troubles with tenses

TPM: Bush criminal administrator of the GSA invokes the Hortatory Subjunctive Defense:

Lurita Doan explained her grammatical shortfalls in her testimony today. But Democrats on the committee had a hard time buying it. Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) took her to task on her tense mincing over a statement Doan made about GSA employees that had cooperated with the Office of Special Council in its investigation into her conduct. When pushed, Doan claimed she meant to invoke the "hortatory subjuctive" when she said:

Until extensive rehabilitation of their performance occurs, they will not be getting promoted and will not be getting bonuses or special awards or anything of that nature.

Son of a Latin teacher, Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD) disagreed. He called her statement the common "future" tense. He also spotted a connection between her grammatical defense and an accusation that she encouraged her employees to help out Republican Congressional races. At a presentation given by Karl Roves' deputy she asked her GSA employess: "How can we help our candidates?"

Includes video.

Hortatory subjunctive: a statement urging self and others to some action. Will always be in first person plural of subjunctive mood -- so in this case would be "Let us not promote them or give bonuses... " I fail to see how that's any better, even were it true.

Oh yeah -- the most important part is: she regrets nothing.

WPA vs GWB

Ezra links a review of a new history of the WPA, which includes a passage about disaster relief that strikes sharp contrast to today:

On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 21, 1937, a vicious hurricane swept through the Northeast, bringing with it a tidal surge that smashed the Long Island coast, flooded the Connecticut River, and left nearly 700 dead. Within a day, employees of the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal office charged with employing those on relief, were filling sandbags, rescuing survivors, and sorting through the wreckage. By Friday morning, 100,000 WPA'ers had been deployed to the afflicted region. As Nick Taylor chronicles in American-Made, his ambitious but uneven history of the WPA, their mobilization was remarkably comprehensive. "Through the region, WPA sewing rooms put aside their other work to produce clothing for flood victims. WPA nurses and nutritionists staffed refugee centers at schools and infirmaries, and kindergarten teachers set up children's playrooms." By November, the region had been almost entirely rebuilt, leaving the Red Cross chairman to observe that the WPA's response to the storm was "one of the most amazing disaster recoveries this organization has ever known."

For someone like myself, whose most indelible memory of the U.S. response to a domestic natural disaster is the image of President Bush strumming a guitar while New Orleans drowned, and whose entire conscious political life has taken place in the wake of the Reagan revolution, the sheer scope and approach of the New Deal in general, and the WPA specifically, is unfathomably alien. A government that marshaled 3 million people to build ski lodges, repair roads, stage avant-garde plays, excavate Indian ruins, and grow herb gardens sounds more like a strange cross between pharaonic Egypt and the Berkeley City Council than the Washington of today, which has outsourced every core function, from tax collection to war fighting.

And to think that was 70 years ago! Yet our ability to help has massively decreased -- because we chose to abandon it.

history of neocons

Sadly, No! is such a great site because not only do they consistently bring teh funny, but also teh knowledge. Today, HTML Mencken came across an old interview with Hitchens ("For the Sake of Argument"), in which he admits the evil of the neocons he later joined.

HITCHENS: Do you remember what it was like? Don’t you remember what a hooligan atmosphere there was in American intellectual life for a long time because of the Cold War? Anyone who had any doubts that this war was worth fighting and worth the risk of a nuclear exchange was accused of being a dupe or a secret sympathizer or a fan of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella or all these other things. People were constantly being crushed and coerced and derided and driven out of the argument. I wanted to put that down before people forget it.

And of course, not only did people forget, they happily allowed the same f---in people to do the same f---in thing all over again. The Sadly story documents how they went in search of a new enemy after the Cold War, even going to far as to encourage Taiwan to declare its independence so that China would attack them and we could have a new conflict. Lovely.

Fukuyama:

I think that for some neoconservatives… In a sense, they wanted to have an enemy. The end of the Cold War was a tough time because they didn’t know who the enemy ought to be. I think in the case of Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard there was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because I think that they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well if foreign policy wasn’t a big issue.

