the latest from The Family

Rep. Bart Sustak is trying to make the Dems choose: abortion rights or health care. From a Kos diary ("Health Care in House Held Hostage by 'Christian Mafia' member"):

Stupak has threatened to block the House health care bill unless he can add an amendment that according to a Media Matters report would restrict, perhaps dramatically, the availability of abortion services in the US - which according to the Guttmacher Institute are currently unavailable in 87% of US counties. As one Daily Kos member put it, "If this [Stupak's amendment] goes through, then ANY clinic who takes funds from the public option will be prohibited from performing abortions even if they are privately paid for..."

So, Bart Stupak is holding health care hostage to his agenda of further restricting access to abortion services. Mafia imagery is very appropriate here :

Stupak is a member of "The Family" whose members sometimes refer jokingly to their shadowy, cultic influence peddling group as a "mafia". Representative Stupak lives in the rent-subsidized "C Street House" that's registered as a church, which became notorious over the summer when three Republicans associated with the C Street House became embroiled in sex scandals.

They pretty much are a mafia, and if not certainly spooky quasi-fascist cult. According to a story in Harper's, which the above diary linked ("Jesus plus nothing: Undercover Among America's Secret Theocrats"):

The brothers of Ivanwald are the Family's next generation, its high priests in training. I had been recommended for membership by a banker acquaintance, a recent Ivanwald alumnus, who had mistaken my interest in Jesus for belief. Sometimes the brothers would ask me why I was there. They knew that I was “half Jewish,” that I was a writer, and that I was from New York City, which most of them considered to be only slightly less wicked than Baghdad or Amsterdam. I told my brothers that I was there to meet Jesus, and I was: the new ruling Jesus, whose ways are secret.

A good "thick description" maybe. His book, The Family is available. Scary stuff.

Waving the bloody shirt

Fascists never change -- the Klan, the Nazis, Rush Limbaugh. Oops, did I say that?

The indispensable Dave provides a post called: Limbaugh, conservatives and the 'bloody shirt': The right has a long history of turning bullies into victims

Starts with discussion about Rush's failed NFL bid, proceeds to explain a few cases of conservatives turning their attacks into attacks on them:

To Bill O'Reilly and Juan Williams and the rest of the Fox crew, the outrage is never the atrocities they actually uttered, only the effrontery of having those atrocities held against them. They all want to make a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim. Their narrative is that the real story is not the atrocities that Rush Limbaugh utters but only the attempt by his political enemies to make political hay out of it.

Very good source cited: Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, (excerpted in the New York Times). Describes the origin of the phrase in the Reconstruction era -- and it turns out to be a myth!!!

in the sausage factory

You don't want to know how right-wing radio works. Well, sure you do. You just don't want to consume it. Milwaukee Magazine provides "Secrets of Talk Radio", and it's a sad story whose sad result have been plaguing us since 1994 at least.

hey, go smack around a reporter

Report from a recent Palin rally. Get those reporters!!

There are certain things that get me really concerned when I hear them from someone I'm working with. Joe Killian (who blogs for the paper here and on his own time here) added a new one to my list:

Joe was working with me on a package for tomorrow's newspaper covering Gov. Sarah Palin's visit to Elon and Greensboro.

"Dude," he says when I called to check on him. "Some guy just kicked me in the back of the leg."

And it goes downhill from there. Sieg Heil!!

political violence 2008

Welcome to 1932 -- oh wait, 2008. The GOP returns to its "ugly roots" (Salon: Gary Kamia) in racist paranoia and violence against elites and urban faggotry.

Palin supporter yells out "KILL HIM!!" at rally. Others racially taunt a media sound man.

McCain supporter responds to his question "Who is Barack Obama?" with answer, "A terrorist!"

Looks like it's spreading to Canada too: Cars in front of houses with liberal yard signs have their brakes cut in St Paul. (Digby)

Meanwhile, a porn producer is sentenced to 4 YEARS PRISON for filming consensual activities... while the Abu Ghraib perpetrators in the White House walk free.

if this stands...

...we have no democracy. Over in Mississippi, where the Republicans already lost one special election recently:

So what does Republican Gov. Haley Barbour (the former RNC chair) and the Republican Secretary of State do? They shuffle the placement of the race on the ballot in order to bury it. They put it last, under all the local and minor races, things like school board races and so on, so that it's difficult to find. They do their best to hide it, knowing that it will lower the response rate and help the Republican incumbent.

The problem is, it's plainly illegal. It's not "arguably" illegal, or "a little" illegal. It's just plain illegal. Barbour, however, doesn't care. He's gonna do it anyway, because the advantage of getting that race buried, thus helping the Republican, far outweighs the odds that anyone can actually do anything about it in time to make a difference for the election.

There are very clear rules being violated. Nobody knows. Nobody cares.

depressing Sunday

More from the Twin Cities. Makes me sad.

The torture, sadism, and abuse the Minneapolis Police, St. Paul Police, Ramsey County Sheriffs (and out of town departments) unleashed upon protesters, press, passers-by, and community members took place while Homeland Security and the Secret Service they control were in direct command of all area "law" enforcement and had final authority over all decisions about protests and protesters. In other words, what we saw in the Twin Cities shows us how American local "law" enforcement act in broad daylight when the Feds are on the scene and supervising their work.

Over the last week, we had a chance to observe de facto professional cultural norms in America's local, state, and Federal enforcement. This is what democracy looks like?

