Who caught a glimpse of the new Fox News slogan on The Simpsons last night?
"Fox News: Not Racists, But #1 With Racists." Okay, so it's not really their new slogan. I don't know how a cartoon airing on Fox gets away with mocking the "news" channel owned by Fox, but maybe that's how they imagine themselves as "fair and balanced." There might be some puppet mastery going on at that network -- which Jon Stewart tried to diagram last week.
Anyway, watch that Simpsons episode if you haven't already. Dick Cheney makes an appearance in Simpsons form and reminds the television viewing public that he's evil and "likes to stack men, naked."
Oh, so it's out? Decision Points by George W. Bush is not only on the shelves but also a best seller on Amazon.com. Bush's memoir is described as a "candid and gripping account" of the "critical decisions that shaped his presidency and personal life." That's funny because when I first heard the title, I assumed it would explain who the hell decided to make him president.
But whatever. I don't think I'm going to read it -- not even the free Kindle sample. I've had enough of this guy, so I will settle for scathing reviews, video mashups, and exclusive interviews (if they include a handy transcript I can easily skim):
LAUER: Did you ever ask yourself the question, "What more could I have done," to prevent this from happening?
BUSH: Well, we just didn't have any solid intelligence that gave us a warning on this. We didn't have any clear intelligence that said you know, "Get ready. They're gonna fly airplanes into New York buildings."
Wow. He's still spreading that horseshit that there was just no way he could have known? Despite the fact that he had been presented with 36 Presidential Daily Briefs that year that related to Bin Ladin or al Qaeda, and that 36th one was actually titled 'Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' What more did he want? Bin Ladin to personally pencil in the attack date in his day planner?
But wait, there's more crazy:
LAUER: Here's something else from the book: “I could never forget what happened to America that day. I would pour my heart and soul into protecting this country, whatever it took." It took two wars. It took thousands of lives, American lives. Billions of dollars. You could say it taking Guantanamo and Abu Gharib and government eavesdropping and waterboarding. Did it take too much?
BUSH: We didn't have an attack. 3,000 people died on September the 11th and I vowed that I would do my duty to protect the American people.
We didn't have an attack? WTF? The Republicans are trying to rewrite history again and nobody is objecting?
Finally, here is the heart of the interview, but it's no surprise. In fact, it's Bush's most famous talking point -- you know, the one where he claims he kept us safe:
BUSH: We believe America's going to be attacked again. There's all kinds of intelligence comin' in. And-- and-- one of the high value al Qaeda operatives was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the chief operating officer of al Qaeda… ordered the attack on 9/11. And they say, "He's got information." I said, "Find out what he knows.” And so I said to our team, "Are the techniques legal?" He says, "Yes, they are." And I said, "Use 'em."
LAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?
BUSH: Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer., but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do.
LAUER: You say it's legal. "And the lawyers told me."
BUSH: Yeah.
LAUER: Critics say that you got the Justice Department to give you the legal guidance and the legal memos that you wanted.
BUSH: Well—
LAUER: Tom Kean, who a former Republican co-chair of the 9/11 commission said they got legal opinions they wanted from their own people.
BUSH: He obviously doesn't know. I hope Mr. Kean reads the book. That's why I've written the book. He can, they can draw whatever conclusion they want. But I will tell you this. Using those techniques saved lives. My job is to protect America and I did.
No, torture didn't keep us safe. Bush and Cheney decided to torture for political gain, torture results in false intelligence, and the fact that we torture was used as a powerful recruiting tool for al Qaeda.
But now we have Bush's memoirs which should have been titled "I Approved Waterboarding," and might as well be used as a signed confession if anybody has the balls to prosecute.
"Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Those are the famous words of Joseph N. Welch in response to Joseph McCarthy at the infamous Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954.
I'd like to repeat those questions to Liz Cheney and William Kristol. Apparently they think it's good politics to vilify Department of Justice lawyers who have defended alleged terrorists. But it's not good politics. Cheney and Kristol look like a pair of McCarthy-era commie-hunting idiots.
