Intelligence is sometimes overrated. Stupidity can be a great source of truth, not to mention (black) comedy. In that vein I give you the Michael Scott of US television “journalists”: Tucker Carlson.

You have to sit through a commercial to view the video at that site (which is why I didn’t embed the video here; I will not let my teency piece of the web be degraded in that particular way, at least not yet), but I think it’s actually worth sitting through, because Carlson exposes so clearly what is wrong with US journalism, and the response of The Scotsman reporter Gerri Peev (who did the interview with former Obama advisor Samantha Power where Power called Hillary Clinton “a monster”) is so awesome.

This is coming courtesy of Glenn Greenwald, who has lots more insightful things to say about the issue, including a round-up of several YouTube clips of non-US journalists asking questions of US politicians. All highly recommended.

To sum things up, here’s an excerpt from Greenwald’s piece at Salon (Tucker Carlson unintentionally reveals the role of the American press), which also requires viewing an ad (sigh), though at least it’s not a TV ad.

Credit to Tucker Carlson for being so (unintentionally) candid about the lowly, subservient role of the American press with regard to “the relationship between the press and the powerful.” A journalist should never do anything that “hurts” the powerful, otherwise the powerful won’t give access to the press any longer. Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle. Rarely does someone who plays the role of a “journalist” on TV so candidly describe their real function.

Glenn Greenwald has some extremely apt things to say about Ezra Levant’s interrogation by the Alberta Human Rights Commission in response to Levant, publisher of a Canadian right-wing magazine, choosing to publish cartoons depicting Mohamed, and thereby eliciting complaints from an Islamic group’s imam: The Noxious Fruits of Hate Speech Laws. Among those apt things is his description of the above video as “nothing short of stomach-turning.” There’s also this:

For those unable to think past the (well-deserved) animosity one has for the specific targets in question here, all one needs to do instead is imagine these proceedings directed at opinions and groups that one likes. If Muslim groups can trigger government investigations due to commentary they find offensive, so, too, can conservative Christian or right-wing Jewish groups, or conservative or neoconservative groups, or any other political faction seeking to restrict and punish speech it dislikes.

Sorry for not keeping my promise to follow up the original reader platform post with some debate posts in a timely manner.

Rather than open this up to a free-for-all, I’d like to start with a specific topic for which we had a pretty wide span of opinions and policy, but is perhaps more pressing even than the typical topics of argument here: trade. To summarize:

Here are a couple starter question for the candidates:

Steve, NorthernLite, and shcb, are you concerned that transnational corporations may be often be pursuing business strategies that optimize their profits at the expense of nation-specific interests, as typified by America’s drift toward a service/consumer economy and widening economic gap?

JAYSON and Knarlyknight, strong economic ties between nations may the be the most effective base on which to build lasting good diplomatic relations; wouldn’t a more nationalistic US economic policy further isolate the US on the world stage, and embolden competing economic unions in the EU and Asia?

I think ymatt will like this: Greeted With Flowers.

A fun item from the Dilbert Blog: On the Other Hand.

Dilbert’s creator offers his views on the Iranian president: A Feeling I’m Being Had.

As long as I’m annoying Janus with pinkyshow items, here’s another one that I really like.

While you’re over at GQ, do read the interview with Colin Powell as well. Consider it a double-feature of amazingly competent, realistic, and principled men. The Powell interview is so consistently good, I won’t even try to quote or summarize it. Go read.

I very much enjoyed this essay entitled The Power of (Right Wing) Myth, and its analogy between the episode of Star Trek involving a race of aliens that speak only in metaphor and the tendency of many (I won’t limit it to the right wing as the author does) to fall back to a defined set of references to 20th century history to explain, even justify, a lot of things our government has done more recently. You can see it in Bush’s bizarrely ironic comparison of the Iraq and Vietnam wars, and all the way down through the ranks of officials and commentators throwing Churchill and Imperial Japan and Hitler around, seemingly without considering them anything more than archetypes of “good” or “evil”.

