Trained in trying to disseminate false allegations

The US has rejected a UN report calling for the closure of Stalag Guantanamo or at the very least for the torture and forcible feeding to stop, have real legal proceedings, and blah blah blah. Why, the US says in badly feigned righteous indignation, we can tell the report is biased because the investigators never even visited Gitmo, having refused our generous offer to come and not be allowed to speak with any of the prisoners (lack of transparency works twice: first you keep everyone in the dark, then you accuse them of ignorance like it’s their fault. Alberto Gonzales did this last week re NSA eavesdropping). “We know that al-Qaeda terrorists are trained in trying to disseminate false allegations,” says Scott McClellan, who, can you believe it, never had a lesson. The US response to the report (pages 53-4 of the pdf linked above) finds its condemnation of the force feeding of hunger-striking prisoners “bewildering.”

Speaking of unethical medical practices, the state of California will respond to a federal judge’s ruling that its particular cocktail of drugs used in executions may inflict pain on prisoners, won’t change the drugs but will provide an anaesthesiologist to ensure that the prisoner in the case, due to be executed next week, will be unconscious before the drugs are administered. The California Medical Association says participation by a doctor in an execution is unethical because “Capital punishment is not a medical task,” but it won’t actually do anything about it.

Condi Rice is asking Congress for tens of millions to “support the aspirations of the Iranian people” (Condi does not say how she determined what those aspirations are; possibly she went door to door with a clipboard). She accuses the Iranian government of “toxic statements and confrontational behavior,” which is funny because she just talked about trying to overthrow that government, which is usually considered at least a wee bit confrontational. Some of this money will be distributed secretly to certain Iranians, ensuring that all reformers can be denounced as American puppets. Condi says that she’s “read that” Beethoven and Mozart cannot be played in Teheran. Well, if she’s “read” it, it must be true.

One of the worst days of my life

Damn, I’m stale today. On Fox Cheney said “was one of the worst days of my life,” and while I immediately wondered what the other ones were, all I could think of were 1) the day he found out that to continue to stay out of Vietnam he would have to (shudder) fuck Lynne and get her pregnant [it’s funny because it’s true], and 2) the day he found out that Mary was a lesbian [it’s unfunny because it’s true]. See what I mean? Stale. So it’s contest time: what are some of the other worst days in the Dickster’s life?

There’s no value that can be added

My, that was the epitome of soft-ball interviews, wasn’t it? Or non-interview, really, since Hume didn’t ask a single question that Cheney didn’t want asked. One thing: I didn’t put any particular credence in the rumors that Pamela Willeford, the ambassador to Switzerland who was also on the hunt, was Cheney’s mistress until he referred to her only as “the other hunter.” As for “taking responsibility,” Media Matters points out that for several days, Cheney’s office referred all questions to Katharine Armstrong, who blamed Whittington for being shot. Still, he talked about shooting an old man in the face without actually bursting into giggles or maniacal laughter, and that’s the important thing.

That interview, remixed as a gay porn script by someone with too much time, and god knows what else, on their hands.

State Dept lawyer John Bellinger, speaking about the new (to us) Abu Ghraib photos, takes exactly the same disingenuous line that so many media outlets in the US and elsewhere have taken towards the Danish cartoons: “It’s unfortunate, though, that the photographs are continuing to come out because I think it simply fans the flames at a time that sentiments on these issues are raw around the world. People know, the world knows, that this behavior went on. It was described. It’s been prosecuted. There’s no value that can be added.” And Pentagon spokesmodel Bryan Whitman added (but without adding any value) that release of the pictures “could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world and... would endanger our military men and women”. You know the word I really like in that sentence? Unnecessary. And are you sure you didn’t mean that the photos would inflame our military men and women and endanger our unnecessary violence? Anyway, the link for those unnecessary-violence-inciting photos once again is here.

Tony Blair forces Parliament to override a House of Lords vote and ban “glorification” of terrorism, to wit,

Statements that are likely to be understood as indirectly encouraging acts of terrorism [because it] glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally) or such acts or offences; and is a statement from which those members of the public could reasonably be expected to infer that what is being glorified is being glorified as conduct that should be emulated by them in existing circumstances.

