Pining for the fjords

My husband and I realized the other day, while watching a Monty Python episode from 1969, that we have spent our adult lives using Monty Pyton lines as our commentary on the passing scene -- "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" and "Steals from the poor and gives to the rich, stupid bitch, dum dum dum, dum dum dum" and "How to defend yourself when being attacked with a banana" and "I didn't come here for an argument. Yes, you did." and "a delightful mint-flavoured burgundy", not to mention "Someday, son, all this will be yours. Wot, the curtains?"
So the line that illustrates the newest report of Osama's demise is "He's pining. Pining for the fjords!"
Glenn Greenwald notes that Osama bin Laden "has died more times than any human being in history" and, surprisingly, it often seems to happen just when things are looking a little dark for the Boy Wonder.
Here is Greenwald's list:

Jan. 19, 2002 "Pakistan's president says he thinks Osama bin Laden is most likely dead because the suspected terrorist has been unable to get treatment for his kidney disease"
July 7, 2002 "FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson said Wednesday he believes Osama bin Laden is dead "
Oct. 16, 2002 "Osama Bin Laden appears to be dead but his colleagues have decided that Al Qaida and its insurgency campaign against the United States will continue, Israeli intelligence sources said". . .
April 30, 2005 "A new Islamist website is reporting that bin Laden is dead"
Oct. 24, 2005 "The Pakistani newspaper 'Ausaf' which is based in the city of Multan in the Punjab Province is reporting that Osama bin Laden died last June in a village near Kandahar in Afghanistan"
Jan. 9, 2006 "according to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December."
Sept. 23, 2006 "Saudi intelligence services have determined that terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden died of typhoid in August . . . the report comes from an actual secret document. . . "

Then, of course, Bin Laden pops up with another video or audio tape -- just in time for another American election.
Greenwald writes:

Most of our "counter-terrorism" efforts have been like this -- like a Three Stooges routine. The reality is that we have no idea whether bin Laden is dead . . . stumbling around in the dark, dealing only with baseless, fact-free insinuations, and ignoring him (by necessity) except to grasp desperately for him when some domestic political gain can be squeezed out of him. In the hands of Bush followers, terrorism and Al Qaeda are big toys, things to be tossed around aimlessly for fun and diversion . . .

The "model" for the Middle East

Shattered and bloody, brutal and dangerous -- has Iraq already become a "model" in the Middle East?
When the neocons and Bush prattle on about how the American "mission" must succeed in Iraq because it will serve as a model for the whole Middle East, I don't think this was the kind of model they had in mind.
At Hezbollah's Victory Rally in Lebanon on Friday (which Juan Cole says attracted an "enormous crowd" in south Beirut) Hezbollah leader Hasan Nazrallah also talked about Iraq is a model -- of what happens to a country which is not protected as Lebanon was by Hezbollah.
Nazrallah said:

. . . before speaking about Lebanon, we as Lebanese should see Iraq as a model. Had the war in Lebanon succeeded, the Americans would have applied this model in Lebanon. They wanted to apply this model in Lebanon. In the war, we the Lebanese offered martyrs from the Resistance, the army, the security forces, the civil defence, the Red Cross, the news media, the establishments, the different parties, and all our beloved people. But how many were martyrs? Never mind, were they 1,000 or 1,200 martyrs? In Iraq, some 10,000 to 15,000 people are killed every month in a chaotic war that is administered, financed, and incited by the Americans and the Mosad. The resistance in Lebanon protected Lebanon from civil war. [Cheers]
Some say that the resistance in Lebanon pushes for civil war. Never! Had Israel won, Lebanon would have been pushed to civil war, and you would have heard voices calling for federalism, cantons, and division. The Israeli language would have become current anew.
Iraq is a model, which we must always ponder. Our message to our people in Iraq must always be: Patience, calm, unity, wisdom, communication, avoid sedition, and don't wager on the enemy . . .

Sigh

You know, civil rights is just so important, affecting people's healthcare and living conditions and workplaces and incomes and families and even the likelihood of going to jail.
So I wish civil rights commissions could stick to what is important instead of wasting their time on trivialities like whether city councils should start their meetings with a prayer. Why does anyone care?

