Poor Richard's Almanac--Mark Anderson

Lorenz's Halloween 3

2007-11-12T17:09:00.001-06:00

Lorenz's Halloween 2

2007-11-12T17:08:00.000-06:00

Lorenz's Halloween

2007-11-12T17:02:00.000-06:00

Bob Garfield's Track Record

2007-10-17T10:47:00.000-05:00

Bob Garfield is actually still conflicted about stating the obvious truth that the Bush administration lies and breaks the law on a daily basis. He resents being forced by the administration to have to do it. He knows it's true, but he still refuses to accept it.

No such ambivalence when it comes to shooting down experiments in journalistic reform. This is a pretty stunning, but sadly typical exhibit of the liberal wing of the media's Stockholm Syndrome.

Poor Bob Garfield is in danger of being compared to Amy Goodman for telling the truth. Pass the smelling salts!

Gotcha journalism's assumption of cynicism and bad faith simply can't be presupposed when it comes to those in power with a track record of nothing but. But one exchange with an experiment in journalistic reform he personally misrepresents and the gloves are off, he's calling out liars and demanding apologies.

The evidence is clear: Jay Rosen is a greater danger to the republic than George W. Bush so he must be held to a stricter standard.

Aside from fear or self-loathing, this is the only possible logical premise that could support Bob Garfield's clownish double standard.

Either way, Bob Garfield upholds a truly noble tradition of abject obeisance to authority and contempt for reform. Congratulations, Bob, you and the Democratic congress are on the same dysfunctional page!

Broder's Real Americans

2007-10-04T11:47:00.000-05:00

Digby describes David Broder as effectively arguing that people who disagree with him aren't real Americans. I would extend her point to suggest that Broder's position here is entirely continuous with Limbaugh's recent "phony soldiers" diatribe. Limbaugh clearly and explicitly said that even Republican soldiers who disagree with him about policy are not "real soldiers." (I know he now wishfully claims he didn't say it, but we can't let fantasy become the only standard for analyzing political fantasy.)

For me, it is the increasingly apparent continuum between the purportedly centrist Broder and the avowedly right-wing Limbaugh that fails us--that has effectively banished political disagreement, banished the public sphere in a manner of speaking.

On one side we have "real Americans" who agree with daily GOP talking points and who come to about 30% of the population in most opinion polls. On the other side we have anyone else who dares to disagree--the 70% of the American people who are so beyond the pale they can't be taken seriously and O'Reilly can call them Nazis and both parties in Congress will pass legislation saying, "Amen."

How did David Broder, icon of civic journalism, arrive at a point where he is effectively calling 70% of the American people "phony Americans"? How can he not see a problem reinforcing an anti-democratic force like Rush Limbaugh who says essentially the same thing? It is becoming difficult to avoid Greenwald's conclusion that this happens because Broder and Limbaugh ultimately agree on these sorts of things. It is becoming difficult not to conclude that the press and the Democrats capitulate because they too are closet extremists, they too are GOP rubber stamps distinguished only by an additional layer of self-loathing and bad faith.

Does Universal Jurisdiction Exist? Yes and No.

2007-09-17T10:57:00.000-05:00

Michael and Richard, welcome to Poor Richard's Almanac--Mark Anderson.

Amnesty International has collected case law from twelve separate nations grounded in claims to universal jurisdiction. Like most major issues in international law, universal jurisdiction is highly contested. There are many who favor it, even see it as the bare minimum for a civilized world, and many others who oppose its institution. At present, an objective observer would have to say that it is frequently and consistently being asserted by many different states and many different contexts. It has sometimes been enforced, sometimes defied, and sometimes abandoned by the states that claim it. In other words, it is frequently claimed, sometimes enforced, and sometimes opposed, often for political rather than legal reasons.

It is simply counterfactual to assert that such a highly contested and occasionally enforced doctrine of international law does not exist. There are legal schools of thought that oppose it. For those schools to assert that it "does not exist" is an assertion of a highly-contested interpretation they continue to actively promote, it is anything but an assertion of fact.

Lastly, isn't there a danger that opposition to universal jurisdiction retroactively challenges the legitimacy of Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Trials? Why would the Geneva conventions apply to Axis powers, but not to the Allies? Why would they apply to enemies of the U.S., but not to the U.S. and its allies today? Isn't the alternative an effective concession that these were cases of victor's justice--that international law absent universal jurisdiction is a state of exception run out of Washington D.C. and the U.N. Security Council?

The GOP Fairness Doctrine Playbook

2007-09-04T10:37:00.000-05:00

This is a response to a blogpost by Jay Rosen, which in turn responded to a post by Glenn Greenwald.

Dear Jay,
As usual, a very thought-provoking post. Doesn't this reading, though, require us to consider Warren Strobel's approach to be outside the playbook of status quo journalism? And is that really the case? I would say both yes and no.

Yes, there is a new politically correct celebrity journalism playbook that has become the norm over the last fifteen years or so that Strobel doesn't follow. No, in that his type of investigative journalism is exactly the job that even politically correct GOP fairness doctrine journalists still claim they are about when they go to work.--except that they're not. I define the GOP fairness doctrine as the journalistic rule that even fictional statistics and verifiably revisionist history must be treated with grave seriousness if they come from the politically and ideologically powerful GOP.

We might ask: Well what is so alternative about checking to see if what your sources tell you is true or not? Why shouldn't we see Strobel as status quo journalism and the rest of the press as part of a new paradigm that won't speak its name--a new paradigm that places greater emphasis on power and authority and political correctness than fact? Isn't that the condition of possibility of the game Rove and Cheney have played with the press? That power and authority and dogmatic "he said/she said" political correctness are considered to trump verifiable reality?

Because the truth of the matter is that Strobel was able to break the stories. In his mind, he was simply doing his job as an investigative journalist and wondered why his colleagues seemingly stopped doing theirs.

To me, one of the intriguing insights of the "savviness" theory is that it recognizes that what passes for power did indeed often trump verifiable reality. We know these things were verifiable because Strobel was able to verify them when others wouldn't even as we know they could have. What accounts for journalism moving from "Trust, but verify" to "Trust Authority?" Why was authority confused with verification?

What I'm suggesting is that perhaps there is another piece of the puzzle. Don't we see the press move from a paradigm of watchdog investigative journalism to a paradigm of politically correct journalism that nevertheless purports to be the same old watchdog journalistic objectivity? Isn't it the playbook of politically correct journalism that was overwhelmed by Cheney/Rove? Isn't it the previous paradigm of "just the facts mam" Sgt. Friday investigative journalism practiced by Strobel that was able to "call them on it?"

Lastly, wasn't one of the big differences between Strobel and his colleagues that his editor insisted that he follow the truth rather than the claims of power and the GOP fairness doctrine that requires even fictional facts must have their day if they come from a politically powerful source? Do you think it's possible that you are overly discounting the significance of a majority of editors (for whatever reasons) who insisted on enforcing the newer GOP fairness doctrine playbook and thereby tied the hands of many professionals who would undoubtedly have done much better under the old rules, the older investigative journalism playbook? Wouldn't the old investigative playbook anticipate and even expect that authority and deception go together? Wasn't it the credulity of the newer GOP fairness doctrine playbook that was overwhelmed? Doesn't the fact that radicalism in the guise of authority became an unimaginable and surprising idea in itself establish that this was not your father's investigative journalism playbook that the press was referring to in guiding its actions?

Despite journalists' protestations to the contrary, hasn't the GOP fairness doctrine playbook displaced the investigative journalism playbook and become the current status quo? Isn't it the new GOP fairness doctrine playbook that makes Strobel's old-school investigative journalism something other than mainstream now?

Gloria Borger reports from the "as if" world of the GOP fairness doctrine in which what Karl Rove says is true regardless of whether it comes to pass. This is not the same world that Warren Strobel lives and works in. They can't both be the traditional playbook. Which is which? Which was overwhelmed? It looks to me as if there is a newly reigning GOP fairness doctrine playbook in town and one of the biggest obstacles to thinking through the consequences of its hegemony is getting journalists to admit that anything has changed. To admit that the job they are doing does not fit Warren Strobel's job description. Can I get a witness?

There's a McLuhan in My Media Soup!

2007-08-28T21:26:00.000-05:00

Over at PressThink, Jay Rosen has a reply to Michael Skube's Blogs: All the Noise That Fits, the 3,238th bloggers vs. the press anti-blogging rant which acuses bloggers of not doing original reporting. In Skube vs. Rosen, newmediatheory.net suggests that considering a number of Anglo-American media theorists might deepen the discussion. In this post, I try to add to that ongoing conversation.

Jay,
Based on your reading of McLuhan in your MA, are there any insights of McLuhan that you feel still fundamentally inform your take on the emerging role of blogs in the media today?

I would say he is still useful in at least the following three ways:
1) The media are typically additive rather than substitutive--there are plenty of media roles to go around and it isn't the end of the world if they are expanded or redistributed. Of course, when this undermines a curmudgeon's authority later in life we can't expect him/her to comprehend the reality, to be pleased by the outcome, or to accept its rationality. Failure to understand the basic taxonomy of blogs is to demonstrate ignorance of your purported object of discussion. Film scholars certainly won't get sympathy for complaining that the latest melodrama is one of the lamest excuses for documentary film they've ever seen. It's a sign of incompetence and lack of knowledge, not an exculpatory context. Militantly raving about your own category mistake is a sign of intellectual failure and lack of curiosity about how your own opinion actually connects up with cultural reality.

2) Historical precedent demonstrates we may expect proponents of expiring views of the role of certain media in a changing world to cling to their increasingly counter-factual views with near theological and historically uninformed fervor. The media rank very high on the list of institutions about which people often seem constitutionally incapable of becoming self-reflexive or self-conscious. The authority of certain forms of entrenched cultural capital is often capable of disqualifying or marginalizing what our lying eyes tell us about sociological reality for decades. These general human failings are further complicated by whole public relations industries with vested interests in discrediting entire media systems in ways that are often consistent in terms of partisanship, but tactically and strategically incoherent as regards media systems per se.

3) Previous tectonic shifts in the media landscape give us important historical context. They provide a precedent for imagining the possibility of old media being challenged and reshaped without utter extinction being the necessary outcome. It was easy to imagine that the telegraph or the radio or the TV would make the news aspect of the newspaper completely redundant, too slow to be considered news anymore. The paper as it originally functioned was revolutionized by the wire services in the mid-nineteenth century and many of its originally perceived purposes of existence were largely farmed out to the electronic media from early in the twentieth century. The purpose of the popular press has already been revolutionized several times over by now. Since the mid-twentieth century, newspapers shifted from breaking the news to defining the news within a several tiered media hierarchy of popular and less popular outlets whose cultural capital and opinion-making influence was an inverse function of their audience share. In other words, for many decades radio and TV delivered the news, but newspapers set the agenda that they all followed. Talk radio, cable news, our current media system agenda setter Matt Drudge, and the more recent emergence of the wider blogosphere have all in their own way fundamentally reshaped this landscape and are in the process of making it more interactive even as older hierarchies of news-defining authority continue to function in their own way.

The really hard part, obviously, is what does all this mean now? That's the question your recent projects are clearly attempting to explore and map out in a more or less pragmatic and experimental manner and why it's so fascinating to keep tabs on what you and your collaborators are able to come up with.

New Haircuts for Mel and Eugene

2007-08-17T15:55:00.001-05:00

Lorenz Wednesday Evening

2007-08-17T15:26:00.001-05:00

This is Lorenz on the deck next to the house Wednesday evening.

Lorenz and Christine posing for the camera, same time, same channel.

Picture of Lorenz

2007-08-17T15:12:00.001-05:00

Thanks to a new SD card reader I can finally download j-peg files from my Ricoh digital camera.
Here's Lorenz yesterday afternoon at the end of his daycare day.

Hamas Wins! Thanks to Us

2007-06-16T09:07:00.000-05:00

By M.J. Rosenberg | bio

There is, no doubt, a whole lot of celebrating going on. For those more afraid of negotiations than of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any of that violent crew, a collapsing Palestinian Authority with Gaza in absolute chaos with Mahmoud Abbas weakened almost to irrelevancy is a dream come true.

Gaza has fallen to Hamas. Abu Mazen's Fatah is on the run. Unless a United Nations force (like UNIFIL) steps in, a sliver of territory with a population of 1.4 million, a short drive from Tel Aviv will become a dagger aimed at Israel's heart and perhaps even an Al Qaeda staging ground. A humanitarian crisis of horrific proportions is a certainty.

Who's fault is it?

The Palestinians, of course. But hardly theirs alone. As Nahum Barnea, Israel's finest journalist, put it today in Yediot Achronoth, "The US and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure. The Americans, in their lack of understanding for the processes of Islamization in the territories, pressured to hold democratic elections and brought Hamas to power with their own hands…. Since the elections, Israel, like the US, declared over and over that "Abu Mazen must be strengthened," but in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert's kisses and backslapping turned Abu Mazen into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street."

The failures to which Barnea refers didn't start with the Palestinian elections either, not by a long shot. Back when Hamas was just a gleam in Sheik Ahmad Yassin’s blind eye, Israeli right-ringers were implementing a strategy to eliminate the authority of Palestinian moderates by building up religious extremists. These Israelis (some very high in Likud governments) believed that only supplanting Arafat’s Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a situation under which Israel would be forced to negotiate with moderates.

It was in 1978 when the government of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin indirectly assisted the start-up of a "humanitarian" organization known as the Islamic Association, or Mujama. The roots of this Islamist group were in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot, and it soon was flush with funding and political support. The right-wing strategists devised the theory of creating Hamas as an alternative to Fatah because they believed that Muslim Brotherhood types would devote themselves to charity and religious study and passively accept the occupation. They certainly would never put Israel on the spot by offering to negotiate.

Likud governments even deported Palestinian advocates of non-violent resistance (most notably, the Ghandian, Mubarak Awad) at the same time that it was doing everything it could to build the street cred of fanatics who, a few years later, would proclaim themselves Hamas, dedicated to Israel’s elimination.

The pro-Hamas tilt accelerated in 1988 when Yasir Arafat himself announced that he favored the two-state solution and that previous PLO demands that Israel be replaced by Palestine were, in his words “caduq” (inoperative).

An Arafat committed to two-states struck terror in the hearts of the settlers and their allies who were and are determined to hold on to the West Bank forever. Their worst fears were realized when Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres repudiated this craziness and decided to engage with the PLO in order to strengthen it vis a vis Hamas, which was by the time Rabin came to office exceedingly powerful thanks in large part to the Israeli right’s support.

We all know the rest of the story. A young rightist killed Rabin in the belief (a belief indoctrinated in him by rightwing rabbis) that stopping Rabin would stop the peace process. As President Clinton told me in 1997, assassin Yigal Amir was right. Clinton said that unlike almost every other assassin in history, Amir achieved his goal, although not completely.

In this context, it is not difficult understanding how Hamas won the legislative elections in 2006. This is another ugly part of the story. First we demanded that the Palestinians hold elections (Abbas didn’t want them), then we dispatched monitors to certify sure they were “free and fair” which they were, but when we didn’t like the election results we rejected them and promised that the Palestinians would “pay.” Almost immediately Members of Congress rushed to stop almost all forms of aid not just to Hamas-run institutions but to the Palestinian people at large.

There was another way we might have gone. We could have welcomed Hamas’s participation in the election as a sign that Hamas was implicitly accepting the Oslo framework (which it was), insisted on the complete cessation of violence, and then used carrots and sticks to encourage the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority to mend its ways. But we offered no carrots, just sticks. And we didn’t even make much of an effort to strengthen Hamas’s arch-enemy, President Mahmoud Abbas, with Congress hastening to impose redundant and insulting conditions even on aid that was to be sent through him.

It was all fun and games, politics as usual. Meanwhile, Hamas looked better and better to a people whose salaries were not being paid, thanks to the US sponsored international boycott of the PA, and whose schools and hospitals were collapsing.

Today it is almost amusing to contemplate the professions of horror on the part of right-wing Israelis (and their neocon friends) who scream “bloody murder” about an outcome they helped effect and actually welcome.

The name of their game was, is, and always will be making sure that Israel has “no partner” with whom to negotiate. Their worst fear is of Palestinians like Mahmoud Abbas who is a credible negotiating partner.

I understand that this is a difficult point to assimilate. But the fact is that the Israeli (and American) right-wingers are rooting for the Palestinian extremists. And that is why, today, with Hamas fully in control of Gaza, they are as happy as Red Sox fans when the team is ten games up on the Yankees on Labor Day.

A new confidential United Nations Report confirms how Israeli and US policies have helped Hamas. Not only that, we have prevented the United Nations from using its own credibility to mitigate the situation.

In his report to the Secretary General, Alvaro de Soto, the UN’s special envoy to the Middle East, wrote, “Even-handedness has been pummeled into submission in an unprecedented way.

"The steps taken by the international community with the presumed purpose of bringing about a Palestinian entity that will live in peace with its neighbor Israel have had precisely the opposite effect…. With all the focus on the failings of Hamas, the Israeli settlement enterprise and barrier construction has continued unabated." He said “that Israeli policies seemed perversely designed to encourage the continued action by Palestinian militants,” whose stance toward Israel he called “abominable.”

He blasted the tendency that exists among U.S. policy-makers “... to cower before any hint of Israeli displeasure and to pander shamelessly before Israeli-linked audiences."

And he made clear that the politics-driven American agenda makes it nearly impossible for the international community to move Israelis and Palestinians toward peace. He specifically cites former World Bank chair, James Wolfensohn, a Jew determined to achieve some semblance of security for Israelis and Palestinians, as someone who finally threw up his hands in disgust when nickel-and-dime micromanaging by politicians only worried about the next election became too much to take.

De Soto cites with anger the three conditions which the international community demanded the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority meet before it receives aid – ending violence, recognizing Israel, and accepting all previously negotiated agreements. He maintains that they were designed to be rejected by Hamas and, in fact, as a pretext for punishing the Palestinians for voting wrong.

He points out that Israel itself has not recognized that Palestinians have a right to a state in the West Bank/Gaza or anywhere else. All Israel has ever done is recognize that the PLO is a legitimate negotiator on behalf of the Palestinian people, no different than recognition by the Palestinians that the government in Jerusalem is a valid negotiator for Jews living in historic Palestine. Asking Hamas to recognize Israel in advance of negotiations, a precondition not demanded of Jordan or Egypt, or of Israel vis a vis the Palestinians, was a non-starter and the authors of the three conditions knew it.

If the conditions were intended as an opening for diplomacy, there would only have been one condition: a full and complete cessation of terrorism. But they were not, and so the three conditions accomplished less than nothing.

De Soto does not let Hamas off the hook. But he does not employ the same yardstick to Israel that he does to a bunch of religious fanatics. Call that a double standard if you like but it is one supporters of Israel should appreciate. Israel is as different from Hamas as Tel Aviv is from Gaza City. De Soto expects Israel to behave rationally. He is shocked when it doesn’t.

Now the enemy could be truly at the gates. We can simply say “to hell with them” and watch Gaza become Hamasistan. Or we can get an international force in Gaza to stop the blood-letting, ensure that humanitarian needs are met, and adopt the policy of distinguishing between Palestinians ready to live in peace with Israel, whatever their affiliations, and those who aren’t. Above all, we can abandon a policy of starving people into submission, a policy reminiscent of the dictator who threatens that “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been a threat to American security, although one that is somewhat indirect. But this week’s events make the threat to America (and to Israel, of course) infinitely more direct. Hamas is on the brink of fully controlling territory adjacent to Israel and Egypt. Is there any reason to believe that if they solidify their hold, their Iranian friends (or even A-Q) will not follow?

A little urgency on the part of the Bush administration is long overdue.

As for the Israeli and Jewish right, these are good times. Palestinians are killing each other. There is "no partner" for negotiations. And, if lunatics own Gaza, they will never have to worry about negotiations. Besides they decided long ago that no Israel at all is preferable to an Israel without the West Bank.

Party on.

Billmon: Thanks for the Memories

2006-12-29T00:03:00.000-06:00

Dear Billmon,
Your site is temporarily bloggered. You had a "Thaaat's All Folks" Cartoon up a few days ago, so I'm wondering if you're done blogging (again). If so, thanks for the memories. If not, read you soon.You rocked.
Regards,
Mark Anderson

Bush's Retreat from Empiricism and Global Poverty

2006-12-28T20:31:00.000-06:00

We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.

--George W. Bush, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 17, 2002

One year prior to the September 11 attacks, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency predicted increased religious extremism and violence as a result of increasing economic inequality due to globalization, warning that:

the rising tide of the global economy will create many economic winners, but it will not lift all boats...[It will] spawn conflicts at home and abroad, ensuring an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today...Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it.

CIA, Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue about the Future with Nongovernmental Experts, December 2000

Surely one of the central exhibits for the case that the Bush administration participates in a retreat from empiricism would be its relentless promotion of neoliberalism and its militarist cousin, neoconservatism, on the demonstrably false premise that free trade and deregulation inevitably promote the common good, counterfactually and sanctimoniously claiming that globalization raises the living standards of the poor across the world when nearly every known historical case demands precisely the opposite conclusion.(Because there are so many economists who cook the books, this sadly takes us back to competing theories producing different facts. This also means that Thomas Friedman and George W. Bush promote the problem as the solution.)

The last twenty years of world history demonstrate precisely the reverse in over seventy separate national economies, yet it is still an article of "centrist" faith that opposition to the neoliberalism that impoverishes the world further everyday demonstrates a callous indifference to the interests of the poor. It is difficult to think of a more paradigmatic case of the retreat from empiricism.

Michel Chossudovsky,Global Poverty in the Late Twentieth Century

Susan George,Global Poverty or Global Justice?

Hat tip to Antonia Juhasz, The Bush Agenda

After We Sentence Saddam, What Should his Buddy Don Rumsfeld Get?

2006-11-03T13:42:00.000-06:00

The GOP: We were for Saddam while he tortured,
but opposed him when he stopped. We insist that foreign
policy must be grounded in the personal character and integrity
of the leaders in question.

After we sentence Saddam, what should Donald Rumsfeld
and Ronald Reagan get?

Link:
What are Democrats Doing About Nov. 5 Saddam Verdict?

The Zoo of pro-GOP Media Monkeys Chatters On

2006-11-03T10:40:00.000-06:00

The Bush administration and their Fox/Limbaugh zoo of squealing, infantile, monkey-like supporters flinging feces at anything that respects reality made their reputation for ignorance and mendacity the old-fashioned way--they earned it.

US Corporations Oppose Civilized Working Conditions In China

2006-10-14T10:57:00.000-05:00

David Barboza:
SHANGHAI, Oct. 12 — China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980’s.

The move, which underscores the government’s growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here.

The proposed rules are being considered after the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a new doctrine that will put greater emphasis on tackling the severe side effects of the country’s remarkable growth.

Whether the foreign corporations will follow through on their warnings is unclear because of the many advantages of being in China — even with restrictions and higher costs that may stem from the new law. It could go into effect as early as next May.

It would apply to all companies in China, but its emphasis is on foreign-owned companies and the suppliers to those companies.

The conflict with the foreign corporations is significant partly because it comes at a time when labor, energy and land costs are rising in this country, all indications that doing business in China is likely to get much more expensive in the coming years.

But it is not clear how effectively such a new labor law would be carried out through this vast land because local officials have tended to ignore directives from the central government or seek ways around them.

China’s economy has become one of the most robust in the world since the emphasis on free markets in the 80’s encouraged millions of young workers to labor for low wages at companies that made cheap exports. As a result, foreign investment has poured into China.

Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany.

The Chinese government proposal, for example, would make it more difficult to lay off workers, a condition that some companies contend would be so onerous that they might slow their investments in China.

“This is really two steps backward after three steps forward,” said Kenneth Tung, Asia-Pacific director of legal affairs at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Hong Kong and a legal adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce here.

The proposed law is being debated after Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s biggest retailer, was forced to accept unions in its Chinese outlets.

State-controlled unions here have not wielded much power in the past, but after years of reports of worker abuse, the government seems determined to give its union new powers to negotiate worker contracts, safety protection and workplace ground rules.

Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law.

The skirmish has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce — which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike — against labor activists and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Party’s official union organization.

The workers’ advocates say that the proposed labor rules — and more important, enforcement powers — are long overdue, and they accuse the American businesses of favoring a system that has led to widespread labor abuse.

On Friday, Global Labor Strategies, a group that supports labor rights policies, is expected to release a report in New York and Boston denouncing American corporations for opposing legislation that would give Chinese workers stronger rights.

“You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms,” said Tim Costello, an official of the group and a longtime labor union advocate. “This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world.”

China’s Labor Ministry declined to comment Thursday, saying the law is still in the drafting stages. Several American corporations also declined to comment on the case, saying it was a delicate matter and referring calls to the American Chamber of Commerce.

But Andreas Lauffs, a Hong Kong-based lawyer who runs the China employment-law practice at the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie, said some American companies considered the proposed rules too costly and restrictive.

Mr. Lauffs said the new rules would give unions collective-bargaining power and control over certain factory rules, and they would also make it difficult to fire employees for poor performance.

“You could hire a sales manager, give him a quota and he doesn’t sell anything, and you couldn’t get rid of him,” Mr. Lauffs said. “It’s not easy to get rid of someone now, but under these rules it would be impossible.”

It is not clear what the final law will look like, and only an updated draft is expected soon. But specialists say the trend suggests that there may be new challenges ahead for foreign companies doing business in this country.

Under China’s “iron rice bowl” system of the 1950’s and 60’s, all workers were protected by the government or by state-owned companies, which often supplied housing and local health coverage.

But by the 1980’s, when the old Maoist model had given way to economic restructuring and the beginning of an emphasis on market forces, China began eliminating many of those protections — giving rise to mass layoffs, unemployment, huge gaps in income and pervasive labor abuse.

The worst off have been migrant workers, most of them exiles from the poorest provinces who travel far from home to live in cramped company dormitories while working long hours under poor conditions.

Migrant workers in virtually every city complain about abuses like having their pay withheld or being forced to work without a contract.

“I don’t know about the labor law,” said Zhang Yin, an 18-year-old migrant who washes dishes in Shanghai. “During the three months I’ve been here, my boss has delayed the salary payment twice. I want to quit.”

