Seven Soldiers!

I've mentioned this before, but it bears emphasis: I've read comic books for a very long time. I was born in December, 1971, and I was reading Superman by - at the latest - the autumn of 1976. If I had come along at an earlier time in the medium's history I'd probably have walked away by now, but I got lucky, and was at just the right age to be seduced over and over again by the revolutionary pop of the 1980s. It imprinted, and I'm stuck with it - intellectual empty calories some of this stuff may be, but it's more basic to me than television.

The superhero/adventure scene these days is different than it was. The comics look an awful lot better than they used to - paper stock's heavier and glossier, and computer coloring has completely transformed everything that happens after the basic line art is set down - but the storytelling's not new to me anymore. I'm not often excited in the ways I used to be - partially because I'm an old fart, and partially (I think) because the big two companies tend to copy Hollywood's stultifying tradition: they cultivate brands rather than characters, and try to clone past blockbusters instead of experimenting. I think they're doing better now, by and large, than they were seven or eight years ago, but I still find I'm reading as much for the craftsmanship as for the fun.

And then there's Grant Morrison's work.

Seven Soldiers isn't his most high-profile project at the moment - that honor goes to All-Star Superman, which is (at one issue in) already looking like a confident, exuberant romp. What 7S is is complicated, playful, and bigger than anything else in sight. It amounts to eight mini-series: one two-parter (Seven Soldiers of Victory) that sets up and concludes the story, and seven separate four-issue stories in between, each tracking the point of view of a major character (who never meets any of the other six). Those seven, in the order in which they were introduced, are Shining Knight, the Manhattan Guardian, Zatanna, Klarion the Witch Boy, Mister Miracle, Bulleteer, and Frankenstein.

Yes, Frankenstein. I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.

The story: the Riders of the Sheeda, a nasty, diminutive race culled from some streamlined assortment of Celtic myth and folklore, are poised to invade the Earth. Their Queen is ascendant, their King is in exile and building armies of his own, and the one good princess is an amnesiac teen with a pierced lip somewhere in San Francisco. Humanity’s only hope (in the judgement of the Time Tailors of Slaughter Swamp) is seven hidden champions, who get maneuvered into harm’s way without ever knowing the full scale of the conflict.

As for the players themselves: the Shining Knight is Sir Justin, the only surviving champion of the pre-historical ur-Camelot, of which all later Arthurs and all later courts are only echoes; the Manhattan Guardian, Jake Jordan, is the official mascot of a crusading tabloid newspaper; Zatanna is a stage magician in her thirties who also happens to be the daughter of the late, great John Zatara, perhaps comics’ finest Mandrake the Magician knockoff (dating all the way back to 1938, and the same comic book in which Superman first appeared) – she’s comic royalty in fishnets and a top hat. Klarion’s the adolescent product of a lost subterranean colony descended from Puritans; Mister Miracle is Shiloh Norman, an escape artist unlucky enough to get caught in the games of disguised hip-hop gods. Alix Harrower, the Bulleteer, got steel-hard skin as an unfortunate result of her late husband’s desperate efforts to give himself superpowers so he could consummate the on-line affair he’d been conducting through a teen superhero fetish site – and, of course, Frankenstein is actually Doctor Frankenstein’s murderous, poetry-quoting monster, who rested for a hundred thirty-five years in a state comfortably close to death after a furious battle with Melmoth, the Sheeda king, on a burning train. The unholy creature was revived, naturally enough, after a bloodbath at the high school with the highest suicide rate in America, and now he knows his work was left unfinished.

There’s a decent chance you’re now confused (partially because there’s a lot going on, and partially because I’m rewriting this – about three hours’ worth of intermittent work – after a Blogger fart, and I'm sorry to say I’m not being nearly as careful with my language the second time around). For what it’s worth, it reads better at twenty-two pages a shot; the story’s highly compressed in places, but it never stops being intelligible, and the energy of it all carries you along.

Granted, I’m writing as an old comic hand here. If you’re new to the medium, you should probably walk on by: this project is dense and it’s stylized and it might just make your head hurt. And, yeah, if you’re not a rookie, you’ll still see flaws – ideas and characters left underdeveloped, scenes that are awkward to reconcile between one series and another, a little too little naturalism in the dialogue, if only here and there. Plus, for better or for worse, the art is very different from series to series - and, increasingly, within series, as various art teams find themselves shuffled from company to company to the detriment of their books.

Yes, for those of you who are wary of weirdness for weirdness’s sake, it’s there – but at least there’s no pretentiousness to it. Mr. Morrison’s just doing what he does: throwing as many ideas as he can fit down on the page, and fusing their shapes into the texture of a weird little world. There’s pulp here, and new weird, and loads of Jack Kirby, and God knows what else, and it’s presented lovingly enough and boldly enough to work. Above all, Seven Soldiers is fun, and when it’s gone we probably won’t see the likes of it again for a very long time.

Enjoy the new.

Cause for concern.

Remember yesterday, when I mentioned that muckity-mucks in the Air Force were somewhat resistant to the idea of sitting back and letting Iraqi ground troops pick their targets?

Here's why.

As the American military pushes the largely Shiite Iraqi security services into a larger role in combating the insurgency, evidence has begun to mount suggesting that the Iraqi forces are carrying out executions in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods.

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation.

Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.

Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison. In a secret bunker discovered earlier this month in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly Sunni inmates appeared to have been tortured.

Seriously, do we - or, better still, the Iraqis themselves - have anything resembling trust-building programs going on among the various ethnic groups and religious factions? Or are we just hoping that the political process (in which the Sunnis keep getting trounced) will somehow yield up a government with enough popular support to shut down hostilities on all sides? All we see in the news here is evidence that every side is having its worst fears reinforced, and if that's the full story then the place is probably already screwed for at least a generation.

The excellent story of a sportsman abroad.

Specifically, Coach Bobby Valentine in Japan.

"He was such a different type of manager for us," said Marines pitcher Tomohiro Kuroki, 31. "He pulled out our hidden potential, made us confident in ourselves. And he taught me one word in English -- 'great!'"

The success of the "Bobby Way" is being hailed by many here as a home run for a growing movement to curb the Japanese tradition of harsh management. Hiroshi Miyata, president of Nippon Metal Industry Co., called on corporate Japan in a newspaper editorial last week to start "treating our employees in the same way that Bobby does." The current and former managers of three of Japan's top baseball teams offered rare praise for Valentine's methods, suggesting that the notion of severe training should be reexamined in the wake of the once-lowly Marines' victory.

This month, the Tokyo-based Macro Mill research company conducted a survey of Japanese job hunters, asking them to list their ideal boss. Valentine was the only foreigner in the top 10.

Read the whole thing if you have the time - it's uplifting enough to make a good Disney movie, with faltering careers redeemed, wounded egos restored, and women and children signing on to watch in ever growing numbers as a little corner of society teeters on the verge of transformation, and it has the added attraction of being real.

More bad times for Iran.

Earlier this month, the government announced that 40 ambassadors and senior diplomats, including supporters of better ties with the West, would be fired. Also let go were pragmatists who handled Iran's nuclear negotiations with Europe under Ahmadinejad's reformist predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. For the first time, a cleric was appointed to head Tehran University, Iran's oldest university, amid noisy protests Sunday by students over the appointment, state media reported. The university has been the scene of weekly Friday prayer services since the 1979 Islamic revolution, but also has also been a hub for many protests, including pro-democracy student demonstrations in 1999.

In the works, but still not made public, is a deeper shake-up of the establishment in which Ahmadinejad is replacing hundreds of governors and senior officials at various ministries with young, inexperienced Islamic hard-liners who oppose good relations with the West. The changes include putting fundamentalists in key posts at security agencies.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's president in the 1990s who remains influential with some in both the hard-line and moderate camps, said the purge has made Iran vulnerable.

"Unfortunately, some are on the offensive, damaging what has been done, and purging competent people. This is hurting the country," Rafsanjani said.

