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By Weldon Berger, on November 15th, 2006
Apparently John Gibson has a feature on Fox News called “The Big Story,” in which he fulminates against this or that outrage. Today’s outrage is all about the lawsuit filed by US and German attorneys seeking to have a German court hear war crimes charges against Donald Rumsfeld and other current and former US officials and military officers. The thing is, though, that Gibson gets almost every detail entirely wrong, from the very first sentence, on a subject that really isn’t very hard to understand.
“Yesterday came the big news that the Germans had suddenly announced a lawsuit had been filed against Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes.” The Germans didn’t “suddenly announce” the suit: they acknowledged receiving the complaint when it was filed yesterday. The American attorneys involved announced last week that they were filing it and the suit has featured prominently in the news during the five days since the announcement. So Gibson is off to a bad start already.
Continue reading The Big Story: Is John Gibson smart enough to breathe?
By Weldon Berger, on November 15th, 2006
The Bush presidency began with a Supreme Court decision disavowed by the very judges who made it, and has only gotten stranger. Now, six years in, the leader of the free world — the man who has claimed dictatorial powers unto himself, the war president, the decider — is the object of a very public salvage operation conducted by his family’s friends and retainers because they think he’s incompetent and delusional.
That’s really, truly bizarre. And so is the press response to it.
This is a man who is closing in on Saddam’s record for slaughtering Iraqis, has killed more American troops than any post-Vietnam president, has shredded the constitution and turned the treasury over to millionnaires and billionnaires and multinationals and whose combination of dull malevolence, brutal incompetency and intellectual shallowness may have led Hunter S. Thompson to blow his own head off in mourning for the incomparably more interesting, if less dangerous, Richard Nixon.
Continue reading Bush: Angry, arrogant, clueless, petulant and now pathetic
By Weldon Berger, on November 14th, 2006
The Center for Constitutional Rights and German lawyers have filed an historic lawsuit against current and former US officials including outgoing secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, US attorney general Alberto Gonzales and others accused of violating international law by abusing prisoners at Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison and the US internment camp at Guantanamo . . . → Read More: Act I in historic drama: Rumsfeld war crimes suit proceeds
By Anders Burkus, on November 13th, 2006
Multinational drug firms seeking to crash the gates of the UK’s National Health Service are getting a boost from the White House. The Guardian says that the US deputy health secretary wants the NHS formulary open to every new drug and wants the British government to permit consumer drug advertising rather than limiting it . . . → Read More: White House pressures Brits on behalf of Big Pharma
By Weldon Berger, on November 13th, 2006
If you’re a creationist looking for a quick answer to the vexing question of hominid fossils, I have two words for you: Ratso Rizzo. Lucy, Australopithecus, Homo erectus … they’re nothing more troubling than the post-Garden ancestors of Dustin Hoffman’s consumptive anti-hero in Midnight Cowboy.
The Guardian’s Stephen Bates paid a visit to the . . . → Read More: Dinosaurs and diseased New Yorkers: Creationism in action
By Weldon Berger, on November 12th, 2006
If a German court agrees to file war crimes charges against Donald Rumsfeld, he can blame the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Germany’s universal war crimes law grants the country jurisdiction over war crimes committed anywhere in the world, but the court rejected a 2004 attempt by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo inmates to have Rumsfeld charged because it found that the crimes in question were covered by US law.
But aside from authorizing Rumsfeld and the president to do whatever they want to whomever they want, wherever and whenever and for as long as they want, the Military Commissions Act stripped “unlawful combatants” of access to US courts while amending the War Crimes Act of 1996 and granting retroactive immunity to any US official who violated the original version. The plaintiffs now have no recourse under US law; unless the German court finds that they have no evidence US officials were responsible for the alleged crimes — which will be difficult since US officials have acknowledged responsibility in at least once instance — it may face a choice between filing the charges or branding the German war crimes law as hollow.
