Just when you thought it couldn't get worse

The O-gang has filed its response to the ACLU-CCR suit on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki's father, who is seeking an injunction against the administration's declared intention to kill Awlaki without any sort of due process despite the facts that he is a US citizen, and is neither on or near any actual battlefield.

The response - big surprise - calls for the case to be dismissed out of hand. Pres. Hopey-Changey has already established a record showing that he does not want any of his actions questioned by the courts. What's important is the basis for the argument. I'm going to turn the next paragraph over to Glenn Greenwald:

At this point, I didn't believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. ... [W]hat's most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is "state secrets": in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are "state secrets," and thus no court may adjudicate their legality. [Emphasis in original.]

I say again, Mr. President, as I did back in April, just who the hell do you think you are?

This has gone past outrageous right into depraved. I want you to imagine just 10 years ago reading a novel with a plot revolving around a president having the authority to kill US citizens simply on their own say-so, based on secret evidence no one outside their circle ever sees and which no court can review and no one can challenge. You would probably think the idea was too far-fetched to be taken seriously. But that is exactly the power Barack Obama is now claiming for himself.

I'm only having trouble deciding one thing: The WaPo reported that

[g]overnment lawyers called the state-secrets argument a last resort to toss out the case, and it seems likely to revive a debate over the reach of a president's powers in the global war against al-Qaeda. ...

Robert M. Chesney, a national security law specialist at the University of Texas School of Law, said that Obama lawyers would undoubtedly prefer not to stoke the state-secrets debate, or to risk judicial review of its claim to a borderless battlefield. ...

"You're trying to avoid a judicial ruling on the merits of the whole issue," Chesney said, adding, "But at the end of the day, if it's your best argument in a case you want to win, you're going to make that argument."

Which means that its inclusion in the brief is an indication that the government does not have a lot of confidence in its other arguments and thinks this is its trump card.

So here's the thing I can't decide: Does that make this more outrageous or not?

I expect there will be more to say about this, more than I can deal with here and now. But it's hard to express how angry and depressed at the same time it makes me.

Footnote: Marcy Wheeler points out that in its brief,

the government does not commit to the basis for its authority to kill an American citizen like Anwar al-Awlaki with no review.

That is, the government never actually makes a case for the authority it's claiming to order a hit on a citizen. They just assert the authority is there and focus on arguing that al-Awlaki's father doesn't have standing to bring the case and doggone it, even if he does, a presidential order to kill his son without due process is a "political question" that the courts shouldn't even touch.

(I thought the issues in the case revolved around the limits of executive authority and how that sort of question became "non-justiciable" is a mystery to me, but never mind.)

But as Wheeler points out, the O-crowd won't even commit to saying if al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group with which Awlaki is allegedly involved, is part of al-Qaeda itself or just "associated" with it. That makes the entire argument problematical since the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) passed after 9/11 only authorizes the president to act against those involved with or aiding and abetting those who attacked on that day - and AQAP did not exist at that time.

As a sidebar to the Footnote, she also mentions that the brief whines that the White House and military "simply can’t be expected to operate under 'generalized standards' and 'general criteria.'" Hmmm. Generalized standards. Aren't they what we call laws?

A Second Footnote: In response to the suit,

Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that the groups are asking "a court to take the unprecedented step of intervening in an ongoing military action to direct the President how to manage that action - all on behalf of a leader of a foreign terrorist organization."

Besides referring to it as "an ongoing military action" with all the implications of "the battlefield is everywhere" so no one is ever captured "away from the battlefield," I guess means that in the minds of the O-gang, innocent until proven guilty is another "general criteria" to which the administration can't be expected to adhere.

RIP

This is from over a month ago, but I just found out about it now and I didn't want to let it pass.

"Greetings, greetings, fellow stargazers!" No more. Jack Horkheimer died on August 20. If you don't know who he was, just know that his infectious joy about stargazing - coupled with a fair amount of showmanship - undoubtedly served to bring many into the fold.

Thanks for the fun, Jack, and we'll keep looking up.

(Link via the estimable Unknown News.)

The things you can find #2

Scanning that same "cool stuff" site, I also found a video of a news report about the aftermath of the BP oil blowout by WEAR-TV of Pensacola, Florida.

It's easy to forget that the disaster affected areas far beyond the Mississippi Delta region, that beaches as far away as Florida have been effected. Well, a reporter from the station named Dan Thomas went with a film crew to the Gulf Islands National Seashore along the Florida panhandle.

After noting that the federal government has directed that the workers hired by BP dig no further down than six inches into the sand to look for oil, Thomas said:

We had come out here to the National Park to show you just what exactly is in the sand, lower than 6 inches. We wanted to use the shovel and give you a look but apparently, that's illegal.

They were challenged first by Pat Gonzales, who claimed to be with the Fish and Wildlife Service and insisted -get this - that it's illegal to dig in the sand. After Thomas and his crew moved to a public beach, a site Gonzales proposed, they were confronted by Officer A. Negron of the National Park Service who demanded to see Thomas's "papers" and then told him not only that "you can't dig" in a national park (Thomas: "So no sand castles, none of that, huh?" Negron: "You're right.") but that it's illegal to film there unless you're with the media.

Thomas ended the report with "Apparently the National Parks Service will only allow BP workers to dig...And only down to six inches."

When the NPS was confronted with this, it turned out - surprise, surprise - that (of course) it's not illegal to dig in the sand and the officials had just no idea how the "field staff" got such a crazy idea.

Right. It was just a nutty fluke, a purely innocent misunderstanding that two separate people from two separate government agencies made exactly the same bogus claim to a news crew that was documenting how digging only six inches down was concealing just how much oil there actually was on that beach. Just pure chance and no one higher up had anything to do with it.

That stinks as bad as the oil, especially when the Obama administration has done its level best to drown the oil in happy talk about how it's almost completely "gone" (Gone where?) even as scientists (and reporters) are finding it is still there, at the bottom of the Gulf, on the beaches, in the tidal waters - and especially when that same administration has effectively made itself a partner with BP's continued pumping and drilling in the Gulf by making the corporation's profits from there the collateral for securing the fund for BP's compensation to those damaged by its corporate homicide of 11 workers and corporate devastation of the Gulf coast.

This really does smell.

The things you can find #1

Scanning through one of those "cool stuff on the web" sites just for the heck of it, I came across something taken from one of NPR's blogs:

It seems that during a talk last week, Bill Simon, the head of Wal-Mart's US operations, said that to see the reality of child hunger and rising poverty

you need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it's real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs, and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when ... government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.

And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they've been waiting for it. ... [I[f you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason.

Simon said this "paycheck cycle," as Wal-Mart calls it, has become "extreme," with lots more shoppers at the beginning of the month than at the end.

"This," the NPR blog said, "is what a rising poverty rate looks like."

Simon's observation was an insightful one that puts a human face on the economic strains and stresses felt by so many among us. Too bad he works for such a scummy company.

Footnote to the preceding

Another case on this front is that of Mumia Abu-Jamal, which will come up again in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on November 9. That is when the court, under a directive from the Supreme Court, will reconsider its 2008 ruling granting him a new sentencing hearing based on a finding that the instructions to the jury were flawed.

This is happening because last year SCOTUS, which has been more concerned with "finality" in capital offense cases than with justice, upheld a death sentence in an Ohio case with similar jury issues and ordered the review in the Abu-Jamal case. That the review is happening is bad news for Abu-Jamal but a lawyer for the defense, Robert Bryan, said he was "cautiously encouraged" that the Appeals Court had scheduled oral arguments rather than ruling on the basis of written briefs, which suggests the Court may distinguish between Abu-Jamal's case and the Ohio one.

I don't know if Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty or innocent. I do know that the prosecution's case always seemed a little flaky to me - especially as it involved not only Abu-Jamal fatally shooting policeman Daniel Faulkner, but that as the mortally-wounded Faulker fell, he drew his gun and fired up at Abu-Jamal who was bending over him, thus "explaining" the odd path of the bullet that wounded Abu-Jamal, one usually associated with the shooter being above the target.

Guilt or innocence aside, I am certain that Abu-Jamal did not get a fair trial. While it is apparently too late to do anything about that, it's not too late to save him from official murder. So I hope the Court renews its order for a new sentencing hearing.