Having grown increasingly concerned about the nation’s widening income gap and fearing social unrest, officials in Beijing now seem determined to improve worker protection. In recent years, more and more factory workers have gone to court or taken to the streets to protest poor working conditions and overdue pay.

“The government is concerned because social turmoil can happen at any moment,” says Liu Cheng, a professor of law at Shanghai Normal University and an adviser to the authorities on drafting the proposed law. “The government stresses social stability, so it needs to solve existing problems in the society.”

In a surprisingly democratic move, China asked for public comment on the draft law last spring and received more than 190,000 responses, mostly from labor activists. The American Chamber of Commerce sent in a lengthy response with objections to the proposals. The European Chamber of Commerce also responded.

The law would impose heavy fines on companies that do not comply. And the state-controlled union — the only legal union in China — would gain greater power through new collective-bargaining rights or pursuing worker grievances and establishing work rules. One provision in the proposed law reads, “Labor unions or employee representatives have the right, following bargaining conducted on an equal basis, to execute with employers collective contracts on such matters as labor compensation, working hours, rest, leave, work safety and hygiene, insurance, benefits, etc.”

If approved and strictly enforced, specialists say the new laws would strikingly alter the country’s vast labor market and significantly push up the wages of everyday workers.

“If you really abide by the Chinese labor laws,” said Anita Chan, an expert on labor issues in this country and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, “migrant-worker wages would go up by 50 percent or more.”

Until now, though, existing Chinese labor laws have gone largely unenforced, which has further complicated the debate here. Opponents of the proposed law argue that enforcing existing labor laws would be enough to solve the country’s nagging problems. Advocates respond that adopting new laws would set the stage for stricter enforcement.

Even lawyers working for multinational corporations seem to agree that there is an epidemic of cheating.

Mr. Liu, the Shanghai lawyer who advised the government on the draft proposal, says many companies avoid existing laws by using employment agencies to hire workers. He says the new law will do more to protect workers from such abuse by holding companies accountable.

“The principle is not to raise the labor standard dramatically,” he said, “but to raise the cost of violating the law. The current labor law is a paper tiger and is a disadvantage to those who obey it. If you don’t obey the law, you won’t be punished.”

Dubya's Legal Shredder

2006-10-07T16:22:00.001-05:00

For those of you who lost track, and for those of you who get your news by watching TV in America and therefore have absolutely no idea what goes on in the world, here is a little example of how the Bush administration has been turning our homeland into a rogue nation; a nation that spits on international law, international cooperation, human decency and the general safety and well being of Earth’s inhabitants.

This is an unpublicized list of international treaties obliterated by the Bush administration, without the approval of the American people. We were not even given any chance to voice our positions on these vital matters because the criminal corporate media did not do its job and report this to the public.

Treaties Revoked by George W. Bush

• The Biodiversity Treaty (continued non-support)
• The Geneva Convention
• The Forest Protection Plan
• The Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty
• The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
• The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
• The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention
• The 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
• The UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
• The Chemical Weapons Convention
• The International Criminal Court

* Honorable Mention: The U.S. Constitution!

Can you imagine what this list would look like if we listed the environmental protection laws and regulations that have been obliterated by the Bush administration along with this? Think about it!

14,000 in Bush Regime's Legal Purgatory

2006-09-18T04:36:00.001-05:00

Patrick Quinn:
In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.

"It was hard to believe I'd get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release — without charge — last month. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell."

Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq.

Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes," U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.

Defenders of the system, which has only grown since soldiers' photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib shocked the world, say it's an unfortunate necessity in the battles to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, and to keep suspected terrorists out of action.

Every U.S. detainee in Iraq "is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces," said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S.-led military detainee operations in Iraq.

But dozens of ex-detainees, government ministers, lawmakers, human rights activists, lawyers and scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States said the detention system often is unjust and hurts the war on terror by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.

Building for the Long Term

Reports of extreme physical and mental abuse, symbolized by the notorious Abu Ghraib prison photos of 2004, have abated as the Pentagon has rejected torture-like treatment of the inmates. Most recently, on Sept. 6, the Pentagon issued a new interrogation manual banning forced nakedness, hooding, stress positions and other abusive techniques.

The same day, President Bush said the CIA's secret outposts in the prison network had been emptied, and 14 terror suspects from them sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to face trial in military tribunals. The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the tribunal system, however, and the White House and Congress are now wrestling over the legal structure of such trials.

Living conditions for detainees may be improving as well. The U.S. military cites the toilets of Bagram, Afghanistan: In a cavernous old building at that air base, hundreds of detainees in their communal cages now have indoor plumbing and privacy screens, instead of exposed chamber pots.

Whatever the progress, small or significant, grim realities persist.

Human rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that were never explained. The secret prisons — unknown in number and location — remain available for future detainees. The new manual banning torture doesn't cover CIA interrogators. And thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law's oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned.

"If you, God forbid, are an innocent Afghan who gets sold down the river by some warlord rival, you can end up at Bagram and you have absolutely no way of clearing your name," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York. "You can't have a lawyer present evidence, or do anything organized to get yourself out of there."

The U.S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the "war on terror" ends — as it determines.

"I don't think we've gotten to the question of how long," said retired admiral John D. Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy. "When we get up to 'forever,' I think it will be tested" in court, he said.

The Navy is planning long-term at Guantanamo. This fall it expects to open a new, $30-million maximum-security wing at its prison complex there, a concrete-and-steel structure replacing more temporary camps.

In Iraq, Army jailers are a step ahead. Last month they opened a $60-million, state-of-the-art detention center at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad's airport. The Army oversees about 13,000 prisoners in Iraq at Cropper, Camp Bucca in the southern desert, and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.

Neither prisoners of war nor criminal defendants, they are just "security detainees" held "for imperative reasons of security," spokesman Curry said, using language from an annex to a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the U.S. presence here.

Questions of Law, Sovereignty

President Bush laid out the U.S. position in a speech Sept. 6.

"These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation," he said. "We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle."

But others say there's no need to hold these thousands outside of the rules for prisoners of war established by the Geneva Conventions.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared last March that the extent of arbitrary detention here is "not consistent with provisions of international law governing internment on imperative reasons of security."

Meanwhile, officials of Nouri al-Maliki's 4-month-old Iraqi government say the U.S. detention system violates Iraq's national rights.

"As long as sovereignty has transferred to Iraqi hands, the Americans have no right to detain any Iraqi person," said Fadhil al-Sharaa, an aide to the prime minister. "The detention should be conducted only with the permission of the Iraqi judiciary."

At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim told AP it has been "a daily request" that the detainees be brought under Iraqi authority.

There's no guarantee the Americans' 13,000 detainees would fare better under control of the Iraqi government, which U.N. officials say holds 15,000 prisoners.

But little has changed because of these requests. When the Americans formally turned over Abu Ghraib prison to Iraqi control on Sept. 2, it was empty but its 3,000 prisoners remained in U.S. custody, shifted to Camp Cropper.

Life in Custody

The cases of U.S.-detained Iraqis are reviewed by a committee of U.S. military and Iraqi government officials. The panel recommends criminal charges against some, release for others. As of Sept. 9, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq had put 1,445 on trial, convicting 1,252. In the last week of August, for example, 38 were sentenced on charges ranging from illegal weapons possession to murder, for the shooting of a U.S. Marine.

Almost 18,700 have been released since June 2004, the U.S. command says, not including many more who were held and then freed by local military units and never shipped to major prisons.

Some who were released, no longer considered a threat, later joined or rejoined the insurgency.

The review process is too slow, say U.N. officials. Until they are released, often families don't know where their men are — the prisoners are usually men — or even whether they're in American hands.

Ex-detainee Mouayad Yasin Hassan, 31, seized in April 2004 as a suspected Sunni Muslim insurgent, said he wasn't allowed to obtain a lawyer or contact his family during 13 months at Abu Ghraib and Bucca, where he was interrogated incessantly. When he asked why he was in prison, he said, the answer was, "We keep you for security reasons."

Another released prisoner, Waleed Abdul Karim, 26, recounted how his guards would wield their absolute authority.

"Tell us about the ones who attack Americans in your neighborhood," he quoted an interrogator as saying, "or I will keep you in prison for another 50 years."

As with others, Karim's confinement may simply have strengthened support for the anti-U.S. resistance. "I will hate Americans for the rest of my life," he said.

As bleak and hidden as the Iraq lockups are, the Afghan situation is even less known. Accounts of abuse and deaths emerged in 2002-2004, but if Abu Ghraib-like photos from Bagram exist, none have leaked out. The U.S. military is believed holding about 500 detainees — most Afghans, but also apparently Arabs, Pakistanis and Central Asians.

The United States plans to cede control of its Afghan detainees by early next year, five years after invading Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaida's base and bring down the Taliban government. Meanwhile, the prisoners of Bagram exist in a legal vacuum like that elsewhere in the U.S. detention network.

"There's been a silence about Bagram, and much less political discussion about it," said Richard Bennett, chief U.N. human rights officer in Afghanistan.

Freed detainees tell how in cages of 16 inmates they are forbidden to speak to each other. They wear the same orange jumpsuits and shaven heads as the terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, but lack even the scant legal rights granted inmates at that Cuba base. In some cases, they have been held without charge for three to four years, rights workers say.

Guantanamo received its first prisoners from Afghanistan — chained, wearing blacked-out goggles — in January 2002. A total of 770 detainees were sent there. Its population today of Afghans, Arabs and others, stands at 455.

Described as the most dangerous of America's "war on terror" prisoners, only 10 of the Guantanamo inmates have been charged with crimes. Charges are expected against 14 other al-Qaida suspects flown in to Guantanamo from secret prisons on Sept. 4.

Plans for their trials are on hold, however, because of a Supreme Court ruling in June against the Bush administration's plan for military tribunals.

The court held the tribunals were not authorized by the U.S. Congress and violated the Geneva Conventions by abrogating prisoners' rights. In a sometimes contentious debate, the White House and Congress are trying to agree on a new, acceptable trial plan.

Since the court decision, and after four years of confusing claims that terrorist suspects were so-called "unlawful combatants" unprotected by international law, the Bush administration has taken steps recognizing that the Geneva Conventions' legal and human rights do extend to imprisoned al-Qaida militants. At the same time, however, the new White House proposal on tribunals retains such controversial features as denying defendants access to some evidence against them.

In his Sept. 6 speech, Bush acknowledged for the first time the existence of the CIA's secret prisons, believed established at military bases or safehouses in such places as Egypt, Indonesia and eastern Europe. That network, uncovered by journalists, had been condemned by U.N. authorities and investigated by the Council of Europe.

The clandestine jails are now empty, Bush announced, but will remain a future option for CIA detentions and interrogation.

Louise Arbour, U.N. human rights chief, is urging Bush to abolish the CIA prisons altogether, as ripe for "abusive conduct." The CIA's techniques for extracting information from prisoners still remain secret, she noted.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government's willingness to resort to "extraordinary rendition," transferring suspects to other nations where they might be tortured, appears unchanged.

Prosecutions and Memories

The exposure of sadistic abuse, torture and death at Abu Ghraib two years ago touched off a flood of courts-martial of mostly lower-ranking U.S. soldiers. Overall, about 800 investigations of alleged detainee mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to action against more than 250 service personnel, including 89 convicted at courts-martial, U.S. diplomats told the United Nations in May.

Critics protest that penalties have been too soft and too little has been done, particularly in tracing inhumane interrogation methods from the far-flung islands of the overseas prison system back to policies set by high-ranking officials.

In only 14 of 34 cases has anyone been punished for the confirmed or suspected killings of detainees, the New York-based Human Rights First reports. The stiffest sentence in a torture-related death has been five months in jail. The group reported last February that in almost half of 98 detainee deaths, the cause was either never announced or reported as undetermined.

Looking back, the United States overreacted in its treatment of detainees after Sept. 11, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a noted American scholar of international law.

It was understandable, the Princeton University dean said, but now "we have to restore a balance between security and rights that is consistent with who we are and consistent with our security needs."

Otherwise, she said, "history will look back and say that we took a dangerous and deeply wrong turn."

Back here in Baghdad, at the Alawi bus station, a gritty, noisy hub far from the meeting rooms of Washington and Geneva, women gather with fading hopes whenever a new prisoner release is announced.

As she watched one recent day for a bus from distant Camp Bucca, one mother wept and told her story.

"The Americans arrested my son, my brother and his friend," said Zahraa Alyat, 42. "The Americans arrested them October 16, 2005. They left together and I don't know anything about them."

The bus pulled up. A few dozen men stepped off, some blindfolded, some bound, none with any luggage, none with familiar faces.

As the distraught women straggled away once more, one ex-prisoner, 18-year-old Bilal Kadhim Muhssin, spotted U.S. troops nearby.

"Americans," he muttered in fear. "Oh, my God, don't say that name," and he bolted for a city bus, and freedom.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — The Associated Press staff in Baghdad and AP writers Andrew Selsky in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Matthew Pennington in Kabul, Afghanistan; Anne Plummer Flaherty in Washington, and Charles J. Hanley in New York contributed to this report.

Billmon Explains Bush Strategy in Iraq

2006-09-16T18:18:00.000-05:00

Doctors say traumatic brain injuries are the signature wound of the Iraq war, a byproduct of improved armor that allows troops to survive once-deadly attacks but does not fully protect against roadside explosives and suicide bombers.

So far, about 1,000 patients have been treated for the symptoms, which include slowed thinking, severe memory loss and problems with coordination and impulse control.

However, doctors say they are puzzled by the fact that some of the worst casualties appear to be among top officials in the Pentagon and the Bush administration -- even though these patients typically show no physical signs of injury.

"We've seen almost total loss of advanced brain functions among scores of top commanders and officials -- Sanchez, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, Cambone, Pace, you name 'em," one doctor explained. "The vice president's office, for example, is practically a coma ward. And yet most of these people have been nowhere near the fighting."

Pentagon researchers say they are exploring the possible use of a "stupid ray" or some other high-tech device by the insurgents.

"The implications are pretty grim," one scientist said. "Some of the worst-hit patients haven't even been to Iraq. If the terrorists now have a weapon that can reach all the way to Washington D.C., we've probably lost the war."

Your President is a Moron

2006-08-17T01:28:00.000-05:00

By THOM SHANKER and MARK MAZZETTI:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 — President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people — had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday.

Those who attended a Monday lunch at the Pentagon that included the president’s war cabinet and several outside experts said Mr. Bush carefully avoided expressing a clear personal view of the new prime minister of Iraq, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But in what participants described as a telling line of questioning, Mr. Bush did ask each of the academic experts for their assessment of the prime minister’s effectiveness.

“I sensed a frustration with the lack of progress on the bigger picture of Iraq generally — that we continue to lose a lot of lives, it continues to sap our budget,” said one person who attended the meeting. “The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success.”

Another person who attended the session said he interpreted Mr. Bush’s comments less as an expression of frustration than as uncertainty over the prospects of the new Iraqi government. “He said he really didn’t quite have a sense yet of how effective the government was,” said this person, who, like several who discussed the session, agreed to speak only anonymously because it was a private lunch.

More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended.

The White House would not comment on the details of the discussion but a senior official warned against drawing conclusions on what the president thinks based on questions he asked in the process of drawing out the invited guests.

Participants said Mr. Bush appeared serious and engaged during the lunch, which lasted more than 90 minutes, as the experts went through a lengthy discussion of the political, ethnic, religious and security challenges in Iraq. And through it all, Mr. Bush showed no signs of veering from the administration’s policies to support the new government and train Iraqi security forces to take over the fight, and only then bring American troops home.

One participant in the lunch, Carole A. O’Leary, a professor at American University who is also doing work in Iraq with a State Department grant, said Mr. Bush expressed the view that “the Shia-led government needs to clearly and publicly express the same appreciation for United States efforts and sacrifices as they do in private.”

The White House began to open its doors to a wider range of views earlier this year, after acknowledging that months of complaints after Hurricane Katrina that the president and his team were isolated — “living in a bubble” was a frequent refrain — had gotten through. But that accelerated after Joshua B. Bolten became White House chief of staff in the spring.

One of the participants at the Monday lunch, Eric Davis, a Rutgers University political science professor who previously served as director of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, released a text of his remarks.

Mr. Davis said he discussed the regional upheaval that could follow if Iraq descended into chaos or was allowed to divide along ethnic lines. “I believe that the American people do not fully understand the potential domino effects that the collapse of Iraq into disorder and anarchy would have on the Middle East and the global political system,” he said.

Mr. Davis said he urged the creation of more jobs for younger Iraqis, and proposed a major reconstruction fund to be underwritten by Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil states seeking regional stability.

Although none of the academics openly criticized Bush administration policy, according to those in attendance, Mr. Davis did take issue with the administration’s order to remove Baath Party members from public service, and he urged the hiring of more qualified Baathists in Iraq or living abroad, and inviting retired army officers back into service.

Vali R. Nasr, an expert on Shia Islam, said the Pentagon meeting appeared to be an effort to give White House, Pentagon and State Department officials better insight into Iraq’s religious and ethnic mix.

“They wanted new insight, so they could better understand the arena in which they are making policy,” said Mr. Nasr, author of “The Shia Revival.” He said he got no sense that the Bush administration was contemplating a shift in its Iraq policy.

Some who have been brought into past meetings with President Bush, even fierce critics of the conduct of the Iraq war, give credit to the White House for beginning to listen to alternate viewpoints.

Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired Army commander who went to the White House in May, said he believed that Mr. Bolten has been largely responsible for bringing in new voices to counsel the president.

“They’re listening to new ideas and they’re listening to the reality,” said General McCaffrey, who has criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and believes that the Iraq war could break the United States Army.

But one critic of the administration’s management of the war effort said he remained unconvinced that the White House was actually listening to alternative viewpoints.

The critic, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a telephone interview that “one of the hallmarks of this administration has been stubbornness to any change of approach.”

Lebanon as Dry Run for Iran

2006-08-13T23:19:00.000-05:00

Seymour Hersh:
In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”

Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat—a terrorist organization, operating on their border, with a military arsenal that, with help from Iran and Syria, has grown stronger since the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended, in 2000. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said he does not believe that Israel is a “legal state.” Israeli intelligence estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three thousand of these have been fired at Israel.

According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”

The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”

Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel’s plan for the air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions. In response to a separate request, a National Security Council spokesman said, “Prior to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel, the Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack. Even after the July 12th attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans were.” A Pentagon spokesman said, “The United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program,” and denied the story, as did a State Department spokesman.

The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.

“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.

“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”

A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” (As this article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground.)

According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term—and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah “may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”

Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East told me that Israel viewed the soldiers’ kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin its planned military campaign against Hezbollah. “Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something small every month or two,” the U.S. government consultant with ties to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members of Hamas, the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the border with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.

The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been cross-border incidents involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both directions, for some time. “They’ve been sniping at each other,” he said. “Either side could have pointed to some incident and said ‘We have to go to war with these guys’—because they were already at war.”

David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said that the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a reason to attack Hezbollah. “We did not plan the campaign. That decision was forced on us.” There were ongoing alerts that Hezbollah “was pressing to go on the attack,” Siegel said. “Hezbollah attacks every two or three months,” but the kidnapping of the soldiers raised the stakes.

In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and retired military and intelligence officers all made one point: they believed that the Israeli leadership, and not Washington, had decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion polls showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice. “The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah,” Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha’aretz, who has written several books about the Israeli intelligence community, said. “By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity.”

“We were facing a dilemma,” an Israeli official said. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “had to decide whether to go for a local response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive response—to really take on Hezbollah once and for all.” Olmert made his decision, the official said, only after a series of Israeli rescue efforts failed.

The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.

One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone. “Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past.”

Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,” the consultant said.

The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)

The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)

Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad, told me that to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the Israeli and U.S. governments were routine, and that, “in all my meetings and conversations with government officials, never once did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with the United States.” He was troubled by one issue—the speed with which the Olmert government went to war. “For the life of me, I’ve never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily,” he said. “We usually go through long analyses.”

The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air Force, worked on contingency planning for an air war with Iran. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz, a former labor leader, could not match his experience and expertise.

In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”

There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and Kosovo. Clark, who retired from the military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Presidency in 2004, took issue with the analogy: “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point. Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective—it was not about killing people.” Clark noted in a 2001 book, “Waging Modern War,” that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well as the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground.”

Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.)

Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”

Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”

The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”

The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”

The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”

Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”

In the White House, especially in the Vice-President’s office, many officials believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah is working and should be carried forward. At the same time, the government consultant said, some policymakers in the Administration have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese society is too high. “They are telling Israel that it’s time to wind down the attacks on infrastructure.”

Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early August, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range-missile launching capacity. “The problem is short-range missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas and homes,” Siegel told me. “The only way to resolve this is ground operations—which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn’t work.” Last week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was troubled by the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, Halutz’s deputy, was put in charge of the operation, supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that Nasrallah might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. “There is a big debate over how much damage Israel should inflict to prevent it,” the consultant said. “If Nasrallah hits Tel Aviv, what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn’t stop, and to remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years. We’re no longer playing by the same rules.”

A European intelligence officer told me, “The Israelis have been caught in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the belief that they could solve their problems with toughness. But now, with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed, and they need different answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?” The problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence officer said, is the group’s ties to the Shiite population in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, where it operates schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.

A high-level American military planner told me, “We have a lot of vulnerability in the region, and we’ve talked about some of the effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and on the oil infrastructure.” There is special concern inside the Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing nations north of the Strait of Hormuz. “We have to anticipate the unintended consequences,” he told me. “Will we be able to absorb a barrel of oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking that you can do it all from the air, even when you’re up against an irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You’re not going to be successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to hear the best case.”

There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war against Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said, “Every negative American move against Hezbollah was seen by Iran as part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare for the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah—anti-ship and anti-tank missiles—and training its fighters in their use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran’s new weapons. Iran sees the Bush Administration as trying to marginalize its regional role, so it fomented trouble.”

Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled “The Shia Revival,” also said that the Iranian leadership believes that Washington’s ultimate political goal is to get some international force to act as a buffer—to physically separate Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply route is through Syria. “Military action cannot bring about the desired political result,” Nasr said. The popularity of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the U.S. were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Nasr said, “you may end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah—the rock star of the Arab street.”

Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration’s most outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.

Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”

A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the intricacies of the war plan. “He is angry and worried about his troops” in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew in 1975, “and he did not want to see something like this having an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern, the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by pro-Iranian Shiite militias.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war’s implications for the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war’s impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, “there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what’s taking place between Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we face in that region, and it’s a difficult and delicate situation.”

The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of the Administration, however, and said simply, “Rummy is on the team. He’d love to see Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for less bombing and more innovative Israeli ground operations.” The former senior intelligence official similarly depicted Rumsfeld as being “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.”

There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her initial support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has reportedly been tempered by dismay at the effects of the attacks on Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said that in early August she began privately “agitating” inside the Administration for permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria—so far, without much success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had directed an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian foreign minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no results. The Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as “trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties” within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide between career diplomats in the State Department and “conservatives in the government,” including Cheney and Abrams, “who were pushing for strong American support for Israel.”

The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams has emerged as a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and that Rice’s role has been relatively diminished. Rice did not want to make her most recent diplomatic trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. “She only wanted to go if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire.”

Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”

Even those who continue to support Israel’s war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. “Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. “The warfare of today is not mass on mass,” he said. “You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.”

Constitutional Crisis and the Cheney Administration: Congressional Report

2006-08-07T09:23:00.000-05:00

The U.S. Military Intentionally Targets Journalists in Case You Hadn't Noticed

2006-07-22T12:10:00.000-05:00

Ron Suskind: US Deliberately Bombed Al Jazeera

CJR Daily
What Happened at Al Jazeera's Kabul Bureau?

If Suskind was somewhat vague about the incident in his book (he writes that "inside the CIA and White House there was satisfaction that a message had been sent to al-Jazeera" on the day of the bombing), he cleared up any ambiguity during an appearance this week on CNN's Situation Room. "My sources are clear that that was done on purpose, precisely to send a message to al-Jazeera, and essentially a message was sent," he told Wolf Blitzer. "... There was great anger at al-Jazeera at this point." He added, "I'll tell you emphatically it was a deliberate act by the U.S."

Reporters Without Borders

Al-Ahram Weekly

In an article published earlier this week by top British journalist Robert Fisk, he recalled a conversation with Al-Jazeera's correspondent in Baghdad before the Arab Media Centre which housed his offices was bombed: "I remarked how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage -- seen across the Arab world -- of civilian victims of the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. 'Don't worry, Robert,' Tareq Ayoub replied. 'We've given the Americans the exact location of our bureau so we won't get hit.' Three days later, Tareq was dead."... US interrogators are obsessed with the idea of Al-Qaeda infiltration of the channel.

Associated Press
AL Jazeera Journalist Killed

The Abu Dhabi TV office in Baghdad also was targeted by U.S. bombing, the station reported.

Blairwatch
FOIA regquest for Al Jazeera memo denied: But Number 10 officially confirms it exists

Democracy Now!
Al Jazeera London Bureau Chief Responds to Report of British Memo

Goodman: One of the people you were up against was arguing that it was right to attack Al Jazeera, saying it's state media.
Fouda: No decent human being on earth would even begin to justify murdering journalists. And in the name of what? In the name of spreading freedom in our part of the world? I mean, you just can’t argue that you are trying to defend everything that Western civilization stands for, that you are trying to spread freedom and democracy in the Middle East, but in the process, you are actually doing exactly the opposite.

Arab News
Wife of Al-Jazeera Journalist Files Lawsuit Against Bush, Rumsfeld

The Neoconservative Vampire Sleeps in the White House and Sups in Lebanon

2006-07-22T11:44:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald:
Apparently, it isn't enough that the U.S. has been defending without reservation the wisdom of the Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon. Nor is it enough that we have been unilaterally blocking a cease-fire and other diplomatic solutions. Nor is it enough that the American taxpayer pays for enormous amounts of Israel's military equipment -- from the planes flying over Lebanon to the tanks entering it. Now we are handing Israel the very bombs that they drop in order to flatten more and more of Lebanon, on a bomb-by-bomb basis:

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The debate over whether the Israeli war should be "our war" is becoming increasingly academic. Once one country starts supplying another country with bombs in the middle of a war, both are participants -- much the way it is said, as imperfect as the comparison is, that Iran is "behind" the actions of Hezbollah. Whatever else might be true, the bombs that will be blowing up all sorts of things and people (beginning) in Lebanon over the next weeks, likely months and perhaps longer will have come directly from the U.S. And everyone, including the Muslims whose "hearts and minds" were ostensibly the object of our invasion of Iraq, will know that. That doesn't exactly seem like a sound strategy for diffusing Muslim animosity towards the U.S. -- which happens to be the Bush administration's stated goal.

