Monday, November 12, 2007

106-year old WWI veteran speaks on the Iraq war.. This weekend, Frank W. Buckles, traveled to Arlington National Cemetary for a ceremony honoring his service in World War I. Buckles, 106 years old, is one of just three known suriving World War I veterans. Asked about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Buckles told the Washington Post, [base "]I[base ']m no authority, but I[base ']m not in favor of war unless it[base ']s an emergency.[per thou] [Think Progress] 6:10:04 PM    comment []

Bush To Give Keynote Address Honoring Federalist Society’s 25th Anniversary. In 1982, conservative legal scholars such as Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork held the Federalist Society’s first National Student Symposium, launching an organization meant to advance the “rule of law.” This week, the organization will celebrate its 25th anniversary with a three-day convention, featuring speakers such as Clarence Thomas and John Yoo, along with Scalia, Olson, and Bork. The Federalist Society has experienced a golden era under President Bush, who will, not surprisingly, be giving the keynote address at the organization’s black tie gala on Thursday. It has served as a gateway for judges and legal aides who strive to work inside the administration, in effect promoting individuals who have dedicated themselves to enforcing a right-wing ideology rather than the law. A look at the oversized influence Bush has afforded the Federalist Society: – Filling top-level appointments. When he took office, Bush immediately filled many of his administration’s top appointments with current and former Federalist Society members, including: Gale Norton (Interior Secretary), John Ashcroft (Attorney General), Spencer Abraham (Energy Secretary), Ted Olson (Solicitor General), and Michael Chertoff (Homeland Security Secretary). – Filling career Justice Department slots. Under Bradley Schlozman, approximately “half of the 14 career lawyers hired” for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division were members of the Federalist Society, “up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years.” – Filling judicial vacancies. Administration officials note that in the early days of the Bush presidency, “about a quarter of their judicial nominees were recommended by the Washington headquarters of the society.” In 2005, The New York Times reported that “15 of the 41 appeals court judges confirmed under Mr. Bush have identified themselves as members of the group.” – Tracking U.S. attorneys’ Federalist Society membership. Political appointees in the Justice Department, such as former Gonzales aide Monica Goodling, assessed U.S. attorneys based not only on prosecution experience and political experience, but also whether they were members of the Federalist Society. In 2005, the White House seemed to recognize the dangers in associating too closely with the conservative society. It aggressively resisted media efforts to (accurately) characterize then-Supreme Court nominee John Roberts as a member of the group, going so far as to call and pressure reporters to report otherwise. Apparently, that’s all water under the bridge. Not only is Bush speaking at the anniversary celebration, but so is Roberts. UPDATE: Rudy Giuliani is the only presidential candidate who will be speaking at the convention. His Justice Advisory Committee includes Federalist Society members Olson and failed court of appeals nominee Miguel Estrada, as well as society co-founder Steven Calabresi. [Think Progress] 12:33:57 PM    comment []

Glenn Greenwald tracks how Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whom he dubs 'Bush's key ally in the Senate,' in her defense of the telecoms, parrots the "administration's standard pro-amnesty talking points, leading with its most deceitful ones." [Cursor.org] 12:27:55 PM    comment []

DynCorp Security Guard Fires, Killing Iraqi Driver. James Glanz, writing for The New York Times, reports from Baghdad: "An Iraqi taxi driver was shot and killed on Saturday by a guard with DynCorp International, a private security company hired to protect American diplomats here, when a DynCorp convoy rolled past a knot of traffic on an exit ramp in Baghdad, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said Sunday." [t r u t h o u t] 12:26:06 PM    comment []

