Magpie

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

No future.

And I thought I was pessimistic about the state of the US. I've got nothing on Chris Floyd, who's already willing to write an obituary for the American republic:

The annus horribilis of 2007 has turned out to be a year of triumph for the Bush Faction -- the hit men who delivered the coup de grâce to the long-moribund Republic. Bush was written off as a lame duck after the Democrat's November 2006 election "triumph" (in fact, the narrowest of victories eked out despite an orgy of cheating and fixing by the losers), and the subsequent salvo of Establishment consensus from the Iraq Study Group, advocating a de-escalation of the war in Iraq. Then came a series of scandals, investigations, high-profile resignations, even the criminal conviction of a top White House official. But despite all this -- and abysmal poll ratings as well -- over the past eight months Bush and his coupsters have seen every single element of their violent tyranny confirmed, countenanced and extended.

he war which we were told the Democrats and ISG consensus would end or wind down has of course been escalated to its greatest level yet -- more troops, more airstrikes, more mercenaries, more Iraqi captives swelling the mammoth prison camps of the occupying power, more instability destroying the very fabric of Iraqi society. The patently illegal surveillance programs of the authoritarian regime have now been codified into law by the Democratic Congress, which has also let stand the evisceration of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, and a raft of other liberty-stripping laws, rules, regulations and executive orders. Bush's self-proclaimed arbitrary power to seize American citizens (and others) without charge and hold them indefinitely -- even kill them -- has likewise been unchallenged by the legislators. Bush has brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas -- and even arbitrarily stripped the Justice Department of the power to enforce them -- to no other reaction than a stern promise from Democratic leaders to "look further into this matter." His spokesmen -- and his "signing statements" -- now openly proclaim his utter disdain for representative government, and assert at every turn his sovereign right to "interpret" -- or ignore -- legislation as he wishes. He retains the right to "interpret" just which interrogation techniques are classified as torture and which are not, while his concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and his secret CIA prisons -- where those "strenuous" techniques are practiced -- remain open. His increasingly brazen drive to war with Iran has already been endorsed unanimously by the Senate and overwhelmingly by the House, both of which have embraced the specious casus belli concocted by the Bush Regime. And to come full circle, Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin are now praising the "military success" of the Iraq escalation -- despite the evident failure of its stated goals by every single measure, including troop deaths, civilian deaths, security, infrastructure, political cohesion and regional stability. This emerging "bipartisan consensus" on the military situation in Iraq (or rather, this utter fantasy concealing a rapidly deteriorating reality) makes it certain that the September "progress report" will be greeted as a justification for continuing the "surge" in one form or another.

It is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement, one of the greatest political feats ever. Despite Bush's standing as one of the most despised presidents in American history, despite a Congress in control of the opposition party, despite a solid majority opposed to his policies and his war, despite an Administration riddled with scandal and crime, despite the glaring rot in the nation's infrastructure and the callous abandonment of one of the nation's major cities to natural disaster and crony greed -- despite all of this, and much more that would have brought down or mortally wounded any government in a democratic country, the Bush Administration is now in a far stronger position than it was a year ago.

How can this be? The answer is simple: the United States is no longer a democratic country, or even a degraded semblance of one.

I know I say this a lot, but ... it's really worth your time to go read the entire post.

My view of our current political situation in the US isn't quite as dark as Floyd's, but he makes a very persuasive argument about the degree of danger to democracy that Dubya, his minions, and his Democratic enablers represent. Dismissing his argument as paranoia only makes it more certain that the tombstone will soon be placed over the grave of the long democratic experiment in the US.

Via The Sideshow.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Dubya, Fascism, Iran, Iraq, Paranoia, Telling It Like It Is

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:20 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, August 30, 2007

This could be tinfoil hat stuff ...

... or it might be that the much-rumored attack on Iran may be coming up Real Soon Now.

