Feds Wage Pre-Emptive War Against Political Dissent In Minnesota

To celebrate our freedom and the Republican National Convention, SWAT teams in Minnesota have attacked peaceful, law-abiding people who might or might not have been planning to exercise some of their First Amendment rights. Instead, they got a dose of the New American Century, with militarized police invading their homes, holding them at gunpoint, and seizing -- without a warrant -- their computers, notebooks, and other personal effects.

This extremism in defense of our liberty comes on the heels of last week's news about similar things happening in Colorado in celebration of our freedom and the Democratic National Convention. All cold patriots must applaud such even-handedness in defense of our liberty, mustn't they?

Glenn Greenwald has more and more and Chris Floyd has more too including more from Arthur Silber, all of which is all well worth reading, in my cold opinion.

On second thought, and after reading through those links again (especially Chris and Arthur), perhaps I was mistaken. It could be that the Feds aren't celebrating our freedom at all, only defending a corrupt system which feeds them and pays their mortgages.

And here we come to one of the bedrock dichotomies (read: lies) of modern American politics: the politicians and pundits tell us that our freedom is dependent on political stability, but in fact political stability (or at least the kind they care about) can only be maintained at the expense of freedom -- your freedom.

It's the old "we had to destroy it in order to save it" argument again, only this time we're not talking about a hamlet half a world away, but about your future, and the future of your children.

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Does Iran Threaten The U.S.A.?

There's an interesting discussion going on at the TPMCafe Book Club where the book of the week is Glenn Greenwald's "A Tragic Legacy" and the guest authors include Chris Floyd. I haven't read "A Tragic Legacy" but I have read a lot of Chris Floyd and I wouldn't want you to miss this discussion. Here are a few quotes and links to get you started:

Glenn Greenwald: Is Iran a threat to the U.S.?

The cartoonish depiction of Iran embraced by Bush and his supporters is nothing more than pure fiction, completely removed from reality. The view of the Iranian government as irrational, intractable, single-minded evil-doers bent on threatening the United States and wreaking world destruction stands in stark contrast to their actions over the last several years.

It is simply beyond dispute that Iran’s behavior since the 9/11 attacks empirically disproves the President’s assertions about what motivates them and how they behave. Indeed, the gap between reality and the President’s rhetoric concerning Iran is almost impossible to overstate.

Chris Floyd: Disaster Bound in the Land of Nod

The very best outcome of a war with Iran – the most benign result possible to imagine – will be the deaths of thousands of innocent people and a floodtide of terror and carnage set loose on a world in overwhelming economic crisis. And that's the best outcome. The worst is the slaughter of millions of innocent people from the nuclear attacks that we know George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have advocated in their war planning: perhaps tens of millions dead, hundreds of millions poisoned, whole nations brought to ruin and a planet mortally sickened. Between these two poles of ungodly mass slaughter and unfathomable genocide lie the only possible realistic outcomes of a war with Iran. And we stand on the very brink.

Seth Gitell: A Rising Threat

Glenn’s put a lot on the table. But he fails to address a central problem: what to do if and when Iran develops nuclear weapons? At the point Iran achieves an ability to produce a nuclear weapon, a reality coming closer every day according to the International Agency for Atomic Energy, the regional calculus of the entire region changes. Nations, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, immediately become subject to an immediate and, in the case of Israel, existential threat. Even if Iran refrains from an immediate, direct attack, it gains an ability to hold the whole region hostage as it did American hostages twenty-eight years ago.

Chris Floyd: Mixed Motives: A Conflation of Concerns on Iraq

Seth Gitell asks: What to do if and when Iran develops a nuclear weapon? Why, I imagine the United States will do what it has done with North Korea: finally sit down and negotiate. Or perhaps, as with India -- which illicitly created a bristling nuclear arsenal that destabilized a volatile region of the world -- we'll just shrug our shoulders and strike juicy deals that "legitimize" their illegal nuke program. Or maybe we'll follow the Bush example with Pakistan -- which not only built its own illicit nuclear arsenal but peddled the technology to "rogue states" around the world -- and give the Iranians billions of dollars in arms and aid. Or we could even adopt the approach used with Israel -- yet another nation with an illicit nuclear arsenal outside all international supervision -- and award Iran with unlimited military and economic largess and unstinting support for its treatment of certain religious and ethnic minorities within its borders.

As you can see, our president has given us a wide range of policy options to choose from when dealing with nations who develop illicit WMD arsenals. (He has also given us -- and the Iranians -- an instructive example of what happens to nations which, like Iraq, do not have WMD programs: they get it in the neck.)

You can click the links to read the full posts, each of which has a comments thread; they're very interesting too. Or just start here.

A Tragic Lunacy: Avoiding The Obvious Fact Leaves A Hole No Words Can Fill

I sat on my hands when Chris Floyd replied to a post by Paul Curtis regarding an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's soon-to-be-published book, "A Tragic Legacy".

I was thinking "If this were hockey, Chris would be gone!" It is, after all, the third man jumping into a fight who opens up the potential for a brawl.

But this wasn't really a fight at all, and as I continued to sit on my hands while more words flew, it dawned on me that there had never been any danger of a fight. And that's how I knew it wasn't hockey, by the way. Chris came to see it as something akin to rowing; in his view, we're all pulling together, even if we each see the course a bit differently. And I was still content to watch.

But that only lasted so long, and all of a sudden I can't restrain myself; now in addition to demanding a spot in the boat I also insist on standing, as the live-action photo at the top of my sidebar attests. You may salute now and later. But please don't drop your oars in the water while doing so...

The full title of Glenn Greenwald's book is "A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency". Much of the discussion which I intend to quote here swirls around the purported physical basis of that mentality -- what Greenwald calls a Manichean world-view.

I'm such a political know-it-all that I actually had to look it up: I learned that Manicheanism was an ancient Persian religion and then of course it was obvious: clearly 'twas an old Middle Eastern religion that "destroyed" the Bush presidency! The Iranians were behind it -- of course. Glenn nails it again!

But unfortunately it's not that simple. Glenn Greenwald is not attempting to pin all the horrors of the past six years on the ancient Persians after all. He's merely using the name of their religion to evoke its dualism, its view of the world as divided into two fundamental (and fundamentally opposed) concepts (such as Good and Evil) as well as, of course, the physical, spiritual and other manifestations of same.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness -- who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a crusade against Evil -- is that the moral imperative driving the mission will justify any and all means used to achieve it. Those who have become convinced that they are waging an epic and all-consuming existential war against Evil cannot, by the very premises of their belief system, accept any limitations -- moral, pragmatic, or otherwise -- on the methods adopted to triumph in this battle.

