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An Independent article by Johann Hari (behind a pay barrier so no link) finds America’s current policy towards Uzbekistan to have been set out in the report of Dick Cheney’s Secret Energy Task Force: “make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy.” So as long as they don’t boil dissidents in oil — our oil — they can get on with it.
From a NYT article on Bush admin plans to militarize space:
The Air Force believes “we must establish and maintain space superiority,” Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. “Simply put, it’s the American way of fighting.” ... “Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny.”
Really, I’d be making fun of those quotes now if only I could get over there being a General Lance Lord (shorter version: General Lord) in charge of an Air Force Space Command. Alliterative and phallic at the same time, what were his parents thinking, and in charge of rockets, oh it has to be a bad joke from a 1940s radio serial.
I found a picture of him, too large a file to clutter up this page with, but Lance Lord is actually a middle-aged bald guy with glasses and a more than passing resemblance to Jesse Helms. (Update: I have received an email informing me that that Air Force picture is misattributed, although whoever is pictured looks a lot like the real Lance Lord. Hope the Air Force keeps better track of its rockets than it does of its generals.)
And one of these space weapons programs is called Rods from God. And one involves bouncing lasers off giant mirrors hanging from satellites, or really high-up blimps. This is like every James Bond movie ever made.
OK, now they’re talking about a former Under Secretary of the Air Force Peter Teets. Pete Teets. Another middle-aged bald guy with glasses and a more than passing resemblance to every other middle-aged bald guy with glasses.
OK, I want everyone to stand up (extra points if you climb up on your desk) and intone in your deepest old-timey radio-announcer voice, “Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny!”
Now do it as William Shatner.
Now Elmer Fudd...
According to Uzbekistan’s prosecutor-general, “Only terrorists were liquidated by government forces.” So that’s ok then.
Luis Posada Carriles gave a press conference this morning, as all fugitives from justice do. He said that after sneaking illegally into this country, he’d hidden for a while, but then realized no one was trying to catch him. I haven’t seen a full transcript, but while various reports claim in their headlines that he denied being involved in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban plane, he actually seems only to have said, “No one saw me make a bomb.” As for the wave of bombings in Cuban hotels in 1997, for which he’d previously admitted responsibility, this time he refused to say one way or another, though he did say the bombs used were “very small,” as was the Italian tourist killed, by what Posada calls a “little wound,” and then suggests that the Cubans killed the wounded Italian to make Posada look bad. He said he’d be willing to be tried by an international court for the plane bombing, if Cuba also turned over some people. I love it when the perps think they can negotiate.
And then the feds grabbed him. Just like Elian. Heh heh.
From today’s Gaggle:
Q -- but nowhere in the Constitution does it say that nominees are guaranteed an up or down vote.
MR. McCLELLAN: The Constitution said “advise and consent,” and that’s the role of the United States Senate, not “advise and block.”
Isn’t that persuasive, just like that masterpiece of the forensic arts, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
For a moment, I was amazed at the ability of the Uzbek government to out and out deny that soldiers fired on crowds, an event seen and heard by many, many people. Then I turned back to the ongoing spectacle of Rummy Rumsfeld and Lawrence DiRita pulling their heads out of Achmad Chalabi’s ass long enough to blame Newsweek for the fact that foreigners don’t like us and strew our path with flowers. Who knew that not being in full command of the facts could lead to people coming to harm?
I think they broke me. They just overloaded my systems, and now I just don’t have enough contempt, sarcasm and outrage with which to respond to this. I thought it was bad last week when Tom DeLay accused the Democrats of having no class, but now I’m just broken. I may have to watch Teletubbies for the next few hours; if I see Bush’s face or hear his voice I’ll just have nothing left. So cold. So cold.
Hey, get that Dick Cheney who voted against the resolution calling for me to be released from prison in here, I’m gonna kick his butt.
The WaPo says that the Pentagon actually has very strict rules on the handling of the Koran in Guantanamo. For example, the handler must wear gloves. Don’t know why that doesn’t reassure me.
