We weren't snubbed if we say we weren't snubbed!

President Bush arrived in Jordan on Wednesday for crisis talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki but a dinner involving the two leaders was canceled at the last moment.

A U.S. official denied the cancellation was a snub by Maliki in response to a New York Times report that carried a leaked White House report criticizing the Iraqi leader.

"It was going to be more of a social meeting anyway," White House counselor Dan Bartlett told reporters traveling with Bush, referring to the dinner that would have also included Jordan's King Abdullah.

Yeah! Social! They were just gonna hang, maybe play some cards - oh, and Abdullah was gonna bring the karaoke machine! Those three and their ABBA!

Honestly, I can't blame Mr. Maliki for wanting to spend as little time as possible with our beloved president; in fact, given that this meeting has prompted a (possibly fatal) Sadrist boycott of the Iraqi government, and given that Team Bush cleared the way for it by hinting all over the American press that Mr. Maliki's lack of resolve is Iraq's greatest problem (unless it's al-Qaeda, of course), telling Mr. Bush not to bother turning up for pot luck was probably the only diplomatic way to preserve any credibility as an independent power at all.

Dick Cheney: catastrophic, but consistent.

I missed this until Glenn Greenwald pointed it out: the Boston Globe ran a retrospective on Mr. Cheney's love affair with the idea of the American monarchy back on Sunday. Highlights include Iran-Contra . . .

In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim.

President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.

"I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff," Cheney said.

Most of Cheney's colleagues did not share his vision of a presidency empowered to bypass US laws governing foreign policy. The committee issued a scathing, bipartisan report accusing White House officials of "disdain for the law."

Cheney refused to sign it. Instead, he commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution "does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power."

. . . and Gulf War I.

The next year, Cheney became defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush. In his new position, Cheney again pushed for an expansive view of presidential power -- most dramatically in late 1990, when Cheney urged Bush to launch the Gulf War without asking Congress for authorization.

For all major overseas wars from 1789 to 1950, presidents obeyed the constitutional provision giving Congress alone the power to declare war. But in Korea and Vietnam, Presidents Truman, Johnson, and Nixon defied this constraint. They asserted that the commander-in-chief had "inherent" power to take the country to war on his own.

Seeking to restore its constitutional role, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973, requiring presidents to consult Congress when sending troops into battle.

After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush sent 500,000 US troops to Saudi Arabia. As they prepared to attack the Iraqi forces, Cheney told Bush that it was unnecessary and too risky to seek a vote in Congress.

The Iran-contra scandal was not the first time the future vice president articulated a philosophy of unfettered executive power -- nor would it be the last. The Constitution empowers Congress to pass laws regulating the executive branch, but over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president's hands to be tied. He embraced a belief that presidents have vast "inherent" powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress.

Note to the media: it would have been nice to have been reminded of all this back in 2000.

I'm gonna plead fair use and sign off by appropriating just about all of the passages dealing with the secrecy and arrogance the man has helped bring to government in our current era; it's really quite impressive when it's all in the same place.

One of Cheney's first acts as vice president was to convene an energy policy task force, inviting energy company lobbyists to suggest a package of tax breaks and other incentives for their companies.

When Congress and watchdog groups requested his task force's records, Cheney successfully fought a court battle to keep them secret, arguing that presidents needed greater power to solicit candid advice. The decision gutted the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a 1972 law in which Congress tried to require such policymaking to be subject to public scrutiny.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, military lawyers objected to the administration's assertion that a president has the power to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects outside the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions. In response, the administration renewed Cheney's attempt to put military lawyers under the control of civilian appointees.

Citing a need for secrecy, the administration also erected new roadblocks to Freedom of Information Act requests, restricted access to historic presidential records, and threatened to prosecute journalists who published classified information using the 1917 anti-spying law -- the same idea Cheney toyed with in 1975.

In signing statements and legal memos, the administration, with Cheney and Addington as its driving force, has repeatedly used the war on terrorism to advance the idea that the president has vast "inherent" authority to bypass laws enacted by Congress. Even when Congress voted, a week after the 9/11 attacks, to authorize the use of military force against Al Qaeda, the administration quickly seized the moment to lay down its marker.