Footnote: Actually, it may not be too late to do anything about the trial. New evidence indicates that a significant piece of the prosecution's case could be completely bogus. Oh, but wait: This doesn't prove "actual innocence," does it? It only proves a major prosecution witness was lying. Never mind. Pull the switch.

Justice = Just Ice

Tomorrow night, September 23, Teresa Lewis is to be legally murdered by the state of Virginia, becoming the first women to be executed in the US in five years. Last week, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell denied a clemency request and today, the Supreme Court denied a stay.

This is happening despite Lewis having an IQ of 72, despite having plead guilty (which usually is an opening for some compassion on the part of officialdom), despite evidence she was emotionally manipulated by "a dominant male co-defendant," and despite the fact that her two male co-defendants, who actually pulled the triggers, were sentenced to life in prison rather than death.

This comes just a month after Troy Davis failed to convince a skeptical judge that he had met the impossibly high standard of presenting "clear and convincing evidence" of his "actual innocence" of a 1991 murder and thus failed to get his conviction and subsequent death sentence overturned - a conviction based solely on the testimony of prosecution witnesses, most of who have since said they testified as they did as the result of police coercion. There was no physical evidence introduced and no murder weapon was ever found.

What I just called an "impossibly high" standard was set by the Supreme Court when it sent the case to District Court in Georgia for review in August 2009. While that particular decision was good news for Davis, I noted at the time that it also

points up a dreadful, shocking, moral hole at the core of how we now deal with capital crimes....

[F]or Davis's petition to succeed, he must be presenting evidence "that could not have been obtained at the time of trial (that) clearly establishes petitioner's innocence." That is the standard [Davis had to meet].

Consider what that means. First, if after the trial you produce new, previously-unavailable evidence that punches holes in the prosecutor's case and clearly establishes reasonable doubt - but which falls short of affirmatively proving innocence - our court system doesn't care. Even in the presence of reasonable doubt, we're going to kill you.

And what if it does "clearly establish petitioner's innocence?" If that evidence could have been obtained at time of trial, if maybe it was there but you just didn't know about it or if maybe you were the victim of incompetent representation, our court system doesn't care. Even if we know you're innocent, we're going to kill you.

Why? Because, our court system says, we don't want to be bothered dealing with this. Death penalty cases are an annoyance, an inconvenience. We're tired of people filing multiple petitions on a single case as people try to avoid being electrocuted or hanged or poisoned or shot. So we're going to set an extremely high, almost impossible, bar: You really get just one shot, the trial. After that, you want reconsideration? You not only have to produce previously unavailable evidence (not previously unintroduced, previously unavailable), but the burden of proof has shifted to you; it's no longer "innocent until proven guilty," it's now "guilty until proven innocent."

Because after all, you're not a person, you're not a life, you're a docket number. And what has justice got to do with legal philosophy?

A year before that, I wrote that

[t]here are lots of good reasons, both practical and ethical, to oppose the death penalty. Lots of unrefuted reasons. And yet still this badge of brutality, this symbol of savagery, stays with us, stays with us because ultimately, that's all the death penalty is about: not justice, not deterrence, but vengeance, bloody vengeance - except that we try to convince ourselves we are too civilized for that and so do our best to eliminate the actual blood. It's all neat, tidy, clean, antiseptic, proper, all according to procedure. We don't even have the honesty to call it vengeance. We call it "retribution."

And as a legal principle we pretend - wait, make that contend - that it's just and fair and proper to electrocute/hang/poison/shoot you even if we know you're innocent so long as all the procedural Is are dotted and Ts are crossed.

As I said on one of those earlier occasions, in Joni Mitchell's song "Sex Kills," she says she saw a license plate and "It said 'Just Ice'/Is justice just ice?/Governed by greed and lust?/Just the strong doing what they can/And the weak suffering what they must?"

The answer is yes.

Footnote: Something else I mentioned one of those earlier times was that Antonin Scalia, writing in dissent of the Court's decision to provide review for Troy Davis, said “This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.” And he's right - SCOTUS has never held that it's unconstitutional to knowingly execute an innocent person provided certain procedural formalities have been observed. Ponder that for a while.

Another Footnote: Some good sources of info on the death penalty are the Death Penalty Information Center, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, The Innocence Project, and the death penalty project of Amnesty International.

And now for something completely different

In 2001, the Earth Liberation Front set fire to the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture. In 2008, Briana Waters was tried on a charge of abetting the crime by serving as a lookout during the operation. She maintained her innocence but was convicted largely on the testimony of two women in the group who decided to cooperate with prosecutors. She was sentenced to six years in prison and $6 million in restitution.

Now, however, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned her conviction, concluding that the trial judge, one Franklin Burgess, made several errors that cast doubt on the fairness of the trial.

One of those was allowing jurors to see some inflammatory articles advocating violence against targets such as Wall Street and Disneyland which Waters had supposedly passed on to someone in the group - and at the same time refusing to let them see a documentary advocating nonviolent protest that Waters began two years before the arson occurred.

What's more, during deliberations, the ELF claimed responsibility for torching a newly-built mansion. After news coverage suggested a link between that and Waters' trial, Burgess questioned the jury as a group to ask if anyone had been influenced by the coverage - when he should have polled them individually.

The reason I noted this case is that I commented on it once before, back in April 2008, at which time I noted that the FBI's own records clearly indicated that the agency pressured the two cooperating defendants into naming the "possibly innocent" Waters as part of a plea deal. So her release does please me and I hope prosecutors will decide against re-trying her.

Here are a few more

Updated Homeowners are unhappy: The administration's various flailing attempts to impact the foreclosure crisis have only made a small dent. Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Making Home Affordable mortgage-relief program have fallen out.

Progressives and social justice activists are unhappy: After some initial excitement about the federal stimulus program, it quickly became clear that it was too small and that any follow-up was not going to happen. Instead, the administration has become a deficit hawk, including creating a stacked commission designed to justify cutting Social Security.

Peace activists are unhappy: The Iraq War is not over. Even the NY Times called the switch from "combat" to "training and support" an "exercise in semantics." Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan is being expanded even as a majority of the public opposes that war and only about one in five expect the situation there to improve over the next year.

The GLBT community is unhappy: In the words of John Aravosis at AmericaBlogGay, "President Obama is about to have accomplished a record zero of his top promises to the gay community." DADT repeal continues to get pushed back until sometime later, whenever that is, and even when a federal court provides the White House with an opportunity to advance the issue (by simply declining to appeal that court's decision that DADT is unconstitutional), it appears the DOJ will reject that opening and try to get the decision overturned.

Unions are unhappy: Their one big legislative goal, the Employee Free Choice Act, was buried under a mound of corporate lies and lobbying while the White House and party leaders stood by, said nothing, and did even less.

Latinos are unhappy: Immigration reform keeps getting what I might start calling the "DADT shove," that is, it keeps getting pushed back with the excuse that "Now is not the time" and the assurance "Don't worry, we'll get to it eventually. Trust us!"

Open-government advocates are unhappy: Candidate Obama declared that “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over." President Obama has surrounded himself with Wall Street insiders and began the health care fiasco by cutting secret deals with lobbyists for the hospital and pharmaceutical industries.

Yet somehow, in the face of all that (and I'm sure I missed some), enthusiasm among Democrats and liberals is actually down. Wow. A real head-scratcher, yes?

Updated with a Footnote: Sean Paul Kelley at The Agonist has his own list which overlaps mine (and includes several things I should have).

Here's another

A line in the first paragraph of a story at DailyFinance.com on Wednesday tells the tale:

[T]he U.S. economy is still on rocky shoals.

GDP hit bottom in December 2008, when the economy was shrinking at a rate of nearly 7% a year. But after recovering in mid- to late 2009 due to massive government spending, it has stalled.

First quarter [2010] GDP increased by 3.7%. And in late August, the government reported that real GDP [for the second quarter] increased by just 1.6%, less than the 2.4% estimated initially.

This has raised the very real possibility that without more government spending - an unlikely prospect given the O-crowd's embrace of the Holy Church of Deficit Reduction - the economy faces years of slow growth and even a double-dip recession.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate doubled from June 2008 to the fall of 2009 and has stubbornly remained at over 9% for over a year.

