Cheney's Attack On The Criminal Justice System

Yesterday a British court followed the rules of their country's legal system and convicted people for illegal acts. It's a novel idea, to be sure, and certainly more expensive than simply locking up anyone you suspect of a crime - just think of the court costs! - but hey, they're such cute kids in England, let them have their little idealist system.

After two trials and the largest counterterrorism investigation in Britain’s history, three men were found guilty on Monday of plotting to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners on a single day with liquid explosives smuggled aboard in soft-drink bottles and detonated by devices powered with AA batteries.

The convictions came three years after the global airline industry was thrown into chaos by the plot. The bombers’ plan to drain plastic soft-drink bottles with syringes and refill them with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a bleaching agent also used as a propellant for rockets, led to new measures prohibiting passengers from carrying all but small quantities of liquids and creams onto flights.

With those measures still in force and causing backups at airport security checkpoints around the world, the police and intelligence agencies in Britain and the United States had waited anxiously for verdicts in the six-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court in London, where eight men were accused of conspiracy to stage the airliner bombings [...]

In Washington, the Obama administration praised the verdict on Monday.

“British authorities have worked diligently to investigate and prosecute those involved in the 2006 aviation plot,” Mike Hammer, a National Security Council spokesman, said via e-mail. “We congratulate them on those efforts and extend our thanks to the British government for seeing these efforts through to today’s conclusion.”

I also want to thank Dick Cheney for almost ruining the successful effort to bring these convicted terrorists to justice, because his political party needed a high-profile capture to help them in the 2006 midterm elections.

Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, nearly destroyed Britain’s efforts to bring the airline bomb plotters to justice, police and intelligence experts said today.

By ordering the early arrest of Rashid Rauf, the bombers’ link man in Pakistan, Washington forced British police to detain the suspects in the UK before all the evidence had been gathered, it was claimed [...]

Although Britain was running the investigation, including a massive round-the-clock surveillance of 200 suspects, the UK was not warned that Rauf - the al-Qaeda facilitator who kept the English plotters in touch with bomb experts and terrorism trainers in Pakistan - was going to be arrested.

What the early arrest did was force an early arrest and trial, where a more deliberate course could have netted more people and broken up the entire cell.

Never let it be said that Dick Cheney doesn't hate the current criminal justice system. He obviously hates it so much that he overtly acted to thwart its success back in 2006.

Who Runs The Death Panels, Again?

It's been clear for a long time that insurance companies make their money off of denying care to those who need it. Under any reasonable standard, that would be credibly seen as insurance company bureaucrats making decisions over a patient's life and death. But we live in America, where any old Alaskan can come up with a phrase and have it repeated endlessly by corporate media, to make the argument that a government-run insurance choice, not the for-profit insurance companies, engage in such behavior.

My friends at Americans United For Change have the evidence on who has created the REAL "death panels".



This Linda Peeno clip comes from Michael Moore's movie Sicko, and so we've known about how insurance companies profit from denying care and allowing people to die for some time. I guess it's impolite for Democrats to actually make this point; Republicans don't have the same respect for decorum.

The truth is that you do not have health insurance, even if you think you're covered. You have a premium that you pay every month, but that does not guarantee that you will be covered if you get sick. It does not guarantee that you can get new coverage if you lose your insurance. It's more a fantasy of coverage than the actuality. Everyone under 65 assumes that their insurance will be there for them when they need it, but ask Linda Peeno - your insurer makes their money on not being reliable.

And if that doesn't convince you, consider the curious truism that most people living under a system of guaranteed care really like it and zealously guard it. There are anecdotal stories, like Harry Shearer's tale of a friend in America versus a friend in Britain, or veteran Jon Soltz, who sings the praises of TRICARE and the VA and has voluminous polling and quality studies to back him up.

But I prefer to look at the case of David Cameron, the would-be Prime Minister of Britain and the head of the conservative Tories. Viewed through the left-right lens in this country, one would assume that the conservatives in Britain, suffering under the National Health Service, would want to dismantle it and return to a private market. There's just one problem; Cameron wants to get elected, and his countrymen, having lived under the NHS for decades, actually appreciate it. At least, that's what you have to conclude from Cameron's words this week:

David Cameron will today face down the Tory right when he pledges to deliver real-terms increases in NHS spending and casts the Conservatives as the party best placed to intensify Labour's "good" reforms.

In an attempt to regain the initiative on health after Tory MEP Daniel Hannan dismissed the NHS as a "60-year mistake" on US television, Cameron will disregard calls from the right for a freeze in spending as a step backwards.

Cameron, who was alarmed by Hannan's intervention during last week's transatlantic row over health reform, will say that only the Tories are offering the NHS a funding guarantee.

"Spending on the NHS cannot stand still, because standing still would be taking a step backwards," Cameron will say in a speech in the north-west of England before visiting an NHS hospital. "That is why we have pledged real-terms increases in NHS spending – unlike Labour – a fact which, to put it mildly, takes the wind out of their point-scoring sails."

You cannot win office in Britain, be you Margaret Thatcher or Tony Benn, without promising to protect and even expand the NHS. That's a measure of customer satisfaction, to borrow a phrase from the business world. I don't see a similar enthusiasm in this country to expand the private insurance market, to take over Medicare, or the VA, or any of the other public programs. At least nowhere this side of Tom DeLay, a disgraced politician who will never have to face voters again. I notice DeLay didn't move to do anything of the sort when he had control of the House and conservatives were firmly in charge of all three branches of government.

