The Interagency Team on Iraq has t-shirts now?

And don’t they look a little young? (click for larger image)

A good PR move to draw attention

Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, says that the Gitmo suicides did not value human life (click here for the 7½ minute audio clip), including their own (the valuable human life which the US still refuses even to name [Update: they are Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi, Yassar Talal Al-Zahrani, and Yemeni Ali Abdullah Ahmed; the Saudi government named its citizens), and then demonstrates her own high regard for human life by calling the suicides “certainly... a good PR move to draw attention,” a “tactic to further the jihadi cause.” She almost sorta had a point – that the actions were a statement aimed at the world, not just a gesture of despair aimed inwards – but then she just had to append that casually callous adjective “good.” Graffy knows all about good PR, because she works for Karen Hughes making the US beloved throughout the Muslim world. (Here’s an interview she gave the BBC in March about Guantanamo).

The outrageous quotes I’ve been relating the past 2 days have been about the US desperately trying prevent these people being seen as victims and martyrs, to portray as vocal, active and dangerous those from whom all voice and action had been removed. When you’ve been working tirelessly to silence these prisoners – no speeches in court, no interviews by UN inspectors, much less journalists, no letters to their families, no suicide notes – and they still manage to communicate with the outside world through the only medium left them, their dead bodies, perhaps that seems like a “good PR move.” When you’ve been trying to reduce these prisoners to entirely passive bodies, employing physical violence to break even their attempts to refuse food, only to see them retake their autonomy one last time in the only way not closed off to them, perhaps that seems like an “act of asymmetrical warfare” to you. The more totalitarian the system, the louder any act of defiance seems.

I’m feeling a little lazy and Deadwood’s on soon, so let’s assume this paragraph is something devastatingly clever linking 1) the Bushite fury that the Gitmo prisoners might be perceived as victims of a system of detention without end or hope with 2) the stuff about Zarqawi being used by the Bushies as a symbol, a more or less mythical figure only marginally related to the actually existing human being named Zarqawi.

Three Square Blocks of Kabul Afghan President Karzai will distribute guns to tribesmen, who are supposed to use them against Taliban. He will call those tribesmen “community police.” He does not see how this could possibly backfire.

Caption contest, if you’re so inclined:

Bring out your anonymous dead, in a humane and culturally sensitive manner

According to White House spokesmodel Christie Parell, Bush expressed serious concern about the Guantanamo suicides and “stressed the importance of treating the bodies in a humane and culturally sensitive manner.” Yes, I can sooooooo hear those words coming out of Chimpy’s mouth.

And all three left notes. Will we ever see them?

And the Pentagon got a fatwa from a tame imam allowing them not to bury the bodies within 24 hours, so that autopsies can be performed. Yes at Guantanamo cultural and religious sensitivity is job 1.

Speaking of nameless dead people, the Pentagon now admits the existence of a girl, aged 5 to 7, who died in the bombing assassination of Zarqawi, whose existence they’d previously denied. No explanation was given for how they could have misplaced a little girl’s corpse for just long enough that it didn’t cast a pall over the victory party.

An act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us

Although the Supreme Court has restricted the use of the death penalty to cases of murder, the governor of Oklahoma has signed a bill for the execution of repeat child molesters.

There are no Iraqi military hospitals; wounded Iraqi soldiers must somehow pay for their own medical care.

Three Guantanamo inmates hang themselves. All were former hunger-strikers who had been forcibly fed (at least according to the Sunday Times of London, the only paper with this detail). Doubtless the Pentagon will describe them as using methods “consistent with Al Qaeda training” and just looking for attention.

Indeed: after writing that, I found that Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the US Joint Task Force Guantanamo, has described the suicides thus: “They are smart. They are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” (horrified emphasis added).

The Pentagon still won’t release their names and doubtless if they left notes those will be suppressed too. Even in death they are un-persons whose thoughts and feelings must be silenced, their actions explained only by Harry “Harry” Harris and his ilk. The Pentagon says that the detainees “are not common criminals” and that the corpses were treated “with the utmost respect,” because if there is one thing Guantanamo is all about, it’s respect.

