So, the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal continues to widen (and to draw much-needed attention to the profoundly un-American obscenity that is the Guantanamo Bay detention center). Of particular note to me are the growing number of people who find themselves struggling to reconcile their views about the rightness of the war with the obvious wrongness of how it is being carried out. People like Thomas Friedman: Restoring our honor. And Christopher Hitchens: Prison mutiny.

I have to give them credit for being willing to face up honestly to the latest news. Still, there are plenty of other people who aren’t burdened by the need to explain how they could have been so wrong in the first place, and so are able to follow the trail of implications even further. People like Sidney Blumenthal: This is the new gulag. And Juan Cole’s wife Shahin: America in the balance: Sex, lies and prison abuse.

I’ve added a new entry to the “blog” portion of the site’s blogroll. It’s a brand-spanking new weblog from a really funny scarysmart polyglot guy I know in real life, and it’s called Patrons of the Absurd.

Also, I’ve restored to the blogroll the link to Adam’s awesome words mean things. It is so cool to have that back again.

I saw this little ditty in IMDB’s Movie News, I’ll lay off the personal commentary, and just link to Mike’s Message and cite a few passages from the NY Times Article…

… Disney executives indicated that they would not budge from their position forbidding Miramax to be the distributor of the film in North America. …

…

Mr. Moore’s agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney’s chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush’s brother, Jeb, is governor.

…

A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax’s distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore’s film is deemed to be against Disney’s interests not because of the company’s business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.

…

Miramax is free to seek another distributor in North America, but such a deal would force it to share profits and be a blow to Harvey Weinstein, a big donor to Democrats.

From lies.com reader Richard comes word of yet another abused-prisoner outrage: 2 men charge abuse in arrest after 9/11 terror attack.

A longtime lies.com link-suggester, who turns out to be Canadian, engaged me in the following interesting email exchange this morning. With his permission, I’m running it here with his identifying information removed.

From: [email deleted]
Subject: A Note From Abroad
To: jbc@lies.com

Dear jbc:

Just wanted to give you a take on the “word on street” from abroad — in this case, Canada.

The general sense here is that the US has completely lost it. Not just in regards to Iraq, but across the board. This torture scandal has pretty much tied it.

Particularly telling is that even the rightmost-leaning of my friends, who previously (grudgingly) supported the US invasion of Iraq, have abandoned their positions. (And for the record, there weren’t very many of those people in the first place up here.)

And for the vast majority of “people on the street” in Canada, it looks for all the world like you guys have simply gone insane. No media outlets in Canada ever pushed a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which means that the whole supposed war rationale was a transparent sham from day one. (And we were already scratching our heads over the theft of the federal election!)

So here’s what we see: a rogue superpower, doing whatever it wants, answerable to no one (foreign or domestic), throwing dissenters at home and abroad in jail forever, flouting international law and its own laws on any whim, starting wars for fun and profit, alienating the world and even its closest allies, run by (at best) a mediocre intellect with a criminal background who blatantly stole the “election”. The populace of this rogue state is too cowed and terrified of being labelled as “unpatriotic” or singled out for punishment to speak up for their basic rights, more of which disappear — perhaps forever — every day.

There’s a word for this, and it’s not democracy. It’s despotism.

When the US is on its game, it is a shining example to the world. But when it slides down into despotism, it’s the scariest thing in the world.

And believe me, we are shared shitless of you guys.

Jesus, guys — if the US can slide into despotism, who the hell can’t?

(As always, please don’t publish my full name — I, too am scared of retribution.)

---

From: John Callender
To: [name and email deleted]
Subject: Re: A Note From Abroad

Could I run your letter as an item on the site, assuming I remove all identifying information from it?

---

From: [email deleted]
Subject: Re: A Note From Abroad
To: jbc@west.net

Of course, provided you agree to fix my typo of “supporters” to “supported” in the third para. (And any other typos you see.)

:)

Listen, I’ve re-read a couple of my letters to you recently, and they were pretty condescending and holier-than-thou. In retrospect, I really regret this.

You have to understand that many in Canada look to the US as a big brother — which is not so inaccurate. We do have the same parents — but where you guys are the rebels that stole the family Thunderbird and peeled off in a cloud of burned rubber, we are the quiet nerds that lived in the basement of the family home until we were 35.

This means that we have a unique perspective. When you exceed us — as you often do — we love you for it, since you’re family, and we’re rooting for you. Plus, like all little brothers, we secretly envy you.

And yet, when you go astray, we strangely feel guilty (guilt, by the way, is the Great Canadian Emotion(tm)), because we feel we should have been able to help you somehow. Plus we feel sad, since you are family, and we love you. And lastly, like all little brothers, we are worried about you.

But right now, it’s like we’ve just learned our big brother has ditched all his friends and gone on a crime spree, robbing banks and blowing people away. We love you, but we’re scared you’ll show up on our doorstep some night, drunk, with a gun on the seat of the old, idling Thunderbird, and demand that we join you.

I guess I’m saying we know we’re not superior to you. Quite the reverse — we will likely always play second fiddle to our big brother. But this raises the critical point I mentioned before — if our big brother can go bad, can’t we?

(Maybe you can wrap these two letters together somehow.)

And the fun continues, with more from Joshua Micah Marshall on Bush’s apparent ignorance of a key report on the Abu Ghraib prison abuses: Shaken, but apparently not stirred. Definitely worth reading the whole thing. Marhsall’s analysis is dead on. This is the rotten heart of the Bush presidency. From Marshall’s conclusion:

There’s an echo here of his [Bush’s] response to the pre-9/11 warnings streaming up through the government bureaucracy. It hasn’t landed on his desk yet, with an action plan, so what is he supposed to do? He talked to Rumsfeld who says he’s on top of it. So what more can be done?

