Hm. Maybe that title is a tad subjective.

Anyway, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), the Senate minority leader, invoked seldom-used Rule 21 in the Senate yesterday, placing the body in closed session to discuss intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts’ (R-KS) failure so far to complete the promised “phase two” of the committee’s investigation into the Iraqi intelligence failures. From the WaPo: GOP angered by closed Senate session.

The usually unflappable majority leader, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), was searching for words to express his outrage to reporters a few minutes later. The Senate “has been hijacked by the Democratic leadership,” he said. “They have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no ideas.” Never before had he been “slapped in the face with such an affront,” he said, adding: “For the next year and a half, I can’t trust Senator Reid.”

Frist seemed much calmer when the closed session ended. He agreed to a six-senator bipartisan task force that will report by Nov. 14 on “the intelligence committee’s progress of the phase two review of the prewar intelligence and its schedule for completion.”

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said the report was nearing completion anyway, but Democrats disputed that.

So, given Roberts’ history, I’m sure the information will only come out with him kicking and screaming, or with any criticism of the Bush administration’s role watered way down, or both. But it’s better than meekly going along with the ongoing whitewash.

Dana Priest has an excellent front-page article in today’s Washington Post on the network of secret prisons being operated worldwide by the CIA: CIA holds terror suspects in secret prisons.

I consider this story truly horrible. I’ve said before, and will say again, that this is far and away the worst thing done by the Bush administration.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military — which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress — have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency’s approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

“We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’ ”

The number of prisoners being held so far is limited, we are led to believe, perhaps about 100. But the size of the program isn’t the point. It could be one prisoner, and it would still be shockingly wrong.

The United States cannot engage in this sort of behavior as a matter of policy and remain the United States. Operating secret facilities where people are detained with no charges, kept indefinitely away from any outside contact, tortured, and occasionally killed is a blatant violation of the most fundamental principles on which this country was founded, and from which our government derives its legitimacy.

By engaging in this sort of behavior, George Bush is doing what neither Osama bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein nor any number of former, current, or future enemies could ever hope to accomplish: he is destroying this country.

I don’t mean that as a metaphor. It is the literal truth.

Good item from Kevin Drum that gets to the heart of the broken policymaking process in Bushland: Lott vs. Rove.

Excellent item by Elizabeth de la Vega from The Nation: The White House criminal conspiracy. (Also via TomDispatch: De la Vega, Bush’s war, a case of presidential fraud?)

Conspiracies to defraud usually begin with a goal that is not in and of itself illegal. In this instance the goal was to invade Iraq. It is possible that the Bush team thought this goal was laudable and likely to succeed. It’s also possible that they never formally agreed to defraud the public in order to attain it. But when they chose to overcome anticipated or actual opposition to their plan by concealing information and lying, they began a conspiracy to defraud — because, as juries are instructed, “no amount of belief in the ultimate success of a scheme will justify baseless, false or reckless misstatements.”

I’m convinced. Impeach the bastard. Do it now.

Link discovered via Jane Hamsher of my new favorite weblog, firedoglake, at The chickenhawk conspiracy, where they also filed the serial numbers off this really excellent propaganda poster remix:

In light of the conversation currently going on in the comments between Enkidu and TeacherVet and others, here’s a piece by Kevin Drum that I can pretty much agree with: Marketing the war.

Was there a widespread belief in September 2002 that Iraq had an active WMD program? Yes. Did the Bush administration nonetheless lie, exaggerate, and dissemble repeatedly about that program? Yes. Should conservatives be concerned about that? Yes. After all, the next president to market a war this way might not be a Republican. They should be as interested in learning the truth about this — and preventing it from happening again — as the rest of us.

This was the key fact that, to me at the time, removed any credibility the Bush team might have previously had in calling for the invasion of Iraq: In the early months of 2003, as the case for war was clearly beginning to unravel, they rushed ahead and invaded anyway. In fact, you could argue that they rushed ahead and invaded precisely because the case was unravelling, because they recognized that waiting any longer was going to lose them their chance to go to war.

Interesting analysis from John Dean: A Cheney-Libby conspiracy, or worse? Reading between the lines of the Libby indictment.

Will Libby flip? Unlikely. Neither Cheney nor Libby (I believe) will be so foolish as to crack a deal. And Libby probably (and no doubt correctly) assumes that Cheney — a former boss with whom he has a close relationship — will (at the right time and place) help Libby out, either with a pardon or financially, if necessary. Libby’s goal, meanwhile, will be to stall going to trial as long as possible, so as not to hurt Republicans’ showing in the 2006 elections.