Our entire system of justice is based on both sides having good, strong legal representation. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) has joined a list of distinguished lawyers and policy experts denouncing the recent attack ads:
"I've been a military lawyer for almost 30 years, I represented people as a defense attorney in the military that were charged with some pretty horrific acts, and I gave them my all," said Graham. "This system of justice that we're so proud of in America requires the unpopular to have an advocate and every time a defense lawyer fights to make the government do their job, that defense lawyer has made us all safer."
Ken Starr has also loudly rebuked Cheney and Kristol on this important issue. But the "department of Jihad" slur will still catch on with some people. Those people don't understand justice, but they also lack a conscious, empathy, and imagination. Do you ever imagine yourself on the unpopular side of a court case?
Hey Liz, let me help you picture what could happen in your fantasy world where no lawyer will defend a man who everybody assumes is guilty:
"I was a big supporter of waterboarding." — Dick Cheney on This Week.
So who's keeping score? Dick Cheney has confessed to war crimes on national television at least twice since he left office.
Andrew Sullivan reported on these facts: "There is not a court in the United States or in the world that does not consider waterboarding torture. The Red Cross certainly does, and it's the governing body in international law. It is certainly torture according to the UN Convention on Torture and the Geneva Conventions. The British government, America's closest Western ally, certainly believes it is torture. No legal authority of any type in the US or the world has ever doubted that waterboarding is torture. To have subjected an individual to waterboarding once is torture under US and international law. To subject someone to it 183 times is so categorically torture is it almost absurd to even write this sentence. "
And it's absurd that a former U.S. Vice President would shamelessly boast that he set these war crimes in motion. There must be some kind of good Samaritan law that requires all of us to call the police and report Cheney's confessions to crimes? We are all witnesses, and I suppose that is why I write this while knowing that, for the foreseeable future, nobody will be prosecuted.
Not to be a real downer or anything, but it's about time our country started talking about Afghanistan again. But who to listen to?
I'm not going to listen to that totally discredited war criminal Dick Cheney. He says President Obama is "dithering," but Bush and Cheney dithered around for years before asking the tough questions seven years after invading Afghanistan! And then, of course, they invaded Iraq, and the entire world wished the Bush administration had dithered before entering two simultaneous quagmires.
But there are more credible people than Cheney. We could listen to the former Marine Corps captain who recently resigned over the Afghan war saying, "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."
But I have the most respect for the man once called The Most Dangerous Man in America, Daniel Ellsberg. He has seen all of this -- just different names and places -- forty years ago when he was working as a military analyst and leaked a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War. Now he has a lot to say about Afghanistan:
At about 14:45 into the video, Ellsberg says about the Afghan army, "no doubt you could put more money into them, but where would it go? Switzerland?" I suppose that's where a lot of drug money ends up, and with the latest news that the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade is also on the CIA payroll, Ellsberg's comment is forthright.
And his conclusion is sobering. If Obama does send more troops, if he does prolong this bloody stalemate, he will do so only to appease his political opponents who will accuse him of being weak, unmanly, and abandoning a "winnable war." We've seen it all before.
Here we go again. Dick Cheney is still defending torture. Dick Cheney still thinks he's above the law. Dick Cheney still thinks he's the one in charge. But now he has a new BFF in Chris Wallace who brings new meaning to the softball interview:
Oh Chris! Did Dick Cheney let you sit on his lap after the cameras were turned off?
And again, Chris Wallace proved himself an inadequate journalist while leading the discussion following the interview. He cut off Juan Williams from making clear and forceful arguments against torture. He dismisses it all as "purely coincidental" that this country has not been attacked again since 9-11. But John Amato is as sick as I am over the "they kept us safe" line of bullshit:
You see, 9/11 doesn't count. Cheney and his ilk make it sound as if America was being attacked every week and once he started torturing they all magically stopped. Why was the US safe from 1993-2001, without using torture or the Patriot act? And the Trade Center bombers were all caught, but using Cheney's method Bin Laden is still free.