A recent Labor Department report shows there are about five job seekers for every available job in the U.S. Economists say that until job creation picks up, there can be no hope of prolonged economic growth in this country.

And that statistic is supposed to be a good sign: At the start of the year, it was six job seekers per job.

As a result, the Census Bureau reported yesterday,

[t]he ranks of the working-age poor in the United States climbed to the highest level since the 1960s as the recession threw millions of people out of work last year, leaving one in seven Americans in poverty.

The overall poverty rate[, covering all ages,] climbed to 14.3 percent [in 2009], or 43.6 million people....

That's more than a full percentage point and nearly 4 million people higher than in 2008 and the highest since 1994. And again, it was government spending - in this case a COLA for Social Security and extensions of unemployment insurance - that helped soften the blow. Without the latter, another 3.3 million people would have dropped into poverty in 2009, according to David Johnson, the chief of the Census Bureau's household economics division.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans without health coverage rose from 15.4% of the population to 16.7%, or 50.7 million people - the biggest single-year increase and the highest total number since the government began tracking the figures in 1987. And one more time it was government that kept it from being even worse, as some of the loss in employer-subsidized health insurance was taken up by expansions of Medicare and Medicaid.

On another front that has been a mainstay of the economy, home prices crashed between June 2008 and May 2009 and have recovered only a little since then. Following the end of federal homebuyer tax credits, which expired in April, home sales plunged so that in July they hit the lowest rate in nearly 50 years. This going on while the number of people losing their homes to foreclosure continues to climb. In fact,

[l]enders took back more homes in August than in any month since the start of the U.S. mortgage crisis. ...

August makes the ninth month in a row that the pace of homes lost to foreclosure has increased on an annual basis. ...

More than 2.3 million homes have been repossessed by lenders since the recession began in December 2007, according to RealtyTrac[, a company that tracks foreclosures]. The firm estimates more than 1 million American households are likely to lose their homes to foreclosure this year.

At the same time, initial default notices, the first step in the foreclosure process, have been dropping. That could indicate that things have finally hit bottom on this front and are starting to improve, if ever-so slowly - but with fewer than one-third of repossessed houses on the market for re-sale for fear of further depressing an already-depressed market, it could just as easily mean that lenders are simply biding their time, not bothering to try to seize properties they can't sell and that a new wave of foreclosures is in the offing as soon as unemployment starts to fall.

Obama called 2009 a tough year but added that "Because of the Recovery Act and many other programs providing tax relief and income support to a majority of working families - and especially those most in need - millions of Americans were kept out of poverty last year." As I already noted, that is likely true. But it's rather like telling someone just diagnosed with kidney disease to be glad it's not AIDS while proposing - à la the "Deficit! Deficit!" mantra - to treat the condition with bloodletting.

Oh, but hey, there's a bright spot: The price of gold hit a record high of $1,271 an ounce on Tuesday! The price is now nearly 50% higher than it was in November 2008 and is expected to hit $1300 an ounce before the end of the year. Great! Um, except that gold prices go up when investors are worried about the economy and are looking for a "safe haven" for their money. So what this really means is that despite the happy talk coming from some places, the wheeler-dealers are as worried as the rest of us.

Why would that be? Here's one idea

Candidate Barack Obama promised "change," a new openness in government functioning and slammed the Shrub gang for its reliance on secrecy and claims of "national security" to conceal its foreign policy activities - that is, its criminality. President Barack Obama has proven the only "change" he is bringing is to make it worse.

Now, adding absurdity to injury, in what Glenn Greenwald pointedly labels "Obama in Wonderland" and a clear case of "sentence first - verdict afterward,"

[t]he Obama administration is considering filing the first criminal charges against radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in case the CIA fails to kill him and he is captured alive in Yemen. [Emphasis added.]

Greenwald also notes that the article says that counterterrorism officials "have revealed few specifics" about Awlaki's supposed terrorist activities and that

the only crime for which there appears to be any known evidence is one which not only raises serious First Amendment issues ... but also one that carries only a "15-year prison sentence." Apparently, though, if the law does not allow for application of the death penalty to a citizen whom Barack Obama wants dead, then all of that annoying "process" about indictments and evidence and trials and the like will simply be discarded with the imperious wave of a presidential hand and the death penalty imposed anyway.

This came just a couple of days after the O-crowd won a major legal victory in what the NY Times called "the administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers." In a split 6-5 decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals embraced a claim made by the DOJ of the bogus "state secrets privilege" and so dismissed a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary.

The suit, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, was filed by the ACLU on behalf of five former prisoners who say they were tortured in captivity. It accused the company of arranging flights for the CIA as part of the agency's secret rendition program in which prisoners were sent to other countries for imprisonment and "interrogation," that is, to be tortured.

A panel of the same court had ruled earlier that the privilege could only be invoked against specific pieces of evidence, not the suit as a whole. The majority overturned that decision, agreeing with the O-gang that it should be applied to the entire case.

Writing in Harper's, Scott Horton rips the court's embrace of the privilege claim, pointing out that by an international convention to which the US is a signatory, "the crime of disappearance connected to torture is a crime against humanity, with no statute of limitations and no defense of superior orders applicable" and that the state secrets privilege cannot be properly invoked to cover up evidence of a crime.

The majority of the justices seemed conflicted about their decision, calling it, in the words of Judge Raymond Fisher, a "painful" decision "reluctantly" reached. In an unusual move, the court ordered the government to pay the plaintiffs’ legal costs, even though they lost the case and had not requested such payment. Fisher also called on Congress to grant reparations to victims of CIA “misjudgments or mistakes," a proposal the dissenters labeled unrealistic; "a delusional fantasy" would be more accurate.

But whatever twinges of conscience the members of the majority may feel, the fact is that by their ruling, they have prevented victims of US-approved torture arranged by the CIA from even having their claims heard - even if those victims relied only on public information in pursuing their case. Simply put, they have essentially declared the courts off-limits to victims of torture.

But why? Why would the O-crew go to such lengths to block a suit even if no secret or classified information would be involved? Horton, calling the claim that protecting state secrets is essential to our security "risible," notes the real issue:

The dilemma faced by the Justice Department was rather that evidence presented in the suit would likely be used in the future (not in the United States, obviously) to prosecute those who participated in the extraordinary renditions process. Twenty-three U.S. agents have already been convicted for their role in a rendition in Milan. Prosecutors in Spain have issued arrest warrants for a further 13 U.S. agents involved in a botched rendition case that touched on Spanish soil. Prosecutors in Germany have opened a criminal investigation into the use of Ramstein AFB in connection with torture and illegal kidnappings. Prosecutors in Poland are pursuing a similar matter. And [UK] Prime Minister David Cameron was recently forced to brief President Obama on his decision to direct a formal inquiry which could lead to prosecutions tied directly to the subject matter of the Mohamed case.

Bottom line is that the intent is not to protect Jeppesen Dataplan, it's to protect the entire structure of criminality, the entire structure of kidnapping and torture, from being revealed. Which also leads to the unhappy and deeply unsettling conclusion that what we already know is only a small part of the whole.

Footnote: Circling back the Awlaki case, a suit filed by Awlaki's father with the support of the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks an injunction against the plan to kill him, saying it amounts to an extrajudicial murder. Buoyed by their win in Mohamed, the O-gang is determined to get the case thrown out but hasn't decided yet what the strongest argument or combination of arguments would be most effective.

[M]any in the administration are reluctant to air in court the case that Mr. Awlaki is waging war against the United States, in part because they do not want to concede that judicial review is appropriate for executive branch decisions on targeted killings.

Instead, they are seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed without discussing its merits.

Or, to put it another way, "Like we keep telling you: Shut yer trap."

But this is the bit that really got me:

There is widespread agreement among the administration’s legal team that it is lawful for President Obama to authorize the killing of someone like Mr. Awlaki - regardless of his citizenship - if he is found in an ungoverned place or in a country that grants permission.

So there is "widespread agreement" in the world of President Hopey-Changey that he can on his own authority, subject to no oversight, order the murder of anyone he chooses, a claim even the Bushites never made. If that doesn't chill your civil liberties soul right through, you don't have one.

