Status report.

Driven to madness through the power of tax rebates, I turned my computer over to the local techno-warlord for a few minor upgrades on Saturday; it's become increasingly clear in the days since that said computer had a strong pre-existing sense of self-worth, and is fixedly inclined to resist change for change's sake.

For the time being, I'm not totally off-line, but for the purposes of blogging I'm pretending that I am; I'm on an ancient laptop that's prone to crashing, locking up, or arbitrarily deciding that I'm not good enough for a functioning cursor - so I'm doing a lot of reading, but not much writing.

With a little bit of luck, the regular flow of verbiage will resume within a day or two.

Inside the hurting machine.

An Aug. 1, 2002 memorandum from the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency instructed the agency's interrogators on specific interrogation techniques for use on Al Qaeda detainees in its custody. Most of the 17-page memo is blacked out and unreadable. But at least one of those techniques is waterboarding, the process of pouring water into the mouth and nostrils of a detainee under restraint until drowning occurs.

"This is a critical piece of the story," said Jameel Jaffer, head of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the memorandum under a Freedom of Information Act filing. "This is the most explicit statement out there that the CIA waterboarded prisoners becaused the Justice Dept. authorized them to do so."

. . .

It is impossible to know for sure what exactly the memorandum says, thanks to its heavy redactions. But it appears that the Yoo-Bybee II memo explains how CIA interrogators can evade prosecution for torturing detainees. "To validate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering," it reads at one point. "Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture. ... We have further found that if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent."

In a phone interview, Jaffer called the contention "sweeping," adding that it had never been accepted by any court. "Imagine that in an ordinary criminal prosecution," he said. "A bankrobber tortures a bank manager to get the combination to a vault. He argues that the torture was not to inflict pain, but to get the combination. Every torturer has a reason other than to cause pain."

He continued, "If you're going to let people off the hook for an intention other than to cause pain, you're not going to be able to prosecute anyone for torture."

The above, and more Ackerman than you can possibly handle, can be found here.

Ethnic cleansing in the Pakistani northwest.

Apparently, the Taliban is targeting native Shi'ites in and around Parachinar; the Pakistani military is generally choosing not to involve itself. Ugly stuff.

Freedom Fries are back on the menu!

Rush Limbaugh's ire is going to be aimed directly at France the next time he bloviates, I guarantee it!

Sarkozy called Obama "my dear" and said he'd work with any American president — but "I am especially happy to be meeting with the senator."

In an effusive, rambling soliloquy, Sarkozy said twice that that "the French love the Americans," and declared that "the adventure of Barack Obama, it is a story which speaks to the heart of French people and speaks to the heart of Europeans."

Perhaps sensing that he was going over the top, the French president hastened to add that he recognized that "it's not up to French people to choose the next U.S. president."

A reporter nonetheless asked Sarkozy if he was endorsing Obama — who half-jokingly said "I'm going to warn my dear friend President Sarkozy to be very careful about that ... question" _and Sarkozy then said: "It's the Americans who will choose their president, not me."

But he added in an implicit comparison of Obama with his rival Republican John McCain: "Obviously, one is interested in a candidate that's looking toward the future rather than to the past."

Sacre merde.

It ought to be fun watching this one get walked back.

First the Iraqi government gave Senator Barack Obama a boost by seeming to embrace his proposal for a 16-month timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. But could Senator John McCain, who built his candidacy in large part on his opposition to a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, possibly be following suit?

"I think it’s a pretty good timetable," Mr. McCain said Friday in an interview on CNN’s "The Situation Room," before adding that it should be based "on the conditions on the ground."

I'm reasonably sure this isn't his honest position (which is probably closer to Krauthammer's); it might not even be what he meant to say. When you're drowning, you grab for anything you can.

Still, I don't think he really wants to look like he's running as Obama, only grumpier and more confused.

Er ist ein Berliner!

And not the pastry, either!

Obama's Tiergarten speech.

I'm really annoyed that I needed this spelled out.

This is just my week for being reminded how bare-knuckle Israeli national security/foreign policy thinking works, I guess. Today's primer comes from Shmuel Rosner, normally of Ha'aretz, but appearing for the moment in the New Republic, and it directly answers one of my favorite rhetorical questions: what do relatively clear-headed Israelis think they might gain from strikes on a relatively decentralized, relatively hard-to-pinpoint, relatively non-Osirak-like Iranian nuclear program?

According to Rosner, it's actually fairly simple: some of them are hoping for a bank shot. The theory holds that inciting a crisis (on Israeli terms) would bring in panicked diplomatic intervention on a scale that hasn't been seen in ages, and would thereby increase the amount of soft power applied to the Iranians to shut the nuclear program down.

I actually kinda respect that. Sure, I don't think it would work the way they hope - my best guess is that the urgency wouldn't escalate in quite they way people seem to hope, and that gains would be offset by losses. I suspect unilateral action would strengthen Ahmadinejad and the hardliners within Iran and would give the Russians and the Chinese even more cover to speak out on the Iranians' behalf, and what the Israelis would get in return is . . . well, hazy to me. I don't think the Bush administration has too many cards left to play, and the state of Middle Eastern politicking in Sarkozy's France and Merkel's Germany is awfully complicated. Theatrical maneuvers seem pretty likely to backfire.

But at least this approach was formed with a real goal - it's not just a demand that people respect the alpha male! Man, I've missed brutal realpolitik that's actually aimed at vaguely credible results!

. . .

It's been a really long decade.

About those Iraqi elections?

Funny story: the Iraqi parliament passed, at the last minute, a provincial election bill that sparked a Kurdish walkout. Apparently, since the bill would have to be signed by the president of Iraq to be made law, and since the president is a Kurd and therefore presumed hostile, there aren't likely to be provincial elections in 2008 (contrary to poor John McCain's increasingly outdated Iraq Issues webpage).

And that's the good news! The bad news is that all of this could lead the Kurds to push more aggressively for concessions on Kirkuk and internal sovereignty than anyone else in Iraq would tolerate.

Marc Lynch has more, with many, many links to back him up.

Submitted without too much comment.