Barbara Ehrenreich: Writers Strike, Silence Falls. In solidarity with the striking screenwriters there will be no laugh lines in this blog, no stunning metaphors, and not many adjectives. Also, in solidarity with the striking Broadway stage-hands, no theatrics, special effects or sing-along refrains. Yes, I realize the strike could deprive millions of Americans of news as Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, and the rest of them are forced into re-runs. If the strike and the re-runs go on long enough, the same millions of Americans will be condemned to living in the past and writing in Kerry for president in 08. But are re-runs really such a bad thing? After opening night, every Broadway show is a re-run in perpetuity, yet people have been known to fly from Fargo to see "Mamma Mia." And yes, it's a crying shame that so many laugh-worthy news items will go unnoted on the late night talk shows: The discovery of Chinese toys coated with the date rape drug. The news that pot-smoking Swiss teenagers are as academically successful as abstainers and better socially adjusted. Bush's repeated requests for Musharraf to take off his uniform. Could there be a simple explanation for the powerful affinity between these two men? True, a screenwriters' strike is not as emotionally compelling as a strike by janitors or farm-workers. Screenwriters are often well-paid - when they are paid. All it takes is for a show to get cancelled or reconceptualized, and they're back on the streets again, hustling for work. I know a couple of them - smart, funny women who clamber nimbly from one short-lived job to another, struggling to keep up their health insurance and self-respect. But my selfish hope here is that the screenwriters' action will call attention to the plight of writers in general. Since I started in the freelancing business about 30 years ago, the per-word payment for print articles has remained exactly the same in actual, non-inflation-adjusted, dollars. Three dollars a word was pretty much top of the line, and it hasn't gone up by a penny. More commonly in the old days, I made a dollar a word, requiring me to write three or four 1000-word pieces a month to supply the children with their bagels and pizza. One for Mademoiselle on "The Heartbreak Diet." One for Ms. on "The Bright Side of the Man Shortage." One for Mother Jones on pharmaceutical sales scams, and probably a book review thrown in. There was a perk, of course - the occasional free lunch on an editor's expense account. These would occur in up-market restaurants where the price of lunch for two would easily exceed my family's weekly food budget, but I realized it would be gauche to bring a plastic baggie for the rolls. My job was to pitch story ideas over the field greens and tuna tartare, all the while marveling at the wealth that my writing helped generate, which, except for the food on my plate, went largely to someone other than me. For print writers, things have gone steadily downhill. The number of traditional outlets--magazines and newspapers - is shrinking. Ms., for example, publishes only quarterly now, Mother Jones every two months, and Mademoiselle has long since said au revoir. You can blog on the Web of course, but that pays exactly zero. As for benefits: once the National Writers' Union offered health insurance, but Aetna dropped it and then Unicare found writers too sickly to cover. (You can still find health insurance, however, at www.freelancersunion.org) So, you may be thinking, who needs writers anyway? The truth is, no one needs any particular writer, just as no one needs any particular auto worker, stage-hand, or janitor. But take us all away and TV's funny men will be struck mute, soap opera actors will be reduced to sighing and grunting, CNN anchors will have to fill the whole hour with chit chat about the weather, all greeting cards will be blank. Newspapers will consist of advertisements and movie listings; the Web will collapse into YouTube. A sad, bewildered, silence will come over the land. Besides, anyone who's willing to stand up to greedy bosses deserves our support. A victory for one group, from Ford workers to stage-hands, raises the prospects for everyone else. Who knows? If the screenwriters win, maybe some tiny measure of respect will eventually trickle down even to bloggers. So in further solidarity with striking writers, I'm going to shut up right now. [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 12:19:34 PM    comment []

As 'Quietly, U.S. death toll hits a new high in Afghanistan this year,' and civilian deaths prove subject to competing interpretations, the Independent reports that while British forces are 'stretched to limit,' plans are already being made to extend British presence in Afghanistan beyond 2009. Plus: 'The rise of the neo-Taliban.' [Cursor.org] 11:27:23 AM    comment []

"They were taking weapons away by the truckload," comments one witness to the "private arms bazaar" created by an Iraqi businessman put in charge of issuing weapons to police cadets, as activities at this armory and other warehouses point to how the American military lost track of some 190,000 small arms. [Cursor.org] 10:44:53 AM    comment []

