One long quote.

An editorial at the Times:

The Supreme Court ruled 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education is inherently unequal, and it ordered the nation’s schools to integrate. Yesterday, the court switched sides and told two cities that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together. It was a sad day for the court and for the ideal of racial equality.

Since 1954, the Supreme Court has been the nation’s driving force for integration. Its orders required segregated buses and public buildings, parks and playgrounds to open up to all Americans. It wasn’t always easy: governors, senators and angry mobs talked of massive resistance. But the court never wavered, and in many of the most important cases it spoke unanimously.

Yesterday, the court’s radical new majority turned its back on that proud tradition in a 5-4 ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. It has been some time since the court, which has grown more conservative by the year, did much to compel local governments to promote racial integration. But now it is moving in reverse, broadly ordering the public schools to become more segregated.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who provided the majority’s fifth vote, reined in the ruling somewhat by signing only part of the majority opinion and writing separately to underscore that some limited programs that take race into account are still acceptable. But it is unclear how much room his analysis will leave, in practice, for school districts to promote integration. His unwillingness to uphold Seattle’s and Louisville’s relatively modest plans is certainly a discouraging sign.

In an eloquent dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer explained just how sharp a break the decision is with history. The Supreme Court has often ordered schools to use race-conscious remedies, and it has unanimously held that deciding to make assignments based on race “to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society” is “within the broad discretionary powers of school authorities.”

Chief Justice Roberts, who assured the Senate at his confirmation hearings that he respected precedent, and Brown in particular, eagerly set these precedents aside. The right wing of the court also tossed aside two other principles they claim to hold dear. Their campaign for “federalism,” or scaling back federal power so states and localities have more authority, argued for upholding the Seattle and Louisville, Ky., programs. So did their supposed opposition to “judicial activism.” This decision is the height of activism: federal judges relying on the Constitution to tell elected local officials what to do.

The nation is getting more diverse, but by many measures public schools are becoming more segregated. More than one in six black children now attend schools that are 99 to 100 percent minority. This resegregation is likely to get appreciably worse as a result of the court’s ruling.

There should be no mistaking just how radical this decision is. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said it was his “firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.” He also noted the “cruel irony” of the court relying on Brown v. Board of Education while robbing that landmark ruling of much of its force and spirit. The citizens of Louisville and Seattle, and the rest of the nation, can ponder the majority’s kind words about Brown as they get to work today making their schools, and their cities, more segregated.

Fires in Tehran.

Angry drivers set fire to at least two gasoline stations in Tehran Tuesday night after the government announced that fuel would be rationed beginning at midnight.

Long lines were seen at other gas stations in the capital today as new rules took effect, limiting drivers of private cars to 26 gallons a month at the subsidized price of 34 cents a gallon. Taxicab drivers are limited to 211 gallons a month. The government is still considering whether to allow drivers to buy additional fuel at higher prices.

Traffic jams developed near some stations as police officers worked to control the lines.

The government first planned to start the rationing a year ago, but put the decision off repeatedly out of fear that it would spark unrest. State television reported today that “several gas stations and public places had been attacked by vandals.” One was set ablaze by protesters in the western Tehran neighborhood of Poonak and Niayesh. Another in Azadi Street in southwest Tehran was attacked, according to a report in Etemad, a daily newspaper.

Iran is rich with crude oil and is the second largest exporter of oil in OPEC. But it has far fewer refineries than it needs to satisfy booming domestic demand, so it must import as much as half of its gasoline from refineries abroad, at a cost of $5 billion a year.

Analysts warned that rationing would make it difficult for unemployed people who used their private cars as taxis to earn a living, and that it could accelerate inflation, which is already a problem in the country. Prices of dairy products like milk, butter and yogurt have risen by 20 percent or more this week.

The Iranian economy may also be pinched by new sanctions being debated by the United Nations Security Council over Iran’s refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment program.

That's from the New York Times - and you can see a few photos from the riots themselves over at this Persian-language blog (thanks go to Andrew Sullivan for the tip).

