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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.

Fewer troops—and a pony for you too!

George Bush's minions have again leaked the amazing news that Bush is considering removing lots of American troops from Vietnam … oh, I mean Iraq. I thought for a moment it was another announcement of Dick Nixon's secret plan for peace. David Sanger and David Cloud at the New York Times seem to take the leak at face value:

The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. They would also greatly scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province.

The mission would instead focus on the training of Iraqi troops and fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, while removing Americans from many of the counterinsurgency efforts inside Baghdad.

This astounding news is attributed to "senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate"—an internal debate, I presume, not about what actions to take in Iraq but what lies to tell in America. Whether Vietnam or Iraq, it's deja vu all over again, and again, and again, as Glenn Greenwald documents at Salon: nearly identical leaks, suppositions, and announcements of illusory troop reductions ever since the Mission was Accomplished:

For four straight years, the same set of war supporters have constantly and repetitiously given the same exact false assurances about Iraq -- virtually verbatim -- in order to protect themselves politically. It is hard to know what is more amazing about this ritual -- (a) how stupid they believe Americans are that they can make the same commitments over and over which never transpire, or (b) that the press jumps each time to proclaim the imminent troop reductions as though it never happened before:

The media might have learned a lesson or two about mendacity and complaisance by this time. Bush will always promise to reduce the numbers while increasing the numbers. His lies—and his war—will continue until Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid can round up enough Republicans to call a veto-proof halt. And that will happen when the constituents of those Republicans let them know that their reelection is in danger as long as they support the Iraq War. In the meantime, it would be refreshing to see some Greenwaldian context in the newspaper of record. And some outrage at an administration that plays us all for forgetful fools.

Bush and his thugs make the world safe for wiretaps

On Tuesday, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey related his Shakepearean tale of George Bush's thugs and the botched hospital/wiretap caper. Bush's two hardnosed consiglieri—Al "Recollections" Gonzales and Andy "Screws" Card—descended on a comatose John Ashcroft to extract legal indulgences for their NSA sins, and only the FBI could fend them off.  But then something about the wiretap program was changed (sorry, can't tell you what, it's secret) to something else (sorry, also secret) to keep Ashcroft and Comey from resigning. Nevertheless, Bush continued to break the law and ignore the Constitution. (Marty Lederman tells the tale in full here.)

Today, Bush appeared at a mutual-admiration "press availability" with Tony Blair, and Kelly O'Donnell of NBC News asked him about Comey's story. He stonewalled, as usual. Did not answer the direct question about his involvement. Changed the subject to the necessity of the NSA warrantless-wiretap program. Security, you know. 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. We have nothing to fear but the diminution of fear. The actual words:

Q [O'Donnell] There's been some very dramatic testimony before the Senate this week from one of your former top Justice Department officials, who describes a scene that some senators called "stunning," about a time when the wireless -- when the warrantless wiretap program was being reviewed.  Sir, did you send your then Chief of Staff and White House Counsel to the bedside of John Ashcroft while he was ill to get him to approve that program?  And do you believe that kind of conduct from White House officials is appropriate?

PRESIDENT BUSH:  Kelly, there's a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn't happen; I'm not going to talk about it.  It's a very sensitive program.  I will tell you that, one, the program is necessary to protect the American people, and it's still necessary because there's still an enemy that wants to do us harm.

And therefore, I have an obligation to put in place programs that honor the civil liberties of the American people; a program that was, in this case, constantly reviewed and briefed to the United States Congress. And the program, as I say, is an essential part of protecting this country.

And so there will be all kinds of talk about it.  As I say, I'm not going to move the issue forward by talking about something as highly sensitive -- highly classified subject.  I will tell you, however, that the program is necessary.

Q [O'Donnell] Was it on your order, sir?

PRESIDENT BUSH:  As I said, this program is a necessary program that was constantly reviewed and constantly briefed to the Congress.  It's an important part of protecting the United States.  And it's still an important part of our protection because there's still an enemy that would like to attack us.  No matter how calm it may seem here in America, an enemy lurks.  And they would like to strike.  They would like to do harm to the American people because they have an agenda. They want to impose an ideology; they want us to retreat from the world; they want to find safe haven.  And these just aren't empty words, these are the words of al Qaeda themselves.

