Apparently, standing on the bodies of the victims of 9/11 has lost its appeal. Perhaps its the smell. The troops no longer make for an effective backdrop either…the blank, idolizing stares of 2003 transformed long ago into the grimace of fatigue and hopelessness. Maybe there just weren’t enough of them to fill our widescreen TV’s. 16:9 can be a bitch.

But its time to turn another fake corner in Iraq and the pickings are slim. According to CNN, via Josh Marshall, it seems that Saddam Hussein, and his well-timed hanging, are going to serve as the latest prop for Bush’s New, New Way Forward in Iraq.

While I share Josh’s embarrassment, and the sense that Bush’s complete failure in Iraq has been laid bare for all to see by this pathetic farce, I can’t help but feel that it is particularly humiliating for Iraqis and the Middle East more generally.

Most Iraqis were willing to overlook “Shock n’ Awe” in 2003 because we were able to remove them from the deadly embrace of Hussein. Now, the Bush administration has decided that it needs a win, and the Iraqis are going to have to give up their one true victory in this god-forsaken war, so that the President can continue to put lipstick on a pig.

As long as we deny the people of the Middle East a victory of their own, they will continue to settle for finding them in places like here, here, and here.

There lies a thin line between loftiness and outright madness. Sometimes the best ideas blossom from the most dysfunctional of minds. In the case of Iraq, we are clearly getting the short end of the stick. Mark Danner, in The New York Review of Books, has written, in my opinion, the definitive essay on the disastrous thinking that brought us the Iraq war. It’s about a month old, but I highly recommend it nonetheless.

While he thoroughly documents the horrible decisions that landed us where we are today, what caught my eye was the utterly flawed and self-serving thought process that was the driving force behind them (via War and Piece).

If the sober consideration of history and facts stood in the way of bold action then it would be the history and the facts that would be discarded. The risk of doing nothing, the risk, that is, of the status quo, justified acting. Given the grim facts on the ground—the likelihood of a future terrorist attack from the “malignant” Middle East, the impossibility of entirely protecting the country from it—better to embrace the unknown. Better, that is, to act in the cause of “constructive instability”

Now back up for a second. Take this concept out of the context of the Iraq war and look at it on its own. This, in a nutshell, is George Bush’s year 2000 admonition of the Baby Boomer generation turned on its head. Apply it to any of the of the conscious-shocking events that have been carried out in the name of national security over the last six years. False arrest, torture, indefinite detention, humiliation, lies, murder, defamation, bigotry.

Many of the people that have proposed, exalted and defended these bad acts have claimed that they do so for the good of the country. But as the quote above clearly illustrates, the real desire driving these policies is a personal one. A need to do something, right or wrong, in order to reclaim some sense of stolen pride. They’ve flipped over the Monopoly board and now tell us they did it for our own good.

As 2006 comes to a close, we find ourselves at a crossroads. The country is clearly dissatisfied with the results of this new “If it feels good, do it” approach to national security, but have we fully absorbed the perniciousness of the childish thinking that has brought us to this point? Will we recognize it, and reject it as its proponents find themselves increasingly boxed in by reality?

2006 may well be remembered as judgment day for Bush and his administration. Will 2007 be our own? And are we ready to face it?

I have a confession. In early 2005, February 1 to be specific, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. There were purple fingers all over the TV, and talk of elections in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Cedar Revolution was just weeks away, and a question was burning my inside’s worse than an Ozzy Spicy Dog, at Pink’s; I asked myself, “Is it possible that Bush was right?”

To make things worse, I couldn’t tell whether I felt sick at the thought that he might be right, or whether I thought it was more important that he be proved wrong, than it was for the people in his charge to have a better life. In short, I was confused and guilt-stricken.

Today I can thank Jonah Goldberg for helping me put a name to that feeling. It’s called a conscience; something he’s done nicely without. Kevin starts the ball rolling by pointing us to this horrible column by Goldberg in the L.A. Times:

“I THINK ALL intelligent, patriotic and informed people can agree: It would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet. In fact, an Iraqi Pinochet would be even better than an Iraqi Castro.”

With most things Goldberg, when the words “I think” come off the page our out of his mouth, the best course of action is to step away briskly, but calmly, and to check on your disaster preparedness kit. So don’t click the link unless you have at least five gallons of drinking water and a healthy supply of duct tape.

The only reason I bring up Goldberg’s recent disdain for Iraq’s democratic future is this little nugget of his dredged up by Atrios (Via Lawyers, Guns and Money), from back in the days when I was feeling guilty about my lack of enthusiasm for purple fingers. Here he is, smacking a Mr. Goodbar-stained glove across the face of that four-eyed waif, Juan Cole:

“Anyway, I do think my judgment is superior to his when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn’t want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let’s make a bet. I predict that Iraq won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I’ll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there’s another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I’m all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc. One caveat: Because I don’t think it’s right to bet on such serious matters for personal gain, if I win, I’ll donate the money to the USO. He can give it to the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or whatever his favorite charity is.”

