Iraq 10 years later

I’m a day late for the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, but I should mention it because it and the Bush administration are why I got into blogging (although it’s not obvious from my first post). The Bush administration had become so relentless in its attempts to demonize any opposition, that I had to find a place to yell or go crazy. The things to remember about the war: lies (and it was obvious at the time), propaganda, and bullying were used to start the war (Weapons of mass destruction! Hussein is Hitler! Liberals are traitors! We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud! Hussein=Al Qaeda!);  it led to Guantanamo and all that entailed (secret prisons, jail without evidence, torture, indefinite incarceration without trial); it led to a huge expansion in secrecy and the police state (warrantless wire-taps, a large increase in National Security Letters, the expansion of executive power without oversight (it can’t be brought to trial because of Secrecy!!!)). And Iraq really isn’t much better off now than it was before the invasion.

The reason the anniversary isn’t as high-profile as it should be is that most people were wrong and people don’t like being reminded. Also, President Obama said that we should look ahead not back and so we haven’t tried to punish any of the people who lied us into war which would have brought the issues back to the foreground. Those of us who didn’t back the war need to try to remind people how wrong the people pushing the war were whenever they pop up again, although I’m sure we’ll just be ignored again.

Anyway, this is an anniversary to make me cynical so fuck all those who made the war possible.

FEMA again

Kevin Drum has a post outlining how FEMA has done under the past four presidents. Here’s an even shorter summary (to be fair, both HW and W tried to improve FEMA after its inept response to a disaster–Andrew in HW’s case and Katrina in W’s):

• George HW Bush: it sucked
• Bill Clinton: it worked well
• George W Bush: it sucked
• Barack Obama: it has worked well so far

Kevin points to these two articles that talk about the change. The takeaway is that Clinton and Obama treated FEMA like professional organization by appointing professionals in disaster preparation, while the two Bushs treated it like an afterthought and appointed people based on their politics (so they did not have a background in disaster planning). Romney, of course, is more like the Bushs (look down a couple posts). Republicans say that FEMA isn’t that important, that states can do the job themselves. Look at the first article Kevin links to see why that’s not true:

In Florida, the hurricane so overwhelmed state officials that they didn’t even know what had happened, let alone what help they needed. Initially, Andrew was expected to hit Miami. But when the hurricane hit 20 miles south of the city the morning of August 24, most Floridians breathed a sigh of relief. “The storm surges were not as bad as anticipated,” said one spokesperson for Governor Lawton Chiles. One National Guard major issued this report the day after the hurricane: “Florida has not requested any support from other states or federal agencies, nor do we project a need.”

Florida was slow to realize its own dire straits because many of its emergency workers were among the storm’s victims. Half of the members of the Dade County Police and Fire Departments had lost their homes. Most of the area’s fire and police stations were destroyed. Like their fellow southern Floridians, disaster management workers were looking for food, water, shelter, and medical care. The state was unable to issue specific requests for aid because it had no one available to assess the damage.

Finally, as the full extent of the damage–and the lack of federal action–prompted heavy criticism, President Bush circumvented FEMA and formed a hurricane task force led by Secretary of Transportation Andrew Card. Card and the task force flew down to Florida to assess the damage. As the Department of Transportation airplane passed over southern Florida, the members of the task force were stunned by the extent of the damage. “This eerie silence came over the plane as we flew over mile after mile of pure devastation,” remembers Shelley Longmuir, the task force’s chief of staff. “You got the feeling that you were no longer in the United States, but in some far away, mystical place because there were none of the reference points of civilization…. It looked like Beirut.”

Some disasters are just too big for one state to deal with.

By the way, this might be a good time to give to the Red Cross.

9/11

This has been known for a while, but still it’s pretty shocking:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22,the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat.Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

This is what happens when a group wants to believe something. The neocons wanted a war with Iraq and so wanted to believe that Bin Laden and Hussein were working together. The fact that it didn’t make sense didn’t matter and the information that was being gathered that said al Qaeda was preparing an attack didn’t matter, because the neocons ‘knew’ what they wanted to know.

