Eschew Obfuscation: November 2005

The New Map

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What a difference a year makes.

Courtesy of dreaminonempty at Daily Kos

Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

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On November 22, 1963 I was a 10th grader walking up a stairwell at high school when a dimuitive latin teacher said breathlessly, "Have you heard? JFK's been shot."

The Four Freedoms - 1941

Norman Rockwell

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You can read FDR's complete "Four Freedoms" address delivered on Janary 6, 1941 here.

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants --everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the world.

Jesus' General

LONDON (AFP) - Admiral Stansfield Turner, a former CIA director, accused US Vice President Dick Cheney of overseeing policies of torturing terrorist suspects and damaging the nation's reputation, in a television interview.

'We have crossed the line into dangerous territory,' Turner, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970s, said on ITV news.

'I am embarrassed that the USA has a vice president for torture. I think it is just reprehensible. He (Mr Cheney) advocates torture, what else is it? I just don't understand how a man in that position can take such a stance.'

The Four Freedoms - 2005

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Ward Sutton at The Nation.

Last spring I went to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbrige, MA. The orignal large versions of the Four Freedoms (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Fear and Freedom from Want) are very moving.

Stupid or Lying?

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Tom Tomorrow gets it right.

Bush: Failure To Grasp the Obvious

Over at The Huffington Post James Fallows points out George Bush's failure to grasp the obvious.

On available evidence, the President himself has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he did: that a war in Iraq undercut the broader and longer term war against Islamic terrorism. Not in one speech, not in one interview or off-hand remark, not in one insider account of White House deliberation has there been the slightest indication that President Bush recognizes this concept sufficiently to offer a rebuttal to it.

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So when the President decided on Friday to "respond to the critics" of his Iraq policy, naturally he did nothing of the kind. For the record, here are the three biggest, most obvious points not even addressed in his speech:

1) Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong, and everybody came to the same conclusion we did. The foreigners came to that conclusion through their intelligence services, and the Democrats (especially that weaselly Kerry and ambitious Hillary) did it when they voted for the war resolution.

But at the time, Administration officials were most emphasically NOT saying "hey, we're all operating in the dark here." The implied message of every briefing for reporters, every speech to the public, and every background session with legislators, was: If you knew what we knew, then you'd be as alarmed as we are. That was the message of Dick Cheney's statement that "there can be no doubt" that Iraq "now" had weapons of mass destruction, of Condi Rice's warning about the mushroom cloud, and of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. The argument over Iraq's capabilities was by definition one sided, because the Administration's presumed insider knowledge trumped what anyone else could say. To pretend this was just a big widely-shared confusion is dishonest and wrong.

2) To say that Saddam Hussein might have been a threat is not to say that we had to invade when we did.

The Administration had two responses when asked in 2003 "what's the rush?" about beginning the invasion. One was logistical: the troops were in place, they couldn't wait forever, soon it would be hot (as if they would not be in Iraq thorugh many summers!). This obviously is a "Guns of August" style of reasoning: the trains are moving toward the front, so we might as well start World War I.

The other response was: we've waited 12 years, why wait any more? The answer to that was, first, that Iraq was now crawling with weapons inspectors, who at a minimum would make it hard for Saddam to cook up any surprise plans -- and, second, that beginning a war could touch off a lot of messy complications left out of the optimistic war scenarios.

This is the crucial point: Every aspect about managing occupied Iraq could have turned out better with more time. There would be more chance to line up Arabic-speaking or Islamic allies; more time to get adequate U.S. troops on the scene; more chance to think about protecting the power system, the hospitals, and other aspects of the public infrastructure; more time in general to ask "what if..."

3) As for managing Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, there is no shared blame at all. The Bush Administration owns every aspect of this disastrously bungled situation.

The failure to stop the looting; the deliberately low-ball on the number of occupying troops; the rash decision to disband the Iraqi army; the inattention to how quickly American "liberators" would become "occupiers"; the lassitude about recruiting or training enough Arabic speakers or getting serious about developing an Iraqi force -- on these and a dozen other familiar points, the Administration cannot possibly say, "Hey, everybody was wrong." These were the decisions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, in many cases bulldozing or ignoring contrary views from within the military and other parts of the government. Or, I guess the reality is: the Administration could "possibly" say this. They just couldn't say it honestly.

