The WaPo, fittingly, confirms that Bob Felt, former second-in-command at the FBI, was, in fact, Woodward and Bernsteins “deep background” source during their investigative reporting on Watergate: FBI’s No. 2 was ‘Deep Throat’.

Caught flatfooted by Vanity Fair’s announcement, Woodward and Bernstein initially issued a terse statement reaffirming their promise to keep the secret until Deep Throat died. But the Vanity Fair article was enough to bring the current executive editor of The Post, Leonard Downie Jr., back to Washington from a corporate retreat in Maryland. After he consulted with Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee, “the newspaper decided that the newspaper had been released from its obligation by Mark Felt’s family and by his lawyer, through the publication of this piece,” Downie said. “They revealed him as the source. We confirmed it.”

So, no more teasing bait-and-switch non-revelations by John Dean, no more speculation about it being Pat Buchanan, no more “wasn’t it Hal Holbrook?” jokes.

US military deaths in Iraq continued to climb in May, reflecting a big increase in car bombings, as well as aggressive counter-insurgency operations in the western part of the country.

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 27 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:

Disclaimer: I’m aware that 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.

These graphs are not intended to show the relative lethality of the two conflicts on a per-soldier basis. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

Sven posted a comment mentioning this extremely fun article on Schwarzenegger from the Orange County Weekly: Capitol Punishment.

Recently termed-out Senate President John Burton holds court in a corner but leaves before I see him. I nearly cry when someone tells me he’d been there. Lovely, foul-mouthed John Burton! Here’s the LA Times when Burton was termed out from the Senate: “To protest what he considered Republican political attacks on the poor, he once drafted legislation that would have made it a crime to have an income below the poverty level. Another Burton bill would have required that state orphanages serve gruel.”

Here’s a fun item from net.kook theferret: The weirdest book I ever got.

(P.S. Sorry I’ve been lax on posting lately; I’ve got a Wikipedia obsession going on, and have been caught up in updating an article on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on Iraqi WMD. Sigh. This too shall pass.)

Here’s an unauthorized capture of the awesome bit by Julia Sweeney that This American Life aired over the weekend: Letting go of God.

Disclaimer: I, too, have invited Mormon kids going door to door in to discuss their beliefs, and found private amusement in the whole story of the gold plates and the magical translation device. So I guess I was predisposed to like this. But anyway, I do. And don’t neglect to scroll down in Norm’s posting to get Sweeney’s response, as posted on her web site, to all the people who’ve contacted her about the program.

I didn’t mention it at the time, but I wanted to point out the responses on the Downing Street memo made by Blair and Bush at their joint press conference on Tuesday. See the transcript (and a link to video) at whitehouse.gov: President welcomes British Prime Minister Blair to the White House, which includes the following:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Steve.

Q Thank you, sir. On Iraq, the so-called Downing Street memo from July 2002 says intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing Saddam through military action. Is this an accurate reflection of what happened? Could both of you respond?

PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: Well, I can respond to that very easily. No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all. And let me remind you that that memorandum was written before we then went to the United Nations. Now, no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me. And the fact is we decided to go to the United Nations and went through that process, which resulted in the November 2002 United Nations resolution, to give a final chance to Saddam Hussein to comply with international law. He didn’t do so. And that was the reason why we had to take military action.

But all the way through that period of time, we were trying to look for a way of managing to resolve this without conflict. As it happened, we weren’t able to do that because — as I think was very clear — there was no way that Saddam Hussein was ever going to change the way that he worked, or the way that he acted.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I — you know, I read kind of the characterizations of the memo, particularly when they dropped it out in the middle of his race. I’m not sure who “they dropped it out” is, but — I’m not suggesting that you all dropped it out there. (Laughter.) And somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to go to use military force to deal with Saddam. There’s nothing farther from the truth.

My conversation with the Prime Minister was, how could we do this peacefully, what could we do. And this meeting, evidently, that took place in London happened before we even went to the United Nations — or I went to the United Nations. And so it’s — look, both us of didn’t want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It’s the last option. The consequences of committing the military are — are very difficult. The hardest things I do as the President is to try to comfort families who’ve lost a loved one in combat. It’s the last option that the President must have — and it’s the last option I know my friend had, as well.

And so we worked hard to see if we could figure out how to do this peacefully, take a — put a united front up to Saddam Hussein, and say, the world speaks, and he ignored the world. Remember, 1441 passed the Security Council unanimously. He made the decision. And the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.

My own take on this is that they’re not disputing the authenticity of the memo per se, but neither are they confirming its authenticity. In classic spin-control mode, they’re making the strongest case they can while avoiding giving anything away to the other side. For me personally, this raises the status of the memo’s authenticity to the level of having been pretty well established, since if they could dismiss it as not being authentic, that would clearly be a stronger rebuttal of its contents than what they’re giving us (and indeed, this has been the biggest argument in favor of its authenticity since it was first revealed). Since they’re not challenging the memo’s authenticity, they don’t feel they have that option available, ergo, the memo is authentic.

