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In Anbar province, Operation Steel Curtain continues apace, although without accomplishing my personal goal for it: giving me some pretext for concocting a “Do the Operation Steel Drapes match the Operation Steel Curtain?” joke. Says Col. Stephen Davis, “I got bombs, he got bombs. I got more bombs that he got. It’s a very primal fight. We don’t do a lot of hearts and minds out here because it is irrelevant.”
From the Daily Telegraph: “Prince Harry is to be pelted with potatoes as part of his year-long training at Sandhurst.” (For Americans: the equivalent of West Point.) It’s to prepare soldiers to deal with riots, or possibly it’s just an excuse to pelt Prince Harry with potatoes.
In France, where cadets surrender are being pelted with French fries, the Bonfire of the Citroëns continues, and is spreading well beyond Paris, with over 1,300 cars torched so far. Auguste Blanqui would be so proud. To fuckwit Interior Minister Sarkozy’s description of rioters as “scum,” we can now add the speaker of the Parliament’s insistence that they “do not come from this planet.” Best analysis (sorry, find the links yourselves) in Doug Ireland’s blog and Lenin’s Tomb.
If you haven’t read the WaPo piece on the FBI’s use of 30,000 “national security letters” (i.e., executive subpoenas), do so now. I especially like the quote from Jeffrey Breinholt of Justice’s counter-terrorism section that having all your personal information perused by government employees is harmless unless they, like, make a mistake and seize all your worldly goods or put you on a no-fly list or send you to a secret gulag or whatever. Civil liberties and privacy concerns, says Breinholt, whose email address is jeffrey.breinholt@usdoj.gov, are “eccentric,” like, you know, having too many cats. About half-way into the article is the pertinent datum that John Ashcroft rescinded a 1995 order that information on Americans obtained through use of a national security letter should be removed from FBI databases if not relevant. Now, the government is building a vast database of information that it will retain, analyze, and disseminate as it pleases, forever. Yes, the feds have naked pictures of you, and they bring them out at the Christmas party. And buried at the end of a long article is a quote from the Justice Dept inspector general, who investigates abuses based on complaints from the abusees, but acknowledges that “To the extent that people do not know of anything happening to them, there is an issue about whether they can complain. So, I think that’s a legitimate question.”
The other two (long) must-reads in the Sunday papers are the LA Times story on the Polish-Iraqi who returned from exile in Poland, where he sold used cars and owned a pizza parlor, and was given control of over $1 billion in Iraqi defense money, with predictable results, and the NYT story which gives more detail on the not entirely gasp-worthy news that the Bush admin lied about the intelligence on Iraq in the lead-up to the war, and knew it was lying.
George Bush, who supported a coup attempt against Hugo Chavez, has delivered a speech in Brazil, widely described as aimed at Chavez, tut-tutting attempts “to roll back the democratic progress of the past two decades”. And like Ronald Reagan, who once returned from a Latin American trip eager to report his discovery that “you’d be surprised – they’re all different countries down there,” Bush also learned something: “Wow, Brazil is big.”
The White House has issued Republican senators a book of talking points about Scalito, including a defense of his opinion in Casey, saying now, in 2005, that in upholding spousal notification in 1991, he was merely showing “concern for the safety of women”. Except that while his dissent was indeed male chauvinist piggish, he never mentioned safety of women except to dismiss as not especially important the instances when spousal notification would actually endanger women. His opinion was about the “interest” of the husband in the fetus, the interest of the state in supporting that interest, and not at all about the safety of women.
I said a day or two ago that the use of gulags in foreign countries gave those countries leverage over the US. You know who else might know countries those secret prisoners are held in? The secret prisoners. So in order to keep secret the details of our secret prisons, we must hold on to those prisoners, even if they no longer have intelligence value or we discover they were never guilty of anything in the first place. They might not have had any valuable intel before, but they do now.
A.A. Gill of the Sunday Times comments that “Rome,” which is playing on HBO here in the US and does get a little sillier each episode, has “a script that sounded like Gibbon rewritten by gibbons.”
Note to my English readers: you may now forget, forget the 5th of November.