I say this every so often, but it's still worth repeating: the idiots who run Iran do worse things to their own people than they do to the rest of us, and one of these days the Iranians - one way or another - are going to find a way to make their government more responsive to their needs. There's a place for sanctions when they're warranted (and almost all of them are) and properly targeted, but otherwise what we want to be doing is building our soft power and keeping the hell out of the way (insofar as we can while keeping Israel's defenses current, anyway). The bad mullahs just can't keep themselves afloat without convincing enemies to demonize.

Cheneypalooza!

You should all be reading this already - and, yes, there will be a test - but if you've been letting your disdain for the Post's increasingly dreadful Op-Ed page keep you away from its reporting, let me direct you over to the startlingly good study of the vice president that's been running for the past couple of days. Yesterday's entry was largely on the mechanisms he's developed to control as much of the White House agenda as he can (the bit about secretly tapping memos between the former National Security Advisor and her legal advisor was particularly choice); today's dwells more on his role in the promotion of torture. It's worth stressing that he's not a shadowy mastermind that's bypassing a tragically naive president - the pieces have so far gone to great lengths to stress that he's a shadowy mastermind who's achieving results with which the president has actually been rather pleased.

Oddly, that doesn't make me feel a whole lot better.

By the way, whenever Alberto "Fredo" Gonzales appears in the narrative, it's as an obedient junior partner (usually to David Addington) who can be counted on to doggedly help make bad policies happen. Even if you support the agenda, the lack of White House regard for his intellect throughout is kinda hard to shrug off.

Our awful Supreme Court.

It's had a busy day today! From . . .

The Supreme Court today loosened the restrictions on what companies and unions can spend on television advertisements just before elections, and in so doing may well have affected the thinking of political strategists for the 2008 elections.

. . . to . . .

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that ordinary taxpayers cannot challenge a White House initiative that helps religious charities get a share of federal money.

. . . to . . .

The Supreme Court sided with developers and the Bush administration Monday in a dispute with environmentalists over protecting endangered species.

. . . to . . .

The dominant thrust of the principal opinion appears, in potential, at least, to be toward a considerable expansion of school officials' authority over student expression. No longer is it necessary to regulation, for example, to find that the expression disrupts school life, or that it is crudely and profanely offensive, or that it is an utterance done during assigned or immediately supervised school work. If it is close enoiugh to the schoolhouse gate, it appears to be subject to regulation -- at least when it is perceived, by school officials, as promoting a drug-use message.

. . . the majority has ruled with remarkable consistency that entrenched powers should be given a freer hand to do whatever the hell they want, and that avenues of correction and complaint should be sealed off.

Scott Lemieux has a couple of comments on the logical and legal jumps taken to get to some of these decisions here and here, and I'm sure there'll be more on the way. But while we're picking apart the reasoning used to justify the decisions, let's not lose sight of the fact that their consequences, though perhaps relatively contained, are more important than the pretexts cited to arrive at them. The only one of those decisions that offers any pretense of furthering the ability of people to participate in their communities is the campaign finance one - and, naturally, that's going to most benefit the wealthy and powerful.

We're going in the wrong direction - not that that's any kind of a surprise.

Zimbabwe, again.

Actually, the article's primarily about Zimbabwe's refugee community in South Africa - as Robert Mugabe's country gets sicker and sicker, more and more people are flooding into South Africa's already distinctly crowded job market. Many are have formal educations and useful skill sets, but . . . well, we're talking about as many as two million immigrants entering into a country of forty-six million. There's only so much elasticity one can expect.

Unquestionably, the Zimbabweans are victims first. A rising number claim to be refugees from persecution by President Robert G. Mugabe’s police and by supporters of his ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Just six Zimbabweans sought political asylum in South Africa in 2001; last year, the total was nearly 19,000, more than a third of all asylum applications in South Africa.

But most are fleeing privation, not persecution. Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate was officially 4,530 percent in May; economists say it is at least twice that. Industries are operating at barely 30 percent of capacity, unemployment exceeds 80 percent and a disastrous harvest is likely to leave up to four million in need of food aid this year.