By this interpretation, though, what they’re actually contending in their statements yesterday, without actually being explicit, is that the memo is just wrong: Either the statements made at the meeting and summarized in the memo were summarized inaccurately, or the statements themselves, while they actually were made at the meeting, were factually incorrect in contending that the US has already committed itself to a policy of going to war. As evidence for this, Bush and Blair both cite their subsequent pursuit of a diplomatic solution at the UN as making a prima facie case that they had not, in fact, committed to war at that point.

Which is a pretty artful bit of spin, and serves nicely to shift the emphasis away from the memo itself. They did, in point of fact, go to the UN and work hard to obtain resolutions critical of Iraq’s WMD programs and support of terrorism. The question then becomes whether they did so in good faith, actually seeking to avoid the necessity of war, or did so in bad faith, merely attempting to obtain diplomatic and legal cover for a decision that had already been made. (Note, too, that it’s possible that Blair was legitimately seeking to avoid war, and only Bush who was acting in bad faith. Or, I suppose, vice versa.) As those familiar with legal issues know, proving that someone did something in bad faith is a very difficult task. And again, since they’ve carefully avoided offering any explanation for the memo itself, they (and their supporters) remain free to adopt whatever explanation seems strongest at any given point: either that the memo is not authentic, that its account of what was said at the meeting is inaccurate, or that it is accurate, but that the statements it reports were themselves factually incorrect.

Of course, the memo itself is Exhibit A in the case that the UN efforts were made in bad faith, in that it describes in detail British (though not American) plans to use the UN in order to help with the justification for going to war. But I won’t be holding my breath waiting for some muckraking journalist to point that out, or to ask Bush or Blair to account for the apparent contradiction between the memo’s version of reality and the one they offered at Tuesday’s press conference. Personally, though, I think the memo really is a smoking gun. The available evidence strongly supports the interpretation that it is, in fact, an unvarnished, your-eyes-only account of what the head of MI6 believed in July, 2002, about the Bush administration’s firm-as-of-that-date commitment to go to war. And in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I don’t see any reason to think he was incorrect in believing that. I mean, it’s not like he was retarded or something.

Jonathon Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution also comments on the press conference: Nature’s perfect lying machine. And I have to wonder if the people at democrats.com, who previously offered a $1000 reward for getting Bush to answer Downing Street minutes, are going to reward reporter Steve for popping the question. I’m not sure if Bush’s response qualifies as a clear “yes” or “no”; it’s more like a substantive waffle, which I guess would mean Steve only qualifies for the $500 reward, not the full $1000. Still, it’s better than a poke in the eye with a stick.

There’s also Cindy Sheehan’s take: Bush on Iraq: “Comforting families” and telling lies. As the mother of a son who died in Iraq, she’s not impressed with Bush’s protestations that he kept war as the last option.

It was another one of those frighteningly good segments Jon Stewart pulls off sometimes: Celebrity interview - Colin Powell.

I thought Powell gave a pretty strong defense of the Bush/Blair position vis-a-vis the Downing Street memo. The interview wasn’t explicitly focused on that; it was more wide-ranging, but the memo did get mentioned, and for all that the Daily Show is comedy, this was very much one of those times when Jon Stewart takes his outsider-critic role seriously, and Powell came off as the principled guy that I still want to believe he is, and the result was some really good discussion that felt truer to me than the shouting-head back-and-forth that passes for public debate in too many places these days.

At the same time, the line Powell took was close enough to the one that Blair and Bush took at their joint press conference that I’m not kidding myself; I don’t doubt for a second that it’s still coordinated spin. But he sells it pretty well.

Anyway, I went ahead and transcribed the appearance for those of you who are interested in it but don’t want to (or can’t) stream the video from the Comedy Central site. Follow the link below, or scroll down, for the transcript.

(more…)

So, the reason I’ve been kind of lax about posting lately, while simultaneously willing to engage for page after page with Craig in the comments to the items on the Downing Street memo, can be revealed: I’ve been plowing most of my free time into revising and expanding the Wikipedia article on the Senate report of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

Check out this photo I snagged from whitehouse.gov to illustrate the article:

That’s Colin Powell waving the vial of anthrax at his UN Security Council presentation on February 5, 2003. I love how you’ve basically got the whole WMD conspiracy theory in one image: Powell trading on the shreds of his credibility to try to sell the bogus intel to the world, watched by George Tenet, point-man on the bogosity, and John Negroponte, eventual inheritor of the bogosity, by virtue of his appointment to the new “director of national intelligence” uber-spook position that was created in the reforms resulting from the blowing up of the intel.

A cool thing about Wikipedia (probably the cool thing about it) is the way it strives for a neutral point of view (abbreviated NPOV by wikipedians) on controversial subjects like this. So Craig, here’s your opportunity to save the world from the bias that is the inevitable result of my Bush hatred: Go thou and edit likewise, fixing the article where I’ve crossed the line into advocacy, and inserting the material I’ve overlooked.

Or not. But the opportunity’s there, and in a venue that is explicitly committed to countering the kind of bias you’ve pointed out in my writing here, policed by third parties dedicated to producing a fair outcome.

