Category: Issues of the Day

This was funny two years ago when it first appeared here.

Now it could actually happen.

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So George is doing yet another photo op at an elementary school, and this one’s been going pretty well, so he offers to take questions. A little boy raises his hand.

“Okay, you,” says George, smiling. “What’s your name?

“Billy.”

“Billy. And what’s your question?”

“I have three questions,” Billy says. “First, why did you go to war without UN approval? Second, why are you president when Gore got more votes? Third, where’s Osama bin Laden?”

George is taken aback. “Uh, those are really hard questions,” he says.

Just then the bell rings. “Whoops, time for recess!” George says. “Guess I’ll have to answer your questions when recess is over.”

After recess, when the kids have settled back down again, George says “Okay, who’s got a question?”

A little kid raises his hand, and George calls on him.

“What’s your name?” George asks.

“Steve.”

“Okay, Steve. What’s your question?”

“I have five questions,” Steve says. “First, why did you go to war without UN approval? Second, why are you president when Gore got more votes? Third, where’s Osama bin Laden? Fourth, why did the bell for recess ring twenty minutes early? And fifth, what happened to Billy?”

“We got a look at the No Fly List from March. And included on that list were 14 of the 19 September 11th hijackers. How do you explain that?”

— Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes questioning Donna Bucella, who has run the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since it began operations in 2003.

Saddam Hussein is on the list, too.

George Washington University Professor Jonathan Turley:

People have no idea how significant this is. Really a time of shame this is for the American system.—The strange thing is that we have become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. The Congress just gave the President despotic powers and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to Dancing With the Stars. It’s otherworldly..People clearly don’t realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country. What happened today changed us. And I’m not too sure we’re gonna change back anytime soon.

Quoted from appearance on Countdown by Crooks and Liars.

You should read the whole post from Functional Ambivalent, but here’s an excerpt:

When I was a kid I was so enthralled with language that I would sit for hours reading the dictionary. I’ve spent my professional life using words to convey ideas, and I lack the vocabulary to describe how strongly I feel at this moment. It’s almost like a state of mourning. President Bush and his followers are killing the Constitution, giving some future authoritarian all the tools he needs to enslave the nation that was once a shining city on a hill. This gang of idiots, led by a vacuous nimrod who knows nothing but politics and his own, irresistable Oedipal scorn, has whipped the Grand Old Party into a fear frenzy. Bush Republicans, quivering chickens that they apparently are, are tearing the Constitution apart in front of our very eyes and telling us its for our own good.

That the Democrats sat silently while this abomination passed tells me that the Democratic Party might as well be dead. They can fillibuster a federal judge’s nomination but not the enfeeblement of the Constitution? The pathetic, dumb bastards, standing silently by for fear that Karl Rove will commission a 30 second attack ad claiming they’re soft on terror. We need to run every one of the useless clowns out of office.

The only appropriate reaction to the Republican rape of the Constitution is sputtering rage. That we aren’t marching on the White House with torches and pitchforks, demanding that this horrendous law be repealed, indicates that we, the people, may not really be much worth protecting. Retire the eagle as the symbol of the United States; we’re a nation of sheep.

Excerpted from Jeff Stein writing on the op-ed page of Tuesday’s New York Times:

For the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.

[…]

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue.

He continues with examples. We’re protected by idiots.

Olbermann again. Video via Crooks and Liars.

Brief CBS News Video from “60 Minutes” of Bob Woodward — who now sees the light. Worth a look.

Dan Froomkin reminds us:

[Woodward’s] first two books on Bush — “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack” — were largely flattering depictions of the president.

Woodward’s image took a major bruising last November, (see my November 16 column ) when it was revealed that he had kept secret for more than two years that he was the first reporter to whom a senior administration official leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Woodward apologized for failing to tell his superiors at The Post. But the irony of a journalist sitting on information like that, along with murmurings in Washington about what he had given up in return for the unparalleled access to the Bush White House, combined to raise doubts about his reportage.