Speaking of language and framing

Framing, of course, refers to the idea that how an argument is presented affects how it's perceived by others. (A version of which I described over 35 years ago by saying that the first rule of effective communication is that what you say is not as important as what the other person hears.) Some framing, both positive ("we good") and negative ("they bad"), is done deliberately. Other framing is done unconsciously, the result of assumptions that may or may not square with logic or reality but which persist because they are unexamined. That sort of framing can be even harder to overcome, being built right into our social and political discourse. And it can lead to some really weird results.

Consider this article from DailyFinance.com:

Almost half the country opposes tax increases for the richest Americans, according to a poll suggesting that congressional Democrats are taking some risk by backing President Barack Obama's plan to boost levies on the wealthy. ...

The Associated Press-GfK Poll is stuffed with encouraging signs for the GOP. ...

By a 46 percent to 41 percent margin, people want Republicans steering the economy....

[W]hile Americans are evenly split over whether they prefer their district's Democratic or GOP congressional candidate, those likeliest to vote tilt toward the Republicans, 53 percent to 43 percent. ...

The survey showed that by 54 percent to 44 percent, most people support raising taxes on the highest earners....

Even so, the poll underscored the political pickle Democrats face in the tax fight. ...

Overall, 40 percent said the country is heading in the right direction, slightly better than last month but below the 48 percent who said so in the early months of Obama's presidency. ...

More than one in four expressed support for the conservative tea party movement....

Okay. So it's an "encouraging sign for the GOP" that by 46-41, those polled prefer GOPpers to "steer the economy" - even though that gap is well within the margin of error. And it's another good sign that the most likely voters prefer GOPpers by a 10-point margin - even though that tells you little unless you know how that support is distributed. (For example, if this so-called "enthusiasm gap" is very wide in a few places but narrow in most places, the effect on overall national totals is seriously diluted.) And it's apparently also good news for them that the percentage saying we're heading in the right direction is down from a peak - even though the pollsters own chart shows that over the last two years, that number has been trending up. And finally, it's also good news, apparently, that somewhere around 25% support the TPers - even though in another context that number would be dismissed as a "small minority."

But on the other hand, now, the same poll says that by a 10-point margin, people support raising taxes on the wealthiest. Is that "good news" for Obama or Congressional Democrats? Of course not. The headline is that "almost half the country opposes" such an increase, that's it's a "risk" to support the plan and the poll "underscored the political pickle Democrats face in the tax fight" by virture of, um, having the support of the majority.

That's how the game is played. That's how unconscious framing - or as it's often called in the case of the media, "the script" - traps you in your own assumptions in a way that can produce inanity. The script this year is "Republicans are rolling, Democrats are doomed" and everything, just everything, has to be fit into that pattern even when it requires overstatment and contradiction to do it.

I want to emphasize that this is not about GOPpers vs. Dims, it's about the failure of our national media to see beyond the limits of their own assumptions and the distorted coverage of events, trends, and issues that generates. It is surely not meant to endorse Dimcrats, especially when they are so totally gutless that the party leaders in Congress won't even commit to having a vote on the matter before the elections. (As a sidebar, the same fate - a "keep your head down" cowardly refusal to act before the election - may well befall a new nuclear arms control treaty negotiated in April by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev even though it just passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a vote of 14-4, including three Republicans in the majority.)

And by the way, another finding in the poll was that

[t]wenty-six percent of Democrats said they are excited about politics, compared with 80 percent of Democrats who said so in a November 2008 AP-GfK Poll just after Obama's election.

Gee, I can't imagine why that would be.

A few assorted related thoughts

I know you know about "skateboard-toting" Jacob Isom, the guy who snatched a copy of the Quran from David Grisham of the reactionary group "Repent Amarillo," and so preventing the pseudo-Christian bigot from burning it.

"I snuck up behind him and took his Quran," Isom told KFDA-TV. "He said something about burning the Quran. I said, 'Dude, you have no Quran,' and ran off."

Well, damn good for him and he deserves the happy notoriety he received. But there are three other bits about this, less noticed or discussed, on which I wanted to comment: One is that there were 200 people there - in Amarillo, Texas - to protest the planned burning. And some people put their hands on the grill where Grisham planned to do the deed to keep him from proceeding. There are good people everywhere.

Another is how the right wing, adhering to its Rule #3 for arguing ("When facts are undeniable, change the subject.") groused and grumped about Isom's act of "theft," later adding "assault" for flavor. Now, there was no more than incidental contact between Isom and Grisham, so there was no assault, and it'd probably be hard to push a case of theft when it involved an item the possession of which Grisham had so little interest in maintaining that he had already doused it with kerosene with the avowed intention of destroying it. But of course, that didn't matter to the wackos; anything to distract from the clear public opposition to Grisham's fanaticism.

But the thing I really wanted to mention was something from the video at the link. In what I assume is video from the local TV news, the Unitarian minister who organized the protest said it is a matter of "great dishonor to desecrate the sacred scriptures of any religious tradition."

Yes, but - jeez, can't we do any better than that? Haven't we, even now, even at this late date, learned about sound bites and effective use of the media? I bemoaned this same failing five years ago:

It's really sad how incompetent we on the left have become at expressing our ideas in the kind of language by which non-politically-involved people can be moved.

It wasn't always that way. William Jennings Bryan, before his fear of modernity and science turned him bitter, was a brilliant orator on behalf of progressive causes whose speeches, laced with religious references, sound stilted to us today but suited perfectly the style of the time. So, too, with Eugene Debs, whose style was bombastic but whose words and meaning were crystal clear to the workers on whose behalf he struggled. So, too, right up through the '60s there were those who understood the language of Main Street.

But for some reason, in the past couple of decades we have lost the touch. We have lost our sense of drama, we have lost our skill at rhetoric, we have lost our grasp of symbolism.

So you want the response to people like David Grisham and Terry Jones? You want the sound bite? Here it is:

Real Americans don't burn books.

That's it. That's the message. If you have the opportunity, you can add "Stalinists burn books. Nazis burn books. Real Americans do not. Burning books is un-American." If you have even more time, you can talk about religious freedom and tolerance and respect. But get that initial statement out there first.

The right wing has long since realized the political importance of the bumper-sticker sound bite. It's way past time we did as well.

This just occurred to me

The coverage of the Saturday demonstrations in NYC about the Park51 project, to the degree it accurately reflects the tenor of the crowds rather than just quoting outliers, served to confirm some of my contentions about the opponents of the center but also prompted one observation that hadn't occurred to me before.

One such contention was how much of the opposition is driven by anti-Muslim bigotry. For example,

[s]hortly after the memorial service for victims killed [in NYC on 9/11], a man from North Carolina burned pages of the Quran, and another protester from Pennsylvania tore out pages of the Islamic holy book and coaxed the anti-mosque protesters to buy it as "toilet paper."

Meanwhile, a woman who said the anti-center demonstration could have been held another day because "It isn't nice for the families of the victims to see us arguing on the day of their sadness" (but who came anyway, so much for being nice) added that she had already helped block construction of a mosque in her neighborhood in Staten Island and that "Muslims build mosques in areas they think they have conquered."

Another contention was about the real motiviation here, the intent to define Muslims out of the American community:

"Muslims will never be American citizens, they don't fit, they don't assimilate," said one elderly protester from Illinois, who declined to give her name. "Let's call a spade a spade: I want them out, not in."

But the thing that just occurred to me was prompted by this:

"They're insensitive people," [said] Ron Silverados, a 57-year-old road striper from Long Island attending the anti-mosque rally. "I'm tired of saying this but this isn't a religious issue ... it is a moral issue."

Leave aside the bigoted use of the sweeping term "they" - and yes, that is bigoted; applying a negative characteristic to all members of a group is the definition of bigotry - and notice the world "insensitive." Oh yes, so much of the blather has been about "sensitivity," how the developers of Park51 have to be "sensitive" to "our" feelings and if only they'd show some "sensitivity" everything would be fine.

Really? The issue is a requirement to be "sensitive" to others' "feelings," to make sure you don't offend anyone? Really?

My gosh! They want to be (GASP!) politically correct! Oh, the horror!

I mean, isn't that supposedly the whole deal with "political correctness?" That you are supposed to avoid offending anyone? And isn't that precisely what these people - the ones who complain about how "insensitive" the project is - are demanding?

What a hoot that would be: Someone complains about the project only to get told "Oh, don't be so politically correct."

