Subject to Change, version 2.0

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 20:08:23 GMT

July 11 Comes and Goes: No Iraq Indicators.

Two weeks ago, David Broder pointed out that the Bush administration was soon going to face a make-or-break moment regarding its Iraq policy: Under a little-noticed provision of the defense spending bill passed by Congress in May, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld has until July 11 to send Capitol Hill a ...

[Think Progress]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 18:50:23 GMT

"And which principle considers your blood real blood and our blood water?" - Osama bin Laden

[BOPnews]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 18:49:17 GMT

The 2+Scalia Scenario.

Novak is reporting that Rehnquist will step down tomorrow morning, creating a two seat vacuum on the Court. That, as it happens, is the subject of a provocative article penned by Loyola Law professor Richard Hasen in today's TNR....

[Ezra Klein]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 18:47:46 GMT

Sandy Frank: The Stateless Enemy

Most wars are between two states (or groups of states), and hostilities end only when one surrenders to the other. But in the war on terror our opponent is not a state, and this has raised a huge problem for those of us who want to end the war – and the killing – as quickly as possible: we don’t have anyone to surrender to.

Immediately after 9/11, we could conceivably have surrendered to either Saudi Arabia – source of most of the suicide hijackers – or Afghanistan – harborer of mastermind Osama bin Laden. But the Saudis disclaimed any connection and, in the case of Afghanistan, the administration predictably squandered the opportunity and attacked. Afghanistan surrendered - no doubt recalling Germany, Japan, and The Mouse That Roared – leaving us stuck. Even bin Laden was in hiding.

We then compounded our problem by attacking Iraq. Perhaps we were hoping to surrender to them, but any hope of that vanished when they cleverly surrendered to us first.

This has left us with few good options. We could try to accede to our enemies’ demands: pull out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, release the prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, side with the Palestinians – no doubt we can come up with others. But even if we do all that, absent formal surrender we face the possibility of further conflict.

Two suggestions: first, maybe leaving bin Laden alive was not a failure but rather a clever tactic to preserve him as someone to surrender to. We’ll have to find him, of course, but that could be a workable strategy. Otherwise, perhaps the United Nations could establish an Office of Surrender Acceptance to handle situations like this, functioning as a last resort third party to accept surrenders. After all, this is bound to come up again.

- Sandy Frank
[The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 16:35:48 GMT

Yank Rove's security clearance.

There have been a number of excellent responses from Dems on the Hill to the Rove scandal, but one stands out for me.

Harry Reid said, "The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration. I trust they will follow through on this pledge." [...]

[The Carpetbagger Report]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 16:35:05 GMT

"Turd Blossom" Must Go.

Pressure is building on the White House to fire Karl Rove (whom his boss calls "Turd Blossom"). Could Rove's arrogance and ruthless political tactics actually be catching up with him?

[TomPaine.com]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 02:15:05 GMT

qWagmire: Could someone tell Bush that obeying the law is not optional?

I understand, I really do. I mean, it's easy to see how a kid growing up in Bush's privileged position would come to think that the law was optional what's to consult about? Why not just submit the report by deadline? NOTE I love the URL that AP used for this story (which was about Bush's latest He Man speech at Quantico): http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050711/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush Let's get out our...

- Lambert
[corrente]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 02:14:14 GMT

Keep licking my boots, peon, there's still a little liquid rubber stuck to the heel.

I was just trying to craft a post on the underexposed issue that napalm is being used in Iraq (article sent by reader labyrus) that had more meat to it than just, "Read this! Napalm in Iraq! Is there anything these criminally minded fuckheads in power won't do?" and I cruised a couple blogs looking for inspiration and the very first one I clicked on was Hullabaloo and at the very top of the page Digby quotes the most asshattery, boot-licking bullshit imaginable from Powerline.