Great line of the day

Lance Mannion writes about Reagan v. Bush:

. . . Reagan saved the Party by being, often, successful, and by being truly popular. People liked the guy; they didn't need to be told over and over and over and over and over again that not only did they like him, they had to like him or the bad guys will come and kill us.
Reagan also helped himself and the Party by being able to give up on a project or an idea that wasn't working.
Bush's reaction to being wrong is to throw all his energy into being more wrong.
He's the kind of guy who if you tell him he's driving the wrong way down a one way street steps on the gas.
Party loyalists in the back seat are forced to say, No, no, this isn't a one way street, it's just narrow, or if it is one way it's one way this direction and all those other cars coming right at us are going the wrong way but fortunately George is such a skillful driver that they'll all miss us.
We're winning in Iraq. Torture is good. Up is down, down is up, the lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn, Bush is in the White House, and all's right with the world.

Emphasis mine.

Updated the blogroll

Hi, Guys -- I finally updated my blogroll, adding these new links I have collected over the last few months:
Saundrie, Big City Lib, Cursor.Org, Echidne of the Snakes, Lance Mannion, Matthew Yglesias, Needlenose, Sadly, No! , and Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule
Give them a try.
UPDATE: "Saundrie" corrected. Sorry Scotian. I should have posted your blog long ago.
UPDATE: Also added Accidental Deliberations and Suburban Guerrilla

Laugh til you cry

Vancouver's Neil Kitson writes a little ditty, in the persona of the Globe Editorial board, titled Bloody but Unbowed: Canadians in Afghanistan and I was going to just quote the funny parts and the tragic parts, but that turned out to be all of it:

Canadian troops are not in Iraq, although this newspaper has consistently advocated sending them there. As we said at the time of the Coalition intervention in 2003, "much good should flow from it." Subsequent events have proved our position to be entirely wrong. It is now clear that Iraq is in a much more desperate situation than before the invasion, that there were no "weapons of mass destruction," and that the invasion was illegal and without justification. We at the Globe are therefore satisfied, like Col. Cathcart, that our genius for ineptitude has not been blunted.
It is in this light that we wholeheartedly support the Canadian involvement in the Afghan catastrophe. We report that our troops are being killed and injured at quite respectable rates, enough perhaps to get us some credibility in Washington. It is indeed regrettable that some of these casualties have been from American bombing and strafing, but this is still honorable: war is a tough business.
Afghanistan was known to be impoverished and littered with land mines after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, but of little interest until 9/11, The Cataclysm That Changed the World Forever. Then, when it became clear that the 9/11 hijackers were almost all from Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan had to be dealt with promptly and aggressively.
Since the subsequent, successful Afghan intervention in 2001, which even the previous lily-livered Liberal government was able to support, there has been marked improvement and benefit. Afghanistan has a democratically elected government, which is pretty influential out to Kabul's city limits, and opium production is up. Land mines are admittedly still a problem, and as reported by the Guardian (a gutless left-wing newspaper that probably supported Stalin, although Churchill supported Stalin, which is a bit of a problem for us, but nothing we can't work out), the current situation in Afghanistan is "close to anarchy with feuding foreign agencies and unethical private security companies compounding problems caused by local corruption." This "stark warning came from Lieutenant General David Richards, head of NATO's international security force in Afghanistan, who warned that Western forces there were short of equipment and were 'running out of time' if they were going to meet the expectations of the Afghan people."
Luckily, however, Operation Medusa has been a success (although there are a few flaky doubters who lower morale but can be easily ignored), and our Canadian troops will now be bravely engaged, with our UN-sanctioned NATO allies, in destroying the opium crop, and with it a major source of income for impoverished rural Afghans (the drought is taking care of the rest). We applaud this resolution. We are not deterred by the fact that European troops (and their colonial descendants) who have little knowledge of the local language, culture, or customs are once again trying to impose their objectives on a population that resents their presence. Neither are we discouraged by the lack of funding or planning for a realistic economic recovery. On the contrary, we on the Globe editorial board are determined to persevere to our objective: a democratic, stable, peaceful Afghanistan, sympathetic to the West, prosperous, and resistant to the mad mullahs in Iran and Pakistan, even though we have no idea how any of this can be accomplished. We support the Harper government's determination to see Canada's Afghan involvement through to its inevitable and disastrous conclusion.

Death is the cash cow

Harper seemed to say that the Canadian military is better off because our soldiers are dying in Afghanistan:

". . . It's, I think, making them a better military, notwithstanding, or maybe in some way because of, the casualties."

When asked to explain how the military benefits when soldiers die, PMO spokesperson Carolyn Steward Olson explained:

. . . she thought the remarks were clear. The military gets stronger when casualties occur, she said, because it means more money is put into equipment and recruiting.

