And there was much shaking of fists.

Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga has urged the African Union to suspend Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe until he allows free and fair elections.

His appeal at an African Union summit in Egypt came as Zimbabwe's opposition said the country faced a constitutional crisis after an "illegal" poll.

I somehow doubt there's going to be much enthusiasm for this; the article quoted above suggests that Thabo Mbeki hasn't even admitted that the runoff was rigged, and Gabon's Omar Bongo has out and out embraced Mugabe's power grab. Still - absent justice or hope for positive change - I am somewhat gratified that the gentleman from Kenya was willing to say what he said even as Mugabe attended the event and maximized his gloating opportunities. Social awkwardness may be the worst thing this vicious bastard suffers while his people die.

By the way . . .

Today the blogosphere tells me that Obama gave a decent speech on patriotism and then, apparently, kneecapped Wes Clark for daring to suggest that McCain's military service doesn't automatically confer superior executive branch abilities. One can see why Obama wouldn't want the Republican machine to have an excuse to go on one of its month-long false outrage binges - Clark's statement is already being conflated with Swift Boating (by people who, in `04, thought Swift Boating was fine), for God's sake - but insofar as it hasn't actually gotten the issue off the table and actually embarrasses a good guy who seems to've said something relatively accurate and inoffensive, it seems like a fairly cruddy move on the candidate's part.

It has nothing to do with how the country should actually be governed, though, so I hope to be washing my hands of it and moving on as of . . . now.

More sunshine and butterflies and happy kittens from Seymour Hersh.

Okay, actually, his new article is more about how Congress seems to've granted the Bush administration four hundred million dollars to support Sunni fundamentalist terrorist groups in Iran, and how the assassinations and kidnappings those groups conduct are undermining our relationships with Iraq and Pakistan while potentially strengthening Ahmadinejad's political position in the run-up to Iran's 2009 elections. Good fun! There are even cliffhangers!

A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the American ships. At a White House news conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.

The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.”

Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

The implication seems to be that hardliners are hoping to use representatives from Iran's ethnic minorities to kill enough Iranian hardliners to trigger a crackdown on ethnic minorities which would then offend our national morality so greatly that we'd just have to intercede. There are other possible approaches, of course, but that one's so cynical it deserves special attention.

Whoa.

Desmond Tutu has crossed a line I didn't expect:

There is "a very good argument" for sending an international force into Zimbabwe if diplomatic pressure fails to sweep away President Robert Mugabe, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said Sunday, as Mugabe was set to be inaugurated for a new term as Zimbabwe's president.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate said the African Union could take a lead role in any such action, as he urged the bloc not to recognise Mugabe as Zimbabwe's head of state at its summit in Egypt this week.

"That crisis has to be resolved sooner rather than later and yes, I think that a very good argument can be made for having an international force to restore peace" under UN auspices, he said.

"I can't see why ... they would be chary and be too reluctant to intervene forcefully if need be," he said, responding to a question on BBC television on whether there should be military intervention.

Urging African leaders not to recognise Mugabe's re-election, Tutu said: "If you were to have a unanimous voice saying quite clearly to Mr Mugabe ... you are illegitimate and we will not recognise your administration in any shape or form, I think that that would be a very, very powerful signal and would really be able to strengthen the hand of the international community."

I don't expect anything to come of it - I don't think the UN and its major partners (the US very much included) have much will for another military engagement, and I don't think Thabo Mbeki's South Africa would invite such an expedition regardless. Still, I am glad that Reverend Tutu and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Nelson Mandela are bringing their moral stature to Zimbabwe's cause - that poor place desperately needs all the advocates it can get.

Just as an aside.

Teh Yglesias is clearly right to observe that the Taliban's capacity to raise hell in Pakistan is worrisome.

Still, to take an uncharacteristically upbeat note, I'm rather gratified that they don't seem to be getting any smarter; the Bush administration's unstinting support for Pervez Musharraf has opened the way for cunning theo-nationalists to win, at the very least, an even greater degree of passive support from the Pakistani state than they've enjoyed to date. And, indeed, we started to see movement in that direction, with the newly elected Pakistani legislature making a great deal of noise about negotiating with the Taliban camps massed inside Pakistani borders.

If Taliban forces insist on reminding Pakistanis that they're brutal, uncompromising thugs driven by messianic zeal to make everyone around them suffer a grotesque and archaic body of prejudice and systematized violence, though, that tacit governmental support is going to be harder and harder to maintain and to magnify. Sure, there are lunatics in Pakistan's military and intelligence services that're always going to find the Taliban sympathetic, and there are still more who'll see them as the stuff of fights not worth fighting, but hopefully a healthy majority will at least come to conclude that it's not really in Pakistan's best interests to see this particular ideology get back into a groove of unchecked expansion.

Knock on wood.

Democracy in action, Harare-style.

Voting is set to begin at 7 a.m.. Zimbabweans expect to be rounded up and taken to the polls. If they are unable to read or do not understand how to vote, according to a journalist in the state-owned news media, they will be “assisted” by a police officer who has already voted publicly in front of a senior officer, as apparently all members of the armed forces are required to do.

Citizens of voting age without an inked finger, which indicates that they have voted, will be regarded as traitors and subject to reprisals, the journalist said.

The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, told the BBC on Thursday, “There could be a massive turnout not because of the will of the people, but because of the role of the military and the role of traditionally people being forced to the polls.”

State-sponsored violence since the first round of voting on March 29 — in which Mr. Tsvangirai won more votes than Mr. Mugabe — has already resulted in thousands of beatings and at least 86 deaths, according to human rights workers in Harare, the capital.

Super.

I feel a perverse need to add that Thabo Mbeki's South Africa - home of "quiet diplomacy" - is aiming high here.

Mr. Mbeki and his team are even now scrambling to salvage a negotiated political settlement, and on Wednesday South Africa’s deputy foreign minister, Aziz Pahad, told reporters, “We can only say the mediation has failed if we reach a situation where Zimbabwe totally gets engulfed in a state of civil war.”

If Zimbabwe's citizens are beaten and terrorized into docility and submission, why, South Africa's crack diplomatic instincts will have been vindicated!

That second article linked above is more an artifact of the moment than a piece of journalism; it basically boils down to a series of quotes taken from people who're reasonably well acquainted with Mbeki (including his brother) and are wondering amongst themselves how he could let himself be complicit in Mugabe's crimes. Is it that they share a loathing for organized labor? Is he a megalomaniac with a diplomatic frame of reference? Does he just resent the leaders of the northern hemisphere more than he cares for the lives of the people in Zimbabwe? There's no way to know, since he himself certainly isn't talking to the reporter at hand.

But, sure, I guess it's good that historians of the future will have documentary evidence establishing that lots of people wondered about all this.

And scorn where scorn is due.

Obama gets one wrong.

Credit where credit is due.

In this case, that's with Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, who may've just saved the Everglades in one fell swoop.

