The Distant Ocean

The sweet, sweet sound of skepticism

I always like it when someone I already respect immensely proves again that the respect is deserved.  The case in point here is Phyllis Bennis, responding to Obama's Iraq reapportionment plan (and I hope she'll excuse me for making a mockery of fair use as I quote a huge chunk of her article):

If this plan were actually a first step towards the unequivocal goal of a complete end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, it would be better than good, it would be fabulous. But that would mean this withdrawal would be the first step towards a complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops, pulling out of all the 150,000+ U.S.-paid foreign mercenaries and contractors, closing all the U.S. military bases, and ending all U.S. efforts to control Iraqi oil.

So far that is not on Obama's agenda.

The troop withdrawal as planned would leave behind as many as 50,000 U.S. troops. That's an awful lot. Even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thinks that may be too much. She told Rachel Maddow, "I don't know what the justification is for 50,000, at the present...I would think a third of that, maybe 20,000, a little more than a third, 15,000 or 20,000."

Those troops won't include officially designated "combat" troops. But those tens of thousands of troops will still be occupying Iraq. Doing what? Very likely, just what combat troops do — they would walk and talk and bomb and shoot like combat troops, but they’d be called something else. The New York Times spelled it out last December: describing how military planners believe Obama's goal of pulling out combat troops "could be accomplished at least in part by re-labeling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be 're-missioned,' their efforts redefined as training and support for the Iraqis." That would mean a retreat to the lies and deception that characterized this war during Bush years — something President Obama promised to leave behind. It would also mean military resistance in Iraq would continue, leading to more Iraqi and U.S. casualties.

Further, the U.S. agreement with Iraq calls for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by the end of December 2011. President Obama's announcement later this week may even reflect something like this goal too. But. The agreement can be changed. Retired General Barry McCaffrey wrote an internal report for the Pentagon after a trip to Iraq last year, saying, "We should assume that the Iraqi government will eventually ask us to stay beyond 2011 with a residual force of trainers, counterterrorist capabilities, logistics, and air power." My estimate? Perhaps a force of 20,000 to 40,000 troops.   

Bennis is one of those serious think tank lefties who keep their voices steady and their words modulated in order to maintain their mainstream credibility, so that last sentence represents a serious jab on her part.  Zing!  And she's right, of course.  The force Obama is leaving behind is probably very close to the size and type of force he'll want to keep in Iraq indefinitely—so he's essentially trying to sell this indefinite occupation, in something very close to its final form, as a withdrawal.  And we all know what it really means for the United States to have "trainers" and "advisors" in a country.

You can read the rest of Bennis's analysis here.

ALSO: Happily, some of the leaders of the anti-war movement are responding in the right way rather than heaping praise on that great new outfit the emperor's wearing:

"The bad news from our perspective is it's going to take [19 months]," [Leslie Cagan] said. "We think the timeline could be a lot shorter. We're also troubled by the plan to leave literally tens of thousands of troops in Iraq."

Cagan said Obama should leave no troops in Iraq.

"We don't think this is a strong enough plan, which leads us to conclude that our work as an anti-war movement is far from over," she said.

Which is absolutely true, but unfortunately the participation of large numbers of mainstream Democrats in the anti-war movement is over now that there's a Democrat in the White House.  So if there are protests against either the continued presence in Iraq or the renewal of the war in Afghanistan, you can count on them being far smaller than anything we saw when Bush was in power.

The change I believe in

Looks like this:

President Alvaro Colom [of Guatemala] Wednesday formally apologized to the victims of the country's 1960-1996 civil war, 10 years after a UN-sponsored report came out on the atrocities largely committed by the military.

"As president of the republic, head of government and commander in chief of the army I ask for your forgiveness, because the system was at fault," Colom said at a ceremony on National Dignification Day commemorating the estimated 200,000 civil war victims. [...]

"If by 'genocide' is meant the intention of destroying fully or in part a national, ethnic, racial, religious or political group, in Guatemala there was genocide; there was ethnocide and also the systematic destruction of religious, political, social, university and indigenous leaders," the president said.

This comes on the heels of Colom's apology to Cuba for Guatemala's involvement in the Bay of Pigs:

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom apologized to Cuba on Tuesday for his country's having allowed the CIA to train exiles in the Central American country for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

"Today I want to ask Cuba's forgiveness for having offered our country, our territory, to prepare an invasion of Cuba," Colom said during a speech at the University of Havana. "It wasn't us, but it was our territory."

He added that he wished to apologize "as president and head of state, and as commander-in-chief of the Guatemalan army."

Notice that in both cases Colom specifically said he was apologizing in all of his official capacities, so there'd be no doubt about the significance of what he was saying.  Note also that the wrongs Colom apologized for were either carried out or supported by the United States—yet he didn't hide behind that fact to downplay Guatemala's responsibility.

