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In one very important way, impeachment does — and maybe soon.

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The news was quickly buried under an avalanche of financial crisis, Palin, debate, and election horse race stories, but it was significant all the same.  In late September, Murray Waas reported in Atlantic.com that Department of Justice investigators were zeroing in on former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s July 24, 2007 testimony to Congress.  In this testimony, Gonzales asserted that in a critical March 10, 2004 meeting — immediately prior to the notorious “hospital confrontation” between Comey, Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Card — a key group of Congressional members privy to intelligence secrets* shared a “consensus” with Cheney, Addington, and Gonzales that the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program described to them should go forward.

Unfortunately for Gonzales, this assertion was denied** by many of the congressmembers involved. Waas:

Gonzales said that he had told the congressional leaders “in the most forceful way that I could [about] … the disagreement that existed.” Gonzales said that in response to that, there had been a “consensus in the room” from the legislators, “who said, ‘Despite the recommendation of the deputy attorney general, go forward with very important intelligence activities.’ ”

This assertion that there had been “a consensus” is currently under investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general as possible perjury or as a false statement under oath.

According to Waas, Gonzales also developed after-the-fact “notes” on the March 10 meeting, at the direction of President Bush; beginning with one sentence(!) , jotted down on March 11.  Gonzales asserted he wrote up the remainder of his notes on the March 10, 2004 meeting “the following weekend,” i.e., March 13 and 14.

But on March 11, when he renewed the NSA warrantless surveillance program, Bush could only have had Gonzales’s say-so and the alleged one sentence note as “documentation” of Congressional acquiescence.  According to accounts like those by the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman, Bush finally modified his March 11 order on March 19 — well after being informed by Comey, on March 12, of likely widespread resignations at the Department of Justice should the program continue in its prior form.

The NSA warrantless surveillance program may well have always been an impeachable offense.  Its continued approval through March 19, 2004, despite the March 12th disapproval of Acting Attorney General Comey — was even more certainly one, at least in my view and that of many others.  Should the March 11th reapproval have been based on evidence of congressional “acquiescence” known to be false or even suborned, that would be yet further grounds for Bush’s impeachment.

But I think it’s also crucial that by feigning that evidence — and by restating that lie in his July 24, 2007 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee — Alberto Gonzales can be impeached as well. And there’s nothing President Bush could do to stop that — not even a pardon.

Read the rest of this entry »

In “Review Assails Spying in Md. By State Police,” the Washington Post’s Lisa Rein reports:

The Maryland State Police “significantly overreached” when they spied on peaceful opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war and were oblivious to their violation of the activists’ rights of free expression and association, an independent review concluded yesterday.

Calling the 14-month monitoring during the administration of then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) a “systemic failure,” former U.S. attorney and state attorney general Stephen H. Sachs said the police violated federal regulations and showed a “lack of judgment” when they entered personal information about some activists into a federal anti-terrorism database.

(Emphasis added.)  This was the part of the scandal I singled out for scrutiny in late July when the story broke (”Maryland police surveillance: “Case Explorer” and civil liberties“), and I’m pleased to see it got detailed attention in the Sachs report.

From that report (”Review of Maryland State Police Covert Surveillance of Anti-Death Penalty and Anti-War Groups from March 2005 to May 2006“; .PDF, 149 pages, link added):

Second, MSP [Maryland State Police -ed.] violated federal regulations when it transmitted some of its investigative findings to a database maintained by the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program, a federally-funded initiative to promote cooperation and information-sharing among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Regulations promulgated by the United States Department of Justice permit MSP, when participating in the HIDTA project, to collect and maintain intelligence information concerning an individual “only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct or activity and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity.” See 28 C.F.R. § 23.20(a). Again, no such reasonable suspicion existed with respect to the investigation at issue here. To its credit, in late 2005 MSP discontinued, on its own initiative, its practice of sharing this type of information with HIDTA. [...]