Recommended reading for amateur occupiers, from Antiwar.com’s Chris Hedges: War: Realities and myths.

We are losing the war in Iraq. We are an isolated and reviled nation. We are pitiless to others weaker than ourselves. We have lost sight of our democratic ideals. Thucydides wrote of Athens’ expanding empire and how this empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself. If we do not confront the lies and hubris told to justify the killing and mask the destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary form of communication, if we do not remove from power our flag-waving, cross-bearing versions of the Taliban, we will not so much defeat dictators such as Saddam Hussein as become them.

From valued lies.com contributor Sven:

In honor of $chwarzenegger’s 80 million dollar “special election” announcement today, Jenny and I have decided to sell our entire collection of Arnold movies on Ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6405678244

I’ve had this kicking around in my post-to-lies folder for a while. It’s a short interview with Jane Goodall: Animals and us: Close encounters

What is the most human-like behaviour you saw in chimpanzees?

Chimps can be deliberately deceptive. For example, when we wanted the young males to get the bananas, the big males would come and take them all, so we took to hiding some of the bananas up in the trees. One day a young male called Figan suddenly looked up into a tree and there was a banana nobody else had seen. He glanced over at three older males grooming. Chimps follow each other’s gaze, and if the males had noticed where Figan had been looking they would have immediately taken the banana, and if he had tried to get it quickly they would have attacked him. I think he knew if he stayed there he wouldn’t be able to resist looking, so he went out of sight. The moment they left, he came back to fetch it.

I very much recommend the whole thing.

I could while away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain
And my head, I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain.

I’ve just finished reading Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, and it’s had me thinking about the non-neurological component of intelligence.

Dawkins’ book is a journey backwards through our ancestors, cast as a pilgrimage to the “Canterbury” of the remotest common ancestor shared by all life on earth. It’s an interesting journey, in part because of the way it emphasizes the literal truth of the notion that all life is related. Reading the book puts you in the position of imagining what it was actually like to be a pre-human hominid, a shrew-like early mammal, a proto-vertebrate, a worm, an amoeba, a bacterium.

In the ‘later’ (that is to say, earlier) stages of that journey, you’re inhabiting a body that doesn’t have much in the way of a brain. And yet, despite their lack of big cerebral cortexes and the resulting large vocabularies that would let them do things like post rambling conceptual pieces on their weblogs, “simpler” organisms seem to have some pretty interesting abilities that are analogous to what we like to think of as the characteristically “human” manifestation of intelligence.

I also just finished reading Jeremy Narby’s Intelligence in Nature. Narby writes in his book about Martin Giurfa of the Centre of Animal Cognition Research in France, who, along with four co-authors, published The concept of ’sameness’ and ‘difference’ in an insect. In Giurfa’s experiment, bees were trained to enter a simple Y-shaped maze that had been marked at the entrance with a particular color. Inside the maze was a branching point where the bee was required to choose between two paths. One path, which led to the food reward, was marked with the same color that had been used at the entrance to the maze, while the other was marked with a different color. Bees learned to choose the correct path, and continued to do so when a different kind of marker (black and white stripes oriented in various directions) was substituted for the colored markers. When the experimental conditions were reversed, rewarding bees for choosing the inner passage marked with a symbol that was different than the entrance symbol, the bees again learned to choose the correct path. “Thus,” write Giurfa et al., “not only can bees learn specific objects and their physical parameters, but they can also master abstract inter-relationships, such as sameness and difference.”

Narby also talks about slime molds, which in part of their life cycle resemble huge colonial assemblages of one-celled individuals who have fused their cytoplasm into a single enormous (well, by unicellular standards) cell containing thousand of nuclei. Narby visited Japanese scientist Toshiyuki Nakagaki, whose studies have shown that slime molds can “solve” a simple maze, arranging their bodies to lie along the shortest path between two food items placed in opposite corners (see Slime mould solves maze puzzle).

Plants, too, manifest something that could arguably be called intelligence. We hyperactive denizens of kingdom Animalia aren’t really wired to notice it, but on longer time scales plants adapt and respond to their environment, and research has shown that they actually respond surprisingly quickly (albeit in ways not easily visible) to outside stimuli of various kinds — all without benefit of brains, or even individual nerve cells.

Narby visits with Scottish scientist Tony Trewavas, who has been making waves in recent years by publishing studies describing what he refers to as “plant intelligence”. (See Root and branch intelligence and Aspects of plant intelligence.) For example, Trewavas talks about earlier research by CK Kelly showing that dodder, a parasitic plant that takes the form of bright orange twining tendrils (and which I happened to be checking out a couple of days ago while taking a hike in the Caprinteria salt marsh with my son), can quickly discriminate between a “good” host and a poor one, “choosing” in a matter of an hour or two how much of its resources to devote to a particular new host plant.

All of which brings me to the item I actually wanted to talk about when I started this posting: Scientists experiment with ‘trust’ hormone. It’s an article describing recent research into how the hormone oxytocin, which I’m mainly familiar with from its medical use in stimulating contractions during childbirth, can render people more trusting.