The late 1990s was the, you know, the period of the stock market bubble and Monica Lewinsky and they didn’t really have an issue in all of that, I thought, that they thought was particularly important or had much traction with the voters and with the public. I think they initially picked on China as their target — and I always thought right from the beginning that was a big mistake because, first of all, foreign policy shouldn’t be driven by the needs of the Republican Party...

Too right.

150,000 year split

NatGeo (GAAAAH! Now I'm doing it!) presents another article about the genetic split in homo sapiens -- adding the fact that the population seems to have dropped to around 2,000 total people between the two groups. Crazy.

Fatherhood at Christian retreats

PZ Myers linked this Matt Tiabbi story from Rolling Stone ("Jesus Made Me Puke"), wherein the writer infiltrates a Ted Hagee weekend retreat. To get a look at the unbridled craziness. And it worked, of course.

Really good and entertaining writing, and also some fatherhood issues worth keeping track of. First, the main pastor himself was - of course - abandoned by his dad. This is all part of "the wound":

The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.

In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's abandonment had crushed his "normal."

"And I was wounded," he whispered dramatically. "My dad had ruined my normal!"

The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.

Then, the writer has to make up his own story:

"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."

....

I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought — after all, who would do such a thing? I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my midtwenties — at least that much was true — and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father's passing from cirrhosis.

It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment.

It gets even more hiliarious from there, as the writer realizes that this might not have been the most productive lie -- since he has to now spend a weekend writing his autobiography....

"I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands."

Awesome. But it gets serious again with the father issues at hand...

Virtually all of the participants of the Encounter identified either one or both of their parents as their "offender," and much of what Fortenberry was talking about in his instructional sessions was how to replace the godless atmosphere of abuse or neglect that the offenders had provided us with God and the church. He was taking broken people and giving them a road map to a new set of parents, a new family — your basic cultist bait-and-switch formula for cutting old emotional ties and redirecting that psychic energy toward the desired new destination. That connection would become more overt later in the weekend, but early on, this ur-father propaganda was the only thing I could see that separated Encounter Weekend from the typical self-help dreck of the secular world.

Of course, the writer soon discovers that his hosts view all this as an eternal struggle, a "generational curse." And worse, he starts to see how effective these rituals are in transforming inner personalities of even a jaded writer like himself:

by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

Overall, a very good piece worth assigning. Or, his forthcoming book.

Millenial Makeover

Title of a new book, "Millenial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics". Based on the Strauss & Howe generational cycle theories.

Interview with MyDD here. But don't get too optimistic that it's going to make things better:

Writing in The Fourth Turning in the 90's, Strauss and Howe suggested that there would be an initial shock to signal the beginning of a new era early in this decade, but that the real crisis would occur years later. So if 9/11 was only the foreshock of the emergence of a new era, there could be much worse things to come either in this year or later ones.

F---ing great.

UPDATE: Also today comes a chart of "The GOP's Generational Time Bomb". So the mushroom cloud has a silver lining.

The Future of Reading

"The Right to Read," by Richard Stallman.

He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do. And there wasn't much chance that the SPA—the Software Protection Authority—would fail to catch him.

Found this in a complaint about the Kindle and fears of Big Brother taking over our information. As if that could happen! What? It could? Never mind.

Washington in 17 years

WaPo presents some futurology projected at 17 years out. So, 2025. ("Washington's Future, A History") Some interesting ideas... who knows if any of it pans out, but could be useful to assign in last class along with World Without Us.

Shoes bad, feet good.

It took four million years to evolve the perfect human foot. And we've gone and thrown it all away!! (New York Magazine, "You Walk Wrong")

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad.