More here. It's sad stuff - most Iranians outgrew this kind of lunacy decades ago (or were born after it was in vogue), and even the true believers probably don't want their government to be incompetent as well as fanatical.

But all we can do is hope Mr. Ahmadinejad doesn't do too much harm before he goes.

A little more of the big picture.

The New Yorker has a new piece up from Seymour Hersh, and it covers a lot of ground - from likely approaches to the war in Iraq to the president's mindset. Mr. Hersh's take on the latter continues to be terrifying, frankly:

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

The piece goes on to compare his information bubble to President Johnson's - with the caveat that LBJ knew that there were filters in place (and was uncomfortable with the notion), while our current commander-in-chief is comfortable with the idea that he's meant only to be providing an example of righteous intransigence for his appointees to follow.

But, whatever - Bush's serene lack of consideration is nothing new, and I'm sure there are still Americans out there that would find the details of it reassuring as much as anything else. I'll say I'm not one of them, and leave it at that.

The talk about strategy, though, is new. While we're apparently unlikely to see anything resembling a full withdrawal, Mr. Hersh's sources contend that we're moving toward a reduction of ground forces and an increase in bombing - with, then, an increased reliance on Iraqi spotters for targeting. Representatives of the Air Force are making their unease known; after all, one of the great lessons of the Iraq campaign to date is that we don't always know - and wouldn't necessarily agree with - our allies' goals. The last thing the Air Force wants is to serve as hit men for warlords on the make, and yet there seems to be real resistance in the civilian leadership to trying to establish a system of safeguards to prevent against it.

Plus, of course, there's the danger of expanding casualties among Iraq's increasingly harried innocent bystanders.

This is one of those instances where I don't dismiss a White House proposal out of hand - we do air warfare very well, and it would be a very good thing indeed to take some of the strain off the Army and the National Guard. But the judgement of our forces on the ground is ideally one of our greatest assets - both in a situational sense and as a long-term correction to Washington's myopia - and I'd hope we wouldn't hand that off on just the basis of a few Iraqi promises and a vague political itch.

On the other hand, we're - again, according to this article - trying to put together an Allawi/Chalabi coalition for the December elections, so maybe we really are just that reckless, desperate, or dumb.

Anyway, I recommend reading the thing if you've got the time: there's a lot of meat to it.

It's bee-yuu-ti-ful!

The mythical blogging hero formerly known as Thorn has emerged from the Californian underworld, unguessable wisdom in hand, to bring you adorable rockets. I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, but I think it's fair to say that this is going to be the single most inspiring guide to the emerging pop culture of the twenty-first century that could ever be written. If you were thinking of creating something along those lines, I'd suggest you just give up now. You're out of your league.

In all seriousness, I'm excited. I've known He Who Is Now Called Rocket since high school, and I've yet to stop being impressed by his insight and his creativity - whatever's cooking at his new outpost, it's gonna taste good. It already looks better than the bare blue Wall; there's art in the banner, proper boxes on the margins, and soft, warm colors to comfort the peripheral vision.

But, please, beware the moé. Rocket is a trained professional, and he's dealing with highly refined samples of Japaniana that can trigger hyper-glycemic shock in the unprepared! God help the innocent traveller who comes upon the hordes of cartoon elementary school kids with cold Western expectations in his or her heart!

Our Constitutional intermission.

When Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales announced last week that Jose Padilla would be transferred to the federal justice system from military detention, he said almost nothing about the standards the administration used in deciding whether to charge terrorism suspects like Mr. Padilla with crimes or to hold them in military facilities as enemy combatants.

"We take each individual, each case, case by case," Mr. Gonzales said.

The upshot of that approach, underscored by the decision in Mr. Padilla's case, is that no one outside the administration knows just how the determination is made whether to handle a terror suspect as an enemy combatant or as a common criminal, to hold him indefinitely without charges in a military facility or to charge him in court.

Indeed, citing the need to combat terrorism, the administration has argued, with varying degrees of success, that judges should have essentially no role in reviewing its decisions. The change in Mr. Padilla's status, just days before the government's legal papers were due in his appeal to the Supreme Court, suggested to many legal observers that the administration wanted to keep the court out of the case.

"The position of the executive branch," said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has consulted with lawyers for several detainees, "is that it can be judge, jury and executioner."

That's the start of another depressing article at the New York Times - and one that's a couple of years late in coming. The Federalist Society crowd has a Constitution-in-Exile movement; it's past time the rest of us start putting together our own. President Bush and his White House have awarded themselves powers that would have made George Washington gag, and nobody in the executive branch is even pretending that to find the situation questionable, or temporary.

More noise, please.

Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Moyers.

Excellent.

Happy Thanksgiving, my fellow Americans!

To my extranational readers: congratulations! You can be relatively confident that we won't invade anybody today! Lean back and relax.

That's just awesome.

Music from the Sisters of Mercy performed by Gregorian monks? Really? Man, I don't know if Andrew Eldritch agreed to this or if someone proposed it, his head exploded, and it was simply taken as a sign of assent.

Nor do I care. Not right now.

This is either a crime against nature or the most brilliant musical idea of the last decade, and either way I need to hear it.

Wish me luck, my peoples. I may not come back intact.

Another day, another environmental crisis.

In China, a city of 3.8 million finds itself without an obvious source of potable water, following a chemical disaster up the Songhua River - and I assume the mess is going to make life hard outside the urban zone as well.

So, here's a test for any self-respecting authoritarian regime; in exchange for suppressing your citizens' natural rights, can you assume a full enough control over your country's physical and economic resources to ameliorate the worst effects of a disaster which you originally tried to keep secret? The clock is ticking, guys.

Meanwhile, best wishes go out to the people of Harbin and the surrounding area.

Whoops.

Almost three and a half years ago, the Bush administration announced that it had arrested a Chicago-born man named Jose Padilla while he was entering the United States to explode a "dirty bomb" and blow up apartment buildings. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, said Mr. Padilla was a Qaeda-trained terrorist so dangerous that he was being tossed into a Navy brig and the key was being thrown away.

The administration hotly defended its right to hold Mr. Padilla without legal process because he was declared an unlawful enemy combatant, one of the new powers that President Bush granted himself after 9/11. The administration fought the case up to the Supreme Court. Mr. Padilla's plot was thwarted, the Justice Department claimed, only because of the government's ability to hold suspected terrorists in secretive prisons where they were sweated, to put it mildly, for information. The "dirty bomb" plot supposedly was divulged by a top Qaeda member who had been interrogated 100 times at one such location.

Never mind. As of yesterday, Mr. Padilla stopped being an unlawful combatant, and the new attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, refused even to talk about that issue. Mr. Padilla is not going to be charged with planning to explode bombs, dirty or otherwise, in the United States. Just in time for the administration to prod Congress on extending the Patriot Act and to avoid having to argue the case before the Supreme Court, Mr. Padilla was charged with aiding terrorists in other countries and will be turned over to civilian authorities.

All this and more, from the Times.

What "outlaw" really means.

Never mind voting restrictions on ex-cons; we've found a whole new way to disenfranchise people with drug convictions on their record: deny them access to emergency funds! Doesn't matter if they've been rehabilitated - if they happened to live in the path of Katrina or her successors, they're left to their own devices.

I oversimplify, but not by a lot. Have some text:

Tough-on-crime laws passed mostly in the 1990s bar drug felons -- though not other kinds of offenders -- from receiving a range of federal assistance, from student loans to cash welfare, now known as Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). The issue is pressing enough that several members of Congress introduced a bill early this month to temporarily restore such aid to residents of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, who have had their lives disrupted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“Parents who have lost everything and are struggling to feed themselves and their family will be denied TANF and food stamps; students who … could continue their education in another school … will be denied student loans; and entire families that have lost everything in the disasters will be denied housing -- all due to the federal bans for a past drug conviction,” said Democratic Representative Robert C. Scott when he introduced the bill on November 2. The Elimination of Barriers for Katrina Victims Act, he went on, “would allow families affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita a chance to put their lives back together through the same means as other victims who suddenly lost their homes and livelihood through no fault of their own.”