The venerable governing tradition of holding one's breath `til one turns blue reappears!

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

. . .

White House pressure to ignore or edit the E.P.A.’s climate-change findings led to the resignation of one agency official earlier this month: Jason Burnett, the associate deputy administrator. Mr. Burnett, a political appointee with broad authority over climate-change regulations, said in an interview that he had resigned because “no more constructive work could be done” on the agency’s response to the Supreme Court.

He added, “The next administration will have to face what this one did not.”

Doesn't bode well for the poor bastards in Guantanamo - if the Bushies are ignoring this Supreme Court ruling, it's hard to imagine them gracefully obeying one that really strikes at what they imagine their legacy to be.

Long Wall cynicism watch.

Okay, contrary to what I wrote here, the revelations about the hiring practices at DoJ during the Ashcroft and Gonzales years do indeed constitute important news; sure, they mostly affirm an already well-documented state of affairs - albeit with a new level of specificity - but maybe the fact that this is actually coming out of the Office of Professional Responsibility rather than Talking Points Memo will lead to some institutional safeguards being instituted (even if the larger damage done in this era by this Justice Department will need more time to heal).

Maybe.

The reflexive dismissiveness I'm exhibiting comes from having survived the Reagan years as much as anything else. Iran-Contra lawbreakers were embraced by the right wing throughout the `90s and were rewarded for past misdeeds when the Age of Dubya arrived - and, oh, hasn't Elliot Abrams acquitted himself well! - and I'm not at all confident that, should Jeb Bush ride right-wing nostalgia to high office in 2016, the people with the most dramatic records of subverting constitutional government in the name of party primacy won't be swept back in and given cabinet positions. Why risk hoping for better?

*sigh*

But, yes, it's a big deal. Or it ought to be.

New from the Department of Things We Already Knew!

A former high-ranking Justice Department official broke the law and another official violated department policies by weighing the political leanings of law students and young attorneys who were applying for coveted internships and jobs, according to a Justice Department watchdog's report made public Tuesday.

The report by the Justice Department's inspector general, Glenn Fine, found that officials disproportionately weeded out those with liberal credentials over those with conservative credentials who were applying for the department's honors program and summer internships in 2002 and 2006.

The report singled out Michael Elston, the former chief of staff to former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, for allegedly violating laws by weeding out applicants who were left-leaning and Esther McDonald, a former Justice Department lawyer, for alleged misconduct for weighing their political leanings during the process.

. . .

Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft created a system in 2002 that required political appointees to approve all applicants' interviews. Previously, career employees within each department had decided which applicants to interview and select.

Under the changes instituted under Ashcroft and continued under his successor, Alberto Gonzales, the political appointees were encouraged to become more involved in the hiring process, Fine said.

*sigh*

We're all shocked. Shocked, I say.

Adding injury to injury.

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe has vowed to press ahead with Friday's run-off presidential election despite growing international condemnation.

Speaking to supporters, he said London and Washington could "shout as loud as they like" but the vote would be held.

South Africa's governing ANC party has accused his government of "riding roughshod" over democracy, while the UN has said a fair poll is "impossible".

Zimbabwe's opposition has withdrawn from the poll amid mounting violence.

Here's the thing that strikes me now. Read the above, read the article it came from, read every piece of contemporary Zimbabweana on the `net - it's pretty clear that there's no major audience anywhere that really believes that this is going to be an election that imparts any kind of legitimacy on its predesignated victor. There's just not going to be a dignified political fig leaf for Mugabe, either in the eyes of the world or in those of the people of Zimbabwe, and unless he's completely out of his mind he has to know it; my best guess at the moment is that he's going ahead with this act primarily because his vanity was pricked by his defeat in the last, somewhat less corrupt election, and he wants to demonstrate his unwillingness to be chastened. It's a sociopath's version of mooning the audience.

The consequence, of course, is that one of the poorest countries on the planet - one looking at a wave of famine that's going to result in something like genocide - is spending a good chunk of money on the normal logistics of a fake election and on the added costs of sending waves of butchers and rapists out to key communities and terrifying them into voting as demanded. It's not just that innocent people are being brutalized to support this farce; they're actually being forced to pay for the privilege.

It's all obvious when you think about it, sure, but it's strikingly offensive when you say it out loud.

Obama and the Democrats let us down.

On FISA, that is. If the candidate does indeed work to get the immunity bits of this "compromise" amended out, I'll happily cut him some slack. Otherwise, it's a disgrace.

Scott Lemieux has a little bit more. [I bet Greenwald has a lot more, but I'm afraid to read it - the concentration of his outrage could presumably flay off the casual reader's face.]

These are better complaints than I was expecting!

I've always thought that al-Hurra - the U.S.'s Arabic-language news network in the Middle East - would turn out to be a good idea if it were ever done well. Transparent journalism makes its own market, and if our fledgling network were capable of reporting honestly on our doings as well as those of the people we'd prefer the Arab street not to embrace . . . well, we'd get points for that. Once we leave the Bush era behind us, I like to think accountability won't be anything we'll have to fear, and maybe we'll start winning international policy debates on their merits.

I also want to believe in unicorns, incidentally.

But, regardless, the point has been moot for the last several years. Al-Hurra isn't competitive with al-Jazeera anywhere but in Iraq, and it turns out there're a lot of reasons for that.

Still, I'm genuinely pleased to discover that the primary cause isn't that the network is serving as a Bush mouthpiece that scorns the intelligence of its potential audience; one Fox News is enough. Instead, it's apparently just amateurish and boring.

And that's relatively easy to fix!

Zimbabwe sinks.

Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC have decided to withdraw from the scheduled runoff election, possibly in the hopes of forcing South Africa's increasingly pathetic Thabo Mbeki to concede that Robert Mugabe and his hangers on are not fostering a political climate that can pass for fair.

Opposition party leaders assumed that the ferocious violence against its supporters would abate once election observers from across Africa arrived, making it possible for them to campaign openly and mobilize their poll workers. Instead, Mr. Khumalo, the head of the team of election observers, said, “As the election was gaining momentum, so was the violence.”

In a decision that will be likely to disappoint some of his supporters, especially those who have paid a terrible price for backing him, Mr. Tsvangirai apparently decided the level of violence had become intolerable.

The party also concluded that the systematic campaign to displace thousands of its poll workers had been so effective in the three vote-rich Mashonaland provinces, where Mr. Tsvangirai made strong inroads into Mr. Mugabe’s support, that they would be unable to staff the polling stations on election day, leaving them open to ballot-box stuffing.

Mr. Tsvangirai, a charismatic former trade union leader who has been Mr. Mugabe’s hated rival for almost a decade, charged Sunday that the president’s violent, vengeful strategy had displaced 200,000 people, destroyed 20,000 homes and injured and maimed over 10,000 people in what he called “this orgy of violence.”

Sunday evening, downtown Harare was largely peaceful, with Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters retreating home early, leaving the streets to pro-Mugabe brigades, chanting, “Win or war!”

