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September 8, 2006

Judge Rules Against ACLU In Georgia Prayer Case

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Story has ruled that prayers that refer to Jesus Christ do not violate the U.S. Constitution and may continue to be offered at the Cobb County, Georgia county commission meetings.

Judge Story did affirm that repeated sectarian prayers given at meetings do violate the Constitution, but that such a violation did not occur with the Cobb County commission meetings. The plaintiffs in the case, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit a year ago because they believed that the council's prayer selection process showed a preference of one religion over the other. Judge Story said that it did not, but he also ruled that the selection of the Cobb County planning commission in 2003 and 2004. In January, Judge Story ruled against the plaintiffs' bid for a preliminary injunction to halt the prayers.

The ACLU also filed suit last year to force Cobb County schools to remove warning labels from science books that advised that evolution is a theory, not a fact. A U.S. District judge then ordered the county to pay the ACLU's attorney's fees.

The Knee-Slapping Hilarity of Republican Satire

Those fun-loving pranksters over at the RNC have cooked up a satirical newspaper from the future to show what life will be like under the Democrats. In September 2007, the paper reports, the Democratic majority in the House and the Senate will be busy repealing tax cuts, dismantling the missile defense system, and cutting funding to faith-based programs.

And who will be cheering them on? "Regular Americans" like "Judy Smith-Walker, a New York graphic designer," "Stefan, a 28-year-old full time student in San Francisco," and "aspiring Hollywood screenwriter Rex Star." Note the oh-so-subtle stereotyping at work. Given the level of humor of the whole exercise (Ted Kennedy’s proposed legislation is entitled, “Leave Education For Teachers” or LEFT ACT), I'm surprised the rapier wits of the RNC didn't just come out and call them Judy Feminazi and Foreign McFagfag.

9/11: What Changed Is What We've Done to Ourselves

There's a good piece by Jonathan Raban in the Independent on what really changed after 9/11.

"Since September 11..." we say, as if the attacks were what changed everything. The month is right but the day wrong, because the real metamorphosis has arisen not so much from what Mohamed Atta and his co-conspirators did to us on September 11 as what we've subsequently done to ourselves - and continue to do, today, tomorrow, and in the foreseeable future (incredibly foreshortened though that has become). On September 12, still in shock at the extraordinary injury inflicted on the US, we woke to essentially the same world we'd been living in before the phones began to ring. The death toll - then estimated at 10,000-plus - was horrifying, on the scale of a major earthquake or tsunami, but the globe continued to revolve on its accustomed axis, as it does after even the most devastating seismic killers. ...

Not 9/11, he argues, but 9/18 is "the real date to circle."

That day, Congress rushed through its Authorisation For Use of Military Force (AUMF), entitling the President, as the nation's commander in chief, to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against "those nations, organisations, or persons" that "he determines" were responsible for the September 11 atrocities, "...in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organisations, or persons." It's the "such" that's the key, the inclusion of nations, organisations, or persons "of that sort", which nicely covers, for instance, the invasion of Iraq, the arrest and detention of most of the prisoners now languishing in Guantanamo Bay, possible future military action against Iran, or Syria, or both, and heaven knows what else, since "such" is a term of potentially limitless capacity to make hitherto unguessed-at likenesses and connections.

The sloppily-worded AUMF endowed the administration with unique and wide-ranging powers. It has become the licence for the executive branch to wave at Congress and the judiciary whenever its actions are questioned or censured. On September 18 2001, the delicate balance between the three branches of government, as laid out in the American constitution, was thrown severely out of whack; since that day, one branch, the presidency, has enjoyed an unprecedented primacy over the others, and we've been living with the consequences of AUMF ever since.

Worth reading in full. Also worth a look is this interview with Raban about his book, My Holy War.

Transparency Bill Passes Senate

One chapter in the long, strange saga of the Federal Accountability and Transparency Act is over. Last night, the anti-pork legislation, which would create a “Google for government spending,” was unanimously passed by the Senate and now moves on for consideration in the House. Up until now its fate has been uncertain, as at least two senators, Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd, had placed temporary holds on the bill, preventing it from a floor vote.

John Hart, a spokesman for Senator Tom Coburn, one of the bill's co-sponsors, told Mother Jones he expects only “minor modifications from the Senate bill” in the House. From here on, he believes, the legislation will pass quickly.