Efforts to impose limits on waging war against Evil will themselves be seen as impediments to Good, if not as an attempt to aid and abet Evil. In a Manichean worldview, there is no imperative that can compete with the mission of defeating Evil. The primacy of that mandate is unchallengeable. Hence, there are no valid reasons for declaring off-limits any weapons that can be deployed in service of the war against Evil.

He has much more to say about this, including:

Equally operative in the Manichean worldview is the principle that those who are warriors for a universal Good cannot recognize that the particular means they employ in service of their mission may be immoral or even misguided. The very fact that the instruments they embrace are employed in service of their Manichean mission renders any such objections incoherent. How can an act undertaken in order to strengthen the side of Good, and to weaken the forces of Evil, ever be anything other than Good in itself? Thus, any act undertaken by a warrior of Good in service of the war against Evil is inherently moral for that reason alone.

It is from these premises that the most amoral or even most reprehensible outcomes can be -- and often are -- produced by political movements and political leaders grounded in universal moral certainties. Intoxicated by his own righteousness and therefore immune from doubt, the Manichean warrior becomes capable of acts of moral monstrousness that would be unthinkable in the absence of such unquestionable moral conviction. One who believes himself to be leading a supreme war against Evil on behalf of Good will be incapable of understanding any claims that he himself is acting immorally.

Later Greenwald says:

The president has been able to engage in this conduct because the country collectively accepted the dualistic framework with which he views the world, whereby the goal of "protecting" ourselves from the "forces of Evil" outweighs every other consideration and justifies every means employed in service of this battle. When President Bush acts in the name of fighting The Terrorists, with the goal of battling Evil, what he does is by definition justifiable and Good because he is doing it.

This absolutist Manichean mind-set venerates physical safety above all else. When President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law in October 2006, he dismissed objections to its Draconian and tyrannical provisions with one very simple and straightforward argument (emphasis added):

Over the past few months the debate over this bill has been heated, and the questions raised can seem complex. Yet, with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat? Every member of Congress who voted for this bill has helped our nation rise to the task that history has given us.

That paragraph summarizes the Bush movement. Because the threat posed by The Evil Terrorists is so grave, maximizing protections against it is the paramount, overriding goal. No other value competes with that objective, nor can any other value limit our efforts to protect ourselves against The Terrorists.

Glenn Greenwald may say "Manichean" in other parts of his book -- and if so he may indeed blame the "destruction" of the Bush presidency on ancient Persians and/or current-day Iranians. I don't know; I certainly hope he doesn't and I assume we'll all find out shortly.

In the interests of showing due diligence if nothing else, I have quoted all the occurrences of "Manichean" in the excerpt published by Salon. I've chosen these excerpts not only because they contained the word I had to look up, but also -- more importantly -- because they embody Greenwald's argument very well -- if (and in my mind that's a big if) the Salon excerpt is representative of the entire tome.

From the ensuing multi-way conversation, I gather that in some way it isn't; and for some reason it strikes me as strange (to say the least) that we're off on this particular tangent. And yet here we are: Glenn Greenwald and Paul Curtis and Chris Floyd and What am I even doing on this list? Yet I insist on standing up in the middle of the boat, which we are supposedly all rowing along together.

Paul Curtis is saying:

Greenwald's critique is tremendously important. Right-wing Manicheanism has taken over the national debate on security matters, operating as a literally totalitarian thought system, in that it subsumes all discourse into its own unanswerable internal logic. We've become familiar with the notion of framing in political discourse: well, this is the meta-frame. It quashes every attempt by liberals and moderates to raise rational points and does tremendous damage to constitutional liberties, the national interest, and global well-being.

It's a sort of cousin to the most disastrous forms of secular utopianism history has seen, echoing the logic that drove the Khmer Rouge and the Cultural Revolution, and if saying this means I've blown completely by Godwin's Law, so be it -- we're talking about the governing philosophy of the world's sole superpower, and the stakes really are that high. Moreover, as Greenwald points out, it's un-American:

But our entire system of government, from its inception, has been based upon a very different calculus -- that is, that many things matter besides merely protecting ourselves against threats, and consequently, we are willing to accept risks, even potentially fatal ones, in order to secure those other values. From its founding, America has rejected the worldview of prioritizing physical safety above all else, as such a mentality leads to an impoverished and empty civic life. The premise of America is and always has been that imposing limitations on government power is necessary to secure liberty and avoid tyranny even if it means accepting an increased risk of death as a result. That is the foundational American value.

Because it is a totalitarian framework of logic, the only way to defeat it is to attack it at its foundations, to root out its very premise, as Greenwald is doing. Conservatives have often gained the advantage in American public discourse because they build and re-enforce these meta-frames with great care; for liberals to bring reason back to the debate we'll need to do a considerable amount of foundational work of our own. This means, in the present case, repeatedly making the argument that Manicheanism is foolish and destructive, that we cannot afford to make policy according to a worldview defined by a simpleminded division of Good v. Evil.

When we make this case, we'll be accused of "moral relativism," which argument is the meta-frame's self-defense mechanism. But the point, of course, is that moral relativism is actually the product of the Manichean worldview, because it permits its adherents to justify any action -- no matter how depraved -- as taken in the service of "Good."

We've already seen that the current crop of Republican presidential contenders are holding tighter than ever to the Manichean frame, desperate as they are to win support from the right on war and terror, since there is nothing else on which the GOP can run. They're betting that liberals will be unable to destroy that meta-frame. Greenwald has the right idea: let's get started on destroying it. Now.

Chris Floyd has added some historical context to the discussion, an excerpt from which follows:

when has a strict Manicheanism not "taken over the national debate on security matters"? The "simpleminded division of Good v. Evil" reigned in all-triumphant glory throughout the decades of the Cold War, as anyone who was there for all or most of it can readily attest. Anything that could remotely be associated with "communism" (however plausibly or implausibly) was irredeemably evil; anyone who opposed communism -- by whatever draconian or murderous methods -- was on the side of the "good." This "meta-frame" also struck a deep chord in vast swathes of the public, which is why it was so effective in militarizing our republic and its economy over the course of half a century -- a process that James Carroll's remarkable Pentagon history, House of War, chronicles so well.