A memorandum prepared by 34 international aid agencies, including the United Nations and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, predicted this month that the country’s economy would cease to function by the end of this year.

A further complication rises up from Thabo Mbeki's policy of refusing to acknowledge wrongdoing from the Mugabe regime - it turns out to be awkward to concede the need for sanctuary when you're not willing to admit that the refugees are fleeing from anything particularly unpleasant.

[And, yes, given that the U.S. is cutting Iraqi refugees even less slack for very similar reasons, I'm aware I can't say what I've said with the air of prissy sanctimony I'd so prefer. We're all in a fallen world together.]

Emperor Cheney.

The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”

As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President's position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President's staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President's executive order.

It's good to be Vice President.

Hey, anybody remember when we used to be a constitutional republic?

They only disregard the law a third of the time!

Generally, when I use a disdainful "they" in the header, you can assume I'm talking about the Bush administration - and, yeah, here we are again.

The Government Accountability Office has released a small study of the execution of laws passed with presidential signing statements that basically reserve the right to ignore said laws. The study covered nineteen (out of a hundred and sixty) provisions from the 2006 appropriations acts to which President Bush expressed executive disdain; three of the nineteen were apparently never triggered, six were violated, and ten were executed faithfully. That's better than fifty percent! Team Bush + teh law 4EVAH!

. . .

I don't even know what I just wrote.

Anyway, the Post has a short piece here, if you'd rather not read the pdf-style full report.

They don't care whether we live or die.

Hey, remember when the Bush administration claimed that they were the only ones who took national security seriously?

Yeah, okay, they still claim it. That just makes this all the more magnificent!

Wrangling between Bush administration aides and U.S. intelligence agencies is holding up talks with Moscow on future monitoring of the thousands of nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia still aim at one another.

The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) established the elaborate scheme of inspections, data sharing, advance missile test notifications and satellite surveillance. But the accord will expire in December 2009, and the U.S. spy satellites that locate and count Russian missile sites are stretched thin by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, concerns about North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs and other threats, current and former U.S. officials and experts said.

Administration policymakers argue that the monitoring system is an outdated vestige of the Cold War that restricts the Pentagon's ability to respond to new threats. They want to replace it with an informal system of looser inspections that would allow the United States to do things such as replacing nuclear warheads with conventional warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles.

. . .

Alarmed by the stress on the limited fleet of U.S. spy satellites, however, U.S. intelligence agencies oppose weakening the on-site inspections and other means that give U.S. officials a window into the only nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the United States.

Ah, but look at Iraq! It clearly demonstrates that the administration only has room to do whatever fool thing it wants when there's insufficient evidence available to completely disprove their assumptions! Expanding our own options for aggression while blinding ourselves to the state of Russian stockpiles is a win-win!

Argh.

Incidentally, I don't know to what extent the START system is involved in our ability to verify that rogue Russian officers aren't selling off nuclear goodies to al-Qaeda, but . . . well, you'd think more inspections would be better than fewer, regardless.

New one from Seymour Hersh.

If you've been keeping track, you know generally what it entails: confirmation of some of your darkest fears and, if you're really lucky, a new dimension to your ongoing sense of revulsion at the people who've been running our country (for those Americans in the audience, anyway). This one's about Abu Ghraib, the investigation thereof, and the unhelpful role some familiar faces played in both.

The fall of Gaza.

I don't think you can really call it a coup, since Hamas doesn't seem to be formally denying Mr. Abbas's hold on the presidency - but, in practice, they've taken over Gaza, and may be threatening the West Bank as well. They also seem to be parading Fatah captives in front of their families and then shooting them in the head - so, even without considering their stance toward Israel, I think we can collectively deem these people war criminals.

Their take? “The era of justice and Islamic rule has arrived.”

Those lucky Palestinians.

The Times suggests that major Sunni players - i.e., Egypt or Saudi Arabia - may try to take the reins long enough to impose some kind of stability, but the idea makes my head spin. Israel's response would depend on the approach, but I'd expect a degree of suspicion - and I don't know how easy it would be for the dictators of Arab nations to reconcile the more excitable members of their own citizenry with the idea of repressing fundamentalist/nationalist uprisings abroad, even without the direct use of military force.