Building on the Transparency Act's momentum, Coburn, along with Senators Barack Obama and Frank Lautenberg, have expressed interest in drafting legislation that will bring greater transparency to the nation’s very opaque tax code.
-- Carl Gutierrez

Death, Destruction, and Orderly Traffic in Iraq

US hands over control of Iraq's armed forces command to the country's government. (AP)

Roadside bombs have risen to record numbers as warning tips from Iraqis have dropped. (WP)

The body count in Baghdad nearly triples. (WP)

Iraqi traffic officers enforce a bit of order in a city full of chaos and corruption. ("The traffic law is the only thing nowadays that functions correctly," says one Iraqi.) (LAT)

Bolton Nomination Dead?

Steve Clemons reports:

Several well-placed sources close to the Bolton nomination process have reported to me that the Bolton confirmation process is now dead.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is "highly unlikely" to reconsider Bolton's confirmation again as things now stand.

One insider reported, as far as the Committee is concerned, "we consider the confirmation over. It's dead."

Good news for a change--and on a Friday at that!

Senate Report on Iraq Intelligence: No Zarqawi/Qaeda-Saddam link

A Senate report on prewar intelligence on Iraq finds no evidence that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al Qaeda. Specifically, the CIA found in 2005 that Saddam "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates."

This is the latest blow to the adminstration's (remarkably successful) 5-year effort to conflate Al Qaeda and Saddam in the public mind. Recall -- with the aid of our handy timeline of prewar intel -- the following:

The day after the 9/11 attacks, according to Richard Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies," Bush collared Clarke and and said, "I know you have a lot to do and all, but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way." Clarke responds, "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this." Bush tells him, "I know, I know, but -- see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred...."

On September 19, 2001, President Bush, according to Ron Suskind, told CIA chief George Tenet, "I want to know about links between Saddam and al Qaeda. The Vice President knows some things that might be helpful." Vice President Cheney tells Tenet about a report that one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, met with senior Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague. Tenet promises to investigate. Two days later, Tenet reports back: CIA's Prague office thinks the Atta story "doesn't add up." Moreover, the intelligence community knows that Atta's credit card and phone were used in Virginia during the period in question. Cheney, however, will continue to cite the alleged meeting in public appearances.

On September 21, 2001, President Bush was informed in a highly classified briefing that the US intelligence community could not link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks and that there is little evidence pointing to collaborative ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

On September 25, 2005, President Bush told journalists, "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."

On September 27, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld called the link between Iraq and al Qaeda "accurate and not debatable."

The report confirms (reconfirms, I'd say), in the words of the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, that "the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq was fundamentally misleading."

Full Senate report here. (PDF)

September 7, 2006

What if the Towers Hadn't Come Down on 9/11?

Tom Engelhardt has the cover story in the new issue of The Nation, a reconsideration of the American response to the 9/11 attacks five years after the event. In it, he asks:

What if the two hijacked planes, American Flight 11 and United 175, had plunged into those north and south towers at 8:46 and 9:03, killing all aboard, causing extensive damage and significant death tolls, but neither tower had come down? What if, as a Tribune columnist called it, photogenic "scenes of apocalypse" had not been produced? What if, despite two gaping holes and the smoke and flames pouring out of the towers, the imagery had been closer to that of 1993? What if there had been no giant cloud of destruction capable of bringing to mind the look of "the day after," no images of crumbling towers worthy of Independence Day?

As he points out, "Americans were already imagining versions of September 11 soon after the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945." Hence, the instinctive recourse to World War II analogies. "No wonder the events seemed so strangely familiar," he writes. "We had been living with the possible return of our most powerful weaponry via TV and the movies, novels and our own dream-life" for 50-plus years.

But here's the catch: What came, when it came, on September 11, 2001, wasn't what we thought came. There was no Ground Zero, because there was nothing faintly atomic about the attacks. It wasn't the apocalypse at all. Except in its success, it hardly differed from the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the one that almost toppled one tower with a rented Ryder van and a homemade bomb.

OK, the truck of 1993 had sprouted wings and gained all the power in those almost full, transcontinental jet fuel tanks, but otherwise what "changed everything," as the phrase would soon go, was a bit of dystopian serendipity for Al Qaeda: Nineteen men of much conviction and middling skills, armed with exceedingly low-tech weaponry and two hijacked jets, managed to create an apocalyptic look that, in another context, would have made the special-effects masters of Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic proud. And from that -- and the Bush administration's reaction to it -- everything else would follow.

