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By Weldon Berger, on September 30th, 2006
A Democratic senator walks into a Republican bar. A Republican senator pulls a knife and demands the Democrat’s money. The Democrat hands over his wallet, grabs the knife and stabs himself repeatedly, screaming “Don’t hurt me!” as he falls to the floor. The Republican removes the cash, returns the wallet to the Democrat, kicks him in the head and says “It isn’t the money, it’s the principle.” As he heads for the exit he trips over his supine colleague. Headlines the next day read “Republicans decry Democratic obstruction.”
Twelve Democratic senators voted to consecrate torture, indefinite incarceration of US and foreign citizens without trial or judicial review and immunity from war crimes as official US policy. Others, hailing themselves as principled constitutional warriors, promised not to filibuster the bill so long as Republicans allowed a doomed vote on an amendment which would have added an expiration date to some provisions.
In point of fact the particulars of the legislation — which will probably come out of the House-Senate conference committee more Draconian than it went in — may not much matter, given that Bush has already done most if not all of the things the bill authorizes him to do and that if he doesn’t like any of the provisions he will, as is his custom, issue a signing statement asserting the right to ignore them.
Continue reading Part-Time Monsters, Full-Time Fools: Torture Rules The Day
By Keifus, on September 28th, 2006
This week, it’s two non-genre-specific used bookstore finds. Given what you find in used bookstores, this is pretty well represented in my library. I’ll try to get more up to date one of these days, but these are both good ones if you missed ‘em.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird (A)
When I read Sirens of Titan several years ago, I likened Vonnegut’s phrasing to the dropping singular bricks of prose from great height, little texticules delivered precisely and distantly for maximum impact. Later, when I read Cat’s Cradle, I remarked that he’d moved these stunners to the level of whole paragraphs and pages, each section mounted alone for optimal appreciation like a gem. As the reader strolled though the museum of ice-9 and Bokononism, a floor plan gradually got revealed. By the time he wrote Jailbird, Vonnegut elevated this effect to the entire story.
It’s something about Vonnegut’s structure that really grabbed me this time, and by completing the loop, as it were, it grabbed me more completely than before. The plot progression in the book is simple and telegraphed early. The reader’s interest is maintained as the details and the backstory get revealed between the bullet points of this curt outline. This isn’t an unusual writing mode, but what makes Vonnegut special is that he’s managed to write a novel that is completely self-similar in form. Each of the large parts of the hierarchy has the same shape as the smaller parts below it. On the whole, the story is a finely crafted irony of a man who drifts from power to public contempt with no special skills or culpability or qualifications. One level down, the subplots of individual characters are fine synecdoches of this larger arc. Further down again, it’s reflected in the “exquisite set of little ironies” that a friendless old man manages to collect, and even on the word and sentence level, through clever repetition and juxtaposition, Vonnegut maintains this punch. He manages to place the whole scope of the book within periodic triple claps that break unwanted into quiet meditations.
Continue reading Kurt Vonnegut and Jonathon Carroll Reviewed
By Weldon Berger, on September 27th, 2006
Yesterday’s excerpt from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq documented president Bush’s success at spreading terror. So how much has it cost us to make the country less safe at the same time as a gang of criminal deviants in Congress and the White House work to bury for once and all whatever claim to moral authority we may have had?
According to a Congressional Research Service report — unclassified and produced at taxpayer expense but officially unavailable to the public — the cost of “military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care” associated with Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terra® through the just-ended fiscal year 2006 is $437 billion. That figure is expected to top $500 billion either this week or early in the next session of Congress. CRS says 95% of the funds are apportioned between Iraq (75%) and Afghanistan (20%), with 1% going for medical care for veterans. The Iraq and Afghanistan figures include foreign aid to those countries, which accounts for about 8% of the funds appropriated for the wars there. And of course we know what happened to a big chunk of that 8%: it’s been lost to corruption, incompetence and steadily escalating violence.
That’s $500 billion and counting to “shape a new generation of terrorist leaders” and increase both the “number and geographic dispersion” of religious jihadists. And as BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer has shown on several occasions, the NIE assessments of the worsening terrorism problem are based wholly in reality.
Continue reading $500 billion and all I got was this lousy NIE-shirt
By Weldon Berger, on September 26th, 2006
The Bush administration has released a declassified excerpt (Adobe Acrobat file) from a National Intelligence Estimate blaming Iraq for increased terrorism. Presumably, this is the upbeat portion of the report. One has to wonder what on earth the depressing part says.
Among the highlights are judgements that “the global jihadist movement—which includes al-Qa’ida, affiliated and independent terrorist groups, and emerging networks and cells—is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts;” that “activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion;” that “the Iraq ‘jihad’ [and] pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims [are] fueling the spread of the jihadist movement;” and that”[t]he increased role of Iraqis in managing the operations of al-Qa’ida in Iraq might lead veteran foreign jihadists to focus their efforts on external operations.”