Two stories that are probably more amusing in my mental picture of them than they were in real life:
Vicar Hurls Tea at Burglar
Cruise Ship Repels Somali Pirates
The US has launched a new offensive on the Syrian border called... wait for it... Operation Steel Curtain. Remember: Iron Curtain bad, Steel Curtain good.
In Sacramento, the police are threatening members of the group Breasts Not Bombs, saying that if they show their breasts not bombs at a demonstration Monday (plan your vacations accordingly), they will be arrested and forced to register as sex offenders (an egregious abuse of power that would take this story out of the realm of the humorous if it weren’t for the, you know, boobs). B Not B says such events are “forum[s] to speak about the vulnerability of humanity and the earth.” The LAT:
State police say that when the group filed for a protest permit last month, there was no indication that Breasts Not Bombs was going to go topless. But the group’s name made them suspicious.
“I decided to conduct some research,” CHP Officer Keith Troy wrote in his court declaration. It’s unclear what that research involved.
The state argued that there was an especial danger to this protest in that the park in the Capitol is frequented by sex offenders. Insert your own Arnold Schwarzenegger joke here.
As every blogger in the known universe has noted, the Bush admin will begin mandatory classes on ethics and not leaking classified shit. Because the reason Rove, Cheney, Scooty-Poot et al released classified information in retaliation against Joseph Wilson was that they didn’t know it was unethical because there hadn’t been a freaking seminar to tell them it was unethical.
Note to my English readers: penny for the guy, guv’nor?
In an only-slightly unfair Bloomberg article on how Michael Brown’s emails show him concerned with his reputation and clothing when he might have been focusing on responding to Katrina (the unfair part is to tweak him for looking for a sitter for his dog – was he supposed to let it starve?), there is this sentence: “Brown didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.” No, Brownie doesn’t immediately respond to anything; if you kicked him in the balls (and I encourage this experiment), he’d yell in pain a week later.
Romania and Poland have also denied hosting the CIA’s torture/detention facilities, sorta. From Romania we get such tortuously (sorry) phrased statements as “In the portfolio of projects of the Romanian government, there is no activity as the one that you refer to” and “the Romanian Intelligence Service does not have any intelligence on such detention centers in Romania.” The last one is the world’s lamest Zen koan. Russia has also denied being one of the countries. It hadn’t even occurred to me to suspect Russia, of all places, but now that they’ve denied it I can’t help wondering... The WaPo, by the way, quotes Human Rights Watch’s well-researched Romania/Poland claim, although presumably it knows whether it's true or not. To allow itself to engage in this he said/she said nonsense, today's article was written by Craig Whitlock rather than Dana Priest, the author of the original article.
Fafblog has a suggestion.
To my Russian readers, if any, a happy Day of People’s Unity, and congrats on throwing off the Polish yoke.
William Saletan smacks down Scalito for treating women as if they were less than full adults in his Casey dissent, at greater length than Billmon and I did Monday. Isn’t that the same William Saletan that Bionic Octopus
and I took to task for the exact same thing back in June? Well, he gets it right this time.
In a meeting of useless inbred children of privilege, Bush praises Prince Charles for his “steadfast leadership.” Leadership of what, exactly? He added, “The nation that defied bombardment from the air in 1940 once again refused to cower when its people were bombed from underground this summer.” He thinks Britain was attacked by the Mole People, doesn’t he? He wants us to fight them in the earth’s core so we don’t have to fight them here, doesn’t he?
WaPo headline: “Rove’s Future Role Debated.” Hey, those license plates ain’t gonna make themselves.
The Czech Republic has denied being one of the Eastern European countries the WaPo didn’t name as hosting American gulags. Now let’s get the rest of them on record. The CR did say that the US tried to get it to take (and give asylum to) released Guantanamo inmates the US didn’t want to return to their home countries. It refused. (Update: Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia have also issued denials. Human Rights Watch thinks Poland and Romania.)
Israel has been firing artillery into Gaza, and preventing journalists entering the territory to report on the damage. But rather more childishly, Israeli military jets routinely cause sonic booms over Gaza, just to scare the shit out of people. Human rights groups have gone into court in an attempt to stop the practice, which they call collective punishment.