The tiny band of fanatics who planned September 11 essentially lucked out. If the testimony, under CIA interrogation techniques, of Al Qaeda's master planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is to be believed, what happened stunned even him. ("According to the [CIA] summary, he said he ‘had no idea that the damage of the first attack would be as catastrophic as it was.'") Those two mighty towers came crumbling down in that vast, roiling, near-mushroom cloud of white smoke before the cameras in the fashion of the ultimate Hollywood action film (imagery multiplied in its traumatizing power by thousands of replays over a record-setting more than ninety straight hours of TV coverage). And that imagery fit perfectly the secret expectations of Americans -- just as it fit the needs of both Al Qaeda and the Bush administration.

Read the rest here.

ABC and "The Path to 9/11"

If you haven't already, check out this activist site dedicated to the noble work of giving ABC/Disney hell over its dodgy docudrama "The Path to 9/11," which was written by a right-wing activist and by all accounts contradicts the 9/11 Commission Report, on which it's supposedly based.

In brief:

The film places the blame for failing to prevent the attacks on the Clinton administration while overlooking the Bush administration's failures
Preview copies of the film have not been sent to left-wing bloggers, but marketed aggressively through advance copies among right-wing bloggers, radio hosts, and pundits
ABC plans to distribute the film free through iTunes and ABC.com, and is pushing for it to be used as an educational resource
The folks who put this site together are demanding, via an open letter, that ABC either correct the film's errors or yank it; label it a work of fiction; reveal the marketers responsible for hiding this film from lefty opinion leaders; and nix the planned outreach to educators.

ThinkProgress is gathering and debunking the film's errors here.

UPDATE: Educational media giant Scholastic, Inc., which is providing classroom companion guides, is redoing the materials on the grounds that the originals "did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues." (TPM Muckraker)

A Year After Katrina, Corps of Engineers Lacks a Flood Plan for New Orleans

Last month, on the anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, George W. Bush told a New Orleans audience:

I take full responsibility for the federal government's response, and a year ago I made a pledge that we will learn the lessons of Katrina and that we will do what it takes to help you recover. (Applause.) I've come back to New Orleans to tell you the words that I spoke on Jackson Square are just as true today as they were then.

Since I spoke those words, members of the United States Congress from both political parties came together and committed more than $110 billion to help the Gulf Coast recover. I felt it was important that our government be generous to the people who suffered. I felt that step one of a process of recovery and renewal is money.

Today, the Washington Post adds a little nuance to that assessment:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lacks a strategic plan to spend more than $7 billion approved by Congress for levee and flood-control projects in greater New Orleans, risking a repeat of the piecemeal approach that led to catastrophic systemic failures after Hurricane Katrina last year, congressional auditors reported yesterday.

While the Corps has spent more than $1 billion to repair southeastern Louisiana's broken levee system by this summer -- more than the $738 million it cost to build over 40 years -- billions more are coming for further work, such as adding pumps and canal gates, raising and reinforcing levees and storm-proofing pumping stations, the Government Accountability Office said in a report.

The money comes before the Corps outlines a long-term strategy to protect the region from the most powerful hurricanes, due to Congress by December 2007, which early estimates said might cost $10 billion to $20 billion, or more.

"We are concerned that the Corps has embarked on a multi-billion repair and construction effort in response to the appropriations it has already received, without a guiding strategic plan," reported the GAO, Congress's audit arm. The Corps is "once again . . . taking an incremental approach that is based on funding."

Pollster Pleads Guilty to Making Up Poll Results

Tracy Costin, owner of DataUSA Inc. (now ViewPoint USA) pleaded guilty yesterday to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. DataUSA Inc. has conducted polls for George W. Bush and Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

Costin was indicted for telling employees to alter poll data. An employee estimates that 50% of the data sent to Bush's campaign was falsified. An assistant U.S. Attorney says that "Sometimes, the respondent's gender or political affiliation were changed to meet a quota, other times all survey answers were fabricated." These fabrications came about when the polling company was working under the pressure of a deadline.

Costin faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. She has agreed to pay almost $83,000 in restitution to clients.