I was one of the generation the author mentions, who grew up in a republican household, imprinted with the mythos of the triumphant Reagan throwing out the unmanly peanut farmer; I had a “Reagan ‘84″ bumper sticker next to pictures of the Transformers on my bedroom door in grade school. But why haven’t more people like me given up childish caricatures and tried to learn the real lessons of history? I mean I wouldn’t use an episode of Star Trek to justify a war…

I won’t say much about “Why Do They Hate Us?” — a really excellent piece by a man who is perhaps in the ideal position to answer that question — as I don’t want to bias your expectations. Just go read it, because sometimes the truth is simple.

W is the best de facto ally al Qaeda ever had.

I was struck by this part of Bush’s speech yesterday at the UN (President Bush addresses United Nations General Assembly):

The Security Council has approved a resolution that would transform the African Union force into a blue-helmeted force that is larger and more robust. To increase its strength and effectiveness, NATO nations should provide logistics and other support. The regime in Khartoum is stopping the deployment of this force. If the Sudanese government does not approve this peacekeeping force quickly, the United Nations must act. Your lives and the credibility of the United Nations is at stake.

Say what you will about Bush’s qualifications (or lack of them) for being President, he does have one thing that makes him truly remarkable. Call it “balls,” call it “chutzpah,” call it “a pathological refusal to acknowledge his own failings,” but whatever you call it, he’s got it in spades, and for him (Bush) to be willing to lecture them (the UN) on this particular subject (the need to maintain their credibility) is as clear an example of it as anything I’ve seen.

Bush’s whole presidency, his whole adult life, is a monument to the power of his faith in himself. And it’s not just faith, but a zealously held and aggressively asserted faith, a faith characterized by bluster and a willingness to get in the other guy’s face and loudly assert that he is so right, and who are you to question it?

That UN speech is just one example I saw today. There was also a Max Boot op-ed piece in the LA Times: The stubbornly hopeful president.

True to the pro-Bush leanings that got him into the small group of reporters meeting with Bush, Boot does his best to put a positive spin on what he saw. But he can’t help conveying a certain sense of wonder at just how disconnected from reality Bush has become:

His steadfastness in the face of adversity is admirable. So is his contempt for the conventional wisdom of the day. But there is a certain fatalism that can come from focusing so much on the long term. (Bush spoke repeatedly of how the world would look 50 years from now.) There is a danger that you will not make the necessary short-term adjustments to achieve results here and now.

Finishing up the trio of items that led me to post this morning was this one from BAGnewsNotes: Losing it?

Up to now, I’ve felt that Bush had the psychological strength to contain the anger and arrogance that underlies much of his behavior. Observing his press conference in the Rose Garden on Friday, however, I’m not so sure anymore. Bush pulled off the Presidency perfectly well when things were going his way and people deferred to him (or cowered). (I’m speaking mentally, not politically.)

With the teflon all but gone, however, he’s starting to come apart whenever challenged. You can hear it in his tone, and you can see it in his body language. Besides Friday, it was quite evident, for example, in the recent “walk and talk” interviews Bush gave to Brian Williams in New Orleans and to Charles Gibson in Atlanta.

As Bush heads into the lame-duck part of his presidency, confronted more and more by his failures and the evaporation of his political capital, his confidence in himself will continue to be challenged. From what I can see, though, this is one challenge (perhaps the only one) that he’ll have no trouble surmounting.

Mourad Benchellaili, writing in the NY Times: Detainees in despair:

I believe that a small number of the detainees at Guantanamo are guilty of criminal acts, but as analysis of the military’s documents on the prisoners has shown, there is no evidence that most of the 465 or so men there have committed hostile acts against the United States or its allies. Even so, what I heard so many times resounding from cage to cage, what I said myself so many times in my moments of complete despondency, was not, “Free us, we are innocent!” but “Judge us for whatever we’ve done!” There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty.

Mark Kleiman has some choice comments on what the right-wing blogosphere has to say about Mary McCarthy’s firing, and the failure of the Bush team to try to prosecute her for allegedly leaking information about the CIA’s “black” sites in Europe to Dana Priest of the Washington Post: Secret prisons: Red Blogistan de-compensates.

Now that the leaker of the information has been unmasked and fired, the same folks are gleeful about the fact that she turns out to have been a Democrat. And they’re out for blood: Why, they demand, was she fired rather than being prosecuted? (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds. If Glenn disagrees, he doesn’t say so.)

