child molesters.

There are no Iraqi military hospitals; wounded Iraqi soldiers must somehow pay for their own medical care.

Three Guantanamo inmates hang themselves. All were former hunger-strikers who had been forcibly fed (at least according to the Sunday Times of London, the only paper with this detail). Doubtless the Pentagon will describe them as using methods “consistent with Al Qaeda training” and just looking for attention.

Indeed: after writing that, I found that Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the US Joint Task Force Guantanamo, has described the suicides thus: “They are smart. They are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” (horrified emphasis added).

The Pentagon still won’t release their names and doubtless if they left notes those will be suppressed too. Even in death they are un-persons whose thoughts and feelings must be silenced, their actions explained only by Harry “Harry” Harris and his ilk. The Pentagon says that the detainees “are not common criminals” and that the corpses were treated “with the utmost respect,” because if there is one thing Guantanamo is all about, it’s respect.

Speaking of respect, today was World Naked Bike Ride day. Because, according to one organizer whose word I will have to take for this, “When you get a lot of naked people on bikes, people tend to smile at you.”



The, ahem, bottom picture is from Prague, I think the top picture is from Britain.

1/500th of a Zarqawi

Headline that I so do not have the emotional energy to click on today, but thanks anyway (from Ha’aretz): “2 Infants among Dead on Beach; Army Apologizes.”

(Later:) Sigh, I guess if you want to avoid stuff like that, don’t read any newspapers at all. The Israelis shelled a picnic on the beach in Gaza.

Here’s how you know the Pentagon was more interested in getting Zarqawi for his symbolic value than it was concerned with wiping out the organization he ran: there was a $25 million bounty on Zarqawi’s head, but for Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian they think will replace him, just $50,000.

And he can no longer implement

The Pentagon is now admitting that Zarqawi was still alive when they reached the scene of the bombing, a fact they’ve kept to themselves until now. And that they cleaned up the corpse before taking those pictures. Says Gen. William Caldwell: “we made a conscious decision that if we were going to take photographs of him and make them available publicly that we were going to clean him up. Despite the fact that this person actually had no regard for human life, we were not going to treat him in the same manner.” Dude, you killed him, blew up everyone around him, including women and maybe a child, and then showed off framed pictures of his body: don’t pretend that cleaning off the blood before taking your victory snaps shows a morally superior regard for human life.

It’s so hard to take Zarqawi’s death at face value (yesterday I was muttering to myself that the US had had all these old photos of Zarqawi but had for years been using an artist’s rendering which had the eyebrows all wrong) because Zarqawi’s been such a convenient tool of Bushite propaganda for so long. Before the invasion, he was the sole piece of “proof” of a Saddam-Al Qaeda nexus, although he was not then connected to Al Qaeda and was operating in Kurdish- rather than Saddam-controlled Iraq, under the protection of the no-fly zone. He was more convenient alive than dead, so he was left to operate his bioweapons lab unmolested. Later, Fallujah was ordered to surrender Zarqawi; he had already fled, and the city was turned into smoking rubble. Then there was the Zawahiri-Zarqawi letter, cited by Bush in speech after speech months after it was discredited as a fake. So you can’t help but wonder when the timing of the man’s death is so symbolically convenient, as Bush admitted today:

The problem we have in this war is that all they’ve got to do is kill some innocent people by a car bomb, and it looks like they’re winning, see. It takes a major event like an election or the death of Zarqawi to understand that we’re making progress.

If it looks like they’re winning, it’s not because of “a” car bomb, but several hundred car bombs. Zarqawi you can presumably only kill once, so when it’s announced on the same day as the cabinet is completed, hopefully obscuring the preceding six months of sordid horse-trading, that’s just jolly symbolic. And... convenient.

Bush – and this is never a good idea – explains: “the upper management of al Qaeda was counting on Zarqawi to help implement their vision beyond Iraq... They want to have their view of the world. I call it totalitarian, Islamo-fascism. Whatever you want to call it, it is extreme and it’s real. And Zarqawi was the implementer of that strategy. And he can no longer implement.”

(Update: Geov Parrish makes all of my points, and more. Bastard.)

(Updater: and Patrick Cockburn: “He was an enemy to America’s liking.”)

Hung out to dry

So does anyone else think that that little incident Sunday when an American howitzer accidentally went off while they were cleaning it, or whatever the story was, and blew up several houses in Hibhib, the place where Zarqawi was just killed, wasn’t such an accident?