The lived experience of Americans who've actually used the health care system is one where insurance companies profit off denial of care, and government-run programs actually work pretty well. Absurd statements like "Get your government hands off my Medicare" only works as a scare tactic because of Democratic weakness in arguing loudly for government that can expand opportunity and access and deliver health care cheaper and with better quality. The rest of the industrialized world has figured this out. They don't like insurance company CEOs having to choose between obscene profits or caring for their customers, because they'll always pick the former. They'll resort to the Limbaugh rule, named after the head of the GOP, who this week told a caller struggling to afford $6,000 to treat a broken wrist: "Well, you shouldn't have broken your wrist."

We can either have that kind of "compassionate conservatism," complete with insurance company death panels, or real compassion. That's the choice in health care reform.

The Fall Of Gordon Brown

So Gordon Brown is either just barely holding on, if you read the stateside papers, or probably in a good position to survive if you read the papers in Britain. Clearly Brown is just marking time until his inevitable exit after elections in around 2010, because I cannot see Labour being able to hold off the challenge from the Conservatives. Basically every incumbent from around the time of the financial meltdown has no shot of surviving, as a rule of thumb. But the tenor of the immediate, near-term threat to Brown's power really changes depending on what paper you read.

What makes this truly sad is that Brown exercised early and decisive leadership on the financial crisis, and steered the policy discussion in the right direction. Nevertheless, he's being blamed both for scandals beyond his control, like the expense account scandal among top political leaders, as well as general blame for the worsening economic conditions, for which he also should not necessarily be faulted, although he was the exchequer while the bubble was inflated.

We're Talking About Gifts?

To say nothing of the fact that a signed songbook by Rodgers and Hammerstein is fairly priceless, I really don't see the point of nervous ninnies commenting on what one person in power gives another person in power as a token. This is a factor in anyone's life how?

And yes, I do think there's a larger meme of "the nouveau-riche black guy doesn't know etiquette" at work here.

Spanish Court Opens Torture Inquiry Against Gonzales, Addington, Yoo, Others

Just off the press from the New York Times:

A high-level Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation against six former Bush administration officials, including former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, on whether they violated international law by providing a legalistic framework to justify the use of torture of American prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an official close to the case said.

The case was sent to the prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzon, the crusading investigative judge who indicted the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The official said that it was “highly probable” that the case would go forward and could lead to arrest warrants.

I would call this a big deal. As the report notes, Garzon indicted Augusto Pinochet, which led to his arrest and extradition. This would not immediately lead to arrest and trial, but it would certainly confine the six officials to the United States and increase the pressure for stateside investigations. Spanish courts have "universal jurisdiction" over human rights abuses, under a 1985 law, particularly if they can be linked to Spain.

In the case against the former Bush administration officials, last week Judge Garzon linked it to an earlier case in which he indicted five former Guantánamo Bay prisoners who were citizens or residents of Spain. The Spanish Supreme Court had overturned a conviction of one of them, saying that Guantánamo was “a legal limbo” and no evidence obtained under torture could be valid in any of the country’s courts.

The complaint was filed by a Spanish human rights group, the Association for the Dignity of Prisoners, to the National Court, which assigned the case to Judge Garzon. After the complaint is reviewed by the prosecutor, a criminal investigation would be likely to begin, the official said. If the case proceeds, arrest warrants could still be months away.
The 98-page complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, was prepared by Spanish lawyers who have also relied on legal experts in the United States and Europe. It bases its case on the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which is binding on 145 countries including the United States.

The six officials in the inquiry are:

• former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
• John Yoo, the Justice Department attorney who authored the infamous "torture memo"
• Jay Bybee, Yoo's superior at the Office of Legal Counsel, also involved in the creation of torture memos
• David Addington, Dick Cheney's chief of staff and legal adviser
• Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy
• William Haynes, the legal counsel at the DoD

The amount of material connecting these six to the creation, authorization and direction of state-sanctioned illegal torture, based on perverse and discredited reasoning, is voluminous, and given the record of Garzón, I would imagine this will lead to arrest warrants.

This story shows once again the growing global unease with the implicit policy of the United States to conveniently forget the torture and other abuses of the Bush regime. In England, police are investigating whether British intelligence officers knew about and prolonged the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the recently released Guantanamo detainee. As Glenn Greenwald notes, other countries have not abandoned their commitment to the rule of law.

As The Guardian reported, the British Government was, in essence, forced into the criminal investigation once government lawyers "referred evidence of possible criminal conduct by MI5 officers to home secretary Jacqui Smith, and she passed it on to the attorney general." In a country that lives under what is called the "rule of law," credible evidence of serious criminality makes such an investigation, as The Guardian put it, "inevitable." British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has clearly tried desperately to avoid any such investigation, yet as The Washington Post reported this morning, even he was forced to say in response: "I have always made clear that when serious allegations are made they have got to be investigated."

Wouldn't it be nice if our government leaders could make a similar, extremely uncontroversial statement -- credible allegations of lawbreaking by our highest political leaders must be investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted? In a country with a minimally healthy political culture, that ought to be about as uncontroversial as it gets. Instead, what we have are political leaders and media stars virtually across the board spouting lawless Orwellian phrases about being "more interested in looking forward than in looking backwards" and not wanting to "criminalize public service." These apologist manuevers continue despite the fact that, as even conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum recently acknowledged in light of newly disclosed detailed ICRC Reports, "that crimes were committed is no longer in doubt."