Problems in Afghanistan

Back in March, Afghanistan passed a rule that severely restricted the rights of Shia women but a huge international outcry forced President Karzai to say he would rewrite it. The new version is out and it seems it’s not much better:

The changes, which are not yet approved by Parliament, would delete sections that said a woman needs her husband’s permission to leave the house and must be ready for sex at least every four days. In a letter to the president, activists said other parts would change so little that the law is still unacceptable.

…

The section about submitting to sex every four days was deleted, but other sections let a husband order sex, said Shinkai Kharokhel, a lawmaker involved in attempts to change the legislation.

A section explaining a husband must provide financially for his wife also says he can withhold support if she refuses to “submit to her husband’s reasonable sexual enjoyment,’’ according to Human Rights Watch.

…

The revised law would also restrict a woman’s right to leave the house and to work, she said.

and:

The new law also still gives rights of guardianship entirely to fathers and grandfathers. By stipulating blood money should be paid for underage girls who are raped, human rights groups allege it also implicitly sanctions child abuse.

I guess we’ll have to wait a bit to see what Karzai does. I’m not too optimistic given that this was supposed to be a revision forced by him. He also is also very good at helping people that might help get him reelected: pardoning drug dealers and vicious rapists.

In general the state of women in Afghanistan is very bad:

“The limited space that opened up for Afghan women following the demise of the Taliban regime in 2001 is under sustained attack, not just by the Taliban themselves, but by deeply engrained cultural practices and customs,” said the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.

Pillay also denounced “a chronic failure at all levels of government to advance the protection of women’s rights in Afghanistan” despite “significant advances” in the creation of new legislation and institutions.

The report, issued by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned of a “growing trend” of violence and threats against women in public life.

“Violence, in the public and private spheres, is an everyday occurrence in the lives of a huge proportion of Afghan women,” the report said.

The full UN report is here. Another example of the oppression of women is in Sudan, where women were flogged for wearing pants.

Another development in Afghanistan has to do with my mistrust of Karzai. It seems that the warlord Dostumkilled hundreds or thousands of captured Taliban troops back in 2002. The US government under President Bush actively campaigned against an investigation of Dostum since he was an ally (he was rewarded with a position as an official in Karzai’s government). You might argue that this is old news, but it’s relevant because Karzai has reinstated Dostum as a military chief of staff (he was suspended last year after being accused of confronting a political rival with a gun). I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that Dostum has powerful allies in Afghanistan (and the CIA)?

More on torture

Via Tom Tomorrow, Mark Danner has two long reports on torture based on the Red Cross’ report. Together they make it obvious that there was torture (and show how simple things become torture: standing, sitting, being in a box, …) and how the Bush administration used the debate on torture to to turn the discussion away from how they had failed. I have been thinking that torture is the simple answer to complex questions that we want–instead of the steady, long involved process of gathering information and connecting events, why just torture someone. Mark puts it all together in this paragraph (this comes near the end of the first article):

The gloves came off: four simple words. And yet they express a complicated thought. For if the gloves must come off, that means that before the attacks the gloves were on. There is something implicitly exculpatory in the image, something that made it particularly appealing to officials of an administration that endured, on its watch, the most lethal terrorist attack in the country’s history. If the attack succeeded, it must have had to do not with the fact that intelligence was not passed on or that warnings were not heeded or that senior officials did not focus on terrorism as a leading threat. It must have been, at least in part, because the gloves were on—because the post-Watergate reforms of the 1970s, in which Congress sought to put limits on the CIA, on its freedom to mount covert actions with “deniability” and to conduct surveillance at home and abroad, had illegitimately circumscribed the President’s power and thereby put the country dangerously at risk. It is no accident that two of the administration’s most powerful officials, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, served as young men in very senior positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations. They had witnessed firsthand the gloves going on and, in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, they argued powerfully that it was those limitations—and, it was implied, not a failure to heed warnings—that had helped lead, however indirectly, to the country’s vulnerability to attack.

This explains why Cheney is so involved in advocating for torture–it means it wasn’t the Bush administration’s fault that 9/11 happened.

This bit shows how torture spreads (from the second article):

The initial panicked rush to “round up prisoners,” which was replicated in Iraq during the first months of the insurgency in the summer and fall of 2003, led to what Wilkerson calls an “ad hoc intelligence philosophy” developed to “justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy.”

Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance…. All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals—in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees’ innocence was inconsequential.

I saw the consequences of this policy in Iraq, in the fall of 2003, when “neighborhood sweeps” and “cordon and capture operations” in “hot areas” led to wholesale arrests of young men. These men, about whom nothing was known apart from the fact that they were young and lived in a neighborhood deemed “hot,” were flex-cuffed, hooded, and promptly sent to Abu Ghraib, where they…sat. Interrogators were overwhelmed, mostly with prisoners who simply had no intelligence to impart. The interrogators were well aware of this, of course, but in part because officers of the combat units who made the arrests sat on the boards that had to approve prisoner releases, it was almost impossible to release prisoners once they had been brought to Abu Ghraib. “Certain [Coalition Forces] military intelligence officers told the ICRC,” according to a 2004 Red Cross report on Abu Ghraib, “that in their estimate between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.”

The articles also note that the executive branch was in on the CIA interrogations every step. And that Democrats had a chance to stop this and didn’t.

This article in the NY Times shows how the media helped the Bush administration push their argument:

Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”

His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”
…
During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.

Why did the US torture?

As more information comes out, it becomes more and more difficult to know why the Bush administration turned to torture. This op-ed by an FBI interrogator notes that they got information without using torture:

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

The claim that torture didn’t get any important intelligence is backed up by ex-FBI director Mueller:

In an interview with Vanity Fair last year, the F.B.I. director since 2001, Robert S. Mueller III, was asked whether any attacks had been disrupted because of intelligence obtained through the coercive methods. “I don’t believe that has been the case,” Mr. Mueller said. (A spokesman for Mr. Mueller, John Miller, said on Tuesday, “The quote is accurate.”)

The torture also meant that the FBI and CIA didn’t work together, since the FBI wouldn’t allow these techniques to be used (since they knew it was torture and illegal). Lack of communication between the CIA and FBI helped allow 9/11.

For those who don’t believe there was actual torture involved, Hilzoy has a good post noting that part of the point in the interrogations was to engender learned helplessness:

Whatever their origins, people who suffer uncontrollable events reliably see disruption of emotions, aggressions, physiology, and problem-solving tasks. These helpless experiences can associate with passivity, uncontrollability and poor cognition in people, ultimately threatening their physical and mental well-being.

Greg Mitchell looks at the story of a US interrogator in Iraq who committed suicide because she was so apalled at the methods (for some reason the army covered this up).

So, why did the US turn to terrorism? This story by McClatchy gives two reasons:

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

…

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

Lovely, we tortured people to try to prove a non-existant link. In some ways, it actually says something good about the agents (well, except for the going along with torture part): they never said there was a link.

It also says something a bit better about the military lawyers:

Rumsfeld approved extreme interrogation techniques for Guantanamo in December 2002. He withdrew his authorization the following month amid protests by senior military lawyers that some techniques could amount to torture, violating U.S. and international laws.

Military interrogator, however, continued employing some techniques in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.

183 times in a month?

I have always thought that someone should go to jail for the torture by US agents, but I used to think it should only be the people who set it up. Now, I’m not so sure:

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.
…
The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

183 times in a month? Anyone should know that this is torture. It’s obvious, that’s why the FBI pulled back:

By mid-2002, several former agents and senior bureau officials said, they had begun complaining that the CIA-run interrogation program amounted to torture and was going to create significant problems down the road — particularly if the Bush administration was ever forced to allow the Al Qaeda suspects to face their accusers in court.

Some went to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, according to the former bureau officials. They said Mueller pulled many of the agents back from playing even a supporting role in the interrogations to avoid exposing them to legal jeopardy, in the belief that White House and Justice Department opinions authorizing the coercive techniques might be overturned.

Hmm, I guess the FBI knows that the Nuremberg trials had shown that ‘I was just following orders’ is not a defense. Emptywheel has more, including the facts that the agents used waterboarding more than they were supposed to and used a worse version than they were authorized to. President Obama has said he won’t charge any of these people? Why? Ex-CIA director Hayden and ex Attorney General Mukasey worry that CIA agents will fear recriminations. Agents should worry if they do something this obviously illegal.

