So I'm wondering: what is the difference between this Congress and the last one, where the war is concerned? It was obvious in Bush's speech Wednesday night that he intends to strike inside Iraq and Syria. His response to the change in Congress, in other words, is to set the entire Persian Gulf ablaze. Joe Biden, as always, has made some disapproving noises about this idea, informing Condi Rice that Bush's existing authority does not allow him to cross Iraq's international borders to carry the battle to the Iranians, in particular. But why else would Bush announce his deployment of Patriot missiles in the region, and the dispatch of another carrier group to the Gulf? We don't need aircraft carriers to fight the Baghdad insurgency, and the Iraqi factions don't use intermediate range missiles. He's going to destroy the Syrian and Iranian networks involved in training and supplying Iraqi insurgents, Bush says. Could they really be doing all that right out in the open in Iraq? It seems far more likely Bush is talking about activities within the territorial borders of Syria and Iran.
Despite what Joe Biden, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska (who compares the cross-border escalation to the Nixon/Kissinger secret war in Cambodia) may say in rejoinder, Bush will not be deterred in the final 24 months of his presidency from attacking Iran if he feels like it. And he clearly feels like it. Bush thinks that war is the answer, that a surgical strike against Iran's nuclear facilities will elevate him to the lofty plane enjoyed by Israel after the destruction of Iraq's Osirak in 1981. Georgie Boy has never been terribly original. Anyway, he's running out of time; there's room for just one more war, he thinks, and this is the big one, the defeat of America's great thorn-in-the-side.
What will La Diva & Mr. Mumbles do about this one? Maybe they'll at last wake up to the idea you have to take Bush on directly, but I doubt it. It might constitute a brand new ground for impeachment, a violation of the War Powers Act, but Bush's artful dodgers will read those earlier authorizations (2001's authorization for war in general against bad people, 2002's for war against Iraq) as implying a license to engage in "cross-border incursions" (like nuclear strikes against the Bushehr reactor in Iran), and the Dems will fret and worry he might be right, and then, once again, they could wind up owning the defeat.
Nope, they'll cluck, and fume, and pass a nonbinding resolution condemning Bush's unilateral act, and then sit back and see if it works before saying anything else. I was always most worried about Bush if he was put in the position of having nothing to lose, which is just about where he is now. Many consider him the worst President ever. He's not going to do anything really positive, like getting behind alternative energy (although I know his State of the Union will go ga-ga for switch grass - just wait), or solving the medical crisis. Too candy-ass, too caring, for Bush. War's his thing. You can do it fast, you can do it now, you can see the results later this afternoon. Unfortunately, we'll all be witnesses to the same thing at the same time.
January 12, 2007
Whither the statesmen of yesteryear
January 11, 2007
La Diva & Mr. Mumbles
Now 6 years on in the unfurling nightmare known as the Bush Presidency, the American people finally caught on to, and got fed up with, Bush and his smirking screwingupness. About 15% of the American populace think the flaming centerpiece of the Bush years, the Iraq War, is a good idea, and they said so in November, 2006. What could be clearer? The Democratic Leadership, however, that Dynamic Duo of La Diva (Pelosi) and Harry Reid (Mr. Mumbles) do not respond to the surprisingly clever discernments of the American electorate. Instead, they are in thrall to the Imaginary Focus Group of Their Minds (the IFGTM). This mythical construct dictates the narrow confines of their available options. The IFGTM does not countenance impeachment, although Bush has done everything but run the Constitution through the Oval Office shredder. It permits the Demos only to say tsk, tsk, when Bush proposes to escalate his disastrous project in the Middle East. Their thundering retort is to propose a nonbinding resolution objecting to Bush's plan, although they hope Bush won't be offended since he is, after all, the Commander-in-Chief and one should be careful about criticizing the C-I-C in a time of "war."
Nope, La Diva and Mr. Mumbles think the American people are all lathered up about (drum roll, please)...the minimum wage. What an achievement, and it will only take 2 years to phase in, provided it contains the Treasury-wrecking tax cuts Bush insists upon as a condition of not throwing a veto at it. Bush is lucky, so lucky, to have such "opponents." Diva & Mumbles appear unaware that the Constitution provides that impeachment is available through a simple majority vote of the House of Representatives. Never mind, for the moment, that a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate would be necessary to remove Bush from office. An impeachment would force Bush to spend the rest of his miserable term in office in a desperate battle to save his political life. Republicans impeached Clinton because of his susceptibility to artfully displayed thongs (what guy who likes girls can't relate to that?). Do Diva & Mumbles think it's a bad thing if Bush is distracted from things he could accomplish if he weren't under indictment? What things is he going to accomplish? What has he ever accomplished? Isn't it a positive good if he is sidelined from accomplishing anything else, since he accomplishes nothing but bad stuff?
I just don't get these two. Diva & Mumbles carry on as if they were the Permanent Minority Party, boxed in at every turn by the Focus Group of their minds which disapproves of anything "bold" or "strong." They could put Bush on the permanent defensive simply by dropping articles of impeachment in the House in-basket. They might save the Republic. Instead, they prefer to incrementalize their way to irrelevance.
