Behind the 8-ball

With the news this morning of blasts in Baghdad aimed at Shiite mosques, I wonder whether Iraq's insurgency, which protrayed itself as a nationalist battle against the American military occupation, is now transforming itself into an insurgency portraying itself as a nationalist battle against Iranian influence in Iraq.
Robert Kagen's column in today's Washington Post -- Shiites and Stereotypes attempts to assure Washington that Shiite government in Iraq shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as an Iranian plot to control Iraq. But I wonder how it looks to the people on the ground in Iraq itself -- Iran, at the very least, is a long-standing ally of the Iraqi Shiites and a model for the kind of religious government they want to create. And the Iraqi military leadership, now running the insurgency, are the same people who fought for a decade against Iran and hate Iran passionately.
Where does this leave the United States? Behind the 8-ball -- in the bizarre situation of using 150,000 of its best and brightest American troops to prop up what might be an Iranian puppet government against a nationalist insurgency that will say it is battling Iranian control of Iraq. And how in the world do they get themselves out of this mess, when they would need to stay in Iraq if they want to use their Iraqi bases to launch a war against Iran or Syria?
Somebody told me there'd be days like these, strange days indeed.

Its like a cop handing a suspect to the Mafia

I've been laid low this week due to a cold and/or flu, but I could not miss noting this Bob Herbert column about the Mahar Arar case and so-called "extraordinary rendition" -- Our Friends, the Torturers: "The entire point of this atrocious exercise is to transfer the suspect to a regime skilled in the art of torture. It's as if a cop picked up a suspect on the street and handed him over to the Mafia to extract a confession. One's guilt or innocence is not relevant. No legal defense is permitted. If a mistake is made, too bad."
Particularly apt, I thought, was Herbert's analogy to police handing a suspect over to the Mafia for questioning. Yes, that's exactly what it is.
Also notable, I notice, is the development of a whole new language to hide what is going on. George Orwell would find terminology like "extraordinary rendition" and "enemy combatant" falls into his definition of "political language" which is "the defence of the indefensible" and "has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."

Pathetic

The Globe and Mail: Bitter attacks open debate on same-sex

"Let us not forget, it is the Liberal Party that said 'none is too many,' when it came to Jews fleeing from Hitler," Mr. Harper said yesterday. "It is the Liberal Party that interned Japanese Canadians in camps on Canada's West Coast, an act which [former prime minister] Pierre Trudeau refused to apologize or make restitution for." Mr. Harper dredged up the 60-year-old events just after the Prime Minister questioned the sincerity of those who would ban gay marriage, saying opponents refuse to admit that it would take the invocation of the Constitution's notwithstanding clause to do it.

I don't get it -- is it Harper's argument now that because the Liberal party once discriminated against Jews and Japanese, that it should be OK today for the Liberals to discriminate against gay people?
Typically incoherent Conservative argument!
I have a test -- for every comment you hear against gay marriage, substitute the words "interracial marriage". And if the comment then sounds like ignorant bigotry, well, it is.

Round and round and round it goes, and where it stops, nobody knows

Updating yesterday's story about whether Canadian soldiers treated Afghan prisoners humanely, the Ottawa Citizen today reports that Canada's JTF2 captives vanish at Guantanamo
"Members of the Ottawa-based Joint Task Force 2 commando unit took at least three prisoners in January 2002 and another four during a raid several months later. But attempts by Canadian officers to find out what happened to the people appear to have been stymied by the U.S." Canada was, after all, just a US ally during this war, so what business could it be of ours?
So we're considering joining this military in the missile defense initiative but won't participate in weaponizing space? Why would we think they would tell us?

Swinging in the wind

Conservative MP ripped for saying gays can marry - just not each other' Stupidest. MP. Ever. Calgary Conservative MP Jason Kenney gets into the Valentine's Day spirit: ". . . homosexuals aren't barred from marrying under Canadian law. Marriage is open to everybody, as long as they're a man and a woman."
And I keep noticing how Conservatives keep complaining about how the Liberals are out of touch with the ethnic communities on the gay marriage issue.
Such a viewpoint only illustrates how profoundly Conservatives misunderstand this issue, and how completely untrustworthy they would be on civil rights issues as a government -- because, boys, gay marriage is not a popularity contest. Paul Martin and the Liberals aren't legalizing gay marriage just to pander to their base or their branches or whatever. They aren't doing it just because they think it makes them "look good" to some voting constituency. They're doing it simply because they believe it's the right thing to do. They support the principle that EVERYBODY'S civil rights matter. And the fact that the Conservatives cannot understand this says a great deal about the heart of today's Conservative party. where painted but empty masks hang from barren trees, swinging in the wind.