. . .

States have the leeway to soften or entirely opt out of the bans on TANF and food stamps, and most have done so in recent years. Louisiana, for instance, allows drug offenders to apply for these benefits after a year’s waiting period, provided they submit to ongoing drug testing. But in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, which have plenty of their own victims and are now home to many Louisiana evacuees, the bans apply for life. (Texas has, at least, waived the ban on emergency food stamps -- but not TANF -- for Katrina evacuees.)

Evidently recognizing that help for drug users isn’t exactly an easy sell, Scott has narrowly tailored his bill: it applies only to the hurricane-affected states and expires after three years.

So far, this hasn't been much of a problem; short-term emergency aid has apparently been extended unconditionally (or, at least, as unconditionally as FEMA managers' competence would allow). But appeals for less ad hoc assistance are going to cause a lot more trouble, unless Representative Scott's plan, or something like it, winds up as law.

By the way, extra points to anyone who can tell me what social good is served - even in normal circumstances - by restricting access to support for higher education to people with drug raps on their record. They already know we don't like them; are we really doing ourselves any favors by ensuring they don't get every fair chance to improve themselves?

Oh, well. At least we look tough.

Hope for humanity?

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is probably still alive, but Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder has spoken to a few people from a Jordanian Muslim community that spawned a few jihadists - and she finds that the Zarqawi cause is in increasingly bad health.

Adnan Badran spends his days repairing computers at a small shop in downtown Irbid. He's a pious man whose customers call him "sheik," in respect of his status as a martyr's brother. His wife's cousins died in the Amman bombings. He watched with grief as an Iraqi woman confessed on television to helping in the attack.

He read every passage in the Quran about resistance and found nothing that could support the hotel blasts. He believes that his brother is dead; that's easier than imagining him alive in a movement that's cast aside Islam's strict rules of war.

"My brother would never think to do that," Adnan Badran said. "But if I find out that he was bombing civilians in Baghdad or Amman or America, I will no longer accept him as a martyr. I would only consider him a criminal."

This is too small a sample size to count for much, but it's reassuring nonetheless. Pseudo-Islamic nihilism - in both the Zarqawi and the bin Laden flavors - is a horrendously destructive force, even (or maybe especially) within the communities that cultivate it. Any hint that its seductive power is waning, even in the face of the Iraqi war, is gratefully received.

Now all we need to see is the collapse of the extremist Wahhabi madrasah system, the resolution of the Palestinian nightmare, a massive international wave of political liberalization, and a whole lot of wealth creation, and the current existential crisis of the Muslim world will be a thing of the past!

Assuming we don't do something stupid first.

Whoa.

Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has decided to quit his ruling Likud party, Army Radio reported on Sunday, quoting unidentified party sources.

The radio said Sharon, after marathon talks with aides and associates, has decided
to quit the party he helped found and run separately in the next Israeli national elections likely to be moved up from November 2006 to March.

I'm having a very hard time thinking of an American political twist that could match that. FDR leaving the Democratic Party over differences in instituting the New Deal, maybe? Except FDR didn't actually found the Dems (and they were much less crazy than some of the Likudniks).

So, what now? I presume Binyamin Netanyahu will grab the reins of what remains of the Likud, and will tack as sharply to the right as he can while still maintaining viability as a national party, Labour will keep on being Labour (the poor guys), and Mr. Sharon's new center-right alliance will basically start its life as Israel's dominant party. Or, y'know, maybe not - take a look at Teddy Roosevelt before you invest too much confidence in a third party built around a single personality.

Anyway, the Reuters story is available over here. Interesting times are likely to follow.

The late, unlamented Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?

A lifetime of reading superhero comics has taught me that the bad guy's not dead if you don't have a body - still, this could turn out to be the first sign of some good news for Iraq and Jordan. The man probably wasn't/isn't the key mastermind behind the Iraqi insurgency, but he's an influential nihilist in a part of the world that already has too many, and if his death has indeed come in the close aftermath of the bombings in Amman, he may enjoy less of a martyr's vogue than he would in later months.

I'd really hate to see this guy's face popping up on T-shirts.

How not to impress your neighbors.

A young Japanese woman in the comic book "Hating the Korean Wave" exclaims, "It's not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the South Korea of today!" In another passage the book states that "there is nothing at all in Korean culture to be proud of."

In another comic book, "Introduction to China," which portrays the Chinese as a depraved people obsessed with cannibalism, a woman of Japanese origin says: "Take the China of today, its principles, thought, literature, art, science, institutions. There's nothing attractive."

The two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in Japan in the last four months.

In their graphic and unflattering drawings of Japan's fellow Asians and in the unapologetic, often offensive contents of their speech bubbles, the books reveal some of the sentiments underlying Japan's worsening relations with the rest of Asia.

More here, from the New York Times.

Of course, "Hating the Korean Wave" has apparently sold 360,000 copies, and "Introduction to China" about half that; the country's total population (according to the CIA) was at something like 127,417,244 as of last July. [The way the article's written, one tends to suspect that the ire toward South Korea has more to do with the results of the 2002 World Cup than anything else.] Best-sellers or not, considerably less than one percent of the Japanese population was interested enough to buy into these manga volumes.

What's actually troubling about all this is that - if this article is to be believed - nobody's going too far out of his or her way to refute their message. In fact, a reasonably big national newspaper (the Sankei Shimbun - some circulation data is available here) has actually gone out of its way to try to legitimize the anti-Korean screed. I don't think we're in any immediate danger of seeing Japanese college kids come out en masse to burn down Asian embassies, but I'm just tired of the best: lack conviction/worst: passionate intensity formula. Japan can be a great country, but I think you find that great countries tend to be reasonably honest with their own citizens about how history happened and how the world works.

. . .

Just a little daydreaming there.

Too much calm in Sri Lanka?

I know, I know - this seems even more obscure an area of interest than Zimbabwe. Still, for those who care, Mahinda Rajapakse just made it out of the Sri Lankan election season as the new president, thanks in no small part to extensive boycotts from ethnic Tamils.

It's not clear to me whether the man is a hardliner by temperament, or simply promised some fist-shaking to win support from affiliated parties, but either way it looks like he's committed himself to shaking up the ceasefire the Sri Lankan government and the terrorist/separatist Tamil Tigers (or, for you purists, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) have maintained for the last four years.

Argh.

Having trouble keeping up with the lies?

Cheney's rough-edged remarks, and the president's unequivocal endorsement of them, were the latest in the Bush administration's new campaign to challenge critics of how it sold the war, accusing them of twisting the historical record about how and why the war was launched. Yet in accusing Iraq-war critics of "rewriting history," Bush, Cheney and other senior administration officials are tinkering with the truth themselves.

The fine folks at Knight Ridder (specifically James Kuhnhenn and Jonathan S. Landay) continue from there, to give us a helpful little list of specific administration allegations of wrongdoing, along with helpful explanations as to how those allegations cross the line into misrepresentation, misdirection, and good, old fashioned deceit!

It's hardly a comprehensive account, but it's an honorable start.

Let's pretend for a moment that civil rights matter.

This is on the domestic scene, now.

Back on the 13th, the Washington Post ran a story on the decline in morale among the professionals at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Here's a taste:

Nearly 20 percent of the division's lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out those who did not share the administration's conservative views on civil rights laws. Longtime litigators complain that political appointees have cut them out of hiring and major policy decisions, including approvals of controversial GOP redistricting plans in Mississippi and Texas.

At the same time, prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division have declined 40 percent over the past five years, according to department statistics. Dozens of lawyers find themselves handling appeals of deportation orders and other immigration matters instead of civil rights cases.

