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Four men who stole the original manuscript of Darwin’s The Origin of Species have been sentenced to long prison terms. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere. Oh, and did I mention it was from the library of Transylvania University?
In Wednesday’s Gaggle, Scotty McClellan was asked if mistakes were committed by the US in the Iraq war. Astonishingly, he admits that there were. Less astonishingly, he says he doesn’t know what they were, and indeed, “we’ll let the historians look back and make those judgments. I don’t think you can do it in the current time.” So there you have it: the Bush admin not only doesn’t learn from its mistakes, but denies even the possibility of learning from its mistakes until decades from now, which could be a little late. On the other hand it might not be late because, due to those mistakes, we’ll probably still be fighting this war decades from now.
Speaking of lengthy contemplation, this Thai Buddhist monk is wearing the helmet because of falling rocks from the blasting at a nearby limestone quarry.
Wilkommen: Cute story in the Indy about preparations in Germany for next year’s World Cup, specifically, mega-brothels being built to accommodate the 40,000 prostitutes expected to make their way to Berlin for the event. Actually a good thing, if it cuts down on the number of prostitutes who are sex slaves. 3 million football fans are expected to make use of their services.
Speaking of remarkably accommodating and flexible Europeans, all the European officials Condi met evidently found her reassurances entirely reassuring, or say they did.
George Bush claims that all his policies come from these two. Explains so much. Now if it were two cats...
In Britain, the Law Lords (the highest court) rule that evidence elicited by torture in other countries may not be used in court.
Back here in torture central, various sources explain how every word spoken by Condi about torture this week has been exquisitely polished by State Dept lawyers to mean either nothing or the exact opposite of what it’s meant to sound like. Eric Umansky in Today’s Papers points out that her statement
As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States obligations under the [Convention Against Torture], which prohibits, of course, cruel and inhumane and degrading treatment, those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States
is undercut by the Bush legal position that there are in fact no legal obligations not to torture foreigners unless they are held in the US. So they would abide by their obligations, but claim there are no obligations.
Also (and forgive the lack of links; I had assumed someone would collect all the Condi-parsings in one place, but no one has), the NYT yesterday noted that when she said the US doesn’t send prisoners to countries where they “will be tortured,” that only excludes rendition when we absolutely, positively know that they will be tortured, not that they may be, or probably will be. I believe in lawyer’s parlance, that’s called a “wink wink.” A couple of days ago, she said that the US didn’t transport prisoners “for the purpose” of torture, more wink winkery. (I just made that up. I like it.) And of course without a working definition of “torture,” no statement rejecting the practice of torture has any real-world meaning.
And someone in the Guardian, um, or the Independent, sorry again, focused on her use of the word “policy” – for example, her statement above began with the phrase “As a matter of U.S. policy...” – which is another loophole, since policies have exceptions and are a matter of presidential will (that is, they can be changed at any time); “policy” is not an iron-clad promise: she wouldn’t have used the phrase if it were. To the extent that gullible news media, and gullible congresscritters like Carl Levin, believe that some sort of change has taken place, her oh so carefully chosen words have done what they were intended to do, get critics off the Bushies’ backs. If she had really intended to rule out the use of torture, her words would not have needed to be carefully chosen.
There is perhaps a limit to gullibility among those who characterize Rice’s words as a “reversal of policy”: I’ve heard no one say that they believe that any of the practices – kidnappings in foreign countries, secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, torture by American interrogators, torture by foreign interrogators – will actually be altered, that a decision was made this week by the Bush admin to stop doing any of the things it’s been doing.
If you’re wondering about the statement by UN high commissioner for human rights Louise Arbour which provoked John Bolton to object “I think it is inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we’re engaged in in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers,” here it is. Oddly, she doesn’t mention the US specifically. Wonder how he knew she meant us?
Some snippets from Bush’s latest Iraq speech:
“Over the course of this war, we have learned that winning the battle for Iraqi cities is only the first step. ... We found that after we left, the terrorists would re-enter the city, intimidate local leaders and police, and eventually retake control.” Boy , live and learn, huh? You’d think no one had ever fought a war before.