And so we will put in place programs to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people, and programs that we constantly brief to Congress.

There were no followups. Bush speaks of "a lot of speculation." No, not speculation, it was sworn testimony by a well-regarded Justice official, and if Bush has contrary information, he should correct the record. But he stonewalls instead. He knows that Comey is speaking the truth, and therefore he changes the subject. O'Donnell's question is about Bush's involvement and appropriate conduct for government officials. His response is a canned appeal to fear and a hypocritical pledge to support civil liberties and openly brief Congress.

The NSA program is not transparent, even to those members of Congress who are trying to conduct proper oversight. And it is deeply inimical to civil liberties. But O'Donnell's question did not concern the NSA program. She asked Bush whether he sent the thugs and whether he approves of thuggery. We may infer from his silence that the answers are yes and yes.

Bush's counselor lies about Bush

Dan Bartlett is counselor to George Bush. George Tenet was CIA director during the preparations for the Iraq War.

In his new book, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet writes, "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat." In response, Bartlett says, "The president did wrestle with those very serious questions."

Counselor Bartlett is being parsimonious with the truth. Or, in the more direct words of James Fallows:

I say plainly: that is a lie. To be precise about it, no account of the Administration's deliberations, by anyone other than Bartlett just now, offers even the slightest evidence that this claim is true. Innumerable accounts offer ample evidence that it is false. I have asked this direct question to many interviewees who were in a position to know: was there ever such a meeting or discussion? The answer was always, No. The followup challenge to Bartlett should be: show us a memo, show us a policy paper, show us a scheduled meeting, show us notes taken at the time to substantiate the idea that the Administration ever seriously considered what the nation would gain or lose by invading Iraq, and what the alternatives might be. What the Administration actually considered, according to all known evidence, is how it would invade Iraq, and when.

The talk was never whether to invade—Bush and Cheney always knew they would do that. The talk was how to fool Congress and the American people into thinking that Saddam was an imminent threat. So they were not waiting for a confirmation from Tenet—a misconstrued "slam dunk," for example—except as a way to pin the blame on him if anything were to go wrong.

Fallows, usually more mild-mannered than this, is incensed. Finally—after years of credible half-truths, plausible inferences, and enticing misdirections from the Bush propaganda machine—he has had it. "I say plainly: that is a lie."

It's about time. Too bad Fallows and his fellow media mavens have waited so many years to begin calling a lie a lie. That Bush propaganda machine could never have been so effective without their cooperation, as Howard Kurtz explained in a recent edition of Bill Moyers' Journal on PBS:

From August 2002 until the war was launched in March of 2003 there were about 140 front page pieces in The Washington Post making the administration's case for war.… But there was only a handful—a handful of stories that ran on the front page. Some more that ran inside the pages of the paper that made the opposite case. Or, if not making the opposite case, raised questions. Was this really true? What was the level of proof? Did the CIA really know? What were those aluminum tubes? Those stories, and some reporters worked hard on them, had a harder time getting on the front page. Why, because they weren't definitive.

Too bad, also, that Tenet and other Bush administration insiders have waited so many years to begin calling a lie a lie. At the time when it really counted (in the words of Michael Scheuer), Tenet lacked "the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss." If he and Colin Powell and other knowledgeable public figures had insisted that the truth be told about Iraq before the invasion, Congress might not have bought the tawdry wares Bush was selling.

Moyers summarizes the results of all these administration lies, insiders' misplaced loyalty, and media complaisance:

The American number of troops killed in Iraq now exceeds the number of victims on 9/11. We have been fighting there longer than it took us to defeat the Nazis in World War II. The costs of the war are reckoned at one trillion dollars and counting. The number of Iraqis killed—over thirty-five thousand last year alone—is hard to pin down. The country is in chaos.

I am reminded of a few lines by Shakespeare. During the Wars of the Roses, as retold in the Henry VI plays and in Richard III, there was another George, duke of Clarence. On a bloody Yorkshire battlefield in 1469, he saw the chaos in England and asked his counselors what to do:

Our hap is loss, our hope but sad despair;
Our ranks are broke, and ruin follows us:
What counsel give you? whither shall we fly?