Mugabe's regime isn't displeased; they've confirmed that the bogus election is going ahead regardless, and so far it looks like South Africa is successfully keeping the official South African Development Community from declaring the whole charade illegitimate.

Meanwhile, the terrorism continues.

More FISA.

Hilzoy:

To recap: there are some minor fixes to the FISA law that everyone agrees should be adopted. The sticking point is whether companies that helped the government engage in surveillance that broke the law should receive immunity for their actions. It seems to me clear that the answer is 'no'. First, people who break the law should be held accountable. Second, we're not talking about some private citizen who might understandably have been inclined to give the government the benefit of the doubt on questions of law, but about large companies with serious legal departments. Third, since our government does not seem inclined to tell us exactly what it has been doing, discovery in these lawsuits has been about the only way in which we have found out anything at all. Shutting down these lawsuits might prevent us from ever finding out.

Most importantly, though, when the government asks someone to break the law, they hold a lot of the cards: the prestige of the Presidency, the power to exclude companies from federal contracts, and so on. Just about the only reason someone might have to say no, other than conscience, is the fear of legal liability. By immunizing these companies, we make it much more likely that the next time some President who thinks he has dictatorial powers asks a company to break the law, it will do so. And that's just wrong.

Laura Rozen:

A knowledgeable friend comments, "It's worse than Nixon because it extends [the argument that if the president says it's legal, it's legal] to cover non-government, private actors. Nixon limited himself to government actors."

Senators Leahy and Feingold:

“I have said since the beginning of this debate that I would oppose a bill that did not provide accountability for this administration’s six years of illegal, warrantless wiretapping,” said Leahy. “This bill would dismiss ongoing cases against the telecommunications carriers that participated in that program without allowing a judicial review of the legality of the program. Therefore, it lacks accountability measures that I believe are crucial.”

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) said what other liberal Democrats are saying privately: Democrats "capitulated" to the White House.

"The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation," Feingold said. "The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the president’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home. Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity."

And, finally for now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"Whatever gloss might be put on it, the so-called 'compromise' on immunity is anything but: the current proposal is the exact same blanket immunity that the Senate passed in February and that the House rejected in March, only with a few new bells and whistles so that political spinsters can claim that it actually provides meaningful court review," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "We call on all members of Congress to reject this sham compromise and maintain the rule of law, rather than deprive the millions of ordinary Americans whose privacy rights were violated of their day in court."

"Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."

Well, the Republican Congress was never able to get it done, but Steny Hoyer and company seem on the verge of passing legislation that broadens President Bush's powers to spy on Americans without warrants, immunizes the telecoms for all the illegal actions taken in previous mass surveillance activities, and ensures that none of the evidence surrounding any of these past illegal acts will be made available to the American public for the foreseeable future. Nice.

Let's quote some choice Greenwald here:

The provision granting amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, Title VIII, has the exact Orwellian title it should have: "Protection of Persons Assisting the Government." Section 802(a) provides:

[A] civil action may not lie or be maintained in a Federal or State court against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community, and shall be properly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the district court of the United States in which such action is pending that . . . (4) the assistance alleged to have been provided . . . was --

(A) in connection with intelligence activity involving communications that was (i) authorized by the President during the period beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on January 17, 2007 and (ii) designed to prevent or detect a terrorist attack, or activities in preparation of a terrorist attack, against the United States" and

(B) the subject of a written request or directive . . . indicating that the activity was (i) authorized by the President; and (ii) determined to be lawful.

So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words -- the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists -- and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.

That's the "compromise" Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now -- according to very credible reports -- pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It's full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we'll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it -- the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.

I'll post more in just a bit on the new warrantless eavesdropping powers George Bush is going to have under this law. They're vast and precisely the kind of powers that were abused by our Government for decades prior to FISA. Returning to that era is going to be part of the legacy not just of George Bush, but of this Democratic-controlled Congress.

. . .

Perhaps the most repellent part of this bill (though that's obviously a close competition) is 802(c) of the telecom amnesty section. That says that the Attorney General can declare that the documents he submits to the court in order to get these lawsuits dismissed are secret, and once he declares that, then: (a) the plaintiffs and their lawyers won't ever see the documents and (b) the court is barred from referencing them in any way when it dismisses the lawsuit. All the court can do is issue an order saying that the lawsuits are dismissed, but it is barred from saying why they're being dismissed or what the basis is for the dismissal.

So basically, one day in the near future, we're all going to learn that one of our federal courts dismissed all of the lawsuits against the telecoms. But we're never going to be able to know why the lawsuits were dismissed or what documents were given by the Government to force the court to dismiss the lawsuits. Not only won't we, the public, know that, neither will the plaintiffs' lawyers. Nobody will know except the Judge and the Government because it will all be shrouded in compelled secrecy, and the Judge will be barred by this law from describing or even referencing the grounds for dismissal in any way. Freedom is on the march.

Look, blogs lend themselves to histrionics and absolutist positions, and I'm as guilty as anyone of taking that road. I'll try to restrain myself here: if this legislation passes, it's just going to codify what the Bushies have been doing for years. In practice, it'll feel no more like a police state than it has throughout the twenty-first century; most citizens won't have the slightest clue that anything has changed - which means, for most, nothing will have changed. What we can't investigate won't change our minds.

At the New Republic, Josh Patashnik spends a couple of paragraphs giving us context and the relative up-side - what purportedly makes the bill a compromise, rather than an overt capitulation to institutionalized unaccountability:

What did the Democrats get in return? Four things, as far as I can tell. One, the bill requires the inspectors general of the DOJ, DOD, and NSA (among others) to submit a report to Congress reports on whether the program was legal. This might be valuable if it were an Obama administration submitting such a report (which it could do on its own, if it wanted to), but there's little doubt as to what a lame-duck Bush administration will find. Two, there are more restrictions placed on the actual surveillance powers given to the president going forward; Leahy seems pleased on this front. Three, the legislation sunsets at the end of 2012, so Congress will have to renew it then if it wants to keep its provisions in place. And four, it reiterates that FISA is the "exclusive means" by which surveillance may be conducted--that is, Bush doesn't have the constitutional authority to simply ignore it. Presumably Bush will claim he does retain that authority.

In sum, not a terrific bill, and it will be interesting to see whether Obama ends up supporting it. About the best that can be said of it is that if Democrats weren't willing to risk letting wiretapping orders start expiring in August, it's probably a good idea to get this off the table now, rather than go through another humiliating last-minute staring contest. They only won the last one because they could plausibly claim that no wiretapping orders were actually being placed in jeopardy; this time around, that wouldn't have been the case.

That last point, I think, is fairly bogus; back in happier days, we assumed the Dems were just going to pass a six-month extension of the current status quo, and the evidence seems to support the notion that that doesn't lead to rioting in the streets. But, whatever - it's weak sauce, but maybe it's what the Democrats actually believe.

