The genocide sprawl.

Turns out the atrocities in Darfur are going out of Darfur now, with (largely Arab) marauders taking the criminal living out to Chad.

"You may have thought the terrible situation in Darfur couldn't get worse, but it has," Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, said in a recent statement. "Sudan's policy of arming militias and letting them loose is spilling over the border, and civilians have no protection from their attacks, in Darfur or in Chad."

Indeed, the accounts of civilians in eastern Chad are agonizingly familiar to those in western Sudan. One woman, Zahara Isaac Mahamat, described how Arab men on camels and horses had raided her village in Chad, stealing everything they could find and slaughtering all who resisted.

The dead included her husband, Ismail Ibrahim, who tried to prevent the raiders from burning his sorghum and millet fields. Like so many others in this desolate expanse of dust-choked earth, she fled west with her three children, much as people in Darfur have been forced to do in recent years.

"I have lost everything but my children," she said, her face looking much older than her 20 years. She is now a refugee, with thousands of other displaced Chadians, in Kolloye, a village south of here.

"We have three bowls of grain left," she said. "When that is gone, only God can help us."

Those paragraphs and more, from Lydia Polgreen, for the New York Times. The article's very intimate in some ways - even disturbingly so. There's the quote above. There's . . .

One refugee, Kaltam Abdullah, cradled her year-old son in her lap; his head lolled on his neck, his eyes were glazed and his limbs slender.

"He has had running stomach for 10 days," Ms. Abdullah said. "He is coughing. But there is no doctor."

And . . .

In one ward lay Fatime Youma, a 13-year-old girl with a tube draining the gunshot wound that had punctured her lung.

She was shot, her father explained, by janjaweed who happened upon her and her 16-year-old sister, Zenab, who lay in the next room with a gunshot wound to her arm.

"I was just looking for firewood with my sister," Zenab said softly. "When the raiders saw us we ran away but they shot at us."

Why? Apparently, the janjaweed is out to weaken the political opponents of the thugs in Khartoum by dispersing, traumatizing and killing said opponents' people. You can't organize if you're starving to death in Chad.

I like to think there's a special place in hell waiting for the architects of this.

By the way, it seems that real props are due to John Bolton for fighting China, Russia and Qatar to keep the UN on the straight and narrow (relatively speaking) on matters Sudanese - Mark Leon Goldberg has more here. And, yes, I'm as startled as anyone.

Who benefits?

At around 6:30 this morning, East Coast (U.S.) time, the big story of the day out of Israel/Palestine was that the leadership of Hamas was suggesting a willingness to recognize the state of Israel, in exchage for Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state defined by the 1967 borders. It was exciting news - and, I'm pretty sure, unprecedented. I did a little happy dance.

Now, it's afternoon, and I'd like to offer a link to that story, but I can't - it's been overwritten. The updated article up from Reuters opens with the headline "Israel says 'irrelevant' Abbas to be Hamas 'fig leaf,'" and proceeds from there. There's still some ambiguity about the Hamas position; Ismail Haniyeh, the incoming Palestinian PM, has recanted his earlier statement, but now the Russians seem to be saying they have reason to expect Hamas to go ahead and recognize Israel over the course of a diplomatic session in Moscow in early March.

Here's hoping.

What isn't ambiguous, though, is that Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni picked a day when there were unusually positive noises coming out of the Palestinian side of Jerusalem to stick a rhetorical knife in Mahmoud Abbas's back. Not just Hamas, but Mr. Abbas as well - why not? No guarded optimism, no tactfully expressed confusion, not even silence: of all the options Ms. Livni had at hand, she chose an inflammatory one. There are only a few effects it could be calculated to have - maybe it's intended for sympathetic publics, to keep news-feeders (particularly the American breed, and the Israeli audience itself, I suspect) guarded against unrealistic hope. Maybe it's a warning shot to Russia, or Europe in general, in response to some hidden initiative leaked on the diplomatic wires - "You try to get us to agree to X, you'll only get more of this shit." Or maybe the point is just to insult the Palestinians and make it as unlikely as possible that Hamas will grow up, behave, and really make an offer that a majority of the Israeli people (but not the Likud) would probably want to accept: peace, and a territorial break along the Green Line. I can say with relative confidence that that last result isn't just the most likely, it's also the hardest to avoid - and Ms. Livni seems not to have even tried.

Again, I don't mean to suggest that Hamas is necessarily sincere, and certainly not that vague hints of intent should be taken for binding promises, but . . . look, just in terms of PR leverage: signs of moderation in the Palestinian discourse benefit Israel. Of course they do. Sincere or not, they're a necessary precondition to real softening in the political lines; when Hamas talks about recognizing Israel, then - to be all cute about it - recognizing Israel ultimately becomes something that Hamas can talk about. And, if you want to be cynical and realpolitik-y about it - if cultivated, these themes might well lead to a schism within Hamas, where the most aggressive tendencies are directed inward for a few months to a year.

And giving a little space to see how all this develops costs Israel nothing. The Israelis can mumble in general terms about a desire for peace and a willingness to deal with honest partners, and then sit back and watch Hamas's next step. It's not the same as committing to turn land over, or even to release Palestinian tax money - it's just not going out and making things worse in the short term.

And, apparently, today that was too much to ask.

J.-approved quote of the day.

With the Bush administration claiming imperial powers to detain, spy on and even torture people, and the Republican Congress stuck largely in enabling mode, the role of judges in checking executive branch excesses becomes all the more crucial. If the courts collapse when confronted with spurious government claims about the needs of national security, so will basic American liberties.

Thank you, New York Times. The immediate subject at hand is the disgraceful dismissal of Maher Arar's legal case against the US (admittedly, news that's nine days old - I guess we have Bob Herbert to thank for keeping it on the editorial page radar), but I'm also prettu sure it speaks to the problem Sam Alito represents for the Supreme Court.

Sigh.

Back to the grind . . . .

Wanna read something scary?

Rosen and Weissman are indicted as having joined in a "conspiracy" with Franklin—not because they bribed, coerced, or even solicited Franklin for the information (there's no charge that they did that, anyway) but rather because they merely received it.

If they are convicted under this legal theory, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus or The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh could be next.

The two AIPAC analysts are charged under Title 18 of the U.S. criminal code, Chapter 37 ("Espionage and Censorship"), Section 793 ("Gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information"). This is a statute at once remarkably vague and astonishingly broad. If officials in the White House or the Justice Department decide to enforce it consistently, they could go after hundreds of publications—and their millions of readers.

More to the point, if Rosen and Weissman are convicted, the lawyer for every serious newspaper or magazine will feel duty-bound to advise the editors and publishers that they could face felony charges for printing any stories containing classified information. Some publishers will go ahead and run the stories anyway. Others won't. Even the brave ones might raise the bar of when to go with a story and when to hold back.

The statute does contain a caveat, a specific condition for declaring disclosures illegal; but it's so loose as to be meaningless. It specifies that, in order to be charged with espionage, those who handle secrets improperly must do so

with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation.

Again, read that line carefully. It doesn't say you must have "intent" to harm the United States or to help some other country. It says that you have "intent or reason to believe" that the information will "be used" to that effect.

It is for this reason (among several others) that Viet Dinh, a former Bush Justice Department official who helped write the USA Patriot Act, has filed a "memorandum of law" in support of Rosen and Weissman's motion to dismiss the indictment. Dinh writes that the statute is so vague on this point that no unauthorized recipient of classified information would have any way of knowing whether he's breaking the law or not. Dinh also notes in his memo that no nongovernmental official has ever been successfully prosecuted under this statute for receiving classified information.

Still, if some attorney general were to view this case as a precedent, he could go after whole newsrooms on the grounds that the reporters and editors had "reason to believe" the information might be used to harm the United States or to help another country.

As ludicrous as it might sound, the attorney general could go after readers, too, since the espionage statutes say anyone who receives certain classified information can be prosecuted. (For a mind-blowing list of what Section 793 outlaws, click here.) Are prosecutors going to arrest the entire population for violating espionage laws? No. But if they succeed in prosecuting Rosen and Weissman under this theory of the law, everyone who publishes a newspaper, or who posts satellite photos on a Web site, will feel the proverbial "chilling effect"—and with good reason.

This federal government, after all, has thrown reporters in jail for refusing to name sources. The Justice Department has proclaimed a theory of government that puts nearly all powers not just in the executive branch but in the presidency. In his recent appearance before the Senate judiciary committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declined to answer questions about the National Security Agency's surveillance program, pretty much on the grounds that he didn't have to and didn't want to. Meanwhile, the Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibilities. According to today's Washington Post, the Senate intelligence committee, under White House pressure, is about to vote against conducting even an inquiry into the NSA program.

