War on Terror 1 -- Constitution 0

Larry Beinhart: Fog Facts notes that the main casualty so far in the War on Terror has been the US Constitution:

The War on Terror does not catch terrorists, especially the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and the people in charge don’t really seem to care. That’s with the expenditure of $200 billion in supplementary spending, over and above the normal cost of maintaining our military and intelligence operations. Let’s look at what they actually did, instead of what they spoke of. That would suggest what the real goals are.
The big, obvious thing that the War on Terror permitted was for America to make its imperial lunge. There were papers that made it clear that this was an administration goal, the most notable one posted at the Project for a New American Century, and there were statements too. Something more subtle also took place. It is quite dangerous and it is largely unremarked.
The War on Terror permitted the administration to put an end to the concept that everyone is equal before the law.
We suddenly have people who are beneath the laws. They are called terrorists and unlawful combatants. All it takes to make someone beneath the law is to denounce them. They then have no rights, no phone call, no lawyers. They cannot argue about what they’ve been called. They can be whisked off to a prison and held incommunicado and tortured. Or at least seriously abused. It appears unlikely that this could happen to you or I or your friends across the street. But with the end of equality before the law, there really is nothing to stop it. Except our belief that our leaders are all honorable men who would not abuse such power.
Along with the creation of a class that is below the law, there is also a new class that is above the law. The presidential legal staff, including Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee and John Yoo, came up with the theory that when the presidents puts on his commander-in-chief outfit, and acts in that capacity, he is not constrained by any laws. Not international law, not the laws of the United States, not by treaties and not even by the constitution. Furthermore, anyone that he commands to do things when he is wearing that costume, is also unconstrained by those limits, statutes and laws. They are all above the law.
In addition, we have created a three tier international system in which there are entire nations below the law: terrorist states, states the harbor terrorists and failed states. There is, of course, one nation that is above the law. That is the United States.

Goodbye, Carolyn

Loose cannon, yes, but she was fun and will be missed -- Parrish not seeking re-election: "Controversial MP Carolyn Parrish is telling her constituents she won't seek re-election as a federal Liberal or as an Independent, says a report on a Toronto radio station." One of the great things about Canadian politics is how we can still elect true originals. Parrish, for all her faults, was a Canadian original and never ashamed to be one.

Tweety's great line of the day

Chris Matthews demonstrates that he actually IS a journalist. Here is how he introduced his show on Monday night -- not a bad summary of what Plame is all about and why it matters, and how it all relates to the Bush administration's push for war with Iraq:

If you don't think this leak case matters, ask yourself, what was the most frightening case you heard for going to war with Iraq? Probably it was that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium yellow cake in Africa to build nuclear weapons. The president said it in his 2003 State of the Union address. The vice president repeated it with military precision, almost like a Gatling gun, Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons, again and again.
But it wasn't true. There's no evidence even now that Saddam tried to by nuclear materials in Africa. We know that now because the man the CIA sent down there to Niger to check it out, sent there after Vice President Cheney asked the CIA to check it out, wrote a New York Times article a few months after the war started that there was no deal. Worse yet, the former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, wrote that the people around the president must have known there was no deal, even when the president and his people kept telling the country there was.
How did the Bush people react to this unwelcome news? This is what the CIA leak case, which could produce indictments any day now, is all about. Did the people around the president actively try to discredit that man who came back from Africa, to say the yellow cake story was a phony? Did they try and kill the messenger? Did they use to enormous media power of the White House to discredit the ambassador, his mission and his wife at the CIA, who suggested him for the mission?
And, in doing so, did they abuse the office and the power to which the president was elected? Did they break the law? Did they conspire to punish a critic of the war, even if their weapon was the destruction of his wife's undercover career by identifying her to the public? Did they lie about their actions to government investigators to a grand jury or even to the president himself?

Since 911. Bush has often said his job is to protect the American people -- actually it isn't of course; the president's job really is to defend the Constitution. But leaving that aside for the moment and getting back to my point -- Americans need to ask the Bush administration how well Bush actually protected them when he took them to war with Iraq.

So whose going to be the new Vice President?

Crooks and Liars reports "The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are working on stories that point to Vice President Dick Cheney as the target of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name."
So when Cheney resigns, whose going to be the new VP?
Just figure out who is the bery least-qualified Bush patriot in the world -- how about Karen Hughes?