Duhhhhh… wait, don’t tell me … ummmm …. because she’d assert a “public interest” defense, which would mean putting the story back on the front pages for weeks, and risk having the facts about what’s been going on in those dungeons revealed in open court? Just a guess.

Anyway, she’d probably get off. I’d be surprised if even this Supreme Court would hold as a matter of law that revealing criminal activity is a crime if the activity in question is labeled “classified.”

There’s more, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of it.

Interesting piece from the NYT about James E. Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, who’s crying foul about agency higher-ups trying to keep him from spreading the word about what the data show about global warming: Climate expert says NASA tried to silence him.

Interesting write-up from John Quiggan at Crooked Timber: The end of the global warming debate. I especially liked this part:

Finally, the evidence has mounted up that, with a handful of exceptions, “sceptics” are not, as they claim, fearless seekers after scientific truth, but ideological partisans and paid advocates, presenting dishonest arguments for a predetermined party-line conclusion. Even three years ago, sites like Tech Central Station, and writers like Ross McKitrick were taken seriously by many. Now, anyone with access to Google can discover that they have no credibility. Chris Mooney’s Republican War on Science which I plan to review soon, gives chapter and verse and the whole network of thinktanks, politicians and tame scientists who have popularised GW contrarianism, Intelligent Design and so on.

There’s a process to doing good science, and it’s very much not the same thing as selling your a priori opinions as Truth. As with the evolution debate that took place in the 1800s, the scientific community has looked at the evidence and reached a consensus. Those who want to continue arguing that particular issue aren’t doing science.

More reading for those whose outrage-o-meter isn’t pegged yet. From a special edition of The Nation:

• The Editors: Conspiracy to torture.
• Anthony Lewis: The torture administration.
• Sarah Goldstein: Wrongly held, never tried, fighting back.
• Karen J. Greenberg: Secrets and lies.

All highly recommended.

As depressing an exercise as it is to parse the Bush administration’s words on state-sponsored torture (and I continue to boggle at the fact that the “state” in that phrase actually refers to the US), we really have no choice but to do so. The Europeans have come to that realization, and it’s high time that the holdouts in this country did, too.

Re: those skeptical Europeans, from the NY Times’ Richard Bernstein: Skepticism seems to erode Europeans’ faith in Rice.

“It’s clear that the text of the speech was drafted by lawyers with the intention of misleading an audience,” Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative member of Parliament, said in an interview. Mr. Tyrie is chairman of a recently formed nonpartisan committee that plans to investigate claims that the British government has tacitly condoned torture by allowing the United States to use its airspace to transport terrorist suspects to countries where they are subsequently tortured.

Parsing through the speech, Mr. Tyrie pointed out example after example where, he said, Ms. Rice was using surgically precise language to obfuscate and distract. By asserting, for instance, that the United States does not send suspects to countries where they “will be” tortured, Ms. Rice is protecting herself, Mr. Tyrie said, leaving open the possibility that they “may be” tortured in those countries.

Others pointed out that the Bush administration’s definition of torture did not include practices like water-boarding - in which prisoners are strapped to a board and made to believe they are about to be drowned - that violate provisions of the international Convention Against Torture.

Andrew Mullin, a Labor member of Parliament, said he had found Ms. Rice’s assertions “wholly incredible.” He agreed with Mr. Tyrie that Ms. Rice’s statement had been “carefully lawyered,” adding: “It is a matter of record that people have been kidnapped and have been handed over to people who have tortured them. I think their experience has to be matched against the particular form of language the secretary of state is using.”

I weep for my country.

Dana Priest in the Washington Post: Wrongful imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA mistake.

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country’s interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the CIA’s Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.

Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.

[snip]

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA’s own covert prisons — referred to in classified documents as “black sites,” which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

[snip]

Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was cold, dirty and in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: “You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know.”

Masri was guarded during the day by Afghans, he said. At night, men who sounded as if they spoke American-accented English showed up for the interrogation. Sometimes a man he believed was a doctor in a mask came to take photos, draw blood and collect a urine sample.

Back at the CTC, Masri’s passport was given to the Office of Technical Services to analyze. By March, OTS had concluded the passport was genuine. The CIA had imprisoned the wrong man.