If the White House or the Justice Department wanted to push these restrictive espionage statutes to the max, if they wanted to create an Official Secrets Act in America, the ground is well-plowed for them to do so.

From Fred Kaplan, for Slate - behold your link.

Defying my own predictions.

Just a few minutes ago, I said in an email that I'd lay off the blogging tonight if I couldn't find anything more revolutionary to say than that the situation in Iraq is looking pretty bleak.

The thing is, though, they really are on edge over there. Shi'ite editorials are calling for civil war, Ayatollah Sistani has apparently legitimized the Shi'ite milita movement, and the Sunnis have just pulled out of negotiations toward the formation of the next government as a protest against the lack of protection they feel their holy sites and important personalities were accorded on Wednesday (and, in fact, the unofficial Sunni tally has one hundred eighty-four mosques damaged or destroyed, ten clerics killed, and another fifteen kidnapped). The emerging political class has lost most of its authority in one fell swoop, according to the LA Times, with the religious elements - Muqtada al-Sadr included, unfortunately - taking up the slack.

It almost goes without saying that the United States and the Brits don't have particularly close ties to these guys.

As for our guys on the ground, I gather American troops are in even worse than in the usual stressful positions - from what I've read (which admittedly ain't much), they're all but single-handedly averting conflict in some regions, and are largely restricted to the barracks in others (including Baghdad, according to the increasingly essential Juan Cole). I'd guess at this stage they're all waiting to see whether every cleric in the country exhorts the faithful to riot and rebellion over the course of Friday services.

Really, I guess we all are.

More on the ports.

The administration's core problem at the ports, most experts agree, is how long it has taken for the federal government to set and enforce new security standards — and to provide the technology to look inside millions of containers that flow through them.

Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers are inspected. There is virtually no standard for how containers are sealed, or for certifying the identities of thousands of drivers who enter and leave the ports to pick them up. If a nuclear weapon is put inside a container — the real fear here — "it will probably happen when some truck driver is paid off to take a long lunch, before he even gets near a terminal," said Mr. Flynn, the ports security expert.

From a new analysis piece at the New York Times.

Iraq just broke.

I hope that's an exaggeration, but tonight I caught Shibley Telhami on CBS news more or less telling Bob Schieffer that yesterday's attack on Samarra's Askariya shrine was going to mark the beginning of a real civil war. For all the relative lack of loss of life, Professor Telhami likened it to the attack on the World Trade Center (while Mr. Schieffer was fishing for a comparison to a hypothetical attack on the Vatican) - it was a calculated blow to the entire Shi'ite community's pride and sense of history, as much as anything else.

Al-Askari is a bit over a thousand years old, and houses the tombs of the last two earthly imams of the Shi'a faith. I think (though God knows I'm not an expert) it's also got associations with Mohammed al-Mahdi, the Hidden Imam, and the great messianic figure of the Shi'ite tradition - all of which probably has no small bearing on Ayatollah Sistani's unusually hard-edged reaction. [It pretty much goes without saying that if the ayatollah is calling for protests, then Muqtada al-Sadr - never one to be outdone - has his forces out killing Sunnis.]

Who's responsible? It's not clear, though - for what little it's worth - my money would be on foreign, al-Qaeda-esque lunatics rather than the native Sunni insurgency; Samarra is, I believe, a majority-Sunni city, and I suspect architecture of the age and the power of al-Askari is going to have to inspire a certain limited religious syncretism among all the people who intimately know it. For the fuckers from outside who just want to spread fire as far as they can see, though, it might not have been anything more than a big, golden target.

Who's getting blamed for it? Oh, everybody. Sunnis, Israelis, the United States - Abdul Aziz al-Hakim actually gave a speech dumping responsibility on US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad for daring to suggest that America wouldn't support an overly sectarian (Shi'ite) governing body.

Still, in practical terms, most of the blowback is being directed against the Iraqi Sunnis - who, in all fairness, have tended to benefit from Shi'ite oppression since . . . oh, I dunno, since the (Sunni) Ottomans kicked the (Shi'ite) Safavids out of Baghdad once and for all in the early 17th century? Earlier?

Regardless, I think Professor Telhami's position was that we may just have passed the point where we can reasonably hope that things will get any better without getting a whole lot worse first. I hope he's wrong, but recent history - Iraqi and American both - seems pretty consistently to favor the pessimists.

Ports reconsidered.

Two posts back, I weighed in on this latest scandal, but I didn't then do the sensible thing and banish the subject from my mind.

Here's what's annoying me: the pushback against the ports arrangement seems largely reflexive, and probably not very well considered. What really should be happening now, I think, is that belated 45 day investigation - which, if conducted seriously, would by no means render up a guaranteed verdict. The UAE's got a lot of skeleton in its closet, after all.

Unfortunately, we're living under the Bush administration, and there's simply no way that they'd allow an honest study once the president has already invested his prestige in the all-purpose "Everything we did was right and I ain't gonna blink!" position. So, for me, the question now becomes, what's the reasonable presumption? Is it that the UAE gang should be considered deserving of the gig unless proven otherwise, or is it that the control of the ports (as opposed to customs or port security) is too important to be given out without an affirmative case being made for trustworthiness?

In all honesty, I don't know how I feel about it. Some of it might even be a matter of written law, about which I know nothing.

My larger concerns are still what they were. Only something like five percent of incoming cargo is searched, which is profoundly unnerving, and the administration's willingness to wave this deal through without due diligence continues to speak dark and unwholesome volumes not just about its political judgement, but about its real concern for American safety.

But this deal itself? I retract my vote for summary rejection of it - for now, I plead ignorance, and simply abstain.

The cartoon uprisings: who's winning.

While the cartoons have infuriated Muslims, the regional dynamics underlying the conflict have been evolving for decades, during which leaders have tried to stall the rise of Islamic political appeal by trying to establish themselves as guardians of the faith.

In the end, political analysts around the region say that governments have resorted to the very practices that helped the rise of Islamic political forces in the first place. They have placated the more extreme voices while arresting and silencing more moderate ones.

Jihad Khazen, a columnist for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat, said: "The Islamists wanted to prove their strength. The government replied in kind, saying that we are all Muslims and we care about our religion, and I think the truth was trampled on in the process."

Read about it at length, if you like - it's all at the New York Times. Everything apart from reasonable solutions, anyway; nobody's got any of those.

The fact of the matter is, the Muslim world has been saddled (by and large) with very bad governments for very long times, and most of those very bad governments have been terrified that popular discontent will achieve critical mass and lead to violent ends. Where Western states a century ago feared communism (or even socialism, depending on your class) as the organizing principle behind any likely revolution, the bête noire of Muslim areas of the developing world ever since the fall of Iran has been organized Islam - which is almost by definition very strongly geared toward social organization, and which tends to yield up charismatic, authoritarian leaders around whom movements can coalesce.

The standard solution is policy bribery - IIRC, the modern era of militant Wahhabi evangelism/violence really began when the Saudi royal family set out to burnish its Islamist credentials by giving safe harbor and government posts to radicals who'd been tossed out of Egypt (the jobs, at least, at the expense of relative moderates), and this latest mess seems to be more of the same. Governments establish they're hardcore - or at least they try - and the overall discourse gets progressively more thuggish. Plus, sometimes, people die.

But, after a generation of coddling, crazy Islamists are more powerful and more assured than ever, so reining them in could be genuinely suicidal for the plutocrats on the thrones. Don't expect them to be in a hurry.

So, unfortunately, here we are.

The thing about the ports . . . .

See, my main problem isn't with Dubai's dubious track record with terrorism - it's that, in a larger sense, the federal government hasn't seemed to be much interested in port security over the last five years. The percentage of cargo containers actually searched at the ports is terrifyingly low, first and foremost, and if we want to get into worrying that we're talking about services that should never have been privatized to begin with . . . well, I'm okay with that, too.

Anyway, in a purely abstract way, I'm inclined to side with the people who say that it doesn't matter where a company's headquarters are. It should be the government's business to set national safety standards and to ensure they're enforced, and anyone who can play by the rules should be free to do so.

In our not purely abstract world, though, this seems like a bad idea. As I say, my sense is that the Bush administration hasn't learned as many 9/11 lessons as it would have the public believe, and Dubai's record on matters dealing with al-Qaeda really is mixed. If the feds aren't prepared to tighten up - and there's no reason to believe they are - then maybe we do need to be looking for a way to back out.