So if Libby can take the heat for a time, he and his former boss (and friend) may get through this. But should Republicans lose control of the Senate (where they are blocking all oversight of this administration), I predict Cheney will resign “for health reasons.”

On that last point, I don’t think it takes a crystal ball to predict a Cheney resignation “for health reasons” after the 2006 elections. Putting the person that the Republican party would like to have replace Bush into the vice presidency after the midterms is the obvious thing to do for political reasons, regardless of whether Cheney has become a political liability because of Plamegate.

But given my own feeling that Libby will stick to his story, secure in the knowledge that a pardon is waiting for him during Bush’s last few days in office, it was interesting to me to see Dean saying essentially the same thing.

I was interested by that recent article from Douglas Jehl at the New York Times (Report warned Bush team about intelligence suspicions). The story describes an intelligence report, recently declassified, that was circulating in early 2002 among top Bush administration officials, and which cast doubt on the allegations of al Qaeda/Iraq cooperation that had been made by captured al Qaeda bigwig Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

See, after we captured al-Libi we handed him over to the Egyptian authorities so they could properly torture him, and it was that torture, apparently, that produced his “confession” of a high-level connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. And the experts who looked at that evidence thought it wasn’t credible, in part because when you torture somebody they’ll say whatever they think you want them to say so you’ll stop torturing them, and in part because the evidence just didn’t make much sense on its own merits.

And the Bush people basically knew this. But they used the information as part of their case for war anyway.

Sigh.

Much intelligent musing on the story from Kevin Drum: Torture and the vice president and Torture and the vice president, part 2. Also from Philosoraptor: Dick Cheney’s pro-torture crusade. And from the LA Times’ Nicole Gaouette: Prewar claims set off bells, and from the LA Times’ editorial writers: Tortured justifications.

There are a lot of good points to be made about this, and the people linked to above make many of them. There’s something else that struck me about this story, concerning the Bush administration’s “tell” (by which I mean, a characteristic sign that helps you spot that they’re lying).

(Cue the cheap shot: “Their lips move.”)

No, seriously. From the Gaouette article linked to above:

In an October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, President Bush said that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gas.”

This sounds eerily like the infamous “16 words” from Bush’s State of the Union address the following January:

The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

In hindsight, knowing what we know now about how both pieces of information had been undercut within the Administration at the time the public statement was made, it’s possible to recognize a certain clever legalistic parsing going on. After all, as any number of Bush supporters are happy to point out to this day, neither statement is completely, hyper-technically untrue. In the same sense that Clinton could assert that he really hadn’t had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky (because the legal definition he was operating under defined sex as touching another person on a list of proscribed body parts, and his claim was that he never actually touched any of her listed parts while she was fellating him), Bush could assert that he (or the British) had indeed “learned” certain things about Saddam, even if Bush had good reason to doubt those things based on information he’d subsequently received.

Just because he said he’d “learned” it, you see, doesn’t mean that he didn’t subsequently “unlearn” it. If the people listening to Bush’s statements chose to add the assumed clause, “…and I actually believe those things to be true today, based on an objective, good-faith analysis of the best evidence I currently possess,” well, that wasn’t Bush’s fault. Caveat emptor.

Note, though, that under this formulation, it would be equally honest if Bush were to stand at the podium during his next State of the Union address and solemnly inform the country, “We have learned that a fat man in a red suit climbs down millions of chimneys leaving presents for children on Christmas eve,” and “British authorities have learned that a magical rabbit hides brightly colored eggs just prior to Easter morning,” and “we’ve learned that a deft fairy replaces children’s lost teeth with money, if those teeth are left under the children’s pillows while they sleep at night.”

All true statements. At some point in our lives all of us (or at least many of us in my part of the world) have learned those things.

So now I’ve learned something else: When Bush says that he (or someone else) has learned something, it’s actually a good bet that it isn’t true.

Here are the updated graphs of US war deaths in Iraq for October. Deaths rose sharply, presumably as a result of increased fighting centered on the constitutional referendum and insurgent strongholds in western Iraq. There were a total of 96 US fatalities in October. As always, I’m comparing the military casualties to those from the Vietnam war at a similar point in each war’s political lifetime (which many have charged is inherently misleading; see disclaimer below).

