Rubicon

9/12: The view from Italy on 9/11

Six years ago, I learned about the attacks on New York and Washington a day late, on September 12. Ensconced in the Umbrian countryside, intentionally cut off from all electronic contact with the world, I was oblivious for 24 hours to the events that (as everyone insisted) changed the world.

In fact, the world did not change that day. Terrorism—the violent acts of those too weak to do anything else—and war—the violent acts of those too unimaginative to do anything else—have always been part of human history. It was only the United States that changed, driven to fear and frenzy by its lying leaders.

That week my wife and I had arrived in the village of Izzalini for two months of undisturbed writing and rambling. Our small apartment in the tenth-century stone castle had no phone, no television, no radio, so on September 11 we spent the day setting up a computer (in the arched room that had once been the armory) and enjoying a long walk through the countryside. It was a beautiful, peaceful place, surrounded by olive groves and vineyards, fields of wheat and sunflowers, and a sprinkling of stone farmhouses and hilltop villages.

The region around Izzalini has not always been so peaceful. Hannibal and his elephants, fresh from their victory over the Romans at Trasimeno, rampaged over the countryside until they were turned away at the gates of Todi. In nearby Orvieto, Guelphs and Ghibellines battled for centuries, and the losers' bodies were sometimes dumped down the municipal well. And the very castle where we were staying was the site of a horrendous fifteenth-century massacre. Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, attacked Izzalini, and when the besieged villagers refused to surrender, he burned 200 of them to death, including many women and children. 

But on 9/11/2001, Umbria seemed like the most peaceful place on a peaceful earth. One day later, the idyll was broken: friends returned from Spoleto with newspapers containing the incredible photographs of Manhattan burning. We were shocked, poring over Corriere della Sera and Il Messagero with our imperfect Italian, confused by the coltellini used as weapons by the hijackers—our dictionary translated the word as letter openers. We drove into Todi to find an English-language paper or a hotel with cable news. No paper, and by that time CNN was carrying nothing but reports on stranded travelers in Canada and the latest rumors of further attacks. No summary, no context, just fear and confusion and rage. We returned to the castle and figuratively raised the drawbridge. We predicted that day that Bush and Cheney would use these terrible events to further their reactionary policies. We had no idea of the extremes to which they would go.

For the next two months I continued to avoid television and radio, following developments by reading The International Herald-Tribune and Italian newspapers  and by phoning friends and family. I was well informed, but my brain was not flooded with constant television images of the collapsing towers and constant bellicose speeches by the vengeful president. The printed words provided me with something like a Brechtian distance on the American political circus, allowing me, I thought, to place the very real dangers in a historical context, to think calmly about appropriate reactions to the technological leverage that terrorists can now exercise. There have always been terrorists, but there have not always been Boeing 767s.

Almost 3,000 Americans died on 9/11 as a result of the actions of 19 hijackers. Since that time, at least 300,000 people—perhaps as many as a million—have died in Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of the actions of the American government. Almost all of them were as innocent as those Americans.

But we Americans are no longer so innocent, in either sense of the word. We are both less trusting and more guilty than we were six years ago. We are now unreasonably wary of those who are not recognizably brothers, and we are guilty of electing George Bush to a second term and allowing him to pursue his murderous course. That day did change us and our country.

It may take a generation to reclaim our soul. We can start by insisting that our too-reticent senators and representatives stop funding the Iraq War and bring the warfighters home. We can encourage them to impeach Bush and Cheney and indict Rumsfeld and Gonzales. We can begin to demolish the military-industrial complex that is undermining our democracy. We can elect a president who has more arrows in his intellectual quiver than hatred and greed and war.

There are real dangers in the world. And there are appropriate actions we can take to minimize those dangers, pragmatic policies that take account of the complexities of human cultures and human history. Perhaps by the time 9/11 rolls around again we can begin to grasp the nettle and seize the day.

[Cross-posted at Scholars & Rogues]

Bombs away over Tehran!