That doesn't make them any less useless.

What makes this case so revolting to me, really, is that it highlights the fact that for those of us who believe in relatively maximalist approaches to civil liberties and in government powers subject to oversight and appropriate restraint there is no representation. When push comes to shove, the Democrats are as alarmist or as subject to institutionalized bribery as are the Republicans - or maybe they're just so terrified of seeming soft that they won't fight for what they believe - and there's no one else for whom we may reasonably vote. We'll keep on losing our rights at the margins, and the people responsible will calmly lie about what it means and tell us we can't look too deeply into it, and it'll all keep going. Hopefully, it won't affect our lives much, but if it one day does there won't be anything we can do about it.

In all fairness, ActBlue has raised over a quarter million dollars in the past few days to use to campaign against this new legislation - and against the people most responsible. Maybe democracy isn't as sick as I fear; maybe this'll do some good.

Barack Obama coming out strongly in the pro-accountability camp would also be a positive development. So far, his rhetoric has been reasonably good, but he hasn't really been out front on the issue - and, in fact, he's still not. For those of us who've backed him because we perceive a refreshing tendency to judge situations wisely and speak out on them forthrightly . . . well, this is a test.

So far, he's failing, but there's time to come back.

I think I could come to like living in science fiction!

We're seeing attacks on cancer from another new direction these days: massive cloning of white blood cells, which are then reintroduced to the donor and targeted toward specific types of cancer - in this case, melanoma. It may not be a cure, but if it makes cancer - even just some kinds of cancer - as manageable as diabetes, it's a huge step.

Plus, y'know, badass.

War crimes.

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote.

It's almost disconcerting not to be out at the fringes of polite opinion on this issue anymore.

More here.

Truce?

Israel has agreed to an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire with Hamas for the Gaza area starting Thursday, officials here said Wednesday.

“Israel has accepted the Egyptian proposal,” said David Baker, a spokesman for the Israeli government. “We hope this will lead to a cessation of the constant rocket fire on Israeli towns and cities.”

Israel is expected as part of the deal to ease the economic blockade of Gaza, which is controlled by the Islamic group Hamas. Israeli government officials emphasized that sanctions would be lifted in accordance with the security situation on the ground.

I'm afraid this has to be considered tenuous, fragile, and presumptively on the verge of collapse until it's been around for at least six months - but, still, it's the first really good news Gaza's heard in years. Let's hope it holds up against the inevitable sabotage.

At least fifty-one people were killed in a Baghdad explosion yesterday.

What else is there to say?

There's a crisis coming.

The Pakistani military is so angry over the American airstrikes here last week that it is threatening to postpone or cancel an American program to train a paramilitary force in counterinsurgency for combating Islamist militants, two Pakistani government officials said.

Some Pakistani officials are convinced that the Americans deliberately fired on their military, killing 11 men from the very paramilitary force the Americans want to train, an accusation the Americans deny.

The uncertainty over the program reflects how deeply scarred the United States’ alliance with Pakistan, already strained, has been since the June 10 airstrikes, Pakistani officials and Western diplomats said.

The $400 million training program is intended to combat militancy by fielding a paramilitary force, called the Frontier Corps, from among the tribes that live in the border areas. It was a compromise between American and Pakistani officials looking for the least intrusive way to fortify security in an area where the Pakistani government has rejected the idea of American soldiers and where even the regular Pakistani Army is often not welcome.

Ending or delaying the program, which is already under way, would deny the United States what little leverage it has in the tribal areas to combat a rising number of cross-border attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan against American and NATO forces this year.

Unless I'm missing something incredibly significant, I can't imagine the Pakistanis are correct in their suspicions. I'm pretty sure that most of them don't even believe it. Cheney's policy shop is thuggish, sure, but surely not even they could think that blowing up Pakistani troops would be the most effective way to get their diplomatic point across.

Right?

Let's pretend.

Given my irreducible Bush-loathing, I'd love to blame the diplomatic climate on the administration's miserable relationship with the Pakistani legislature - the people brought in to repudiate the dictator we've been so steadfastly propping up - but, in this scene, the most extreme signs of distrust have been coming from the Pakistani military, which is clearly still disproportionately pro-Musharraf at the upper echelons (as evinced by the fact that Musharraf is still in power).

There's no quick fix to this, though sucking up and making a vigorous public apology or ten for the accidental deaths of Pakistani soldiers would probably not be inappropriate (unless we're planning on coming out and saying that they were part of a Pashtun/Taliban convoy or some such). It's just an ugly situation; the Taliban was always to some degree a product of the Pakistani intelligence services, and . . . well, it's not exactly a surprise that major Pakistani players would see their interests as being somewhat in conflict with ours - particularly when we're prone to playing somewhat fast and loose with other countries' sovereignty even when we're not provoked.

And here? We're provoked. The Taliban and assorted other radicals have been staging attacks into Afghanistan from Pakistan for years now; the cost for us of crossing Pakistan's borders and shooting back is, for the moment, considerably less than the cost of sitting back and letting them blow up random Afghans and retreat.

But, no mistake, the cost is going up.

"If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

It's not very satisfying, creatively, to throw up links to articles that discuss practices that I find self-evidently disturbing. Commentary seems redundant, and - given the nature of my sense of humor - frequently downright trivializing.

So, none of that here. I'll just note that the quote in the title comes from this McClatchy article, which touches on heady days in 2002, when the powers that be were hiding captives from the Red Cross, so that stories of their abuse/interrogation tactics wouldn't get out.

Here's a punchline for you:

In one prophetic e-mail on Oct. 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, wrote a colleague: "This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of. ... Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this." The objections from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines prompted Navy Capt. Jane Dalton, legal adviser to the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to begin a review of the proposed techniques.

But Dalton, who's now retired, told the hearing Tuesday that the review was aborted quickly. Myers, she said, took her aside and told her that then-Defense Department general counsel William Haynes "does not want this ... to proceed."

The sweet smell of deceit in the morning.

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

The reported evidence -- some of which is expected to be made public at a Senate hearing today -- also shows that military lawyers raised strong concerns about the legality of the practices as early as November 2002, a month before Rumsfeld approved them. The findings contradict previous accounts by top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal.

Whoops.


EDIT: The subject heading originally contained the word "perjury" in the place of the current "deceit." Ordinarily, I'd leave it as is - since the Wall isn't in any way influential, I figure I can go for shock value over precision every so often.

By which I mean almost constantly.

Still, there may well be some real crimes in evidence here - crimes of the lying to Congress variety, in addition to the more serious Geneva violations - and it's intellectually bracing to consider them. If you're curious, and in a vindictive state of mind, you could do worse than to check out this article. It dates back to Alberto Gonzales's shameless performance before the Senate, but the criminal statutes it cites haven't been repudiated by the legislative branch in the time since.

Today's big rhetorical questions.