Footnote: The most hopeful quote of the day came from Bill Love, a member of the Lower Manhattan Community Board which approved the Park51 project:

I promise you that when that project goes up on Park Place, 10, 20, 30 years down the road, someone will point it out and say, "You know what? That was a big national controversy." ... People will shake their heads and say, "How can that be?"

The hopeful me says yes, that is the way history has played out many times: A generation later, people can't see what the fuss was about. The cynical me says maybe, but there is a rather long dark road between here and there.

More of an addendum than a Footnote

I meant to include a link to this in the previous post but it slipped my mind until today. I've linked to it I think three times before, always with some version of the same basic message, one I'll repeat here.

One of those three times I remarked that Osama bin Laden had done at a stroke what would have seemed impossible the day before: He had turned the US into the victim in the eyes of the world. What an opening, what an opportunity for a new direction that could have been pursued if we as a people, as a nation, had just displayed the dignity and maturity to do so.

But we - our leaders and our society both - had neither in sufficient measure. We went another, a dark, way. So I invite you to look at the link and think, as I've said those previous times, of what we threw away.

Consider this my own personal observance

In the face of the bigots, boobs, buffoons, and baboons who persist in befouling the memory of the innocents killed on 9/11 by trying to turn it into a casus belli against all Muslims, I offer my own personal observance of the date. It consists of a couple of things I wrote about the event at the time. I think they have held up well.

The first is an email, dated September 13, 2001, in response to an online friend asking how I was feeling in the wake of the attacks. The part in brackets is from the friend.

[ How are you doing? ]

I’m hanging in there. Stressed and sad like most, I expect - and fearful of what happens next, wondering what’s going to be the next loop in the cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, a cycle in which everyone (including us) views themselves as the wronged innocents. And, as the reports of attacks on, harassment of, and threats against Arabs and Muslims in the US begin to come in, as people equate Arab with Muslim and Muslim with fanatic (much as if they equated American with Christian and Christian with the KKK) and as cries of, in one form or another, “kill them all” start to rise, reminded of the dictum that those who deal in vengeance tend to become that which they say they oppose.

“We will never be the same” is an instant cliche. And it’s certainly true - the question for us as a people now is what the change will be. I’ve been thinking of the last verse of “There But For Fortune” by Phil Ochs:

“Show me the country/Where the bombs had to fall./Show me the ruins/Of the buildings once so tall,/And I’ll show you a young land/With so many reasons why/There but for fortune may go you or I.”

We have indeed been fortunate, and still are. A good question now is when faced with misfortune (not in the sense of bad luck but of bad events) will we as a people act as mature adults who will think about what we do and what it will accomplish or as spoiled brats flailing wildly at any convenient target within reach?

The magnitude of the event remains a little hard to grasp, perhaps (perhaps) more so for those of us who grew up in or around NYC, for who the twin towers were a natural part of the skyline. I’ve been told that the closer people are to NYC, the more the shock hasn’t worn off and the further away, the more anger there is. If there’s a silver lining at all, maybe it’s that the magnitude of the tragedy will keep us focused on the task of rescue and rebuilding long enough for the unreasoning anger to dissipate at least a little.

The second is another email reply to another friend on the same day.

[ Such sad news. Hope no-one close to you is caught up in this. ]

No, no one I know personally. But there’s always more of an impact when it’s something you know, something you can picture. I remember when the World Trade Center was built. Now I’ll remember when - and how - it came down.

Apparently, the delay between the first and second hits enabled a good portion of the second tower to be evacuated. Nonetheless, the loss of life will be huge; I wouldn’t be surprised if it ultimately reached 5 figures.

Now what happens? I’m afraid of what this could mean to the future. Already there have been incidents of violence and threats against Arabs (who are ALL Muslims, of course, as we all know) and mosques (because ALL Muslims are rabid extremists, of course, as we all know). Even someone I know online who would usually be considered rather liberal said she has “no problem with that” when I expressed a worry about “anti-Muslim xenophobia” because “I never met a nice Arab who wasn’t a Jew-hating racist at heart,” using the attack to justify her own concealed bigotry.

Meanwhile, the White House is promising an “extended military campaign.” We may be in for hard times, times which will not include asking any questions about why it happened that don’t involve “security lapses.” Even wondering about motivations beyond “unreasoning hatred” and being “uncivilized” simply won’t be allowed and risking such a thought is liable to get you branded an apologist for terrorists.

We’re headed, I expect, for more cycles of retaliation and counter-retaliation, everyone insisting their enemies are subhuman devils and they themselves are the offended innocents. It’s gonna get worse.

This is the big one; it's an unpublished op-ed piece dated October 2.

In the wake of September 11, a blunt truth: Barring divine intervention, and I for one do not count on that, we will never “rid the world of terrorism.” As long as there are people there will be those, both individuals and governments, prepared to commit the most venal cruelties against innocents to gain political ends. What we can hope to do is control terrorism, limit it, minimize it.

But if the history of the Middle East over the last 30 years proves nothing else, it proves beyond question that neither terrorism nor “counter”-terrorism, neither retaliation nor counter-retaliation nor counter-counter-retaliation will stop the circle of death - particularly not so long as those on each side insist on seeing themselves at the wronged innocents only defending themselves against unreasoning violence or oppression or exploitation (or all three) while viewing their adversaries as evil brutes fully aware of their own brutality. Another cycle of mayhem is simply not an answer.

If we want to limit, to minimize, terrorism, we have to understand the roots of it, understand what produces it, understand what moves people to embrace such desperation-driven fanaticism. And that in turn requires seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, which is where most of the mainstream commentaries attempting to answer the question “Why do they hate us?” have failed. The authors have projected themselves into the Muslim world and tried to think of what they might resent about the West in general or the US in particular. That is, they have changed their imagined location but not their eyes, still seeing the world through the filter of their own perceptions and desires. So they wind up producing answers like “They hate us because we’re rich” or “we’re modern” or “we support Israel.” Such answers are so removed from context that even to the extent they’re right, they’re useless, the more so because they add up to the unintentionally-revealing “They’re backward, jealous, anti-Semites who hate us because we’re better than they are.”

So for a moment, just for a moment, try to see the world through the eyes of an average person on the ground in the Middle East. This is how the world might look to you:

For centuries the West has looked down on you, regarding you, your culture, and, if non-Christian, your religion as inferior. (There is a reason bin Laden keeps referring to American “crusaders.”) They think of you as “ragheads” or “towelheads.”

Every time a strong Arab leader rises and tries to become independent of the West, they get slapped down. The only regimes that survive are those too weak or too corrupt to threaten Western interests. (One such “threatening” government was that of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, who was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 after he attempted to nationalize oil reserves. The result was the 26-year reign of the Shah, whose army was practically stamped “Made in the USA.”) Yes, you resent the West’s wealth but it’s not so much that they’re rich and you’re poor, it’s that they’re rich because you’re poor, that their wealth is built on exploitation and economic domination.

In just the past 20-plus years, you’ve seen the US pick a fight with Libya in the Gulf of Sidra, bomb Tripoli, openly try to kill Moammar Khadaffi, bomb a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan on the spurious claim it was a chemical weapons factory (leading to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of deaths due to inadequate supplies of medicines), stand by along with the rest of the West while Muslims were slaughtered in Bosnia (stepping in only when European interests were threatened), shell Beirut, shoot down a civilian Iranian airliner, and fire cruise missiles into Afghanistan.

Then there’s Iraq, it’s infrastructure systematically destroyed in a war which it seems to you had nothing to do with the West except to humiliate another strong Arab leader. In the runup to that war you saw foreign troops stationed near the holy sites of Islam at the insistence of the US despite Saudi Arabia’s reluctance and warnings that doing so would be deeply offensive to conservative Muslims - which it was. (One thus offended being Osama bin Laden.)

For 10 years you have seen the bombing of Iraq continue, so much so that a few months ago a Pentagon press representative referred to one such raid as “routine.” Sanctions imposed by the West have cost the lives (by UN estimate) of 500,000 Iraqi children over the last 10 years, a death toll which then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright described in 1996 as “worth it.” Worth it, yes, you say - as long as it’s Arab children who are doing the dying. [I noted later that some sources dispute that total, saying it may have been “only” 370,000.]