This isn’t a matter of the aesthetics of leadership. It is another example of how this president is a passive commander-in-chief, how he demands no accountability and, because of that, allows problems to fester and grow. Though this may not be a direct example of it, he also creates a climate tolerant of rule-breaking that seeps down into the ranks of his subordinates, mixing with and reinforcing those other shortcomings.

The disasters now facing the country in Iraq — some in slow motion, others by quick violence — aren’t just happening on the president’s watch. They are happening in a real sense, really in the deepest sense, because of him — because of his attention to the simulacra of leadership rather than the real thing, which is more difficult and demanding, both personally and morally.

What’s that, you say? This is just typical election-year partisanship from the Bush haters of the far left? Um, no, not really. For proof of that, I give you none other than George F. Will, in an op-ed piece that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday, Time for Bush to see the realities of Iraq.

This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts. Thinking is not the reiteration of bromides about how “all people yearn to live in freedom” (McClellan). And about how it is “cultural condescension” to doubt that some cultures have the requisite aptitudes for democracy (Bush). And about how it is a “myth” that “our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture” because “ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit” (Tony Blair).

[Several paragraphs of erudite Will-isms snipped.]

Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue. Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice.

When pundits from both ends of the political spectrum are saying essentially the same thing about your guy, it’s hard to argue away their criticisms as being the result of an anti-your-guy bias. No, at this point I think it would be simpler for Bush supporters to just admit the obvious: the man has no business being president.

Lots of interesting stuff lately about Iraq, mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, and doubts about the wisdom of turning over the pacification of Fallujah to Fallujans. But the usual suspects (see the blogroll for starting points) have all that well-covered.

In the meantime, I was struck by this piece from Joshua Micah Marshall: One of the things I’ve found difficult…

The most recent headline that looks as if it crawled off theonion onto a “real” news site: Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act.

So somehow Bush and Cheney suckered the 9/11 investigation panel into allowing them to testify simultaneously, behind closed doors, under no oath, without a transcript. They were generous enough to allow the panel to take handwritten notes.

Which they then confiscated.

Remember back on April 15, when Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers said the growing Iraqi insurgency was a sign of our “success“? Well, I’ve updated my Iraq-Vietnam comparison graphs with the numbers of US dead for April, so you can now get a graphical representation of that success.

Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first fourteen months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Obligatory disclaimer: As large numbers of people have previously pointed out, we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.

I’m not claiming that these graphs prove that the Iraq war is somehow equivalent to, or worse than, the Vietnam war. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. Those of you who like to defend the Iraq war by pointing out that many more US troops died each month at the peak of the Vietnam war than are currently dying in Iraq are welcome to make that case using the data shown above. Those of you who want to explain why I’m an idiot for suggesting a comparison between the two sets of data are likewise welcome to contribute via the comments.

I try to notice when I’m wrong. Like everyone, I fail in that endeavor most of the time, but I still make a point of trying. Failed predictions are important. They’re trying to teach me something.

So with this latest news from Fallujah, that US forces are turning over control of the city to a newly constituted Iraqi force under the leadership of one of Saddam’s former generals. From the LA Times, Iraqi general enters Fallouja as security transition advances:

FALLOUJA, Iraq — Iraqi troops led by one of Saddam Hussein’s former generals began replacing Marines here Friday as a plan to end a near-monthlong siege of this battle-torn city gained momentum.

Former Iraqi Maj. Gen. Jassim Mohammed Saleh, dressed in the uniform of Hussein’s Republican Guard, entered Fallouja to cheering crowds, triggering a debate on whether securing the defiant city with an Iraqi force was a masterstroke or a concession that could undermine U.S. control of the country.

So, I was wrong, or at least it looks for now as if I was wrong, when I predicted that Bush would have the Marines push on in and do the overwhelming-force thing in Fallujah. Apparently his sense of political self-preservation, given time to operate, can overrule his gut, at least in certain circumstances (say, when his gut’s choice has already been tried, and more or less conclusively shown to be disastrous). So, lesson learned, both by me and, one would hope, by Bush.

Which leaves me in a bit of a dilemma of my own, though. How do I feel about this? Well, I’m a little bummed by the fact that I was wrong. But that reaction is countered by a sense of relief that the innocents of Fallujah will not have to pay with more of their blood for my president’s bad judgement.

The part of me that generally prefers to be right, though, strikes back by pointing out that if Bush strings together enough good decisions like this in Iraq, he could conceivably pick up enough support from jittery-about-the-war swing voters to help him win the upcoming election. Perhaps I should want things to go badly in Iraq, in order to help bring about the much-to-be-desired regime change here in the US. Perhaps it would be better for Bush to screw up a certain amount now, to avert the possibility of his screwing up much more spectacularly in the course of a second term.

But that argument gives me the creeps. Accepting the death of innocents in the pursuit of some hypothetical greater good isn’t the kind of thing I want to get involved with. I’ll leave that to people like Osama bin Laden and George Bush.

But when I update my US-troop-deaths graph in a few minutes with April’s record body count, what will I be feeling? Sorrow and remorse over the carnage that those statistics represent? Or grim satisfaction at the way the statistics bear out my concerns about Bush’s policies? And if it’s the latter, what does that say about the kind of person I am?