Possible grounds could involve a random piece of evidence that supports my "the administration isn't taking this seriously" theory: the fact that certain legally mandated investigations into this deal were apparently forgotten, up on high.

The administration's review of the deal was conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a body that was created in 1975 to review foreign investments in the country that could affect national security. Under that review, officials from the Defense, State, Commerce and Transportation Departments, along with the National Security Council and other agencies, were charged with raising questions and passing judgment. They found no problems to warrant the next stage of review, a 45-day investigation with results reported to the president for a final decision.

However, a 1993 amendment to the law stipulates that such an investigation is mandatory when the acquiring company is controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government. Administration officials said they conducted additional inquires because of the ties to the United Arab Emirates, but they could not say why a 45-day investigation did not occur.

Whoops.

However this plays out, I bet that the president's veto threats are never going to come to pass. The administration will lean hard on Congressional Republicans to make the political pressure go away, and there's a decent chance it'll work; if it doesn't, though, it's hard to imagine the White House wanting to invite the conservative firestorm that'll come from plonking its first ever veto down on a measure blocking an Arab state with ties to 9/11 from owning American ports. I'm amazed it's gone as far as it has, actually.

Another front on the war against expertise.

Today's Post has an article on the state of State since Colin Powell's departure; apparently, a dozen nonproliferation experts have been driven out of the department in the last few months in order to bring State a little more in line with the Bush administration's expectations and a little less in line with reality.

The picture it sketches of State in the administration's first term is faintly surreal - and certainly disfunctional; Mr. Powell apparently had to create a series of back channels so that his subordinates - the sorts of people now being made uncomfortable or absent - could report to him without having to risk appearing on (then Undersecretary) John Bolton's radar. Unfortunately, that system may be better than the one that has evolved to take its place.

I'd hoped that Condoleezza Rice's arrival - and Bolton's departure - would allow for smoother contact between the secretary of state and the career professionals in the ranks below, but it seems I was once again overly optimistic; Mr. Bolton's philosophies have apparently been retained by Robert Joseph, his successor, and Ms. Rice just seems not as interested as Mr. Powell was in hearing things from outside the echo chamber.

The specifics cited in the article are depressing as hell. Take, for example, a study in how to get one's neck on the block: disagreeing with Mr. Bolton's efforts to punish the IAEA's Mohamed ElBaradei for being right about things.

One particular office in the nonproliferation bureau, dealing mainly with the International Atomic Energy Agency, was especially targeted, numerous officials on both sides of the dispute said. Several top officials in the office were close to IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei and had privately objected to the administration's public campaign to deny him a third term. A former office director who had been on loan to the IAEA asked for his job back -- but was given a non-managerial position in another bureau; the acting office director also did not get the job.

Instead, a relatively junior Foreign Service officer, who is outranked by several officials in the bureau but who is considered skeptical of the IAEA, was named acting head of the office. Last year, two months before ElBaradei and the IAEA were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the official sent an e-mail to his colleagues ridiculing the idea. The subject line read: "A Nobel for the IAEA? Please."

Three officials familiar with the reorganization said the actions were necessary because this office -- and others -- had been openly opposed to administration policies and thus was perceived as incompetent. "You can't expect everyone to agree with you. But you do expect results," one official said. "The office became a black hole and was very ineffective."

Supporters of these officials acknowledge that they were sometimes appalled by administration positions, with several saying they had at times been embarrassed for the United States. But they also noted that the IG report had praised the office as being effective, well-run and having high morale -- in contrast to the assessment of its counterpart in the arms-control bureau.

"But you do expect results." Priceless.

Oh, great.

According to an editorial in the Washington Post, Vice President Cheney apparently wants to create a new division of the Treasury Department devoted pretty much solely to arguing that tax cuts are great for everybody. I guess it's kind of like how Doug Feith and company did what they could to make sure that the administration had enough credible-sounding details to construct the argument for invading Iraq to clear out those weapons of mass destruction and to break up those ever-so-intimate ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

"The evidence is in," indeed.

Austria: a special case with really bad timing.

If you're the sort of person who pays attention to popular history books - particularly those concerning the second world war - you may already may David Irving's name familiar.

That's because he's a notorious idiot.

I have no reason to doubt that he's articulate, or that he's quite capable of discerning complex patterns from fields of facts and ideas - it's a more subtle form of idiocy. Basically, at one point he set himself up as the go-to "historical expert" for anyone who cared to contend that the Holocaust wasn't really all that bad. It killed his professional reputation and now it may be about to put him in an Austrian jail. He's going to appeal, and I hope he's successful - but, as it stands now, he's looking at a three-year prison term.

Of course, Austria is one of those places where curbs on free speech were constructed to address a very specific social problem: a lingering postwar tendency to take pro-Nazi propaganda at face value. Why the laws that result in imprisonment upon conviction are still enforced today - and why the European Court of Human Rights find them consistent with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights - is a little bit harder to explain. Anti-Semitism is certainly not gone and forgotten in Europe, but neither is it so urgent a threat that locking up the likes of Mr. Irving would seem to be a proportionate response - or, really, would seem to do anyone any good; if anything, this will just legitimize his crazier stuff as the work of a political martyr.

Also on the "not doing anyone any good" front: all throughout the Muslim world now, you're going to have the most dangerous elements saying, rightly, that Europe is all humanist piety when it comes to freedom of speech where "speech" has the prophet Mohammed carrying bombs - but when the issue is closer to home, freedom of speech isn't so absolute. If the appeals court doesn't turn this one around, European credibility is going to take a big hit, and that would be a shame.

A Gitmo primer.

Most detainees are being held for the crime of having "associated" with the Taliban or al-Qaida—often in the most attenuated way, including having known or lived with people assumed to be Taliban, or worked for charities with some ties to al-Qaida. Some had "combat" experience that seems to have consisted solely of being hit by U.S. bombs. Most were not picked up by U.S. forces but handed over to our military by Afghan warlords in exchange for enormous bounties and political payback.

But weren't they all proved guilty of something at their status review hearings? Calling these proceedings "hearings" does violence to that word. Detainees are assumed guilty until proven innocent, provided no lawyers, and never told what the evidence against them consists of. That evidence, according to another report by Hegland, often consists of little beyond admissions or accusations by other detainees that follow hundreds of hours of interrogations. (A single prisoner at Guantanamo, following repeated interrogation, accused over 60 of his fellow inmates—or more than 10 percent of the prison's population. Some of his accounts are factual impossibilities.) Another detainee "confessed" following an interminable interrogation, shouting: "Fine, you got me; I'm a terrorist." When the government tried to list this as a confession, his own interrogators were forced to break the outrageous game of telephone and explain it as sarcasm. A Yemeni accused of being a Bin Laden bodyguard eventually "admitted" to having seen Bin Laden five times: "Three times on Al Jazeera and twice on Yemeni news." His file: "Detainee admitted to knowing Osama Bin Laden."

All that and more, care of Slate.

Some good news?

If President Bush is serious about pushing to get NATO more involved in Sudan, good for him - and good for the evangelicals who've apparently been lobbying him on the subject. Me, I'm honestly grateful anybody's even talking about the place.

The Times has a short piece here.

By the way . . .

Yeah, by the time I post this, it'll literally be yesterday's news - but what the hell.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post ran an editorial on Congress's approach to the Bush administration's illegal . . . whoops, "extralegal program of domestic surveillance."

One essential prerequisite to finding a solution is to have enough information. The administration, after a period of resistance, gave House and Senate intelligence committees some information last week, but it's far from clear that legislators know enough to act responsibly -- or that they are willing to insist on getting the information that they need. What does the program entail and why is it not, as the administration contends, feasible to comply with the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? How many Americans have been subjected to surveillance? For how long? Has the program proved valuable, or has it inundated investigators with too many false leads? What agencies are privy to the information that is collected? What steps are taken to minimize dissemination of surveillance that doesn't bear fruit -- and to scrub the record of leads that prove to be blind alleys? What procedures are in place to make certain the intelligence is not abused?

We are not contemplating public hearings that would offer the administration's political opponents a platform for flagellating its failure to appropriately disclose the program. But a thorough scrubbing, by members and staff cleared for and versed in intelligence-gathering, is essential to achieving the truly critical goal: bringing the operation under a legal framework that includes sustained and rigorous outside oversight. To argue that an investigation is warranted under these circumstances is not to presuppose wrongdoing but simply to point out that Congress cannot effectively do its job in the dark.