Labeling your opponents as traitors is so 2002. Although it is comforting to note that Goldberg continues to be wrong about everything. And fat.

Update: And stupid.

The President did his little touchdown dance on the Constitution today. And while most of the Lefty Blogosphere has directed its anger towards him, I can’t seem to find it within myself to be all that angry with the guy. That’s not to say that I’m not angry. I’m furious. I’ve even taken to naming the wrinkles and swollen veins that have characterized my face in the Bush Era. I have a laugh line called “the Decider”, a throbbing vein called “Gitmo”, and a Spider Angioma called “Iraq”, just to name a few.

But today, I’m not angry with the President. I’ll let Jonathan Turley tell you why (via Crooks and Liars).

“And people have no idea how significant this is –What really a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the President signed today, essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values. It couldn’t be more significant. And the strange thing is that we’ve become sort of Constitutional couch potatoes. I mean, the Congress just gave the President despotic powers. And you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to you know, Dancing with the Stars. It’s otherworldly.”

Yes, the President put the baby in the microwave. Yes, the President frantically typed in the numbers with his pudgy little fingers, hoping not to get caught. But through the drug-induced haze, his self-medicated parents saw it all,

And took another hit.

[Update*] Not to be confused with Stoned (1980) (TV), or The Boy Who Drank Too Much (1980) (TV). Who knew Scott Baio would turn out to be such a prophet?

Think Progress: 

President Bush signs the “Military Commissions Act of 2006″ today in the Rose Garden, a bill that will not grant detainees legal counsel. “Also, it specifically bars detainees from filing habeas corpus petitions challenging their detentions in federal courts.” The new law sets the stage for what many analysts believe will be yet another historic showdown between the courts, the president, and Congress.

This could be a bombshell. If true, it should mean the end of Gitmo. I believe that the F.B.I., erroneously or with malice, pawned off a 2000 Abu Dhabi TV interview with two Taliban prisoners as an Al-Qaeda Martyrdom tape. Following up on this post from Digby, I did a little digging on a Guantanamo Bay prisoner named Abd Al Rahim Abdul Rassak Janko (referred to as Abdul Rahim Al Ginco in this Oct, 2006 NY Times story.)

From the Times story:

Mr. Ginco, a college student living in the United Arab Emirates, had gone to Afghanistan in 2000 after running away from his strict Muslim father. He was soon imprisoned by the Taliban, and tortured by operatives of Al Qaeda until, he said, he falsely confessed to being a spy for Israel and the United States.

But rather than help Mr. Ginco return home, American soldiers detained him again. Nearly five years later, he remains in the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — in part, it appears, on the strength of a propaganda videotape made by his torturers.

[snip]

The Taliban announced in May 2000 that Mr. Ginco had been arrested as a spy. Another videotape was then broadcast on an Arab television network, in which he looks pale, uneasy and underweight and confesses at length to having been a spy for the United States and Israel.

In an effort to determine whether or not Mr. Janko’s story (AKA Ginco) was credible, I went looking for the original 2000 Taliban claim that Janko was an American spy. Here is the 2000 AP story.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - An Arab arrested in Afghanistan says the United States recruited him to try to find alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden, and his Taliban captors say he and another prisoner “were spying for America and Israel.” A television reporter interviewed the two prisoners at a secret location in southern Afghanistan. The Associated Press viewed the taped interview Wednesday in Islamabad..”

[ snip ]

The reporter and his cameraman, interviewed by the AP upon their return to Islamabad this week, work for United Arab Emirates Television, Abu Dhabi Channel, in the UAE’s capital. They interviewed the Taliban’s two acknowledged prisoners the night of April 25. The Syrian, Abdul Rahim Janko, 22, fidgeted in his chair as he answered questions. “During my interrogation, I told them how I was recruited, what they wanted me to do and who I was to contact with my information,” he said. Janko said he’d been lured to a party in Abu Dhabi where he was filmed drinking and having sex. He said two men who claimed to work at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi threatened to show the film to Janko’s deeply conservative father if Janko refused to go to Afghanistan. “I committed every sin,” Janko told the reporter, Jamal Ismail, who is Palestinian.

On camera, his voice broke, tears welled in his eyes and his face turned crimson as he pleaded for his life: “I deserve to die, I know that. I have committed sins for all of my 22 years, but if the Taliban let me live, I want to spend the next 22 years fighting for jihad (holy war) to make up for my sins.”