The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

Army officials denied that Mr. Smith had been removed because of the dispute, but confirmed that they had reversed his decision, arguing that blocking the payments to KBR would have eroded basic services to troops. They said that KBR had warned that if it was not paid, it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services.

How in the name of God could even the Bush administration voluntarily accept a status quo wherein private contractors blackmail the U.S. government with a credible threat of denying essential services to active troops in a combat theater? Hm? How is that seen as anything other than obscenely irresponsible?

Jesus wept.

Cassandra is alarmed.

Okay, it's actually Glenn Greenwald, and I'm rather desperately hoping - contrary to the Cassandra myth cited above - that he's gonna be wildly wrong about this:

The Democratic Party's embrace of the most radical and lawless aspects of the Bush administration will, by most accounts, be complete this week. The putative "compromise" that Congressional Democrats have agreed to with regard to spying powers and telecom amnesty is no such thing. The White House has signed off on the "compromise" precisely because it gives the President everything he and Dick Cheney have been demanding, simply dressed up in the most transparent wrapping to enable Democratic House leaders to lie to their supporters by claiming that they won important concessions.

Although, as I indicated yesterday, public reports about the bill's telecom immunity provisions were unclear, I've now been able to confirm definitively that the "compromise" that Democrats have agreed to does contain guaranteed immunity for the telecoms. The bill provides that the federal courts are required to dismiss the suits and immunize the telecoms as long as conditions are met that everyone already knows will be fulfilled. Put another way, the bill simply provides that the federal courts must dismiss all lawsuits against telecoms for their illegal spying as long as telecoms can demonstrate "A, B, and C" -- where "A, B and C" are already known in advance to be true and easily proven. The Democrat-supported bill is nothing more than a pre-ordained, mandated script provided to the courts to compel them to dismiss the telecom lawsuits.

Worse still, the conditions for dismissal in the Democrats' "compromise" bill shows how corrupt and lawless they are. Courts are required to immunize telecoms as long as telecoms merely demonstrate that the illegal spying they enabled was requested by the President and was represented to them by the Executive branch to be lawful. Courts will be required to dismiss the lawsuits without any consideration whatsoever of whether these telecom-defendants actually broke the law.

Put another way, Congressional Democrats -- not the Federalist Society, but Congressional Democrats -- are embracing the proposition that the President has the power to instruct private citizens to break the law. As the ACLU puts it:

This will set an incredibly dangerous precedent.

Why have privacy laws if the president can write you a note to disobey them? When the government asks companies to break the law in the future, they will have precedent that Congress will cover their tracks.

Democrats are about to institutionalize a proposition that has been rejected since the Nuremberg Trials -- namely, that individuals (or, more accurately, lobbyist-protected corporations) are free to break the law as long as they can claim afterwards that they were told by the Leader to do so. That's the principle which the Democratic Party -- following their standard pattern of having enough of their members join a virtually unanimous GOP while the Democratic leadership enables it all -- is about to write into our laws.

The excuse Congressional Democrats are using for this behavior -- that passing a FISA/telecom bill is necessary to avoid political harm -- is as false as it is cowardly. As I noted the other day, there are all sorts of easy ways to avoid political controversy if that goal were really what was driving them, including simply extending the existing PAA orders by 6-9 months so that they don't expire in August.

The Democrats have given us a few happy surprises over the last few months - one or two specifically on the subject of telecom immunity - and I'm hoping that the members of the House who stood up on the right side of the matter and weren't instantly struck down by the wrath of voters and God won't soften now just because they've been offered the chance to theatrically shift responsibility over to the courts.

But, alas, Greenwald isn't the only one who's been seeing the rumors, and since his response is so spot-on, I figure there's no harm in just quoting it pre-emptively.

Here's hoping - really, really hoping - it's needlessly alarmist, though. How many times do we have to relive the fall of this particular Troy?

This is not who we're supposed to be!

"There were Afghans being sent to Guantanamo because of bad intelligence," said Helaluddin Helal, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for security from 2002 to early 2004. "In the beginning, everyone was trying to give intelligence to the Americans ... the Americans were taking action without checking this information."

Nusrat Khan was in his 70s when American troops shoved him into an isolation cell at Bagram in the spring of 2003. They blindfolded him, put earphones on his head and tied his hands behind his back for almost four weeks straight, Khan said.

By the time he was taken out of the cell, Khan — who'd had at least two strokes years before he was arrested and was barely able to walk — was half-mad and couldn't stand without help. Khan said that he was taken to Guantanamo on a stretcher.

Several Afghan officials, including the country's attorney general, later said that Khan, who spent more than three years at Guantanamo, wasn't a threat to anyone; he'd been turned in as an insurgent leader because of decades-old rivalries with competing Afghan militias.

Ghalib Hassan was an Interior Ministry-appointed district commander in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, a man who'd risked his life to help the U.S.-backed government. Din Mohammed, the former governor of that province and now the governor of Kabul, said there was no question that local tribal leaders, offended by Hassan's brusque style, fed false information about him to local informants used by American troops.

The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy's findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, refused to speak with McClatchy.

The Pentagon's only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.

"These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians," Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.

That's from an extremely depressing McClatchy article describing the results of investigations into sixty-six former Guantanamo detainees. The details are brutal and ugly and they're what you really should be reading, but if you want a dry summary, I'd go with this:

The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn't belong there.

Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida's leadership, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication — and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are — most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren't terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.

One would hope that the poor bastards still in custody after six years really are, each and every one, the worst of the worst - but it's pretty clear that's not true. And one would hope that they're all at least being treated humanely, but - even if the worst is behind them - there seems still to be damage being done.

But, of course, the only change the administration has signaled so far is a return to the use of secret evidence in military trials. Because, obviously, allowing potentially innocent people to present an informed defense is contrary to the goal of getting them convicted and out of the way so that they will no longer be quite so embarrassing.

There's nothing so bad that Robert Mugabe can't make it worse.

There's a new article up at the Guardian on the state of affairs in Zimbabwe as the presidential run-off election draws nearer. The short synopsis is that the vote is looking as fixed as it can possibly be, opposition figures are being charged with treason just to be safe, and Mugabe is promising "war" on the off-chance that all of that still doesn't result in a poll count that he can spin as a win.

Mugabe's opponent won the previous election, of course, and the people that voted for him were rewarded with government-enforced starvation, state-sponsored terrorism, and breathtakingly cynical assurances from South Africa, their only possible lifeline, that the process was moving along smoothly and fairly. I don't suppose anyone has any great hope for better any more.

Why doesn't anyone want to join our empire?

The Bush administration's Iraq policy suffered two major setbacks Friday when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki publicly rejected key U.S. terms for an ongoing military presence and anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for a new militia offensive against U.S. forces.

During a visit to Jordan, Maliki said negotiations over initial U.S. proposals for bilateral political and military agreements had "reached a dead end." While he said talks would continue, his comments fueled doubts that the pacts could be reached this year, before the Dec. 31 expiration of a United Nations mandate sanctioning the U.S. role in Iraq.