On Najaf: “An Iraqi battalion has consumed [sic] control of the former American military base” but “There are still kidnappings, and militias and armed gangs are exerting more influence than they should in a free society.” As opposed to exerting just the right amount of influence.
Says there’s some corruption in the Iraqi government at the local and national levels, so “[w]e’ve helped the Iraqi people establish institutions like a Commission on Public Integrity and a stronger Supreme Board of Audit to improve oversight of the rebuilding process.” I’m guessing the contracts to set up the Commission on Public Integrity and the Supreme Board of Audit went to Haliburton.
As is now requisite, Bush quoted Holy Joe Lieberman approvingly. Joementum went to Iraq and wrote that he could see the signs of progress: “There are many more cars on the streets... and literally millions more cell phones in Iraq hands than before.” Of course the cell phones are being used to detonate the cars...
California right-wingers are so upset with Der Arnold that they’re looking around for an alternative.
In Germany, Condi Rice said that she wouldn’t comment on the American kidnapping, and five-month detention and torture of German national Khaled al-Masri, all because he had a “suspicious name,” because he’s suing, and she certainly can’t talk about an issue that might be before the courts. I am getting so sick of that line. Angela Merkel came out of their meeting saying Rice had admitted a mistake in that case, but the State Dept says that Rice did no such thing and they don’t understand how Merkel could ever have gotten such an idea. Rice said something about “if” little errors occur, the US will rectify them, although she didn’t say how dumping al-Masri on a mountain road and then pressuring Germany not to talk publicly about the case fit with that.
George Bush loves him the Hanukkah. Possibly because it’s all about the oil. So he got a 19-day jump start on it.
Is the White House’s fire insurance premium paid up?
That’s the West Point Jewish Cadet Choir. Let me repeat that: the West Point Jewish Cadet Choir.
Earlier this year, Robert Mugabe destroyed the houses of hundreds of thousands of people in the subtly named “Operation Drive Out Rubbish.” Now, his government has rejected an offer from the UN to provide tents because “we are not tents people.”
A Bush exchange with AP reporter Nedra Pickler today:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Insurgents in Iraq claim that they have taken a U.S. citizen hostage. We also have a U.S. peace activist who is being held. Is there anything you can do to get them back?
THE PRESIDENT: We, of course, don’t pay ransom for any hostages. What we will do, of course, is use our intelligence gathering to see if we can’t help locate them. The best way to make sure that Iraq is a peaceful society is to continue to spread democracy. And, clearly, there are some there who want to stop the spread of democracy. There are terrorists there who will kill innocent people and behead people and kill children; terrorists who have got desires to hurt the American people. And it should be -- the more violent they get, the clearer the cause ought to be, that we’re going to achieve victory in Iraq, and that we’ll bring these people to justice. We will hunt them down, along with our Iraqi friends, and at the same time, spread democracy.
Notice how quickly he slides from the individual hostages to his terrorists-are-bad talking points, never making a human connection or saying a word to the families of the hostages. The rest of us just aren’t real to him. Indeed, there’s nothing in his answer that demonstrates that he knows the hostages’ names or is following this story at all. Also, saying we don’t pay ransom is fine, but the thing about using intel to track them down just increases the chances they’ll be killed.
On Iraq, he says the troops “need to hear... that we have a strategy that will win. ... And so our strategy is two-fold” (killing people, spreading democracy). Only, the thing is, in last Wednesday’s so-called major speech, he said, “Our strategy in Iraq has three elements.” He can’t even remember how many folds/elements his strategy has. Or possibly he just can’t count that high.
About secret prisons and torture, he seems to have gotten the memo about stressing how everything we do follows American laws without mentioning the Bush admin position that American laws don’t actually apply to these detainees. Note the McClellanesque use of mindless repetition:
I can tell you two things: one, that we abide by the law of the United States; we do not torture. And two, we will try to do everything we can to protect us within the law. We’re facing an enemy that would like to hit America again, and the American people expect us to, within our laws, do everything we can to protect them.