"The media feeding frenzy will, indeed, be massive. But absent a serious claim of a statutory violation or perjury, it's questionable whether anyone apart from liberal bloggers and other pre-existing Bush haters will partake in the media's dog food. This isn't a top presidential aide accepting an expensive gift, or engaging in lewd sexual conduct. It's a top aide providing truthful information to journalists in response to lies told to embarrass the administration and our government."

[Pandagon]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 02:12:39 GMT

Paul Krassner: Quickie

George Bush promised that he would fire the leaker. Now that Karl Rove has been revealed as the leaker, what will Bush do? Obviously, he'll ask Karl Rove what to do.

- Paul Krassner (pkrassner@earthlink.net)
[The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 02:11:04 GMT

Who Said This?.

Physicists everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief to learn that quantum mechanics is no longer part of their domain:When we say, "a physical basis for consciousness" we are forgetting that everything physical is at the most fundamental...

[Political Animal]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 02:09:53 GMT

Bush Now Exporting Fear To Other Countries

It's bad enough that SOB King George has his own citizens walking around in fear, now he decides to export it to Canada and Australia. From the World Conference on Disaster Management in Toronto on Monday.Conference speaker Ty Fairman, who has worked with the FBI investigating bombings and chemical attacks around the world, said Canadians need to wake up to the possibility that they could be...

- canuk
[CanadianPerspective]

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 02:09:08 GMT

Iran-Contra Redux.

And they wonder why we’re suspicious: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Robert Earl, who destroyed national security documents during the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, is working as chief of staff to acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, the Pentagon said on Monday. Earl destroyed and stole national security documents while working for Lt. Col. Oliver North during a secret arms [...]

[Suburban Guerrilla]

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 20:13:15 GMT

Problems at the National Guard.

Here's the serious news:The Army is running perilously low on its Reserve and National Guard soldiers who largely fill certain critical support jobs, like military police and civil affairs officers and truck drivers. Marine Corps reservists...

[ Political Animal]

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 20:12:08 GMT

Have You Forgotten?.

An excerpt from today's gaggle :

QUESTION: You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson's wife. So don't you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn't he?

MCCLELLAN: There will be a time to talk about this, but now is not the time to talk about it.

QUESTION: Do you think people will accept that, what you're saying today?

MCCLELLAN: Again, I've responded to the question.

QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott...

(LAUGHTER)

... because after the investigation began -- after the criminal investigation was under way -- you said, October 10th, 2003, "I spoke with those individuals, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they were not involved in this," from that podium. That's after the criminal investigation began.

Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation.

This is starting to give me a stomach ache. The way we liberal bloggers have been following this, it's easy to see this as an enormous game of partisan "Gotcha!" that we're all wrapped up in.

Well, it's not.

I know that evoking 9/11 is a game that both sides of the aisle like to play to smear the other side, but I honestly can't shake the mental imagery of the last four years of bloody chaos. Usually my mind focuses on two or three images at a time. This morning, for example, it was the people diving out of the burning WTC towers to escape the smoke, the grainy video of Danny Pearl saying "I am a Jew" just prior to being beheaded, and the shredded double decker bus in London. Other times I think about the gaping hole in the Pentagon or the photos that leaked of row after row of American flag draped coffins. Whatever it it, the message that's drilled into my subconscious is the same :

Thousands of people have been killed already, but there are still others out there who want to murder you right now.

September 11th obviously effected everyone in profound ways, so I would never imply that my grief and fear is something unique to one political persuasion or another. But it still puzzles me when something this big only seems to generate outrage on one side of the aisle.

Right now there are people who want to murder as many Americans as possible. It doesn't matter to them who their victims voted for, what religion they are, if they're rich or poor, black, white, whatever. As long as the bodycount is high, it doesn't matter who gets hit. The fact that the WTC towers were financial centers was secondary to the fact that hitting the largest buildings in the country at mid-morning would maximize the terrorists' bloodshed. With these people wanting to kill so indiscriminately, it seems that the best means to this end is to make sure that we stop the spread of the appropriately-named weapons of mass destruction.