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

From an editorial in Thursday’s New York Times that adds:

“There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.”

Well, I guess.

Going forward, the bill departs even more radically from our most fundamental values. It would permit the president to detain indefinitely—even for life—any alien, whether in the United States or abroad, whether a foreign resident or a lawful permanent resident, without any meaningful opportunity for the alien to challenge his detention. The administration would not even need to assert, much less prove, that the alien was an enemy combatant; it would suffice that the alien was “awaiting [a] determination” on that issue. In other words, the bill would tell the millions of legal immigrants living in America, participating in American families, working for American businesses, and paying American taxes, that our government may at any minute pick them up and detain them indefinitely without charge, and without any access to the courts or even to military tribunals, unless and until the government determines that they are not enemy combatants.

— From remarks by Senator Patrick Leahy

It’s bad, but somehow understandable that Bush has wrecked FEMA, EPA, Education, the Forest Service, Public Broadcasting, the Mineral Management Service, the Supreme Court and god knows what else, but now it looks like he’s wrecked the Army — and that’s not understandable.

And it’s certainly not acceptable.

Reports are saying French intelligence has information that Osama bin Laden has died of typhus.

Obviously, they didn’t get the memo. Word of bin Laden’s death is not supposed to be made public until just before our election.

THE SILENT PARTY. You worthless passel of cowards. They’re laughing at you. You know that, right?

The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to sink it to the bottom of the sea. For an entire week, it allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party, the latter best exemplified by John McCain, who keeps fashioning his apparently fathomless ambition into a pair of clown shoes with which he can do the monkey dance across the national stage. They’re laughing at him, too.

The New York Times has the right of it here, limning the pathetic gullibility at the heart of the “compromise.” There is nothing in this bill that President Thumbscrews can’t ignore. There is nothing in this bill that reins in his feckless and dangerous reinterpretation of the powers of his office. There is nothing in this bill that requires him to take it — or its congressional authors — seriously. Two weeks ago, John Yoo set down in The New York Times the precise philosophical basis on which the administration will sign this bill and then ignore it. The president will decide what a “lesser breach” of the Geneva Conventions is? How can anyone over the age of five give this president that power? And wait until you see the atrocity that I guarantee you is coming down the tracks concerning the fact that the president committed at least 40 impeachable offenses with regard to illegal wiretapping.

And the Democratic Party was nowhere in this debate. It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives — “Aggressive interrogation techniques” — the Democratic Party had…no opinion. On the issue of allowing a demonstrably incompetent president as many of the de facto powers of a despot that you could wedge into a bill without having the Constitution spontaneously combust in the Archives, well, the Democratic Party was more pissed off at Hugo Chavez.

This was as tactically idiotic as it was morally blind. On the subject of what kind of a nation we are, and to what extent we will live up to the best of our ideals, the Democratic Party was as mute and neutral as a stone. Human rights no longer have a viable political constituency in the United States of America. Be enough of a coward, though, and cable news will fit you for a toga.

However, because I know it is vital for the Democrats to “recapture” the good Christian folks, there’s a passage from Scripture that seems apropos: “When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.”

Charles P. Pierce.

As reported in The New York Times:

Asked at a news conference on Tuesday about a Canadian commission’s finding that the man, Maher Arar, was wrongly sent to Syria and tortured there, Mr. Gonzales replied, “Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria.” He added, “I’m not aware that he was tortured.”

The attorney general’s comments caused puzzlement because they followed front-page news articles of the findings of the Canadian commission. It reported that based on inaccurate information from Canada about Mr. Arar’s supposed terrorist ties, American officials ordered him taken to Syria, an action documented in public records.

On Wednesday, a Justice Department spokesman said Mr. Gonzales had intended to make only a narrow point: that deportations are now handled by the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Justice.

NewMexiKen guesses Gonzales was speaking as the head of the Justice Department, not as the Attorney General of the United States.

The United States Congress is debating how much torture to allow.

The United States Congress is debating how much torture to allow.

The United States Congress is debating how much torture to allow.