Iraqi PM to Obama: If you release those unreleased photos from Abu Ghraib, my electorate will go up in blue flame and demand that the US get out yesterday.

…from Think Progress.   Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something.

As Jesse Ventura said on The View:

“If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

And no, I don’t care if half the Democratic leadership knew something about the bad stuff pulled off by Bush; they should have had the guts to stand up at the time and say - NO - but they apparently didn’t.  Them being gutless wonders is not a reason to excuse anyone else from prosecution.  The more in the dock or politically dealt with and squished on this, no problem.

My focus is on justice, the law, and good government.  Torture and other arbitrary government crap has caused an awful pile of hurt to most all of us in some form from the past; just ask a Japanese-American whose family was in internment camps during WW2, or blacks who had to deal with government-backed racism in the South (or North, and I’m talking the Bull Connor sort of thing), or those of us out there who have family who were destroyed in the Holocaust or disappeared in the Gulags behind the Iron Curtain.

Gitmo: People reviewing the cases of prisoners are finding out that there’s really no solid files as such on anyone,  and that a lot of material is suspect or worthless - and scattered, disorganized and fifth-hand.   The realization is coming through that people were supposed to get confessions and information first and worry about anything else waaaaaaaay later, and that bunches of people in Gitmo and the other ‘black’ jails, like the taxi-drivers in Abu Ghraib, were just Joe Blows scooped up in a wide net and tortured at length for information they didn’t have.

25. The written statement allegedly containing Mohammed’s confession and thumbprint is in Farsi. Mohammed does not read, write, or speak Farsi. There are several factual assertions in the statement that are false, including Mohammed’s name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, his uncle’s name, his residence, his current residence, his age, and an assertion that he speaks English. The statement’s account of the grenade attack — the responsibility for which the statement ascribes solely to Mohammed — conflicts with the eyewitness accounts of the American victims. Yet, it was this statement that Respondents and their agents primarily relied on as a basis for Mohammed’s detention, and for the charges brought against him in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.\

That was written by one of the prosecutors, folks.

He was the lead prosecutor against a detainee, Mohammed Jawad, until he resigned last September. After spending over a year on the case, he became convinced that the government had no good case against Jawad, that Jawad had been badly mistreated and was suffering serious psychological harm, and that continuing to hold him was “something beyond a travesty.” (p. 1) That’s why he wrote the declaration in question, in support of Jawad’s habeas petition.

From Dick Meyer at NPR on Blago and Made-off:

As audacious as Blagojevich’s political gluttony is, it is easy to find far worse political corruption, much of it perfectly legal: Distorting intelligence to invade Iraq, torturing prisoners, failure to regulate Wall Street, and systematic pork-barrel boondoggling come quickly to mind. If you’re feeling expansive, how about depriving unemployed and underemployed people of health insurance, rural and poor urban people of decent schools, or veterans of state-of-the-art health care?

As flamboyant as Madoff’s alleged cons are, their consequences pale in comparison with the orgy of predatory lending, the flimflam in the mortgage-backed securities markets, the egregious ostentation of executive compensation, the pervasive lack of competent regulation and the unparalleled inequalities of wealth and income of the early years of the 21st century. To name a few econo-scandals.

Many people over the years chose not to turn Blagojevich and Madoff in. I think they call that phenomenon “casting a blind eye.” You might cast a blind eye in the workplace at abusive or sleazy colleagues or at your kid’s school with bullies, inept teachers or bungling bureaucrats. Collectively, we cast blind eyes toward raunchy and violent entertainment, dysfunctional government and substandard medical care — to pick some almost random examples.

And from Peggy Noonan,  of all people, in the Wall Street Journal:

A more sober observation came from a Manhattan woman who spoke, on the night Mr. Madoff was arrested, and as word spread through a Christmas party, of the general air of collapse in America right now, of the sense that our institutions are not and no longer can be trusted. She said, softly, “It’s the age of the empty suit.” Those who were supposed to be watching things, making the whole edifice run, keeping it up and operating, just somehow weren’t there.

That’s the big thing at the heart of the great collapse, a strong sense of absence. Who was in charge? Who was in authority? The biggest swindle in all financial history if the figure of $50 billion is to be believed, and nobody knew about it, supposedly, but the swindler himself. The government didn’t notice, just as it didn’t notice the prevalence of bad debts that would bring down America’s great investment banks.

All this has hastened and added to the real decline in faith—the collapse in faith—the past few years in our institutions. Not only in Wall Street but in our entire economy, and in government. And of course there’s Blago. But the disturbing thing there is that it seems to have inspired more mirth than anger. Did any of your friends say they were truly shocked? Mine either.

The reigning ethos seems to be every man for himself.