The end of the NY Times article shows why the US can hardly claim that Spain is acting irresponsibly beyond its own borders and violating the soveriegnty of other nations, because in one recent case we did almost exactly the same thing:

The United States for the first time this year used a law that allows for the prosecution in the United States of torture in other countries. On Jan. 10, a Miami court sentenced Charles Taylor, the former Liberian leader, to 97 years in a federal prison for torture, even though the crimes were committed in Liberia.

Last October, when the Miami court handed down the conviction, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey applauded the ruling and said: “This is the first case in the United States to charge an individual with criminal torture. I hope this case will serve as a model to future prosecutions of this type.”

So do I.

Back To Reality

The stock market provided perhaps the right punctuation to this Inauguration Day, reminding everyone that the economy won't magically repair itself because of the change in occupancy at the White House. In fact, given the deterioration in the banking sector this past week, I'd say we got off easy with just a 4% drop.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Fear that the global banking crisis is worsening sent financial stocks plunging Tuesday, with many companies' shares down by double-digit percentages and Citigroup Inc. diving to a 17-year low.

Disheartening news came from U.S. and British banks: They are still suffering losses from loans and are warning that those losses will not subside anytime soon. Regional banks as well as the big money center banks are struggling [...]

Evidence that the banking crisis is worsening overseas also rattled investors. On Monday, the Royal Bank of Scotland forecast a loss of $41.3 billion in 2008. That led the British government to increase its stake in RBS to nearly 70 percent, essentially nationalizing the bank. Separately, the British government announced a new round of bailouts for the country's troubled banking industry.

Bank stocks also dropped in the aftermath of multibillion losses announced Friday by Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp.

15-20% losses were the NORM for a lot of banks today. The UK banks are getting a very generous bailout, with guarantees made against their losses in mortgage-backed securities, instead of allowing the shareholders to bear the brunt of the pain. Gordon Brown may want to clean up the balance sheets but he's really just sinking massive amounts of money into the system. Meanwhile, the US is considering building a "bad bank" where the toxic waste would all flow to, paying off banks for ridding themselves of their own self-created problems. Paul Krugman had a good piece on this yesterday; basically, we're using an artificial respirator to keep the banks alive. They are completely dependent on the government, and yet we are unwilling to do the cheaper and more sensible thing and just nationalize them.

Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, recently tried to describe how this would work: “The aggregator bank would buy the assets at fair value.” But what does “fair value” mean?

In my example, Gothamgroup is insolvent because the alleged $400 billion of toxic waste on its books is actually worth only $200 billion. The only way a government purchase of that toxic waste can make Gotham solvent again is if the government pays much more than private buyers are willing to offer.

Now, maybe private buyers aren’t willing to pay what toxic waste is really worth: “We don’t have really any rational pricing right now for some of these asset categories,” Ms. Bair says. But should the government be in the business of declaring that it knows better than the market what assets are worth? And is it really likely that paying “fair value,” whatever that means, would be enough to make Gotham solvent again?

What I suspect is that policy makers — possibly without realizing it — are gearing up to attempt a bait-and-switch: a policy that looks like the cleanup of the savings and loans, but in practice amounts to making huge gifts to bank shareholders at taxpayer expense, disguised as “fair value” purchases of toxic assets.

Why go through these contortions? The answer seems to be that Washington remains deathly afraid of the N-word — nationalization. The truth is that Gothamgroup and its sister institutions are already wards of the state, utterly dependent on taxpayer support; but nobody wants to recognize that fact and implement the obvious solution: an explicit, though temporary, government takeover. Hence the popularity of the new voodoo, which claims, as I said, that elaborate financial rituals can reanimate dead banks.

There are very real consequences to this. We've already lost something like $64 billion dollars from the initial TARP release (remember when that was called an "investment" and we were all assured we would get the money back?). Everybody's tiptoeing around the solution. England owns 70% of the Royal Bank of Scotland and won't nationalize it.

Without President Obama (yay, I get to write that!) leveling with the American people, we will continue to waste more money propping up an insolvent set of banks.

World Report

Here are a few things that caught my eye.

• Will you look at that, another foreign policy failure for the Bush Administration. They're basically saying that, with the Israeli government in a fair bit of turmoil, there isn't likely to be any movement on a Mideast peace deal. This is what happens when you wait 7 1/2 years to pay any attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I know the economic crisis is all-consuming, but Obama would do well to attack this early in his Administration, because it truly is the linchpin to peace throughout the region, and ignoring it for years will only cause more violence and resentment.

• Not that Israel is necessarily going to be inclined to cooperation with Obama. Tzipi Livni, who is the more "dovish" of aspirants for the Prime Minister's post, warned the President-elect that dialogue with Iran would be unwise because it may project "weakness." I don't think Obama will agree - but this gives you an insight into the prevailing mindset in Israel regarding Iran, driven more by paranoia than facts (the consensus of the US intelligence community is that Iran has no nukes, a fact that is conveniently forgotten).

• The E.U. is eager for financial reforms to regulate international banks, but waiting for President Bush to do the right thing is a Godot-like experience. Their plan, to hammer out reforms now and reassess them when Obama takes office with his input, is decent enough, I just think it's wishful thinking.

• Practically the only politician coming out of the financial fallout looking sound is Gordon Brown, who was one of the few to implement a solution that matched the problem. Voters in England appear to be responding by giving his party a boost, as Labour won a key byelection in Scotland. Brown was part of the Blair regime that was as asleep at the switch as every other world government leading up to the crisis, so I'm not sure he deserves all this praise, but I do think he's recovered enough to actually contend for his re-election instead of the sure defeat to the Tories predicted earlier.