Despite much "talk of improvement," a quick tour outside the U.S. media provides a rather more discouraging portrait of Iraq, amid revelations about the grisly methods of one of America's 'new allies,' and what many Iraqis see as "the uncertain consequence of a divide and rule policy." [Cursor.org] 10:44:03 AM    comment []

Jonah Goldberg's deeply "conflicted" thoughts on war and torture. In this week's version of their borderline-unwatchable (though, I confess, perversely engrossing) Internet chat show, Jonah Goldberg and his friend, Peter Beinart, amicably debate waterboarding. Jonah protests the unfair treatment of what he calls the "pro-waterboarding camp's position." Waterboarding, you see, is a "tough question" and Jonah feels "very personally conflicted about it." What Jonah calls "one half of his brain's problem with the debate" is that it is an "open question" if waterboarding is even torture at all. All very riveting. To explain his objections to the use of the "pro-torture" label for those who are merely "pro-waterborading," Jonah creates an analogy which very well may be the most deceitful and hypocritical claim ever uttered. The "pro-torture" label is unfair because it obscures what Jonah calls -- seriously -- all of the "nuance and principled objections involved on the side of those willing to condone waterborading." He then unleashes his analogy: It's sort of like calling people pro-war. Very few people just love war. Um, most people have, you knew, a pretty well-developed series of reasons why war is sometimes necessary as a last resort, and sometimes not. And to simply call people "pro-war" glosses over all of that. Absolutely. Calling neoconservatives like Jonah "pro-war" is every bit as unfair as describing the "pro-waterboarding camp" as "pro-torture." Here, for instance, was Jonah's highly nuanced, principled, and extremely reluctant case for starting a war against Iraq: WHY IRAQ? So how does all this, or the humble attempt at a history lesson of my last column, justify tearing down the Baghdad regime? Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way). Just to underscore the case, Jonah went on to assure us: "Whether or not Ledeen -- a historian and student of Machiavelli -- was being tongue-in-cheek when he made the suggestion, there's an obvious insight to it." And the same person who today righteously explains that virtually nobody can fairly be called "pro-war" then said (emphasis in original): There is nothing we want to see happen in the Middle East that can be accomplished through talking around long tables festooned with bottled water and fresh fruit at Swiss hotels, that cannot be accomplished faster and more permanently through war. But there is plenty that cannot be achieved by such gabfests that can only be achieved through war. And what was the highly nuanced, principled, profoundly serious and angst-ridden rationale for choosing Iraq to invade (only as a "last resort," of course)? This: "The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense." Is it even possible to ponder the intellectual depravity necessary to enable the same person who said that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall," to now solemnly lecture us about how nobody should be called "pro-war" because war is only chosen reluctantly as a last resort and that label obscures all the deep thoughts and nuances underlying the war cheerleading? It's the same type of depravity necessary to deny -- or even question -- the proposition that waterboarding is torture. Here is counter-terrorism expert Jim Nance -- a former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) who underwent and trained in the waterboarding technique (in order to teach U.S. soliders how to endure captivity at the hands of waterboarders such as Al Qaeda) -- in The New York Daily News: When performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique -- without a doubt. There is no way to sugarcoat it. In the media, waterboarding is called "simulated drowning," but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word. . . . Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia -- meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells. . . . One has to overcome basic human decency to endure causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you questioning the meaning of what it is to be an American. Of course, Jonah never has "been strapped down to the board" and thus it's easy (and repulsive) for him to send around with his friend Pete talking about all the fascinating theoretical nuances behind the "waterboarding debate." Identically, he's never been near a war and it is thus fun and easy for him to beat his chest and type about the "need to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall." As extreme -- and sometimes unfathomable -- as the events of the last six years have been, it isn't actually that difficult to understand why it has all happened. It's because there's nothing unique about Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg; he's depressingly commonplace. [Salon: Glenn Greenwald] 9:37:20 AM    comment []