David Benson-Pope, a junior education minister in the New Zealand government (a job he combined with the post of minister of fisheries; small country, I guess), has had to resign after he was accused of having, in his previous job as a teacher, hitting one student in the nose, and punishing another for talking in class by stuffing a tennis ball in his mouth and taping his hands to the desk. No word on whether he ever similarly abused his authority over fish.
Someone should suggest to the Afghans that when they see something they don’t like in a newsmagazine, they should just blog about it. It’s less aerobic, but there’s also less chance of being shot. I kept expecting to see signs with hyperlinks. Anyhoo, the Pentagon has been trying to have its cake and eat it too; it’s claiming that the reports are false, but failed to respond when asked for comment by the Newsweek reporters. There’s a reason the story had only one source. The government and its employees (plus the inaccessible prisoners, of course) were the ones in possession of the facts Newsweek needed. To demand too many sources would make the DOD’s failure to comment an effective veto, rewarding stonewalling. The Pentagon continues to try to manage the debate, issuing blanket condemnations of Newsweek but refusing to send someone to appear in McNeil-Lehrer’s segment on the subject (or, probably, Nightline tonight), precisely because it wants the focus to be on Newsweek’s journalistic practices rather than Guantanamo’s interrogation practices. [Update. Well, not really an update since I hadn’t posted yet, but before writing that I hadn’t seen Josh Marshall’s similar thoughts:
“If the new standard is that every material fact reported must be attested to on the record then in the future we’ll know only a tiny fraction of what we do now about the internal workings of our government. What I see here is an effort by the White House to set an entirely different standard when it comes to reportage that in any way reflects critically on the White House.”]
The State Dept is still doing its balancing act on Uzbekistan, criticizing both sides equally, although the death toll seems to be 600-0. Here’s Richard Boucher:
On the side of the demonstrators, rioters, whatever you call them, the armed attack by civilians on the prison in Andijan and other government facilities is the kind of violence that we cannot countenance in any way and we condemn these kind of armed attacks on prison facilities and on government facilities. There is nothing that justifies acts of violence or terrorism and we’re very concerned at reports of either the release or the escape of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan members.
Who says the released prisoners were terrorists? Oh yes, the guys who torture and boil people (including some we send there)(“Dammit I brought this man here to be dry-cleaned and he’s clearly been boiled!”) and who claim all critics of their government are terrorists. Also, in a country where political prisoners (of whom there are an estimated 7,000) are treated the way they are in Uzbekistan, attacks on prisons to release them are in fact justified. Remember the Bastille!
Condi Rice stepped up criticism of Uzbekistan; it could now be described as “mild”: “We have been encouraging the Karimov government to make reforms, to make the system more open, to make it possible for people to have a political life”. A very top-down view, in which voting, organizing, free speech etc are privileges granted at the will and whim of the ruler.
Women in Kuwait will finally be allowed to vote, calloo callay, and even stand for office, although the law also requires them to abide by Islamic law, whatever that means (some Islamicists say it means not voting or standing for office).
Eli at Left I notes the differences between what Newsweek actually said in its clarification of its story about Koran-flushing in Gitmo, and how what it said is being mischaracterized (see also The Light of Reason). Scotty McClellan started bitching about Newsweek not meeting a “certain journalistic standard” by failing to retract the story completely; “I just find it puzzling,” he said. Little Scotty has not only never met any standards of truth-telling himself, but runs across the street or ducks into a doorway whenever he sees them coming down the block towards him. And as for the number of things Scotty finds puzzling...
Speaking of standards, when a Pentagon spokesmodel says that the story is “demonstrably false” and that there are “no credible allegations of willful Koran desecration,” one really has to wonder about his standards. If there are no credible allegations, have there been incredible allegations? And who evaluated their credibility? And have there been instances of non-willful Koran desecration? Answers on a separate piece of paper, and show all your work.
My assumption is that Newsweek, horrified that all these people have died because of what it reported, deliberately wrote a correction that could be mischaracterized in the way it has been.