Here's part of a post by Barnett Rubin at Informed Comment Global Affairs:

Today I received a message from a friend who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient. According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way:
They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

Of course I cannot verify this report. But besides all the other pieces of information about this circulating, I heard last week from a former U.S. government contractor. According to this friend, someone in the Department of Defense called, asking for cost estimates for a model for reconstruction in Asia. The former contractor finally concluded that the model was intended for Iran. This anecdote is also inconclusive, but it is consistent with the depth of planning that went into the reconstruction effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Emphasis added]

You should really read the whole post, in which Rubin (a well known expert on Afghanistan and Central Asia) draws some scary comparisons between what happened in the weeks ahead of Dubya's attack on Iraq, and the stuff that's going on now.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Cheney, Dubya, Iran, Paranoia

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:26 PM | Get permalink

Saturday, August 25, 2007

I'd walk away from a nut case, too.

In the current issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has an interesting piece on the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy and how France is changing under his presidency. Buried at the end of the article is what I'd argue is the most important part of Gopnik's whole piece—for those of us who live in the US, anyway:

The catastrophe in Iraq has had an unlooked-for effect: not to stoke anti-Americanism in a new generation but to make America seem almost marginal. For almost two hundred years, Americanization in Europe has been synonymous with modernization—that’s why the Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor, as a gift of the Third French Republic, the fraught state that appeared after Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire failed. It was a gift not from a complacent old world to a nascent new one but from a newborn republic to one that, after its civil war, was firm and coherent. The point wasn’t that Europe would not abandon us; it was that we would not abandon old Europe to the despots.

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from. [Emphasis added]

Yet another thing we have Dubya's administration to thank for: Going from being the so-called world's only superpower to a new life as the crazy guy on the international block in only six years.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Dubya, France, Iraq

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:13 PM | Get permalink

Friday, August 24, 2007

If you're going to lie about something ...

You should try to make your lie believable.

This is especially true if you're a public official, because some damned blogger is going to fact-check you. (This used to be the job of the 'mainstream' press, but you know how that's turned out.)

Today's case in point involves US director of national intelligence Mike McConnell. In an interview [transcript here] with the El Paso Times earlier this week, McConnell claimed that the requirement that spy agencies get a FISA court warrant to conduct a foreign intelligence wiretap is making it hard for the nation's spy agencies to fight terrorism:

Q: Can't you get the warrant after the fact?

A: The issue is volume and time. Think about foreign intelligence.... My argument was that the intelligence community should not be restricted when we are conducting foreign surveillance against a foreigner in a foreign country, just by dint of the fact that it happened to touch a wire. We haven't done that in wireless for years.

Q: So you end up with people tied up doing paperwork?

A: It takes about 200 man hours to do one telephone number. Think about it from the judges standpoint. Well, is this foreign intelligence? Well how do you know it's foreign intelligence? Well what does Abdul calling Mohammed mean, and how do I interpret that? So, it's a very complex process, so now, I've got people speaking Urdu and Farsi and, you know, whatever, Arabic, pull them off the line have them go through this process to justify what it is they know and why and so on. And now you've got to write it all up and it goes through the signature process, take it through (the Justice Department), and take it down to the FISA court. So all that process is about 200 man hours for one number. We're going backwards, we couldn't keep up.

200 hours of paperwork? That sounds like a lot of time to this magpie. It also sounded like a lot to Ryan Singel at Threat Level, and he actually did the numbers on McConnell's claim:

In 2006, the government filed 2,181 such applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court. The court approved 2,176....

That means government employees spent 436,200 hours writing out foreign intelligence wiretaps in 2006. That's 53,275 workdays.

Let's assume dedicated government employees work 40 hours a week with two weeks off a year. That means there were 218 government employees with top secret clearances sitting in rooms, writing only FISA warrants.

Leaving aside the question of whether it really takes 200 hours to prepare a FISA warrant, I'd suggest that all the time spent putting together the supporting info for a warrant is a good thing (and that most of the 200 hours McConnell claims is spent doing stuff that would need to be done anyway). Wouldn't you agree that the fact that intelligence agents (in McConnell's words) 'go through this process to justify what it is they know and why and so on'—basically, forcing them to make a good case for why a wiretap is needed— might help prospective wiretappers to better focus on what's really important once the FISA warrant lets them start eavesdropping?

Just asking.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Big fat liars, FISA, Wiretapping

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:20 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, August 23, 2007

I think the press is finally noticing ...

... that Dubya is pulling reasons for staying in Iraq out of his butt.

