Fruit of the poisonous tree

There is a legal principle called "fruit of the poisonous tree" by which evidence is inadmissable if it was generated from an unconstitutional or illegal act.
In discussions about the Iraq War, I think we need to talk more about its poisonous tree -- the first mistake which is the mother of all the other mistakes made in this awful war.
Josh Marshall describes what is happening now: "It seems the president's defenders have fallen back on what has always been their argument of last resort -- cherry-picked quotes from Clinton administration officials arranged to give the misleading impression that the Clintonites said and thought the same thing about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as the Bushies did."
Yes, this is exactly what the Bush apologists are doing.
But the right wing and the left wing are both making the same error -- neither is talking about the poisonous tree.
Folks, it doesn't matter WHAT Clinton thought. It doesn't matter what Sandy Berger thought, either. Or Al Gore. Or the whole Senate and House and Pentagon. Neither does it matter what Powell thought, or Rice, or Tenent, or Rumsfeld, or Cheney, or Bush himself.
The point is this -- regardless of what ANYBODY thought, they had no right to ACT -- not unless or until Saddam committed an overt act of aggression first.
Clinton, it should be noted, did NOT unilaterally start a war even if he thought Saddam's weapons bore watching.
But with George Bush, the US pomulgated the Bush Doctrine, giving itself the authority to strike preemptively, to start a war.
Now, this doctrine is illegal in terms of international law. Regardless of how powerful the US thinks it is, it cannot legally ignore the Security Council, and demand "regime change" in another country, regardless of what weapons Saddam had or how awful his government was.
The Bush Doctrine is the basic mistake here, the poisonous tree which has produced poisoned fruit. The inability of the US to establish a legitimate and respected government in Iraq flows from the basic illegality of the Bush Doctrine. As a result of this doctrine, the US and Britain started the Iraq War without international support or credibility, and hence their occupation of Iraq was not legitimate. From the very beginning, they lacked the moral authority to govern; no democratic government can ever be successful without such authority.
Now, what Juan Cole calls "the guerrilla war" in Iraq is killing hundreds of Iraqis every week, including a dozen or more American soldiers. The insurgency is so widespread and so powerful that there are more than 100 attacks against American soldiers every day -- that's right, EVERY DAY. Now the news comes that the US was using white phosporous bombs in Fallujah last November
Juan Cole writes "The lessons of British Iraq were mostly unknown to the American politicians who planned out and executed the 2003 Iraq War. One of them is that the military occupation of a conquered population is a barbaric business and can easily draw the colonizer into the use of horrific means to control the rebellious occupied. The Americans' moral fibre is being destroyed from within by things like Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and other atrocities. In the end, America may not any longer be America. The country that began by forbidding cruel and unusual punishment is ending by formally authorizing torture on a grand scale, and by burning small town Iraqis down to the bone with white phosphorus."
Poison. Pure poison.

Great line of the day

d r i f t g l a s s writes:

". . . .the GOP hasn’t just hit a bad patch: they’ve “lost the room." . . . And in ways that are virtually identical to Republican Herbert Hoover’s response to the Great Depression, the GOP’s response to the calamity their own policies have created is to freeze up, do nothing, and hope it’ll all just blows over, even though that path leads to ruin. Why? Because they are ideologically bound on all sides. Because like the Christopaths that ate their Party, Republicans are congenitally unable to admit error. . . . the GOP will spend millions on scapegoats, but not one cent on solutions. Hoover's failure to deal decisively with the Great Depression effectively killed the Republican Party for a generation. Eisenhower brought it back, but with a humane and moderate touch that this generation of anti-American Gingrich and Falwell Republicans have completely repudiated, and now the brighter among them are beginning to dimly perceive the size and shape of the pit into which Bush has led them.
Because they can't get rid of him. If instead of yapping about it, the GOP really ran the government (which they now completely control) like a business, George W. Bush would have been out on his ass in April. He has bankrupted the United States in every way conceivable, blow his performance evaluation worse than any other man in modern history for four quarters in a row, and has presented no turnaround plan to the Board beyond three more years of the same corruption, deception and bumblefuckery that got us here in the first place. And there is no way to get him the hell off the stage. Their Chickenhawk-in-Chief has become a 500-pound albatross hanging around the neck of the Republicans Party.