"[Congress cannot] place any limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response," the Justice Department asserted in a September 2001 memo solicited by the White House. "These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the president alone to make."

The following year, the administration drew up secret legal opinions informing military and CIA interrogators that the president has the power to authorize them to violate laws banning torture.

"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign against Al Qaeda and its allies, [the anti-torture law] must be construed as not applying to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority," said an August 2002 memo, which was leaked to the media only after the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib came to light.

Then, in December 2005, The New York Times revealed that the administration was wiretapping Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without warrants, violating the 1978 surveillance law.

Three days later, Cheney sat down with reporters and laid out his belief "in a strong, robust executive authority." Bypassing the warrant law, he asserted, was "consistent with the constitutional authority of the president."

Cheney also indicated that he hopes to establish further precedents for the expansion of presidential authority. Listing other statutory constraints on presidential power, he said they "will be tested at some point."

Cognitive dissonance.

Today's New York Times features a couple of big-picture articles about Iraq (following up on yesterday's revelations in the Post about our long, slow stalemate/defeat in Anbar) - the first covers a memo from Stephen Hadley, Mr. Bush's national security advisor, which makes the rather obvious point that Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki may not be doing his job to our specifications.

[As an aside, timing is everything: Mr. Bush is gearing up for a meeting with Mr. Maliki later today. The memo leak, along with the Post article signaling Mr. Bush's frustration with the state of affairs in Mr. Maliki's government, should probably be taken as a sign that we're not going to let the Sadrists (who, of course, threatened to bring down Iraq's governing coalition over this meeting) play hardball alone. Or, hell, maybe it's just calculated petulance - the president seems to be in kind of a mood these days.]

The second Times article is a broader piece of analysis: the short version is that Iraq functionally has no political center, the government is ineffective and flying apart, and Muqtada al-Sadr has everyone over a barrel. For the long version, follow the link itself - the thing is worth reading in its entirety.

Me, though, I'm just introducing it for contrast. What I really want to talk about comes from yesterday's edition: an article wherein President Bush talks about what's going on and why.

“There’s all kinds of speculation about what may or may not be happening,” Mr. Bush said in Estonia, with that country’s president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, by his side. He added, “No question about it, it’s tough.”

Saying he blamed Al Qaeda for the increased violence, Mr. Bush referred to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader in Iraq who was killed by American forces over the summer. “The plan of Mr. Zarqawi was to foment sectarian violence,” he said.

Yes, indeed. And Mr. Zarqawi was killed in June.

Obviously, al-Qaeda is active in Iraq - not least in Anbar - but foreign fighters are hardly the primary cause of violence in Baghdad, let alone the fragility of the state's governing entity. Every other article I've linked to above explains as much, and generally sources members of the Bush administration to do it. If Sunni violence had been strangled down by early 2004 - or, hell, if the Iraqi Army had been maintained in the first place - it's possible that Muqtada al-Sadr's dreams of warlordism might've been contained, but these days it's the Shi'ite extremists who are presenting the most complicated security problems. Even if the common Shi'ites on the street felt safe enough to back away from them - if the Sunnis, native and foreign, were pacified - the Mahdi gang would still run the hospitals, the universities, and altogether too much of the infrastructure of the nation.

So I'm wondering why Mr. Bush said what he said, and the most obvious answers are grotesque cynicism - associating violence with al-Qaeda allows him to tap into whatever lingering glow of legitimacy he had on September 12, 2001 - or a degree of personal confusion on his part that just isn't appropriate for a man in his office.

Neither of those explanations offers much evidence to support any great hopes of introspection or healthy change from the White House, obviously. We're looking at another occasion Mr. Bush is failing to rise to meet.

The Net Neutrality front.

Updates here, yo.

The more things change . . .

Robert M. Gates, President Bush's nominee to lead the Pentagon, advocated a bombing campaign against Nicaragua in 1984 in order to "bring down" the leftist government, according to a declassified memo released by a nonprofit research group.

The memo from Gates to his then-boss, CIA Director William J. Casey, was among a selection of declassified documents from the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal posted Friday on the website of the National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ .

In the memo, Gates, who was deputy director of the CIA, argued that the Soviet Union was turning Nicaragua into an armed camp and that the country could become a second Cuba. The rise of the communist-leaning Sandinista government threatened the stability of Central America, Gates asserted.

Gates' memo echoed the view of many foreign policy hard-liners at the time; however, the feared communist takeover of the region never materialized.

All this and implicated in Iran-Contra too? And the Bush administration thought it would never find love again!

Care of the LA Times.

Near the end of the road.

Iraq's civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks in the wake of coordinated car-bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite slum the day before -- even as a main Shiite political faction threatened a walkout, a move that likely would lead to the government's collapse and plunge the nation deeper into disarray.

Thursday's massacre in Sadr City -- a Shiite slum that is a stronghold of anti-U.S. cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his militia, the Mahdi Army -- sparked a flurry of attacks around the country, reinforced doubts about the effectiveness of the Iraqi government and U.S. military, and emboldened Shiite vigilantes.

In a sermon al-Sadr delivered Friday, the black-turbaned cleric argued that the U.S. military's refusal to grant full control of the Iraqi security forces to the Iraqi government was leaving the populace vulnerable to insurgent attacks. And as militiamen loyal to al-Sadr took matters into their own hands in fierce battles with Sunni Arabs on Friday, al-Sadr's political representatives demanded that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki signal his displeasure with the U.S. occupation by cancelling a meeting scheduled with President Bush in Jordan next week.

Al-Sadr's representatives said they would withdraw from Maliki's government if the prime minister did not submit to their demands.

In defiance of an emergency curfew, gunfire crackled throughout the day and mortar rockets arced over Baghdad's jagged skyline, smashing into houses of worship, residences and shops. By Friday night, at least 65 people were reported killed in attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere.

From the LA Times.

A quick recommendation.

Okay, I have a link for you. It's down the page a bit.

It leads to an essay in the American Conservative from Austin W. Bramwell, a former director and trustee of the National Review. He has, however, become disenchanted with movement conservatism.

This is actually a surprisingly hard introduction to write; I don't want to make it seem as though this piece's main value rests in its potential to embarrass the political opposition. It's honest and responsible in a way that, frankly, I haven't been - you may have noticed that I haven't been able to work up the energy to knock the incoming Democratic leadership for giving us Hoyer v. Murtha (corporate shill versus suspected crook), and impeached judges as chairmen and . . . well, God, the rewards to Lieberman - and to exploit it as a cudgel is to prove I haven't just failed to equal it, I've missed its point.

It's worth reading. Let's just leave it there.

Here we go.

Happy Thanksgiving!

To all the Yanks in the audience, anyway . . . .

Civil war.

What else can you call it?

In its bleakest assessment since the U.S.-led invasion, the United Nations today reported the highest monthly death toll among Iraqi civilians so far: At least 3,709 killed during October, up nearly 400 from September and 700 more than in August.

The vast majority of the killings took place in Baghdad.

The continued slaughter of civilians as well as increasing poverty has forced more than 2 million people from their homes, according to the report. Every month, nearly 100,000 Iraqis flee to neighboring Jordan and Syria, the U.N. found.

Two million homeless would be almost ten percent of Iraq's total population (estimated at 26,783,383 in July), incidentally. At this point, vast majorities of the Iraqi people apparently don't trust the current powers that be (i.e., the US) to make things better - and, in fact, flat out want us gone - and I can't say that I blame them.

Speaking of Palestine . . .

If this is true . . . well, actually, it doesn't alter the big picture very much at all. The big offenders aren't exactly distinguished by their respect for Palestinian property rights, on either the national or the individual scale. It's just we tend to see things framed most in terms of the former.

But, hey, one can hope that new revelations will prompt Israel's decent majority to take another look at the rather urgent business of reining in the settlers! Stories like this aren't assets in an existential crisis.

A new study conducted by left-wing group Peace Now has found that approximately 40 percent of settlements, including long-standing communities, are built on private Palestinian land and not on state-owned land.

In a press conference held in Jerusalem on Tuesday, the group presented a report asserting that out of a total area of 157,000 dunams used by West Bank settlements and industrial zones, 61,000 dunams (approximately 38 percent) are privately owned by Palestinians.