• All hell is breaking loose in Zimbabwe, and right on schedule. After negotiating a power-sharing agreement, Robert Mugabe is now going to form his own government and deny cabinet posts to his rival Morgan Tsvangirai. The only surprise is that this didn't happen sooner. I hope Tsvangirai has a food-taster. Mugabe plays for keeps.

• Remember when the Russian "invasion" of Georgia was the greatest international crisis since the end of the Cold War? Turns out that it not only was not a consequential crisis on par with, say, the war in Iraq, but it was not a Russian invasion.

TBILISI, Georgia — Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

This is good journalism but you could have considered the source of the scaremongering - neocons with an agenda - back when the whole thing was in the news, and drawn the same conclusion. Neocons are wrong about everything. And the way to break their lock on power is to find everyone who hasn't been wrong about everything, regardless of ideology or political party, and put them in a room together, and unify them against these clowns. There's a lot at stake.

Comeback

Stocks are shooting up today. Why? Well, over the weekend, European leaders followed the lead of Gordon Brown and Britain (who bought up the Royal Bank of Scotland today), announcing plans for equity stakes in banks, and more important, vows to guarantee interbank lending. If that can't grease the skids of the credit market, absolutely nothing can. And since it's a global financial market, this affects Wall Street.

There's also Mitsubishi's buy of a stake of Morgan Stanley, and federal officials guaranteed that stake, protecting the company.

This has appeared to be enough, for now.

As I said a couple days ago, Brown seemed to have the right idea all along, to recapitalize the banks in exchange for equity stakes. Here's Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman:

This sort of temporary part-nationalization, which is often referred to as an “equity injection,” is the crisis solution advocated by many economists — and sources told The Times that it was also the solution privately favored by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman.

But when Henry Paulson, the U.S. Treasury secretary, announced his plan for a $700 billion financial bailout, he rejected this obvious path, saying, “That’s what you do when you have failure.” Instead, he called for government purchases of toxic mortgage-backed securities, based on the theory that ... actually, it never was clear what his theory was.

Meanwhile, the British government went straight to the heart of the problem — and moved to address it with stunning speed. On Wednesday, Mr. Brown’s officials announced a plan for major equity injections into British banks, backed up by guarantees on bank debt that should get lending among banks, a crucial part of the financial mechanism, running again. And the first major commitment of funds will come on Monday — five days after the plan’s announcement.

At a special European summit meeting on Sunday, the major economies of continental Europe in effect declared themselves ready to follow Britain’s lead, injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into banks while guaranteeing their debts. And whaddya know, Mr. Paulson — after arguably wasting several precious weeks — has also reversed course, and now plans to buy equity stakes rather than bad mortgage securities (although he still seems to be moving with painful slowness).

While President Paulson was concerned with whether any plan fit with a carefully constructed ideology, Brown actually looked at the problem and sought to fix it.

It's important not to breathe a sigh of relief and think the crisis is solved. It's not. There are still systemic problems and a virtual certainty of recession. That requires an entirely different response. Getting the credit markets working again is only a start.

Today In Economic Armageddon

The Federal Reserve joined forces with central banks across the world for a coordinated interest rate cut of 50 basis points. They're obviously throwing concerns about inflation out the window and trying to kickstart the credit markets, but Paul Krugman explains why that is not likely to work.

A quick illustration: in early July 2007, before the crisis, the target Fed funds rate was 5.25% and the rate on 30-day A2/P2 commercial paper — that is, CP issued by less-than-sterling borrowers — was 5.4%. On Monday of this week, the target Fed funds rate was 2%, down 325 basis points from pre-crisis levels, but the CP rate was 5.61% — up from pre-crisis levels.

So will this latest rate cut make any difference to borrowers? Maybe — but only to a few of them. We’re way past the point at which conventional monetary policy has much traction.

On top of this you have the Fed jumping into the commercial paper market, perhaps illegally, to get the rates they can't touch through monetary policy lowered. And they're starting to lend to private companies, putting more taxpayer dollars at risk.

These look like desperate attempts to stave off the inevitable, and nobody's really certain whether or not they'll work. What I think we have here is the policymakers in the White House trying to rescue their failed ideology and not the market. They want to use everything in their power (and a few things that aren't) to halt a slide to recession, as long as it doesn't look socialist and icky. What's more, they'd rather reward their friends on Wall Street than punish them, even though they have the opportunity to do either with the authority granted in the Paulson plan. The wiser move would be to follow Britain and just nationalize the banks already.

Britain’s largest banks are to be part-nationalised after the government took the momentous decision to pump tens of billions of pounds of public money into the sector to avert a banking collapse [...]

Under the UK bank rescue, the government is to put up to £250bn into the banking system in an effort to keep banks lending. It will also offer a guarantee to banks issuing medium term debt, which could mean backing a further £250bn of bank borrowings. But it is likely to demand dividend cuts and the end of big bonuses at the banks in return.

This is clearly what we should be doing here; a Swedish-style temporary nationalization with large equity stakes. It's cheaper and is more likely to be effective. And it looks like Emperor Paulson is slowly resigning himself to that reality:

Did anybody else notice that when Hank Paulson was describing in his press conference today what the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act enables Treasury to do, the first thing he listed was “to inject capital into financial institutions”?

That wasn’t how Treasury initially advertised its Troubled Asset Relief Program. It was sold as a way to get the market for mortgage securities moving (or, to use the jargon, liquid). Lots of academic economists objected that liquidity wasn’t the problem, it was insolvency. What Treasury needed to do was recapitalize financial institutions and take equity stakes in return […]

None of the people asking questions at the press conference really seemed to pick up on this, of course (&%%$# Washington journalists!). Along with Paulson’s affirmation that the FDIC was going to use its “systemic risk” powers to protect depositors and unsecured creditors “as appropriate,” I take it as one more sign that we’re headed toward a Swedish solution of our banking crisis—recapitalization and temporary nationalization of much of the banking system.