There is palpable and quite unseemly excitement gripping neoconservatives over what the world sees as a horrible and tragic war, but which they glowingly call a "great opportunity." They have an extraordinary goal that they intend to fulfill -- to somehow induce the U.S. to vastly expand its Middle East war to include yet more countries which have not attacked us, and more amazingly, to do so notwithstanding the fact that our current little experiment in Iraq is, arguably, in the worst shape it has been in some time, perhaps since we invaded.

The boldness of their objective, its sheer audacity, is requiring neoconservatives to throw all caution to the wind, to really put all of their rhetorical cards on the table and be open about what they really think and want, unburdened by all of the lofty pretenses about the virtues of spreading democracy and winning hearts and minds. The real underlying premises and impulses of neoconservatism are being laid bare for all to see. And what they really want is more war and destruction -- lots and lots and lots of it -- to rain down mercilessly on their enemies and anyone nearby.

The terms they are using to describe their grand war visions are "annihilation" and "cleaning out." They have had enough with restraint and limited strikes and a war that has been depressingly and weakly confined just to Iraq and Afghanistan. They want full-scale, unrestrained Middle Eastern war -- they always have -- and they see this as their big chance to have it.

And the more one reads and listens to neoconservatives in their full-throated war calls, the more disturbing and repellent these ideas become. So many of them seem to be driven not even any longer by a pretense of a strategic goal, but by a naked, bloodthirsty craving for destruction and killing itself, almost as the end in itself. They urge massive military attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Iran -- and before that, Iraq -- knowing that it will kill huge numbers of innocent people, but never knowing, or seemingly caring, what comes after that. And the disregard for the lives of innocent people in those countries is so cavalier and even scornful that it is truly unfathomable, at times just plain disgusting. From a safe distance, they continuously call for -- and casually dismiss the importance of -- the deaths of enormous numbers of people without batting an eye. And for what?

What is Lebanon going to look like -- let alone Syria and Iran -- once we decimate large parts of their infrastructure, kill, maim and render homeless thousands upon thousands of their citizens, and bring down their governments? Who cares. Let's just stop whining and appeasing and get on with the action. They're bored with Iraq because the killing and destruction part are done with, so they want to move on. It's the war and bombing that interests and excites them. At least for the neoconservatives I've been reading and hearing -- and they have been among the most influential -- the "arguments" aren't much more substantive or complex than that. More on that in a moment.

Ever since neoconservatives began openly salivating over this "great opportunity" -- beginning, I'd say, with Bill Kristol's soon-to-be infamous "Our War" column, followed by Newt Gingrich's declaration that World War III has begun -- there has been a sense that their war-mongering stance is too extreme, too transparently irrational, to really influence the Bush administration's decisions. After the disaster in Iraq, Bush is in no mood to be led by the same people into more wars, that line of thought goes. Cheney and Rumsfeld have been beaten and even humbled by Iraq, and are too preoccupied with it, to entertain thoughts about Syria and Iran. Because of everything from limited resources to electoral concerns, it's been assumed and suggested that it is simply not plausible that the White House will take the crazed neoconservative path with regard to Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

That line of thought seems, at this point, to be more wishful thinking than reality. The administration is still composed largely of adherents to neoconservatism. John Bolton is at the U.N. for a reason. Richard Perle protegee Elliot Abrams is still running Middle East policy out of the White House. And, most importantly, anyone who thinks that Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld or George Bush have changed their mind about anything -- let alone about their biggest signature decision, the invasion of Iraq -- is attributing to them far more flexibility than they have ever before demonstrated. They see Iraq as a success and the rationale that led us there to be the right approach to the Middle East generally.

Neoconservatism is what brought us into Iraq, and there is no persuasive evidence that its influence in the administration has diminished. To the contrary, this article from the Washington Post yesterday reports that Bush and Cheney's working premises and assumptions with regard to the Middle East are indistinguishable from those evangelized by the likes of Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, Kristol and Gingrich:

Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, said Bush's statements reflect an unambiguous view of the situation. "He doesn't seem to allow his vision to be clouded in any way," said Rosen, a Democrat who has come to admire Bush's Middle East policy. "It follows suit. Israel is in the right. Hezbollah is in the wrong. Terrorists have to be eliminated, and he sees Israel fighting the war he would fight against terrorism."

George Bush is still on board with every neoconservative premise. And as Atrios put it yesterday:

Each crisis is an opportunity to wage a war they wanted to wage. The president believes Iraq is a success story. No one will tell him anything else.

Given what neoconservatism has revealed itself to be, that the administration continues to be driven by its "principles" is nothing short of alarming. The opportunities for even unintentional American involvement and escalation in this new war -- through miscalculation, deliberate provocation or simple accident -- are manifold. Add to that the warmongering rhetoric, our perceived proxy fighting through Israel, and the fact that we have 140,000 soldiers sitting in the middle of a virtual Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq, and it is not hyperbole to say that it would be miraculous if we did not become involved in expanded hostilities.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are now seeking full-on unrestrained war, to be fought more aggressively and less "delicately" than the prior and current wars. The neoconservatives are expressly saying so.

When we last heard from Shelby Steele, for instance, he was arguing in a column widely trumpeted by neoconservatives that America's problem is that it suffers from too much "white guilt," which prevents us from fighting wars such as the one in Iraq with the unrestrained "ferocity" we ought to be using, i.e., that we fail to use "the full measure of our military power." In his Townhall column yesterday, Thomas Sowell takes that a step further and, in the context of Israel's bombing of Lebanon, identifies the real problem as being that we don't "annihilate" our enemies -- using that word twice within two paragraphs:

Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in the process. . .

There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated. . . .

One can find this sentiment everywhere among neoconservatives, who have now really released their war-loving id. The true enemy are those who stand in the way of all-out war, and all-out war is the only way to achieve peace. Peace is War and War is Peace. Listen to Sowell:

"Peace" movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called "peace" movements -- that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.

An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions.

In the neoconservative mind, wars happen because we don't annihilate enough people, because we are insufficiently "ferocious," because we place limits on the "the full measure of our military power." Those who oppose such unrestrained destruction are, to use Bill Kristol's description from his new column yesterday, "weak horses" (quoting Osama bin Laden). In the Jerusalem Post yesterday, Daniel Pipes complained that each time it excitingly looks like Israel will finally wipe out the evil-doers, we instead get "an orgy of Israeli remorse and reconsideration, followed by a quiet return to appeasement and retreat." Victor Davis Hanson celebrates how great it is that "Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists."

Most striking is the casualness, even the self-satisfied joy, with which they regard the suffering, maiming, and slaughter of other people -- not "The Terrorists," but people whom even they acknowledge are innocent of wrongdoing. Here is National Review's Cliff May almost bored with having to acknowledge the irrelevant fact that hundreds, more likely thousands, of Lebanese are likely to be killed by the campaign which he urges from a safe distance:

Yes, innocent Lebanese are suffering in this conflict. That suffering at least should produce some good results. Lebanon’s liberation from the suffocating embrace of Hezbollah and its foreign sponsors would qualify.

I am almost done reading John Dean's now #2 NYT best-selling new book, Conservatives Without Conscience, and will likely have a review up tomorrow. But one of the central points he makes is highly relevant here -- that what is called the "conservative movement" these days has no real unifying or cohesive ideas, but instead, what binds it and defines it is an authoritarian impulse to identify the Enemy (the Terrorist, the Liberal, the Communist, the illegal immigrant), followed by a swarming, hateful, rage-fueled desire to destroy it:

Given the rather distinct beliefs of the various conservative factions, which have only grown more complex with time, how have conservatives succeeded in coalescing as a political force? The simple answer is through the power of negative thinking, and specifically, the ability to find common enemies. . . . Today's conservatives. . . define themselves by what they oppose.

That is clearly not only the Republican electoral strategy again, but more disturbingly, it appears to be the full extent of the neoconservative foreign policy. There are bad people over there. The Enemy. And we need to attack and kill them without restraint, regardless of the cost or consequences or alternatives or what might come after that. And anyone who doesn't agree, or who wants to negotiate with the Enemy, is weak, an appeaser, someone who likely is even on the side of the Enemy. That is the crux of our foreign policy at this point.

Beyond all of that, our neoconservative policy in the Middle East has become as incoherent as it is bloodthirsty. The President argued in December of last year that "by helping Iraqis to build a democracy, we will gain an ally in the war on terror." But the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iraq, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has "forcefully denounced" Israel for the bombing campaign which we are defending and supplying -- a fact which led a confused and enraged Laura Ingraham last night on Bill O'Reilly's show to protest the unfairness that the person she called "our guy in Iraq" was supporting the other side.

What is the Iraqi Government's position going to be if we wage war on its Iranian ally? I doubt it will be what we would want from an "ally in the war on terror." So what are we hoping to achieve in Iraq? The whole project makes no sense because there really never was anything that came after the invasion and destruction part.

And the supposed Middle Eastern allies we do have -- the ones who issued the terse anti-Hezbollah statements which neoconservatives have been parading around -- are not democracies, but instead, are the tyrants, dictators, and emirates whom we support and prop up. Conversely, the democratically elected governments in the Middle East beyond Iraq -- such as Lebanon, the Palestinians, and one could even add Iran -- are on the other side of this conflict. And two Middle Eastern democracies, Israel and Lebanon, are at war with one another.

All of this is the exact opposite of the glorious neoconservative promises that invading and bombing countries and bringing democracy to the Middle East will foster pro-U.S. alliances and ensure peace. And literally, the only thing which neoconservatives seem to want to do in response to all of this patent failure is bomb and invade more and more countries because that's worked so well so far.

One can easily lose sight of how bizarre it is that we now so frequently debate whether we should attack countries who have not attacked us nor pose any real threat to attack us. As was true for the "debates" over whether we should use torture (or even "debates" over whether the President can break the law), when something is advocated openly and frequently enough, even the most reprehensible and previously insane ideas can become acceptable and mainstream. We have become a country that now casually and without much trauma debates which countries we should preemptively invade next.

Neoconservatism in its basest and most unadorned form very well may be dangerous, morally repugnant, and completely irrational. But it has also been a leading influence in our country's foreign policy decisions over the last five years, and there is no sign that that has changed. Quite the contrary. The White House seems to be operating in accordance with the neoconservative script as much as ever, and it is hard to imagine why that would stop any time soon.

The US Military Doesn't IntentionallyTarget Journalists Except When It Does

2006-07-22T11:25:00.000-05:00

Jason,
You argue that the US does not intentionally target journalists AND that all the journalists it targeted had it coming. If you want to sound like a hypocritical hack that's your prerogative, but if you'd prefer people not to audibly chuckle when you post I'd suggest you consider picking one or the other.

By your logic, if we find an Al Qaeda spy in the Pentagon we should bomb the Pentagon. That's a really clever plan.

Save the Snowflake Iraqis!

2006-07-21T12:43:00.001-05:00

Save the Snowflake Palestinians!

2006-07-21T12:43:00.000-05:00

Save the Snowflake Lebanese!

2006-07-21T12:42:00.000-05:00

Stabbed in the Back!: The Past and Future of a Right-Wing Myth

2006-07-14T23:28:00.000-05:00

Kevin Baker:

First drink, hero, from my horn:
I spiced the draught well for you
To waken your memory clearly
So that the past shall not slip your mind!

—Hagen to Siegfried
Die Götterdämmerung

Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.

As the United States staggers past the third anniversary of its misadventure in Iraq, the dagger is already poised, the myth is already being perpetuated. To understand just how this strategy is likely to unfold—and why this time it may well fail—we must return to the birth of a legend.

* * *

The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of explaining the nation’s stunning defeat in World War I. It was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war, who told the National Assembly, “As an English general has very truly said, the German army was ‘stabbed in the back.’”

Like everything else associated with the stab-in-the-back myth, this claim was disingenuous. The “English general” in question was one Maj. Gen. Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin after the war, who put forward this suggestion merely to politely summarize how Field Marshal Erich von Ludendorff—the force behind Hindenburg—was characterizing the German army’s alleged lack of support from its civilian government.

“Ludendorff’s eyes lit up, and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone,” wrote Hindenburg biographer John Wheeler-Bennett. “‘Stabbed in the back?’ he repeated. ‘Yes, that’s it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.’”

Ludendorff’s enthusiasm was understandable, for, as he must have known, the phrase already had great resonance in Germany. The word dolchstoss—“dagger thrust”—had been popularized almost fifty years before in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. After swallowing a potion that causes him to reveal a shocking truth, the invincible Teutonic hero, Siegfried, is fatally stabbed in the back by Hagen, son of the archvillain, Alberich.

Wagner had himself lifted his plot device from a medieval German poem, which was inspired in turn by Old Norse folklore, and of course the same story can be found in a slew of ancient mythologies, whether it’s the fate of the Greek heroes Achilles and Hercules or the story of Jesus and Judas. The hero cannot be defeated by fair means or outside forces but only by someone close to him, resorting to treachery.

The Siegfried legend in particular, though, has nuances that would mesh perfectly with right-wing mythology in the twentieth century, both in Germany and in the United States. At the end of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the downfall of the gods is followed by the rise of the Germanic people. The mythological hero has been transformed into the volk, just as heroic stature is granted to the modern state. Siegfried is killed just after revealing an unwelcome truth—much as the right, when pressed for evidence about its conspiracy theories, will often claim that these are hidden truths their enemies have a vested interest in concealing. Hagen, as a half-breed, an outsider posing as a friend, stands in for something worse yet—the assimilated Jew, able to betray the great warrior of the volk by posing as his boon companion.

It was an iconography easily transferable to Germany’s new, postwar republic. Hitler himself would claim that while recuperating behind the lines from a leg wound, he found Jewish “slackers” dominating the war-production bureaucracy and that “the Jew robbed the whole nation and pressed it beneath his domination.” The rape imagery is revolting but vivid; Hitler was already attuned to the zeitgeist of his adopted country. Even before the war had been decided, a soldier in his company recalled how Corporal Hitler would “leap up and, running about excitedly, say that in spite of our big guns, victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of the German people were a greater danger than the biggest cannon of the enemy.”

It didn’t matter that Field Marshal Ludendorff had in fact been the virtual dictator of Germany from August of 1916 on, or that the empire’s civilian leaders had been stunned by his announcement, in September of 1918, that his last, murderous offensives on the western front had failed, and that they must immediately sue for peace. The suddenness of Germany’s defeat only supported the idea that some sort of treason must have been involved. From this point on, all blame would redound upon “the November criminals,” the scheming politicians, reds, and above all, Jews.

Yet it was necessary, for the purging that the Nazis had in mind, to believe that the national degeneration went even further. Jerry Lembcke, in his brilliant work, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, writes of how the Nazis fostered the dolchstosslegende in ways that eerily foreshadowed returning veteran mythologies in the United States. Hermann Göring, the most charismatic of the Nazi leaders after Hitler, liked to speak of how “very young boys, degenerate deserters, and prostitutes tore the insignia off our best front line soldiers and spat on their field gray uniforms.” As Lembcke points out, any insignia ripping had actually been done by the mutinous soldiers and sailors who would launch a socialist uprising shortly after the war, tearing them off their own shoulders or those of their officers. Göring’s instant revisionism both covered up this embarrassing reality and created a whole new class of villains who were—in his barely coded language—homosexuals, sexually threatening women, and other “deviants.” All such individuals would be dealt with in the new, Nazi order.

* * *

The dolchstosslegende first came to the United States following not a war that had been lost but our own greatest triumph. Here, the motivating defeat was suffered not by the nation but by a faction. In the years immediately following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion. Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations—supported by many liberal Republicans—had led the nation successfully through the worst war in human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.

Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly—even suicidally—maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” and the right’s enduring presidential hope, had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist organization, America First, and opposed the nation’s first peacetime draft in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more concerned about Chiang Kai-shek’s worm-eaten Nationalist regime in China than U.S. allies in Europe. “The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is built up,” Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe even in 1951.

This sort of determined naiveté had Taft and his movement teetering on the brink of political irrelevance. They saved themselves by grabbing at an unlikely rope—America’s very own dolchstosslegende, the myth of Yalta. No reasonable observer would have predicted in the immediate wake of the Yalta conference that it would become an enduring symbol of Democratic perfidy. Yalta was, in fact, originally considered the apogee of the Roosevelt Administration’s accomplishments, ensuring that the hard-won peace at the end of World War II would not soon dissolve

into an even worse conflict, just as the botched peace of Versailles had led only to renewed hostilities in the years after World War I. The conference, which took place in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945, was the last time “the Big Three” of the war—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—would meet face-to-face. The U.S. negotiating team went with specific goals and was widely perceived at the time as having achieved them. Agreements were reached on the occupation of the soon-to-be-defeated German Reich, the liberation of those Eastern European countries occupied by or allied with Germany, the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan, and, most significantly in Roosevelt’s eyes, on the structure of a workable, international body designed to keep world peace, the United Nations.

FDR’s presentation of these agreements before a joint session of Congress that March met with almost universal acclaim. This was not surprising. Roosevelt, who had been at Versailles as a junior member of the Wilson Administration, was preoccupied with making sure that his vision for the postwar world did not founder on any partisan bickering with Congress. Before leaving for Yalta, he had briefed a group of leading senators from across the political spectrum on what he hoped to accomplish, and solicited their opinions and questions. The delegation he took with him to the Soviet Union was a bipartisan team of senior diplomats, advisers, and military men, and he continued to cultivate support from all quarters on his return to the United States. Such prominent Republican figures as Arthur Vandenberg, the once-isolationist senator from Michigan turned internationalist, and Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt’s fierce opponent in the 1944 presidential race, expressed general support for the results of the Yalta conference. Taft and the right wing of the Republican Party were more skeptical, but offered no substantial criticisms.

Save for a few congressmen, newspaper publishers, and columnists on the extreme fringe of the right, this early Cold War consensus would survive until 1948. Then, Dewey’s and the Republicans’ stunning losses in the elections that fall, combined with a confluence of American setbacks abroad, served to revivify the right.

Not only did the Republicans lose a presidential election against a badly divided, national Democratic Party; they also lost the congressional majorities they had just managed to eke out in 1946, following fourteen years in the political wilderness. It now seemed clear that the Republicans would never return to power merely by supporting Democratic policies, or by promising to implement them more effectively, and the right wing gained traction within the party.

Meanwhile, the exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent followed, in relatively rapid succession, by the fall of Czechoslovakia’s coalition government to a Soviet-backed coup, the Soviet attainment of an atomic bomb, and the victory of Mao’s Communists over Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang regime in China, cast the entire policy of containment into doubt. Never mind that the right’s own feckless or muddled proposals for fighting the Cold War would not have ameliorated any of these situations. The right swept them into the memory hole and offered a new answer to Americans bewildered by how suddenly their nation’s global preeminence had been diminished: Yalta.

A growing chorus of right-wing voices now began to excoriate our wartime diplomacy. Their most powerful charge, one that would firmly establish the Yalta myth in the American political psyche, was the accusation that our delegation had given over Eastern Europe to the Soviets. According to “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” an essay written for Life magazine shortly before the 1948 election by William Bullitt—a former diplomat who had been dismissed by Roosevelt for outing a gay rival in the State Department—FDR and his chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, were guilty of “wishful appeasement” of Stalin at Yalta, handing the peoples of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states over to the Soviet dictator.

The right wing’s dolchstosslegende was a small but fateful conspiracy, engineered through “secret diplomacy” at Yalta. Its linchpin was Hiss, a junior State Department aide at Yalta who was now described as a major architect of the pact. Hiss was a perfect villain for the right’s purposes. He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern intellectual right down to his name—and, by implication, possibly a homosexual. He had been publicly exposed by that relentlessly regular guy, Dick Nixon, as an unnatural, un-American element who had used his wiles to sway all of his superiors in the Crimea.

Just how he had accomplished this was never detailed, but it didn’t matter; specificity is anathema to any myth. Bullitt and an equally flamboyant opportunist of the period, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, offered a more general explanation. The Democrats, Mrs. Luce had already charged, “will not, or dare not, tell us the commitments that were overtly or secretly made in moments of war’s extermination by a mortally ill President, and perhaps mortally scared State Department advisers.”

The idea of the “dying President” at Yalta was plausible to much of the public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt looking suddenly, shockingly gaunt and exhausted throughout much of the last year of his life. To the right wing—which had conducted a whispering campaign against Roosevelt throughout his term in office, claiming that his real affliction was not polio but syphilis, and that he, his wife, and various advisers, including Hopkins, were “secret Jews” and Soviet agents—it all made perfect sense. To the many Americans who still loved Roosevelt and whose votes the Republicans needed, FDR himself could now become the Siegfried figure, a dying hero betrayed by the shady, unnatural Hiss.

All of this, of course, falls apart under the most cursory examination. Hiss was a “technician” at Yalta, relied upon mostly for his expertise regarding the planned United Nations, and—already suspected of espionage—he had played no policymaking role in a large, bipartisan delegation that included most of the nation’s military and diplomatic leadership. Roosevelt was in severe physical decline and would die from a massive stroke some two months later, but his mind was still active and engaged. Chip Bohlen—who actually was at Yalta and who went on to become a leading Cold War statesman under both Republican and Democratic administrations—would echo many other observers in reporting that while Roosevelt’s “physical state was certainly not up to normal, his mental and psychological state was certainly not affected. He was lethargic but when important moments arose, he was mentally sharp.”

Far from handing over anything to anyone, Roosevelt had actually persuaded Stalin to sign onto a “Declaration on Liberated Europe” that affirmed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and committed the Big Three “to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people.” More was not possible. The salient fact about Eastern Europe at the end of World War II was that the Red Army enjoyed an immense numerical advantage there. To dislodge it, the United States would have had to embark immediately upon another epic struggle, a vast new war for which the American people, already clamoring for demobilization, showed absolutely no enthusiasm. It is likely that the United States would have eventually prevailed in such a struggle, but only at a cost of American lives that would have dwarfed the total lost in World War II itself, and the further devastation of the very European countries we had sought to liberate.

As Bohlen told a Senate committee in 1953, “I believe that the map of Europe would look much the same if there had never been a Yalta conference at all.” Why this should have been surprising, and how it possibly reflected a failure of American foreign policy, is a mystery in any rational analysis of the situation. But any such analysis could never be made by the heroic state. Instead, Roosevelt and the nation he represented had to have been betrayed. The previous, disastrous policies advocated by the Republican right—ignoring the growing Axis threat, then leaving Western Europe defenseless while plunging into war in China—could be safely forgotten.

* * *

Republicans now began an almost continuous campaign against alleged Democratic conspiracies. Following Chiang’s defeat, conservatives in Congress demanded to know “Who lost China?” and Robert Taft, discarding his much vaunted integrity, egged on Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt against the Truman Administration, urging him to “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another.” Yet it would take another hot war—and another expansion of the dolchstosslegende—to permanently enthrone the idea of a vast, treasonous left-wing conspiracy in the American psyche.

The outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950 was disturbing enough, but the defeat of General Douglas MacArthur that winter by invading Chinese forces sent shock waves throughout the United States. More than anyone else, MacArthur had brought about his own defeat, launching his troops up the Korean peninsula in separate columns, divided by mountain ranges, ignoring both orders from the White House to halt and plentiful signs that a massive Chinese force had already infiltrated the Korean peninsula. But while his subordinates scrambled to rally their reeling men, MacArthur moved swiftly to salvage his military reputation and his hopes for the presidency.

What the general proposed was a massive escalation of the war. U.N. troops would not only “blockade the coast of China” and “destroy through naval gunfire and air bombardment China’s industrial capacity to wage war” but would also “release existing restrictions upon the Formosan garrison” of Chiang Kai-shek, which might lead to counter-invasion against “vulnerable areas of the Chinese mainland.” Above all, MacArthur urged that no fewer than thirty-four atomic bombs be dropped on what he characterized as “retardation targets” in Manchuria, including critical concentrations of troops and planes. Even this soon seemed insufficient. MacArthur later added that had he been permitted, he not only would have launched as many as fifty atomic bombs but also would have used “wagons, carts, trucks, and planes” to create “a belt of radioactive cobalt” that would neatly slice the Korean thumb from China. “For at least sixty years,” he said, “there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north.”

MacArthur insisted the “only way to prevent World War III is to end the Korean conflict rapidly and decisively”—as if a massive, atomic attack upon the world’s most populous nation would not, in itself, constitute World War III. When the Truman Administration rejected his proposals, the general announced that he was not being allowed to win—“An enormous handicap without precedent in military history.” The U.N. had to “depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the area of Korea” and accept his strategy to “doom Red China,” an opponent “of such exaggerated and vaunted military power.”

MacArthur conveyed similar sentiments to his conservative allies in Congress, writing House Minority Leader Joseph Martin that he was only trying to “follow the conventional pattern of meeting force with maximum counter-force, as we have never failed to do in the past,” and concluding: “There is no substitute for victory.” Martin gleefully aired the great man’s views in a speech in Brooklyn, thundering, “If we are not in Korea to win, then this Administration should be indicted for the murder of thousands of American boys.” He added that “the same State Department crowd that cut off aid” to Chiang in 1946 now opposed invading China because this would show up their earlier mistakes. The only way to “save Europe and save Asia at the same time” was “to clear out the State Department from top to bottom.” After Martin repeated MacArthur’s views on the House floor, Truman finally removed the general from his command. But the move seemed only to confirm that something was very wrong.

The right seized the opportunity to renew—and expand—its charges of dolchstoss. Republican Senator William Jenner of Indiana bellowed from the floor of the Senate that “this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our own choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction.” Nixon, his new colleague, agreed in barely coded language, attacking “the whining, whimpering, groveling attitude of our diplomatic representatives who talk of America’s fear rather than of America’s strength and of America’s courage.” He claimed that “top administration officials have refused time and time again to recognize the existence of this fifth column” or “to take effective action to clear subversives out” of the government.