The report singles out the two largest settlements, both of which have city status. It says that 86.4 percent of Ma'ale Adumim is built on Palestinian land, and 35.1 percent of Ariel.

Breaking Lebanon.

Pierre Gemayel, a Lebanese cabinet minister and strong opponent of Syrian influence in Lebanon, was gunned down in his car here on Tuesday afternoon, jolting a nation already paralyzed by political conflict that threatens to topple the government.

The killing of Mr. Gemayel, the 34-year-old scion of a prominent Maronite Christian family, inflamed tensions between the anti-Syria coalition trying to hold its government together and the Syrian-allied opposition, led by Hezbollah. An Iranian-supported Shiite group, Hezbollah has threatened street protests if it is not given more power.

The demonstrations were expected Thursday. Now, there will be a funeral instead.

Lebanese radio reported that shots were also fired Tuesday into the Beirut office of Michel Pharaon, a Greek Catholic member of the ruling coalition and minister for parliamentary affairs.

More here, in all its bleakness. Apparently, if the pro-Syrian, pro-Hizbollah bloc can assassinate one more minister, Lebanon's current government goes into a constitutionally-mandated shutdown, after which . . . I dunno. The deluge.

I don't know what happens to the Middle East if Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon all slip into civil war at the same time (to say nothing of the perpetual misery in Palestine/Israel); it would be an unprecedented opportunity for Iran to expand its influence, but I don't know that they're deft enough to pull it off in any way that results in stability. I don't know that anyone is.

Professor Juan Cole has a bit of a recent history lesson for the interested, once you get through a certain amount of Bush-directed bitterness.

The last hurrah of the 109th Congress.

Yes, to cap off a session of legislative triumphs like Theresa Marie Schiavo's Law (intrusive and petty on an intimate level) and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (broadly, historically evil), the worst Congress of our lifetimes has decided to go out without doing a big part of its job!

Republicans vacating the Capitol are dumping a big spring cleaning job on Democrats moving in. GOP leaders have opted to leave behind almost a half-trillion-dollar clutter of unfinished spending bills, [sic]

There's also no guarantee that Republicans will pass a multibillion-dollar measure to prevent a cut in fees to doctors treating Medicare patients.

The bulging workload that a Republican-led Congress was supposed to complete this year but is instead punting to 2007 promises to consume time and energy that Democrats had hoped to devote to their own agenda upon taking control of Congress in January for the first time in a dozen years.

Now, insofar as this actually reduces the harm these clods might do, I can't say it's an entirely bad thing. It is disrespectful to the institution in which they serve, though.

Good riddance to them.

Seymour Hersh: spreading the joy.

A month before the November elections, Vice-President Dick Cheney was sitting in on a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building. The talk took a political turn: what if the Democrats won both the Senate and the House? How would that affect policy toward Iran, which is believed to be on the verge of becoming a nuclear power? At that point, according to someone familiar with the discussion, Cheney began reminiscing about his job as a lineman, in the early nineteen-sixties, for a power company in Wyoming. Copper wire was expensive, and the linemen were instructed to return all unused pieces three feet or longer. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork that resulted, Cheney said, so he and his colleagues found a solution: putting “shorteners” on the wire—that is, cutting it into short pieces and tossing the leftovers at the end of the workday. If the Democrats won on November 7th, the Vice-President said, that victory would not stop the Administration from pursuing a military option with Iran. The White House would put “shorteners” on any legislative restrictions, Cheney said, and thus stop Congress from getting in its way.

There's a lot going on in the article from which that passage came: allegations of intelligence stovepiping (again), a glimpse into the position of Ehud Olmert's government, some debate on the question of how reassuring we should all find our incoming Secretary of Defense, and a closing reminder that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran probably shouldn't be trusted with any weapons more formidable than a can of bug spray. Assuming that Mr. Hersh's reporting is accurate, though, the main thing to take away is that there's more institutional pressure for military action against Iran than is commonly understood; according to the CIA there's no compelling proof of a weapons program, but the Israelis, the Bush administration, and even a few of the more high-profile hawkish Democrats (including Senator Clinton, dammit) are in favor of blowing something up - the difference is in the degree of insanity. The borderline realists think a military display will teach the Iranians that their aggressive posturing will have negative consequences; the Cheneyites contend that we should just double down and work to overthrow the Iranian theocracy.