Henry Kissinger, that arch-proponent of realpolitik, has an op-ed piece in the WaPo calling for a middle way with Bush’s unrealpolitik (shorter Kissigner: don’t get too hung up on that promoting-democracy thing). Actually, Kissinger hasn’t changed much. “Elections are not an inevitable guarantee of a democratic outcome,” he writes today. When he decided to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected government, he said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
More London Review of Books personal ads:
The placing of this advert has less to do with me wanting to find love and more to do with me being an attention whore. Reply now before I’m forced to cartwheel at the next London Review Bookshop reading. Woman, 34. Box no. 10/05
Mature gentleman (62), aged well, noble grey looks, fit and active, sound mind and unfazed by the fickle demands of modern society seeks… damn it, I have to pee again. Box no. 10/06
This ad is the final phase in my plan to conquer the earth. Man, 41, seeks puppet-like trillionaire F with vast army and intergalactic fleet, ready to hand over total control of all affairs. Must also enjoy canasta and be a non-smoking vegetarian. Box no. 10/07
[More of my LRB favorites here.]
A perhaps poorly phrased opening sentence in a story on the Pentagon website: “Terrorists continued to attack innocent Iraqis as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a surprise visit to the country today.”
Rice evidently went in order to put pressure on Iraqis to shit out a constitution by August. Also, see if you can find the key word Ms. Subliminable is trying to get across here: “We talked about how the political process should be inclusive -- and the government is an inclusive government -- and the need for the constitutional writing process to be inclusive.”
A WaPo article about Operation Matador focuses on the American Marines’ frustrations about not finding enough Iraqi ass to kick. It quotes a major saying that if there were foreign jihadis in one village, “we’ll make it rubble.” Instead they wandered around, tore up people’s houses, stole their pillows, beat up a few of them, yelled at them in pidgin Arabic, and then went away, wondering what the hell they’d been doing there. Mission accomplished.
Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan fired by Blair’s government for telling the truth about human rights abuses there (they also tried to smear him as alcoholic and crazy) (in the general elections, he ran against Foreign Minister Jack Straw, and did pretty well), has a commentary in the Guardian.
Karimov is very much George Bush’s man in central Asia. There is not a senior member of the US administration who is not on record saying warm words about Karimov. There is not a single word recorded by any of them calling for free elections in Uzbekistan. ... When Jon Purnell, the US ambassador, last year attended the opening of a human rights centre in the Ferghana valley, he interrupted a local speaker criticising repression. Political points, Purnell opined, were not allowed.
I can’t wait to see if Scotty McClellan will still be urging restraint equally on the demonstrators and the government.
Condi Rice is visiting Iraq. Since it’s the first second [sorry, my bad; she was along for Bush's plastic turkey visit] time she’s ever been there, she feels qualified to tell the Iraqi people how well everything is going and that they should just have patience. “Iraq is emerging from a long national nightmare of tyranny into freedom,” she said.
Wonder if she knew that the phrase “long national nightmare” was first used in Gerald Ford’s inauguration speech, referring to the Nixon years? No, I really don’t: of course she didn’t know that.
She took the opportunity to give a new version, Mark XXIII I believe, of the explanation for how 9/11 required the invasion of Iraq, saying “This war came to us, not the other way around.” Mark XXIII incorporates the crusade for democracy into the argument. See, “The absence of freedom in the Middle East -- the freedom deficit -- is what produced the ideology of hatred that allowed them to fly airplanes into a building on a fine September day.” Note her awkward use of the pronoun “them,” rather than a term like hijackers, terrorists or Al Qaida; she’s hoping that if she glides quickly over that part, listeners won’t remember that none of “them” were Iraqis and that we started the War to Make the Middle East Safe for Democracy in precisely the Middle Eastern country that produced the fewest terrorists.
2 from the Sunday Times:
Error of the week
A teenager who forced open an industrial container in the New Zealand port of Ashburton was caught in an avalanche of peas that flooded through the open doors. The 17-year-old was trapped, unable to move, in a chest-high pile of peas and arrested after police used a forklift truck to free him.