At the CIA, the question was: Now what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and release him. “There wouldn’t be a trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No one would believe him,” one former official said. “There would be a bump in the press, but then it would be over.”

Once the mistake reached Tenet, he laid out the options to his counterparts, including the idea of not telling the Germans. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage argued they had to be told, a position Tenet took, according to one former intelligence official.

“You couldn’t have the president lying to the German chancellor” should the issue come up, a government official involved in the matter said.

Senior State Department officials decided to approach Interior Minister Schily, who had been a steadfast Bush supporter even when differences over the Iraq war strained ties between the two countries. Ambassador Coats had excellent rapport with Schily.

The CIA argued for minimal disclosure of information. The State Department insisted on a truthful, complete statement. The two agencies quibbled over whether it should include an apology, according to officials.

[snip]

Masri can find few words to explain his ordeal. “I have very bad feelings” about the United States, he said. “I think it’s just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws.”

Yeah, I’d say that pretty much sums it up. George Bush: The president who destroyed the United States.

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’m sure most of us in the Bush-hater community remember the interview that Irish reporter Carole Coleman did with Bush last year. Well, now she’s publishing a book, and an excerpt from it gives more details about the circumstances surrounding the interview: Ireland: I wanted to slap him.

I find myself forgetting how petty the current occupants of the White House are, how much their sense of their mission is limited to “maintaining the illusion that George Bush is qualified to be president,” and then I read something like this.

No, not that politically motivated outing of a national security asset, a different politically motivated outing of a national security asset. With the Bush White House, it’s hard to keep track, I realize, but Juan Cole has the details: The outing of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan: State of play.

I actually did not begin by being critical of the Ridge announcement. I remember being interviewed by a print reporter on August 3 or so, and declining to dismiss the press conference as pure politics. I didn’t say anything negative about it at my weblog at the time. What impelled me to begin following the story and to speak out about it was the Reuter report of August 6, which made the case that the Bush administration had leaked Khan’s name as part of its public relations use of terrorism. That allegation seems to have been incorrect in its specifics.

The Reuters story still does seem to me to hold water, however, at a more general level. After understanding that Ridge set in train the events that led to Khan’s outing, I think it was a huge mistake. It would have been better to keep quiet and use Khan to get more and more of al-Qaeda, maybe even Bin Laden himself. I do not know if the Bush administration made the announcement to take the spotlight off the Kerry campaign right after the Democratic National Convention, but Paul Krugman and others have persuasively argued that the Bush administration does time such announcements for political purposes. The British security officials have the better instincts here.

Here are a few comments that tie in yesterday’s bombings in London with the larger issue of al Qaeda-sponsored terror. From Juan Cole: Implications of London bombing. And from David Sirota: Iraq, London & America’s homeland insecurity.

The idea that, because our troops are in Iraq, terrorists will only attack us there and not “in the streets of our own cities” is, first and foremost, an insult to our troops because it treats them as if their entire mission is to serve as bait for terrorists. That’s not what our troops – or America – was told this was all about.

Secondly, are we really supposed to believe the same terrorists who masterminded the 9/11 attack can’t walk and chew gum at the same time? I mean, maybe George W. Bush and the dolts around him are so intellectually impaired they can’t do two things at once – but Al Qaeda sure can, and any sentiment to the contrary is idiotic.

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.

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.

I found this interview with British historian Frederick Taylor, author of a new book on the firebombing of Dresden, really interesting: Dresden bombing is to be regretted enormously.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Some critics have accused you of writing a justification of the bombing of the city of Dresden. Is this accusation misplaced?

Taylor: Yes it is. Some people mistake the attempt at rational analysis of a historical event for a celebration of it. My book attempts to be distanced and rational and where possible I try to separate the myths and legends from the realities. I personally find the attack on Dresden horrific. It was overdone, it was excessive and is to be regretted enormously. But there is no reason to pretend that it was completely irrational on the part of the Allies. Dresden had war industries and was a major transportation hub. As soon as you start explaining the reasons for the attack, though, people think you are justifying it.