His counselors told him to give up, that neither fight nor flight would do any good. George fled to France, but years later his brother Richard drowned him in a vat of wine.

George Bush's counselor advises him to stay the course, piling lie on lie. But everyone knows the truth by now: Iraq is in chaos, and so is the United States. And fleeing to Crawford will not change that fact.

[Cross-posted at Scholars & Rogues]

The Whole World Is Watching

John Shelton Lawrence (see his books here) introduced me to a very interesting website today. It's called Watching America, and it compiles (and when necessary translates) articles from foreign periodicals about the US and US-relevant issues. It's a good corrective to the American media, which is mostly insular and self-serving.

George Bush lives in an information bubble, but it is also true that to some degree all Americans live in a bubble—more permeable than Bush's, perhaps, but still a space that contains a limited amount of filtered information about the world. And that information is particularly distorted when it deals with America's image, especially in this era of bully-boy diplomacy and preemptive war.

Here's a short sample of articles now on Watching America:

1. Kak Aso Kurdi, "Three 'Wasted Years' On, the Breakup of Iraq the 'Most Judicious Solution'," 8/28, Kurdish Media, Iraq (includes Kurdish map above):

After three wasted years, the number of coalition deaths has exceeded more than 2,845. Approximately 100,000 mostly innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed. These war statistics are unbiased and are conservative in terms of Iraqi deaths. The rate of unemployment, inflation and crime has skyrocketed to alarming levels; Iraq's infrastructure has been totally paralyzed; and worst of all, sectarian and ethnic violence is on the rise. Iraq has become fertile ground for international terrorist groups.

Despite the allocation of huge financial resources for the reconstruction of Iraq, except for "new" ruins and remains, nothing has been accomplished. Reconstruction cannot thrive without enduring peace and stability. The fate and future of Iraq remains very much on doubt, and every day the outlook becomes more disconcerting.…

Most military strategists and political experts assess that it will not be possible to contain the calamitous civil war that is now underway. The more that the United States remains firm that it is obliged to maintain its presence, the more affliction, insecurity and mayhem the Iraq people have to look forward to.

At present, the definitive and most judicious solution would be the disintegration of Iraq into three different entities: a Kurdish state in the north, a Sunni state in the center and a Shiite state in the south. To prevent the further waste of innocent lives and to put and end [sic] the pain and suffering, Iraq must ultimately be divided up … and the sooner, the better.

2. Interview with Salman Rushdie, "Terror Is Glamor," 8/28, Der Spiegel, Germany:

Rushdie: I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal. There are always reasons for criticism, also for outrage. But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people. If the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, for example, were to be miraculously solved from one day to the next, I believe we wouldn't see any fewer attacks.…

Terror is glamour -- not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there's something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers. Many are influenced by the misdirected image of a kind of magic that is inherent in these insane acts. The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other peoples lives. There's one thing you mustn't forget here: the victims terrorized by radical Muslims are mostly other Muslims.…

I hadn't thought it possible that the Bush administration would go about setting up the machinery of an authoritarian state.…

Spiegel: Has it done that?

Rushdie: Oh yes.…

Spiegel: So are Bush and Blair going too far?

Rushdie: This is the problem with politicians who by nature tend towards being authoritarian: When they are given the chance, they go too far. We have to watch out there. I find it deeply depressing that the Anglo-American politics and Arab politics are currently corroborating each other -- that is: their worst prejudices. Take a look at Iraq, at Lebanon. There is no just side in either conflict. But at the same time we need moral clarity, something I have often missed recently in many liberally minded people -- and I myself am liberal. We need clarity about what is right and wrong, the willingness to defend our values with clear words and to actually call the guilty persons guilty.

3. "American Inconsistency 'a Tragedy of the Highest Order'," editorial, 8/28, The Daily Star, Lebanon

From the perspective of many Lebanese, being America's friend carries precious few benefits. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has done his utmost to respect American wishes on a variety of fronts, only to be sent away empty-handed when he has asked for anything in return. American policy vis-a-vis the devastating war with Israel was no more than a highly purified version of this formula, with Washington repeatedly claiming that it was concerned about the stability of Siniora's government, but simultaneously helping the Jewish state to mete out more and deadlier punishment.