Speaking of respect, today was World Naked Bike Ride day. Because, according to one organizer whose word I will have to take for this, “When you get a lot of naked people on bikes, people tend to smile at you.”



The, ahem, bottom picture is from Prague, I think the top picture is from Britain.

1/500th of a Zarqawi

Headline that I so do not have the emotional energy to click on today, but thanks anyway (from Ha’aretz): “2 Infants among Dead on Beach; Army Apologizes.”

(Later:) Sigh, I guess if you want to avoid stuff like that, don’t read any newspapers at all. The Israelis shelled a picnic on the beach in Gaza.

Here’s how you know the Pentagon was more interested in getting Zarqawi for his symbolic value than it was concerned with wiping out the organization he ran: there was a $25 million bounty on Zarqawi’s head, but for Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian they think will replace him, just $50,000.

And he can no longer implement

The Pentagon is now admitting that Zarqawi was still alive when they reached the scene of the bombing, a fact they’ve kept to themselves until now. And that they cleaned up the corpse before taking those pictures. Says Gen. William Caldwell: “we made a conscious decision that if we were going to take photographs of him and make them available publicly that we were going to clean him up. Despite the fact that this person actually had no regard for human life, we were not going to treat him in the same manner.” Dude, you killed him, blew up everyone around him, including women and maybe a child, and then showed off framed pictures of his body: don’t pretend that cleaning off the blood before taking your victory snaps shows a morally superior regard for human life.

It’s so hard to take Zarqawi’s death at face value (yesterday I was muttering to myself that the US had had all these old photos of Zarqawi but had for years been using an artist’s rendering which had the eyebrows all wrong) because Zarqawi’s been such a convenient tool of Bushite propaganda for so long. Before the invasion, he was the sole piece of “proof” of a Saddam-Al Qaeda nexus, although he was not then connected to Al Qaeda and was operating in Kurdish- rather than Saddam-controlled Iraq, under the protection of the no-fly zone. He was more convenient alive than dead, so he was left to operate his bioweapons lab unmolested. Later, Fallujah was ordered to surrender Zarqawi; he had already fled, and the city was turned into smoking rubble. Then there was the Zawahiri-Zarqawi letter, cited by Bush in speech after speech months after it was discredited as a fake. So you can’t help but wonder when the timing of the man’s death is so symbolically convenient, as Bush admitted today:

The problem we have in this war is that all they’ve got to do is kill some innocent people by a car bomb, and it looks like they’re winning, see. It takes a major event like an election or the death of Zarqawi to understand that we’re making progress.

If it looks like they’re winning, it’s not because of “a” car bomb, but several hundred car bombs. Zarqawi you can presumably only kill once, so when it’s announced on the same day as the cabinet is completed, hopefully obscuring the preceding six months of sordid horse-trading, that’s just jolly symbolic. And... convenient.

Bush – and this is never a good idea – explains: “the upper management of al Qaeda was counting on Zarqawi to help implement their vision beyond Iraq... They want to have their view of the world. I call it totalitarian, Islamo-fascism. Whatever you want to call it, it is extreme and it’s real. And Zarqawi was the implementer of that strategy. And he can no longer implement.”

(Update: Geov Parrish makes all of my points, and more. Bastard.)

(Updater: and Patrick Cockburn: “He was an enemy to America’s liking.”)

Hung out to dry

So does anyone else think that that little incident Sunday when an American howitzer accidentally went off while they were cleaning it, or whatever the story was, and blew up several houses in Hibhib, the place where Zarqawi was just killed, wasn’t such an accident?

Molly Ivins:

I had a slightly insane discussion the other day with a winger who wanted urgently for me to understand that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war. Whereas I was trying to point out to him that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war.

Two of the British Guardsmen acquitted for the fatal “wetting” of that 15-year old Iraqi have announced that they are leaving the army in disgust at having been, and I quote, “hung out to dry.” Maybe not the most apt choice of metaphor under the circumstances.