If anything, the Cold War "division of Good v. Evil" was far more "simpleminded" than what we see today. Imagine a Cold War president stating in public that Communism was a worthy doctrine, dedicated to human betterment, but had unfortunately been hijacked by extremists and rogue states, etc. Yet Bush has consistently made such remarks about Islam (for public consumption, at least). And of course, many of his allies in his "Terror War" are Muslims: the Saudis, the Pakistanis, the Egyptians, the Kurds, the militant Shiite factions he has empowered in Iraq, the warlords and drug kings and woman-hating clerics he has empowered in Afghanistan, etc. While in no way defending Bush's policies, his alliances or his murderous Terror War, there is simply no way that this murky, chaotic, shifting miasma can be compared, ideologically, to the rigid fault lines of the Cold War. (I'm speaking here of those who are actually in power, making policy, not the innumerable bootlickers, sycophants, extremists, cranks and idiots on the ideological right, who are cynically used -- and occasionally dropped -- by the power-players as needed.)

The point here is not that Greenwald or Curtis are wrong in asserting that "Right-wing Manicheanism has taken over the national debate on security matters." Of course it has. They are entirely right about this, and Greenwald especially has done great work in delineating the deeply sinister effects and implications of the Bush gang's thuggish rule. But the fact is, such Manicheanism has been long been operative in American history.

Since those words were written, Paul and Chris have had an interesting exchange of ideas full of flickering glimpses of our history through the Cold War and now into the War on Terror, well-documented at Empire Burlesque and worthy of a read.

I don't imagine I'll have more than one chance -- or one urge -- to stand up in the middle of such a distinguished boat, so I'll cut straight to the core of my argument:

I keep reading all these fine writers -- good thinkers, too -- and I can't imagine why nobody has asked the question that's been bouncing around inside my frozen little brain since I first saw the title of Glenn Greenwald's book:

How a What Destroyed the Come-Again???

The obvious implication in Glenn Greenwald's title is that there was originally something of value in Bush and his administration which was capable of being destroyed -- some potential treasure that was lost when this particular president was -- what? suddenly? inevitably? understandably? post-9/11? infected with a dangerously simplistic world view of Good vs Evil, Us vs The Terrorists...

I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it. In my opinion, to subscribe to such a view -- to even consider allowing a phrase such as "How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency" on the front cover of one's book -- displays either an acute case of Head-In-Sand Disease or a degree of moral corruption I do not care to contemplate.

Let us instead contemplate a question that may indeed be pivotal:

What If It's All A Lie?

What if the whole thing -- the entire national swill -- 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the entire GWOT -- is a deliberate, pre-fabricated, mass-murdering, war-mongering lie?

What if the government -- the Bush administration -- the Cheney-Rove-Bush axis-of-evil-propaganda machine -- the authors of the "Manichean" talking points which dominate our national swill ... What if they know, as surely as you and I do, but in much more detail, that 9/11 was an inside job?

They do know that, you know! How could they not know?

Otherwise, why did they refuse to testify under oath? Why did Bush refuse to testify without Cheney? Who did they think they were fooling, appointing Henry Freaking Kissinger to chair the sham "investigation"?

For that matter, how could they get the PATRIOT Act written and presented to Congress so soon after 9/11, if 9/11 was so unexpected? Why were they so ready to bomb and invade Afghanistan that they could initiate offensive operations in-country less than a month later? Why were the bin Laden family flown out of the country so fast, and who chartered the plane they flew on? And is the FBI's ObL "WANTED" poster really "out-of-date", or does it merely reflect a reality that relatively few Americans -- even among those who position themselves as implacable foes of the current administration -- are willing to examine, lest the truths they discover should become too obvious to ignore any longer, while their implications remain too painful to accept?

What if? Guess what!

What if the Manichean world-view of Good vs Evil upon which rests the entire foreign and domestic policy agenda of the Bush administration -- what if that world-view was in fact chosen for bureaucratic reasons?

What if, like the "weapons of mass destruction" that didn't exist in Iraq, the "terrorist organizations of global reach" against whom we are supposedly fighting have no basis in reality independent of all the usual suspects, and merely represent the most plausible lie that happens to be available?

What if this lie is not only the most plausible lie available, but also the most powerful? What if it was chosen -- and therefore made available -- for the very reason of its power? For who could dare to stand -- even against creeping tyranny, even against a plan to unleash death and destruction on the rest of the world -- knowing he will be accused of aiding the terrorists who "want to kill us all"?

The power of the lie is such that whoever owns it can have anything else he wants.

What if this is why it was chosen?

It's not as if it doesn't matter. It's not as if anyone could even semi-plausibly pretend it doesn't matter. Every single issue under debate on the national scene -- or not! -- now and back in time nearly six years -- has been touched by the War on Terror. We don't have any money for anything else because of the War on Terror. We have to give up some of our civil liberties because of the War on Terror. We have to do anything possible to keep our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan -- against the will of the vast majority of the electorate -- because of the War on Terror. The president is commander-in-chief until he says otherwise because of the War on Terror.

We have devoted all the resources of our society to a war against "terrorist organizations of global reach" even though it is more true than ever before that no terrorist organization of global reach can possibly exist -- much less operate -- without the knowledge and consent -- not to say the active cooperation -- of the CIA and the NSA and all their friends in high places, like MI6 and ISI.

And still we have supposedly meaningful debates on such topics as whether the president should be able to detain indefinitely those whom he designates "enemy combatants", "unlawful" or otherwise.

Knowing what we do know about the illegitimacy of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory, how can we possibly sit and debate such a thing? Prior to the Bush administration, such a debate would have been unthinkable.

Reasonable people would have said, "the President cannot possibly make such a designation; besides, there's no such thing as "an unlawful combatant"! And we don't hold people indefinitely without trial or hearing, no matter what they're called! This is America, remember?"

But instead we now live in what appears to be almost like a dictatorship except that the rules are a little bit fuzzy. So now it's a matter of (a) If you don't think the president should be able to detain indefinitely those whom he designates "enemy combatants" then you must be a terrorist, or at the very least a terrorist sympathizer, and assuming that maybe you're not one or the other but merely terminally un-serious if not mentally ill, (b) If not indefinitely, then how long should the president be able to detain those whom he designates "enemy combatants"?

To his credit, Glenn Greenwald usually lands on the right side in such debates; he makes his points very clearly and he documents them very well. But what exactly is he saying? And what impression is he conveying by debating these issues from inside them, rather than stepping back -- out of the meta-frame and into full-bore reality -- and calling them what they are: bogus?

It seems to me that the daily swill which passes for national discourse often boils down to this question:

"Is the GWOT the correct response to 9/11, and if not, what kind of WOT would be the correct response to Islamofascist terrorism?"

And while Glenn Greenwald does a fine job arguing that the GWOT is not the correct response, he never stops and says:

Hey! Wait a minute!!

The correct response would be to investigate 9/11!!