Update: Harvey Silvergate has an editorial about this:

A CIA agent, operating in good faith, could readily consider such DOJ advice to be a binding legal opinion that he could safely follow. And in our legal system, based on an ancient Anglo-Saxon moral and legal tenet incorporated into our own criminal codes, a wrongdoer may be punished only if he knowingly and intentionally committed an act that he believed to be illegal.

Hmm, this might be a good point except the CIA agents went further than the legal advice allowed and the FBI refused to participate, showing that reasonable people could see that the memo’s argument might easily be wrong.

Bush Justice Department memos released

The memos written by the the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Council have been released by President Obama. This is a good thing, but Obama is still holding to this:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

Let’s see, suppose a few years ago I went into a building and took some stuff acting on the guidance of a neighbor who said it was ok. Some people might think I should be charged with robbery, but not Obama–with the current economic problems, now is not the time to revisit old crimes that could cause dissension. Really, does that make sense? If a crime was committed, someone should pay–I agree that the people following the advice of the OLC probably shouldn’t, but someone should. Also, remember that the interrogations started before these memos came out.

I also like the unwitting irony with this statement:

Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, cited his experience after taking part in the unpopular Vietnam War. “We in the intelligence community should not be subjected to similar pain,” he said.

If you take away the first sentence it would sound like he was saying that people in the intelligence community shouldn’t be tortured.

And, of course, people in the Bush administration are defending the practices:

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

You see they hope we have forgotten that the intelligence community had all the information needed to have an idea something like the 9/11 attacks were possible. The Patriot act and these ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques were not needed. And then they follow it up with the usual ‘they do it too’  and ‘it wasn’t that bad’ childen’s arguments:

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

Of course, they ignore that the knowledge that the US tortures helped al-Qaeda get followers is ignored. And they ignore that people were tortured to death by the US (they pretend that allowing these rules for the CIA had nothing to do with what happened at Abu Ghraib, but the rules inevitably flowed down the chain–it was policy).

Of course, they can’t resist attacking those of us that wanted the disclosure:

In addition, there were those who believed that the U.S. deserved what it got on Sept. 11, 2001.

You know what Mukasey and Hayden can jump off a cliff. They’re the ones who are saying the US should act like the terrorists. Good riddance to them.

Update: I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the writers of the memo lied about conclusions of a sleep study so they could say it was ok to use extended sleep deprivation.

You also won’t be surprised to learn that the Bush administration decided to turn to torture even though interrogation was working and:

A footnote to another of the memos described a rift between line officers questioning Abu Zubaydah at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand and their bosses at headquarters, and asserted that the brutal treatment may have been “unnecessary.”

Quoting a 2004 report on the interrogation program by the C.I.A. inspector general, the footnote says that “although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within C.I.A. headquarters still believed he was withholding information.”

Typical, the bosses think they know more than the people actually doing the job. Of course the CIA types weren’t exactly great:

His interrogation, according to multiple accounts, began in Pakistan and continued at the secret C.I.A. site in Thailand, with a traditional, rapport-building approach led by two F.B.I. agents, who even helped care for him as his gunshot wounds healed.

Abu Zubaydah gave up perhaps his single most valuable piece of information early, naming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom he knew as Mukhtar, as the main organizer of the 9/11 plot.

A C.I.A. interrogation team that arrived a week or two later, which included former military psychologists, did not change the approach to questioning, but began to keep him awake night and day with blasting rock music, have his clothes removed and keep his cell cold.

But I guess the higher ups just wanted to punish him more.

Torture memos to come out?

This (via Kevin Drum) would be a good thing:

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against “high value” Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA.
…
The debate about torture ramped up again last week with an account in the New York Review of Books about a secret International Red Cross report that was delivered to the CIA in February 2007. The report, according to journalist Mark Danner, quotes detainees describing, often in gruesome detail, how they were locked in coffin-size boxes; swung by towels around their necks into plywood walls; and forced to stand naked for days while their arms were shackled above their heads.

If President Obama releases these memos, then perhaps he will revisit some of his problematic orders about state secrets. That would be really good.