Oxytocin is secreted in brain tissue and synthesized by the hypothalamus. This small, but crucial feature located deep in the brain controls biological reactions like hunger, thirst and body temperature, as well as visceral fight-or-flight reactions associated with powerful, basic emotions like fear and anger.

For years oxytocin was considered to be a straightforward reproductive hormone found in both sexes. In both humans and animals, this chemical messenger stimulates uterine contractions in labor and induces milk production. In both women and men, oxytocin is released during sex, too.

Then, elevated concentrations of the hormone also were found in cerebrospinal fluid during and after birth, and experiments showed it was involved in the biochemistry of attachment. It’s a sensible conclusion, given that babies require years of care and the body needs to motivate mothers for the demanding task of childrearing.

In recent years, scientists have wondered whether oxytocin also is generally involved with other aspects of bonding behavior - and specifically whether it stimulates trust.

The article goes on to describe how researchers dosed experimental subjects with oxytocin, then had them play a simple investment game that revealed the level of trust they were willing to extend to a randomly assigned trading partner. Those who got the hormone were dramatically more trusting.

Researchers said they are performing a new round of experiments using brain imaging. “Now that we know that oxytocin has behavioral effects,” Fehr said, “we want to know the brain circuits behind these effects.”

I’m sure there’s more to learn about how the brain is involved in all this, but I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that it necessarily plays the most important role. Brains are a relatively recent innovation. For most of our collective history of living on the planet we haven’t had them — yet we’ve been intelligently negotiating our environment the whole time, presumably through the same sorts of complex chemical interactions that underlie the “intelligent” behavior of our distant relatives, the slime molds and dodder plants.

Okay. Done rambling for now.

For all his talk about going after evil-doers, Bush sure can be a wimp when it comes to standing up for the public interest in the face of big campaign contributors. I thought that when he let Bill Gates off with a wrist-slap after Microsoft’s antitrust conviction, and now he’s done it again: Tobacco escapes huge penalty.

After eight months of courtroom argument, Justice Department lawyers abruptly upset a landmark civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry yesterday by asking for less than 8 percent of the expected penalty.

What a wuss.

It’s a bit dated (they freed the rover a little more than a week ago), but I still want to link to driftglass’s account of this, mostly for the title: Mars, bitches!

I previously talked about the weird-ass equatorial ridge on Saturn’s moon Iapetus. I’ve been waiting to hear what wacky theories real scientists come up with to explain it (after getting tired of the differently-wacky theories non-scientists were coming up with), and it seems that Paulo C.C. Freire has one: Did Iapetus consume one of Saturn’s rings?

So, I guess there was some sort of trial up the road in Santa Maria that ended yesterday? At least, I noticed that at one point in the afternoon the same dumb program, in which a swarm of helicopters follwed a line of black SUVs, was on every channel.

Sigh.

It’s a little late, but Triumph is always good for a laugh. Courtesy of anti-copyright superhero Norm of One Good Move (I think he has a spandex suit in the closet that says “Fair Use Man!” in bold letters across the chest): Triumph The Insult Comic Dog and MJ Fans.

A few more Downing Street memo links: From Eric Boehlert at Salon (one-day pass required): Bush lied about war? Nope, no news there! And from the Sunday Times of London: Ministers were told of need for Gulf war.

That last one features a new twist: It seems the Times of London has published most of a secret briefing paper that was distributed at the meeting summarized by the original Downing Street memo. I’m sure Bush defenders will be all over certain parts of it; the following quote, for example:

Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq.

Bush critics, on the other hand, will likely focus on passages like this:

A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden.

It’s a real crowd-pleaser. This top-secret document has something for everyone!

Jumping back to the story about the briefing paper that I linked to above (before I linked to the actual briefing paper), I also like how the Times of London is now reporting on the US media’s reporting on the previous Times of London reporting on the original memo:

The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.

I also like the following:

John Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. He also asked the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order to justify the war.

He and other Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear weapons programme.

Yay! We have Joe Wilson to kick around some more!

Here’s a funky site that the spirtually complex J.A.Y.S.O.N. passed on to me the other day: entrancestohell.com. It features such insights as this one:

Walking to what he after three years still thought of as “the new school”, Jeff Phillips realized that he had gotten used to how much his stomach hurt every morning. [Mamou, LA]

Weirdly variant takes on religion have been on my mind lately. My wife has been reading Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, feeding me choice tidbits; when she’s done I hope to read it myself. It apparently concerns the actions of some members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, an offshoot sect of the Mormon church that believes in things like forced marriages of 14-year-old girls to aging patriarchs who already have lots of wives, and abandoning teenage boys on the side of the road in order to adjust the sect’s male-female ratio to facilitate the aforementioned polygyny.

It seems to be human nature to fuck with the message of God. Mormonism itself, for all that it has many devout, upstanding adherants, strikes me as a prime example of that. I can’t see any other way to read the life story of Joseph Smith than as that of an opinionated kid who really wanted to bring more Old Testament-style fire and brimstone to the practice of Christianity, and told a chain of preposterous lies in order to accomplish it.