Bad news. Now that Bush and Cheney's approval has fallen into the lower depths, the two-headed president no longer has anything to lose. Therefore, according to Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger of the Guardian, Iran is now in serious danger of being attacked. At some point before Bush leaves office, a preemptive strike is very likely:

The shift [in thinking] follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."

The White House claims that Iran, whose influence in the Middle East has increased significantly over the last six years, is intent on building a nuclear weapon and is arming insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The vice-president, Dick Cheney, has long favoured upping the threat of military action against Iran. He is being resisted by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence secretary, Robert Gates.

Last year Mr Bush came down in favour of Ms Rice, who along with Britain, France and Germany has been putting a diplomatic squeeze on Iran. But at a meeting of the White House, Pentagon and state department last month, Mr Cheney expressed frustration at the lack of progress and Mr Bush sided with him. "The balance has tilted. There is cause for concern," the source said this week.…

"Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact," said Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Washington source said Mr Bush and Mr Cheney did not trust any potential successors in the White House, Republican or Democratic, to deal with Iran decisively.…

No decision on military action is expected until next year. In the meantime, the state department will continue to pursue the diplomatic route.

Sporadic talks are under way between the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, on the possibility of a freeze in Iran's uranium enrichment programme. Tehran has so far refused to contemplate a freeze, but has provisionally agreed to another round of talks at the end of the month.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said that there are signs of Iran slowing down work on the enrichment plant it is building in Natanz. Negotiations took place in Tehran last week between Iranian officials and the IAEA, which is seeking a full accounting of Iran's nuclear activities before Tehran disclosed its enrichment programme in 2003. The agency's deputy director general, Olli Heinonen, said two days of talks had produced "good results" and would continue.

At the UN, the US, Britain and France are trying to secure agreement from other security council members for a new round of sanctions against Iran. The US is pushing for economic sanctions that would include a freeze on the international dealings of another Iranian bank and a mega-engineering firm owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Russia and China are resisting tougher measures.

There is only one way to stop these madmen from beginning another catastrophic war: double impeachment. Nancy Pelosi must put it back on the table—it's the only way to preserve what's left of the American republic. As John Nichols told Bill Moyers last Friday on his PBS Journal:

Bill Moyers, you are making a mistake.  You are making a mistake that too many people make.…

You are seeing impeachment as a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis. Don't mistake the medicine for the disease. When you have a constitutional crisis, the founders are very clear. They said there is a way to deal with this. We don't have to have a war. We don't have to raise an army and go to Washington. We have procedures in place where we can sanction a president appropriately, do what needs to be done up to the point of removing him from office and continue the republic. So we're not talking here about taking an ax to government. Quite the opposite.

Impeach Dick Cheney. Impeach George Bush. Now.

Declaring independence from King George

Scooter Libby walks free because he is a friend of the king. Two hundred thirty-one years after we American colonials declared our independence from the tyranny of one King George, another King George has reasserted the royal prerogative of placing himself and his friends above the law.

It's time for a new Declaration of Independence, but we don't have to start from scratch. Many charges in the original bill of particulars against George III are equally applicable to George W:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Keith Olbermann delivered his version of this new declaration yesterday on MSNBC, calling on King George and Regent Dick (Lord Cheney) to abdicate:

Olbermann lays out his own bill of particulars:

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient. I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors. I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this republic over to a vice president who is without conscience and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, … of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. His lies protected the king and the regent from any prying eyes that might discover their participation in "high crimes and misdemeanors"; and the king returned the favor, setting free his loyal vassal. Sidney Blumenthal explains:

The pardon is the one monarchical power that the framers of the Constitution assigned the presidency. But they placed one restriction, that it could not be exercised for impeachment. In other words, the president could not use his power to pardon himself. Bush is entirely within his narrow right to use the pardon power in the Libby case. But it violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law governing that power because it is a consummate gesture of self-exoneration, at least if the vice president is an "entity within the executive branch." Bush rewards Libby's cover-up, thwarting the investigation into Cheney's and perhaps his culpability. Bush's commutation is the successful culmination of the obstruction of justice.