The second half of this needs to be a real stimulus bill for ordinary Americans which includes aid to state and local governments as well as infrastructure investment. And that's exactly what Nancy Pelosi is calling for.

DENVER - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that a $150 billion economic stimulus plan is needed now because of the faltering economy and she may call the House into session after the election to pass it [...]

The Senate is expected to be back at work after Election Day to complete a public lands bill and perhaps deal with other matters, such as a measure to extend unemployment benefits. The House also could return to consider a stimulus plan and additional issues in a lame-duck session before the newly elected Congress takes over in January.

"We may have to go back into session before the next Congress," Pelosi said.

Pelosi said a stimulus package would create jobs by investing in public works, increasing food stamps benefits and extending unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless. She said lawmakers need to "hunker down" and look closely at the federal budget for possible savings, and reconsider whether the U.S. can afford to fight "a war without end" in Iraq.

Reality is intruding on the fantasy scenario that we can continue to prop up the financial system with funny money. The reckoning is going to be painful but we should at least start to head in the right direction.

Tales Of The War On Terror

So Congress isn't buying the neat little bow that the FBI tried to put on the anthrax case.

WASHINGTON — A month after the F.B.I. declared that an Army scientist was the anthrax killer, leading members of Congress are demanding more information about the seven-year investigation, saying they do not think the bureau has proved its case.

In a letter sent Friday to Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Democratic leaders of the House Judiciary Committee said that “important and lingering questions remain that are crucial for you to address, especially since there will never be a trial to examine the facts of the case.”

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, committed suicide in July, and Mr. Mueller is likely to face demands for additional answers about the anthrax case when he appears before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Sept. 16 and 17.

“My conclusion at this point is that it’s very much an open matter,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Senate committee, said of the strength of the case against Dr. Ivins, a microbiologist at the Army’s biodefense laboratory who worked on anthrax vaccines. “There are some very serious questions that have yet to be answered and need to be made public.”

I'm looking forward to that hearing.

In addition to letting potential domestic terror suspects go free, you'll be pleased to know that the Bush Administration, an equal opportunity bungler, has done the same with foreign terror suspects:

A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended Monday when the jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.

But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.

The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks seven years ago this week. British and American experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an operation by Al Qaeda, and that it was conceived and organized in Pakistan.

In a case of a buried lede, the Times story later gets around to mentioning that the Bush Administration's jumping of the gun, authorizing arrests in Pakistan of people connected to the plot for nakedly political reasons prior to the 2006 midterm elections, cut short the investigation and put Scotland Yard in a situation where they didn't have enough evidence to convict. London had to roll up the plotters before they were ready to present full evidence.

George Bush - politicizing terror, making sure nobody is held responsible since 2001!

Time for a change.

World Report

• This Zimbabwean election is poised to end in violence and tragedy. The runoff between ruler Robert Mugabe and challenger Morgan Tsvangirai is set for later in the month. And already Tsvangirai has been arrested and detained before being set free, and US and British diplomats have also been detained. They're trying to suspend all NGO work in the country under the suspicion that aid workers are undermining the ruling party. This kind of paranoia combined with brute force never ends well.

• Speaking of fearful dictators, in Burma the military junta has rejected the aid of US Navy ships, leaving up to a million people still without adequate food or water in the wake of the cyclone. Meanwhile, the country has gone so far as to detain an activist comedian named "The Tweezers" for the crime of trying to help out cyclone victims. That's a humanitarian disaster beyond all reason, and a telling reminder of the tragic intersection between natural disasters and despotic governments.

• Here's a nice interview with the world's most notorious nuclear proliferator - A.Q. Khan, under the scourge of house arrest at his elaborate villa in Pakistan. He claims in the interview that he was doing the bidding of Pakistan by selling nuclear secrets to the likes of Libya and North Korea. That just shows the stupidity of trying to work with Pervez Musharraf, the head of the government during Khan's selling spree.

• I've been sitting on this one for a couple weeks, but haven't had the time to go into it. Basically, the British have been laundering money through a weapons maker called BAE and creating a giant off-the-books slush fund that has been used to finance covert ops with Britain and the United States in the lead. The Saudis were at the head of this, through former US Ambassador Prince Bandar. It's looking pretty clear that these bribes from the Saudis to BAE funded covert ops. The story is labyrinthine, but Marcy Wheeler's on it.

• There may be nothing sadder than the plight of the Baghdad Jews. This is a sect that has direct roots back to Abraham, and in the strife of the Iraq occupation they've been almost completely wiped out.

• Maher Arar was a Canadian citizen who US officials detained after 9/11 and rendered to Syria, where he was tortured. Now the Justice Department is investigating the incident, but I hold little hope that they will reach any actionable conclusion. What's sad is how stories like Arar's are NOT the exception. Also sad is the number of investigations that this branch of the DoJ, the Office of Professional Responsibility, has on their plate.

• And the story of the day is the retelling of how the Defense Department was duped by Iranian intelligence into advancing the cause of exiles, which led to the Iraq war.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The proper response to unbelievable misconduct of this kind is to stop any investigation into it.