While the MSP employees with whom we spoke recognized that the individuals and groups under investigation here were not “terrorists,” under any reasonable and accepted definition of that word, none who were aware of the use of the designation seemed to consider that a government agency’s decision to label someone a terrorist, particularly when that label is included in an external database, could cause serious harm to that person’s reputation, career, and standing in the community.

While this is absolutely no reflection on Mr. Sachs’s excellent report, that last part seems so implausible that I wonder if any of this was based on depositions under oath; if not, that’s a step I would then hope is not long in coming.*

Setting that aside, the Sachs report provides a wealth of information about the decision to use Case Explorer, and the ramifications of that decision; I’ll be studying that part of the report and writing about it separately.

Meanwhile, Sachs recommends that the Maryland State Police “formulate binding regulations that govern covert surveillance of “advocacy” or “protest” groups” which respect their constitutional rights.  But Sachs also makes several specific database- and “Case Explorer”-related recommendations (emphases added):

2. MSP should establish standards for the collection and dissemination of criminal intelligence information; provide for periodic auditing of the contents of MSP’s intelligence database; and require that information inappropriately entered as criminal intelligence information be purged promptly and that other information be purged on an appropriate cycle. Numerous law enforcement agencies around the country, including in Maryland, have promulgated regulations that address these issues. In Section IV below, this report identifies several models from which MSP may choose to draw.

3. MSP should revise, and possibly discontinue, its use of the Case Explorer database in connection with its intelligence-gathering activities. If funds are available, it should separate its criminal intelligence database from the information that it maintains in Case Explorer for other purposes. As presently employed by MSP’s Homeland Security and Intelligence Division, Case Explorer encourages the overinclusion of individuals and groups in the database, does not facilitate supervisory review of ongoing investigations, and, for a variety of technical reasons, frustrates the troopers, civilian analysts, and supervisors who have to use it on a regular basis.

He also recommends that MSP allow surveilled individuals who aren’t suspected of violent crime to see their files and then purge those files.

These recommendations echo those by constitutional law professor Jack Balkin in “The Constitution and the National Surveillance State”, which I outlined in my “Case Explorer and civil liberties” post: “…create a regular system of checks and procedures to avoid abuse … stop collecting information when it is no longer needed … discard information at regular intervals to protect privacy.“  If the Sachs recommendations are enshrined in state law and regulations, Maryland will have turned an deeply disturbing civil liberties failure into a historic civil liberties success, one that can show the way for other states and even the nation.

I’ll be forwarding these comments to all of my Maryland state representatives, and to any others who seem to have a role to play in enacting reforms.  I hope other Maryland citizens will add their voices in support of the Sachs recommendations.

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* UPDATE, 10/2: Sachs notes that he could not take testimony under oath, but got full cooperation from the MSP.  From the introduction: “As you know, I was not asked to conduct a formal investigation.  I had no power to issue subpoenas and no authority to take testimony under oath.  That said, my colleagues and I consider it important to note that we have received full cooperation from the State Police in [making MSP personnel] available for interviews, and giving us full access to all of the many documents we sought to examine…”

In Steve Coll’s New Yorker profile of General David Petraeus (”The General’s Dilemma”, 09/08/2008), a couple of things stood out for me.  First, there’s this:

…Petraeus and those around him believed “deep in their bones that we don’t get to choose what kind of wars we fight,” John Nagl, a 1988 West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who became part of Petraeus’s circle, said. They felt that it was therefore essential to vanquish Vietnam’s ghosts and learn to wage irregular war successfully.

While I take Petraeus et al’s point that officers don’t get to choose them, wars like Viet Nam and Iraq are precisely the kinds of wars the country – or more precisely, the U.S. government — or more precisely yet, these days, the White House — gets to choose to fight.