This king is not given to self-doubt or repentance. It is unlikely that he would ever choose to abdicate. It's time for impeachment. It's time to declare independence from King George.

A few questions for Bush and Cheney

Dan Froomkin has a brilliant Washington Post column today about good soldier Scooter Libby and his nefarious bosses. Just in case your outrage has been flagging, read the whole thing. Clemency, Froomkin says, is indeed a presidential prerogative, but not if it shields the president himself from scrutiny for misdeeds.

Froomkin quotes a Watergate-era report from the Judiciary Committee on the discussions conducted about this issue while the Constitution was being written:

In the [Constitutional] convention George Mason argued that the President might use his pardoning power to "pardon crimes which were advised by himself" or, before indictment or conviction, "to stop inquiry and prevent detection." James Madison responded:

"[I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds [to] believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.…

"Madison went on to [say] contrary to his position in the Philadelphia convention, that the President could be suspended when suspected, and his powers would devolve on the Vice President, who could likewise be suspended until impeached and convicted, if he were also suspected."

Now that's a good idea: suspend Bush and Cheney and let Nancy Pelosi act as president until they clear themselves.

Froomkin also lists some questions that Bush and Cheney should be facing from reporters as well as from Congress:

• Does the president approve of Libby's conduct?
• On whose behalf did Libby act?
• Did the White House make any sort of a deal with Libby or his defense team?
• What did Bush know and when did he know it?
• When did he find out that Karl Rove and Libby had both leaked Plame's identity? Before or after he vowed that any leakers would be fired? Did anyone lie to him about their role? Why didn't he fire them?
• How does the conduct of his aides comport with Bush's vow to restore ethics to the White House? How does the commutation?
• What factors did the president take into account in deciding to commute the sentence?
• What does the president consider an appropriate punishment for perjury and obstruction of justice?
• What was Cheney's role in the commutation?

Representative John Conyers has called Judiciary Committee hearings on Bush's abuse of the powers of presidential clemency. If anyone in Congress can make this into a substantive investigation, it's Conyers. I would say that this is one Constitutional capacity that should be stripped: it's so clearly open to abuse, especially when the president is protecting himself and his cronies.

Dan Froomkin has been on a roll lately. His usually excellent compendium of White House news and views has been extraordinary the last few days. Yesterday he wrote about Bush's mental state. Verdict: not good.

Keeping the lid on Libby

The only characteristic George Bush shares with Solomon is his certainty that God anointed him king. He certainly exhibited no Solomonic wisdom when he commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence. True, he could have pardoned Libby outright, or he could have allowed Libby to serve his 30-month sentence. Commutation, therefore, appears to be a split-the-difference compromise, a wise middle course.

But it is not. Bush decided on commutation, in fact, as simply the best way to protect himself and Cheney, because it keeps the lid on Libby. As Jeff Lomonaco predicted two weeks ago when he wrote this oped, either of the other two courses would have been more likely to open legal avenues for establishing Bush and Cheney's involvement in the case—including both the initial leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity and the subsequent coverup for which Libby was convicted.

Either pardoning or allowing imprisonment might also have kept the case active in Congress and in the media, as the investigative pot continued to bubble. Pardon would have further enraged Congressional leaders, while imprisonment would have further enraged the right-wing GOP base. But commutation, while hardly a real compromise in legal terms, is more nearly acceptable to Bush's critics on both sides and so less likely to create continuing dispute.

There is a great deal of evidence that Libby leaked Wilson's identity with the knowledge of Bush and Cheney and Rove—probably at their direction—and that his subsequent obstruction of justice was also at their direction, but definitive proof is lacking. If Libby had gone to prison, he might have found conditions sufficiently distasteful that he would have cooperated with Patrick Fitzgerald, and his insider information would then have certainly implicated his bosses.

But a full pardon would also run the risk of piercing the veil of secrecy. As Lomonaco predicted, it would have deprived Bush and Cheney of "the rationale they have used successfully for four years to avoid addressing their own roles in the case. And Libby's trial made very clear that the President and Vice President played significant and troubling roles at the very heart of the case." After a pardon, Bush could no longer have claimed his silence was because the "legal case is ongoing," and Congress could have granted Libby immunity and forced him to testify. So that would also have been a dangerous path for the White House.

