You're Fired

Time for a Donald Trump moment. Gen. Stanley McChrystal is a crybaby and a whiner who was given the Afghanistan strategy of his choice and was stupid enough to allow Rolling Stone to follow him around and quote both himself and his aides while he was present saying disparaging remarks about those above them in command, as in civilian command, as in the President, Vice President, etc. The only person who seems to like McChrystal is corrupt Afghan President Karzai, end of story.

Per Juan Cole, this is Obama's Truman-MacArthur moment:

Obama has largely misunderstood the historical moment in the US. He appears to have thought that we wanted a broker, someone who could get everyone together and pull off a compromise that led to a deal among the parties. We don’t want that. We want Harry Truman. We want someone who will give them hell. We don’t want him to say one day that Wall Street is making obscene profits when the rest of the country suffers, then the next day say that the brokers deserve their bonuses. We don’t want him to mollify Big Oil one day then bash it the next. More consistent giving of hell, please.

If Obama doesn’t fire McChrystal, he will never be respected by anybody in the chain of command that leads to his desk. Moreover, moving McChrystal out now would be a perfect opportunity to pull the plug on the impractical counter-insurgency campaign that the latter has been pursuing, which probably has only a 10% chance of success. (A RAND study found that where a government that claimed to be a democracy actually was not, and where it faced an insurgency, it prevailed only 10% of the time. Sounds like President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan to me.)

Sure, there's more in the article more scandalous than the comments, i.e. the problems with McChrystal before all this, as well as what appears to be a bad war in Afghanistan. This isn't the first time McChrystal has spoken with insubordination in his voice. And there are replacements in the wings.

A large part of what we want in a President is a strong, solid sheriff. Yep, time for Obama to man up, as he appeared to do with BP last week. It's time for him to defend his turf -- the U.S. Constitution -- and fire Stanley in a clear and unmistakable way.

Fascist Revisionists

Welcome to the Goskomizdat 2010 -- Christianists taking over the school board and rewriting history books to suit their ideology:

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

Dunbar and her allies deserve public humiliation if not treason trials for their fascistic use of power. Not only did Thomas Jefferson's writing inspire revolution around the globe, he's the author of our Declaration of Independence, the ultimate great revolutionary document of all time.

Obama may be President, but he hard right threat to this nation is only just getting started. Since Texas buys a disproportionate number of text books, there are other states that will be infected by this school board's lies.

Another argument for allowing Tejas secession.

Torture = Treason

Obama releases the torture memos, redacting the names of CIA persons appearing in them. Kevin Drum on the depths of the moral depravity:

Reading the OLC torture memos is enough to make you ill. The techniques in question are plainly and instinctively abhorrent by any common sense definition, and the authors of the memos obviously know it. But somehow they have to conclude otherwise, so they write page after mind-numbing page of sterile legal language designed to justify authorizing it anyway. It's not torture if the victim survives it intact. It's not against the law if it takes place outside the United States. Waterboarding is OK as long as it isn't performed more than twice in a 24-hour period. Sleep deprivation of shackled prisoners for seven days at a time is permissible as long as the victim's diaper is changed frequently. And on and on and on.

Do they know this is torture? Of course they do.

Jeffrey Toobin on a particular player who needs to be made accountable:

The author of the memo, which is dated August 1, 2002, is Jay S. Bybee, who was the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. Bybee concludes that all of these various techniques, including waterboarding, do not constitute torture under American or international law.

Bybee is generally the forgotten man in torture studies of the Bush era. The best known of the legal architects of the torture regime is John Yoo, who was a deputy to Bybee. For better or worse, Yoo has been a vocal defender of the various torture policies, and he remains outspoken on these issues. But whatever happened to his bossë/p>

Today, Bybee is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Of course he is. Membership has its benefits.

Is Obama daring us to call for investigations and indictments? The Administration announced policy not to indict CIA officials who participated in the torture program, leaving the door open for the higher ups to taste the courthouse air.

Dick, anyone?