I hope somebody comes up with something soon, though.

The world is still awesome.

Proof:

Startled, the "ninja" made his escape, hopping onto a bicycle and racing off into the nearby cornfields - followed by police who were quickly on the scene.

This was in Italy, mind you.

Meanwhile, in the holy land . . .

It looks like Ehud Barak has beaten out Ami Ayalon for control of Labour in Israel, which bums me out just a bit. No offense to Mr. Barak; I just don't suspect a deep capacity for happy surprises in him, and the Israeli left (and Israel in general) needs some happy surprises.

But not as much as the Palestinians do.

Which is to say, Fatah and Hamas are on the verge of out-and-out warfare. It really just keeps getting worse for the people in the Gaza Strip, doesn't it?

The twilight of the general?

Spencer Ackerman on the decline and possible fall of the go-to strongman for our time, Pervez Musharraf:

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S.'s Pakistan policy can be summed up in two words: Pervez Musharraf. But within the U.S. intelligence community, and in Pakistan, there's a growing belief that the U.S.-friendly military dictator's days are drawing to a close -- and possibly within the next few months. It may be time for the U.S. to face what it's long feared in the nuclear state: the prospect of chaos, rising Islamism or anti-Americanism that follows Musharraf.

But the hope -- among Pakistani military officers and politicians, to say nothing of U.S. diplomats -- is that the increasingly inept and unpopular Musharraf can be eased out of power while the U.S. slowly distances itself from him, allowing for as smooth a transition as is possible in the turbulent South Asian country. Some see the Pakistani Army remaining powerful enough to prevent a chaotic transition or an Islamist takeover. "This is going to be a Pinochet-like transition, instead of a Marcos-like one," one former Pakistani official tells TPMmuckraker. In other words, according to the ex-official, the U.S. may not stand foursquare behind its ally Musharraf until he's ultimately forced from power, as President Ronald Reagan chose with doomed Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Over the past few weeks, U.S. intelligence have started to conclude that Musharraf is on his way out. "It is the sense people have, and it's been out there," says Rob Richer, a former deputy head of CIA operations who has met with Musharraf personally and long worked with the Pakistanis on intelligence issues. "This is the view of both senior (U.S. intelligence) officials and people who follow the issue closely."

There's a lot more article on the other side of the link, and it's all fascinating. I promise.

No confidence.

Okay, the no confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales crashed and smoldered (I figure a majority vote in favor of panning the guy precludes allegations of out-and-out burning, even if it wasn't enough to break a filibuster).

Arlen Specter apparently made a few points to which I'd like to reply, even if I have precisely no standing. Care of TPMmuckraker (which also features an embedded video):

The thrust of the resolution, if it really seeks his ouster, is going to be a boomerang and is going to be counterproductive. My own sense is that there is no confidence in the attorney general on this side of the aisle, but that the views will not be expressed in this format. Already some who have called for his resignation on the Republican side of the aisle have said they will not vote for this resolution. Others have declined to comment about his capacity but have said that this is not the proper way to proceed, that our form of government does not have a no-confidence vote. Is the principle reason for this resolution to help the Department of Defense (sic) or to embarrass Republicans? I think, clear cut, it is designed to embarrass Republicans. It’s designed to embarrass Republicans if the Senate says they have no confidence in the Attorney General…

Many on this side of the aisle, most, if not almost all, will vote against cloture here because there are ample reasons to vote against cloture. But as a I look at this matter as which is the more weighty, the more compelling, the more important – candidly stating that I have no confidence in Attorney General Gonzales or rejecting the outright political chicanery which is involved in this resolution offered by the Democrats, I come down on the side that the interests of the country and moving for improvements in the Department of Justice is to make a candid statement that I have no confidence in the Attorney General – which I have said repeatedly, it’s no surprise – and I am going to deal with this resolution on the merits and vote to invoke cloture.

First of all, good for him.