The data come 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 32 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 some three and a half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above. The starting point for the Vietnam graphs is the death that was identified (years later) by Lyndon Johnson as being the first of the war.

These graphs do not address 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 how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

It’s kind of a minor issue in the larger scheme of things, but I think this story is significant in terms of the larger pattern it helps to illustrate. From Think Progress: That’s not accurate: White House alters transcript of press briefing.

At issue is a response Scott McClellan made to reporter David Gregory concerning Rove and Libby during an October 31 press conference. Here’s Gregory’s question:

Q Whether there’s a question of legality, we know for a fact that there was involvement. We know that Karl Rove, based on what he and his lawyer have said, did have a conversation about somebody who Patrick Fitzgerald said was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. We know that Scooter Libby also had conversations.

If you watch the White House-supplied video, it’s clear that McClellan responds by saying, “that’s accurate.” Later, when the White House transcript appeared, McClellan’s response was given as “I don’t think that’s accurate.”

The White House has reportedly pressured Congressional Quarterly and Federal News Service, which provide their own, independent transcripts, and which give the McClellan response as “that’s accurate,” to change their transcripts to conform with the White House version; so far the news organizations have refused. From Wonkette: The White House’s war on transcripts. And from Editor & Publisher: White House stands by ‘not accurate’ quote in dispute.

Now, no one’s really going to make a lot of stew from this one oyster of McClellan supposedly confirming the fact that Rove and Libby had conversations with reporters about the Plame matter. I’m perfectly willing to stipulate that McClellan misspoke. I’m sure, given his recent history of statements on Rove and Libby, that McClellan would not have wanted to respond to that question with anything, neither “that’s accurate” nor “I don’t think that’s accurate.” It pretty obviously was just a brain fart on his part, and one that’s completely understandable, given the context of his having to find several hundred different ways to say, “we’re not going to comment on an ongoing investigation” while sounding (at least a little bit) like he’s actually responding to reporters’ questions.

But a transcript is supposed to be a transcript. It’s a record of what was actually said, not what participants wish, in hindsight, they’d said. If the White House wanted to amend the transcript with a footnote saying McClellan misspoke, that would be fine.

But that’s not what they’re doing. They’ve seized on what might very well be a more or less innocent mis-transcription by the White House stenographer (who knows as well as anyone that McClellan would never have wanted to respond to that question with “that’s accurate”), and have asked two independent news organizations to go along with their magical thinking.

They really, really want for McClellan to have responded differently, so they just squeeze their eyes shut and wish very, very hard. If only all the little girls and boys in the audience will clap their hands and chant along with them, “I do believe in fairies. I do! I do!” then little Scottie McTinkerbell will come back to life.

From the Editor & Publisher article linked to above:

White House press office spokeswoman Dana Perino confirmed that her office had requested a review of the transcripts, noting, “it was simply to point out that the official transcript by the White House stenographer had it as it was released and that is all it was,” she said, saying the White House transcript was never altered.

When asked about the fact that the White House version contradicts video accounts of the briefing, Perino added, “the White House stenographer was in the room and I was in the room” and they heard McClellan say “I don’t think that’s accurate’.”

I don’t dispute that they heard it. But McClellan clearly didn’t actually say it. And as an example of the kind of magical thinking that pervades the Bush administration, and which ends up having more significant consequences when applied to other questions (like whether or not to go to war), it’s pretty scary.

It’s been interesting to see all the Bush administration weathercocks turning in unison in response to the ongoing grumbling about the dishonest case for war in Iraq. Or maybe they’re not weathercocks, but actually aspen groves, their leaves turning in unison because their roots connect them; I get confused by fancy metaphors.

Whatever.

First came that Norman Podhoretz article from Commentary the other day: Who is lying about Iraq? Kevin Drum did a good job of debunking Podhoretz’s argument: Marketing the war.

Then Bush himself weighed in with his Veterans Day remarks (President commemorates Veterans Day, discusses war on terror). The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus have some insightful observations about that: Asterisks dot White House’s Iraq argument. Or, as helpfully summarized by Philosoraptor in (Epistemic) sins of omission: Bush’s meta-lies:

…Bush is currently engaged in the same types of deception about the historical facts about his use of pre-war intelligence that he engaged in with regard to the intelligence at that time. That is, he’s using carefully-worded half-truths and exaggerations to try to fool people into believing that an equivocal case is crystal clear.