But these guys can't be bogged down with concepts like truth and justice... or journalism. Is there a prize opposite of the Pulitzer? I'll have to look into that, but meanwhile I'm making up my own. The first ever Porkpuller Prize for weakest effort in journalism goes to Chris Wallace. Congrats, Chris.
"When they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity." — Dick Cheney, 05/21/2009
"The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of judgment suspended, in favor of self-fulfilling prophecy. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of moral force supplanted by violence and revenge fantasies. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness... of Dick Cheney." — Keith Olbermann, 05/21/2009
I'm still trying to get my head around Cheney's paradoxical double-flip of criticizing dissent and appealing to the terrorists all in the same gasp. I realize that ingrained deep in the Republican psyche is the stabbed-in-the-back philosophy. Failure in war is always the fault of domestic enemies and treachery in high places. Always blame the dissenters and hippies! Except now, Cheney is the dissenter... Does he even realize that?
I don't want to take away his right to disagree or anybody's right to disagree. But does he get it that he's not the one in charge now? Most of us voted for Barack Obama (he won the election, you know).
And Cheney is engaging in another old game of extreme fear-mongering (plus exaggerations and misstatements). If we don't agree with him, we're all going to die. He must have mentioned 9/11 every 30 seconds in his speech last night. Republicans can't get any blunter than that, or can they?
Why is the GOP remixing the 1964 "Daisy" ad? The main offense is that they took White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs completely out of context, but at least they were smart enough to leave out the H-Bomb of the original ad. The message is the same though: the future of America is in immediate danger. In 1964, the perceived threat was Barry Goldwater. In 2009, the perceived threat is closing the Guantanamo Bay Prison.
But I thought we had already tortured this topic. Our world-class prison industrial complex can safely hold these alleged terrorists. Supermax prisoners spend up to 23 hours a day in solitary confinement -- unable to communicate, unable to plot, and unable to escape!
Glenn Greenwald lists the convicted Muslim Terrorists already imprisoned inside the US, and he refutes another popular scare tactic. If there really were sleeper terrorist cells waiting to liberate their imprisoned comrades, then they've already had a long list of potential "target" prisons for 20 years now.
But let's not forget why the Guantanamo Bay Prison was opened in the first place. The location was ostensibly selected for its security. But let's get real. The location was really selected for its legal ambiguity. However, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees do indeed have habeas corpus rights.
So Dick Cheney and the RNC are scared. They're scared of something, but I'm not convinced it's the terrorists. I think their biggest fear is that nothing bad will happen, and then their ideologies, their policies, and their wars will lose even more credibility.
The world hasn't gone completely mad yet. Two top Bush-era officials, Robert Gates and Tom Ridge, say the country's national security is not in jeopardy. And at least one American town realizes that taking Guantanamo prisoners could be good for their economy.
Right now I wish Dick Cheney would take a nice long vacation. I hear Spain is lovely.
The imminent threat of a terrorist attack was Dick Cheney's justification for torture. Terrorists are poised to set off dirty bombs and biological weapons annihilating entire US cities -- according to Cheney and the popular TV show 24. But real experts, like former Army interrogators in the war in Iraq, tell us how unrealistic a torture fantasy show can be:
“These are very determined people, and they won’t turn just because you pull a fingernail out,” he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. “They almost welcome torture,” he said. “They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory—the ticking time bomb will go off!” ... “In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” Lagouranis told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.” Some people, he said, “gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information.” If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”
But now, after all these years of FOX propaganda, evidence is gathering that Cheney's authorization of torture wasn't really about the theoretical ticking time bombs anyway. The Bush administration tortured for political gain:
Perhaps the sharpest rebuke to Cheney's assertions has come from Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, who says bluntly that when the administration first authorized "harsh interrogation" during the spring of 2002, "its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaida."