Bush vs. Obama on State secrets

The Justice Department has now released some of the memos written after 9/11 by the Bush administration. Some of it is simply stunning:

The legal memos written by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel show a government grappling with how to wage war on terrorism in a fast-changing world. The conclusion, reiterated in page after page of documents, was that the president had broad authority to set aside constitutional rights.

Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted search and seizure, for instance, did not apply in the United States as long as the president was combatting terrorism, the Justice Department said in an Oct. 23, 2001, memo.

“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo wrote, adding later: “The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

On Sept. 25, 2001, Yoo discussed possible changes to the laws governing wiretaps for intelligence gathering. In that memo, he said the government’s interest in keeping the nation safe following the terrorist attacks might justify warrantless searches.

and also:

A newly released Bush administration legal memo from 2002 claimed that the president has an unfettered right to transfer suspected terrorists to other governments without regard for whether they would be subject to torture

I’m actually wondering if this stuff was released now to get our attention away from this almost as stunning bit:

So on Friday, in a move that Al-Haramain’s lawyer called “mind-boggling”, the Obama administration told the federal court, once again, that it did not have the authority to order the government to make the critical document in the case available to the organization’s lawyers. The decision to reveal the document, wrote the government, “is committed to the discretion of the Executive Branch, and is not subject to judicial review.”

Not only does that defy the court once again, but there’s a catch: the court already has the document, which was filed months ago under seal. What’s more, the lawyers for Al-Haramain have already seen it; it was inadvertently turned over to them back in 2004, when the government was busy trying to prove that Al-Haramain was funnelling money to terrorists.

…

In other words, the government lawyers threatened to physically remove the document from the court files if the Judge insists that he has the right — as he already ruled he has — to allow Al-Haramain’s lawyers to see it.

(go read the article for the bits that explain this). Obviously, this is at a different level than saying the President could ignore or overrule the First and Fourth amendments, but were these Obama administration lawyers really saying they might send the FBI or other group to break into a judge’s office?

6/5/09 Update: The latest is:

A federal district court judge in California yesterday dismissed a slew of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies that allegedly helped the U.S. government engage in warrantless wiretapping.

Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco dismissed the cases because Congress explicitly gave the telecom companies immunity from civil suits in a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

…

Meanwhile, in a separate ruling in the Al-Haramain case, Judge Walker ruled that the defunct Islamic charity can proceed with its case against the government even without the document that the Obama administration has been trying so desperately to conceal. That document — which the government inadvertently disclosed to Al-Haramain’s lawyers — establishes that the organization was wiretapped, its lawyers say.

Ex-President Bush

Ex-President Bush. That sounds very good, wonderful. And President Obama isn’t bad either. I’ll add the new Whitehouse blog to my list.

Torture at Guantanamo

I know this isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s followed the news at all, but Susan Crawford gave that the reason for not trying to prosecute a prisoner:

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

This despite:

“There’s no doubt in my mind he would’ve been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001,” Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. “He’s a muscle hijacker. . . . He’s a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don’t charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, ‘Let him go.’ “

In case you think this wasn’t that bad:

The interrogation, portions of which have been previously described by other news organizations, including The Washington Post, was so intense that Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani’s heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.

In other words, they almost killed him twice. What makes this all even worse is that government prosecutors don’t seem to have been trying to … prosecute:

When she came in as convening authority in 2007, Crawford said, “the prosecution was unprepared” to bring cases to trial. Even after four years working possible cases, “they were lacking in experience and judgment and leadership,” she said. “A prosecutor has an ethical obligation to review all the evidence before making a charging decision. And they didn’t have access to all the evidence, including medical records, interrogation logs, and they were making charging decisions without looking at everything.”

She noted that prosecutors are required to determine whether any evidence possessed by the government could be exculpatory; if it is, they must turn it over to defense lawyers. It took more than a year, she said — and the intervention of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England — to ensure they had access to all the information, much of it classified.

If the Bush administration thinks these people are so dangerous, shouldn’t they have tried to prosecute them to make sure they stay in jail? I guess that was too much trouble.