(Update: And Josh Marshall has a great response to Bush’s speech, too: What a sorry, sorry, unfortunate president…)

This kind of lying from Bush is very consistent. There’s an evil cleverness to how the arguments are crafted that’s characteristic of his most notable public statements. I assume (though I don’t know for a fact) that what we’re seeing here is the mind of Karl Rove at work. Having escaped the initial Plame-outing indictments, he’s been free to devote some attention to Bush’s free-falling poll numbers and the growing discontent with the war, and this latest pushback is his response.

The heart of that “evil cleverness” thing I’m talking about is the way the argument incorporates truths that are, in fact, quite damning of Bush himself. But it twists their meaning and misapplies them. I’m not sure, but I suspect that’s consciously done. It’s like a vaccination: by putting those arguments in Bush’s words, they pre-emptively frame critics’ use of the same arguments. “Hey!” Bush’s supporters can say later, “You’re saying the same thing Bush said. And it doesn’t undercut Bush’s argument, it’s part of his argument.” Well, yeah, but only if you’re willing to engage in overtly fallacious reasoning.

Here are a few examples from Bush’s Veterans Day speech:

And our debate at home must also be fair-minded. One of the hallmarks of a free society and what makes our country strong is that our political leaders can discuss their differences openly, even in times of war.

And this:

…it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.

And this:

The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges.

And this:

If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery while radicals stir the resentment of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, in our generation and for the next.

All of those statements are true. The principles they describe are of vital importance. It’s just that they actually argue quite strongly against, rather than in favor of, Bush’s policies and actions.

One of the best things I’ve seen from Kevin Drum in a while (which is saying a lot): Declaration of war.

The Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Jim VandeHe have an interesting article that looks at Scooter Libby’s testimony, and the argument that he was trying to protect Dick Cheney from the Fitzgerald investigation: Libby may have tried to mask Cheney’s role.

There’s nothing really new here, but it does a good job of explaining the basic facts. Doesn’t come right out and say, “yeah, Libby lied to protect Cheney,” but makes it clear that that’s what Fitzgerald’s probably thinking. Because, you know, it’s pretty obviously the truth.

Future chronology:

• 2006: Libby’s lawyers drag out the trial’s start to minimize impact on the 2006 midterm elections.
• 2007: Libby convicted at trial, begins serving sentence. McClellan: “As you know, I’d love nothing more than to answer your questions. But there is an appeal under way, and this administration believes it would be irresponsible to make public comments that might prejudice an ongoing legal proceeding.”
• 2008: Libby loses on appeal.
• January, 2009: On his last day as president, Bush pardons Libby.

Interesting commentary and some fun strips from yesteryear in this little interactive dealie from Slate: The appeal of Calvin and Hobbes.

As long as you’re enjoying your C&H, brush up on the deeper significance of annoying.com’s Calvin pees.

I meant to link to his a while back when it appeared in the LA Times, then got caught up in Fitzmas obsessions and whatnot, and neglected to. So I’m doing it now.

From Kyle Zirpolo, one of the child accusers in the McMartin preschool-molestation trial: I lied.

I’m not saying nothing happened to anyone else at the McMartin Pre-School. I can’t say that — I can only speak for myself. Maybe some things did happen. Maybe some kids made up stories about things that didn’t really happen, and eventually started believing they were telling the truth. Maybe some got scared that the teachers would get their families because they were lying. But I never forgot I was lying.

My stepdad was a police officer who had guns in the house. I remember when all of this was coming down, he was put on a leave of absence from work because he was being investigated for supposedly threatening the McMartin family. He was cleared of that accusation — apparently it wasn’t true. But being only 9 years old at the time, I thought my dad was saying he would kill the McMartins. So in my mind, I figured no one from the school was going to dare mess with him because he would have hurt them first. That made me feel secure. It could be a reason I never mixed up reality and fantasy and always knew I was lying.

But the lying really bothered me. One particular night stands out in my mind. I was maybe 10 years old and I tried to tell my mom that nothing had happened. I lay on the bed crying hysterically — I wanted to get it off my chest, to tell her the truth. My mother kept asking me to please tell her what was the matter. I said she would never believe me. She persisted: “I promise I’ll believe you! I love you so much! Tell me what’s bothering you!” This went on for a long time: I told her she wouldn’t believe me, and she kept assuring me she would. I remember finally telling her, “Nothing happened! Nothing ever happened to me at that school.”

She didn’t believe me.