Liberals think that people like me are just unwilling to give Obama a chance, but that couldn't be farther from the truth.  If Obama would do nothing more than offer official apologies like those Colom offered, even for just these U.S. crimes and no others, I'd reassess my entire stance toward him.  That would represent genuine, meaningful change to me.  That's how pathetically low my bar is.  All I'd require would be an apology for decades-old, well-documented crimes like these (or others like them)—mere words that would cost Obama nothing but a few minutes of his time, are the very least we owe our victims, and which not only couldn't possibly do any damage to the U.S. but would improve our standing throughout Latin America and the world.

And yet here in reality, talking about this minuscule gesture as though it's a serious possibility is as ludicrous as hoping that a pit viper will learn to play Für Elise on the banjo.  We'll see "change" with Obama, of course, but it will all be safely within the context of U.S. economic, domestic, and foreign policy as they've existed for decades—an extra 15 minutes of recreation every day from the new camp commandant.

No, as I've said before, the real change in this hemisphere is in Latin America.  And what gives me hope—again and again—is witnessing the end of right-wing dominance there, and moves toward true independence and a reckoning with the past.  Congratulations to Colom for taking more steps in that direction.

Attack of the passive voice

I usually can't keep my gorge down long enough to watch showcase political speeches, so I just read the transcripts instead (when I don't ignore them entirely).  But tonight I did dip in a few times on the State of the Union (aka the Serial Ovation Marathon) and happened to catch this troubling statement from Obama: "Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks."

"Made their way?"

See, this concerns me, because I naively believed the banks took advantage of the massive deregulation they bought a few years back, leveraging themselves to the eye teeth with ludicrously high-risk debt, convincing themselves that the housing bubble was nothing at all like, oh, say, tulips, and studiously ignoring the inevitable long-term consequences in favor of short-term profit.  I didn't realize that what was actually going on was that financial instruments have developed some sort of autonomous semi-sentience and are now migrating around willy-nilly, searching out warm, welcoming institutions and parking themselves on unsuspecting balance sheets there.  Maybe I should check my account periodically to make sure bad loans from the housing crisis haven't somehow made their way onto my books too?

Well, that settles that

The U.S. government has investigated the U.S. government and, shockingly, determined that it's not doing anything wrong:

The U.S. military's Guantanamo Bay prison camp currently complies with the Geneva Conventions' standards for humane treatment, a top U.S. Navy officer concluded on Monday in a review ordered by President Barack Obama.

Vice-Admiral Patrick Walsh led a team of investigators on a 13-day visit to inspect the camp at the U.S. naval base in Cuba and said he had found no violations of the Geneva treaties' ban on cruel, humiliating or degrading treatment.

As usual, though, some misinformed malcontents refuse to accept official self-exoneration:

[The Center for Constitutional Rights'] report, "Conditions of Confinement at Guantanamo: Still in Violation of the Law," covers conditions at Guantánamo in January and February 2009 and includes new eyewitness accounts from attorneys and detainees. The authors address continuing abusive conditions at the prison camp, including conditions of confinement that violate U.S. obligations under the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Constitution and international human rights law.

"The men at Guantánamo are deteriorating at a rapid rate due to the harsh conditions that continue to this day, despite a few cosmetic changes to their routines," said CCR Staff Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei. "They are caught in a vicious cycle where their isolation causes psychological damage, which causes them to act out, which brings more abuse and keeps them in isolation. If they are going to be there another year, or even another day, this has to end."

Despite President Obama’s executive order of January 22, 2009, requiring humane standards of confinement at Guantanamo and conformity with "all applicable laws governing the conditions of such confinement," including the Geneva Conventions, attorneys assert that detainees at Guantanamo have continued to suffer from solitary confinement, psychological abuse, abusive force-feeding of hunger strikers, religious abuse, and physical abuse and threats of violence from guards and Immediate Reaction Force (IRF) teams.

So we're left with a simple choice: we can either trust the U.S. government, which only has our best interests at heart and hasn't lied to us within at least the last 8 picoseconds, or believe some grant-grubbing nogoodniks at the so-called Center for so-called Constitutional Rights.  I think the choice is clear.

This does unavoidably raise one question, though: why does Pardiss Kebriaei hate us for our freedoms?  We can only speculate, but I have to think it's for our freedoms.

Iranians need a lesson from the Democrats

Iranian extremists show their utter contempt for democracy:

Iranian authorities have blocked two Web sites promoting the presidential bid of Mohammed Khatami, reformists said Saturday, in a first sign that powerful hard-liners might seek to thwart his challenge to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the June 12 election. [...]

"At midday, we learned that our Web sites have been blocked. ... Closing down our Web sites means hard-liners are not going to tolerate Khatami challenging Ahmadinejad," Behrouz Shojaei, editor of one of the sites, told The Associated Press Saturday.

Shutting down web sites?  No, no, no—they need to learn to be more subtle about it:

[T]his was the most massive anti-democratic campaign to eliminate a third-party candidate from the ballot in—probably in recent American history. It is—not content with having all these laws and statutes on the book that make it difficult for third-party and independent candidates to run, the Democratic Party and their allies in over fifty-three law firms, with over ninety lawyers, were engaged in filing litigation in eighteen states. They were to remove Ralph Nader from the ballot. It was an organized, abusive litigation process.