Dubya's speech to the VFW yesterday (see this earlier post) seems to have finally pushed a number of US reporters over the edge. Good examples are this video clip featuring MSNBC's David Shuster [WMV file, thanks to Crooks and Liars], and this commentary by Joseph Galloway, McClatchy's senior military correspondent:

This week we saw two President Bushes in action. In a news conference in Canada, he acknowledged that while security has improved somewhat thanks to the surge, the Iraqis have made little progress toward meeting the benchmarks. Two days later, speaking at the National VFW convention in Kansas City, the president spoke at length about the need to stay the course in Iraq indefinitely.

He pleaded for the patience he said is needed to win in Iraq, and surprisingly put forward the example of the Vietnam War and our withdrawal from there after 10 years and 58,249 dead American troops as a reason why we must stick to our guns in Iraq.

He trotted out his administration's now shopworn fear tactics, arguing that persisting in this senseless war will prevent a massacre of millions in Iraq and attacks on us at home by a reinvigorated al Qaida.

The more things change in this administration, the more they stay the same. [Emphasis added]

In fairness, though, I should point out that McClatchy (and its previous incarnation as Knight Ridder) has been almost the only mainstream US news organization that's been critical of Dubya's Iraq adventure right from the start.

Via McClatchy Washington Bureau.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Big fat idiots, Dubya, Iraq, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Iraqi insurgents = Al-Qaeda = Khmer Rouge.

To most people, the logical leaps needed to make that equation would be impossible, but nothing is too difficult for our Dear Leader.

In a speech given to members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars earlier today in Kansas City, Dubya unloaded some of the most preposterous misunderstandings (and outright lies) about the world's history since the Second World War that this magpie has had the misfortune to hear. For example, the prez said that the US was responsible for the decolonization of Asia and after 1945. (It wasn't.) He likened the 'war on terror' to the war against Japan and the Korean war. (As a historian, I can't think of any significant similarities.) And he attributed the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia to the fact that the US withdrew its troops from Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. (In fact, the success of the Khmer Rouge was due to a CIA-sponsored coup that replaced a neutralist government with one more sympathetic to US war aims in Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge wouldn't have had a chance without a US-backed enemy to fight against.)

However, all that pseudo-history pales when compared to Dubya's main contention: If the US withdraws from Iraq, Al-Qaeda will not only wreak destruction on the Iraqi people like that suffered by Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge years, but Osama bin Laden will bring a similar reign of terror here to the US.

Bin Laden has declared that "the war [in Iraq] is for you [the US] or us to win. If we win it, it means your disgrace and defeat forever." Iraq is one of several fronts in the war on terror -- but it's the central front -- it's the central front for the enemy that attacked us and wants to attack us again. And it's the central front for the United States and to withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating.

If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities. Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home. And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America.

This, of course, completely ignores the facts that 1) there was no al-Qaeda threat in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion; 2) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; and 3) the US occupation of Iraq is what has turned that country into a terrorist magnet and training ground. But hey, facts never get in Dubya's way when he's trying to support some stupid policy that he's already committed himself to.

If you have a strong stomach, I strongly suggest reading Dubya's whole speech. I'm sure the GOP is already sending out talking points based on what he said, so you might as well get a good handle on the arguments for the occupation that the 30-percenters will be tossing at you between now and when the administration has to make its Iraq progress report to Congress next month.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', al-Qaeda, Dubya, Ignorance, Occupation, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:05 AM | Get permalink

Friday, August 17, 2007

Can I see your papers, please?

Guess what? It looks like Dubya's administration is parlaying the Real ID Act and its new passport requirements into a de facto internal passport that will have to be used by many US citizens.

Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.

The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008. The law sets baseline criteria for how driver's licenses will be issued and what information they must contain....

The cards would be mandatory for all "federal purposes," which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don't comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.

I guess those wild-eyed privacy fanatics who opposed the Real ID Act weren't so paranoid about the feds' real intent, were they?

Via CNN.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Civil liberties, Fascism, Privacy, Real ID, Surveillance

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:10 PM | Get permalink

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The sun won't be setting on warrantless wiretapping any time soon.