Molly Ivins:

I had a slightly insane discussion the other day with a winger who wanted urgently for me to understand that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war. Whereas I was trying to point out to him that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war.

Two of the British Guardsmen acquitted for the fatal “wetting” of that 15-year old Iraqi have announced that they are leaving the army in disgust at having been, and I quote, “hung out to dry.” Maybe not the most apt choice of metaphor under the circumstances.

Speaking of quitters, you might or, if you’re sane and/or not a blogger, might not want to read Tom DeLay’s farewell speech, a high-minded paean to the virtues of viciousness, liberal-bashing, and assholery: “You show me a nation without partisanship, and I’ll show you a tyranny.”; “conservatism isn’t about feeling people’s pain, it’s about curing it.”

And Maliki has an op-ed piece in the London Times you also might or might not want to read. Evidently while he uses tough-guy talk in Iraq – maximum force, iron fist, etc – when he addresses Western audiences he uses a different arsenal of clichés: national reconciliation initiative, tipping point, liberty, democracy and, over and over, national unity government (NUG). Interestingly, he describes what’s going on in Baghdad as “ethnic cleansing.”

Nascar meets Scientology: this is how the world ends.

For the hell of it, two pictures of Queen Elizabeth and some Chelsea Pensioners (it’s all about the hats).

And the “Bloody” goes to...

Rumsfeld: “I think arguably over the last several years, no single person on this planet has had the blood of more innocent men, women and children on his hands than Zarqawi.” I assume Rummy is just being modest.

Zarqawi death dance party: who was supposed to bring the balloons?

The US military has announced the death by air raid of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (Muss to his friends). Zarqawi was never as important inside Iraq as he was in Washington, where the Jordanian served as symbol of the Bush admin’s contention that insurgency in Iraq was largely the work of outside agitators. It’s hard to see what will change. After all, unlike our illegal immigrants, the Z Man was doing a job that many, many Iraqis are willing to do.

Still, in the Green Zone, Gen. Casey, Amb. Khalilzad and PM Maliki, seemingly the only Iraqi present except for an interpreter, held a kick-ass victory party. Later, there was cake.

A teeth-breaking defeat

A Taliban commander vowed to inflict a “teeth-breaking defeat” on British forces in Afghanistan. A good phrase, properly chilling, slightly reminiscent of The Iliad, but dude, have you seen British teeth?

The BBC, to whom he gave that interview, pointed out that the armed men who kept trooping through the frame were the same three guys over and over.

Have I been over-using “dude”? I blame Hurley on “Lost.”

Max Hastings writes in the Guardian that when British soldiers occupying Basra in 2003 were turned into policemen with no training (because being a cop is so easy that any guy with a gun and a uniform can just do it, right?), they were, “in effect, invited to invent their own system of local justice, because Bush and Blair had failed to make provision for any other.” And what they invented was “wetting” looters (by the way, about that word “looter” – Basra was under siege, with no economic activity going on; people trying to scavenge food were no more looters than were Katrina victims) in the canal, which we now know was a widespread practice. I’m not how soon it was ended after the 15-year old drowned.

Why yes I’d love some dessert. The still-warm heart of a baby with hot fudge sauce is my favorite too!

It’s a defense mechanism

Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki has ordered the release of 2,500 prisoners against whom there is no actual, you know, evidence. The first 600 have been thrown out of prison kicking and screaming and shouting, “Hell no, we won’t go! Let us back in! Do you know how fucking dangerous it is out there?”

Maliki has made some criticisms of Haditha. Here’s the response of James Jeffrey, the Coordinator for Iraq Policy at the State Department: “It’s a defense mechanism. ... I wouldn’t make too much out of it... There is a constant buzz in Iraq of what our troops did or didn’t do.” Buzz buzz. Sometimes the condescension reaches an entirely new level of refinement, and this was one of those moments.

Jeffrey also says that Haditha is “at this point nothing like Abu Ghraib.” It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t measuring it in terms of the body count or human suffering or sheer awfulness, but in terms of something much more important – public relations: “I think this will not have the same impact in terms of insurgents turning the population against us or turning opinion in the Arab world against us.” Yes, it’s all the insurgents’ fault. Buzz buzz buzz.

New low

In The Times, a headline about Iraq that’s hard to argue with: “Severed Heads Mark New Low.”