Both approaches are bonkers. Any weapons program the Iranians have is too diffuse and well hidden to completely stop, and subjecting the Iranian people to violence without clear provocation is only going to give the radical theocrats more political capital. There's no easy solution at hand - in no small part because Iraq has been handled so ineptly - but escalating tensions without having the means to direct them just seems appallingly stupid.

And yet it's exactly the kind of thing the home team might try, just in the hopes that if they're sufficiently audacious God, the Fates, and every saint in heaven will clear the way for them. Lord knows it's happened before.

You'd think they'd have more faith in secular democracy.

In today's news, the Dutch overreact.

The Dutch government agreed on Friday a total ban on the wearing of burqas and other Muslim face veils in public, justifying the move on security grounds.

Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk will now draw up legislation which will result in the Netherlands, once one of Europe's most easy-going nations, imposing some of the continent's toughest laws against concealing the face.

"The cabinet finds it undesirable that garments covering the face -- including the burqa -- should be worn in public in view of public order, (and) the security and protection of fellow citizens," the Dutch Justice Ministry said in a statement.

TODAY'S FUN HOLLAND FACT: Every year, thousands of people are killed in Amsterdam alone by their inability to discern the shapes of Muslim women's noses!

This is just embarrassing. If they're going to make policy based on xenophobia and cultural disdain, they ought to just stand up with all the dignity they can muster and say so. Pleading "security and protection of fellow citizens" is altogether too goofy.

Reality sets in.

"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman, Jordan.

"The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body," Hiltermann said.

"All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on U.S.-Arab relations.

From this morning's Washington Post.

So much for the afterglow.

A smoking gun.

The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged for the first time the existence of two classified documents, including a directive signed by President Bush, that have guided the agency’s interrogation and detention of terror suspects.

The C.I.A. referred to the documents in a letter sent Friday from the agency’s associate general counsel, John L. McPherson, to lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The contents of the documents were not revealed, but one of them is “a directive signed by President Bush granting the C.I.A. the authority to set up detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees,” the A.C.L.U. said, based on its review of published accounts.

From the New York Times.

Not that there was ever much doubt that this president's name would be linked with war crimes once history shook itself out, but I'm afraid this is another clincher.

Quickly . . .

Okay, you may have noticed that I haven't been blogging since the elections. It's been a period of joy and relief and just generally positive feelings, and I knew - oh, yes, I knew - that once I started digging back in the news for stories to highlight, I'd lose sight of this wonderful new forest among all those damn dirty trees; hell, just confronting the fact that Joe Lieberman's career isn't winding its way down to an unremarkable stint on Celebrity Jeopardy could kill this current lovely mood if I looked it head-on. For more than a year and a half now, the Long Wall has been primarily about unease and dismay, and I'm enjoying my vacation from those particular emotions.

Sorry.

That said, this bit blows my mind enough to capture for posterity: the Germans are filing war crimes charges against Don Rumsfeld? Maybe? And General Karpinski is testifying against him?

I honestly don't expect this is going to end up doing anybody any good - much as I'd love to see the former (YES!) Secretary of Defense, the President and the Vice President all get up and try to defend themselves, under oath, against a rigorous exploration of all the carnage their hubris and failures of character has brought, I think there's precisely no chance that they'll be successfully compelled to do so. And I'm afraid the threat will push a big hunk of the American public back toward reflexive Europe-bashing and a generalized resistance to criticism.

. . .

Still having to fight the urge to applaud, though.

And, with that, silence resumes for a bit longer.

"Recount" is the hardest word to say.

Oh, Virginia - why must you make things complicated?

In fact, the link above is out of date in one key detail: Jim Webb now has an even more minute lead over George Allen than Allen had over Webb. The appeal provisions obviously still apply, though - and I've got no idea how absentee ballots are playing out.