January 10, 2007
It's not a Pacific Heights cocktail party, Nancy
Like most lawyers who spend a career in litigation, I found myself many times in the chambers of a Superior Court judge negotiating with opposing counsel in 11th hour efforts to avoid trial. It's a big part of the job. They tell us that 90% of all cases end this way, and that if they didn't the whole system would be quickly overwhelmed. Over and over again you play your part in this Kabuki theatre. Your main bargaining chip is simple; if the other side doesn't compromise to your satisfaction, you tell everyone (with as much conviction as you can muster) that you'll let a jury decide.
Nancy Pelosi seems to favor a different approach. She begins her "negotiations" by giving away all of her leverage in the naive hope President Bush will like her for her accommodating nature and will "cooperate." Although (to resume the analogy) she is negotiating with people who are willing to bribe the jury, blackmail the judge and blow up the court house, she says, for example, that impeachment is "off the table." When Bush wants to escalate the war in Iraq, Nancy says, in that fine measured diction that must sound swell up on Russian Hill, "we are not going to withdraw funding, because we must support the troops," although in so doing she gives away Congress's main Constitutional weapon for controlling the conduct of war. She will lead a noble charge instead to pass a non-binding, symbolic resolution expressing her distaste for the "surge."
Joe Biden, in similar feckless fashion, tells us that there's nothing anyone can do to stop the Commander-in-Chief from doing anything he wants in this stupid war. I think he knows better. But who are these people? What's wrong with them? What overwhelming majority of the American people would have to express their utter contempt and hatred of this debacle before the Democrats would "risk" doing something effective?
How about this for an argument? Bush went to war on the basis of a resolution passed by the House and Senate, apparently under the War Powers Act, which was itself probably an unconstitutional abridgment of Congress's right to declare war under Article I. Congress is apparently afraid to declare war, which it has not done since December, 1941, so it passes resolutions saying to the President, "you decide." Nevertheless, the War Powers Act does act to constrain the President in his conduct of war, and the resolution for Iraq reads as follows.
SEC. 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq".
SEC. 2. SUPPORT FOR UNITED STATES DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS
The Congress of the United States supports the efforts by the President to--
(a) strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions applicable to Iraq and encourages him in those efforts; and
(b) obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions.
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION. The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq.
So that's it. That's Bush's authority to conduct this insane war. Suppose, for the sake of precision, we say that Iraq may be chronologically considered as Saddam's Iraq (Iraq1) and the present, post-Saddam fiasco (Iraq2). It seems very clear that Sec. 3 of the Authorization was aimed only at Iraq1. The current, "sovereign" Iraq which we installed is not a "continuing threat" to the USA; indeed, they're now our friends and allies in the Middle East, which was the whole idea behind their installation. A "bastion of democracy" in the "heart of the Arab world." And this Iraq (Iraq2) can't be held responsible for any breach of UN Resolutions, such as those pertaining to weapons of mass destruction or incursions into Kuwait. Indeed, what all the Shiites presently in power have in common is their status as victims of Iraq1.
It is true that Iraq2 is having a hard time running the country in an orderly way, on account of the civil war that has gained force in the power vacuum created by Saddam's removal and American bungling. But that does not in itself constitute any authority to continue the war, which is now devoted to "nation building." Bush said the mission was "accomplished" way back in May, 2003. Under the Resolution, his only authority for commanding troops in Iraq at all, he was right. As the War Powers Act of 1973 itself states,
- SEC. 2. (c)
- The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.
January 09, 2007
Why we have no idea what's going on
So Jerry Mander is actually a funny guy, but he wasn't amused by the effects of television. Maybe he got religion, in a sense; maybe he became appalled at the effects of his own work, his ability to manipulate the general public with images and minimal text. Maybe he got worried. The essence of his four arguments was as follows:
"The first argument is theoretical and environmental. It attempts to set the framework by which we can understand television's place in modern society. Yet, this argument is not about television itself. In fact, television will be mentioned only occasionally. It is about a process, already long underway, which has successfully redirected and confined human experience and therefore knowledge and perceived reality. We have all been moved into such a narrow and deprived channel of experience that a dangerous instrument like television can come along and seem useful, interesting, sane, and worthwhile at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control.
"The second argument concerns the emergence of the controllers. That television would be used and expanded by the present powers-that-be was inevitable, and should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits of no other controllers.
"The third argument concerns the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium.
"The fourth argument demonstrates that television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all human understanding within a rigid channel. What binds the four arguments together is that they deal with aspects of television that are not reformable.
"What is revealed in the end is that there is ideology in the technology itself. To speak of television as "neutral" and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns."
Maybe Jerry Mander was following in the large footsteps of Marshall McCluhan, and others who have worked in a field one might call "technological epistemology." It's very difficult to get your mind around, because it requires us to simply give up the notion that we can trust the mass media information that lies at the core of our roof-brain chatter, our dinner table conversations, our blogging, our confidence that we have any idea about what's going on in the world at large. Our picture of reality is "mediated," in Mander's word, through television; it is not direct; it is not based upon unfiltered sensory inputs; it is edited; it is systematically biased by the demands of the medium itself.