The core of the lawsuit is that these lawyers, led by Toby Moffett and Elizabeth Holtzman, and something called the Ballot Project, which was a 527 organization, systematically went around the country and filed lawsuit after lawsuit, twenty-four in all, plus five FEC complaints, to try to completely remove the Nader campaign from the ballot and to, in effect, bankrupt the campaign, which they succeeded in doing.

We'll know Iran has truly joined the modern world when its democracy-hating zealots have enough of a sense of humor to call themselves "Democrats".

(Regarding Nader's lawsuit, by the way: it was apparently dismissed on December 22nd on jurisdictional grounds.  Who says crime doesn't pay?)

Generic change-mockery title #670123

And the beat goes on:

The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.

In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.

"The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we'd hoped," said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. "We all expected better."

(Really?  Why?)

Foster was just echoing this hopeful call from Amnesty International, issued the day before the State Department filing:

Amnesty International is urging President Barack Obama and his administration to continue its break from the USA's unlawful detention policies of recent years by ensuring that detainees held in the US airbase in Bagram in Afghanistan have access to the US courts to challenge their detentions.

"Continue its break"?  Aw, that was a sweet gesture.  I don't think the Obama administration was listening, though, since they apparently have a plan:

But as Guantánamo is being drawn down, large-scale construction is under way at a US military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.

Some critics are already calling it "Obama's Guantánamo." And it looks to become the next big flash point in a long legal tug of war over the direction of America's antiterror policies.

An estimated 242 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. In contrast, more than 600 are held at Bagram, and efforts are under way to expand facilities to potentially hold as many as 1,100 terror suspects.

This is why I've long felt it was a mistake to call (in isolation) for Guantanamo to be shut down: because it's the most recognizable symbol of what the U.S. is doing elsewhere as well, and so the ultimate result would just be that detainees would be shipped to less conspicuous dungeons like Bagram.  Unless all detention facilities are closed simultaneously, the main effect of shutting down Guantanamo is to remove the focal point for resistance.

Obama understands this clearly, which is why he made such a show of moving toward closing it.  Like so many of his fellow Democrats, Obama's real problem with Guantanamo has never been the institution itself but the damage it's done to the "reputation" of the United States—and he's smart enough to know that rebranding often works. Get used to hearing nice liberals braying "Yes, but he closed Guantanamo" for the next four years.

The change machine is broken again

The always sane and worthwhile Mark Weisbrot (who writes frequently about Latin America generally and Venezuela in particular) points out yet another example of Obama continuity:

US-Latin American relations fell to record lows during the George Bush years, and there have been hopes – both north and south of the border – that President Barack Obama will bring a fresh approach. So far, however, most signals are pointing to continuity rather than change.

Obama started off with an unprovoked verbal assault on Venezuela. In an interview broadcast by the Spanish-language television station Univision on the Sunday before his inauguration, he accused Hugo Chávez of having "impeded progress in the region" and "exporting terrorist activities".

These remarks were unusually hostile and threatening even by the previous administration's standards. They are also untrue and diametrically opposed to the way the rest of the region sees Venezuela.

So despite an uncharacteristic bout of honesty by the State Department (which admitted that the Venezuelan referendum on term limits was conducted in a way that was "fully consistent with democratic practice"), things are looking to be the same or worse under Obama when it comes to Venezuela.

Then there's this incredibly ironic news:

The Obama administration on Thursday concluded its first round of politically charged U.N. negotiations on racism, pressing foreign governments to drop reparation demands for slavery. [...] U.N. officials have urged the Obama administration to participate in the review conference, saying that the election of the first African American president presents the United States with an opportunity to inspire other minorities around the world and to highlight U.S. progress in the years since slavery was abolished and blacks were granted civil rights.

So Obama is sticking to the longstanding U.S. practice of preventing discussion of reparations for the victims of slavery (which as far as I can tell was not intended to be limited to the United States, by the way).  This is entirely consistent with his practice of attacking blacks for his own political advantage, of course, so it's no surprise, but the least we should have been able to expect from the first black president was substantive change in the handling of racial issues.  I can hardly imagine a more pointed illustration of the fact that on issue after issue, the only change with Obama is the person, not the policy.

A helpful clarification

Howard Jacobson offers a canonical illustration of the point I made a few days ago, in an article titled "Let’s see the 'criticism' of Israel for what it really is".  He begins with this plaintive cry that hints at his central point:

But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is, I am assured, "criticism" of Israel, pure and simple. In the matter of Israel and the Palestinians this country has been heading towards a dictatorship of the one-minded for a long time; we seem now to have attained it. Deviate a fraction of a moral millimetre from the prevailing orthodoxy and you are either not listened to or you are jeered at and abused, your reading of history trashed, your humanity itself called into question.

(Like all totalitarians, Jacobson sees the fact that groups of marginalized protesters are allowed to express opinions opposed to his own—albeit all but shut out from mainstream or official expression—as proof that there's a "dictatorship of the one-minded" arrayed against him.  But to his credit, despite being one of the last pro-Israeli voices in the entire United Kingdom, he keeps marshaling on.)