And you see the US justify both the bombing and the sanctions on the grounds that Iraq “defies UN resolutions” while at the same time it pours billions of dollars in economic and military aid into Israel despite the fact that for 30 years Israel has openly defied UN resolutions about Palestinians and the occupied territories. It’s not even so much that the US supports Israel, it’s that the US does it to the detriment, the denigration, the denial, of the Palestinians.

If that was your world, what would the West, what would the US, look like to you? Like a noble friend? Or like a selfish, conceited, arrogant bully which figures it can do as it damn well pleases without cost to itself? And amid all this, what is the only force that has offered you hope, offered you help, offered you a model that has defied the West, offered you self-respect? Islamic fundamentalism. Seen through such eyes, the question “Why do they hate us?” answers itself.

This doesn’t mean excusing the terrorists who brought such ruin and pain to the streets of New York on September 11. We are all responsible for what we do and their acts deserve nothing but condemnation: Understanding does not mean approving.

What it does mean is that our best targets for “attack” in this “extended campaign” are not the actual terrorists (who likely number no more than a few thousand) but the tens of thousands, the millions, among who they recruit and from who they draw their strength. Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism. The best way to minimize terrorism is to ensure that the dispossessed have a genuine stake in the world and don’t see us as grasping bullies - and the best way not to be seen as a grasping bully is not to be one.

These last two aren't complete pieces but excerpts. The first is from a letter to The Nation dated October 16, replying to a column by Eric Alterman in which he condemned some unnamed folks for their reactions to 9/11, saying they should be “rejected for reasons of honor and pragmatism.”

In any political dispute, it is a dreadful tactical mistake - one of which the left has been too often guilty - to let your opponents define the terms of debate. By decrying “the refusal to draw [a] line” between “principled dissent” and an ill-defined “‘Hate America’ left” Alterman effectively acknowledges that questions about our patriotism - however we individually define the word - are proper ones and thus repeats this same blunder. His proposed course of action does not defuse the right’s attack, it legitimizes it.

If “patriotism requires no apologies,” neither should it require conscious demonstration. Instead of trying to prove we are part of “responsible debate” by slicing others out of that range, we should simply assume that we are and act on that basis. I’ve long maintained that the left in this country has been at its strongest and most influential when we have spoken the truth as we understand it without giving a flying damn if anyone was offended or not. Our task must be to present ourselves and what we believe, clearly, strongly, unreservedly, and unashamedly. Time and energy wasted defensively declaring what we don’t believe are just that - and we’ve little enough of either to start with.

Finally, an excerpt from a December 24 letter to Mother Jones. Todd Gitlin, still living off his radical credentials from the '60s, had written a piece blasting what he called the "blame America first" crowd, the single requirement for membership seemingly being not sharing his resurgent sense of flag-waving patriotism.

As deeply as I mourn the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, as much as I admire the dedication of the firefighters and rescue workers, the EMTs and RNs, who rushed to get to the place everyone else rushed to get away from, as hard a wrench as I felt the first time I saw the post-attack profile of New York (with sky where the twin towers should’ve been), I still insist that the question for us as Americans is not, cannot be, what Osama bin Laden could have or should now think or do differently, but what we could have or should now think or do differently. The clock of history did not start on September 11 and refusing to face our own complicity in creating and maintaining the conditions of desperation-driven fanaticism in which such as al-Qaeda can take root and grow (and continue to recruit) is the surest way we as a nation can guarantee a continuation of terrorism directed against us.

I have to admit to finding some bitter amusement in the fact that both Alterman and Gitlin, like a lot of those who supported the Iraq war early on only to feel embarrassed by that later, seem never to mention or even acknowledge those initial reactions. Down the memory hole.

Footnote: For another perspective on patriotism, try this.

So what's all that got to do with us?

As I expect any even occasional visitor has noticed, I didn't write anything about the ostensible "end to combat operations" in Iraq. There was a reason for that, one which many have mentioned but which I think the New York Times, of all places, actually put the best:

The withdrawal ... is a feat of logistics that has been called the biggest movement of matériel since World War II. It is also an exercise in semantics.

Yes. Perfect. Semantics. So it really didn't seem worth a comment. But since I've just posted a couple of things about Iraq, a subject I've neglected of late, I figured I'd say something here.

The fact is, there will still be 50,000 US troops in Iraq - not to mention the 11,000 armed private security contractors employed by the DOD in Iraq - troops which will, in the words of Gen. Ray Odierno, US commander in Iraq,

certainly have the ability to protect themselves, and if necessary, to conduct combat operations if it was required.

All of which means that, as the NYT put it,

[w]hat soldiers today would call combat operations - hunting insurgents, joint raids between Iraqi security forces and United States Special Forces to kill or arrest militants - will be called “stability operations.” ...

“In practical terms, nothing will change,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza, the top American military spokesman in Iraq. “We are already doing stability operations.”

Add to that the fact that

the State Department is planning to more than double its private security guards, up to as many as 7,000,

private guards who will be expected to defend five fortified compounds, operate radar to warn of rocket attacks, search for IEDs, fly reconnaissance drones, and even form "quick reaction forces" supposedly to rescue civilians in trouble, and well, I can't say I'm really impressed with this withdrawal.

And speaking of those State Department contractors,

[t]o move around Iraq without United States troops, the State Department plans to acquire 60 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, called MRAPs, from the Pentagon; expand its inventory of armored cars to 1,320; and create a mini-air fleet by buying three planes to add to its lone aircraft. Its helicopter fleet, which will be piloted by contractors, will grow to 29 choppers from 17.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon will, at least initially, maintain at least 12 large bases in Iraq, bases in the military continues to make investments, a fact which is not at all surprising when you consider that Odierno himself raised the possibility of US troops remaining beyond the supposedly-firm 2011 deadline.

Although he insisted that would only be in a technical support role,

[t]he conventional wisdom among military officers, diplomats and Iraqi officials is that after a new government is formed, talks will begin about a longer-term American troop presence.

Indeed, Hugh Sykes of the BBC's bureau in Baghdad says it's "probable, even" that the deadline will be renegotiated - that is, extended if not dropped altogether.

So no, again, I'm not really impressed with this "end to combat operations."

On the other hand, something that was impressive - hardly new but still impressive - was the ability of US media to ignore the history and romanticize the US role in the whole sordid mess. Where coverage was not marked with lies about the war's origins or with delusional views of the role US troops played - I twice heard Richard Engel, NBC News's chief foreign correspondent, refer to those soldiers as going into Iraq "to topple a dictator" and then "to end a civil war" - it was getting all teary-eyed about how the Iraqis really don't want us to leave. That coverage never seemed to mention what the IWPR reported, which was that reactions to the withdrawal "generally divided along partisan lines," so that the concerns (which are real enough) are not the result of any love for the US or its military forces but are found primarily among Sunnis who fear their future at the hands of the majority Shiites. That is, what those mainstream media reports really do, although they never acknowledge it, is to point up the fractured state of Iraqi society.

Oh, and of course there was the comic relief of the GOPpers, forever trapped in 2003, this time featuring Rep. John Boner (R-Orange), a man always willing to display how tough he can be so long as others bear the cost, whining about how

"Over the past several months, we've often heard about ending the war in Iraq, but not much about winning the war in Iraq."

Well, boys will be boys. And satanically-spawned blood-thirsty cretins will be satanically-spawned blood-thirsty cretins. At least Obama had the grace to not pump his fist, chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!"

Two Footnotes to the Footnote: First is that I know you've heard about the size of the Green Zone and all, but if you really want to get a sense of what it's like, read this. And two, when Engel talked about the US "ending a civil war" I wondered if he ever referred to it as "a civil war" at the time, rather than as something that forever "could happen" or "Iraq might experience."

Interesting footnote to the preceding, Number 3

According to the September 7 English-language edition of Asharq Al-Awsat, an Arabic newspaper published in London, an unnamed Iraqi political official has charged that an official security agency, acting on behalf of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, has been spying on opposition political parties and leaders.

The political official, who is not connected to the government and preferred anonymity for security reasons, told Asharq Al-Awsat via telephone from Baghdad, that “we’ve noticed for a long time that there has been interference with our telephone lines, which prompted us to be suspicious about the presence of surveillance, and interception of our communications, through a specific agency”. ...