Responding to questions about the NIE yesterday, the White House said that reports based on leaks about the document distorted the overall thrust of it. In fact, the declassified portion serves only to reinforce the impression conveyed by the government sources who spoke with reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post: the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has aided terrorist recruiting efforts by increasing anti-US sentiment and, as the CIA predicted last year, the fighting in Iraq is providing terrorists fighting there the opportunity to hone their skills for export to other parts of the world.
Continue reading Key judgements in National Intelligence Estimate are bleak
By Weldon Berger, on September 25th, 2006
Iraq, with an impotent central government propped up by US troops and sectarian militias, is in practical terms a failed state. Afghanistan is in deep trouble. Pakistan’s dictator president is publishing a memoir aimed at burnishing his anti-US credentials. Hezbullah is sitting pretty in Lebanon. Gaza is in ruins. Iran is daily gaining clout in the Middle East. The CIA says US foreign policy, in particular the elements of it creating large numbers of dead people, is manufacturing terrorists faster than we can capture or kill them. So what to do?
One of the answers appears to be “On to Africa.” An August 31 Reuters story referenced a “Combating and Preventing Terrorism in Africa” conference in connection with which Pentagon officials said they were considering establishing a unified Africa command. More recent stories confirm that the idea is close to becoming a done, if evolving, deal.
From a military standpoint, a unified Africa command makes sense. It’s a big continent with a lot of oil and several potential, if not actual, safe havens for terrorist organizations, and no US administration will want to be caught flat-footed on either issue in the region: if the Bush administration doesn’t establish an Africa command, the next administration, Republican or Democrat, will.
Continue reading Things not working out in the Middle East? On to Africa …
By Weldon Berger, on September 24th, 2006
Senate majority leader Bill Frist has an intriguing take on pending Senate legislation that would legitimate certain torture techniques: he says that if he talks about specific provisions in the bill, terrorists “[will] come and try to assassinate us and people listening to us right now.”
Frist was responding to questions about the “compromise” legislation permanently stripping some US prisoners of their habeas rights and authorizing the CIA to conduct interrogations in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and the new — actually not so new; it was completed almost six months ago — National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq.
The leader of what is widely considered to be the more thoughtful and deliberative chamber of Congress also said, in a moment reminiscent of his psychic Terri Schiavo diagnosis, that while he hadn’t seen the NIE and doesn’t know what it says, it shows that “[w]e’ve got to win this war on terror, wherever it is, and it’s going to be fought overseas, or if we don’t win there, it’s going to be fought here in the United States.”
Continue reading Frist waxes incoherent on torture bill, terrorism report
By Weldon Berger, on September 23rd, 2006
The New York Times reports today that an assessment produced jointly by all US intelligence agencies says US actions in Iraq exacerbated terrorism.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology. The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.
The National Intelligence Estimate is a consensus report, mind you, which means the conclusions represent what everyone felt comfortable signing off on. The Times says that “[p]revious drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. ”
Continue reading CIA, others say Iraq invasion helped spread terrorism
By Weldon Berger, on September 23rd, 2006
“It is my responsibility … to help the Iraqi people to turn Iraq into a stable, safe, peaceful and prosperous country. I take it seriously.”
Thus spake Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer on April 15 of 2003. He has since griped that he wasn’t given the tools necessary to fulfill his responsibility, specifically that the US didn’t go in with enough troops. He didn’t mention the handicap of administering an armed occupation with a staff consisting in large part of baby-faced Republican sycophants.
Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran generated a lot of excitement with his September 17 story detailing the cronyism afflicting the CPA, but the outlines of the situation were detailed first by his colleague Ariana Eunjung Cha in a May 23 2004 story and expanded upon almost exactly two years ago by former CPA official Peter Galbraith in a New York Review of Books essay which I wrote about here.
Continue reading Bremer optimistic; Rumsfeld blasts Bush on Iraq violence
By Weldon Berger, on September 22nd, 2006
Should Democrats want to win the mid-term elections? Will the debate over torture and a scofflaw White House help Republicans?
According to the leading online opinion journal, maybe yes and maybe no, but definitely one or the other or another.
Slate’s Jacob Weisberg tackles the issue of whether or not Democrats should want to win control of one or both chambers of Congress in November, and whether or not a loss for Republicans would be a victory for conservatives. Political correspondent John Dickerson addresses the question of whether the Republican-Republican battle over how to pay lip service to the Geneva Conventions while enshrining the elimination of habeas rights for US prisoners held abroad, preserving the president’s god-given right to order people tortured if he feels like it and immunizing administration officials from liability for war crimes committed to date is good for Republicans.
Along the way, Weisberg takes a swipe at the evidently absurd notion that Howard Dean’s strategy for building an effective Democratic presence in every state will be good for the party’s long-term prospects.
Continue reading Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and John Dickerson take a stand
By Eric Brewer, on September 22nd, 2006
Tony Snow laughed at me today in the White House briefing room after I asked him a question inspired by John Yoo’s vigorous defense, in an op-ed in last Sunday’s NY Times, of the Supreme Leader style of government that Mr. Yoo helped fashion when he worked in Bush’s Justice Department in the two years after the 9/11 attacks. . . . → Read More: In which Tony Snow laughs at me (but the last laugh is on Tony)
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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