We should experience “the current crisis” as “a gigantic wake-up call.” We’ve been living beyond our means, both governmentally and personally. “We have to be willing to face up to our problems. But we have a capacity to roll up our sleeves and get down to work together.”

What a task President-elect Obama has ahead. He ran on a theme of change we can believe in, but already that seems old. Only six weeks after his election he faces a need more consequential and immediate. In January, in his inaugural, he may find himself addressing something bigger, and that is: Belief we can believe in. The return of confidence. The end of absence. The return of the suit inhabited by a person. The return of the person who will take responsibility, and lead.

Maaaan. Well, I would have loved to have seen that earlier this year from her. Take responsibility? Accountability?

Details after the cut.

The real root of Don’t Ask Dont Tell and other anti-gay stuff seems to be an insistent idea, that, similarly to the idea my father tried to pass on to me, that all gay men and women are desperate and determined to infect us all with their orientation – that somehow, they will all be predators waiting for their chance to rape, humiliate and then convert us all to also become homosexuals.  Total nonsense, of course, but some people feel that they have to approach it that way.

Of course, my attitude is that I’ve seen more improper gay behavior in the Republicans in Congress than anyone I’ve known who happened to be gay in real life, but I guess that’s the difference between real life and Congressional Republicans. Pretty wide.

The ugly truth about what happens when you send people to a war zone who aren’t up for the situation; they get turned into the contents of a coffin. A waste, an utter stinking waste. But the recruiters can fill their quotas, and the President can play with men’s lives.

And once again, the answer is that really, the President doesn’t have a plan to deal with the Iraq situation aside of to hold on and hope something comes around.  The GAO just reported that post-surge, Bushco really has no  plan and no real prospects on what to do next.  And there’s a story about how a local city council member in Iraq stood up and blew away two American soldiers…right after a meeting.

I know that there are people out there who have a bunch of questions about Obama’s stance on the military and the war.  I decided to look up his initial statement in 2002 as an Illinois State Senator - a speech where he said what his feelings about war and the military were.

I work about a block from where this was given, and I wished that I’d heard it at the time.  It’s incredibly prescient to where we are now.

Various retailers are offering shoppers a 10% rebate or break on money spent at their stores with money from the new US Treasury tax rebate ’stimulus’ check. (For us, it’s probably going into a side of beef and some needed home repairs.)

Domino’s Pizza is also offering a “recession-busting” special of three pizzas for $12. “While you’re feeding the economy with your special refund check, let it feed you back,” the company said in a news release promoting the offer.

“A lot of people probably have high-cost debt they need to pay off with this money,” said Jean Ann Fox, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America. “And if you’ve tied up your stimulus check in a card that can only be used at one store, you can’t do that.”

“You’ve got to be careful that you don’t seem like you’re, what I call, like a buzzard,” said Evan Anthony, vice president for corporate marketing and advertising at Kroger. “But you build customer loyalty when times are tough.”

The real problem, of course, is that people do not have a lot of loose money around under tight circumstances, with tight budgets and rising costs of fuel and food. Of course, it would be nice if someone did something substantive about the base causes of the financial problems, food, fuel, etc.

Bush grasps at the straws of his own disinformation as he casts himself deeper into the abyss. The more profound and compounded his blunders, and the more he redoubles his certainty in ultimate victory, the greater his indifference to failure. He has entered a phase of decadent perversity, where he accelerates his errors to vindicate his folly. As the sands of time run down, he has decided that no matter what he does, history will finally judge him as heroic. </p>

The greater the chaos, the more he reinforces and rigidifies his views. The more havoc he wreaks, the more he insists he is succeeding. His intensified struggle for self-control is matched by his increased denial of responsibility. Hence Petraeus.

Best short observation I’ve seen yet on the man.  Read it all.

Reading the latest run of things out in the news, it strikes me that there seems to be a competition between Bush and Larry Craig as to which one can twist reality around in their heads and ignore what’s going on and what the heck they did and what consequences that has.  I’m betting on Bush to be the one that’s most delusional, but in his case, we’re talking about something bigger by far that being caught out being on the down low.

There’s a good quote from John Adams on this, from a letter he wrote to Jefferson in 1816:

“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.”

No, AlQaeda is not a big factor in Iraq.  Yes, Bush set up benchmarks in January for Iragi performance and demanded they be met; only the most trivial of them have been, and anything of consequence in the benchmarks has not and will not be met in the near future, because there’s too much disinterest in coming to a solution other than My Faction Stomps All Of You Guys and you beg Allah for mercy.   No political progress is followed by no significant military progress; Bush and the DOD are cooking the numbers on that to say that there has been something of that sort, while noisily rejecting all other reports.