You should read the whole sordid story. It involves neocon crackpot Michael Ledeen, an old Iran-Contra hand named Manucher Ghorbanifar, and basically a bunch of idiots at the Pentagon taking these stories at face value. The stories that have come out JUST THIS WEEK about the war are enough grounds for impeachment.
•

Cluster Bomb Breakthrough

Gordon Brown hasn't had a great couple of months, but he showed some backbone today and greatly improved prospects for an international ban on cluster bombs.

In a major diplomatic defeat for the U.S., Britain broke ranks Wednesday and joined more than 100 nations in agreeing in principle to an international ban on cluster bombs, the small, insidious weapons that have killed thousands of civilians in the aftermath of battle.

Though the Bush administration has lobbied hard against the treaty and many U.S. and British officials consider cluster bombs valuable weapons, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown overruled elements of his own military and threw his support behind the prohibition. Brown's decision cleared the way for an agreement that supporters said would lead to the removal of cluster munitions from arsenals around the world.

Most interestingly, the convention not only prohibits the use and stockpiling of cluster bombs among signatories, but it calls on any nation conducting joint military operations with a non-signatory to "actively discourage use of the weapons." With Britain on board, that will have an impact on the United States regardless of what a future President and Congress do with the treaty (for example, these have been used in Iraq).

Cluster bombs are a truly hideous by-product of modern warfare, canisters that open upon ejection and pour a series of "bomblets" across a wide area that are meant to explode on impact. However, up to 25 percent do not, creating minefields that kill hundreds or even thousands of civilians wherever they are deployed.

But while a ban on these weapons would be a major human rights victory, it is more reflective of the waning credibility of the United States under Bush. It would have been unthinkable a few years ago for a stalwart ally like Great Britain to break with the US on a diplomatic issue such as this. But Brown is in trouble domestically, and may have seen such a split as a political cure-all. It's not only McCain who wants to show his independence from Bush. Moreover, here is the United States, on the wrong side of a human rights issue YET AGAIN, lining up with China and Russia and using technicalities like "China and Russia don't support it, so we won't" to justify their behavior. Which is essentially saying that "We don't think this effort will succeed until you bring users of the weapons, like us, to the table."

How many foreign policy failures from this Administration can you name off the top of your head? Because you can add this one.

Tibetan Protests Rise In Europe

First in London and now in Paris, pro-Tibet protesters are disrupting the Olympic torch relay, and in the case of Paris, canceled the presentation.

A relay of the Olympic torch through Paris was canceled on Monday and the flame was put on a bus at the request of Chinese officials after pro-Tibetan protesters repeatedly disrupted its progress.

Chinese authorities decided to scratch the torch relay after human rights activists and pro-Tibet protests disrupted the passage of the flame in the French capital, forcing security officials to partly speed the flame through the streets of Paris in a bus.

Despite a heavy police escort, organizers had to twice extinguish the flame briefly after hundreds of pro-Tibet activists disrupted its progress.

The flame reaches San Francisco for its only American stop on Wednesday. Hundreds of police officers are expected to shroud the ceremony, and the route has been shifted and altered in an attempt to outflank the expected protesters. Meanwhile, European governments are mulling over potential boycotts of the opening ceremonies.

The situation is essentially that the International Olympic Committee currently has the most leverage over the Chinese government's behavior in Tibet, and their human rights record generally. And so these proposed boycotts, most recently discussed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, make more than a symbolic statement. Hillary Clinton is calling on George Bush to follow suit (which is unlikely, because he digs sports). Hold Fast Blog has a lot more.

UPDATE: There are now 3 protestors carrying signs on the spans of the Golden Gate Bridge. SFist has the story.

Remember The Dodgy Dossier?

This was the suspect document created by the British government that made the case for the Iraq war. It's been discredited for a long time, but new information has been discovered which makes Tony Blair look even more like Bush's poodle. It seems like they hired an official spin doctor to make sure the document was performing properly under the war brand.

Fresh evidence that a senior government press officer was closely involved in drawing up the government's discredited Iraq weapons dossier, despite official denials, was revealed yesterday.

A document the Foreign Office tried to suppress shows that John Williams, its director of communications at the time, had access to secret intelligence as he prepared an early draft in 2002.

The document suggests that Williams, a former Sunday Mirror political editor, used the same sources as the Joint Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sir John Scarlett, which produced the government's final dossier. Though there are striking similarities, Williams's draft does not contain the claim that Iraq could launch a chemical warfare weapon in 45 minutes - a claim central to the prime minister's case for war.

The 45-minute claim was made later, and subsequently withdrawn.

They ran an intelligence document by their press guy. Wonder if Ari Fleischer got the same treatment?

The fact that the 45-minute claim wasn't in the early draft, but so many other charges were identical, shows further that the document was sexed up, with something shocking added that Blair could use as a talking point for the public.

We're so used to government being run as a press operation in the Bush era, that it's not necessarily shocking that Britain was imitating this style. The case for war was so flimsy that all the rhetorical stops had to be pulled out. While the bitter-enders may thank God we invaded Iraq, sane people are looking for ways to ensure that this doesn't happen again. How about political consultants and press advisors don't get intelligence clearance?

Let Us Rob You Or We'll Suicide Bomb The Place

It's really stunning that we still have this symbiotic relationship with Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11, and they still harbor all kinds of terrorists and actually use them as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE*.

He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.

Prince Bandar, incidentally, is known familiarly as "Bandar Bush" and is an unofficial member of that family, so maybe it's not so stunning.

So the President can claim to be acting on behalf of the families of the victims of the London train bombing, yet his good friend and pseudo-relative Bandar Bush is actually terrorizing Britain by threatening more attacks.