Second of all . . . whew. It's an interesting point, and if I were in his shoes I could see how I might settle on it. The Democrats can only gain by bringing more attention to the Attorney General's gross misconduct and glaring unworthiness, but every Republican facing that vote was going to have to reconcile the demands of the White House, the passions of the base, and the desires of whatever tiny fraction of the electorate was actually paying attention - and, in some way or another, any vote would end up costing them. Moreover, since the president is who he is, the odds of this shaming him into doing the right thing - thereby netting an objective good for the country - were always alarmingly small. In practice, there was a very good chance that a no confidence vote really wouldn't have accomplished anything more than making the Republicans look like hypocrites, idiots, or feuding cousins.

I would argue that that's almost an inevitable consequence of renouncing oversight and abetting the megalomaniacal tendencies of the executive branch for the first six years of the Bush presidency - some of the bad behavior has to wash back on them, at this point - but I can understand how Mr. Specter might be less sanguine about the point than I am.

Still, it seems disingenuous (if possibly politically useful) for him to attribute this to political mean-spiritedness on the Democrats' part - and that's what I infer from those paragraphs. The simple fact is, the president has left Congress with very few options; Alberto Gonzales has soiled his office and shows every sign of willingness to continue to do so.

His office is, unfortunately, profoundly important.

He needs to go.

If Mr. Specter could propose some mechanism for getting him gone that didn't involve making life so miserable for his defenders that they skulk away from the ramparts in the dead of night . . . well, I've become more of a furious partisan than most, but I'd be delighted to listen.

I don't think there is any such mechanism, though. Heaping embarrassment on the White House, and anyone who chooses to carry its water, is really all we've got - and that's President Bush's fault, not Harry Reid's.

Again, though, Senator Specter ended up voting for accountability, despite what he perceived as a personal political cost, and I really do have to salute him for that. I wish it could have been another way - which is to say, I wish we had a better president.

Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman voted against the resolution, presumably because making the Republicans feel bad is worse than leaving the Justice Department in the hands of a serial abuser. Nice.

Justice a-comin'.

In a stinging rejection of one of the Bush administration’s central assertions about the scope of executive authority to combat terrorism, a federal appeals court ordered the Pentagon to release a man being held as an enemy combatant.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote, “even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country.”

“We refuse to recognize a claim to power,” Judge Motz added, “that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic.”

The full article's here.

I have to admit, I'm curious about what the administration's next step is going to be - are the Bushies prepared to risk the uppermost tiers of the justice system cutting their legs out from under them once and for all? Is the hackishness of the majority of the Supremes deemed reliable enough for the case?

Meh.

I put the Constitutional worries above all the others, but it is worth hoping that if Mr. Marri (or anyone else we have in custody whose fate will be affected by this ruling) really is genuinely dangerous, the U.S. government hasn't forfeited all the legal tools it could use against him through mistreatment or willful disregard of the rights which our system of government formally recognizes. We're paying enough of a price for the administration's incompetence as is.

Regional conflagration roundup!

I'm really getting tired of this.

Way, way back in the day, this blog was going to be something more than it's turned out to be. The political/current events angle was always in the works - in a way, the Wall's earliest advocates were a few friends who were sick of getting rants in emails, and were eager to redirect all the invective toward a more general audience - but I imagined I'd be doing breezy, thoughtful essays, maybe even some fiction. Instead, it all just seems to be about flagging the things that make me angry, in the hopes that they'll make other people angry, and maybe more likely to vote or cough up campaign contributions or complain to still more people. A robot could do it, if it could be programmed for bitterness.

And yet the stupidity keeps coming, and I can't stop banging my head against the keyboard.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Joe Lieberman:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman said Sunday the United States should consider a military strike against Iran because of Tehran's involvement in Iraq.

Yes, by all means. Let's consider it. Let's see what it would result in.

Escalation, catastrophe, and a windfall for the Ahmadinejad government? Okay!

We can stop considering now.

But, wait! There's more!

"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Lieberman said. "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

The U.S. accuses Iran of fostering terrorism and Tehran's nuclear ambitions have brought about international reproach.

Lieberman, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000 who now represents Connecticut as an independent, spoke of Iranians' role in the continued violence in Iraq.