Especially in this part of the world and particularly for a tiny country like Lebanon, the absence of effective support means no support at all. The presence, meanwhile, of active and enthusiastic support - diplomatic, economic, and military - for a powerful invader is difficult to see as anything other than unabashed betrayal.…

The current situation in Lebanon is just the latest episode in a long-running horror show of American inconsistency, and the Lebanese need look no further than Palestine for another recent case: the collective punishment and economic strangulation of a people who dared elect a government that defied Washington's diktats.

And that's the news from outside the bubble.

Sole King and Decider

Back in the Bronze Age of American politics, during the 1984 election campaign, Elizabeth Drew interviewed Walter Mondale on PBS. He was running against sunny, Teflon-coated Ronald Reagan, and the dour Mondale didn't have a chance at the presidency. But Drew, having honed her acerbic style at the New Yorker, was a merciless interviewer, and Mondale didn't know how to respond. Watching on TV, I didn't either, and I blamed Drew. I wanted Mondale to look good—unlike Reagan, he did offer reasonable policies and had a serious record as a public servant—and I thought she should have given him some space to repeat Democratic talking points. Be friendly, I thought. Be nice.

If only I had known what good journalism is! Drew's searching questions and her unwillingness to accept mere talking points were the very essence of good journalism, and if I had been reading and listening to British media more often then, I might have recognized it. But American TV personalities of the eighties—like the milquetoasts who have inherited their comfortable chairs today—were often worshipfully obsequious around the slightest whiff of power. The relationship between press and government in Britain seems often more confrontational. (As in Ireland: Carole Coleman's 2004 interview of Bush for Irish TV is still worth watching.) BBC interviewers tend  to approach politicians with the presumption that they're not telling the truth—or anyway not the whole truth—and therefore followup questions are almost always obligatory. That's what Elizabeth Drew was like, and her interview style was so unusual it seemed bizarre.

I am happy to say that Drew is back. To be fair, she never left the scene, though a later puffy incarnation of the New Yorker did not welcome her, nor did the rightward-swinging PBS. And now her style is essential, more than ever. In these parlous times, under the reign of King George the Lesser, she writes, with an acerbity ever more finely honed, of the end of a balanced American republic and the triumph of tyranny. From the New York Review of Books, "Power Grab":

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the White House has made an unprecedented reach for power. It has systematically attempted to defy, control, or threaten the institutions that could challenge it: Congress, the courts, and the press. It has attempted to upset the balance of power among the three branches of government provided for in the Constitution; but its most aggressive and consistent assaults have been against the legislative branch: Bush has time and again said that he feels free to carry out a law as he sees fit, not as Congress wrote it. Through secrecy and contemptuous treatment of Congress, the Bush White House has made the executive branch less accountable than at any time in modern American history. And because of the complaisance of Congress, it has largely succeeded in its efforts.…

From the time of the vote on the Iraq war, many Democrats have been reluctant to be caught on the "wrong side" of "national security" issues, even those blatantly cooked up by the White House. It usually requires a strong public reaction, as there was on the subject of torture, for Congress to make a move against the President's actions. A Republican senator told me, "There's a feeling on the Hill that the public doesn't care about it, that it's willing to give up liberties in order to defeat the terrorists." Some of the proposals offered on Capitol Hill for regulating the NSA wiretaps amount to little regulation at all.

At the center of the current conflict over the Constitution is a president who surrounds himself with proven loyalists, who is not interested in complexities, and who is averse to debate and intolerant of dissenters within his administration and elsewhere. (A prominent Washington Republican who had raised a lot of money for Bush was dropped from the Christmas party list after he said something mildly critical of the President.) A Republican lobbyist close to the White House described to me what he called the Cult of Bush: "This group is all about loyalty and the definition of loyalty extends to policy-making, politics, and to the execution of policy—and to the regulatory agencies." The result, this man said, is that the people in the agencies, including the regulatory agencies, "become robotrons and just do what they're told. There's no dialogue."

This is not a matter of a few policies about which reasonable people might reasonably disagree. It's not a matter of competence, or of an interest in the minutiae of good government. We're talking about the very essence of governmental structure, about where sovereignty resides, about who has the final say: the people and their representatives, or a single individual.