Speaking of quitters, you might or, if you’re sane and/or not a blogger, might not want to read Tom DeLay’s farewell speech, a high-minded paean to the virtues of viciousness, liberal-bashing, and assholery: “You show me a nation without partisanship, and I’ll show you a tyranny.”; “conservatism isn’t about feeling people’s pain, it’s about curing it.”

And Maliki has an op-ed piece in the London Times you also might or might not want to read. Evidently while he uses tough-guy talk in Iraq – maximum force, iron fist, etc – when he addresses Western audiences he uses a different arsenal of clichés: national reconciliation initiative, tipping point, liberty, democracy and, over and over, national unity government (NUG). Interestingly, he describes what’s going on in Baghdad as “ethnic cleansing.”

Nascar meets Scientology: this is how the world ends.

For the hell of it, two pictures of Queen Elizabeth and some Chelsea Pensioners (it’s all about the hats).

And the “Bloody” goes to...

Rumsfeld: “I think arguably over the last several years, no single person on this planet has had the blood of more innocent men, women and children on his hands than Zarqawi.” I assume Rummy is just being modest.

Zarqawi death dance party: who was supposed to bring the balloons?

The US military has announced the death by air raid of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (Muss to his friends). Zarqawi was never as important inside Iraq as he was in Washington, where the Jordanian served as symbol of the Bush admin’s contention that insurgency in Iraq was largely the work of outside agitators. It’s hard to see what will change. After all, unlike our illegal immigrants, the Z Man was doing a job that many, many Iraqis are willing to do.

Still, in the Green Zone, Gen. Casey, Amb. Khalilzad and PM Maliki, seemingly the only Iraqi present except for an interpreter, held a kick-ass victory party. Later, there was cake.

A teeth-breaking defeat

A Taliban commander vowed to inflict a “teeth-breaking defeat” on British forces in Afghanistan. A good phrase, properly chilling, slightly reminiscent of The Iliad, but dude, have you seen British teeth?

The BBC, to whom he gave that interview, pointed out that the armed men who kept trooping through the frame were the same three guys over and over.

Have I been over-using “dude”? I blame Hurley on “Lost.”

Max Hastings writes in the Guardian that when British soldiers occupying Basra in 2003 were turned into policemen with no training (because being a cop is so easy that any guy with a gun and a uniform can just do it, right?), they were, “in effect, invited to invent their own system of local justice, because Bush and Blair had failed to make provision for any other.” And what they invented was “wetting” looters (by the way, about that word “looter” – Basra was under siege, with no economic activity going on; people trying to scavenge food were no more looters than were Katrina victims) in the canal, which we now know was a widespread practice. I’m not how soon it was ended after the 15-year old drowned.

Why yes I’d love some dessert. The still-warm heart of a baby with hot fudge sauce is my favorite too!

It’s a defense mechanism

Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki has ordered the release of 2,500 prisoners against whom there is no actual, you know, evidence. The first 600 have been thrown out of prison kicking and screaming and shouting, “Hell no, we won’t go! Let us back in! Do you know how fucking dangerous it is out there?”

Maliki has made some criticisms of Haditha. Here’s the response of James Jeffrey, the Coordinator for Iraq Policy at the State Department: “It’s a defense mechanism. ... I wouldn’t make too much out of it... There is a constant buzz in Iraq of what our troops did or didn’t do.” Buzz buzz. Sometimes the condescension reaches an entirely new level of refinement, and this was one of those moments.

Jeffrey also says that Haditha is “at this point nothing like Abu Ghraib.” It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t measuring it in terms of the body count or human suffering or sheer awfulness, but in terms of something much more important – public relations: “I think this will not have the same impact in terms of insurgents turning the population against us or turning opinion in the Arab world against us.” Yes, it’s all the insurgents’ fault. Buzz buzz buzz.