Of the women veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have walked into a VA facility, 15 percent have screened positive for military sexual trauma, The Associated Press has learned. That means they indicated that while on active duty they were sexually assaulted, raped, or were sexually harassed, receiving repeated unsolicited verbal or physical contact of a sexual nature.

There's more here. Most of it is horrible, though there's at least some indication that people are becoming aware of the underlying problems.

And here we see John McCain wigging out.

For the most part, I don't really focus on gaffes or even on the broader contents of individual interviews in this blog. It's not that outrageous (or interesting) things aren't said - it's just that most of them don't have much lasting impact, nor do they really illuminate all that much about the position of the speaker when set within the context of months or years of speeches and policy papers, and stripping them down and then building them up into two thousand word essays just starts seeming like an act of intellectual vanity.

Clearly, I go for easier acts of intellectual vanity than that.

That said, there are lines that I really do feel shouldn't be crossed and McCain has suddenly taken to stumbling over them. I give you . . . talk of treason, with a phrase he used at least twice yesterday!

When we adopted the surge, we were losing the war in Iraq, and I stood up and said I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war. Apparently Sen. Obama, who does not understand what's happening in Iraq or fails to acknowledge the success in Iraq, would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.

Now, I've got no particular reason to believe that the gentleman from Arizona is being anything less than sincere in his main point: he really seems to believe that if we Respect the Surge we will Win (with the terms of victory including America-friendly governments in Iraq, Iran and Syria, achieved through means best kept vague), whereas if we Abandon the Gains of the Surge we will Lose (with the terms of loss including all those Shi'ite members of al-Qaeda following us home and eating our puppies).

And, yes, I know that's disrespectful, but . . . well, I have a very hard time coming to terms with McCain's approach without falling back on snark. It's just too much like arguing religion, and it shouldn't be.

His campaign has a page on Iraq on the "Issues" section of its website; you can read it here. If you don't care to do so, here's a short abstract: after an introduction, McCain's camp calls for continuing the surge (which we now know is contrary to the Iraqi government's express wishes - to say nothing of those of the Iraqi people), and then speaks warmly of pending Iraqi elections, and then dictates economic policy to Iraq and its "Arab neighbors," and then proposes bolstering our "regional military posture to make clear to Iran our determination to protect our forces and deter Iranian intervention," and finally insists upon a campaign to convince the American people that all of this is necessary lest the enormous loss of (American) life be in vain. You'll notice that there are only a few specific policies that amount to more than trying to command various Middle Eastern states to do things McCain wants done, and they tend to involve maintaining high levels of U.S. military force and, where possible, re-orienting them in order to better intimidate Iran.

Call me cynical, but I tend to infer from that that John McCain doesn't really have terribly realistic conditions for victory rattling around in the back of his mind. More policy specificity and deeper discussions of his understanding of, say, political organization in post-colonial nation-states and the typical response therein toward apparent efforts to expand American hegemony might go some way toward convincing me he's not just some belligerent, short-sighted dude shooting off his mouth, but . . . well, I'm not optimistic.

To get at part of why that's so, let's go back now to that quote above wherein McCain accuses Obama of having a predilection toward treason, and specifically to the subsection where he says Obama suffers from either ignorance or hypocrisy, vis-a-vis the nature of the great American success. That seems to be a throwback to a statement the gentleman from Arizona made earlier in the day, during an interview with Katie Couric. Here, there actually is some detail work on display.

Behold!

Kate Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What's your response to that?

McCain: I don't know how you respond to something that is as-- such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane [phonetic] was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history. Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn't make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed.

The problem, as Spencer Ackerman gleefully demonstrates here, is that McCain is totally wrong. Not just in his conclusions, but in the actual narrative - General McFarland (not McFarlane) actually documented the "Anbar Awakening" months before the surge was announced, let alone instituted - and, in fact, McFarland and his unit were out before the new troop deployments were fully arrayed. It may well be fair to say that Anbar benefited indirectly from the surge (though let's recall that the whole point was to exercise greater control over Baghdad, not the nation as a whole), but the surge certainly wasn't the proximate cause of all that is good in Iraq.

It's totally reasonable to worry that the relative stability in Iraq today is fragile - and, hell, that it may even be deceptive. There are still deep disputes about oil control and the future of Iraqi Kurdistan (for want of a less blunt phrase) that could explode with very little provocation, and there's plenty of reason to fear that the next rounds of elections could lead to new political disruptions. Hopefully, the slow-motion genocides are over (albeit because they were fairly successful), but, yes, the massive-scale shooting could well resume, bringing with it a legitimate (if horrifying) humanitarian argument for reversing troop drawdowns.

But the sense I get from McCain is that all of that is just the stuff of arguments he can deploy, usually carelessly, on behalf of a greater agenda. I think (or fret) that he really just believes in the literally redemptive power of American militarism - we can transform the region! - and he wants to prove the point to the world. Obama's contrary positions on the war and on our goals in the Middle East - and, indeed, Obama's general tendency toward foreign policy pragmatism - really seem increasingly to be taken very personally by McCain, as something of a challenge to his world view, and the man just isn't handling it well. Misrepresenting the dimensions and character of the surge, intentionally or otherwise, is just a part of that, and in its own way somewhat scarier than just accusing Obama of sacrificing the national good for his own ambitions. Again, my sense is that he's not, by his own standards, lying, or even all that much in error; he's just unconcerned with the details except insofar as they amplify the central truth of the story, which - for him - is that American force solves problems.

It's like he's clinging by his fingernails to this idea of aggressively projecting national virtue, and Obama and the damn electorate is threatening to take it away, and, man, it just pisses him off! Obama's willing to lose wars, dammit!

It doesn't seem very presidential to me.

Still making friends and influencing people.

Britain can no longer believe what Americans tell us about torture, an MPs' report to be published today claims. They also call for an immediate investigation into allegations that the UK government has itself 'outsourced' the torture of its own nationals to Pakistan.

In a damning criticism of US integrity, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said ministers should no longer take at face value statements from senior politicians, including George Bush, that America does not resort to torture in the light of the CIA admitting it used 'waterboarding'. The interrogation technique was unreservedly condemned by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who said it amounted to torture.

A change in approach would have implications for extradition of prisoners to the US, especially in terror or security cases, as the UK has signed the UN convention which bars sending individuals to nations where they are at risk of being tortured.