By now, anyone who reads this blog has to know what I think of this surveillance program - but, for the record, I think it's demonstrably illegal, and I think the only theory that would make it not so, the idea that the president has the power under Article 2 of the Constitution to disregard the Legislature and its laws in matters of national security, is wildly inconsistent with the Founders' intent, with the broad pattern of American history, and with our own best interests. For now, though, let's set that aside.

One almost gets the sense - not just with the writers of this editorial - that there are a number of opinion makers who're desperate to come up with some law and some Congressional understanding that can be reconciled with the administration's actions purely so that no later administrations will be able to point to this lovely little era as clear proof of the supremacy of the executive. And, honestly, if the administration is going to cling to every power it can snatch and is willing to force a Constitutional showdown over every abuse . . . well, hell, maybe that really is the best game someone who loves his or her country can play. Limit the damage to our own generation, for God's sake!

And maybe the best way to keep this administration from forcing the fight anyway is to look adoringly into its metaphorical eyes and to tell it all the stories about its virtue and its opponents' petty little treacheries that it could ever want to hear, and then - with your bona fides established - to respectfully beg that it accept its wins and sit graciously back down. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But, for all that, it's just not right to paint public hearings into "extralegal" actions as purely opportunistic. It's just not right. The Post's own reporting has created a compelling case that this surveillance program broke a twenty-seven year old law; how can its editors then dismiss any serious investigation as just some opportunity for "the administration's political opponents" to score some points? The guiding principle of our Constitutional framework is that every citizen and every branch of government is constrained by and accountable to a social contract that begins with the Constitution and extends into the laws passed by Congress and signed by the president.

When members of government are persuasively accused of breaking laws - look, that's not just politics as normal. It gets to the heart of our system, and it's a real matter of public concern. And while members of the administration no doubt take some satisfaction from having any bids for accountability dismissed as partisan traps, it reinforces the idea that law and politics have the same weight.

They don't, and they shouldn't.

So, to the editors of the Washington Post: if you feel that the Bush administration's actions are self-evidently legal, and that any investigation would be a waste of fat tax dollars, I'll disagree - loudly - but I'll at least accept the consistency of your position. But, please, don't concede abuses and then trivialize any public study of them before it can begin. It's not just indefensible, it's silly.

So, Tony Blair's apparently something of a prick.

I'll admit, I've refused to accept it `til now. I've been swayed by the rhetoric, and the obvious intelligence, and the total lack of resemblance to John Major and George W. Bush (depending on the era) - and so I've tried to ignore some of his more worrisome attacks on British civil rights.

Now, though? "We have free speech in this country, but you cannot abuse it."

He's celebrating new legislation that bans groups that "glorify" terrorism. Not fund it, not participate in it - we're apparently just talking about groups that hold up signs saying that they approve.

Honestly, I'm not unsympathetic - if I lived in London, and people were rubbing pro-bombing shit in my face, I'd probably be furious. That said, making the opinions themselves illegal wouldn't seem to correct any serious social problem; placards aren't violence - they can simply be ignored, or even shouted down - and the response comes with problems of its own. Most basically, it allows the government to arrogate the power to regulate private speech - dangerous as a precedent, even if not in limited actual practice. And, yeah, it also needlessly reinforces a sense of grievance in Britain's young immigrant community, and then drives it underground to fester still further.

So, in the spirit of cold pragmatism: why is this something to celebrate?

Except insofar as it makes Mr. Blair look tough, I mean.

Our tax dollars at work.

Know how much money the US government sent to public relations firms in the year 2000?

Thirty-nine million dollars.

Know how much money the US government sent to public relations firms in the last two and a half years?

One billion, four hundred million.

That includes things like the quarter mil paid to Armstrong Williams to talk up No Child Left Behind - since deemed illegal - along with . . . well, God only knows what else. Brandweek offers a few examples (thanks go to Josh Marshall for the link).

The PR and ad contracts included providing "expert advice and support in the development of several marriage-related research initiatives," an educational campaign regarding the "Medicare Modernization Act, and its coverage and benefits," and a contract regarding "message development that presents the Army's strategic perspective in the global war on terrorism," the study said.

A Food and Drug Administration contract had the objective of warning the public about the "consequences and potential dangers of buying prescription drugs from non-U.S. sources."

This may really be the administration's much-touted business background at work; support for public policies is treated like support for any commercial commodity. What's desired isn't informed agreement, it's a willingness to buy.

On the other hand, with this administration, I suppose I should just be grateful that the money went toward selling policies instead of funding them.

Blood pressure: dangerously high.

So, I took a look at this morning's Post - and, honestly, is this where we are as a country? The vice president shot a man (in the face, Jon Stewart would have me add) and didn't tell the nation about it for almost a day, and you've got former representative Robert Michel talking about Mr. Cheney's reluctance to discuss his feelings; meanwhile, the White House has apparently gotten right up to the verge of killing a Congressional investigation into the NSA's illegal surveillance program because, and I quote, "The administration has obviously gotten the message that they need to be more forthcoming," according to Rep. Olympia Snowe. It doesn't matter what anyone does, as long as they've got the proper affect; pick apart the Constitution, lie to and keep secrets from the public (see David Ignatius's new piece for more on that theme), shoot a guy - apparently none of this matters in and of itself as long as they get their messages and show a little remorse in front of reporters.

This country needs a lot less TV in its diet. Appearances need to become a lot less important very, very quickly.

Pigs also need to fly.

New Abu Ghraib photos.

The Australians apparently have sixty; here's a link to the first fifteen. You won't need me to tell you this, but they're not pretty - lots of nakedness, lots of blood, lots of fear. One guy has . . . what, cigarette burns on his buttocks?

It's a disgrace.

More on the Guantanamo story.

The basic message from these four pieces is that the evidence against an awful lot of the Guantanamo prisoners isn't just weak, it's known to be flatly false. For example, here's an account of Mohammed al-Tumani, a prisoner who was lucky enough to be assigned a "personal representative" who discovered that his primary accuser was a busy man indeed:

Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man — the aforementioned accuser — had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.

The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway.

There's more like this, and the story it tells is that the problem at Guantanamo isn't just that it's difficult separating fact from fiction when prisoners have been captured in the heat of battle and the witnesses against them are thousands of miles away and untrustworthy to boot. That's a genuine problem, and not one that's easily resolved.

From Kevin Drum - and, of course, there's more. There's always more.

Anyway, here's hoping the UN continues to make a stink.

The New York Times talks Palestine.

In the long, sorry history of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, there is not a shred of evidence to support the notion that pushing the Palestinian population into more economic desperation would somehow cause them to moderate their political views. In fact, experience teaches the exact opposite.

Fatah lost last month's election because its incompetence and corruption drove Palestinian voters into the arms of the more austere, social-services-oriented Hamas. If the new government fails to deliver because it puts continued terrorism over the well-being of the Palestinian people, it may indeed be booted out of office. But a Hamas that could explain continued Palestinian misery by a deliberate American-Israeli plan to reverse the democratic verdict of the polls would be likely to become only stronger.

Washington publicly asserts that no such plan is being discussed. A far wiser course for the United States to pursue would be to step back and desist from deliberately provoking the Palestinians, and give Hamas a chance to reconsider its own options. Some hints about its intentions may emerge from the way its leaders respond to overtures by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Last week, Mr. Putin indicated that he intended to invite them to Moscow for a visit.

Mr. Putin's move was controversial in the West, and perhaps he should have provided more warning. But that would be a minor snub indeed if he prods Hamas toward renouncing terrorism, accepting Israel's right to exist and reviving the peace process.

From an editorial in today's edition.

I'm past the point where I can work up much optimism for the doings of Vladimir Putin, but I suppose there's no harm in hoping. Beyond that, though, I pretty much fall in line with the Times - particularly insofar as they take concerns I mumbled over yesterday and express them well. Denying Hamas aid until its leadership acts up and disavows terrorism is one thing, but going beyond that to make life maximally intolerable for the Palestinian people - movement restrictions and so forth - isn't just unethical (and, like most collective punishment, it is that), it's counterproductive. Hamas isn't overwhelmingly popular now; in fact, as Tom Friedman so helpfully observes (over in TimesSelectland, I'm afraid), crooked, stupid Fatah seems to've actually had over a ten point lead on Hamas in the popular vote; they just arranged their slates so poorly that they split their own support. But if we go overboard in our treatment of the Palestinian people - particularly after announcing that we're out to destabilize their government until it's run by the people we want - we're giving Hamas a PR hand grenade.