New low

In The Times, a headline about Iraq that’s hard to argue with: “Severed Heads Mark New Low.”

The NYT reports that the Pentagon will try to have only psychologists assist in the interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere rather than psychiatrists, because the American Psychiatric Association has higher ethical standards than the American Psychological Association. What the NYT misses is that the Pentagon’s new standards (pdf) also allow for the use of detainees’ medical files for “any lawful law enforcement, intelligence or national security-related activity,” i.e., interrogation. Also, they reaffirm the use of force-feeding on sane hunger-strikers.

It’s what we call assimilation

In another speech on immigration today, Bush said, “I believe English is the key to unlocking opportunity in America.” If I had the patience, I’d count the number of grammatical and subject-verb-agreement errors in this speech. “It’s been what it takes to help somebody go from picking crops to owning a grocery store, or from cleaning the floors of an office building to running that office.” When was the last time an immigrant actually did that? Or anyone else, for that matter? “It’s what we call assimilation, as part of assimilating to be Americans.” Sorry, Webster, could you take another stab at defining that word? Oh, and just for laughs, could you try spelling it as well? “When immigrants assimilate into this society, they realize their dreams.” But remember: no dreaming in Spanish.

All that advice to immigrants was of course delivered to an audience of immig... no, wait, it was delivered at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico. Guess they couldn’t find any of the millions of immigrants in this country for him to speak to, just like they couldn’t find any gay people (unless you count the re-closet cases at Exodus International) for Bush to explain his opposition to gay marriage to.

And why didn’t any of the MSM mention the presence of those “ex-gays” when reporting on Bush’s speech?

Those who can’t do, teach

3 years ago in Basra, several British servicemen forced 4 alleged looters into a canal “to teach them a lesson.” Because if there are three things the occupation of Iraq has been about, it’s education, education, education. However, the lesson being taught was not a swimming lesson and one of the Iraqis, a 15-year old, drowned. At their court martial, the servicemen complained that they themselves had not been adequately trained for the job of occupation (what, no lectures on core warrior values?), but the court decided not to teach them a “lesson,” and acquitted them, in the latest of a string of acquittals for occupation-related homicides. I suspect the Iraqi people are learning a lesson of their own.

Was that a little too belabored?

Speaking of education, in Denmark some masonry students complaining about the lack of internships built a wall across the entrance to the Education Ministry.

Bush and gay marriage, the love whose name he dares not speak

Bush gave his anti-gay marriage speech today, oddly enough while wearing his flight suit. It turned out to be only ten minutes long, much of it identical to his radio address Saturday, which I’ve already analyzed.

Acting on a precept he certainly didn’t learn from his mother, Barbara “Rhymes with socksucker” Bush, he decided that if he couldn’t say anything nice about gays and lesbians, he wouldn’t say anything about them at all, even as he advocated permanently restricting their rights. He again said that “As this debate goes forward, every American deserves to be treated with tolerance and respect and dignity,” but failed to see the difference between that and ignoring them completely, refusing to acknowledge their existence like a fart at a cocktail party. He not only has nothing to say about gays and lesbians and their families, he has nothing to say to them. (Update: In fact, there were, according to Tony Snow, no gay people invited to the meeting at which he gave this speech.) (But there were some “ex-gays.” Has anyone seen the full list of participants?)

Again, he fails to make much a case for going the literally extra-ordinary route of amending the Constitution. Here’s a bit of the speech which is structured as if it were a logical argument:

marriage is critical to the well-being of families. And because families pass along values and shape character [Just ask Jenna!], marriage is also critical to the health of society. Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them. And changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure.

Undermine it how? He does not say.

I suppose his recognition that engaging in rhetorical gay-bashing is no longer acceptable is encouraging, a sign of progress. But this is Bush, and Bush needs an enemy to excoriate, so it’s back to the activist judges, who are described as “over-reaching” (insert your own “reach-around” joke here) and “imposing their arbitrary will on the people,” leaving “no other choice” but to amend the Constitution. This is odd and contradictory as legal theory: he is claiming the decisions were arbitrary, i.e., not correct interpretations of the Constitution, but he proposes to change the Constitution anyway.

