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In Congress, Dem and GOPer Working Together to Change the NDAA | Mother Jones

"Smith and Amash's effort comes amid a bipartisan backlash against indefinite detention that has already produced legislation on the state level. Republican-dominated legislatures in Arizona, Maine, and Virginia have passed anti-NDAA legislation. Proponents of indefinite detention argue that Congress' 2001 authorization of the use of military force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban permits the indefinite detention without trial of American citizens, even those apprehended in the United States. But the Supreme Court has not definitively ruled on the issue. Opponents counter that indefinite detention of American citizens in the United States is unconstitutional."

Review & Outlook: The Tea Party's Inner ACLU - WSJ.com

The Wall Street Journal has a conniption fit about conservative opposition to the NDAA: "The ACLU tea partiers may be well-intentioned but they are woefully uninformed about the war on the terror. Their efforts would undermine executive war-fighting authority and the legitimacy of a terrorist detention and military tribunal system that has been established over many Congresses, endorsed by two Presidents and confirmed by the Supreme Court. They should stick to shrinking the entitlement state."

Arizona Joins Virginia in the NDAA Exodus. Is Nullification the Next New Thing? (Cutting the Gordian Knot)

"In less than a week’s time a second state has put a foot down making it clear that it will not cooperate with Federal Law which is blatantly unconstitutional. Yesterday Arizona became the second state to pass a nullification of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)."

How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian's Nightmare | | AlterNet

“The major defining feature of the Obama administration on this issue is the eagerness with which it embraced the stunning evisceration of civil rights and liberties that was a hallmark of the Bush administration, and then deepened those outrageous programs,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, who is an attorney representing many Occupy protesters swept up in last fall’s mass arrests. “He has successfully counted on the acquiescent silence of the liberals.”

‘I withdraw’: A talk with climate defeatist Paul Kingsnorth (Stephenson, Grist)

I don’t think any “climate movement” is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: We are all climate change. It is not the evil “1%” destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if you’ll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25 percent of the world’s wildlife in the last four decades alone.

Chris Hedges: Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

“You are unable to say that [such a book] consisting of political speech could not be captured under [NDAA section] 1021?” the judge asked. “We can’t say that,” Torrance answered. “Are you telling me that no U.S. citizen can be detained under 1021?” Forest asked. “That’s not a reasonable fear,” the government lawyer said. Advertisement “Say it’s reasonable to fear you will be unlucky [and face] detention, trial. What does ‘directly supported’ mean?” she asked. “We have not said anything about that …” Torrance answered. “What do you think it means?” the judge asked. “Give me an example that distinguishes between direct and indirect support. Give me a single example.” “We have not come to a position on that,” he said. “So assume you are a U.S. citizen trying not to run afoul of this law. What does it [the phrase] mean to you?” the judge said. “I couldn’t offer any specific language,” Torrance answered. “I don’t have a specific example.”

America brings the ‘war on terror’ home (Wolf, Daily Star)

"(Judge) Forrest also repeatedly asked for assurances – at least five times – that the NDAA would not sweep up people like the plaintiffs: journalists engaged in journalism and citizens engaged in peaceful protest. Again, every time, the lawyers for Obama and Panetta said that they could not give her such assurances. [...] We now have it from the U.S. government lawyers’ own mouths: This law may put journalists at risk, or at least the lawyers explicitly refused to rule out that option for their client – and, as Forrest put it, they have “one very big client.”"

Obama’s evolution: Behind the failed ‘grand bargain’ on the debt (Wallsten/Montgomery/Wilson, WaPo)

"That night, Obama prepared his party’s congressional leaders. He warned Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that he might return to the position under discussion the previous Sunday — that is, cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for just $800 billion in tax increases. [...] White House officials said this week that the offer is still on the table."

Not All Labor Leaders Happy With AFL-CIO’s Obama Endorsement (Elk, In These Times)

“There's not a lot of choice here, that’s the sad part of this,” says Matt McKinnon, political and legislative director of the Machinists union (IAM), which is affiliated with AFL-CIO and endorsed the president earlier this year. “He’s been a disappointment in several areas, but he came through with some decent appointees.” The expected endorsement represents the reality that organized labor leaders still feel trapped in a two-party system, with a not-always labor-friendly Democratic Party on one side and a downright hostile Republican Party on the other.

Elections: What Are They Good For? (Swanson, War Is A Crime.org)

Voting isn't everything. "I think Emma Goldman had a point in saying that if voting changed anything they would ban it. I think Howard Zinn had a point in saying that it doesn't matter who is sitting in the White House so much as who is doing the sitting in. The relentless ubiquitous question of how you can change the world if you refuse to engage in electoral politics strikes me as crazy. Women didn't vote themselves the right to vote. Workers didn't elect the eight hour day. India didn't vote the British out."

Part II Infiltration of Political Movements is the Norm, Not the Exception in the United States (Zeese, Occupy Washington, DC)

"When the long history of political infiltration is reviewed, the Occupy Movement should be surprised if it is not infiltrated. Almost every movement in modern history has been infiltrated by police and others using many of the same tactics we are now seeing in Occupy. "

Critiques Of Libertarianism: A Non-Libertarian FAQ (Huben)

"The purpose of this FAQ is not to attack libertarianism, but some of the more fallacious arguments within it. That done, libertarians can then reformulate or reject these arguments. This is also needed to help people place libertarianism and its arguments in context. It is very hard to find any literature about libertarianism that was NOT written by its advocates. This isolation from normal political discourse makes it difficult to evaluate libertarian claims without much more research or analysis than most of us have time for. Compare this to (for example) the extensive literature of socialism and communism written by ideologues, scholars, pundits, etc. on all sides. Libertarianism is scantily analyzed outside its own movement. Let's fix that."