The election of George W. Bush, a phenomenon of modern history which always vexes my understanding, can perhaps best be understood as yet another unholy manifestation of the dark truth at the center of Mander's work. We do not elect national leaders on the basis of first-hand perceptions. We elect them on the basis of manufactured images which are packaged and sold to privately owned television stations. The successful leaders are those who have become most adept at the manipulation of the imagery, who know how to avoid the "sound bite" error of ever saying anything blunt which would look bad out of context, who know how to impersonate the qualities which appeal to some "real" value in the American voter. Thus, George W. Bush was sold as a folksy, honest, down-to-earth cowboy. Over the long, painful years, most Americans have realized that they were sold a bill of goods, as their unconscious minds have gradually assimilated all the dissonant clues that undercut this false image. But look at all the damage that was done through the power of television's fake and mediated reality in the interim. Had George W. Bush been running for mayor of a town of say 1,000 people, no such mistake could ever have been made. The citizens would have known him for an idiot to begin with. His smug and immature personality would have rubbed everyone the wrong way. He could have remained the town drunk he was always meant to be. But his handlers knew he had the last name, the malleability, and the complete lack of personal convictions which made him ideal for their mass marketing purposes. These are not, alas, the same qualities necessary for a president to deal with actual, immutable reality in the world.
The Iraq War might be seen as a kind of black box, in this epistemological analysis. It is generally conceded that the environment around Baghdad is simply too dangerous to permit thorough reporting. All of the statistics concerning attacks, deaths, injuries, refugees, etc., are systematically distorted by those with a political agenda, without fear of decisive refutation, because no better numbers are available. Those of us watching cable news receive our information in a mediated way, through TV. If television decided to show us, for three solid weeks, images of children walking untroubled toward their school in some Iraqi small town, the American public would gradually change its view. But such images (of the kind Donald Rumsfeld mourned the lack of) are not newsworthy. A car bomb sending an orange-black cloud four stories high in the central part of Baghdad, with a tableau of dismembered bodies and burning vehicles in the foreground, makes good news. People will watch the news and sit through the ads to see such mayhem. And these mediated images, confined to the tight focus of a TV screen which eliminates all context, gradually become our picture of Iraqi reality. I think the American public has turned against the war for a couple of reasons. One, the images of George W. Bush, with his trademark smirk and garbled syntax, sicken most people to the point where they oppose anything he's for. And second, the anti-war imagery, with pictures of gore, explosions, death, is more arresting than anything positive that might be put on the screen. TV doesn't care what's right as long as you watch. It's really that simple.
I don't think Jerry Mander expected TV to go away, and it never will, of course. It's an unthinkable world without the electronic hearth blazing. We derive our false, frustrating, distorted view of life on Earth by looking at it and absorbing its images. Where it will ultimately lead is scary to contemplate.
January 08, 2007
The Surge
We'll hear soon about how another $100 billion and 20,000 troops will accomplish in Iraq what the previous $300 billion, 140,000 troops and 4 years could not accomplish. The situation will continue to deteriorate, of course. A different sort of battle is now raging in Iraq, for control of the country, and the United States is simply caught in the cross-fire. 20,000 troops will simply enrich the target environment.
I wonder sometimes where George got his original ideas about Iraq. I firmly believe the accounts that he did not know there were Shia and Sunni factions in the country before he launched the attack. He reportedly said, on being so informed, that he "thought they were all Muslims." It is a trenchant comment on the state of the Union that such a numbskull could have been elected President. All by itself, such a revelation should frighten thoughtful Americans to their core. His ideas seem transmuted from Dick & Jane books to the world of international relations. Everyone loves freedom, he thought; democracy is the best system; get rid of the tyrant, and the rival factions will put aside their 1,400 year old prejudices and work together to be just like America.
I think that's it, sum total, no refinements or embellishments needed. Syllogistically, it went like this:
All people love freedom and democracy, given a chance.
The Iraqis are people.
Therefore, the Iraqis will become freedom-loving democrats after we give them a chance.
I can see Bush in the Oval Office writing this out in block letters with a No. 2 pencil on a yellow legal tablet Harriet Miers placed there for him. He writes slowly, pressing hard on the pencil. The time is late fall, 2002, and the light coming through the big windows is dimming. It's almost time to quit (4 pm) and go have a diet Coke and pretzels in the residence. George's clever deduction will be filed for him by his secretary in the Presidential papers. A good day's work for George. He's figured out why his plan is right, and he did it in a way that did not involve a lot of egghead, think-tank, overly-detailed baloney, all that talk about "culture" and "theocratic tendencies." The problem was simple. It is obvious to George that someone screwed up his perfectly reasonable plan, because the analysis was flawless.
That's actually what happened. That's what our leadership in Washington is now like. This guy was elected not just once (well, maybe just once), but twice. By Americans. You think maybe something is wrong somewhere?
