I hate writing this.  For one thing, we are only weeks away from a critically important election — one which, notwithstanding everything I say here, the Democrats must win for the sake of this country.  Besides, attacking congressional Democrats for gutlessness is such an overplayed game: Everyone — or at least every liberal who writes on the web — does it.  And much of the time these attacks are unfair.

But not this time.  This time it’s the very soul of the nation that’s being trashed; and, frankly, fellow Democrats, calculated inaction, which appears to be the strategy of our party’s elected representatives, is morally unacceptable — no, it’s worse than that — it’s unforgivable.

Sometime in the next few days, assuming the tea leaf readers are right, Congress will adopt a statute that will literally rewrite the DNA of our constitutional system of government, granting the president — this president — this miserable excuse for a president — extraordinary and wholly un-American powers: Powers fit for a king.

Henceforth, the president will have the prerogative to seize any foreign national, whether overseas or here at home, based upon nothing more than the bare suspicion that such person has provided some sort of support to a terrorist organization.  No proof is required.  No trial or hearing need ever be provided.  No charges need be filed.  And the prisoner can be held in this fashion year after year until death.

It will be the ultimate legal limbo, with no right whatsoever to petition the courts to challenge the confinement.  The sacred right of habeas corpus, like the Geneva Convention before it, having apparently now become quaint and disposable.

And, oh yeah, while they’re being held in this fashion they can be tortured — so long as we don’t call it torture, mind you.

(more…)

(AP) Iraq is ’cause celebre’ for extremists

A declassified government intelligence report says the war in Iraq has become a “cause celebre” for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that is likely to get worse before it gets better.

In the bleak report, released Tuesday on President Bush’s orders, the nation’s most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al-Qaida, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach.

“If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide,” the document says. “The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.”

Bush ordered a declassified version of the classified report released after several days of criticism sparked by portions that were leaked. Asked about those Tuesday, Bush said critics who believe the Iraq war has worsened terrorism are naive and mistaken.

Sorry bud – but based upon this report it’s not your critics who are the “naïve and mistaken” ones.

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Have you ever wondered why the military brass attack Donald Rumsfeld so ferociously, but have so little bad to say about George W. Bush and the Republican Congress, the people who, after all, actually run the show?

Freud would have understood.

The leaders of our military face a difficult conundrum: The personal politics of the officer corps is overwhelmingly pro-Republican, but as smart people they can’t help but notice that the Republican Party is royally screwing the nation’s armed forces.

As the blog Hughes for America notes (in providing a long series of examples), “Listing every example of Republicans screwing the troops would fill a weighty volume, the type of volume the president would laughingly claim to have read this summer, just after those ‘three Shakespeares.’”

So what’s an avidly pro-Republican military leader who also happens to be as mad as hell about what the Republicans are doing to his army, navy and/or air force supposed to do?

The answer, I’m going to suggest, is found in a psychological concept known as transference: It’s defined as follows: “In psychoanalysis, the process by which emotions associated with one person, such as a parent, unconsciously shift to another, especially to the analyst.”

What we’re seeing in the current anti-Rumsfeld orgy is a massive transference of the military leadership’s rage over GOP mismanagement and neglect of the armed services to the single person of Rumsfeld.  It isn’t Bush and the Republican Congress who are screwing them, they tell themselves, it’s Rumsfeld.  I mean, what’s their other choice — to stop being Republicans and join up with those hippie-loving Democrats?

So month by month, the military’s attacks on Rumsfeld, generally delivered by retired generals (and certainly every single barb directed against him is well deserved, but again, let’s remember who’s in charge) grow more and more shrill.

(AP) x-military officers criticize Rumsfeld

Retired military officers on Monday bluntly accused Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of bungling the war in Iraq, saying U.S. troops were sent to fight without the best equipment and that critical facts were hidden from the public.

“I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq,” retired Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste told a forum conducted by Senate Democrats.

A second military leader, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, assessed Rumsfeld as “incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically.”

“Mr. Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making,” Eaton added at the forum, held six weeks before the Nov. 7 midterm elections, in which the war is a central issue.

Gen. Batiste went further than most in mentioning “others in the administration,” but Rumsfeld remains the central focus of the military’s ire, while Bush remains comparatively untouched. 

Will this anger among the armed forces ever turn more generally against the GOP?  Among the upper echelons of the officer corps, I personally doubt it.  Someone like Wesley Clark comes along only once in a blue moon anymore, with fealty to the Republican Party now almost as deeply ingrained at the top of our armed services as honor, duty and country. 

That this is an unhealthy state of affairs for a democracy goes without saying.  But it’s a reality that’s going to be extremely hard to change.

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(MSNBC) Global warming nears ‘dangerous’ level

Global temperatures are dangerously close to the highest ever estimated to have occurred in the past million years, scientists reported Monday.

In a study that analyzed temperatures around the globe, researchers found that Earth has been warming rapidly, nearly 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) in the last 30 years.

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This thing is getting away from us.  We’re fiddle-farting around, studying this, explaining away that.  Meanwhile, the planet is sliding steadily into the void. 

Has there ever been a more irresponsible and self-indulgent generation than ours?  

To: George W. Bush
From: God
Re: Torture

Dear George:

Please be advised that in light of your continued support of the use of torture during prisoner interrogations, I am officially no longer on your side.  In furtherance of this declaration, I have retroactively corrected the defect in Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballots, making Al Gore the winner of the 2000 election.

Please change the White House stationery accordingly.

Sincerely,

The Almighty

P.S.  I wasn’t the one who gave you the bum steer on Iraq.  It was that other guy, dumb-ass.

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Saddam Hussein’s lawyers are threatening another boycott.  I doubt it will change anything, but from the standpoint of lawyers representing a client, they’re doing the right thing.

(AP) Saddam’s Defense Team to Boycott Trial

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Saddam Hussein’s defense team will boycott his genocide trial indefinitely, his chief lawyer said Sunday, accusing the judges of violating Iraqi law.

The move was unlikely to halt Saddam’s second trial, just as a similar walkout had no effect on his first, since the chief judge said he would appoint replacements after the lawyers stormed out of court last week. Proceedings resume Monday.

Still, the boycott could raise further questions about the court, which already was under fire over the replacement of the first chief judge after some Iraqis accused him of allegedly favoring the defense.

Saddam’s head lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, called the decision to replace Judge Abdullah al-Amiri a ”flagrant violation of the law” because it was ”dictated by the government and not the court.”

Whatever one thinks of the Judge’s off-the-cuff comment that he didn’t believe Hussein was a dictator, for the government to replace the judge in the middle of a trial because he says something that worries the prosecution is about as inconsistent with the fair administration of justice as anything could be.  And it’s the job of Hussein’s lawyers to raise hell about it.

Some day soon the guilty verdicts will come in and Hussein will be sentenced to death.  Various media commentators will then solemnly pronounce, no doubt, that Hussein was given something that none of his victims ever received, a fair trial.

Well, it was a trial anyway.

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We already had a pretty good idea that the madness in Iraq has been hurting the fight against terrorism: But now our own intelligence community has confirmed it — in spades.  Which really leaves only one question on this subject still on the table: How will Bush & Co. try to lie their way out of this one? 

(NY Times) Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

I assume that the official Bush response will be to ignore the substance of the issue and attack the “leaks” instead.  These guys really do hate freedom, don’t they?  But then given that freedom is ultimately about governmental accountability to the people (among other things, of course), why wouldn’t they hate it?