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Sunday, November 13, 2005
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Please call your Senators and urge them to vote for the Bingaman Amendment regarding habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay. If you agree, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman's S. AMDT 2517 to bill S. 1042.Hilzoy and Katherine at Obsidian Wings have a long series explaining why. I also agree with the New York Times: It certainly is a relief that the Senate is finally getting around to doing the job it so shamefully refused to do four years ago, after the 9/11 attacks: requiring the administration to follow the law and the Geneva Conventions in dealing with prisoners taken by the military and intelligence operatives. But what started as an admirable attempt has become a tangle of amendments and back-room deals . . . On Thursday, the Senate passed a measure that would deny foreigners declared to be "unlawful enemy combatants" the right to a hearing under the principle known as habeas corpus, which dates to Magna Carta. Instead, the measure would mandate an automatic review by a federal court of the status of the inmates now at Guantánamo Bay and any future prisoners of that kind. It would exclude coerced confessions from that review, and place important new controls over Guantánamo operations. These safeguards . . . are long overdue. . . . The Senate should adopt [Senator Graham's his proposal for a federal court review of detentions, preferably by a huge margin, and the House should follow suit. . . . But we cannot support Mr. Graham in trying to rewrite the habeas corpus law. The habeas petitions are not an undue burden. And in any case, they are a responsibility that this nation has always assumed to ensure that no one is held prisoner unjustly. . . . We'd rather see the Senate delete the suspension of habeas corpus from Mr. Graham's measure now. Some constitutional principles are too important to play around with. This is precisely what the Bingaman Amendment would do and that is why I strongly urge you to contact your Senators and urge their support for the Bingaman Amendment.
(Via Daily Kos.)
9:41:50 PM 
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The new GOP meme, as repeated by White House marionette Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday this morning, is that "The President never said Saddam posed an imminent threat." (You can watch it at Crooks & Liars.)
I'm guessing Chris pinched this off the daily Fox News "official opinion" crib sheet and didn't actually do much research into the claim himself, because that is just some remarkable revisionist history. Sadly Jay Rockefeller was ill-prepared to answer the charge, so mindful of being ever-helpful, we present this little historical refresher:"Well, of course he is.”
• White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett responding to the question.“is Saddam an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?”, 1/26/03
"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02
"Absolutely."
• White House spokesman Ari Fleischer answering whether Iraq was an "imminent threat," 5/7/03
"This is about imminent threat."
• White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 2/10/03 Okay, fine, we know Scottie doesn't speak for anybody, he's just David Gregory and Terry Moran's puffy pinata. So what about Preznit Remedial Reading himself?"The world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq whose dictator has already used weapons of mass destruction to kill thousands."
• President Bush, 11/23/02
"There are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists."
• President Bush, 10/7/02
"The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency."
• President Bush, 10/2/02 You're right. He didn't use the specific word "imminent."
Too many syllables.
(graphic by Monk at Inflatable Dartboard)
(Via firedoglake.)
8:22:11 PM
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The defenders of the Bush Iraq policy rolled out a new talking point this morning on the Sunday talk shows. That is: the Bush administration wasn’t the only one to get the pre-war intelligence wrong — rather, this was a global failure of intelligence.
Sen. John McCain: “Every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russian, including the French, including the Israeli, all had reached the same conclusion, and that was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” [Face the Nation]
Sen. Pat Roberts: “Not only ours but the British, not only that but the French, not only that but the Russians, not only that but the Israelis – this was a worldwide intelligence failure.” [Fox News Sunday]
Former White House Political Director Ken Mehlman: “The UN looked at it, the Germans looked at it, the French looked at it… they all agreed that this guy has WMD.” [Meet the Press]
What the right wants you to believe is that because these intelligence agencies may have believed Saddam had WMD, they also believed that the intelligence rose to the necessary level of justifying military force to invade Iraq. That is entirely false. In fact, many of our friends and allies believed the opposite — that based on the intelligence they had, the threat of Iraq did not rise to the level of justifying immediate force.
FRANCE: President Jacques Chirac: “France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the U.S. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go down that path. And we should pursue it until we have come to a dead end, but that is not the case yet.” [CNN, 3/17/03]
GERMANY: Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer: “The Security Council is now meeting for the third time within a month at ministerial level to discuss the Iraq crisis. This shows the urgency we attach to the disarmament of Iraq and to the threat of war. … Are we really in a situation that absolutely necessitates the ‘ultima ratio’, the very last resort? I think not, because the peaceful means are far from exhausted.” [Statement by Fischer to Security Council, 3/7/03]
RUSSIA: Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov: “What is really in the genuine interests of the world community? Continuing the albeit difficult but clearly fruitful results of the inspectors’ work, or resorting to force, which inevitably will result in enormous loss of life and is fraught with serious and unpredictable consequences for regional and international stability? It is our deep conviction that the possibilities for disarming Iraq through political means do exist. And they really exist. And this cannot but be acknowledged.” [Statement by Ivanov, 3/7/03]
CHINA: Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan: “We believe that as long as we stick to the road of political settlement, the goal of destroying Iraq’s WMD could still be obtained. Resolution 1441 did not come by easily. Given the current situation, we need resolve and determination, and more importantly, patience and wisdom.” [Statement by Jiaxuan, 3/7/03]
(Via Think Progress.)