Now, representatives from the Justice Department have formally poo-poohed complaints. They're winning a higher percentage of their cases than they did in the Clinton administration, so the cases they're trying must be better ones: so sayeth Ralph Boyd, Jr., the head of the division from 2001 to 2003. Plus, notes Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, the Republicans won the election, so it's only right that the civil rights guys represent their agenda.

The Bush administration has filed only three lawsuits -- all of them this year -- under the section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits discrimination against minority voters, and none of them involves discrimination against blacks. The initial case was the Justice Department's first reverse-discrimination lawsuit, accusing a majority-black county in Mississippi of discriminating against white voters.

Yep. That's our Justice Department - protecting the whites of Mississippi from those power-mad blacks.

Anyway, I mention all this today because the administration's reputation with the black community seems to be on the verge of taking another big self-inflicted hit.

A team of Justice Department lawyers and analysts who reviewed a Georgia voter-identification law recommended rejecting it because it was likely to discriminate against black voters, but they were overruled the next day by higher-ranking officials at Justice, according to department documents.

The Justice Department has characterized the "pre-clearance" of the controversial Georgia voter-identification program as a joint decision by career and political appointees in the Civil Rights Division. Republican proponents in Georgia have cited federal approval of the program as evidence that it would not discriminate against African Americans and other minorities.

But an Aug. 25 staff memo obtained by The Washington Post recommended blocking the program because Georgia failed to show that the measure would not dilute the votes of minority residents, as required under the Voting Rights Act.

The memo, endorsed by four of the team's five members, also said the state had provided flawed and incomplete data. The team found significant evidence that the plan would be "retrogressive," meaning that it would reduce blacks' access to the polls.

A day later, on Aug. 26, the chief of the department's voting rights section, John Tanner, told Georgia officials that the program could go forward. "The Attorney General does not interpose any objection to the specified changes," he said in a letter to them.

Lemme just expand on a couple of points which the article goes on to make.

First, staff recommendations such as these simply aren't traditionally overturned; since 1965, the practice has been to accept them in good faith. Clearly, the upper echelons at DoJ are entitled to do what they've done, but let's note that it's conspicuous - and perhaps deserving of some explanation for that reason alone.

The second point, though, is that convincing explanations are proving hard to come by - in defending the decision to support this law (which, by the way, has now been blocked twice in the courts as unconstitutional), Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella misrepresented the data the authors of this memo reviewed - or, rather, he apparently completely reversed the way in which those data were interpreted. It may be that the Justice Department had a logically and morally sound rationale for taking the path it took, but if the people in charge can't make the case with an internally consistent presentation of facts, then my faith in their reasoning - let alone the faith of black voters in Georgia - isn't going to be very high.

I want them to make their case. I desperately want them to make their case. Even if I disagree, just a whiff of transparency around this decision would come as such a relief at this point I can hardly express my desire.

But I expect nothing good. I expect that there'll be a whole lot of silence, and that - even if the voters of Georgia escape the implementation of a law that one judge has compared to the stuff of the Jim Crow era - we're going to be left with nothing to go on but the supposition that the Justice Department deemed an electoral advantage for the Republican Party to be worth more than the enfranchisement of legitimate voters.

Three more years.

Say it ain't so, Bob!

The latest celebrity journalist to get burned by the Valerie Plame debacle - and by "burned," I mean "exposed as having concealed relevant facts from his editors, his newspaper, and the public" - is Bob Woodward. It now appears that Mr. Woodward was the first reporter to be leaked word that Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA operative, by someone other than Scooter Libby (or Karl Rove).

[Does this affect the charges against Mr. Libby? Doesn't look like it - in fact, I can't see how it impacts the obstruction of justice scenario at all.]

The Post's first piece on the matter is here, and Mr. Woodward's statement to the public is here (as a pdf file). It's hard to know what to say about it all - not least because Mr. Woodward has access to people higher on the food chain even than Misters Libby and Rove, who may now be feeling a little bit of heat - but let me just note that there are flashes of this that are depressingly familiar from the Judy Miller affair. Mr. Woodward kept the Washington Post in the dark on this for more than two years - even as he was making public statements about the validity of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation - and he's made statements about his own actions that at least one of his co-workers, Walter Pincus, seems to deny quite strenuously.

Basically - and, God, I hate to write this about one of the authors of All the President's Men - he seems to have rendered himself untrustworthy here, in one swell foop, and in so doing may have tarnished the newspaper that has been his home since 1971.

I hope I'm proved wrong.

I wonder what they're talking about in Iraq today.

Maybe a little of this . . .

Iraq's government said Tuesday that it had ordered an urgent investigation of allegations that many of the 173 detainees American troops discovered over the weekend in the basement of an Interior Ministry building in a Baghdad suburb had been tortured by their Iraqi captors. A senior Iraqi official who visited the detainees said two appeared paralyzed and others had some of the skin peeled off their bodies by their abusers.

. . .

Ominously, amid rising sectarianism here, Interior Ministry officials reported that the abused detainees appeared to have been mostly Sunni Arabs, and their abusers Shiite police officers loyal to the notorious Badr Organization, a militia with close links to Iran.

. . . and maybe a little of that.

The Pentagon has confirmed that US troops used white phosphorus during last year's offensive in the northern Iraqi city of Falluja.

"It was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants," spokesman Lt Col Barry Venable told the BBC - though not against civilians, he said.

The US earlier denied it had been used in Falluja at all.

Now, the article goes on to mention that the use of white phosphorus is probably just short of being a war crime, assuming civilian populations didn't get in its way - but, then, we get back to the Italian journalism that brought the subject up in the first place.

The documentary showed images of bodies recovered after a November 2004 offensive by US troops on the town of Falluja, which it said proved the use of white phosphorus against men, women and children who were burnt to the bone.

"I do know that white phosphorus was used," said Jeff Englehart in the RAI documentary, which identified him as a former soldier in the US 1st Infantry Division in Iraq.

"Burnt bodies. Burnt children and burnt women," said Englehart, who RAI said had taken part in the Falluja offensive. "White phosphorus kills indiscriminately."

The US Marines in Baghdad described white phosphorus as a "conventional munition" used primarily for smoke screens and target marking. It denied using it against civilians.

In point of fact, at the time this article was written - last week - the military denied using it at all. Whoops!

Seriously, I'm not alleging that this was an intentional lie, and I don't have the resources available to determine whether the charges of the use of this stuff against civilian populations have any merit. I just want to make the obvious point: if you're an Iraqi Sunni, you and your peers overwhelmingly voted against a constitution you saw as stacked against you. You lost. The anti-Ba'athist movement has kept even decent people from your community (along with the monsters) out of the bureaucracy and out of the military, but at the same time you've seen state sponsorship for the Kurdish peshmurga and, worse, Shi'ite militia groups like the Badr Corps (who, for the pure nativists in the audience, haven't traditionally been great friends to the Americans, either). Meanwhile, the architects of the system meant to be rising up around them seem to keep on getting caught torturing people, trying and failing to cover it up - and paying no price for it. Think it's lost on the Iraqis (Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds alike) that Don Rumsfeld kept his job after Abu Ghraib? Think anyone expects the pro-Iranian fringe to get washed out of Iraq's security services now? Bayan Jabr, the sitting interior minister, isn't long for the job even if he's not forced to resign - but so what? The militias will still be on the streets.

So, seriously, how can the people running the show entice this community into joining in the political experiment when the most visceral evidence in the news supports the Sunnis' first prejudices - that the former underclasses will never give them a shot at peaceful co-existence?

I'm desperately afraid that the only way the political dimension can play out well is if the Shi'ite community can find within itself a Nelson Mandela: a voice for truth commissions rather than retribution, and unity rather than insecurity.

And I'd say they're still more likely to get this guy.

One last gem from the Post for the morning.

The Russian Chronicles. Nifty.

Credit where credit is due.

After marathon all-night negotiations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Tuesday announced a comprehensive agreement between Israel and the Palestinians designed to open up the Gaza strip to Israel and the outside world.