In his road to the top, Petraeus — a learned warrior — earned a Ph.D., read and wrote extensively on counterinsurgency, and finally rewrote the Marine Corps “counterinsurgency” manual (US Army Field Manual 3-24 / Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 33.3.5: Counterinsurgency) so well  — and  so well timed — that Samantha Power (the future ex-Obama advisor) wrote about it in the New York Times Book Review.

But what had seemed in the 1990s like an academic exercise in keeping military options open turned into something bigger and worse in the next decade.  It became the latest life preserver thrown to a president weighted down with a strategically stupid idea: the occupation of a foreign country and its conversion by force to a mutant version of “democracy.”  Take it from Westmoreland, McNamara, and LBJ: Petraeus isn’t vanquishing Vietnam’s ghosts, he’s been making new ones from Iraq.

And even in as damaged a democracy as our own, strategically stupid ideas like that require a great deal of artful communication, spin, and con jobs to sell them… maybe “lying” sums it up.  That’s where the second part that struck me comes in:

Petraeus is a professional briefer, and with a PowerPoint slide before him he will slip into a salesman’s rapid-fire patter. He illustrates his remarks with a laser pointer; he will swirl a bright dot of emerald light around a particular sentence fragment until a listener risks succumbing to hypnosis. Petraeus and his staff will discuss at length the shading of colors on a slide, or the direction of arrows depicting causality. When I asked, in a skeptical tone, about this passionate use of PowerPoint, the General responded in the staccato of the medium: “It’s how you communicate big ideas—to communicate them effectively.”

That struck me because it suggests it was no mistake that Petraeus chose a much more misleading set of maps for his slideshow presentation to Congress in the fall of 2007 than a different general (James Jones) had a week or so earlier.  As I wrote last September, Petraeus’s maps failed to show a competing explanation for declining violence — that the surge had been too late to put out the fire of ethnic cleansing, arriving in time to witness the burned-out result.  By successfully laying claim to a bizarre kind of “success,” Petraeus gained Bush — not Maliki — the “breathing room” to extend the escalation and leave the Iraq mess for the next President to clean up.  (And like idiots, Congressional Democrats went for it, despite having been elected to get us out of Iraq.)

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m proud to have been a small part of this: we have a total of 9 “Get FISA Right” ads scheduled to air in Minneapolis/St.Paul during the Republican convention this week, including at least four on FOX News network — two are scheduled for daytime hours (9am-4pm) on September 3, two for evening hours (7-12pm) the same day.

Though another set of ads being aired are more partisan, the ones I helped place are more non-partisan — without being in denial about how the FISA Amendment Act came to pass:

For 200 years, the Fourth Amendment protected us from unreasonable searches and seizures.
On July 9, all the Republican Senators voted to allow the government to listen to your phone calls and read your email without a warrant.
We’re building a new movement that puts our Constitution above politics.
Don’t let American freedom die. Join us at getfisaright.net

“Get FISA Right” was originally formed as response by Obama supporters to Barack Obama’s disappointing “yes” vote on the FISA Amendment Act — breaking his pledge to oppose any bill featuring telecom immunity.  As disappointing as that was, though, a great deal of the blame goes to the administration that proposed the FISA Amendment Act and the lockstep Republican Party that unanimously supported it.*  Neither party can be let off the hook for the FISA Amendment Act; we need to be building support wherever we can find it to roll back that and other infringements of our civil liberties.

Moreover, given the crackdown underway in St. Paul (see prior post), “Get FISA Right” ads may be the closest encounter Republican conventioneers have with the Constitution and free speech.  As I wrote last week, it’s “a way to take a stand for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that GOP convention-goers can’t avoid: on their TV sets.”

It’s high time, too. The Bush era assault on the 4th Amendment is threatening to become an everyday feature of the political landscape.  The right against unreasonable search and seizure is also under siege by state, local, and federal police in Minnesota, as a  Joint “Terrorism” Task Force has intimidated, searched, and arrested people, and relieved of them of their laptops, video cameras, and the like, all on far-fetched suspicions of “intent to riot” and even of “fire code violations.”