I don't know if these revelations will change public opinion, but most certainly we need to rephrase our dialog about these issues: "Pollsters should be asking if Americans support using torture to extract false confessions for political purposes, because that's what happened."
Also, somebody needs to present Cheney with this bit of logic: if torturing people led to false justifications for war, and if thousands of Americans died in that war, then didn't torture cost American lives?
The Republicans don't understand that torture is not a partisan issue. Take that old Newt Gingrich for example. Does he honestly believe that if he can prove that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about torture, then everybody will forget about George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Douglas Feith, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee, and William Haynes?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is engaging in a "despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort" to withhold what she knew about the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques, former Speaker Newt Gingrich said Friday.
Gingrich said Pelosi "lied to the House" when she earlier claimed that the CIA had never briefed her about the Bush administration's use of interrogation methods like waterboarding, which is considered torture by the current administration.
"I think that the House has an absolute obligation to open an inquiry, and I hope there will be a resolution to investigate her. And I think this is a big deal. I don't think the speaker of the House can lie to the country on national security matters," the Republican leader said in an interview with ABC Radio.
Pelosi has been under fire from critics who say she was fully briefed on the techniques in 2002 and 2003. On Thursday, the California Democrat accused CIA officials of misleading her, reiterating a claim that she was briefed on such techniques only once -- in September 2002 -- and that she was told at the time that the techniques were not being used.
I know torture is abhorrent and illegal, and this is not about politics. You can't fool me, persuade me, calm me, or dazzle me with your smokescreens or a million "provocative" editorials. Even if Pelosi did know about torture (and I doubt she did), then we, the torture opponents, do not lose the argument! This is not like Clinton and blow jobs. This is not about getting even with the Republicans. This is about pursuing justice even if it's our highest officials who are guilty.
So yes, Mr. Gingrich. Let's gather up everybody who has lied to the House and the American public about torture and war and weapons of mass destruction. Let's investigate all of them.
I was counting on this happening eventually, but I thought it would come as the result of a criminal investigation. Vincent Bugliosi explained how and why Bush administration officials would start ratting each other out:
What I'm saying is that even people of character aren't usually loyal to each other when their own life is on the line. But these moral weaklings will all probably sing like canaries against each other, since they all appear to be almost amoral individuals who are devoid of any character. If they are willing to lie to the American public about a matter of war and peace that resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 people, certainly they'd be willing to tell the truth to save their worthless hides from the gas chamber or electric chair. Indeed, I suspect that the prosecutor's biggest problem won't be to get them to talk to save their lives, but to make sure they don't embroider the truth and start telling lies in an effort to get a better deal from the prosecutor.
Well, they're starting to sing even without any prosecutor (if video doesn't show, click here):
The precise bureaucratic standards include instructions for forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls (walling), prolonged sleep deprivation (up to 11 straight days), the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees, being locked in a cramped box with an insect, and waterboarding.
Since the release of these documents, the torture debate has reached a crescendo that is impossible to ignore yet difficult to listen to.
There is, of course, former Vice President Dick Cheney who months ago calmly and shamelessly admitted to authorizing torture because he really thinks it works. He'd like us to believe that waterboarding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) 183 times was a worthwhile endeavor, but counter-terrorism experts are contradicting his claims saying most of the information KSM coughed up during the waterboarding sessions involved things he thought his interrogators already knew, or were just his ideas for mayhem. Also, there is the inconvenient fact that the Bush timeline shows the LA plot was thwarted long before KSM was caught and waterboarded.
Then there are the cries of Former Attorney Michael Mukasey and former CIA director Michael Hayden. One imaginative claim from the duo is that the no-torture policy is inviting "the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on September 11, 2001." However, history isn't a Gumby toy they can bend into any pose they like. The cumulative failures leading up to the attack on September 11, 2001 are well documented and have nothing to do with timidity and everything to do with incompetence.