"We've said so publicly that the Iranians have a base in Iran at which they are training Iraqis who are coming in and killing Americans. By some estimates, they have killed as many as 200 American soldiers," Lieberman said. "Well, we can tell them we want them to stop that. But if there's any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping, for instance, their nuclear weapons development, we can't just talk to them."

He added, "If they don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force, and to me, that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing."

Just a reminder: the sitting (if soon to be outgoing) Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says there's no actual evidence of official Iranian backing of anti-American violence in Iraq. As with the allegations of a connection between the Quds goons and the Taliban, actual state sponsorship is almost impossible to document from the outside, even if the (reasonable) temptation is to speculate that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his fingers in it. Regardless, it's absolutely certain that it's not stated Iranian policy, and it wouldn't have the support of the majority of Iranian citizens if it were.

So, if you'll indulge me, a thought experiment. There was a story in the Post this weekend documenting tenuous new alliances forming between American soldiers and Sunni paramilitaries in the conflict against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Say for kicks that some of said Sunnis then, I dunno, commit atrocities against Shi'ite pilgrims out of Iran - or just that they're accused of it. Say Iran then responded with a series of punitive bombings within the United States to discourage our support of the murderous Sunnis.

Here's the million dollar question: would that make average Americans more or less sympathetic to the Iranian position?

That's right: Dick Cheney would nuke Tehran while CBS news ran polls suggesting forty-eight percent of Americans supported suspending the 2008 elections and creating a "temporary" Anti-Terror Dictatorship.

Why the hell should we think a use of force that Iranians (and the rest of the world and even most Americans) would perceive as disproportionate and unwarranted would change any opinions for the better over there? How can professional politicians be so damn blind to political cause and effect?

But Mr. Lieberman's not done!

"They can't believe that they have immunity for training and equipping people to come in and kill Americans," he said. "We cannot let them get away with it. If we do, they'll take that as a sign of weakness on our part and we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region and ultimately right here at home."

Okay, for the record: none of the 9/11 hijackers were Iranian. The Iranians have never perpetrated an attack on American soil, nor ever tried to. Even if failing to attack them for no good reason constituted a sign of weakness - which is, of course, insane - the consequences would not then be Shi'ites falling all over themselves to join in Osama bin Laden's quest to sting us until we backed off and gave him the room to try to establish a new Sunni caliphate. Unless we radicalize a largely moderate Iranian population to the point of absolute nihilism, there's just no reason for them to come here and do violence. None. Zip.

Footage of Mr. Lieberman's extraordinary performance can be found here, if you can stomach it. Some of the likely consequences of an Iranian war, meanwhile, are discussed here.

And, again, let's stress that this isn't just Joe Lieberman. Dick Cheney's office is pushing for military action (see here, though it's been expanded upon in the mainstream press since), Binyamin Netanyahu's been lobbying for it for months (if not years), the right wing press (see Michael Ledeen's words in one of the links above) is calling for it - we have to be aware, and we have to be prepared to shout bloody murder.

Even if we're getting really sick of the view from the barricades.

Yes.

The evidence that our government held Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's sons is not conclusive, and I do not mean to suggest that it is. Still, if you had told me, six years ago, that I would find myself seriously entertaining the possibility that my own government had detained children more or less the same age, I would have thought you were insane. Disappearing people of any age, without charges or trial or anything, is what two-bit dictators do; not what we do. But disappearing children, not seventeen year olds about whom one might have interesting debates about when exactly childhood ends but seven- and nine-year olds -- that's so far across the line that it would have been unimaginable to me. And the fact, if it is one, that they are supposedly "handled with kid gloves" and "given the best of care" does not begin to make up for this. Detention is not "the best of care" for anyone. It is certainly not "the best of care" for a young child.

Later in the same article, someone identified as 'a CIA official' says of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: "His sons are important to him. The promise of their release and their return to Pakistan may be the psychological lever we need to break him." I'm sorry: children are not "psychological levers". They are children. And if we don't know the difference, then we should just hang it up right now, since we have plainly lost anything remotely resembling a sense of decency.