The NYT reports that the Pentagon will try to have only psychologists assist in the interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere rather than psychiatrists, because the American Psychiatric Association has higher ethical standards than the American Psychological Association. What the NYT misses is that the Pentagon’s new standards (pdf) also allow for the use of detainees’ medical files for “any lawful law enforcement, intelligence or national security-related activity,” i.e., interrogation. Also, they reaffirm the use of force-feeding on sane hunger-strikers.

It’s what we call assimilation

In another speech on immigration today, Bush said, “I believe English is the key to unlocking opportunity in America.” If I had the patience, I’d count the number of grammatical and subject-verb-agreement errors in this speech. “It’s been what it takes to help somebody go from picking crops to owning a grocery store, or from cleaning the floors of an office building to running that office.” When was the last time an immigrant actually did that? Or anyone else, for that matter? “It’s what we call assimilation, as part of assimilating to be Americans.” Sorry, Webster, could you take another stab at defining that word? Oh, and just for laughs, could you try spelling it as well? “When immigrants assimilate into this society, they realize their dreams.” But remember: no dreaming in Spanish.

All that advice to immigrants was of course delivered to an audience of immig... no, wait, it was delivered at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico. Guess they couldn’t find any of the millions of immigrants in this country for him to speak to, just like they couldn’t find any gay people (unless you count the re-closet cases at Exodus International) for Bush to explain his opposition to gay marriage to.

And why didn’t any of the MSM mention the presence of those “ex-gays” when reporting on Bush’s speech?

Those who can’t do, teach

3 years ago in Basra, several British servicemen forced 4 alleged looters into a canal “to teach them a lesson.” Because if there are three things the occupation of Iraq has been about, it’s education, education, education. However, the lesson being taught was not a swimming lesson and one of the Iraqis, a 15-year old, drowned. At their court martial, the servicemen complained that they themselves had not been adequately trained for the job of occupation (what, no lectures on core warrior values?), but the court decided not to teach them a “lesson,” and acquitted them, in the latest of a string of acquittals for occupation-related homicides. I suspect the Iraqi people are learning a lesson of their own.

Was that a little too belabored?

Speaking of education, in Denmark some masonry students complaining about the lack of internships built a wall across the entrance to the Education Ministry.

Bush and gay marriage, the love whose name he dares not speak

Bush gave his anti-gay marriage speech today, oddly enough while wearing his flight suit. It turned out to be only ten minutes long, much of it identical to his radio address Saturday, which I’ve already analyzed.

Acting on a precept he certainly didn’t learn from his mother, Barbara “Rhymes with socksucker” Bush, he decided that if he couldn’t say anything nice about gays and lesbians, he wouldn’t say anything about them at all, even as he advocated permanently restricting their rights. He again said that “As this debate goes forward, every American deserves to be treated with tolerance and respect and dignity,” but failed to see the difference between that and ignoring them completely, refusing to acknowledge their existence like a fart at a cocktail party. He not only has nothing to say about gays and lesbians and their families, he has nothing to say to them. (Update: In fact, there were, according to Tony Snow, no gay people invited to the meeting at which he gave this speech.) (But there were some “ex-gays.” Has anyone seen the full list of participants?)

Again, he fails to make much a case for going the literally extra-ordinary route of amending the Constitution. Here’s a bit of the speech which is structured as if it were a logical argument:

marriage is critical to the well-being of families. And because families pass along values and shape character [Just ask Jenna!], marriage is also critical to the health of society. Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them. And changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure.

Undermine it how? He does not say.

I suppose his recognition that engaging in rhetorical gay-bashing is no longer acceptable is encouraging, a sign of progress. But this is Bush, and Bush needs an enemy to excoriate, so it’s back to the activist judges, who are described as “over-reaching” (insert your own “reach-around” joke here) and “imposing their arbitrary will on the people,” leaving “no other choice” but to amend the Constitution. This is odd and contradictory as legal theory: he is claiming the decisions were arbitrary, i.e., not correct interpretations of the Constitution, but he proposes to change the Constitution anyway.

But then political theory has never been his long suit (by the way, when I referred to his arguments as sub-Federalist Papers on Saturday, I refrained from making a pun based on “Publius,” and I think I deserve some credit for that). In the days of this most imperial of presidencies, it’s interesting to see Bush make an assertion about power that doesn’t involve concentrating it in the executive branch. But what he does assert is horribly muddled: “A constitutional amendment would not take this issue away from the states, as some have argued. It would take the issue away from the courts and put it directly before the American people.” In fact it would ban the states from enacting same-sex marriage, and earlier in the speech he said that marriage was a “national question [which] requires a national solution,” so of course he wants to take the issue away from the states. And putting something “directly” before the American people would involve a national referendum, which he is not suggesting.