I knew that Saudi Arabia had us over a barrel, literally, when it came to oil, but apparently that's also true with regard to terrorism. Makes you wonder that if we actually try to get off the carbon-based economy, what they would do to ensure that doesn't happen.

* I've written about this Bandar/BAE thing previously, it's really one of the more devious "Syriana" type things that's been going on the past several years.

No Fair, WE Get To Start The Next War

Not Turkey, I mean, who are they?

Turkey's ruling party decided Tuesday to seek parliamentary approval for an offensive against Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq, a move that could open a new front in the Iraq war and disrupt one of that nation's few relatively peaceful areas.

The government did not say it had decided to launch such an attack, which could jeopardize Turkey's ties with the United States. The U.S. warned against sending troops across the border and urged Turkey to work with Iraq's government to quell the Turkish Kurd guerrillas.

Considering that the Iraqi government has little leverage in Kurdistan, and is also non-functional in general, I don't see how they can help any nation with anything.

This has been the great fear coming out of Iraq for some time. Allowing the Kurds to go basically autonomous invited this kind of cross-border terrorism, and Turkey honestly has a right to defend themselves. The problem is that this has the potential to spill out far beyond Turkey and provoke a wider war, with the involvement of all kinds of ethnic regions. And the US will be stuck right in the middle.

I don't really trust the diplomatic power of the White House to massage this into a good place, do you?

As a side note, maybe we can get Gordon Brown to work on this one, he seems to have figured out that Middle Easterners are tired of colonialism:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain told the House of Commons on Monday that the number of British troops in Iraq will be cut in half to 2,500 by next spring, and he left open the strong possibility that all British soldiers will leave Iraq by the end of 2008.

Brown said the reductions -- down from about 5,000 British soldiers now -- are possible because of the progress made in training Iraqi security forces. He described the situation in Basrah in southern Iraq, where the British troops are based, as "calmer."

See, foreign troops occupying your country has a tendency to inflame the local populace.

As for the next war in Turkey, a NATO ally by the way... well, that's a whole other kettle of fish.

Loyalty Is A One-Way Street

Under HLIC (head lapdog in charge) Tony Blair, Great Britain did absolutely everything that the Bush Administration wished, and covered for the disastrous policy in Iraq. Now that Gordon Brown is in charge, and he clearly doesn't share the same neocon ideology (and he wants to get elected at some point, so he's keeping his distance from Bush), British policies are changing. They're withdrawing from Iraq rapidly. And the White House is peeved, so they're lashing out, not at Brown's judgment, but the performance of their armed forces:

“There’s concern about Brown,” a senior White House foreign policy official told The Daily Telegraph. “But this is compensated by the fact that Paris and Berlin are much less of a headache. The need to hinge everything on London as the guarantor of European security has gone.”

The White House official added that Britain would always be “the cornerstone” of US policy towards Europe but there was “a lot of unhappiness” about how British forces had performed in Basra and an acceptance that Mr Brown would pull the remaining 4,500 troops out of Iraq next year.

“Operationally, British forces have performed poorly in Basra,” said the official. “Maybe it’s best that they leave. Now we will have a clear field in southern Iraq.”

I eagerly await the reoslution of censure in the British House of Parliament for the White House's slander of their fighting men and women. Of course, if you're Republican, it's OK to defame the troops (and it's doubly OK to censor any rebuttals to that slander). If you're a Democrat, it calls for immediate action (even if it's not actually slander).

It's pretty disgraceful for the US to drop their most loyal ally because they won't set the same course for the center of the sun. Indeed, the relations are now quite frosty.

There has been a notable reduction in contact between Downing Street and the White House since Mr Blair left and US officials have remarked on how few British ministers have visited Washington in recent months.

Mr Brown and Mr Bush are understood to have spoken twice by telephone in three months since they met at Camp David in June, whereas Mr Blair and Mr Bush held video-link conferences, often weekly.

....A British diplomatic source said: "In the White House there's a sense of enormous change from Blair. They used to be on the phone to Blair all the time and that's no longer the case because Brown clearly wants to be the unBlair."

Of course, this fits in with the Bush definition of ally: a country that agrees with me wholly and completely. Anyone else is an enemy. With us or agin' us.

UPDATE: Here's an example of how that plays out.

Bush is a classic insecure authoritarian who imposes humiliating tests of obedience on others in order to prove his superiority and their inferiority. In 1999, according to Draper, at a meeting of economic experts at the Texas governor's mansion, Bush interrupted Rove when he joined in the discussion, saying, "Karl, hang up my jacket." In front of other aides, Bush joked repeatedly that he would fire Rove. (Laura Bush's attitude toward Rove was pointedly disdainful. She nicknamed him "Pigpen," for wallowing in dirty politics. He was staff, not family -- certainly not people like them.) [...]

At a political strategy meeting in May 2004, when Matthew Dowd and Rove explained to him that he was not likely to win in a Reagan-like landslide, as Bush had imagined, he lashed out at Rove: "KARL!" Rove, according to Draper, was Bush's "favorite punching bag," and the president often threw futile and meaningless questions at him, and shouted, "You don't know what the hell you're talking about."

Those around him have learned how to manipulate him through the art of flattery. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played Bush like a Stradivarius, exploiting his grandiosity. "Rumsfeld would later tell his lieutenants that if you wanted the president's support for an initiative, it was always best to frame it as a 'Big New Thing.'" Other aides played on Bush's self-conception as "the Decider." "To sell him on an idea," writes Draper, "aides were now learning, the best approach was to tell the president, This is going to be a really tough decision." But flattery always requires deference. Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: "Thank you for the privilege of serving today."