December 20, 2006
The Slander of Barney Bush
We might note too (since we've run out of nice things to say here at Pondside) that Bush's declaration, a kind of Alamo-like challenge that he'll go on getting American's killed, killing Iraqis, spending money America doesn't have while increasing the frequency and intensity of terrorism in the world at large; that he'll proceed this way, even if his only support comes from his wife and the family dog - that all this sounds like the ranting and raving of a lunatic.
There is evidence for this diagnosis, of course, some of it professional. Viz., the whole book by Justin Frank, "Bush on the Couch," which concluded, psychoanalytically, that Bush is a megalomaniac with elements of paranoid ideation. Let us look logically at Bush's co-opting of Barney in this regard. For Bush to believe that a policy of war against Iraq, which even he would have to concede is at best an arguable theory of social and political engineering, and hugely subjective in any evaluation of its success and subject to many persuasive and compelling contra arguments, should be sustained even if only one married couple and their canine friend support it (and as stated, how can we be sure about Barney?), then Bush would necessarily believe, overtly or impliedly, that he possesses powers of insight and intellectual analysis that are absolutely unique to him (and only to him; I do not believe he would stay the course if only Laura & Barney chose to, if he disagreed).
While reiterating one should be gracious in acknowledging the positive qualities in another man, surely at this point there is not an American soul extant, including Harriet Myers (who used to think otherwise), who really believes Bush is such a person. On the contrary, most Americans concluded long ago that Bush is a person of thundering, crashing mediocrity, a cypher, an intellectually lazy goof-off with no powers of concentration, insight or analysis at all. The evidence is all around us, here in America and in the world at large. Particularly in Iraq. Bush is just another guy, and without the Bush brand name behind him, no one would ever listen to him at all, based, if you will, on his personal congitive powers.
The disjunction between Bush's self-image coupled with his fantastical assertion that he would stay the course even if no other rational homo sapiens agreed with him (by now Laura has been so reduced by co-dependency she can't think straight, and Barney, as noted, has been given the benefit of the doubt) - all of that, put on one side - versus the measured judgment of the American people that Bush is a moderately intelligent fruitcake - leads one to an inescapable conclusion. Bush must, indeed, be out of his mind.
The respectable, mainstream mass media, however, cannot do its own analysis on this basis. It has to analyze what Bush says, what he orders, what he leads America to do, on the basis of policy decisions. As an analysis of pros and cons. It has to take Bush's weird ideas seriously, as if they were part of a serious debate. The delusions, the flights from empiricism that characterize almost all the decisions the Bush White House makes, are taken at face value, as if they were simply one among many rational decisions that might have been made, and Bush chose this one.
The NSA spying scandal is an excellent case in point. Simply put, there was no reason that Bush ever needed to walk all over the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution or the FISA statute in order to eavesdrop on terrorist conversations in the United States. A cowed Senate and Congress would have given him carte blanche to invade every nook and cranny of American privacy by amending U.S. law (hell, by amending the Constitution). Senator Russ Feingold's censure motion garnered 4 supporters in the Senate, an eloquent measure of the institutional cowardice pervasive in the legislative branch. Bush did not need to invoke the "unitary executive" or to claim that the Congressional resolution of October 2001 (the Authorization for Use of Military Force) mysteriously granted him this non-military authorization.
Bush has gotten involved in felonious activities associated with the domestic spying scandal, and with other high crimes, such as violations of the War Crimes Act (at least as the act existed before Bush was granted his absolution by that same cowed Congress in the form of a retroactive exoneration) because it is his nature to commit such acts. Yet, again, the mainstream media has to take seriously his assertion that "the times have changed" and the Constitution is "out of date," and seeking search warrants for roving electronic captures of conversations is "too cumbersome." Or terrorists are a "new kind of enemy" not entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. One can multiply examples easily. This scofflaw pattern has characterized his governing style from its earliest days.
This approach to government, to life, is not a policy matter. It is a deranged mental state, a personality disorder. Simply for the sake of analogy, and without implying a similarity of scale, one might, in the 1930's, have taken seriously Hitler's anti-Semitic ravings and debated the "merits" of whether European Jewry was responsible for all the world's ills. At the time, there was doubtless a lot of mainstream "debate" about just such questions. In retrospect it seems sick to have discussed the matter in such terms at all. In the long run, historical judgment will condemn all of Bush's arrant lawbreaking and Constitution-wrecking behavior in the same way that Hitler's "policies" are now seen as simply the idiosyncratic mental disorders of a power-mad, delusional, paranoid and megalomaniacal personality.
Such things take time. Acquiring the perspective to see things as they really are requires time for reflection. In the meantime, we will suffer under Bush's self-delusions, with the stately institutions of Washington aggrandizing his madness. Barney, however, should not be tarred with the same brush. In the absence of hard proof, I am inclined to believe that it's simply a case of misplaced loyalty. After all, some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall, as the great Bard told us centuries ago.
