Heroes Are Hard to Find

I'll be stealing shamelessly here (you don't hear any cry for financial remunerance do you?). This is a tale of a diplomat I don't recall even hearing of before - he apparently quit his job in protest in 2003 over our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Wow. I'm having serious trouble coming up with any more recent actual "principled" resignation by a Bush appointee. The only departures I can think of have tended to be full-out rodents trying to escape the slightest hint of accountability. I could be missing one or two there, for which I offer a mea culpa, but the point is the pattern. Our cartoon cowboy went for fealty rather than skill, talent, or original thinking. It's an administration with no character or virtue. Loyalty, boot-licking, elitism, and word-parsing are the primary qualitities they revere.

It's no wonder then that a person of character who might actually be a student of history and have a conscience might do some serious career planning in early 2003. Tristero is my terrific source at Hullabaloo:

Heroes are always a rare thing. But one of the greatest of our time surely is John Brady Kiesling, the career diplomat in Greece who dramatically resigned in 2003 rather than continue to support the Bush/Iraq war. Here, Kiesling writes with undisguised bitterness at the financial and career rewards Tenet received for behaving like a scoundrel while, in contrast, Kiesling's job prospects were, in effect, destroyed because he was absolutely, and very publicly, right. Two excerpts from this essay by one of the most remarkable Americans of our time:

Accurate prophecy regarding Iraq does not require brilliance or deep expertise. An open-minded person who watched the interplay of nationalism and religion in the Middle East, anyone who listened sympathetically to ordinary Muslims, could have predicted the response to our amateurish attempts at preemptive emocracy. And now that foreign policy pragmatism is socially acceptable again, the spies, diplomats, politicians, journalists and academics are pulling out their private correspondence to remind us that indeed they knew better. They would have given an honest opinion on Iraq back when it mattered, but their Commander in Chief failed to ask them for it.

Note that Kiesling writes "foreign policy pragmatism." Nevertheless, his excellent book, Diplomacy Lessons is subtitled "Realism for an Unloved Superpower." But it is clear that Kiesling is hardly advocating black box diplomacy of the traditional "Realist" sort, but rather diplomacy that knowledgeably grapples with issues in international relations as they come up, not within the dangerous framework of an ideological agenda.

I'll come back to the implications of that in a moment. But I wanted to share this other excerpt from Kiesling's essay with you first:

I live simply these days in central Athens. By bicycle (the silver SUV had palled, even if I could still afford it) it takes half an hour to Korydallos prison. There I study "Revolutionary Organization 17 November," a Greek terrorist group that humiliated the CIA for 27 years. This next book would be more salable if I soft-pedaled U.S. blunders, but then key lessons for America's "war on terrorism" would be lost.

I find this very moving. Rather than deliberately cashing in on the big bucks (and from what I can tell, I may be one of three people in the world who actually bought and read "Diplomacy Lessons"), Kiesling is doing scholarship - primary source scholarship - that will provide a candid,
no-holds barred, look at a long, frustrating, struggle with terrorism. Talk about serving your country...

Given both his pragmatic approach to diplomacy and the overall tenor of his writing, Kiesling is the kind of person who, at one point, would probably have been labelled a conservative. Quiet, principled, uninterested in revolutionary change, loyal to his country, aware of America's foibles, but never seriously questioning its core ideas. I used to meet people like him, registered Republicans, people who I strongly disagreed with on many, many issues but whose basic decency and integrity was simply beyond question. That was a very long time ago.

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And that is the tragedy of the modern political discourse. There is nothing to gain from listening to any of the so-called conservative voices, be they Kristol, or Perle, or Wolfowitz, or Rumsfeld, or Cheney or O'Reilly...well, you can list them as well as I. There is no there there, intellectually or morally. There is only the will to power and the willingness to say anything, do anything, to seize power and wield it beyond oversight or question. There are no real ideas, despite their pretensions otherwise, and there are no fine minds; Wolfowitz's academic credentials merely recalls to mind one of Frank Zappa's funniest lines from Roxy & Elsewhere"You get nothing with your college degree."

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When Amnesia Comes a-Callin'

I posted much of this as a comment at Next Hurrah a couple nights ago. The irk persists:

It continues to fester at me how delusional reality-averse rightwingers get away with trotting out the "attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President" twaddle, often trying (unsuccessfully, praise be) to use it to make the whole mess magically go away ("he can fire them without any reason at all, so there's no crime here").