The deal set terms for freedom of movement on three borders: traffic across the Rafah border into Egypt, Gaza's main link with the outside world; commercial trucks at the Karni crossing into Israel; and bus convoys between Gaza and the West Bank, the separated parts of the Palestinian Authority.

Just as important long-term, the deal allows the Palestinians to begin work on Gaza's airport and seaport, Rice said.

The deal is the most significant movement in the peace process since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza two months ago and the first broad agreement between the two sides in nine months, since talks at Sharm-el Sheikh, Egypt.

For the first time since 1967, the Palestinians will gain access of the borders in the areas where they live, Rice said at an unusual press conference with international envoy James Wolfensohn and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana just for the press traveling with Rice, but no local journalists. The target date for the opening of Rafah is Nov. 25.

Again, from the Post.

This could - and certainly should - turn out to be an exceedingly big deal for the Palestinian population of Gaza, whose economic opportunities have been strangled for way too long. Kudos to Ms. Rice and everyone involved; it's nice to have some good news to shout about.

Diplomacy, eleventh century style!

Naw, not a subtle dig on either the Bush administration or Islamic fundamentalists. Instead, I'm fixating on a weird little piece on A3 of this morning's Washington Post - a look at a Peruvian embassy that seems to've been in continuous use from the seventh to the eleventh centuries (give or take), and was then dispatched to Embassy Valhalla after one hell of a farewell.

The pitch:

It was not your usual embassy party. True, it opened with a banquet, but when it ended, the hosts burned the palace down. Then everyone moved next door, where brew mistresses poured nightcaps. And when that was over, the hosts set fire to the brewery, hurled tankards into the flames and said goodnight. And goodbye.

This was the end of the Peruvian desert settlement known as Cerro Baul, a team of archaeologists reported yesterday. Built atop a mesa in about A.D. 600 and continuously occupied for 400 years, Cerro Baul was perhaps the first diplomatic mission in the Americas.

And then suddenly -- but quite carefully -- it was torched and abandoned after a spectacular feast and beer party. The elite female brewers left their shawl pins in the brewery's ashes and may have joined in a final toast.

I know nothing - absolutely nothing - about pre-Incan cultures, but I'm still in love with this piece. Not enough sex for prime time, maybe, but a good dose of mystery and rich hints of things that have been lost.

Where we learned to be bad.

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

The article says that - since the Bush White House basically had to draft its most abusive interrogation protocols from scratch, given the relative humanity of previous administrations - America went and looked hard at what the Communists did to captive Americans in our Korean and Vietnamese wars, and adapted those techniques to our own purposes.

But, of course, the North Vietnamese and North Koreans didn't apply these techniques in the hopes of securing actionable information; they wanted the propaganda coups of coercing our guys into publicly rejecting their cause and the leadership under which they had operated. Basically, pain and fear make people try to appease their tormentors, not tell the truth. Just ask the Israelis.

I bet the people responsible have confused the sense of dominance that comes with this kind of abuse with a more meaningful degree of control. We can't have totally fucked up the situation on the ground if we have a number of our enemies totally vulnerable to our every whim, right?

It seems as much a sign of institutionalized fear as anything else.

What a difference four days makes!

There's been movement on the Graham package, and the whole messy business of habeas corpus for detainees from the "war on terror." The following comes from the Post:

A bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise yesterday that would dramatically alter U.S. policy for treating captured terrorist suspects by granting them a final recourse to the federal courts but stripping them of some key legal rights.

The compromise links legislation written by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), which would deny detainees broad access to federal courts, with a new measure authored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) that would grant detainees the right to appeal the verdict of a military tribunal to a federal appeals court. The deal will come to a vote today, and the authors say they are confident it will pass.

Graham and Levin indicated they would then demand that House and Senate negotiators link their measure with the effort by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to clearly ban torture and abuse of terrorism suspects being held in U.S. facilities.

"McCain's amendment needs to be part of the overall package, because it deals with standardizing interrogation techniques and will reestablish moral high ground for the United States," Graham said.

It should help, at least. The devil's always in the details - which, so far, I haven't seen - but if the compromise provides for reasonable access to those appeal courts, rather than simply making a show of offering judicial scrutiny on largely technical points, then I'm inclined to embrace it and call it God's work. The system desperately needs oversight, in whatever form can be most easily secured.

I'll add that the subject has gotten a fair amount of play in the Op-Ed pages over the past few days; the Times has a fascinating little piece up on an embarrassing precedent - the denial of habeas corpus to Southerners during Reconstruction - and extrapolates darkly on current practice. It's a good read.

The most affecting piece I've seen, though, comes from the Post - or, rather, from an attorney providing pro bono representation for Guantanamo detainees. I'm reprinting a lot of it, because it strips away a good number of dangerous ambiguities here; certain senators may be surprised to learn it, but it turns out there are real people involved in this filthy business.

As the Senate prepared to vote Thursday to abolish the writ of habeas corpus, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jon Kyl were railing about lawyers like me. Filing lawsuits on behalf of the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Terrorists! Kyl must have said the word 30 times.

As I listened, I wished the senators could meet my client Adel.

Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.

The military people reached this conclusion, and they wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months later. And these facts would still be a secret but for one thing: habeas corpus.

Only habeas corpus got Adel a chance to tell a federal judge what had happened. Only habeas corpus revealed that it wasn't just Adel who was innocent -- it was Abu Bakker and Ahmet and Ayoub and Zakerjain and Sadiq -- all Guantanamo "terrorists" whom the military has found innocent.

Habeas corpus is older than even our Constitution. It is the right to compel the executive to justify itself when it imprisons people. But the Senate voted to abolish it for Adel, in favor of the same "combatant status review tribunal" that has already exonerated him. That secret tribunal didn't have much impact on his life, but Graham says it is good enough.

It's basically a textbook case of how prison systems - particularly American-run prison systems - should never operate. We're not just applying an unreasonable presumption of guilt, we're consciously abrogating the rights of the innocent. Mostly for the convenience of the people in charge, as far as I can tell.

They ought not to be in charge anymore, by the way.

No appeal.

The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of the principal legal tool given to them last year by the Supreme Court when it allowed them to challenge their detentions in United States courts.

. . .

Under Mr. Graham's measure, Guantánamo prisoners would be able to challenge only the narrow question of whether the government followed procedures established by the defense secretary at the time the military determined their status as enemy combatants, which is subject to an annual review. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would retain the right to rule on that, but not on other aspects of a prisoner's case.

Detainees would not be able to challenge the underlying rationale for their detention. "If it stands, it means detainees at Guantánamo Bay would have no access to any federal court for anything other than very simple procedural complaints dealing with annual status review," said Christopher E. Anders, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Otherwise, the federal courts' door is shut."

If the measure is enacted, civil liberties groups said it would appear to render moot the Supreme Court's decision on Monday to decide the validity of the military commissions that Mr. Bush wants to try detainees charged with terrorist offenses to trial.

From the New York Times. There are apparently over two hundred appeals currently in the works that these provisions, if passed into law, would instantly void.

Now, I should insert a caveat: apparently, there's a group of Democrats who supported this mess with the idea of cancelling out the bits that actually restrict detainee access to courts while maintaining provisions for Congressional oversight. I suspect that this is either a cover story or painfully naive, since any language that supports simple civil liberties seems pretty likely to get tossed out when the Senate and the House get together to reconcile their different versions of the bill - but, hey, the Dems have been playing a strong game lately, and some Republicans clearly don't want to be on the wrong side of prisoner abuse issues, so maybe it'll all work out. My fingers are crossed in a way I hope the goddess Fortuna finds strangely attractive.

As for Lindsey Graham's distaste for habeas corpus . . . well, he frames his thinking like this: "It is not fair to our troops fighting in the war on terror to be sued in every court in the land by our enemies based on every possible complaint. We have done nothing today but return to the basics of the law of armed conflict where we are dealing with enemy combatants, not common criminals."