From the Guardian.

Progress in Zimbabwe?

Maybe, though it's hard to be optimistic. I'm sure Mugabe and ZANU-PF are looking for an arrangement that lets them stay in power while sharing in Tsvangirai's legitimacy, while Mr. Tsvangirai presumably wants to see the violence curtailed and as many political prisoners as possible released. Given that, the whole thing smacks of negotiated surrender.

On the other hand, Zimbabwe's people are in such dire straits that that may be necessary. Mugabe's regime has no money, and no idea what it's doing; if its extremely limited resources can be diverted back away from rape camps, and if smarter voices start being heard on economic matters, maybe fewer people will die over the next year than might otherwise.

Maybe.

A little bit of justice.

War criminal Radovan Karadzic has been caught - and by the Serbians, no less! Maybe they'll make it into the EU after all . . . .

The non-retracting retraction has been implicitly retracted.

Ah, my post titles are ever-unfolding fractals!

Anyway, the LA Times has the latest: Obama and Maliki met earlier today, after which Maliki's spokesman reported that the Iraqi position was that American troops should ideally be out of the country by 2010, barring a dramatic increase in violence. It's not explicitly Obama's sixteen months, but it's close.

John McCain's had a rough time responding. For the article linked above, his approach was one of extolling his support for the surge; in an interview with Meredith Viera, he goes instead with what looks like an expression of a state of outright denial - he knows better than Maliki what's in Maliki's head and, anyway, Petraeus!

It might actually be enough to get by; generally speaking, if a politician sounds like he or she has firm convictions, the American media seems to consider it rude to examine their validity.

The non-retracting retraction.

Today's pithy newspiece: Bush administration officials wigged out over Nouri al-Maliki's endorsement of the Obama plan for American involvement in Iraq, and then rattled the prime minister's cage until some poor spokesperson came out and said (care of CENTCOM!) that Maliki's remarks had been mistranslated. He didn't indicate that there was anything specific wrong with them, of course, nor did the Maliki gang issue any qualifications through the Iraqi press - and, of course, Der Speigel stands by its work, complete with transcript - but now the American press has an excuse not to give any of this any more play between now and election time.

Why beat on McCain when he's down, right?

Meanwhile, the Sunnis are back!

In the Iraqi government, that is - a year-long boycott has finally come groaning to an end. Good news!

Sixteen months.

I think Nouri al-Maliki just voted for Obama.


LATE EDIT: From Marc Ambinder:

Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, "We're fucked." No response yet from the McCain campaign, although here's what McCain said the last time Maliki mentioned withdrawal: "Since we are succeeding, then I am convinced, as I have said before, we can withdraw and withdraw with honor, not according to a set timetable. And I’m confident that is what Prime Minister Maliki is talking about, since he has told me that for many meetings we’'ve had."

But, wait! Ambinder then did get a response!

"His domestic politics require him to be for us getting out," said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "The military says 'conditions based' and Maliki said 'conditions based' yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders."

So, the opinion of the leader of a sovereign nation and ally can't be trusted because our horrendous unpopularity there is naturally going to curtail his talking points (apparently to such an extent that he had no choice but to endorse explicitly the Obama plan) - but we mustn't be swayed by his cynicism! It's the views of the officer corps that the Bushies have carefully cultivated over seven and a half years for its sympathy to their strategic goals and tactical predilections that really counts!

Well, let's concede that about thirty percent of the American electorate will probably fiercely agree. I think it might be a harder sell for the rest.


LATER EDIT: I should probably stress that I don't actually believe that Nouri al-Maliki, or any other foreign leader, should be dictating U.S. foreign policy; the interests of a specific government aren't necessarily the interests of its own state, let alone mine. If Maliki had called for a half-million troop "hyper-surge," I'd certainly feel some obligation to suss out his reasoning and weigh its merits, but I wouldn't argue that Obama should just shut down his campaign and hang his head in shame.

I can't fault McCain's tribe for feeling the same way.

That said, they're going to have to come up with some really compelling explanation of what they want to achieve and how Maliki's logic breaks down; just dismissing the statement as a dishonest but necessary reflection of how incredibly unpopular we are with the Iraqi public doesn't accomplish much.

This is perhaps the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

And I don't mean that in a funny way.

Israeli military officials have identified Hamas's civilian infrastructure in the West Bank as a major source of the Islamic group's popularity, and have begun raiding and shutting down these institutions in cities like Hebron, Nablus and Qalqilyah.

Last week, troops focused their efforts in Nablus, raiding the city hall and confiscating computers. They also stormed into a shopping mall and posted closure notices on the shop windows. A girls' school and a medical centre were shut down in the city, and a charitable association had its computers impounded and documents seized.

This policy, officials say, is meant to deny the Islamic group, which is committed to Israel's destruction, the ability to use these institutions as a pipeline by which money is channelled to finance attacks on the Jewish state. But the main goal of this campaign is to stem Hamas's growing popularity in the West Bank, and ensure it does not seize control of the area as it did in Gaza a year ago, when its forces vanquished the more moderate Fatah movement headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

In Gaza, Hamas was able to capture the hearts and minds of the residents not just because it offered an alternative to the corruption-tainted Fatah leadership, but also because its network of schools, clinics, summer camps, after-school activities and charitable associations provided impoverished Gazans with the type of institutions and welfare alternatives that the Palestinian Authority failed to.

So, to reduce the popular support for a radical anti-Israeli group, the Israelis propose to make life even more miserable for the Palestinians of the West Bank and hope that they'll be inclined to blame the people who were, however cynically, trying to help, rather than the people who're actually closing down the shopping malls, girls' schools, and local charities. I'm sure Hamas is just collectively terrified by this show of brute cunning!

The cruelty would be appalling even if it were rooted in anything even remotely resembling an adult understanding of human nature.

Holy crap! A New York Times piece on Iraqi public opinion?

It's true! Admittedly, it's based on interviews rather than polling, so there are pretty firm limits on its utility for trying to gauge the real national mood (I mean, insofar as there is a single such thing), but the cocktail of sentiments it presents - the resentment (and in some cases hatred) of the American presence rubbing against a fear of social collapse if we leave - seems very reasonable to me.