I look at my own language last time around, and there are parts of it that are very American. I talk about "letting Hamas subvert the resources of the Palestinian state toward violent ends," for example - but letting isn't really at issue. If we don't support their agenda, we shouldn't give them assistance we can't control or oversee, and if they engage in acts of aggression against us or our allies, we should box them in and make them regret it. But Palestinian democracy isn't a Western gedankenexperiment, and its citizens have their own inalienable rights; none of us should fall into the trap of thinking pure power politics can realign them to our liking. What we most need at this stage is more emphasis on flexible public diplomacy - assuming that Kadima stays dominant in Israel and that Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes are in obliging states of mind.

Breaking the law's only fun if you can't get caught!

President Bush has ordered the largest crackdown in decades against whistleblowers in government.

The Justice Department has initiated or summoned to investigate whistleblowers throughout the government. Officials said the effort includes FBI agents questioning suspected leakers, particularly in defense and intelligence agencies.

"The investigation is part of the administration's effort to stop leaks, particularly in national security," an official said. "The evidence shows that national security leaks have been fully exploited by al Qaeda."

Yes, of course. Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora? Never would've happened if it hadn't been revealed years later that the administration couldn't be bothered to secure warrants for its surveillance activities!

Read the sorry story of Porter Goss's crackdown at Insight, if you can bear it.

Checkbook brinksmanship.

Apparently, the US and Israel are on the verge of cutting off funding to Palestine until Hamas either renounces violence and its ambitions for Israeli destruction or cracks up and leaves the Palestinian government. It's not an irrational approach - hell, even I'm in favor of cutting off aid if there's no way to secure a guarantee that it won't be channeled into violence (though the ethics of cutting off Palestinian taxes are a hell of a lot more ambiguous) - but it's one that could backfire in a serious way. The downside to every sanctions regime is that the people ostensibly being punished - the bad actors in the targeted governments - have better access to what resources are available than do the hungry citizens on the street, and are also better situated to shape the storyline as it plays on the local news. I can just see Palestinians starving, and members of Hamas sternly explaining that it's because the damn Jews and Americans want to keep them down, and that their only friends are the ever-so-generous Iranians and Syrians.

Now, it hasn't happened yet, and if it's a feint meant to put Hamas on diplomatic footing . . . well, excellent. And even if some version of it is executed, I can hardly say that it's a worse option than war, or than letting Hamas subvert the resources of the Palestinian state toward violent ends.

I just wish I believed that our side could handle the public relations (to say nothing of basic services for the Palestinian people) half as well as Hamas can.

Psst!

Somebody tell the Bush administration they're running a frickin' huge deficit!

The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

Those guys! They're just so generous!

If you're way above the poverty line, I mean.

More details over here, care of the New York Times.

Because real wildlife just isn't defenseless enough.

Seriously, as I've been hearing more about the style of hunting Mr. Cheney favors, I've been getting more revolted. The guys with guns go out after hundreds of pen-raised, apparently flightless birds, and kill as many of them as possible. It's got all the logic of a certain kind of video game - one with Duke Nukem in its DNA - but a lot more real blood.

What's lacking is empathy, or even basic sportsmanship.

Bleah.

The failure of initiative.

To my amazement and delight, House Republicans seem to have put together a report on the government's handling of Hurricane Katrina that's actually worth taking seriously. It's not due out for another couple of days, but the New York Times writes up a few of its conclusions over here.

For it to really be useful, though, the administration would have to be willing to study its mistakes - and since Michael Chertoff is still unchastened at the helm at Homeland Security, I'd say history's not pointing toward a happy future. As far as I can tell, there's not a whole hell of a lot of reason to believe that there's been any serious revolution in disaster preparedness - DHS is looking at a minor funding bump in the new budget, yes, but there's only a fifty million dollar raise to the National Preparedness Integration Program (as opposed to over a billion and a half for new immigration control measures). And, again - because I really can't stress this enough - Mr. Chertoff and his crew have still got the president's "full confidence."

And Alberto Gonzales says it's condemning illegal surveillance that makes the terrorists smile.

He's comin' right for us!

This . . .

"The person who is not doing the shooting at that moment in time is just as responsible and, should be, as the person actually shooting," [Katharine] Armstrong said.

. . . seems like poor form.

The subject is, of course, Vice President Cheney's accidental shooting of 78 year old Austin lawyer Harry Whittington. Ms. Armstrong's family owns the property on which the incident took place, and she was accompanying the hunting party when it happened.

As she describes the event, Mr. Whittington had become separated from the main group of hunters, and was catching up - but failed to announce his approach. Mr. Cheney was training his sights on a group of birds flying to his right, he fired as he turned, and Mr. Whittington was caught in the line of fire, taking birdshot on his face, neck, and side. [It's hard to piece together from the coverage I've seen how severe the damage is - hopefully not very. The man's alleged to be in good spirits, but it's been more than twenty-four hours and he's apparently still hospitalized; we're presumably not talking about a few scratches.]

Now, I'm not a hunter - so in a lot of ways my opinion is worth exactly squat - but, for what it's worth, I figure the vice president made a very small, very human error. I'd hope that basic gun safety would demand that you be sure of what's in front of you before you pull the trigger, regardless of how you expect the people you're with to comport themselves, but . . . well, he bowed to reflex and took a little too much for granted. I'm sure it happens fairly often, and - particularly if Mr. Whittington's basically okay - it's totally forgivable. It may not even be a really big deal (particularly in Texas).

Still, going the extra mile to make sure the veep's ass is covered in the press by shifting attention over to the guy who didn't have the gun - I'm sure it was meant innocently, more or less, but it strikes a discordant note. It seems a little unfair to the guy who's actually in a hospital bed.

[I could segue very easily into a rant about the government in which Mr. Cheney serves and its larger unwillingness to accept responsibility for anything bad at any time, but maybe that would be unfair to Mr. Whittington as well. So I'll formally wish him a speedy recovery and, for once, shut my yap.]

Good luck to the real whistleblowers.

Federal agents have interviewed officials at several of the country's law enforcement and national security agencies in a rapidly expanding criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding a New York Times article published in December that disclosed the existence of a highly classified domestic eavesdropping program, according to government officials.

The investigation, which appears to cover the case from 2004, when the newspaper began reporting the story, is being closely coordinated with criminal prosecutors at the Justice Department, the officials said. People who have been interviewed and others in the government who have been briefed on the interviews said the investigation seemed to lay the groundwork for a grand jury inquiry that could lead to criminal charges.

I assume that this is, among other things, the administration's way of suggesting to its discontented elements that any other illegal programs should be kept hidden from the public - God knows Alberto Gonzales has pretty strongly hinted that the FISA mess isn't the only turd in the bowl, and these guys don't seem to want to pay political costs just because what they're doing is despicable.

Anyway, the story's at the Times. Here's hoping that all the reporters who argued for keeping sources private when those sources were dishonest can stick to their guns now that it really matters.

Are we thorough, or are we a little bit crazy?

Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.

Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

They are reporting to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, as America updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the Islamic republic's nuclear bomb ambitions. Teheran claims that it is developing only a civilian energy programme.

"This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," said a senior Pentagon adviser. "This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months."

Granted: the Pentagon plans for all sorts of military actions, and the vast majority of them are never enacted. The fact that we're stepping up preparedness as diplomatic relations grow more and more strained isn't of itself a cause for alarm.

Still, before this gets too much farther along, I'm going to say that I'm completely against the use of force here; whatever optimism I was able to summon up at the start of the Iraqi adventure is long gone. With any other administration, I might at least listen to argument - Iranian nukes scare me as much as the next guy - but the Bush team has demonstrated both that they can't be trusted to distinguish good intelligence from bad and that they're too diplomatically inept to contain or positively shape the consequences of their actions. I don't have confidence that military action would accomplish the intended goals, and I'm quite convinced that the international blowback would be just about as bad as it could possibly be.

So: no. Just no. Get back to me in 2009, if you must.

Here's the article, incidentally.

And now the awesome news.

History nerd newsflash!

An undisturbed tomb has been discovered in the Valley of the Kings - the first since Howard Carter hit the Tutankhamun motherload in `22! Five mummies were found, and some of the early giddy speculation hovers around one of the few pharaonic names we'd actually recognize: Nefertiti.

I figure it's unlikely - but, then, what were the odds of finding a 63rd tomb at all?