In other evolution news, some interesting new evidence of divergence in human gene pool -- before it then re-merged. BBC: "Human line 'nearly split in two'" relays finding from the American Journal of Human Genetics. Basically, 150,000 years ago a population split off and inhabited southern Africa, where they lived in isolation from the east African group for 50-100,000 years:

Dr Wells told BBC News: "Once this population reached southern Africa, it was cut off from the eastern African population by these drought events which were on the route between them."

Modern humans are often presumed to have originated in East Africa and then spread out to populate other areas. But the data could equally support an origin in southern Africa followed by a migration to East and West Africa.

The genetic data show that populations came back together as a single, pan-African population about 40,000 years ago.

This renewed contact appears to coincide with the development of more advanced stone tool technology and may have been helped by more favourable environmental conditions.

Neat.

antiwar voices

In the wake of the NYT military analysts story, we're paying more attention to who was allowed on tv in 2002-3. Kevin Drum provides an alaysis done by some cats at Syracuse ("Whose Views Made the News? Media Coverage and the March to War in Iraq"):

The data flatly contradict the claim that dissenting views were "shut out" of news coverage....When the two networks are aggregated together, the distribution of source quotes is 34% supportive, 35% neutral, and 30% opposed.

What a relief! But wait. It turns out that virtually all of the supportive quotes came from the Bush administration (no surprise) while nearly all of the opposed quotes came from....

Foreigners. Yep. Despite the fact that plenty of Democratic politicians and U.S. experts opposed the war, the news networks almost completely shut off domestic sources of criticism...

There's a chart of who's in what category. So it's mostly Iraqis, UN nerds, etc. who presented the case against the war. Helpful? Hardly.

Needless to say, relying on Saddam Hussein, Jacques Chirac, and Kofi Annan to be the almost exclusive face of the anti-war movement is even worse than ignoring it. As the authors say blandly, "It is well known that source credibility is central to the persuasiveness of communication, political or otherwise. And while many Americans were skeptical of the Bush administration's motivations for a confrontation with Iraq, we would surmise that even greater skepticism infused Americans' perceptions of Saddam Hussein's arguments about why war was a bad idea."

And the American public says... La la la, I'm not listening.

I hate Illinois Nazis...

....but the Republican candidate for IN-2 LOOOOOVES THEM!!!

C&L has the video here:

On Sunday, Tony Zirkle, a Republican candidate for Indiana’s 2nd District, took time out from saving the economy by shredding vintage Playboys (of course!) so he could attend a 119th birthday celebration for Adolf Hitler. He claims he was only there to talk about his experience as a state’s attorney in Indiana, his wacky theories about pornography, and to preach the gospel, so of course his being there had absolutely nothing to do with his segregation plan that would allow blacks to “have six states, so instead of having one half-black senator, well they would have 12.”

The Bilerico Project (Indiana politcal blog) has Zirkle's lame excuses and also some video here.

South Bend Tribune:

During a news conference Monday afternoon, Zirkle said he accepted an invitation to address the group to spread his anti-pornography message.

An account of the gathering on www.Overthrow.com says "Zirkle spoke on his history as a state's attorney in Indiana, prosecuting Jewish and Zionist criminal gangs involved in trafficking prostitutes and pornography from Russia and the Zionist entity.''

Lovely how consistent the Nazi message is over 80 years -- Jewish Commie Darkie Homos are after your women and destroying your families!!!!

Northwest Indiana Times:

A congressional candidate is defending his speech to a group celebrating the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, saying he appeared simply because he was asked.

Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in Indiana's 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.

"I'll speak before any group that invites me," Zirkle said Monday. "I've spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta."

Yeah, because that's comprable...