It's a healthy reminder that they're real people. That doesn't often come across in the coverage we see here.

My mind is now blown, patched together, and blown again.

The US plans to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran for the first time in 30 years as part of a remarkable turnaround in policy by President George Bush.

The Guardian has learned that an announcement will be made in the next month to establish a US interests section - a halfway house to setting up a full embassy. The move will see US diplomats stationed in the country.

If this is real, then it's even more shocking than Nixon going to China. It pains me to say it, but: good for Bush!

Unless something goes horribly wrong, of course.

Andrew Sullivan can become an American now!

But, yeah, it looks like one of Jesse Helms' great legacies of shittiness to our fellow man is on its way out, as a whole host of restrictions on HIV positive non-US citizens are on the verge of being revoked.

For the gentleman blogger at the Atlantic, that means he can finally claim U.S. citizenship - or soon can, anyway. The dude's been a practicing American for years now, so it's only fair.

Anyway, he's exulting over here, if you're in the mood to partake of some uncommonly high spirits.

Birth control pills are abortion!

So sayeth the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, anyway. And, according to draft regulations making the rounds, any health programs that receive federal funds won't have the option of not employing people who refuse to provide such treatment on moral grounds.

Apparently, there's nothing wrong with this country's moral values that a wave of unwanted pregnancies won't cure. Awesome!

Dana Goldstein has more here, and - just to remind us all that there's a reason to vote Obama - Steve Benen links us all to a short reminder that John McCain isn't wild about birth control either.

Mars!

More pictures, my children. Tiny, beautiful pictures!

Hallelujah!

Progress?

President Bush has authorized the most significant American diplomatic contact with Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, sending the State Department’s third-ranking official to Geneva for a meeting this weekend on Iran’s nuclear program, administration officials said Tuesday.

The decision appeared to bend, if not exactly break, the administration’s insistence that it would not negotiate with Iran over its nuclear programs unless it first suspended uranium enrichment, as demanded by three resolutions of the United Nations Security Council.

Still, after months of accusations and counteraccusations from the United States and Iran, the meeting raised the prospect of an intensified diplomatic push to resolve concerns over Iranian nuclear activity, not unlike the lengthy and painstaking talks that resulted in a deal last month with North Korea.

I'm actually kinda stunned.

Obama's Iraq speech.

The text is up here, with a tiny bit of commentary from Tim Fernholz.

Another prisoner.

From what I can tell from a quick on-line infotrawl, there's a decent chance that Ali al-Marri really might've been planning to commit terrible crimes - though the most he was ever charged with was credit card fraud and lying to the FBI, and those charges were dropped. Still, as a super-criminal/would-be terrorist, he doesn't seem ever to have had the chance to amount to much, even if he'd wanted to.

I'll get back to that. For now, the news: in a split decision, the Republican-appointed judges in the most right-wing appeals court in the country ruled today that the president has the inherent power to keep Mr. Marri (a legal immigrant, seized on American soil) in custody forever, albeit with some as-yet undefined avenue of appeal. The following quote touches upon their deliberations concerning the appropriate grounds for using that power, and the uncertainties that drove their decision.

The five judges who ruled that the president has the authority to detain people captured in the United States offered differing criteria for who might be subject to such detention. In earlier decisions, the Supreme Court and the Fourth Circuit had ruled that the 2001 Congressional authorization allowed the military detention of people like Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, American citizens who had been present in the combat zone in Afghanistan.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said the president may also detain members of organizations or nations against which Congress has authorized the use of force who mean to harm people or property to further military goals.

. . .

In the conclusion of his long opinion, Judge Wilkinson said terrorism cases present courts with special challenges.

“We may never know,” he said, “whether we have struck the proper balance between liberty and security, because we do not know every action the executive is taking and we do not know every threat global terror networks have in store.”

I don't mean to trivialize Judge Wilkinson's concerns, but I'm not at all thrilled that - in the absence of complete knowledge - it was the response of the court to err on the side of reducing liberty.

But, even beyond that . . . well, let's go back to Mr. Marri, the human being. Even if we grant that the government's original allegations about his plans are accurate - that he was meant to be one of the agents of a second wave of al-Qaeda attacks in the US back in late `01 - that doesn't make him a superhuman threat. That's one of the points that I think really gets lost in the debate about civil liberties and physical security: that the only real advantage a would-be terrorist on American soil might have, barring some kind of incredibly efficient WMD, is the ability to strike without warning. If Mr. Marri were released today - never mind the justice of it - he'd presumably be sent back to Qatar, without any of the crap that was on his laptop back in `01, and with no technical skills beyond what he picked up in his incomplete push to get a computer science degree six and a half years ago. That's just not a man who's likely to kill thousands of people, even if he wants to.

So what point does weakening constitutional protections have in this case? If you look at it not as an abstract case of security versus freedom, but as a question of containing this one specific guy versus upholding the traditionally accepted interpretation of the Bill of Rights, where's the justification?

I'm afraid a big part of the answer is just avoiding embarrassing ourselves, after keeping him in custody for so long, and that's . . . well, that's a pretty terrible reason.

Well, well, well.

The Maliki government is quite literally hitting the U.S. presence in Iraq where it lives.

The green zone of Baghdad, a highly fortified slice of American suburbia on the banks of the Tigris river, may soon be handed over to Iraqi control if the increasingly assertive government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, gets its way.

A senior Iraqi government official said this weekend the enclave should revert to Iraqi control by the end of the year. “We think that by the end of 2008 all the zones in Baghdad should be integrated into the city,” said Ali Dabbagh, the government’s spokesman.

“The American soldiers should be based in agreed camps outside the cities and population areas.

“By the end of the year, there will be no green zone,” he added. “The separation by huge walls makes people feel angry.” Dabbagh acknowledged that getting rid of the green zone would be a huge undertaking, given the thousands of American soldiers, private contractors and foreign workers who live inside. He said the concrete walls that divide it from the rest of the city would be taken down slowly, “depending on the threat and circumstances”.

Obviously, a great deal of this is for show - the Iraqis have every reason to be reminding the Bush administration that its political leverage is not what it once was, and their final goal might not be as hardcore as their current rhetoric would suggest.