December 04, 2006
The Jose Padilla Case Takes A New Turn
That's our man Jose, poster boy for George Bush's War on the United States Constitution, on his way to a dental appointment down the hall in the South Carolina brig. Shackled, muffled and blindfolded, Jose shuffles toward a Navy dentist for a root canal, which for Padilla is nothing to be dreaded, since he'll actually be in human company for a change. Those of you who want to know more about the legal significance of the Padilla nightmare should read Jack Balkin's series of reprinted articles (originally written about the time Padilla was disappeared by the Pinochet Unit of Bush's Junta). Follow the link above to Balkinization and you can read them in all their frightening immediacy.
Padilla's case puts the lie to the idea that "it can't happen here" or it can happen only to evil people very unlike ourselves. Under the Bill or Rights, as it existed before George W. Bush happened to it, Jose Padilla is exactly like you and me, an American citizen entitled to a presumption of complete innocence; that is to say, then, that at this point, nearly five years after his arrest on the battlefield of O'Hare International in Chicago, the government has never proved anything against Jose Padilla. Nothing. It dropped the original "dirty bomb" allegations which supposedly justified his disappearance into the Bush gulag. Nevertheless, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the government lawyers who do Bush's dirty work, such as the uber-articulate Paul Clement, Solicitor General of the United States, have strained mightily to deprive Padilla of the rights to counsel, to an indictment, to confront his accusers, or to grant him his day in court. Finally, as some who have followed this sorrowful case know, Padilla was transferred into the criminal justice system in South Florida and added to an ongoing conspiracy case set for trial next month. The junta took this route in a cowardly attempt to avoid another unfavorable Supreme Court ruling on the extent of Bush's perogatives as the "unitary" executive, that is, his powers as a self-appointed tyrant.
Padilla's lawyers are now mounting a legal challenge to the government's right to try Padilla at all, on the grounds that his solitary confinement in a 9x7 foot cell, in a cell block emptied of all other prisoners, without a window, calendar or mirror, and while being subjected to the usual Torquemada routine of "stress" positions, volume ten Garth Brooks, and sleeping on a metal plank -- that all of this, "justified" solely by Bush's unilateral, sua sponte, unreviewable determination that Padilla, an American citizen, was nevertheless an "enemy combatant" without any of the rights we thought we took for granted -- drove Jose Padilla insane. The "government lawyers" (who I hope must mainline Ambien in order to sleep even an hour a night) of course maintain there is not a "shred" of evidence to support this claim. They probably trot out the usual legal cliche -- not even a "scintilla" of proof. Well, of course it might be hard for Jose to prove it. That's the advantage of solitary confinement without access to a lawyer or the Red Cross. Ask August Pinochet how many of his desaparecidos successfully resisted prosecution by claiming they were driven insane. Where is your witness other than the victim himself? Anyway, Pinochet (thank all that's good and decent) is now dead, and he didn't conduct trials in the first place. We're not there yet -- but let Bush get away with this atrocity and eventually we will be there.
The estimable Mr. Patel, counsel for Padilla, must be making the Bush administration sweat. This is not a favorable turn of events for Bush, especially given the recent changes in Congress. An American citizen is about to detail the "special interrogation techniques" made popular in Poland, Hungary and other CIA dungeons around the world. Unless, of course, he can be silenced again. Which may not be so easy this time - Padilla is just crazy enough to spill the beans, and the Bush Administration can thank itself for that.
November 30, 2006
My Dog Ate My Car Bomb
Viewed from this perspective, the current manufactured controversy over whether Maliki's no-show at the meet-and-greet with Bush in Amman, Jordan was or was not a "snub" fades into insignificance. One can say two things about his decision. First, it was deliberate, and the post hoc ergo propter hoc justifications for his nonappearance (it turned out a 3 way with the King and Bush wasn't "necessary" or a "productive use of time") are patent nonsense. The head of government installed by American contrivance doesn't blow off a long-planned "summit" with his benefactor because he decides, without consulting Bush, that their meeting would be a "waste of time." This is no rationale, especially when talking about Bush. All meetings with Bush are by definition a waste of time, as he proves over and over again. The purpose of his frequent international trips is to give him something to do, which in his case is to travel the world spreading ill will. It makes him look sort of like a president as he's filmed climbing on and off planes, saluting and waving, having his picture taken with heads of state.
Second, Maliki's lame excuse was deliberately transparent. It was contrived to mollify the "firebrand" cleric Muktada al-Sadr, head of the Mighty Mahdis, who had insisted that Maliki skip the meeting altogether. That was clearly too much. As pointless as the meeting was, you can't just give Bush the finger. So, as a giraffe is a horse designed by a committee, the half-snub was the compromise worked out by Maliki, al-Sadr, and, we suspect here at the Pond, the Bush Administration. Everybody looks pretty good. Maliki makes the point of his "independence." Al-Sadr looks powerful. Bush appears, as always, smilingly irrelevant and ineffective.