Emphasis mine. I know, a little long, but I thought it was all pretty good.
The advantage of a parliamentary system is that a government will fall if too many people lose confidence in the leadership.

Good, bad, ugly

Good


Bad


Ugly

The week that was

Here's what the last week has been like for our boy Georgie.
Last weekend, Capitol Hill Blue reports

. . . When a GOP strategist suggested . . . that the President fire Rove, Bush exploded. 'You go to hell,' he screamed at the strategist. 'You can leave and you can take the rest of these lily-livered motherfuckers with you!' The President then stormed out of the room and refused to meet further with any other party leaders or strategists . . .

Then they announce Alito for the Supreme Court on Monday, but then his silly old mother immediately says he opposes abortion, with the result that the hearings won't even start until January so the base will be pissed about that
Then Harry Reid pulls a fast one Tuesday and gets Iraq back into the news.
Then Wednesday the CIA secret prison story broke.
Thursday Libby had his first court appearance.
Friday we see Cheney still promoting torture .
We continue to see stories about Tom Delay screwing up again.
Background noice all week was that the number of attacks in Iraq have continued to escalate, with several soldiers a day being killed. The 2000 mark has been passed. The flimsiness of the rationale for war and the incompetence of its execution has become a frame for all Iraq-related news stories now. The opinion polls have Bush at 35 per cent.
Also on Friday, Bush's trip to Argentina inspires tens of thousands of people to riot.
And coming on Saturday, the inane "ethics class" story will produce a loud raspberry across the country/
And then next week, Ahmed Chalabi is coming back.
And it was just a year ago that Bush was reelected . . .

Just follow the Jim Carey Rule

When I read this story -- Bush Orders Staff to Attend Ethics Briefings -- I recalled Jim Carey's best line in Liar, Liar: when asked by a client what he could do about his legal problems, Carey replied "Stop breaking the law, asshole!"

Great line of the day

Digby writes about the "I forgot" defense as it applies to Karl Rove:

In a court of law, perhaps Pat Fitzgerald would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rove lied about that. In the court of public opinion, it is as ridiculous as the idea that OJ didn't do it. Perhaps Karl can spend the rest of his tenure in the White House looking for the real leakers.

Emphasis mine.

A-hunting

A-hunting we will go
A-hunting we will go
We'll catch a little fox
And put him in a box
And never let him go!
So take 500 plus or minus in Guantanamo, and add to them 100 or more spread around the globe in the CIA's prison system -- and of course don't forget the thousands and thousands now jailed in Iraq.
Almost none of them can be proven guilty of anything at all, at least not according to the standards of law that you or I would want to be judged by -- like in a trial, with admissable evidence or witnesses, and a defense attorney, and a judge. But neither the military nor the spooks are willing to let any of them out.
This story describes what has happened in the CIA:

. . . The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials. The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said . . . the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable. "It's just a horrible burden," said the intelligence official.

So what did they think was going to happen -- that their CIA officers were going to show restraint? That they would give some priority to determining whether these people were guilty or innocent, and then let the innocent ones just go home?
Nope. No more restraint than the military has shown in Iraq or Guantanamo, where the guiding principle seems to be that the only trustworthy Arab is the one on the other side of the barbed wire.
So you have people who are supposed to be in charge of US national security, who are quite willing to imprison people they KNOW are innocent, just because they cannot figure out what else to do with them.
And someday it will be 2010, and then 2020 -- and are we still going to be reading stories about Guantanamo and secret prisons?
Or will all the journalists be locked up by then too?