The State Dept’s position on the Venezuelan elections, the Miami Herald notes, “was clearly closer to the opposition line” than to the government’s. Funny, that. State spokesmodel Adam Ereli says the low turnout, caused by the opposition boycott (and not even that low compared to other Venezuelan mid-term elections, Left I points out), is a sign of distrust in the electoral system, showing a magical ability to read the minds of the Venezuelan non-voters. (Response of one reporter at the press conference: Isn’t that a bit of a reach? Fifty percent of the people in this country don’t vote. You just don’t like Venezuela very much.) The Herald quotes an opposition leader saying, or possibly miming, “Silence united Venezuelans.” A little silence from the State Dept would also be nice.
Rummy Rumsfeld, criticizing the media’s peculiar habit of focusing on the negative: “To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks.” That’s one of the best Rummyisms yet. And he asked, after citing a survey showing pessimism about Iraq among American journalists, academics, think tanks, etc, “Which view of Iraq is more accurate, the pessimistic view of the so-called elites in our country, or the more optimistic view expressed by millions of Iraqis and by some 155,000 U.S. troops on the ground?” Oo, oo, I know this one, oh, I’m gonna have to go with “the so-called elites in our country.”
Excellent: it was time for another Neil Bush scandal. Now he’s hanging around with Sun Myung Moon.
Israel – ostensibly in response to 3 rockets, but any excuse would have done – has announced plans to a) resume assassinations in Gaza, b) fire into built-up regions, after giving the residents what I’m sure will be ample time to get out of the way.
George Monbiot on why biodiesel sucks.
Quote of the day, from Marine Col. Stephen W. Davis, about military operations in Anbar province: “This is not a hearts and minds battle. ... There are a lot of knuckleheads here that need to die. You’re just crunching heads.”
There are two kinds of people in the world: those the (London Times) headline “Saddam Trial Hears of ‘Human Flesh Grinder’” makes want to read the article, and those it makes want not to read the article.
Caption contest: Bush (circled, on the right) attends a production of The Nutcracker.
The NYT has an article on “The Man Behind the Secretary of State’s Rock Star Image.” That aide insists that all of his work in promoting her alleged rock star image is not for domestic consumption – in a story about Condi’s rock star image (no, it doesn’t get less silly with repetition, does it?) printed coincidentally on the same day she’s facing questions in Europe about secret prisons and torture.
Rockin’?
Condi the rock star tried today to implicate European countries in America’s torture flights and secret prisons (whose existence she refused to confirm or deny): “Some governments choose to cooperate with the United States. That cooperation is a two-way street. We share intelligence that has helped protect European countries from attack, saving European lives.” So if a country doesn’t “cooperate,” we don’t share any intelligence we have that it might be attacked by terrorists? She won’t say which European countries cooperate, because that would put them at risk of reprisal. Not saying, instead, puts all of them at risk, or at least the ones rumored to be involved. She defended, nay praised, the extra-judicial detention of prisoners, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge the existence of the prisons in which those prisoners are held, because to do so “would be compromising intelligence information, and I’m not going to do that”. That statement is designed to elicit the Pavlovian mouth-shutting that is the response of most of the media to claims that intel is endangered, but in fact makes no sense whatsoever. Compromised how?
Oh, and if you read Condi the rock star’s comment about respecting the sovereignty of European states too quickly, you may have missed what she was actually saying: she totally respects their right to lie about there being secret prisons on their territory.
NYT: “The American commanders say their soldiers have largely halted combat missions and now play a training and backup role for the Iraqi forces”. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
Let’s see if we can spot a pattern. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, asked by Chris Wallace about secret overseas prisons today, said, “We respect the sovereignty of the countries with which we deal and we do not move people around the world so that they can be tortured.” Bush, last Tuesday, in non-response to a question about secret overseas prisons: “The United States of America does not torture.” McClellan, Friday, when asked about secret overseas prisons: “The President has made it very clear that we do not torture.” And we’ll see what Condi says in Europe this week. (Update: yup.) The pattern is that you ask them about secret prisons and they immediately turn the subject to torture. Which is a term none of them have ever been willing to define.
