Non-News: GHB is Incubating Terrorism, not Fighting It

Anyone paying any attention at all, as opposed to fighting desperately with hands over ears to defend their mistaken and pathetically naive votes and positions, has of course known this for a good long time now. The misbegotten Iraq invasion, predestined and inevitable due to the bushtapo's determination that actually monitoring, managing, or attending to terrorism and Bin Laden in particular was too Clintonesque, has turned out to be the best thing terrorism ever saw. Not that the bush dynasty hasn't been a friend to tyrants and terrorism and its supporters for decades. They profiteered with a vengeance in the 1930's, enthusiastically helping to arm Hitler. They have financed Bin Laden, Hussein, Iran's rulers, and any number of other tyrannical leaders and terrorists for as long as they have been in government of course. That would be George 1 and 2 and their ilk. Or yukk is more like it.

Not that it takes deep channeling to understand that if terrorism tapered off or - say - Bin Laden were found dead at the wrong moment (e.g., in a non-election year?), the administration's feeble yet febrile fear-mongering and claims of effective terror-fighting might lose some spin. They need more and more terrorism of course to make their dark fantasy plausible even to the kool-aiders. Hence the idea that Iraq is a "success." Of course it is. We have many more terrorists to have a potential shot at (and be bombed by) now. Sorry, civilians. Mea culpa, American military, thinking you were actually engaged in a "war." This is all about maintaining the bush dynasty, and/or saving their "face."

When reports from our own intelligence agencies, currently outrageously throttled, controlled, threatened with jail, and otherwise censored by cheney et al document what a fantastic terrorism-generator the Iraq nightmare dreamed up by bush/cheney/rumsfeld etc. has been, you know we have reached something a good long way from nirvana.

Glenn Greenwald, he of Unclaimed Territory (I have spoken with admiration of him before), has this, working off a NYT article. This ought to be thought-provoking stuff, but that word "thought" worries me - I fear it may be so only for those who already know. It's troubling that some 30% or so of those responding to polls at least seem to have taken their batteries out. I encourage you to check out full Greenwald and Times article.

If I were shaping the Democrats' election strategy, I would create a television commercial where someone reads the following four paragraphs -- from a new report in the NYT today -- and then I would air it over and over and over every single day as much as possible until November 7:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

Numerous sources told the NYT about the contents of NIE, which "are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence." So this assessment -- that the war in Iraq has increased the terrorist threat to the U.S. -- is from the Bush administration itself and is the consensus of the same intelligence community which the administration purged of all dissidents.

Only in the U.S., with its toxic mix of Bush administration propaganda and media listlessness, could it ever even be a question open to debate whether invading, bombing and occupying a Muslim country in the Middle East for almost four years would fuel Muslim radicalism, inflame anti-American resentment, and create far more terrorists than ever existed before. And only in the current political climate where up is down could the political party directly responsible for severely exacerbating the terrorism problem with a pointless, disastrous and seemingly endless war have their chances for victory depend upon maximizing the country's focus on terrorism -- the very problem they have so severely exacerbated.

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Lighting Up Dark Corners

A potpourri tonight. Not the sort with those dried fruits some might think of though. But come to think of it, . . .

There are a lot of words to this post, yes, but many of them are better than the ones I would have come up with, as consolation. And there are more in the wings - just let me know via comment or off-line email when you're ready!

A common bush/republican tactic in talking points lately is to contrast their "right" position with a nullity. E.g., most obviously, "give me the power to torture without constraint or we will not be able to do anything and will have to totally forego combatting terrorism." That verbal fakery is the real essence of a multitude of their postures right now. Among other aspects of this Bonfire of the Dynasts, it is going to be interesting to observe how well this clearly dishonest debating tactic plays with both the populace and the press. For the sake of democracy, which I'm still hoping we'll be restoring Very Soon here in America, and international harmony, we cannot afford more idiotic swallowing of this propaganda, obviously intended to suppress dissent, using model from late '30's Germany. I will not here use the F word, but the fact that the party in power has begun playing that card is ever-so-telling. There is a smell of desperation in the air.

I'll kick it off with an excerpt from the one and only Dan Froomkin:

President Bush was at his most pugnacious and disingenuous Friday in a Rose Garden press conference, refusing to give reporters a direct answer about where he stands on torture.

Here's the transcript . Bush's repeated refrain -- that all he wants is for Congress to bring "clarity" to the Geneva Conventions -- was so far from the truth that straight news reporting simply wasn't up to the task of conveying the real meaning of the day.