FISA and the Fourth Amendment may seem like an abstraction to some people, but what’s happening in St. Paul isn’t abstract at all.  Those are your freedoms they’re trampling on.  These ads are one way to insist that’s not OK with us.

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* McCain, though absent for the vote, made clear he supported the bill.

NOTE: For other blog reactions to the ad campaign, visit this Get FISA Right wiki page (and please add your own entry!)
UPDATE, 9/2: Ari Melber, Washington Independent: Liberals Storm GOP Hotels in St. Paul
UPDATE, 9/3: Nick Juliano, Raw Story: Anti-FISA group targets GOP airwaves in St. Paul

A few days ago I gave the Democratic platform a somewhat magnanimous “gentleman’s B” regarding civil liberties and respect for the rule of law — long on rhetoric, short on some of the specifics I hoped for, but arguably pointed more or less in the right direction. I now see, via Jonathan Schwarz (”A Tiny Revolution”)*, that the foreign policy sections of the draft Democratic platform (a.k.a. “Renewing America’s Promise“) contain an old familiar whopper (emphases added):

The world must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That starts with tougher sanctions and aggressive, principled, and direct high-level diplomacy, without preconditions. We will pursue this strengthened diplomacy alongside our European allies, and with no illusions about the Iranian regime. We will present Iran with a clear choice: if you abandon your nuclear weapons program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, you will receive meaningful incentives; so long as you refuse, the United States and the international community will further ratchet up the pressure, with stronger unilateral sanctions; stronger multilateral sanctions inside and outside the U.N. Security Council, and sustained action to isolate the Iranian regime. The Iranian people and the international community must know that it is Iran, not the United States, choosing isolation over cooperation. By going the extra diplomatic mile, while keeping all options on the table, we make it more likely the rest of the world will stand with us to increase pressure on Iran, if diplomacy is failing.

This performs the neat trick of promising no illusions about Iran only to provide one in the very next sentence. The Democratic platform committee notwithstanding, the United States intelligence community published a National Intelligence Estimate just a year ago that famously — well, maybe not famously enough — concluded (emphases added):

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.

It also quietly resuscitates the ugly “all options on the table” code for “we already got nukes, know what I’m saying?” If you were a Tehran leader, you’d already halted any nuclear weapons work, and you heard yourself being threatened with possible nuclear strikes (all options, remember) for something you’d already stopped doing, what would you do? A) regret stopping, B) restart on the “might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb” principle, C) find ways to credibly threaten or actually cause pain to whatever U.S. personnel or interests might be in the vicinity, D) all of the above.

Sad to say, the “abandons its nuclear weapons program” language was already a feature of the Obama “Blueprint for Change” (p. 29 of 33).** But it used to be the only mention Obama’s platform made of “table” was of coming to one or having a seat at one, not keeping “all options” on it.

The rot runs deep. The newfound belligerence is of a piece with H.Con.Res.362, a resolution demanding that the President increase pressure on Iran to abandon a nonexistent nuclear weapons program among other things by “…prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran” — i.e., a blockade. I.e., an act of war. This rash piece of legislation has been co-sponsored by 265 Representatives at latest count. The tally includes a number of major Democratic figures — Rahm Emanuel, Barney Frank, Steny Hoyer, Chris Van Hollen, and Henry Waxman among them — many no doubt congratulating themselves on reaching across the aisle to nutballs like Issa, Pence, King, Hoekstra, Rohrabacher, or Westmoreland, or kind of across the aisle to Bush Dogs like Heath Shuler or Lincoln Davis.

There’s more bad news tucked in here and there among the platform’s foreign policy pages; for example, the promise of 92,000 more, not fewer troops in our standing armed forces must rank high among them (p. 28, and also no surprise to Obama watchers).