Mukasey and Hayden also want us to believe that we shouldn't admit to torture because then the terrorists will know we torture! First of all, terrorists would also know this if they listened to the news or picked up any newspaper in the last 6 years. Secondly, I don't think knowledge of a US government document will ease any man's panic while being drowned. Thirdly, because the US is committed to lawful interrogation techniques now, it won't matter if detainees know about banned procedures.
Listening to this ongoing debate is like sitting through a remedial math class where everybody has to relearn that two plus two is four. Indeed, the Bush administration might have also been wise to sit through a remedial history class. In a shocking article, the New York Times asserts that nobody in the Bush administration investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate:
According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.
Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.
They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.
The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.
I'm afraid that one night in the near future I'm going to turn on the TV at 3am and see Dick Cheney with his own infomercial selling torture. It's kind of like his own Snuggie... but at least the Snuggie works. Torture doesn't.
Why are we doomed to learn these lessons over and over? Six decades ago, the US military understood how to get information from prisoners of war:
"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.
So why should we be surprised today when we read that "not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions"? Well, I'm not surprised, but I think I now understand why the CIA destroyed the videotapes showing these interrogations. Certainly Cheney is not embarrassed that the CIA tortured with his authorization. That fact is well established and advertised, but I believe those tapes would have shown just how crappy the extracted information was. That's why they got rid of them.
So the coming Spanish Inquisition can continue without the tapes. At least they have these infamous memos that President Obama recently declassified. However, I'm not certain how the Spanish courts will round up Alberto Gonzales, Douglas Feith, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee, and William Haynes. If our government chooses not to pursue trials in American courts, I doubt they're going to just hand these guys over to Spanish courts. Any Spanish arrest warrants would be simply symbolic...
Condoleezza Rice was playing it cool last night on The Tonight Show (if video doesn't show, click here):
For one tiny second I wanted to like her. After all, she's rejecting Dick Cheney's harsh words for Obama and basically telling the former VP to keep it to himself. But then I remember that this is the same woman who led the meetings with Rumsfeld and Ashcroft where they decided torture was legal. This is the same woman who was a complete failure as national security adviser. This is the same woman who went along with the charade to link Saddam Hussein to September 11, and then later denied it. No wonder she earned the nickname "kinda-lies-a-lot."
I was also irked by the whole "we did our best" shtick. It's not much different than Bush's petulant reminders that he made "tough decisions." Let's not forget that you only get the pat on the back when you make right decisions.
It's no surprise that Rice's interview was self-serving. She's trying to apply the soft focus lens to her career -- blurring the image and creating an aberration. We wouldn't put such a nice person in prison, would we?
It's times like these that I wish I had a degree in psychology so I could attempt to analyze Dick... But I will say this -- his dire warnings feel more like threats.
"It's easy to make your voice heard," proclaims Change.gov, Barack Obama's web site. The president-elect is taking questions, and after this recent round, the people's concern is clear. The highest ranked question asks, "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor -- ideally Patrick Fitzgerald -- to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?"
The response was disappointing with both Biden and Obama reiterating the need to look forward above all else:
Vice President-elect Biden, 12/21/08: “[T]he questions of whether or not a criminal act has been committed or a very, very, very bad judgment has been engaged in is—is something the Justice Department decides. Barack Obama and I are—President-elect Obama and I are not sitting thinking about the past. We’re focusing on the future… I’m not ruling [prosecution] in and not ruling it out. I just think we should look forward. I think we should be looking forward, not backwards.”
Barack Obama, 01/11/09: We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering [up].
Of course we need to look forward, but I, for one, was looking forward to seeing Dick Cheney behind bars!
Well, let me put it another way. Investigating crimes and prosecuting offenders is forward looking! We are a nation of laws, and if we do not prosecute, then those laws are meaningless. If we do not prosecute, we are not protecting our very purpose as a nation: liberty and justice for all. If we do not prosecute, then evil triumphs.
