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Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Geneva . . . isn’t that somewhere in France, anyway?

Newsweek has posted, in .pdf form, the January 2002 memo from Alberto Gonzales to George Bush in which the Geneva Convention is described as “quaint” and “obsolete.” As a public service to my readers, I’ve managed to dig up the original executive summary (which is, in all likelihood, what Bush actually read, since the Gonzalez memo is a killer-- over three pages long, single-spaced).

TO:  W
FROM:  GONZO
RE:  TORTURING THE BASTARDS

The Department of Justice has determined that the Geneva Convention accords on the treatment of prisoners of war do not apply when:

-- the prisoners are very bad men;

-- who have been captured by the United States;

-- and we really, really need information from them; or

-- we have no reason to believe that they have any information, but we’re still really, really mad at them.

The full memo goes on to say that there are two “positive” consequences of abandoning the Geneva accords:  one, it “preserves flexibility” (this is followed by three bullet points) and two, it “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act” (this is followed by five bullet points).  These are direct quotes.  In other words:  Mr. President, you get to do whatever you want, and you get to do whatever you want.  What’s not to like?

On page three, Gonzales gets around to discussing the possibility that this ruling will provoke widespread international condemnation, and here’s what he says:

The statement that other nations would criticize the U.S. because we have determined that GPW does not apply is undoubtedly true.  It is even possible that some nations would point to that determination as a basis for failing to cooperate with us on specific matters in the war on terrorism.  On the other hand, some international and domestic criticism is already likely to flow from your previous decision not to treat the detainees as POWs.

Yep, you read that right.  On one hand, we might fray or shred the alliances we’ll need to deal effectively with shadowy stateless terrorists.  On the other hand . . . uh, on the other hand . . . oh, what the hell, we’d already decided to do that anyway.

The War Crimes Act is 18 U.S.C. 2441.  Any enterprising attorneys out there want to apply it to the Bush Administration’s conduct of this war?  Because it seems to me as if Oakland attorney Charles Gitting’s March 24, 2003 letter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is looking pretty damn good these days.

Posted by Michael on 05/18 at 07:30 AM
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Monday, May 17, 2004

Multiply exhausted re-entry vehicle

So I get back from Norfolk/ Virginia Beach, where my primary access to the Internet consisted of a pair of semaphore flags, and I notice that the Bush government has finally lost that last little shred of legitimacy, the moral degeneration of the American right wing has accelerated exponentially (assisted on the high end by the complete intellectual collapse of British conservatism), and that both conference final series are tied.

I’ll have more on all of the above as soon as I recover from my recent travels, capped off as they were by yesterday’s nine-hour drive from Virginia Beach to central Pennsylvania.  Thanks once again to everyone who visited last week-- including you Philly fans.  Your Flyers are certainly worthy of the Cup this year, and that little horse of yours isn’t too bad either.

Posted by Michael on 05/17 at 05:37 AM
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Thursday, May 13, 2004

Blogging while driving

No, not really.  We’ve checked into a nice motel for the night.  Jamie is very excited about this-- it’s one of those residence-suite deals and he has the pullout sofabed in the front room.  He has been reading license plates all day long, and it did not escape his notice that this place has a pool.  When we travel together I have a bunch of keywords with which he can describe his behavior to me (and to himself):  independent, mature, patient, and (the only one that doesn’t involve praise) relentless.  To this we can now add observant.

About the Flyers-Lightning game:  on the one hand, nobody wants to hear about this.  On the other hand, somebody’s got to do hockey blogging right, and it might as well be me.  Suffice it to say that the Lightning won the crucial (imaginary, but crucial) award for Cumulative Team Hand-Eye Coordination.  They batted pucks out of the air all night, stripped the Flyers almost at will, and scored two gorgeous, backbreaking goals in the third period, just after the Flyers had come out . . . um . . . flying in the first minute of the period and narrowed the score to 2-1.  The first involved a perfectly executed long pass that sprung Vincent Lecavalier on a breakaway just 40 seconds after the Flyers’ goal, a breakaway he converted by snapping a shot cleanly over Robert Esche’s left shoulder, thus quieting the crowd considerably; the second started with a turnover forced by the Lightning in center ice and culminated in a tic-tac-toe passing play between Martin St. Louis and Brad Richards so deft and dazzling that even Philadelphia fans, notoriously unreflective as they are, buzzed in awe.