But maybe it’s more worthwhile to highlight a central, innocuous-looking conceit of Obama’s and of many Americans. From page 2 of the “Renewing America’s Promise” platform:

The Democratic Party believes that there is no more important priority than renewing American leadership on the world stage.

Really? Might it not be at least as important to have our facts straight first?

And even when we do (from time to time), might there not be problems so critical — e.g., global warming — that solving them takes priority over who gets to be at the head of the victory parade? Might there not be problems — e.g. nuclear proliferation — that all but require us to forego conventional measures of leadership, by beginning to disarm our own vast nuclear arsenal?

In truth, there may be no more important priority than redefining just what it is we mean by “leadership on the world stage.” Has our global reach in the past decades to, say, Saudi air bases, Afghan fighters, or Iranian coup d’etats helped us or hurt us? Does the 5,000th nuclear warhead make us more or less secure? Do we prefer to lead in aircraft carriers at sea, or liberties preserved at home? Do the American people gain, or does someone else, when United States policy fixates on protecting overseas oil fields and pipelines instead of education and infrastructure?

There may be much that’s good about this draft platform. But the Democratic Party is missing an opportunity to level with itself and the American people by insisting that the United States government must continue to run the world (or at least try to) on its own terms, without regard to the facts, and without regard to the American people’s desire or ability to bear any burden or pay any price our masters in Washington decree.

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* Schwarz credits Don Bacon (”War is a racket”), perhaps via correspondence; I found no specific entry at the site.
** The document is printed two reduced pages per printed page; by its own pagination, the “abandons” cite is on p. 52 of 59.
UPDATE, 8/18: “desire or ability” instead of “manifest inability”

As advertised, I went to a nearby “Listening To America” Democratic platform drafting meeting yesterday. The idea was that “people all across America will hold Platform Meetings in their homes, or in their local churches and even coffee shops, to help build the Democratic Party’s platform for change from the bottom up.”

Signing in to “Listening to America” platform
drafting event
Originally uploaded by Thomas Nephew

As it happened, ours really was in a coffee shop, the Mayorga Coffee Factory in Silver Spring. About twenty people showed up to the area set aside for us and signed in.

I brought a bunch of “Restore Our Rights & Demand Accountability” fliers I’d printed out drafted by the GetFISARight.net organization,* proposing three additions to the Democratic platform:

• Stop government practices that violate the constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech, privacy, and due process, including warrantless surveillance on Americans, secret evidence in military courts, torture, illegal imprisonment of U.S. citizens and others, and arbitrary racial and religious profiling.
• Repeal or substantially amend laws that violate constitutionally guaranteed rights, including the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments law, the Military Commissions Act, related executive orders, and executive signing statements. Replace these with laws that reaffirm our fundamental rights and hold accountable all parties who violate those rights.
• Restore constitutional rights that the Bush administration has eroded through its lawless theory of unchecked executive power, including dissent, free speech, assembly, habeas corpus, privacy, due process of law, and equal protection.

When the meeting began, it quickly became clear I’d have trouble getting all of those points adopted. The goal, it turned out, was to actually try to draft a single platform statement reflecting a group consensus, rather than perhaps voting on a series of possible statements like those above and just forwarding that to the higher ups in the process. The moderators — two very nice and able people from the policy side of the Obama campaign, Keith Harper and Chris Goldthwait (sp.?) — had in mind that we’d eventually form a couple of clusters around the commonalities that emerged as people introduced themselves and explained what they hoped for from the meeting. While I wasn’t alone in bringing the Constitutional/rule of law/civil liberties concerns to the table, there were plenty of other agendas — housing, health care, women’s reproductive rights, global warming, energy, education, poverty, to name just the ones I was able to jot down.

One woman (A.) noted how in other parts of the world, things like health care, education are considered human rights, and that (I’m paraphrasing) we need to catch up with that. So I suggested that maybe my civil liberties/constitutional erosion concerns and those like education and health care might be joined up under a single rubric of “restoring and expanding rights,” and that’s pretty much what happened.