You can see a similar process happening with Westboro Baptist, which I came across the other day via this funny posting by C. Monks of Utter Wonder: Fashion highs and lows of the Westboro Baptist Church.

At first I couldn’t tell if the church was real, or was a parody like Landover Baptist, but after some investigation I’m forced to conclude that Westboro Baptist, along with its spiritual leader, Pastor Fred Phelps, are all too real. For one thing, I don’t think the droll subversives who create sites like Landover Baptist would stoop to this kind of child abuse just to make a point:

What is it in human nature that makes us so anxious to imbue God with our own hatreds and fears, then use our faith as a stick to beat up on each other? I thought about that yesterday while browsing the FAQs posted by Tim Boucher, Occult Investigator. They include the folllowing:

Are you aware that you’re going to hell?

I’m absolutely dumb-founded by people who call themselves Christians but who go out of their way to be spiteful and mean-spirited. If you can show me how that is part of Christ’s message of love and forgiveness, I will eat my hat. And when I poop it out, I will eat the poop.

Christianity itself, from a certain perspective, is based on a perversion of Christ’s original teachings. The Church as a political entity isn’t based on Christ as much as it’s based on Paul, and a strong case can be made (and in fact, has been made, by A. Victor Garaffa of The pauline conspiracy) that Paul actually pulled off a coup de main, overthrowing the disciples of Jesus and erecting in their place a church that more-closely matched his own authoritarian leanings.

From what I’ve seen of the religious mutations taking place in my own time, I find that explanation easy to believe.

Here are some more interesting (usual disclaimer) items on the Downing Street memo. Some are new; others are older items I’d previously overlooked.

First up, from today’s LA Times: New memos detail early plans for invading Iraq (login required; cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works for now). The article gives details from six additional documents obtained by the Sunday Times; they describe internal British government discussions of U.S. plans for war dating to March, 2002.

More dots filled in; I’d recommend Craig read it to see if he can still connect them in a way that looks like anything other than an early decision for war. But I suspect he may have reached the point where it’s easier not to pay attention; evidence that disconfirms deeply held beliefs can be a real pain in the ass, what with the need to keep erasing the picture you’ve previously formed so you can redraw the lines in a more convoluted fashion.

Eric Boehlert in Slate, who’s been doing a better job than most at keeping up on this story, had a piece yesterday that provides more details on the slow pace of media coverage: AP dropped the ball on the Downing memo (one-day pass required). Among the things he links to are this article from the ombudsman at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Downing Street memo’s route to paper, which discusses, among other things, how that newspaper came to publish a strikingly backboned editorial back on Memorial Day that talked about the memo, and tied it in with a larger point about the Iraq war being — like Vietnam — a “mistake” in which young people were being sent to die in “a war that should never have happened.”

Finally, I can’t believe I missed this back when it first appeared, but on May 19 (!) Juan Cole had an article in Salon that put the Downing Street memo in context, citing the events that took place in the run-up to war and showing how they fit in perfectly with the memo’s revelations: The lies that led to war.

A key observation:

The Bush administration, and some credulous or loyal members of the press, have long tried to blame U.S. intelligence services for exaggerating the Iraq threat and thus misleading the president into going to war. That position was always weak, and it is now revealed as laughable. President Bush was not misled by shoddy intelligence. Rather, he insisted on getting the intelligence that would support the war on which he had already decided.

I think that’s the heart of my disagreement with Craig these days: he persists in giving Bush the benefit of the doubt on this question, pointing to things like the reports of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Bush’s WMD commission as proving it was bad intelligence, not Bush’s bad judgment, that put us in the position we’re in today in Iraq. Bush was forced to go to war by Saddam’s failure to comply with resolution 1441, the argument goes, and by the UN’s failure to hold Saddam accountable.

As Cole says, that position was weak at the time the war began. It was obvious (at least to me) what was going on from the way Bush disengaged from the UN process just when it seemed most clearly to be working (where “working” is defined as “reducing the threat represented by Saddam’s WMD to a negligible level, at a minute fraction of the cost of going to war”).

Weak then, but indeed, laughable now. With each new piece of documentation that comes out, the picture gets clearer. The British government’s private communications from that time provide detailed, repeated confirmation of Bush’s early decision for war.

Crystal ball time. As this evidence grows stronger, the Bush team’s defenders will retreat to their ultimate fallback position: Sure Saddam didn’t actually have WMD. Sure the UN effort wasn’t made in a good faith search for an alternative to war. But Bush knew Saddam was a threat, and that one day, sooner or later, he was going to do something very bad to the United States. So he decided to stop him. Whether Bush actually reached that decision in 1998 or 2000 or 2001 or 2002 (or when he actually says he reached it, in 2003) is unimportant. What is important is that it was his decision, he made it, and we’re better off because of it.

Which is something like a belief in Creationism: It’s unfalsifiable. It’s based on a hypothetical prediction of what would have happened if we hadn’t removed Saddam by force, and no matter how bad the actual debacle of the Iraq war becomes, Bush and his supporters will always be able to imagine something worse.