Lie by Lie...by Lie! Bush Tells a Whopper about Zubaydah

In his speech yesterday, the president said this:

In addition to the terrorists held at Guantanamo, a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. This group includes individuals believed to be the key architects of the September the 11th attacks, and attacks on the USS Cole, an operative involved in the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and individuals involved in other attacks that have taken the lives of innocent civilians across the world. These are dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans for new attacks. The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know.

Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged. Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country. I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks -- here in the United States and across the world. Today, I'm going to share with you some of the examples provided by our intelligence community of how this program has saved lives; why it remains vital to the security of the United States, and our friends and allies; and why it deserves the support of the United States Congress and the American people.

Those examples include that of Abu Zubaydah, whom Bush called "a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden."

We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why -- if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.

Our timeline tells a different story about Al-Zubaydah.

March 28, 2002
Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah is captured in Pakistan. A highly prized target whom administration officials will call a "chief operator," Zubaydah is later found to be severely mentally ill and in charge only of al Qaeda's minor logistics. He arranges travel for wives and children, for example, and has little to do with the "operational," side of the network's activities.

April 9, 2002
Bush: "The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah. He's one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." Members of the Administration call Zubaydah a "chief operator" and a "member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle"

When Bush is informed of Zubaydah's true stature within Al Qaeda, Bush says to Tenet, "I said he was important. You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" Tenet's reply: "No sir, Mr. President." The CIA has top medical professionals fly to Pakistan to fix up the wounds Zubaydah sustained in his capture. "We got him in very good health, so we could start to torture him," says one CIA official.

As time passes Tenet begins pushing his staff for something he can take to the President, anything to support the President's public statements about Zubaydah. In a comment exemplifying CIA resentment, one top agency officials says, "Bush and Cheney knew what we knew about Zubaydah...why the hell did the President have to put us in a box like this?"

The CIA tortures Zubaydah until he starts talking about plots against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, and apartment buildings. Writes reporter Ron Suskind in his book "The One Percent Doctrine," "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

Just for the record.

This is What Democracy Looks Like? Iraqi Govt Shutters Arab Satellite Station

AP is reporting today:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Iraqi government on Thursday ordered Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya to shut down its Baghdad operations for one month, state television reported. Al-Arabiya said Iraqi police later arrived at its offices to enforce the order. ...

Al-Arabiya, which is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, at first said its headquarters had not yet been informed of a ban, but later said on live television that police had arrived at its Baghdad offices to close its operations down.

The order apparently was issued by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Cabinet.

Al Maliki's office said AA put out news reports that "capitalize on the footage of victims of terrorist attacks," and called on media outlets to "respect the dignity of human beings and not to fall in the trap set up by terrorist groups who want to petrify the Iraqi people." (Didn't John Ashcroft say something similar about US media a few years back...?) Recall, the Iraqi government shut down the Baghdad news office of Al-Jazeera in August 2004. It remains closed.

In tangentially related news,

Al Arabiya is running a two-week training course for its correspondents in a drive to raise the standards of media professionalism in the region. Local Al Arabiya correspondents, as well as redional staff from Morocco, Sudan and Iraq will be taken through training sessions on subjects such as Arabic language and chief editing.

RadioShack Streamlines the Layoff Process, Emails Pinkslips to 400 Workers

Last week, at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, RadioShack laid off 400 employees. Layoffs are hardly news these days, but exactly how they laid off the workers is a bit more noteworthy. Employees received an e-mail that read:

"The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated."

"The nation's most trusted consumer electronics specialty retailer" has taken heat for the move, with its spokesperson defending the decision saying that employees were forewarned of the method of communication and that using email was both "fast" and "private." True, the company sells phones and could have used those to notify employees, but most of its likely young and expendable workforce is familiar enough with email that the mode of communication may not have fazed them. Instead they had to realize that, as jobless claims are on the decline, they just joined the ranks of the unemployed.

Curiously, the company is currently hiring, using the tagline, R You Ready?, on their career page. They're already using the lingo, maybe layoffs by text message are next?

September 6, 2006

Study: Bush Raises the Terrorism Fear Factor...And His Poll Numbers Jump Too

A new study by political scientists at Columbia University finds that three things follow from presidential pronouncements on terrorism: the media repeat the president's remarks; public fear of terrorism increases; and the president's poll numbers rise.