Blair intends to use this power to ban whole organizations, and to deport foreign imams. Blair said, “We have free speech in this country, but you cannot abuse it.” I wouldn’t have thought that free speech is that difficult a concept to grasp – what part of “free” is so hard to understand?

I’m the guy who pulled the trigger

Another cartoon contest, in Israel, calling for the best anti-Semitic cartoons, with only Jews allowed to enter because they will not be under-sold.

Dick Cheney forthrightly says that he and not Harry Whittington is responsible for his having shot Whittington in the face – after waiting four days to see how well having his surrogates say the reverse was playing out, maybe have a few focus groups...

By the way, the line I’d like to see engraved on Cheney’s head-stone: “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger.”

The interview will be on Fox at 3 pm PT. I... may... have more to say afterwards.

Bush gives a speech on “health savings accounts. I call them HSAs. When you hear me say HSA, that’s kind of government-speak for health savings account.” He gave the speech at the hq of Wendy’s, a fast-food chain. Not being fully conversant with the concept of insurance, he finds it “interesting” that people with insurance pay only part of their own health care costs.

It means most Americans have no idea what their actual cost of treatment is. You show up, you got a traditional plan, you got your down payment, you pay a little co-pay, but you have no idea what the cost is. Somebody else pays it for you. And so there’s no reason at all to kind of worry about price.

And that’s a bad thing, that sick people don’t have to kind of worry about medical bills. He keeps talking about people making their health care decisions themselves, but of course what he’s advocating is having them make their health care decisions on financial rather than medical grounds. Now when people make their dietary decisions on those grounds... I did mention that he was speaking at the headquarters of Wendy’s, didn’t I?

It is what it is

Peppergate has traction and resonance because it looks, sounds, feels and especially smells like a metaphor for so many policies and attitudes of the Cheney-Bush administration that we can’t pick just one. This little incident fits a certain genre, for which Echidne of the Snakes provides the Cliff’s Notes:

Picking targets that they think are easy (tame birds in this case), then finding out that the whole thing turned into a disaster (shooting yourself or someone on your side), then exhibiting a certain callousness about the whole thing (going to have the meal as planned) and then trying to keep everything a secret.

The variants are endless: blaming the victims of Katrina; the US taking aim at a guy on crutches, experiencing “target fixation,” wheeling around and shooting peppering Afghanistan/Iraq; Valerie Plame, etc etc and etc.

Or Damadola, that town in Pakistan where the US bombed peppered a house more than a month ago to kill an Al Qaeda guy who wasn’t there, killed 18 people including children, but still hasn’t admitted it. There may be consequences for Harry Whittington, but never for Damadola, such are our priorities.

(Update: the 10 ways Iraq is like Harry Whittington.)

I watched Tuesday morning’s Gaggle for a while, but Little Scottie was simply refusing to answer any questions – “It is what it is” – and it got a little tedious. Now it turns out that he knew about the heart attack before he entered the room, and failed to say anything. Good luck with the White House press corps in the future, Little Scottie.

And good luck Iran, because Dick Cheney may have to endure the next three years without going hunting again, and he needs to burn off that cold furious rage somehow.

Elsewhere in the world, the Cartoon Wars resulted in fatalities in a new country today, Pakistan. I’ve lost track of the number of deaths. 20? A Taliban commander put a price on the heads of the cartoonists.

We finally found WMDs: the Nazis released malarial mosquitos in Italy in 1943, intending to infect invading Allied soldiers (who were taking their quinine and were unaffected, not so the civilians who lived in the area).

Some more Abu Ghraib pictures have come out.

Getting personal

For Vday, a selection of personals from the London Review of Books. For all my favorite LRB personals, click here.

Librarian-looking punk, 34, seeks punkette-looking librarian.

Every year, without fail, the LRB produces the biggest turkey. This year it’s me – monocled, plaid-festooned gadabout, out of place in any relationship, or century, that fails to recognise the comfort of a secure knickerbocker. Please help me. Man, possibly your embarrassing uncle, 51. Box no. 24/10

It takes me just seven minutes and thirty-one seconds to dress for dinner. Woman, 34. Don’t even pretend not to be impressed. Box no. 01/04

Technically, by writing this ad, I’m breaking the terms of my probation. Technically, though, I’m not really a woman either. Two wrongs always make a right in the mixed-up, muddled-up, security-tagged and banned from most Croydon shopping centres world of box no. 01/09.