As a fan of old-timey radio drama, I enjoyed being the recipient of a little mini-melodrama yesterday , on my phone. Next week we in California have a proposition requiring parental notification for abortion, so today the phone rang with a recorded call purporting to be from a mother with a vaguely Hispanic accent whose daughter’s boyfriend’s mother had taken her to an abortion clinic, and when she went to the rescue, they wouldn’t let her in and threatened to call the police. Who were these monsters to keep her from her daughter? All this with ominous music in the background. Very gripping. I give it two fetus-thumbs up. (If anyone has seen or heard this online, or can remember more details than I can, please tell us in comments.)
The WaPo has agreed with a CIA request not to say which Eastern European countries host secret CIA prisons holding secret CIA prisoners being subjected to secret CIA tortures. Discussing the CIA’s attempts to house-hunt for their new gulag, the Post notes that it considered an Alcatraz-type situation in the islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia, but decided that the Zambians might not be capable of keeping the secret CIA prisons secret. You know, even if the thought of your government engaging in torture doesn’t bother you, how wise is it that governments like Egypt, Jordan, Thailand, Uzbekistan and those unnamed Eastern European ones have information they can use for blackmail?
At a press conference, Rumsfeld was asked about the forcible feeding of hunger strikers in Guantanamo:
But there are a number of people who go on a diet where they don’t eat for a period and then go off of it at some point, and then they rotate and other people do that. So it’s clearly a technique to try to get the attention of you folks, and they’re successful.
“Go on a diet”?! GO ON A FUCKING DIET!!???!!!!!!!
He also claimed the decision not to let the UN inspectors talk with Guantanamo prisoners wasn’t his or the Pentagon’s, but a “government decision, a matter of policy,” which is rather mysterious and opaque.
Asked whether the Pentagon was involved in any way with Cheney’s efforts to smear Joe Wilson: “Not to my knowledge, but how could one answer that? I mean, you’ve got a department of hundreds and thousands of people, millions of people, and you say, ‘Was this department in any way involved in some allegation?’ My goodness gracious.” Well, I’m reassured. Asked if he personally had spoken with Cheney about Wilson, he responded
I -- how would I know if I ever spoke about it with the vice president over five years? I don’t recall speaking it -- with him about it, and I don’t recall the department being involved. Is it possible? I mean, my goodness, that’s -- that question is such a -- it’s -- what is that game? Fish. Give me all your sevens or something. I mean, that’s not for me.
And another in the long list of things Rummy does not have knowledge of: before naming Dorrance Smith to be assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs, he never bothered reading Smith’s op-ed accusing the media of being complicit with terrorists. It’s long past time Rummy retired to the old war-mongers’ home and played some, what is that game? Fish.
Bush announces his plan to combat Avian flu.
The US military has released 500 prisoners from Abu Ghraib to celebrate the end of this thing they’ve just heard of called Ramada Inn, or something. Evidently a review board, which just coincidentally came to its conclusions at the end of Top Ramen, showed that all 500 were completely innocent of any serious crime, which you’d kinda think would have been nice to know before locking them up in the first place. Also, sez the Pentagon, “These detainees have confessed to their crimes, renounced violence and pledged to be good citizens of Iraq.” Also, they have all learned to love Big Brother. The press release goes on, “Deputy Prime Minister Abed Motlaq al-Jabouri, Justice Minister Abdul Hussein Shandel and Human Rights Minister Narmin Othman witnessed the release to emphasize the importance of being a good Iraqi citizen and provide support to the Iraqi government, officials noted.” How does it emphasize the importance of what-they-said exactly?
Who says Iraq isn’t like Vietnam? We’ve got us our first fragging. Which the military managed to keep quiet for nearly 5 months.
Excellent. Just like I said they should, the UN human rights monitors refused the Pentagon’s “nothing to hide” offer of inspections in Guantanamo, but only performed by people named by the US, and without access to the prisoners.
A woman in Oregon bought a lottery ticket that won $1 million with a credit card that did not belong to her but to a dead relative. Which invalidates the purchase. When police arrived to retrieve the initial instalment of $33,500 already paid to her, they didn’t find the money but did find a quantity of methamphetamine.
(Update: Everything I wrote after the quote seems to have disappeared on the way to posting. It is now restored.)