Costume of the week
A protester was turned away from a government meeting in British Columbia, Canada, because he was protesting at the dumping of raw sewage by dressing up as a giant piece of faeces.
The LA Times has an interesting account of “Operation Matador” (Next up: Operation Cockfight, Operation Bear-Baiting, Operation Dog Fight, Operation Pig-Sticking...). It suggests strongly that the operation succeeded in its objectives only to the extent that the insurgents cooperated. That is, it got under way so slowly, due to some combination of over-optimistic planning, too little manpower, and heavy lumbering armored vehicles which it took a whole day to get across the Euphrates, that anyone who wanted to slip over the border into Syria could do so; anyone who stood and was killed or captured wanted to stand and be killed or captured. Also, an intriguing sentence in the WaPo report: “Americans had come through their communities a few days ahead of the Marines, scaring foreign fighters into flight.”
The idea behind Operation Matador was that this distant part of western Iraq was the new Fallujah, a gathering point for insurgents, so there was a need, according to the colonel in charge of the operation, for “proving that they don’t have any safe havens.” Note the verb: Matador is about proving something rather than accomplishing something. The Marines went to the Ramana region to pee on it to mark their territory; the goal was psychological rather than strictly military. And the proof of this is that, while the military claims to have “neutralized this sanctuary,” they’re not actually planning to occupy the area, and are now in the process of leaving; the insurgents will be back in days. The Marines are claiming victory, but the jihadis are probably claiming the same thing, with at least as much justification.
Two things about the LAT report: 1) it claims that locals welcomed the Marines, but it’s not clear whether the reporter is “embedded” or just passing on what the military told him. (Update: the WaPo says locals talked to “a reporter” through a US military translator. That’s the sort of detail a reader needs to evaluate a source.) 2) Again, a newspaper buries a story’s punchline in the penultimate paragraph: on why Iraqi troops didn’t participate, possibly as picadors: they were on vacation that week.
American policy in Central Asia just goes from one awful extreme to another, doesn’t it? Either we’re toadying up to people-boiling dictators, or... a writer in the LA Times says the US is “helping train democratic leaders for 2006 presidential elections in Belarus”.
Flagstaff has a ballot initiative Tuesday against Wal-Mart’s proposed expansion of its local store. Wal-Mart ran an ad equating this attempt to restrict the rights of Flagstaffians to shop as they please with book-burning. Wal-Mart has had to apologize, not because the comparison was both laughable and odious, but because the particular book-burners in the photograph used in their ad (blurrily pictured here, pdf file, 200k) were Nazis in 1933 Berlin; if the book-burners had been Americans in the South, it would have been ok. According to the WaPo, other Wal-Mart ads have “included a picture of a child praying and a person with duct tape over her mouth.”
In a story about a Marine who won’t even be court-martialed for shooting two unarmed Iraqi prisoners, possibly in the back as they were kneeling, emptying his weapon, reloading, and firing 30 more rounds into their bodies, the WaPo saves the punchline for the last sentence: “Pantano continues to serve as a Marine training officer at Camp Lejeune, N.C., as he awaits a decision from Maj. Gen. Richard Huck, commander of the 2nd Marine Division in Iraq, on whether to drop charges.”
Another website not to go to for news on Uzbekistan, where the death toll is now in the hundreds: that of the American embassy there. However, you can look at the page that details American payments to the Uzbek government in 2004, including money to “focus on strengthening the institutions of civil society, supporting human rights, and addressing the problem of torture”. Yeah, how’s that going? Another $10.7m went to “security and law enforcement” or, in other words, torture. Link. Other link.
Karimov says that he didn’t gave any order to shoot, it just kinda happened, but denied that children had been killed: “In Uzbekistan, nobody fights against women, children or the elderly.” Consider yourselves reassured.
Addendum: when McClellan called for both sides in Uzbekistan to “exercise restraint at this time,” did he mean that the demonstrators should refrain from bleeding too much on the soldiers?For objective, up-to-the-minute coverage of all things Uzbek, don’t click here. For example: Due to latest events, The President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov arrived in the city of Andizhan early in the morning of May 13th.