I've been thinking, over the course of various torture posts, that it might be a trap to try to refute pro-abuse arguments on their merits, or in the details - it opens up a rhetorical weakness, as though a new study demonstrating the effectiveness of forced sodomy as an interrogation technique might make it dramatically more acceptable than anal rape when presumed ineffective. The truth is, we shouldn't be removing the legal constraints that keep us from torturing people in our power because without those constraints we'll do it. If we pronounce it acceptable, we'll do it, we'll say it's all about self-defense, and there'll be more of it every year because everyone who protests will have to fight through a news cycle's worth of soundbites about being soft on America's enemies. We're the most powerful nation on Earth, and one of a rare few that was explicitly built as an experiment in virtue - we shouldn't be going out of our way to empower our cruelest angels.

But let me say this to Senator Graham's concerns: first, I'm pretty confident that there's not a court in this nation that wouldn't err on the side of caution in hearing civil cases against members of the armed services for actions taken in the fulfillment of duty. Never mind the scenario's irrelevance to the basic question of habeas corpus for prisoners - we would never see a rash of these kinds of trials because they'd be unpopular with the judiciary and unpopular with the public. If a complaint makes it through at all, it'll be on the merits of a scene like Abu Ghraib, where pretty much anyone with eyes would think the questions of culpability and recompense deserve an airing.

The American military has committed at least occasional abuses throughout its history, and the truth is - even under current law - not one of them has ever led to a flood of litigation powerful enough to drag the system down; it simply has never been and will never be allowed. We're basically looking at the saddest straw man in the straw man warehouse.

Second, "returning to the basics" presupposes that how we're treating our "enemy combatants" is more or less in accord with accepted rules of warfare. It's not. Of course it's not. We haven't been in a war in fifty years where we'd have argued the right to detain people for decades without so much as a passing glance from the Red Cross simply because the president says they're, y'know, bad. It's a deviation from the ethics of a modern, professional military power - and shame on you, Mr. Graham, for hoping you could pass it off as mainstream and nobody would call you on it.

We'll see how this all turns out, but I'm guessing it's going to prove to be still another stain on the record of this generation of congressmen. You'd think we, as a nation, could do better.

Dover, PA gets to stay in the twenty-first century!

Voters in a Pennsylvania town wracked by a debate about adding intelligent design to a science curriculum have cleaned house.

Eight Republican school board members who ordered a statement on intelligent design read in biology class were voted out and replaced with Democrats who oppose the policy.

. . .

One member of the nine-person school board was not up for reelection.

The article is here; thanks go out to Amy Sullivan for the link!

Posted in its entirety.

The Times on Mr. Chalabi and his visit.

It might have been awkward for President Bush to have told Ahmad Chalabi, a deputy prime minister in Iraq, that he would receive no official welcome in Washington this week. Mr. Chalabi does not easily take no for an answer, and he seems to have no inhibitions about embarrassing his former friends with impolitic remarks, especially if they help him in next month's Iraqi elections. But it is disgraceful to hand this multiply discredited schemer the prestige he will surely milk from his meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley.

Mr. Chalabi is not just any political opportunist. He, more than any other Iraqi, is responsible for encouraging the Bush administration to make two disastrous mistakes about the Iraq intervention: basing its justification for war on the false premise that Saddam Hussein had active unconventional-weapons programs, and falsely imagining that the Iraqi people would greet the invasion with undiluted joy.

Nor did Mr. Chalabi's destructive influence stop there. After the invasion, he played a leading role in persuading American occupation authorities to issue a blanket decree against former Baath Party members, sweeping aside the lawyers, doctors, teachers and other professionals who had preserved their careers by joining the lower ranks of Mr. Hussein's party. That exclusion helped cement the disastrous estrangement of the Sunni Arab middle class. Mr. Chalabi personally took charge of enforcing this purge, and he still resists efforts by the United States and less divisive Iraqi parties to rein it in for the sake of national unity.

As if all that weren't enough, Mr. Chalabi is suspected by United States government investigators of tipping off Iran that American spy agencies had broken its codes and were covertly reading its international messages, a charge he vehemently denies.

Mr. Chalabi's record as a double-dealer and unreliable source stretches back for decades. He has long been distrusted by those in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency who know Iraq best. But during the crucial months that the Bush administration was planning the invasion and occupation, Mr. Chalabi became a favorite of pro-war Pentagon and White House officials, largely by telling them what they wanted to hear. It is alarming that the administration is still willing to reward him with such a high-ranking official audience.

Amman.

Three bombings in Jordan's capital - one of which, just for that extra nihilistic oomph, targeted a Jordanian wedding party. The best account I've seen so far is the Post's, but I'm afraid the body count in that article is no longer current; according to the BBC, there are at least 57 dead now, and I suppose the number is likely to rise.

The creatures responsible haven't taken credit yet, but early speculation points toward Abu Musab Zarqawi and his lot. Ordinarily, I'd warn against pointing to the regional boogeyman, lest problems seem more centralized than they are, but when it comes to Jordanian terrorism it seems reasonable - this guy really is at the top of the list of lunatics who want to see one of the more peaceful states of the Middle East go down to ash and scattered stone.

My condolences go out to the people hurt, directly and indirectly.

The Times takes its medicine.

Judy Miller's out the door.

Kansas: Because Ignorance Can Be a Way of Life!

In addition, the [school] board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

Pretty much says it all. The story's up at the New York Times, if you can bear to read it.

Not a big surprise.

Republican Congressional leaders called today for lawmakers to investigate who told journalists that secret American prisons had been set up overseas for the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Senate majority leader, and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois wrote in a letter to intelligence committee chairmen that leaking such information "could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences" for the security of the United States.

The letter, to Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, and his House counterpart, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, both Republicans, complained that the leaking of classified information by government employees appeared to have increased, "establishing a dangerous trend that, if not addressed swiftly and firmly, likely will worsen."

More on the matter at the New York Times, though I think the gist of it comes across pretty clearly in the passages above.

I don't get a vote, but I might as well add that I think this is exactly the kind of national security breach we do want reporters to be willing to go to jail to encourage. Photographs from Abu Ghraib and hunger strikes at Gitmo strongly argue that this administration needs to have its extranational detention facilities kept under close scutiny - particularly when the vice president is running around arguing that we shouldn't be making it harder for the CIA to torture people.

Japan's most awkward immigrant since Bobby Fischer . . .

. . . has made an unexpected departure. It's probably too soon to say whether this is good news for Peru, but it's clearly some kind of news.

Much, much more on the man here, care again of Wikipedia.

Good God!

There's another piece in the Washington Post this morning about Vice President Cheney's love of causing pain, and it's startling both in its contents and in its likely significance as a bellwether of bureaucratic warfare. The meat of the piece isn't just from Congressional aides, after all; it's pretty clearly Condoleezza Rice's State Department that's really out to bury this guy in his own policy feces.

And, seriously, with good cause. Apparently the vice president isn't just leaning on senators - he's got his people pulling out all kinds of stops. Let's look at the language of the article itself.

McCain's amendment would limit the military's interrogation and detention tactics to those described in the Army Field Manual, and it would prohibit all U.S. government employees from using cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Cheney pushed hard to have the entire amendment defeated. He twice held meetings with key lawmakers to lobby against the measure, once traveling to Capitol Hill in July, to button-hole Sens. John W. Warner (R-Va.), McCain and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).

When that tack did not work -- 90 senators supported the measure -- Cheney handed McCain language that would exempt the CIA. Despite Cheney's concerns, Graham said he has not heard any concerns from the CIA suggesting it needs an exemption from the McCain amendment. The CIA declined to comment.

. . .

Beside personal pressure from the vice president, Cheney's staff is also engaged in resisting a policy change. Tactics included "trying to have meetings canceled ... to at least slow things down or gum up the works" or trying to conduct meetings on the subject without other key Cabinet members, one administration official said. The official said some internal memos and e-mail from the National Security Council staff to the national security adviser were automatically forwarded to the vice president's office -- in some cases without the knowledge of the authors.