Missing from the Times story, the original AP story mentions another Taliban prisoner — this one an Iraqi named Arkan:

Ismail said he and the cameraman were driven by turbaned Taliban to a secret location in Kandahar on April 25, but the darkness and the vehicle’s tinted windows limited their ability to see their surroundings. Once there, the Taliban refused to allow the TV crew to see the American or to speak at length with Arkan, saying they were being questioned. Arkan appeared sullen and unkempt on camera. He had shoulder-length hair and wore a beige shalwar kameez, the traditional Afghan pajama-like outfit of baggy pants and long shirt. “Do you want my real name or my jihad name?” Ismail said the Iraqi asked him. “My real name is Arkan and my jihad name is Islam.” Arkan said he had come to Afghanistan 18 months ago; Janko said he arrived in December.

Which Brings us back to the Times story:

On Jan. 17 [2002], however, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, held a news conference to announce that five videotapes had been recovered from the ruins of Mr. Atef’s home showing several men who “may be trained and prepared to commit future suicide terrorist acts.” The first man shown in an excerpt from one of those tapes was Mr. Ginco, whom Mr. Ashcroft identified as Abd Al-Rahim.

Lawyers for Mr. Ginco, who was born to a Kurdish family in Syria, still have not viewed the complete tape from which Mr. Ashcroft showed a brief excerpt or heard its audio. But they said they believed it showed part of one of the propaganda videos made by the torturers who extracted Mr. Ginco’s confession.

I believe this is at least a portion of the same video. It is two minutes long and was released by the F.B.I without audio.

From screenshots, we can see Janko, who is pictured at the top of this post. We also see a man who appears sullen, with shoulder-length hair, wearing beige or green shalwar kameez. He was identified by Ashcroft as Khalid Ibn Muhammad Al-Juhani at the Jan. 17 news conference. I believe he is the man referred to as Arkan in the 2000 AP story.

That means that the secret evidence used to hold a man at Guantanamo for more than four years was not originally from a martyrdom tape, but from an Abu Dhabi TV interview arranged by the Taliban in 2000 under the auspices that these two men were American spies.

At the time of the Ashcroft press conference, the men on these videos were touted as fugitives from the justice. When asked about whether the tapes would be released with audio, he responded:

“We will pursue and make a judgment on that based in the national interest and the interest of this investigation. And so we need to complete the analysis of the tape and to complete all the specific and detailed translation of the tape.

I know that the portions we released today we felt were safe for release, and we didn’t believe they contained any surreptitious messages or coded signals that would be designed to alert parts of the terrorist network.”

To this date, I am unaware of any effort by the U.S. government to get a hold of the full Janko interview tape or to clear up the fact that at least two of the men on the tape had been in American custody since December of 2001. What is clear though, is that one portion of the tape is being used to hold Janko as an enemy combatant, while the portion where he admits, probably falsely, to being an American spy, remains a secret from him and from the public.

Some enterprising reporter should talk to Jamal Ismail of Abu Dhabi Television or AP Writer Kathy Gannon what they know.

[Bonus*] You know Janko’s strange confession about being an American spy? According to him, it was extracted by Al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives,”by applying electric shocks to his ears and toes, nearly drowning him in a filthy water tank, depriving him of sleep and beating him on the soles of his feet”.

Why am I not surprised?

Following up on an earlier post, I wanted to see what Fareed Zakaria was saying about a potential war with Iraq during the period between his secret meeting with Paul Wolfowitz on November 29, 2001 and the beginning of hostilities in March of 2003.

Surprisingly, less than two weeks after brainstorming how best to sell a showdown with Saddam, he wrote this:

The debate over Iraq is taking place far more furiously outside government than it is inside. The formal meetings of the president’s top national-security advisers–the “principals committee”–has barely discussed Iraq. (It was mentioned briefly in last week’s sessions.)

From Bob Woodward’s recounting of the Wolfowitz meeting, which included Robert D. Kaplan from The Atlantic Monthly and throng of neoconservative policy thinkers, the general takeaway:

‘…was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia … were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important…’ But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with… But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable… ‘We concluded that a confrontation with Saddam was inevitable. … We agreed that Saddam would have to leave the scene before the problem would be addressed.’

In fairness to Zakaria, he does, over the course of more than a year, make the above argument in his columns. But a couple other things happened, and didn’t happen as well. First, he makes little or no attempt to reconcile the administration’s public argument (WMD, Nuclear Weapons, terrorism, Prague, Al-Qaeda ties, mushroom clouds) with it’s private argument, that Saddam Hussein was weak and his toppling would serve as an example to America’s real enemies. Second, as the war draws closer, his argument for “Iraq, the nuclear powerhouse” inches its way up the bullet list, obscuring his earlier arguments that an Iraq war “would change the Middle-East and be totally awesome and sweet.“

On a couple occasions he even suggests that the United States should attempt, by using a form of Diplomatic Jujitsu, to trick Saddam Hussein into forcing war upon himself. No, this is not intended to be another “Fareed Zakaria is dumb” post, although he clearly is, considering he went from this,

“Let me make a prediction. If the administration stays on its current path, there will be no conflict with Iraq.”

to this,

“The United States will soon be at war with Iraq.”

in less than a Friedman.