The other reports from independent observers are saying - the only peace that is going on is because there’s a zillion soldiers there and where the ethnic cleansing process has exiled the non-whatevers out of the neighborhood.  In the meantime, we’re keeping the sides busy and happy - by passing out a lot of weapons, telling them who to shoot and hoping that the weapons won’t be used later against someone else, like, say, us.

The point on all of this isn’t to keep the political process going, or to win militarily; the point is now what became screamingly obvious after this new Bush bio came out.   Bush is totally incapable of admitting there is a universe out there that doesn’t fit in his point of view or preconceptions, and he will never admit error.   He can’t.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.”

If I was Barack Obama, I’d start calling out this whole business from the tree tops.  Why are we giving so much deference to Bush and Cheney on this war?  They fabricated us into it, and are trying like hell to fabricate like mad to keep us in it for the foreseeable future.  Why was it that practically nobody in the Congress actually read the reports from the intelligence agencies before they voted for war?  Why was it that these men decided to lie and cheat to get us there and keep us there?  Where is the accountability for this, for Katrina, for a million different things?  Do you think that Hillary will have the guts to force this issue when she wouldn’t even read the reports before voting for the war?

I don’t, honestly.  And this is the discussion that should be before the American people, if anyone has the wits and guts to do it.  Someone needs to bring these points home to the people in power and to the public and make a big deal about it.

COMMENT: Saddam and his majority sect was systematically exterminating the minority sect in his county. He used chemical weapons to do so at least on one documented occasion.

JIM’S RESPONSE: His sect (Sunnis) are only about 20% of the Iraqi population. No argument from me that he deserved what he got. See also what he did to the Shi’ite Marsh Arabs.

COMMENT: I think to use the excuse of weapons of mass destruction was wrong.

JIM’S RESPONSE: Well, what they wanted was a quick and sure and simple sell to the American people that They Were In Danger. WMD fit the bill, and they manipulated the CIA and other reports to make all sorts of claims that could never hold up to close examination. They also believed that underneath all of that horsecrap, that they would find a pony eventually and they would be able to breath a lot easier. They never did.

Which means that in the present, they’re not too interested in you looking at what they did to sell the war, how much they lied or how badly they’ve done in handling Iraq.  The line is now ‘it’s a bloody mess, and we have to fight on now that we’re in it.’  Ah, but why should we trust you to know how to go forward with this?  Everything else has been a total mess once you’ve touched it, Mr Bush and Mr. Cheney!

And the whole ‘if we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here’ line is connected with that.  More on that later.  But the problem again and again (and this is what royally torques me off) is that that crew can never admit, never explain, just go off on some sort of new tear about what’s Dangerous Now.    They never explained that no, there were no WMDs in Iraq.  This conclusion was particularly awful:

1. The repetition of tentative news stories, even if they are subsequently disconfirmed, can assist in the creation of false memories in a substantial proportion of people.
2. Once information is published, its subsequent correction does not alter people’s beliefs unless they are suspicious about the motives underlying the events the news stories are about.
3. When people ignore corrections, they do so irrespective of how certain they are that the corrections occurred.

I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer that the people who run the country are halfway honest and straight with the citizens of our country.

COMMENT: Bushes problem was he failed to recognize the instant gratification syndrome of the American public. If a news story doesn’t end by the end of the week the public is bored with it.

JIM’S RESPONSE: No argument from me that between the media and the public, it’s Short Attention Span Theater out there. However, Bush and his advisors expected that the war in Iraq would be a cheap, quick in and out victory, and had no plans for anything else. The problem since is that instead of fixing things and handing the occupation of Iraq with half a brain, they had short attentions as to what the heck they were supposed to be doing there.

Instead of guarding all of the huge ammo and weapons dumps, they left them wide open for pilferage. Instead of maintaining the Army for a little while to clean things up, if nothing else, they sent them off with weapons to go scavenge for something to do. Don’t even get me started on the lack of planning for vets returning from the war with massive injuries, PTSD and the like. Or why they didn’t go for proper levels of training, equipment, armor and armored MRAPs.

Aside of that, Bush has depended on Short Attention Spans – as to what we were doing there, why we were there in the first place, and hoped that he could keep the war as cheap and low key as possible; less Not-My-Son-Or-Brother-Or-Dad that would have occurred with the draft.

More on the answers to a commenter:

COMMENT: Saddam was destabilizing the region and his success was encouraging the other countries to do the same.

JIM’S RESPONSE: Iraq was an invention of the West from the ruins of the Ottoman Sultanate; jamming in three not-sympatico ethnic and religious groups together and calling it a country. A far smarter thing to do would have been to create three states way-back-when and leave it at this; would have made the Kurds happy. It then suffered under a great deal of instability for decades unless some Big Goon was in charge and smashing everyone flat under his power. Same sort of thing happened in Yugoslavia – disrupts, then Tito smashes people flat, then disrupts and disunion.