Matt Stone wants more mon-ay

Well, not really. He's swimming in it. But he has some thoughts on "some of that Internet mon-ay" that can be found in some audio interviews here. Some discussion of something I was ranting about after Canada On Strike, which is that the actions of Stone's own studio shows that they clearly think there IS money out there:

In the above-mentioned strike episode, the boys make an outlandishly obscene "YouToob" video, hoping to cash in on some of those Internet ducats. Their video is a hit on "YouToob" -- and it got posted all over the real YouTube too. With so many would-be auteurs constantly battling just to get their work noticed online, there was something surreal and incongruous about watching Viacom methodically remove dozens of copies of a hit viral video its own show had generated as a joke.

When I asked about those takedowns, Stone admitted to being "a little schizophrenic" about it. "Trey and I have never had a problem. It's never hurt us," he said, but he added that "from Comedy Central and Viacom's point of view, I understand how they want to try to make some money."

Well, is there online money or isn't there?

Exactly. Parker & Stone can afford to be blase about the writers' strike becaue, unlike other shows, their corporate masters haven't made them work without pay to produce online-only content that the companies clearly think has earning potential. Overall, interesting media analysis.

Romanian party ships

It's funny when The Corner devolves into infighting. This case is KLo's blathering about the problems of porn on military bases "bears scrutiny." Lisa Schiffren talks some sense, and gets into some interesting cases of supplying "R&R" for the troops in the First Gulf War.

Back in 1991, during Desert Storm, I worked at the Pentagon. I was, at first, taken aback to see routine message traffic cross my desk discussing explicitly the logistical arrangements for "R&R" for the troops. How were the boys at bases in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and how were they going to get action? The problem, I still recall, was that the normal ports of call in nearby Africa were having problems with AIDS, which was still newish. Whichever country was the traditional port was very miffed at losing the business, because those soldiers at the bars and brothels were a big source of hard currency. Almost anywhere in a reasonable distance was under the sway of the mullahs. I bet you're wondering how the military solved this problem. My recollection is a little hazy, since this was something I followed mainly for entertainment (as did my Special Ops colleagues). But I believe the government of Romania made an offer. Eastern Europe was just emerging from the Soviet boot, and a bunch of those countries really wanted the business. Romania was judged to have better resort infrastructure than most. And I also believe that one of the less religious Gulf emirates decided that it would allow a few huge "party ships" to dock just offshore. I suppose we transported our troops to Romania. I don't know who brought the hookers to the ships. Everyone winked and nodded, and the troops carried on.

It's continually hilarious how Republicans bleat about moral problems, then create situations that exacerbate the things they fear. Of course, this allows them to increase their outraged cries of moral crisis, which then helps get them re-elected. Nice racket they have there.

US out of everywhere! Especially Haiti!

Some historical background useful for next time teaching Haitian slave revolt. Apparently we invaded and occupied Haiti from 1915-1934. And apparently we did some not so nice things and behaved in horribly racist fashion. Who knew?

Friday Feith

Seeya, Eichmann!!

The Hoya: Feith Contract Not Renewed

Douglas Feith (LAW ’78) may not have devised an exit strategy for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but according to the former Bush administration official, a group of Georgetown professors apparently had no trouble coming up with an exit strategy for him.

The distinguished practitioner in national security policy in the School of Foreign Service will not be returning to teach at Georgetown next semester after the university chose not to renew his two-year contract.

“Technically I was appointed for two years and there was no extension of the appointment,” Feith said in an interview. “My understanding is that there were some members of the faculty that didn’t want me on the faculty.”

Cry cry cry. More from TPM:

Dana Milbank offers us a good take down on Douglas Feith, one of the two or three principal architects of the Iraq war.

Feith, typical of the ideologues and seekers after profit, feels no guilt whatsoever about the role he played manipulating intelligence to help lie us into the war.

So sad. Will Berkeley follow suit and fire Yoo?

media whores exposed

Big story this week is the NYT's "Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand," which finally reveals that all those talking military heads on teevee selling us this lovely war are -- surprise, surprise -- in the tank for military contractors, and coordinate their talking points with the Pentagon ministry of information. The bit that everyone is quoting:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. ....

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Also, they include a cool visual video thingie with it. Neat.