I moved to Manhattan Beach after preschool age, but a lot of my friends in junior high and high school were former McMartin students. My girlfriend and her brother both went there; both were interviewed as part of the investigation, and both said they’d never seen or experienced anything unusual or questionable.

I give Zirpolo a lot of credit for being willing to come forward now. But I can also understand the surviving defendants refusing to meet with him to hear his apology.

Children lie. Hell, grownups lie, all the time. But for children, there’s something innocent about it, an element of the fantastical, magical thinking that makes anything potential as “true” as any other thing. Words like “fantastical” and “magical” have something of a positive connotation, and I’m not trying to say there’s anything good about little kids lying, especially when the lies ruin the lives of innocent third parties.

But the children who testified in the McMartin trial to abuses that didn’t actually take place weren’t really responsible for their actions. They were little kids. They were victims of the process, too. But the grownups who elicited those accusations from them, and the police and district attorneys and parents who took the ball and ran with it, and the media that sold lots and lots of advertising while demonizing Ray and his mother and the rest of the accused, have more to answer for.

Joshua Rosenau of the Thoughts from Kansas weblog, who apparently knows something about statistics, takes my side in the wee disagreement I had with Dean Esmay a while back regarding the trend of US military deaths in Iraq: Armistice Day thoughts on Iraq.

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the better stuff on the ‘Bush lied’ story, as fueled by Bush and the offensive linemen of Team GOP having decided to push it lately:

• Kevin Drum: Manipulating intelligence and Abuse of power.
• Joshua Micah Marshall: Kevin Drum had a piece up last night…, First the White House lashed out…, and It seems that National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley…
• Fred Kaplan: I was wrong, but so were you — Parsing Bush’s new mantra.
• Ryan Lizza: Con text: Bush’s dishonest new strategy for defending the war.
• The NYT editors: Decoding Mr. Bush’s denials.

I think it’s pretty clear that if we’re playing this by the rules, Bush loses the debate, bigtime. He’s basically making the same type of bullshit argument about his actions in the run-up to the war that he was making back then about Saddam and his nukes and ties to al-Qaeda.

But it’s a hallmark of the Bush team’s response when they get backed into a corner like this that they don’t play to win some kind of fair, high-minded debate. Look at how they reacted when Richard Clarke went public with his dynamite accusations about how Bush had ignored the threat of al-Qaeda during the first nine months of his administration. Clarke had solid documentation for every one of his charges. It really was a slam-dunk case.

And Bush went on to win re-election anyway. And his main strategy was the same one he’s using now: To make really vile, dishonest arguments, thereby luring the other side to respond in kind, systematically ratcheting up the level of hostility until everyone not already obsessed with politics gets disgusted and tunes out the debate.

Continuing to demonstrate how real journalism should be done, the reporters at Knight Ridder (specifically, James Kuhnhenn and Jonathan S. Landay) debunk the latest Bush assertions re: his misleading the country in the run-up to the Iraq war: In challenging war’s critics, administration tinkers with truth.

Sam Anderson has written an interesting profile of comedienne Sarah Silverman. It’s in the latest Slate: Irony Maiden - How Sarah Silverman is raping American comedy.

I especially liked this part:

This summer, she got into trouble in a venue that was supposed to be trouble-proof: The Aristocrats, a documentary that challenged 100 comedians to offend its audience as ingeniously as possible. While most of the comics went straight for the “piss-shit-suck-fuck” paradigm, which very quickly became about as offensive as a newborn koala, Silverman turned the old-school joke against an iconic old-schooler. She implied, via an emotionally supercharged soliloquy full of loaded pauses, that she had been sexually abused by the 79-year-old show-business institution Joe Franklin. At the end, she looked straight into the camera and said, dead seriously, “Joe Franklin raped me”—an anti-punch line that completely paralyzed the theater I was at. Instead of laughing, we were all stuck trying to decide whether this was some new species of joke or just plain old slander. When Franklin threatened to sue soon after the movie was released (”I didn’t like the nature of that wisecrack”), it made the joke strangely better. Silverman was the only comic in the film who met the challenge of the joke: She pushed it too far.

Mary Mapes, the former CBS producer who was made the fall gal, mostly, for the 60 Minutes story based on the almost-certainly-forged Killian memos about Bush’s spotty National Guard service, has a book out. As profiled in the WaPo: Ousted CBS producer comes out swinging.