For that reason, Rice "wanted to be in all meetings," said a senior State Department official.

There's more on that last point elsewhere in the article; as the Post tells it, Ms. Rice interrupted at least one international trip to make sure she got in a teleconference with Mr. Cheney to ensure that he didn't corrupt policy while she was gone. [As I say, in the background of this article seems to be a vigorous effort from the Condi camp to extricate State from the ethical sewer in which the Bush administration has come to lurk; there are, you'll note, an awful lot of paragraphs in a piece on Mr. Cheney that are in fact devoted to how darn progressive Ms. Rice is.]

What else? Well, for one thing, we get another chilling glimpse at one of the men Mr. Cheney selected to fill Scooter Libby's shoes.

Cheney's chief aide in this bureaucratic war of wills is David S. Addington, who was his chief counsel until last week when he replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the vice president's chief of staff.

Addington exerted influence on many of the most significant policy decisions after Sept. 11, 2001. He helped write the position on torture taken by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, a stance rescinded after it became public, and he helped pick Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the location beyond the reach of U.S. law for holding suspected terrorists.

When Addington learned that the draft Pentagon directive included language from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits torture and cruel treatment, including "humiliating and degrading treatment," he summoned the Pentagon official in charge of the detainee issue to brief him.

During a tense meeting at his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Addington was strident, said officials with knowledge of the encounter, and chastised Deputy Assistant Secretary Matthew C. Waxman for including what he regarded as vague and unhelpful language from Article 3 in the directive.

The New Republic has a little more on the same theme (I'm afraid the article is probably only available to subscribers).

This pattern of Cheney aides staking out extreme positions until they lead to a political crisis or judicial rebuke reached its zenith in the case of the infamous Justice Department memo arguing that torturing suspected terrorists "may be justified." According to The Washington Post, which first obtained the legal document, Addington was the most vigorous advocate of the so-called "commander-in-chief" section, which stated that any law barring torture "does not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants." In a separate memo, which Addington wrote under Alberto Gonzales's name, he argued that Geneva Convention provisions were obsolete for terrorist suspects. Inevitably, the administration distanced itself from these policies, once the details became public, partially because they threatened Gonzales's nomination to be attorney general. But, even now, after the domestic and international outcry, Cheney and Addington continue a two-front battle to retain Bush's right to torture. They are simultaneously fighting John McCain's Senate legislation, which would ban cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners, and, as the Times reported on Wednesday, battling officials within the administration who want to use Geneva language in the new Defense Department guidelines on handling terrorist suspects. The Times reported, "According to several officials, Mr. Addington verbally assailed a Pentagon aide who was called to brief him and Mr. Libby on the draft, objecting to its use of language drawn from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. 'He left bruised and bloody,' one Defense Department official said of the Pentagon aide, Matthew C. Waxman, Mr. Rumsfeld's chief adviser on detainee issues. 'He tried to champion Article 3, and Addington just ate him for lunch.'"

There's scary stuff in all this. The vice president is pretty clearly surrounding himself with people who reinforce his own darker, more radical tendencies, and the result is an increasingly passionate embrace of real extremism. There's a whole host of bad results - and a lot of them have been evident for quite some time - but when we get to the point where the vice president of the United States is sneaking around behind the State Department's back to further the cause of state-sanctioned torture, we've got entirely new lines being crossed.

I honestly wonder if the man might've had an undiagnosed stroke at some point. He's starting to seem literally not in his right mind.

Anyway, let me close this off with a nod to an important point from Laura Rozen: on top of its moral odor, abusing prisoners tends to get bad results.

More from the blog round-up.

I won't quote, just point - Andrew Sullivan notes that there's reason to hope that Samuel Alito actually favors a looser and more morally defensible definition of torture than those of us on the left might have feared.

Now, granted, Mr. Sullivan is a determined optimist - he spent years hoping the administration would suddenly stop treating his ideals like Lucy Van Pelt treats a football - but I'll take any reassurance I can find at this stage.

Another knee-jerk reaction.

Rioting in France has not, in fact, dropped off - and according to a new article at Reuters, other European countries are beginning to get alarmed.

Neighboring Germany, too, has a large immigrant population, including over 3 million Muslims -- most of Turkish origin.

Wolfgang Bosbach, deputy leader of the conservative Christian Democrats in parliament, said Germany should be under no illusion that similar events could [not] happen there too.

In Italy, opposition leader Romano Prodi called on the government to take urgent action, telling reporters:

"We have the worst suburbs in Europe. I don't think things are so different from Paris. It's only a question of time."

This worries me a little. The temptation isn't going to be to address the underlying social problems - it's going to be to restrict the ability of immigrants and their offspring to organize. [Particularly when we're talking about conservative parties and oppositions in search of politically enriching issues.] And, while stopping riots before they start is a decidedly good thing, doing it in such a way as to deepen the acrimony in Muslim communities isn't.

As far as I can tell, there are no specific, dangerous plans being offered to the citizens of relevant nations yet, so maybe it's premature to twitch and fritter about mistakes. But - and I'm speaking here as a citizen of a country prone to shallow thinking and heavy-handed action - Europe's general approach to its Muslim inhabitants (to say nothing of Turkey) doesn't really lead one to expect the most forward-thinking of policy choices.

Anyway, the good news from France is that we're still not seeing new riot-related deaths. Hooray for that, at least.


UPDATE (5:21 PM): Nice, informative essay on what we're seeing in France - thanks to Kevin Drum for the pointer!

Wikipedia: not just for riot-watchers.

But, I've got to say, it's kind to them too.

I haven't been following the story in Paris all that closely over the last week and a half - partially because it didn't get a lot of play here, and partially because I really wanted to believe it wasn't all that serious. France has never had a truly smooth relationship with its Muslim citizens and guests (I really do respect the principle of secularity, but - even if we grant that its application in post-colonial France is consistently well-meant - it can be kind of heavy-handed), but neither has it really been marked by out-and-out savagery in recent years. I really hoped that this round of unrest didn't amount to any serious threat to a relatively stable status quo.

Now we've just finished night nine, and I concede I ought to start taking it seriously. Violence has moved beyond the Parisian suburbs, into Marseille and Dijon, and yet it seems like the interior minister's plan is just to keep playing hardass and hope that the memory sticks with France's more frustrated voters when the 2007 elections roll around (the gentleman, Nicolas Sarkozy, has presidential ambitions). A mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois was tear gassed, the rioters (mostly teenage boys - quelle suprise!) have been dismissed as "scum," and calm voices seem awfully quiet. That said, so far loss of life has apparently been avoided - apart from the two deaths that sparked the violence in the first place - and early reports hold that direct confrontations between rioters and cops are finally starting to go down.

I don't have too much insight to contribute to the discussion here, but I will make the knee-jerk point: this whole mess is pretty bad for Europe. France is leading the pack as a destination for immigration, legal and otherwise, but I gather it's only ahead of the curve - not outside of it. The continent's Muslim population is growing fast, and it's not enjoying a whole hell of a lot of social mobility - or, for that matter, easy cultural integration into what are ethnically and religiously fairly homogenous populations. White Western Europe was wary of its new neighbors even before the age of exported Islamofascist terrorism, but now . . . well, let's just say tensions were high enough in Holland without filling the news with images of out-of-control Muslim kids setting fires in Sarcelles. An awful lot of Western Europe - particularly the underclasses - are effectively segregated, and the continent really needs to start some effective mediation between its whites and non-whites before the young Muslims become any more susceptible to radicalizing lunatics than they already are.

Alas, shit like this makes starting such dialogues even more politically hazardous than it had to be.

They should have a sinister theme song.

Yep, the Republicans in the Senate (with five noble exceptions) are getting down to budget cutting!