The moves by two of Iraq's most powerful Shiite leaders underscore how the presence of U.S. troops has become a central issue for Iraqi politicians as they position themselves for provincial elections later this year. Iraqis across the political spectrum have grown intolerant of the U.S. presence, but the dominant Shiite parties -- including Maliki's Dawa party -- are especially fearful of an electoral challenge from new, grass-roots groups.

"All the politicians are trying to prove that they care more about Iraqis than they do about Americans -- otherwise they know the people and the voters will not support them," said Ala Maaki, a senior lawmaker with Iraqi's largest Sunni political party. "I think we could see al-Maliki and Moqtada Sadr trying to one-up the other today and see who can take the strongest stand against the Americans."

There's more here.

There have been indications that majorities of Iraqis have wanted us out (or mostly out) of the country for a very long time now; we just don't talk about it much on this side of the oceans because, well, the views of the Iraqi people don't affect our policies at all. They don't know what's good for themselves, right?

But that can only be tenable for so long.

The great Gaelic "No."

Europe was thrown into political turmoil on Friday by Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, a painstakingly negotiated blueprint for consolidating the European Union’s power and streamlining its increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy.

The defeat of the treaty, by a margin of 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent, was the result of a highly organized “no” campaign that played to Irish voters’ deepest visceral fears about the European Union. For all its benefits, many people in Ireland and in Europe feel, the union is remote, undemocratic and ever more inclined to strip its smaller members of the right to make their own laws and decide their own futures.

The repercussions of Friday’s vote are enormous, for Ireland and for Europe. To take effect, the treaty must be ratified by all 27 members of the European Union. So the defeat by a single country, even one as tiny as Ireland, has the potential effect of stopping the whole thing cold.

Whoa.

Now, I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't been following pan-European politics closely at all over the last couple of years - I only found out about the Irish vote a couple of days back, and what I read seemed to indicate that the expected scenario was a win with moderately low turnout.

Not so, it seems.

As for the Lisbon Treaty itself, the summaries I've read make it seem fairly benign, and I have no real reason to doubt that it offers some real structural improvements in the EU. I haven't studied it well enough to say that I would've voted for it, had I been eligible, but it doesn't look totally ridiculous on its face.

That said, there's a clear and frustrating pattern here. We've been seeing it for years: European politicians and bureaucrats craft these proto-federal mechanisms to cover the continent, they do what they can to get them ratified with a minimum of input and fuss from European citizenries, and then when things go wrong they stand up and insist that they'll find ways around the will of whatever electorate has spoken. I'm sure the intent is good - at least, I hope the intent is good - but it's a process that really inescapably seems to make people feel marginalized and disrespected. I'd be wary of the underlying views toward democratic participation, myself.

It's a shame, really. A streamlined, healthy EU would almost certainly benefit Europeans and trading partners alike; it's just not clear that that's what's being made at the moment.

Boumediene, again.

Glenn Greenwald's on it too.

Boumediene.

I've flagged a few judicial rulings over the course of this blog's lifetime - and if you've read any of those posts you'll have pegged that I'm speaking as an amateur. I'm not competent to comment on the extent to which any given pronouncement is consistent with dominant, recognized precedent, and more than a few lawyers would say that means I'm not competent to comment at all. Interpretation is a subtle game, and it's built upon a very complicated history of jurisprudence; ideally, Bush v. Gore notwithstanding, what the judiciary does is carefully and conservatively extrapolate from existing conventions, and as such the appropriateness of its decisions would seem to be outside the realm of responsible political discourse. Legislative remedies to its decisions might be fair game, but the decisions themselves are bricks of logic, immutable against a gale of debate. Right?

Well, sometimes.

Sometimes the scale of the case is such that I think the socially responsible thing is to have people outside of the legal profession consider - from a meta-legalistic perspective - whether the ruling is consistent with their broad understanding of American democracy as a whole. It's just as much an obligation of the citizenry as is having an opinion of major legislation, even if the means of correction (or approbation!) are less easily manipulated by the layperson than the stuff of Tuesday morning votes or chiding phone calls to one's senators. It's appropriate to care!

All of that having been said: the Supreme Court today found that habeas corpus applies in Guantanamo. I feel like I'm getting my country back.

Andrew Sullivan's got a commentary roundup here, if you want to dig into it.

If ever there was a country that could convert me to neoconservatism . . .

Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, ladies and gentlemen:

Zimbabwean authorities confiscated a truck loaded with 20 tons of American food aid for poor schoolchildren and ordered that the wheat and pinto beans aboard be handed out to supporters of President Robert Mugabe at a political rally instead, the American ambassador said Wednesday.

This year's cereal crop yield in Zimbabwe is expected to be a record low, and the UN is predicting that the government's crackdown on foreign aid workers will impact the lives of some four million Zimbabweans - almost a third of the country's population. Christopher Hitchens is calling it "slow motion mass-murder," and he's right.

The idea that just won't die.

Six months ago, after American intelligence agencies declared that Iran had shelved its nuclear-weapons program, the chances of a U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iran before President Bush left office seemed remote.

Now, thanks to persistent pressure from Israeli hawks and newly stated concerns by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the idea of a targeted strike meant to cripple Iran's nuclear program is getting a new hearing.

. . .

Intelligence analysts disagree over the likelihood of a military strike on Iran before Bush leaves office. But there's little disagreement about the possible repercussions, which could include missile strikes on Israel, an attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities, renewed attacks on Israel from Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, a resurgence of Shiite Muslim resistance to U.S. forces in Iraq or an attack on oil shipping in the Persian Gulf, which could send crude oil prices well above $200 a barrel.

It might also be a gift to the incompetent and rather deranged presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - nothing makes demagoguery easier than direct military attacks.

Anyway, the article's here; make of it what you will.

That's kind of the point.

Persistent violence by government agents and supporters is making it impossible for Zimbabwe to hold a fair presidential runoff election this month, according to a report released Monday by New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The study, which included interviews with victims, details violence against opposition supporters across the country and the creation of "no-go zones" in rural areas to deny access to foreign journalists and human rights workers and prevent them from witnessing the abuses.

The report says Zimbabwe is suffering the worst election violence in its history, overwhelmingly perpetrated by the ruling ZANU-PF party against Movement for Democratic Change activists and supporters in the run-up to the June 27 vote.

"Time has nearly run out for Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU) to make the necessary political interventions to end the violence and ensure a free and fair vote," the report says, calling on regional powers to abandon mediation efforts with President Robert Mugabe and instead take strong action to stop the attacks.

"If current conditions are maintained, there is no possibility of a credible, free and fair poll," the report adds.

The whole ugly thing is here.

Meanwhile, in Iraq (oh, and in Iran) . . .