Mapes is now pushing a book, called “Truth and Duty,” about the botched “60 Minutes II” story on Bush’s National Guard service that led to her firing. She ladles out plenty of blame but largely defends what she still considers a fair piece of reporting, although an independent panel accused CBS of having “failed miserably” to authenticate the documents before rushing the story to air.

The article is pretty old, but I meant to link to it when it came out, and forgot to until now. I find it interesting both as an example of someone working to salvage her reputation in the face of a pretty cut-and-dried case of error, and because big stories like this tend to get clearer, rather than murkier, with the benefit of a little hindsight.

Philosoraptor does some digging in an effort to get to the bottom of what’s really behind all this yes-he-did, no-he-didn’t yapping re: Bush’s dishonest case for war with Iraq: The Iraq Intelligence Inquiry Initiative.

It’s actually good stuff, if you obsess about this topic (as I do, obviously). But it’s also kind of sad, because it’s pretty much the only place that such a degree of objectivity and rigor is going to be applied to the question.

And the question is kind of an important one.

More at: Josh Marshall and Frederick Shmidtt on (AD) and (AI)
and The Aluminum Tubes Argument (Initial Version).

I love this (well, not love, but you know what I mean): Online daters sue matchmaking Web sites for fraud.

Match.com, a unit of IAC/Interactive Corp. (IACI.O: Quote, Profile, Research), is accused in a federal lawsuit of goading members into renewing their subscriptions through bogus romantic e-mails sent out by company employees. In some instances, the suit contends, people on the Match payroll even went on sham dates with subscribers as a marketing ploy.

[snip]

The company said it does not comment on pending litigation. But Match spokeswoman Kristin Kelly said the company “absolutely does not” employ people to go on dates with subscribers or to send members misleading e-mails professing romantic interest. The company has about 15 million members worldwide and 250 employees, she sa

Joshua Micah Marshall does a good job getting to the heart of the dishonesty at the heart of one particular angle the Bush people have been pushing lately: Some of the White House jabs…

For better or worse there was a vast consensus within the American political establishment that Saddam Hussein was a threat to American interests and that he must at least be maintaining some stocks of chemical weapons. It is even true that in 1998 the Congress passed and the president signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which put the US on record as supporting ‘regime change’ in Iraq, though we should not forget that this law was intentionally foisted on the president at a moment of maximum political weakness by most of the same connivers that brought us the real war four years later.

All true. But not everyone thought we should invade Iraq. And that’s the heart of this. You could easily substitute “WMDs” for “a threat” in the sentences above. The question is ‘how much of a threat’? Do we need to invade? Do we need to invade right now? Do we have to invade right now before we even get a chance to see if the suspicions which are the premise of our invasion are even accurate?

Various people of different political stripes said ‘no’ to one or more of these questions. And that’s the heart of the matter. It’s almost comical when you take a moment to think about it. President Bush has spent most of his presidency swinging around the cudgel that he has the character and the strength to defend the country when his political opponents don’t. Now suddenly we learn that all the Democrats he’s run against for four years as not tough enough to defend the country actually supported all of these decisions and would have done everything the same way had they been in power. What an extraordinary development.

When both Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall lead a posting on something by noting that it is “(seriously|awfully) weird,” you know I’m going to be all over it. Anyway, from Drum: Bombing al Jazeera. And from Marshall: This is an awfully weird story…

At issue are some British newspaper reports that Bush, while meeting with Tony Blair in April 2004, disclosed a plan to bomb the al Jazeera offices in Qatar as part of pushing back against the Arab-language broadcasters for their unfavorable coverage of US operations in Iraq.

The obvious interpretation of this is that Bush was joking, since that’s the kind of actually-not-very-funny sadistic humor that we’ve come to expect from the Frat Boy in Chief. But there are interesting signs that at least some of those in the room on the British side took the statement seriously, and made notes of Blair’s subsequent efforts (successful, reportedly) to talk Bush out of it.

I think that’s the detail that raises it to non-believability for me. We all know that if Bush really wanted to do something like that, no whimpering from his poodle across the pond would change his mind.

But it’s still kind of interesting. Bush apparently said something in that meeting, and however you interpret it, it isn’t very flattering that he did so.

McClellan made the following response when asked about the story:

“We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan told the Associated Press in an e-mail.

I really liked Philosoraptor’s take on that: I have no plans to attack al Jazeera on my desk.

Given that we know that the administration is willing to mislead with half-truths, it would simply be irrational to interpret this as a denial. Which is not to say that it should be interpreted as an admission, either. Rather, we know that we must demand ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers.