The meeting broke up into basically one “rights” group and another “problems” group (energy, global warming), and got to work. After a bit of philosophical discussion about whether we were for expanding rights or reclaiming ones that were there all along, we settled on “Rebuilding and Reclaiming Our Basic Rights” as a title, and then A. came up with a pretty good preamble. From my notes:

The Democratic Party has long recognized that the most significant role of government is to protect basic human rights. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his “Four Freedoms” speech, set forth a comprehensive vision of human rights, and Eleanor Roosevelt fought hard to ensure that vision of human rights was incorporated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Success - getfisaright.net point adopted
Originally uploaded by Thomas Nephew

Then Keith, our moderator, said it was time to get specific - “put some meat on the bones.” I figured of the ones I’d brought, I most wanted the second one, because it mentioned accountability (i.e., prosecutions, I explained to one guy before the meeting started).

So I said that I knew I’d said a lot already, but I really hoped that point could be part of our platform recommendations. And people were OK with that; we dictated it to the “raporteur”/Obama organizer (Mona) keeping track on a poster sheet. Hooray! We then went on to “rebuild and reclaim” other basic human rights — living wage, education, health care, housing — with codicils that, for example, reproductive health care was part of the picture for universal health care. When we got back together with the rest of the meeting, no major changes were made by either group to the overall result.

I guess it’s true: sometimes all it takes is showing up. Of course I can’t guarantee that these points will make it to Denver or actually become part of the Democratic party platform. But it’s to the credit of the Obama campaign that they have this much grassroots input to the platform, and I think they’ll have to take note of all of us somehow. At any rate, it felt like a good afternoon’s work to me.

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* An alternative excellent flier focused on the FISA Amendment Act per se. I picked the “PlatformConstitution.pdf” one on the theory that it might help to put the FISA Amendment Act in a broader context in a platform discussion.

UPDATE, 7/29: You, too, can be part of a platform drafting team — follow this link to Netroots Nation’s Democratic Platform and vote on or write your own plank on Civil Liberties!
(UPDATE, 8/11: the full text of the 7/28 Silver Spring consensus statement is here.)

Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area
(WB HIDTA) “Case Explorer” listing for Max Obuszewski, June 2005.
Via ACLU-MD “MSP Documents” dump, 7/17/08.

On July 17th, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland released documents “…revealing that the Maryland State Police (MSP) engaged in covert surveillance of local peace and anti-death penalty groups for over a year from 2005-2006.”

As the Washington Post reported the next day,

A well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, 63, was singled out by the undercover agents and entered into a “Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area” database. His entry indicates a “Primary Crime” of “Terrorism-anti-government” and a “Secondary Crime” of “Terrorism-Anti-War Protesters,” according to the documents.

In the following, I summarize the story so far, and then pursue one aspect that may not yet have received sufficient attention: the “Case Explorer” database and its implications.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Post’s lead editorial on Wednesday, “The Iron Timetable,” made clear from the start that the paper’s editorial board will be little more than an auxiliary of the McCain campaign from now on:

Barack Obama yesterday accused President Bush and Sen. John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: ““They said we couldn’t leave when violence was up, they say we can’t leave when violence is down.” Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting earlier this month that he might “refine” his Iraq strategy after visiting the country and listening to commanders, Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.

Well, good for him — if that’s what Senator Obama has decided (I still believe so), and if he actually sticks to that decision (I wish I could count on it).

In one way, Wednesday’s editorial may have set a land speed record for “fastest to be overtaken by events,” given the “time horizon” gambit now being floated by the Bush administration itself. But neocons and their media enablers are never ones to let the facts get in their way. So in case the editorial’s argument — that is, its cheap rhetorical trick — is used more often in the days ahead, it’s worth taking on. The question isn’t whether Obama (or McCain) are “foolishly” consistent about how to conduct the mission in Iraq in the face of some changed conditions. The question is whether having U.S. troops in Iraq was, is, or ever will be in our country’s best interest. And whether the Post likes it or not, that question was answered “no” a long time ago.