Yeah, I know that the 'Protect America Act' (PAA) passed by Congress a few days ago contains a provision that sunsets the law in six months. Unfortunately, the law was crafted by the White House, and you know they'd never give up the right to spy on ~~victims~~ citizens so easily.

Constitutional scholar Marty Lederman points out a little-noticed provision of the law that shouldn't surprise any of us:

Although section 6(c) provides that the operative provisions of the Act "shall cease to have effect 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act," i.e., on February 1, 2008, there is an express exception in section 6(d), which reads as follows:
AUTHORIZATIONS IN EFFECT.—Authorizations for the acquisition of foreign intelligence information pursuant to the amendments made by this Act, and directives issued pursuant to such authorizations, shall remain in effect until their expiration. Such acquisitions shall be governed by the applicable provisions of such amendments and shall not be deemed to constitute electronic surveillance as that term is defined in section 101(f) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801(f)).

Thus, "acquisitions" authorized by Attorney General Gonzales will be permissible for one year, even if that period extends beyond the ostensible February 1, 2008 sunset date. I think it's fair to assume that the Attorney General will authorize a system of such acquisitions on or close to February 1, 2008, which will mean that the warrantless surveillance can continue until . . . February 1, 2009, or twelve days after the next President is sworn in.

That's right. Dubya and Attorney General Gonzales didn't get a six-month window in which to spy on everyone and everything—the PAA gives them 18 months. If you (like this mapgie) was worried about all the backdoors that the feds could order installed over the next six months at internet providers, telecommunications networks, and search engines, just think about the permanent spying infrastructure that Dubya's regime will be able to get up and running in 18 months.

And while Congress could decide to pass a law preventing Gonzales from extending warrantless wiretapping until 2009, the cowardice that some Democrats showed when they aided the passage of the 'Protect America Act' speaks volumes about the likelihood that Congress will suddenly grow a spine and start protecting the Constitution.

Via Balkinization.

Labels: 'Protect America' Act, 'War on Terrorism', Al Gonzales, Dubya, Internet, Police state, Spying, Surveillance

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:38 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Another lesson from the Tom Tancredo School of Foreign Policy.

Here's the right-wing GOP member of Congress from Colorado on how to keep the US safe from Islamic terrorists with nuclear weapons:

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," the GOP presidential candidate said. "That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent or you will find an attack. There is no other way around it. There have to be negative consequences for the actions they take. That's the most negative I can think of."

And remember, folks: Rep. Tancredo is what passes for a credible Republican presidential candidate these days. Kinda makes Rudy Giuliani look like a moderate, doesn't he?

Via Iowa Politics.com.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', 2008 Election, Politics, Right-wing idiocy, Tom Tancredo

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:41 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

15,000 new pairs of eyes.

All of them spying on you and me on behalf of Alberto Gonzales and Dubya.

The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.

According to a recent unclassified report to Congress, the FBI expects its informants to provide secrets about possible terrorists and foreign spies, although some may also be expected to aid with criminal investigations.... The FBI did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

The FBI said the push was driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush ordering the bureau to improve its counterterrorism efforts by boosting its human intelligence capabilities.

The aggressive push for more secret informants appears to be part of a new effort to grow its intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Other recent proposals include expanding its collection and analysis of data on U.S. persons, retaining years' worth of Americans' phone records and even increasing so-called "black bag" secret entry operations.

To handle the increase in so-called human sources, the FBI also plans to overhaul its database system, so it can manage records and verify the accuracy of information from "more than 15,000" informants ...

Via The Blotter.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Civil liberties, Spying, Surveillance

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:29 PM | Get permalink

Come visit the USA!

On second thought, maybe you should forget about it.

Via The Sideshow.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Air travel, Police state, Tourism

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:35 PM | Get permalink

Friday, July 20, 2007

Are you scared yet?

Remember that executive order about "Continuity of Government" that Dubya issued back in May? The one that put the prez in charge of running the government after a massive terrorist attack or other major disaster? And which gave the prez the authority to determine just what constitutes a major disaster?

If you're like this magpie, that executive order made you a bit nervous about the future of constitutional government in the US, and just a bit suspicious about the prez's motives. And I'll bet you weren't all that reassured when 'common wisdom' said that Dubya's executive order was just a routine housekeeping measure.