How is this "pleasure" business supposed to have any traction at all when we apparently have inexperienced DOJ cub scouts managing the to-be-fired list and possibly acting as firing squad while AG and WH reps keep reading cue cards to the effect that the very same president was wholly oblivious to the entire affair?

For the sake of argument, let us say George has the right to fire a USA anytime for no or any cause he damn well chooses (not too different from common terms of employment in the outside world, come to think of it). How does that power turn up in the possession of a young green-behind-the-ears sprout at DOJ under circumstances where the self-advertised dumbest stump of an Attornery General claims what amounts to wholesale amnesia? Obviously we must conclude that a person with memory deficiencies like our little AG sycophant should not be holding public office, but we must not let him continue to take the heat here. There is serious crime to be found just up the street.

Hey Gomer - What You Doin' in September?

There seems to be a consistent appalling and amazing bumpkin-like quality to the journalism and dialogue regarding the supposed significance of the September timeframe for “revisiting” the issue of troop strength and strategy in Iraq. It’s the sort of “Duh” thing that can be amusing in the context of, say, classic musicals – rubes and snake-oil salesmen in the likes of Oklahoma! and The Music Man come to mind.

But in this context it’s damned unfunny. How eager we seem to be to believe that this time it will be different and September will be a magical epiphany. Oh sure, the administration and those subservient enough to still be in positions of seeming authority will for once find a way to accurately assess and document the true state of affairs in Iraq. They will come back and report candidly to Congress and We the People on their newly-accurate findings and let the chips fall where they may. Depending on the findings, they’ll schedule parades to celebrate the “win” or the dude and his entourage will admit they were wrong and we’ll all grit our teeth and come together in a new spirit of camaraderie to do whatever it takes to promptly end the occupation.

Say what? Could we dial up that skepticism just a tad please? Have we forgotten that Petraeus seems to have his present assignment at least largely because he was the first candidate willing to sufficiently stifle whatever independence/testosterone he has left after a long military career so as to pass muster with the cordon of slimy loyalty-sniffers around the president? Recall that more than a few of his peers were (and are) openly opposed to the “surge” program. This is obviously not someone with the courage to break it to Our Fool that he is the worst president in the last 30 years and is even more of an idiot than his father and that Hollywood stooge. Which is to say, General P gives every sign of being a Good Soldier - like those in Germany in the ‘30’s.

But somehow, mirabile dictu, in September 2007 this man is going to do a Moses act and come to us with absolute truth regarding the Situation in Iraq (no doubt carved in stone).

And a reminder. These are seasoned recidivist liars. History demonstrates that they have absolutely no compunction about fudging, distorting, dodging, and outright lying. What they most enjoy seems to be the closely-cropped verbiage where they didn’t “actually” say that. I don’t think I would be far from the mark to suggest that almost every answer they offer up to the rare question they submit to must be closely-parsed. Lying is what they do for a living – at our expense.

There has been an ever-receding horizon for the Barbara’s black sheep. We never actually get to compare performance to claims, do we? He has been well-enabled by such as Tom Friedman, who even has a mocking entry in his name in Wikipedia as a result of his routine “always-six-months-out” forecast of success. Of course the administration and their mindless sycophants (Broder, et al) merely refine this by having it be a 3 or 4 month timeframe. They've been that close to victory for several years now! I wonder what the average Iraqi thinks of that.

And speaking of success, how about a specific target or two? The closest we seem to have come up with so far are the benchmarks the dude set in connection with the “surge” – and none of these have apparently been met! How are we supposed to judge success or failure when the house-that-used-to-be-white-but-now-is-a-Superfund-Site cannot identify anything resembling targets, goals, or metrics? (The reality of course is that they’re preoccupied chasing their tail on multiple criminal investigations, not to mention trying to defend our occupation of Iraq and the meaningless sacrifice of thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.)

"September" appears to me to be yet another episode of the constantly-receding horizon. George and reality are never on the same side of the planet. Why don't we just be pro-active like real MBAs and tackle this obvious problem now?

An Inconvenient Murder

The inclusion of John McKay, US Attorney for Western Washington State, with those whose jobs were terminated for what seem as the days go by with not a whit of evidence otherwise to be wholly political and partisan ideology (and hence almost certainly illegal) always struck me as odd. Not to take away from the helter-skelter whacko aspect of the firings in general. No explanation other than overreaching by folks already so deep into felonious behavior in multiple arenas and yet still walking the street (hi KKKarl - can you spell "hubris"??) is needed. These are repeat-offenders, feeling themselves above the law - and they have been explicit in that belief.