Very Smart Bad Guys

The reason I hate David Addington and John Yoo is that I feel like I know them, that we all knew the very book smart, wargame playing armchair chickenhawks with a libertarian bent, but these are two particular ones who got law degrees and put them to work for Dick Cheney, their Grand Vizier writing memos declaring torture legal as long as it's under the President and only the President's authority, as long as he says he thinks he's protecting the country.

Today they squirmed in front of Congress, particularly Yoo. He knows he's in trouble underneath his own smugness, but Addington takes the cake it that department. The smugness of the geek, only that he's smug about Abu Ghraib.

Take a look, even if you have to skip through the clip a bit, but I found it f-a-s-c-i-n-a-t-i-n-g. The first moment of accountability since Scooter Libby got convicted (and we all know how that ended) and these guys won't answer anything they think might box them into being revealed:



Here's more of Addington, this time defining the Vice President as "attached" to the legislative branch, lots of quoting of opinions, smug ammo:



Last clip I'll link to is Addington refusing to discuss the torture policy he and Yoo designed, the shame of the U.S.A. in the eyes of the world, in our owns eyes, how far fallen from "The Greatest Generation" that actually fought a World War for which all citizens mobilized and sacrificed. He won't talk about it, because the terrorists are watching.

Makes one kinda nostalgic for Nuremberg.

Friday

So Obama take a slightly nuanced position supporting the FISA compromise but pledging to fight the telco immunity giveaway in the Senate. He admits it's not a perfect bill, but as they say about laws and sausages, it'd not pretty watching them get made.

I'm not terribly torn up about it. Everyone agrees that FISA needs to be updated for new technologies, and everyone in the Constitutionality camp wants to make sure that our government's Executive branch can't violate the rules without oversight from the other two. From what I understand the bill does all that well enough.

The immunity is a sticking point, as wiretaps have been used in the past on civil rights leaders and so-called "enemies" of the particular President of the time (i.e. Nixon). I'd rather the telcos hadn't pitched in when the Bush/Cheney syndicated told them to, but those were heady times and I'm not sure the companies did so enthusiastically.

In any case, rather than blaming Obama for the sins of the GOP Administration, I'd rather get him in office and start the promised transparency January 20, 2009. As President he'll still need to keep some secrets and take steps to protect us all, but it's hard to imagine it will be in the treasonous manner of the mob that still inhabits the White House and associated offices.

While sometimes it's hard to remember, George W. Bush is still in office, and no amount of projecting a President Obama is going to make January 20th come any sooner.

Now Can We...?

If, per former Bush Administration Press Secretary Scott McClellan, El Presidente himself authorized the Valerie Plame covert CIA identity leak, can we impeach him now? Per Emptywheel:

Thus far, though, we only had Dick Cheney's word that he had actually asked Bush to declassify this information. We didn't have Bush's confirmation that he had actually declassified the information. In fact, we've had Dick Cheney's claims that he--Dick--had insta-declassified via his super secret pixie dust declassification powers.

But now we've got George Bush, confirming that he, the President of the United States, authorized the leaks of "this information."

Now, though Scottie refers, obliquely, to "this information," he explicitly refers only to the NIE. But as I've described over and over again, it's not just the NIE Bush authorized Dick to order Libby to leak.

Here's McClellan seeming to let this slip on the Today Show. According to him, Bush was fine with having done it, treating Scottie as inner circle, having come from Texas, his mother a GOP stalwart -- until the last election.

What appears to have happened here is that McClellan was young, idealistic, and more the older type Republican, probably more like Bush Senior. He's put in the middle of this thing after Ari Fleischer broke in the job through the selling of the Iraq War and then wisely jumped ship. Fleischer had seen what was being passed around Air Force One the night or so before Cheney set Libby loose to smear Wilson, having run it by the President with a bunch of other slightly less impeachable deception plans, and (a very smart, if misaligned guy) must have gone home to his family after with every Spidey sense in his head going off at once, panic vertigo, got to get out of there before he ends up on a executive prison farm, got to protect myself and my family.

Then, I imagine, as Scottie got these weird moments of revelation, mainly that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had hung him out to dry, he must have leaked it back to his mom, the old hand politico. Just imagine what that did to her Party alignment -- I could tell you what it would do to mine if one of my boys was played the patsy that way, by people so powerful.