The study found that since 9/11 increases in terror alerts always made the top of the news on the three major networks while decreases got far less play. Reports the San Francisco Chronicle:

The official with the greatest ability to shift opinion on terrorism, the researchers found, is Bush, whose statements in the media about terrorism correlated highly with increases in the public's perception of terrorism as a major national problem -- and with increases in his approval ratings.

At the beginning of July 2002, for example, approval of the president's handling of terrorism was around 79 percent. After television coverage of one statement by Bush and seven public statements by administration officials about the terrorist threat, the president's rating rose to 83 percent.

In June 2004, approval for the president's handling of terrorism had fallen to 50 percent. One month later, after an increase in television coverage of Bush's comments on terrorism, that number had risen to 57 percent.

As I mentioned earlier, our handy interactive timeline can be a great tool for putting the day's news in context. So, for example, if you click on the "Terror Alert" link you get a list of all the times between 9/11 and March, 2003 when the government scared the bejesus out of us with dark warnings of impending attacks.

Now, of course...

The Columbia study does not conclude the White House intentionally used terror alerts to influence the president's popularity.

But, ahem, ...

...[I]t is unlikely the White House is ignorant of the effect, said Nacos, who added that former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has complained publicly that he was sometimes pushed to raise the threat level on the basis of flimsy intelligence.

A Timeline of Torture

In the September/October CJR, Eric Umansky has an excellent and lengthy account of the reporting done on torture in the War on Terror. He recaps the scoops and the way many reporters advanced the story (notably Carlotta Gall, Seymour Hersh, and Dana Priest), but what is most striking is the lack of attention paid to these revelations. Scoops were not followed up, stories were buried, official investigations were deliberately limited in scope, and, most shamefully, Congress was uninterested in using its power of subpoena to fully connect the dots of the reported incidents and the administration policies that enabled them. It was not until the stark evidence of the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced that everybody piled on the story and by then the damage had been done.

Of course, the abuse first uncovered by Carlotta Gall for the NYT was exported from Bagram to Abu Ghraib and it is sobering to consider, as Umansky gets ex-Times editors to do, what might have happened had they played Gall's scoop more prominently:

Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”

Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.)

“Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.”

Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline "U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody." (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)

One quibble with Umansky's piece is that he says it was the NYT story of May 20, 2005, that linked the Bagram abuse to Abu Ghraib by reporting that an officer from Bagram was transferred to help oversee interrogations at Abu Ghraib. For an earlier account of that, see Emily Bazelon's fine piece, From Bagram to Abu Ghraib, in the March 2005 Mother Jones.

(Full disclosure: Umansky, a former editor of motherjones.com, is a friend. Despite that and the fact that he is Lakers fan, the piece is worth reading in all of its 9,000 word plus glory.)

CIA Secret Prisons and the Future of Guantanamo

Why is President Bush coming clean about the CIA secret prisons? Time offers one explanation.

By transferring name-brand al-Qaeda prisoners recognized as dangerous men — such as alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad — to Guantanamo from secret detention abroad is likely to strengthen the rationale for the off-shore facility, and for dispensing justice via military courts. It is also precisely because the Supreme Court has ruled that military tribunals do not offer detainees sufficient legal rights that the President has now urged Congress to pass legislation to address those concerns.

But the detainee transfers and the legislative intervention sought by President Bush is unlikely to end the legal and political controversy over Guantanamo. It may, however, strengthen the case for a policy of holding detainees off-shore and trying them in military courts. And by making the announcement in the form of a dramatic break into national television schedules before a handpicked audience that included some families of 9/11 victims, it also aimed to position the President and his Administration in the minds of swing voters as the guardians of the nation's security in the face of a clear and present danger.

Why Rumsfeld Should Be Sacked (A Very Long But Incomplete List of Reasons)

How many times have I heard some piece of breaking news, usually reporting a fresh outrage of the Bush administration's, and asked myself, "Wouldn't it be great to have handy an interactive timeline of the Bush years -- sortable by category -- so I could whip up a quick blog post furnishing helpful context?" I'll be honest: Not many. But it's good to be able to do just that, thanks to our (nonpartisan, fact-based) Lie by Lie timeline!