Still, this really only becomes a huge deal if the Dems pull off Senate wins in two (and only two) more heretofore Republican states - then Virginia decides who has the majority. Possible, but I don't know that I'd call it likely.

On the up-side, the Republicans have officially lost the House; if nothing else, we're now guaranteed a modest restraint on Congressional craziness and two years of the White House fighting subpoenas all the way to the Supreme Court! Good times!

Here in my back yard . . .

Dirty trickin', baby.

Groups of men from a Philadelphia homeless shelter said they were brought to Prince George’s County early Nov. 7 by Republican Senate candidate Michael Steele’s campaign and told to pass out fliers publicizing information that county officials say is misleading.

Three men stood at the front entrance of the University Park Elementary School precinct wearing Steele T-shirts and hats, passing out pamphlets titled, "Ehrlich-Steele Democrats." The pamphlets had pictures of Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson, former county executive Wayne Curry and former Democratic Senate candidate Kweisi Mfume. At the bottom, it read, "These are our choices." The flier says it was authorized by both the Steele and Ehrlich campaigns.

Neither Steele nor Ehrlich has returned telephone calls.

The Post's early account adds the little detail that the Philadelphia crowd was received on arrival by Governor Ehrlich's wife, which I'd think would make distancing and disavowing tricky for our local Republican leadership.

But, yeah, they've surprised me before.

[Thanks to Justin Rood for the flags!]


UPDATE (7:01 PM): More here.

Soothing my guilty conscience.

Longish-time Wall readers may remember that the designation of Shinzo Abe as the successor to Junichiro Koizumi probably wouldn't have been any worse received in these parts if he had kicked me in the shin before accepting the job; I was afraid his governing agenda would be primarily characterized by a belligerent nationalism, and I was afraid he was going to make Japan coarser than it had to be.

For all I know, domestically, my fears may still be in play; if there have been any big moves on education, I'm in the dark. Diplomatically, though, the man's not off to a bad start.

So, Shinzo, I'm tentatively sorry for slagging you as you came in the door. It was really premature of me.

Should we hug?

Dirty trick watch.

The folks at Talking Points Memo are starting to turn themselves over to full-time coverage of the innovative and unethical vote-turning/corrupting pushes around the country, if you can bear to read about it. You want your false and harassing phone blitzes? Your false party-line lists? Your misrepresented propositions? Start here, and check the main blog regularly - it's only going to get worse between now and Tuesday.

By the way, all the examples above are pro-Republican efforts; for the last few cycles, we've seen shit like it every time backs are against the wall. Ken Mehlman and company are really letting their ethical constituents down.

[Of course, the modern Democratic response to desperation is blithering, pandering, back-stabbing, and pre-emptive surrender. It ain't like we're perfect.]

Adding injury to injury.

The U.S. government's Department of Inhumanity is at it again.

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

. . .

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo, said the prisoners "can't even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn't do it justice. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.'"

For the record, the government's position here is that it can capture people, torture them, prosecute them with evidence which can be withheld from them, and now that they should be held criminally liable if they tell their lawyers about the means by which testimony was coerced.

Even if you somehow still trust the Bush administration, are these really precedents you'd want set? Is it really that hard to imagine them being used, mistakenly or otherwise, against innocent people?

Apparently so, if you're in the majority of the 109th Congress.

Bad timing for impending ecological calamity.

Unless the Bush years somehow mark the decisive moment of overreach and collapse of the anti-environmental movement and clear the way toward some innovative multinational eco-leadership, anyway. I suppose there might be room to hope - there've been more than a few articles over the last year or so highlighting the rise of conservationist conservatism, after all.

Be that as it may, the nightmare du jour is the destruction of marine life as we know it.

An international group of ecologists and economists warned yesterday that the world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates, based on a four-year study of catch data and the effects of fisheries collapses.

The paper, published in the journal Science, concludes that overfishing, pollution and other environmental factors are wiping out important species around the globe, hampering the ocean's ability to produce seafood, filter nutrients and resist the spread of disease.

"We really see the end of the line now," said lead author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada's Dalhousie University. "It's within our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood if we don't change things."

On the plus side, this may be one of those rare instances where the U.S. isn't the single most arrogant offender. Party hats all around!

