Spineless toadies

Well -- one down, dozens to go.
On Countdown tonight, John Dean said the Nixon White House actually considered whether they could use the secrecy of a grand jury proceeding to try to hide the Watergate crimes. Instead, Congress held public hearings and down came the Nixon administration.
Digby writes: "If the Republican leadership of congress weren't spineless Bush toadies and insane religious fanatics they would do their job and investigate this honestly for the good of the country. But they won't. They are nothing more than braindead fatcats gorging at the pork barrel with a fistfull of C-notes in one hand and a bible in the other . . . We are left with a timorous press and an honest prosecutor to get to the bottom of what these people have done to us."
Only if the democrats take the House or the Senate in 2006 will the Bush administration get the kind of public investigation it deserves.

DBK was right (updated)

Columbus, Ohio newspaper The Free Press reports that the Government Accounting Office "now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House. Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that's exactly what happened." Hoo, boy. Forget Meirs -- THIS is a story. Frogsdong DBK always said that the 2004 election was stolen, and now the GAO shows how it was done.
UPDATE: Frogsdong is now DBK -- sorry, Frog, I missed the announcement until today.

Yes, we should be ashamed of ourselves

I have been waiting to blog on the Milgaard Inquiry until it was a little clearer what direction the inquiry was taking.
Was it going to pin down some responsibility for sending an innocent 17-year-old kid to jail for 23 years for the rape-murder of nurse Gail Miller. Or was it just going to whitewash all the good old boys (police and prosecutors) involved -- several of whom, it appears, cannot actually remember much if anything all now about one of Saskatoon's biggest murder cases ever -- oh, sure, guys!
There were some bad signs early on -- I don't have the details at my fingertips anymore, but last spring a couple of the lawyers started flinging around comments to the effect that, really, David Milgaard actually could have killed Miller after all. And I thought, what the heck is going on here? -- this is supposed to be an inquiry into a conviction which has already been proven to be wrongful, where another man has already been proven guilty. Its not supposed to become a forum for inventing new fantasies about imaginary evidence.
Finally Judge MacCallum put a stop to this kind of speculative and suggestive questionning and the inquiry got back on track. But it left me concerned that this inquiry risked letting the lawyers try to exonerate their clients by demonizing Milgaard.
Now, once again, I am starting to wonder.
Milgaard, quite justifiably, doesn't want to testify at the inquiry. He says the prospect of testifying makes him sick.
And I can understand it -- he was victimized by the Saskatchewan justice system once before. So now, does he really have to sit in that witness chair again? Once more at the mercy of bunch of lawyers, who will try once again to victimize him, to sneer at him and trip him up with trick questions and make him look like such a sneaky, unstable, unlikeable liar that of course anyone would have thought he was guilty -- they couldn't help themselves because you just looked so guilty and anyway you were just such an asshole , weren't you, MISTER Milgaard?
Well, the judge now is saying that Milgaard may have to testify if he wants his lawyer to continue to be able to question the other witnesses at the inquiry. Yet the evidence so far has been that it was not Milgaard's personality nor actions which contributed to his conviction -- rather, his so-called friends, dumb and dumber and dumberer, helped over-eager police put together a very loose, circumstantial case, and everyone happily rushed to judgement, so glad to get such a monster off the street that it took Joyce Milgaard two decades to make a dent in the public's perception of his guilt.
This story says that Milgaard's mother "told reporters she felt 'intimidated' by [Judge] MacCallum and thought 'Canadians would be ashamed' with the way her son is being forced to testify."
Well, here's one Canadian who is ashamed.

Think about it

Miers withdraws Supreme Court nomination -- so now Bush is going to nominate the person who was originally his SECOND choice, someone who he felt was LESS qualified than Miers. Jenna, perhaps? Or Barney?