Imaginary thinking is what they’re good at. It’s reality that they — and their supporters — have a hard time getting their heads around.

Here are some more links, representing the most interesting stuff I’ve read since I last updated y’all on my Downing Street Memo reading. Some of it’s up to a week old; apologies for being only sporadically obsessed.

From Think Progress: Full text of British briefing papers revealed: More evidence intel was fixed. It includes PDFs for the six additional documents that have entered the discussion recently. So far I’ve only read excerpts in news accounts, but it sounds like it continues to fill in more pieces of the picture; the legal concerns the British had about the invasion, references to the deal Tony Blair had cut with Bush at the ranch in Crawford in March, 2002, and so on. I’m still a little fuzzy on the history of when the various documents were leaked to the publlic, though I’m trying to put a clearer picture together so I can update Wikipedia’s Downing Street memo page with the details.

The Raw Story also has copies of the six documents, with some additional information on how they came to be released, and the details on how they were handled by Michael Smith, the journalist who received them from his confidential source, apparently in September, 2004: Backstory: Confirming the Downing Strett documents.

Speaking of journalist Michael Smith, he did a really interesting online chat via the Washington Post this past Thursday, June 16, 2005: Transcript: The Downing Street memo.

Michael Kinsley wrote an op-ed column questioning the memo’s significance: No smoking gun.

Downingstreetmemo.com has a nice page refuting some of the arguments against the memo’s significance, including some of those advanced by Kinsley: Reality check.

On June 12 Juan Cole had an item on the July, 2002, briefing paper (the one that was prepared in advance of the meeting summarized in the Downing Street memo): Bush and Blair committed to war in April, 2002.

Blogger Digby of Hullabaloo had some good discussion of the original memo’s significance last Sunday, June 12: The elephant.

A really good summary of the significance of all the documents was provided on Wednesday, June 15 by Slate’s Fred Kaplan (and was apparently on NPR’s Day to Day, also): Let’s go to the memo. Kaplan manages to be objective about what the documents do and don’t say, which is a pretty good trick in the current overheated rhetorical environment.

Speaking of overheated, it’s worth getting the day pass from Salon to read the views of four constitutional scholars regarding Ralph Nader’s (and others’) calls for Bush and his senior staff to be impeached based on the memo: The I-word.

Whew.

Philosoraptor provides an example of the kinds of things that pot-smoking philosophers find time to think about: Is it good that Iraq has been a disaster? He answers with a qualified affirmative, and I’m not sure I can find any flaw in his argument.

Victor Navasky of the Columbia Journalism Review writes about how to break through peoples’ complacency about torture: Breaking the barrier. The comments are interesting, too.

Live: Breaking News!

Do you want to know more?

Nothing much to say about this, but I wanted to make note of it for my own future reference more than anything else: Deceiving us has become an industrial process.

Eugene Volokh takes a stray line from a Michael Shermer piece on Intelligent Design and runs with it: Is evolution a threat to religious belief? And PZ Myers of Pharyngula responds: Volokh’s question.

John Cleese, besides being funny, is also my neighbor (broadly speaking). And I like to keep up on what my neighbors are doing. So here you go: To the citizens of the United States of America.

In honor of my recent Downing Street Memo obsession, let’s look at another case of facts being fixed around a policy. Pro-war weblogger Dean Esmay has created a graph that long-time readers of this site will immediately recognize: Iraq combat deaths: perspective. You should click through to the large version of the image on his site to get the full effect, including his observations on the significance of the various ups and downs, but here’s a cropped and slightly reduced version for the sake of discussion:

And here, for comparison purposes, is the most-recent version of my own graph of US combat deaths in Iraq:

Esmay is using the same source for his data that I’ve been using for mine (the Iraq Coalition Casualties site), so it shouldn’t be surprising that the two graphs look similar. The one thing he’s doing differently with his numbers (besides avoiding my gratuitous comparison with Vietnam) is that he’s not plotting total deaths per calendar month, the way I am, but is instead giving a month-by-month daily average. (Oh, and he’s listing US and total coalition deaths as separate lines, while I do only US deaths; and he’s looking at combat deaths only, while I include non-combat fatalities. And he’s got that pretty blue background going on.)

Now, in one sense his use of a per-day average is misleading, in that it somewhat obscures the actual number of deaths involved. Glancing at his graph, you don’t see a monthly total of deaths ticking by (36, 52, 80…). Instead you see the less-alarming daily average (1.29, 1.73, 2.84…). And of course you could do the math yourself to figure out the actual number of deaths, but his labelling of the graph’s y axis makes those numbers just a tad less obvious.

The other thing that this choice of Esmay’s does is to let his graph emphasize the higher death rate in the very early days of the war. That’s because the March, 2003 numbers that make up both his and my first plotted data points actually only cover 11 days of fighting, from March 21 to March 31.