Don't accept these transgressions as normal! House judiciary committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and nine other lawmakers aim to establish a Blue Ribbon Commission comprised of experts outside government service to investigate the broad range of policies of the Bush administration. A great idea, but if our new President feels he can't look backwards, then maybe the evidence should be turned over to the World Court.
See that picture I posted of the rear-view mirror? It is possible to look forward and backward at the same time. In fact, it is necessary.
This painting by Edward Sorel is titled The Imperial Family and was featured in Vanity Fair's farewell slide show. It's not a very flattering portrait, is it?
But it is accurate nonetheless. Dick Cheney is the patriarch and George W. Bush is the little drooling spawn.
A lot has been said about Cheney in the last eight years, but his own words are the most incriminating. Last month, while the world was asleep or something, Dick Cheney took credit for torture. Torture is a war crime. The Vice President of the United States confessed to a war crime in prime time. Americans yawned and changed the channel.
Anybody who has been paying attention already knew about torture memos and other documents linking high level officials to the torture decision. Of course Dick Cheney was the planner of these crimes. I was not surprised.
But I was angered. At this point, the anger is just anger heaped on top of more anger. Will anybody anywhere ever have the balls to prosecute this man?
Surprisingly, in the rush to pardon nearly everybody, Bush has not issued a pre-emptive pardon for Cheney. Cheney is so arrogant that he recently told the Associated Press that "he sees no reason for President George W. Bush to pre-emptively pardon anyone who authorized or was involved in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists."
Clearly, he is counting on the American people and the Obama administration letting him get away with these crimes.
Cheney's hubris is appalling. Let's stop calling him a "mastermind" or even "imperial." He is a scheming criminal bureaucrat with blood on his hands. To let him walk free is a crime in itself.
American Idol meets DHS in ABC's new reality show Homeland Security USA. Tonight, I watched it so you don't have to.
From the start, a faceless and booming voice-of-authority tells us how brave men and women safeguard our country and enforce our laws while patrolling our borders. I assume they mean these border regions that nearly 2/3 of the US population lives in, and the ACLU refers to as a "constitution-free zone."
So how do you turn an absurd bureaucracy with an Orwellian name into fun family entertainment? Well, you have to have some zany characters like the Swiss belly dancer who, in broken English, wanted to know if she would get a refund on her airline ticket because she was being sent back home. I was waiting to hear her sing, but then I remembered that show doesn't start until next week.
A reality show has to promise a lot of suspense. Oh look, we caught a terrorist using his real name and birth date! Oh wait. A case of mistaken identity. But how nice of the kindly agents to tell the family, after traumatizing their children with guns, how to handle the situation in the future. (We don't hear what this advice is, by the way.)
The producers must have an easy time making this show. Everything is right out of the Bush-Cheney propaganda handbook. They stick to the official script that DHS is securing the United States from terrorist threats and attacks. But where were the threats? The umpteen pounds of drugs confiscated don't scare me in the least. Make them legal already. The barbecued bats from Thailand? That's definitely gross and they might have made a few people sick, but I wish our government could put the same effort into inspecting imports which are a very real threat.
Finally, we're treated to the new American experience of airport security theater. The bizarre scene of a boy around age 11 dutifully reporting the contents of his backpack to an agent made me wonder if Bush ever envisioned a Youth League. Hey, it's not too late, George. You've got two weeks left.
The message of the show was clear. Shut up. We're doing this for your own good. Now stand still while we put this collar around your neck.
I rate this show "code red." Be on high alert if you dare to watch it.
As White House Press Secretary, Scott McClellan had a lucrative career lying to us. Now, with the recent change in political climate, he makes his bucks exposing those lies. His most recent revelation is that George W. Bush outed CIA agent Valerie Plame (if video doesn't show, click here):
So this video is already a week old. Has Bush been impeached yet? Let me check... nope. However, Dick Cheney has been indicted on something totally unrelated. I'm shocked -- the charges aren't shocking but the indictment itself surprises me. In a government where an executive order can grant the VP limitless power, I thought Cheney was untouchable...