Douglas MacArthur now became the martyred Siegfried, stabbed in the back by weaklings at home who were for some reason afraid of victory. It was the fault of these “whimpering,” “soft,” “cowardly,” “lavender” “appeasers,” so unnatural they were willing to “murder” American boys to cover up their own misjudgments. Communist treachery and appeasement were blended seamlessly with an emerging, postwar sex panic.

An entire, seemingly plausible narrative of treason was now firmly established. The conspiracy of spies, or sexual deviants, or both, had now expanded beyond Alger Hiss to include pretty much the entire State Department and maybe the rest of the executive branch. Taft, launching his third run for the Republican nomination, offered to name MacArthur as his vice president, and the general, while still harboring hopes of winning the nomination himself, agreed on the condition that he would have a voice in foreign policy and be put in charge of national security.

In their desire for power, Republican centrists soon joined this right-wing chorus. John Foster Dulles, now Eisenhower’s secretary-of-state designate, denounced the very strategy of containment that he had helped to formulate and promised to “roll back” Communism everywhere, including in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower himself refused to disown McCarthy, even after the senator had impugned the patriotism of his longtime friend and mentor, George Marshall.

The Republican platform that Ike ran on in the fall of 1952 was a freefall into fantasy, a fatal compact by party moderates with a right wing that would eventually push them into extinction. For the first time since the Civil War era, one major American political party charged another one with treason. Democrats were accused of having “shielded traitors to the Nation in high places” and creating “enemies abroad where we should have friends.” Democrats were responsible for all “110,000 American casualties” in Korea, where they had “produced stalemates and ignominious bartering with our enemies” that “offer no hope of victory.” Republicans promised to “repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavements.”

United once more, Republicans brought this compilation of hysterical charges and bald-faced lies before the American people—who swallowed them willingly. Once in power, Eisenhower and Dulles immediately returned to managing the Democratic system of containment. Dulles met with MacArthur, listened respectfully to his plan to nuke Manchuria, allowed that it “could well succeed,” then shelved it without another word. No “secret understandings” to “aid Communist enslavements” were repudiated because, of course, they did not exist. The idea of “rolling back” Communism from Eastern Europe was taken seriously solely by the Hungarian people, who launched a brave rebellion against their Soviet occupiers in 1956, only to find that Dulles and Eisenhower were willing to offer them nothing more than sympathy.

* * *

The right’s initial blindness toward first the Axis and then the Soviet threat in Europe; the disastrous military campaign waged by one of its icons; its feckless and even apocalyptic ideas for recouping its previous mistakes—all had been erased in much of the public consciousness by the stab in the back, a vote-winning tale of deviancy, subversion, and intentional defeat radiating from Yalta all the way to Korea. The Vietnam War, however, would call for yet another expansion of the dolchstosslegende.

Vietnam was the sort of war Republicans had been clamoring to fight for two decades. A liberal administration had started it, with misplaced bravado, but it had been egged on—even dared—to take the plunge into full-scale war by prevailing right-wing dogma. When the war soured, Republicans first tried to blame not the failed premise of the domino theory or the flawed diplomacy of the Kennedy Administration or the near-universal American failure to recognize Vietnam’s boundless desire for self-determination—no, it was the old fallbacks of appeasement, defeatism, and treachery in high places.

Once again, we were told that American troops were not being “allowed” to win, if they could not mine Haiphong harbor, or flatten Hanoi, or reduce all of North Vietnam to a parking lot. Yet Vietnam was a war with no real defeats on the ground. U.S. troops won every battle of any significance and inflicted exponentially greater casualties on the enemy than they suffered themselves. Even the great debacle of the war, the 1968 Tet offensive, ended with an overwhelming American military victory and the Viet Cong permanently expunged as an effective fighting force. It is difficult to claim betrayal when you do not lose a battle.

Worse yet, Republicans could not provide any meaningful alternative strategy. Nixon was able to take office in 1969 only by offering a “secret plan” to get the boys home from Vietnam, not by promising to hugely escalate the fighting or risk a wider conflict. Richard Nixon became the first Republican president since the turn of the century to take office while a major war still hung in the balance, and now all the fantasies began to fall away. More than 21,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during Nixon’s time in office, and there were no Democrats to blame it on.

The only political hope for the administration was to turn its gaze outward—to blame the people themselves, or at least a portion of them. Nixon, as historian Rick Perlstein has observed, “had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties,” and he had been on hand at the creation of this game. Initially, the divisions he sought to exploit were much the same as those he had manipulated back in the 1940s, though they were now aimed at broad swaths of the general public—the children of the New Deal, as it were. The leading tactics included employment of the same sorts of code words so bluntly wielded twenty years before, along with a good deal more street muscle.

Over and over, antiwar protesters were called Communists, perverts, or simply “bums”—the last epithet from Nixon’s own lips. The large percentage of college students in their ranks were depicted as spoiled, obnoxious, ungrateful children. Older, more established dissidents were ridiculed by Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, in a series of William Safire‒authored speeches, as “nattering nabobs of negativity,” and, unforgettably, as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” These invectives were, of course, doubly disingenuous; it was Agnew and Safire who very much wanted such persons to be known by the damning label of “intellectual,” and what the vice president was really calling them was fags.

All these bums and effetes might be un-American, but their disapproval still was sufficient to demoralize our fighting men in Vietnam and thereby put them in imminent peril. And on hand to take the torch from an increasingly beleaguered Nixon was a new Republican master at exploiting subterranean anxieties, Ronald Reagan. As early as 1969, Reagan was insisting that leaders of the massive Moratorium Days protests “lent comfort and aid” to the North Vietnamese, and that “some American will die tonight because of the activity in our streets.”

The Nixon Administration now had its new Hagens. People who voiced their opposition to the war were traitors and even killers, responsible for the death of American servicemen, and as such almost any action taken against them could be justified. The Nixon White House even had its own blue-collar shock troops. Repeatedly, on suspiciously media-heavy occasions, construction workers appeared to break up antiwar demonstrations and beat up peaceful demonstrators. The effete protesters had been shown up by real working-class Americans—and their class allies in the police force eagerly closed ranks.

* * *

Neither Nixon, nor Agnew, nor the war would survive a second term. With the shameful, panicked helicopter evacuation of Saigon, U.S. prestige in the world dropped precipitously—but none of the other dominoes followed. Once again, by 1975, the American right should have found itself utterly discredited. A war that conservatives had fervently supported had ended in defeat, but with none of the consequences they had prophesied. Instead, the entire operating right-wing belief in “monolithic communism” was debunked in the wake of our evacuation from Saigon, as Vietnam attacked Cambodia, China invaded Vietnam, and the Soviet Union and China clashed along their border.

Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage the war in Vietnam would take on a life of its own long after the war was over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam had been an unnecessary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of our fighting men must become the issue.

Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco airport were especially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting the war.

Of course, those who were able to return at all were the lucky ones. Soon after we had bugged out of Saigon, millions of Americans became convinced that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Vietnamese work camps, by a government that was too cowed or callous to insist upon their return. Numerous groups sprang up to demand their release, disseminating flags with a stark, black-and-white tableau of a prisoner’s bowed head against the backdrop of a guard tower, a barbed-wire fence, and the legend: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN POW*MIA.

It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left behind or that Jane Fonda’s addle-headed mission to Hanoi did anything to undermine American forces. The stab-in-the-back myth is much more powerful than any of these facts, and it continues to grow more so as time passes. Just this past Christmas, one Faye Fiore wrote a feature for the Los Angeles Times about how returning Iraqi veterans are being showered with acts of good will by an adoring American public, “In contrast to the hostile stares that greeted many Vietnam veterans 40 years ago.” The POW/MIA flags, with their black-and-white iconography of shame, now fly everywhere in the United States, just under the Stars and Stripes; federal law even mandates that on at least six days a year—Memorial Day, Flag Day, Armed Forces Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day, and one day during POW/MIA Week (the third week of September)—they must be flown over nearly every single U.S. government building. There has been nothing else like them in the history of this country, and they have no parallel anywhere else in the world—these peculiar little banners, attached like a disclaimer to our national flag, with their message of surrender and humiliation, perennially accusing our government of betrayal.

* * *

If the power of the stab-in-the-back narrative from Vietnam is beyond question, it still raises the question of why. Why should we wish to maintain a narrative of horrendous national betrayal, one in which our own democratically elected government, and a large portion of our fellow citizens, are guilty of horribly betraying our fighting men?

The answer, I think, lies in Richard Nixon’s ability to expand the Siegfried myth from the halls of power out into the streets. Government conspiracies are still culpable, of course; ironically, it was Nixon’s own administration that first “left behind” American POWs in North Vietnam. Yet this makes little difference to the American right, which never considered Nixon ideologically pure enough to be a member in good standing, and which has always made hay by railing against government, even now that they are it. What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make culture war the permanent condition of American politics.

On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens” through George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals”; from Lee Atwater’s characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream,” the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies—from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to the “war against Christmas” last year.

This has become such an ingrained part of the right wing’s belief system that the Bush Administration has now become the first government in our nation’s history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq—and the “war on terrorism”—seems to have been to foment division and to win elections by forcing Americans to choose between starkly different visions of what their country should be. Again and again, Bush and his confederates have used the cover of national security to push through an uncompromising right-wing agenda. Ignoring the broad leeway already provided the federal government to fight terrorists and conduct domestic surveillance, the administration has gone out of its way to claim vast new powers to detain, spy on, and imprison its own citizens, and to abduct and even torture foreigners—a subject we shall return to. It has used the cover of the war to push through enormous tax cuts, attempt to dismantle the Social Security system, and alter the very social covenant of the nation. Incidents from the Terri Schiavo case to the teaching of “intelligent design” are periodically exploited to start new cultural battles.

Given this state of permanent culture war, it is not surprising that the Bush White House trotted out the stab-in-the-back myth when its Iraq project began to run out of steam early last summer. It was first given a spin, as usual, by the right’s media shock troops, and directed at both Democratic and renegade Republican lawmakers who had dared to criticize either the strategic conduct of the war or our treatment of detainees. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page opined, “Where the terrorists are gaining ground is in Washington, D.C.” and noted that General John Abizaid, of the U.S. Central Command, had said, “When my soldiers say to me and ask me the question whether or not they’ve got support from the American people or not, that worries me. And they’re starting to do that.”

Again, the link was made. Soldiers of the most powerful army in the history of the world would be actively endangered if they even wondered whether the folks at home were questioning their deployment. The right was looking for a target, and it got one when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), appalled by an FBI report on the prisons for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, compared them to those run by “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings . . . ”

The right’s response was predictably swift and savage. The Power Line blogger Paul Mirengoff commented that the senator “slanders his own country. Normally that kind of slander is uttered only by revolutionaries seeking the violent overthrow of the government.” Rush Limbaugh harrumphed that “Dick Durbin has just identified who the Democrats are in the year 2005, particularly when it comes to American national security and when it comes to the U.S. military. These are the same people that say they support the troops. This is how they do it, huh? They give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Yet for once, Rush was outdone. John Carlson, host of a Seattle talk show and Washington State’s unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor in 2000, said of Durbin, “This man is simply a piece of excrement, a piece of waste that needs to be scraped off the sidewalk and eliminated.” Bill O’Reilly of Fox News launched a preemptive attack on his few liberal counterparts, urging that the staff of Air America be jailed: “Dissent, fine; undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it? So, all you clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send them over to the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they’re undermining everything.”

Once the Republican media had secured the ground and set the terms of debate, the party’s representatives in Washington jumped into the fray. When Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi called the war “a grotesque mistake” that was “not making America safer,” the as-yet-unindicted Tom DeLay retorted that Pelosi “owes our military and their families an apology for her reckless comments,” and House Majority Whip Roy Blunt claimed that Pelosi’s words had “emboldened” the enemy.

All of the crucial elements of the stab-in-the-back charge were now in place. Critics of the war were not simply questioning its strategy or its necessity, or upholding the best of American traditions by raising concerns over how enemy prisoners were being treated. Instead, they were aiding the enemy, and actively endangering our fighting men and women. They were traitors and “revolutionaries,” individuals who were “conducting guerrilla warfare on American troops,” and “excrement” who could now be safely incarcerated “immediately” or even “eliminated.”

It remained only for the chief Republican strategist, Karl Rove, to appear before a conservative party fundraiser in Manhattan on June 22 and tie up a campaign that bore all of his usual earmarks.

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” Rove began, riffing on a proven theme from the 2004 presidential election, which sought to link Democrats not only with the terrorist attack on 9/11 but also with a generation of Republican assertions that liberals are “soft” on domestic crime. Rove then honed in on poor Dick Durbin’s remarks: “Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”; (My italics.)

The conspiracy had expanded yet again. Not just Nancy Pelosi or Dick Durbin but all Democrats and all liberals were now firmly established as traitors, and it was not possible that they had made some honest gaffes; instead, their very motives were sinister.

When Rove’s thunderous media offensive had finally subsided, however, a strange silence ensued. The popularity of his master, George W. Bush, continued to plunge in the opinion polls. Support for the war continued to plummet as well, and by July, Rove himself was thoroughly enmeshed in the Valerie Plame scandal, with all of the attendant implications about its manipulation of prewar intelligence. By November, Rove was forced to send out Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney themselves on a new “Strategy for Victory” campaign. Speaking on Veterans Day to an all-military audience at an army depot in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, Bush attacked Democrats who were saying they had been duped by the fraudulent intelligence the administration had used to secure their votes for war.

“These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will,” Bush told the soldiers assembled for his photo op. “As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them.”

Once again, criticism of the war in Iraq had been adroitly linked to criticism of the administration, and then to treason—something that would, somehow, magically empower the enemy and demoralize our own troops. Once again, unnatural enemies were striking at the heroic, Siegfried figures at the top of the administration, who struggled to get out their great truth that no intelligence had been manipulated and the Democrats were engaging in “revisionism.”

Yet still, somehow, Bush’s numbers continued to plunge. What went wrong? How could such an infallible Republican strategy, conducted with all of the right wing’s vast media resources at his command, have failed so utterly? How was it that the story of the stab in the back had lost its power to hold us spellbound?

* * *

What has really robbed the conspiracy theories of their effectiveness is how the war in Iraq has been conducted. Bush and his advisers have sought to use the war not only to punish their enemies but also to reward their supporters, a bit of political juggling that led them to demand nothing from the American public as a whole. Those of us who are not actively fighting in Iraq, or who do not have close friends and family members who are doing so, have not been asked to sacrifice in any way. The richest among us have even been showered with tax cuts.

Yet in demanding so little, Bush has finally uncoupled the state from its heroic status. It is not a coincidence that modern nationalism dates from the advent of mass democracy—and mass citizen armies—that the American and French revolutions ushered in at the end of the eighteenth century. Bush’s refusal to mobilize the nation for the war in Iraq has severed that immediate identification with our army’s fortunes. Nor did it begin with the Bush Administration. The wartime tax cuts and the all-volunteer, wartime army are simply the latest manifestations of a trend that is now decades old and that has been promulgated through peace as well as war, by Democrats as well as Republicans. It cannot truly be a surprise that a society that has steadily dismantled or diminished the most basic access to health care, relief for the poor and the aged, and decent education; a society that has allowed the gap between its richest and poorest citizens to grow to unprecedented size; a society that has paid obeisance to the ideology of globalization to the point of giving away both its jobs and its debt to foreign nations, and which has just allowed one of its poorer cities to quietly drown, should choose to largely opt out of its own defense.

Anyone who doubts that this is exactly what we have done need only look at how little the war really engages most of us. It rarely draws more than a few seconds of coverage on the local television news, if that, and then only well into the broadcast, after a story on a murder, or a fire, or the latest weather predictions. Even the largest and angriest demonstrations against our occupation of Iraq have not approached the mobilizations against the war in Vietnam, but a close observer will notice that we also have yet to see any of the massive counterdemonstrations that were held in support of that war—or “in support of the troops.” Such engagement on either side seems almost quaint now.

Who could possibly believe in a plot to lose this war? No one cares that much about it. We have, instead, reached a crossroads where the overwhelming right-wing desire to dissolve much of the old social compact that held together the modern nation-state is irreconcilably at odds with any attempt to conduct such a grand, heroic experiment as implanting democracy in the Middle East. Without mass participation, Iraq cannot be passed off as an heroic endeavor, no matter how much Mr. Bush’s rhetoric tries to make it one, and without a hero there can be no great betrayer, no skulking villain.

And yet, a convincing national narrative, though it may be the sheerest, most vicious fiction, can have incredible staying power—can perhaps outlast even the nation that it was meant to serve. It is ironic that, even as support for his war was starting to unravel in May of 2005, George W. Bush was in the Latvian capital of Riga, describing the Yalta agreement as “one of the greatest wrongs of history.” The President placed it in the “unjust tradition” of the 1938 Munich Pact and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which together paved the way for the start of World War II in 1939. Bush’s words echoed his statements of three previous trips to Eastern Europe, dating back to 2001, during which he had pledged, “no more Munichs, no more Yaltas,” and called Yalta an “attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability,” a “bitter legacy,” and a “constant source of injustice and fear” that had “divided a living civilization.”

The ultimate irony of Bush’s perpetuating this ageless right-wing shibboleth is that for once it wasn’t intended for home consumption. The Yalta myth has finally lost its old magic, here in historically illiterate, contemporary America. Nor did Bush make any special attempt to let his countrymen know he was apportioning them equal blame with Stalin and Hitler for the greatest calamities of the twentieth century.

Bush’s pandering was directed instead to the nations he was visiting, in a region that still battens on any number of conspiracy theories. Why he should have so denigrated his own country to a few small Eastern European nations might seem a mystery, until one considers that this is the “new Europe” that Bush has solicited for troops for his Iraqi adventure . . . and where he appears to have found either destinations or conduits for victims of “extraordinary rendition,” en route to where they could be safely tortured in secrecy.

An American president, wandering the halls of Eastern European palaces, denounces his own nation in order to appease his hosts into torturing secret prisoners. Our heroic age surely has come to an end.

About the Author

Kevin Baker’s most recent novel, Strivers Row, is the final installment in his “City of Fire” trilogy about New York City. His last article for Harper's Magazine, “We’re in the Army Now,” appeared in the October 2003 issue.

This is Stabbed in the Back!, a feature, originally from June 2006, published Friday, July 14, 2006. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.

Are We in France Yet? Press Coverage When the Theater of Battle is the Media itself, but it's "Classified"

2006-07-09T08:54:00.000-05:00

The Cheney administration's Second World War analogy is a bait and switch. It is designed to legitimate fighting guerilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NOT fighting a war on al-Quaeda, and cheerleading the guerilla wars of choice AS IF they were conventional wars, but absent any benchmarks that go along with the terms of conventional war. In the GWOT, we are told that the very field of battle itself is classified--but the administration's model of information warfare requires that the media itself is part of that classified field of battle we can't know about.

In the midst of the collision between "The New York Times is traitorous" camp and the "How does a responsible press cover a classified war" camp, I think another important aspect of what's involved in covering a "classified war" is being lost. It is probably implicit in several of Jay Rosen's comments in It's a Classified War, but I haven't seen it spelled out yet.

One of the primary reasons it is ludicrous to compare the issue of secrecy in a conventional war and a "war on terror" (beyond the fact that it begs the very question at issue, there are no comparable privacy concerns in conventional war) is that the obvious benchmarks of a conventional war are not in place.

Roosevelt could lie his ass off throughout most of the Second World War (and surely did quite frequently), but the public was still in a position to know certain facts on the ground:
1. Who controls Africa?
2. Who controls Italy?
3. Who controls France?
4. How far have Allied troops advanced? Are they to Paris yet?

We have none of these benchmarks in the Bush version of the war on terror. The administration's chronic malevolence forces a serious person to wonder, "With authorities this full of it, this militantly opposed to credibility in all its recognizable forms, how would I ever be able to tell the difference between a genuine terrorist threat and a politically convenient photo-op?"

We've had literally dozens of former administration officials go on the record in effect telling us that a substantial percentage of politically convenient warnings, were in fact militarily unmotivated photo-ops.

The Cheney administration's Second World War analogy is a bait and switch. It is designed to legitimate fighting guerilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NOT fighting a war on al-Quaeda, and cheerleading the guerilla wars of choice AS IF they were conventional wars, but absent any benchmarks that go along with the terms of conventional war. In the GWOT, the very field of battle itself is classified. We don't know boo that isn't politically or strategically convenient for the administration without violating laws regarding classification. Given the CYA mode in which the Bush administration is run, that includes orders for office supplies.

Where are the unclassified benchmarks?
1. Is there progress in the war against al-Quaeda that Bush has publicly declared doesn't much interest him even as it legitimates everything he does militarily?
bin Laden is still at large and the Bush administration's CIA has closed its bin Laden shop. Did they give up or move that to the Pentagon? Classified.

2. How are the guerilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq going?
Official administration statements say everything's coming up roses, that all worthwhile and difficult things require perseverance. The US ambassador's own classified correspondence says they fear for the safety of the Iraqi employees necessary to make the US fortress we call an embassy function. The puppet government is tearing itself to pieces in a civil war. The press violated laws regarding classification in bringing us some truth. Which do you prefer?

3. How is the imaginary war on terror going that the administration wishes to talk about in the terms of conventional war, namely the second world war?

Have we take France yet in the global war on terror? Are we in Berlin yet in the global war on terror?

According to the administration's global strategy review, the US goal in the war on terror and security policy more generally is US military and strategic dominance of the world now and into the forseeable future. Such that there are no outstanding threats to US strategic supremacy now or in the forseeable future.

Described in terms taken from W.W. II, that sounds more like Axis designs to take over the world to me, than an Allied attempt to liberate it. When they talk like that and combine it with Axis contempt for international law, I get confused which side of the W.W.II analogy we are supposed to be on.

Again, are we in Paris yet in the GWOT? That's classified. The Bush administration will know when we're there. Just trust them.

The Illegal Employer Crisis: Thank You Ronald Reagan

2006-07-06T14:13:00.000-05:00

Thom Hartmann:
Every time the media - or a Democrat - uses the phrase "Illegal Immigration" they are promoting one of Karl Rove's most potent Republican Party frames.

The reality is that we don't have an "Illegal Immigration" problem in America. We have an "Illegal Employer" problem.

Yet it's almost never mentioned in the mainstream media, because to point it out could slightly reduce the profits and CEO salaries of many of America's largest multi-state and multinational corporations - who both own the media and contribute heavily to conservative politicians. Republicans would prefer that the "criminals" covered in the press are working people, and that corporate and CEO criminals not get discussed.

As the Busby/Bilray contest showed, "illegal immigration" is a red-hot issue for American voters. The Democrat Busby was way ahead until she committed a faux pas before a group of Latinos, leading to (false) media reports (particularly on right-wing talk radio) that she was encouraging illegal immigrants to vote for her in the upcoming election. Her Republican opponent seized on this and hammered the district with ads for the last few days of the campaign (while voting machines curiously went home at night with some of the poll workers), and now a Republican lobbyist has taken the seat of a Republican congressman convicted of illegal deals with Republican lobbyists.

Encouraging a rapid increase in the workforce by encouraging companies to hire non-citizens is one of the three most potent tools conservatives since Ronald Reagan have used to convert the American middle class into the American working poor. (The other two are destroying the governmental protections that keep labor unions viable, and ending tariffs while promoting trade deals like NAFTA/WTO/GATT that export manufacturing jobs.)

As David Ricardo pointed out with his "Iron Law of Labor" (published in his 1814 treatise "On Labor") when labor markets are tight, wages go up. When labor markets are awash in workers willing to work at the bottom of the pay scale, unskilled and semi-skilled wages overall will decrease to what Ricardo referred to as "subsistence" levels.

Two years later, in 1816, Ricardo pointed out in his "On Profits" that when the cost of labor goes down, the result usually isn't a decrease in product prices, but, instead, an increase in corporate and CEO profits. (This is because the marketplace sets prices, but the cost of labor helps set profits. For example, when Nike began manufacturing shoes in Third World countries with labor costs below US labor costs, it didn't lead to $15 Nikes - their price held, and even increased, because the market would bear it. Instead, that reduction in labor costs led to Nike CEO Phil Knight becoming a multi-billionaire.)

Republicans understand this very, very well, although they never talk about it. Democrats seem not to have read Ricardo, although the average American gets it at a gut level.

Thus, Americans are concerned that a "flood of illegal immigrants" coming primarily across our southern border is, to paraphrase Lou Dobbs, "wiping out the American middle class." And there is considerable truth to it, as part of the three-part campaign mentioned earlier.

But Dobbs and his fellow Republicans say the solution is to "secure our border" with a fence like that used by East Germany, but that stretches a distance about the same as that from Washington, DC to Chicago. It'll be a multi-billion-dollar boon to Halliburton and Bechtel, who will undoubtedly get the construction and maintenance contracts, but it won't stop illegal immigration. (Instead, people will legally come in on tourist and other visas, and not leave when their visas expire.)

The fact is that we had an open border with Mexico for several centuries, and "illegal immigration" was never a serious problem. Before Reagan's presidency, an estimated million or so people a year came into the US from Mexico - and the same number, more or less, left the US for Mexico at the end of the agricultural harvest season. Very few stayed, because there weren't jobs for them.

Non-citizens didn't have access to the non-agricultural US job market, in large part because of the power of US labor unions (before Reagan 25% of the workforce was unionized; today the private workforce is about 7% unionized), and because companies were unwilling to risk having non-tax-deductible labor expenses on their books by hiring undocumented workers without valid Social Security numbers.

But Reagan put an end to that. His 1986 amnesty program, combined with his aggressive war on organized labor (begun in 1981), in effect told both employers and non-citizens that there would be few penalties and many rewards to increasing the US labor pool (and thus driving down wages) with undocumented immigrants. A million people a year continued to come across our southern border, but they stopped returning to Latin America every fall because instead of seasonal work they were able to find permanent jobs.

The magnet drawing them? Illegal Employers.

Yet in the American media, Illegal Employers are almost never mentioned.

Lou Dobbs, the most visible media champion of this issue, always starts his discussion of the issue with a basic syllogism - 1. Our border is porous. 2. People are coming across our porous border and diluting our labor markets, driving down US wages. 3. Therefore we must make the border less porous.

Lou's syllogism, however, ignores the real problem, the magnet drawing people to risk life and limb to illegally enter this country - Illegal Employers. Our borders have always been porous (and even with a "fence" will still allow through "tourists" by the millions), but we've never had a problem like this before.