Happy happy, joy joy!

Update: Okay, so maybe they're not royal mummies. It's still exhilarating, dammit!

But, wait! There's more!

A C.I.A. veteran who oversaw intelligence assessments about the Middle East from 2000 to 2005 on Friday accused the Bush administration of ignoring or distorting the prewar evidence on a broad range of issues related to Iraq in its effort to justify the American invasion of 2003.

The views of Paul R. Pillar, who retired in October as national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, echoed previous criticism from Democrats and from some administration officials, including Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser, and Paul H. O'Neill, the former treasury secretary.

But Mr. Pillar is the first high-level C.I.A. insider to speak out by name on the use of prewar intelligence. His article for the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs, which charges the administration with the selective use of intelligence about Iraq's unconventional weapons and the chances of postwar chaos in Iraq, was posted Friday on the journal's Web site after it was reported in The Washington Post.

"If the entire body of official intelligence on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war — or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath," Mr. Pillar wrote. "What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in decades."

This seems pretty fair to me. If the administration disputes it, then how about they voluntarily waive executive privilege and turn over the relevant documentation to some nice, bipartisan Congressional committees? Maybe the president and his advisors could even testify under oath!

. . .

Ah, that's just too funny!

Michael Brown strikes back!

Maybe the White House would've been better off paying his legal bills after all.

In contrast to low-key statements in the past, Mr. Brown, who resigned under pressure on Sept. 12 as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was aggressively on the defensive, saying he was "sick and tired" of his remarks or e-mail messages being taken out of context or hearing that he lacked the leadership skills for his job.

Mr. Brown said it was "baloney" for Department of Homeland Security officials to claim they did not know of the extent of the flooding until Tuesday, because he and other FEMA officials had notified them the day before.

In response to questioning, Mr. Brown also said he believed he told the White House on Monday that a breach had occurred in the 17th Street Canal levee, passing on observations made by one of his staff members on the ground in New Orleans that day.

"Everything that we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true," Mr. Brown said he told the White House aide.

From the Times.

Of course, there's no reason to take this at face value. Mr. Brown came away from Katrina looking for all the world like an American Nero, valuing his meals and sartorial arrangements more than the lives in his care, and this is clearly an early shot in a campaign to rehabilitate his reputation.

I don't really think he should be allowed to get away with it. Whether he was as disinterested as early coverage made it seem, or was simply unable to work out authority issues with Michael Chertoff at OHS, he was the guy most directly responsible for FEMA when it failed. He gets no pass.

On the other hand, it's not solely his fault, and I'm delighted that he's not making it easy for the White House to wash its collective hands of this tragedy - at the time, its pleas of ignorance were obscene, and its neglect of New Orleans since has been, in many ways, even worse. Mr. Brown is responsible for exactly none of that, and he's (finally) doing the country a service by refusing to fall on his sword - if we're really lucky, he's bringing us one small step closer to a proper investigation of what really went wrong.

It just goes on and on.

JONES: Back at the January press conference the President said he didn’t know Jack Abramoff. Abramoff’s saying he met with the President in nearly a dozen settings and that the President joked with him "about a bunch of things," including details of Abramoff’s kids. He also says the President has one of the best memories of any politician he’s ever met. Does that help the President perhaps to remember that there were many meetings at which he met Jack Abramoff?

MCCLELLAN: I think what the President says still stands. Mr. Abramoff is someone who was involved in wrongdoing. He acknowledged that himself. He is being brought to account and there’s an investigation going on by the Justice Department. They are continuing to pursue the matter and go after anybody else that was involved in wrongdoing. I think as the President also indicated, he’s taken at least five photos with many people in this room at the annual holiday reception. And so I think you need to put this in context.

JONES: Would he still then be saying that he does not remember meeting Abramoff on a dozen occasions?

MCCLELLAN: You heard directly from the president on this matter. Go ahead –

JONES: No, we haven’t. We didn’t know there were as many meetings as this at that time.

MCCLELLAN: Go ahead.

You can see the exchange here, if you're so inclined, and the Times has more on the e-mails in which Abramoff makes his claims over here.

Obviously, the question of how much face time Mr. Abramoff enjoyed with the president isn't all that important on its own; lobbyists meet politicians, big game lobbyists meet very powerful politicians, and there's nothing necessarily improper about any of it - we only start talking about malfeasance when lobbying causes politicians to act contrary to the public trust (say, by allowing Jack Abramoff's outfit to draft actual legislation).

Anyway, we know that Mr. Abramoff - through his clients - raised over $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign; there wouldn't be anything particularly surprising about his having had a conversation or two with the president (if that was as far as it went). But the Bush administration, being the Bush administration, can't say anything like that - they can't risk any admission that would seem to contradict their own belief in the myth of their complete and unchallenged righteousness - and so would rather just make laughable blanket denials, trusting that their true believers will take them at face value.

It's not a bad way to run a cult, but it's not healthy for a democracy. A shame these guys can't seem to tell the difference.

Hey, look! It's another lie!

By morning, this'll probably be on every TV news broadcast (he writes with a touching air of optimism), but for now I'm gonna treat it as a significant but under-reported gem.

Despite the fact that I'm grabbing it from the front page of the New York Times.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

Whoops.

I should add (with another grateful nod to Mr. Marshall) that FEMA's departed honcho has already threatened to be honest and forthcoming with investigators unless the White House agrees to take up responsibility for his legal fees. Welcome to the era of responsibility, hey?

Another exasperating catch from Josh Marshall.

Apparently, the Associated Press, in an effort to explore (in a fair and balanced way) Jack Abramoff's reach into the Democratic Party, ran a pretty lengthy article on the great bribist's dealings with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Said article was not, however, quite lengthy enough to bring at least one story to its actual conclusion - Senator Reid, after several meetings with Slick Jack, voting against the man's wishes.

But, of course, that would undermine the suggestion that the senator was crooked.

Anyway, the piece is here - and it's a good one.

More from one of our little working models of hell.

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.

In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers. The measures appear to have had drastic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped to 4 from 84 at the end of December.

Another point to grant right up front: apparently the detainees' legal counsel typically don't contest coercive life-saving measures. The imagery this calls up is appalling, but one can see the argument for this particular measure.

That said: we've locked up people for several years, we've denied them pretty much every right one can take for granted in a civilized society, and now apparently scores of them have become suicide risks as a result. I wouldn't be proud of that even if they were all guilty of criminal or paramilitary actions against the United States - and, of course, they're not.

Since last year, the protests have intensified, a sign of what defense lawyers say is the growing desperation of the detainees. In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.

All this good news comes care of Tim Golden, at the New York Times.

What turns a cartoon into a riot?

Well, in past posts I've touched briefly upon some Muslims' sense of a lack of respect from the West, and even upon the intent and cultural milieu of the people who published the cartoons in the first place. This morning, my squalid little survey continues with the help of a new piece ("At Mecca Meeting, Cartoon Outrage Crystalized") in the New York Times.

The short synopsis goes something like this: in December, representatives from fifty-seven Muslim nations gathered in Mecca for a summit. As the meeting progressed, more and more delegates seemed to be talking about the Danish cartoons (printed in October), which seemed to them to symbolize the shoddy treatment they feel the religion and its adherents get from the West in general.

Naturally, for a few, the question then became how the sentiment could be exploited.

Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said that for Arab governments resentful of the Western push for democracy, the protests presented an opportunity to undercut the appeal of the West to Arab citizens. The freedom pushed by the West, they seemed to say, brought with it disrespect for Islam.

He said the demonstrations "started as a visceral reaction — of course they were offended — and then you had regimes taking advantage saying, 'Look, this is the democracy they're talking about.' "

The protests also allowed governments to outflank a growing challenge from Islamic opposition movements by defending Islam.

. . .

On Jan. 26, in a key move, Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark, and Libya followed suit. Saudi clerics began sounding the call for a boycott, and within a day, most Danish products were pulled off supermarket shelves.

"The Saudis did this because they have to score against Islamic fundamentalists," said Mr. Said, the Cairo political scientist. "Syria made an even worse miscalculation," he added, alluding to the sense that the protest had gotten out of hand. The issue of the cartoons came at a critical time in the Muslim world because of Muslim anger over the occupation of Iraq and a sense that Muslims were under siege. Strong showings by Islamists in elections in Egypt and the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections had given new momentum to Islamic movements in the region, and many economies, especially those in the Persian Gulf, realized their economic power as it pertained to Denmark.