I once came within an ace of making my own toothpaste. M, 36, seeks woman with knowledge of fluoride compounds/tantric love-making. Box no. 02/18

I ate a pencil and three Post-Its whilst writing this ad. Oh, and drank a bottle of correcting fluid. Whhheeeeeeee!!! Man, 33-and-a-quarter. Box no. 03/06

The only thing that makes me happy is weeping in front of the television whilst wearing mother’s clothes. That, and jazzercise. M, 42. There’s always time for guilt, Newsnight, and a good abs workout in the tortured juvenile psyche of box no. 03/07

I have the largest collection of bus tickets in Sunderland. Beat that. Man, 41. Box no. 03/11

Human beings are not normally this inefficient

Today’s Gaggle is especially amusing and worth reading/viewing. One reporter used the line I used as this post’s title. You almost feel sorry for Little Scottie. Okay, you don’t. Looks like the press corps has finally found an issue they’re not willing to be lied to about.

Scottie may not be able to answer basic questions about The Incident, but he does have an answer for the Cartoon Wars: “And I think we ought to look at all the goodwill that’s being shown at the Olympics as an example of the kind of understanding that we would like to see moving forward.”

And evidently God has his own response to the cartoons: a calf born in Egypt whose skin folds form the words (presumably in Arabic but possibly in Moo-Cow) “There is no God but Allah.” I was unable to find a picture.

The lame-duck Palestinian parliament, in its last session, voted to greatly expand the powers of Mahmoud Abbas at the expense of the incoming Hamas-led parliament, including the right to appoint judges to the highest court without parliamentary confirmation. The packed court will then overturn legislation passed by Hamas.

It looks very much like the elections in Haiti are being stolen, or at least forced into a second round (after the first one was postponed 4 or 5 times). Lenin’s Tomb has details, but there’s one Lennie missed: the 50% Preval has to get to prevent that run-off includes 50% of all those ballots which are rejected as “faulty” or (allegedly) blank (14% in some areas). In the election-theft biz, that’s known as having your hanging chad and eating it too.

He will take whatever steps are needed to comply with applicable rules

Oh dear holy fuck, it just gets better. This is the statement, evidently the ONLY statement, issued by the office of the vice president:

It has been brought to the Vice President’s attention by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department this afternoon that, although he had acquired a 125 dollar Texas non-resident season hunting license, he lacked a 7 dollar stamp for hunting upland game birds. To address any questions about the licensing:

-- A member of the Vice President’s staff wrote a check for 140 dollars understanding that this would purchase a Texas non-resident season hunting license that would permit the Vice President to hunt quail in Texas. It appears now that the license itself cost 125 dollars, and an extra 15 dollars covered the cost of a Federal migratory bird stamp. The Vice President did not need the Federal stamp, as he already possessed one.

-- The staff asked for all permits needed, but was not informed of the 7 dollar upland game bird stamp requirement.

-- Because the requirement is new, the Department has informed us that it is issuing warnings, and the Vice President expects to receive one. He will take whatever steps are needed to comply with applicable rules.

-- In the meantime, the Vice President has sent a 7 dollar check to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which is the cost of an upland game bird stamp.

I know I’m satisfied.

Actually, I’m no longer convinced that the wall of secrecy was just to get them past the Sunday talk shows. Not telling Bush for 12 hours, and telling the White House that there had been a shooting but not who the shooter was, smells of “plausible deniability.” I think they were planning a cover-up that didn’t work, probably getting Whittington to say that he’d accidentally shot himself.

Wait a minute, why is a member of Cheney’s staff, paid for by taxpayer dollars, running personal, blood-sport-related errands for him?

All of you are going to be seeking that information

I was going to ask if Cheney spoke to the local cops before fleeing the scene back to Washington, but silly me: in Texas when someone gets shot while hunting there’s no requirement even to inform the authorities unless they actually die.