And it's not just because poverty has increased in Mexico - today, about half of Mexico lives on less than $2 a day, but 50 years ago half of Mexico also lived on the equivalent of $2 today. Our trade and agricultural policies are harmful to Mexican farmers (and must be changed!), but we were nearly as predatory fifty years ago (remember the rubber and fruit companies, particularly in Central America?).

Yet fifty years ago we didn't have an "illegal immigration" problem, because back then we didn't have a conservative "Illegal Employer" problem.

As the Washington Post noted in an article by Hsu and Lydersen on June 19, 2006:

"Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.
"In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three."

The hiring crimes of Illegal Employers are being ignored by the law, and rewarded by the economic systems of the nation.

Proof that this simple reality is ignored in our media (much to the delight of Republicans) is everywhere you look. For example, check out a series of national polls on illegal immigration done over the past year at www.pollingreport.com/immigration.htm. A typical poll question is like this one from an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in June, 2006:

"When it comes to the immigration bill, the Senate and the House of Representatives disagree with one another about what should be done on the issue of illegal immigration.
"Many in the House of Representatives favor strengthening security at the borders, including building a seven-hundred-mile fence along the border with Mexico to help keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States, and they favor deporting immigrants who are already in the United States illegally.
"Many in the Senate favor strengthening security at the borders, including building a three-hundred-and-seventy-mile fence along the border with Mexico to help keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States, and they favor a guest worker program to allow illegal immigrants who have jobs and who have been here for more than two years to remain in the United States.
"Which of these approaches would you prefer?"

The question: "Or would you prefer companies that employ undocumented workers be severely fined or put out of business?" wasn't even asked. The word "employer" appears nowhere in any of the questions in that poll. Nor is it in the CBS News immigration poll. Or in the Associated Press immigration poll. Or in the Fox News immigration poll.

Only the CNN poll asked the question: "Would you favor increasing penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants?" Two-thirds of Americans, of all party affiliations, said, "Yes," but it went virtually unreported in mainstream media coverage.

"Illegal Immigration" is really about "Illegal Employers." As long as Democrats argue it on the basis of "illegal immigration" they'll lose, even when they're right. Instead, they need to be talking about "Illegal Employers."

Politically, it's not a civil rights issue, it's a jobs issue, as working Americans keep telling pollsters over and over again.

"Mass deportations" and "Fences" are hysterics and false choices. Start penalizing "Illegal Employers" and non-citizens without a Social Security number will leave the country on their own. And they won't have to confront death trying to cross the desert back into Mexico - Mexican citizens can simply walk back into Mexico across the border at any legal border crossing (as about a million did every year for over a century).

Tax law requires that an employer must verify the Social Security number of their employees in order to document, and thus deduct, the expense of their labor. This is a simple task, and some companies, like AMC Theatres, are already doing it.

For example, Cameron Barr wrote in The Washington Post on April 30, 2006, that: "At one area multiplex owned by AMC, the Rio 18 in Gaithersburg, 11 employees 'decided to resign' this month after they could not rectify discrepancies that arose during the screening, said Melanie Bell, a spokeswoman for AMC Entertainment Inc., which is based in Kansas City, Mo. She said such screening is a routine procedure that the company conducts across the United States."

Not wanting to be an Illegal Employer, the Post noted that AMC "has long submitted lists of its employees' Social Security numbers to the Social Security Administration for review. If discrepancies arise, she [company spokeswoman Bell] said in an e-mailed response to questions, 'we require the worker to provide their original Social Security card within 3 days or to immediately contact the local SSA office.' She said the process is part of payroll tax verification and occurs after hiring."

Easy, simple, cheap, painless. No fence required. No mass deportations necessary. No need for Homeland Security to get involved. When jobs are not available, most undocumented workers will simply leave the country (as they always did before), or begin the normal process to obtain citizenship that millions (including my own sister-in-law - this hits many of us close to home) go through each year.

Republicans, however, are not going to allow a discussion of "Illegal Employers." Instead, they will continue to hammer the issue of "Illegal Immigrants," and tie that political albatross around the necks of Democrats (who seem all too willing to accept it).

Bob Casey, for example, was beating the pants off Rick Santorum in the Pennsylvania senatorial campaign, until Santorum began running an ad that says:

"Bobby Casey announced his support of a Senate bill that grants amnesty to illegal immigrants, shocking hardworking taxpayers all across Pennsylvania. Now Casey's trying to wiggle out of it by saying the bill doesn't offer amnesty and requires illegal immigrants to pay their back taxes. Either Casey didn't read the bill, or he's trying to deceive you. The Washington Times reports the legislation gives amnesty to 11 million who are here illegally, and paves the way for 66 million more immigrants to enter the country. The bill also forgives two of the last five years of back taxes for illegal immigrants, something the IRS would never do for you. This Casey-supported bill even gives illegal aliens Social Security benefits for the time they were here illegally. Fortunately, Rick Santorum voted against the bill, and Rick's leading the fight to make sure it never becomes law. Now you know the advantage of having in our corner a fighter like Rick Santorum."

Casey is still ahead, but the ad is visibly eroding his support. As George Will pointed out in a June 18, 2006 op-ed titled "Calculating Immigration Politics":

"Many Republicans, looking for any silver lining in an abundance of dark clouds, think the immigration issue might be a silver bullet that will slay their current vulnerability. The issue is, as political people say, a 'two-fer.' Opposition to the Senate bill, and support for the House bill, puts Republican candidates where much of the country and most of their party's base currently is -- approximately: 'Fix the border; then maybe we can talk about other things.' And opposition to the Senate bill distances them from a president who, although rebounding recently, has approval ratings below 40 percent in 29 states."

Now even Bush is talking like the Republicans in the House of Representatives - time to "get tough" and give Halliburton a few hundred billion to build a fence.

But still nobody is talking about the real problem here - the Illegal Employers.

Hopefully one day soon a dialogue like this fictitious one may ensue on, for example, Face The Nation:

[Bob Schieffer] Senator, do you really think the solution to the illegal immigration problem in America is to offer amnesty instead of building a fence?

[Senator Stabenow] Bob, I think you've been drinking some of Karl Rove's Kool-Aid. Illegal immigrants aren't the cause of undocumented workers driving down wages in this country. It's caused by Illegal Employers. We need to do something about these corporate criminals.

[Bob Schieffer (baffled)] Illegal employers? But what about the illegal aliens?

[Senator Stabenow] Bob, the aliens wouldn't be here if they didn't think they could get a job. Of course, we need to clean up US agricultural subsidies and trade policies that are causing human suffering in our neighboring countries, but to truly protect the pay standards of workers here in the United States we need to crack down on the Illegal Employers. They're the magnets that are drawing people in from all over the world, many of whom come in as tourists and then overstay because they get illegal jobs. And these Illegal Employers are breaking the law - both immigration laws and IRS laws. I suggest that we need to tighten up these laws against Illegal Employers, adding huge fines for first offenses, jail time for CEOs for second offenses, and the corporate death penalty - dissolve their charters to operate - for repeat offenders.

[Bob Schieffer (stammering)] The, the, er, did you say "corporate death penalty"? You mean against companies?

[Senator Stabenow] Better companies die than human beings. These Illegal Employers, in their quest for ever-cheaper labor, are drawing people to cross our borders in ways that cause many people to die in the deserts of the southwest. These people were executed, for all practical purposes, by the policies of a few greedy and lawbreaking American companies. When companies are repeat offenders, they should be dissolved, their assets sold to reimburse their shareholders, and let other, more ethical companies pick up the slack. We used to do this all the time in America when companies behaved badly. Up until the 1880s, an average of around 2000 companies a year got the corporate death sentence in the US.

[Bob Schieffer (bug-eyed)] But what about the illegal immigration problem?

[Senator Stabenow (patting Schieffer's hand)] It's okay, Bob. You shouldn't listen so much to those Republicans. There isn't really much of an illegal immigration problem - it's an Illegal Employer problem. When we clear up the Illegal Employer problem in this country, we'll be back like we were before Reagan started allowing employers to behave illegally. When non-citizens can't get a job, most of them will go home, as they always have in the past. We don't need a fence, we don't need amnesty, we don't need mass roundups or deportations, and we for sure don't need guest workers. We have as many unemployed citizens in this nation as there are illegal immigrants - in my state of Michigan, for example, Flint and Detroit have massive unemployment since Reagan and his corporate cronies declared war on working people. When we get rid of Illegal Employers, that's one step in helping the job market tighten up so that legal employers will have to pay a living wage to attract legal citizens to work. That and rational labor and trade policies, and we can begin to restore our middle class and put our cities back together.

[Bob Schieffer (nodding)] It makes sense, Senator. An "Illegal Employer problem." Who would have thought of that?

[Senator Stabenow (smiling)] Well, Bob, the Republicans thought about it, back in the 1980s. But they thought it was a good idea. Which is why we have this mess today. Get rid of the Illegal Employers - toss a few CEOs into jail and shut down the outlaw companies - and the rest of this part of the problem will be easy and inexpensive to fix...

Koizumi is Riding With the King

2006-06-29T21:23:00.000-05:00

The following was written in response to a question posed by Earl Kinmonth on the H-Japan listserve. Kinmonth asked why seemingly intelligent liberal or progressive media outlets seem to actively promote egregious errors of fact and reason in their treatment of Japan.

Dear Earl Kinmonth,
Writing from the US in 2006, it is quite difficult to see utterly moronic, pejorative journalism as remotely unique to Western attitudes toward Japan. For three years now, most US press coverage of domestic US politics has essentially towed the Bush administration line that anyone who disagrees with the Bush administration's Iraq policy for any reason is an immoral, defeatist, pro-appeasement traitor. It has largely been immaterial whether that opposition has been based on knoweldge of geography, history, military strategy, human nature, or addition and subtraction. Any disagreement with official policy for any reason, rational or otherwise, has led to hysterical scapegoating of the person in question by the press as a defeatist, pro-appeasement traitor. So it's a little hard to be all that shocked by ignorance in journalistic discourse on Japan given the stupefying ignorance that characterizes so much journalism on so many subjects in the US today.

My first inclination in response to your question is to consider the Chomsky/Hermann model of public opinion being distorted by self-censorship (Manufacturing Consent). When you see absurd discrepancies in standards or rationality applied by the press regarding nearly indistinguishable matters (for example exit poll discrepancies in the Ukraine that demonstrate obvious election fraud as opposed to exit poll discrepancies in the "election" of George W. Bush that demonstrate obvious flaws in exit poll protocols), ask yourself if there are significant official policy objectives in play. Chomsky and Hermann's model suggests that more often than not press coverage will track official government positions and distort opposing positons to the point of unrecognizability. A similar assumption can be made regarding economic interests. Regardless how "high-brow" or "left" The Guardian or the New York Times may be from the perspective of right-wing propagandists, unrecognizable distortion of economic affairs to conform with official government policy is a daily occurrence at both papers that it is again very difficult to be surprised by or to consider a phenomenon particular to material concerning Japan.

I strongly suspect the statement you cite involving immigration in Japan is closely tied to the nearly 150 year old British jihad on behalf of neoliberal "free trade." When state policies oppose offical dogmas, reason is typically turned off. The neoliberals see Japan's lingering Keynesian and state economic management sympathies as not only unfair, as Japan being a free-rider on the back of the states that allow more immigration, etc., they essentially see divergence from neoliberal free market fundamentalism as sinful. Once you see the Japanese as political economic lost souls, considerations such as the obvious fact that most immigrants to Japan come from E. Asian and S.E. Asian countries fall by the wayside. If you have already determined that Japan will burn in economic policy hell, history and facts start to look like trivial details by comparison to their predetermined theological status. Right-wing dogmas of this sort have long since been internalized by journalists at purportedly "left" newspapers such as the Guardian and the New York Times.

If breath-taking ignorance were a sign of racism, eight out of ten stories in up-market US newspapers would be racist. As profoundly central as racism is to contemporary US social structure, racism is probably not why demands to prosecute the New York Times for treason get a serious hearing when the same story was published by the Wall Street Journal with nary a complaint and when the New York Times story itself didn't go into as much detail as prior press releases from officials of the Bush administration itself. Much of this US press refusal to believe what's in front of their faces has as at least as much to do with power, profits, and pressure as it does with race.

Having said that, I have seen presentations to Comparative literature departments and English departments in the US where the most virulently anti-essentialist scholars suddenly seem to forget all the theory, history, and skepticism they have ever known when the topic turns to Asia. Somehow they seem to put their critical faculties on standby when the subject turns to Asia or the Middle East.

I see at least four things at work here as this problem relates to Japan more particularly. First, the perspective of international law suggests that Japan has consistently been discriminated against, but it is important to distinguish between when they have been treated as quasi-civilized, non-Europeans subject to neo-colonial exploitation (1852-1910 under unequal treaties), when they have been discriminated against as a second class imperialist power (1910-1945, to say which does not mean they did no wrong or that I approve of their actions), when they have been treated as a protectorate subject to the will of their military occupier (1945-1952), or when they have been treated as a second class neoliberal economic power that does not have much say over the international terms of engagement and does not have a vote on the UN security council (1960-present). Under S. African laws, the Chinese and Japanese had honorary white status. That tells you something about how power can trump race.

Secondly, liberals drawn to identity politics who embrace cultural essentialism in non-majority, domestic ethnic groups often naively extend that frame to their thinking about non-European nations, regardless of the nation's actual standing in international society. Thus we get much well-intended cultural essentialism from the elite US press when it comes to Japan in a misguided attempt to be liberal and multi-cultural.

Third, Japanese neoconservatives actively promote Japanese cultural essentialism in the same way and for the same reasons that US Republicans promote "traditional family values." It is reactionary political polemic decked out in cultural historical drag.

Fourth, there are still astonishing swathes of Euro-American societies that insist on seeing Asians in general and Japanese in particular in an evolutionary frame. After all, the neoliberalism that passes for common sense in the media is ultimately Social Darwinism in denial, so why not? For Social Darwinists, Asians are either little colored brothers and sisters who need a paternalist helping hand (Theodore Roosevelt, George W. Bush) or a Yellow Peril threat to the survival of Western civilization (Lothrop Stoddard, Samuel Huntington). The image can flip on a dime and it almost always ties in with whether or not Japan's policies reinforce or conflict with the clear strategic and economic interests of elites in the nation from which the journalism originates.

For me the question would be why neoliberal Social Darwinist common wisdom more easily drops the reflexive disavowal of racism when the subject turns to Asians or Japanese. Given that, over the last fifty years, the right has practically rehabilitated inequality as an inevitable byproduct of meritocracy, my priority would be to challenge Social Darwinism in all its forms, whether culture or race-based. Nineteenth century evolutionary theory did not distinguish very clearly between maladaptive traits passed on by race or culture (they believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics). As a consequence, the distinction between prejudice grounded in race and prejudice grounded in culture is almost meaningless for contemporary variants of Social Darwinism. They can jettison race and carry on almost indistinguishable discrimination in the name of cultural difference as cultural failure.

At the moment, US neocons tend to save the Yellow Peril demonization for the Chinese and smother the Japanese with kisses. Tomorrow, George W. Bush and Junichiro Koizumi are touring Elvis Presley's home, Graceland, as a sign of Bush's personal fondness for Koizumi as he leaves office. Junichiro Koizumi's neoconservative Japan "gets it" from George W. Bush's perspective. Koizumi publicly pretended to believe all the nonsense about permanent US bases in Iraq being related to the spread of democracy. He was willing to subject a few hundred Japanese Self-Defense Forces to potential attack from the Iraqi resistance as a gesture of support. He recently announced that Japan will install the US anti-ballistic missile defense system that doesn't work as soon as possible. Koizumi has been a feisty Akita to Blair's bouncy poodle and he is getting his reward, such as it is, for having been a good boy.

Tomorrow, Koizumi will become famous for paying his respects to "The King" in Nashville, as well as for his public displays of affection for the Japanese Imperial line at the Yasukuni shrine. Absent an overthrow of the Bush II dictatorship and Republican one party rule, from the perspective of the US state that means that, as fellow neoconservatives, the Japanese are made men and won't get thrown a whole lot of organized flak in the US media for the next several years, just as they've pretty much had a US press holiday for the last five years.

Should the Bush Administration Prosecute Itself for Treason?

2006-06-28T23:20:00.000-05:00

Bryan Bender:

WASHINGTON -- News reports disclosing the Bush administration's use of a special bank surveillance program to track terrorist financing spurred outrage in the White House and on Capitol Hill, but some specialists pointed out yesterday that the government itself has publicly discussed its stepped-up efforts to monitor terrorist finances since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

On Monday, President Bush said it was ``disgraceful" that The New York Times and other media outlets reported last week that the US government was quietly monitoring international financial transactions handled by an industry-owned cooperative in Belgium called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Communication, or SWIFT, which is controlled by nearly 8,000 institutions in 20 countries. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal also reported about the program.

The controversy continued to simmer yesterday when Senator Jim Bunning, a Republican of Kentucky, accused the Times of ``treason," telling reporters in a conference call that it ``scares the devil out of me" that the media would reveal such sensitive information. Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, requested US intelligence agencies to assess whether the reports have damaged anti terrorism operations. And Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has urged Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to pursue ``possible criminal prosecution" of the Times, which has reported on other secret government surveillance programs. The New York Times Co. owns The Boston Globe.

But a search of public records -- government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 -- describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.

``There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. ``The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. ``A lot of people were aware that this was going on," said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.

``Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume" their transactions were being monitored, Comras said of terrorist groups. ``We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing."

Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. The system, which handles trillions of dollars in worldwide transactions each day, serves as a main hub for banks and other financial institutions that move money around the world. According to The New York Times, SWIFT executives agreed to give the Treasury Department and the CIA broad access to its database.

SWIFT and other worldwide financial clearinghouses ``are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information," according to the 33-page report by the terrorist monitoring group established by the UN Security Council in late 2001. ``The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries."

Some worry that the new disclosures will nonetheless hamper US counter-terrorism efforts.

``I worked this stuff and I can guarantee that [revealing the SWIFT] information made a difference," said Dennis Lormel, a retired FBI special agent who helped establish the bureau's Terrorist Financing Operations Section before leaving government in 2003. ``The disclosure will have an adverse impact on investigations. It was used in two specific instances where it helped to track terrorists. We also used it for lead value."

But the White House has also been very public about its efforts to track the overseas banking transactions of Americans and other foreign nationals.

Less than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Bush signed an executive order calling for greater cooperation with foreign entities to monitor money that might be headed to terrorist groups. The executive order was posted on the White House website.

The document called for ``cooperation with, and sharing information by, United States and foreign financial institutions as an additional tool to enable the United States to combat the financing of terrorism."

Richard Newcomb , the head of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control at the time, later publicly credited the president for enabling US law enforcement and intelligence agencies to nab suspected terrorists, including followers of ``Hambali, " Al Qaeda's leader in Southeast Asia. The New York Times report said Hambali's capture in 2003 came with the aid of information gleaned from SWIFT.

Administration officials have said this week that the disclosure of such details were particularly damaging to US security.

Nevertheless, in July 2003 -- a month before Hambali was captured -- Newcomb told the Senate Government Affairs Committee in detail about a program initiated after 9/11 between his office and the Pentagon to track Hambali's financial network in Southeast Asia. The scope of the project included Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore, focusing on the finances of Jemaa Islamiyah , the Al Qaeda group run by Hambali that was responsible for deadly bombings in Bali in 2002.

He said the operation ``identified the key leaders, fund-raisers, businessmen, recruiters, companies, charities, mosques, and schools that were part of [Jamaa Islamiyah] support network. Thus far, we have imposed sanctions against two of these key nodes, and are coordinating action against several others," Newcomb told the committee.

Other public documents have also detailed post-9/11 efforts to follow terrorist money.

The Patriot Act approved by Congress after the attacks emphasized providing new authorities for the Bush administration to track and choke off terrorist funds around the world. One part of the act, dealing specifically with terrorist money, was described by the Treasury Department as the most ``significant [anti-money-laundering] law" since a 1970 law requiring banks to report cash transactions over $10,000.

That section of the Patriot Act required the Bush administration to ``adopt regulations to encourage further cooperation among financial institutions, their regulatory authorities, and law enforcement authorities" to track terrorist-related money laundering.

In testimony before Congress in early 2002, Juan C. Zarate , deputy assistant Treasury secretary in charge of terrorism and violent crime, discussed how the global exchange of information was a key element in choking off their source of funds.

He cited a special international meeting hosted a month after the attacks by the international Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, ``to eliminate existing impediments to exchanging information" between financial institutions and to find solutions to the challenges of tracking terrorist funds.

Why George Bush is Not a Dictator

2006-06-27T00:38:00.000-05:00

I'm all ears.

Academic Freedom Means, "Get Thee Behind Me David Horowitz"

2006-06-18T02:37:00.000-05:00

Michael Berube:
In the past year I’ve come to realize that very few people know what academic freedom is, or why it matters. Perhaps that’s not surprising at a time when all too few Americans know what the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, or why it matters. But what I’m going to argue today is not only that academic freedom is under attack, but that we are now dealing with a coordinated program of obfuscation about just what academic freedom means.

I’ll make the obvious argument first. Academic freedom is under attack for pretty much the same reasons that liberalism itself is under attack. American universities tend to be somewhat left of center of the American mainstream, particularly with regard to cultural issues that have to do with gender roles and sexuality: the combination of a largely liberal, secular professoriat and a generally under-25 student body tends to give you a campus population that, by and large, does not see gay marriage as a serious threat to the Republic. And after 9/11—again, for obvious reasons—many forms of mainstream liberalism have been denounced as anti-American. There is, as you know, a cottage industry of popular right-wing books in which liberalism is equated with treason (that would be Ann Coulter), with mental disorders (Michael Savage), and with fascism (Jonah Goldberg). Coulter’s book also mounts a vigorous defense of Joe McCarthy, and Michelle Malkin has written a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. In that kind of climate, it should come as no surprise that we would be seeing attacks on one of the few remaining institutions in American life that is often—though not completely—dominated by liberals.

You’re already aware that we have in Pennsylvania a House Select Committee on Academic Freedom. Its hearings over the past year have largely been uneventful; one of the Democrats on the committee has even described them as a “colossal waste of time.” But it’s worth noting that HR 177, which created the committee, actually stipulates

that if an individual makes an allegation against a faculty member claiming bias, the faculty member must be given at least 48 hours’ notice of the specifics of the allegation prior to the testimony being given and be given an opportunity to testify at the same hearing as the individual making the allegation.

I think some people read that paragraph in July of last year, when it passed the Pennsylvania House, and imagined a dramatic scenario in which outraged conservative undergraduates would stand up and say “J’accuse!” at hapless liberal faculty members who’d had but 48 scant hours to get their act together and haul themselves before a board of inquiry. Happily, things haven’t unfolded in quite that way. There doesn’t really seem to be a flood of students complaining about their liberal professors; at Penn State, it turns out, we’ve had 13 complaints over the past five years, in a statewide system involving 8,000 professors and 80,000 students. And those thirteen complaints don’t fit any clear pattern, either; as our local paper, the Centre Daily Times, reported on January 25 of this year, in one such complaint a Muslim student suggested that a professor was opposed to Islam; another student charged that a professor was too conservative.

Pennsylvania is the only state to have passed one of these laws. But thanks largely to the efforts of David Horowitz, bills like HR 177 have been introduced in about twenty states so far, and it’s clear that in many cases, the legislators sponsoring them are doing so in the name of preserving academic freedom—but without having any clear idea what academic freedom might be. In Florida, for instance, State Rep. Dennis Baxley insisted, upon introducing a similar bill and successfully shepherding it through committe on an 8-2 party-line vote, that the legislation would help to combat “leftist totalitarianism” on the part of “dictator professors,” by allowing students to sue professors whenever they felt their beliefs were not being “respected.” At the University of Florida, the Independent Florida Alligator reported:

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule”—for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class—would also be given the right to sue.

“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design [a creationist theory], and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue.

In January 2005, Ohio state senator Larry Mumper introduced a similar bill one of whose clauses was drawn directly from the AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure: “Faculty and instructors shall not infringe the academic freedom and quality of education of their students by persistently introducing controversial matter into the classroom or coursework that has no relation to their subject of study and that serves no legitimate pedagogical purpose.” But when Senator Mumper introduced Senate Bill 24 last year, he was asked by a Columbus Dispatch reporter what he would consider “controversial matter” that should be barred from the classroom. “Religion and politics, those are the main things,” he replied.

In recent months I’ve learned something of the back story on the legislative history of Pennsylvania’s HR 177, and I’ve discovered that the bill we now have is significantly different from the bill that was first proposed. This spring, I was a guest on a conservative radio talk show hosted by Penn State students. They wanted to know, among other things, just what was so bad about a House committee being convened with the purpose of making sure that universities are abiding by their stated grievance procedures for students who feel they have been discriminated against on political grounds. I replied that while it’s perfectly legitimate for the state to ensure that universities have adequate grievance procedures for students, Rep. Gibson Armstrong’s proposal for such a committee said no such thing; on the contrary, the original bill called for the creation of a committee that would investigate everything from reading lists to hiring practices, and that would travel throughout the state holding fifteen to twenty hearings on liberal bias—hearings in which accused professors would have no opportunity to face their accusers (that bit about the “48 hours’ notice” was an especially late revision). Furthermore, the original language of HR 177 sought to ensure that students would be graded on (among other things) their ability to defend their perspectives. Now there’s a recipe for relativism—in which you have to give a student an A for his dogged insistence on citing the Book of Genesis in a class on evolutionary theory.

Fortunately, between the first draft and the version that passed the House, the adults in Pennsylvania took over, and revised the charge of the committee so that its focus lay largely on the viability of universities’ internal grievance procedures. But that was not what the hard-right culture warriors wanted; they wanted a much more wide-ranging and intrusive committee. And in a weird way, the outcome of those revisions to the bill helped to confuse the public understanding of academic freedom still further—for, after all, here was a House committee investigating “academic freedom” by making sure that students had every opportunity to speak their minds.