So let's go right to the editorials.

Editorial Watch

The Washington Post editorial board explains what Bush meant when he said his "one test" for legislation was whether Congress would authorize "the program."

Writes The Post: "He's talking about the practice of sequestering terrorist suspects indefinitely and without charge in secret foreign locations and holding them incommunicado even from the International Red Cross. Until recently, such 'disappearances' were the signature of Third World dictatorships. . . .

"Mr. Bush also wants the CIA to be able to treat its detainees to such practices as 'cold cell,' or induced hypothermia, in which detainees are held naked in near-freezing temperatures and repeatedly doused with water; 'long standing,' in which prisoners are handcuffed in an uncomfortable standing position and forced to remain there for up to 40 hours; and prolonged sleep deprivation.

"Throughout the world and for decades, such practices have been called torture. That's what the United States called them when they were used by the Soviet KGB. As the president himself tacitly acknowledges, they violate Geneva and other international conventions as well as current U.S. law."

For a little background, The Post notes: "Common Article 3, which prohibits cruel treatment and humiliation, is an inflexible standard. . . . The Army issued a thick manual this month that tells interrogators exactly what they can and cannot do in complying with the standard. The nation's most respected military leaders have said that they need and want nothing more to accomplish the mission of detaining and interrogating enemy prisoners -- and that harsher methods would be counterproductive. . . .

"Mr. Bush's real objection to Common Article 3 is not that it is vague. It is that it will not permit abusive practices that he isn't willing publicly to discuss or defend."

The Los Angeles Times editorial board writes: "On the treatment of detainees, the president has been especially disingenuous. He has never been a fan of international law, so it's absurd for him to pretend to want to 'clarify' the Geneva Convention. What he clearly wants to do is gut the treaty's humanitarian protections for wartime detainees, with an eye toward retroactively legitimizing abusive CIA interrogation tactics used on terrorism suspects."

The New York Times editorial board writes: "Watching the president on Friday in the Rose Garden as he threatened to quit interrogating terrorists if Congress did not approve his detainee bill, we were struck by how often he acts as though there were not two sides to a debate. We have lost count of the number of times he has said Americans have to choose between protecting the nation precisely the way he wants, and not protecting it at all.

"On Friday, President Bush posed a choice between ignoring the law on wiretaps, and simply not keeping tabs on terrorists. Then he said the United States could rewrite the Geneva Conventions, or just stop questioning terrorists. To some degree, he is following a script for the elections: terrify Americans into voting Republican. But behind that seems to be a deeply seated conviction that under his leadership, America is right and does not need the discipline of rules. He does not seem to understand that the rules are what makes this nation as good as it can be."

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As always there's a lot more good stuff at Dan F's daily post. I try to check it daily and never regret the effort.

Another reliable source, albeit with longer repeat cycle, is Frank Rich of the NY Times. His insightful columns are now locked behind a pay-per-view wall, but mysteriously there is some leakage at times. This is a timely seepage, when we all need all the news that's fit (vs. I guess all the news that we can keep the Internet community from getting for free), in order to counteract at least some of the damage done by the Gray One Itself in sanctioning war crimes and acting as a primary propaganda tool for rumsfeld/cheney/bush in the runup to the misbegotten invasion of the wrong place:

Rarely has a television network presented a more perfectly matched double feature. President Bush's 9/11 address on Monday night interrupted ABC's "Path to 9/11" so seamlessly that a single network disclaimer served them both: "For dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression."

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The untruths are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job. Maybe that's why I am beginning to find Dick Cheney almost refreshing. As we saw on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, these days he helpfully signals when he's about to lie. One dead giveaway is the word context, as in "the context in which I made that statement last year." The vice president invoked "context" to try to explain away both his bogus predictions: that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the insurgency (some 15 months ago) was in its "last throes."

The other instant tip-off to a Cheney lie is any variation on the phrase "I haven't read the story." He told Tim Russert he hadn't read The Washington Post's front-page report that the bin Laden trail had gone "stone cold" or the new Senate Intelligence Committee report(PDF) contradicting the White House's prewar hype about nonexistent links between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Nor had he read a Times front-page article about his declining clout. Or the finding by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war that there was "no evidence of resumed nuclear activities" in Iraq. "I haven't looked at it; I'd have to go back and look at it again," he said, however nonsensically.

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In this case, again, you're missing a helluva lot of good stuff if you don't check out the whole post. Do it!