Dispatch from inside the rabbit hole

Tomorrow belongs to me!
The sun on the meadow is summery warm.
The stag in the forest runs free.
But gather together to greet the storm.
Tomorrow belongs to me.
The branch of the linden is leafy and green,
The Rhine gives its gold to the sea.
But somewhere a glory awaits unseen.
Tomorrow belongs to me.
The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes
The blossom embraces the bee.
But soon, says a whisper "Arise, arise,
Tomorrow belongs to me"
Oh Fatherland, Fatherland, Show us the sign
Your children have waited to see.
The morning will come when the world is mine.
Tomorrow belongs to me!
As I read this TalkLeft story about white supremists buying billboards proclaiming "The Future Belongs to Us!" this song from Cabaret started playing in my mind - a TalkLeft commenter noted it as well.
The National Alliance which is directing this campaign is also involved in the Zundel case. And in poking further around their site, I found this notice of a protest just a week ago at Anne McLelland's constituency office (with a bogus photo - this is NOT Edmonton in February!) -- I don't know how many actually attended -- and a link to another Canadian website, The Freedom Site which purports to be some sort of free speech site but actually seems to think there is something noble about hating Jews and Aboriginals and immigrants (except, apparently, their own ancestors) and selling Heritage Front t-shirts and David Duke books. Eeeuuuu!
UPDATE: Orcinus also has a post about the National Alliance and their connection to the conservative US agenda. "If you look at most of these cases, the thread running through them is that they are clearly tying themselves to mainstream conservative issues: the National Alliance ad campaign, for instance, targeted immigration and "European American" rights. What is enabling these extremists, in reality, is a conservative movement that has in fact been moving in their direction in recent years. Like the NASCAR folks, conservative Republicans apply cosmetics and give lip service to the causes of equality and tolerance. But the proof, as always, lies in the pudding."

And so it begins

DRUDGE REPORT: FEC May Tighten Restrictions On Internet Political Activity
Since the American election, I've been saying that the Bush administration is bound and determined to bring the progressive bloggers to heel. Howard Dean was extraordinarily successful in internet fundraising, and now that he has been electec chair, Daily Kos has raised close to $100,000 for the democrats in two days. Can't have that . . .

Canadian troops? Doing this? Outrageous!

POGGE points us to this Ottawa Citizen story and this awful photo.

The Canadian Forces' practice of covering the heads of Afghan prisoners with hoods and using plastic handcuffs is an outdated way to handle captives and could violate the Geneva Convention, a senior military police officer warned last year. But Department of National Defence officials say since that the Afghan mission is a peacekeeping operation, any prisoners taken by Canadian troops are not subject to the convention.

This is BULLSHIT, totally and completely.
I'm glad at least one major has objected to it. But as POGGE says, "These are the kinds of games with semantics that have been used to justify the treatment of detainees in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. I didn't realize that DND officials had been studying at the feet of Alberto Gonzales."
And if we don't see Bill Graham in the Commons tomorrow assuring Canadians that the Canadian military follows the Geneva Conventions in ANY Canadian military operation of ANY kind, ANYWHERE in the world, regardless of whose war it is . . .

Remember this?

So as we were watching tonight's Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which was about ghost prisoners in a Brooklyn jail, I mentioned to my husband that 1,800 people had been arrested during the Republican Convention and held for two days incommunicado at some pier in New York City. He said "What? I hadn't heard anything about that! Why wasn't there something on the news about it?" Now, my husband keeps up with the news as much as anyone does -- I'm the internet and news junkie in the family -- and he was stunned that he had heard nothing about this either during or since -- nothing in the papers or on the TV news or on the talk shows, and we were watching a lot during the convention. "How did you know about it?" he asked me. I told him I had read about it on the left-wing blogs at the time, but that it hadn't ever got any real coverage, I guessed.
Just goes to show, doesn't it, how a major event effectively disappears if the media are too scared to write about it.
So I started to wonder what had happened since, and found this story from a week ago: USATODAY.com - Protesters challenge NYC arrests
"Despite the sweeping arrests, more than three-quarters of the people arrested during the convention had their cases dismissed outright or dropped in exchange for a promise to behave for six months. Fewer than 10% have pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor or violation. And out of 28 trials, 10 protesters have been convicted. The handful of convictions and large number of dismissals are seen by protesters and their advocates as evidence that police wanted to take demonstrators off the streets and intimidate potential participants into staying home." Gee, ya think?
UPDATE: And thinking about this a little further, I remember that the Democrats were too cowardly to march with the New Yorkers -- so scared were they of being seen as "anti-war". So maybe that's why the police could arrest people so indiscriminately, and the media could ignore the story -- Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and John Kerry weren't out there on the front lines supporting these anti-war protestors, nor did they lead a news crew to Pier 57 to bail them out. Well, maybe now with Howard Dean chairing the DNC, the Dems will get some guts and some heart.