Great line of the day

Hunter at Daily Kos takes on the right-wing bloggers who are still trying to argue that Plame wasn't really outed as an undercover CIA agent:

Dear Whoever The Hell Comes Up With These Things: . . . It takes an act of wanton dumbassitude to assert, after the case has been investigated for two years, that maybe Plame wasn't really covert, and they'll get around any day now to figuring that out. Call me an excessive believer in the powers of investigative deduction, but I'm pretty sure that before spending two years of investigation, the CIA figured out whether or not Plame was actually covert.
Yes, this is the intellectual movement that is going to take down the mainstream media with their hard-hitting news analysis. These are the New Pundits, the FactCheckers, the Socket Rientists of Journalism. From the militia members stocking up for the nuclear apocalypse to be caused by Y2K, to the network-busting power of small animated gifs, to the monkey howls of Hillary! Hiiiiiillaryyyyyyy! that accompany the slightest dull thud in the political landscape, these are the members of 'Bush's Base'. Lord help us all, we're going to die.

Emphasis mine.
We're heard lots of Plame talking points over the last two years, haven't we - she wasn't really covert, nobody knew who she really was, she was nobody really, nothing was actually leaked, no law was really broken, the law sets such a high standard that no one could ever be actually guilty of breaking it, maybe it was Powell's fault, maybe it was Fleisher's fault, it was the reporters who told Rove and Libby that she was CIA, when Rove and Libby talked to reporters it was about welfare reform not uranium from Africa, that guy Wilson is just a publicity hound, that prosecutor is a nutcase, that guy Wilson is a nutcase, that prosecotor is just a publicity hound -- all gradually falling by the wayside as events proved them just too ridiculous for anyone to keep trying to promote.
The republicans are trying out two new talking points now.
First is that society shouldn't "criminalize politics" -- which implies that the whole thins is somehow really just a part of the usual political game that Washingtonians play, not something anyone should find illegal or take offense at, Democrats argued that nobody cared when Clinton had that affair so wouldn't it be hypocritical to care about this, oh my word can't anyone take a joke around here? Of course, this talking point won't stand for very long. There are just too many Americans who will insist on thinking that this is NOT like having a consentual affair, that outing a covert CIA agent is actually a criminal act, and how dare anyone pretend that such behaviour is OK just because you dislike her husband, what's wrong with you people anyway.
The other new talking point now is the "Rove lied to Bush" story. This may be Bush's last line of defense, the last refuge of a scoundrel.
This fairy tale describes how Bush ASKED his good buddy Karl about the Plame leak yes indeedy he DID, but then that tricky ole Rove lied -- yes, he LIED, and so our pore ole George got tricked by ole buddy Turdblossom.
Now this self-serving piece of twaddle strikes me as about as credible as the "slam-dunk" anecdote. You remember, the Woodward anecdote that in December of 2002 -- long after all the mushroom cloud remarks and the 'fixing the intellegence around the policy' memo -- that Bush supposedly asked then-CIA-director Tenant if he was really really really sure that Saddam had WMD and Tenant said it was a slam dunk. So therefore Bush believers could be comforted that their guy had TRIED to find out the truth about the WMD, he REALLY TRIED, but his staff done him wrong, and it was all Tenant's fault. This "Rove lied to Bush" line strikes me as just another fairy story about how Bush's staff done him wrong AGAIN!
So Bush's only fault, really, was that he loved, not wisely, but too well -- or something like that.

What a suprise!

Well, well, how surprising -- ". . . with Saturday's constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency . . ." Oh, quel suprise -- so, actually, Bush can argue that they have stayed the course long enough, and it would actually enhance democracy if the US just pulls troops out before the congressional midterms next fall? Except, of course, for the 20,000 troops who will hunker down on those permanent bases.
I don't know if they can actually sell this one to the American people as peace with honour, considering that war with dishonour is the more likely scenario for the next six months regardless of how many purple fingers are waggled.

Cutest kitten ever

Just for fun, I stole this from The Poorman.
The photo is actually entitled "cutest kitten ever".