Hadley said Rice won’t comment on the CIA operations, presumably even to the people who run the countries where they take place, because “the information would help the enemy.” John McCain? The ACLU?
Hey, I just figured something out. The secret prisons are only in a couple of countries, as far as we know, Poland and Romania we think, but the flights that took prisoners there went through a lot of countries – Britain, Ireland, Germany, Italy, etc etc. I think the CIA deliberately spread them around to implicate as many countries as possible to keep them quiet.
AP headline: “US Missile, al-Qaida Death May Be Linked.” Ya think? The first story they tried to put out was that he’d been blown up accidentally by one of his own bombs. If that’s your cover story, you might use missiles without model numbers and the words “guided missile” and “US” on them.
Not surprisingly, Kazakhstan’s dictator Nazarbayev is “re-elected” for another 7-year term with 91% of the vote, in what Nazarbayev calls “unprecedented democratic conditions,” but which were, of course, undemocratic and very precedented.
The alleged number 3 man in Al Qaeda was killed in Pakistan by a drone. At the same time, Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway gives birth to a boy who is number 3 in the line of succession. Coincidence? I think not!
In both his speech on immigration last month and his radio address today, Bush said that immigrants should assimilate and “we must continue to welcome legal immigrants and help them learn the customs and values that unite all Americans, including liberty and civic responsibility, equality under God, tolerance for others, and the English language.” Funny that he should be talking about assimilation and equality while proposing a guest worker program. Also, when will Mr. Patriot Act learn the customs and values of liberty; since when did the draft- and, just yesterday, jury-duty dodger believe in civic responsibility; what does this privileged member of the lucky sperm club know about equality; when did this god-bothering homophobe show a passing acquaintance with tolerance; or the English language? And indeed, which is the English language supposed to be, a custom or a value?
Also, what’s with the “equality under God” crap? Well, I know what the phrase means: that God values all souls equally. It’s a Christian thing (yeah, yeah, other religions too, but the expression is a Christian one), it is not an American thing. Indeed, just as he often says that freedom comes from God, what he is trying to do is Christianize the values that underlie American institutions, and it’s as creepy as the campaign to take that atheist Jefferson off the nickel and replace him with Jesus.
Okay, I made that up, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
The Pentagon has decided to brazen it out and defend the practice of secretly paying to place happy-news stories in the Iraqi press as a) perfectly legitimate “rebuttal information” to counter the “lies” of the insurgents and “get the truth out there”, b) a practice “customary in Iraq.”
Although it is widely reported that Condi Rice, who is visiting Europe next week, will answer the questions of European governments about secret prisons, Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern, who met her on a visit to the US this week, says (I can only found a paraphrase, not a direct quote) that she told him that “she expected allies to trust that America does not allow rights abuses.” Ah yes, the old “trust me” ploy.
The front-runner in Chile’s presidential elections is Michelle Bachelet, who was tortured as a dissident during the Pinochet years, and whose father was tortured to death.
On the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat, various bus systems kept a seat unoccupied in her honor and inevitably someone in New York – although a tourist, not a New Yorker – sat in it and wouldn’t get up. “I think I’ve got a right to sit here,” she said. Welcome to your place in history, Fiona Humphreys of Bristol.
The Chinese finally admit that they harvest organs from people they execute and sell them to rich foreigners, but promise to “tidy up the medical market.”
The annual Bad Sex in Fiction prize has been awarded, to Giles Coren’s novel Winkler. I didn’t think it was as funny as previous winners, so I was going to pass on posting it this time, but there’s something I rather like about the form in which the London Times (for which Coren is a restaurant reviewer) printed the award-winning passage:
And he **** **** in her ***** and his **** jumped around and ******* on her ***** and he blacked *** and she **** his **** out of her ***** and lifted ******* from his **** and ******* the pillow away and he ****** and ******* at the air, and he **** again so **** that his **** ******** out of her **** and a **** of it *** him straight in the *** and ***** like ******* he’d ever *** in *****, and he yelled with the pain, but the **** could have been ********, and as she ******* at his ****, which was ******* around like a ****** dropped in an ***** ****, she ********* his **** deeply with the ***** of both **** and he **** three **** times, in ***** ****** on *** chest. Like Zorro.