We first learned this when Mr. Bush told us that there were “no plans to attack [Iraq] on [his] desk.” Later we found out that the planning was well underway. So the plans must have been in his drawer, or have moved on to Powell’s desk, or whatever. But we discovered something important about Mr. Bush at that point: we couldn’t interpret his words in the ordinary way, in the way we’d interpret the words of someone we knew we could trust. It was a despicable use of conversational implicature to prey on our trust and good will in order to deceive us.

In fact, I feel a tug–which I want to resist–to count McClellan’s evasive answer as Winglish for ‘yes’. And given Mr. Bush’s terrible decision-making in the past, I suppose I wouldn’t put this past him. One thing I think everyone can agree on: if he was serious about bombing al Jazeera, then this counts to some degree against his stability and/or competence.

Heh. “Winglish.”

Update: More from Jeremy Scahill in The Nation: Did Bush really want to bomb al Jazeera?

An important piece of the puzzle (for those who still need help coming to grips with the obvious) is this article from Murray Waas in the National Journal: Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel.

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President’s Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won’t say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the “President’s Daily Brief,” a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing.

[snip]

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president’s national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee’s ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won’t say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

Hm. So, are we still clinging to that “everyone had access to the same intelligence Bush did, and agreed that we needed to go to war with Saddam” storyline?

I haven’t really talked much about this whole white phosphorus thing until now, though I’ve been entertained by the back-and-forth in the comments. But a while ago Sven forwarded this really interesting article from the North County Times to me, and now that I finally got around to reading it I wanted to pass it along. From staff writer Darrin Mortenson: White phosphorus debate grows white-hot.

It includes a firsthand account of the then-embedded reporter’s experience alongside Marines shelling Iraqi fighters with WP during the first battle of Falluja. It also offers a nice summary of the Pentagon’s evolving claims regarding the use of the substance, first saying it had not been used as an anti-personnel weapon, then, when confronted with detailed accounts of just that, switching to saying that it wasn’t a banned weapon, and wasn’t used against civilians.

Finally, the comments at the end of the story mention the ironic uncovering of a Defense Department report after the first Gulf War in 1991 that alleged that Saddam had used WP against Iraqi Kurds, and referrred to it as a “chemical weapon.”

Highly recommended.

Answering the question, “who will watch the watchers?”, the Watching America site features translated news articles on America from foreign news sources. The site recently underwent a redesign, according to the borderline-spam I received about it, so I checked it out, and guess what? It’s pretty interesting stuff.

For example, if I hadn’t visited it, I never would have seen this video clip from al-Manar TV of Lebanon, in which Cleric Abd Al-Karim Fadhlallah explains how when Columbus came to America, “the intellectuals among the Indians spoke Arabic.”

I’ve noticed Michael Kinsley making snarky arguments in favor of positions that I think are frankly wrong. So I’m not sure I want to put the full-on Lies.com stamp of approval on this latest one of his, even though I think it’s frankly right. In any event, it’s very much worth reading, and thinking about: The phony war against the critics.

So, this whole thing about Bush allegedly threatening to bomb al Jazeera, only to be talked out of it by Tony Blair, continues to bug Philosoraptor. He speculates some more about what it means in al Jazeera on Bush’s alleged urge to bomb.

Also interesting was this piece from Jane Hamsher of firedoglake: And Tarek Ayoub is still dead.

Philosoraptor makes what appears to me to be a slam-dunk case: Iraq and the evaporating myth of American invincibility.

By irresponsibly (and possibly unjustly) invading Iraq, the Bush administration has made it irrational for other countries to trust their safety to our good will. Countries now eye us suspiciously, not sure what might set us off next. By invading a more-or-less randomly-selected country–a country no more allied with al Qaeda than, say, Syria or Iran or Pakistan–we have acted irrationally and unpredictably. Since we can’t be trusted to act morally or rationally, it becomes necessary for other countries to prepare to defend themselves against us.

I think there’s a level on which George Bush believes it’s a good thing for him to act irrationally and unpredictably with the US military. And evaluated in the Karl Rove calculus, which is all about winning and holding elective office in the US, he was obviously smart to believe that. But in the larger scheme of things, in which there’s a collective good to be striven for, both in terms of US citizens’ interests and the interests of humanity generally, that attitude of Bush’s is horribly stupid and wrong.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate has an interesting article on Jose Padilla, the homegrown alleged “dirty bomber” who has spent three and a half years locked in a military brig without charges: Public Enemy No. 43,527 - The government throws back another small fish.

