(snip)

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor.

(snip)

In A Journey: My Political Life, Blair depicts Cheney as believing the United States was at war not only with Islamic terrorists but with rogue states that supported them and that the only way of defeating [this threat] was head-on, with maximum American strength.

Cheney wanted forcible regime change in all Middle Eastern countries that he considered hostile to U.S. interests, according to Blair.

He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hezbollah, Hamas, etc., Blair wrote. In other words, he [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”

(snip)

The majority concludes its opinion with a recommendation of alternative remedies. Not only are these remedies insufficient, but their suggestion understates the severity of the consequences to Plaintiffs from the denial of judicial relief. Suggesting, for example, that the Executive could “honor[ ] the fundamental principles of justice” by determining “whether plaintiffs’ claims have merit,” [see Maj. Op. at 13554] disregards the concept of checks and balances. Permitting the executive to police its own errors and determine the remedy dispensed would not only deprive the judiciary of its role, but also deprive Plaintiffs of a fair assessment of their claims by a neutral arbiter. The majority’s suggestion of payment of reparations to the victims of extraordinary rendition, such as those paid to Japanese Latin Americans for the injustices suffered under Internment during World War II, over fifty years after those injustices were suffered [Maj. Op. at 13554], elevates the impractical to the point of absurdity. of Similarly, a congressional investigation, private bill, or enacting of “remedial legislation,” [Maj. Op. at 13556], leaves to the legislative branch claims which the federal courts are better equipped to handle. See Kosak v. United States, 465 U.S. 848, 867 (1984) (Stevens, J., dissenting).

Arbitrary imprisonment and torture under any circumstance is a “ ‘gross and notorious . . . act of despotism.’ ” Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 556 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting 1 Blackstone 131-33 (1765)). But “ ‘confinement [and abuse] of the person, by secretly hurrying him to [prison], where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten; is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.’ ” Id. (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting 1 Blackstone 131-33 (1765)) (emphasis added).

(snip)

Yet nothing comes closer to Titus Andronicus than the insistent, terrible stories of gang rape by United States personnel in Abu Ghraib. You hear this repeatedly in Amman, and a very accurate source of mine in Washington – a man who deals with military personnel – tells me they are true. This, he says, is why Barack Obama changed his mind about releasing the photographs which George W Bush refused to make public. The pictures we saw – of the humiliation of men – were outrageous enough. But the ones we haven't seen show Americans raping Iraqi women.

Lima Nabil, a journalist who now runs a home for on-the-run girls, sips coffee as the boiling Jordanian sun frowns through the window at us. In Abu Ghraib, she says, women were tortured by the Americans much more than the men. One woman said she witnessed five girls being raped. Most of the women in the prison were raped – some of them left prison pregnant. Families killed some of these women – because of the shame.

Labels: 9/11, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, American Empire, Cheney, Occupation of Iraq, PNAC, Sadomasochism, Tony Blair, War with Iran, YouTube

Krugman wrote the following in his latest column:

... the Bush administration has managed to convince many people that its tax cuts, which go primarily to the wealthiest few percent of the population, are populist measures benefiting middle-class families and small businesses. (Under the administration's definition, anyone with "business income" - a group that includes Dick Cheney and George Bush - is a struggling small-business owner.)

For a little background on what he is referring to in the above, here's a relevant press release from moveon.org:

Cheney said "about 900,000 small businesses will be hit if you do, in fact, do what they want to do with the top bracket."

The figure Cheney cited is highly disingenuous and Cheney’s logic highly convoluted. Under Cheney's definition a small business is any taxpayer who reports some income -- even just $1 -- from a small business investment or partnership.

By this logic "every partner at a huge accounting firm or at the largest law firm would represent small businesses."

Also, by Cheney's definition, President Bush would have counted as a small business in 2001 because that year "he reported $84 of business income from his part ownership of a timber-growing enterprise." The overwhelming majority of actual small businesses are in the lower tax brackets and would be unaffected by the Kerry proposal.