Robbie, do you like movies about gladiators?
A couple of days ago I commented on the insanity in the White House whereby they believe that George Bush making a speech about his Iraq policy, emitting word-like sounds from his chimp-like mouth, would actually increase support for it. But it’s actually worse than that, much worse. Let me give you two quotes. Bush two days ago: “The United States of America does not torture. And that’s important for people around the world to understand”. And Scotty McClellan today, after he refused to confirm or deny the existence of secret prisons: “The President has made it very clear that we do not torture”. Now maybe this was obvious to all of you, but the concept is so alien to my way of thinking that my brain may just have rejected it out of hand before now, succumbing to audacity overload: they expect everyone, and not just Americans either, to take Bush’s word for it, to treat Bush’s say-so as if it were incontrovertible evidence, to say “Well, I’ve read all these stories about torture, and it really seemed like there was something to them, but George Bush has said that we do not torture, and that obviously clears up that little misunderstanding completely and conclusively.” They won’t let the UN into Guantanamo, they won’t admit the existence of the prisons: they are literally offering no other proof than Chimpy’s verbal denial.
So the Bushies didn’t realize that torturing Iraqis would look bad, or the use of chemical weapons like white phosphorus, or... Israeli commandos training Kurds in Israeli-style “anti-terrorist” techniques.
327 parties are running in the Iraqi elections, among them: the Islamic Virtue Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution In Iraq, the Assyrian Patriotic Party, the Turkmen Loyalty Movement, Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, Iraqi Dignitaries Council, Gathering for the Future of Iraq, Assyrian Independent Gathering Movement, Society of Turkmen Tribes and Elites, the Independent Cultivated League, the Arabic Unifying Front (I think not), The Sixth of January Movement, Democratic Iraqi Sons Gathering, Amal Association for Intifada Martyrs, a party simply called Consistency, the Future Party, the Future, We All For Iraq, Prisoners and Political Martyrs Gathering, Syndicate of the Honorable Gentlemen, etc.
And the insurgency ELIGgers exhibit the same fragmentation, with over 100 groups. The NYT quotes a leaflet found in Ramadi complaining about this: “We are asking people to reject any statement signed by the Sajeel Battalion of the Islamic Army that does not carry their slogan or seal.”
Singapore must have found a new hangman, because they executed the Australian drug smuggler, Nguyen Tuong Van. After intense lobbying by Australia, they allowed him to hold hands with (but not hug) his mother before they strung him up. Interestingly, his mother was a Vietnamese refugee, who escaped Vietnam the same year she gave birth to him (I don’t know whether before or after), while the victim of the 1,000th American execution since 1976, Kenneth Boyd, was a Vietnam veteran. Also, Nguyen was executed in Changi Prison, which Australians will remember as the site of a Japanese prisoner of war camp where many Australians were kept during World War II.
Texas was responsible for 355 of those 1,000 executions, and George W. Bush signed the death warrants for 152 of them.
A leading Kazakhstan opposition leader, Zamenbek Nurkadilov, has been found dead of what the police are calling a suicide. He was shot twice in the chest and once in the head, so he must have been really quite depressed.
CBS is in talks with Al Sharpton for him to star in a sitcom, possibly called “Al in the Family.”
Free at last: Nelson Mandela has been made a freeman of Salford, England, which means he has the right to herd sheep over London Bridge, be drunk and disorderly without risk of arrest, or wander the streets with a drawn sword and if convicted of a capital crime (and the combination of sheep, a drawn sword and being drunk & disorderly has brought down many a man before now), to be hanged with a silken rope. I’m pretty sure this is what he was working towards, those 27 years on Robben Island.
Back in South Africa, the Constitutional Court rules that confining marriage to heterosexuals is a form of discrimination inconsistent with the constitution.