Great lines of the day

Twas the night before Fitzmas, and in the White House
Every one was scared shitless, and Bush was quite soused
The indictments were hanging like Damoceles' sword
As verminous oxen prepared to be gored

The perps were all sleepless, curled fetal in bed
While visions of prison cells loomed in each head
And Dick in his jammies, and George in his lap
Were sweating and swearing and looking like crap

When out on the web there arose such a clatter
The blogs and the forums were buzzing with chatter
Away to the PC Rove ran like a flash
He booted his browser and cleared out his cache

The rumors that flew through the cold autumn air
Made Dubya shiver with angry despair
When what to his horror-filled eyes did he spy?
A bespectacled man with a brown suit and tie!

With an impartial manner that gave Bush the shits
He knew in a moment it must be St. Fitz!
With unwavering voice, his indictments they came
He cleared out his throat and he called them by name:

Now Scooter, Now Libby,
Now Blossoming Turd,
Now Cheney, dear Cheney,
Yes, you are the third
To the bench of the court
Up the steps, down the hall
Now come along, come along,
Come along, all!

He then became silent, and went right to work
He filed the indictments and turned with a jerk
And pointing his finger at justice's scale
Said, "The people be served, and let fairness prevail."

He then left the room, to his team gave a nod
And the sound could be heard of a crumbling facade
And we all did exclaim, as he faded from sight
"Merry Fitzmas to all, and to all a good night!"

- © 2005 by Daryl W at no confidence.org, via Daedalus at Washingtonrox

2000 Americans dead

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Play The Last Post and think of them.
What a pointless, stupid waste.
One of the things about Vietnam was, in the end, how meaningless it was -- they killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese to stop China from taking over Southeast Asia and when they left, China did nothing. North Vietnam took over the whole country, which is exactly what would have happened in 1965 if matters had been allowed to run their course without US interference.
The war in Iraq has also already been proven to be useless in protecting America, because the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction which Hussein was supposedly using to threaten the America and his Middle Eastern neighbours did not actually exist. This war has also already killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, but has not transformed middle-eastern politics, hasn't improved Israel's security, and hasn't stabilized oil production capability. What overall effect it will have on stablizing the Middle-East is still pretty questionnable.
War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Chickens roosting on an open fire . . .

"...and so its been said, many times, many ways, merry Fitzmas to you."
Several posts today about chickens homing to roost, comeuppances arriving, "so's" being told, wake ups being called, yada yada and all that jazz. . .
From Pre$$titutes comes this piece about "The Great Vindication Of The Anti-War Movement ":

In case the world hasn't noticed, the events of the past few months have vindicated the millions of people in the U.S. and around the world who protested the Iraq invasion on the basis that it was being justified by lies and that it would lead to a long, bloody struggle . . . the fact that the outcome of this grand misadventure was predicted by anti-war demonstrators goes unmentioned. It didn't take foreign policy experience or national security expertise or top-secret Intel briefings for the anti-war movement to know, unequivocally, that the Iraq invasion was a hyped-up, over-sold war. It was crystal clear from day one what Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rummy, Colin, et al were up to . . . It's awful for the anti-war movement to be so right about something so catastrophic as a war based on lies and deceptions, but it behooves America to give credit to those who predicted every step of this sorry journey. Maybe next time they'll listen more closely. And then again...

And Driftglass writes about the tragic fate of the Moderate Republican in "You bought it. "