The suit also names attorney general Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington and others. For more information on those named and an HTML version of the background paper from the Center for Constitutional Rights (Acrobat file here), see the brief biographies and links below (click on the (more) link if you’re on our front page). The suit may name other defendants; we’ve requested that information and if there are additional ones, we’ll add them when the names become available.
Continue reading Military Commissions Act backfires on accused US officials
By Weldon Berger, on November 11th, 2006
John McCain has had a lock on the maverick label since the 2000 presidential campaign. Reporters are fined heavily and demoted if they don’t use the term when writing about him. But there are signs he’s losing his maverick mojo, and senator-elect Jim Webb of Virginia may put the final bullet in the myth.
McCain is in trouble anyway. Two weeks or so ago Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, a reliable Washington weathervane, wrote a mash note to maverick-in-waiting Barack Obama, who is apparently the lone religious Democrat in America. Weisberg appeared to be on the verge of dumping McCain — upon whom he’s had the obligatory man-crush since the Straight Talk Express took to the road in 2000 — when he said “Skeptics note that we’ve been through swoons like this before—including for McCain in 2000. Obama could turn out to be just another liberal fad, like Howard Dean in 2004. Once he decides to run, the cynics assure us, his halo will tarnish or crack. And maybe so. But this time, maybe not.”
Which is to say, “Dear John …”
Continue reading Move over, John McCain: there’s a new Maverick in town
By Weldon Berger, on November 11th, 2006
Is George W. Bush reverting to type and handing the remaining two years of a failed family enterprise — the presidency — to his father?
With the Democratic sweep in Congress, Bush’s domestic agenda has gone from comatose to dead; his sole remaining domain is foreign policy and for several reasons I’m not remotely convinced he’s ready to surrender it to his father. But the nominations of Robert Gates to head the defense department and David Laufman as the Pentagon’s inspector general, along with James Baker’s high profile on Iraq, suggest that at the least Bush is once again looking to his father and his father’s friends to if not clean up the mess he’s made, at least obstruct any efforts to examine how big a mess it actually is and to hold him responsible for it.
Continue reading Robert Gates and David Laufman: Cleanup on Aisle 3?
By Weldon Berger, on November 10th, 2006
A few days ago I wrote about my sense that a military draft will be instituted before the end of president Bush’s term in office. The piece generated some interesting comment which I think is worth reading. The gist of my case is that the increasing strain on the military imposed by Iraq is nearing the point at which it has to be addressed by either removing the source of the strain — extricating ourselves from Iraq without perpetrating some further disaster — or adding considerably more manpower more quickly than the recruiting climate will permit.
Following is the final comment in a series of interesting ones from Tony, a National Guard officer, and my response to it. For more context, you can read the original piece here, and the exchange between Tony and I beginning in the comments section here.
Tony initially took my thesis as an assault on the character and enthusiasm of troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Although any large population of heavily armed people in combat will include some you’d rather not spend time around and some whose failings make life appreciably more difficult for their fellows and their country, I’m concerned about mechanics that are for the most part outside the control of the troops.
Continue reading An interesting conversation on the possibility of a military draft
By Weldon Berger, on November 9th, 2006
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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The Big Story: Is John Gibson smart enough to breathe?
Apparently John Gibson has a feature on Fox News called “The Big Story,” in which he fulminates against this or that outrage. Today’s outrage is all about the lawsuit filed by US and German attorneys seeking to have a German court hear war crimes charges against Donald Rumsfeld and other current and former US officials and military officers. The thing is, though, that Gibson gets almost every detail entirely wrong, from the very first sentence, on a subject that really isn’t very hard to understand.
“Yesterday came the big news that the Germans had suddenly announced a lawsuit had been filed against Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes.” The Germans didn’t “suddenly announce” the suit: they acknowledged receiving the complaint when it was filed yesterday. The American attorneys involved announced last week that they were filing it and the suit has featured prominently in the news during the five days since the announcement. So Gibson is off to a bad start already.
Continue reading The Big Story: Is John Gibson smart enough to breathe?