He pointed out that “a close ally of al-Maliki’s office, who is sympathetic to our bloc, informed us frankly not to talk via the telephone about our plans, or anything that is critical of the Prime Minister. The fact is that there is a security agency which is hijacking our conversations, and this agency belongs to al-Maliki’s office”. ...

[The official] warned that “these procedures are not limited to wire-tapping alone, but there are extensive security checks on political leaders, conducted by monitoring elements from security services, to follow their movements. Some security forces also have gathering points near the headquarters of leaders, or political parties that are not close to the government”.

The official said that among those being wiretapped were the offices of the Iraqiya coalition and it's leader, Iyad Allawi; leaders of the Islamic Supreme Council, a member of the INA coalition; leaders of the Sadrist Movement, likewise part of INA; and even some leaders and members of Maliki's own State of Law coalition where he has "reservations about their loyalty."

An Iraqi security official who would comment only on condition of anonymity told the paper that he assumed this was to "protect" the officials, "in particular during the recent period which has seen assassinations and attempts to kill some politicians." However, he also admitted that the parties' own security services "were not informed of these procedures" and confirmed that there is a security apparatus directly answerable to Maliki's office.

Footnote to the Footnote: The political official said that Maliki had made the decision to re-open some streets in Baghdad by removing concrete barriers.

However, [Asharq Al-Awsat notes], there has been no implementation of these decisions except with regards to the office of Allawi, where the majority of surrounding concrete barriers have been raised. ... Meanwhile, other streets, close to the headquarters and residences of government leaders and associates of the government, have remained closed.

Put another way, the only political office on a street now open to the public and therefore at greater risk in this "recent period which has seen assassinations and attempts to kill some politicians" is that of Maliki's chief opponent and bitter rival.

Maybe that means nothing. Still....

Interesting footnote to the preceding, Number 2

According to the very-valuable Institute for War & Peace Reporting,

[l]eaders of pro-government Sunni militias have accused Iraq’s national leaders of leaving them in poverty and vulnerable to violence. The warnings come as al-Qaeda employs a mix of intimidation and enticement to lure Sunni fighters to joint the insurgents. ...

Sahwa, also known as the Awakening Councils or Sons of Iraq, is a Sunni Arab tribal movement that from 2006 onwards, played a key role in battling insurgent groups. Many of its members were themselves former insurgents.

The US military used to pay each fighter 300 dollars a month, but Sahwa leaders complain that the handover of military control to the Shia-dominated Iraqi government has led to delays and non-payment. ...

Resentment among Sahwa members is growing, and is directed against both the US and the Iraqi government, which they accuse of failing to deliver on pledges to provide jobs or integrate them into the Iraqi security forces. ...

Al-Qaeda’s mounting influence and new tactics have made the situation more complex. The group has alternated between brutal attacks on Sahwa members and offers of forgiveness and wages if the militiamen switch sides and take up arms against the US and Baghdad.

Those attacks have intensified of late, leaving Sahwa members "feeling they have been hung out to dry," as the article puts it. According to Captain Ali al-Dulami of the Ramadi police,

many believe that Sahwa was just a shoe that the US and the government put on to step out of the quagmire the Sunni provinces were in when they were controlled by al-Qaeda.

While some government officials insist that that all Sahwa fighters are "receiving adequate help," Rifat Mohammad, head of the government’s National Reconciliation Committee in Anbar province, admitted that the pay "doesn't amount to ten per cent of what the US used to pay," that pay often was months late and that some "haven't been paid in six months."

Let's not forget that it was these increasingly-resentful fighters, lured by the prospect of good wages and fed up with the extremism of al-Qaeda (who they came to regard as every bit as much "foreigners" as they did the US troops) who, combined with Moqtada al-Sadr deciding to have his Mahdi militia stand down in favor of political campaigning, were really responsible for the shifting fortunes of the military situation in Iraq - not the "surge," which really didn't do a damn thing.

Interesting footnote to the preceding, Number 1

According to Monday Morning (Lebanon) for the week of September 6, Falah Mustafa, head of foreign relations on the Kurdistan Ministers Council, has rejected a statement from the Iraqi Oil Ministry,

which described as illegal an agreement recently signed between the regional government and a German energy firm.

“We will not wait on orders from a ministry that has no production and is as unsuccessful as the Oil Ministry of Iraq, which wasted billions of dollars without providing any electricity and energy services during all the past years”,

Mustafa said.

Talks on the allocation of Iraq’s natural resources are deadlocked, and Baghdad refuses to recognize contracts which the Kurdish regional government, based in the northern city of Arbil, has signed with foreign oil companies.

A lack of recognition which the regional government appears determined to ignore. It continues to amaze me how much of the mainstream coverage of events in Iraq refers to the Sunni-Shiite divide without even mentioning the Kurds and their always-fragile relations with the central government.

Happy half-anniversary

Updated Updated again Today is September 7. Today, that is, marks six months since the elections in Iraq and there is still no government. And no real expectation that there will be one soon. As if often true, the map tells the tale.

The March 7 elections were inconclusive except in demonstrating the clear and strong ethnic divisions that still exist in Iraq. Iraqiya, a largely secular coalition headed by Iyad Allawi, a Shiite and a former former prime minister, but which draws its main support from the predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq, won 91 seats. That group was closely trailed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-led State of Law grouping, which got 89. The Iraqi National Alliance, or INA, which is also Shiite, won 70 seats and Kurdish parties obtained 57, with most of those, 43, going to the Kurdistan Alliance. If the very fact that you can identify major political groupings in terms of ethnicity and religion doesn't make the point, the map clearly shows just how marked those divisions are, just how ethnically segregated Iraq is.

Note that as a result of the scattered outcome, there is only a single combination of two groupings that would hold a majority of 163 seats in the 325-seat parliament: Allawi's plus Maliki's. Now consider first that the two men are bitter rivals. Then consider that Allawi insists that, having gotten the most seats, he should be allowed to form a government (with himself as prime minister) but Maliki has refused to step aside and appears determined to remain PM. Consider next that each has not only a domestic but also a foreign power base: Maliki is backed by Iran and Allawi by most Arab states. And consider finally that while the two sides have engaged in supposed negotiations about forming a coalition government, that appears to be largely for show and that relations are so hostile that in the last week of August Iraqiya broke off negotiations for a few days, demanding an apology from Maliki for calling it a "Sunnite" bloc in a TV interview.

Add to that bath of testosterone reports of fractures within the other Shiite grouping, the INA, and fractures within those fractures, and you have a six-month impasse

[t]hat has held up the appointment of other key officials [besides prime minister] and the seating of the government. Parliament has only met once, in June, since the election.

You also have a population that increasingly wonders why it bothered voting as conditions deteriorate. Unemployment is estimated at anywhere from 15 to 30 percent. There have been riots and even bloodshed over severe shortages of electricity as people complain they are getting one hour of electricity every five hours, or maybe two hours out of six.

US and Iraqi officials insist production of electricity has improved and blame the shortages on people snapping up power-hungry consumer goods, in effect arguing the problem exists only because things are so much better in other ways. The claims about electricity generation, however, are bogus because they are making a false comparison, comparing today with right after the 2003 invasion - that is, right after Iraq had experienced a decade of crippling economic sanctions following a war in which its infrastructure had been a primary target. It's true that generating capacity in now nearly double what it was in 2003 - but it is still one-third below where it was in 1990, even as demand has increased.

An additional consideration that people often forget is that when the electricity goes down, so do water treatment plants, increasing the risk of spreading disease. That is a real challenge to a health care system which the ICRC described in July as "still struggling to cope." There are only half as many doctors in Iraq now as there were in the 1990s and the shortage of nurses is even worse.

While health-care facilities have been rebuilt in most urban centres, facilities in rural and remote areas remain in dire condition. Facilities already coping with a poor supply of electricity or water frequently also have to deal with unreliable sewage or air-cooling systems and with inadequate solid-waste disposal. Equipment is often old and poorly maintained, and sometimes is not operated correctly. ...

Frequently, minimum standards of nursing, sterilization and waste management are not respected owing to a lack of resources. ... The number of beds in specialized services such as intensive care and dialysis units is insufficient, and shortages of trained nurses and paramedical staff oblige hospitals to rely on relatives to provide the patients with care.