A pardon at the end of Bush's term doesn't entail the same risks, and spokesbot Tony Snow has already made clear that a pardon remains on the table. In fact, Jonathan Zasloff at The Reality-Based Community suggests that Libby's pardon may not be the only one under consideration: "Will Bush pardon Cheney in January 2009, then resign and be pardoned by newly-sworn-in President Cheney the next day?" That should clear the decks. Of course, in that case Cheney might decide he likes the Oval Office and decide to stay in it after January 20, 2009. Something about terrorists and the Long War, I think.

That Libby receives a just punishment, of course, is less important than the fate of Bush and Cheney. Scooter was just doing the devils' work, and it's the devils who must be brought to the bar. Mark Kleiman, also at The Reality-Based Community, thinks Congress should call Bush's bluff and subpoena Libby, even as the appeals process continues:

At this point, there's no reason not to bring Libby in, immunize him, and start asking questions. His Congressional testimony wouldn't be relevant to his appeal. It might prevent a retrial should the DC Circuit reverse his conviction. So what?

After Libby, let's hear from Cheney. Since he's not a part of the Executive Branch, surely he can't claim executive privilege. And if the inquiry is into Cheney's own impeachment, I doubt the courts would interfere.

Bush's artfully calibrated commutation could yet backfire, and his approval ratings could enter previously unexplored territory. If that blue line keeps moving southward, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid might even find some new friends among congressional Republicans, putting impeachment back on the table where it belongs.

These criminals must not be allowed to get away with their despicable crimes. Accountability is all.

The foreign policy of Dick Cheney

Randy Newman was a prophet. Even in 1972, he knew how Dick Cheney would propose to make friends for America. That's when he wrote "Political Science":

And if you want more details, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker have lots of terrifying details this week in "Angler," their Washington Post series on the Voldemort of Washington. Chapter one is here, and two is here, with more to follow. They write:

[Cheney] has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.…

In roles that have gone largely undetected, Cheney has served as gatekeeper for Supreme Court nominees, referee of Cabinet turf disputes, arbiter of budget appeals, editor of tax proposals and regulator in chief of water flows in his native West. On some subjects, officials said, he has displayed a strong pragmatic streak. On others he has served as enforcer of ideological principle, come what may.

He says he's above the law, subject to neither Congress nor the president, in effect a fourth branch of government. And when it comes to torture:

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.…

Many of the harsh measures [Cheney]  championed, and some of the broadest principles undergirding them, have survived intact but out of public view.

The vice president's unseen victories attest to traits that are often ascribed to him but are hard to demonstrate from the public record: thoroughgoing secrecy, persistence of focus, tactical flexibility in service of rigid aims and close knowledge of the power map of government. On critical decisions for more than six years, Cheney has often controlled the pivot points -- tipping the outcome when he could, engineering stalemate when he could not and reopening debates that rivals thought were resolved.

"Once he's taken a position, I think that's it," said James A. Baker III, who has shared a hunting tent with Cheney more than once and worked with him under three presidents. "He has been pretty damn good at accumulating power, extraordinarily effective and adept at exercising power."

Cheney has used that power to short-circuit diplomacy, again and again, and substitute military force. It's so much easier to drop the big one than to talk . Is Iran next?

Impeachment first.

Taguba on torture: another frozen scandal

Major General Antonio Taguba, who directed the first investigation of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, has now retired from the US Army and spoken at length with Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. His story of torture in Iraq and coverup in Washington is newly shocking.

Since the release in March 2004 of the Taguba Report, and of those now-iconic photos of cavalier mistreatment in May 2004, the scandal of Abu Ghraib has been locked in a deep freeze of inaction. At the time, Taguba found that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees" and there was "systematic and illegal abuse." But only a few low-ranking enlisted soldiers were charged with crimes. Then, under a barrage of lies from George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and their underlings, the scandal disappeared from the mainstream media's attention. Nothing, it seemed, could be done, so it was better that we all turn our attention to other matters.

