For the Record

A "morally depraved" judiciary: Arar case dismissed in the U.S.

Greenwald discusses and summarizes:

Yesterday, the Second Circuit -- by a vote of 7-4 --  agreed with the government and dismissed Arar's case in its entirety.  It held that even if the government violated Arar's Constitutional rights as well as statutes banning participation in torture, he still has no right to sue for what was done to him.  Why?  Because "providing a damages remedy against senior officials who implement an extraordinary rendition policy would enmesh the courts ineluctably in an assessment of the validity of the rationale of that policy and its implementation in this particular case, matters that directly affect significant diplomatic and national security concerns" (p. 39).  In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context -- even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured -- and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.

Reflecting the type of people who fill our judiciary, the judges in the majority also invented the most morally depraved bureaucratic requirements for Arar to proceed with his case and then claimed he had failed to meet them.  Arar did not, for instance, have the names of the individuals who detained and abused him at JFK, which the majority said he must have.  As Judge Sack in dissent said of that requirement:  it "means government miscreants may avoid [] liability altogether through the simple expedient of wearing hoods while inflicting injury" (p. 27; emphasis added).

Americans, in particular, should read the rest of Greenwald's excoriating post, including the embedded excerpts from dissenting judges lamenting the death of an independent judiciary and describing Arar's horrific treatment.  What has that country come to?  Oh, and there's also this.

The Goldstone report on Israel's attack on Gaza

If you were really in any doubt about whether Israeli forces have engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians, you can put those doubts to rest.

The full UN site on the fact-finding mission is here.

The summary report is here.

The full report is here.

Epic fail

Nick Burbules (editor of the invaluable Progressive Blog Digest) is devoting today's post to summarizing some of the truly astonishing low-lights of the catastrophic Bush presidency.  Goodbye and good riddance to that illegally installed ignoramus and his malignant manipulators.

Of course, the Bush/Cheney "legacy" will long be with us---in millions of lives destroyed and relatedly, in a fundamentalist Islamic community that has been handed all the ideological ammunition it could ever want; in an economy trashed by deregulation; in government offices heavily populated with incompetent cronies; and so on.

Perhaps the biggest legacy, in the long run (putting aside the now increased possibilities of world-wide destruction, of both climatic and non-climatic varieties) is not so different, when you think about it, from that the Germans inherited: the knowledge that our government can be hijacked, and that many of us will go along for the ride, cheering along the way.

Here, as there, the biggest questions for the future are: can we prevent this from ever happening again?  And if so, how? 

I don't have an answer to the second question (though again, we might look to Germany for some ideas).  However, it seems that a necessary condition on the bare possibility of future prevention is that we recognize, not just as individuals but as a nation, that in the installation and the implementation of the Bush/Cheney regime gross wrongs occurred.  Without public recognition of that fact---of the sort that effective investigations, into (a) the crimes of the Bush administration, and (b) of the institutional and personal mechanisms (within the judiciary, the legislature, the military, governmental offices, and the media as well as the executive offices) allowing the associated gross wrongs, might be expected to produce---no change to these mechanisms will occur, and the conditions for future usurpation of our government in service of vile and unconscionable ends will remain intact.

Bush signature on torture authorization

I'm reposting this 7 February 2002 memo, signed by Bush. (Source: this archive, which I discovered via this dKos diary.)

The central finding of the memo is that members of AQ are not covered under either article 3 or 4 of the Geneva Conventions. Accordingly, "detainees" held to be members of AQ need be "treated in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva" only insofar as is "appropriate and consistent with military necessity". In other words, torture away.

The central finding is clearly false. According to convention IV, part 1, article 4, paragraph 4:

Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third Convention, a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention, or again, a member of the medical personnel of the armed forces who is covered by the First Convention. There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law.

There you have it, war crimes approved by Bush's hand.

Whitewashing Blackwater

The old site, and the new site.

Wired is helpin' out with a new logo contest.

Hat tip to Lisa Rivera.

Bush wars to cost 40 times estimates

8K for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.

George Bush is an idiot

For the record, George Bush is an idiot.   Not just an idiot---the kind you feel sorry for---but a complete and unabashed idiot---the kind you rightly despise.

"My job is a decision-making job. And as a result, I make a lot of decisions," the president said.

He elaborated on that point later.