"I am the decider," said His Worshipfulness recently, a perfectly reasonable thing for a hereditary, absolute monarch to say. Not even the ex-king, George's Georgian father, can sway his decisive decisions (as Sidney Blumenthal relates in Salon). The young ruler confided his reasoning to the obsequious Bob Woodward: "I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel I owe anybody an explanation."

That is the interesting thing. Maybe somebody needs to do something about it. Somebody in the Supreme Court, perhaps, or somebody in Congress, or (Jesus forfend!) somebody in the executive branch of the United States government—a person, say, who has read some history, is familiar with the Constitution, and comprehends the difference between a democratic republic and a monarchical empire. Somebody who might, perhaps, get the ball rolling on this impeachment thing. Any noncomatose Republicans out there? Any courageous Democrats? Read Drew's indictment, and act. Act now. Hurry up please, it's time.

The Black Hole of Coulter

Ann Coulter is TV-friendly. She is identifiably female, and she speaks outrageous words. Many viewers therefore remain attached to their video receivers, desperate to catch her latest shimmy and bleat. Where she appears, higher ratings and advertising dollars follow.

Coulter's latest shtick is to accuse all "liberals" of being irreligious, of having an "obsession with Darwinism and the Darwinian view of the world, which replaces sanctification of life with sanctification of sex and death. Sex and death. That's how you get improvement in the species." Just for good measure, in case anyone was thinking of changing channels, she also attacks widows of 9/11 victims: "These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much."

The first response of any rational person is to engage Coulter on the grounds of rationality. Lay out the proof. Define the terms. Examine the syllogisms. That's what the serious and tireless documentors at Media Matters do, time after time: quote her words, debunk them, and bemoan the idiotic programmers who continue to invite her back. That's what Hillary Clinton did when she called the swipe at the widows a "vicious, mean-spirited attack."

But Andrew Sullivan has a better approach. Since Coulter is not serious, do not take her seriously. Ignore her ranting:

[T]he problem with Coulter is that she is a form of camp, is she not? The minute you take her seriously, you lose grip on her reality. She's not a social or political commentator. She's a drag queen impersonating a fascist. I don't even begin to believe she actually believes this stuff. It's post-modern performance-art.… Half the time, I tend to think that a Hannity or O'Reilly or Malkin actually believes their own rhetoric. With Coulter, I don't believe it for a second. And so her vileness cannot be taken seriously. She is worse than vile. She is just empty.

True, this very post quotes her vicious words, does not ignore her—another small platform. But from now on, performance art is to be judged as performance art, discursive argument as discursive argument, and never the vain shall meet.

Therefore, say I: Judged solely as performance art, Coulter's shtick is predictable and boring. Although her popularity on the tube cannot be denied, she reminds me of Gore Vidal's cutting observation when he saw the Cockettes, that gender-bending San Francisco troupe so popular in the seventies. "Lack of talent," said Vidal, "is not enough."

Of Newts and Salamanders

Newt Gingrich, disgraced former speaker of the House of Representatives, appeared on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday. Tim Russert treated him as though he were a serious interlocutor, a misunderstood servant of the people who is merely trying to help his beleaguered party rediscover true conservatism—rather than a corrupt power-seeker who is attempting, Nixon-like, to resurrect his noxious political career. Russert turned the public airways over to Gingrich's slimy propaganda for thirty minutes, asking few searching questions and almost no follow-ups.

In fact, Gingrich told blatant, uncontested lies on nearly every subject:

On NSA eavesdropping without warrants: "Well, first of all, the amazing thing is—everything that has been done is totally legal. You just look at the, at the specifics of what they’re doing, it is totally legal."

On the Democratic Party: "[I]f you represent a party whose contract is with San Francisco and Vermont, you can hardly explain what your future is. I mean, Congresswoman Pelosi cannot explain what her speakership would be because it would be so far to the left they would guarantee the Republicans re-election."

On Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction: "I would—I read the—as you know I’m on the Defense Policy Board—and I went—I read the initial report, the 100-page report the president got. Knowing what the intelligence community—not in the U.S., in Russia, in France, in Italy, in Britain—knowing what they believed in 2003, it would have been irresponsible not to have eliminated Saddam’s regime in 2003."