Object lesson.

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

Just a friendly reminder: this is how oversight works in a Republican Congress.

The Long Wall owns up.

On Halloween I wrote a short post titled "John Kerry for President!" Naturally, I turn out to have been celebrating one step in a political explosion that may well have destroyed Mr. Kerry's chances in 2008.

Whoops.

I'm appalled by the way this has hung in the news - not because I particularly wanted to see Mr. Kerry drag us through another fumbling run for power, but because it's so clearly a non-issue, and because the Republican condemnation has been so transparently insincere. Mr. Kerry is a retired soldier himself (as well as a reasonably experienced politician); of course he wasn't insulting the troops. Even if we didn't have direct access to the line he flubbed, there's no way anyone who's paying any kind of attention at all could seriously believe that the guy who rather famously asked "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" is going to be out there knocking the men and women serving in the armed forces. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth is hypocritical bullshit, and I like to think in the era of the great newsmen, the Republicans would've had it hung around their necks like a goddamn yoke by, say, a sad-eyed Walter Cronkite.

In this era, John Kerry has to go into seclusion for the good of the Democratic campaign.

By the way, if you think it might have been unfair of Mr. Kerry to attack Mr. Bush's mental powers and habits . . .

With less than a week before the election, President Bush sought to rally Republican voters on Wednesday with a vigorous defense of the war in Iraq and a vow to keep Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in office until the end of Mr. Bush’s term.

I'm just sayin'.

[Quoted from the Times.]

BOO!

The federal government's "no sex without marriage" message isn't just for kids anymore.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

"They've stepped over the line of common sense," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education. "To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It's an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health."

From USA Today.

You know, the fact that the Department of Health and Human Services is about to waste our tax money trying (and presumably failing) to impose an intrusive, puritanical agenda is pretty bad news. On the other hand, you have to weigh the damage against the hilarity that will ensue should this ever become a campaign issue.

"The Democrat Party thinks that it's okay for consenting adults to have sex without government involvement!"

YAY!

The space agency’s finest scientific instrument escaped a death sentence yesterday when Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator, approved a shuttle mission to service and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. It was a brave call, since repairing the Hubble will put the shuttle at greater risk than a typical mission to the International Space Station. It was also a welcome sign that NASA is willing to go the extra orbital mile to support superb science, even while it squanders large sums on completing the space station to perform research that can’t begin to compare with the Hubble’s in importance.

For a decade and a half, the Hubble has made discoveries that have helped revolutionize our understanding of the universe. Its typical role is to pick up a hint from ground-based telescopes and then use its unparalleled vantage point above the atmosphere to probe deeply into some puzzling phenomenon. The Hubble has peered farther into space and farther back in time than any other instrument. It has discovered more than 500 proto-galaxies that emitted light when the universe was in its formative stages, confirmed the jaw-dropping discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and helped establish the rate of expansion and the age of the universe.

A panel of distinguished astronomers judged that the Hubble “has arguably had a greater impact on astronomy than any instrument since the original astronomical telescope of Galileo.” And what made all of this possible was NASA’s willingness to refurbish the Hubble every few years to replace depleted batteries and gyroscopes and install new equipment. Many experts believe that when the Hubble gets two state-of-the-art instruments on the next servicing mission in 2008 it will be more capable than ever, ready to peer farther back into a time when galaxies were forming and the universe was emerging from darkness into light.

The threat to the Hubble’s future came unexpectedly from NASA itself in early 2004. In a decision that can only be described as myopic, Sean O’Keefe, the administrator at the time, unexpectedly canceled the next servicing mission, ostensibly because of safety concerns after the Columbia disaster. But the underlying reason was almost certainly that a Hubble mission would be a diversion from the administration’s priorities to complete the space station and then send astronauts back to the Moon and eventually Mars. Only intervention by Congress and the National Academy of Sciences kept the death sentence at bay.

Now Mr. Griffin has concluded that the mission can be conducted safely, especially since NASA has developed new inspection and orbital repair techniques, and that the mission will not interfere with other space priorities. A Hubble mission may be marginally more risky than a flight to the space station, but that risk is surely worth taking for the scientific payoff.

From the Times.