So let's optimistically imagine we can get to the point where Bush is put on trial, and Scott McClellan is called as a witness. I am sure that McClellan's loyalty and character will be attacked along with his honesty. In an astonishing contradiction, Scott McClellan told members of the House Judiciary Committee last June that he didn't think that the president knew in advance about the Plame Wilson leak. He has clearly changed his story.
However, I still feel that McClellan's claims corroborate other reports and charges against Bush and Cheney. I could care less about McClellan's apparent lack of loyalty to a political party. I just wish he wasn't a professional liar.
Golly, ain't she folksy? Yet worldly enough to know a homosexual or two. Yet arrogant enough to say she may not answer the questions tonight. Yet stupid enough to criticize the MSM (wow, is she pissed at Couric or what?). And dangerous enough to want to expand the powers of the vice presidency. Yikes!
IFILL: Governor, you mentioned a moment ago the constitution might give the vice president more power than it has in the past. Do you believe as Vice President Cheney does, that the Executive Branch does not hold complete sway over the office of the vice presidency, that it it is also a member of the Legislative Branch?
PALIN: Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president's agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation. And it is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as V.P. with McCain, not only as a governor, but earlier on as a mayor, as an oil and gas regulator, as a business owner. It is those years of experience on an executive level that will be put to good use in the White House also.
IFILL: Vice President Cheney's interpretation of the vice presidency?
BIDEN: Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.
And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.
The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.
Wow, Sarah Palin's reply to that question was the most disturbing moment tonight. I started to have one of those panic moments reminiscent of when Bush was reelected. I'm seeing a grim future for our country in one sudden flash.
Joe Biden, however, was impressive tonight. He has command of the issues. His answers were clear and crisp, and he defended Senator Obama when necessary. His best quip was "past is prologue" when Palin complained Democrats were constantly looking backwards. Well, the world is still suffering for the crimes of the Bush administration! Palin, in here folksy twang, brushed off these crimes as "huge blunders." Yeah, let's not hold any high-level officials accountable. Let's not look at what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. Let's not look back because we might realize McCain-Palin would be as disastrous as Bush-Cheney.
Oh, Palin tried to push the myth that they would somehow be different than Bush-Cheney, but she couldn't offer one single example how. Neither did she offer to "get back to ya on that one."
She also pushed the other myth that our enemies hate us for our freedom. Can we get over this childish explanation offered by... BUSH? (I thought they wanted to distance themselves from Bush?) Let me just make it clear. Our enemies hate us for our foreign policies and they hate us for our airstrikes.
I suppose you can say Sarah Palin exceeded expectations tonight if you were expecting her to cry or pass out. She did neither of those. Instead she met my expectations. I fully anticipated the fake folksy cartoonish personality. I expected the awkward nonanswers mechanically sticking to talking points and attack lines. I expected that she could not explain anything in detail. But I never would have expected Palin's indifferent response to a very personal story from Biden (if video doesn't show, click here):
In between the banking crisis, presidential campaigns, and the world's obsession with Sarah Palin, other stuff is going on in the USA believe it or not.
Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, according to newly released documents.
In meetings during that period, the officials debated specific interrogation methods that the C.I.A. had proposed to use on Qaeda operatives held at secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, the documents show. The meetings were led by Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and attended by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top administration officials.
Why are we still using the phrase "harsh interrogation techniques" when we all know it's torture? I have no tolerance for euphemisms in these serious matters. But watching officials cover their asses is mildly amusing:
“I recall being told that U.S. military personnel were subjected in training to certain physical and psychological interrogation techniques and that these techniques had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm,” Ms. Rice, now secretary of state, wrote in response to one question.
I've never liked Rice because of her epic mistakes as national security adviser, but despite her screw-ups, she would have been a much better VP choice for McCain. It's sad that the Republicans got scared when they heard the rumors that Rice is a lesbian. It sure would have been an interesting election without the Christian conservatives on the Republican's side.