Still, it's worth noting that the days when the White House could dictate terms to the Iraqis might finally be behind us. My gut reaction, as an American, is that that's a good thing; the last thing anyone needs is for the next president to be saddled with an even deeper legacy of Bush-style colonialism and combat force privatization than he's already going to get. That's the sort of thing that's superficially reasonable for a strategy of expanded regional warfare and aggressive resource acquisition, but not so good for pinning down al-Qaeda in Pakistan, encouraging (or at least not discouraging) Iranian civil society, and just generally fostering the growth of mature governance (and, yes, relatively open markets) in the Middle East.

[I'd much rather be advocating peace, freedom, and the general betterment of all humanity, but I've finally come to realize that when Americans define our goals that expansively, we end up inviting some crazy asshole to step in, co-opt the language, and start bombing.]

Anyway, setting aside the future of unexamined Bushism, insofar as this also seems to suggest that the Iraqis don't feel as great a need to be reliant on us . . .

. . . if only because they're becoming more reliant on Iran - or, less facetiously, because the first phase of ethnic cleansing really is over, and the shockwaves that'll come from final constitutional settlements and/or major Kurdish land grabs haven't hit yet . . .

. . . it seems like a positive sign in its own right.

On the other hand, Maliki's assertiveness does raise the odds that more of my tax dollars are going to end up paying for Doug Feith to brainstorm about tossing out the current Iraqi government and setting up Ahmad Chalabi as an interim president, so it's not all good news.

One other thing about attacking Iran.

I don't know how much anyone outside of the country knows about their nuclear program at this point, but I don't think it's as much as we'd like. I mean, the IAEA certainly has its eyes on some sites - and heaven only knows what Israeli sources have dug up - but for years one of the most frequently recurring complaints I've seen is that Western human intelligence within the country is crap and our satellite coverage is fairly inconclusive. I can't help but think that any strikes would be symbolic as much as anything, and since that's a form of symbolism that cuts both ways, and maybe a few other ways besides, the cost-benefit ratio seems just wildly unbalanced.

But, of course, the Israelis frequently disagree with me in matters such as these.

Another revelation which does not surprise.

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.

Super.

PhotoShop's mighty powers are being turned to the cause of evil!

Okay, anyone who's spent any time on the Internet at all wouldn't be surprised by that header - but this case is a little more interesting than some.

Has Iran been conducting some moderately frightening rocketry tests? Yes.

Have said tests been as successful as the Iranians would want the rest of the world (and perhaps also the Iranian citizenry at large) to believe? Maybe not.

The funny thing is, a couple of public misfires might actually constitute a near optimal scenario for the Iranian government. Sure, they'd be somewhat embarrassing, but they'd complicate the PR argument for semi-discriminate U.S. or Israeli attacks on Iranian soil while still making clear that someone in the upper atmosphere in Tehran is dumb enough to want new sabers to rattle. Ninety percent of the deterrence value/negotiating leverage is preserved, but maybe the story on all the TV screens around the world becomes something other than a linear run of escalating aggression.

All or nothing in the Sudan.

The chief prosecutor of the Internationals Criminal Court will seek an arrest warrant Monday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, charging him with genocide and crimes against humanity in the orchestration of a campaign of violence that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the nation's Darfur region during the past five years, according to U.N. officials and diplomats.

The action by the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, will mark the first time that the tribunal in The Hague charges a sitting head of state with such crimes, and represents a major step by the court to implicate the highest levels of the Sudanese government for the atrocities in Darfur.

Some U.N. officials raised concerns Thursday that the decision would complicate the peace process in Darfur, possibly triggering a military response by Sudanese forces or proxies against the nearly 10,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers located there. At least seven peacekeepers were killed and 22 were injured Tuesday during an ambush by a well-organized and unidentified armed group.

Representatives from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- met with U.N. officials Thursday to discuss the safety of peacekeepers in Darfur. U.N. military planners have begun moving peacekeepers to safer locations and are distributing food and equipment in case the Sudanese government cuts off supplies.

"All bets are off; anything could happen," said one U.N. official, adding that circumstantial evidence shows that the government of Sudan orchestrated this week's ambush. "The mission is so fragile, it would not take much for the whole thing to come crashing down."

As far as I know, there are very few people out there who deserve to be charged with war crimes as much as does Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and none who deserve it more. But, man, I do not understand the timing here - one certainly respects the goal of zealous prosecution unhindered by geopolitical concerns, but with Sudan and Chad still both poised on the edge of a particularly ugly metaphorical knife, one might think that the ICC could've benefited from spending a year or two really focusing all its efforts on Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. Nine times out of ten, I'm very sympathetic to moves to make the perfect the enemy of the good in cases of this kind of symbolic importance, but . . . well, these are simply terrifying stakes.

The first step to avoiding dealing with a problem . . .

. . . is to encourage debate as to whether it really exists.

The Bush administration has decided not to take any new steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions before the president leaves office, despite pressure from the Supreme Court and broad accord among senior federal officials that new regulation is appropriate now.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce today that it will seek months of further public comment on the threat posed by global warming to human health and welfare -- a matter that federal climate experts and international scientists have repeatedly said should be urgently addressed.

The Supreme Court, in a decision 15 months ago that startled the government, ordered the EPA to decide whether human health and welfare are being harmed by greenhouse gas pollution from cars, power plants and other sources, or to provide a good explanation for not doing so. But the administration has opted to postpone action instead, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

To defer compliance with the Supreme Court's demand, the White House has walked a tortured policy path, editing its officials' congressional testimony, refusing to read documents prepared by career employees and approved by top appointees, requesting changes in computer models to lower estimates of the benefits of curbing carbon dioxide, and pushing narrowly drafted legislation on fuel-economy standards that officials said was meant to sap public interest in wider regulatory action.

The decision to solicit further comment overrides the EPA's written recommendation from December. Officials said a few senior White House officials were unwilling to allow the EPA to state officially that global warming harms human welfare. Doing so would legally trigger sweeping regulatory requirements under the 45-year-old Clean Air Act, one of the pillars of U.S. environmental protection, and would cost utilities, automakers and others billions of dollars while also bringing economic benefits, EPA's analyses found.