As Senator Obama noted, “What’s missing in our debate is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq.” And the Post’s reply to that is telling (emphases added):

Indeed: The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war’s outcome — that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq’s future is a vital U.S. security interest. If he is elected president, Mr. Obama sooner or later will have to tailor his Iraq strategy to that reality.

Largest oil reserves? That’s funny, last I checked invading Iraq was all about the central front in the war on terror. Before that it was freedom, democracy, and all that jazz. Before that it was Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Before that it was Saddam’s nonexistent ties to Bin Laden. (Remember Bin Laden?)

But even on the Post’s realpolitik premise, they’re wrong. First, Iraqis will remain eager to sell us as much oil as we’re stupid enough to have to buy. Second, broadly speaking, when the United States finds itself “doing counterinsurgency,” we’ve already screwed up. That’s what we’ve been doing in Iraq: American troops killing whoever’s killing them back that month, on behalf of a mission that changes from one six month unit to the next.

Third: as the “time horizon” concession (such as it is) makes clear, even the people we’re allegedly propping up want us out, and sooner rather than later. The oddest thing about the editorial was its silence about the Maliki government’s own demands for a withdrawal date. The people hanging on to power in the Green Zone realized their best bet is to create some plausible distance between them and the U.S., and a plausible timeline for a U.S. departure. If so, this week’s “show of force” in Sadr City is more for our consumption than for Sadr’s, i.e., “see? we run things. now leave.”

There’s more to dislike about the editorial — the patently false claim that a 16 month timetable for withdrawal is militarily infeasible, for starters.

But while it’s not the most important thing about the piece, I think it’s revealing that the editorial’s lede speaks of “Barack Obama,” but “President Bush” and “Sen. John McCain.”

That’s “Senator Obama” to you, Fred Hiatt, for the remainder of the campaign. The Washington Post likes to set itself up as arbiter of ’serious’ talk about foreign policy, but its execution is not often this plainly ham-handed: Senators and Presidents think unfoolishly, Baracks think foolishly. While I remain a Missourian (i.e., “show me”) about Obama, I’m already clear about the Post: they’re not on my side, or the American people’s side, when it comes to this war, this occupation, and this oil reserves empire.

Near Philadelphia and Maple, July 4th (photo by
Michelle Bailey). Originally uploaded by Thomas Nephew

Once again, I rented some “Minuteman”/colonial town crier type duds and joined the Takoma Park Fourth of July parade and spectacle. I had about a thousand little 4 by 5 fliers with phone numbers for Senators Cardin, Mikulski, and (sigh) Obama, urging them to vote against the FISA Amendment Act. Here’s a reproduction and text version of the flier (4 to a page) I used, which quoted the 4th Amendment as well. The text is from something I ran across at the mybarackobama.com site about this issue, I just rearranged it a bit. (For incoming visitors, more specific information about the issue — joining the mybarackobama.com group, links to the ACLU, etc. — is in the prior post, Celebrate the Constitution this 4th of July!)

Both my spouse Crickey and my friend (and fellow impeachment activist) Michelle Bailey came along to help pass out the fliers; Michelle also snapped some photos like the one here.

Some notes: people — even Obama supporters with buttons or stickers — were disappointed in Obama’s reversal on this. The phrase that helps the most with recognizing the issue is “telcom immunity” — maybe Takoma Park is exceptional, but that got pretty high “issue recognition,” to coin a phrase.

As anyone knows who’s done this kind of thing more than once, you wind up getting a “rap” down if you didn’t already have one — some stock phrases to get across what the issue is about. Not saying it’s golden, but one thing that worked was this:

“…telcom immunity is a terrible idea looking back” — thumb one way — “…we’ll never find out what happened. And it’s and even worse idea looking forward” — thumb other way — “some other company, under some other president — asked to do something sketchy? They’ll think to themselves ‘why not — phone companies got away with it.’