"I delegate to good people. I always tell Condi Rice, `I want to remind you, Madam Secretary, who has the Ph.D. and who was the C student. And I want to remind you who the adviser is and who the president is.'

I got a lot of Ph.D.-types and smart people around me who come into the Oval Office and say, `Mr. President, here's what's on my mind.' And I listen carefully to their advice. But having gathered the device (sic), I decide, you know, I say, `This is what we're going to do.' And it's `Yes, sir, Mr. President.' And then we get after it, implement policy."

Astonishing.   A complete, unabashed idiot of the magnitude of George Bush is---get this---president of the U.S.  Even ignoring all the destruction and devastation he and his fellow right-wingers have wrought on the U.S. and any country or people in their sights, the fact that---by whatever hook and crook---such a complete, unabashed idiot became president of the U.S. is itself enough to establish that the U.S. has entered its period of ultimate decline and fall.

And who are the compliciters saying "Yes, sir, Mr. President" to this complete, unabashed idiot?

Where did all the good people go?

When the basic illusions have been exhausted...

[What follows is from John Cusack's interview with Naomi Klein, a journalist in the tradition of Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh, and author of recent articles and a book on Disaster Capitalism.]

Cusack: One of my favorite quotes is from Arthur Miller, who said: "An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted."  And with The Shock Doctrine, you are basically trying to shatter and obliterate the illusion of the neo-liberal or neo-con fundamentalist free market -- this official narrative wherein we not only are supposed to worship free markets that really aren't free, we must actually kill to feed them.

What the book rightly asks is what many have felt for a very long time: shouldn't we make a moral choice that you either make defense policy or you profit from it? I think that kind of transparency would be very important to have in the public sphere. Those people who go on CNN and are treated as impartial statesmen when, in reality, the book -- which is triple footnoted and sourced -- suggests otherwise. They did hold their former jobs...I guess by defintion they are statesmen....but if we are compelled to be honest we know they are other things as well... I'm speaking of people like George Shultz or Richard Perle.

Klein: Right.  If we look at who the real intellectual engines of this war are, we'd see a web of people who are not simply the statesmen they appear to me but card-carrying members of the disaster capitalism complex -- shareholders, board-members and directors of companies that profit directly and enormously from war and other disasters --

Cusack: Who would these people be..?

Klein: Well, for instance, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq was a propaganda arm of the Bush administration, publicly making the case for the invasion of Iraq.  And it was founded by Bruce Jackson, a vice president of Lockheed Martin who had been out of his job for just three months.  Jackson stacked the committee with old colleagues from Lockheed -- Charles Kupperman, Lockheed Martin's vice president for space and strategic missiles was on it, and so was Douglas Graham, Lockheed's director of defense systems. And even though the committee was formed at the explicit request of the White House to make the case for war in the public mind, no one had to step down from Lockheed or sell his shares. Which was certainly good for committee members, since Lockheed's share price jumped 145 percent thanks to the war they helped engineer -- from $41 in March 2003 to $102 in February 2007. The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq was chaired by George Shultz, who wrote op-eds and went on TV beating the drums, and was presented just as this respected statesman. But Shultz hasn't been in office for decades.  And in the meantime, he'd been working for Bechtel -- at the time he was calling for the invasion, he was still on its board, and since Bechtel is a privately held company, we don't know anything about his holdings. We do know that Bechtel was one of the biggest winners of the reconstruction game in Iraq, landing $2.3-billion in contracts.

Cusack: How about James Baker and the $1 billion kickback that the Carlyle Group used him to try to get from the government of Kuwait, which you wrote about in The Nation?

Klein: Right.  I talk about the incredible power of the "formers." One of the distinguishing features of the Bush administration has been its reliance on outside advisers and freelance envoys to perform key functions: James Baker, Paul Bremer, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Richard Perle, Bruce Jackson, and so on. So you have Congress playing a rubber-stamp role during the pivotal decision-making years, and Supreme Court rulings treated as little more than gentle suggestions, while these mostly volunteer advisers have wielded enormous influence, especially when it comes to Iraq. Their power stems from the fact that they used to perform key roles in government -- they are former secretaries of state, former ambassadors and former undersecretaries of defense. All have been out of government for years and, in the meantime, have set up lucrative careers in the disaster capitalism complex. And because they are freelance government contractors, they aren't subject to the same conflict-of-interest rules as elected or appointed politicians. The effect has been to eliminate the so-called revolving door between government and industry and allow the disaster industries to simply set up shop inside the government, using the reputations of these supposedly illustrious ex-politicians as cover.