Thanks for clearing that up, Carolyn.
Death, the cash cow for the Canadian military...

What have they been doing to people?

What are they afraid of?
Why are both Bush and McCain so eager to pass a law that exempts the United States from the Geneva Conventions?
When they say that the prohibitions against "humiliating and degrading treatment" and "outrages upon personal dignity" are just too difficult to understand, it reminds me of all those CEOs and politicians caught with their hands in the till up to their armpits -- the ones who prattle on about how their company's rules about stealing are "just so vague, you know, so don't blame me because how was I to know it was wrong?"
So what has the Bush administration been doing to people?
We already know about the waterboarding, the cold cell, the long-time standing, the belly slap, the attention slap. We already know they have been running secret prisons themselves, as well as shipping people off to be tortured in other countries. And we already know they have 14,000 prisoners mouldering away in legal limbo, scattered at prisons all over the Middle East and Guantanamo -- all being run, like Abu Gharib was, by people who don't appear to know anything about operating prisons and are making it up as they go along.
As quoted at Daily Kos, here is what law professor Jonathan Turley said about the Bush and McCain show now going on in Congress:

. . . why are you doing this? You don't need to redefine the Geneva Conventions - you don't have to do anything with it. It's a treaty. We're a signatory. We've never had to do this before. We've gotten along just fine, as has the world, with the language of the Geneva Convention. If we make any effort at all to try to redefine it or tweak it or to amplify it, the world will see that as our effort to lawyer the Geneva Convention to try to create some type of loophole or excuse for conduct.

I thought Bush going to grab Matt Lauer and start shaking him during that interview the other day, he was just so anxious to justify how they've been "protecting the American people".
So what conduct do they need an excuse for? What have they been doing?
Here are a few hints and portents I gleaned as I read through a variety of stories about the last three years:
Seymour Hersch was quoted two years ago talking about "horrible things done to children of women prisoners".
Here is Amnesty International's report on one of the Guantanamo prisoners:

Mohamedou Slahi had been threatened with death and "disappearance" by military interrogators. The detainee had also been told that his family was in US custody, and that he should cooperate in order to help them. For example, on 20 July 2003, a masked interrogator told Slahi that his family had been "incarcerated". Again, on 2 August 2003 he told the detainee that his family were in US custody and was in danger. A letter was given to the detainee indicating that because of his lack of cooperation, US agents in conjunction with the Mauritanian authorities would interrogate his mother, and that if she was uncooperative she would be detained and transferred for long-term detention in Guantánamo . . . a leaked subsequent interview of one of the investigators [confirmed]Slahi’s allegation that he was taken off from Guantánamo in a boat where he thought [he was to be] killed or "disappeared" . . . Mohamedou Slahi remains in Guantánamo without charge or trial. He has now been held for nearly five years. . .

An American soldier who was pretending to be a prisoner at Guantanamo during a "training exercise" was beaten so severely that he suffered brain damage:

"They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down," said Baker. "Then he - the same individual - reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor . . . " Baker sustained a traumatic brain injury that left him with a seizure disorder.

And this happened at Bagram in Afghanistan:

Dilawar, who died on December 10, 2002, was a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver and farmer who weighed 122 pounds and was described by his interpreters as neither violent nor aggressive.
When beaten, he repeatedly cried "Allah!" The outcry appears to have amused U.S. military personnel, as the act of striking him in order to provoke a scream of "Allah!" eventually "became a kind of running joke," according to one of the MP's. "People kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."
On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days . . . It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

So these stories indicate they have been torturing children, threatening people's families, "disappearing" prisoners by tossing them overboard during midnight boat trips (reminiscent of Vietnam's helicopter executions) and displaying a pattern of savage and inhuman cruelty. And these are things we already know about.
Is there anything else yet to be exposed?
Though actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the Bush administration's worst fear is this one: that almost none of these thousands of supposedly dangerous characters could be convicted in a real court with a real judge under real laws, because once you discard the torture confessions and hearsay and rumours there is no real evidence against them.

Aarrr!