So, it’s now going on five days since the big Newsweek-Koran story became big, and there has certainly been a great deal written about it, especially by poltiically conservative webloggers, if my smallish sample is any indication. But at least in that sample, I haven’t seen anything that sounds more intelligent to me than these two items, both of which appeared way back on Monday: From Tim Burke of Easily Distracted: “Demonstrably false”. And from Juan Cole of Informed Comment: Guantanamo Controversies: The Bible and the Koran.

This won’t be news to those with a functioning bullshit detector (since they’ll know this already), and those who lack one aren’t likely to benefit much either (since they’ll probably persist in ignoring the evidence now, just as they’ve done all along), but here’s some pretty ironclad proof that Bush was not misled by bad intelligence on Iraq WMD, but instead cooked the intelligence books intentionally to justify an a priori decision to invade. From London’s Sunday Times: The secret Downing Street memo.

Some interesting quotes from the memo, which summarized a Prime Minister’s meeting on Iraq held July 23, 2002:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

And later:

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned Administration gadfly, has a suitably snarky take on the memo: Proof Bush fixed the facts.

There will be a socialization class in room 700 for citizens cited for deviations 23-A and 96-A per subchapter six of the Permanent Emergency Code…

Something worth a good deal of thought, I think, is how we of the First World plan on coping with the upcoming end of our collective petrochemical binge. See, for example, this Rolling Stone article by James Howard Kunstler: The long emergency.

From Davids Medienkritik comes this collection of stereotypical depictions of Americans, as presented in Germany’s Stern magazine: USA: The Divided Land.

My favorite image is this one:

The caption translates as: “‘If you forget about the liberal crazies on the east and west coasts, we live in a really nice country.’ —Ronald Wilhelm, President of the lawn bowling club, Sun City, Florida.”

I like that image for a personal reason: Thirty-one years ago, when I was 12, my dad was transitioning between wives #2 and #3, and simultaneously being re-deployed to Washington D.C. by his overlords in the military-industrial complex. As part of the attendant reshuffling I was sent to live with my grandparents in Sun City Center, FL, and I spent most of the next 6 months as that retirement community’s youngest citizen, unofficial mascot, and general pain in the ass. Also, I did a lot of lawn bowling, and I did it on that very field. Seeing that image brings back memories of my childhood.

I’m really glad that Jeanne of Body and Soul takes the time to think about these things, and comment on them publicly in the honest way she does: Lasciate ogni speranza.

Among the questions raised by the Bush team’s casual attitude toward human rights is this one, voiced by an ex-CIA official, quoted in Newsweek, then by Jeanne, and now by me:

“Where’s the off button?” says one retired CIA official. “They asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for [interrogation] guidance. The answer was, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’ Now we don’t know what to do with these guys. People keep saying, ‘We’re not going to shoot them’.”

Something to think about.

My mother’s family is from Maryland; a long line of us from that side of the family have lived and plied our trades along the shores of Chesapeake Bay. So even though I’ve lived my own life a continent away, I was interested by this: An anthropocentric, Hobbesian, pessimistic environmentalist looks at the Chesapeake Bay: An interview with author Howard Ernst.

Side note: I feel like I need a new topic icon for “environmental” topics, generally. This story could arguably have been filed under “Animals,” “USA,” “Science,” or “The World” (the topic I actually used), but it doesn’t really fall squarely into any of them.

A nice commentary by The New Republic’s Peter Beinert on what US conservatives’ reaction to the tsunami reveals about their view of the world: Distant shores.

To win over global hearts and minds, the United States must show Muslims, and others, that we are benevolent–that we want a better world for them; that we are not just in it for empire and oil. That means financial generosity–giving money for economic and social development rather than only military assistance. But it also means what might be called intellectual generosity–a genuine curiosity about the rest of the world, even when our safety is not directly threatened, even when the dramas aren’t primarily about us.

It is that curiosity that is so profoundly absent from Bush, who tries to see as little as possible of the countries he visits.

Beinert pretty much nails it. The campaign to convince the world of US benevolence is doomed, at least as long as the current team is responsible for US foreign policy, because the current team simply doesn’t do benevolence. Bush doesn’t care, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

A greet speech by journalist Bill Moyers, on the dangers of letting theology and ideology trump reason in our collective attitude toward the environment: Battlefield Earth.