At the end of the article he finally gets to the heart of the matter:

This is the old stuff. Jew-hating pure and simple – Jew-hating which the haters don’t even recognise in themselves, so acculturated is it – the Jew-hating which many of us have always suspected was the only explanation for the disgust that contorts and disfigures faces when the mere word Israel crops up in conversation. So for that we are grateful. At last that mystery is solved and that lie finally nailed. No, you don’t have to be an anti-Semite to criticise Israel. It just so happens that you are.

Well, that settles it: if you criticize Israel you're an anti-Semite, period.  Whether you recognize it or not, the only possible motivation for your criticism is a deep and abiding hatred of Jews.  And of course, the critical implication of this is that the only way to purge yourself of the scourge of anti-Semitism—and to avoid the charge from Jacobson and his fellow travelers—is to never, ever criticize Israel, no matter what it does.  This is no guarantee that you'll finally free yourself of your acculturated Jew-hatred, of course, but it's a necessary condition.

I'm actually happy to see this line of reasoning finally making its way to the surface, because it makes it much easier for people to see just how absurd and manipulative it is.  And so I wholeheartedly encourage supporters of Israel to keep pulling out this ad hominem whenever they get the chance—even (no, especially) when it's entirely unjustified by the argument they're attacking.

Rethinking kidnapping

To his credit, Glenn Greenwald is reconsidering the position he'd staked out in defense of the Obama administration's rendition policy:

[A]fter initially (and very tentatively) defending the limited rendition policy which Leon Panetta said they would continue, I've become convinced ... that there's more potential mischief in that policy than I immediately recognized.

There's just no denying that there are substantial and disturbing steps which have been taken.

No, there's not.  But although it's good to see Greenwald backing away from his (tentative) support for state-initiated kidnapping, it's unfortunate that he didn't also retract some of the shabby straw men he deployed in that article, like this one:

Those who reflexively criticize every Obama action because they predicted long ago that he would be the same as Bush and want that prediction to be vindicated are but the opposite side of the same irrational coin as those who find ways to justify everything Obama does because they long ago placed the type of faith in him that no political leader should ever enjoy.

There's a distressing tendency on the left to say "this far and no further", meaning that my opinions are at the limit of reasonable criticism, and if you venture beyond them you're not only wrong but your motivations are in question.  Greenwald gives a textbook example of it here, where he not only asserts the existence of some non-trivial collection of leftists who "reflexively criticize" everything Obama does—as opposed to criticizing him for those actions which deserve criticism, and doing so based on careful attention to his words and actions—but also claims that their reason for seeing similarities between Obama and Bush now is just their desire to have this reflexive (unthinking, automatic, unconsidered) opposition "vindicated".

This is a caricature so extreme that it's hard to imagine anyone who fits it...or at least I've never found anyone who does.  And the worst part is that it's entirely unnecessary; the hypothetical group Greenwald posits is either right about Obama or wrong, but in either case it's necessary (and sufficient) to explain why that is, and dime-store psychologizing about their presumed motivations is just a pointless distraction.

In any case, now that Greenwald finds himself agreeing more with these "reflexive critics", maybe he'll also take a moment to consider that their criticisms may not be as reflexive as he thought.

How did the electoral college die?

The National Popular Vote initiative killed it:

Under the U.S. Constitution, the states have exclusive and plenary (complete) power to allocate their electoral votes, and may change their state laws concerning the awarding of their electoral votes at any time. Under the National Popular Vote bill, all of the state’s electoral votes would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538).

Ok, it hasn't killed it yet, but it's just a matter of time; they're already up to 50 out of the required 270 electoral votes.

The practical effect this will have on the world is next to nil, I imagine, and I wouldn't be surprised if NPV ended up hurting third parties (since the tiny minority of people who understand how the electoral college works and are freed by geography to vote for the candidate they actually prefer would find themselves faced with the same lesser-evil calculus as the rest of the population).  Still, it's an impressive and even mildly inspiring example of how a small group of people can fix an egregiously broken system, and I'd like to see it succeed on principle if nothing else.

UPDATE: In researching the status of NPV here I found that the California legislature passed it in 2006, but the bill was vetoed by the Governator.  A second version of the bill is apparently still sitting in his inbox.

You can see what's going on with your own state here.

HaCohen on Foxman on anti-Semitism

Ran HaCohen takes his verbal scalpel to Abe Foxman's claim that a "pandemic of anti-Semitism" has been unleashed in the wake of Israel's attack on Gaza:

[M]uch like anti-Communism in the U.S. during the 1980s, anti-anti-Semitism is (Jewish) Israel's national religion. Every non-Jew is an anti-Semite, potentially if not actually – be it a bad-tempered waiter in a French restaurant or even Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Anti-Semitism is our best excuse: We do not believe in peace because all Arabs are anti-Semites. We must attack Iran because all Muslims are anti-Semites and want to annihilate us, and the rest of the world is anti-Semitic and doesn't care if we are annihilated. And of course every criticism of Israel's occupation is purely anti-Semitic.