Actually the Flyers fans were a pretty knowledgeable and discerning bunch.  Really.  Their interpretation of hockey’s offsides rules sometimes differed appreciably from that of the officials, but I know no one wants to hear about offsides rules.

Posted by Michael on 05/13 at 06:09 PM
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Road trip

If I post another thing on Abu Ghraib this week my head will explode, and you don’t want little bits of brain and skull all over your desktop screen or your laptop.  Yes, that’s precisely what would happen, thanks to the mystery of the Internet.

Instead, I’m going to pack my bags-- and Jamie’s-- and head down to Norfolk, Virginia to attend my father’s retirement party (25 years of teaching at Old Dominion University, and a long career as a labor activist and writer before that).  Along the way, Jamie and I are stopping at the Whatever Corporate Stadium in Philadelphia to see game three of the conference finals between the Flyers and the Tampa Bay Lightning.  If any Philadelphia-area bloggers are planning on attending the game, stop by and say hello-- I’ll be the guy in section 224 with the charismatic kid with Down syndrome.  (No, I’m not a Flyers fan.  I just like going to playoff games, especially deep into the playoffs, if they’re within driving distance.  But I will pretend to be a Flyers fan for roughly three hours tonight, because you know how . . . hmm, shall we say, unreflective those Philadelphia sports fans are, how incapable of watching a game from a properly cosmopolitan and nonpartisan perspective.)

I might do some Norfolk Blogging, might not.  We’ll have to see just what the Birth Family Situation looks like down there.

Oh, and speaking of the birth family:  some people among the legions of new readers recently sent this way by the mighty Atrios and the mighty Max (thanks, guys) have asked me what’s up with the accents.  Well, it’s a French-Canadian name, not a French name; most of the BÈrubÈs who live in the US (most of ‘em in New England) have dropped the accents, and some of them pronounce the name “Barooby.” I got weary of this sometime around the age of 10, since we pronounce it “BEH roo bay.” But I honestly don’t care if people use the accents or not.  I must say, though, that in recent years I’ve had occasion to take pride in my association with cheese-eating surrender monkeys and all their QuÈbÈcois progeny.

OK, gotta go and pack.  In the meantime, I recommend Timothy Burke’s most recent post-- new heights of eloquence from a guy who was already terrific even on his off days-- and this healthy reminder from Digby about why we should support our favorite Democrats, now more than ever.

UPDATE:  Credit where credit’s due dept.:  Janet packed Jamie’s bag.  And Jamie loves travelling with his own suitcase.

Posted by Michael on 05/13 at 02:59 AM
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Getcha red hot outrage

Well, it took them two weeks, but it looks like the wingnuts have gotten their act together on Abu Ghraib.  Unable to stem worldwide outrage at the atrocities by belittling them and/or blaming them on (a) a few rogue elements (b) women (c) gays in the military, they’ve decided to out-outrage the outrage by flooding the outrage zone.  Thus the hideous James Inhofe (R, what else-- OK):

“I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment,” the Oklahoma Republican said at a U.S. Senate hearing probing the scandal.

These prisoners, you know they’re not there for traffic violations,” Inhofe said. “If they’re in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”

Yep, there’s no question that people protesting atrocities are way worse than the atrocities themselves.  But look at the bizarrely recursive position in which this puts protestors:  what are we going to say now?  How about “I’m probably not the only one in the country that is almost as outraged by the outrage about the outrage as I am about the treatment”?

Besides, liberals and progressives don’t get to express outrage at outrageous things.  Inhofe:  “I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying.” In the hypothetical Sane Universe (still only a figment of certain astrophysicists’ imaginations), remarks like these would appear only in the Weekly World News under Ed Anger’s byline:  “I’m madder than a bloviating pusbag on an Oxycon binge about all these wacko humanitarians trying to keep our troops from blowing off a little steam.” (And what’s this about humanitarians crawling all over these prisons?  Last I looked, it actually wasn’t the humanitarians who were doing the crawling.)

At least this explains wingnuts’ hostility to reports like these from the crawling do-gooders over there at the International Committee of the Red Cross.  (International?  Red?  Isn’t this some sort of Communist front?) We now know that (as the Red Cross puts it) “between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” Next we’re going to find out that 20 to 30 percent of them were, in fact, arrested for traffic violations, at which point Inhofe is going to be more outraged by the outrage in response to the outrage about the outrage than by the arrests themselves.