The question is, have we as a nation lost the gumption to tell them where to get off? Criminal sentences are already obviously needed for pretty much the entirety of the so-called "Executive" branch of government. The Supreme Court made a mockery of "justice" and anything resembling a reasonable application of the law when they installed our little new england/texas playboy in the first place. The Department of Justice is obviously going to be renamed very shortly the Laughingstock of Justice, thanks to Alberto, the most embarrassing hispanic-toady-of-all-time. The CIA, FBI, and DOD are clearly in full failure mode in terms of staffing, performance of their stated function, and credibility with the American people.

But the initial hypothesis for McKay, i.e. his failure to be the sort of vote-fraud thug-prosecuter that apparently many of the US Attorneys were willing to be for the clear purpose of gaming elections for the Republican Party, always seemed shaky.

There is another, much more sinister hypothesis now, more Rove/Cheney/Bush-like in its nasty combination of sucking up to power and money. This theory is so plausible and consistent with the now-known psychopathic tendencies of this administration that I believe we must consider it truth until proven otherwise.

Dan Eggen seems to have broken the story in the Washington Post:

A U.S. attorney in Seattle was singled out for dismissal in part because he clashed with senior Justice Department officials over the investigation of a federal prosecutor's murder, and he was recommended for removal 18 months earlier than was previously known, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews.

D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, told congressional investigators that he believes he may have recommended former U.S. attorney John McKay's removal in March 2005 because of conflicts with senior Justice officials over the investigation of the 2001 murder of federal prosecutor Tom Wales, according to congressional aides and Sampson's attorney.

Several officials familiar with the investigation said McKay and other officials in Seattle believed that senior Justice officials were not paying enough attention to the case. Sampson did not cite specifics, saying only that McKay had demanded actions that led to conflicts, congressional aides familiar with his account said.

The suggestion of a connection between the firing and the unsolved Wales murder case generated angry reactions from McKay and others in western Washington yesterday.

"The idea that I was pushing too hard to investigate the assassination of a federal prosecutor -- it's mind-numbing" that they would suggest that, McKay said. " . . . If it's true, it's just immoral, and if it's false, then the idea that they would use the death of Tom Wales to cover up what they did is just unconscionable."

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I'm not the gambling sort, but you can make book on this being full-out felony-level crime by someone appointed by our little Drugstore Cowboy. Of course almost all folks with an IQ over 80 (thus excepting those still supporting the president in every respect) know that this is only another such violation, which even with as little as we yet know must amount to scores of felonies.

There has for good reason been more than a little followup on that article, including this at Down With Tyranny:

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As James Fallows notes in the aforementioned blog entry (which we'll come back to), Wales "was shot, through the window of his home, as he sat working at his computer late at night." On October 11, 2001, to be exact.

Astonishingly, in all these years, given an event as momentous as the murder of a federal prosecutor, no one has ever been arrested. It turns out, though, that the case hasn't necessarily gone unsolved. In fact, almost from the start, local law-enforcement officials and local FBI personnel identified a suspect. Then, mysterously, the local FBI office had the case yanked away by nameless superiors in Washington.

The local law-enforcement people don't seem ever to have wavered in their belief that they know who the perpetrator is. Incredible as it may sound, there are all too plausible reasons to believe that the Bush administration deliberately derailed the investigation for political reasons.

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And then there's this, at Anonymous Liberal:

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Now for some background. Tom Wales was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Seattle U.S. Attorney's Office. He was murdered in his Seattle home on the night of October 11, 2001. He was shot in the neck through his basement window as he sat at his computer. The story was big news in Seattle, and for obvious reasons. First and most obviously, Wales was a federal prosecutor. As the Seattle Times has noted, "[i]f Wales was killed because of his work, he would be the first federal prosecutor in U.S. history to be slain in the line of duty." But Wales was more than just an anonymous prosecutor. He was the president of an organization called Washington Ceasefire and an outspoken advocate of stricter gun control laws. His activities on behalf of this organization had angered a number of people in the gun-rights crowd.

Indeed, the prime suspect in the case is a Bellevue airline pilot and gun-enthusiast whom Wales prosecuted for fraud in 2000. Wales eventually dropped the prosecution, but the pilot--furious with the government about the case--sued for wrongful prosecution (his suit was later dismissed). According the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

In the middle of the pilot's suit to recover attorney's fees, terrorists attacked America on 9/11. Wales, a leading anti-gun activist, argued on television against calls to arm commercial pilots. One federal criminal justice source later speculated that the pilot, whom he called a "Second Amendment nut" who owned several guns, saw Wales on TV and "went over the edge."

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