The Pentagon admits that it is currently force feeding 22 hunger-striking prisoners in Guantanamo, but says it is doing so “humanely,” so that’s okay, then. Says Brig. Gen. John Gong, “We have a great desire to ensure they are healthy.” And, heck, says the press release, “For the most part, the feedings are not involuntary... Most agree to the procedure” (if they don’t “agree to the procedure,” they’re put in restraints). Why some of them even insert their own NG tubes into their own noses. And no you may not confirm any of this by speaking with the prisoners.
Asked about the program whereby the Pentagon paid for happy-talk stories to be printed in Iraqi newspapers, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch responded, Yeah, but Zarqawi cuts people’s heads off and stuff, “so that he gets international coverage to look like he has more capability than he truly has”. Also, Zarqawi lies and stuff, but “We don’t lie - we don’t need to lie,” he lied.
The lower house of the Czech parliament has voted to reduce, in tandem, the age of consent and the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 14. They also voted to make communist genocide denial a crime.
Bush’s National Strategy for Victory says, “No war has ever been won on a timetable - and neither will this one.” This follows the strategy of such great American generals as Eisenhower who, when asked to set a date for the invasion of France, a “D-Day,” as one aide, a youngster possibly named Murtha, called it, refused out of hand, declaring, “No war has ever been won on a timetable: I won’t be bound by your fancy-shmancy ‘watches’ and your hoity-toity ‘calendars’ and your la-di-da ‘measured progression of events in relation to time’...”
We don’t need no stinkin’ cute kitty calendars
Fred Kaplan at Slate points out some of the inconsistencies, to put it kindly, in Bush’s speech, including multiple definitions of when the “mission” is complete, and no definition at all of “victory.” So it’s not just timetables Bush rejects, but dictionaries as well. But you knew that.
Because people in the White House still believe that the way to revive support for something is to have the Chimperor make a speech about it, Bush gave a “strategy for victory” speech today at Annapolis, although I’m pretty sure the Navy isn’t a big part of that strategy.
Actually, after listening to it, I’m not sure I heard any actual strategy. He did repeatedly refer to it as a “clear strategy,” so it may be see-through, which would explain a lot.
He also called it a national strategy, but he didn’t say which nation, and for most of the speech American troops were also see-through, invisible. Mostly he spoke about Iraqis. Good Iraqis, and bad Iraqis. The good ones have all joined the Iraqi army or police, all for altruistic reasons of course, no death squads here, and they are standing up so... well, you know the rest. They’re being trained and increasing in numbers and in every day in every way they’re getting better and better.
For the bad Iraqis, who Rumsfeld says we’re no longer allowed to call insurgents, Bush created a handy taxonomy, applying labels that are in no way useful in assisting understanding and which bear little resemblance to the actual people involved. They consist, he says, of Rejectionists, Saddamists & terrorists. Rejectionist, which sounds like a label Stalin might have used for his ideological opponents or kulaks or something, actually means Sunni. Evidently we’re going to “marginalize” these Rejectionists, he said it several times, but I don’t know what that actually means. I suspect he doesn’t either. Saddamists (shouldn’t it be Husseinistas?) are just a few guys, also Sunnis, and will also be marginalized or turned into margarine or something. Terrorists are defined as “affiliated with or inspired by Al Qaeda,” and Bush emphasized the foreigners among them; they’re like outside agitators and “These terrorists have nothing to offer the Iraqi people.”
Bush twice refers to violence as media events (“the suicide bombings and the beheadings and the other atrocities we see on our television” and “creat[ing] chaos for the cameras”), as if the terrorists were run by an Arab Karl Rove.
I fell into a hypnotic state after a while, but I could swear he made fun of Democrats for saying that his only plan is to “stay the course,” like they just made up the phrase themselves.
Anyway, if you were wondering what our mission in Iraq is, “Our mission in Iraq is to win the war - our troops will return home when that mission is complete.” As opposed to when the mission is accomplished, which was a couple of years ago.
And then it was over, leaving us all re-energized and re-dedicated to whatever it was he was talking about.