Obviously, reports of steady or declining levels of anti-Semitism is not what Israelis want to hear: anti-Semitism should always be on the rise, to boost our national cohesion.

Of course this is a bit unfair to Foxman, who defines every criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic and is therefore 100% correct (albeit tautologically) that "anti-Semitism" is on the rise.  By the same token, the U.S. crucifixion of Iraq over the past two decades has been accompanied by a startling rise in "anti-Americanism," and Germans experienced a similarly alarming rise in "anti-Teutonism" as the Luftwaffe bombed Poland in 1939.

What is it about mass killing and destruction that unleashes latent and entirely irrational animosity toward the perpetrators?  Just think what a world of tolerance and racial harmony we'll have if we ever manage to unravel this perplexing psychological conundrum.

The next war

Barack Obama is apparently looking to add some Iranians to his list of victims.  Here's how his administration is dealing with that pesky National Intelligence Estimate that claimed that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003:

Little more than a year after U.S. spy agencies concluded that Iran had halted work on a nuclear weapon, the Obama administration has made it clear that it believes there is no question that Tehran is seeking the bomb.

In his news conference this week, President Obama went so far as to describe Iran's "development of a nuclear weapon" before correcting himself to refer to its "pursuit" of weapons capability. [...]

The language reflects the extent to which senior U.S. officials now discount a National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007 that was instrumental in derailing U.S. and European efforts to pressure Iran to shut down its nuclear program. [...]

U.S. officials said that although no new evidence had surfaced to undercut the findings of the 2007 estimate, there was growing consensus that it provided a misleading picture and that the country was poised to reach crucial bomb-making milestones this year.

Got that?  The NIE was taken so seriously that it effectively balked the Bush administration's attempt to push for an attack on Iran, but the Obama administration is nonetheless determined to toss it aside—even in the absence of any new information that contradicts it.  Which also means that Obama's repeated overblown claims about Iran's quest for nuclear weapons weren't anomalies, but the leading edge of a new official policy.

So I'd say we can safely ignore the smoke Obama was blowing this week about "sitting across the table face to face" with Iran in the next few months.  Given the above, it seems likely that the main purpose of that kind of talk (and any attendant pro forma follow through) is to provide the illusion of a good-faith effort at diplomacy, while preparing the way for public acceptance of a military attack on Iran.  The Obama administration is just adopting the tried and true formula that we've seen most recently in the Bush administration's push for war with Iraq: pretend to be engaging diplomatically while vastly exaggerating the threat (by distorting intelligence, among other things), further pretend that those diplomatic overtures have failed, and then blame the already-planned assault on the malicious fist-clenching intransigence of the victim.

I'd assume the eventual attack will be launched by the Israeli branch of the U.S. military, with the usual overt and covert military and diplomatic backing by the United States.  I say that because the Obama administration's rhetorical buildup and intelligence-molding is happening hand in hand with a marked increase in belligerent statements from Israeli officials, like this:

A senior Israeli diplomat has warned that Israel is ready to launch a military offensive against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

In an interview with The Age, Dan Gillerman, who was Israel's permanent representative at the United Nations from 2003 until last September, said time for diplomatic efforts to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear capability might have already expired.

"The world cannot afford to live with a nuclear Iran," Mr Gillerman said.

It's possible that the Israelis just happen to be ratcheting up their war talk at the same time the Obama administration is spouting alarmist rhetoric and pushing aside the major impediment to war with Iran, of course, but I don't believe that any more than I believe it was a coincidence that Israel pulled back on its Gaza assault just before Obama's inauguration.  No, there's every indication that the U.S. and Israel are cooperating very closely under Obama, and so it seems likely to me that a decision to attack Iran has already been taken and the mutual planning is underway.  (And to be clear, I'd guess that the Israelis are the ones pushing the hardest—but the U.S. is a willing co-conspirator.)

So barring any major surprises, at this point it's just a matter of time.

Obama also a big fan of Kafka*

The Obama administration, eager to demonstrate how different it is from its predecessor, just endorsed this apex of Bushian Kafkakery:

The dispute involves Walker's Jan. 5 order to allow plaintiffs who say the government illegally wiretapped their phones to read a classified surveillance document that could confirm the assertion and avoid dismissal of their suit. [...]

The government inadvertently sent the classified document to Al-Haramain [the plaintiffs] in 2005. It reportedly showed that the now-defunct Islamic charity had been wiretapped before the government designated it a terrorist organization.

Al-Haramain returned the document at the request of the government, which then argued in court that without the document, the group could not prove it had been wiretapped.

The article also mentions that the filing by Obama's Justice Department "elaborated on arguments by the same lawyers under the Bush administration", which I'm guessing is just evidence to the faithful that these Bush dead-enders are doing everything in their power to undermine the new president.  And the fact that "Department spokesman Charles Miller confirmed that the brief represented the views of the new administration and its attorney general" means nothing, except that Charles Miller is a lying bastard who needs to be removed from his position immediately, before he can do any more damage to Obama's reputation.