On the invasion of Iraq: "[I]t was a war of choice in the sense that we believed that sooner or later he was going to hit us, and therefore I would argue that the only question was timing."

On Iran: "I think we clearly have the capability if we need to, to replace the regime in Tehran. We clearly have the power and capacity in the region.… Ultimately, if you have no choice there may be a morning you have to replace the regime militarily."

On the Republican culture of corruption: "I think there’s a problem in both parties. Remember, you just had the, the leading Democrat on the Ethics Committee have to step down because of allegations in millions and millions of dollars of corruption."

On distancing himself from George Bush's record to run for president: "Well, first of all, we are trying to create a movement for real change."

On Gingrich's own corruption as speaker and the fine he paid: "I didn’t pay a fine, I paid the cost of the investigation.… Yeah. OK. But I—if you go back and read the actual report, it—we agreed that the—it had cost $300,000 dollars to investigate. We had one letter—out of 83 ethics charges filed by Democrats, the only allegation that had any substance was not even from 83. All 83 in the end were not problems. We had one letter, which my attorney wrote, which was technically wrong. And I said that was wrong, I took full responsibility for it being wrong."

Full responsibility for Gingrich would require an oath to tell the truth, which is clearly beyond his capability. Full responsibility for Russert would require challenging Gingrich when he spouts one lie after another. Full responsibility for NBC would require denying a self-serving politician the platform to broadcast his lies without refutation, particularly given the fact that Gingrich's "conservative" revolution of the nineties is directly responsible for the current political culture of fear, greed, corruption, and war.

Gingrich paved the way for Bush. He cannot shirk responsibility now.

Quote of the Week: Arlen Specter

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, was frustrated with his fellow Republican George Bush this last week. He couldn't get a straight answer about the National Security Agency's extensive wiretapping program, which is supposed to protect Americans against terrorists but seems instead to be directed against Americans who are opposed to Bush. I say "seems" because Bush refuses to tell anybody anything about the NSA. His mantra is: "Trust me." His stance is: "I am above the law."

On Thursday, Specter threatened to use the only power he still has, the power of the purse, and deny funding to the NSA until Bush is more forthcoming. Specter said:

Institutionally, the presidency is walking all over Congress at the moment. If we are to maintain our institutional prerogative, that may be the only way we can do it.…

It is true that we have no assurance that the president would follow any statute that we enact.

In other words, implies a prominent Republican senator, the president believes he is above the law, and there may now be nothing we can do to stop him from assuming dictatorial powers. Specter's shocking final sentence, all but conceding Bush's blatant disregard for law and Constitution, did not get wide coverage in the American media. Most stories about Specter's frustration did not include it, and I would have missed it myself if my brother Frank had not alerted me to it. I quoted it in a note on Thursday, but it seems to have nearly disappeared elsewhere, so I decided to highlight it again today.

The sentence was included in update 3 of an Associated Press story by Laurie Kellman headlined "Sen. Specter Threatens to Block NSA Funds," but later updates of the story omitted it, and by Friday (except for other blogs) I could find it in only three places on the web: an MSNBC version, a Forbes version, and a Guardian version of Kellman's article. I did not conduct a LexisNexis search, so there may be a few other instances, but the principal US national newspapers and other TV networks apparently censored it. Did they do so because they failed to see the significance of Specter's statement? Or were they threatened by the Bush administration? Or were they merely careless?

In October 2003, historian Kevin Baker, writing in Harper's, expressed the concern that "we are not far from the day when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, our Congress will take its last meaningful vote and turn over power to a military dictator." If Specter is right, that day may be sometime in AD 2006.

Update: I have learned that on Thursday the Washington Post apparently included the "no assurance" sentence in an early version of an article by Walter Pincus and Charles Babington (headlined "Specter Wants More Debate on Spying") but omitted the sentence in later versions. A commenter to Joel Achenbach's Thursday blog on the Post website  ("Bush the Worst President?") quotes the sentence and references the URL to the Pincus-Babington article. If you follow that URL, you will no longer find the offending statement. Clearly, the Post thought the sentence was too hot to handle and removed it by Friday's edition. It's either censorship or extremely poor editorial judgment.