This story follows the path of many other Bush-administration scandals, as Mark Danner notes. Finally, he says, it seems that:

[T]he accumulated frozen scandals of this administration slowly crack open to reveal their queasy secrets. And yet the problem, of course, is that they are not secrets at all: One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be revealed—and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.

But Taguba is not willing to let that happen with Abu Ghraib; he now has more to say. What is the proper word for the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib? His official report said "abuse." But in a May 2004 meeting with Rumsfeld, attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Cambone, and several top generals, Taguba now says that he corrected the record: "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That’s not abuse. That’s torture.' There was quiet." The top brass was silently considering how to keep that fact quiet.

The next day, Rumsfeld testified to Congress that he was shocked, shocked, to learn of what had happened. He said, "It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, 'Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something.'" In fact, Taguba says, his report had said exactly that, and furthermore, the photos had been sent to the Pentagon four months earlier. Rumsfeld knew about them and had every opportunity to see them. If he chose not to look until the night before, as he testified, he had certainly read a description and knew precisely what was in them. He was lying. One lieutenant general put the matter more starkly for himself: "I don't want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?" Remain quiet, apparently.

And what about those few bad apples we heard about so often? Taguba, after 35 years' experience in the US Army, knows how it works. The privates do what the sergeants want them to, the sergeants look to the lieutenants, the lieutenants to the captains, and so up to the secretary of defense, who takes his orders from the president (or perhaps, in Rumsfeld's case, from the vice president). That is the meaning of a military chain of command, and a soldier at any level who deviates from that chain places himself in serious jeopardy. As Taguba told Hersh:

From what I knew, troops just don't take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups. These M.P. troops were not that creative. Somebody was giving them guidance.

The bad apples, the real bad apples, according to Taguba, were Rumsfeld and his cronies:

He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.

The extent of the rot became clear when Taguba was confronted by one of those officers, General John Abizaid, head of Central Command, in early 2004. "You and your report will be investigated," he threatened. Taguba told Hersh, "I'd been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia."

The damage to the morale and cohesion of American soldiers is hard to gauge. From their first day in the army—even, for General Abizaid and many of his fellow careerists, from their first day at West Point—the sense of honor and duty is inculcated into every soldier, along with the clear distinction between lawful orders (which must be obeyed) and unlawful orders (which must be disobeyed).

The orders (and veiled suggestions) to torture detainees were unlawful—and Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cambone, Abizaid, and their cohorts should be investigated and tried for their part in the scandal. The first witness should be the courageous General Taguba:

There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff [the explicit images] was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.

From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service. And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.

Unfreeze the scandal. Impeach Cheney and Bush. Then prosecute the whole Mafia family.

Beyond the Rule of Law

The Bush/Cheney administration continues to imprison approximately 385 men in the cruel penal colony at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Flouting the clear opinions of the US Supreme Court—and of the court of world opinion—the torturemasters of Abu Ghraib keep these prisoners beyond the reach of the law, refusing to try them in a real court, to charge them legally, or even to allow a fair hearing to determine whether there exists any evidence to warrant their detention.

According to a new report by Amnesty International, about 80 percent of the Guantánamo prisoners are held in isolation, many of them in a newly constructed facility called Camp 6, which "has created even harsher and apparently more permanent conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation." AI describes the conditions:

Detainees are reportedly confined for 22 hours a day to individual, enclosed, steel cells where they are almost completely cut off from human contact. The cells have no windows to the outside or access to natural light or fresh air. No activities are provided, and detainees are subjected to 24-hour lighting and constant observation by guards through the narrow windows in the cell doors. They exercise alone in a high-walled yard where little sunlight filters through; detainees are often only offered exercise at night and may not see daylight for days at a time.