Yet here we are, almost four years later, and we've got a situation in which we're 99% certain that the right hand man to the guy who's in charge of keeping our nightmares for becoming a reality has been undercutting efforts to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. I honestly cannot understand why everyone who was effected by 9/11 isn't outraged about this. I really can't.

I don't know what's more frightening. Being kept up at night with neurotic fears about mushroom-clouds and evil terrorists, or the suspicion that the people who are supposed to be taking this fight seriously aren't having the same nightmares.

[The Talent Show]

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:30:00 GMT

The B-52s saved me from dorkitude.

1989 was an overall a shitty year. I moved from what any reasonable person would deem as red state hell into a red state hell that put the previous red state hell to shame. Indeed, the small town we moved to was so small and backwards, it made El Paso look like a fucking metropolis. We moved to 1957, a joke that still gets me laughs to this day.

To make things even worse, it was my first year of junior high school. I failed a bunch of classes, girls and boys both wanted to beat me up, I was so scared of the vile bitches that cornered me on the playground and demanded to know why I wore "boys'" shoes (at the time, athletic sneakers were popular in big towns but not in 1957 West Texas where they were considered unfeminine), I threw up but not to control my weight and I menstruated but not in a cool Judy Blume novel way. Shit sucked bad. And the music was worse. The "cool" kids all like Milli Vanilli, which I didn't give two shits about. I gave a helluva effort to seem like I like the boy bands of the time, but mostly I was scared.

1989 was the year that the B-52s released their extremely stupid song "Love Shack". Being a dumb shit kid, I loved it. My aunt, who was a few years older than me, loved the B-52s and latched onto my love of the song to bestow upon me a copied tape that had their first album on side one and and Wild Planet on side two. I loved it. I am surprised I did not fry it I played it so much. The first album especially grabbed my attention--it was weird, decadent, beautiful and the song "Dance This Mess Around" in particular was fucking perfect. They sang about sexual decadence, dancing 'til dawn, but more than anything they sang about how gorgeous music is and could be.

I didn't know their entire story then--I didn't know about how they were just jamming and having fun and how Ricky Wilson played on a Sears Silvertone and how they got swept into the New York scene and how they inspired John Lennon to get back into writing music and how Ricky, whose underrated guitar work was the backbone of the band, died of AIDS and how their popularity on the mainstream charts came after they lost his brillance or anything like that. If I had known those things, maybe I wouldn't have learned the prejudice that was hard to unwind that bands peak early and decline. Who knows what they would have been, after all, if Ricky had lived? But I did learn something that would fuck me up from then on--I related to the B-52s, which made me a weirdo and I would never, ever fit in.

I came out with my secret love my junior year of high school and put the tape of their first album on for my friends and tried to get them to understand the punk rock awesomeness of "52 Girls" and the downright Dusty Springfriend-esque surreal beauty of "Dance This Mess Around". I played them "Rock Lobster", thinking that its strange pop appeal would break through, but it was sort of long and they got bored and thought it was stupid.

[Pandagon]

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:28:49 GMT

Christian cop tries to convert during arrest.

[The Raw Story | A rational voice - Alternative news]

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:28:04 GMT

UK And US Secretly Planning Iraq Pullout

Britain And America are secretly preparing to withdraw most of their troops from Iraq - despite warnings of the grave consequences for the region. The British newspaper The Mail reports:A secret paper written by Defence Secretary John Reid for Tony Blair reveals that many of the 8,500 British troops in Iraq are set to be brought home within three months, with most of the rest returning six...

- canuk
[CanadianPerspective]

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:25:54 GMT

When Did The White House Plame Outing Really Start?.