Bush partisan to the end

President elect Obama wanted to move into Blair house opposite the White House early so his children could attend school more easily. President Bush said he couldn’t because … umm…he just didn’t want to:

Last night on MSNBC’s “Countdown,” Bloomberg journalist Margaret Carlson revealed that when the White House turned down Obama’s request in early December, it had not yet even invited Howard to stay at the Blair House:

I reported…on December 11 and 12 that there were no foreign dignitaries booked into Blair House during that period of time. … I have the feeling they asked him [Howard] to come and stay so that there might be some plausible reason for not letting the Obamas stay there.

She also pointed out that Blair House has “119 rooms with 35 bathrooms. Howard wouldn’t even have to share a sink with the Obamas.”

Really, I can’t wait until Bush is gone.

Henshaw: OSHA is for employers

The situation at OSHA shows how the Bush administration worked:

The agency’s first director under Bush, John L. Henshaw, startled career officials by telling them in an early meeting that employers were OSHA’s real customers, not the nation’s workers. “Everybody was pretty amazed,” one of those present recalled. “Our purpose is to ensure employee safety and health. . . . He just looked at things differently.”
…
Days after publication and seven months after Henshaw’s retirement from OSHA, he sent its science director an e-mail demanding that the warning be withdrawn and redone to express a “more balanced” view. Henshaw did not tell the career official that he had since been employed as a $350-an-hour courtroom witness on behalf of an asbestos-products firm and had testified for companies in two other asbestos lawsuits filed by auto mechanics.
…
In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations.
…
“This is critical,” Foulke said, “to the company.” He paused briefly before clarifying, “to the country.” Foulke resigned Nov. 9 and the next day began work at an Atlanta law firm that represents companies accused of workplace safety violations.

You won’t be surprised to learn that enforcement went down and politics trumped science. This style permeated the Bush administration.

They’re Our Terrorists

This shows what the Bush administration is about:

Iraqi officials say they intend to expel members of an Iranian exile group living in a camp north of Baghdad that is protected by the U.S. military. The expulsion, which the Shiite-led government has long sought, is expected to become feasible once the U.N. mandate that regulates the presence of U.S. troops — and which gave the Iranian opposition group protected status — expires at the end of the year.

Iraqi national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie on Saturday traveled to the camp with several other government officials to deliver the message to members of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group that was closely aligned with deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein but has been under U.S. military protection since shortly after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
…
The Shiite-led Iraqi government, which has close ties to Iran, has for years threatened to shut down Camp Ashraf because it regards the MEK, also known as the People’s Mujaheddin Organization of Iran, as a terrorist organization.

The European Union and the U.S. State Department have also labeled the group a terrorist organization.

It shows that all their anti-terrorist rhetoric is empty. Terrorists are only bad if they oppose the US (of course, this is true of most US presidents).

Bush Performance in a Nutshell

If you want to see the problems with the Bush administration, look at what happened in Somalia:

A collapse of the government and the human disaster that would almost surely follow would be strike three for American efforts in Somalia.

The United States failed disastrously in its peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s. (Remember “Black Hawk Down”?) In 2005 and 2006, the C.I.A. paid some of Somalia’s most reviled warlords to fight the Islamists. That backfired. In the winter of 2006, the United States took a third approach, encouraging Ethiopia to invade and backing them with American airstrikes and intelligence.

…

In 2006, Islamist troops teamed up with clan elders and businessmen to drive out the warlords who had been preying upon Somalia’s people since the central government first collapsed in 1991. The six months the Islamists ruled Mogadishu turned out to be one of the most peaceful periods in modern Somali history.

But today’s Islamists are a harder, more brutal group than the ones who were ousted by an Ethiopian invasion, backed by the United States, in late 2006. The old guard included many moderates, but those who tried to work with the transitional government mostly failed, leaving them weak and marginalized, and removing a mitigating influence on the die-hard insurgents.

Notice the few themes that occurred here that were repeated in other countries before and after:

• force before diplomacy
• anyone who works with your enemy is your enemy
• any means necessary

The Islamists in 2006 were nothing to write home about, but they at least said they wouldn’t install a Taliban style government. In other words, we could have at least tried working with them and, since Somalia is mostly a moderate religious society, it might have worked (I should note that there were divisions forming among the Islamists even then, so the government might not have lasted long anyway). But the Bush administration couldn’t have that. And now we see the consequences

Poor Poor President Bush

Via Steve Benen, this is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while:

According to recent Gallup polls, the president’s average approval rating is below 30% — down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.