There were misunderstandings and crossed wires along the way as well - in Egypt, a newspaper falsely told the public that Denmark was about to censor the Koran, while the timing of a Norwegian show of solidarity with the Danes stirred suspicions of an emerging Europe-wide anti-Muslim PR push. Danish diplomatic instincts don't seem to have been at their most acute, either.

Sheik Muhammad Abu Zaid, an imam from the Lebanese town of Saida, said he began hearing of the caricatures from several Palestinian friends visiting from Denmark in December but made little of it.

"For me, honestly, this didn't seem so important," Sheik Abu Zaid said, comparing the drawings to those made of Jesus in Christian countries. "I thought, I know that this is something typical in such countries."

Then, he started to hear that ambassadors of Arab countries had tried to meet with the prime minister of Denmark and had been snubbed, and he began to feel differently.

"It started to seem that this way of thinking was an insult to us," he said. "It is fine to say, 'This is our freedom, this is our way of thinking.' But we began to believe that their freedom was something that hurts us."

So, right: a lot of manipulation, and some unfortunately closed ears in the West. There's no reason to think that the Muslim world was destined to take the absolutist position, and there's no reason to think that we're generations away from balancing freedom of speech (on which, again, there can be no compromise) with a Muslim desire for respect. Someone in Denmark - the editors at Jyllands-Posten, the Prime Minister, whoever - listening gracefully to what the European Committee for Honoring the Prophet had to say sometime before the issue got tossed to the worst cynics in Mecca might just've tied this whole mess off before it started, at no harm to any party involved.

That said, now that the genie's out of the bottle, there's some ugliness here that probably shouldn't be dismissed. I'm not talking about the violence - God knows I don't endorse it, but it's not like riot logic is particularly exclusive to the Muslim world - but instead about the shit currently being stirred in some quarters to "show the West how it feels." In today's Times, David Brooks (in a pay-per-view opinion piece) tells us that the Arab European League is running cartoons featuring Anne Frank in bed with Hitler, while Hamshahri, in Iran, is launching a Holocaust cartoon contest. I presume this isn't really for European consumption so much as to stir up the most reliable xenophobic instincts of the lowest class of Muslim reader - but, for the record, a note to the editors (and, at least in the Iranian case, the government behind it): the way to secure Western respect has precisely nothing to do with swinging wildly at the Jews every time you feel aggrieved. It's not clever, and it doesn't highlight any serious Western hypocrisy - it just makes you look small.

Stealing a post from Greg Sargent.

The following comes from Tapped, and we join it mid-sentence:

. . . the problem Democrats have flows largely from the fact that many reporters and pundits simply aren't prepared to let Dems have the position on wiretapping that they actually have. I noted yesterday that in The Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote that Democrats grilling Alberto Gonzalez "tried not to paint wiretapping as inherently evil," as if they were cynically papering over their position that all wiretapping is bad, which of course isn't their position at all.

Other examples are legion. A few weeks back, just after Karl Rove's speech, The Times did an enormous front-page piece on the GOP's attempt to use the wiretapping story to paint Dems as weak. Incredibly, in an article purporting to be an examination of this new tactic, in only one sentence did the reporter question whether Rove's characterization of the Dem position was true, while paragraph after paragraph talked about whether it would be tactically effective.

In another example, The Times's most recent poll on the wiretapping question also framed the issue in a way that made the politics of it look favorable to Republicans. The poll's key finding was that a majority of Americans would tolerate eavesdropping without warrants to fight terrorism -- but the question omitted asking what Americans would think if the practice were seen as illegal, a key component of the Democratic critique and, more to the point, one which has tilted majority opinion against it in other polls. With that omission, the Times poll's findings enabled the paper to conclude that the political environment around wiretapping automatically favored the GOP.

What's most galling about all this is that when news organizations focus far more on whether an attack will work than on its veracity -- or when they frame the issues involved in a way that excludes the most potent pushback against that attack -- those choices and news judgments themselves can have the effect of making the line of attack more effective, either by confusing voters or by emboldening the attackers and giving their opponents the jitters. News organizations always present themselves as disinterested observers of a particular political dynamic -- in this case, one that supposedly favors Republicans -- but more often than not they're active participants in the creation of that same dynamic.

I don't think there's a single thing in there that I don't think needed to be said.

The Social Security wars begin again.

Because the president can never just let a bad idea die.

Quick update: Josh Marshall is once again climbing up onto the ramparts. Here's hoping he doesn't have to stay there too long . . . .

Discrimination's fine, as long as we don't do it here.

The Bush administration's support for Iran's proposal to bar two gay rights groups from a voice at the United Nations sparked a demand from U.S. legislators on Tuesday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repudiate the action.

The January 23 vote denying "consultative status" at the world body to the Belgium-based International Gay and Lesbian Association and the Danish National Association for Gays and Lesbians was a "drastic reversal" of Washington's previous stand on the issue, the U.S. House of Representatives members wrote.

Nearly 3,000 nongovernmental organizations have such status, which enables them to distribute documents and speak at meetings of some U.N. bodies and conferences.

In voting for Iran's proposal, "the United States joined some of the world's most oppressive regimes, among them China, Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe" and demonstrated "a reprehensible inconsistency" in the protection of rights based on sexual orientation, the lawmakers said.

Apparently, we rejected the Belgian group because of its ties to the North American Man/Boy Love Association - which would be a fair point, except it's complicated by the fact that by 2002 we had apparently decided there were no longer any such ties. No explanation for dumping the Danish group was cited in the article I'm quoting.

Man, you'd think the fact that we're siding with Iran on a human rights issue would be kind of a hint that it's not a great idea.

[That said, I reserve the right to backtrack in a hurry if a pro-pedophilia slant is at some point genuinely established.]

Cartoonish violence: a sidebar.

There's a fascinating story up in today's Salon about the origin of those strips - for those of us who don't know anything about Denmark's newspapers (to say nothing of their relationships with local political parties), it's a real eye-opener.

In Denmark the national papers have historically been associated with the main political parties and the movements that formed them. Jyllands-Posten is associated with the prime minister's party. In English, Fogh Rasmussen's party is referred to as the Liberal Party; in Danish it is "Venstre," meaning "the Left." But the party is neither left nor liberal. The names date back to the days of limited suffrage, when the Conservatives were "the Right" and there were only those two parties.

. . .

The paper wanted to instigate trouble, just not the kind of trouble it got. And in this mission it acted in concert with the Danish government. "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid," boasted the minister of cultural affairs, Brian Mikkelsen, in a speech at his party's annual meeting the week before Rose's cartoon editorial last fall. Mikkelsen is a 39-year-old political science graduate known for his hankering for the "culture war." He continued, "The Culture War has now been raging for some years. And I think we can conclude that the first round has been won." The next front, he said, is the war against the acceptance of Muslims norms and ways of thought. The Danish cultural heritage is a source of strength in an age of globalization and immigration. Cultural restoration, he argued, is the best antidote.

Is the Danish government responsible for what the paper ran? Presumably not. And it's certainly not responsible for the violence abroad - that's all on the people with torches and the regimes that love them.

But it's still useful to understand the cultural atmosphere in which this whole mess started - particularly since it's strangely reminiscent of the bits of France's mindset that surrounded the riots earlier this year. European unease over immigrant populations has been leading to movements and policies and incidents that have global ramifications: we're starting to see the pattern.

Anyway, the article's here - but if you're not a subscriber, you'll need to sit through an ad to read it. Sorry for that.

While I'm at it . . .

Let me point out that Eric Alterman has found a few choice things to say (and a few choice things that are being said elsewhere) about the president's new budget. The short form, of course, is that it manages to be reckless, deceitful and mean-spirited in one simple package!

Only two more years until we can all really start daydreaming about voting someone better into office. That's all. Two.

. . .

And yet it seems like an eternity.

My head hurts.

And it's Steve Clemons' fault!

The dog and pony show continues.

The hearing got off to a bad start when Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican who leads the committee, refused to have Mr. Gonzales testify under oath. Mr. Gonzales repaid this favor with a daylong display of cynical hair-splitting, obfuscation, disinformation and stonewalling. He would not tell the senators how many wiretaps had been conducted without warrants since 2002, when Mr. Bush authorized the program. He would not even say why he was withholding the information.

On the absurd pretext of safeguarding operational details, Mr. Gonzales would not say whether any purely domestic communications had been swept up in the program by accident and what, if anything, had been done to make sure that did not happen. He actually refused to assure the Senate and the public that the administration had not deliberately tapped Americans' calls and e-mail within the United States, or searched their homes and offices without warrants.