Expelled!

Not recorded much of this controversy (or much of anything recently at the end of this semester), but this link from Richard Dawkins (courtesy PZ Myers' "Appropriate Responses to Expelled") shoots down in perfect form the supposed connection between Nazis and Darwin. Which, Nazis being one of my things, would be handy to have around for future needs.

Though in a way, all one might have to say on the subject is that in all of Mein Kampf.... Hitler never mentioned Darwin. Some influence.

tenure history

CT provides some handy links.

preach it, sister!

My new favorite blog Indexed on the housing bust and American society (title, "Bail us out, nerds!"):

history of Feith's stupidity

Lefty blog First Draft presents a series of historical posts on the idiocy/criminal maliciousness that is Doug Feith, with the purpose of reminding people that waaaaay back in 2003 people were already trying to call bullshit on his intelligence cooking. Not that anyone really noticed.

Has a link to a book Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith & the Faulty Intelligence That Led to War, which collects blog posts on the matter. Also includes:

People like ABW, who put together an exhaustive timeline of all Feith's missteps and mistakes in a Kos diary, such that you can go all the way back to 1996 to see how this mess got started.

People like Matt Yglesias, who put the blame where it really belonged, on the Congress that did absolutely zero oversight of anything Feith and his cronies were doing.

People like Jack K at The Grumpy Forrester who brought home why what Feith did isn't just some silly insider Washington issue.

And the post finishes with the funny line: "the history's worth knowing so the present mound of bullshit makes sense."

Robertson's empire

Virginia Quarterly Review presents "The Christian With Four Aces", a Pat Robertson bio piece. Very good. Interesting episode about his full-bore entry into politics -- after the death of his father.

To avoid the risk of alienating potential givers, Robertson’s one on-air rule was no discussion of politics. Even when Robertson’s father was running for reelection to the Senate in 1966, Robertson stayed decidedly out of the political arena. He later explained that God had told him not to get involved by campaigning for his father. “You cannot tie my eternal purpose to the success of any political candidate,” God said. Robertson insisted his role was to save souls and not to influence voters.

That political neutrality changed with two events—Watergate in 1972, and his father’s death in 1974; the first outraged him, and the second, perhaps, freed him to express that outrage. Robertson covered the Watergate scandal extensively on the network, repeatedly voicing his sense of betrayal and anger toward the White House. When Jimmy Carter—a fellow Baptist—ran for office, Robertson interviewed him and followed his campaign with great interest, but he soon grew dissatisfied by Carter as well. Eventually, as the Carter administration faltered, Robertson began to offer, to what he saw as the alienated Christian right, his own politics as an alternative.

So this is a key point, though it's hard to see how to interpret his relationship with his father without more details. Maybe there's a full-length bio about it.

Yoo too

Matt Yglesias, quoted in full:

I don't think I have the stomach to try to do any serious original analysis of John Yoo's now-declassified torture memos. As usual, you can find a lot of great legal analysis at Balkinization. But Yoo aside, you need to really be staggered by the mental processes of his employer. Some subordinate shows up in your office with a memo about how it is, in fact, legal to break all kinds of laws -- specifically laws that seek to entrench a few hundred years' worth of conventional wisdom about the moral and political unacceptability of torturing people. What do you do? Fire the guy? See if you can recommend that he get counseling? Not if you're George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, if you're those guys you adopt the legal reasoning and move on to the torturing.

Except eventually it becomes clear that the torture's gotten out of hand -- it's happening to innocent people, it's spreading throughout the U.S. detention and interrogation system, it's producing all kinds of possibly spurious information, etc., so naturally you respond by classifying the whole thing and pretending that it would imperil national security for everyone to know what a bunch of sickos you are. It really makes the stomach churn.

torture day

Well, it stands to reason I guess. More on torture from Vanity Fair ("Green Light"):

The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a “trickle up” explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration—by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees—lawyers—who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option. This is the story of how the torture at Guantánamo began, and how it spread.