As Senate Democrats push (futilely) for a resolution to have the Defense Secretary canned, I can simply click the "Rumsfeld" link on the timeline, and here (below) is what comes up: a fairly extensive catalogue of lies, obfuscations, idiocies, and screw-ups; an impressive enough record, one would think, to have gotten him fired long ago. Bear in mind, the time period covered by Part I of Lie by Lie ends at the start of the Iraq war, in March, 2003 -- that is, before Abu Ghraib, the torture memos, "stuff happens," "Heck, I'm an old man," the utter disaster of the post-war period.... Stay tuned for further installments.

September 11, 2001
A note from an aide who was with the Secretary of Defense at the National Military Command Center shows that just five hours after the attacks Rumsfeld says, "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

December 1, 2001
According to Bob Woodward, Rumsfeld orders Franks to begin work on an Iraq war plan. Bush will meet with military leaders regarding the plan on a regular basis starting late December, despite public assurances that the administration is seeking a diplomatic solution to its showdown with Saddam.

January 22, 2002
After a Defense Department photo is released showing detainees in goggles and masks, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defends the detentions of "committed terrorists," saying, "We are keeping them off the street and out of the airlines." Besides, he says, "To be in an eight-by-eight cell in beautiful, sunny Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is not a — inhumane treatment. And it has a roof."

April 17, 2002
Reports emerge that American forces could have caught or killed bin Laden at Tora Bora. Reporters confront Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with the story. He says he does not "know today of any evidence" that bin Laden "was in Tora Bora at the time, or that he left Tora Bora at the time." Later reports will make clear that the military was asked by the CIA at the time to supply troops to help close off bin Laden's escape routes. The military declined.

May 21, 2002
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld tells a Senate subcommittee that there are al Qaeda terrorists living in the United States. According to Ron Suskind's 2006 book, "The One Percent Doctrine," this is a reference to the "Lackawanna Six," a group of six men living near Buffalo, NY, who have made contact with al Qaeda and will be arrested by American authorities later in the year. Rumsfeld says they "are very well trained," though intelligence officials familiar with the case already recognize this is not the case.

September 16, 2002
Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly tells reporters, "The President hasn't made a decision with respect to Iraq."

September 18, 2002
Donald Rumsfeld tells Congress, "Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam Hussein is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain—we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."

September 19, 2002
Rumsfeld tells Congress: "[Saddam has] amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons, including Anthrax, botulism, toxins, and possibly Smallpox. He's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, Sarin and mustard gas. His regime has an active program to acquire nuclear weapons."

September 27, 2002
Donald Rumsfeld calls the link between Iraq and al Qaeda "accurate and not debatable."

November 14, 2002
"Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that. It won't be a World War III." — Donald Rumsfeld, predicting the length of the war in Iraq, on a call-in radio program.

November 27, 2002
Donald Rumsfeld receives a memo requesting that he sign off on "Category III" interrogation techniques for use on prisoners. He does so. It is later shown that Category III interrogation techniques are consistent with torture as defined in US federal law, something the DOD knew at the time of the memo.

January 29, 2003
A day after the President?s State of the Union address, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld backs him up. "[Saddam's] regime has the design for a nuclear weapon; it was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The regime plays host to terrorists, including al Qaeda.?

February 20, 2003
In an interview with PBS's NewsHour, Donald Rumsfeld has the following exchange with Jim Lehrer.

Q: Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?

A: There is no question but that [the troops] would be welcomed. Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda would not let them do.

He will later deny saying that America would be welcomed. ?Never said that. Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else.... I may look like somebody else.?

February 25, 2003
General Eric Shinseki tells the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Defense Department's estimate of troops needed for occupying Iraq is too low and says "several hundred thousand soldiers" will be needed. (FDCH Political Transcript, 02/25/03) Paul Wolfowitz, appearing before Congress two days later, responds that Shinseki's estimate is "wildly off the mark." Says Wolfowitz, ?It?s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam?s security forces and his Army. Hard to imagine.?

Rumsfeld names Shinseki's successor one year before the end of Shinseki's term, making him a lame duck and an example to the rest of the military. Three months after Shinseki's comments, former Army secretary Thomas White will admit that he was right.

Can Iran Be Negotiated With?

Great (long) post by Kevin Drum starting from observation that hawkish types, such as Andrew Sullivan, who supported the Iraq war but now question the wisdom of a military-first approach to foreign policy, are nevertheless sounding mighty belligerent on the topic of Iran.