UPDATED: Limbaugh's Misogynistic Attack On Georgetown Law Student Continues With Increased Vitriol (Media Matters for America)

Always good to have a reference, this is it. "Rush Limbaugh is not backing down after widespread condemnation over his misogynistic attack on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law School student who testified before Congress recently about the problems caused when women lack access to contraception. " Multiple clips for future show and tells.

America's Death Squads (Davies, PDA Community/ZCommunications)

"Barack Obama has halted the macabre parade of hooded, shackled suspects in orange jumpsuits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine at Guantanamo, but he has not done so by restoring the rule of law. Instead, to a great extent, he has replaced Bush’s policy with a global campaign to simply kill a wide range of people in cold blood: terrorism suspects, resistance fighters, and anyone else added to secret lists for secret reasons. From a uniquely American “exceptionalist” point of view, killing suspects instead of capturing them is a convenient way to avoid the embarrassment of sweeping up hundreds of mostly innocent people in an indiscriminate global dragnet and then not knowing what to do with them. The dead tell no tales. Public outrage is contained within the faraway countries where the killings take place and does not cause domestic political problems."

Corruption in Iraq: 'Your son is being tortured. He will die if you don't pay' (Abdul-Ahad, Guardian)

Iraq ten years after: instead of one Saddam, many little ones. "Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison. "We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else.""

Gotcha, you bastard. Repeat endlessly.

Posted by Thomas Nephew on June 9th, 2006

So Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah (a.k.a. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) is dead. Will he be missed?

Not by me, certainly, nor by the vast majority of Shiites in Iraq, nor perhaps even by most Sunnis there, in their decent heart of hearts. The question is, will he be missed by his fellow jihadists, and the wider insurgency in Iraq? From what I’ve read about him and Iraq, my guesses are “yes, for a while,” and “no.”

Accounts like the one by Mary Ann Weaver in the Atlantic Monthly (prescient title: “The short, violent life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi“) suggest he was a charismatic leader and a very successful recruiter of those admiring his brutal Salafist outlook. Also, his death wasn’t the only thing that happened yesterday — other people and evidence were reportedly captured in simultaneous raids. There may also have been an insider informant who pinpointed Zarqawi’s presence when the time came.

Together, that may mean that Zarqawi’s particular network is in for hard times. Fine; good riddance. But there are plenty more where they came from, and Bin Laden and Zawahiri — remember them? — are no slouches at mayhem, either.

Meanwhile, just about everyone agrees the foreign jihadists Zarqawi led are a relatively small part of the insurgency facing American troops and their Iraqi allies. More are home grown fighters with perhaps more straightforward nationalist or sectarian aims: kick the Americans out, wrestle for control of the country or region. As Ivo Daalder points out, “Much of the killing in Iraq today isn’t the result of Zarqawi’s men, but of Sunni and Shite militias engaged in a big fight for control of neighborhoods, towns, cities, and the resources they control.”

A different question — for Americans, at least — is whether Zarqawi would have become a household name if the U.S. hadn’t invaded Iraq. I don’t know for sure, of course, but I suspect not — he was an advocate of the “near war”, and was originally focused on the fall of the Jordanian monarchy. Without the stage of Iraq, he’d have been a minor figure in the larger scheme of things.

Our king and vice king are known to enjoy hunting and fishing, of a sort, in preserves stocked with fish and game (or lawyers). While I’m not saying Zarqawi was “stocked,” exactly, we certainly turned Iraq into a place where he would flourish, and we certainly managed to save him up for another one of our “most powerfully staged photo ops in the world” — recall that an opportunity to bomb him in a camp in northern Iraq before the war was passed up, in order to not undercut the case for war, such as it was.

Once upon a time, I would put up these “Gotcha” posts with more unalloyed satisfaction, and some day, if they ever get their hands on Bin Laden or put a bomb on Zawahiri’s pup tent, I’ll put up another one. I feel about Zarqawi’s demise, though, a little like how I’d feel about taking out some nasty garbage I left in the house too long: glad that’s done, sorry I helped make the mess in the first place.

=====
OTHER REACTIONS: Pablo Shounin: “finally some good news”, Gary Farber (early news roundup), eRobin (“beginning of a very long and bloody road”), Natalie Davis (“He who lives by the sword… Every death is a diminishment, but the really sad news is that the “war” goes on”), Stygius (”May he roast in hell“), WorldWideWeber (“The hydra loses a head”) ; see also Steve Benen (”Carpetbagger”), John Robb (”Global Guerilla”): “Unfortunately, Zarqawi proved to be rather good at his role.”; Juliette Kayyem (”TPM Cafe”).
NOTES: Robb via James Wolcott, Weaver, Daalder, Kayyem via Josh Marshall.

UPDATE, 6/12: Will Bunch (”Attytood”) reminds his readers of an April 10 Thomas Ricks article in the Washington Post, “Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi,” which discussed a coordinated military propaganda or PSYOPS campaign — aimed in part at Americans. Ricks:

Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain “a very small part of the actual numbers,” Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways.”

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