After the comprehensive study of the situation, the head of the state, gave specific instructions to corresponding organizations and government bodies.
In the evening of the same day he returned to Tashkent.
Just paints a picture, doesn’t it?Luis Posada Carriles (previous posts)
applied for asylum in the US this week, on the run from both Cuban and Venezuelan justice. Can you file those papers through your lawyer, without even making an appearance? And if not, why is he not in custody, since he did enter the country illegally. If the Department of Homeland Security won’t go looking for him, maybe we could get the Minutemen.The US military is responding to the increased violence in Iraq by suggesting that the Iraqi interim/transitional/imaginary government might want to do something look like they’re doing something about it. Sez “one senior military officer”: “The perception of governance is important.”Speaking of the perception of governance, was Bush upset that he wasn’t informed of the panic back at the homestead while he bicycled on obliviously? Fuck no:The president also tried to deflect concern about being out of the loop, telling an audience yesterday, with a grin, “I strongly urge you to exercise on a regular basis.”
President Bush, followed by a Secret Service agent.
Will Durst explains Social Security reform and coins a phrase I hereby command my fellow bloggers to use: faith-based retirement.
I’m not entirely sure of the dynamics driving the unrest in Uzbekistan. I know the regime is one which boils its enemies alive and which is threatened by Islamic groups that might be less attractive if some other vehicle of opposition existed. The US, which considers President-for-Life Karimov an ally in The War Against Terror (TWAT), has been singularly unhelpful. Here’s Scotty McClellan today:
We have had concerns about human rights in Uzbekistan, but we are concerned about the outbreak of violence, particularly by some members of a terrorist organization that were freed from prison. And we urge both the government and the demonstrators to exercise restraint at this time. The people of Uzbekistan want to see a more representative and democratic government, but that should come through peaceful means, not through violence. And that’s what our message is.
Very on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand. He even talks of a more representative and democratic government, being unwilling to admit that the current government is neither. And McClellan adopts Karimov’s characterization of any opposition to his dictatorship as terrorist. As for change coming through peaceful means, I repeat: boils its enemies alive. Not much restraint there.
This revolution, or whatever it is, hasn’t been assigned a color yet. Where’s Tom Ridge when you need him? What color is boiled human flesh?
The deputy leader of the state of Bremen, Peter Gloystein, has had to resign after pouring a magnum of champagne over a homeless man. He said it was a joke. Maybe it’s just the way he tells it.
In the committee meeting on John Bolton, Sen. George Allen said — and it was made even more obnoxious by his delivery than simple words on a computer screen can convey — “We are not electing Mr. Congeniality. We do not need Mr. Milquetoast in the United Nations. We’re not electing Mr. Peepers [a 1950’s sitcom — I never heard of it either] to go there and just be really happy, and drinking tea with their pinkies up.” Folks, this man is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and that’s his idea of what diplomacy is like, just a bunch of gay English guys, maybe Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton.
Having trouble meeting its recruiting targets, the Army will allow suckers recruits to sign up for only 15 months of active duty instead of 4 years, and they promise, cross their hearts, not to extend their tours of duty, they would never do that, how could you even think such a thing?
From the Afghan protests, these students, including one no doubt shouting “Death to America” whilst sporting a backwards baseball cap or possibly just trying to get a hotdog from the vendor, object to the insult to the Holly Quran.
And, not to sound like a right-winger or anything, but is this really the best way to protest the insult to the Holly Quran?
We are informed by multiple news sources that desecrating the Holly Koran is punishable by death in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And I seem to remember that under the Taliban... yes, I’ve looked it up and I posted this back in 1997... recycling paper was made illegal, to prevent Korans being recycled for more profane uses.
Adding to your slang vocabulary, just a little service I perform here: it seems that in Britain, gangs film themselves beating people up and this is called “happy slapping.” Also, Tony Blair today complained about yobs and hoodies. Hoodies are sweatshirt jackets with hoods, but possibly also the people who wear them.