Here’s Scalito’s reasoning in Casey:
The Supreme Court has held that a man has a fundamental interest in preserving his ability to father a child. The Court’s opinions also seem to establish that a husband who is willing to participate in raising a child has a fundamental interest in the child’s welfare. It follows that a husband has a “legitimate” interest in the welfare of a fetus he has conceived with his wife. ... This interest may be legitimately furthered by state legislation.
So what does he mean by “interest”? One definition given by my computer dictionary is “the state of wanting to know about something or someone,” but I don’t think that’s what he meant, but something more like “a share, right, or stake in property or a financial undertaking.” And you have to ask how the man’s property rights in a fetus may be “furthered” by notification.
(Update: Billmon notes that Alito, to give him his proper name for once (I’m taking bets, though, on who the first senator or tv anchor will be to accidentally call him Scalito, assuming it hasn’t already happened), condescendingly compared the burdens Pennsylvania’s legislation put on adult women to those the Supreme Court was willing to place on minor children. The line I quoted in my last post positing that wives may just need their pretty little heads straightened out about “perceived problems” like economics – the little lady just can’t balance a check book – is also not a little bit condescending.)
Bush says that Sam Alito “understands that judges are to interpret the laws, not to impose their preferences or priorities on the people.” No, evidently that the job of legislatures: in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Alito supported mandatory notification of husbands (with a one-year prison term if the wife falsely certified having done so) before an abortion because “The Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands’ knowledge because of perceived problems--such as economic constraints, future plans, or the husbands’ previously expressed opposition--that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion.” The US Supreme Court, by the way, only struck that provision down by 5-4.
More to come, but his willingness to trample a woman’s right to privacy in that way tells me as much as I need to know.
Hugo Chavez denounces Halloween as an American import, a “game of terror.” “Families disguise their children as witches. That is contrary to our ways.” Also, he couldn’t find anyone to fill his order for one million Patrick Fitzgerald masks. Speaking of great moments in cultural exchange, Al Kamen tells how the Iranian “students” who took over the American embassy in 1979 had to have the Halloween decorations explained to them. One of them then asked, “You do this to your children?”
I’ve seen several variants on the idea that, while John Roberts was able to insist that judicial nominees don’t have to talk about their opinions on pretty much anything, the right’s treatment of Harriet Miers has created a new situation, and D’s will now be able to ask such questions of the next nominee. Isn’t that adorable? They actually think that intellectual inconsistency matters. The it’s-ok-to-ask-about-ideology thing is just soooo last week. Unless it isn’t. Remember, the rules are whatever Tom DeLay, Karl Rove and Fox say they are at any particular moment. If a Democrat commits perjury and tries to pass it off as a harmless technicality and the criminalization of politics, it’ll be like Scooter Libby never happened.
Humorous death of the week:
Waco, Texas: The Rev Kyle Lake, 33, was electrocuted while performing a baptism. He grabbed a microphone while standing up to his shoulders in water in a baptismal at University Baptist Church. Doctors in the congregation tried unsuccessfully to revive him. (AP)
(Update: additional from the BBC, which quotes the pastor: “At first, there was definitely confusion just because everyone was trying to figure out what was going on. Everyone just immediately started praying.”) (Update update: I’m told his church’s website has this message: “We are confident that Kyle is in Heaven today because of his trust in Jesus Christ as his savior.” Um, that can be taken two ways.)
The new intelligence strategy statement has given American intelligence agencies the task, among other things, of “bolster[ing] the growth of democracy”. Because nothing says bolstering democracy like covert action.
The US will allow UN investigators to visit Guantanamo (it’s even named which ones it wants) and look into torture allegations. The Pentagon says this will show “we have nothing to hide.” Of course, they won’t be allowed to speak with any of the prisoners. They should refuse to go under those circumstances, but I don’t suppose they will.
Odd-sounding quote of the day, from Christie Todd Whitman: “Scooter has fallen on his sword”. Just like an ancient Roman, though not a lot of ancient Romans named Scooter: Peel me another grape, Scooter told his slave; Cicero and Scooter met at the vomitorium to conspire against Valerius Plamius, etc.
Also, Scooter did no such thing. Had he really been such a loyalist, he would have stood up, possibly in the vomitorium (I do know that vomitorium doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means, but I really like saying vomitorium), and taken one for the team two years ago, after it turned out that this particular piece of character-assassinating assholery, among all the instances of Bush-administration character-assassinating assholery, would be the one people gave a shit about.