Brother Punisher

Back in May of 2005 I blogged about Amanda Marcotte's description of Priscilla Owen as a Sister Punisher: "a woman whose willingness to turn on other women to curry the favor of sexist men knows no bounds."

Now I read that Ward Connerly, California's "brother punisher" is trying to kill affirmative action in Michigan education just as he did in California. For me Connerly is just a guy whose willingness to turn on other minorities to curry the favor of racist men and women knows no bounds.

There is no question that Connerly's efforts in California reduced opportunity for minorites seeking higher education. Michigan can look at the California experiment and see the results of Connerly's hidden agenda.

For more look here.

Race was obviously a big issue there," Connerly said in an interview. "I felt that the people of Michigan would probably understand this issue more than in any other state, other than California."

Even a year before the election, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative has roiled the state's political waters.

Opponents have staged loud rallies, prominent Republican and Democratic politicians have opposed the ban and court battles have raged over the initiative's validity. Supporters say the measure would end racism, while their foes deride the initiative as "the California amendment."

In other words, Michigan looks a lot like California, circa 1996.

Many California higher-education leaders say Prop. 209 devastated their ability to enroll adequate numbers of black and Latino students. Educators and administrators fear the same could happen in Michigan.

"It's unfortunate that there's an attempt to import an experiment from California that hasn't been terribly successful," said Marvin Krislov, a University of Michigan vice president and the institution's lead attorney in the Supreme Court case.

"We all, of course, hope that progress can be made," he said. But, in California, "the data suggests this has been a dismal failure."

Yet hundreds of thousands of Michigan residents signed a petition qualifying the Civil Rights Initiative for the ballot. Donations supporting the measure have poured in from across the country, including East Bay cities such as San Ramon, Livermore, El Cerrito and Kensington.

How pathetic.

Some Kind of Manly

Molly Ivins over at Working For Change makes it clear that Bush and Cheney are not tough guys with their pro-torture stance. Instead they are pathetic with their "fake machismo."

'We do not torture,' said our pitifully inarticulate president, straining through emphasis and repetition to erase the obvious.

A string of prisons in Eastern Europe in which suspects are held and tortured indefinitely, without trial, without lawyers, without the right to confront their accusers, without knowing the evidence or the charges against them, if any. Forever. It's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.' Another secret prison in the midst of a military camp on an island run by an infamous dictator. Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Who are we? What have we become? The shining city on a hill, the beacon and bastion of refuge and freedom, a country born amidst the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere.

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'Sometimes you gotta play rough,' said Dick Cheney. No shit, Dick? Now why don't you tell that to John McCain?

Pssst ... Nobody Loves a Torturer

Fareed Zakaria says what should not have to be said in Newsweek. We torture prisoners in Saddam's old house of pain at Abu Ghraib and then we set up a Soviet style Gulag while Bush righteously claims that the "evil-doers hate our freedoms." I have zero respect for the members of the Bush administration who allowed this to happen.

Nov. 14, 2005 issue - As President Bush's approval ratings sink at home, the glee across the globe rises. He remains the most unpopular political figure in the world, and newspapers from Europe to Asia are delighting in his troubles. Last week's protests in Mar del Plata were happily replayed on televisions everywhere. So what is the leader of the free world to do? Well, I have a suggestion that might improve Bush's image abroad—and it doesn't require that Karen Hughes go anywhere. It would actually help Bush at home as well, and it has the additional virtue of being the right thing to do. It's simple: end the administration's disastrous experiment with officially sanctioned torture.

The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman

Frank Rich illustrates the Bush Administration's pattern of deception by comparing the pattern behind the indictment of Scooty Libby to the pattern behind reporting the death of Pat Tillman.

It would be a compelling story, if only it were true. Five weeks after Tillman's death, the Army acknowledged abruptly, without providing details, that he had 'probably' died from friendly fire. Many months after that, investigative journalists at The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times reported that the Army's initial portrayal of his death had been not only bogus but also possibly a cover-up of something darker. 'The records show that Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath,' Steve Coll wrote in The Post in December 2004. 'They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders.'

This fall The San Francisco Chronicle uncovered still more details with the help of Tillman's divorced parents, who have each reluctantly gone public after receiving conflicting and heavily censored official reports on three Army investigations that only added to the mysteries surrounding their son's death. (Yet another inquiry is under way.) 'The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons,' said Patrick Tillman, Pat Tillman's father, who discovered that crucial evidence in the case, including his son's uniform and gear, had been destroyed almost immediately.