That will be news to Zelda

Does anyone remember the movie "Getting Straight"?
It was Elliot Gould's best movie, and Candice Bergen's too. Among many great scenes, the greatest was the Master's Oral.
It culminated in a bit of business between Gould and one of the Masters examiners, who was trying to get Gould to agree that F. Scott Fitzgerald was gay. Seeing his degree disappearing unless he could appease this examiner, Gould tried mightly to find some ethical way to agree with the examiner's belief. He twisted and turned, but he just couldn't do it, finally bursting out with "well, that will be news to Zelda". Needless to say, the Oral deteriorated from there. ("The greatest expression of English literature is...the Limrick!")
I was reminded of this scene when I read this post Matthew Yglesias: Thinking Things Through about the Social Security debate in the US. The right-wing politicians and economists are trying so hard to find some way to support Bush's plan, twisting and turning to make sense of it, and to try to make it sensible. But they just can't do it. It DOESN'T make sense, it will never make sense, the emperor HAS NO CLOTHES.
And that won't be news to Zelda at all.

Dispatch from the trenches

On Rabble, we find Charles Demers' Pride and prejudice in the chapel o' love
A good article all around, skewering people who want the left to stop dealing with "wedge issues" like gay marriage. "One would assume that, in the face of such a blatantly contradictory, homophobic, illiberal, anti-democratic, obscurant campaign by the right, we might see a reinvigorated, confident, accessible and lucid counter from left. One would be wrong, as one nearly always is when one expects invigoration, confidence, accessibility and lucidity from us." He decries the left's failure to mount an aggressive defense of gay marriage because it is thought to be a "wedge issue". ". . . we know from the experience of workers and activists of colour what appeals to ignore 'wedge issues' means: 'Shut up about abortion, language rights, affirmative action, tiered wages, and wheelchair access. We need to emphasize campaigns that white men can get behind.' "
And he points out something I have wondered about as well -- the hypocrisy of Harper's use of the "polygamy" scare tactic, while also courting Muslim men whose religion has been interpreted by some to actually support having more than one wife.
And for more news on the gay marriage fight, now the Conservatives are playing the victim over some sort of email scam where MPs were told to send their constituents a pamphlet about gay marriage. The CP story leads with this remarkable sentence "The Conservatives say they're the victims of a dirty tricks e-mail campaign designed to make them look anti-gay ... "
Well, let me just remind the conservatives of this one little fact: opposing gay marriage IS anti-gay! They cannot have it both ways, demonizing gay marriage while pretending they actually support gay rights and gay people.
But they want to, oh how they want to. As a result, they're living in a self-created myth world, where they think they can pander to bigoted religious groups while denying that they are actually promoting bigotry.
I checked out the Conservative Party Website to see what it had to say on the issue. Here is their discretely-titled section "Definition of Marriage: The Conservative Party will fight to give a greater voice to Parliament. We will ensure that issues like marriage are decided by parliament, not the courts." That's all. So, I guess they'll be issuing a press release any day now to say how happy they are now that parliament is deciding the issue, eh?
And here's an example of Harper's fire-and-brimstone rhetoric on the issue, from the text of a Feb. 5 speech , the most recent speech posted on the website. "I think its important to have equal rights, just as important to preserve traditional definition." That's it, one incoherent sentence. Of course, he was speaking to a Conservative meeting in Nova Scotia, with Peter McKay apparently in the room, so he knew he couldn't actually get into the scare tactics used in the Conservative ad campaign, about which he had not informed McKay before it started.
Well, I can only conclude that, while the left may be somewhat cowardly on the issue, this pales in comparison to the mean-spirited, deliberately-misleading hypocritical cowardice on the Conservative side.