But then political theory has never been his long suit (by the way, when I referred to his arguments as sub-Federalist Papers on Saturday, I refrained from making a pun based on “Publius,” and I think I deserve some credit for that). In the days of this most imperial of presidencies, it’s interesting to see Bush make an assertion about power that doesn’t involve concentrating it in the executive branch. But what he does assert is horribly muddled: “A constitutional amendment would not take this issue away from the states, as some have argued. It would take the issue away from the courts and put it directly before the American people.” In fact it would ban the states from enacting same-sex marriage, and earlier in the speech he said that marriage was a “national question [which] requires a national solution,” so of course he wants to take the issue away from the states. And putting something “directly” before the American people would involve a national referendum, which he is not suggesting.

In today’s Gaggle, there was a tug of war over nomenclature:

Q So at what point is -- that’s what I’m trying to -- why on gay marriage is it not that important?

MR. SNOW: You mean, why on traditional marriage?

Q On the issue of gay marriage, yes.

MR. SNOW: It’s the issue of traditional marriage. This is the Family Marriage Amendment.

Hibhib Hubbub

The US occupation forces can’t seem to do anything, including merging into oncoming traffic and possibly flossing, without collateral damage. In the latest military oopsie, on Friday an infantry unit training on a base in Iraq accidentally fired a 155mm howitzer shell into the town of Hibhib, killing three people and damaging 6 houses. So this may not be the appropriate time to point out what a fun name that is. Say it with me, everyone: Hibhib, Hibhib, Hibhib.

As I mentioned last month, Cruz Bustamante’s campaign for California insurance commissioner consists entirely of telling people how much he’s weight he’s lost. So LAT columnist Steve Lopez tested his commitment by inviting him to a Mexican restaurant and ordering every fatty food on the menu, while interrogating him about the money he took (and has since returned) from insurance companies. At the end, Lopez asked him just what he had said he’d weighed that morning, and then took a scale out of his backpack...

A very people-focused and a very people-friendly force

Embarrassing deaths of the day: two 21-year olds think, as anyone would, that if sucking helium from a balloon is funny, then climbing inside an 8-foot helium balloon will be hilarious... The balloon advertised a condo complex, one of whose residents said, “This is not the kind of place where this happens.” As opposed to where?

Admitting that American troops are less than popular in Afghanistan, the commander of NATO troops in the country, Lt. Gen. David Richards, vows that when NATO replaces the Americans in southern Afghanistan next month, they will be “a very people-focused and a very people-friendly force.” Can’t make this shit up. Oh, and they’ll also be better drivers.

Condi Rice on Iraq, on Meet the Press: “So American forces are the solution here, not the problem.”

Do you think that in 100 years or so, dotty spoiled holo-vid stars, possibly even the clones of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, will be naming their children Haditha and Ramadi and Fallujah?

Couldn’t they find a sailor suit in Rummy’s size?

Hold the mayo

From Saturday’s NYT:

Marine commanders in Iraq learned within two days of the killings in Haditha last November that Iraqi civilians had died from gunfire, not a roadside bomb as initially reported, but the officers involved saw no reason to investigate further, according to a senior Marine officer.

So the Pentagon decided to pretend to believe the marines’ second story, knowing the first one had been a cover-up and, therefore, that there was something to be covered up. If they were ignorant of the Haditha Massacre, it was wholly wilful. Remember the initial “investigation” into My Lai, in which Colin Powell concluded “relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent”? Indeed, the WaPo informs us that the Captain Jeffrey Pool who dismissed the Haditha story as Al Qaeda propaganda, emailing reporters “I cannot believe you’re buying any of this,” was the very person who first released the roadside bomb story. Last paragraph of the WaPo story: “The Marine Corps still has not corrected its misleading Nov. 20 statement asserting that the Iraqi civilians were killed in a bomb blast. A Marine Corps spokesman didn’t return calls on Friday asking why it had not.”