We always act as if 9/11 were a legitimate event and the only possible questions now involve the correct response to that "act of war", that awesome manifestation of unprovoked Evil. But what if there was nothing legitimate about 9/11? What if it was never properly investigated? What if the official story doesn't even make any sense? How can we even speak of waging war in response -- let alone two of them? Let alone actually doing it!

As a matter of strict semantics, Islamofascism is a contradiction in terms. As a matter of political reality, Christofascism appears to be something of a threat. And yet we're devoting all we've got -- all we are -- to a fight against a made-up word that appears to be mostly meaningless! What is wrong with this picture?

Many supposedly dissident authors who wish to be considered "serious" persist in ignoring -- or dismissing -- or banning! -- such questions, declaring that there's no evidence to support the lunatic fringe notion of 9/11 as anything other than whatever the government said it was according to its most recent report, which may very well be obliterated by its next one, in the same way that the previous one was.

But that's all ok with them, and they don't talk about the PNAC, and they don't talk about how the "path of action" taken by the Bush administration prior to 9/11 shows clearly that it was preparing for war -- endless, limitless, unrestrained war against the rest of the world -- as well as unprecedented secrecy and an attempt to concentrate all power in the Oval Office. They may admit that these things are happening, and they may wail bitterly against them, but do they ever suggest that these abuses of power were not simply a reaction to 9/11 -- but the plan all along? They don't talk about the abundant and very clear evidence that our electoral system is an obvious fraud. They don't talk about false-flag terror in any meaningful way. And they certainly don't talk about 9/11.

It's not hard to see why. There are rafts of reasons why one might choose such a course; to be as charitable as possible I'll single out those who believe there's been enough malpractice in the Bush regime that there's no need to speak of deliberate malfeasance -- and that to appeal to a much more narrowly-held view -- to admit in public what everybody seems to recognize in private: that the Bush regime has never even meant well -- would be bad tactics.

In my view, it is not, nor can it ever be, bad tactics to write the truth -- regardless of how obvious it is, regardless of how appalling it is, regardless of the number of people who already believe it. Only dead fish move with the current.

But it is bad tactics to ignore the truth, if for no other reason than this: the most honest among your potential readers -- i.e. the great unwashed, who are not yet cleansed of their "lunatic fringe" ideas and scented with the poison of "political truth" -- will spot your omission instantly and avoid your work like leprosy.

And when you inscribe your massive tome with an enormous lie on the cover so that the great unwashed can see from a distance -- without even reading about the Manicheans -- that you're dismissing, or deliberately hiding, or otherwise lying to yourself about the single most significant geopolitical event of our collective lifetimes, well then I'm sorry, Charlie, but the great unwashed will choose to remain at a distance.

No matter how well-inscribed the rest of your tome may be, every now and then one of the cold and filthy ones will stand up in the middle of the boat and call you a shameless opportunist, for ignoring or hiding the most basic truths of your generation, in order to better insinuate yourself into the mainstream of American swill.

You'll have other critics, of course. The more generous among them may assume that for whatever unfathomable reason you have chosen to be utterly oblivious to the fact that our lives have all been changed -- significantly and for the worst -- by the single most deadly sleight of hand in the history of the world.

But none will dispute that the changes that followed this most appalling magic trick -- malignant and repulsive and everywhere, as so thoroughly and cogently documented by Greenwald himself -- are rapidly becoming permanent, and will certainly be permanent unless people such as Glenn Greenwald start acknowledging what the rest of us -- all us so-called "B bloggers" who are busting our asses every day to tell the truth to a few hundred people at a time, lest it die out entirely -- already know.

And when the lunatic fringe truth-seekers -- those people who cannot bring themselves to hide or ignore or dismiss the shameful truth -- when these miserable souls, tormented by their inability to forget about simple little things like appearance and reality and unable to shake their personal observations about how things are and how they got that way -- when one of those people stands up in your boat and looks you in the eye and says "How could you... ? How could you expect any of us to take you seriously, when you refused to acknowledge the most basic fact of all?"

What will you have to say then? What else could anyone possibly say, but "Oh yeah? Well how fast is your hit counter spinning?"

The sad fact remains that there are quite a number of supposedly dissident websites where 9/11 and false-flag terror in general are never discussed, where impeachment is never on the table and election fraud is never among the topics of the day, where everything that matters comes down to Democrats against Republicans, and where the webmaster sees more visitors before breakfast on a slow day than I have seen ever since I started blogging. Make of that what you will.

For me, it says that the truth -- the obvious, transparent, in-your-face-every-day truth -- a truth which I barely even approach here, even on my best days -- is far too awful for the vast majority to bear. So they go back to discussing just how long the president should be able to hold those whom he labels "enemy combatants". Two years? Three years? Four? What do you think?

As I was saying, not having read Glenn Greenwald's novel, I cannot begin to critique it. Judging the book by its title, and the excerpt provided by Saloon, may be less than fair.

Still it would not be possible to draw such an excerpt -- let alone such a title -- from any book which I personally would consider reading -- much less buying.

It pains me to see that one of the "leading lights" of the blogosphere can be so dim. It pains me even more to say so.

It pains me to see that none of the critics I've been reading and quoting has ventured anywhere near the point that seems to me central, and vital, and utterly bloody obvious -- at least not so far -- not in this conversation. And it pains me even more to say that.

I don't mean to demean the work of any other blogger; if I didn't respect them, I wouldn't even read them, much less write about them. Nor do I mean to insist that every conversation must revolve around 9/11. Certainly Chris Floyd has had plenty to say about it, although not in this conversation.

And I will freely admit that 9/11 is not the be-all and end-all of 21st century American politics. But surely no analysis of the Bush administration can afford to ignore it -- and the possibility that -- like everything else -- they are lying to us about who was behind those attacks.

And I always get uncomfortable standing up in a boat, but I believe that one cannot advance the cause of truth unless one is willing to stand up and speak it -- even in the middle of an unsteady boat, and especially when the light is dim. As Thomas Paine so aptly wrote:

"He who stands [up] now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

There's No Left Left!

It's funny how one thing can lead to another, and how sometimes you don't get what you need -- until you need it!