Next will come the news reports on "developments" in the "substantive" meeting which Bush and Maliki will hold today in Jordan. You don't need to be Merlin the Magician to predict those. Maliki will "redouble" his resolve to bring Baghdad under control. Bush will pledge U.S. support for his efforts and resist a "time table."
On Friday, another 100 Iraqis will be tortured, killed, dismembered and dumped around Iraq. Another few American GIs will die. The U.S. will add another $2 billion to the national debt. Bush will head to Camp David and Maliki will sneak back into the Green Zone under cover of darkness.
November 26, 2006
The Insurgents Muscle In
"The insurgency is raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, corrupt charities and other crimes, a report concluded." New York Times, November 26, 2006.
Scene: An upstairs room at the Busharoni Olive Oil Company, New York City. The present.
Don Busharoni (speaking with a characteristic gravelly voice): I want to call a meeting of the heads of the Five Families to discuss this crisis we got. The Halliburtoni, the Bechteloso, all of them. It's like discipline, you know, are we working together or not? Don Dickarini?
Capo Dickarini (speaking with a characteristic growly baritone out of the corner of his mouth): We could go to the mattresses. Assert control. It's our territory, you know? Or we could be smart.
Don Busharoni (impatiently watching Sonny wave his hand): Yeah, okay. Sonny?
Sonny Busharoni: It's like Pop says, is our families working together? It was a deal. We wanted one thing, oil, we didn't care about the rough stuff when we moved in. We didn't start this. We whack a guy, take over, plenty for everybody. Now this.
Don Busharoni: I told the al-Tattaglia family that, straight to Ahmed al-Tattalgia's face. But now this other guy...
Capo Dickarini: Aziz ibn Solazzo.
Don Busharoni: Yeah, Aziz. I tell him that too, there's enough to go around, but this other stuff, the drugs, the kidnapping, the ransom...this we will never do, because then the political support that makes this good life possible, we will not have it.
Sonny: Pop, that's old thinking. We gotta change. If the al-Tattalgia people joins up with ibn Solazzo and takes over these profit making operation in our territory, and we don't revamp...
Don Busharoni (turning to his consigliere, Connie Rice-A-Roni): Please forgive my unruly son. The children these days do not understand when it's right to discuss things in public.
Connie Rice-A-Roni: (nodding quietly) Suppose we were to send an emissary, Don, such as the other Don, Don Rumafellio.
Don Busharoni (shaking his head gravelly, or gravely): I am sorry. It was necessary to have him whacked. He was blowing our political cover.
Connie Rice-A-Roni: Then maybe Jimmy "The Fix" Baccharini. He can talk.
Sonny Busharoni: Talk! That's all we do, Pop! Let's hit 'em hard. They understand that.
Capo Dickarini: And draw attention to the whole syndicate, eh Sonny? Smart move. Right now we control construction, we control most of the oil, we service the military, and overcharge them by building in the protection money. We run the security.
Don Busharoni: That was genius, Dickie. To literally sell them protection.
Dickerini (nodding graciously): There's enough for everybody. So the al-Tattalgias working with ibn Solazzo have figured out an angle to pick up the loose change by selling humans. I say let them have it. We're making a nice living, and the American people front us the money for it. We don't just have government protection for what we do. We are the government. Who ever thought of a better deal than that?
Don Busharoni: Capisco, Dickie.
Sonny Busharoni: We whack 'em! Bada-bing! They don't buy us out. We buy them out. We do the kidnapping! We smuggle oil. We counterfeit money.
Connie Rice-A-Roni: They're counterfeiting American money, Sonny. We'd be counterfeiting our own money.
Don Busharoni (shaking his head): Sometimes brains can skip a generation, I guess. And they're only smuggling the oil we don't steal. My son has been watching too many gangster movies. He doesn't know how to run a real racket.
Capo Dickarini (taking the Don's hand and kissing it): I'm so glad, Godfather, your steady hand is back in charge.
November 20, 2006
The Torture Train Derailed, Part 2
Back in the old days, when the only good Muslim was a Muslim you never heard from again, Bush had set up his military kangaroo courts with his usual casual disregard for legal niceties, such as evidentiary rules against hearsay or anything else that an occasional viewer of "Perry Mason" or "Boston Legal" might take for granted. He did not attempt to incorporate the legal protections afforded American soldiers under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) in courts martial. He saw no problem with the admissibility of coerced confessions. If Ahmed didn't do it, why did he say he did? And in any event -- and here's the crux of Bush's entire philosophy of Guilt By Declaration: they're all guilty anyway, which is why they're locked up in the first place.
I would defy anyone to find any extended discussion or comment by George W. Bush, at any time or any place, about the "presumption of innocence" to which any defendant, American or foreign, is nominally entitled under the American system of justice. Try to discover a single instance, search your memory -- when and where did George W. Bush ever say, "Well, on the face of things, as a starting point, we don't even know if a single inmate at the Guantanamo detention facility is guilty of anything, since no one has ever been brought to trial. We begin with the presumption they are actually all innocent."