8:20:22 PM
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Terror For Export
Afghanistan used to be the place to go for terrorist training, funding and real-world experience in battle. Not anymore. Iraq has become, in President George W. Bush’s words, “the central front” in the war on terror. And compared with distant Afghanistan, Iraq has more fighting, more people, more money and a far better strategic position in the heart of the Middle East. If Afghanistan under the Taliban was a backwoods school for terrorism, Iraq is an urban university. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri remain in the leadership’s safe haven in Afghanistan,” says a senior Taliban official who uses the nom de guerre Abu Zabihullah. “But Iraq is where the fierce encounters take place, where we recruit and dispatch fighters and where jihad’s spirit thrives.”
The historical legacy of the Bush administration is going to be the body count of civilians who died at the hand of terrorism. Who knew Al Qaeda would have such compliance from the White House?
(Via Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid.)
6:45:37 PM
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The conservative movement is reacting to Bush’s impotence with characteristic hysteria. Check out some of the reactions to Howard Dean on Meet The Press this morning from the GOP base on Free Republic:
HOWARD DEAN IS A DANGEROUS AND DEMENTED SOCIALIST CROOK UNPATRIOTIC UNAMERICAN LIAR, ARREST HIM NOW
W could issue an executive order to round up the seditious scum in the rat party and at least prevent the left from continuing to fight a second front against us at home.
This great man is deserving of nothing less than piano wire and a lamp post.
He ought to be arrested for sedition along with Reid, Durbin and Harkin.
Howard Dean is a Hitler emulator…He stinks of death camps, right through the TV screen
Glenn Reynolds would be proud.
(Via Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid.)
6:45:12 PM
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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND POL POT: What do they have in common? They both believed that "water-boarding" wasn't "anything close to torture." More on the Khmer Rouge's use of the "psychological interrogation technique" of waterboarding here. Here's a picture of the Khmer Rouge doing something now authorized and endorsed by Dick Cheney. Imagine someone wearing the uniform of the United States doing this. And remember who authorized it.
(Via Daily Dish.)
6:42:27 PM
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L.A. Times Magazine: The fabulist literature that's peculiar to Los Angeles is the only American fiction that's really worth reading, says Alan Rifkin
(Via Locus Online Blinks.)
Lots of writers-new-to-me mentioned herein, but in the company of writers I do know and like.
If you include writers with one foot in fantasy/sci-fi—if your L.A. vision leans toward time travelers and mermen with vestigial gills—the list becomes a catalog: Octavia Butler, Kem Nunn, James Blaylock, Scott Bradfield, Tim Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, and all the descendants of Philip K. Dick.
Sometimes this L.A. literature jumps the ropes of literature itself. In film it's Robert Towne, the L.A. writer's successful half-brother in Hollywood, finally directing his version of John Fante's "Ask the Dust," whose desert-grave epiphany you could see trying to happen in Towne's script for "Chinatown." It took him 30 years to get the backing. ("Some pictures are jobs," he told Variety, "but others become obsessions.") And the urban theorist Norman Klein, who in another metropolis might set off a manhunt with nets, is not only at work on a "cinematic database novel" but also leads "anti-tours" of the city's "erasures" (lost pasts) and "social imaginaries"—such as trucked-in Victorian homes that create a "collective memory of an event or place that never occurred but is built anyway."
5:48:53 PM
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WaPo tells it like it is.
VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.
...
It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.
Tags: Dick Cheney, torture
(Via No More Apples.)
1:43:46 PM
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This week's Sunday Sermonette comes from American newspaperman H. L. Mencken:
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
I'm not signing on to the "all government is evil" line, but other than that, it's a great credo.
Here's another Sunday Sermonette from a great American journalist.
(Via Majikthise.)
1:20:39 PM
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Sorry, but this is an illustration of the contorted absurdities religion can lead people into:
Where did Jesus get his DNA? His Y chromosome? [. . .]
[T]here's a problem with arguing Jesus came about through cloning or parthenogenesis - he would have been born a girl. In the past few decades, science revealed that to be male you need a Y chromosome, and the only place you can get one is from a man. [. . .]
Catholics and Protestants seem to agree [. . .] that Jesus was fully human and male, so he must have carried the usual male quotient of DNA. It's not the Y chromosome he needed per se but a gene called SRY normally carried on the Y. [. . .] That fragment of the Y has to come from a father.
Biology professor David Wilcox of Eastern University, a Christian college, said [. . .] ''Of course Jesus had DNA and a Y chromosome - and the source for half of that DNA [and the Y chromosome] would presumably be pure and simple miracle,'' he says.
Theology professor and ordained minister Ronald Cole-Turner said standard Christian thought attributes the virgin birth to God's intervention in the natural order, not a biological anomaly. ''It's not God's sperm . . . but God created something like a sperm and caused it to fertilize Mary's egg,'' he says.[. . .]
[A] natural conception was problematic to early Christian thinkers, [Boston University theology professor Wesley] Wildman said, because St. Augustine and others believed original sin was passed on ''through the male via the loss of control associated with the male orgasm.''
Oh, please.
(H/T: Althouse.)
(Via AmbivaBlog.)
10:01:09 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 12/2/2005; 7:09:22 PM.
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