The problem with bullies and tyrants is that somehow, they have to motivate the secret police and the army into shoving people around. And keep the people meek enough that they don’t rebel.

A commenter on a previous Livejournal post was putting forward some posits and asking some questions, and I’m going to respond to them in a few chunks of material.

COMMENT: This president went into war with the hope that the region would stop being a hotbed for terrorism.

JIM’S RESPONSE: It’s difficult to tell all of the motivations. People guess at them, and W is not a deep thinker. He’s a reactor on some kind of gut level, and he’s not intrinsically introspective. One of the hallmarks of these guys is that they honestly think that thinking things through on ‘actions’ is for wimps and losers and equivocators, and that’s not them, nosirree bub! They are *maaaaanly men* who know what they want and go for it.

I can be concerned about crime in my town, but there’s all sorts of ways of going about dealing with the situation. Making a big badge that says SHERIFF and pulling out an Uzi and going house to house shooting it off isn’t a good one.

Some people say it was oil, or US hegemony, or some sort of idea that if you just knocked off Saddam, that everyone would cheer like when the Wicked Witch bit the dishwater in Oz and melted. Then, they’d salute Bush, offer their eternal friendship, and become a western-style democracy that would stand by Bush like, say, the UK and Tony Blair.

Or maybe it was a desire to get back at them over the first war and Bush’s dad. Hard to say.

My guess is All Of The Above, and the real question is not “what were their specific motivatons”, because truthfully, short of a one-way trip for Bush and Cheney to Gitmo with Jack Bauer, you’ll never know and I’ll never know.

The real question is more – did they really think this through? Consider unintended consequences? Consider that what they were doing and how they were doing it would lead to a bigger mess? No, I’m pretty sure that they did not. And that’s the really damning item for me. They didn’t have to do this, this way and in this manner, and they put us in the mess that we’re in right now and then dug us in deeper and deeper. To have them say ‘well, trust us to get you out of it now’ when they’ve done nothing significant right since boots touched the ground inside of Iraq – I mean, are we that gullible?

Well, I’m not. And what Bush did has destroyed Iraq as any kind of cohesive nation state and made the terrorist situation worse.

Stuff below on the complex of scandals washing over Washington. You are warned. More after the cut.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/26/rumsfeld/print.html

• The best training: No, you can’t go to counterinsurgency training, you have to fight the insurgents.
• Military readiness: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reports that we can’t handle any other fighting, and it will take years to rebuild what we have.
• And the White House says: what readiness problem?
• This readiness and resource problem in, say, Afghanistan.
• Food safety is going to heck; the FDA’s enforcement is cut to ribbons.
• Hate the terrorist, keep his campaign contributions.
• And fire US Attorneys for cause - the cause being that they’re digging into our guys’ misfeasances, or we need to give Smedley our unqualified buddy a job. The link goes over the past history of such firings, and notes that it’s rare and almost always for real cause. Not this time.

Rumsfeld wargaming a government disruption: But instead of working to re-establish a functioning US government in the aftermath of a massive disaster, Rumsfeld had other priorities.A former official at the time told Cockburn that Rumsfeld, “always tried to unleash the maximum amount of nuclear firepower possible,” in retaliation for a Soviet attack.

As we Save Ulster From Sodomy, we need to reflect on these items:

• “For a brief moment yesterday, Scooter Libby was not a former White House aide on trial for perjury. He was an orphan in need of a loving home.“
• Now the people in Pastor Ted Haggard’s church are coming forward about his ‘dark side’ that they knew about all along.  I especially liked this line: “These findings established a pattern of behavior that culminated in the final relationship in which Ted was, as a matter of grace, caught.”
• If you haven’t checked out the whole story (mostly in the Washington Post) about the mess at Walter Reed Hospital and the treatment of rehabbing injured Iraq war veterans, do so.  And notice the reactions of the people in authority - either denying it, or saying who cares, or trying frantically to clean things up.  To me, it says volumes  about how much the people in power over the military gave a damn about ’supporting the troops’.  It’s not something different and new; it’s part of a whole picture about using them like gamepieces on a board, and not bothering to think about them as human beings.
• Similarly, it’s painful to watch McCain wildly veer from mavericity to suckupery, where one day he lauds the people in power, and the next day, goes off about how they’re incompetent boobs.  Bush isn’t the only person in DC to be working hard on reducing his own credibility.
• A legend in his own mind.  George Washington, who had gravitas and never-told-a-lie, and George W., who has the gravitas of a frat boy on pledge night, and can’t-tell-the-truth or doesn’t-know-the-difference.  Take your pick, but it’s upchuck city.
• Brain glitches from Tom Tomorrow.