One of the main points is how the administration hid its decision making process in order to make the end result seem more legitimate.

The real story, pieced together from many hours of interviews with most of the people involved in the decisions about interrogation, goes something like this: The Geneva decision was not a case of following the logic of the law but rather was designed to give effect to a prior decision to take the gloves off and allow coercive interrogation; it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall. The new interrogation techniques did not arise spontaneously from the field but came about as a direct result of intense pressure and input from Rumsfeld’s office. The Yoo-Bybee Memo was not simply some theoretical document, an academic exercise in blue-sky hypothesizing, but rather played a crucial role in giving those at the top the confidence to put pressure on those at the bottom. And the practices employed at Guantánamo led to abuses at Abu Ghraib.

And the conversation with Feith is particularly sickening. He displays enourmous pride at having manipulated the conditions of the Geneva Convention so as to claim the US is upholding it, while at the same time ensuring that no prisoner can access its protections. He's so fucking proud of it too, including a "little speech" where he talks about how important the GC are as a matter of binding law and national morality:

“There is no country in the world that has a larger interest in promoting respect for the Geneva Conventions as law than the United States,” he told Rumsfeld, according to his own account, “and there is no institution in the U.S. government that has a stronger interest than the Pentagon.” So Geneva had to be followed? “Obeying the Geneva Conventions is not optional,” Feith replied. “The Geneva Convention is a treaty in force. It is as much part of the supreme law of the United States as a statute.” Myers jumped in. “I agree completely with what Doug said and furthermore it is our military culture It’s not even a matter of whether it is reciprocated—it’s a matter of who we are.”

....... and it turns out that speech was just to fool Gen. Myers into thinking the Pentagon was going to play by the rules, as Myers wanted. But it's all just a way to avoid them:

I asked Feith, just to be clear: Didn’t the administration’s approach mean that Geneva’s constraints on interrogation couldn’t be invoked by anyone at Guantánamo? “Oh yes, sure,” he shot back. Was that the intended result?, I asked. “Absolutely,” he replied. I asked again: Under the Geneva Conventions, no one at Guantánamo was entitled to any protection? “That’s the point,” Feith reiterated. As he saw it, either you were a detainee to whom Geneva didn’t apply or you were a detainee to whom Geneva applied but whose rights you couldn’t invoke. What was the difference for the purpose of interrogation?, I asked. Feith answered with a certain satisfaction, “It turns out, none. But that’s the point.”

That indeed was the point. The principled legal arguments were a fig leaf. The real reason for the Geneva decision, as Feith now made explicit, was the desire to interrogate these detainees with as few constraints as possible. Feith thought he’d found a clever way to do this, which on the one hand upheld Geneva as a matter of law—the speech he made to Myers and Rumsfeld—and on the other pulled the rug out from under it as a matter of reality. Feith’s argument was so clever that Myers continued to believe Geneva’s protections remained in force—he was “well and truly hoodwinked,” one seasoned observer of military affairs later told me.

It gets even better:

I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

What a sick fucker. Turns out he's a liar too:

Feith, for his part, had told me that he knew nothing about any specific interrogation issues until the Haynes Memo suddenly landed on his desk. But that couldn’t be right—in the memo itself Haynes had written, “I have discussed this with the Deputy, Doug Feith and General Myers.” I read the sentence aloud. Feith looked at me. His only response was to tell me that I had mispronounced his name. “It’s Fythe,” he said. “Not Faith.”

Time to evict him from that "eighth floor office lined with books on international law."

Worth reading all 8 pages and using them as a future assignment for the history-as-present finale.

Pentagon-paid propaganda

More secret plans revealed (Wired)... A study written for US Special Operations Command suggested:

“Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” write the report’s co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning…. Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, “I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don’t know if it led to anything.”