So mom's approval must have given him the courage to put out the book. To let loose the truth, no matter the rusted bullybats of the disparate remaining pieces of what was once Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's character assassination machine. Just as Paul O'Neill. He did an hour tonight with Olbermann. He hits The Daily Show on Monday. Assuming he stays healthy.

John Dean says this may be prosecutable. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) has been pushing for impeachment hearings for awhile, now has new evidence to pursue. Rove has been subpoenaed, not looking good for weaseling out.
But even if we don't get our impeachment, our public flogging (and with Bush's escape pod ready), maybe we'll get, looking ahead to November, the most important thing of all. Per gpack:

If one thing is clear, it is that McClellan just confirmed that Obama was right from the start - the war should never have been waged. McClellan has destroyed McCain's argument that there is any reason to remain in Iraq. Even Pat Buchannan said that the core principle of the GOP has always been to avoid foreign entanglements. He added that going into Iraq, which he too opposed, is not a conservative ideal. It is the product of neo-conservatives who developed an ideology best described by McClellan as "coercive democracy." Knowing that this idea would not even float in the Republican Party, McClellan presents the story of how it was sold as a lie to the American people.

I'll take it.

More Traitorous Behavior

While the manic U.S. rightwing continues to howl and cry that somehow anti-War Americans are traitors to our country, there's that Republican Bush/Cheney Administration leaking willy-nilly for political gain, no matter the damage to our country's anti-terrorist intelligence efforts:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

Leading to White House spin fury. Remember Scooter Libby getting off for leaking the identity of Valerie Plame? Or their 2004 election campaign leak regarding Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan?

Putting the safety of America after their dreams of political domination has been their m.o. all along.

Will anyone ever bring them to justice?

President Pain

Has there ever been a U.S. Presidency as sadistic as that of Richard Bruce Cheney/George Walker Bush Jr.?

Yes, it is finally revealed, Cheney and his henchman David Addington got then-Attorney General Alberto "I Don't Remember" Gonzales to author a -- this makes me sick -- secret order authorizing torture.

SECRET.

Like...double secret probation...only for administering unbearable pain the bodies and psyches of other human beings in your custody to elicit information that is more often than not rendered unreliable due to the damaging methods. Without due process.

You know, fascism:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

It's perjury, it's bad faith, it's just plain evil when applied to, say, Jose Padilla in our country's name.

It's SECRET -- not just from us, the citizens, we accept some of that from our government, like secret nuclear codes and backdoor peace negotiations. But this was secret from any other branch of government, from all our other elected officials at the highest levels of our representative government.

Per Digby -- "Sociopathic Governance":

When Bush said, "a dictatorship would be easier --- as long as I'm the dictator" he wasn't joking. They simply do not believe that they have to adhere to the rule of law --- it's awe-inspiring in its pathology. And the rest of us are like a bunch of frightened townspeople, hovering behind the curtains just hoping these drunken louts will pass out or leave town before they take a match to the place.

I am still stunned that we are talking about the United States of America issuing dry legal opinions about how much torture you are allowed to inflict on prisoners. Stories like this one are the very definition of the banality of evil --- a bunch of ideologues and bureaucrats blithely committing morally reprehensible acts apparently without conscience or regret.

It's like some sort of Gilded Age gathering of wealthy Robber Baron sadists, or the repulsive fetishistic power-trippers in Pasolini's Salo. They don't love the children -- they love their children, and provide amply for them alone.

They're too busy vetoing child healthcare legislation (SCHIP) to protect their private insurance companies and their enabling ideology:

He said the bill's funding level would have expanded the health program beyond its original intent and taken a step toward government-run health care.

"The policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage," Bush said.

"I happen to believe that what you're seeing when you expand eligibility for federal programs is the desire by some in Washington, D.C. to federalize health care. I don't think that's good for the country," he added.

That's Bush's legacy, cutting off children because their parents are merely struggling, not completely poverty stricken. And now all of the top ranked Republican Presidential contenders -- Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, McCain -- have gone on the record backing him up.