Emotional physics

My Bhalg posts about Gwyne Dyer's new book, so I decided to look up his recent columns. What a great writer he is. The latest column on his website is Jan 17, when he writes about . the chances that the US will invade Iran. Here is how he ends it:

"Edward Luttwak, the military historian and strategic analyst who is renowned in Washington for his maverick views, recently described US foreign policy post-9/11 almost as an exercise in emotional physics. Never mind all the elaborate strategic plans and projects of the neo-conservatives, he implied; what really drives all this is just push-back. After 9/11, there was an enormous need in the US to do something big, to smash stuff up and punish people for the hurt that had been done to Americans. Afghanistan was a logical and legitimate target of that anger, but it fell practically without a fight and left the national need for
vengeance unassuaged. The invasion of Iraq was an emotional necessity if the rage was to be discharged, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the United States. In this interpretation, all the talk about attacking Iran is the last wave of this emotional binge running feebly up the beach, and it is unlikely to sweep everything away. The talk is still macho, but the performance is not there to back it up. What the US public gets for all the taxes it pays on defence -- currently around $2,000 a year for every American man, woman and child -- is armed forces that are barely capable of holding down one middle-sized Arab country. There simply aren't any American troops available to invade Iran, and air strikes will only annoy them. What would really tip the whole area into an acute crisis is a re-radicalised Iran that has concluded that it will never be secure until it has expelled the United States from the region."

On Hardball tonight, the retired generals were talking about the US being in Iraq for another three years. I wonder how long Iran will be willing to wait?

Guantanamo goes mainstream

Wednesday night I watched one of my favorite shows, NYPD Blue. The plot of this episode was disturbing and horrifying.
An Army recruiter is shot in front of a school, and the first suspect found by the detectives is a teenager - 17 years old - who had argued previously with the recuiters because his brother died in Iraq. And the boy admitted he had learned how to shoot in Scouts. Oh, and he also had taken a school trip to Spain and Morocco the previous summer.
So, according to the Army CID guy helping the NYPD investigate the case, the boy fit the profile of an "enemy combatant" and the CID was therefore entitled to use "special interrogation methods" to force him to confess. The good detectives of the squad, though, wanted to investigate a little further. and of course they finally found the real culprit. And in the end, the boy went up to the recruiter and basically apologized for causing so much trouble.
What was horrifying about it was, first, that on the basis of coincidence, with zero evidence, the Army CID type concluded the boy was guilty and was all set to ship the boy to Guantanamo, and second, that everybody else in the squad accepted without a murmur the right of the CID to do this. They all acted like torturing the boy and condemning him without a trial would be perfectly OK if they couldn't find a better suspect.
I was reminded of this plotline when I read Digby today writing about Death in Life "We are disappearing people, rendering them to friendly governments that aren't afraid to put the electrode to genitals and threaten with dog rape. And we are building our own infrastructure of torture and extra legal imprisonment. It is a law of human nature that if you build it, they will come. This infrastructure will be expanded and bureaucratized. It's already happening. And when they decide, as Professor Yoo has already decided, that an election is a sanctioning of anything the President chooses to do in the War on Terror, it is only a matter of time before internal political enemies become a threat.
And then it will be us."
Perhaps it is time for people like Digby and Kos and Atrios and BOP and Frog and the other progressive bloggers to start making some back-up plans, like European mirror sites. And does anyone know if the Weathermen safe houses still exist? Canada would welcome you all, of course.

"I'm not a journalist but I've played one at the White House"

AMERICAblog summarizes the Gannon coverage. Spiderleaf at Daily Kos provides the timeline which shows how Gannon was a major player in twisting the Plame leak story. For me, this is much hotter stuff than the "military escorts men for men" angle, though your mileage may differ.
UPDATE: Digby blows away the "poor conservative journalist targetted by the liberal blogosphere" spin, which isn't going to survive the sh*tstorm now directing attention squarely where it belongs, on the White House press office, which I assume will shortly be approached by the Daily Show for credentials.

Nothing is taboo for these guys

Pogge has a good post about the latest missle defense moves: Peace, order and good government, eh?: Let's not let the facts influence our decision
What frustrates me about the missile defense discussion is Canada's pious insistence that even if it does participate in the "defense" part, it would not participate in the weaponization of space, oh no, never, and besides the Americans say they don't want to put weapons in space anyway.
My question is -- why wouldn't they?
For the last 40 years, the American military has worked to weaponize everything else -- just tonight, on Countdown I think, there was a laudatory story about how US unmanned planes can fire missiles at Iraqi snipers, on orders from corporals sitting in bunkers a thousand miles away. One of the big scare stories in the Iraq war buildup was the "discovery" of some torpedo-like tubes which the Americans said were Iraqi prototypes of unmanned aircraft which the Iraqis were planning to use to attack the US -- of course, they turned out to be nothing of the kind, but it shows what the Americans were thinking. And they're working hard making nuclear weapons that they can actually use, that will, for instance, burrow underground.
So why wouldn't they want to be able to put weapons in space? In fact, some think they already are doing this -- its the final frontier, for one thing, and besides, they likely think they will need such weapons to win the war against China which they probably think America will be fighting in about 20 years.