Hey, Tuesday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Here are the only three pirate jokes you will ever need, according to the Official Web Site :

Thar be only three pirate jokes in the world.
The biggest one is the one that ends with someone usin' 'Arrr' in the punchline. Oh, sure, thar be plenty o' these, but they're all the same damn joke.
What's the pirate movie rated? - Arrr!
What kind o' socks does a pirate wear? - Arrrrgyle!
What's the problem with the way a pirate speaks? - Arrrrticulation!
...and so forth.
The second joke is the one wear the pirate walks into the bar with a ships wheel attached to the front o' his trousers. The bartender asks, 'What the hell is that ships wheel for?' The pirate says, 'I don't know, but it's drivin' me nuts!'
And finally. A little boy is trick or treatin' on Halloween by himself. He is dressed as a pirate. At one house, a friendly man asks him, 'Where are your buccaneers?' The little boy responds, 'On either side o' me 'buccan' head!'
And there ye have it. A symposium on pirate humor that'll last ye a lifetime - so long as life is violent and short.

Ye all be havin' a jolly day, me hearties!
(h/t to The Sideshow for the link)

Why did you say it?

So was this just a case of "Open mouth. Insert foot"? Or was Pope Benedict actually trying to muscle himself onto the world stage by promoting George Bush's religious war meme?
I'm not sure. But I do find it odd that the Pope's remarks came in the same week as Bush started talking about the "confrontation between good and evil" and the Third Awakening.
In a Saturday Globe article Michaek Valpy describes what Pope Benedict actually said:

The Pope, quoting a 15th-century Byzantine emperor, told his audience at the University of Regensburg: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." He used the words to illustrate that violence is contrary to the nature of God . . . The prevailing theory among scholarly Vatican observers is that the Pope, rather an unworldly scholar, simply goofed and used the wrong example from religious history to make his point that violence is contrary to God's nature and therefore unreasonable.

So aren't there plenty of examples in the history of Christianity which illustrate this point even better? Why, yes, yes there are:

He could have referred to Christian authorities forcibly converting Jews in the Middle Ages, or to the Crusaders savagely sacking Constantinople in 1204 . . . Instead, because he apparently had just finished reading a scholarly treatise on a religious dialogue between "an educated Persian" and the 15th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, he cited the emperor's words about "evil" Islam spreading faith "by the sword" without indicating whether he thought the emperor was right or wrong.

Could the Pope really be so clumsy? I don't think Valpy believes it:

An alternative to the goof theory is the explanation that Benedict intended, and has intended for some time, to make a tough, provocative statement on fundamentalist Islamic terrorism and violence.
Vatican scholars and bureaucrats interviewed in April on the first anniversary of Benedict's papacy thought he was showing signs of taking a harder position on Islamic violence than John Paul II.

Frightened by the violence against Catholics, Benedict is now trying to sort-of withdraw his remarks:

Pope Benedict said Sunday that he was 'deeply sorry' about the angry reaction to his recent remarks about Islam, which he said came from a text that he insisted did not reflect his personal opinion.

So why did you say it, then? As Geraldine would say, Did the devil make you do it?

Repetitive Mess Syndrome

Oh, give it a rest, will ya? We won, you lost, get over it!

As MPs return to Parliament tomorrow, Christian lobby groups and others opposed to same-sex marriage are putting the screws to the federal politicians to turn back the clock, and once again ban gay couples from the aisle and altar.

The story goes on to say how Harper is going to hold the vote but hopes he will lose. What, aren't you going to make this a confidence motion Steve? Oh, wouldn't the other parties just love to go to the polls on THIS issue -- the Intolerant Bigots vs. True Canadian Values.

Space, the final frontier and all that

Well, if I had a spare $20 million and I was 15 years younger and I was in top physical shape, this is what I would want to do, too.

I read the news today oh boy

From Robert Dreyfuss comes this summary of the latest news about Iraq:

The Sunnis, who have been the heart of the resistance to the U.S. occupation since at least the fall of 2003, are virtually unified now. A critical piece of news, overlooked but for a brief mention in the Washington Post, is that fully 300 Iraqi tribal leaders—mostly Sunni, but including some Shiites—met in a town south of Kirkuk, to issue a demand that Saddam Hussein be freed. One of the leaders, whose tribe numbers 1.5 million, said: “If the demand is not satisfied, we will lead a general, sweeping, and popular uprising.” Such a threat would mean, in effect, that the Iraqi insurgency would be adopted officially by the entire tribal leadership of western and central Iraq. This is not al-Qaida. This is Iraq.
The Shiites, meanwhile, are entering the early stages of a fratricidal splintering. Although they have long been divided, current trends would indicate that the Shiite bloc in Iraq is about to collapse. Until now, the Shiites have been the tent pole holding up the entire U.S. enterprise in Iraq—so, if they splinter, it signals the end of the U.S. occupation. It’s a kaleidoscope: The Mahdi Army of Muqtada Sadr is restless, seemingly ready to launch another uprising, as it did in 2004—and Sadr’s army itself is seriously beset by divisions, with armed, rogue elements throughout. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is pressing hard for partition of Iraq—which it calls “federation”—and one of its leaders (who happens to be the Iraqi education minister) laid out a scenario for full-scale civil war. “Federation will cut off all parts of the country that are incubating terrorists,” he said. “We will put soldiers along the frontiers.”
Deepening the divisions among the Shiites even further, a new warlord is emerging, Mahmoud Hassani, who has built private armies in Najaf, Karbala, Basra and Baghdad, and who is violently opposed to SCIRI and to Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Hassani, who also opposes the United States and who hates Iran, is emerging as a nationalist Shiite leader who could upset the whole Shiite apple cart.
And the pesky Kurds are openly threatening secession. Massoud Barzani, who is the real power in Kurdistan, said defiantly this week: “If we want to separate, we will do it without hesitation of fears.” Should the Kurds launch their widely expected operation to seize Kirkuk and Iraq’s northern oil fields, it will trigger a major escalation of civil war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, back in Washington:

Bush isn’t acknowledging these realities. The Pentagon is only hinting at them—though the generals know what’s going on. But inside the political class, an awareness of realities in Iraq is dawning. Last week, James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton, two consummate political insiders who happen to lead a hush-hush task force on Iraq called the Iraq Study Group, were in Baghdad, where (according to my sources) they got a heavy dose of reality. The Baker task force—which I wrote about in The Washington Monthly—includes top-level luminaries, including Robert M. Gates, Vernon Jordan and William Perry. Returning from Baghdad, Baker’s elite group, which also includes dozens of Iraq experts, met this week to consider a draft plan to exit Iraq, Jack Murtha-style, or alternatively, to stick around for another 12 months and then end up getting out anyway. Increasingly, after the elections, that will be the stark choice forced on the White House—by Washington’s political elite, by the precipitous drop in public support for the war and by the growing antiwar movement that has set up shop at Camp Democracy on the Mall.

Great line of the day

At Talking Points Memo DK writes about the "torture debate" in Congress:

I am beyond being able to assess the political implications, one way or the other, of this spectacle. Regardless of which version of the bill finally passes, this debate is a black mark on the soul of the nation . . . The Republicans have defined deviancy down for the whole world, including every two-bit dictator and wild-eyed terrorist . . . In their fear and their weakness and their smallness, the President and those around him stepped over the line. To do so in the heated days after 9/11 is understandable to a point, though not justifiable. Yet they persisted, first in saying that they did not step over the line and now in seeking to redraw the line . . . They are descending from the morally reprehensible to the morally cowardly.

Emphasis mine.

In the land of the waterboard, the home of the stress position

Billmon writes the Great line of the day:

. . . The sadistic and/or bizarre acts committed in Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA's secret prisons can be written off as the crimes of a few bad apples with names like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- or, more charitably, as the consequences of a string of bad and brutal decisions made under emergency conditions by men who were terrified by all the things they didn't know about Al Qaeda . . .[but] the question is now formally on the table:

Does Congress really want to make the United States the first nation on earth to specifically provide domestic legal sanction for what would properly and universally be seen as a transparent breach of the minimum, baseline standards for civilized treatment of prisoners? . . .

The answer, at the moment, appears to be yes . . . So now we'll find out, I guess, what we're really made of as a nation -- down deep, in our core . . . What this amounts to (and what Powell was really complaining about) is the final decommissioning of the myth of American exceptionalism -- once one of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Without it, we're just another paranoid empire obsessed with our own security and willing to tell any lie or repudiate any self-proclaimed principle if we think it will make us even slightly safer.
To put it mildly, this is not the kind of flag the rest of the world is likely to rally around, no matter how frantically we wave it.

Emphasis mine.
There have been times in the past when America found itself drowning in a moral swamp -- when Pinkertons and police were beating up unionists in the 30s, when governors were using watercannons and worse on the peace and civil rights demonstrations of the 60s -- and always before there was a vigorous American opposition to such abuses, led by fearless writers and philosophers and politicians and clergy, in whom the best part of America and the world could still believe.
Who will now stand against torture?