Mr. Gonzales repeated Mr. Bush's claim that the program of intercepting e-mail and telephone calls to and from the United States without the legally required warrants was set up in a way that protects Americans' rights. But he would not say what those safeguards were, how wiretaps were approved or how the program was reviewed. He even refused to say whether it had led to a single arrest.

About the only senators Mr. Gonzales managed to answer directly were the more depressingly doctrinaire Republicans, who asked penetrating questions like whether Al Qaeda is a threat to the United States and whether Mr. Bush is trying hard to protect Americans from terrorists.

Generally, Mr. Gonzales stuck to the same ludicrous arguments the administration has continually offered for sidestepping the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expressly forbids warrantless spying on people in the United States. He said that the president could make his own rules in time of war and that Congress had authorized warrantless spying in giving the president the authority to invade Afghanistan. Only the panel's most blindly loyal Republicans bought that argument.

To his credit, Mr. Specter pressed the attorney general hard on a legal position that, he said, "just defies logic and plain English." Mr. Specter forcefully pointed out that this isn't just an issue of public relations, but of the bedrock democratic principle of checks and balances. He said it is not possible to judge a program without knowing what it involves and said Congress's intelligence panels should review the domestic spying "lock, stock and barrel."

"Because if they disagree with you," he said, "it's the equilibrium of our constitutional system which is involved."

That's from an editorial in today's New York Times.

If you're watching the train wreck play out in slow motion, the current stage of the disaster is apparently the Republican loyalty crunch - Insight magazine is reporting that the administration is summoning Republicans from the Judiciary Committee to the White House for a little on-the-spot intimidation, while the (yes, Republican) chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence is calling to kick the inquiry up to the full Congress.

Now, if you're like Emily Bazelon, you've got no faith in the Judiciary Committee's ability to do the right thing on this one, regardless of tantalizing hints of Republican independence - and God knows my own expectations are low - but I'll allow that Lindsey Graham has already underlined one of the many flaws in the many theories the administration has trotted out to reconcile breaking the 1978 FISA statute with the president's constitutional powers. Let's toss it over to Adam Liptak at the NY Times for a few paragraphs:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales made the case to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that two potentially contradictory Congressional actions — one a 1978 law forbidding domestic surveillance without a court's permission, the other a 2001 resolution giving the president authority to use force to combat Al Qaeda — together mean that the executive branch is free to decide on its own to spy on communications between people in the United States and those abroad.

Under the ordinary rules that courts use to harmonize potentially conflicting laws, the more specific one typically governs. Here, that would seem to be the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which created an elaborate legal scheme to regulate wiretaps, as well as a secret court that promptly hears warrant applications.

If a later law means to override or amend an earlier one, moreover, courts generally require it to say so specifically. The 2001 resolution authorized the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States."

Now, the article goes on to note that the Bush administration has tried to argue before that laws should be interpreted as giving the executive maximal powers, even when those aren't expressly detailed in the language - in that case, the story was that the Controlled Substances Act gave the attorney general the power to ignore Oregon's assisted suicide legislation - and the Supreme Court smacked the line of reasoning right down.

Here, we can take it a (legally unnecessary) step farther - we know the 2001 resolution didn't expressly give the president the authority to ignore the 1978 law, and we can also get to the question of intent. Tom Daschle said it first, if I recall correctly, but now we get it from the mouth of Senator Graham, a Republican:

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was one of the Republicans who wasn't going for it. "When I voted for [the AUMF], I never envisioned that I was giving to this president or any other president the ability to go around FISA carte blanche," he said. "I would suggest to you, Mr. Attorney General, it would be harder for the next president to get a force resolution if we take this too far."

[That's from the Bazelon article in Slate, incidentally.]

So the fig leaf of broad Congressional authorization would seem to be pretty well obliterated; it's not in the law, and it's not even in the lawmakers' express intent (not that that should really matter). Or, as Arlan Specter (also a Republican) put it to Mr. Gonzales, "Well, that just defies logic and plain English."

Of course, the real position of the administration is undoubtedly the unitary executive mumbo-jumbo: that the president is exercising his national security powers in a time of war, and that Congress and the courts don't have the authority (and, ideally, don't have the opportunity) to circumscribe those powers in any way - laws simply don't apply. I pitch it over to Salon's War Room for more (and a scary glimpse of what else might be moving under the sheets):

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said Monday that if the Bush administration's defense of warrantless spying must rely on the president's power as commander in chief, then it's a theory that "seems to have no boundaries when it comes to executive decisions in a time of war."

It was a remarkable statement coming from a Republican senator, but what was more remarkable still is that Alberto Gonzales wasn't able to -- or just didn't want to -- lay out some specific "boundaries" in response. The attorney general uttered vague words about the power that Congress maintains during war, then suggested that Congress had used exactly that power to implicitly authorize warrantless spying with its post-9/11 use-of-force resolution -- an argument Graham had already dismissed out of hand.

If Graham was looking for signs that the Bush administration understood and appreciated limits on its own powers, he didn't get them from Gonzales. During the first day of hearings on the president's warrantless spying plan, Gonzales was asked again and again whether the Bush administration was either engaged in or thought it had the power to engage in all sorts of intrusive or otherwise troubling wartime activities. Again and again, Gonzales declined to answer any such questions.

Gonzales wouldn't answer when Sen. Patrick Leahy asked him if he thought the use-of-force resolution authorizes the administration to search Americans' first-class mail. He wouldn't say when Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked him whether the president's commander-in-chief power authorizes him to suspend the National Security Act's prohibition against domestic propaganda. He said he couldn't answer, at least not immediately, when Sen. Russ Feingold asked whether the administration has engaged in "other actions under the use of military force for Afghanistan resolution that, without the inherent power, would not be permitted because of the FISA statute." He wouldn't answer when Sen. Chuck Schumer asked him whether the government has searched -- or placed a listening device in -- the home or office of an American citizen without a warrant since 9/11.

When Schumer asked about warrantless searches of Americans' homes and offices, Gonzales did what he did a number of times Monday: He narrowed the question to the very edge of existence, then refused to answer it anyway.

Schumer: Now, here's the next question I have: Has the government done this? Has the government searched someone's home, an American citizen, or office, without a warrant since 9/11, let's say?

Gonzales: To my knowledge, that has not happened under the terrorist surveillance program, and I'm not going to go beyond that.

Schumer: I don't know what that -- what does that mean, "under the terrorist surveillance program?" The terrorist surveillance program is about wiretaps. This is about searching someone's home. It's different. So it wouldn't be done under the surveillance program. I'm asking you if it has been done, period.

Gonzales: But now you're asking me questions about operations or possible operations, and I'm not going to get into that, Senator.

Schumer: I'm not asking you about any operation. I'm not asking you how many times. I'm not asking you where ...

Gonzales: You asked me, "Has that been done?"

Schumer: Yes.

Gonzales: Have we done something?

Schumer: Yes.

Gonzales: That is an operational question, in terms of how we're using capabilities.

Schumer: So you won't answer whether it is allowed and you won't answer whether it's been done. I mean, isn't part of your -- in all due respect, as somebody who genuinely likes you, but isn't this part of your job, to answer a question like this?

Gonzales: Of course it is, Senator.

Schumer: But you're not answering it.

Gonazales: Well, I'm not saying that I will not answer the question.

Schumer: Oh.

Gonzales: I'm just not prepared to give you an answer at this time.

In practice, the main restriction is apparently public opinion ("'Think about the reaction, the public reaction that has arisen in some quarters about this program,' Gonzales told Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.). 'If the president had authorized domestic surveillance as well, even though we're talking about al Qaeda-to-al Qaeda, I think the reaction would have been twice as great. And so there was a judgment made that this was the appropriate line to draw in ensuring the security of our country and the protection of the privacy interests of Americans.'" - from the Post), hence the Republican outrage at any of this stuff getting out to the public at all - typically couched, of course, in the usual doomsday gobbledegook. Stuff like . . .

"Our enemy is listening," Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told the Judiciary Committee at the start of a day-long hearing into the National Security Agency's warrantless monitoring of Americans' phone calls and e-mails with foreign-based people suspected of terrorist ties. "And I cannot help but wonder if they aren't . . . smiling at the prospect that we might now disclose even more, or perhaps even unilaterally disarm ourselves of a key tool in the war on terror."

Also from the Post.

So, anyway, that's where we stand. The train wreck is still in progress.