No, I'm not going to make any smirking references to the c-word.  And it's not like anyone should feel any real vindication about this, or the growing list of similar atrocities Obama and his coterie have committed; after all, predicting that a Democrat will act this way requires about as much insight as foretelling tomorrow's sunrise.  I'd be overjoyed if Obama would prove the lowest expectations of him mistaken, against the iron lessons of history and every shred of available evidence...but by the same token, I think it'd be super cool to discover that squirrels will grant you wishes if you feed them the right nuts.

* (Or possibly Monty Python.)

Bollocks!

John Pilger is pissed.  At what, you ask?  At just about everything going on at the moment, that's what.  Here's a sample (on a topic I'd planned to post about, but set aside for other timely news):

The BBC's explanation for banning an appeal on behalf of the stricken people of Gaza is a vivid example. [...] In 1999, at the height of the illegal Nato bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, the TV presenter Jill Dando made an appeal on behalf of Kosovar refugees. The BBC web page for that appeal was linked to numerous articles meant to stress the gravity of the humanitarian issue. These included quotations from Blair himself, such as: "This will be a daily pounding until he [Slobodan Milosevic] comes into line with the terms that Nato has laid down." There was no significant balance of view from the Yugoslav side, and not a single mention that the flight of Kosovar refugees began only after Nato had started bombing.

For reference, here's a list of the appeals the BBC has either aired or denied; the only previous denial for political reasons was an appeal for aid after Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006.  Do I detect a pattern here?

Regarding Obama and rendition, Pilger begs to differ with Glenn Greenwald, Scott Horton, and Hilary Bok:

Far from “shutting down the CIA’s secret prison network”, Obama’s executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, “current and former US intelligence officials said that the rendition programme might be poised to play an expanded role”. A semantic sleight of hand is that “long-term prisons” are changed to “short-term prisons”; and while Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners working for the US are not. This means that America’s numerous “covert actions” will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, doing the dirtiest work.

It's hard to tell exactly what's going to happen with all the smoke being blown about renditions at the moment, of course.  But here's something I'd missed last week from Leon Panetta's testimony that supports Pilger's interpretation:

Obama's nominee for CIA director, Leon Panetta, said last week that he approved of rendition for foreign prosecution or brief CIA detention, but not for extended confinement. Like his Bush administration predecessors, he also said he would require a foreign government to promise not to torture a prisoner.

So it looks like we'll just be back to using pro forma, wink-wink-nudge-nudge promises from foreign governments not to torture prisoners.  Hey, at least it will provide plausible deniability—and I'm sure that will be more than sufficient for the diehard Obama fans out there, who've already demonstrated their mental flexibility by convincing themselves that the Obama administration's position on the use of the state secrets privilege is just "the work of either Bush moles inside Justice, or, Bush moles in concert with wingers in Intelligence forcing their position on the matter."  (And while I admit there's some nutpicking there, consider that Glenn Greenwald advanced a similar notion in his column on renditions.)

Read the rest of Pilger's enjoyable rant here.

(Thanks to reader Bjorn for the pointer to Pilger's article.)

Nick Rivers: sane!

As trivial as it may be, I'm always glad to hear stuff like this:

Kilmer agreed with a reporter that "he was giving a 'strong maybe' for a run for governor." [...] Now we also know that Val Kilmer donated more thant (sic) $4,000 during the 2008 presidental (sic) cycle to none other than Ralph Nader, the perennial green and/or independent candidate for president. [...]

Think about it. In a year when Democrats were fighting so hard to take back the White House, someone who says he'd like to be our governor was busy writing checks to support a candidate running against Obama. In the general election cycle. Inexcusable, isn't it?

Inexcusably cool that I can watch Top Secret again with a clear conscience, you mean?  Yes it is!

Radio silence

It looks like global warming is going to let up long enough to allow some snow to fall in Lake Tahoe, prompting me to go try my "Jesus walking on (frozen) water" impression.  So things will continue to be quiet here for a little while.

MEANWHILE: If you're really, really bored, see if you can ferret out the musical reference in this post and the multiple Hitler references (one paired with a film reference) in one of the past 7 posts.

A liberal fondness for kidnapping

To make a long story short: Obama signed an executive order about "ensuring lawful interrogations," after which the L.A. Times pointed out that he's nonetheless retaining the use of rendition (i.e. kidnapping), leading a bevy of prominent liberals to attack the Times and leap to Obama's defense—in particular Glenn Greenwald, saying that the Times article was the "wildly exaggerated" output of an "uninformed, gullible reporter" and citing arguments by Scott Horton and Hilary Bok in support of that thesis.  Are you with me now?

There's a lot that could be said about this, but out of mercy for you I'll try to keep that short also.  The things that bothered me the most here were 1) the eagerness to attack the Times report and defend the Obama administration, 2) the lack of skepticism (verging on credulity) in the face of official claims, and 3) the apparent support of U.S.-initiated kidnapping.  My own take is that the Times article contained a few arguable characterizations and statements that might be misconstrued, but no more or less than you'd see in any other article, and the central premise of the article is almost certainly correct and also very important.