In the comment thread of yesterday's post about Robert Kagan, we sort of accidentally got talking about Glenn Greenwald, and that started me thinking (again) about Left and Right (and a few other things too), and I finally found a way to express a few thoughts which have been in the back of my mind for a long, long time, hoping for an opportunity to get out. In light of this long-awaited breakthrough, I hope you'll forgive me if I recycle some of what I wrote yesterday.

~~~

I think we make a big mistake when we try to model politics as a one-dimensional continuum. A more realistic model might be n-dimensional, where n is the number of issues on the table.

But that still wouldn't account for the fact that there are usually more than two ways to lay out the options for each issue. In other words, even single-issue politics doesn't usually fit on a one-dimensional continuum.

Start dealing with multiple issues simultaneously and it gets messy fast, even with a relatively small group of people. Expand it to include hundreds of millions of people and the paradigm doesn't fit in the slightest.

Therefore, classifying everything in terms of Left and Right doesn't add clarity to the discussion -- in fact, by trying to collapse the infinite variety of humanity into a single dimension, it destroys clarity. But that's how most people "understand" politics.

In the USA, for reasons which go way back in the national history, the entire Left-Right continnum has been dragged so far to the Right that now there's no Left left.

The so-called "centrist" Democrats are, by any reasonable standard, very far-Right, and most of the so-called "liberal" Democrats are at best moderately-Right.

What used to be called the Center, still passes for Center in most European countries, and would be considered slightly Right of Center in most of Latin America, is not even part of the continuum anymore.

But hardly anybody talks about this. And when they do, they catch a lot of flak. So apparently we weren't supposed to notice.

~~~

Stranglely (or maybe not!), while I was struggling to find those words, Ohmy News of Korea was publishing an opinion piece in which Lee Roberts absolutely nails it:

The United States, which proclaims itself a democracy, is the only developed country on the planet with a political spectrum that lies entirely right of center. There is no left wing, or even centrist position in the political public domain. Even the first-ever "socialist" Senator, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is no more than a moderate liberal when his political skin is scratched. The bulk of the Democratic Party is equivalent to the Christian Democrat movement in European terms, and would find themselves on the right wing of the Tory party in the United Kingdom (or the right wing of Blair's New Labor, which now dominates the right axis of Britain's political spectrum). Bill Clinton would not have nurtured a friendship with a genuine representative of labor, and found in Blair a kindred spirit, someone who transferred his allegiance without a blink to Bush. He was able to do so because there are very few fundamental disagreements between America's two parties.

Neither party is willing to cut back on corporate excesses; neither party will confront the insurance industry and give America a national health system; neither party disagrees with the aims of hegemony in the Middle East; both oppose progressive movements in Latin America and elsewhere; both believe deeply in American empire and domination; both are dedicated to the continued growth in America's nuclear arsenal. The Democrats are no more outraged [than the Republicans] by the slaughter of more than half a million innocent civilians in Iraq, or the thousands in Lebanon. Both parties are totally committed to the aims and goals of Israel and opposed to any concessions to the Palestinians. As I write, it has been announced that Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Harry Reid, will make a bipartisan display of unity in support of Israel, by appearing alongside Dick Cheney at the March meeting of the ultra-reactionary American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC has dominated American foreign policy for decades, strengthened since 2000 by the Project for a New American Century, the Bush shadow cabinet, which drew up the blueprints for American empire and the conquest of Iraq and Iran.

None of the Democratic candidates for the presidency, with one exception, is committed to any fundamental change. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have only a whisper of difference between them and both are dedicated to the maintenance of corporate America. The exception is Dennis Kucinich, who having no other serious political party with which to affiliate continues with a tiny band of centrists, to push the Democrats into genuine opposition, to no avail.

There's a lot more, and it's very good. And Lee Roberts catches some flak, too, in the comments thread, mostly (ok -- all!) from people who (I have to say it) seem so out of touch with reality that they cannot even imagine that what they've just read might possibly be true.

It is indeed a very sad situation. But it is not without its opportunities.

In "Debating a Neocon", Stan Goff, describing his debate (shortly after the 2004 "election") with Patrick Clawson, wrote:

In every case, I agreed with him that Democrats wanted to attack Iraq, too, and that they had attacked it as often as possible throughout the eight-year administration of Bill Clinton­ who by the way had killed more Iraqis than George W. Bush. I also pointed out that Democrats, not Republicans, were the most vocal in calling for a return of military conscription, and that Kerry not only said he wouldn't withdraw from Iraq, but that he would expand the troop numbers making him the Lyndon Baines Johnson of Southwest Asia. Not only that but any smart Democrat right now would be whooping for joy that they won't get the next four years [2004-2008] hung around their necks, because the forces in motion­ including maybe stagflation and the deepening defeat in Iraq are bigger than either party of the rich.
...

One might think the audience was put off by all this; that the conservatives were offended when I called George W. Bush "Dick Cheney's meat puppet," or worse, that those who had desperately voted Kerry would be offended by my speaking the unspeakable about him being another bourgeois war-candidate.

Not so. People on both sides were anxious to talk after the debate, asking for references and links to some of the information, seeming suddenly stimulated to ask new questions in the face of information to which many had obviously never been exposed. They weren't angry. They seemed almost relieved, like they'd been locked in and suddenly found a key.

I could be wrong -- I've been wrong once before! -- but I think the same is true today, only more so.

We have all sorts of keys, but they won't do us much good unless we share them.

Good "News": The "Surge" Is "Succeeding"!!

[updated below, twice]

The president's brilliant new strategem is working wonders in Iraq, and it's horribly unfortunate that the anti-American leftist press, led by the terrorist-sympathizers at the Washington Post, are not intellectually honest enough to say so on their front page.

But fortunately the WaPo has op/ed pages, where neutral observers such as Robert Kagan can fill us in on all the wonderful progress being made between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

So finally we can read all the details being suppressed by the president's mortal enemies at the New York Times, which wants America to lose in Iraq; the details the anti-war and pro-terrorist Congressional Democrats won't tell you; the very important facts you'll never see from radical liberal television news outlets such as CNN and FOX.

Here's the good news: The surge is succeeding! Iraq is more peaceful now! The American soldiers are winning the hearts and minds of the families whose doors they break down, earning the love and respect of the parents whose daughters they rape and murder, and deserving the eternal gratitude of a nation whose vast oil reserves will soon be controlled by the big oil companies! How could we not be celebrating?

Robert Kagan draws most of his material from Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, the thoroughly discredited bloggers propagandists who bring us the good news from Iraq lie through their teeth at Iraq The Model. Kagan calls the Fadhil brothers "widely respected for their straight talk"; apparently he doesn't realize that their con game was exposed a long time ago.

It's surprising that Robert Kagan doesn't know this, especially since he is a co-founder of the neoconservative "think tank" Project for a New American Century and the Fadhil brothers at ITM are there only to do the neocons' bidding.

It's also surprising that the Washington Post introduces Robert Kagan as "a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund", without mentioning his relationship to the PNAC or his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations.

Oh well. The anti-American leftist press regularly omits details of this sort, so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised at all.