A small bit of journalistic malpractice at the NYT. I was going to pass on to you a short piece that appeared in the print version about a Seminole County, Fla. Republican party chairman who sued a woman because he “said his campaign to head the state party was sabotaged by a letter falsely accusing him of having been married six times. The right number, he said, is five.” But when I went looking for it, I found that to create that cute little story, the NYT had edited out the detail that she also accused him (falsely, according to the judge) of abusing one of those wives.
It will be fun to watch George Galloway, MP take on Norm Coleman, who has revived the charge that Galloway was bribed by Saddam Hussein with oil-for-food money. This was not what I meant last week when I warned against identifying too closely with Gorgeous George, since I have no idea if it’s true or not, or whether the new evidence is as obviously manufactured as the last was. Galloway says his first words will be that it’s too bad they were only willing to hear from him after declaring his guilt. Perhaps his second words should be to challenge Coleman to take it outside — where Coleman doesn’t have the protection against libel suits he does inside the Senate.
Another 3 Afghans died in the rioting over the alleged Koran-flushing incident, making 7 so far, and those are government figures so you know it’s much higher. Condi Rice made a statement today said that the US military is investigating, which I know reassures me no end, and condemned actions that might have happened: “Disrespect for the Holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, tolerated by the United States. We honor the sacred books of all the world’s great religions.” Human beings of all the world’s great religions, that’s another matter. Also, what’s the threshold for a “great” religion? Do we honor Dianetics, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Chicken Soup for the Soul and The Tao of Pooh? She concluded with this sentence, whose precise meaning is a little hard to unpack: “I am asking that all our friends around the world reject incitement to violence by those who would mischaracterize our intentions.” Fortunately, that appeal is addressed to all our friends around the world, so only Tony Blair has to decipher it, after he’s done ridding Britain of the scourge of hoodies.
Movie trivia: the actor who provided the voices for various robot butlers and computers in Woody Allen’s Sleeper is Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Speaking of robot voices, First Draft has an excellent and entertaining run-down of the Bolton hearings
This party is schizo, seriously. Putting a guy on a box with electrodes attached to his testicles and a hood over his head, beating him bloody, flushing his holy book down the toilet, that’s all in good fun and merely “aggressive,” but calling a guy into a room, making him sit in a chair in a suit and talk to some hairdos about his past, that’s unconscionable torment beyond human capacity to bear. Pick it, wingnuts. You’re either the party of hardass buttkickers, who don’t mind siccing a dog on somebody to get some unreliable info, or you’re the party of screaming little girls who cry when somebody says bad words to them. You can’t be both.
Murkowski at those hearings: “The president deserves to be surrounded by people that he selects.” It’s all about the group sex with these people, isn’t it? [For those not in the know, or reading this 5 years from now because you googled “group sex,” Bolton is alleged to have gone to group-sex clubs].
The supplemental military spending bill which just passed the Senate includes all sorts of goodies, such as giving the feds back the old McCarren-Walter ability to exclude foreigners from the US merely because of their speech or writings, and, on the other side, a ban on the government spending money to torture people, including non-Americans, who Alberto Gonzales claimed had no constitutional right not to be tortured. No doubt more details will be revealed in the days to come, and no one will be more surprised by them than the hundred senators who voted for the bill without reading it.
Oklahoma’s lower house passed a (non-binding) resolution demanding that libraries hide away books with homosexual content in adult-only sections. The resolution’s sponsor, Eagle Forum fixture and homophobe Sally Kern, the wife of a Baptist pastor, was especially incensed by a children’s book, King & King, about a prince whose mother the Queen tells him he must marry, but he’s “never cared much for princesses”... Ages 6 & up, according to Amazon.
Afghanistan erupts in rioting over claims that Americans flushed Korans down the toilets in Guantanamo as part of their sophisticated interrogation tactics. The story is no sillier than similar rumors that started the Indian Mutiny in 1857, but I tend to doubt it. Americans have much more respect for... plumbing.