A few specific observations:

— Horton entirely misses the point, accusing the Times of confusing renditions (kidnapping only) with extraordinary renditions (kidnapping plus detention in secret prisons and/or torture).  This despite the fact that the article clearly states—in the first paragraph, no less—that Obama is pledging to close the CIA's secret prisons and end the use of torture, and only then follows it up by saying that rendition will still be performed, thus making the distinction quite clear.

— Greenwald turns in a disappointing performance, taking cheap shots at the Times journalist (noted above) and then veering into the realm of ad hominem and (mild) conspiracy theory, implying that there's been some collusion here between "members of the intelligence community who do not want any new limits imposed on their activities" and "establishment media figures, eager to depict Obama as supportive of, rather than hostile to, prevailing policies, because they spent the last eight years supporting and enabling those policies"—all of this resulting in this "wildly exaggerated" article.  He then goes on to defend kidnapping by deploying a modified (but equally contrived) version of Alan Dershowitz's favorite ticking time-bomb thought experiment.  And along the way he takes time out to thrash the straw man of "people who have long argued that there is no difference between the parties," asserting dismissively that these people "reflexively criticize every Obama action because they predicted long ago that he would be the same as Bush"—a shoddy tune I fear we may be hearing a lot from him over the next four years.

— Bok notes that Obama's executive order references the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits the extradition of a person to a state where it's believed he might be tortured, and seems content that this means the administration won't pursue third-party torture.  I'm sure it's unnecessary to review here any of the long list of international laws and covenants the United States has paid lip service to while also blithely violating, but Bok acts as though she's unaware of that history.

She also says that "nothing the Obama administration has done to date suggests to me that they would engage in the kinds of creative reading of legal documents that would allow them, say, to disregard Egypt's long record of torture in making this determination."  I have to imagine she's aware that Obama personally ordered the killing of twenty people in Pakistan, however, and so I can't understand why she'd think that a President who's already demonstrated his willingness to carry out extrajudicial executions, in flagrant violation of international law, would shy away from "creative reading of legal documents."

— Finally, setting aside their eagerness to attack anti-Obama reporting and their willingness to give generous readings to lofty official proclamations, why are these defenders of human rights acting as though kidnapping is no big deal?  Do they really think Khaled El-Masri would have been ok with just being kidnapped by the CIA so long as he wasn't tortured as well?

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights took up this point in a debate with Scott Horton (who I should note was much more reasonable than he had been in his original response to the Times):

MICHAEL RATNER: I don’t think you can justify rendition of any sort, whether it’s Eichmann or anybody else, because it opens a door, a slippery slope to renditions all over the world. And it opens them not for Cuba; it opens them for big power countries or for countries that are protected by big power countries. If Cuba came in here and snatched Posada, that would be, I mean, probably the end of Cuba. It wouldn’t be the end of the United States if they went in and snatched Vesco when he was alive in Cuba or Assata Shakur. It would be outrageous. It would be illegal. But it wouldn’t be the end. So the problem with opening a hole for rendition is you’re once again opening a hole that big countries will use, or countries that are protected by big countries.

Ratner also makes the single most critical point about all of this (and vindicates all the good things I've said about CCR over the years):

MICHAEL RATNER: I think what’s really crucial here is that, yes, there’s executive orders and, yes, there’s a lot of wiggle room, but I think the role of citizens, of all of us as human rights people, particularly, is to focus on the wiggle room and make sure that that wiggle room is not used to violate fundamental rights.

Bingo.  And this is exactly where Greenwald, Horton, and Bok fell down entirely: their first reaction to this Times article was to give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt and to pounce on the messenger, rather than approaching official pronouncements with the same skepticism they did under Bush.  This isn't exactly a surprise, of course, but it's a disappointment nonetheless, and I can only hope they'll take some time to think about it and seriously reconsider what their role as "human rights people" should be for the next four years.

Not funny ha-ha

Anyone who's read The Onion for any length of time knows it's written by mainstream liberal Democrats—not exactly a shock given that they're a group of sarcastic, well-educated literary types in SoHo.  Still, it's interesting to me to see just where on the spectrum they fit, and this squib ("Liberals Horrified By Lack Of Inexperience Among Obama Appointees") is highly instructive:

Following Barack Obama's appointment to his cabinet of several veteran Clinton administration officials and a number of others with extensive backgrounds in their respective fields, former left-wing supporters of the new president expressed shock and outrage at the combined experience and competence of his choices.

Get it?  Left-wing supporters of Obama wanted inexperienced ideologues, not seasoned Clinton administration pragmatists.  Oh, my sides!  Feel fine, that is—not sore like they might after, say, a bout of uncontrollable laughter.  Read the rest if you want, but I warn you, the laughs just never start.  Your best chance for amusement here will be the discovery that this Onion writer considers Chris Bowers and DailyKos to be at the outer reaches of the left.