Hardly. Post goes on to outline all kinds of horrible abuses, including deliberate targeting of journalists and medics. And they're also going after random black people just for the hell of it. And check this:

Just a few rogue cops who don't believe in negotiation? Nope.

Twin Cities "law" enforcement now storms into meetings between residents and elected political leaders.

A peaceful meeting of lawyers with the Mayor of Minneapolis to discuss the police-incited riots and the way peaceful protesters and journalists have been treated is broken up by cops in FULL RIOT GEAR.

This is what democracy looks like?

WTF!?!?!

more from St Paul

Motherfuckers.

intemperate but true

"How the Secret Service Turned into the Stasi"

And if that isn't Godwin-defying, which it technically is not, then why not refer to them as the SS throughout. That's their proper acronym after all.

RNC protest police state

Bitch, PhD:

Criminalize dissent, privatize public space (and, I would add, politicize private space): the tactics of police and Homeland Security over the weekend leading up to the convention

Needless impounding of a bus on which this earth-activist family lives

All the lies told in defense of the police state

Video from Amy Goodman, journalist with Democracy Now! who was arrested for nothing

See also Glenzilla ("Massive police raids on suspected protectors" -- emphasizing the pre-emptive nature of the police response and its brutality. The best part is where the city code people come by to try and shutter the house for violations including a busted back door -- that the police kicked in). Also his Scenes from Saint Paul, other links as well.

Firedoglake: It also helps to remember that the fascists behind this do so to cover up their own corruption. (Godwin violation mine, not theirs)

chinese torture in guantanamo

Okay, it's been like two months. But that's summer. Couldn't pass this up, however, for magnitude of sickness (and, at this point, obviousness).

NYT: China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

So it's basically Manchurian Candidate meets Darkness at Noon. Wonderful.

What. The. FUCK?

Just when you think the Bushies have killed your capacity for outrage... ABCNews: "US Soldiers Did 'Dirty Work' for Chinese Interrogators":

U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men -- or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China's ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar.

U.S. personnel "are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese," she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said.

"Why are we doing China's dirty work?" Manning said. "Surely we're better than that."

As Attaturk on FDL said: Lady, you're forgetting who's been in charge here for 8 years. Sick.

Maddow/Matthews on appeasement flap

The gift that keeps on giving. Maddows guest hosted Countdown last Friday, and had Matthews on to talk about the destructive nature of talking point-driven political culture, in which people mouth magic words to stigmatize their opponents and drive them out of the public square. C&L has the video:

MADDOW: Do you think this is something new? Do you think this is something specific to our current, contemporaneous politics that we have these sort of buzzwords and bumper sticker slogans, whether it’s ‘appeasement,’ or ‘fight over there so we don’t fight them here’ or ‘they hate our freedom,’ any of these terms. Are they designed to be repeated and not to be interrogated?

MATTHEWS: Well, just look at the way people are basically exterminated or tried to be exterminated. Bill Maher makes a comment –which may not have been the right comment–but he was making a point he was trying to make, about stand back weaponry compared to people killing themselves. You can argue about the niceties of that. The Dixie Chicks say something about the war—and they shouldn’t have said it overseas, but they said it. The shutting up of opposition is critical to running a country in an undemocratic way, let’s put it that way. And so you have buzzwords like ‘appeasers’ or ‘cut and run’ and they’re used over and over again by the most mindless people. The trouble with them is they tend to work. The dittoheads can use them. Anyone can use them and they seem to have the same effect. They cause people to run from criticism.

scary new world

From Wired -- Visible Man: an artist and professor mistakenly put on the terrorist watch list can't clear his name... so instead he started a web site, TrackingTransience.net, that makes his life an open book.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

Why do this?

The idea is to give them all info in real time, so they feel no need to investigate him.
So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."

So it's both an interesting reaction and a FUCKING SCARY SIGN of the lengths we have to go through in this new security state.

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.

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.

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.

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.

torture TV

Via AS, Scott Horton at Harpers notes that when he says "torture" in an interview segment, it doesn't air in the US:

I discovered that when I gave interviews to major media on this subject, any time I used the word “torture” with reference to these techniques, the interview passage would not be used. At one point I was informed by a cable news network that “we put this on international, because we can’t use that word on the domestic feed.” “That word” was torture.

I was coached or told that the words “coercive interrogation technique” were fine, but “torture” was a red light. Why? The Administration objected vehemently to the use of this word. After all, President Bush has gone before the cameras and stated more than three dozen times “We do not torture.” By using the T-word, I was told, I was challenging the honesty of the president. You just couldn’t do that. [...]

He then talks about how Surnow created "24" to enable torture, and how Cheney ruthlessly forced the acceptance of "dark side" techniques on the country:

We should start with a frank question: has “24” been created with an overtly political agenda, namely, to create a more receptive public audience for the Bush Administration’s torture policies? I think the answer to that question is now very clear. The answer is “yes.” In “Whatever It Takes,” Jane Mayer has waded through the sheaf of contacts between the show’s producer, Joel Surnow, and Vice President Cheney and figures right around him. There is little ambiguity about this point, namely, if the torture system introduced after 9/11 can be traced back to a single person, it is Vice President Cheney.

Scary as usual. Even scarier is how few people care.

The Horton story itself is fantastic: a full history of the media's relationship with torture, a graph of depictions of torture on network tv (peaks in 2003), echoes of the Algerian war, etc. Great.