Still less is there a legal requirement to inform the press. White House press corps to McClellan: “Why didn’t you tell us Cheney shot a guy?” McClellan: “You didn’t ask.” (I wrote that before seeing his actual words: “Well, I think we all know that once it is made public, then it’s going to be news, and all of you are going to be seeking that information.”) Ten bucks to the first reporter who asks just how many other people Cheney has shot over the years that they failed to tell us about. Remember all that construction work a couple of years ago at Blair House (the Veep residence)? Installing giant freezers to store all the bodies.

Rumsfeld has been visiting North Africa, citing Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia as positive examples for dealing with “the problem of extremism.” Here’s how he describes his conversation with Algerian President Bouteflika:

He described it from the inside, as to what took place and how they fought off the terrorism problem and the problem of extremism, and the numbers of people who were killed or beheaded, and the task of persuading the Algerian people that their future was in a forward-looking, economically prosperous, democratic system, as opposed to violence and extremism.

Or to put it another way, how the Algerian government refused to implement the results of elections won by Islamists, banned their parties, then massacred many thousands of people and threw tens of thousands into prison.

And I was musing as he talked about the fact that so many people looking at it from the outside had so many ideas and critiques, and opined on this and opined on that, and it was very different from where he was.

Different still from a dungeon or a mass grave.

Peppered

Mary Matalin says Cheney “was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.” Now they’re just cut-and-pasting, using the same assertions to defend torture, holding people without trial, wiretapping, shootin’ a guy, whatever. In comments on my last post, Neil Shakespeare suggests the delay in getting Whittington to the hospital was in case someone checked Cheney’s blood-alcohol level, which seems plausible.

Also – obvious, but I didn’t think of it earlier – he waited until after the Sunday-morning shows were safely past.

Also, at some point he has to make a public statement, in which he will have to attempt to express contriteness and sympathy for the fellow human being he shot, so he’s gotta be practicing that, like Dick Gregory once said Lyndon Johnson didn’t talk about race for a while after he became president because his aides were trying to teach him how to say negro. “Niggra-o.” “Not quite, Mr. President, try again.”

Starting with the woman who owns the ranch where Cheney stalked and gunned down his prey, we have and will be hearing a lot of people talking about how it’s no big deal to be shot (or “peppered,” as they like to call it), why heck being shot by one of your buddies while huntin’ and drinkin’ is the Texas equivalent of a bar mitzvah.

You just stand there looking cute, And when something moves, you shoot

Lech Walesa suggests to Cuban exiles in Florida that they should prepare for what happens after Castro dies. Yeah, they should really do that instead of whatever it is they’ve been doing for the last 50 years.

Cheney exercised one of the little-known “inherent rights of the vice presidency,” and shot a 78-year old man.

Harry Whittington, who has just found his way into history trivia quizzes for decades to come, may have been a Republican, a lawyer and a hunter, but he also campaigned for better treatment of retarded prisoners, including not, you know, executing them.

They didn’t make an announcement until the local press got hold of the story over a day later. Say, do you think they reported the shooting to the police? Oh, and despite the fact that Cheney has his own personal ambulance, which did take Whittington to the hospital (insert your own ambulance-chaser joke here), it didn’t do so until nearly 3 hours after he was shot. What’s that about?

I’m gonna have that Tom Lehrer song – you know the one I mean – going through my head the rest of the day.

The United Arab Emirates sentences 26 men who attended a gay wedding (!) to 5 years each for being gay.

Victimless

Norman Solomon makes the point that we’re being too sanguine if we think Bush can’t use an over-stretched US military against Iran: “But what’s on the horizon is not an invasion -- it’s a major air assault”.

Riverbend raided.

Salman Rushdie, in an op-ed piece in favor of free speech (who’da thunk it?), quotes a t-shirt: “Blasphemy is a victimless crime.”

A letter to the London Times: “I have just purchased a bread and butter pudding from the Finest range of a leading supermarket chain. A heart-emblazoned sticker proclaims: ‘Perfect for Valentine’s Day’. Lower down, an information box states: ‘Serves 3’.” David Lilley, Leicestershire

And the Olympics Fever computer virus infects the LauraBot 3000. Or do any of you have a better caption you’d like to share with the class?

But I sure as H.E. double hockey sticks believe in something for victims of rape

The NYT runs the story of the alleged Al Qaeda shoe-bomb plot against LA on page A20, the WaPo on A4. Get the feeling they don’t really believe it either?