***

THE PRINCIPLE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM stipulates that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties”; it insists that professors should have intellectual autonomy from legislatures, trustees, alumni, parents, and ecclesiastical authorities with regard to their teaching and research. In this respect it is one of the legacies of the Enlightenment, which sought—successfully, in those nations most influenced by the Enlightenment—to free scientists and humanists from the dictates of church and state. And it is precisely that autonomy from legislative and religious oversight that helped to fuel the extraordinary scientific and intellectual efflorescence in the West over the past two centuries; it has also served as one of the cornerstones of the free and open society, in contrast to societies in which certain forms of research will not be pursued if they displease the General Secretary or the Council of Clerics. But today, the paradox of these legislative “academic bills of rights” is this: they claim to defend academic freedom precisely by promising to give the state direct oversight of course curricula, of departmental hiring practices, and of the intellectual direction of academic fields. In other words, by violating the very principle they claim to defend.

Now, Horowitz claims that the Academic Bill of Rights does no such thing; he points out that it includes a great deal of language from the AAUP’s Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom, and he insists that it would forbid the hiring or firing of any faculty member on the basis of his or her political beliefs. But that’s just what David Horowitz says for public consumption. To his supporters and funders, by contrast, he says that his mission is to “get into the trenches with the radical left and battle them into submission.” That’s a real quote, from one of Horowitz’s fundraising letters, in which he claims that there are “thousands of Ward Churchills” teaching at American universities. [Veteran readers of his humble blog will surely remember my response to that particular Horowitz text in December of last year.] Well, you think, maybe Horowitz is just engaging in a little rhetorical excess here, a little hyperbole for the folks at home; really, all he wants is for university faculties to be more ideologically diverse. You think wrong. Here’s Horowitz in his 2000 book, The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits: “[y]ou cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate. You can only do it by following Lenin’s injunction: ‘In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent’s argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.’” (See Graham Larkin’s takeInside Higher Ed.) on this passage in an April 2005 essay for

There should be no question about this: David Horowitz was a member of the extremist fringe thirty years ago when he was hanging out with late-model Black Panther Party crackpots, and he’s a member of the extremist fringe now. He’s merely exchanged fringes. And he’s notoriously slipshod in everything he does, right down to his claim that on the eve of the 2004 election, a Penn State biology professor showed his class Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, compounded by his admission that he had no proof of this claim despite making it throughout the latter half of 2005, compounded still further that his claim that he was holding himself to “a higher standard of honesty” for dropping the original claim when he was challenged on it by Pennsylvania Democrat Lawrence Curry this past January. [About his questioning by Curry, Horowitz said to USA Today, “These underhanded, devious, malicious, dishonest tactics. I gave 45 minutes of testimony, a half-hour of questions, and I never once mentioned the incident they’re referring to. . . . Curry saved it to the very end of the hearings and rammed it to me.” Yes, you heard that right: it was underhanded, devious, malicious, and dishonest of Lawrence Curry to ask Horowitz about a claim he had not made at the hearing—but had made repeatedly for six months prior to the hearing.] So why are twenty states considering legislation written by this man, legislation that claims to defend academic freedom by placing professors directly under the control and oversight of the state? Why does he have the ear of the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives? Horowitz has managed to pull off this rhetorical and political feat by confusing the definition of academic freedom, construing it as a property of students rather than teachers. Basically, he has managed to convince many Americans, including many American students, that “academic freedom” means, among other things, “freedom from liberal professors.”

You can find a neatly condensed form of this confusion in Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom handbook. I have a copy of the handbook with me, and I hope all of you brought yours. It’s a little red book of some kind, but I don’t rightly know what to call it. Anyway, here’s Horowitz on page 19:

VI. Frequently Asked Questions

1. Question: Is there a conflict of interest in appealing to the legislature for help in the case of public universities, since the principles of academic freedom seek to protect the university from political interference?

Answer: There is no conflict. The state legislatures and publicly appointed boards of trustees have a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayer-funded institutions and their tax-paying supporters. Among them is the responsibility to insure that these institutions serve the whole community and not just a partisan political or philosophical faction. If public universities become politically partisan they act to subvert the democratic process, which is not what their creators intended. It is illegal under state patronage laws to use state-funded institutions for partisan purposes. No one has the right to create a closed political fiefdom at public expense. Such exclusionary practices are the very opposite of academic freedom. Most importantly, there is a world of difference between asking the legislature to defend principles of academic freedom, intellectual diversity and student rights, and asking them to interfere with the universities’ proper academic functions.

I hope some of you are familiar with the game of three-card monte, because by the time you’ve gotten to that final sentence, the little red book has done a fine job of hiding the little red card: “academic freedom” has now become “academic freedom, intellectual diversity and student rights,” while professors who teach about the history of race in the United States in ways Horowitz does not like, to take but one example, have become “partisan” members of a “political fiefdom” that works to “subvert the democratic process.”

[A more elaborate version of this argument can be found in Mark Bauerlein’s testimony to the Georgia state legislature on Horowitz’s behalf, the full transcript of which is available at FrontPage.com. Some of you may be familiar with the celebrated Chronicle of Higher Education essay in which Bauerlein argues, “we can’t open the university to conservative ideas and persons by outside command. That would poison the atmosphere and jeopardize the ideals of free inquiry.” But not all of you will be familiar with the fact that eight months before that essay was published, Bauerlein was saying something quite dramatically different:

In a democratic society, universities occupy a special place, namely, the place in which inquiry is to be unfettered by politics, money, and power. But in return comes an obligation for professors to safeguard the principles of free exchange. It’s a social contract: society grants faculty space protected from power politics and business models, and faculty members pledge to uphold the ideals that differentiate the campus from the rest of society.

Academic freedom doesn’t precede the contract, nor does it belong exclusively to the faculty. Every member in the campus community must honor academic freedom and be honored by it. It is just as easy for a professor to violate a student’s academic freedom as it is for an administrator to violate a professor’s academic freedom. For a professor to argue with a student over conservative opinion is altogether fitting and proper, so long as it is conducted with respect and decided on evidence. But for faculty to hire only Left-leaning faculty, teach only Left-leaning thinkers, and explore only Left-leaning opinions is to substitute advocacy for inquiry. For administrators to discourage conservative speakers, while paying radical Leftists five-figure fees, is to throw a mainstream aura around but one narrow range of belief.

The educational costs of such bigotry are obvious, and the ethical example it sets is deplorable. Such behaviors belong outside the campus, not inside, and there is no reason why outsiders should countenance universities that break the terms of the social contract. To be sure, academic Leftists will perceive outside pressure as an infringement of academic freedom. They think that the university is an independent enclave accountable only to itself, and that any incursions from beyond by definition threaten the integrity of higher education. But, in truth, outside pressure arises precisely in order to do the opposite. It is the faculty who have abandoned the ideal, who stifle dissent no matter how learned, who under the guise of a rearguard, adversarial, protest posture rule the campus intellectual world and apportion its many comforts and securities to a slim ideological spectrum.

This is what we must demonstrate to trustees, alumnae, politicians, and parents. Academic freedom isn’t the property of the faculty. It is the responsibility of campus dwellers, yes, but the property of all citizens.

Some people would criticize Bauerlein for lining up with Horowitz so thoroughly—for misconstruing “academic freedom” as a property of students and for telling legislators that universities “hire only Left-leaning faculty, teach only Left-leaning thinkers, and explore only Left-leaning opinions.” But not me! I support all forms of intellectual diversity, including a healthy diversity of intellectually honest and intellectually dishonest positions!]

This past year, some students at Penn State have picked up this idea as well, and have begun to defend their right to academic freedom in the face of stultifying professorial orthodoxy. Under the banner of promoting “academic freedom,” the Young Americans for Freedom erected a cute little mockup of the Berlin Wall last November, to symbolize their oppression at the hands of their liberal professors. One student was quoted in the Penn State Daily Collegian as saying “communism was pretty much dead,” but at Penn State, “it’s still one of the most heavily taught subjects.” Another agreed that “there were many liberal courses at Penn State, especially in sociology, his minor.” Now, quite apart from the question of whether communism is heavily taught at Penn State, or whether it is synonymous with liberalism, perhaps it’s worth pointing out to conservative students (at Penn State and elsewhere) that the people of the Eastern bloc, the people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, suffered mightily and died in great numbers under Communist rule, from the forced collectivization of the farms through the show trials and purges, the jailing and exile of dissidents, the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, and the crackdown in Poland. Surely, then, one liberal response to Penn State’s Berlin Wall is that such gestures actually trivialize the history to which they appeal. For it is one thing to experience political oppression at the hands of Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev. It is quite another thing to have a liberal sociology professor in a course you have chosen to take at a university you have chosen to attend. I can’t imagine that Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa would be terribly impressed with Penn State’s Berlin Wall, or the bravery of those who built it. Nor can I imagine that they would think much of a putatively “conservative” movement whose goal it is to place educational institutions directly under the control of the state.

And yet this kind of thinking is now taken for granted in some quarters of the right. Last November, National Association of Scholars president Stephen Balch testified to the Pennsylvania House Committee on Academic Freedom that because of the number of faculty members at state-funded universities in Pennsylvania who identify with “a particular political group,” state legislatures should make sure that no “advocacy” exists. I want to call attention to the evidentiary standard here: a preponderance of registered Democrats among the faculty, in and of itself, is grounds for state action. According to the National Association of Scholars transcript of Balch’s testimony, the state of Pennsylvania must pursue “intellectual diversity” in hiring—meaning, of course, a redress of the shortage of conservatives in academe. The legislature, Balch argued,

should expect to see the problem of intellectual pluralism addressed with the same vigor that the state’s universities are already addressing what they take to be the problem of a lack of ethnic and gender diversity. . . .

The legislature must expect a full accounting of progress made toward these goals each time the state’s universities seek new statutory authority and renewed financial support. If a good-faith effort is being made to overcome these problems, it should leave the remedial specifics to the universities’ own decision making. If a good-faith effort isn’t made, it should urge governing boards to seek new leadership as a condition of full support. Failing even in that, it might, as a last resort, consider a full-scale organizational overhaul, to design governance systems and institutional arrangements better able to meet the obligations that go with academic freedom.

“Full-scale organizational overhaul”: what can that mean? I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound good. And while I don’t want to say it sounds . . . Stalinist, exactly, I’m told that it was more elegant in the original Russian, when it had the secondary connotation of “let’s party like it’s 1929.”

More seriously, Balch is drawing on the history of affirmative action and employment discrimination law in order to argue that universities should make “good faith” efforts to hire people more to his ideological liking. This is a common theme in right-wing attacks on universities, especially among those critics who have become alarmed that affirmative action has gone too far, insofar as fully five percent of all doctorates are now awarded to black people. In 2002, attorney Kenneth Lee, a member of the far-right Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, made the case in so many words. “The simple logic underlying much of contemporary civil-rights law,” said Lee, “applies equally to conservative Republicans, who appear to face clear practices of discrimination in American academia that are statistically even starker than previous blackballings by race.” Even starker than previous blackballings by race: according to Lee, conservative scholars have it worse than did African-Americans under segregation and Jim Crow. Conservative is indeed the new black. (This would mean, I imagine, that on some campuses there are fewer than zero conservatives.) It is a fantastic and deeply offensive claim in and of itself, but it becomes all the more offensive if you go back and look at the history of conservatives’ opposition to affirmative action programs in American higher education.

***

BUT WHERE ARE MY MANNERS? I’ve spent all this time on David Horowitz and the National Association of Scholars, and I haven’t even mentioned the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, even though its president, Anne D. Neal, has come all this way to be with us today. Last month, ACTA published a report titled “How Many Ward Churchills?", which consists largely of course descriptions adduced by ACTA as evidence that American universities are in fact infested by Ward Churchills. As the report says, “it is important to explore just how widespread the Ward Churchill phenomenon” really is. The first subheading, “Ward Churchill is Everywhere,” would seem to suggest, at least on one reading, that Ward Churchill is everywhere.

Now, I can’t say much about the courses ACTA flags, because I know no more about them than ACTA does. All we have are the course descriptions, and it’s hard to say on the basis of those that the professors who designed the courses are really willing to blame the World Trade Center dead for the attacks of September 11. [Timothy Burke’s response to the report is characteristically painstaking and substantive, and his followup discussion is far more patient than the report or its defenders deserve.] But there is one course description I recognized when I read through the report:

Penn State University offers “American Masculinities,” which maps “how vexed ideas about maleness, manhood, and masculinity provided rough-riding presidents, High Modern novelists, Provincetown playwrights, queer regionalists, star-struck inverts, surly bohemians and others with a means to negotiate—and gender—the cultural and political turmoil that constituted modern American life.”

I happen to know who taught that course. He is a brilliant young professor, and, thank goodness, he is nothing like Ward Churchill. In fact, I don’t see anything objectionable about this course description, regardless of who taught the course. On the contrary, I suggest that anyone who tries to claim that such a course has no place at an American university has no business commenting on American universities.

By the way, since ACTA, Horowitz and company are fond of telling people that courses like this are not only evidence of the corruption of the university but also a disservice to students, perhaps it’s germane that the student evaluations of this course, and of this professor, have been off-the-charts spectacular.

[Since returning from Washington I’ve learned that ACTA blogger and University of Pennsylvania English professor Erin O’Connor is now congratulating Ms. Neal on the “civility” and on the “measured, searching, mutually respectful tone” with which she conducts correspondence with her critics, even as she continues to engage in the Horowitzian tactic of associating thousands of fine professors with Ward Churchill—including one anthropologist who committed the thoughtcrime of putting the word “race” in scare quotes. Interestingly, a commenter by the name of Aretha Franklin, who rightly considers such attacks disrespectful of the work of good teachers, is having none of it.]

There are two more kinds of confusion behind the attacks on academic freedom, as well, and I’ll just touch on them briefly for now.

The first is that most critics of universities don’t seem to distinguish between unconscious liberal bias and conscious, articulate liberal convictions. They take the language of “bias” from critiques of the so-called liberal media, where it is applied to outlets like the New York Timesbeliefs, and of course they should be presented—ideally, along with legitimate competing beliefs—in college classrooms. Now, notice that I said legitimate competing beliefs. We have no obligation to debate whether the Holocaust happened. And that’s not a hypothetical matter. Late last fall, the philosopher with whom I co-founded the Penn State chapter of the AAUP, Claire Katz, informed me of a graduate teaching assistant in philosophy who had just had a very strange encounter with a student. The course, which dealt with bioethics, had recently dealt with the vile history of experiments on unwitting and/or unwilling human subjects, from the Holocaust to Tuskegee, and the student wanted to know whether the “other side” would be presented as well. I hope you’re asking yourselves, what other side?—because, of course, to all reasonable and responsible researchers in the field, there is no “other side”; there is no pro-human experimentation position that needs to be introduced into classroom discussion to counteract possible liberal “bias.” We are not in the business of inviting pro-Nazi spokesmen for Joseph Mengele to our classrooms. More recently, I was asked by a member of the Penn State College Republicans whether I taught “both sides” in my graduate seminar on disability studies. In response, I mentioned the debate over what’s called the ethics of selective abortion of fetuses with disabilities, and briefly sketched out four or five positions on the question. My point, of course, was that just as it is a mistake to think that there are two sides to every question, it is also a mistake—and a pernicious one, encouraged by Horowitz, Balch, and company—to think that there are only two sides to every question. But this is the language with which some of our students now enter the classroom; it is the language of cable news and mass-media simulacra of “debate.” There is one side, and then there is the other side. That constitutes balance, and anything else is bias. and CBS News that, in the view of movement conservatives, lend a leftish slant to the news both deliberately and unwittingly. But the language of “bias” is not very well suited to the work of, say, a researcher who has spent decades investigating American drug policy or conflicts in the Middle East and who has come to conclusions that amount to more or less “liberal” critiques of current policies. Such conclusions are not “bias”; rather, they are legitimate, well-founded

A second confusion has to do with “accountability.” The argument goes like this, and I have heard it innumerable times in recent years, here at Penn State and at public universities across the country: We pay the bills for these proselytizing faculty liberals—we should have some say over what they teach and how they teach it. Public universities should be accountable to the public. And you know, at first blush it sounds kind of reasonable. The taxes of the people of Pennsylvania do go to support Penn State, and I take the mission of the public university very seriously. From Virginia to Illinois to dear old State, I have spent my adult life at public universities, and I will be happy to explain my teaching and writing to any member of the public who wants to learn more about it. But let’s look more closely at that funding, and at what forms of “accountability” are appropriate to an educational institution. Only twenty years ago, forty-five percent of Penn State’s budget was provided by public funds; back then, in-state tuition was $2562. Our level of state support is now down to 10 percent, and, not coincidentally, in-state tuition is $11,508. So perhaps it’s worth pointing out that state support has declined as state demands for accountability have increased; or, to put this more dramatically, I sometimes find myself faced with people who say, in effect, “I pay ten percent of your salary, and that gives me the right to screen one hundred percent of your thoughts.”

Now, Penn State as an institution is accountable for that ten percent of its budget. We should—and we do—make every effort to ensure that our funds are spent responsibly, and I think everyone who’s dealt with a university purchasing system will know what I’m talking about. But that does not mean that legislators and taxpayers have the right, or the ability, to determine the direction of academic fields of research. And I say this with all due respect to my fellow citizens: you have every right to know that your money is not being wasted. But you do not have the right to suggest that the biology department should make room for promoters of Intelligent Design; or that the astronomy department should take stock of the fact that many people believe more in astrology than in cosmology; or that the history department should concentrate more on great leaders and less on broad social movements; or that the philosophy department should put more emphasis on deontological rather than on utilitarian conceptions of the social contract. The people who teach these subjects in public universities actually do have expertise in their fields, an expertise they have accumulated throughout their lives. And this is why we believe that decisions about academic affairs should be conducted by means of peer review rather than by plebescite. It’s a difficult contradiction to grasp: on the one hand, professors at public universities should be accountable and accessible to the public; but on the other hand, they should determine the intellectual direction of their fields without regard to public opinion or political fashion. This is precisely why academic freedom is so invaluable: it creates and sustains educational institutions that are independent of demographic variables. Which is to say: from Maine to California, the content of a public university education should not depend on whether 60 percent of the population doubts evolution or whether 40 percent of the population of a state believes in angels—and, more to the point, the content of a university education should be independent of whatever political party is in power at any one moment in history. Would I say this if Feingold Democrats were in power in every state house from sea to shining sea? Absolutely. Without a moment’s hesitation. Legislative interference by Democrats would violate the principle of academic freedom just as surely as would interference by Republicans, though I suppose the interference would take a somewhat different form. And don’t even get me started about those Greens.

To understand what’s at stake in this principle, we have to make an important distinction between substantive liberalism and procedural liberalism. For one of the things at stake here is the very ideal of independent intellectual inquiry, the kind of inquiry whose outcomes cannot be known in advance and cannot be measured in terms of efficiency or productivity. There is no mystery why some of our critics loathe liberal campuses: it is not simply that conservatives control all three branches of government and are striking out at the few areas of American cultural life they do not dominate. That much is true, but it fails to capture the truly radical nature of these attacks on academe: for these are attacks not simply on the substance of liberalism (in the form of specific fiscal or social policies stemming from the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society) but on procedural liberalism itself, on the idea that no one political faction should control every facet of a society. There is a sense, then, in which traditional conservatives are procedural liberals, as are liberals themselves; but members of the radical right, and the radical left, are not. The radical right’s contempt for procedural liberalism, with its checks, balances, and guarantees that minority reports will be incorporated into the body politic, can be seen in recent defenses of the theory that the President has the power to set aside certain laws and provisions of the Constitution at will, and in the religious right’s increasingly venomous and hallucinatory attacks on a judicial branch most of whose members were in fact appointed by Republicans. What animates the radical right, in other words, is not so much a specific liberal belief about stem-cell research here or gay civil unions there; on an abstract level, it’s not about any specific liberal issues at all. Rather, it’s about the very existence of areas of political and intellectual independence that do not answer directly and favorably to the state. So, for example (and this is my final example, chosen especially for you librarians out there), when in April 2005 Alabama state representative Gerald Allen proposed a bill that would have prevented Alabama’s public libraries from buying books by gay authors or involving gay characters, he wasn’t actually acting as a conservative. Real “conservatives” don’t do that. He was behaving like a member of the radical right. Indeed, his original intent was to strip libraries of all such works, from Shakespeare to Alice Walker; and as he put it, “I don’t look at it as censorship. I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.” Thankfully, relatively few public officials see it as their job to protect the children of America from the heritage of Western culture.

But some do, and that’s why academic freedom is so important. It may not be written into the Bill of Rights—you know, the real one, the one in the Constitution. It is far younger than the rights enumerated there, and more fragile. But together with freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances, and the freedom of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, academic freedom is an aspect of procedural liberalism that is one of the cornerstones of a free society. If you believe in the ideals of the open society and the intellectual legacies of the Enlightenment, you should believe in the ideal of professors’ intellectual independence from the state—and you should believe that it is an ideal worth defending.

Powerline Lie of the Day

2006-05-27T17:34:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald:
The war-mongers who are pining for the next phase of their Glorious War of Civilizations -- regime change in Iran -- thought they hit the jackpot last week when the pro-War, Israel-centric National Post of Canada published a column by neoconservative Amir Teheri which claimed that the Iranian parliament had passed a new law mandating "separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public." The warmonger pundits immediately began screeching how they found definitive proof that Iran is the New Nazi Germany -- a new law requiring that Jews wear yellow identifying strips on their clothing.

But the story was a complete scam, total fiction, and everyone -- including the National Post and the pro-Israeli groups which were promoting the story --now acknowledge that the story was false. Everyone, that is, except for the fact-proof fanatics at Powerline, who continue to insist that it's true.

As CNN reports, National Post has now categorically retracted the story and admitted that it's false:

A Canadian newspaper apologized Wednesday for an article that said Iran planned to force Jews and other religious minorities to wear distinctive clothing to distinguish themselves from Muslims. . . .

But the National Post, a longtime supporter of Israel and critic of Tehran, admitted Wednesday it had not checked the piece thoroughly enough before running it.

"It is now clear the story is not true," Douglas Kelly, the National Post's editor in chief, wrote in a long editorial on Page 2. "We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story."

This article from Jewish Week -- headlined: "Anatomy of a Hoax: False story alleging special yellow insignia for Iranian Jews spurred by Wiesenthal Center's flawed confirmation" -- details how many pro-Israeli organizations (including AIPAC and the Simon Wiesenthal Center) pushed the story as hard as possible, while some exercised more caution. But the publication of the story by National Post, combined with the mindless and reflexive support of scores of neoconservative organizations and pundits intensely yearning for removal of the anti-Israeli regime in Iran, caused the false story to explode into the public dialogue. The Jewish Week article details the predictable fallout:

The ensuing media blaze was like a match thrown onto a tinderbox, starting with the National Post page one banner, headlined: "IRAN EYES BADGES FOR JEWS?" - followed within hours by blogs, wire services, radio reports, Rush Limbaugh and outraged press statements issued by Jewish groups carrying the news to millions.

And any doubt about the circles that spat up this false story are dispelled by this paragraph in that article:

Benador Associates, the public relations agency that placed the story with The National Post, is a boutique firm specializing in promoting neoconservative figures such as Taheri, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer and others who supported the Iraq war and "regime change" in Iran now.

The same people who conjured up the cakewalks, Saddam's chemical stockpiles and mushroom clouds that led us into the Iraq disaster are now trying the same fraudulent tactics to induce Americans to get rid of the regime in Iran. But as the article details, all of those groups now recognize that the story was false. Indeed, the original newspaper publishing the story has not just retracted it, but said expressly that it is false.

But just as they continue to insist that Iraq had WMDs and elaborate contacts with Al Qaeda, Powerline is not going to abandon this claim just because every fact makes indisputably clear that it is false. No - they have a war to deceive people into, and nothing will take precedence over that. In an amazing post to which both Scott "Big Trunk" Johnson and John "Rocket" Hinderaker contribute, they insist that the crux of the story is true, and they even trot out their standard line by excoriating the "MSM" for covering up the story. Scott, for instance, says:

I am struck, however, by the lack of interest in the undisputed component of the law on which Taheri focused. Taheri reported that the the (sic) Iranian Majlis had adopted legislation that prescribed the clothing to be worn by Muslims . . .

Taheri also reported that the law "envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians." It is the latter element of the law that generated the furor, but I have not seen any report taking issue with Taheri's account of the pending imposition of an Islamic dress code. If such a dress code were to become effective, religiously based noncompliance (assuming it is permitted) would identify the offenders as non-Muslims or infidels. Along with Reuters and the Daily News, the mainstream media have overlooked this apparently troubling consideration.

Displaying his only talent, Rocket then takes the deceit one dishonest step further and adds this:

As Scott notes, it is hard to see how Iran can regulate the clothing worn by Muslims without also regulating the clothing worn by non-Muslims, either explicitly or implicitly.

There simply is no law in Iran that has anything to do with mandating what non-Muslims should wear. It does not exist. And it never did. And everyone acknowledges that except for Powerline. From Jewish Week:

[Israeli expert on Iran, Meir] Javedanfar told The Jewish Week he spent "about 40 minutes" talking to sources in and outside of Iran and, more importantly, getting the text of the legislation off the Internet. His review of the extensive parliamentary debate of the bill, also available online, showed that such a proposal was not even part of the discussion.

Indeed, the law's text and parliamentary debate, available in English from the BBC Service, discloses no provision mandating that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress. It instead focuses on promoting "traditional clothing designs" using Iranian and Islamic patterns by Iran's domestic fashion industry and preventing "the import of clothes incompatible with cultural Islamic and national values." The law is meant to develop and protect Iran's clothing industry, Javedanfar said.

At this point, the only way to claim that Iran has passed a law regulating the clothing which non-Muslims must wear is by lying. But that's exactly what Powerline is claiming. And four months from now, and six months from now, when the debate intensifies over whether the American military should forcibly change Iran's government, Big Trunk and Rocket will be writing posts insisting that Iran has a law requiring Jews and Christians to wear identifying clothing, and they will link to the post they wrote today setting forth the "rationale" which proves that, and scores of other warmonger pundits and bloggers will link to that post when arguing, with increasing urgency, that Iran is the new Nazi Germany and that those who oppose an attack on it are a bunch of appeasers who never learned the mistake of Neville Chamberlain and who don't care if another Holocaust occurs.