Pandemic Flu Awareness Week

This week was Pandemic Flu Awareness Week on the blogs -- I haven't had anything to contribute to this discussion, but here is some handy information about personal preparedness.
Though I find the survival articles interesting -- for example, it would not have occurred to me to stockpile brown rice as a diet staple -- I am probably not scared enough or organized enough to make disaster preparedness part of my daily life. However, I did find this post from Aetiology
How ready are we, and what can YOU do? which gives some pretty basic advice that I can follow:

. . . wash your hands . . . many of us still don’t do it correctly. It is recommended to wash with soap and running water for at least 20 seconds . . . Teach your children to do this as well: have them count to 20 or sing their ABC’s while washing their hands . . .
If you’re sick, please, please, please stay home. Adults are contagious for ~5 days and children for up to 21 days after becoming sick. Don’t go and expose others when you’re coughing, sneezing and hacking all over the place.
Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth . . . re-train yourself not to cover your mouth with your hands when you cough: use a tissue, or the crook of your arm—-something that won’t come into contact as often with surfaces, or with other people.
Get a flu shot. No, it won’t protect you from “bird” flu, but should that virus spread, it will prevent you from being co-infected with both viruses and passing along any potential recombinant viruses . . .
Get stocked up. You should always have a supply of food, water, medications, and basic household necessities on hand in the event of any kind of disaster . . .

Great line of the day

Crawl Across the Ocean writes:

. . . our 'qwerty' keyboard receives it's non-intuitive layout ad part of a scheme to slow typists sown do that they wouldn't overload the typewriters of the say. . . . it occurred to me that - in this era of spell-checkers - if I has been allocates the task of redesigning the keyboard, the best thing to so would be to come up with a layout which minimized the chanced of mid-typing something but still creating a valid word at the dame time. I wouldn't put the 's' and the 'd' beside each other, that id for sure.

Emphadid mine.

Mark A. R. Kleiman: Patrick Fitzgerald's mousetrap

Mark Kleinman's blog on Patrick Fitzgerald's mousetrap explains the latest Plame theory-of-everything pretty well, a scenario which is particularly believable in terms of the egotistical personalities involved in this story. Read the whole thing.

Some earthquake photos

(AFP/Sajjad Hussain) Survivors in Kashmir


(AP Photo/B.K.Bangash) A makeshift ward is set up outside a hospital in Abbotabad.


REUTERS/Danish Ismail Rescue in Srinagar


REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood Volunteers gather at the site of a collapsed apartment building in Islamabad.
More photos here.

Good Better Best

Good.

Cam Cardow, The Ottawa Citizen

Better.

Non-sequitur

Best.

Ann Telnaes

Great line of the day

From firedoglake: "Note to self: do not EVER play poker with Patrick Fitzgerald."
I've put up a few new links, and reorganized a few of the existing ones. One of the new ones is Firedoglake, where this line comes from -- its part of an interesting article on the latest in the Plame story.
All over left blogistan, the cry is going up -- "Oh please, oh please, oh please . . . ". (This quotes WTF is it Now? orgiastically contemplating even the possibility of a Rove frogmarch moment. But everyone else feels the same way.)
If you thought right-wingers were disappointed with Hariett Miers, I cannot even imagine the gloom in left blogistan if Fitzgerald announces next week 'so long and thanks for all the fish.' However, I don't think he will -- he has been too serious in his approach, on everything from interviewing Bush and Cheney to jailing Judy Miller, to be shooting blanks. There are all sorts of scenarios being booted about, but the one everyone seems to think most likely is that Scooter is going down, maybe also Rove, and maybe with Cheney and/or Bush as unindicted co-conspirators -- see also Lawrence O'Donnell's stuff, and emptywheel's stuff.

By Howie, I think he's got it!

Dean Aims to Overhaul Democrats -- well, well, will wonders never cease. A story which is positive about: 1)Howard Dean, and 2) what he is doing with the Democrats.

Dean is putting four or five DNC staff members in every state with orders to organize every precinct. One of the organizers' first mandates is to conduct four major events a year, one or two of which are mainly social. Dean learned from his own campaign that it is critical to form relationships that turn into small communities and build into networks of people who feel part of a bottom-up operation with a purpose larger than themselves. It's a long-term investment that runs counter to the political culture in Washington that, in the last years of the 20th century, has valued multimillion-dollar TV buys over grass-roots organizing. 'You've got to recruit people. You've got to ask them to do something,' Dean said. 'You have to treat them like a community.'

Absolutely correct, Howie.

A Hallway Moment

IAEA, Agency Chief Win Nobel Peace Prize I'll bet this announcement made John Bolton run down a hallway screaming.