On the other hand, God bless the terrorist-sympathizers at the Washington Post for finally bringing us some good "news".

The "surge" is "succeeding".

[UPDATE]

Baghdad reeling from bomb attacks

Baghdad streets were once more filled with mourners on Monday after deadly bombings killed dozens of people and exposed the limits of a month-old security sweep through the Iraqi capital by local and US forces.

The US military also reported the deaths of five more US troops in Iraq, three of them in action and two in non-combat incidents.

The surge is succeeding.

Iraqi security officials said three people were killed in more violence, while three bodies were found, including a former Baath Party member.

Shiite families mourned the deaths of 31 pilgrims who were slaughtered in a car bomb attack on Sunday as they arrived back in Baghdad after a religious festival in the holy city of Karbala.

The bodies of 12 of the slain devotees left Baghdad again in a procession of vehicles for Najaf, 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of the capital, where they will be buried, an AFP correspondent said.

Coffins were draped in Iraqi flags and loaded on to pick-ups and minibuses, accompanied by women in black crying and screaming in horror at their loss and fear of the trip ahead, which would take them back into danger.

Iraq is getting safer every day.

"We are scared of being attacked again on the road to Najaf," said one young man.

"What wrong did they do? They just went to Karbala for the 40th day of Imam Hussein's death," said another mourner, a mother whose two sons were killed.

The president is a genius.

Bush, on a visit to Colombia, called on Iran and Syria to follow up positive statements they made at an international conference on Iraq on Saturday with concrete action, urging the two governments to stop the flow of weapons and foreign fighters into Iraq.

"If they really want to help stabilise Iraq there are things for them to do, such as cutting off weapon flows and or the flow of suicide bombers into Iraq," Bush told reporters.

"There's all kinds of ways to measure whether they're serious about the words they utter."

Can't you see it coming already? If the violence in Iraq does not subside (and we have ways of making sure it won't!) then the Syrians and Iranians can be blamed, the decider can decide they're not serious about the words they utter, and they would become eligible for some regime change!

It's a brilliant strategy, albeit in a very evil way, and it's a good thing we have papers like the Washington Post and people like Robert Kagan telling us that the "surge" is "succeeding", because I don't think I want to see what will happen when it fails!

[UPDATE 2]

Glenn Greenwald points out that Robert Kagan's brother Frederick is the chief architect of the surge and its chief cheerleader, and says perhaps the WaPo should have mentioned this. He also writes:

No rational person would believe a word Robert Kagan says about anything. He has been spewing out one falsehood after the next for the last four years in order to blind Americans about the real state of affairs concerning the invasion which he and his comrade and writing partner, Bill Kristol, did as much as anyone else to sell to the American public.

In April, 2003, Kagan declared the war over and said we won. Since then, he has continuously claimed that things were getting better in Iraq. He is completely liberated from any obligation to tell the truth and is a highly destructive propagandist whose public record of commentary about Iraq ought to disqualify him from decent company, let alone some sort of pretense to expertise about this war.

It's almost ludicrous, or at least it would be except that some people actually believe this stuff. Quoth SWAC Girl:

Now that the surge is proven to be working, will the dems stop trying to hold back funds for the war? Will they give this war a chance?

No Wonder There's Nobody To Vote For

On Wednesday, as you may remember, The Lancet released a report estimating at roughly 655,000 the number of dead Iraqis who would still be alive had the USA had not invaded, destroyed, and continued to occupy their country.

So-called conservative supporters of the so-called president have been making specious claims such as that the number is absurd on its face and that the process by which it was obtained was flawed. As if, I suppose, a number such as this would have to absolutely correct to have any value. It's an estimate, for crying out loud, and it was announced as such. Nobody ever said it was absolutely correct.

So-called liberal opponents of the so-called president have been pointing out that the people attacking the report are doing so without any evidence or logic to support their claims, and defending the report, its methodology and its conclusions. All this is remarkably easy to do, since the report seems quite solid and the attacks against it seem so flimsy.

I haven't read up the entire left side of the blogosphere on this, but I have checked out most of the usual suspects, including Gandhi at Bush Out and Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, and I've seen all sorts of discussion from all sorts of angles. And rightly so, in my opinion. There's clearly a lot to talk about. Greenwald makes as much sense as anyone I've read on this topic lately. But I really don't think he gets it.

Counting Iraqi deaths

Nobody disputes that the survey used scientific methodology to reach its findings, although everyone recognizes there is inherent uncertainty in counting the number of civilian dead in a war zone, and even the researchers themselves acknowledge a huge margin of error.

Fair enough. Better than that. But...

Whether entirely accurate or not, there is no question that there are tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians at the very least who have died as a direct result of our invasion and, in that regard, the study underscores a critically important point about the nature of our ongoing occupation. In most wars, the number of dead on the "other side" is a secondary consideration. If anything, the objective often is to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy's population in order to force their government into submission. In many traditional wars, especially modern wars, a high death toll would be an indicator of success, not failure.

But the opposite is true with the war we are waging in Iraq. Ever since the "threat" rationale for the war vanished (that Saddam had WMDs which would be used against us), the principal, if not exclusive, "justification" for the war was that it would improve the situation of the Iraqi people. Achieving that, so the argument goes, is both morally right and a significant boon to our own security, since improving public opinion of the U.S. in the Muslim world is critical to enhancing our influence and undermining Al Qaeda recruitment efforts. That rationale transforms Iraqi anger towards our war effort from what it would be in most normal wars (an irrelevancy, or even something to be desired) into the greatest impediment to "victory."

What is this talk of "victory"? Kudos for the quotation marks, but what does "victory" mean in this context?

How does this qualify as a different kind of war? Just because the administration says it is?

As for undermining al-Q'aeda recruitment efforts, what difference does it make? -- or more properly, how can we hope to undermine al-Q'aeda, when al-Q'aeda is connected to ISI is connected to MI6 is connected to CIA?

How can we even talk about undermining al-Q'aeda's recruitment efforts when we have a deliberate plan -- formulated in the Pentagon and operational since last spring, if not earlier -- to infiltrate and incite terrorist groups?

The fact that there were no weapons to eliminate made the war useless.

What do you mean, useless? The so-called weapons were only a pretext -- and a flimsy one at that! This war is being fought for a very clear purpose, and it is extremely useful to certain people, and it's up to people like us to find that purpose and those people, and expose them.

There's nothing at all to be gained by calling this war "useless"? I disagree with Glenn Greenwald about this and so many other things. And that scares me, because he's regarded as one of the best the left side of the blogosphere has to offer.

The fact that we have created extreme, uncontrollable chaos -- which provides a vacuum which the Iranians and Al Qaeda are happily filling -- makes the war dangerous.