As you say, in the press, they maintain their credibility as statesmen -- their current, far more relevant work in the corporate world is almost never mentioned. You brought up Baker. He was Bush's debt envoy to Iraq while he was still a partner in the Carlyle Group, which is a major arms trader whose fortunes have exploded since the war. He was also still a partner at Baker Botts, which represents some of the largest oil companies in the world, as well as Halliburton.  Kissinger is another classic example of the power of the formers because he's primarily been a businessman, not a statesman, now for some 25 years. He met with Bush and Cheney regularly making Iraq policy -- according to Bob Woodward, more than any other advisor. But who was he representing in those meetings? Kissinger has repeatedly put his business interests ahead of the public interest, most dramatically when he resigned as chair of the 9/11 Commission rather than disclose his list of corporate clients at Kissinger Associates.

Another example is Richard Perle.  Richard Perle headed the Defense Policy Board. Just two months after 9/11 he launched a venture capital firm called Trireme Partners that exists to invest in the homeland security and defense sectors.  One of his first investors was Boeing -- it sunk $20 million in Trireme. Meanwhile, Perle is using the Defense Policy Board to make the case for war. And of course Boeing was another one of the huge winners from the invasion of Iraq.

So I asked the question, "Why is it that we refer to Richard Perle merely as an ideologue -- rather than, say, as an arms dealer with an impressive vocabulary?"

Cusack: The question becomes one of intellectual honesty and basic morality. I wanted to talk about the players or the heirs of the Friedman legacy who are in the public sector today... The Grover Norquists and Bill Kristols of the world come to mind ...You also talk about the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute as pursuing the goal of the elimination of the public sphere and the total liberation of corporations.

Klein: I refer to the people in those think tanks as "the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks" because a huge amount of the funding for these think tanks is coming directly from the weapons and homeland security industry. They are funded by some of the wealthiest families and the wealthiest corporations in this country so the question of intellectual honesty really has to come up. They exist in a strange intellectual gray zone where they get money in order to think. And besides, I'm not sure thinking really belongs in tanks.

Cusack: So you're saying that the Shultzes and the Perles and the Kissingers and the Jim Bakers of the world are embedded in the homeland security/privatized war economy?

Klein: More than embedded. I mean, they are it.

Cusack: I was trying to --

[laughter ]

Klein: Why are you trying to be polite?

Cusack: I don't know. I don't know. That's part of the problem, too: being polite with this immorality and not having the courage to call something what it is...The refusal of the Congress to challenge Bush in a meaningful way is proof of the Democratic complicity in the new economy. To name only right wing people is to ignore the central thesis of intellectual honesty as the first step in a long corrective march... So we'll have to talk about what Democrats are in on this game and name them, too...we'll have to get into that later.

How it works

When the govt is run by a band of deranged and lawless radicals, aided and abetted by team-playing conservatives, craven journalists and bedwetting Democrats.  Glenn Greenwald comments:

More revealing still is Goldsmith's description of how the Bush administration systematically violated one law after the next -- employing tactics that are truly the hallmark of the most lawless third-world dictators:

"In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: "They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations," he writes.

[...]"

They literally decided they would break whatever laws they wanted -- one law after the next, in critical areas -- based on patently baseless memos issued by obedient followers like John Yoo. Not only did they do this in complete secrecy from Congress, they refused even to allow Executive Branch officials who were told to follow orders to see the legal basis for what they were told to do. Addington, whom Goldsmith described as "someone who spoke for and acted with the full backing of the powerful vice president," would simply demand compliance with what Cheney wanted. And anyone who objected was subjected to this (emphasis in original):

"Months later, when Goldsmith tried to question another presidential decision, Addington expressed his views even more pointedly. "If you rule that way," Addington exclaimed in disgust, Goldsmith recalls, "the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands." "

While our national media was glorifying the Great Commander-in-Chief and actively disseminating their most manipulative claims and mocking Democrats on the pettiest of grounds (The Serious National Security Grown-ups are in Charge; John Kerry windsurfs! John Edwards loves his hair!), the Bush administration was dismantling the rule of law, systematically violating long-standing statutes and treaties at will. We were ruled by a truly lawless government, while our media institutions and political elite sat by meek and respectful.