I also talked with people about how the bill threatens the Fourth Amendment (in my opinion) by settling for a judge authorizing protocols for “computer dragnets” rather than insisting on probable cause for a specific person and reason.

In addition to “thanks for doing this” from many parade watchers, I got good reactions from parade participants and local politicians Jamie Raskin, Heather Mizeur, George Leventhal, and Tom Hucker, so that was a plus as well. Raskin and Mizeur are delegates to the Democratic Convention in Denver (Obama, “super” who’s endorsed Obama, respectively).

I had a blast; I like doing this kind of thing — whether in costume or not. Thanks again to Michelle and Crickey for joining me, and for the great photos they took; slideshow here.

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UPDATE, 7/6: eRobin works the crowds in Philadelphia about the FISA Amendment Act.

In the years and decades and centuries ahead, John Yoo’s and David Addington’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week will become a simple, memorable marker about just how low this country fell in the early years of the 21st century. A former Department of Justice counsel and a current chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States proved unwilling to say that the president could not legally order torturing children or burying people alive.

Since last week’s events are well known enough, I’ll make just two points, and ask a question.

First, torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading abuse of children by United States military, intelligence personnel, and/or U.S.-hired contractor thugs is not a hypothetical situation. I’ll list just two cases, but more have been reported, and no doubt yet more remain unreported. Abu Ghraib sergeant Samuel Provance told a German news team about “interrogation specialists” pouring water on a boy, driving him around in the cold night, smearing him with mud — and then displaying the result to his father, who (Provance was told) broke and promised to tell all he knew. In an even grimmer story, Tara McKelvey reported (in her 2006 book “Monstering) about at least one alleged rape of an underage detainees — photographed by a fellow soldier. The investigation was desultory at best. In cases like these, the cruelties and/or the whitewashes can be traced to policies made in America.

Second, the way in which Addington and Yoo answered — that is, failed to answer — Congressional questioning should itself set off emergency sirens for our democracy. These two are, in a very real sense, enemies of our state. They are our enemies. Whether delivered with Addington’s coolly contemptuous attitude or Yoo’s baby-faced pseudo-naivete, we simply can not afford to have legitimate questions to the executive branch by the legislative one “answered” this way. To pretend to fail to understand the distinction between “would” and “could” is the kind of ‘trick’ a 3rd grader wouldn’t get away with. Contempt of this sort by the Bush administration should be … that is, should have been… met by Congress with contempt of its own — direct, immediate, Congressional sergeant at arms, off to jail you go contempt.

Meanwhile, at least the future narrative is clear. We were attacked. We panicked. Our elected leaders in the White House threw away our country’s honor and our alleged principles, and set about subverting our own political system in order to do so and to get away with it. Meanwhile, our elected representatives in Congress did next to nothing to prevent it.

People have often tried to lay the abuses in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere at the feet of so-called “bad apples.” The future will know those “bad apples” didn’t fall far from a corrupt and rotten tree, and can roll the tape above to prove it. The question for us is how far and deep that rot extends — to the White House only? To its alleged “check” and “balance” on Capitol Hill in the “opposition” party — capable of belated video theatrics, but not of real oversight?

Or does it extend deeper yet? A recent study (by WorldPublicOpinion.org) suggests that the United States is more akin to brutalized societies like Egypt, Azerbaijan, or Russia than those like Europe’s when it comes to accepting torture under some or even any circumstances. To agree that the state may completely own an individual, make this one say something … anything, turn that one into a screaming thing — that, to me, seems a kind of original sin. As we approach our Independence Day with the usual fanfare, self-congratulation, parades, and hot dogs, I may wish that this country were not so easily tempted to that sin. But wishing doesn’t make it so. Maybe 9/11 really did change everything. Maybe the terrorists have really won.