He never talks that way. It never crosses his mind that Arabs and others held at Gitmo, some for periods now nearing 5 years, are entitled to any kind of consideration, to any kind of legal avenue for reviewing the merits of any case against them. Maybe they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe they aren't terrorists, maybe they never took up arms against the United States at all. The main purpose of judicial review (such as habeas corpus), at an early stage of detention, is to make certain that someone is being held on at least the basis of prima facie guilt, so that the de facto imposition of punishment, confinement for a term of years, is not meted out regardless of guilt or innocence simply because no means of redress is available.
Bush loses no sleep over any of this. Anyway, he has a fallback position. If the detainees aren't guilty of, or chareable with, any "crimes" against the United States, nevertheless they are "prisoners of war" who have been removed from the battlefield. That's where we found a lot of 'em: on the battlefield. Ergo, they're enemy soldiers who can be held until the "cessation of hostilities." When will the hostilities end? Well, how much time you got? The war against terror, as Bush has admitted, will never end. When you're fighting a noun instead of a nation or named adversary, it's difficult to have that deck-of-the-Missouri moment. The confinement at Gitmo, therefore -- also open-ended.
In that sense, Hamdan was one of the lucky ones. They charged him with something. He got his case heard, and although the Supreme Court ruled that the "conspiracy" charge against him was not a war crime cognizable in a military commission trial, the bare bones of a case could go forward against him. He could have a day in court.
Just not in any court Bush had set up as of the date of the Hamdan decision. That was the crux of the decision, the gravamen of the Court's holding. Bush's improvisational approach to criminal justice just hadn't produced anything compatible with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
And how, exactly, had Bush's quick knock-off of a trial system for Gitmo detainees run afoul of Geneva? It didn't meet this criterion:
d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
Reflect on that for a moment. Bush had devised a method of trial which did not measure up to the basic requirements of the civilized world. So it was back to the drawing board, since the Bush team now knew that Common Article 3 applied to Osama's hack. Of all the...and, hey, wait a minute! If the Geneva Conventions apply to this guy, then that means...
November 14, 2006
How Bush's Torture Train Went off the Rails: An Exegesis of Evil in Numerous Parts
Back in the happy-go-lucky days after September 11, when Bush could get away with nearly anything he wanted (and he wanted to get away with a lot), his naturally malevolent character motivated him to seek ways to violate the Geneva Conventions. It never mattered to George whether torture is "effective" or "productive." It doesn't matter to him whether it produces false or misleading evidence, as it undoubtedly does and has. His motivations were always malicious, and the whole giant barge of baloney floated under the "ticking time bomb" theory of justification was always way, way beside the point.
No, George wanted legal license to make certain various Sons of Allah, more or less snagged at random, suffer in ways that the civilized world prohibits, simply because Bush does not like the constraints of civilization. Why he doesn't is again entirely beside the point.
Thus it was that Bush commissioned his crack team of Inquisitors to research the law of torture and abuse and find legal loopholes that would permit him to violate the Geneva Conventions. Preferably with complete impunity. Alberto Gonzalez, at that time White House Counsel, was naturally eager to help. He had helped Bush set an American record for executions in Texas while George was Governor, and established an unblemished standard of never, ever granting clemency to any condemned convict, including the retarded and the patently insane. Gonzales, sensing the gravity (and the opportunity) of the mission, retained the help of John Yoo, a professor of law at Berkeley's Boalt Hall (the institution which has also spawned Phillip Johnson, the creationist apologist). Not surprisingly, Gonzalez and Yoo (and others eager to help, of course) found "the way forward." The al-Qaeda flotsam and jetsam falling into American hands in the mountains and poppy fields of Afghanistan weren't really humans at all. They were a kind of homo sapiens sub species known as "enemy combatants."
Bush was exultant. Waterboarding; beatings; mock executions; insanely loud music played in confined quarters for interminable periods; stress positions; the homoerotic fun of group nudity and sodomy; incarceration in dungeons and other shitholes; hypothermia; starvation and dehydration; fear, terror and intimidation. Even the occasional, lamentable death (46 at last count). All were now within the Administration's scaly grasp. What a great day for America. And on the surface of things, Bush seemed to have a pretty good case for his end-run around the norms of civilization. What law protected these untermenschen, if Article 3 read as follows?
provisions:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.
So far, so good, thought Bush & the Gang. Maybe the Taliban prisoners, as soldiers of a "High Contracting Party," (Afghanistan) were entitled to some kind of grudging civility. But the real prizes, the al-Qaeda creeps - no such luck. All bets were off. Al-Qaeda was not a signatory to anything. Not even a country, let alone a "contracting party." Crank that wheel another turn, Torquemada!