Those early days of the war were relatively deadly. On March 23, 2003, for example, 30 US troops died, most of them as part of the intense fighting that took place in and around Nasiriyah. March 2003 also saw some helicopter crashes with multiple fatalities, some friendly-fire and non-hostile vehicle accidents, and generally just a very large amount of shooting and bombing and mayhem.

What does Esmay make of this?

Note that in this first chart, ever since what was called “Major Combat Operations” (or what should probably more appropriately be called “The Invasion”), mortality has been much lower overall. We’ve never had a period as high in the number killed as the initial invasion, although we’ve had a few pretty bad days here and there.

I guess what he means is that, generally speaking, we haven’t had as many people dying in as short a period of time as we did during those first 11 days of the war. But it seems fairly silly to me to compare the first 11 days with monthly averages since then, in order to derive some hopeful observation about how mortality has been “trending” downward. We have to be sure to speak “generally,” too, since if we speak more specifically, there have been at least a few times when we’ve had short-term mortality rates higher than that of the initial invasion. For example, there was early May, 2004, when 79 US troops died in 10 days (7.9 deaths per day). Or early November, 2004, when 89 US troops died in 10 days (8.9 deaths per day). And in general, I think we’d have to recognize that the 1670 US deaths since the end of March, 2003, are fairly significant when compared to the 65 deaths that came before, even if the average daily death rate, when averaged on a per-month basis, has tended to be lower than it was during the war’s first 11 days.

What most of us really want to know, of course, is what the overall trend has been. Are we “making progress”? Is the insurgency in “its last throes”? Or are we thrashing along at pretty much the same rate of US deaths each month, or in fact seeing a slight increase over time?

Dean has this to say on that key question:

Overall, if you try to plot a trend over the entire period starting from day 1, you see a very mild upward curve, but that doesn’t really make sense. There was no organized resistance per se until several months after the initial invasion and the fall of Baghdad, and the mission of occupying forces is completely different from the mission of invading forces.

I find this passage really remarkable. The “very mild upward curve” Esmay sees is simply the objective reality that the US Iraq war death rate, over the entire course of the war, has been trending gradually upward. We’ve already seen how Esmay went out of his way to come up with an initial graph that gave him a high first data point on which to hang his preferred interpretation (that the overall trend is downward), but now, when he actually tries to fit a curve to the numbers, he realizes that it goes the other way. So what does he do? He simply rejects reality, because it “doesn’t really make sense.”

Hm. Maybe if he pokes and prods at the numbers some more, he can come up with a picture that looks more like what he wants. And indeed, that’s what he does next: he takes the four “periods” discussed by the Iraq Coalition Casualties web site (the initial invasion to the end of major combat, the end of major combat to the handover of sovereignty, the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi elections, and the time since then), and plots the average daily death count for each period as a whole:

Now, this graph is really wacky, at least in the sense of providing any kind of apples-to-apples comparison. Note that we’re presenting four very different-sized chunks of time: The initial chunk covers about 2.3 months, the next one about 14 months, the next one about 7 months, and the last one about 4.7 months. This presentation completely obscures the overall death totals, since the periods across which the daily average is being computed can no longer be read from the graph.

But he gets what he’s really after: The downward “trend” (which again, he’s only able to get because he’s comparing the apples of the initial invasion to the oranges of the post-invasion occupation, over the course of which, even in this distorted presentation, you can see that the mortality is actually trending upward).

He concludes his analysis with the following:

My own gut tells me, frankly, that if by this time next summer the Iraqis do not have a new Constitution and have not held new elections that the formerly-privileged Sunni minority have participated in to a reasonable degree, it will probably be time to question whether the operation is ever going to succeed and start rethinking our strategy.

Until then, it seems obvious that we continue to retain the upper hand, and that the fascist insurgency is losing. Let’s hope that trend continues.

But as you can see, it’s really been his gut doing the talking all along. He ignores and massages the actual data as much as he needs to in order to make it support his a priori belief that we are, in fact, defeating the insurgency. But his own numbers clearly show that the insurgency has been getting stronger over time, rather than weaker (at least as measured by US deaths).

I’m reminded of the following graph by Dale Amon of Samizdata.net, which he hopefully presented under the headline “We are winning” back in October of 2003:

Amon was merely premature in deriving a negative trend from the insurgency’s slow start. I haven’t checked, but I doubt he’s updated that graph lately. Esmay, revisiting the same numbers today, needs to go to considerably greater lengths to find an upbeat message, but find it he does, in a nice example of how a hard-nosed, just-the-facts conservative (update: or not; see his response in the comments) can actually compete quite nicely with a mushy-headed liberal like me when it comes to ignoring data that conflicts with his worldview.

Update: As a sort of pretty-pictures-over-facts exclamation point, Esmay links at the end of his post to the following item from weblogger Chrenkoff: The willing. It features a nice collection of flags and soldiers in stirring martial poses, illustrating the “26 other countries… doing good work for the future of Iraq.” Yes, well, I wouldn’t want to call into question the individual courage of those 33 Macedonians and 26 Kazakhstanis, and the approximately 10 Norwegians currently in-theater are doing their part, I’m sure (amazingly, it looks like every single one of them managed to fit into Chrenkoff’s photo).