Now, there's no evidence they ever actually followed through on this. And there are plenty of crazy wingers ready to attack anyone they're pointed at without being paid. But on the other hand, given the hiring of journalists and columnists by the administration, and the Pentagon's own interests in the media war, it wouldn't be surprising if they had.

See also: C&L,

smashing GOP myths

Speaking of GG, he's plugging his new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. And if it's written at the level of his preview of it, I'm sold:

The central paradox of our political life is that the right-wing faction that continues to dominate our political institutions and win elections embraces fringe beliefs which have little popular support. That's why their overarching objective is to remove substantive considerations from our political debates -- the more consequential the issue, the less establishment media attention it receives, the less real public debate there is over it. Instead, our elections are determined by the barren, petty personality-based distractions and mindless chatter that define the lowly Drudgian Freak Show, where our political life now almost exclusively resides.

The Right has perfected the art of creating mythical cults of personality around their leaders. They are strong, courageous, honor-bound, protective, morally upstanding salt-of-the earth Everyman-warriors -- contemptuous of elitist prerogatives, and oozing traditional masculine virtues and cultural normalcy. As important, if not more so, is the corresponding character demonization of liberals, Democrats and a growing group of miscellaneous right-wing opponents -- those weak, subversive, conniving, appeasing, gender-confused, elitist freaks, whose men are as effeminate and cowardly as their women are angry, threatening and emasculating.

Comes out April 15.

torture memo revealed

News of the memo's existence is of course old. But the contents have now also been released. From WaPo: "Memo: Laws Didn't Apply to Interrogators".

The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

I'm amazed it was declassified at all. Go ACLU!!

Hat tip: Sullivan / Greenwald, the latter of whom observes:

It is not, of course, news that the Bush administration adopted (and still embraces) legal theories which vest the President with literally unlimited power, including the power to break our laws. There are, though, several points worth noting as a result of the disclosure of this Memorandum:

(1) The fact that John Yoo is a Professor of Law at Berkeley and is treated as a respectable, serious expert by our media institutions, reflects the complete destruction over the last eight years of whatever moral authority the United States possessed. Comporting with long-held stereotypes of two-bit tyrannies, we're now a country that literally exempts our highest political officials from the rule of law, and have decided that there should be no consequences when they commit serious felonies.

John Yoo's Memorandum, as intended, directly led to -- caused -- a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George Bush's White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney's counsel (and current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, by all measures, very serious war crimes.

He also notes that 2) the legal structure set by the memo remains in place, 3) the idea that political appointees at the DoJ can absolve executive branch employees of following the law is "rancid and corrupt"; 4) since Nuermberg, we recognize that not only the trigger men are responsible, but the bureaucrats and lawyers as well.

His sad ending:

But those who propound these principles and claim to believe in them ought to apply them consistently. John Yoo is not some misguided conservative legal thinker with whom one should have civil, pleasant, intellectually stimulating debates at law schools and on PBS. Respectfully debating the legality and justification of torture regimes, and treating systematic torture perpetrators like John Yoo with respect, isn't all that far off from what Yoo and his comrades did. It isn't pleasant to think about high government officials in one's own country as war criminals -- that's something that only bad, evil dictatorships have -- but, pleasant or not, it rather indisputably happens to be what we have.

Cry.

UPDATE: Sadly, No! quotes a part worth noting separately:

Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a “national and international version of the right to self-defense,” Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations — that it must “shock the conscience” — that the Bush administration advocated for years.

“Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification,” Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted.

Breathtaking cluelessness of how laws and societies work. Not to mention that it contains an admission that these people have no consciences. Yet it's the individual soldiers at the tail end of this who are the sole problem.

Gavin adds: [...] That definition of torture also allows for the prosecution of ‘bad apples,’* as with the Abu Ghraib affair. Naturally, their superiors would be unmaliciously managing paperwork and personnel matters as the blood and excrement spattered the cell walls.

And gives a helpful link to the Judges' Trial at Nuremberg.