"They argued that this increase in regulation should be on the next president's record," not Bush's, said a participant in the lengthy interagency debate, referring principally to officials in the office of Vice President Cheney, on the White House Council on Environmental Quality, on the National Economic Council and in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

I particularly like the bit where they seem to concede, however implicitly, that dramatic action should be taken, but they're nonetheless going to kick responsibility to the next guys; I assume the thinking is that history will therefore completely exonerate them should the fallout be worse than it would've been if we'd acted sooner.

Who knew anyone could find so many ways to be in denial?

An endless source of humor.

Killing Iranians.

I realize that after the last seven and a half years (or longer, if you include the parts of Monicagate that were clearly Clinton's own fault) the standards for presidential conduct have fallen pretty damn far, but can we please not have our potential leaders publicly fixated on doing harm to civilian populations in foreign countries? Can we please keep the bar that high, at least?

. . .

I'm being naive again, aren't I?

Learning to live with lawlessness.

The FISA update passed in the Senate, the telecoms are immune from any public accounting of their illegal actions, and somewhere in the distance Glenn Greenwald is setting his office on fire with the numinous radiance of his outrage.

Boo to Barack Obama for supporting this thing.

Remember, the socially responsible thing to do is to marry an heiress!

John McCain reminds us that Social Security is our great national shame.

Nothing was achieved, but at least the president didn't start any fires.

From the G8 summit, non-binding partial agreement on climate change!

Leaders from the world's developed nations have agreed a "shared vision" on climate change with rising economic powers at the G8 summit in Japan.

But no specific agreements have been announced, and India and China have reportedly dismissed the rich nations' target of halving emissions by 2050.

Leaders from eight emerging economies held talks with the Group of Eight rich nations on the final day of the summit.

A US official said the broad agreement represented progress.

Jim Connaughton, chairman of President Bush's Council of Environmental Quality, told the Associated Press that the agreement "will give us greater confidence and commitments as we go to next year".

A statement on behalf of all 16 nations said they recognised the need for "deep cuts" in global greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming.

But it stopped short of urging numerical targets for those reductions.

"Iran Is Not an Existential Threat."

True.

That's not to say Israel should be happy about this, though.

Service.

One excerpt from Senator Obama's recent speech:

Finally, we need to integrate service into education, so that young Americans are called upon and prepared to be active citizens.

Just as we teach math and writing, arts and athletics, we need to teach young Americans to take citizenship seriously. Study after study shows that students who serve do better in school, are more likely to go to college, and more likely to maintain that service as adults. So when I'm President, I will set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year. This means that by the time you graduate college, you'll have done 17 weeks of service.

We'll reach this goal in several ways. At the middle and high school level, we'll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources to offer new service opportunities. At the community level, we'll develop public-private partnerships so students can serve more outside the classroom.

For college students, I have proposed an annual American Opportunity Tax Credit of $4,000. To receive this credit, we'll require 100 hours of public service. You invest in America, and America invests in you - that's how we're going to make sure that college is affordable for every single American, while preparing our nation to compete in the 21st century.

Jonah Goldberg has compared the above to a call for slavery, which is obnoxious.

But, man, I hope Obama and company encourage the schools to do this right.

I don't think of myself as one of the candidate's dreaded cynics, but I do have concerns with this issue, and they rise up from a very personal (if borderline petty) cause: I was unhappy in school. More precisely, I was miserable in junior high, and sullen and conflicted (and, yes, black trenchcoat-wearing) in high school - and then, boom, college was this exhilarating revelation!

Here's the thing: I think part of the difference was very much down to the nature of my relationships with the people on the other side of the academic line; I had teachers and counselors who clearly felt contempt for the students (in one specific case, singling us out and mocking us in class), or who considered understanding the way the kids learned to be of less interest than maintaining the consistency of the way things were being taught. Some of the smartest people I've ever known were told not to bother to go to college - mostly because they argued with certain counselors.

It's the sort of thing that doesn't seem as important a decade or two later, to be sure - at least, not for those of us who made it past high school. We all have horror stories, and most of us survive them and leave them behind, though maybe we wince a little bit as the young'uns we care about go marching off into the trap. Still, objectively, you don't learn as effectively as you should while you're going through it - or, at least, no one I knew seemed to do so.

I don't think that sort of thing would have happened nearly as often if, at an institutional level, we had been seen as people with rights, as opposed to baying packs of feral minors. I mean, when you arrogate to yourself the right to determine where hundreds of people can be at any given hour of the day, and what they can wear, and what they can say, and how they can say it, you assume a sort of power on a kind of scale that you don't often see in American culture - and a minority (I hope) of the people who end up with that power take to it badly. I'm not even talking about the ones who believe in gratuitous corporal punishment, or in promoting their own religious (or atheistic, if that's what worries you) beliefs, or any of the other glaring no-nos. I'm thinking more of the generally decent people who start seeing their students as not quite fully-realized people because the poor little bastards have no rights and no recourse and wouldn't know what to do with themselves if things were otherwise - which leads to the kids not being asked to participate in their education so much as to sit back and receive it.

When we start talking about school-centric pushes for public service for teenagers, then, I imagine what it could all too easily have been for me: institutionalized coercion leading to two more hours a week of feeling powerless and trapped. I'd love to see the opportunity for public service hugely expanded, and promoted from the mountaintops. Recruiters in the schools, credits offered for hours donated, registries of opportunities taped to the walls in every damn hall - as hard a sell as you like! The goal really is an excellent one!

But, please, give the kids the chance to enter into it all as adults. Even if they're not there yet, developmentally, treat them like they are; wed these plans to some minimal standard of respect, and teach the kids that it's fair to expect that much. I can't help but think that everyone involved would gain more from the whole process that way - even though, yeah, we're only talking about seventeen weeks of work over eight or nine or ten years.

[Sidebar: I'd also suggest that, where possible, you help them to utilize their own social networks, rather than just breaking them up and moving them around. Charity fund-raisers in college were conducted through clubs and societies, and were genuinely exciting, as I remember them - and, lo, they did some real good! Seems a lot like how the ground-level Obama campaign is evolving now, actually.]

My two cents.

My classy government.