Hubris

Those whom the gods would destroy they first make all powerful.
Those whom the gods would destroy they first make proud.
Hubris is the description for just about all political administrations who have been in power long enough to believe their own press releases. Occasionally, that happens in about three days (ie, the Bush administration), but usually it doesn't happen until at least one successful reelection, maybe two.
When Hubris strikes, it ain't pretty.
Chretien obviously had a bad case of it before he (finally!) left. As witness the Gomery inquiry report today -- the key paragraphs in this Globe story are these:

. . . Judge Gomery said Mr. Chrétien must shoulder at least some of the responsibility for the program's problems. Mr. Chrétien, he said, chose to run the program from his own office and to have his own staff take responsibility for its direction. For those reasons, he said, Mr. Chrétien "is accountable for the defective manner in which the sponsorship program and its initiatives were implemented."
"Good intentions are not an excuse for maladministration of this magnitude," he said. "The Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff [Jean Pelletier] arrogated to themselves the direction of a virtually secret program of discretionary spending to selected beneficiaries, saying that they believed in good faith that those grants would enhance Canadian unity." Each, Justice Gomery said, had testified during hearings that they believed the program would be administered responsibly by Mr. Guité, who ran the program from its inception until 1999. But they also did not verify that assumption "even though they had created a program lacking all of the normal safeguards against maladministration."
"The assumption was naïve, imprudent and entirely unfounded," Justice Gomery said. Similarly, he said, Alfonso Gagliano, who was public works minister from 1997 to 2002, chose to continue with the "irregular manner" of directing the sponsorship program adopted by Mr. Pelletier, when he took office. "Contrary to his testimony to the effect that his participation was limited to providing political input and making recommendations about events and projects to be sponsored, Mr. Gagliano became directly involved in decisions to provide funding to events and projects for partisan purposes, having little to do with considerations of national unity." Just as Mr. Chrétien must accept responsibility for the actions of his exempt staff, so must Mr. Gagliano, Justice Gomery added.
The Quebec wing of the Liberal Party, Justice Gomery also said, "cannot escape responsibility for the misconduct of its officers and representatives." He said two successive executive directors "were directly involved in illegal campaign financing and many of its workers accepted cash payments for their services when they should have known that such payments were in violation of the Canada Elections Act."

Not only should they have known better, its quite likely that somebody TOLD them not to do it this way. Somebody said, this isn't right. Somebody said, you should be following the rules. And they ignored that aggravating bureaucrat, that stick-in-the-mud, that useless twit who couldn't get with the tour, that annoying naysayer who wasn't 'onside' with the program. So they remained secure in the comfortable belief that their cause was just and their aspect noble, so pure were they that they could not possibly be doing anything wrong, just cutting a little unnecessary red tape . . .

Oh, great -- now its war with Cuba

For crying out loud.
Isn't it enough that the US wants to go to war with Syria, Iran and North Korea? Now Cuba is being added to the list -- as soon as Castro dies, mind you. This new story writes "The inter-agency effort, which also involves the Defense Department, recognises that the Cuba transition may not go peacefully and that the US may have to launch a nation-building exercise."
So its not called a war anymore, its called a "nation building exercise".

"Of course he's against abortion"

Raw Story links to this news story -- Bush Nominates Alito for Supreme Court -- which lays it out clearly:

Alito's politically conservative views were not in dispute. 'Of course he's against abortion,' his 90-year-old mother Rose told reporters at her home in Hamilton, N.J. Despite the unguarded comments of a proud mother, Sen. Arlen Specter, who will chair Judiciary Committee hearings, told reporters in the Capitol, 'There is a lot more to do with a woman's right to choose than how you feel about it personally.' The Pennsylvania Republican cited adherence to legal precedent in rulings over 30 years upholding abortion rights.

And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you . . .
The pressure now will be on state legislatures to pass a large number of anti-abortion laws, which will then be challenged and hence will work their way up to the Supreme Court in the next year or two.
Likely not before the congressional midterms, but certainly before the next presidential election, Roe V Wade will be TOAST in the US.