Hmm. Via a Paul Lukasiak posting at TPMCafe comes this July 6th 2005 Walter Pincus piece that I'd seen previously, but I admit I didn't really "get" the potential importance of the nut grafs the first time I read it:

On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.
I didn't write about that information at that time because I did not believe it true that she had arranged his Niger trip. But I did disclose it in an October 12, 2003 story [here] in The Washington Post. By that time there was a Justice Department criminal investigation into a leak to columnist Robert Novak who published it on July 14, 2003 and identified Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. Under certain circumstances a government official's disclosure of her name could be a violation of federal law. The call with me had taken place two days before Novak's column appeared.

Now, here's the thing about that bolded sentence. Even presuming Novak's column was seen at the White House before publication: Novak's column didn't say that.

[Daily Kos]

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:24:51 GMT

JOURNAL: The Controlled Chaos Exit Option.

Reuters has published details of a leaked memo from the British Ministry of Defense. The memo indicates that both the US and the UK will draw down troop levels in Iraq over the next year (8,500 to 3,000 for the...

[Global Guerrillas]

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 21:34:30 GMT

Stephen Elliott: And Then There Was A Knock

The Strange Detention of a 71 year old Afghan Hindu Man and His 69 Year Old Wife

First comes the knock. There are two, maybe three, uniformed officers from the Department of Homeland Security. They tell the boy they want to take his parents in for questioning. Have them back in two to three hours. The father, Gokal Kapoor, is 71, his wife, Sheila Kapoor, 69. Old people. Hindus from Afghanistan. Two hours, they'll be back, see ya.

It takes several days and several lawyers to find out where they are. They're being held in Pamunkey Regional Jail, in Hanover, Virginia, a red and white brick structure at the end of a circular drive. The web page boasts "a state-of-the-art facility" with a housing capacity for 400 inmates. The jail serves the needs of all "user agencies, law enforcement, courts, attorneys, and community organizations." Mostly it's used to house criminals awaiting trial or convicted of misdemeanors serving less than twelve months. In Pamunkey there is a commissar, run by AraMark. If the prisoner has money in his or her account they can get Snickers bars and Pepsi, soap, feminine hygiene products, underwear. They can even get cups of noodles but not the kind in styrofoam; has to be in a see-through container. Also, no non-dairy creamer. Non-dairy creamer is flammable. There is separate housing for males and females. Male and female prisoners have no access to one another. So Sheila and Gokal don't see one-another anymore. The prisoners spend their time in their unit's day room. They can make phone calls, collect. Very expensive. Sheila's sister comes to visit, drives an hour, but she is turned away. She didn't fill out the paperwork correctly.

No one is sure why Gokal and Sheila have been arrested. They are not accused of anything, they are not interrogated. It seems it was part of a sweep of immigrants working in airports. Gokal is a baggage handler at Dulles. Sheila is an assistant for disabled passengers. But the authorities are not answering questions. Yesterday the Kapoor's were fingerprinted. Looks like they are being readied for deportation. Hard to say. Welcome to The Department Of Homeland Security.

They arrived in America in 1997 fleeing the vicious persecution of Hindus in Afghanistan (imagine statues exploding on mountain sides, a small minority forced to wear identifying insignias, beaten and forced to convert to Islam or pay fines). Sometimes an asylum case can take a while to work its way through the system. Following the American invasion of Afghanistan an immigration judge decided that the Kapoors no longer needed asylum in America, though they'd lived here for years and were very old. Though they had social security numbers and held jobs. They obeyed the law, their son went to school, and they appealed the judge's decision. Two months ago their work permits expired. Eighteen days ago, June 22, on the day they were arrested, their son graduated from high school.

There are thousands of aliens with final deportation orders against them in the Washington-Virginia area. Few are arrested.

Gokal has a successful brother, Dr. Wishwa Kapoor, head of internal medicine at The University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Kapoor has been in America thirty years. He is an American citizen. He retains a lawyer for his brother, Michael Maggio. The Washingtonian called Mr. Maggio "Washington's best immigration lawyer". Mr. Maggio thinks the whole thing is very unusual. He's quoted in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette - "Why, given the limited resources at the Department of Homeland Security, do they go after a 70-year-old Afghan man who's no threat to anyone and who faces being sent to one of the most dangerous countries in the world?

