Congrats to the Jags, who took down my Steelers by the score of 9-0. No excuses- they were just better. The Jags were a solid team last year, and they look to have picked up right where they left off. Good luck to them, and I hope we don’t see them in the playoffs.
Archives for September 2006
Open Thread
For anything other than gloating about the Steelers’ loss. There is a thread for that already.
* Progress in Iraq? This comment at Kevin Drum’s provides a handy resource.
* Don’t eat fresh spinach. Like most agricultural E. coli outbreaks this one will eventually be traced to poop getting in the food stream. Which spinach grower is using uncertified fertilizer? We will find out soon. It is also worth pointing out that much of America’s cheap produce comes from countries which use human waste in agriculture on a routine basis.
* Fast feet.
* Pakistan releases all of its Taliban/al Qaeda detainees, including the killers of Nicholas Berg. This deserves a post of its own but that will wait until I see the story picked up by a source whose credibility I can verify.
* Creationism abroad. We already knew that stupid is contagious…
* Willie Nelson busted. For what? Guess.
Unacceptable
Whatever it is that makes America great, it sure is not this:
Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.
[…] The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda “watchlist,” without justification, the report said.
Arar was also listed as “an Islamic extremist individual” who was in the Washington area on Sept. 11. The report concluded that he had no involvement in Islamic extremism and was on business in San Diego that day, said the head of the inquiry commission, Ontario Justice Dennis O’Connor.The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda “watchlist,” without justification, the report said.
Barring a long-overdue sense of shame, count on the usual suspects to put out the Frayed Electrical Cable Cookbook to show how great life was for innocent Canadian Maher Arar under CIA and Syrian captivity.
You can bet that there are more Maher Arars out there. Glenn Greenwald has a rundown of a few more that we know about – count the number times that the US invokes the State Secrets doctrine to cover up erroneous maltreatment exactly like Maher Arar’s. Given our present government’s manic bent for secrecy the actual number of innocent people taken from their previous lives, denied contact with their family and cruelly tortured, in some cases to death, is certainly far higher than we know. The AP suggests that the number could be staggering:
In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.
Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.
Keep Maher Arar in mind when defenders put the best face on our system:
Every U.S. detainee in Iraq “is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S.-led military detainee operations in Iraq.
That’s right, we ship an innocent Canadian citizen to Syria to be cruelly tortured with frayed electrical cables based on the “best” intelligence of US and Canadian authorities acting on their home turf, and Lt. Col. Curry wants us to believe that our intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan is airtight enough to reliably tell a cabdriver from a jihadi. Funny, the FBI doesn’t need a translator or a Canada expert to mistakenly finger Maher Arar. Maybe if the US had Arabic translators and mideast experts to sort through the area’s byzantine cultural currents we might hope to reach the FBI’s stellar false-positive rate. Since we don’t have enough of either it is a statistical certainty that the occupation will have a false-positive rate that is orders of magnitude worse.
This parable should clarify what people mean when we talk about the government’s torture policy. Those who continue to argue that the question is whether to torture terrorists simply have no credibility. Torture advocates, revolting as that concept may be in our supposedly enlightened country, want to punish bin Laden and instead end up whipping innocent westerners like Maher Arar with frayed electrical cables. When one demands that the government have the right to mistreat its captives and in the same breath argues that the government should escape accountability for acting wrongly then mistakes like Arar become simply inevitable. Anybody who pretends otherwise is fooling himself.
Go Steelers
Fables Of The Reconstruction
#305: Well-intentioned people gave it their best shot.
To pass muster with [Jim O’Beirne, husband of fair-and-balanced insane person Kate O’Beirne], a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn’t need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.
O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .
Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.
A bit late to the party, WaPo? From Knight-Ridder, 6/30/05 (link dead):
The coalition government relied heavily on a revolving door of diplomats and other personnel who would leave just as they had begun to develop local knowledge and ties, and on a large cadre of eager young neophytes whose brashness often gave offense in a very age- and status-conscious society. One young political appointee (a 24-year-old Ivy League graduate) argued that Iraq should not enshrine judicial review in its constitution because it might lead to the legalization of abortion. A much more senior Iraqi interlocutor (a widely experienced Iraqi-American lawyer) became so exasperated with the young man’s audacity that he finally challenged him:
“You must have thoroughly studied the history of the British occupation of Iraq.”
“Yes, I did,” the young American replied proudly. “I thought so,” said the Iraqi, “because you seem determined to repeat every one of their mistakes.”
It seems awfully hard to question the decision to keep reasonable policy hands with relevant experience in reserve in case, say, mideast terrorists attack the unemployment office. Better to send in the College Republicans. After all, nobody could have anticipated that parachuting inexperienced partisan hacks into an unfamiliar country might not work. Well, maybe the Future of Iraq Working Group did. But listening to State is a perfect example of pre-9/11 thinking.
[/snark]Ech.
***Update***
No More Troops To Send
Iraq has left America’s military utterly unable to deploy fighting forces anywhere in the world. Defensetech comments:
It should be noted that this assessment closely mirrors what the Army has been saying itself, again and again, in private meetings on Capitol Hill.
“There are no more troops to send to Iraq,” Daniel Benjamin writes in Slate. “That is the unmistakable message of an Army briefing making the rounds in Washington. According to in-house assessments… not a single one of the Army’s Brigade Combat Teams — its core fighting units — currently in the United States is ready to deploy. In short, the Army has no strategic reserve to speak of.”
Think that the Iran war talk is anything other than election-year base pandering? Now you know. If America wanted to do more than irritate Iran with scattered bombing we would have to send the Boy Scouts.
***Update***
I feel safer. Don’t you?
Friday CatBlogging
Tim informed me that he is off to a 4 day convention/getaway, so it is up to me to hold down the fort and provide the Friday entertainment. I know nothing about beer other than that I would rather be drinking a martini/wine/scotch, so beerblogging is out. Thus, our only option is to present pictures of fat cats.
I give you Dante, in all his glory:
And you thought the only fat cats were in Washington.