More photos from the Aboriginal Spiritual Journey

Here are some more photos from the Aboriginal Spiritual Journey ceremonies in Europe:


This is the Native Women's Association of Canada wreath. The photo cutline says "these flowers were laid during a remembrance ceremony at Hill 62 Canadian Memorial in Zillebeke near Ypres [Friday] . . . The Calling Home Ceremony, to call home to Canada the spirits of Aboriginal soldiers who died in the two World Wars, will be held over four days in Belgium. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir "


"Ceremonial dancer Harvey Thunderchild sits near the Colin Gibson sculpture, Remembrance and Renewal, at the Juno Beach Center in Courseulles-sur-Mer, France on Sunday . . . Thunderchild is participating in the Aboriginal Spirtual Journey, a visit by Aboriginal veterans to battlefields in Europe. (AP Photo/CP, Andrew Vaughan) "


"Canadian Gov.General Michaelle Jean dances with ceremonial dancer Lorne Duquette, from Mistawasis First Nation in Saskatchewan, as she visits the Juno Beach Centre in Courseulles-sur-Mer, France on Sunday . . (AP Photo/CP, Andrew Vaughan) "


"Canadian Inuits reflect in front of an Inuksuk Memorial during a Ceremony of Remembrance next to Juno Beach Center at Courseulles-sur-Mer [on Sunday] . . . REUTERS/Franck Prevel "


"First Nation dancer Lorne Garpydie (L) and Harvey Thunderchild (C) perform a spirit dance in front of a Canadian Memorial during a Ceremony of Remembrance at Beny-sur-Mer War Cemetery, France . . . REUTERS/Franck Prevel "


"George Horse, from the Thunder Child First nation in Saskatchewan, hold his ceremonial eagle over the grave a Canadian soldier at the Beny-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery in Reviers, France . . . Horse . . . landed on Juno Beach on D-Day . . . (AP Photo/CP, Andrew Vaughan) "'


"Members of the 'Cri' tribe Harvey Thunderchild (L) and Lorne Garpydie (R), reflect in front of the Canadian War Cemetery's graves before a Ceremony of Remembrance at Beny-sur-Mer, France . . . REUTERS/Franck Prevel "


"A Canadian veteran comforts his daughter at the Canadian War Cemetery before a Ceremony of Remembrance at Beny-sur-Mer . . . REUTERS/Franck Prevel"

Tough love

Clinton says to Democratic politicians: "'If you don't want to fight for the future and you can't figure out how to beat these people, then find something else to do.' "

Aboriginal Spiritual Journey

I thought this was a wonderful idea -- as part of Canadian Rememberance Day tributes in The Year of The Veteran, Veterans Affairs arranged an eight-day tour for a delegation of 300 First Nations and Metis veterans and youth to travel to Ypres, Vimy, Juno Beach, and Courseulles-sur-Mer to pay tribute to Aboriginal veterans and to do a "calling home" ceremony.
Our new governor general, Michaëlle Jean, joined the group during the Juno Beach portion of their trip.

Canadian Press photo


First Nations and Metis ceremonial performers outside the Kemmel school in Belgium. Veterans Affairs photos.


Veterans and representatives from Veterans' organizations stand at attention during the Last Post, at the "calling home" ceremony at Hill 62.

Last week, the Globe and Mail gave us one warrior's story -- from Elmer Sinclair, now 84:

When Elmer Sinclair last trod on European soil, he did so as a warrior. Sixty years later, he is returning to pay tribute to comrades buried in ground he helped liberate. Mr. Sinclair, a Cree from Manitoba who lives in Nanaimo, spent much of his adult life in uniform. He served in the Canadian Army for all but the first nine months of the Second World War. Later, he re-enlisted to fight on the frozen hills of Korea before spending a year in the desert as a peacekeeper in the Gaza Strip. Those were assignments for a young man. He was not much more than a boy when he signed up as a regimental signaler with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. He then transferred to the Signal Corps as a radio operator.
Mr. Sinclair was born to a family living just outside Selkirk, in a home in the woods. His carpenter father belonged to the Peguis band, but his son would never live on the reserve. Young Elmer spoke English at home, and his parents saved their native tongue for their private conversations. The family moved to Pine Falls and seven-year-old Elmer was sent to Fort Alexander Residential School, operated by Oblate priests more interested in corporal punishment than celestial reward. "It wasn't heaven," Mr. Sinclair recalled in an interview. "They were mean to us and cruel. They prayed like hell in church, then beat the hell out of us afterward." After leaving school, he worked in a sawmill. Canada declared war on Germany two days after his 18th birthday. He enlisted in Winnipeg nine months later.
His expertise at transcribing and transmitting Morse code kept him out of the front lines, and he was assigned signal security. Mr. Sinclair landed at Gold Beach with the 50th British Infantry Division about a week after D-Day. He has never forgotten the scene. "All the pillboxes and the obstructions in the water. Pillars of cement. Barbed wire. All flattened out. It was an awful mess." After rejoining the Canadian Army, Mr. Sinclair tramped through France, Belgium and the Netherlands. He was in the port city of Bremen, flattened by years of Allied bombing, when Germany at last surrendered. Other soldiers' weapons went rat-a-tat-a-tat. His went dit-dah-dit dah-dit . . . Mr. Sinclair re-enlisted after the outbreak of the Korean War, rejoining the Princess Pats. At 29, he had a greater knowledge of the horrors of war than did younger recruits. "We were marching along a valley toward the hills to take over a position at the front," he said. "We saw a village ahead of us on fire. Burning. We got up close and started seeing bodies of American soldiers. They had been on a patrol the night before and gone to sleep there. "The Koreans or the Chinese came down off the hill, surrounded the village and burned it. The Americans started running back toward our lines and there must have been patrols of North Koreans or Chinese along the road. They killed them all. "Our men had been going forward laughing, having a good time. The sight sobered them up." Mr. Sinclair left the army in 1964 with the rank of Warrant Officer 2. During his trip to Belgium, Mr. Sinclair hopes to offer a final salute to a classmate from Selkirk, Sergeant O. D. Smith of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, who was killed on Oct. 12, 1944. To pay homage to his friend, Mr. Sinclair will need to visit the Adegem Canadian War Cemetery midway between Bruges and Ghent on Highway N9. In the southeast corner, in Plot No. 8, Row G, Grave No. 10, he will find the final resting place of Sgt. Smith, one of 1,144 war dead buried in the cemetery. If he finds the grave, Mr. Sinclair said, "I'll just stand there and have a look." He knew the sergeant as Orville. He was just 23 when he died.

And here's another priceless piece of Canadiana -- in the Comments section to the Globe and Mail article on the Jean visit, was one remarkable contribution from David Hawyard of Nanoose Bay, BC, who sent in this moving piece of poetry

We, the Descendants...
We, the descendants of Canada's Aboriginal, French and English founders,
and of all others who later arrived to help build this nation,
stand in unity as witness to this pledge.
Remembering that Canada's provinces and territories have been settled
by peoples whose mother tongues, heritage and values differed,
we pledge in the name of Canada, and to one another:
To recognize, to respect, and to celebrate Canada's diversity,
lest a loss of identity suffers unto our descendants;
To embrace tolerance, equality, sharing and compassion
as the moral cornerstones of our great nation;
To bond together as one in the pursuit of dignity, health,
prosperity and happiness for all Canadians;
To forever preserve and promote this mission
that we so proudly share.

Great line of the day

The Smirking Chimp quotes Huffington Post's Trey Ellis column 'President Cheney's goose is cooked' about the Scooter Libby indictment:

. . . Republicans keep saying that Democrats looked at the same intelligence briefings they did when they overwhelmingly voted to go to war. That is true. They all saw the same books, but what this indictment should bring to light next, is that those books had been cooked.

More torture chronicles

Hmmm -- this is interesting: Reuters is reporting that "The United States on Friday invited three U.N. human rights investigators . . . to visit the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in a bid to show 'we have nothing to hide'." The investigators cannot, of course, actually speak to any of the Gitmo prisoners -- apparently only the International Committee of the Red Cross can do that -- but at least the UN will get a look at what is going on. (And boys, make sure you get them to open ALL the doors.)
Maybe this sudden smasm of conscience is in response to this story about the abuse of the prisoners who are involved with the Guantanamo prisoner hunger strike, or this story about how the US State Department is trying to convince the UN that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the US signed in 1992, actually doesn't apply to US military prisoners outside the US.
At which the UN is shaking its head and rolling its eyes . . .