A paragraph from the AP, verbatim:
Violence during the last week has killed 23 people, including 14 suspected insurgents and two worshipers who were dragged from a mosque and shot. The incident underlined the challenges of bringing stability and strengthening Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy.
23 dead people do not just constitute an “underline,” but also bold-face type, an exclamation point, capital letters and a fucking emoticon.
Underlined the challenges, indeed. Sheesh.
A little detail missing from previous stories of Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s speech in which he called for Israel to be wiped off the map. It was at a conference on “the world without Zionism” held in Teheran, so why is this sign in English?
Apropos of nothing, let me tell you the story (from memory, but I’m pretty sure I have the facts correct) of a time the White House leaked the name of a CIA employee. It was 1988, and the (former) employee was named George Bush. A researcher, a historian I think, looking into the Kennedy assassination, ran across a document which mentioned that someone at the Agency named George Bush had spoken with Cuban emigres right after the assassination. Was it the George Bush whose hitherto first known association with the CIA was when he was appointed to head it in the 1970s, then running for president? Well, in 1963 he was in the oil business, including in the Caribbean, and from a Republican family, so it was certainly plausible that he’d been asked to develop a few contacts, but the document was unclear, and seemed to be referring to someone more officially employed by the CIA. After this story was published in the Nation, the White House put out a statement that it was indeed a different George Bush, someone who’d left the CIA a couple of years later and they didn’t know what had happened to him. But they named him as a former CIA employee anyway. Not undercover, but still. The Nation tracked that George Bush down, which wasn’t especially difficult because he was listed in the phone book and was living at the same address as in 1963 (he’d left the CIA for another civil service job, in Social Security). He denied being the George Bush mentioned in the document; in 1963 he’d been something like 25 and too low-level to have been liaising with anti-Castro Cubans. So it remains a mystery to this day, but the relevant point for us now is that, just 6 years after the Philip Agee Act, the White House outed a former CIA employee, without even warning him first.
Ha’aretz illustrates a story about Israeli police using stun-grenades to keep West Bank Palestinians entering Israel with this AP picture, unhelpfully captioned “Palestinian women waiting to be checked by Border Police officers in Abu Dis while making their to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on Friday.”
The big news of the day is of course that Sulu is gay.
Some things of note in Bush’s statement on Scooter Libby’s indictment: He called him by the nickname Scooter. While he said that the Scootster is presumed innocent, he added “we’re all saddened by today’s news,” which would not be an appropriate response if the Scootmeister is in fact guilty of what Bush said two years ago was a serious crime. Speaking of serious crimes, Bush then went on to say “I got a job to do, and so do the people who work in the White House. We got a job to protect the American people”. Well, it’s a serious crime against grammar, anyway.
Bush’s latest speech on The War Against Terror (TWAT) began with his usual appreciation-fest: “I appreciate the foreign officers here. I appreciate you being here. I appreciate the jointness that we’re working on, and the transformation they’re working on together to make sure that we’re able to keep the peace.” And I appreciate the accurate transcriptions. This one even included the heckler:
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr. President, war is terror.
AUDIENCE: Booo!
That’s a three-O boo. I believe if it had been just a two-O boo, that would have meant ghosts.
He’s still quoting the discredited Zinoviev Zawahiri-Zarqawi letter.
He tells this story: “An 85-year-old Iraqi woman cast a ballot in favor of the constitution after her son carried her to the polls on his back....” We’ve heard this exact story before, haven’t we, except it was about the January election or the Afghan election. I’m right, aren’t I?
“Some observers also claim that America would be better off by cutting our losses and leaving Iraq now. This is a dangerous illusion, refuted with a simple question: Would the United States and other free nations be more safe, or less safe, with Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq, its people, and its resources?” So if the American occupation were ended, bin Laden would become president, is that what you’re so saying? How about the Ghost of Hitler, would he be minister of the interior?
90% of the speech is literally word for word stuff he’s said before, most of it duplicating that televised National Endowment for Democracy speech, so there’s no need to re-mock it here. So thank you and may God continue to bless... oh wait, what the hell am I saying, now he’s got me doing it.