Coincidentally, I happened across this just after I noticed this article by Obama voter David Sirota, in which he comes to a painful realization:

Though Obama won states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana on promises to challenge Wall Street and reform our trade policies, there has been a deliberate and calculated effort to stack the administration with the very Wall Street Democrats who created the problems he lamented, and shun those who have been fighting the good fight.

Don't get too excited, though, since Sirota's pain stems from Obama passing over venture capitalist Leo Hindery for a high-level administration position.  Still, I do at least give him credit for being willing to draw the right conclusions from Obama's appointments.

Entire world menaced by better Iranian cell phone reception

Things that threaten world peace:

Western countries have expressed their fears about the launch of Iran's first domestically-built satellite. The United States, France and Great Britain believe that the rocket from which the satellite was launched could also be used to fire nuclear warheads.

The satellite, dubbed Hope, will orbit Earth 15 times every 24 hours. Iran insists that it was designed for research and telecommunications only.

Things that do not threaten world peace:

Israel strengthened its foothold in space on Monday by successfully launching a spy satellite that defense officials said provided the IDF "unprecedented operational capabilities." [...]

The Ofek 7's elliptical orbit reportedly takes it over Iran, Iraq and Syria every 90 minutes.

(Ofek 7 was launched in June of 2007, and—in what I'm sure was an entirely unrelated event—Israel bombed Syria three months later.)

In a masterpiece of understatement, the UK Guardian helpfully points out that the Iranian satellite launch "does not imply Iran is on the brink of targeting Washington with a nuclear warhead."  While I appreciate this distressingly rare bow to sanity, I feel compelled to point out a few more things that would not imply Iran is on the brink of targeting Washington with a nuclear warhead:

• Actual development by Iran of a nuclear warhead
• Claims by U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran is on the brink of targeting Washington with a nuclear warhead
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appearing on TV screaming, "We are on the brink of targeting Washington with a nuclear warhead!"

This is because there's no reason to believe that Iran's leaders are determined to commit national suicide.  And it's a testament to the discipline of the Western media that this unspoken, absurd premise of U.S. posturing over Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons is treated seriously rather than with the derisive scorn it deserves.

(Previous contemplations of the awesome threat posed to us by Iran here, here, and here.)

AND ALSO: Hillary Clinton echoed Obama when she recently said that "we are reaching out a hand, but the fist has to unclench"; apparently threatening total obliteration amounts to "reaching out a hand" in Clinton's book.  Meanwhile, in the latest evidence of Iran's intention to keep fisting us for the next four years despite heartfelt offers of peace like Clinton's, they've just refused visas to the U.S. badminton team.  Can the targeting of Washington with a nuclear warhead be far behind?

Even more great news!

Thanks to Quin for the pointer to this article by David Archer of RealClimate ("Irreversible Does Not Mean Unstoppable"):

Susan Solomon, ozone hole luminary and Nobel Prize winning chair of IPCC, and her colleagues, have just published a paper entitled “Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We at realclimate have been getting a lot of calls from journalists about this paper, and some of them seem to have gone all doomsday on us. [...] Let’s not confuse Irreversible with Unstoppable. One means no turning back, while the other means no slowing down. They are very different words. Despair not! [...]

Perhaps the despair we heard in our interviewers’ questions arose from the observation in the paper that the temperature will continue to rise, even if CO2 emissions are stopped today. But you have to remember that the climate changes so far, both observed and committed to, are minor compared with the business-as-usual forecast for the end of the century. It’s further emissions we need to worry about. Climate change is like a ratchet, which we wind up by releasing CO2. Once we turn the crank, there's no easy turning back to the natural climate. But we can still decide to stop turning the crank, and the sooner the better.

So the happy news here is that we're only somewhat screwed so far, and we still have some control over just how screwed we're going to be.  Are you feeling better now?

The article goes on at some length about the fact that what Solomon was talking about is just the "long tail" of global warming, which Archer says is old news.  However, here's what Solomon said:

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years," Solomon says.

If the long tail is such old news, which people is Solomon talking about who are doing this imagining?  The hoi polloi?  Then it seems a bit odd to publish a scholarly study (pdf) about it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—not exactly at the top of the average person's reading list.  Perhaps the only new information here is the determination that the long tail isn't just 100 or 200 years, but 1000?

I am not a scientician (or not a climate scientician, anyway) and I haven't waded through the entire paper or all of Archer's references, so I'm not qualified to resolve all the murkiness here.  When I originally read the NPR article about Solomon's work I suspected that "irreversible" might be carrying implications she hadn't intended, and so I can appreciate Archer's points.  But at the same time, there's clearly new information here or the NAS wouldn't be publishing this paper—and if it doesn't change the game at all, it's strange that Solomon would have put the information out there using such incendiary terms, both in the paper and in subsequent interviews.  Perhaps she's just painfully tone deaf to the way her words would likely be interpreted (as evidenced by her feeling that "if it's irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it").

In any case, Archer's right that it's not time to slit your wrists just yet.