When Secretary of War Rumsfeld is bored, he likes to rename stuff (and torture puppies). Today, he decided (full transcript here) that the Iraqi insurgency doesn’t merit the word insurgency. “These people don’t have a legitimate gripe,” he says, so from now on, they’ll be “enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government” or ELIGgers for short. Also, since the Iraqi government is legitimate, “Any contention that there’s some sort of an occupation taking place or that coalition forces are there at anything other than the invitation of the government and the United Nations becomes a weaker argument.” Yeah, heaven forfend they get the idea into their heads that there’s some sort of an occupation taking place.
Asked about white phosphorus, Rummy handed off to the alliterative Gen. Peter Pace, and here there’s something interesting in the transcript. Pace insists willy pete is “a legitimate tool of the military” and that
It is not a chemical weapon, it is an incendiary (sic) [It is not an incendiary weapon as defined by the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons], and it is well within the law of war to use those weapons as they are being used for marking and for screening.
The sic & brackets are in the transcript. I think Pace accidentally admitted to a war crime.
Asked about the uniformed death squads working within the, uh, legitimate Iraqi government, Rumsfeld: “I’m not going to comment on hypothetical questions. I’ve not seen reports that hundreds are being killed by roving death squads at all.” As Maureen Dowd once said, fire Rummy or make him read faster. He went on, “I can only talk about what I know. That’s life.” He actually suggested that the death squad claims are purely “politicking,” part of the December 15 elections, so they’re yet one more “sign of progress” – see if you can follow this – because instead of “repression by a vicious dictator,” “They’re tugging; they’re pulling; they’re arguing; they’re debating; they’re making charges and countercharges. That’s a good thing. That’s a sign of progress, in my view.” Yes, Sunnis complaining about being murdered by roving Shiite death squads is a sign of progress.
In response to a question about torture by Iraqi security types, there was this already-famous exchange:
GEN. PACE: It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it. ...
SEC. RUMSFELD: But I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it’s to report it.
GEN. PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.
Rummy emits an odd combination of happy talk – “But by golly, the people who have been denigrating the Iraqi security forces are flat wrong!” – and language designed to distance himself from any responsibility for the atrocities that are going on now, and the atrocities to come:
Our problem is that any time something needs to be done, we have a feeling we should rush in and fill the vacuum and do it ourselves. ... It is the Iraqis’ country, 28 million of them. They are perfectly capable of running that country. They’re not going to run it the way you would or I would or the way we do here in this country, but they’re going to run it.
At 6:45 a.m. PST, Bush will give his speech outlining his “strategy for victory” in Iraq.
Bush:
Q Is there going to be investigating the allegations that there are U.S.-run terrorist detention centers abroad? Don’t the American people deserve an accounting of why these places exist and what’s being done there?
THE PRESIDENT: The United States of America does not torture. And that’s important for people around the world to understand.
You’ll notice that even when evading a question, he does it in the form of a bald-faced lie.
Speaking of bald-face lies, the London Times details those by the British (Labour party) government in the 1970s to cover up the atrocities committed by Indonesia after it invaded East Timor, doing the bidding of Henry Kissinger.
Spain just really pissed off the Bushies by selling arms to Venezuela. As much as I enjoy seeing the “imperialist elite which seeks to dominate the world,” as Chávez calls them (imperialist, check, seek to dominate the world, check, but “elite?”), with smoke coming out of their ears, I’m not especially comfortable with his description of the signing ceremony as “more than a commercial [deal], this ceremony is one of dignity”. I get worried when countries, especially those run by former military officers, start defining their national dignity in terms of weaponry; that’s the sort of rhetoric we hear from Iran, India and Pakistan about their nuclear programs.
In Iraq, the US is bribing newspapers to print, as if they were real news stories, good-news stories written by American military personnel, stories with titles like “Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism” and “More Money Goes to Iraq’s Development.” The managing editor of one paper said that if he’d known the stories came from the US government, journalistic ethics would have required him to... “charge much, much more.” Also, the Americans have bought a newspaper, and through some mechanism taken over a radio station; they won’t say which ones, but only to protect the employees, of course.