Just for the record, the Bush administration is keeping the ACLU from paying the fees and the expenses of the attorneys who represent the Guantanamo detainees. Because, really, what's the point of being the most powerful state on Earth if you can't be petty?

Zimbabwe just becomes more and more appalling.

No playing verbal games with this one - the LA Times has a piece up on the nine hundred camps from which young pro-Mugabe terrorists launch their raids on the Zimbabwean people. Mugabe's regime is running out of money to pay these monsters, but there are perks for them to make up for it - high among them, apparently, is the chance to kidnap young women, enslave them, and repeatedly rape them.

If you're looking for a silver lining, it's that - without money to keep them in line - the beasts Mugabe and his generals have raised up are probably going to turn on them at some point, and maybe the total collapse of the country would clear the way for something better.

But silver linings aren't generally supposed to be gruesome.

It's only public health!

Seeking to play down the effects of global warming, Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed to delete from congressional testimony references about the consequences of climate change on public health, a former senior EPA official claimed Tuesday.

The official, Jason K. Burnett, said the White House was concerned that the proposed testimony last October by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might make it tougher to avoid regulating greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.

Burnett's assertion, which he made in a July 6 letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, conflicts with the White House explanation at the time that the deletions reflected concerns by the White House Office of Science and Technology over the accuracy of the science.

Ordinarily, one would be skeptical of he said/she said allegations on subjects as volatile as these, but . . . well, this is the White House that refused to open EPA emails when the contents were deemed un-Republican; their credibility in matters environmental is sadly lacking.

Or, y'know, comically lacking.

Depends on how cynical you've gotten over the last seven and a half agonizing years, really.

We all just have to believe!

When pressed on his position on McCain told an audience last year, “One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit.’” Asked about how he would shape the nation’s surveillance laws, McCain said, “[P]eople that are patriotic Americans need to sit down together and work this out.”

And here we are, just four months from Election Day, and McCain is presenting a bizarre economic plan, which doesn’t make any sense on its face, and which also lacks any and all support from the campaign itself. Knowing we might look at the numbers to see if they add up, the McCain campaign decided not to include any numbers.

There’s a $410 billion budget deficit, which McCain will eliminate in his first term. How? He just will. He wants to cut taxes by about a trillion dollars. How can we afford it? We just can. McCain realizes the value of the dollar is down, and he’s committed to reversing this. How? He just will.

The McCain campaign, everybody! Though, to be fair, giving the electorate policy specificity is way less important than branding Barack Obama as a flip-flopper.

The natives are restless.

Iraq said for the first time yesterday that it wanted to set a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from its territory.

President Bush has long resisted a schedule for pulling his 145,000 soldiers out, arguing that it would play into the hands of insurgents. Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Prime Minister, who boasted last week that he had crushed terrorism in the country, suggested that it was time to start setting time-lines.

“The current trend is to reach an agreement on a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or to put a timetable on their withdrawal,” Mr al-Maliki said during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. He rejected efforts by Mr Bush to hurry through an agreement on vital issues such as the immunity of US troops in Iraq and use of the country’s airspace. Mr Bush had hoped to sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) by the end of July to establish the basis for a long-term presence of US troops in the country.

. . .

In a rebuff to the Mr al-Maliki the Pentagon said any timetable would be articifical [sic] and withdrawal would depend on conditions on the ground.

Now, I don't know if Maliki really feels that his government can stand on its own two feet, or if he just wants to take as antagonistic a public position to the proposed, ridiculous SoFA as he can to maximize his leverage in the negotiations - time is, after all, more on his side than on George W. Bush's. [The sense I have is that Muqtada al-Sadr still has the strongest long-term prospects of all, as long as he can keep his senior Mahdi guys on reasonably short leashes, but, for the purposes of this post, that's neither here nor there.]

Either way, though, it does underline the fact that all the discussions of Iraq that have come up prominently in the American presidential campaign to date have tended to reflect the assumption that the Iraqi government and the Iraqi public are going to be content with whatever decisions we ultimately make; that is, of course, bullshit. Insofar as polling has suggested that the Iraqis have wanted us gone for years - hell, as of last September, a majority of Iraqis apparently thought violent attacks on Americans were fair game - I suspect that John McCain, at least, would find his visions of perpetually shared Iraqi sovereignty pretty soundly rejected by the folks off in Mesopotamia. I also suspect that he wouldn't much care.

But, y'know, Iraq isn't just an abstraction that offers Americans the chance to argue about foreign policy principles. It's a real place filled with real people - many of whom have never tried to kill American soldiers! - and insofar as they're the ones most in the line of fire, and insofar as we in the U.S. generally purport to love (small "d") democratic values, we should probably at least address Iraqi opinion directly in formulating our own.

Anyway, you can find the article quoted above over here.

The Christianity beta.

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

Now, the stone is broken, and my understanding is that the language is too archaic for quick and absolute translation regardless, so - the implicit take of the article's author notwithstanding - there's no obvious reason why the more literally/mystically minded Christians can't argue that this represents a prophetic tradition which Jesus fulfilled, rather than a folktale his followers co-opted.

However you want to take it, it's fascinating stuff - and it's downright mindblowing that, two thousand years down the line, there are still such potent surprises being found. You stop looking for flying saucers, Indiana Jones!

Hey, did you know it was possible for things to get even worse in Zimbabwe?

It's true!

Fresh from his rigged election victory, Robert Mugabe and his military backers plan to assassinate or frame dozens of opposition MPs in an attempt to consolidate power and take back control of Parliament.

The Zanu (PF) party of Mr Mugabe lost its grip on the legislature for the first time since independence when the Movement for Democratic Change took control of the Lower House and drew level in the Senate after the March elections.

Having overturned Morgan Tsvangirai’s victory in the first round of the presidential vote with a brutal campaign of terror, President Mugabe’s henchmen believe that they can retake Parliament using violence or trumped-up criminal charges to drive out elected opposition MPs.

Leaked minutes from a meeting of the Joint Operation Command outline a strategy by which the MPs can be forced from office, sparking by-elections that Zanu (PF) planned to win by force. The original plan was to overturn the majority by challenging opposition wins through the courts, alleging that the results had been rigged. The refusal of judges to kowtow has led the regime to resort to tried and tested methods of violence.