But it doesn’t matter. Democrats probably also have their doubts, but they’re afraid of saying so, in case they turn out to be wrong and look foolish. This is how Bush can lie, can be known to have a long record of lying, and not be slapped down for it.

Condi Rice congratulates the Haitian people on voting, just as if the US hadn’t forced the last elected president to resign before they would save his fucking life from thugs supported and funded by the US (my recap here). So anyway, pretending all that never happened, she tells the Haitian people to “respect the final results” (!) and says the Bush admin will “support the people of Haiti as they progress toward a transparent and stable democracy”.

However, nothing says transparent democracy like an open-mike incident.

The lower house of the South Dakota legislature votes 47-22 to ban pretty much all abortions, turning back moves to make exemptions in cases of rape, incest or the woman’s health. The pro-choice side was careful to follow Saletan’s advice and proclaim their abhorrence for abortion itself, one legislator saying, “I don’t believe in abortion by choice... But I sure as H.E. double hockey sticks believe in something for victims of rape.” AP says that Rep. Keri Weems, who made the usual don’t-punish-the-fetus-just-because-its-father-raped-its-mother argument, “describes herself as a stay-at-home mother,” which is funny because I thought that “Rep.” stood for Representative, which isn’t really a stay-at-home job, but perhaps in South Dakota Rep. is a special title they give to mothers, standing for Reproducer. Actually, she so describes herself on her website, where we find that she also wants to make distribution of condoms in schools punishable by one year in prison and a $1,000 fine, and to exempt cattle and swine semen from sales tax. Sort of a mixed message, really. A Democrat noted that this vote would be used “in campaign fodder,” impelling one of the Righteous, Republican party leader Rep. Larry Rhoden, to say, “I’m offended that anybody on this floor would accuse us of being political on this issue. We’re debating this based on our own personal beliefs.” Yes, precisely: you’re trying to impose your own personal beliefs on everyone else.

Via SF Chronic columnist Jon Carroll, this 4½-minute video of a guy juggling (the one at the right labeled “big finale”). Take my word for it, go watch.

That’s what friends do -- they share information and share strategic thoughts

Bush met today with right-wing Polish President Kaczynski. “I asked the President his advice on Ukraine. That’s what friends do -- they share information and share strategic thoughts.” Oh, and help each other move.

Some people think the sudden eruption of the Cartoon Wars four months after the cartoons’ original publication indicates some sort of organization or conspiracy. If so, the four-month delay is the tell-tale signature of that most dastardly group (you’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?), FEMA.

The part of the story about the supposed plot to shoe-bomb hijack a plane into downtown LA that is least credible is that the alleged hijackers went to meet Osama and get his blessing a month after 9/11, which would have been a ridiculous breach of security. At today’s Gaggle, Little Scottie was stumped by a question about how you hijack a plane with a weapon more suited to blowing up a plane. The administration answer is that they would use the shoe-bombs to blow up the cockpit door so that they could gain access and... what? hijack the plane with no other weapons, and not even a door to stop the passengers tearing them apart?

By the way, Bush accidentally referred to the Library Tower as the Liberty Tower, verbally replacing one thing with which he is completely unfamiliar with another thing with which he is completely unfamiliar.

It’s like a padded cell – on wheels!

Man, remember when the phrase “cartoon protests” applied only to any event Al Sharpton showed up at?

When Democrats in the House International Relations Committee submitted resolutions asking for information about torture policy and extraordinary rendition, Henry Hyde suggested that they should “at least silently confess to themselves that their actions pose real dangers to our country.” The resolutions were of course voted down by the R’s.

An AP story yesterday passed on the Pentagon’s claim that there were only four detainees still hunger striking in Guantanamo. Spokesscum Col. Jeremy Martin, who we’ve seen before defending the torture of forcible feeding and describing hunger striking as an Al Qaeda tactic, claims to have no idea why the drop in numbers – Martin never seems to know what prisoners are thinking, saying or demanding, because that would humanize them – saying, “We haven’t changed anything. Our processes and procedures are the same.” In fact, they are not, as is proven in an actual by god piece of investigative journalism, only 4 years late, in today’s NYT. I won’t quote at length because you need to go read it now. Take your time, I’ll be waiting in the next paragraph.