In today’s Gaggle, there was a tug of war over nomenclature:

Q So at what point is -- that’s what I’m trying to -- why on gay marriage is it not that important?

MR. SNOW: You mean, why on traditional marriage?

Q On the issue of gay marriage, yes.

MR. SNOW: It’s the issue of traditional marriage. This is the Family Marriage Amendment.

Hibhib Hubbub

The US occupation forces can’t seem to do anything, including merging into oncoming traffic and possibly flossing, without collateral damage. In the latest military oopsie, on Friday an infantry unit training on a base in Iraq accidentally fired a 155mm howitzer shell into the town of Hibhib, killing three people and damaging 6 houses. So this may not be the appropriate time to point out what a fun name that is. Say it with me, everyone: Hibhib, Hibhib, Hibhib.

As I mentioned last month, Cruz Bustamante’s campaign for California insurance commissioner consists entirely of telling people how much he’s weight he’s lost. So LAT columnist Steve Lopez tested his commitment by inviting him to a Mexican restaurant and ordering every fatty food on the menu, while interrogating him about the money he took (and has since returned) from insurance companies. At the end, Lopez asked him just what he had said he’d weighed that morning, and then took a scale out of his backpack...

A very people-focused and a very people-friendly force

Embarrassing deaths of the day: two 21-year olds think, as anyone would, that if sucking helium from a balloon is funny, then climbing inside an 8-foot helium balloon will be hilarious... The balloon advertised a condo complex, one of whose residents said, “This is not the kind of place where this happens.” As opposed to where?

Admitting that American troops are less than popular in Afghanistan, the commander of NATO troops in the country, Lt. Gen. David Richards, vows that when NATO replaces the Americans in southern Afghanistan next month, they will be “a very people-focused and a very people-friendly force.” Can’t make this shit up. Oh, and they’ll also be better drivers.

Condi Rice on Iraq, on Meet the Press: “So American forces are the solution here, not the problem.”

Do you think that in 100 years or so, dotty spoiled holo-vid stars, possibly even the clones of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, will be naming their children Haditha and Ramadi and Fallujah?

Couldn’t they find a sailor suit in Rummy’s size?

Hold the mayo

From Saturday’s NYT:

Marine commanders in Iraq learned within two days of the killings in Haditha last November that Iraqi civilians had died from gunfire, not a roadside bomb as initially reported, but the officers involved saw no reason to investigate further, according to a senior Marine officer.

So the Pentagon decided to pretend to believe the marines’ second story, knowing the first one had been a cover-up and, therefore, that there was something to be covered up. If they were ignorant of the Haditha Massacre, it was wholly wilful. Remember the initial “investigation” into My Lai, in which Colin Powell concluded “relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent”? Indeed, the WaPo informs us that the Captain Jeffrey Pool who dismissed the Haditha story as Al Qaeda propaganda, emailing reporters “I cannot believe you’re buying any of this,” was the very person who first released the roadside bomb story. Last paragraph of the WaPo story: “The Marine Corps still has not corrected its misleading Nov. 20 statement asserting that the Iraqi civilians were killed in a bomb blast. A Marine Corps spokesman didn’t return calls on Friday asking why it had not.”

Incidentally, Lance Corp. Ryan Briones, who took pictures at Haditha that were later erased, who spoke to reporters about carrying out bodies, and who 36 hours after returning stateside stole a pickup and crashed it spectacularly into a house, has just been charged not only for that, but also for pot possession from 2003. To a suspicious mind, this might suggest that the government is bringing the hammer down on him for... some reason.

And little 9-year old Iman Walid Abdul-Hameed, Haditha survivor and media voice par excellence, is demanding that the marines be executed.

Among the latest things banned by Iraq’s religious militias: falafel stands. Also, mayonnaise. And ice. Anything they didn’t have in Mohammed’s time (unless it shoots or blows up, of course) or which Bill O’Reilly... no, I won’t go there. The Sunday Times has the latest of what’s sure to be a long series of articles on how Iraqi women can’t leave their homes anymore. Freedom, ain’t it grand?