After what this country has been through, each and every one of them is a joke candidate.

All that history will remember Bush, Cheney and their whole gang for is pain.

Hijacked

Just a quick note from New York City where I'm spending most of the week. It's easy to lose sight of what happened on 9/11/2001 from sunny Southern California when so much of the actual comprehension of the attack has been obfuscated by the Cheney/Bush Administration's perversion of that event for naked partisan gain.

But when on the streets of Manhattan, looking to orient myself, I glance over where the World Trade Center used to be, the southern tip of the island, and when I see only empty sky, it all comes rushing back and I utter under my breath, "You bastards."

We shouldn't forget that we were attacked, nor the need to take measures to prevent a future attack. We did strike back, definitively and with both bi-partisan and worldwide support, when we went into Afghanistan.

How tragic that we failed to finish the job -- Bin Laden escaped under George Bush's direction, any permanent fix abated due to the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Neoconservative misdirection into Iraq, their complete undermining of favorable world opinion and U.S. "soft power" by their war atrocities and illegal renditions.

There is no way to overstate how much this villainous Administration has abused the memory and emotion engendered by the attacks.

That alone is worthy of a treason trial, if not ruling.

Tipping Point?

It's not like the latest news from surged-up Iraq is unusual or unexpected, although certainly hoped against, but I'm wondering if maybe support for Bush/Cheney's GOP policy there won't go further down the drain, with Republican Senators and Reps switching out well before September. Leaving just Joe Lieberman supporting those criminals and traitors.

Yes, May was the third worst month for U.S. soldier deaths (127) in Iraq since the start of the war (the worst since November 2004) and June is starting out just as badly.

Y'see, you put more of our soldiers (surge) into their civil war, you get more young American men and women killed. Not to mention Iraqi civilian slaughter (@ 2000 -- 29% over April).

So how do the Commanders in the field feel about the escalation (surge) so far (NY Times)?:

Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment...

...while military planners had expected to make greater gains by now, that has not been possible in large part because Iraqi police and army units, which were expected to handle basic security tasks, like manning checkpoints and conducting patrols, have not provided all the forces promised, and in some cases have performed poorly.That is forcing American commanders to conduct operations to remove insurgents from some areas multiple times...

...American commanders have also had to send troops outside the capital, to deal with a sharp rise in violence in Diyala Province and to search for American soldiers kidnapped south of the capital...

Is it a house of cards or too little too late?

Is this political death by a thousand cuts to El Presidente's greatest narcissism project?

Will enough Senators (67 needed) finally stop the madness?

Happy Anniversary

It was four years ago Tuesday that our El Presidente made a choreographed landing on the U.S.S. Lincoln, took off his flight suit like a regular James Bond and, with a huge banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" behind him, declared the Iraq War over.

This was the GOP wet dream. Ah, how the media fawned.

Four years later to the day, with the War declared unwinnable by as stalwart a Conservative Republican as William F. Buckley, with the cost rising towards half a trillion dollars before our very eyes, Congress will deliver the stinging War wind-down bill to the White House.

And none too soon.

Just today there is more than a hint by former C.I.A. Analyst Ray McGovern that Vice President Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney was actually behind the forging of fake evidence that led us to the War. McGovern says he has proof but is waiting to release it -- one can only hope he is not just playing a hunch. He posits a "Watergate plumber" type scenario where Cheney authorized or directed the dirty work, leaving the execution to the type of scum that has been doing GOP dirty work since well before Nixon. Bay of Pigs, anyone?

Imagining that this is the case makes the motivation for Cheney to have personally directed the smear against Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson in which his wife was outed and for lying about which Scooter Libby was convicted. What perfect sense it all makes -- this was Cheney's baby all along.

Defrauding the American people to lead us into a disastrously ill-advised war that benefits only the Halliburton Corporation in which he owns massive amounts of stock, and those of his syndicated buddies...would that not be grounds for impeachment, if not charges of treason?

Maybe McGovern is stretching the proof. Maybe that appearance on Tucker Carlson's show is where it all ends.

Or maybe we'll be hearing more about it.

Happy Anniversary. Dick.