Labels: Cheney, Krugman, Tax cuts

Over the past couple of months as it became increasingly clear that the neconservatives' big adventure had failed and that Iraq was becoming a dangerous bloody mess, Dick Cheney has made a habit of claiming there was a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist network despite the lack of credible evidence supporting this conclusion.

Months ago he would justify his pet claim by referring to the so-called "Feith memo", a leaked classified message from Douglas Feith to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The memo was hyped by The Weekly Standard as the last word on the Hussein-Laden connection but it never achieved the Standard's intended goal of rendering Dick's pet conspiracy theory a tenable position -- the memo was quickly and accurately characterized as another example of the sort propaganda that's been flowing out of Feith's office since the run-up to Bush's War, propaganda of the cherry-picked and exaggerated intelligence variety, as Daniel Benjamin wrote in Slate

At best, [the Feith memo] records expressions of various individuals' wish for a better relationship between the two sides--a desire that does not appear to have been consummated. ... There was a lot of seeking and wanting going on, and perhaps there were even meetings. But the fact that meetings occurred has never been the issue--at least not among serious critics--nor has it been disputed that some jihadists lived in or traveled through Iraq. ... What is disputed is that the meetings went anywhere. It would not be surprising to find out that the two sides had a de facto cease-fire, as has been alleged. But we're still waiting to see real cooperation in the form of transfers of weapons and other materiel, know-how, or funds

Even the Pentagon wouldn't stand by the Standard's spin and it released the following statement on the subject:

News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq ... are inaccurate. [The Feith memo] was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and drew no conclusions.

But this didn't stop Cheney from standing by his favorite story; he just stopped trying to defend it by citing the discredited memo. After the 9/11 commission report concluded that "to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts [between Hussein and al Qaeda] ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship", Cheney began spinning furiously and really started making a fool out of himself. His reply to the above definitive statement made by the group that his own administration had authorized to investigate the matter was to simply ignore it, saying

[The 9/11 commission] did not spend a lot of time on these other issues. They've got one paragraph in the report that talks about that. And so the notion that you can take one paragraph from the 9/11 Commission and say, `Ah, therefore that says there was never a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda.' It's just wrong. It's not true. I'd love to go on on all of this stuff, but the fact of the matter is there clearly was a relationship there.

and Cheney is right, there was a relationship there: the two adversarial entities, Iraq and al Qaeda, had a few tentative meetings to decide whether to pursue a collaborative relationship and decided not to. Nothing more substantive is supported by the available intelligence -- of course, it is impossible to prove a negative assertion so Cheney's continued insistence that an operative connection existed is similar to insisting that elves exist because no one can prove that they don't.

But this whole little political circus took another turn today ... apparently back when Cheney first started telling his tall tale months ago, he asked the CIA to review the intelligence on the subject and produce a report, well the CIA has completed the requested investigation and, you guessed it,

The new assessment follow[ed] the independent Sept. 11 commission's finding that there was no "collaborative relationship" between the former Iraqi regime and bin Laden's terrorist network.

according to Knight-Ridder today. I haven't yet seen Cheney's response to the report, but based on his past behavior, his lack of shame in publicly maintaining a belief that simply is not corroborated by the available facts, I have no doubt that Cheney will continue to endorse his conspiracy theory.

Yesterday, however, as reported by the AFP, Rumsfeld jumped ship, stating

To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.

contradicting previous statements of his which situated him squarely as a drinker of the neoconservative Kool-Aid; for example, on 9/27/2002 Rumsfeld said

We have what we consider to be credible evidence that al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire weapons of mass destruction capabilities

But Rummy's political conversion didn't last long. After the above statement hit the press he attempted to back pedal issuing the following on the Pentagon's website claiming that his previous statement was "misunderstood":

I have acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between al Qaeda and Iraq ... Today at the Council, I even noted that 'when I'm in Washington, I pull out a piece of paper and say ``I don't know, because I'm not in that business, but I'll tell you what the CIA thinks'' and I read it'.

So maybe Rummy and Cheney can still be friends...

Labels: Al Qaeda, Cheney, Feith Memo