Even the extremists who peddled this story now admit that it's false. Only Powerline continues to claim that it's true. Isn't that fairly definitively proof of the complete lack of credibility, integrity and honesty of TIME's Blog of the Year? There is no limit on what they are willing to fabricate in order to justify their defense of the administration and to push the country to war with Iran. But if this patently dishonest insistence on clinging to a plainly false story isn't enough to compel their removal from mainstream respectability, what would be?

UPDATE: Taylor Marsh, who has done some substantial original reporting on this story from her blog, has a detailed and very interesting post today exploring the question of who bears original and ultimate responsibility for the manufacture and distribution of this false story. Be sure to follow the links to Taylor's other posts where you can see the chronology of her impressive journalistic involvement in this story.

Get Your NeoCon Anti-Iran Disinformation Here

2006-05-26T01:56:00.000-05:00

Jim Lobe, InterAsia Times:
Washington - A story authored by a prominent US neo-conservative regarding new legislation in Iran allegedly requiring Jews and other religious minorities to wear distinctive colored badges circulated around the world last weekend before it was exposed as extremely dubious.

The article by a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Iranian-American Amir Taheri, was initially published in last Friday's edition of Canada's National Post, which ran alongside the story a 1935 photograph of a Jewish businessman in Berlin with a yellow six-pointed star sewn on his overcoat, as required by Nazi legislation at the time. The Post subsequently noted denials of the story.

Taheri's story, however, was reprinted by the New York Post, which is owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, and picked up by the Jerusalem Post, which also featured a photo of a yellow star from the Nazi era over a photo of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

Another neo-conservative publication, the New York Sun, also noted the story on Monday, claiming that the specific report that special badges were required by the legislation had been "incorrect". At the same time, however, the Sun quoted two Iranian-American foes of the Islamic Republic as suggesting that dress requirements for religious minorities were still being considered by Iran's ruling circles. It offered no evidence to support that assertion.

The story, which was also noted in the Australian press, comes at a moment of rising tensions between Iran and both Israel and the United States over Tehran's nuclear program, which, according to the latter two, is designed to produce nuclear weapons. Both the US and Israel have suggested that they may take military action against nuclear-related targets in Iran unless ongoing diplomatic efforts to freeze Tehran's program bear fruit.

Juan Cole, president of the US Middle East Studies Association (MESA), described the Taheri article and its appearance first in Canada's Post as "typical of black psychological operations campaigns", particularly in its origin in an "out-of-the-way newspaper that is then picked up by the mainstream press" - in this case, the Jerusalem Post and the New York Post. A former US intelligence official described the article's relatively obscure provenance as a "real sign of [a] disinformation operation".

Taheri's original article, "A color code for Iran's 'infidels'", dealt primarily with new legislation that it said was designed to ensure that Iranians wear "standard Islamic garments" that removed ethnic and class distinctions and that eliminated "the influence of the infidel" - presumably meaning the West - "on the way Iranians, especially the young, dress".

But it also noted in passing that it would "envisage" separate dress codes for religious minorities - Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians - who would be required to adopt distinct color schemes to make them identifiable in public "so that [Muslims] can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus [become] najis" (unclean).

In particular, he explained, religious minorities will "have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faiths. Jews will be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes, while Christians will be assigned the color red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the color of their zonnar," he wrote.

While Taheri did not evoke the Nazi precedent in his column, the National Post asked its readers at the end of the piece, "Is Iran turning into the new Nazi Germany? Share your opinion online at national post.com."

That was compounded by the Post's publication of a front-page article by Chris Wattie that quoted unidentified "human-rights groups" as "raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country's Jews and Christians to wear colored badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims".

"This is reminiscent of the Holocaust," Wattie quoted Rabbi Marvin Heir, the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, as telling him. "Iran is moving closer and closer to the ideology of the Nazis."

The story also quoted one Iranian exile living in Toronto as confirming the story, as well as Canadian Jewish leaders and Prime Minister Stephen Harper as denouncing the legislation and suggesting that it was consistent with other recent moves made by Tehran.

Similarly, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, who, however, denied any specific knowledge about the alleged measure, called it "despicable" and reminiscent of "Germany under Hitler".

In fact, however, the legislation contained "absolutely no mention of religious minorities", according to Hadi Ghaemi, the chief Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch, who said it included "only generalities with regard to promoting a national dress code and fashion industry that should be subsidized and supported by the government".

The article - and especially its attribution to "human-rights groups" - was particularly unfortunate, he said, because "it plays into the hands of the Iranian government that wants to discredit human-rights issues that are raised at the international level".

The actual legislation was indeed "a troubling development", but not for the reasons cited by the Post, he said, because "its main target is most probably Iranian women".

Other denunciations were quick to follow. One Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament, Maurice Motamed, insisted that color requirements for ethnic minorities had "never been proposed or discussed in parliament", let alone approved. "Such news," he told the Associated Press, "is an insult to religious minorities here.

"This report is a complete fabrication and is totally false," he told The Australian newspaper. "It is a lie ..."

Two Israel-based Iran experts, Menashe Amir and Meir Javedanfar, also denounced the original reports about the legislation, suggesting in a follow-up article in the Jerusalem Post on Monday that they were based on outdated speculation about the impact on non-Muslims of the adoption of Islamic dress standards.

Nonetheless, the Sun, without endorsing the specific contents of the National Post articles, refused to drop the story, quoting "a leading spokesman for Iranian Jews", the secretary general of the Iranian American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles, Sam Kermanian, as thanking "the world for its outcry" over the original reports and praising Taheri as "someone with fantastic credibility".

Taheri is a member of Benador Associates, a public relations firm that lists a large number of leading neo-conservatives, including American Enterprise Institute associates Richard Perle, David Frum, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin and Joshua Muravchik, among its clients.

Major boosters of the war with Iraq, Benador clients, who also include former Central Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey and former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky, have also called for the US administration to take a hard line against Iran.

The newspapers that so far have run the story are similarly identified with a hard line against Tehran. The National Post, which was bought by CanWest Global Communications from Conrad Black, a close associate of Perle's, is controlled by David and Leonard Asper, who have accused the Canadian Broadcasting Corp of being anti-Israel, according to Marsha Cohen of Florida International University, who has closely followed the badges story.

Similarly, the Sun has taken positions consistent with the right-wing Likud Party in Israel on Middle East issues, while Murdoch owns the strongly pro-Israel Weekly Standard and Fox News, in addition to the New York Post.

"I think the way these stories played - particularly the references to the Holocaust - was designed to arouse and play upon concerns and accusations that Ahmadinejad is another Hitler who needs to be dealt with accordingly," noted Cohen, who added that the Iranian president's questioning of the Holocaust and aggressive statements about Israel had made such stories more credible.

2006-05-17T16:54:00.000-05:00

Technorati Profile

2006-05-17T16:52:00.000-05:00

Technorati Profile

John Hinderaker Carries the White Man's Burden

2006-05-17T16:05:00.000-05:00

In John Hinderaker's devastatingly critical response to Bush's Monday night speech on immigration (now apparently the "the failure to build a wall" speech in rightist circles), He Had His Chance, he shares more than simply his views on the speech:

I rode home from the airport in a taxi a few minutes ago. My driver, as is almost always the case in Minnesota, was an African immigrant. No sooner had I gotten into the cab than he began talking about the speech and railing against Bush on the theory that the President is anti-immigrant. I patiently tried to explain that President Bush is in trouble because he is not just pro-immigrant, but pro-illegal immigrant. I explained that he has argued for a guest worker program and a path to citizenship, and has said repeatedly that it would be impossible to deport all the illegals.

My cab driver was completely disoriented by this. I could tell he didn't believe it. Like nearly all African cab drivers, he listens to public radio all day long. Twenty minutes with me wasn't enough to overcome years of liberal indoctrination. He simply wasn't able to absorb the idea that President Bush might not be a racist who hates immigrants. I'm sure he'd forgotten everything I said by the time he left my driveway.

Being a fellow resident of the Twin Cities area, I can verify that many cab drivers in Minneapolis are recent immigrants from Africa. They are almost all from Somalia, to be precise.. To Hinderaker, however, they are simply "African." This distinction might seem subtle until you consider the consequences of Hinderaker's failure to understand who he was talking to.There are many religions and many political stripes in Africa. There is one effective religion in Somalia from which almost 100% of the Minneapolis cab drivers of African extraction hail--they are almost universally Muslim.

They know what Bush policies have meant for fellow Muslims in the US (massive government generated violations of civil rights), and in the Middle East (that would be bloody catastrophe, not liberation). They have probably had friends or acquaintances interrogated for contributing to a legitimate charity while Muslim, charities they've contributed to locked down, their assets frozen for fruitless, years-long Bushco witchhunts while children starve in Northern Africa. Friends across the country legally abused and/or deported and potentially subject to torture when they get off the plane the Bush administration forced them to get on.

The idea that Hinderaker imagines one of them might not be a Bush supporter as a consequence of being brainwashed by public radio(!) (which is mostly milquetoast, pro-Republicanism here, anyway) is such a profound confession of ignorance--so surreal--it's almost amusing.

Muslim Civil Rights Report, 2002

Data gathered for this report demonstrate that Muslims in the United States are more apprehensive than ever about discrimination and intolerance. U.S. Government actions after September 11, 2001, alone impacted more than 60,000 individuals. Muslims have charged that the government's actions violated the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution because they included ethnically and religiously-based interrogations, detentions, raids, and closures of charities...Unlike any other past crisis, the post-September 11 anti-Muslim backlash has been the most violent, as it included several murders...
...Excluding the September backlash incidents, this year's normal reporting period contains 525 valid complaints, up from 366 in 2000/2001--a 43 percent increase...
...Two particularly encouraging developments are noteworthy. First, on April 3, 2002, a federal judge in Detroit, Michigan ruled that the Bush administration's policy of closed immigration hearings was unconstitutional. The ruling came in the case of Rabih Haddad, who had overstayed his immigration visa. In another case involving a hate crime, a Dallas, Texas jury convicted Mark Stroman for the murder of Vasudev Patel last October. Storman thought the Hindu man looked Middle Eastern and killed him to avenge the attacks on New York and Washington.

Damn public radio...

Update:
Glenn Greenwald has more on Hinderaker's response here.
Firedoglake on whitemen's bloviating on immigration for the cameras.

George W. Calls Out the Cavalry!

2006-05-15T03:35:00.000-05:00

Extended PressThink Comment:

Andrew,
I'm generally persuaded by your refinement of the thesis, "they're still experimenting." My reservation is that when I hear Bush give a public speech (for as long as I can stand it, usually about 60-90 seconds at a time, which means I generally have to read a transcript for the sake of my sanity), I still don't hear persuasion. I hear many things: clanging, incoherent stereotypes, geographically and historically impossible fantasies, etc.

Above all, I hear the sound of a vacuum. They hate us for our freedom? I just feel insulted. I hear plenty of bully and I hear plenty of pulpit, but I have yet to hear the barest hint of rational persuasion. Tomorrow's announcement of a "plan" will ultimately be the lead-in to a several hundered mile long photo-op designed to avoid having to resolve the glaring contradiction between his corporate-friendly guest-worker proposal and the militant anti-brown, lock-down fantasies of about a third of those who voted for him in the last electio--in favor of the image of the latter and simple stall tactics on the substance of the former. Of course, in the meantime he has refused to fully fund the border patrol! But this is a photo-op most essentially designed to distract from the likely indictment of his political godfather, Karl Rove, and the excrement hitting the fan over the discovery that the name of "Big Brother" is in fact, George W. Bush.

Ultimately, I'm forced to modify the opposition Jay seems to have drawn between Theodore Roosevelt and Bush. It's true Roosevelt was a pioneer in mass media persuasion, but I think we need to recall his contribution as the founding of a cult of presidential personality in many cases precisely at the expense of the art of rational, democratic persuasion. TR certainly could do the latter when he was so inclined. But he pioneered an approach with which he didn't necessarily have to.

Beyond media strategy, T. R. was a pioneer of jingoistic unilateral US imperialism. Conservative luminaries such as Max Boot hold up the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine as a fine upstanding precedent for the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. Rove aspires to be Mark Hanna to George W's T.R.. Before they gave up on him, PNAC conservatives like Bill Kristol dreamed that the Bush administration would take up the notion of a civilizing mission in the TR mold, raising up the natives and making the world safe for capitalism by moving from a Thomas Friedmann style "globalization as fate" to a Paul Wolfowitz-style "imperial globalization."

T.R. was the man who could say it loud and say it proud. Imperialism is our friend, he would say. US imperialism is a good deed. Why? Because white Americans are a master race destined to rule the world and the expansion of our power is an act of benevolence. In many ways, George W. Bush is that man and yet that is precisely why even a speech from him is anything but rational persuasion.

I see Jay's point: TR was a PR genius, an author, and a charismatic, very complex man (after all, he busted trusts as well as busting heads in the Philippines (about 400,000 of them to the death at last count. When was the last time W busted a trust?)).

My point is that when TR took to the bully-pulpit, he was talking politics. When Bush takes to the bully-pulpit, he makes threats with a messianic zeal instead of talking politics.

In other words, I'm ultimately saying that even when the Bush team tries to do exactly what you and Jay understand them to be trying to do, experimenting with both rollback and persuasion, for me, even the Bushco idea of persuasion is still ultimately another version of rollback. They just can't afford to talk about the real world.

Even the bully pulpit becomes rollback when George W. steps into it, whether that was the intention or not.

What odds will any of you give that President Bush's speech tomorrow will address the fundamental political and logical contradiction between his guest worker plan, his right wing supporters' ethnic cleansing proclivities, and the "temporary" fix he has conjured up to beg the question with images that imply the ethnic cleansing route? As policy, this form of begging the question from the bully pulpit even further undermines the already beleaguered National Guard, thus solving an imaginary problem by creating yet another real world problem. Whither rational persuasion?
(Of course, I haven't read his speech yet. We'll see just how far off I am.)

George W. Bush, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt

2006-05-12T20:24:00.000-05:00

I have consistently argued for a deep resonance between tenets in the work of Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Bush Doctrine police-state neoconservatism. I do not say the Bush regime is fascist, but I do say that you have to study fascism to understand a lot of what they do. There are profound agreements and significant disagreements between the way Bushco runs things and the way the two fantasied enemies of the administration, WWII era German Nazis and Japanese militarists, ran their programs.

The official GOP understanding of judges who interpret law with an eye toward social welfare and distributive justice as dictatorial activist legislators was a case Carl Schmitt had already made in the twenties (it should be noted Schmitt himself was hardly an unqualified representative of Nazi doctrine). Schmitt argued that distributive justice was opposed to democracy in principle. Both Leo Srauss and F.A. Hayek, the icons of GOP movement conservatism, share this view. The conclusion that Schmitt drew from this belief was that true democracy was a function of assent rather than formal legal process that could be sidetracked by the letter of the law. Distributive justice was liberalism. Assent to the authority of the leader by the people was true democracy. I think this attitude is quite strong in the GOP. This is a connection Jay Rosen of PressThink appears to have implicitly moved closer to in his more recent, more critical posts regarding McClellan-era Bush administraton PR assumptions of assent to authority and contempt for persuasion.

Hannah Arendt argues that Nazism was a movement that was opposed to party and state structure and hierarchy. Generating an image of infallibility and actively creating a world that backed up the organizing ideological fiction--in this case that the GOP is faced with a liberal conspiracy they must conspiratorially organize against to overcome, manifested most profoundly in the liberal bias of journalists individually and mass media organizations generically--were top priorities.

As for differences, while the Fox/Limbaugh axis has done an impressive job of keeping the organizing ideological fiction of the movement going the last five years in the face of all facts to the contrary, actively refusing to adjust the ideology to the well-known liberal bias of reality, Rove and Bush's consistently demonstrated concern to return value for cash on the barrelhead stakeholders such as Big Oil, Big pharma, transnational bankers, and transnational contractors like Halliburton and the Dubai port management group show a patent failure to stick to the "crusading nationalists versus sell-out atheist liberal traitor" script. As dangerously incompetent as Bushco is, in this sense (at least so far) they still seem to be much more reality-based than the Nazi party.

Regarding Bush administration militarization of US foreign policy, the distinctions between Bush, Nazi, and Japanese militarist policy are much more subtle and difficult to discern. If the last two official US "defense" strategy papers were not doctrines of global military domination, it's hard to imagine what might qualify.

I'll leave you with a quote from Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism that seems particularly appropriate to more recent developments over the last few weeks:

Practically speaking, the paradox of totalitarianism in power is that the possession of all instruments of governmental power and violence in one country is not an unmixed blessing for a totalitarian movement. Its disregard for facts, its strict adherence to the rules of a fictitious world, becomes steadily more difficult to maintain, yet remains as essential as it was before. Power means a direct confrontation with reality, and totalitarianism is constantly concerned with overcoming this challenge. Propaganda and organization no longer suffice to assert that the impossible is possible, that the incredible is true, that an insane consistency rules the world; the chief psychological support of totalitarian fiction—the active resentment of the status quo, which the masses refuse to accept as the only possible world—is no longer there; every bit of factual information that leaks through the iron curtain, set up against the ever-threatening flood of reality from the other, nontotalitarian side, is a greater menace to totalitarian domination than counterpropaganda has been to totalitarian movements.

p.510

Iran Strike Already En Route?

2006-05-11T23:49:00.000-05:00

Larisa Alexandrovna:
Concern is building among the military and the intelligence community that the US may be preparing for a military strike on Iran, as military assets in key positions are approaching readiness, RAW STORY has learned.

According to military and intelligence sources, an air strike on Iran could be doable in June of this year, with military assets in key positions ready to go and a possible plan already on the table.

Speculation has been growing on a possible air strike against Iran. But with the failure of the Bush administration to present a convincing case to the UN Security Council and to secure political backing domestically, some experts say the march toward war with Iran is on pause barring an "immediate need."

"In March/April of this year [the US] was pushing for quick closure, a thirty day window," says a source close to the UN Security Council, describing efforts by the Administration to "shore up enough support" to get a UN Chapter 7 resolution.

A UN Chapter 7 resolution makes it possible for sanctions to be imposed against an uncooperative nation and leaves the door open to military action.

The UN source also says that a military analysis suggests that no military action should be undertaken in Iran until spring of 2007, but that things remain volatile given this administration’s penchant for having "their own way."

Strike could come earlier than thought

Other military and intelligence sources are expressing concern both privately and publicly that air strikes on Iran could come earlier than believed.

Retired Air Force Colonel and former faculty member at the National War College Sam Gardiner has heard some military suggestions of a possible air campaign in the near future, and although he has no intimate knowledge of such plans, he says recent aircraft carrier activity and current operations on the ground in Iran have raised red flags.

Gardiner says his concerns have kept him busy attempting to create the most likely scenario should such an attack occur.

"I would expect two or three aircraft carriers would be moved into the area," Gardner said, describing what he thinks is the best way air strikes could be carried out without disengaging assets from US fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Two air-craft carriers are already en route to the region, RAW STORY has found. The USS Abraham Lincoln, which recently made a port call in Singapore, and the USS Enterprise which left Norfolk, Virginia earlier this month, are headed for the Western Pacific and Middle East. The USS Ronald Reagan is already operating in the Gulf.

In addition to aircraft carrier activity, Gardiner says, B-2 bombers would be critical.

"I would expect the B-2's, the main firepower asset, to be flown on missions directly from the United States," Gardiner explained. "I would expect B-52's to be flown in strikes from the UK and Diego Garcia."

"Finally," he added, "a large number of cruise missiles would be fired from the carrier support ships."

Steven Aftergood, senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, says that the B-2 bomber is capable of such long range activity.

"The B2 bomber was designed, with the Soviet Union in mind, for intercontinental operations," Aftergood said. "With aerial refueling, it has a range of up to 10,000 miles."

Like Gardiner, Aftergood has heard similar claims with regard to a June strike, but has not been able to confirm them independently.

Intelligence sources confirm hearing the allegations of a June attack, but have been unable to fully confirm that such an attack is in the works. Both the New Yorker and the Washington Post have previously reported that the Pentagon is studying military options on Iran.

All sources, however, agree that given the administration’s interest in regime change, an attack on Iran is likely, regardless of international support or UN backing. Furthermore, all sources agree that Gardiner’s scenario is the most probable, including an estimated duration and "pause" assessment.

Gardiner believes that the entire initial operation could run quickly, roughly 24-72 hours. "Most of the strikes would be at night," he said. "The Iranian nuclear facilities will be targeted; more important however, a major effort would focus on Iran's capability to retaliate. The US will target missile facilities, air bases and naval assets."

"After the initial effort, there will be a pause during which time the Iranians will be told that if they retaliate, the air strikes would continue," he added.

The Pentagon did not return calls for comment.

Advance teams under way; Congress ‘bypassed’

As previously reported by Raw Story, a terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) is being used on the ground in Iran by the Pentegon, bypassing US intelligence channels. The report was subsequently covered by the Asia Times (Article).

Military and intelligence sources now say no Presidential finding exists on MEK ops. Without a presidential finding, the operation circumvents the oversight of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

Congressional aides for the relevant oversight committees would not confirm or deny allegations that no Presidential finding had been done. One Democratic aide, however, wishing to remain anonymous for this article, did say that any use of the MEK would be illegal.

In addition, sources say that a March attack that killed 22 Iranian officials in the province of Sistan va Baluchistan was carried out by the MEK.

According to a report by Iran Focus filed Mar. 23, the twenty-two people killed in the ambush included high ranking officials, including the governor of Zahedan.

"Hours after the attack took place, Ahmadi-Moqaddam announced there was evidence the assailants had held meetings with British intelligence officers," the Iranian news service reported.

"Radical Shiite cleric Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi also claimed the people behind the attack were the same as those behind a spate of bombings in Iran’s south-western province of Khuzestan earlier this year and in 2005," it added.

Military and intelligence sources say that MEK assets were responsible for this attack, but did not know if the US military was involved or if US military assets were part of the ambush.

One former high ranking US intelligence official described the use of MEK as more of a "Cambone" operation than a "Department of Defense operation."

Undersecretary of Defense Intelligence Stephen Cambone, a stalwart neo-conservative, is considered by many to be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s right-hand man.

During a White House briefing in early May, outgoing press secretary Scott McClellan denied that the administration was using MEK, among several other terrorist organizations named, for ground activity in Iran.

"There are numerous reports about low-intensity operations ongoing in Iran from three different places -- PKK going over the border into Iraq, the MEK southern border of Iraq into Iran, and also certain operations from Balochistan involving also the Pakistanis," a reporter asked. "Does the U.S. have a policy, given also reports which I know you won't comment on, on possible special forces operations in Iran?"

"Our policies haven't changed on those organizations," McClellan said. "They remain the same. And you're bringing up organizations that we view as terrorist organizations."

"We would never cooperate with them, in terms of—" the questioner continued.

"Our policy hasn't changed," McClellan replied.

Military, intelligence community alarmed

According to a New Yorker article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, other activities aimed at intimidating and agitating Iranian leadership are also underway.

"One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of ‘coercion’ aimed at Iran," Hersh wrote.

The increase in violence on the southern border of Iran, the movement of aircraft carriers into the region, the insistence of Iran’s leadership that they intend to be a player on the nuclear stage and the Bush Administration’s focus on regime change make military and intelligence sources nervous.

"[President] Bush thinks that history will judge him as a great leader, not unlike Winston Churchill," one former high-ranking military intelligence official remarked.

For now, Gardiner and others remain on the sidelines as the Administration plots their next move.

Mark Kleiman: Knights in White Satin

2006-05-08T03:01:00.000-05:00

Mark Kleiman has a post up defending Ana Marie Cox from Atrios and Digby at The Reality-Based Community, Atrios and Digby on Cox on Colbert. He characterizes Cox's column as "trenchant, sensible, and well-written." That is his characterization of the following lines:

Ana Marie Cox:

The blogospheric debate — whining, really — about the mainstream media's "silence" on Colbert rumbled into existence with a post by Peter Daou.

This is surely "trenchant, sensible, and well-written" if you are a producer for Fox news. Cox's dimissal of widespread outrage over the MSM's news blackout of Colbert's Washington Correspondents Dinner Speech, the most cogent critique of Washington press malfeasance in the last five years, as simply another case of misguided, ill-informed liberals gratuitously getting their panties all in a bunch could easily have come from Phyllis Schlafly.

Kleiman's paternalistic "white knight to the rescue of the helpless social-climbing sorority girl without principles" act is major clowning in its own right. As he suggests, truly a lesson in grrl power for us all.

Cox's performance of the official GOP delegitimation of liberalism, her recitation of the reflexively "pro-GOP contempt for anyone else" common wisdom of the Washington bubble relentlessly promoted by the dominant press and broadcast media with a breathlessly "new" blogospheric enthusiasm is no doubt a public service. Kleiman's playing Sancho Panza to Cox's Don Quixote? I'm speechless.

Unitary Executive="Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Democracy

2006-05-03T02:55:00.000-05:00

If we think through the logic of the unitary executive theory promoted by the Bush II administration, we are forced to arrive at the conclusion that this is "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" democracy. They claim that they represent the people as they were elected and successful election shows that the people approve of their policies. But the theory of the unitary executive means that the administration thinks it never really needs to tell the people what has been done in it's name and further, that for representatives of the people to inquire what policies have been instituted, what actions the state has taken that they were supposed to approve or disapprove in the last election, is not properly the people's business.

In fact, they claim that during a time of war it is an act of treason for any employee of the executive branch to inform the people what it is doing. In other words, according to the unitary theory of the executive, the will of the people prevails, just as long as we the people don't have the temerity to ask what they are doing, and just as long as the members of the executive branch don't deign to tell us what has been done.

But as was the case with "don't ask, don't tell" as a strategy for reforming military policy, it quickly becomes clear that DADT is not a strategy for action, it is a strategy of avoidance.

In other words, the Bush administration's theory of the unitary executive essentially tells us that the most successful and effective way to ensure that the will of the people is done is to absolutely avoid the question of what the executive does.

From the perspective of the theory of the unitary executive, democracy= blind faith. The more blind our faith in the state is, the more we may rest assured that our will is being done! Lack of transparency is thus the key to effective democracy. Now do you understand?

Bush's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty

2006-05-03T01:11:00.000-05:00

This post is a response to a comment by Steve Lovelady over at Jay Rosen's PressThink.