"And how are they going to deport him, anyway? The government there is barely functioning -- who's going to do the paperwork? There's no direct flight to Kabul, so they have to send him through a transit country, which means they'd have to send a U.S. agent to escort him ... does anyone think this is the best use of taxpayer dollars?"

He hopes it's just a mistake. But then yesterday the fingerprinting. One has to ask, is it possible? OK, septuagenarians thrown in jail for a few weeks, a mistake, ha ha, part of living in America. They're just tired and poor, yearning to breathe free. It happens. I mean, it's not like they were kept in a super-max. Sure, they haven't done anything wrong and they haven't been allowed to see each other, but it's just jail, a short term facility, it's not prison. Pamunkey, it even sounds funny. And there's a commissar, you can buy Snickers bars. Fine, we locked up some very old people for a few weeks, what's done is done. But are we really going to deport them? I mean, can't we, as a society, just apologize, send the old people home, scarred but still alive. Are we really going to deport Hindus to Afghanistan? After eight years? Their whole family in America and no reason to suspect them of anything. Is this what America has become? Are there no checks and balances for this broken system?

more information: Stopdetention.org

- Stephen Elliott

- Stephen Elliott (stephen@stephenelliott.com)

[The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 15:55:35 GMT

David Corn: Time for Rove Withdrawal?

What's a I-wanna-see-Rove-go-to-jail fanatic to do now?

For the past few weeks, the Plame/CIA leak was in the news far more so than it had been ever since the CIA first asked the Justice Department in September 2003 to investigate the leak from Bush administration officials that outed an undercover CIA official working on WMD issues (Valerie Wilson, a.k.a. Valerie Plame), who was married to a critic of Bush's war in Iraq (former Ambassador Joseph Wilson). That leak first appeared in a Bob Novak column published on July 14, 2003; Novak cited two unnamed "senior administration officials" as his sources.

What drew all the recent attention to the investigation was the face-off between special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and two reporters--Time's Matt Cooper and The New York Times' Judith Miller. Fitzgerald, in pursuit of the leakers (who may have violated a federal law making it a crime for a government official to identify a clandestine CIA official), wanted Cooper, who cowrote a Time article that also reported that unnamed government officials had said Valerie Wilson was a CIA official, and Miller, who had written nothing on this subject, to testify before his grand jury and talk about what their sources had told them. Initially they both resisted. And the ensuing clash--as troubling as it was for those of us who care about protecting reporter-source confidentiality--was a goldmine for anyone trying to figure out what has been happening with Fitzgerald's investigation. His inquiry has been surprisingly low on leaks, and it had been hard to suss out what he was doing and whether he was achieving any progress. But his fight with Miller and Cooper pushed facts and hints into the public record.

As regular readers of this blog know, Fitzgerald's tussle with these reporters moved Karl Rove to the top of the suspects list. Though much remains unknown, it does seem probable--as Lawrence O'Donnell has blogged about here and as Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reported--that the source Fitzgerald has so much wanted Cooper to talk about is Rove. Why is Fitzgerald intensely interested in Rove? We can only guess at this moment. But it's not unreasonable to presume this is because Fitzgerald considers him a chief suspect--even though Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, has told reporters that Rove did not name Valerie Plame as a CIA official to any reporter and that Fitzgerald has informed Rove he is not a target. (For a thorough analysis--by me--of what the recent court proceedings do and do not tell us about Fitzgerald's investigation and Rove's place in it, click here.