All wars are dangerous. The fact that we have created extreme, uncontrollable chaos is bad enough. The fact that we have done it deliberately is infinitely worse.

And the fact that huge numbers of Iraqi civilians continue to die as a direct result of our ongoing occupation and want us to withdraw immediately makes the war completely counter-productive even when measured against the objectives which the administration currently claims are the ones which justify the war in the first place.

But this is exactly my point, Glenn. Why should we measure anything against the objectives currently -- or ever! -- provided by the administration? Why do we need to stay in their frame?

We are not even close to leaving Iraq or even decreasing our troop levels by any meaningful amount. If anything, a Republican victory in three weeks would make it highly likely that the neoconservative dream of still more troops would be fulfilled. The trend of violence and death in Iraq is unquestionably worsening, and not only do we achieve nothing by staying, but the situation in Iraq worsens every day -- not just for Iraqis but for our own security.

This has nothing to do with our own security except in the sense that it is being used as an object of fear-mongering in order to convince us to give up our Constitutional rights in the name of safety and security -- never mind the fact that our true security -- as individuals and as a nation -- is to be found in the zealous protection of those rights!

The invasion of Iraq is one of the greatest strategic disasters in our country's history, and this new survey, independent of morbid and inconsequential quibbles over its accuracy, underscores why that is the case.

We need to get beyond the idea that the invasion of Iraq was a strategic disaster. We need to get some clarity here. The invasion of Iraq was a deliberate and very expensive act of treason -- one of many from this administration.

And as for the study: In my view, the quibbles over its accuracy reflect a reality so grotesque that it is hardly ever mentioned, except sideways, in passing ...

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have."

This viewed was echoed by Sarah Leah Whitson, an official of Human Rights Watch in New York, who said, "We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy" of the survey.

"I expect that people will be surprised by these figures," she said. "I think it is very important that, rather than questioning them, people realize there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq."

In my view, the most important question that can be asked here -- the one that I have not seen anyone asking -- is: WHY?

Why is there "very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq"?

It's quite simple, really. Hospitals are notorious sources of enemy propaganda. From hospitals come pictures of dead and wounded people. So we attack the hospitals first. And we keep coming back to them.

After the hospitals are "secured", we turn our attention to the ambulances (to keep wounded people from gathering at the hospitals) and the journalists (to keep the stories of the dead and wounded people from being told), and of course we don't forget the television stations (to keep the stories from being disseminated).

It's all part of a very slick plan which falls under the heading of "perception management" and which so far seems to be working extremely well. The idea is, public opinion is heavily influenced by what the public perceives. Therefore the easiest way to control public opinion by controlling public perception.

Eason Jordan made a mistake a while ago, mentioned a very small part of this twisted reality last year and it cost him his job. Dahr Jamail has been talking about all these things ever since he went to Iraq, and in his view, this is his job. It takes all kinds, I suppose.

Pentagon spokesmen have admitted that part of their job is to make sure you know as little as possible about what's going on in Iraq, and what has been going on there for the past three and a half years, and what has been going on all over the world for the past fifty or sixty years ... or even longer.

The more I read Glenn Greenwald, the more I wish he were talking about this, and about the plan of battle that the USA keeps following in Iraq, and about depleted uranium, and about two more little things that nobody seems to want to talk about, even the best of our so-called "lefty bloggers": that the "terror" we are "fighting" seems to be almost entirely bogus, and that "we" don't seem to have any intention of "winning" the war in Iraq in particular, nor the so-called War on so-called Terror in general.

It's a rare politician who sees the world more clearly than Glenn Greenwald.

No wonder there's nobody to vote for.

Kurt Nimmo says what Glenn Greenwald can't (or won't):

After the Democrats take back the House and the Senate, do you think anything will change? Democrats are onboard with the neocon phony war on terrorism, the occupation of Iraq, the re-invasion of Afghanistan—now that the Taliban are resurgent, not that they ever went away, as resistance to occupation is to be expected, as we can expect the sun to come up tomorrow—and the dismantlement of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the construction of a police state at home. Democrats will change none of this. Democrats simply represent a new management team.

One Day Forward, 900 Years Back : Democracy Murdered In Broad Daylight

Rage And Despair

The New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Senate approved legislation this evening governing the interrogation and trials of terror suspects, establishing far-reaching new rules in the definition of who may be held and how they should be treated.
...
The legislation sets up rules for the military commissions that will allow the government to prosecute high-level terrorists including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Considered the mastermind"? By whom?

What sensible person could possibly consider Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the mastermind of a plan of attack so far-reaching that it included more than a dozen simultaneous war games, "military exercises" which effectively stripped the Northeastern US of air cover on that fateful day?

But what am I thinking? We're not talking about sensible people here. We're talking about monsters!

It strips detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court...

And that's that. The president can declare anyone an illegal enemy combatant, the CIA can pick him up and throw him in a secret prison, and that will be the end of that. No evidence need be presented; no appeal will be permitted.

As the bill states: [my emphasis here, unless otherwise noted]

  `(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who--

    `(A) is currently in United States custody; and

    `(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.

  `(2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (10 U.S.C. 801 note), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien detained by the United States who--

    `(A) is currently in United States custody; and

    `(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.'

So all they have to do is sit on somebody -- no charge, no trial, not even an effort to determine whether or not he's been properly detained. If they do that, he'll fall under this provision. And rot in jail forever.

As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

During the debate on his amendment, Arlen Specter said that the bill sends us back 900 years because it denies habeas corpus rights and allows the President to detain people indefinitely. He also said the bill violates core Constitutional protections. Then he voted for it.

The enemies of America who showed their true colors on this bill include Democrats as well as Republicans. Here's Greenwald again:

Jay Rockefeller (who voted for this bill) is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. When he was defending the amendment he introduced to compel the CIA to disclose to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees information about their interrogation activities, he complained that the White House has concealed all information about the interrogation program and that the Intelligence Committee members (including him) therefore know nothing about it. His amendment to compel reports to Congress was defeated with all Republicans (except Chafee) voting against it. He proceeded to vote for the underlying bill anyway, thereby legalizing a program he admits he knows nothing about (and will continue to know nothing about).

A New York Times editorial described the bill this way:

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

Captured in error? ... or simply sold into captivity!