My last couple 'cerpts here are actually out of chronological order but that seemed to work for me. Dave Lindorff at OpEd News is also picking up on signs of angst at 1600:

The Bush administration's full-court press against the Constitution is on, with the president getting closer to Senate, and possibly full Congressional approval of his warrantless spying program by the National Security Agency, and with a lobbying campaign on to get his program for kangaroo courts and life-time detention without trial for terror "war" detainees approved by Congress.

It's staggering to see this happening after a federal court just ruled that NSA spying without a show of probable cause is a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment, and after the US Supreme Court just ruled that Bush was in violation of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of POWs for refusing to treat the detainees at Guantanamo in accordance with US and International Law.

One might think this to be a case of a powerful president just steamrolling the courts and the Congress, but I think it is not a sign of strength, but rather the desperate act of a man who sees impeachment in his future, and who is acting while he can to try to cover up a few of his crimes.

For while the list of this president's crimes against the Constitution, the Republic and the People of the United States is long and ugly, the truth is that the two areas where he is the most vulnerable to impeachment are precisely the two that he is working so hard now to make go away: the warrantless NSA spying program and the abuse of the detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

This is because the president has already been found, in the first instance by a federal district court judge, and in the second by the full Supreme Court, to be a criminal (if you violate the law, you are by definition a criminal). It's just that as president he cannot simply be indicted and put on trial. That's why we have impeachment.

Bush and his legal adviser, the ethically and morally challenged Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who heads what is still officially called the "Justice" Department, but which has become more of an Enabling Department at this point, both know that if the House of Representatives is captured by the Democrats in November (only 15 seats need to change hands), there almost certainly will be impeachment hearings against the president. They know too that even Republican control of the Senate is at risk, which would make changing laws in his favor impossible.

This means that if they want to change the laws so that the president's crimes against the Constitution can be retroactively made legal, the sleight-of-hand needs to be completed in the next eight weeks, while the Republicans are firmly in charge of both houses of Congress.

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And then there's Bob Herbert, another victim of the NYT principle that money trumps news dissemination. That firewall gets breached at times, but to the extent I am representative of a non-resident New Yorker, it may be of import that that fence they put up has cut my interest in and reading of the paper by at least 75%. Marketing genius not.

I love his title, "The Stranger in the Mirror." One poster of this column included great image of Adolf gazing into spherical mirror.

We had elections in New York and around the country on Tuesday. But it seems to me that the biggest issue of our time is getting very short shrift from the politicians, and that’s the fact that the very character of the United States is changing, and not for the better.

One of the things that stands out in my mind amid the memories of the carnage and chaos of Sept. 11, 2001, is the eerie quiet — an almost prayerful quiet — that hovered over a scene on the western edge of Manhattan that afternoon.

I stood for a long time outside the triage center that had been set up at the Chelsea Piers sports and entertainment complex. Sunlight glistened off the roofs of ambulances lined up in military fashion on the West Side Highway. Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel were standing by, waiting for what they thought would be the arrival of legions of seriously wounded victims in need of emergency care.

There seemed to be very little talking. As I recall, most of the people maintained a kind of stunned, awed silence.

The expected onslaught of victims never came. As the afternoon faded, I headed east, along with others, toward the morgue at Bellevue Hospital.

What I thought was the greatest expression of the American character in my lifetime occurred in the immediate aftermath of those catastrophic attacks. The country came together in the kind of resolute unity that I imagined was similar to the feeling most Americans felt after Pearl Harbor. We soon knew who the enemy was, and there was remarkable agreement on what needed to be done. Americans were united and the world was with us.

For a brief moment.

The invasion of Iraq marked the beginning of the change in the American character. During the Cuban missile crisis, when the hawks were hot for bombing — or an invasion — Robert Kennedy counseled against a U.S. first strike. That’s not something the U.S. would do, he said.

Fast-forward 40 years or so and not only does the U.S. launch an unprovoked invasion and occupation of a small nation — Iraq — but it does so in response to an attack inside the U.S. that the small nation had nothing to do with.

Who are we?

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The character of the U.S. has changed. We’re in danger of being completely ruled by fear. Most Americans have not shared the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very few Americans are aware, as the Center for Constitutional Rights tells us, that of the hundreds of men held by the U.S. in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, many “have never been charged and will never be charged because there is no evidence justifying their detention.”

Even fewer care.

We could benefit from looking in a mirror, and absorbing the shock of not recognizing what we’ve become.