They have clearly stepped up the level of violence used against hunger-striking prisoners, and deliberately increased the pain involved in forcible feeding, removing throat lozenges, over-feeding to cause diarrhea, and introducing... the Emergency Restraint Chair.




They’ve bought 25 of these puppies, and are clearly using them as punishment, strapping prisoners into them for hours at a time, which goes against the manufacturers’ instructions that “Detainees should not be left in the Emergency Restraint Chair for more than two hours. The Emergency Restraint Chair should never be used as a means of punishment.” The company told the NYT that the Pentagon never asked for instructions in the chairs’ use.

My googling also turned up this site, which has many prisoner-restraint products for sale, and is quite scary.

(Update: Sigh, Slate’s Today’s Papers did the same Google search I did and has a link to the restraint chair company too. I thought I’d be the only blog with a picture of the chair. Actually, the print NYT, which arrived after I wrote the above, has the first picture, although the Times website does not.)

As long as I’m being unoriginal, I’ll hat-tip A Tiny Revolution’s catch on this wonderfully telling sentence from the London Times: “Iran has threatened to defend itself if attacked.”

If we didn’t build on former cemeteries, we would never build

Condi Rice failed to respond when Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a fellow member of the my-parents-were-drunk-when-they-picked-my-name club (or, in Livni’s case, not so much drunk as tzipsy), said that a Palestinian state run by Hamas would by definition be a “terrorist entity.”

Israel is building a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. On the site of an ancient Indian Muslim cemetery, used for more than 1,000 years. Says the srael Antiquities Authority, “If we didn’t build on former cemeteries, we would never build.”

Picture from the Pentagon website, where it has the caption, “U.S. Marines perform log drills, which are exercises conducted using logs”.

And the world ought to call them on it

Bush met with Jordan’s King Abdullah, his Oilaholics Anonymous sponsor, today. “We had a little time by ourselves to talk strategically about the world and our deep desire for this world to be peaceful.” One of the things they talked strategically about was... those damn cartoons. Evidently “we believe in a free press. We also recognize that with freedom comes responsibilities. With freedom comes the responsibility to be thoughtful about others.” Bush is always willing to stand up for rights, as long as they’re not exercised. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to suppress free speech: “we reject violence as a way to express discontent with what may be printed in a free press.” Jordan, for example, simply arrested two editors. Think George asked Kingy about them? He went on to call on all governments to stop the violence (the largest number of deaths, 12 so far, has been in US-occupied Afghanistan), “to be respectful” (!), and to protect the lives of “innocent diplomats” (is there such a creature as an innocent diplomat?).

Condi Rice has found the real culprit in the Cartoon Wars: Iran and Syria, who have “gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes. And the world ought to call them on it.” Yeah, I’d hate for the smoking cartoon gun to come in the form of a cartoon mushroom cloud.

Give the customers what they want

Favorite White House website article title of the week: “President Honors Dance Theatre of Harlem at the White House.”

Also honored by the president today, Coretta Scott King. Less honored was the woman at the far right of this picture, who goes unidentified in the caption on the White House website. Hillary Clinton, of course, and they were so anxious not to have her fully in frame that they cropped the picture in a way which also left out George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. And, er, how disrespectful would it be to have a caption contest here, about just what Shrub is thinking at this moment?


A week ago I asked how the cartoon protesters got those Danish flags they were burning in Gaza. Capitalism, baby, capitalism.

When entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Dayya first heard that Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed were being reprinted across Europe, he knew exactly what his customers in Gaza would want: flags to burn.

$11 each.

Abu Dayya sources some of his flags from suppliers in Taiwan, but he buys Israeli flags from a merchant in Israel, even though he sells them to be burned at anti-Israeli rallies.

And the Danish flag was also burnt today by Members of the state parliament of the Kano province of Nigeria, the closest thing Nigeria has to Taleban-era Afghanistan, where they resisted polio vaccinations as a diabolical Western plot. No word on where they acquired the flag. The flag was also burnt in the Philippines today.

Actually, “bling handler” sounds kind of dirty

Something seems a bit suspicious about the fact that in the Cartoon Wars, 5 Afghans were killed by Afghan police trying to storm Bagram Air Base. Since when does the American military entrust its security to Afghans?