Still, some health care experts say new premiums and co-payments that would be imposed on the working poor would drive millions of families out of the Medicaid system entirely.

"From a beneficiary's perspective, [the changes] are hugely significant," said Jocelyn Guyer, senior program director at Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families, who estimated that 6 million children will be affected by the changes.

Under the House plan, states could raise co-payments for Medicaid recipients below the poverty line from $3 to $5 per doctor's visit or prescription, then keep raising them with the medical inflation rate. For the working poor just above the poverty line, there would be no limit to higher co-payments, although out-of-pocket health costs are not supposed to exceed 5 percent of a family's income. Health policy analysts say that protection may not amount to much as poor families will have difficulty tracking health care expenses that closely.

For the first time, poor children and pregnant women -- currently shielded from any out-of-pocket payments -- could be billed for some medications or hospital visits for non-emergency care.

Next on the docket? Seventy billion dollars in tax cuts. Aw, yeah.

Seriously, I'm at least as offended as the next guy, but I have to thank them for at least streamlining the story down to something future generations of high school kids will understand. On the national scene, the Democrats are cowardly and disorganized, while the Republicans - from the Hammer to Scooter to Turdblossom to Vice - are escaped Dick Tracy villains.

A new day at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?

Halfway there, perhaps.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board of Directors said Thursday that embattled former board chairman Ken Tomlinson has resigned. The board has been reviewing a CPB Inspector General's report--called for by a pair of congressmen--on Tomlinson's relationship with the board stemming from Tomlinson's attempts to add more conservative programming. The board said in a statement: "[F]ormer chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson has resigned from the CPB board. The board does not believe that Mr. Tomlinson acted maliciously or with any intent to harm CPB or public broadcasting, and the board recognizes that Mr. Tomlinson strongly disputes the findings in the soon-to-be-released Inspector General’s report. "The board expresses its disappointment in the performance of former key staff whose responsibility it was to advise the board and its members.

"Nonetheless, both the board and Mr. Tomlinson believe it is in the best interests of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that he no longer remain on the board. "The board commends Mr. Tomlinson for his legitimate efforts to achieve balance and objectivity in public broadcasting."

Tomlinson came under heavy fire for adding conservative shows to balance what he saw as liberal bias, and for hiring an outside consultant to gauge the bias in shows, particularly Now with Bill Moyers.

The CPB board has been under fire itself from groups complaining that it has not released the report and has been meeting in closed session about it. One of those groups was happy with the Tomlinson exit, but saw the problem as systemic.

"It was time that Mr. Tomlinson stepped down," said Center for Digital Democracy Executive Director Jeff Chester. But, he added. "CPB needs a thorough house cleaning," he said, "We await the IG report's release."

More over here.

Left hand, meet right hand.

It's probably not a big deal that the Post's editorial page doesn't live up to the standards of its reporting. Still, this morning, I admit I got ticked off - see, they chose to wrap up an otherwise well-advised editorial on human rights abuses in the "war on terror" with the following paragraph . . .

There is no more important issue before the country or Congress. Yet the advocates of decency and common sense seem to have meager support from the Democratic Party. Senate Democrats staged a legislative stunt on Tuesday intended to reopen -- once again -- the debate on prewar intelligence about Iraq. They have taken no such dramatic stand against the CIA's abuses of foreign prisoners; on a conference committee considering Mr. McCain's amendment, Democratic support has been faltering. While Democrats grandstand about a war debate that took place three years ago, the Bush administration's champions of torture are quietly working to preserve policies whose reversal ought to be an urgent priority.

. . . and it just seems gratuitous. Yes, if the Democrats are stalling on fixing our detainee abuse mess, they should be called on it - but then we look at "Policies on Terrorism Suspects Come Under Fire," the article on A2, and it reads:

House Democrats said they plan to introduce a motion as early as today to endorse language in the defense spending package written by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), which would bar cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, including those in CIA hands. The motion would instruct House conferees to accept McCain's precise measure.

Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), ranking Democrat on the Appropriations defense subcommittee, urged the United States to adopt a doctrine of "no torture, no excuses," and said Congress needs to speak on the issue. "The United States of America and the values we reflect abhor human rights violators and uphold human rights," Murtha said in a statement.

McCain's amendment was endorsed last month by the Senate, 90 to 9, over the objections of the White House, which said it would restrict the president's ability to protect the country. The House Democrats said they already have 15 GOP supporters for their motion, and Republicans have told the White House they expect it to pass, an Appropriations Committee spokesman said.

. . .

John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has been pushing for more than a year to conduct a review of the CIA's interrogation and detention practices. Yesterday, he lashed out at the administration for not being more forthcoming.

And, let me stress, the nine that voted against the McCain amendment in the Senate were all Republicans. So, basically, the Post's journalistic side offers no indication that the Dems are waffling - and, in fact, seems to imply that all the reform momentum (at least in the House) is coming from their side of the aisle. If that's substantively incorrect, or even misleading, then the Post has serious reporting problems on its hands.

As it is, though, I think it's the editorial that's most likely to be screwy - particularly given the weird broadside there at the very end. The Post's editors are bitching about Democratic "grandstanding" over a "war debate that took place three years ago?" Really?

Is the point that the question of honesty in the pursuit of war is irrelevant? Or that Congress should only be expected to do one thing at once? Or was it simply unseemly for Harry Reid to use parliamentary tricks to prod along an investigation that the majority party was content to bury?

Whatever it was, I can't help but think that it was pretty stupid, and that it diminished the piece as a whole.

Secret prisons.

Another of the Bush administration's many curses upon future generations (to say nothing of modern prisoners).

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

. . .

The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.

The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.

Full article here.

Just in case anyone was wondering why Vice President Cheney was so adamant that the CIA gets to torture people . . . .

A quick nitpick.

An editorial on Syria in today's Post gives us this passage:

And there is no shortage of Western apologists for Mr. Assad, who claim that he is a victim of hard-liners around him, or that the United States and Europe would be better off striking a deal with him than supporting action that might "destabilize" his country.

Now, I wouldn't call myself an apologist for Mr. Assad, but I am one of those people who suspects that he doesn't have the same kind of control over his government (and the crazier elements thereof) as did his father, or Saddam Hussein. The thing is, that should be irrelevant to the situation at hand: the involvement of any one member of the Syrian hierarchy neither justifies or delegitimizes an investigation into the assassination of Rafiq Hariri. If an inquest is called for - and it is - it's up to the people conducting it to establish schemes of culpability. The only job for the rest of the world is to pressure the Syrian state as a whole to let investigators do their business.

Here's why I thought this was important enough to bring up: since the end of the Cold War, the American popular discourse about international threats has generally been made to sound like synopses of James Bond novels. We reduce movements, organizations, and rogue states to their supervillainous (and sometimes nominal) leaders, and in so doing we oversimplify what's actually going on. Invading Panama was about getting rid of Noriega, Iraq's only problem was Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden was synonymous with al-Qaeda until Zarqawi's name started making the rounds. Now, obviously, crazy guys in leadership roles are going to make bad scenes worse, but our current style of narrative-building seems to set us up to be startled every time international unrest isn't quelled by the intimidation, capture, or elimination of the bad guy du jour.

Is Syria a threat to stability in the Middle East? Unquestionably. But the rot in its government isn't localized in the kid brought in to take Hafez Assad's place, and if we fall into the trap of saying otherwise, it's kind of like implying that Iraqi Ba'athists would all magically disappear with the fall of Saddam.

The Washington Post is an important newspaper - increasingly more so as the Times threatens to continue its long fall - and I think it ought to go into the Syrian mess with its editorial eyes all the way open. To be fair, the bulk of today's editorial does indeed allow for the possibility that the assassination plot extends beyond Mr. Assad, but I think the language of the overall piece suggests that the success of the investigation hinges on the cooperation provided by this one man alone, and that may just not be realistic.

I think there are a lot of people who need to be shaken here.