Incidentally, Lance Corp. Ryan Briones, who took pictures at Haditha that were later erased, who spoke to reporters about carrying out bodies, and who 36 hours after returning stateside stole a pickup and crashed it spectacularly into a house, has just been charged not only for that, but also for pot possession from 2003. To a suspicious mind, this might suggest that the government is bringing the hammer down on him for... some reason.

And little 9-year old Iman Walid Abdul-Hameed, Haditha survivor and media voice par excellence, is demanding that the marines be executed.

Among the latest things banned by Iraq’s religious militias: falafel stands. Also, mayonnaise. And ice. Anything they didn’t have in Mohammed’s time (unless it shoots or blows up, of course) or which Bill O’Reilly... no, I won’t go there. The Sunday Times has the latest of what’s sure to be a long series of articles on how Iraqi women can’t leave their homes anymore. Freedom, ain’t it grand?

How George Bush serves the interests of all

With today’s radio address, Bush joined the battle in defense of heterosexual marriage. If he does as well in this fight as he’s doing “defending” Iraq, by 2009 there won’t be an intact marriage left anywhere in America. Something to look forward to.


At the end of the address, he made the ritual intonation that “every American deserves to be treated with tolerance, respect, and dignity. All of us have a duty to conduct this discussion with civility and decency toward one another, and all people deserve to have their voices heard.” Which is funny, because at no point does he actually mention the existence of, you know, the gays. It’ll be interesting to see if his longer speech on the subject Monday will also manage the feat of talking about “protecting” marriage without ever acknowledging who he proposes to protect it from. Homophobia without the homos, so to speak. Indeed, he claims, even gays will benefit: “Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.” So what are you whining about, gay people?

Really, that “interests of all” thing is just breathtakingly obnoxious and dismissive.


Actually, it’s not true that he doesn’t name the enemy who marriage needs protection from: the dread activist judges. This is part of a completely insincere, sub-Federalist-Papers argument, that “in a free society, decisions about such a fundamental social institution as marriage should be made by the people -- not by the courts.” “In a free society”? So a society in which courts order the recognition of gay marriages is unfree? I say insincere since he affirms the right of “the people” to make such decisions democratically only so long as they don’t seem likely to support gay marriage, and even then the purpose of the constitutional amendment he supports is to close off the option for states or localities that might do so. There needs to be a poly sci word, along the lines of subsidiarity, for the idea that decisions should be made at whichever level of government is most likely to come to the “right” decision.

Some people, by the way, would argue that in a “free society,” the only “people” who get to decide about marriage are the people getting married.


This address is notable for its bland, evasive language, which is why I can’t wait for a full-length speech. The more people like Bush are forced to enunciate their prejudices, the better. Have you read anti-women’s suffrage pamphlets? Once society has moved beyond the laugh-it-out-of-court stage and opponents actually have to articulate a case, the weakness of that case becomes nakedly apparent. Today, Bush said that this issue is “critical” – necessitating amending the United States Constitution, no less – but didn’t say how it was critical. He said that heterosexual marriage “promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society” but did not say what will promote the welfare of the children of gay people and what the position of homosexuals (stop it! get your minds out of the gutters!) is in relation to society. Is he implying that gays destabilize society or that they are outside of it altogether? If heterosexual marriage is to be “honored and encouraged,” does society owe anything to the decision of two people of the same sex to commit themselves to each other? Should their unions be discouraged? ignored? I’m curious what word he’d even use to describe such commitments: obviously not marriage, but not partnerships, or unions either. Hell, I want to watch his chimp-like face as he tries to conceal his discomfort when forced to speak the words “gay,” “lesbian” and “ass-fucking.” Yes, I want to hear him talk at length about gay marriage, over and over.


(For anyone who wants more, here is a two-year old post which argues that traditional marriage isn't what it used to be and that opponents of gay marriage are sexists.)