Smoking Gun: the Phantasmal WMDs

Tyler Drumheller, former chief of  the CIA's Europe division, was interviewed on CBS's 60 Minutes last Sunday. He said that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condi Rice knew definitively before the Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD programs. They knew because Iraq's foreign minister had become a spy for the US and that's what he told the CIA—and then CIA director George Tenet passed the word directly to Bush, Cheney, and Rice. Nevertheless, they continued to justify the invasion on the basis of WMDs they knew to be nonexistent.

The problem was not that there was an intelligence failure. It was that Bush and his coconspirators refused to listen to good intelligence—they preferred to listen only to intelligence that fit their preconceptions, intelligence that gave them ammunition to support their predetermined, preemptive strike. They knew there was no danger, and if they had passed that information on to Congress, Congress would not have supported the invasion. So they kept their knowledge secret and lied about their reasons for the war.

In a sense, this story is not news. Everyone who has been paying attention to the publicly available facts has been almost certain since late 2003 that they were lying, and the likelihood has increased over time with new testimony, new books, and constant leaks. But this story is different, because the likelihood that Bush lied is now 100 percent. With Drumheller's report, we now know beyond doubt that the American public was tricked into supporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Here's what Drumheller told Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes:

BRADLEY: According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high level meeting at the White House.

DRUMHELLER: The President, the Vice President, Dr. Rice…

BRADLEY: And at that meeting…?

DRUMHELLER: They were enthusiastic because they said they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.

BRADLEY: And what did this high level source tell you?

DRUMHELLER: He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

BRADLEY: So, in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?

DRUMHELLER: Yes.

BRADLEY: There’s no doubt in your mind about that?

DRUMHELLER: No doubt in my mind at all.

BRADLEY: It directly contradicts, though, what the President and his staff were telling us.

DRUMHELLER: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.

BRADLEY: Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister. He was taken aback by what happened.

DRUMHELLER: The group that was dealing with preparations for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested. And we said, “Well, what about the intel?” And they said, “Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.”

BRADLEY: And if I understand you correctly, when the White House learned that you had this source from the inner circle of Saddam Hussein, they were thrilled with that.

DRUMHELLER: The first we heard, they were. Yes.

BRADLEY: But when they learned what it was that he had to say, that Saddam did not have the capability to wage nuclear war, weapons of mass destruction…?

DRUMHELLER: They stopped being interested in the intelligence.

David Gregory of MSNBC also interviewed Drumheller, and he described the kind of intelligence the Bush team was willing to accept:

DRUMHELLER: [T]he only seemingly hard intelligence that they had on it came from a source called Curveball, which we had serious doubts about the validity of the reporting that we had raised already with them, and from the uranium yellowcake reporting that everybody knows about that came out of Rome. And both of those were highly suspect, so here for the first time we had information that really confirmed, in a lot of ways, what the inspectors were saying.

GREGORY: Which is that Saddam had no WMD program.

Bush claims that these allegations have been thoroughly investigated and that he has been exonerated. In fact, Drumheller did testify before both the Robb-Silbermann Commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but his testimony was ignored, as Josh Marshall reports. The two investigations said they did not consider it within their purview to determine what Bush did with the intelligence he received or how he made the decision to attack Iraq. In other words, the two investigations swept under the rug the most important facts about the genesis of the Iraq War.

Why has there not been more news coverage of Drumheller's bombshell? In part because in a sense everyone already knew. It is, as I said, not news, merely another confirmation of an accepted fact, and therefore uninteresting. Another reason is that a great deal of media time masquerading as news coverage has degenerated into a mere clash of opinions. So once the opposing opinions have been reported, however briefly—Drumheller says Bush lied, and Bush says he did not lie—there is nothing left to say. But the real answer may simply be that American media have become so dumbed-down and headline-oriented that they are unable to explain a moderately complex story like this, especially if it doesn't have at least a touch of sex.

Drumheller has another take. As he told Bradley, people are reluctant to think that what he is saying is possible:

The American people want to believe the president. I have relatives who I've tried to talk to about this who say, "Well, no, you can’t tell me the president had this information and just ignored it." But I think over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time.

A smoking gun. As with Nixon, the question has been "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" Now we know the answer.