But now Fitzgerald's fight with Miller and Cooper is done. Miller is sitting in a jail in Virginia, dispatched there by federal District Court Judge Thomas Hogan until she cooperates with Fitzgerald or his grand jury expires in four months. Cooper is a free man. Time magazine, over his objections, surrendered his emails and notes to Fitzgerald. Still, Fitzgerald wanted Cooper to testify before the grand jury. Cooper was prepared to say no and be imprisoned. Then at the last-minute, Cooper declared that his confidential source--Rove?--had granted him a personal waiver to speak to the grand jury about his conversations with this source. But this waiver did not allow Cooper to speak in public about this source.

With the Miller and Cooper cases resolved, we will be left with no new tea leaves to read. Fitzgerald's investigation will proceed under the cloak of secrecy that covers (or is supposed to cover) all federal criminal probes. Some, of course, leak. (Remember Ken Starr?) But Fitzgerald's inquiry has been rather tight. I've had Justice Department officials tell me that they tend to hear nothing about Fitzgerald's actions. Cooper's upcoming testimony to Fitzgerald's grand jury will be confidential. So what he says--or does not say--about Rove will>here to see that. The article is headlined, "Novak Squealed."

- David Corn
[The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 15:24:37 GMT

Tony Blair In Purgatory: Forget for a moment that ...

Tony Blair In Purgatory:

Forget for a moment that Sarasota, Florida is about 860 miles from Washington, DC, roughly twice the distance that Gleneagles, Scotland is from London. Forget for a moment that after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, President Bush continued to read to schoolchildren until he was taken on a multi-state flight around the United States, while Tony Blair yesterday rushed back to London to assure his nation before rushing back to Scotland to assure that the work of the G-8 Summit would be accomplished. Forget that Bush's first words to America on 9/11 were to thank the school children, declare it a tragedy, and offer a moment of prayer, while Tony Blair, before leaving for London, spoke to the UK about terrorism, resolve and the world. Forget that Bush's speech to the nation that fucked-up day was given by a man looking like a deer in headlights, including a reassurance that capitalism was fine and a Bible quote, while last night in England, Blair gave a speech that's been described as Churchill-like in its rallying call and was also compassionate towards Muslims.

Forget all that. And think about Tony Blair for just one moment: dicked over time and again by George Bush and the United States on every world issue except for the war in Iraq. Think about the Prime Minister, coming back to London from that fine resort in Scotland, ready to hear about and talk about carnage. And let us think that, for a moment, he may have wondered if he's been played for a sucker by the neocon right and the White House. As the death toll rises, perhaps a thoughtful man, which we here in the U.S. with our thoughtless leaders often hope Blair is (in the same way we thought Colin Powell was an honest man), couldn't be blamed for second-guessing himself. Oh, no, he can't show it. But perhaps, in his sickened heart of hearts, as the police try to dig out the shattered corpses from the tunnels, Blair knows, fucking knows he's walked down the garden path with the very man who would put a bullet in the back of his skull if such an act would benefit the powerful in the United States, that he's tossed his chips onto a table filled with cheaters. Sure, he tried to bluff with sexed up documents and lies of his own, but he had no idea who he was dealing with.

In the end, Blair knows that once you've tossed in your ante, there's no gettin' out until the pot is played.

- Rude One [The Rude Pundit]

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 14:54:34 GMT

The 'Oscars of Idiocy'.

How about a little Friday diversion from the usual political news? My friends at the World Stupidity Awards emailed this week to let me know about their third annual ceremony to be held in Montreal on July 22nd. The show will be hosted, appropriately enough, by Lewis Black (of Jon Stewart fame).

There are some nominations, [...] [The Carpetbagger Report]

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 13:58:01 GMT

Iraq And Iran To Cooperate On Defense.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e77d12b8-ef0f-11d9-8b10-00000e2511c8.html

[TomPaine.com]

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 13:55:57 GMT

No One's Advantage.

No One's Advantage [The terror attack near the G8 summit location] "works to...the Western world's advantage, for people to experience something like this together." —Brian Kilmeade, Fox News host, in an on-air exchange July 7, 2005....

[TomPaine.com]