Now live in it . . .in five short years, the Moderates have lived to become everything they detest. Every word of clucking reproach they yelped in snickering glee during the Clinton Age has gotten caught up in the Bush Treason Cyclotron, sped up to light-speed, and is now coming screaming back at them like a sack of radioactive axe-heads. Their worst nightmare is in the process of coming true, big as a mountain in stilettos, carrying a sledgehammer in one hand and a 40-foot-long straight razor in the other, and there is not shit all they can do about it. Because everything they believed or touted or crowed about or tried to rub in our faces is in the process of coming down around their ears. Every. Single. Thing. Every justification that they were fed about their Great Ay-rab Safari is now spilling out into the sunlight and can clearly be seen -- even from High Earth Orbit -- to have been a willful lie. . . . now it’s not one thing that’s melting down; it’s everything. The serial cons that have kept the grubby Mods goggle-eyed and heroin-loyal are all falling apart simultaneously and there’s nothing but decibels left in the Shiny Object Bag to keep them from noticing the awful truth. That their Leaders are traitors. Their heroes are liars. Their dogma is a joke. Their President is a feeble-minded creep who has fucked up everything he has ever touched . . . How terrifying that must be. I mean, I’m wrong about a lot of stuff...but everything? Every God Damned Thing? And worse – so very much worse – not only were they utterly wrong about everyfuckingthing, but the Evil Liberals were right all along. The big picture. The fussy details. The arithmetic. The real, racist heart of the GOP. The various myriad, casual betrayals by the Bush White House. All of it. . . . I can’t even imagine how it must feel to know at some level that your whole world is a farce, and your whole belief system is a Ponsi Scheme run on you by thugs who never gave a shit about you, or your family or your dearest peon dreams.

And on Huffington, Katrina Vanden Heuvel ends her piece on the "Five stages of political grief":

. . . In the meantime, we get to enjoy the hypocrisy of listening to Republicans run through the Clinton playbook. They are currently referring to the investigation as the "criminalization of politics," dismissing perjury as a "technicality," and smearing the Special Prosecutor. It is a veritable nostalgia-fest.

Personally, I'm waiting for the new phase to be identified, in the tradition of "I am not a crook", "What did he know and when did he stop knowing it?" and "Its not the sex, its the lying." I wonder what the Plame sentence will be?

Great line of the day

From Background noise and fried Rice'
at Smirking Chimp:

You know we're in trouble when the best we can say about our President is that, in a macabre way, he provides comic relief to our reeling nation.

Another "Ah-ha!" moment

You know, given all the time and energy going into the leak investigation, I had been starting to wonder whether Plame's work on WDM was purely the coincidental, ironic, "hey, who wouldda guessed it" meme that is always portrayed as being. Here Justin Raimondo lays down the scenario:

Until now, I have never understood why, in the name of all that's holy, Scooter and his cabal went after Valerie Plame, the wife of the man they supposedly sought revenge on. It seems remarkably petty and small-minded, even for a neocon. . . A hissy fit on Scooter's part doesn't quite qualify. There is, on the other hand, another possible explanation, less emotional and more cold-blooded, one that – in the context of recent developments – makes a certain amount of sense… Remember, the [Niger] forgeries were exposed in early March 2003. The New York Times published Wilson's now famous "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed on July 6, 2003 – and we now know that Scooter and the gang were homing in on Wilson even before his piece appeared. We also know that Ms. Plame wasn't the only deep-cover CIA agent outed by Scooter and the Cheney-ites: she worked through a CIA front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, engaged in anti-proliferation work, whose activities were aborted by Plame's exposure. In one fell swoop, an entire group of undercover CIA experts on nuclear weapons proliferation was neutralized . . . Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald's reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald's purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes . . .

Well, and I suppose they were just so pleased with themselves at the time -- thinking they were neutralizing both Wilson AND Plame in one blow.
But there's more. Ramimondo also connects the leak investigation to the recent flap over Syria:

The U.S. is ratcheting up its campaign against Syria, even as the principal proponents of confronting Damascus – Libby, Hadley, Hannah, Wurmser, et al. – find themselves in Fitzgerald's sights. In effect, the prosecutor is running a race with the War Party: can they provoke a war with Syria before he brings charges? . . . The War Party has its own prosecutor, UN "investigator" Detlev Mehlis, currently trumping up charges against the next candidate for "regime change" in the Middle East: Syria. Mehlis operates under none of the constraints of the U.S. legal system . . . His report is full of uncorroborated testimony from unknown witnesses of unknowable veracity, and in places reads more like a political polemic than a legal document. I defy anyone to read it and come to any definite conclusion other than that Lebanon is one vast snakepit we would do well to stay out of. Yet drawing American troops into the Levant is precisely what the neocons are counting on to distract the American people from their treason, in a "wag the dog" scenario so bold it leaves one breathless. According to Joshua Landis, the respected scholar of Syrian politics and culture who resides in Damascus, the very people who fear indictments the most are behind this new push for war: "I have it on good authority that Steven Hadley, the director of the US National Security Council, called the President of the Italian senate to asked [sic] if he had a candidate to replace Bashar al-Assad as President of Syria. The Italians were horrified. Italy is one of Syria's biggest trading partners so it seemed a reasonable place to ask! This is what Washington has been up to." . . . We're on the Middle Eastern escalator, as I've said before: there is no way to contain the conflict we've unleashed in Iraq . . . The neocons know they're running a marathon, desperately trying to outrun the consequences of their own trail of deception. Will the truth catch up with Hadley, Ledeen, et al., before they can do any more damage to American interests in the Middle East – and spill more blood?

See the Raimondo article for the links to the background documents.

Please, Sir, can I get a raise too?

Members of N.S. legislature get additional raise to cover rising fuel costs: "A legislative committee has quietly awarded provincial politicians in Nova Scotia a substantial increase in their travel and constituency allowance to help them cover rising fuel costs, The Canadian Press has learned. The increase is over and above a planned 2.9 per cent salary increase for members of the legislature." Ooh, and did they think that Nova Scotia taxpayers wouldn't notice?

Another dispatch from Occupied France

The Poorman links to this story -- US troops fighting losing battle for Sunni triangle-- and he titles is "Hearts and minds". But to me, stories like this sound more and more like the stories out of Occupied France during World War II:

The mob grew more frenzied as the gunmen dragged the two surviving Americans from the cab of their bullet-ridden lorry and forced them to kneel on the street.
Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight. Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man's body to stoke the flames.
It had taken just one wrong turn for disaster to unfold. Less than a mile from the base it was heading to, the convoy turned left instead of right and lumbered down one of the most anti-American streets in Iraq, a narrow bottleneck in Duluiya town, on a peninsular jutting into the Tigris river named after the Jibouri tribe that lives there.
As the lorries desperately tried to reverse out, dozens of Sunni Arab insurgents wielding rocket launchers and automatic rifles emerged from their homes . . . Within minutes, four American contractors, all employees of the Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown & Root, were dead. The jubilant crowd dragged their corpses through the street, chanting anti-US slogans. . . . Perhaps fearful of public reaction in America, where support for the war is falling, US officials suppressed details of the Sept 20 attack, which bore a striking resemblance to the murder of four other contractors in Fallujah last year . . . The violence here seems to encapsulate the growing difficulties the US military is facing in trying to defeat the insurgency . . . The insurgency in eastern Salahuddin province is growing more intense, more deadly and more sophisticated.
Lt Col Gary Brito, the battalion's commanding officer, said that in recent months the number of roadside bombs targeting his men had increased by a third - even though journeys out of base have been cut back. They are having a more devastating effect too.
"Before only two out of 10 used to be effective," he said. "Now four or five have a catastrophic effect, blowing away a vehicle or causing casualties." In the past few months at least four American soldiers in this battalion alone have been killed. Another 39 have been wounded.
Even routine patrols are fraught with danger.
"What the hell was that," shouted Lt Chris Baldwin as a huge explosion rocked Baker Company's convoy of humvees trundling along a street in Dour, another town under Lt Col Brito's watch.
"Contact! Contact!" he bellowed into his radio as the gunners opened fire on a row of nearby houses from where the rocket-propelled anti-tank missile was fired.
As the gunfire died down, the soldiers burst into house after house, their facades peppered with bullet holes.
But, as is so often the case, the attacker had vanished down one of Dour's maze-like alleys.
Instead the Americans were confronted with sullen Iraqis, holding their terrified children to their sides. An old woman sat on her bed, clutching her heart, as the soldiers interrogated the family.
"They heard nothing, they saw nothing, same as ******* usual," said Sgt Jody Miller. Taking another deep drag from his cigarette, he turned to the company's translator.
"Tell them to tell us where the bad guys are so we stop frigging shooting up their houses," he said.
Nobody was hurt but the mutual distrust between the Americans and the local community deepened just a little bit more.