So while it can be said that things have improved since 2003, that is scant comfort. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, human rights consultant Michael Otterman said that

there are currently 4.5 million displaced Iraqis languishing on the outskirts of Iraqi cities and scattered throughout nearby Jordan and Syria. This represents the largest urban refugee crisis in the world.

Thousands more are fleeing to Syria every week, many with scant hope of ever returning home. (Link via Juan Cole.) One of those refugees, a pharmacist named Dr. Entisar Al-Arabi, told Medea Benjamin that

I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college.... I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything - electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein.

Meanwhile, Otterman writes, in Iraq itself

basic services are still in disarray. According to the Pentagon, only 20 percent of the population of Iraq has access to sanitation, 30 percent to health services, 45 percent to potable water, and only 50 percent to more than 12 hours of electricity per day.

And yes, violence is increasing. Assassinations are on the rise, and despite the best PR efforts by the US military, the agency which earlier famously said "we don't do body counts" and openly admitted to making no attempt to track civilian casualties, to minimize the deaths by dismissing the "unofficial" figures coming from Iraqi government agencies in favor of its own "trusted" but unspecified sources, everyone knows it. In fact,

rarely a day goes by without some loss of life, and spectacular attacks such as a nationwide onslaught of bombings and shootings [in late August] that killed 56 people still happen with disturbing regularity.

And while Veep Joe Biteme brags that it's "much safer" in Iraq now, Nuri Hadi, an Iraqi political analyst, properly reminds us that

[t]he recent violence in Iraq, to some extent, looks less devastating mainly because the bloodshed peak during 2006 to 2007 was so hellish and notorious.

Even the New York Times was moved to note that security has "improved"

to levels that many of those who proclaim this war over would consider murderously dangerous in their own countries.

To make it worse, Hadi noted that

we have to admit that a large part of the insurgent groups in Iraq are directly or indirectly linked to political parties participating in the political process,

bringing us right back to the same political impasse, continuing in large part because whether out of desire to advance its own interests or fear of the consequences of another grouping advancing theirs (or both), no faction can see a real advantage in any available compromise.

Today, AFP is reporting that Maliki has gained the upper hand in his drive to keep his position by having won the support of the US, which wants to avoid further delay in establishing a governing coalition and has convinced almost all the Arab states to withdraw their support of Allawi. If that's true, it would be an ironic development because remember, the main foreign backer of Maliki is Iran - so this would put the US and Iran on the same side. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

An event that could be seen as confirmation of that report is that yesterday, a senior official of the Iraqiya coalition said that

Iraqis face two choices: An Iraqi government on the basis of electoral rights or a pro-Iranian government.

That is, we get to form the government or Iran is in charge. Which could easily be read as a last-ditch attempt to head off a de facto US-Iran united front on behalf of Maliki. (Sidebar: The National Council of Resistance of Iran, from where the above quote comes, is a sort of Iranian equivalent of Ahmed Chalabi's notorious Iraqi National Congress except that it wasn't invented by the Rendon Group. Even so, I have no reason to doubt they quoted the official accurately since it serves their purpose.)

However, the only source the AFP cites is an unnamed "senior State of Law official" who makes assertions about what Joe Biteme and Kurdish regional president Massud Barzani told Maliki in private, all of which assertions work to the advantage of Maliki. And at about the same time as the AFP article, Reuters was reporting that

[a] resolution to the impasse appears as distant as ever

as both inter- and intra-party squabbles and splits complicate any attempts at a solution with sufficiently wide acceptance. The article lays out several different scenarios of how things could develop, involving several different personalities, some of which are clearly more likely than others and several of which involve Maliki being dumped by his own coalition so that it can gain the support necessary to form the government.

In the end, few expect the Shi'ite majority to sacrifice their unity. The power Shi'ites gained after the fall of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein is simply too precious.

The only question may be just what form that unity will take and just who will be the unifier. But despite that, there is still another hurdle: Remember that even combined, the two Shiite blocs have 159 seats: still four short of a majority. In Iraq's fractured political (and ethnic) landscape, the idea of a minority government is laughable. So someone is going to have to make up that difference. And whoever that is will have real bargaining power in a future government. A State of Law/INA government could try to gain those seats either by getting the Kurds on board or by picking up the necessary support from one of the minor parties holding the 18 seats the four big blocs do not.

But forming a government without Iraqiya, that is, establishing a ruling coalition created with the support of both the US and Iran which effectively excludes the Sunnis and which oversees a still-broken, still-suffering, still-violent nation is a sure recipe for pushing Iraq back over the abyss of civil war. Forming a government without the Kurds would simply promote a fracturing along different lines. And forming a government without the Shiite blocs, while mathematically possible, is unthinkable - especially as Shiites are the majority of the population and control the most seats. It's another recipe for disaster.

And once again we're back to the same impasse. Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds all must be part of a new government. And there is no clear arrangement that would not involve a hell of a lot of hard swallowing on the part of at least some of them. I have been both right and wrong often enough before to advance predictions with some trepidation, but I can't help but fear that six months may just be the opening act.

Ghassan Attiyah, a commentator and political scientist, lamented "Maybe Iraq is finished." I want to argue that he is clearly too pessimistic, but right now, I can't.

Footnote: What, you ask, would be the US's preferred outcome because even though Iraq is "sovereign" everyone knows damn well it isn't? As the Reuters article suggests, it would be a coalition of Iraqiya, State of Law, and the Kurds, with Maliki as PM and Allawi in some prominent role. Assuming all the Kurdish groupings joined in, the coalition would have 237 seats, a comfortable majority. One reason for this preference is that this arrangement excludes the INA, which includes the supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, who are regarded as "unpredictgable" and who

are fiercely opposed to the U.S. presence, and might demand either a speedier pullout or guarantees U.S. forces are not allowed to remain beyond their end-2011 withdrawal date.

Oh, and one other thing:

Oil majors investing in Iraq's oilfields may also prefer this solution - the Sadrists are the main critics of contracts the companies signed with the outgoing government.

But that can't be important because the war was never about oil. Was it?

Updated with some more about refugees.

Updated again to include Attiyah's observation and as long as I was doing an update, to properly identify Iyad Allawi as being a former prime minister of Iraq.

It's nothing you didn't already know...

...but still, confirmation is always nice to have. According to Fox News, on Wednesday,

President Obama, in one of his most dramatic gestures to business, will propose that companies be allowed to write off 100 percent of their new investment in plant and equipment through 2011, a plan that White House economists say would cut business taxes by nearly $200 billion over two years. ...

[T]the investment incentive would embrace a long-held wish by conservative economists that had never won support from either Republican or Democratic administrations.

So giving business a huge tax break that conservative economists have long wanted. They must be over the moon. But wait!

[T]he response Monday from business lobbyists hinted at uncertain political prospects for the idea: Many said a higher priority for their members remains extension of the Bush income-tax rates for higher earners that are set to expire at the end of 2010.

So all the blather about investing and jobs and how they really really really want to build the economy but oh my! the taxes! was just pure unadulterated bullshit. When it's put to them, what they actually really really really want is to keep the cash flowing into their own wallets, no matter the effect on everyone else.

And yeah, of course you already knew that. But like I said, confirmation is always nice.

Just wondering

This is something I've wondered for a while now and this, found via Notes from Underground, gives me an opening to bring it up:

Madera's Planned Parenthood clinic is closed Thursday[, September 2,] after someone firebombed it with a Molotov cocktail. ...

Burnt blinds on the grass and a boarded up window show the damage caused by a firebombing attack early Thursday morning.

The clinic, in Madera, California, was damaged but will re-open on Tuesday.

Okay. Here's the thing: In every case of an attack on an abortion clinic or Planned Parenthood site or a related physician or nurse or staff member where we know who did it, the guilty person was a white self-proclaimed Christian, almost invariably male, claiming to act in the name of their religion, i.e., in the name of God.

Consider the "Christian" part of that for a second. How do you think the mouth-breathers getting all hot and bothered by the Park51 project's "insensitivity" would react to a proposal to prevent a church or YMCA being built near an abortion clinic on the grounds that it is "insensitive" to the memory of, for example, Dr. George Tiller?

Yeah, that's what I think.