Our man in Baghdad, Nouri al-Maliki, has been talking to the Iranians. Partially, it's to schmooze for help in restoring electricity; partially, it's to promise that the Iraqi government isn't going to let the Bush administration launch a war on Iran from Iraqi soil. I know it seems like it should be unnecessary, but . . . well, McClatchy's got a nice little piece up on the Bush administration's wish list in its own current negotiations with the Iraqi leadership:

Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed "status of forces" agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely.

Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the Iraqi government rejected this proposal along with another U.S. demand that would have effectively handed over to the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq. Lawmakers said they fear this power would drag Iraq into a war between the United States and Iran.

. . .

The 58 bases would represent an expansion of the U.S. presence here. Currently, the United States operates out of about 30 major bases, not including smaller facilities such as combat outposts, according to a U.S. military map.

And, sure, it's asking a lot. But "the top U.S. Embassy spokesman in Iraq" instructs us all to chill, and to chill mightily. We're not going over the top, he promises.

"Look, there is going to be no occupation," said U.S. spokesman Adam Ereli. "Now it's perfectly understandable that there are those that are following this closely in Iraq who have concerns about what this means for Iraqi sovereignty and independence. We understand that and we appreciate that and that's why nothing is going to be rammed down anybody's throat.

"It's kind of like a forced marriage. It just doesn't work. They either want you or they don't want you. You can't use coercion to get them to like you," he added.

You don't say.

Don't misinterpret that sarcasm - I tend to concur with that whole business of coercion being doomed to failure! It's just that it seems the U.S. government isn't above trying.

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.

US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.

Iraq's foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq's funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq's independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new "strategic alliance" with the United States.

The threat by the American side underlines the personal commitment of President George Bush to pushing the new pact through by 31 July. Although it is in reality a treaty between Iraq and the US, Mr Bush is describing it as an alliance so he does not have to submit it for approval to the US Senate.

McCain's response has been a big no comment, it should be added. Obama's making it known that he feels any deal has to be submitted to Congress, but I don't suppose the mad dauphin really cares.

Press coverage seems to suggest that the Iraqi people are almost universally against the terms the Bush administration is demanding as well; some are even promising a whole new round of violence.

So, basically, I'm wondering if Nouri al-Maliki could be enticed to come here and promise he won't cave to Bush when he's done with the Iranians. I know I'd sleep better.

It almost seems sweet.

Chairman Waxman and Ranking Member Davis issued a proposed Committee report on White House contacts with Jack Abramoff that concludes that Mr. Abramoff had personal contact with President Bush, that high-level White House officials held Mr. Abramoff and his associates in high regard and solicited recommendations from them on policy matters, that Mr. Abramoff and his associates influenced some White House actions, and that Mr. Abramoff and his associates offered White House officials expensive tickets and meals.

Awww.

Shame about all the lying, though.

I regretfully call bullshit.

Well, maybe "bullshit" isn't quite the word; still, over the last twenty-four hours, there's been a fair amount of noise generated on the left side of the American blogosphere over an article from the Daily Mail that explores the end of John McCain's first marriage. A short synopsis would go something like this: while McCain was in Vietnam, his first wife was involved in a horrible car accident, and reconstructive surgery left her shorter and less agile than she had been before. Furthermore, she gained weight. McCain returned home, became restless, left her for a gorgeous heiress, and several of her friends (including, conspicuously, Ross Perot) think he's a shallow son of a bitch.

Now, there's a lot I don't like about Senator McCain, but this? I dare say there are a lot of marriages that wouldn't survive having one of the participants being kept and tortured in a Vietnamese prison camp for years at a time. I don't know what McCain's mindset was like at the time, and I'm simply not fit to judge. People who know all the parties involved may be on surer footing, but . . . well, I didn't vote for Perot in `92, and my sense of his judgement had a lot to do with that.

Anyway, the first Mrs. McCain apparently still considers the senator a friend, and insofar as any of this is any of my business, I think that settles it for me.

Besides, there are better reasons not to vote for the man.

Katherine Holly Rocket!

At long last, a certain legend among men and the still more extraordinary woman who puts up with him (whose webpage is less anonymous, and which I'll therefore leave unlinked) have perpetuated their genes and thereby brought new radness into the world! Let us all grant them many w00ts!

Less flippantly, I've known Matias and Jenny since high school, and I'm hard-pressed to think of any better people to whom a baby might be born. Youth and wisdom and discipline and love: they're intoxicatingly good at all of it, and have been since they were at least fifteen or sixteen, and that's grounds for just a mind-blowingly good environment in which a kid can grow up.

All my best wishes, hopes and prayers, guys.

The valedictory.

Senator Clinton's endorsement of Senator Obama is up here if you missed it, and the emerging consensus - hell, the immediate consensus - on the left side of the fence is that it was just about the best speech she could have given. It was a hell of a gift to her supporters, to her erstwhile opponent, and to the party as a whole, and . . . well, thank you, senator.

Now we just have to beat Senator McCain.

Updates from the two worst governments on Earth.

More unnecessary suffering ahead in Burma and Zimbabwe.

Happy Saturday!

Anxiety is the appropriate response.

I'm not sure that there's any point to mentioning this, beyond ensuring that the date and circumstances are properly registered in my electronic archives, but here it is nonetheless: uncaring fate kneed the U.S. economy in the groin on Friday.

A soaring jobless rate, an unprecedented jump in oil prices and a sliding dollar sent tremors through financial markets yesterday and cast fresh doubt on how soon the U.S. economy would be able to break out of a pattern of feeble growth and financial instability.

The nation's unemployment rate shot skyward last month to 5.5 percent, the biggest leap in more than two decades, and crude oil prices rocketed up $10.75 a barrel, sending U.S. stock markets tumbling and shaking the economic and political landscape just as the general election season begins.

It was one of the worst days of economic news in a year already well-stocked with disappointment. The Dow Jones industrial average reacted by plunging 394.64 points, or 3.13 percent, its sharpest decline since Feb. 27, 2007. Other major indicators also dropped about 3 percent.

"Today's events are a combination of really nasty news for American consumers," said Andrew Tilton, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs.

Crude oil prices hit a new trading record of more than $139 a barrel before settling at $138.54. This more than erased a drop earlier in the week and promised further increases in motor fuel prices. The nationwide average is already just a penny shy of $4 a gallon for regular gasoline.

The one-day increase in crude prices was the biggest ever in dollar terms, the largest in percentage terms since June 1996 and more than the cost of an entire barrel a decade ago.

Meanwhile, the jobless rate for May was up 0.5 percentage points from April, the Labor Department said, the largest swing in a single month since 1986. The number of jobs on employers' payrolls fell by 49,000, the fifth consecutive monthly decline for an economy that has shed 324,000 jobs this year. Joblessness rose across race and gender. Professional, commercial, construction, business service and manufacturing employers all cut jobs.

"When you have an employment situation like that, and you see crude bounce . . . that's shocking to anything that's going to touch the consumer," said Bart Barnett, head of equity trading at Morgan Keegan, an investment and brokerage firm. "Outside of anything to do with oil, everything is down -- airlines, restaurants, furniture stores, retailers, transportation."