"Mutual distrust"? Try "hate".

DART in Pakistan

Canada's DART has arrived in Pakistan. Here's a photo:

Sgt. Alain Beauvais, from Quebec City, and Pvt. Marie-Clair Proulx, from St. Jean, Que., with Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team, gives a young boy a tetanus shot at a clinic run by Pakistani doctors from America in Gari Dupata, Pakistan, Friday, Oct. 21, 2005. (AP Photo/CP, Ryan Remiorz)

The anti-war beat goes on...

Tim Goodrich, right, an Air Force veteran and co-founder of a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Army veteran John McNamara, left, await the arrival of the motorcade carrying President Bush enroute to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and dedication ceremonies for the retired Air Force One Boeing 707 aircraft, in Simi Valley, Calif., Friday, Oct. 21, 2005. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)


Cindy Sheehan (C) joins the Grandmothers Against the War vigil in New York October 19, 2005. Sheehan, whose son Casey, of Vacaville, California was killed in Sadr City, Iraq while serving in the Army, joined the eighteen grandmothers who were arrested Monday after they tried to enlist at a military recruiting center in Times Square. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

Charging Bush with war crimes

Daily Kos alerts us to this article in Counterpunch -- Prosecuting Bush in Canada for Torture -- about a group trying to charge Bush with war crimes.

Ms. [Gail] Davidson and Lawyers Against the War have laid charges against George Bush Jr; accusing him of aiding, abetting, and counseling the commission of torture. This charge is based on the abuses of the prisoners held at the U.S. prisons in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and Abu-Ghraib, Iraq including Canadian minor Omar Khadr, who has been held in Cuba since 2001. "Many Canadians don't realize that we have not only the right but the responsibility to pursue these charges, it is a responsibility that the Canadian government owes not only to the people of Canada, but to the people of the world. The 1987 Convention Against Torture [And Other Cruel, Inhuman Or Degrading Treatment Or Punishment] binds us to this action." . . . "The American legal system seems incapable of bringing him to justice and there are no international courts with jurisdiction. So it's up to Canada to enforce the law that everybody has signed on to but nobody else seems willing to apply."

The attempt to bring charges has been going on for ten months, since Bush's visit to Canada last year, but the case was under a publication ban for some reason. The BC Supreme Court removed the ban because no one could defend it.
Apparently this group, Lawyers against the War, is pursuing charges against Bush in Germany too.

Canadians in Iraq on both sides

Wow, now here's a story: Canadians taking part in Iraqi insurgency:

The head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) says Canadians have joined the insurgency in Iraq. James Judd, the director of CSIS, revealed Thursday evening that some of the foreign fighters in Iraq battling coalition troops are Canadians. He said there aren't many, but more are expected to join. Speaking to reporters at a break during a security conference in Montreal, Judd was asked if Canadians were in Iraq fighting against the American-led coalition. 'Yes, I believe so,' he said. He said there weren't many, 'we're talking single digit numbers.' But he said 'we're aware of several others who are contemplating leaving.' . . . the Prime Minister's Office was 'flabbergasted' that such sensitive information could be released by the head of the spy agency. 'They didn't know it was being spoken about publicly and for that they [the PMO] are very angry.' . . . Acknowledgment that Canadians are fighting in Iraq raises a number of questions, such as what will their status be if they decide to return to Canada. "It raises the longer-term question of what do they bode for the future?" Judd said.

Single digits, of course, means fewer than ten. But still, its a potential mess, isn't it. There are also some Canadians fighting with the Americans in Iraq.
So what happens when they meet up?