When Robert Gates became secretary of defense in December, he recommended closing Guantánamo, since any "legal proceedings [there] would be viewed as illegitimate," but he was overruled by Gonzales, Cheney, and other hardliners. Last June, even George Bush spoke of wanting to shut the prison down, and he made clear that he understood what is at stake:

I'd like to close Guantanamo.… No question, Guantanamo sends a signal to some of our friends — provides an excuse, for example, to say the United States is not upholding the values that they're trying to encourage other countries to adhere to.  And my answer to them is, is that we are a nation of laws and rule of law.

If Bush would really like to close Guantánamo, he could do so in matter of days. As long as it continues to operate, the United States is not a nation of laws and the rule of law. It has become an embarrassment to civilized society and a pariah among nations. As Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA executive director, put it:

Guantánamo Bay is the festering symbol of the Bush administration's continued contempt for international law and disregard for human rights — further diminishing our country's moral standing. The administration continues to think that it can justify ongoing human rights violations in the name of national security. Perhaps President Bush needs to think again, because the voices calling for the closure of this disgrace to American values are only getting louder.

The kangaroo courts established under the unconstitutional Military Detentions Act of 2006 have conducted their first dubious hearing. On March 26, David Hicks, an Australian held incommunicado for more than five years, pled guilty to a reduced charge of "providing material support for terrorism" after two of his defense lawyers were thrown out of court. He was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment and scheduled to be returned to Australia. He said he was not tortured—as he was certainly required to say if he wanted to get out—though a British court affadavit stated that he had been "repeatedly beaten, restrained, blindfolded, threatened with bodily harm, forced to take unknown medication, and subjected to food and sleep deprivation and other forms of mental and physical coercion."

Impeach George Bush. Impeach Dick Cheney. Impeach Alberto Gonzales.

Close Guantánamo now!

The Year of Living Truthfully

In today's lie-polluted sea of political discourse, Elizabeth Edwards's frank acceptance of mortality and her candid preference to continue to live her remaining life fully constitute a bracing splash of truth. After Edwards's Stage 4 cancer diagnosis, Katie Couric on 60 Minutes obtusely reminded her that she was "staring at possible death," and Edwards replied, "Aren't we all, though?" She and her husband John decided to tell the truth about the disease and yet to proceed with his presidential campaign, considering that it will be a good way to spend their energy and time, as much time as she has left. That's admirable—and more authentic than anything we're used to hearing from politicians.

In the New York Times, Frank Rich writes that she herself deserves to be president (link here, unfortunately behind a subscriber wall):

People admired her before she was ill for the same reasons they admire her now. She comes across as honest, smart and unpretentious — as well as both devoted to and independent of her husband.…

It’s been a steady refrain of her public comments that “we’re all going to die” and that she has the right to make her own choice to fight for her husband’s candidacy even as she fights for her life. There are no euphemisms or equivocations in her language. There’s no apologizing by either Edwards for the raw political calculus of their campaign plans. There’s no sentimental public hand-wringing about the possible effect her choice might have on her children. The unpatronizing Mrs. Edwards sounds like an adult speaking to adults.…

In a political culture where nearly every act by every candidate and spouse is packaged to a fare-thee-well for the voters’ consumption, the Edwardses’ story by definition will play out unpredictably in real time, with a spontaneity that is beyond any consultant’s or media guru’s control. Here is one continuing familial crisis that cannot be scored with soothing music to serve as a Hallmark homily in an inspirational infomercial at the next election-year convention. The Edwardses’ unscripted human drama will be a novelty by the standards of our excessively stage-managed political theater and baffling to many in its permanent repertory company.

That’s one reason it will be good for the country if Mr. Edwards can stay in this race for the duration, whether you believe he merits being president or not. (For me, the jury on that question is out.) The more Elizabeth Edwards is in the spotlight, the more everyone else in the arena will have to be judged against her. Next to her stark humanity, the slick playacting that passes for being “human” and “folksy” in a campaign is tinny. Though much has been said about how she is a model to others battling cancer, she is also a model (or should be) of personal transparency to everyone else in the presidential race.…

[John McCain and Hillary Clinton] want us to believe that they are speaking in a direct, unfiltered manner, but so far their straight talking, even without Elizabeth Edwards as a yardstick, seems no more natural than Cheez Whiz.