Here in Oregon, some people were sufficiently worried about the executive order that they asked US representative Peter DeFazio to look into whether anything sinister was lurking in order's classified portions, which describe in detail how the executive branch would run the government after a major disaster. DeFazio asked the White House to have those classified portions delivered for viewing in a special secured room at the Capitol building — a request that he's definitely entitled to make as a member of the House's Homeland Security Committee. After initially giving the nod to DeFazio's request, something — no one knows what — changed at the White House, and permission to see the classified documents was withdrawn.

A good case could be made that the White House's refusal of DeFazio's request is just another example of the Dubya/Cheney regime's penchant for secrecy. Or maybe it's just another case of the prez giving Congress the finger. But maybe the reason that the White House doesn't want these documents to be seen by anyone outside the prez's immediate circle is that there is something sinister hidden in Dubya's executive order.

Indulge this magpie's paranoia for a moment and consider: Dubya's domestic political problems continue to get worse and his popularity is showing signs of dropping below Nixonian levels. The Iraq occupation is not going well. Congress is beginning to shine some light on the dark and illegal deeds that have taken place under Dubya and Cheney's watch. Almost half the country supports the impeachment of Dubya, and even more support impeaching Cheney.

In the midst of this political environment, consider the timing of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff's recent 'gut feeling' that the US is in danger of a terrorist attack this summer. And, finally, reconsider the fact that the White House doesn't want a member of Congress to see documents that explain how a president — Dubya, for example — will run the goverment in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

Taking all of that into account, don't the phrases 'suspending the constitution' and 'executive coup d'etat' sound less like stuff that belongs only in the ramblings of paranoid conspiracy theorists and a bit more like possibilities that we all should be concerned about?

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Dubya, Fascism, Paranoia, Politics, Presidency, White House

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:54 PM | Get permalink

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Those 'coincidences' just keep rolling along.

Dubya's administration is beset by multiple scandals. Congress is refusing to write the prez a blank check for the Iraq occupation. And Dubya's approval ratings have dropped into the high 20s, according to some polls.

Must be time for a terrorism scare, yes?

We've already had the arrests in New Jersey for an alleged plan to attack US soldiers at Ft. Dix. Now there's a terror alert out for possible attacks against US troops in Germany.

As usual, I'm sure there's no connection between the administration's problems and the fortuitous appearance of new terrorist threats.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism'

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:01 PM | Get permalink

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Making sure the terrorists don't win, Spanish style.

While Dubya's administration does its best to ensure that terrorism suspects are denied legal protections and to keep the press away from terrorism trials, the Spanish government is not only trying the accused Madrid train bombers in public, but is broadcasting that trial live on television and on the Internet.

The trial, held in a converted brick building on the grounds of a former exhibition center, is a judicial experiment that is being observed around the globe. A Web site allows viewers to witness, from anywhere in the world, how a Spanish court is dealing with a particularly brutal attack in the global jihad. By going to www.datadiar.tv, anyone can experience how the suspects are seeking to justify their actions and how their attorneys are defending them....

The image that [video technician] Roberto Gallego selects on his mixing console is first sent to TVE, the Spanish state television network, which then distributes the signal to anyone interested in a direct feed. That amounts to millions of curious onlookers throughout Spain. In addition to a few regional and private broadcasters, Datadiar, a specialized Internet portal for the legal profession, is streaming the entire terrorism trial. Internet users elsewhere, including the United States, Peru, Germany and even Pakistan, are viewing the direct transmission -- and by last week the site had already tracked 6 million page impressions.

The virtual audience is there when Rabei Osman Ahmed, nicknamed "Mohammed the Egyptian," the attackers' suspected ideologue, operates his remote control for Arab translation and insists: "I am completely innocent." They can also listen to the heart-wrenching stories of the survivors of the attack. For example, they can hear the testimony of a 21-year-old Spaniard who suffered three episodes of cerebral apoplexy and lost his hearing: "I saw people running around. It was like a dance of sleepwalkers."

I know which way of dealing with terrorism makes me feel more confident that justice is being done. Not to mention confident that the country involved isn't tossing out the rule of law in a mindless pursuit of often-imagined enemies.