You would think this “down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11.” would disprove this ”Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.”. You would if you actually weren’t crazy that is.

His solutions to reform the immigration system alienated traditional conservatives, while his refusal to retreat in Iraq has enraged liberals who have unrealistic expectations about the challenges we face there.

Umm, the main problem most of us liberals have with Iraq, was the lies the Bush administration told to get us there and the fact that it was a distraction from the main problem in Afghanistan.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Really, it’s hilarious. President Bush’s first act in office was partisan, he demonized his opponents, he lied to go to war with Iraq, he ruined the economy, and he let New Orleans become a disaster. He also officially condoned torture and illegally wiretapped innocent people. After 9/11 almost the whole world was behind us (even Iran) and that goodwill and support was gone within the year because of the actions of Bush. But WE should be ashamed. Funny.

A Right to Discriminate?

Well, it seems the Bush administration wants to go out as it came in: declaring that religion trumps anti-discrimination laws:

In January 2001, Mr. Bush’s first two executive orders created an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the White House and in five federal agencies, telling them to ease the way for church groups to win grants for social work, like homeless shelters.

Mr. Bush also asked Congress to make it legal for religious groups to win grants even if they discriminate against people of other faiths when hiring for taxpayer-financed posts. He said it was not fair to force them to give up their identities in order to compete for grants. When Congress failed to pass such a bill, Mr. Bush issued an executive order that made the changes on his own for most federal programs.

But statutes trump executive orders, and a few grant programs — including the one involving World Vision — had independent antidiscrimination requirements.

…

But the memorandum said the government could bypass those provisions because of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It sometimes permits exceptions to a federal law if obeying it would impose a “substantial burden” on people’s ability to freely exercise their religion. The opinion concluded that requiring World Vision to hire non-Christians as a condition of the grant would create such a burden.

In the typical Bush fashion, the memo was made in secret in 2007 and only released now. This is typical favoritism for religion, any other group has to follow the established criteria but religious organizations don’t have to. And think about the statement here: hiring a non-Christian would force them to give up their identity? Since any aid is not supposed to be contingent on religion, I find it very hard to see why this would be. Obama also pushs faith-based initiatives, but at least he believes they shouldn’t be able to get money if they discriminate–McCain, of course, says nothing.

More Bush Mismanagement Found

 The Minerals Management Service (part of the Interior Department) seems to have a problem:

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

…

The investigations are the latest installment in a series of scathing probes of the troubled program’s management and competence in recent years. While previous reports have focused on problems the agency has had in collecting millions of dollars owed to the Treasury, the new set of reports raises questions about the integrity and behavior of the agency’s officials.

The story seems to have it all:

The report accuses Mr. Smith of improperly accepting gifts from the oil and gas industry, of engaging in sex with two subordinates, and of using cocaine that he purchased from his secretary or her boyfriend several times a year between 2002 and 2005. He sometimes asked for the drugs and received them in his office during work hours, the report alleges.

…

On one occasion in 2002, the report said, two of the officials who marketed taxpayers’ oil got so drunk at a daytime golfing event sponsored by Shell that they could not drive to their hotels and were put up in Shell-provided lodging.

The same two women also “engaged in brief sexual relationships with industry contacts,” the reports’ cover memo said, adding that “sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length.”

Just your typical government officials in the Bush administration.

Next: Companies Decide?

In some ways I’m a bit confused about this:

The Bush administration is proposing to let federal agencies decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction projects might harm endangered animals and plants, according to a draft of planned rule changes obtained by The Associated Press.

The proposed regulations, which do not require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews that government scientists have been performing for 35 years.

I understand that it’s a bit of payoff to the corporations that have supported him, but usually a President will use these last minute changes to help their party in the next election. Since McCain says he is for more environmental protection, I would think this would hurt him. It’s obvious that Obama would change these rules if he’s elected, but if we go by his statements, so would McCain. In fact that should be the follow up, reporters should ask McCain what he thinks of these new rules.