Considering Steve Lovelady's comment on WingnutThink and Jay Rosen's post on Tony Snow has led me to realize that the prevailing legal theory of the unitary executive so dear to the darkside of the Bush II administration, the claim that they are representatives of the people so they are in charge and can do anything they want, but they aren't at liberaty to tell the people exactly what it is they are doing in the name of the people can be summarized quite succinctly: the unitary theory of the executive is a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" theory of popular sovereignty. The will of the people continues to rule, just as long as the people don't violate monarchical protocol so grievously as to actually ask the government what it is doing, and just so long as the government doesn't depart from its monarchical perquisites so far as to deign to inform the people of what form their will currently takes in the world.

Steve Lovelady:

As a correspondent of mine observed, "If he found a broken arrow at the site of the Little Big Horn, he'd wave it around in the air, declaring that it's proof that Custer won.
And he wouldn't care if the president's former press secretary, the president's former CIA director, the president's current Secretary of State and the president himself all acknowledged, 'No, actually, Custer lost.'

Your correspondent has really pulled a lot together here. The fact that the publicly stated opinion of the president's former press secretary, the president's former CIA director, the president's current Secretary of Stte and the president himself don't even slow this narrative down never fails to astonish me. Whatever happened to cognitive dissonance? How does a mind following this line of thought make that entire boxcar full of contradictions just go pfft!?

It reminds me of Japanese army officers in the 1930s who were constantly organizing coups and assassinations of corrupt civilian politicians in the name of reclaiming the Imperial Way from the forces of evil, in the name of the emperor, but frequently in explicit opposition to the stated position and preference of the emperor himself!

In both cases, the appeal to obedience, authority, and tradition as a source of legitimacy is belied by interpretations of the principles and causes at stake that are so radical they patently contradict the claim to obedience and traditional authority they ritually claim for themselves.

Perhaps this is one of the lesser understood inflections of the term "neo-conservative." An avowedly conservative individual who routinely violates all known precedent in the name of adherence to and revival of "tradition." Neoconservatives are more accurately described as anarchists in "traditional values" drag.

This has everything to do with the translation of democracy from explicit sufferage to the presumption of popular assent, the "don't ask, don't tell" doctrine of popular sovereignty. The "rule of law" in the liberal sense is too corrupt (i.e., insufficiently authoritarian and unilateralist) to capture the "purity" of the anarchist's vision of the cause.

I've spent quite a few years trying to figure out how people as intelligent as Okawa Shumei or Leo Strauss and his followers can seriously believe the nonsense they spout, but I've really hit a dead end. The more information I have on the subject, the more mysterious it becomes. I've almost started to think of the requirement to trust authority and force (vs. law) implicitly as an existential inclination like a lack of tolerance for spicy food--it just doesn't seem to be something that is up for negotation.

But finally, the most impressive trick of all--like Colbert's Cirque de-Soleil guy pulling himself up by his bootstraps--is the fantasy that trusting authority and force implicitly is a form of anti-authoritarian rebellion. This loses me every time.

The tyranny of the majority as rebellion--WTF? Did your correspondent have an anecdote for that one?

Bush: "The state is myself."

2006-04-30T15:25:00.000-05:00

Charlie Savage:
President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.

Former administration officials contend that just because Bush reserves the right to disobey a law does not mean he is not enforcing it: In many cases, he is simply asserting his belief that a certain requirement encroaches on presidential power.

But with the disclosure of Bush's domestic spying program, in which he ignored a law requiring warrants to tap the phones of Americans, many legal specialists say Bush is hardly reluctant to bypass laws he believes he has the constitutional authority to override.

Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws -- many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military.

Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush's theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts.

Phillip Cooper, a Portland State University law professor who has studied the executive power claims Bush made during his first term, said Bush and his legal team have spent the past five years quietly working to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White House.

''There is no question that this administration has been involved in a very carefully thought-out, systematic process of expanding presidential power at the expense of the other branches of government," Cooper said. ''This is really big, very expansive, and very significant."

For the first five years of Bush's presidency, his legal claims attracted little attention in Congress or the media. Then, twice in recent months, Bush drew scrutiny after challenging new laws: a torture ban and a requirement that he give detailed reports to Congress about how he is using the Patriot Act.

Bush administration spokesmen declined to make White House or Justice Department attorneys available to discuss any of Bush's challenges to the laws he has signed.

Instead, they referred a Globe reporter to their response to questions about Bush's position that he could ignore provisions of the Patriot Act. They said at the time that Bush was following a practice that has ''been used for several administrations" and that ''the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution."

But the words ''in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution" are the catch, legal scholars say, because Bush is according himself the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution. And he is quietly exercising that authority to a degree that is unprecedented in US history.

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation's sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ''signing statements" -- official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills -- sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.

''He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises -- and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened," said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.

Military link

Many of the laws Bush said he can bypass -- including the torture ban -- involve the military.

The Constitution grants Congress the power to create armies, to declare war, to make rules for captured enemies, and ''to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces." But, citing his role as commander in chief, Bush says he can ignore any act of Congress that seeks to regulate the military.

On at least four occasions while Bush has been president, Congress has passed laws forbidding US troops from engaging in combat in Colombia, where the US military is advising the government in its struggle against narcotics-funded Marxist rebels.

After signing each bill, Bush declared in his signing statement that he did not have to obey any of the Colombia restrictions because he is commander in chief.

Bush has also said he can bypass laws requiring him to tell Congress before diverting money from an authorized program in order to start a secret operation, such as the ''black sites" where suspected terrorists are secretly imprisoned.

Congress has also twice passed laws forbidding the military from using intelligence that was not ''lawfully collected," including any information on Americans that was gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches.

Congress first passed this provision in August 2004, when Bush's warrantless domestic spying program was still a secret, and passed it again after the program's existence was disclosed in December 2005.

On both occasions, Bush declared in signing statements that only he, as commander in chief, could decide whether such intelligence can be used by the military.

In October 2004, five months after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq came to light, Congress passed a series of new rules and regulations for military prisons. Bush signed the provisions into law, then said he could ignore them all. One provision made clear that military lawyers can give their commanders independent advice on such issues as what would constitute torture. But Bush declared that military lawyers could not contradict his administration's lawyers.

Other provisions required the Pentagon to retrain military prison guards on the requirements for humane treatment of detainees under the Geneva Conventions, to perform background checks on civilian contractors in Iraq, and to ban such contractors from performing ''security, intelligence, law enforcement, and criminal justice functions." Bush reserved the right to ignore any of the requirements.

The new law also created the position of inspector general for Iraq. But Bush wrote in his signing statement that the inspector ''shall refrain" from investigating any intelligence or national security matter, or any crime the Pentagon says it prefers to investigate for itself.

Bush had placed similar limits on an inspector general position created by Congress in November 2003 for the initial stage of the US occupation of Iraq. The earlier law also empowered the inspector to notify Congress if a US official refused to cooperate. Bush said the inspector could not give any information to Congress without permission from the administration.

Oversight questioned

Many laws Bush has asserted he can bypass involve requirements to give information about government activity to congressional oversight committees.

In December 2004, Congress passed an intelligence bill requiring the Justice Department to tell them how often, and in what situations, the FBI was using special national security wiretaps on US soil. The law also required the Justice Department to give oversight committees copies of administration memos outlining any new interpretations of domestic-spying laws. And it contained 11 other requirements for reports about such issues as civil liberties, security clearances, border security, and counternarcotics efforts.

After signing the bill, Bush issued a signing statement saying he could withhold all the information sought by Congress.

Likewise, when Congress passed the law creating the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, it said oversight committees must be given information about vulnerabilities at chemical plants and the screening of checked bags at airports.

It also said Congress must be shown unaltered reports about problems with visa services prepared by a new immigration ombudsman. Bush asserted the right to withhold the information and alter the reports.

On several other occasions, Bush contended he could nullify laws creating ''whistle-blower" job protections for federal employees that would stop any attempt to fire them as punishment for telling a member of Congress about possible government wrongdoing.

When Congress passed a massive energy package in August, for example, it strengthened whistle-blower protections for employees at the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The provision was included because lawmakers feared that Bush appointees were intimidating nuclear specialists so they would not testify about safety issues related to a planned nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada -- a facility the administration supported, but both Republicans and Democrats from Nevada opposed.

When Bush signed the energy bill, he issued a signing statement declaring that the executive branch could ignore the whistle-blower protections.

Bush's statement did more than send a threatening message to federal energy specialists inclined to raise concerns with Congress; it also raised the possibility that Bush would not feel bound to obey similar whistle-blower laws that were on the books before he became president. His domestic spying program, for example, violated a surveillance law enacted 23 years before he took office.

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive-power issues, said Bush has cast a cloud over ''the whole idea that there is a rule of law," because no one can be certain of which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore.

''Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other laws that were already on the books before he became president are also unconstitutional," Golove said.

Defying Supreme Court

Bush has also challenged statutes in which Congress gave certain executive branch officials the power to act independently of the president. The Supreme Court has repeatedly endorsed the power of Congress to make such arrangements. For example, the court has upheld laws creating special prosecutors free of Justice Department oversight and insulating the board of the Federal Trade Commission from political interference.

Nonetheless, Bush has said in his signing statements that the Constitution lets him control any executive official, no matter what a statute passed by Congress might say.

In November 2002, for example, Congress, seeking to generate independent statistics about student performance, passed a law setting up an educational research institute to conduct studies and publish reports ''without the approval" of the Secretary of Education. Bush, however, decreed that the institute's director would be ''subject to the supervision and direction of the secretary of education."

Similarly, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld affirmative-action programs, as long as they do not include quotas. Most recently, in 2003, the court upheld a race-conscious university admissions program over the strong objections of Bush, who argued that such programs should be struck down as unconstitutional.

Yet despite the court's rulings, Bush has taken exception at least nine times to provisions that seek to ensure that minorities are represented among recipients of government jobs, contracts, and grants. Each time, he singled out the provisions, declaring that he would construe them ''in a manner consistent with" the Constitution's guarantee of ''equal protection" to all -- which some legal scholars say amounts to an argument that the affirmative-action provisions represent reverse discrimination against whites.

Golove said that to the extent Bush is interpreting the Constitution in defiance of the Supreme Court's precedents, he threatens to ''overturn the existing structures of constitutional law."

A president who ignores the court, backed by a Congress that is unwilling to challenge him, Golove said, can make the Constitution simply ''disappear."

Common practice in '80s

Though Bush has gone further than any previous president, his actions are not unprecedented.

Since the early 19th century, American presidents have occasionally signed a large bill while declaring that they would not enforce a specific provision they believed was unconstitutional. On rare occasions, historians say, presidents also issued signing statements interpreting a law and explaining any concerns about it.

But it was not until the mid-1980s, midway through the tenure of President Reagan, that it became common for the president to issue signing statements. The change came about after then-Attorney General Edwin Meese decided that signing statements could be used to increase the power of the president.

When interpreting an ambiguous law, courts often look at the statute's legislative history, debate and testimony, to see what Congress intended it to mean. Meese realized that recording what the president thought the law meant in a signing statement might increase a president's influence over future court rulings.

Under Meese's direction in 1986, a young Justice Department lawyer named Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a strategy memo about signing statements. It came to light in late 2005, after Bush named Alito to the Supreme Court.

In the memo, Alito predicted that Congress would resent the president's attempt to grab some of its power by seizing ''the last word on questions of interpretation." He suggested that Reagan's legal team should ''concentrate on points of true ambiguity, rather than issuing interpretations that may seem to conflict with those of Congress."

Reagan's successors continued this practice. George H.W. Bush challenged 232 statutes over four years in office, and Bill Clinton objected to 140 laws over his eight years, according to Kelley, the Miami University of Ohio professor.

Many of the challenges involved longstanding legal ambiguities and points of conflict between the president and Congress.

Throughout the past two decades, for example, each president -- including the current one -- has objected to provisions requiring him to get permission from a congressional committee before taking action. The Supreme Court made clear in 1983 that only the full Congress can direct the executive branch to do things, but lawmakers have continued writing laws giving congressional committees such a role.

Still, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton used the presidential veto instead of the signing statement if they had a serious problem with a bill, giving Congress a chance to override their decisions.

But the current President Bush has abandoned the veto entirely, as well as any semblance of the political caution that Alito counseled back in 1986. In just five years, Bush has challenged more than 750 new laws, by far a record for any president, while becoming the first president since Thomas Jefferson to stay so long in office without issuing a veto.

''What we haven't seen until this administration is the sheer number of objections that are being raised on every bill passed through the White House," said Kelley, who has studied presidential signing statements through history. ''That is what is staggering. The numbers are well out of the norm from any previous administration."

Exaggerated fears?

Some administration defenders say that concerns about Bush's signing statements are overblown. Bush's signing statements, they say, should be seen as little more than political chest-thumping by administration lawyers who are dedicated to protecting presidential prerogatives.

Defenders say the fact that Bush is reserving the right to disobey the laws does not necessarily mean he has gone on to disobey them.

Indeed, in some cases, the administration has ended up following laws that Bush said he could bypass. For example, citing his power to ''withhold information" in September 2002, Bush declared that he could ignore a law requiring the State Department to list the number of overseas deaths of US citizens in foreign countries. Nevertheless, the department has still put the list on its website.

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who until last year oversaw the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for the administration, said the statements do not change the law; they just let people know how the president is interpreting it.

''Nobody reads them," said Goldsmith. ''They have no significance. Nothing in the world changes by the publication of a signing statement. The statements merely serve as public notice about how the administration is interpreting the law. Criticism of this practice is surprising, since the usual complaint is that the administration is too secretive in its legal interpretations."

But Cooper, the Portland State University professor who has studied Bush's first-term signing statements, said the documents are being read closely by one key group of people: the bureaucrats who are charged with implementing new laws.

Lower-level officials will follow the president's instructions even when his understanding of a law conflicts with the clear intent of Congress, crafting policies that may endure long after Bush leaves office, Cooper said.

''Years down the road, people will not understand why the policy doesn't look like the legislation," he said.

And in many cases, critics contend, there is no way to know whether the administration is violating laws -- or merely preserving the right to do so.

Many of the laws Bush has challenged involve national security, where it is almost impossible to verify what the government is doing. And since the disclosure of Bush's domestic spying program, many people have expressed alarm about his sweeping claims of the authority to violate laws.

In January, after the Globe first wrote about Bush's contention that he could disobey the torture ban, three Republicans who were the bill's principal sponsors in the Senate -- John McCain of Arizona, John W. Warner of Virginia, and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina -- all publicly rebuked the president.

''We believe the president understands Congress's intent in passing, by very large majorities, legislation governing the treatment of detainees," McCain and Warner said in a joint statement. ''The Congress declined when asked by administration officials to include a presidential waiver of the restrictions included in our legislation."

Added Graham: ''I do not believe that any political figure in the country has the ability to set aside any . . . law of armed conflict that we have adopted or treaties that we have ratified."

And in March, when the Globe first wrote about Bush's contention that he could ignore the oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, several Democrats lodged complaints.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Bush of trying to ''cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow."

And Representatives Jane Harman of California and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan -- the ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, respectively -- sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales demanding that Bush rescind his claim and abide by the law.

''Many members who supported the final law did so based upon the guarantee of additional reporting and oversight," they wrote. ''The administration cannot, after the fact, unilaterally repeal provisions of the law implementing such oversight. . . . Once the president signs a bill, he and all of us are bound by it."

Lack of court review

Such political fallout from Congress is likely to be the only check on Bush's claims, legal specialists said.

The courts have little chance of reviewing Bush's assertions, especially in the secret realm of national security matters.

''There can't be judicial review if nobody knows about it," said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who was a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration. ''And if they avoid judicial review, they avoid having their constitutional theories rebuked."

Without court involvement, only Congress can check a president who goes too far. But Bush's fellow Republicans control both chambers, and they have shown limited interest in launching the kind of oversight that could damage their party.

''The president is daring Congress to act against his positions, and they're not taking action because they don't want to appear to be too critical of the president, given that their own fortunes are tied to his because they are all Republicans," said Jack Beermann, a Boston University law professor. ''Oversight gets much reduced in a situation where the president and Congress are controlled by the same party."

Said Golove, the New York University law professor: ''Bush has essentially said that 'We're the executive branch and we're going to carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us, go ahead and try it.' "

Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch ''to exercise some self-restraint." But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, he said, and then ruled for himself every time.

''This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy," Fein said. ''There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn't doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power."

Olbermann: Execs at NBC "do not like to see the current...administration criticized"

2006-03-13T12:51:00.000-06:00

Summary: Keith Olbermann, appearing on C-SPAN, said: "There are people I know in the hierarchy of NBC, the company, and GE, the company, who do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all. ... There are people who I work for who would prefer, who would sleep much easier at night if this never happened. On the other hand, if they look at my ratings and my ratings are improved and there is criticism of the president of the United States, they're happy."

During a March 12 interview with C-SPAN president and chief executive officer Brian Lamb, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said: "There are people I know in the hierarchy of NBC, the company, and GE [General Electric Co., NBC's parent corporation], the company, who do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all. ... There are people who I work for who would prefer, who would sleep much easier at night if this never happened." He added, "On the other hand, if they look at my ratings and my ratings are improved and there is criticism of the president of the United States, they're happy."

Olbermann also discussed his relationship to Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and claimed: "O'Reilly's agent calls the head of NBC week after week saying, you have got to get Olbermann to stop" criticizing O'Reilly.

From Olbermann's interview with Lamb, aired on the March 12 edition of C-SPAN's Q&A:

LAMB: We have got some other quotes about Fox from you: "Fortunately for the free world, News Corp.," which owns FOX, "is very aggressive but ultimately not very bright."

OLBERMANN: Yes, they are somewhat self-destructive. And that's the best hope for mankind, relative to them. In other words, you know, Bill O'Reilly, who has an audience at 8 o'clock [p.m. ET] that even with recent programming gains on the part of my show, the total audience that he has is still, what, six, seven times what we are doing. Even -- as Fox and News Corp. put it, the "money demo," the 25- to 54-year-old news viewers who don't watch news, even there they are still about double what we are doing.

When I attack Bill O'Reilly or criticize him for something that he said on the air, some ludicrous suggestion like, you know, we should let Al Qaeda go in and blow up San Francisco because he doesn't like San Francisco, I mean, just lunatic things, if I punch upwards at Fox News, the clever response, the cynical and brilliant response is to just ignore. Like, well, why do we have to worry, they have one-seventh of our audience? They attack. Bill O'Reilly's agent calls the head of NBC week after week saying, you have got to get Olbermann to stop this, as if for some reason there are rules here. We have -- these are the people who have suspended the rules, and they want the referee to step in protect them against my little pinky.

LAMB: More quotes. This is about Rupert Murdoch: "His covey of flying monkeys do something journalistically atrocious every hour of the day."

OLBERMANN: Yeah. I think that's probably true. I think -- well, sometimes they miss. They are sometimes -- there are a few hours in a row where there might not be a flying monkey appearing, devastating society.

LAMB: Doesn't this work for both of you?

OLBERMANN: I don't think so. I haven't met a lot of flying monkeys at NBC. I have met people who -- and by the way, this is the great freedom and the great protection of American broadcasting, commercial broadcasting -- we made a mistake in the '20s. We let broadcasting in this country develop with commercial broadcasting taking the lead and all other kinds of information on radio or television secondary or tertiary. But the protection of money at the center of everything, including news to the degree that it is now, is that as long as you make the money, they don't care what it is you put on the air.

They don't care. There are people I know in the hierarchy of NBC, the company, and GE, the company, who do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all.

Anybody who knew anything about American history and stepped out at any point in American history and got an assessment of this presidential administration would say, "Yeah, I don't know how much they need to be criticized, but they need to be criticized to some degree."

There are people who I work for who would prefer, who would sleep much easier at night if this never happened. On the other hand, if they look at my ratings and my ratings are improved and there is criticism of the president of the United States, they're happy.

If my ratings went up because there was no criticism of the president of the United States, they'd be happy.

Sandra Day O'Connor Warns that GOP Thugs are Pulling Us Onto the Path Toward Dictatorship

2006-03-10T13:21:00.000-06:00

NPR's Nina Totenberg aired an amazing story this morning about a talk that just-resigned Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gave at Georgetown University. The first woman to serve on the High Court wouldn't allow her actual words to be broadcast, and that's a shame, because -- based on Totenberg's report -- every American needs to hear what she said. The Reagan appointee who became a moderate and an American icon -- Bush v. Gore notwithstanding -- all but named names in thinly veiled attacks on former House majority leader Tom DeLay and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, and ended with a stunning warning.

We transcribed some of the report, which you can listen to here. (UPDATE: Here's a full transcript from Raw Story.)

O'Connor told her Georgetown audience that judges can make presidents, Congress and governors "really really mad," and that if judges don't make people angry, they aren't doing their job. But she said judicial effectiveness is "premised on the notion that we won't be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts." While hailing the American system of rights and privileges, she noted that these don't protect the judiciary, that "people do":

Then, she took aim at former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. She didn’t name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year, when DeLay took out after the courts for its rulings on abortion, prayer, and the Terry Schiavo case. This, said O’Connor, was after the federal courts had applied Congress' one-time-only statute about Schiavo as it was written, not, said O'Connor, as the Congressman might have wished it were written. The response to this flagrant display of judicial restraint, said O'Conner, her voice dripping with sarcasm, was that the congressman blasted the courts.

It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. It doesn’t help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions that the senator disagrees with. She didn’t name him, but it was Texas Sen. John Cornyn who made that statement after a Georgia judge was murdered in court and the family of a federal judge in Illinois murdered in the judge's home.
Now, the kicker:

O’Connor observed that there have been a lot of suggestions lately for so-called judicial reforms -- recommendations for the massive impeachment of judges stripping the courts of jurisdictions and cutting judicial budgets to punish offending judges. Any of these might be debatable, she said, as long as they are not retaliation for decision that political leaders disagree with

I, said O’ Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and formerly Communist countries, where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

Courtesy of Attywood

McCain's Anti-Torture Compromise PROHIBITS ITS OWN ENFORCEMENT! Way to Go, John!

2006-03-03T18:05:00.000-06:00

Josh White and Carol D. Leonnig

Friday, March 3, 2006; A04

Bush administration lawyers, fighting a claim of torture by a Guantanamo Bay detainee, yesterday argued that the new law that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to people held at the military prison.

In federal court yesterday and in legal filings, Justice Department lawyers contended that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, cannot use legislation drafted by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to challenge treatment that the detainee's lawyers described as "systematic torture."

Government lawyers have argued that another portion of that same law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, removes general access to U.S. courts for all Guantanamo Bay captives. Therefore, they said, Mohammed Bawazir, a Yemeni national held since May 2002, cannot claim protection under the anti-torture provisions.

Bawazir's attorneys contend that "extremely painful" new tactics used by the government to force-feed him and end his hunger strike amount to torture.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler said in a hearing yesterday that she found allegations of aggressive U.S. military tactics used to break the detainee hunger strike "extremely disturbing" and possibly against U.S. and international law. But Justice Department lawyers argued that even if the tactics were considered in violation of McCain's language, detainees at Guantanamo would have no recourse to challenge them in court.

In Bawazir's case, the government claims that it had to forcefully intervene in a hunger strike that was causing his weight to drop dangerously. In January, officials strapped Bawazir into a special chair, put a larger tube than they had previously used through his nose and kept him restrained for nearly two hours at a time to make sure he did not purge the food he was being given, the government and Bawazir's attorneys said.

Richard Murphy Jr., Bawazir's attorney, said his client gave in to the new techniques and began eating solid food days after the first use of the restraint chair. Murphy said the military deliberately made the process painful and embarrassing, noting that Bawazir soiled himself because of the approach.

Kessler said getting to the root of the allegations is an "urgent matter."

"These allegations . . . describe disgusting treatment, that if proven, is treatment that is cruel, profoundly disturbing and violative of" U.S. and foreign treaties banning torture, Kessler told the government's lawyers. She said she needs more information, but made clear she is considering banning the use of larger nasal-gastric tubes and the restraint chair.

In court filings, the Justice Department lawyers argued that language in the law written by Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) gives Guantanamo Bay detainees access to the courts only to appeal their enemy combatant status determinations and convictions by military commissions.

"Unfortunately, I think the government's right; it's a correct reading of the law," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "The law says you can't torture detainees at Guantanamo, but it also says you can't enforce that law in the courts."

Thomas Wilner, a lawyer representing several detainees at Guantanamo, agreed that the law cannot be enforced. "This is what Guantanamo was about to begin with, a place to keep detainees out of the U.S. precisely so they can say they can't go to court," Wilner said.

A spokeswoman for McCain's office did not respond to questions yesterday.

Murphy told the judge the military's claims that it switched tactics to protect Bawazir should not be believed. He noted that on Jan. 11 -- days after the new law passed -- the Defense Department made the identical health determination for about 20 other detainees, all of whom had been engaged in the hunger strike.

Guantanamo Bay officials deny that the tactics constitute torture. They wrote in sworn statements that they are necessary efforts to ensure detainee health. Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the facility's commander, wrote that Bawazir's claims of abuse are "patently false."

"In short, he is a trained al Qaida terrorist, who has been taught to claim torture, abuse, and medical mistreatment if captured," Hood wrote. He added that Bawazir allegedly went to Afghanistan to train for jihad and ultimately fought with the Taliban against U.S. troops.

Navy Capt. Stephen G. Hooker, who runs the prison's detention hospital, noted that the hunger strike began on Aug. 8, reached a peak of 131 participants on Sept. 11, and dropped to 84 on Christmas Day. After use of the restraint chair began, only five captives continued not eating.

Hooker wrote that he suspected Bawazir was purging his food after feedings. Bawazir weighed 130 pounds in late 2002, according to Hooker, but 97 pounds on the day he was first strapped to the chair. As of Sunday, his weight was back to 137 pounds, the government said.

Kessler noted with irritation that Hood and Hooker made largely general claims about the group of detainees on the hunger strike in defending the switch to the new force-feeding procedures used on Bawazir.

"I know it's a sad day when a federal judge has to ask a DOJ attorney this, but I'm asking you -- why should I believe them?" Kessler asked Justice Department attorney Terry Henry.

Henry said he would attempt to gather more information from the officials but said there was no legal basis for the court to intervene. Bawazir's weight is back to normal, his health is "robust" and he is no longer on a hunger strike, Henry said.