Karzai said the riots were proof that freedom of speech and democracy were taking hold in Afghanistan, an exercise in making lemonade out of lemons spoiled only by the addition to that beverage of the blood spilled from at least 4 protesters shot to death by Afghan police, and yes I just nauseated myself with that imagery too. Karzai also gave this as another reason why the American occupation must go on and on and on.
A London Times story begins by asking “Is Kirsty Sword Gusmao the first woman to unbutton her shirt in the House of Lords dining room? It is hard to be sure. What is clear is that when she did so to breast-feed her five-month-old son, their lordships noticed.” The breasts of Ms Gusmao, the Australian wife of East Timor’s president, turn out to be the least interesting things about her in this fascinating article.
The US Court of Appeals for DC rules, unanimously yet, that Dick Cheney can keep the records of his energy task force secret, saying in its opinion that “The president must be free to seek confidential information from many sources, both inside the government and outside.” Why must he? In a democracy where the government is theoretically accountable to the people, the people must have the necessary information to judge the actions of the government, but the Bushies want to preserve a monopolistic hold on that information. Judge Raymond Randolph’s unstated assumptions about how executive functions should be carried out — “free” not just to seek information, but free from accountability — are anti-democratic; they assume that a president is like a king.
Randolph also cites the need to preserve the “separation of powers,” but c’mon, no actual powers are threatened in any way, except in the sense that “knowledge is power.” This is about data, not power. What the Court’s ruling actually preserves is separation of information, since Congress will be asked to vote on the administration’s proposals without having access to the data the task force had, or the ability to judge whether that data might have been distorted by having come only from representatives of industry, unchallenged.
Much the same thing went on in the court. The judges ruled that the plaintiffs hadn’t proven that the energy companies’ flacks had acted as de facto members of the secret task force, writing an energy policy to suit themselves, but wouldn’t let the plaintiffs have access to the names of those people in order to prove that they were. I’m not even sure the court itself was given the task force’s records.
In the Bush administration, knowledge is power, and they’re both fossil-fuel based.
Spain’s stock market regulator has ruled that directors of corporations must disclose not only their own economic dealings, but also those of their spouses, children and, oh yes, mistresses, boy toys, gay lovers. Twice a year.
The invaluable National Security Archives has documents about Luis Posada Carrile, including FBI reports connecting him to the 1976 plane bombing, CIA records showing his relationship to the Agency.
The Taliban say they don’t need any steenking amnesty. The head of the Afghan committee overseeing the amnesty suggested yesterday that it be expanded to include all Taliban, right up to Mullah Omar, if they lay down their arms. But Pentagon spokesmodel Col. James Yonts responded, “Our position all along has been that those guilty of serious crimes must be responsible for their actions. We believe the government of Afghanistan understands and supports that.” So now an American colonel can over-rule the Afghan government and inform it of what it “understands and supports.” In the chain of command, the “sovereign” Afghan government must be the equivalent of, what, a corporal?
John Tierney’s NYT column today displayed such a level of assholery that I feel compelled to violate my usual policy of ignoring the paleo-pundts (every so often I start writing a withering refutation of something David Brooks has said, but I always delete it because life is too short and Brooks is too self-evidently a doofus). Tierney says that suicide bombings in the Middle East are a dog-bites-man story about which there’s nothing new to say and when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all and he always gets bored and stops reading before the end and the media should just stop reporting them except for the “box score.” Just two points: 1) What is new in each new attack is the unique individuality of the human beings who are its victims; Tierney is treating those victims with the same callous disregard as do the terrorists; 2) Tierney makes the same assumption the terrorists do, that publicity for suicide bombings serve their ends. A less pessimistic view of human nature would be that viewing scenes of carnage would produce disgust for the people who caused them and an increased determination to defeat them.
British archaeologists have found a 2,500-year old leather shoe. Lace-up, size 9 or 10. This is an incredible find, given that half the stuff you’re served in British restaurants looks and tastes like a 2,500-year old leather shoe.
The King of Jordan will pardon Chalabi, without even asking him to return the money he embezzled.