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

A brief reading for the season, courtesy of Dickens, who I’m told undertook A Christmas Carol mainly for the money, being in desperate need of cash in the fall of 1843. But then, like all good obsessives, he got caught up in the venture, and the rest is history. Anyway:

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

‘Spirit, are they yours?’ Scrooge could say no more.

‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And abide the end!’

Fun cartoon in the Schoolhouse Rock tradition: Pirates & Emperors.

Jeanne of Body and Soul does a sobering compare-and-contrast: Putin and Bush.

You know how callous Americans can be about tragedy in other parts of the world? Ho, hum; another 17 million dead in flooding in Bangladesh. Well, here’s the world holding up a mirror to that behavior: AP Photo/Peter Cosgrove.

From some web page in a language I can’t understand, a collection of really cool-looking aerial photographs: Link.

Update: Per commenter Daniel, these images are actually the work of French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Many more images, and different-sized versions, are available from Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth from above site.

Joshua Micah Marshall is tanned, rested, and ready to get back in the blogging swing of things after a brief hiatus. And he’s running quite the teaser today. After referring to the story in today’s Financial Times that purports to reveal important details about where the forged Niger yellowcake documents at the heart of the “16 words” scandal came from (By the time you read this…), he says this:

That’s what the FT says.

I hear something different.

In fact, I know something different.

My colleagues and I have reported on this matter extensively, spoken to key players involved in the drama, and put together a detailed picture of what happened. And that picture looks remarkably different from this account which is out today — specifically on the matter of the origins of those forged documents and who was involved.

I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to say more than that. And at some later point in some later post I will do my best to explain the hows and whys of why I can’t. But, for the moment, I can’t.

So, my take on this is that he’s working on some big article for the actual media, as opposed to this silly bloggy hobby he dabbles in on the side, and we all have to wait for said real article to appear to learn the point of all this coy hinting.

If Marshall were a Bush supporter offering tidbits about the latest smoking-gun evidence that Iraq had WMDs or al Qaeda had close operational ties with Saddam, I’d be making exaggerated wanking motions right now. But he’s not. As far as my obsessive following of his commentary over the last year or so tells me, he doesn’t pull this sort of thing without having the actual goods to back it up. So I’m (tentatively) hopeful that that’s the case here. And I’m looking forward to having that view confirmed or disconfirmed in the days ahead.

Security expert Bruce Schneier has some really interesting analysis of the story about how our boy Ahmed Chalabi was caught telling the Iranians we had broken their intelligence code–because the Iranians used the compromised code to communicate the fact that he’d done so: Breaking Iranian codes.

There’s a giddy Pynchon-esque recursiveness to the story, and to the whole notion of compromising the other side’s secrets, but then pretending that you haven’t in order to keep the other side from knowing that you’ve done so. An excerpt:

If the Iranians knew that the U.S. knew, why didn’t they pretend not to know and feed the U.S. false information? Or maybe they’ve been doing that for years, and the U.S. finally figured out that the Iranians knew. Maybe the U.S. knew that the Iranians knew, and are using the fact to discredit Chalabi.

The really weird twist to this story is that the U.S. has already been accused of doing that to Iran. In 1992, Iran arrested Hans Buehler, a Crypto AG employee, on suspicion that Crypto AG had installed back doors in the encryption machines it sold to Iran — at the request of the NSA. He proclaimed his innocence through repeated interrogations, and was finally released nine months later in 1993 when Crypto AG paid a million dollars for his freedom — then promptly fired him and billed him for the release money. At this point Buehler started asking inconvenient questions about the relationship between Crypto AG and the NSA.

So maybe Chalabi’s information is from 1992, and the Iranians changed their encryption machines a decade ago.

Or maybe the NSA never broke the Iranian intelligence code, and this is all one huge bluff.

In this shadowy world of cat-and-mouse, it’s hard to be sure of anything.

Josh Micah Marshall is one of my favorite webloggers. Sometimes I almost forget that he’s also a real journalist with a PhD in history. Then something like this new article he’s written for The Atlantic Monthly comes along: Kerry Faces the World.

Wow. There are no pretty pictures, but the analysis is razor-sharp. Marshall looks at Kerry’s advisors, a