And now it's Iran, yet another country that can't be negotiated with. Why? Religious fanaticism is the excuse this time. But while the Iranians may seem scarier simply because they're today's enemy, that doesn't mean they can't be dealt with just like any other nation state can be dealt with.

Not every problem can be solved by diplomacy. Sometimes, as in the currently fashionable right-wing obsession with 1938, negotiation really is useless. But far more often than not, our enemies can be negotiated with, despite all the convincing reasons the hawks adduce for confrontation and war as the only possible solution. So ask yourself: With a track record this bad, why should we pay attention to the same old hysterical siren song this time? Shouldn't we send the hawks packing and instead figure out more sensible ways to react to our global problems? Shouldn't we have learned our lesson by now?

Is Tony Blair On His Way Out?

Troubles for Tony Blair, hit today by a wave of resignations by junior members of his government. They're ticked off at his refusal, so far, to say when he'll step down. (The Sun newspaper has reported that he'll go on 31 May, something the PM's office won't confirm.)

Is this a plot by allies of Gordon Brown, Blair's antsy heir apparent? If so, says this BBC analysis, "they have to decide if they are going to follow it through. Will this become not just this group of relatively junior folk - but senior cabinet ministers, as they did with Thatcher in 1990, saying to the PM, 'you need to go and you need to go soon'?"

Problem is (for Brown), Blair's pals in the party can't stand him.

Can they bring themselves to work with Gordon Brown to make a reality of this awkward phrase "stable and orderly transition"? They haven't so far for one good reason - they don't want Gordon Brown to become PM. They wanted their man to stay in office so someone else could emerge. If they can bring themselves to work with Brown, perhaps he'll call the dogs off. Perhaps.

(Here's a BBC rundown of the other possible contenders for Blair's job, which includes this description of Brown: "Has been circling Tony Blair for years, like a dog watching the family cat squatting in its basket.")

If Brown doesn't call the dogs off (...the cats?), Blair could be gone in weeks. Meanwhile, the Conservatives, riding higher than they have in years, are pronouncing the government "in meltdown."

Accutane Users Pledge Abstinence, or Commit to Test After Test

Six months ago the FDA launched iPLEDGE, a mandatory registry for users of Isotretinoin (commonly prescribed as Accutane), designed to keep its users pregnancy free. Given that the powerful acne medication that's prescribed to 5 million Americans has been linked to serious birth defects and mental health problems, precautionary steps are understandable.

The FDA, caught in a tussle between patients wanting this extremely effective acne drug and those wanting it off the market, accepted iPLEDGE as a compromise to essentially improve behavior while taking a dangerous drug. But the requirements of the "computer-based risk management program" are so daunting it turns out people might be avoiding the drug altogether.

Women on the medication take mandatory pregnancy tests each month (two, one in a clinic), and have to take two forms of birth control at the same time. Or, they can pledge to “abstain from intercourse for one month prior to treatment, during treatment and for one month after treatment has ended.” Every month patients must repledge the two forms of birth control they are using. Those who get pregnant anyway must “agree to be queried by an agent of iPLEDGE.”

Male users have to sign on as well, and all users have to sign a document acknowledging that Accutane can increase risk for birth defects, depression, and suicidal thoughts.

Doctors and patients alike are complaining about the complicated $80 million system that requires everyone, patients plus all the people involved in the distribution of the drug to register: doctors, pharmacists and drug wholesalers included.

Each month prescribers must enter a female patient's pregnancy test results into the system and the two forms of contraception she is using. The system then authorizes the doctor to prescribe, and the pharmacist to dispense, the drug. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the 15,000-member American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) released a survey finding:

-90% of 378 physicians are having problems with the program.

-Nearly 52% said patients' treatments had been delayed because they were unable to pick up a prescription within seven days.

-39% said their patients encountered technical problems using the website.

The website itself is a curious sight. The tagline, “Committed to Pregnancy Prevention” has an icon that is a red stop sign with a big hand in the middle. The website features a big red arrow with the words “The Only Way” running across each page. Of the women on Accutane, 80% are under 30, "females of childbearing potential" and given the hoops women have to go through abstinence may be the best policy when taking the drug, or finding another drug. One outgrowth of the system is that, if it survives, it will creates a national database tracking birth control use and behavior, as well as pregnancies and abortions, of Isotretinoin users. Somewhat far afield of treating acne. We'll stay tuned to see how it plays out.