But if we’re going to talk about hard numbers, here’s the true picture: US forces currently account for about 87% of the foreign troops in Iraq. The next-largest contingent, from the UK, accounts for 5%. South Korea is 2%. The next three countries in descending order (Italy, Poland, and Ukraine) are 1.8%, 1.0%, and 0.8%, respectively — and all three of them are due to be gone before the end of the year. The manpower contributions of the other 20 countries in our grand coalition are significantly smaller than those. (See globalsecurity.org for details.)

I realize this leaves out the Iraqi forces we’ve been struggling to train and equip, and yes, I realize that they’re the ones we will eventually be handing this situation off to, one way or another, assuming any of them survive the insurgency’s targeted killings long enough for us to hand it off to them.

I’ve got nothing against giving all these brave soldiers their moment to pose, proud and unmaimed, under their country’s flag while someone snaps a photo. They deserve that.

Okay, we’ve now given them that. So let’s get back to talking realistically about what it’s going to take to get them out of this clusterfuck and back home.

Journalist Michael Smith of Downing Street memo fame offers his take on what is significant in the British government’s formerly secret documents on the run-up to war: The real news in the Downing Street memos.

American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that “the U.S. had already begun ’spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.” This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial “spikes of activity” didn’t have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn’t retaliate. They didn’t provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

Because I know John is both obsessive and a huge LOTR fan, I will ruin his life with this link, showing the Eye of Sauron has been discovered in the blackest depths of space. Which is actually pretty cool.

Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings offers a cogent summary of what she loves about the United States (or used to, before a morally retarded national leadership started systematically dismantling it): More things we throw away.

Peter Beinert tells it like it is on the early-exit option: Shake up the war room.

President Bush famously hates admitting mistakes. And he generally plays to his base. But on Iraq, those instincts are driving his administration off a cliff. The vast majority of Democrats, and most independents, now think Iraq was a mistake. And the calls for withdrawal are moving from the fringes of American politics to the center.

Congressional Democrats must resist those calls. As retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, a fierce critic of the war, recently explained, even a timetable for withdrawal is a terrible idea.

So, I somehow missed the chance to listen to Bush explain what’s going on in Iraq, but from the reports I’ve seen I didn’t miss much of substance. In the comments on an earlier item, Rise Against offered the following word counts (courtesy of the Dissent blog):

Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists 33
Free, Freedom 29
Security 16
Defend, Protect 15
Election, Vote, Polls 10
Mission 9
Killers, Murderers 9
New York, September 11th 7
War 7
Insurgents 6
Violence 6
Democracy, Democratic 5
Liberty, Liberate 4
Attack 4
Dissent 1
WMD 0
Exit Strategy 0
Mission Accomplished 0

So, Bush used the speech to go once again to the well of linking Iraq with 9/11 in the public mind. Well, as today’s LA Times editorial puts it:

Bush might be right to now put Iraq at the center of the “global war on terror,” but it didn’t have that status before the invasion.

Meanwhile, Ryan Lizza goes into more detail in the New Republic Online on just what Bush and Karl Rove have been up to with their 9/11 comments lately, including Bush’s repeated invocations of the attacks in last night’s speech: Explain away.

Many expected that Bush would give a speech updating the American people about the war in Iraq. But instead, and not for the first time, the White House confused the need to bolster public support for an increasingly unpopular war with the need to bolster support for an increasingly unpopular president. Bush may have momentarily achieved the latter, but only at the expense of the former.

Update: This article on the speech by Ronald Brownstein of the LA Times was good, too: As war shifts, so does the message.

Actually, I don’t think I can really support the above title; there’s been a lot of amazingly good Daily Show. But these nine minutes, as archived by Fair-Use Man (aka Norm of Onegoodmove), are up there: Words.

I guess the main reason this clip doesn’t rank up there quite as high, in my estimation, as the “as much of a dick in real life” Tucker Carlson baiting (which, technically speaking, wasn’t even Daily Show proper) or the time the Republican Congressman from Texas gave Jon the baby-sized boots with “GOP Rocks” on the soles, is that the degree of difficulty wasn’t very high. In the context of the silliness on Iraq that Cheney and Rumsfeld have been spouting lately, the jokes pretty much write themselves. Low-hanging fruit, and all that.

Oh, and that reminds me: Ed Helms in Speedos, with the “ball cam.” So yeah, “best nine minutes evar” is a stretch. But it’s still awfully good. Go thou and viewest! Yea, unto the twelfth viewing shalt thou view!

Yes, Craig, it’s just what you’ve been waiting for! Yet another round of “Bush lied!”, this time from Digby of Hullabaloo: In our faces.

Actually does a really nice job of summing up many of the high points of Bush’s lies on Iraq during the presidential campaign. And I’m not going to apologize for calling them that. I called it a lie when Clinton claimed not to have had sex with Monica, and if that was a lie, this is every bit a lie. It really is.

I know there are plenty of people willing to tell themselves Bush was merely mistaken, but it won’t wash. It just won’t.