Nobody disputes that small-fry terrorists must be caught and punished. After all, most of the Sept. 11 murderers were small fish with no real grasp of the big plan. Nor does anyone dispute that these terrorists should be questioned by the state if they can help foil big terrorist plots. But most Americans now dispute — and some have long disputed — that all this needs to be done outside the existing legal stratosphere. More than three years after the government began holding citizens in jails without charges, there is no proof that anyone in this country is safer for it. Nor is there any proof that ordinary criminal trials for Padilla, Hamdi, and the other terrorists we’ve tagged would have exposed vital intelligence information or resulted in acquittals. Yet with Hamdi sent home, and Padilla shuffled to the criminal courts, there may be no testing the addled theory that President Bush has boundless wartime powers, even after the Supreme Court has told him he doesn’t.

This story really burns me up. Not because I have any particular sympathies for Padilla. But because the wrong being committed by those who have locked him up without charges, using him as a poster boy to promote fear and civil liberties erosions, strikes me as more significant than anything he ever did himself.

All those high-profile bloggers who indulge in Friday cat-blogging (or whatever) have inspired me to inflict this on you. It’s from my little would-be Photoshopper, William, who, during our recent Thanksgiving trip to the mountains saw fit to doctor Matthew McConaughey’s People magazine “Sexiest Man Alive” cover with the picture of the recently-departed “ugliest dog in the world” that he’d read about in the LA Times:

That’s my boy. :-)

When I first read the text of Randy Cunningham’s statement acknowledging having taken bribes and announcing his resignation from the House, I thought to myself man, I just love these speeches. I love it when a politician comes out and delivers his mea culpa, acknowledging what half of us knew perfectly well already, and shifting seamlessly from contrition to the tearful appeal for our sympathy. Here’s the text, as I read it at Talking Points Memo:

I am resigning from the House of Representatives because I’ve compromised the trust of my constituents.

When I announced several months ago that I would not seek re-election, I publicly declared my innocence because I was not strong enough to face the truth. So, I misled my family, staff, friends, colleagues, the public — even myself. For all of this, I am deeply sorry.

The truth is — I broke the law, concealed my conduct, and disgraced my high office. I know that I will forfeit my freedom, my reputation, my worldly possessions, and most importantly, the trust of my friends and family.

Some time ago, I asked my lawyers to inform the U.S. Attorney Carol Lam that I would like to plead guilty and begin serving a prison term. Today is the culmination of that process. I will continue to cooperate with the government’s ongoing investigation to the best of my ability.

In my life, I have known great joy and great sorrow. And now I know great shame. I learned in Viet Nam that the true measure of a man is how he responds to adversity. I cannot undo what I have done. But I can atone. I am now almost 65 years old and, as I enter the twilight of my life, I intend to use the remaining time that God grants me to make amends.

The first step in that journey is to admit fault and apologize. The next step is to face the consequences of my actions like a man. Today, I have taken the first step and, with God’s grace, I will soon take the second.

Thank you.

Cue the violins, right? I was reminded of Clinton’s speech coming clean about Monica (sort of) in the wake of the blue dress.

So now I’ve actually watched the video of Cunningham delivering the statement, courtesy of Crooks and Liars. And I don’t know. Call me a sucker, but I sure want to be taken in by it. I want to believe that that’s real contrition, that Cunningham means it, and isn’t just playing for sympathy with that “twilight of my life” stuff.

But then I think about Aaron Broussard, and his tears, and my heart hardens a bit.

I guess when you get right down to it I don’t know what’s real here. Except that the things Randy Cunningham said in the course of that statement were all starkly, verifiably true. What a moment it must be for a corrupt politician, someone who’s been sucking down millions of dollars in bribes and casually shelling out favorable treatment in response, to stand in front of those lenses and that microphone and actually speak the final, irrevocable truth.

Like I said, watching him, I want to believe. Does that make me a putz?

I thought this was kind of fun. From the Salt Lake Tribune: Hatch refers to Iraq as Vietnam.

“The Democratic Party seems to be taken over by the Michael Moore contingent in their attitude toward Vietnam, and they continually call for a withdrawal of troops at a time when we haven’t finished the job,” Hatch said on the network’s morning show. Hatch’s spokesman acknowledged the error, which was first reported on the American Prospect Web log.

The comedy works on at least a couple of different levels, doesn’t it?