Perhaps most infuriating is the fact that, as it turns out, violating these laws in secret was not even necessary -- because Congress was, and still is, more than happy to legalize whatever they wanted to do. Almost immediately after the Supreme Court finally imposed some mild limitations on the President's detention and interrogation powers -- first in Hamdi, then in Hamdan -- Congress, as Goldsmith says, "promptly passed a law that gave him everything he asked for, authorizing many aspects of the military commissions that the Supreme Court had struck down."

And the terrorist bomb about which David Addington was fantasizing in order to get rid of FISA was equally unnecessary, since the Democratic Congress, in the face of the types of threats Goldsmith recounts Addington routinely made -- "the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands" -- just eviscerated the crux of FISA's protections by law. Hence, what began as the administration's illegal and secret abuses have become the legally sanctioned policies of the United States.

It is critical to emphasize that Goldsmith -- like James Comey and John Ashcroft -- is no hero. He is a hard-core right-wing ideologue who continues to support many of the administration's most radical positions, including his view that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions does not apply to terrorist suspects (the position rejected by Hamdan). And it was Goldsmith who ultimately approved of the modified (and plainly illegal) NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.

Moreover, Goldsmith explains that he had not even intended to address the NSA surveillance program in his book, but changed his mind once he was served with subpoenas by the FBI in connection with the ongoing criminal investigation to find out who the whistleblower was who alerted the country to this illegality -- an investigation which Goldsmith supports. As Goldsmith says: "I'm not a civil libertarian, and what I did wasn't driven by concerns about civil liberties per se."

Goldsmith is commendable only by comparison to the truly extremist and reprehensible likes of Cheney, Addington, Gonzales and Yoo. He is, by and large, a True Believer in the Bush "War on Terror" and in theories designed to expand substantially executive power. That is what makes his revelations all the more credible, and all the more disturbing. What he is describing is a band of deranged and lawless radicals who, during his tenure, ran our government and who, after they forced him out, continue to do so.

But with little meaningful opposition to any of this -- either in the media or in the Congress -- little attention will be paid to these extraordinary revelations, and our government will continue to be shaped in the image of Dick Cheney and David Addington. Now that they have obtained most of their original wish list from a compliant Congress, just imagine what they are dreaming of, the still new unchecked powers which they believe are only "one bomb away."

How it works

Apropos of my recent post on what the pardon of Libby indicates, I bring you the brilliant James Adomian as Bush.

Here's a partial transcript... really, a tragic poem for our times.

[gives the finger]

My fellow America, welcome to the future.

I know a lot of you are pissed off about me computing Scooter Libby's sentence
I know a lot of you thought I let a good friend off the hook
because he was covering up my crimes.

That's stupid.  Why would I do that?
I commit crimes all the time out in the open
and nobody does anything.

I start wars for no good reason
against all kinds of laws.
I torture people.

I torture people.

Torture!

Nothin' happened.

That's why I computed Scooter Libby
Not to cover up for me
Just to torture you folks a little bit
Just to piss ya off

Cause I know I could get away with it

That's what you need to start learning.

Listen, I could walk outside of the White House right now
and shoot a kid!

Who would do anything about it?
TV?
heh heh.  I don't think so.

You see, I decide.
I'm the executive branch
and as far as I'm concerned, that's the only branch that exists

What else you have?
Ya got the Supreme Court.
I appoint them.
Ya got the, eh, whatever branch Dick Cheney is.
I picked him.

What else is there?
House?  House branch?
Run by a woman.  A girl.
That don't scare me too much.

So all you bloggers out there in blogland
need to quit whining and squitching and squawking
about impeachment, censure, and all that.

We all know that ain't gonna happen.

I can get away with whatever I want to.

All you complainers, all I gotta say to you folks is Fuck you.
Fuck you hard.

I ain't gonna do nothing I can't get away with.

You may think you're so much different than TV or radio
Let me tell you.    TV and radio print whatever I tell them to print.

You're not that much different.
You may be a little bit off the beaten track
But I still, I still got ya where I want ya.

MoveOn.org?
Guess what, MoveOn
I'm still here.

People like me and Scooter Libby's always going to be here.

And guess what?
We're gonna pardon each other
and we're gonna make each other rich
and we're gonna control shit.

That's the way it fucking works.

Watch your back, bitches.