And now comes the beheading of Nick Berg—like the beheading of Daniel Pearl over two years ago, a medieval atrocity caught on video.  Apparently the wingnuts are utterly outraged by this, and even more outraged at the lack of liberal outrage, and even more outraged at liberal outrage about Abu Ghraib, since now, obviously, everything we do to torture and kill random A-rabs is A-OK.  Of course Max is right about this—there’s no one to complain to:

If I could, I would write a letter of protest to the U.S. Department of Beheading Facilitators, but of course there is no such place. There is nobody for me to appeal to who is beholden to me in any way, has a conscience, or has some responsibility for this heinous crime.

Even still, I’m outraged.  But then, I’ve been outraged by al-Qaeda for six years now.  I was against them before, and I’m against them now.  That’s why I supported war in Afghanistan even though it was conducted by this corrupt and incompetent administration:  I didn’t think we had the luxury of waiting until 2005 or 2009 to destroy the Taliban’s terror training camps.  And I think the day that these ultrareligious patriarchal thugs vanish from the globe—together with all the other ultrareligious patriarchal thugs I know—will be a very good day.

Until then, I’m going to continue to be outraged that Bush and company abandoned a legitimate fight in Afghanistan for the neocon FantasyLand in Iraq—thereby allowing al-Qaeda to regroup and open new recruiting branches in Fallujah, Tikrit, Basra, and in the new West Baghdad Insurgency Mall.

Kos says it better than it can be said in any known tongue.

And let’s take a moment of silence to reflect on the fact that the Bush administration could have taken out Abu Musab Zarqawi, well before their invasion of Iraq, but decided to give him a pass while they concocted their harebrained schemes for how to deal with all the roses with which our troops would be greeted.

There’s your Nick Berg outrage for you.  We mourn for his family and friends, and for everyone—that’s everyone—who has died or been maimed in this catastrophe.

Posted by Michael on 05/12 at 01:54 AM
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Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Lieberman resigns from Senate; cites “blogswell of outrage”

Washington, DC (MB)-- Shocking political observers across the nation, Joseph Lieberman (D in name only- CT) resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate yesterday.  “I am deeply saddened by the blogosphere’s reaction to my remarks in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Friday,” Lieberman said in a prepared statement.  “I have long looked upon blogs as a vital resource in our fair nation, challenging our official media from a wide variety of political positions and giving voice to ordinary American citizens in every walk of life.  I know that if I have lost the support of bloggers, I have lost the support of the people.  I have therefore decided not to serve out my term of office between now and 2006.  To do so under these circumstances, I feel, would make a mockery of democracy itself.  I thank the good people of Connecticut for allowing me to serve as their representative for these past sixteen years, and I look forward, as I remarked in my October 2000 debate with Dick Cheney, to rejoining the private sector.”

Spokesmen for Lieberman reported that the Senator was overcome by what he called “a blogswell of outrage.” “Ordinarily, Senator Lieberman does not approve of trendy neologisms like ‘blogswell,’” a staffer remarked yesterday.  “He believes strongly that they erode the moral fiber of our language.  But this is an exception.  The volume and the cogency of bloggers’ protests concerning his remarks to Secretary Rumsfeld were simply overwhelmingñ so much so that they’ve simply swept him out of office.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Sources close to Lieberman pointed specifically to remarks by Washington-based reporter Joshua Micah Marshall, as well as to the website of an obscure literature professor in central Pennsylvania.  “Apparently this guy had an ordinary little blog that got about seven or eight hundred visitors a day,” one aide said, “and then he puts up this thing on Lieberman, and before he knows it, he has something like ten thousand hits in twelve hours.  For the Senator, I think that was the tipping pointñ we took one look at the traffic stats at michaelberube.com and we knew it was time to throw in the towel.”

_________________________

FROM THE MAILBAG:  Reader Arlene writes in to remind me that one of Lieberman’s moral initiatives-- in which he teamed up with Indiana Republican Dan Coats-- involved writing to then-Secretary of Education Richard Riley (in 1998) to protest the Department of Education’s provision of closed captioning for the Jerry Springer show.  That’s our Joe-- when it comes to systemic human rights atrocities in Abu Ghraib, he’s careful to weigh them against unrelated atrocities committed by other Arabs.  But he stands firm against any expenditure of federal funds that would give hearing-impaired people access to the moral depradations of Jerry Springer.

Posted by Michael on 05/11 at 02:59 AM
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