Rich also has good words for the candidate, praising John Edwards's devotion to both his wife and to the country. He points out that, whatever the small-minded Couric may imagine, it is possible to run the country while dealing with a family crisis:

Would it be better if he instead ran the country at the same time he was clearing brush on a ranch? Polio informed rather than crippled the leadership of F.D.R.; Lincoln endured the sickness and death of a beloved 11-year-old son during the Civil War. In the wake of our congenitally insulated incumbent, who has given our troops neither proper armor nor medical care and tried to hide their coffins off camera, surely it can only be a blessing to have a president, whether Mr. Edwards or someone else, who knows intimately what it means to cope daily with the threat of mortality. It’s hard to imagine such a president smiting stem-cell research or skipping the funerals of the fallen.

Indeed, of all the reasons to applaud Elizabeth Edwards’s decision to stay in politics, the most important may be her insistence, by her very action, that we not compartmentalize the harsh reality of death and the imperatives of public policy, both at home and at war. Let the real conversation begin.

Whatever the current resident of the White House may think, life is not a fraternity prank, responsibility is not a joke, and war is not a game.

Impeach George Bush.

Update, 4/1: With his usual percipience, Andrew Sullivan writes in the Times (London) of the candor now expected about disease, and how Elizabeth Edwards measures up but Dick Cheney doesn't. He concludes, "[A]s Philip Larkin put it, with his usual precision, days are where we live. And I want to be alive when I die."

Death by Procrastination

The US has lost the Iraq War. But we do not know how long the defeat will be prolonged or how many more people will die.

If George Bush has his way, this war will drag on for many years. But Democrats have a plan to halt the carnage, and they passed it yesterday in the House, 218–212. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow representatives wrote a requirement into Bush's "emergency" military appropriations bill, requiring that occupying American troops begin to leave Iraq by March 2008 and complete their retreat by August 2008.

The Democratic timetable for withdrawal is unfortunately timid, but it seems to be the best the House can pass this month. As the war continues to claim more victims, week by week, opposition will certainly increase, and timetables will become more stringent. But for now, the Senate cannot even do as well as the House, and Bush (of course) will veto any withdrawal, even though it is what most Americans want.

Barbara Lee, the courageous member of Congress who represents Berkeley and Oakland, voted against the bill as insufficient, though she had agreed earlier in the week not to fight for its defeat. She released this statement:

While as a matter of conscience I cast my vote against the funding, I hope that this passage of this bill marks the beginning of the end of the Iraq war, but the real fight still lies ahead.  Congress will continue to have to confront the issue of this war and occupation, and I am committed to continuing to push to fully fund the safe withdrawal of our troops from Iraq at the earliest practicable date and for timelines for withdrawal that are backed up by the appropriations power that the Constitution grants to Congress.

The bill is a first step. Let us hope that stronger steps follow soon.

Bush's war of choice has now continued for 1,465 days, and these are the numbers of the dead:

• about 655,000 Iraqis
• 3,234 American military personnel
• 258 other coalition military personnel
• at least 389 coalition contractors
• at least 124 journalists

Let us imagine that the House bill were to be passed by the Senate and signed by Bush. We could then begin to estimate how many more deaths this procrastination might entail. If casualties were to continue at the current rate until March 1, 2008 (the date by which withdrawal must begin), then ramp downward until August 31, 2008 (the end date in the bill), and after that miraculously cease, additional deaths in Iraq would still be likely to exceed 200,000:

• about 195,000 Iraqis, for an estimated total of some 850,000
• 960 American military, for a total of about 4,200
• only a few dozen additional coalition military (since most of the coalition forces have already withdrawn or will do so soon), for a total of perhaps 300
• more than 100 contractors, for about 500
• 35 or so journalists, for a total of 160

These figures, unfortunately, are unrealistically low, because Republicans will keep the House bill from becoming law, because Bush is escalating to put more American troops in danger, and because the sectarian violence sparked in large part by the American presence is also escalating.

Impeach George Bush. Impeach Dick Cheney. Indict the murderers.