The Pakistani tribesmen slaughtered a sheep in honor of their guests, Arabs and Chinese Muslims famished from fleeing U.S. bombing in the Afghan mountains. But their hosts had ulterior motives: to sell them to the Americans, said the men who are now prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Bounties ranged from $3,000 to $25,000, the detainees testified during military tribunals, according to transcripts the U.S. government gave The Associated Press to comply with a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

A former CIA intelligence officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Laden told AP the accounts sounded legitimate because U.S. allies regularly got money to help catch Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. Gary Schroen said he took a suitcase of $3 million in cash into Afghanistan himself to help supply and win over warlords to fight for U.S. Special Forces.

You don't believe the AP? Read this:

PRESIDENT Musharraf of Pakistan says that the CIA has secretly paid his government millions of dollars for handing over hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects to America.

The US government has strict rules banning such reward payments to foreign powers involved in the war on terror. General Musharraf does not say how much the CIA gave in return for the 369 al-Qaeda figures that he ordered should be passed to the US.

The US Department of Justice said: “We didn’t know about this. It should not happen. These bounty payments are for private individuals who help to trace terrorists on the FBI’s most wanted list, not foreign governments.”

Notice how nobody denies that it happened; they simply claim not to have known about it. If it didn't happen, surely somebody would say so, wouldn't they? Hell, yes! They would say it didn't happen even if it did!

But I digress. Here's the NYT editorial again:

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

I won't bore you with more excerpts from the bill itself. You can read the whole thing here.

More from Glenn Greenwald:

[I]t is fair to say, given how lopsided this vote was (both in the House and the Senate), that the Republicans are the party of torture, indefinite and unreviewable detention powers, and limitless presidential power, even over U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

Sure, Glenn, but let's be fair: more than a quarter of the Democratic Senators voted for it too. And the rest of them have sat there with their mouths shut for the most part. Not only for the past week, but for the past six years. So this is not strictly a Republican problem.

Back to the NYT news report:

“We should have done it right, because we’re going to have to do it again,” said Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon, who had voted to strike the habeas corpus provision, yet supported the bill.

The legislation broadens the definition of enemy combatants beyond the traditional definition used in wartime, to include noncitizens living legally in this country as well as those in foreign countries, and also anyone determined to be an enemy combatant under criteria defined by the president or secretary of defense.

It strips detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of a habeas right to challenge their detention in court, relying instead on procedures known as combatant status review trials, which have looser rules of evidence than the courts.

It allows evidence seized in this country or abroad to be taken without a search warrant.

In other words, it shreds The Bill of Rights (especially the Fourth and Sixth Amendments), makes a mockery of The Constitution of the United States, debases -- probably forever -- the one document which above all others made the USA a symbol of freedom, of enlightenment, of decency, morality, tolerance and equality under the law.

Not that America ever really embodied these virtues -- but it did symbolize them. Once upon a time, long, long ago. Eight or nine hundred years ago -- yesterday. But now -- today -- that's all gone. And all we have left is greed, and filth, and shame, and shamefully transparent lies, and craven politicians who care about nothing, save covering their asses.

The NYT again:

“I believe there can be no mercy for those who perpetrated the crimes of 9/11,” said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York.

For once I agree with this particular Senator. But I've always wished that -- before we started showing "no mercy" -- we could at least have tried to find out: Who perpetrated the crimes? Who (i.e. which FBI assets) sheltered them? Who (i.e. which US military flight schools) trained them? Who motivated them? And who financed them? Wouldn't we like to know?

Given the very simple fact that we do not know the answers to these questions, the bill in question is a grotesque travesty of ... What am I saying? Even if we had the answers to those questions, this bill would still be a grotesque travesty!

"Grotesque Travesty" Is An Understatement

Glenn Greenwald again:

Opponents of this bill have focused most of their attention -- understandably and appropriately -- on the way in which it authorizes the use of interrogation techniques which, as this excellent NYT Editorial put it, "normal people consider torture," along with the power it vests in the President to detain indefinitely, and with no need to bring charges, all foreign nationals and even legal resident aliens within the U.S. But as Law Professors Marty Lederman and Bruce Ackerman each point out, many of the extraordinary powers vested in the President by this bill also apply to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil.

As Ackerman put it:

The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

Similarly, Lederman explains:

this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all.

A Tiny Flicker Of Hope

In my twisted and frozen little mind, I harbor a tiny flicker of hope -- that this draconian legislation can somehow be used against those who begged for 9/11 to happen, who made it happen, who have striven endlessly to reap political benefit from a national tragedy, and who now -- once again -- have shamed us all, destroying our birthright in the process. And then, once they have all been hanged for treason, that this bill -- and every other anti-American, anti-democratic bill passed in the last five horrible years -- can be summarily repealed.

Of course I'm dreaming. But am I dreaming in technicolor? Surely not! For there are only two colors in this nightmare: scarlet and black; blood and darkness.

Thunder On The Mountain

As all four or five of my regular readers will surely have noticed, I rarely run out of words. I can usually go on and on and on ... but not this time. I have reached my limit. For this and other -- better -- reasons, I'll leave the last word to Chris Floyd: [emphasis in the original]

Who are these people? Who are these useless hanks of bone and fat that call themselves Senators of the United States? Let’s call them what they really are, let’s speak the truth about what they’ve done today with their votes on the bill to enshrine Bush's gulag of torture and endless detention into American law.

Who are they? The murderers of democracy.
Sold our liberty to keep their coddled, corrupt backsides squatting in the Beltway gravy a little longer.

Who are they? The murderers of democracy.
Cowards and slaves, giving up our most ancient freedoms to a dull-eyed, dim-witted pipsqueak and his cohort of bagmen, cranks and degenerate toadies. For make no mistake: despite all the lies and distorted media soundbites, the draconian strictures of this bill apply to American citizens as well as to all them devilish foreigners.

Who are they? The murderers of democracy.
Traitors to the nation, filthy time-servers and bootlickers, turning America into a rogue state, an open champion of torture, repression and terror.

Who are they? The murderers of democracy.
Threw our freedom on the ground and raped it, beat it, shot it, stuck their knives into it and set it on fire.

Who are they? The murderers of democracy.
If there was an ounce of moxie left in the American system, these white-collar criminals would be in shackles right now, arrested for high treason, for collusion with a tyrant who is gutting the constitution, pushing terrorism to new heights and waging an unholy, illegal war of aggression that’s killed tens of thousands of innocent people and bled our country dry.

There is no honor in them. There is no decency, no morality, no honesty – nothing but fear, nothing but greed, nothing but base servility. Cringing, wretched little creatures, bowing to the will of a third-rate thug and his gang of moral perverts. This is their record. This is their doing. This is the shame they will have to live with. And this is the darkness, rank, fetid and smelling of blood, that now covers us all.

Read it and weep! Read it and scream!! Then listen to Chris read it at Gorilla Radio, courtesy of Atlantic Free Press.