No, this is not one of those posts. This is a “Fareed Zakaria sold you out to get his pet war and kept his job so STFU you macaca sucka motha-fucka” kind of posts. Below are some excerpts from his Newsweek columns on Iraq during the period in question. Read ‘em and weep.

(more…)

Not since William Randolph Hearst has the profession of journalism committed such a vile act against the American public. Steve Clemons, quoting the New York Times, tells us that Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek and [*correction] Robert D. Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly brainstormed on how best to sell the Iraq war in a 2001 secret meeting convened by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

It was the kind of shadowy, secret Washington meeting that Bob Woodward is fond of describing in detail. In his new book, “State of Denial,” he writes that on Nov. 29, 2001, a dozen policy makers, Middle East experts and members of influential policy research organizations gathered in Virginia at the request of Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense. Their objective was to produce a report for President Bush and his cabinet outlining a strategy for dealing with Afghanistan and the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11.

What was more unusual, Mr. Woodward reveals, was the presence of journalists at the meeting. Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and a Newsweek columnist, and Robert D. Kaplan, now a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, attended the meeting and, according to Mr. Kaplan, signed confidentiality agreements not to discuss what happened.

More from Laura Rozen, Quoting Bob Woodward in State of Denial:

… ‘The general analysis was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia … were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important…’ But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with… But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable… ‘We concluded that a confrontation with Saddam was inevitable. … We agreed that Saddam would have to leave the scene before the problem would be addressed.’ … Copies of the memo, straight from the neoconservative playbook, were hand-delivered to the war cabinet members. In at least some cases, it was given a SECRET classification. Cheney was pleased with the memo, and it had a strong impact on President Bush …

So why does this matter? It matters because Zakaria and Kaplan presided over the public debate that led to the Iraq war, not as government advocates, but as supposedly impartial actors. They knew that the Bush administration believed that a war with a Iraq was really just a shot over the bow at Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But they allowed the debate to center around suitcase nukes, Al-Qaeda/Iraq ties, and mushroom clouds. In other words, they fucked us.

[*correction]

I incorrectly stated that Fred Kaplan (of Slate) attended the secret meeting with Wolfowitz in 2001.  The meeting was attended by Robert D. Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly.  There is no excuse for such a sloppy mistake.  I regret the error and apoligize to Fred Kaplan.

Whether it’s Iraq, or vomit-inducing torture policies, or the faith-based foreign policy disasters in the Middle-East and N. Korea, it seems you can trace the genesis of every bad policy to conservatisms creamy center, the Instigators.

These are the fearful little men that drive our policies as a nation. They are the Yoos and the Perles and the Cheneys and the Kristols of this world – with the Hannitys, Hewitts and O’Reilly’s playing the backup rapper that grunts “uh” and “yeah” and “say what?” in the never-ending Yo! MTV Raps Marathon that is America 2.0.

Conservatism has its Thinkers, like William F. Buckley Jr. and George Will that give the movement an undeserved luster. The Enforcers…(If you’re wearing duct tape on your mouth with the word “Life” emblazoned across the front, that’s you)…will direct their anger and bloodlust wherever they are told. But the instigators are the mediocre middle that holds the whole rancid heap together. They are the middle-managers, the telephone-sanitizers of the conservative movement.

Faced with strikingly similar circumstances, with Armageddon coming and all, Douglas Adams had some sound advice on how to deal with this lot:

“Yes, so anyway,” he resumed, “the idea was that into the first ship, the ‘A’ ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and then into the third, or ‘C’ ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things; and then into the ‘B’ ship—that’s us—would go everyone else, the middlemen, you see.”

“And they made sure they sent you lot off first, did they?” inquired Arthur.

“Oh yes,” said the Captain, “well, everyone said, very nicely I thought, that it was very important for morale to feel that they would be arriving on a planet where they could be sure of a good haircut and where the phones were clean.”

“Oh yes,” agreed Ford, “I can see that would be very important. And the other ships, er…they followed on after you did they?”

Normally, I find John Aravosis rather shrill, but on this, he just might be right.

In America, children and family are paramount. Nothing is more important to the Republican agenda than family values. It’s time to defend those family values and protect our children from potential sexual predators.

It’s time to waterboard Mark Foley.

Apparently John Cole is thinking along the same lines.