A quote from hilzoy at Obsidian Wings.

Human rights news.

Good.

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee passed an important bill to restore habeas corpus, the sacrosanct Constitutional right to challenge government detention in court, by a vote of eleven to eight.

Habeas corpus was revoked by last year's Military Commissions Act, which has been assailed as unconstitutional and un-American by leaders across the political spectrum. Today's habeas bill was backed by the Judiciary Committee's Democratic Chairman, Patrick Leahy, and its Republican Ranking Member, Arlen Specter. "The drive to restore this fundamental right has come from both sides of the aisle," said Sharon Bradford, an attorney at the bipartisan Constitution Project, in response to today's vote. "Restoring America's commitment to the rule of law is not a partisan cause; it is a patriotic one," she added.

Today's vote means the habeas bill can now be brought to the Senate floor at any time. One source with knowledge of the legislative plan said Majority Leader Harry Reid has committed to bringing the bill to a vote within the month.

Disgusting.

At least 39 people from a half-dozen countries have been held in secret U.S. detention centers worldwide for three or more years, and their fates remain unknown, six human-rights groups say in a report to be released Thursday.

Human rights advocates said that the document, which they called the most comprehensive account yet of so-called "ghost detainees," raises new alarms about the Bush administration's practice of secretly detaining suspected terrorists without any legal proceedings.

In five instances, the report says, U.S. authorities detained the wives or young children of suspects held in secret prisons. And in four instances, terrorism suspects in U.S. custody may have been transferred to Libya, once a major adversary of Washington.

I wouldn't have believed it if not for Richard Clarke.

New bit here on Iranian backing of the Taliban.

NATO officials say they have caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces, in what the officials say is a dramatic escalation of Iran's proxy war against the United States and Great Britain.

"It is inconceivable that it is anyone other than the Iranian government that's doing it," said former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stopped short earlier this week of blaming Iran, saying the U.S. did not have evidence "of the involvement of the Iranian government in support of the Taliban."

But an analysis by a senior coalition official, obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com, concludes there is clear evidence of Iran's involvement.

"This is part of a considered policy," says the analysis, "rather than the result of low-level corruption and weapons smuggling."

Iran and the Taliban had been fierce enemies when the Taliban was in power in Afghanistan, and their apparent collaboration came as a surprise to some in the intelligence community.

"I think their goal is to make it very clear that Iran has the capability to make life worse for the United States on a variety of fronts," said Seth Jones of the Rand Institute, "even if they have to do some business with a group that has historically been their enemy."

Now, when they say "the Iranian government," I'm assuming what they mean is a faction associated with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - subsequent mention of the Quds goons would seem to back that up. In the past, I probably would have meant that observation to be somewhat reassuring - the bad actors not representing the will of the most powerful forces in the government, and all - but at this point I'm actually kind of startled by how much independence the Ahmadinejad/thug faction seems to be able to exercise. It may be that the religious oligarchy that has typically run the country with an eye to its own preservation can't keep its extremists on the kind of leash I'd supposed, and that would be very bad news indeed.

Also bad news, by the way? Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Romney standing up on television and speculating about pre-emptive nuclear strikes on Iran. Even if they're too smart to actually do it should they come to office - and I wouldn't bet any money on any prominent Republican being too smart to do anything anymore - their pitch to the Republican base is going to end up on al-Jazeera, and it's going to encourage the worst actors in the Middle East to arm up to (in the eyes of the public) defend themselves against us. There's real harm to it, and it's unnecessary for anything beyond short-term political gain.

Just my way of saying these two men have pretty much already disqualified themselves for the presidency in my eyes. Big shock, I know.

“How much more evidence do we need that the military commission process doesn’t work?”

The Guantánamo experiment took another big hit yesterday; the short summary, from Reuters, reads like this:

The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo came to a screeching halt on Monday when a military judge dropped all the charges against a young Canadian in a ruling that could preclude trying any of the 380 prisoners.

Army Col. Peter Brownback, the judge, said the military tribunal lacked jurisdiction over Canadian Omar Khadr because he did not meet the definition of those subject to trial under a law the U.S. Congress drafted last year.