Along comes the elderly kill-joy John Paul Steves, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Writing for the Court in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld:
"The Court of Appeals thought, and the Government
asserts, that Common Article 3 does not apply to Hamdan
because the conflict with al Qaeda, being “‘international in
scope,’” does not qualify as a “ ‘conflict not of an international
character.’ ” 415 F. 3d, at 41. That reasoning is
erroneous. The term “conflict not of an international
character” is used here in contradistinction to a conflict
between nations. So much is demonstrated by the “fundamental
logic [of] the Convention’s provisions on its
application.” Id., at 44 (Williams, J., concurring). Common
Article 2 provides that “the present Convention shall
apply to all cases of declared war or of any other armed
conflict which may arise between two or more of the High
Contracting Parties.” 6 U. S. T., at 3318 (Art. 2, ¶1). High
Contracting Parties (signatories) also must abide by all
terms of the Conventions vis-Ã -vis one another even if one
party to the conflict is a nonsignatory “Power,” and must
so abide vis-Ã -vis the nonsignatory if “the latter accepts
and applies” those terms. Ibid. (Art. 2, ¶3). Common
Article 3, by contrast, affords some minimal protection,
falling short of full protection under the Conventions, to
individuals associated with neither a signatory nor even a
nonsignatory “Power” who are involved in a conflict “in the
territory of” a signatory. The latter kind of conflict is
distinguishable from the conflict described in Common
Article 2 chiefly because it does not involve a clash between
nations (whether signatories or not). In context,
then, the phrase “not of an international character” bears
its literal meaning."
Upon such fine nuances may hang a man's entire future. Not so much a failure to read the fine print as a failure to appreciate the full import of the fine print. Hamdan, allegedly Osama's limo driver, was not "associated" with a signatory (the Afghan/Taliban or the United States), but he was, alas, "involved in a conflict 'in the territory' of a signatory" (Afghanistan). And, further alas, that conflict is "not of an international character" because as Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and Addington, and Gonzalez, and Yoo, and Carbone and all the other charter members of Torture 'R Us keep insisting: Al Qaeda is not a nation, so it can't be involved in an international conflict, that is, one "between nations." Unfortunately for these future defendants (perhaps the near future, in Germany), this accurate observation had exactly the opposite effect to that hoped for.
So Common Article 3 is right on point. Oh, I know. It's so easy to figure something out once someone tells you the right answer.
Hamdan, it turns out, was a human being with rights under Article 3. Who could have imagined such a thing? The consequences of this revoltin' development, as Jimmy Durante would have said about something actually funny, will be spelled out next time.
November 10, 2006
Maybe the trial should be in Nuremberg
Posted Friday, Nov. 10, 2006
"Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba." Time Magazine
To say the least, there is considerable irony in the idea of German prosecution of American war crimes. The prospect of German legal proceedings against Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Carbone and others first surfaced two years ago and caused a diplomatic dust-up because of its effect on Rumsfeld's plan to attend a conference in Munich. Rumsfeld, now operating ex officio, is not faced with that difficulty anymore, although it's unlikely he's planning any idyllic sojourns in the Bavarian Alps at present. That case was terminated by the Germans on the theory the USA would deal with its own war criminals in its own way, under the complex network of American federal statutes which deal with torture and violations of the Geneva Conventions (the War Crimes Act). No doubt this rather fanciful notion served diplomatic purposes of the moment, and could not have been reflective of actual German sentiment.
Under Germany's Code of Crimes Against International Law, which was introduced in 2002, German courts have universal jurisdiction in war crimes and crimes against humanity. As another instance of irony, the U.S. largely led the way in establishing international precedent for the prosecution of war crimes following World War II, and presumably the Germans, once hoist on this petard themselves, would draw on the principles as the textual basis for a prosecution of alleged American war crimes. The USA, as noted, carries the same general principles on its own books as part of the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture Statute and the recently enacted Detainee Treatment Act (McCain bill) applying the anti-torture statute to all detainees in U.S. custody, whether or not designated "enemy combatants," an extension solidified by the decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, in which the Supreme Court clarified the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to human beings in general, despite the strenuous efforts of Bush's Torture Brigade to create a special class of Untermenschen upon whom any atrocity or depraved act could be practiced with impunity, rather like another polity between 1933 and 1945.
The Supreme Court, having brought Bush up short with its Hamdan decision, motivated The Decider to decide to seek a get-out-of-jail free card in his Military Commissions Act. You may recall from an earlier Swim in the Pond that Bush was vociferous in his need, expressed in September, 2006, to get on with immediate trials at Guantanamo for his high value detainees being shipped there even as he spoke. Without risking too much sarcasm, one might note that (a) no trials are currently underway, as the Bush Administration fights mightily to deprive the inmates of counsel on the basis of Kafkaesque arguments also previously detailed, and (2) the real deadline Bush was up against was November 8, 2006, election day, when his pet Congress might turn a little unruly. The sole purpose of the MCA can be stated in the following, innocent-looking citations (the first is from the Military Commissions Act):
"(b) PROTECTION OF PERSONNEL.—Section 1004 of the Detainee
Treatment Act of 2005 (42 U.S.C. 2000dd–1) shall apply with respect
to any criminal prosecution that—
(1) relates to the detention and interrogation of aliens
described in such section;
(2) is grounded in section 2441(c)(3) of title 18, United
States Code; and
(3) relates to actions occurring between September 11,
2001, and
(The cited section from the Detainee Treatment Act reads in full as follows:)