Apparently, Gordon Brown isn't whispering the right sweet nothings.

More Hearts And Minds At 30,000 Feet

Our strategy of bombing Afghanistan into loving us because we don't have the troops on the ground has turned tragic:

A U.S. warplane mistakenly dropped a 500-pound bomb on British troops after they called for air support in Afghanistan, killing three soldiers and seriously wounding two others in an accident that could re-ignite debate about America's heavy use of air power.

Friendly fire involving U.S. troops has led to the deaths of three British servicemen in the current Iraq war, but the incident Thursday night was the first confirmed case between the two forces in Afghanistan. British officials said they were investigating the error, which comes amid growing concerns about civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes.

The troops were patrolling northwest of Kajaki, a militant hotspot in southern Helmand province, when they were attacked by Taliban fighters, Britain's Ministry of Defense said in a statement.

This is a particularly tragic situation, but it's standard practice for the Afghan people, who die from errant bombing regularly. Which is why they are not swayed by arguments of the so-called benevolent Western powers.

UPDATE: Apparently they went and printed Koranic verses on soccer balls and threw them out of planes to the Afghan people, who immediately were incensed that they would put the holiest texts in Islam on a ball to be kicked. Man, it's like we're trying to insult them in whatever way possible.

Democracy At 30,000 Feet

A British general had the courage to call out the United States.

A senior British commander in southern Afghanistan said in recent weeks that he had asked that American Special Forces leave his area of operations because the high level of civilian casualties they had caused was making it difficult to win over local people.

Other British officers here in Helmand Province, speaking on condition of anonymity, criticized American Special Forces for causing most of the civilian deaths and injuries in their area. They also expressed concerns that the Americans’ extensive use of air power was turning the people against the foreign presence as British forces were trying to solidify recent gains against the Taliban.

We really are Borat in the antique shop, aren't we?

It's an article of wingnut faith that our pulling out of Vietnam indirectly caused the rise of Pol Pot and the genocide of a million Cambodians. In fact, it was the heavy Cambodian bombing campaign that destabilized the country and gave rise to the murderous dictator. Bombing to stop a counter-insurgency is a sign of desperation. And it's not possible to be successful. You alienate far more of the good guys to make up for the bad guys (and civilian collateral damage) that you kill.

“Everyone is concerned about civilian casualties,” the senior British commander said. “Of course it is counterproductive if civilians get injured, but we’ve got to pick up the pack of cards that we have got. Other people have been operating in our area before us.”

After months of heavy fighting that began in early 2006, the British commanders say they are finally making headway in securing important areas such as this town, and are now in the difficult position of trying to win back support among local people whose lives have been devastated by aerial bombing.

There's a sense of denial here, that as long as you rack up body counts you must be winning. It's simply untrue.

Calls For Police State Meet With Deafening Silence From Libertarians

I knew that it was a matter of time that someone would take the lesson from the bumbling terror cell plots in the UK that we need to look at everyone continually at every waking moment. Little surprise that it was Joe Lieberman (Lieberman - CT), who advocated for a police state this morning on ABC:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said Sunday he wants to “more widely” use surveillance cameras across the country.

“The Brits have got something smart going in England, and it was part of why I believe they were able to so quickly apprehend suspects in the terrorist acts over the weekend, and that is they have cameras all over London and other of their major cities,” Lieberman said.

“I think it’s just common sense to do that here much more widely,” he added. “And of course, we can do it without compromising anybody’s real privacy.”

Before you laugh and scoff that this is the work of a crackpot, remember that this is the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the Senate.

Look, Britain's CCTV did not stop any terror attack, quick thinking by law enforcement combined with embarrassingly little knowledge of science on the part of the would-be bombers did. They simply don't prevent crime, and that's not even their object. It couldn't possibly be their object unless you wanted to hire a million or so people to be official government watchers. Detection and prosecution is their object, and in this case, I think the British were able to apprehend people in Glasgow, for example, because the guy ran out of the car on fire. The British have grown more comfortable with having 4 million CCTV cameras in their country, though there are critics. In American, we have a little thing called the Fourth Amendment which would potentially disallow unreasonable searches. It's ingrained in the American character to be mindful of their own privacy and resist efforts to take it away. So calling for a "Big Brother" setup in America is fairly nutty and potentially illegal. In other words, perfect for someone like Lieberman to call for.

You would think that this would alarm the libertarians that populate the Republican Party and particularly the conservative blogosphere. But we've learned over the past several years that, as long as you're taking away civil liberties in the name of fighting really dumb terrorists, libertarians will nod in assent or mumble uncomfortably about something else, like how that guy in line at the convenience store with the turban looked a little suspicious. Outside of this mild criticism at RedState, pretty much nobody on the right has anything to say about the chair of the Senate committee on Homeland Security calling for blanketing the country with surveillance cameras. This includes the Ole Perfesser, who yesterday got all hyped up about "Big Brother" scanning your driver's license when you buy beer, and who in the past has waged a one-man jihad against traffic cameras. Somehow, Joe Lieberman openly pining for CCTV nationwide isn't rousing much interest. Of course, it has nothing to do with robots, so maybe that's to be expected.

We have a continuing threat from terrorism (in many ways due to our bungling in international relation), but not one that requires the stripping of all of our civil liberties enshrined in the fabric of this republic. There used to be a lot of constitutionalists that understood that. Not these days, because they've become so shell-shocked and scared from 9/11 PTSD that they are willing to gladly surrender to a de facto police state in America.