"It's not a technicality. It's another demonstration that the system simply doesn't work," said the tribunal's chief defense counsel, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan. "Fundamentally it is a system of justice that does not comport with American values."

The judge said a military review board had labeled Khadr an "enemy combatant" during a 2004 hearing in Guantanamo. But the Military Commissions Act adopted by the U.S. Congress in 2006 said only "unlawful enemy combatants" could be tried in the Guantanamo tribunals.

Brownback said Khadr did not meet that strict definition because there had been no formal proceeding designating him as unlawful.

Because none of the 380 foreign captives held at Guantanamo have been designated in that way, lawyers said they could not be tried unless they first faced proceedings reclassifying them as unlawful enemy combatants.

Further coverage at the New York Times spends a lot of time with Arlen Specter, the perpetually conflicted senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and in so doing seems to suggest that there may be some serious Congressional objection to stringing out this particular exemplar of grotesque administration vanity. He mentions specifically the restoration of habeas corpus, thank God.

Of course, anything Arlen Specter says is subject to revision upon pressure from on high.

Still, there's new reason to hope that arguably the most egregious end run the Bushies have tried around the Anglo-American tradition of civil liberties isn't going to have the lasting effects its proponents might have wanted - and I'll take what hope I can grab.

William Jefferson has been indicted.

No offense, but it's about time.

Steve Clemons is trying to trick me.

He's arguing that people who aren't insane are in ascent when it comes to shaping American foreign policy. I give Condoleezza Rice very little credit for political courage (or courage when it comes to her relationship with the president, at any rate), and I can't overlook the fact that George W. Bush is still ultimately in charge, and from some recent accounts in an unusually belligerent frame of mind.

Still, I want to believe things are getting better, and I have no reason to doubt the quality of most of the people to whom Mr. Clemons refers - even if I share in his worries that they'll be contained and marginalized by Dick Cheney's agents.

Whatever. There's cause for a little bit of optimism here, if anyone's in the mood to indulge.

QF, as the kids say, T.

We have eroded not only the good will of the post-9-11 days but also any residual appreciation from the countries we supported during the Cold War. This is due to several actions taken by the Bush administration, including pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol (environment), refusing to take part in the International Criminal Court (rule of law), and pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (arms control). The prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and the continuing controversy over the detainees in Guantanamo also sullied the image of America.

Collectively, these actions have sent an unequivocal message: The U.S. does not want to be a collaborative partner. That is the policy we have been "selling" through our actions, which speak the loudest of all.

As the director of media affairs at State, this is the conundrum that I faced every day. I tried through the traditional domestic media and, for the first time, through the pan-Arab TV and print media -- Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Hayat -- to reach people in the U.S. and abroad and to convince them that we should not be judged by our actions, only our words.

I was not a newcomer to these issues. I had served at the State Department for more than 17 years, through the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, numerous episodes of the Middle Eastern peace process and discussions in North Korea on its nuclear programs.

During each of these crises, we at least appeared to be working with others, even if we took actions with which others did not agree. We were talking to our enemies as well as our allies. Our actions and our words were in sync, we were transparent, our agenda was there for all to see, and our actions matched it.

This is not the case today. Much of our audience either doesn't listen or perceives our efforts to be meaningless U.S. propaganda.

This comes from Price Floyd, until recently the State Department's Director of Media Affairs - tip of the hat to Matt Yglesias for finding it (along with a follow-up by Fred Kaplan). There's nothing terribly new here, apart from the inside perspective, but every so often it helps to see the forest (the immense, leafy awfulness of the Bush years, in this particular case) for a few of its deformed little trees. An awful lot of the world is wary of notoriously self-righteous and disproportionately powerful countries under the best of circumstances; given that we've started from there and then spent the last few years making the world less stable, denying the substance of what we've done and grumbling about how no one understands how awesome we are is probably not a winning strategy - but it's really the only one that doesn't offend this administration's collective vanity (e.g., the Texas-based parts of this), so we seem to be stuck with it.

Lousy note to end a blog post on, huh?