Thabo Mbeki would want me to observe, though, that all those deaths, once they happen, might be entirely accidental.

Happy fourth of July!

Independence Day for the Yanks, and a fine July Friday for everyone! Excellent!

Obama's comments on the FISA update and telecom immunity.

They're posted at his website.

As one would expect, the man writes very well, and I guess he's succeeded in shifting my outlook from one of outright disappointment in him to one of mere disagreement - and, shit, if he and Dodd and the rest actually get immunity removed from the final package in the Senate, I'll move all the way over to applauding his tactical sense (though I'm afraid I don't expect it to come to that).

I still believe that there are wounds here that need to be treated. The American public needs to be aware enough of the tools the Bushies have taken up in their war on nebulous enemies to be able to debate their value, and American civil society as a whole needs to dismantle this ugly precedent that establishes that laws are optional if the executive branch winks at you. I have no problem with the government assuming all the costs incurred by the telecoms in a civil suit; I just really want the principle that there can and should be legal redress available to average citizens strongly affirmed. Symbolically, if nothing else.

Telecom immunity does the opposite - and I really do think that it wasn't even particularly politically expedient; Steny Hoyer has a lot to answer for.

But, whatever. This post is about Obama and his position, and . . . well, you can judge it for yourself.

Having saved the best for last this morning . . .

I now get the satisfaction of turning the Wall south, and observing that the Colombians have sprung Ingrid Betancourt (a former presidential candidate) and fourteen other hostages of the narco-terrorist group FARC; several, if not all, had been captives for years (Ms. Betancourt's ordeal clocked in at about six years).

This is one of those deals where the big political picture shouldn't be allowed to overshadow the immediate good news, but . . . well, the big political picture is good, too. FARC really seems to be falling apart at the moment, and - though the Colombian government certainly could benefit from some prodding from the left - this particular gang of self-aggrandizing murderers was never going to be the agency through which positive change was achieved. Basically, a few nightmares may be ending - including the exceedingly personal one of Ms. Betancourt - and it's long past time.

Cool archaeological news.

George Washington's childhood home - or the site thereof - has apparently been located. It's fifty miles south of modern D.C., and I think it can expect to grow a modest but healthy tourism industry just about overnight. Hoorah!

The things you learn at fake journalism school!

On the July 2 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade labeled New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe "attack dogs," claiming that Steinberg's June 28 article on the "ominous trend" in Fox News' ratings was a "hit piece." During the segment, however, Fox News featured photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered -- the journalists' teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe's hair moved further back on his head. Fox News gave no indication that the photos had been altered.

After putting up the photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe, Fox & Friends also featured a photograph of Steinberg's face superimposed over that of a poodle, while Reddicliffe's face was superimposed over that of the man holding the poodle's leash.

Classy.

Sensible, but disconcerting.

Well, the honeymoon between the U.S. military and Iraqi security forces is long over. In fact, we're now at the stage where we bring in private investigators to see where they really go on "book club nights."

Caught off guard by recent Iraqi military operations, the United States is using spy satellites that ordinarily are trained on adversaries to monitor the movements of the American-backed Iraqi army, current and former U.S. officials say.

The stepped-up surveillance reflects breakdowns in trust and coordination between the two forces. Officials said it was part of an expanded intelligence effort launched after American commanders were surprised by the timing of the Iraqi army's violent push into Basra three months ago.

The use of the satellites puts the United States in the unusual position of employing some of its most sophisticated espionage technology to track an allied army that American forces helped create, continue to advise, and often fight alongside.

The satellites are "imaging military installations that the Iraqi army occupies," said a former U.S. military official, who said slides from the images had been used in recent closed briefings at U.S. facilities in the Middle East. "They're imaging training areas that the Iraqi army utilizes. They're imaging roads that Iraqi armored vehicles and large convoys transit."

Military officials and experts said the move showed concern by U.S. commanders about whether their Iraqi counterparts would follow U.S. guidance or keep their coalition partners fully informed.

Y'know, it's (ostensibly) a sovereign nation acting within its own borders; the people in charge do, in fact, get to move forces around without American coordination. They're entitled!

Still, one can't help but feel a little . . . I dunno, unwelcome? Is that a fair word?

This is the sort of thing I wouldn't mind so much if I trusted the government.

The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.

Law enforcement officials say the proposed policy would help them do exactly what Congress demanded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: root out terrorists before they strike.

Although President George W. Bush has disavowed targeting suspects based on their race or ethnicity, the new rules would allow the FBI to consider those factors among a number of traits that could trigger a national security investigation.

Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons — like evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated — to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press, would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.

Among the factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.

. . .

Critics say the presumption of innocence is lost in the proposal. The FBI will be allowed to begin investigations simply "by assuming that everyone's a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent," said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Now, there's very good reason not to trust members of the Bush administration with expanded police powers - the whole basis of the FISA fight, from the lefty point of view, is that we have a fair amount of circumstantial evidence to suggest that they've abused the powers they've got, and we know they're desperately conniving with members of Congress to ensure that those abuses will go uninvestigated. These are not reassuring signs.

But, really, die-hard Republicans shouldn't have to trust an Obama administration with these powers either. That's kinda what the deeply suspicious thinking behind the Constitution was all about.

I'll just add that most of my family came from Ireland a couple of generations back, and I spent a couple of years there in the early `90s, including a trip to Belfast in the twilight of the IRA's crazy days, and if the policies described here had been in place when I first got back, some very bored feds might well have been tasked with wiretapping my phones and listening to me make some of the lamest telephonic come-ons to young women ever committed. That's something I dare say none of us would've enjoyed.

One sentence says it all.

"The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: 'Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.'"

I bet you can see where this is going.

My hands are not quite washed.

I know what I said here, and I believe it was the right position to take, and I'm honestly a little bit disgusted with myself for helping to keep this stupid story alive - but it's not like it needs my help! Yes, apparently, the McCain camp is still insisting that Obama personally needs to apologize for Wes Clark's Sunday morning statement of, y'know, truth (or, if you disagree, then at least legitimate opinion).

I find myself almost hoping that this is just brute cynicism on the Republicans' part; if one were to start believing that McCain really is this prickly and insecure, then his candidacy would start looking even more ill-advised than it already was.