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A few hours after the announcement of Maliki’s “reconciliation plan,” video of the murder of 4 abducted Russian embassy workers was posted on the internet. A simple “no” would have sufficed.
The London Times, which saw a draft of it last week, says it’s been vagued up, including the removal of a real timetable, details of un-de-Baathification, and “a call for the Government to recognise the difference between resistance and terrorist groups and a written invitation for resistance groups to join a national dialogue.”
The Chinese legislature decides not to criminalize sex-selection abortions. Which is one of those practices I find morally abhorrent and wouldn’t consider banning for a second. The sort of people whose values would lead them to that act should not be inflicted with a baby girl, or vice versa.
I’ll bet when Bush goes to church, the Secret Service doesn’t let anyone else have an umbrella.
Maliki issues his 24-point plan, marked down from 28. Hurrah! It calls for a timetable for American withdrawal, without actually suggesting one. An amnesty, except for people who committed “criminal and terrorist acts and war crimes.” But jay-walkers need no longer live in fear of a midnight knock on the door. For those others, “we present a fist with the power of law to protect our country and people”; “No and a thousand times no. There can be no deal with them until they have been justly punished.” My impression that Maliki is a bit of a blowhard is not diminishing over time. It’s unclear whether or not the amnesty applies to people who just killed Americans, since the “terrorist acts” thing might or might not include that (depending on whether you ask an American or an Iraqi, really). Also, he didn’t say how they’d determine who had committed those acts which are ineligible for the amnesty. In other words, on this key provision, as on the timetable, he decided to fudge. He says that foreign troops should respect human rights. Rummy says, “Yeah, we’ll get right on that.”
What else? Ensuring the army is run on “professional and patriotic lines,” presumably by professional patriots. Compensation, from who knows what source, for victims of terrorism, ethno-sectarian cleansing, de-Baathification and military operations. Adoption of a rational discourse. National dialogue. A united stand against terrorists. Pretending that Iraq’s elected bodies are solely responsible for decisions regarding Iraq’s sovereignty and the presence of foreign troops. Yet more national dialogue. And then, for dessert, some national dialogue.
Letter to the NYT, one of several deploring its publishing of the details of the warrantless surveillance of banking records: “Isn’t the point that the public’s right to know must be balanced against protecting the public at a time of war? I’d rather know that the bad guys were being caught than having my ‘interest’ in this story satisfied over this morning’s cup of coffee.”
And in North Korea, whose citizens haven’t been told of its threat to test a ballistic missile, a waitress tells the Sunday Telegraph: “Our Dear Leader knows what he does, and if it’s necessary to keep something secret, we will.”
Saddam Hussein, unclear on the concept of a hunger strike, skipped exactly one meal to protest the killing of another of his lawyers.
Treasury Sec John Snow says the program of spying on private banking records is “government at its best.” In your face, Social Security!
Incidentally, that program may have been conceived to fight terrorism, but like every other expansion of executive power was immediately put to other uses, against more mundane crimes like money laundering and drugs. Other than that, their examination of millions of money transfers ($6 trillion a day) seems to have netted them one terrorist. Presumably if they ever put anyone on trial with evidence derived from this program, if it were actually effective, it would have all come out anyway, so really everyone can lay off the New York Times (Cheney says the Times’s decision “offends me”).
Meanwhile (is it too suspicious of me to wonder if this was timed to coincide with the NYT story, which they knew about for at least a month?), the FBI arrests a group of Floridian would-be terrorists whose plans were “more aspirational than operational.” Isn’t that the Republican Party motto?
Finally, farewell Harriet, we hardly knew ye.
It’s been a little while since Bush gave one of those speeches that were supposed to rally the American people behind him, but in them he always assured us that he had a plan, indeed a “plan for victory” in Iraq. Actually, I’m not sure which is less reassuring to me, Bush without a plan or Bush with a plan. This week the D’s have been talking endlessly about the plan, suggesting darkly that it is a mythical beast, holding up blank placards which are said to show that plan – hilarious! side-splitting! don’t quit your day jobs! It’s a way for the D’s to criticize – mildly – the conduct of the war without having to come to a common position on the war itself. The “plan” they’re calling for is as nebulous as Bush’s. Do they want a “plan for victory” – the same war only, you know, “better” – or a plan for phased withdrawal? In short, they’re focusing on plans so they don’t have to talk about the actual war – what is it for, how do we know when we’ve won, is it worth it – you know, the little stuff.
“Say, who here wants to go the Sunni Triangle?” (And yes, that is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace)
David Corn points out an 11-day old story I missed: the Pentagon has stopped releasing the number of how many Iraqi units are capable of fighting on their own. The number of Iraqis standing up so that we may stand down is now “classified.”
“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”
Eli points out in comments that the Olmert quote in my previous post has been slightly altered in the linked Ha’aretz article, softening it without changing the message that Israeli lives are more important than those of Palestinians. The quote is completely missing from reports of his meeting with Abbas in the WaPo, Guardian, and NYT, so you’d think his only remark was an apology for the various civilian deaths, plus a claim that the Israeli Army is “the most decent and restrained army in the world.” The Swedish Army was too decent and restrained to comment. Those articles also all omitted Olmert’s insistence that the assassinations would continue.
Gore Vidal: “He [Bush] says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It’s like having a war on dandruff, it’s endless and pointless.”
Pluto’s newly discovered moons are named Hydra and Nix. Should have been Nyx, but the name was already taken. Still, pretty cool names.
Another excellent name from the military. Asked yesterday about post traumatic stress in returning troops, Rumsfeld referred the question to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder, Jr.
Israeli PM Olmert says he will continue the policy of assassinations, no matter how many civilian casualties there are (like the three children and the pregnant woman yesterday), because “the lives and the welfare of the residents of the Sderot are more important than those of the residents of Gaza.”
I don’t know why it’s so shocking to hear him say aloud what we knew he thought.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