Via Spiegel.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Spain, Trials

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:43 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Is Dubya brilliant or what?

The prez, from a speech about Iraq he made earlier today:

Either we'll succeed, or we won't succeed.

To be fair, Dubya's speech was longer than that one sentence. But if you go read it, I defy you to prove that the summary of the prez's speech would amount to much more than what I quoted.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Cluelessness, Dubya, Iraq

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:42 AM | Get permalink

Monday, April 23, 2007

Another threat to the nation is turned back at the border.

Canadian psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar is a really dangerous guy. He had the nerve to write about his experiences with psychedelic drugs and suggest that, under some circumstances and with some patients, those drugs might be more effective in dealing with psychological problems than standard psychotherapy. Despite the fact that Feldmar's experiences with psychedelics took place decades ago -- many of them before the drugs were illegal in the US or Canada -- and despite the fact that he wrote in a scientific journal, Feldmar was turned back at the border the last time he tried to cross from Canada and has been permanently barred from entering the US.

Sadly, this kind of story is nothing new. As this article points out, the US has a history of keeping out people it doesn't like politically. Since 9/11, however, Dubya's administration has been excluding foreigners from the US with distressing regularity:

Pop singer Cat Stevens was turned back from the U.S. in 2004, after being detained. Bolivian human rights leader and lawyer, Leonida Zurita Vargas was prevented from entering in February of 2006. She was planning to be in the U.S. as part of a three week speaking tour on Bolivian social movements and human rights.... [She] never got beyond the airport check-in at Santa Cruz, Bolivia where she was informed her ten-year visa had been revoked because of alleged links to terrorist activity.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a paper at a conference titled "How Class Works" at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S. officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios's visa, issued in 1996, was set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate in academic meetings.

The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It's a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.

In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government's use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.

What's more dangerous to freedom than these exclusions themselves, I'd suggest, is the apparatus that has to be set up to identify such people at the border. The feds need to collect information from all over the place, consolidate it into databases that can be easily used by border officials, and make sure that there are more people at the borders identifying 'undesirables.' As one person mentioned in the Tyee article about Feldmar suggests, the tools for an authoritarian state have been put into place in the US. The fact that they haven't been used yet on most of us doesn't mean that they won't be.

Via The Tyee.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Canada, Paranoia, Surveillance, War on Drugs

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:49 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Why the f'n hell does the US need a 'war czar'?

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Dubya is having trouble finding anyone who's willing the be the 'war czar' — a new position that will 'oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies.'

A big question went unasked in the Post's article (and in the blog comments that I've seen): Doesn't the US already have someone whose job it is to oversee the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq? Someone called the 'commander in chief'?

Just asking.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Afghanistan, Dubya, Incompetence, Iraq, Pentagon

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:23 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Dubya's administration keeps on supporting the troops.

This time, it's a plan to add three months to the tour of duty of troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to ABC News, the Pentagon could approve the plan as early as this week.

Every time I think Dubya's gone as low as he can get, there's news like this extension.

More: The Pentagon has made the three-month extension official.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Afghanistan, Dubya, Iraq, Pentagon

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:19 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Too much is not enough.

Not for Dubya's administration.

Concerned that the feds don't have enough powers to spy on people, the prez's director of national intelligence is asking for even more.

Via AP.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', FISA, Paranoia, Spying

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:36 PM | Get permalink

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Who's winning the 'war on terrorism'?

It ain't the US.

Some experts warn that the successes [sic] of Bush's war on terrorism have been undercut by huge security costs, strains on the U.S. military from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and resentment of the United States abroad.

"Look at al Qaeda's plans," said Michael Scheuer, who once led the CIA team devoted to finding al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. "They're very simply defined in two phrases: spread out America's forces and bleed the United States to bankruptcy. I'd argue America has been under attack successfully every day since 9/11 from that perspective.

"If you're looking at it from the cave, or wherever al Qaeda is hiding at the moment, you have to be pretty happy with the way the world is moving," he said.

The rest of the Washington Post article where I got that quote isn't particularly interesting, so I wouldn't go read the rest of it unless I had lots of time on my hands.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', al-Qaeda, Iraq, Osama bin Laden

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:29 PM | Get permalink