I won't think less of you if you freak out.

Wow.

We have achieved levitation. All we need to do now is not destroy the planet and the twenty-first century will be something to gloat about!

It turns out you have to go through a lot of tragedies before reaching farce.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

. . .

The Senate committee also found that Pentagon officials concealed the contacts with Ghorbanifar from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Pentagon officials also provided Senate investigators with an inaccurate account of events and, with support from two unnamed officials in Cheney's office, continued meeting with Ghorbanifar after contact with him was officially ordered to stop.

The whole article is here, and it's worth reading.

My own two cents? I'm inclined to suspect that Ghorbanifar was telling his interviewers what they wanted to hear and collecting as much cash from it as he could; he was asking for millions in "seed money" as the stories went on, you'll note. Not hard to see how Occam's Razor might cut.

I'm not saying the Iranians are above playing us; the strangely Alcibiades-like career of Ahmed Chalabi is pretty strong evidence that Iranian intelligence was trying to get what it could. Still, it's worth remembering that in late 2001 and 2002, the American invasion of Iraq wasn't a clear blessing for Iran; on the contrary, we were openly hostile, and that round of conquest combined with the Afghan campaign put Iran directly between two of our armies. From such things nervousness comes. In fact, the Iranians were freaked out enough to offer all sorts of concessions on issues ranging from nukes to Palestinian support in exchange for security guarantees (which, of course, we were unwilling to offer).

God knows they hated Saddam - and with good cause! - but, even so, I'm just not sure the Iranian elite would've seen encouraging American aggression as a risk worth taking.

Still, whatever happened, it sure seems like the DoD got played and covered it up. And, sure, that was par for the course back then; it still shouldn't be given a pass.

John McCain is determined to disappoint me.

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Mr. McCain believes that “neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the A.C.L.U. and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin wrote.

And if Mr. McCain is elected president, Mr. Holtz-Eakin added, he would do everything he could to prevent terrorist attacks, “including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.”

Although a spokesman for Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, denied that the senator’s views on surveillance and executive power had shifted, legal specialists said the letter contrasted with statements Mr. McCain previously made about the limits of presidential power.

In an interview about his views on the limits of executive power with The Boston Globe six months ago, Mr. McCain strongly suggested that if he became the next commander in chief, he would consider himself obligated to obey a statute restricting what he did in national security matters.

Mr. McCain was asked whether he believed that the president had constitutional power to conduct surveillance on American soil for national security purposes without a warrant, regardless of federal statutes.

He replied: “There are some areas where the statutes don’t apply, such as in the surveillance of overseas communications. Where they do apply, however, I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.”

I'm guessing he was surrounded by fewer crazy people back then.

There's more here.

Zimbabwe didn't fix itself while I was off gleaming the cube.

The tragedy just keeps dragging on. At the risk of sounding like an arrogant American out to disregard and disparage international institutions, there's a big part of me that had hoped that Mugabe would be summarily detained when he made his defiant appearance in Italy last week. It would've been a direct violation of a great many UN safeguards, and maybe it would've damaged the institution and enraged the Chinese and . . . yeah, okay, lots of real-world downsides there.

On the other hand, maybe taking away ZANU-PF's nationalist hero figurehead - even for just a couple of days - would've startled the powers that be in Zimbabwe's brutal plutocracy into giving some ground to the country's majority party.

Or, yeah, maybe they would've flailed out blindly and killed tens of thousands of their own citizens.

No, I see the sanity of the road taken, and I guess I don't seriously question it - or, at least, I can't pretend I can see a better alternative (outside of somehow blackmailing Thabo Mbeki into being more proactive). But the situation in Zimbabwe is just so dire that passivity can't help but seem like a really subtle expression of malice.

Keyboard-bashing resumes! Everybody wave your hands!

So, a friend of mine noted that I hadn't acknowledged Obama's win on ye blogge, and took that as a likely sign that I was dead; he's a shrewd judge of character, no mistake, but the still more ugly truth was that thunderstorms hit as I was shaking off the procrastination, and the local power company decided that the proper response was twenty-three hours of darkness. I come to you now emotionally traumatized, but more deeply in love with electricity than ever before.

Anyway, nobody who's connected enough to read this actually needs to see me say it (as it were), but I'm much too narcissistic to care: Barack Obama did indeed crawl across the finish line, with Senator Clinton chewing strenuously on his ankle, and now the matter is settled. The lady's official concession . . .

[Well, actually, it's probably going to be more "endorsement" than "concession." She's highly resistant to conceding, as a practice, and I expect the optics and the language to be consistent with that.]

. . . is due on Saturday, whereupon there won't be any major figures out there pretending we aren't now in the general election phase. That counts as a triumph.

In fact, it's a huge one. The last several weeks have been politically bloody, but one happy consequence is that the popular narrative of Obama's campaign has shifted from the rather condescending themes of the early spring; nobody's accusing him of gliding by on a gentle wave of oratory anymore. Last year, we know now, he and his team pulled together a long-shot strategy for maximizing the delegate difference in states they could win and minimizing the difference in the major ones that would go to Clinton, and they turned out to be disciplined enough to stick with it through political cycles that almost demanded panic, and now we can say that it worked. It's something no other Democrat has managed on a national scale in the last decade, and in cold political terms it bodes really well for the fall - particularly since McCain's crew is reputedly almost schizophrenically torn between proponents of an extremely risky decentralized campaign plan and advocates of a more conventional top-down system. Add to that the money differences, the troubles with lobbyists, the staff turnovers - after the monomaniacally aggressive focus of the Bush-era Republicans, this seems very strange to say, but I'm expecting the Democrats to have huge advantages in organizational structure and message discipline this time around.

Hoorah!

Still, I've missed Obama himself in the last couple of months.

Or, no, I've missed the speeches. Maybe he's been making them, and they're just not as newsworthy as they were, or maybe the post-"elitist" campaign tactics have involved fewer national-scale rhetorical set pieces and more pseudo-conversational campaigning. Either way, the part of the message that transcends his own campaign - that politics can be inspirational, and even exalting - was harder to hear in the weeks leading up to his Tuesday night speech. It's not that I want him to advertise himself as a messianic figure - in fact, his recent comments to AIPAC about an "undivided Jerusalem" (though since disavowed) should probably be taken as a sad but healthy reminder that he's not politically pure as the driven snow - but rather that I think it's just insanely healthy to have someone out there reminding the American people that they themselves are direct participants in history, and can work to improve what's coming, and that that's really damn exciting.

Tuesday's speech was a proud return to form, even if it was overshadowed in the press by astonishment at Clinton's advanced case of denial and stuttering bafflement at McCain's rather poorly considered effort to out-speak Obama on Obama's own night, and I hope we get more of it. Soon.

But, for now, for this moment, I think we can all afford to relax and to bask in the waves of contentment emanating from Andrew Sullivan.