Job title of the day: “bling handler” for a rapper. And that guy just got killed, so the job is available.

The deputy editor of the Taizhou Evening News dies following a police beating.

Gonzales said that the only reason they’re not wiretapping calls both ends of which are in the US is that public reaction might be negative. In other words, they probably think it’s one more thing they have the “inherent authority” to do (the list grows with each episode of “24”: every time Jack Bauer threatens to gouge someone’s eye out or whatever, Gonzales “discovers” something else they have the inherent authority to do), but it’s politically expedient not to, at least for the present.

Reminds me: I would have quoted Russ Feingold yesterday, but I thought everyone else would, and they haven’t. In response to that nonsense about D’s having a “pre-9/11 mindset,” he said that Bush is demonstrating a pre-1776 mindset.

Poland is down to fewer than 200 legal abortions a year, and often it’s the doctors themselves doing the refusing. A woman who was told by 3 eye doctors that a pregnancy could result in blindness was refused an abortion by all 3 of those doctors and a gynecologist; she gave birth, is now close to blind, and is taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights.

The language about Iran has been quietly ramping up, not perhaps helped by the announcement by Iran’s largest newspaper that it will run cartoons making fun of the Holocaust. In fact, it will have a contest to find the best one. What would an appropriate prize be for that? In addition to the Security Council referral over its nuclear program, I’ve heard government statements in the last week claiming Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism and that the increasing sophistication of IED’s in Iraq is down to Iranian assistance.

Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to do a brief book report slash recommendation of a book I finished last week, Norman Solomon’s War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. The book’s an essay about the myths, lies, memes used to sell America’s wars, using the wars of the last 40 years to illuminate the current Iraq war. It’s very much a journalist’s book, relying mostly on old newspaper and magazine articles rather than archives and memoirs. This means he doesn’t really delve into whether Lyndon Johnson, Reagan, Rumsfeld, Bush etc actually believe what they’re saying, but that would be a different book. This book is divided into 17 chapters, each of which focuses on one of these myths, such as: This Guy is a Modern-Day Hitler, They Are the Aggressors, Not Us, The Pentagon Fights Wars as Humanely as Possible, Withdrawal Would Cripple U.S. Credibility, What the US Government Needs Most is Better PR, etc (the table of contents is on the Amazon site). He demonstrates that the same themes are recycled over and over; this book is intended to be the antidote to the American amnesia that allows successive administrations to get away with that. The structure of the book really works: I knew most of this stuff, but the thematic chapters arrange the information in a way that is genuinely enlightening. Since his concerns overlap so well with my own, I would venture that anyone who likes my blog would like this book. And if you use the link at the top of this paragraph, Amazon will kick back 89¢ to me (or check your public library, like I did). Solomon’s previous book, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You, is available as a free download on his website. I haven’t read it yet, but I will. Oh, and no small thing: the man can write.

The short answer is, we didn’t think we needed to

The BBC said it, I didn’t: “Muslim Cartoon Fury Claims Lives.”

Alberto Gonzales, testifying about domestic surveillance, gave an answer that it took me a second to realize was inadvertently revealing: asked why the admin hadn’t consulted Congress, he replied, “The short answer is, we didn’t think we needed to.” Going into the store this morning, I didn’t need to hold the door for the person behind me, it wasn’t a legal requirement, but I did it anyway. Asked where in the Constitution it says that the prez can wiretap American citizens without a warrant, he admitted “nowhere specifically.” So if they don’t wanna do something, they don’t gotta unless it says so in exactly as many words in the Constitution, but if they wanna do something, they’ll interpret the shit out of that parchment. (Update: Leahy made exactly that point: “I’m getting the impression this administration picks and chooses what it’s subject to.”) So there was a lot of talk about the inherent powers of this incoherent president; “inherent powers” are the Holy Ghost of this administration’s constitutional theology. Biden asked what damage could really have been caused by the leak of the existence of this program, didn’t terrorists already figure that they were being listened to; Gonzales replied that “if they’re not reminded about it all the time in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget.” And for sweeps, a little stunt casting: the R’s brought the sister of one of the 9/11 pilots to the hearings.