Note to readers: Deep Blade Journal will be undergoing a major re-vamping over the next few weeks. Do not be surprised if the site goes down for a period of time, or serves you oddball or alternate pages. The process we will be going through includes a move from Blogger to WordPress, along with the addition of excellent new authors! This will be exciting! Stay tuned…
Return of winter
Lilac not ready to bloom yet
After a long stretch of dry weather, a few inches of snow came today. This is a good thing because bare is bad in the winter. It’s been totally bare for weeks now.
A cold snap is on the way. . .
Veto talk gave the president more power to torture than if the ban had never even been discussed
Before the current one concerning the Dubai ports deal (see previous post), what was the one other major veto threat issued by President Bush? Back in October, what brought it on was,
The [US Senate's] 90-to-9 vote to ban “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in U.S. government custody was one of the sharpest political rebukes in Washington of a system under which abuses occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan and at the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba.
Seems that the only time the Bush veto pen comes out is when there is some kind of challenge to the radical statist power the president wishes to reserve for himself beyond all reach of law.
Despite what was reported just before last Christmas–that the president relented on the McCain anti-torture amendment, backing the torture ban because the “McCain proposal had veto-proof support”–Mr. Bush got his way.
Here is how Alfred McCoy described the failure of the McCain anti-torture effort in the highly-rcommended Democracy Now! interview from last Friday:
Most Americans think that it’s over, that in last year, December 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act 2005, which in the language of Senator McCain, who was the original author of that amendment to the defense appropriation, the author of that act, it bars all inhumane or cruel treatment, and most people think that’s it, that it’s over, okay? Actually, what has happened is the Bush administration fought that amendment tooth and nail; they fought it with loopholes. Vice President Cheney went to Senator McCain and asked for a specific exemption for the C.I.A. McCain refused. The National Security Advisor went to McCain and asked for certain kinds of exemptions for the C.I.A. He refused.So then they started amending it. Basically what happened is, through the process, they introduced loopholes. Look, at the start of the war on terror, the Bush administration ordered torture. President Bush said right on September 11, 2001, when he addressed the nation, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some ass.”
Those were his words, and then it was up to his legal advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate his otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives, and they did it by crafting three very controversial legal principles. One, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties. Two, that there was a possible defense for C.I.A. interrogators who engage in torture, and the defenses were of two kinds. First of all, they played around with the word “severe,” that torture is the infliction of severe pain. That’s when Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said, “`severe’ means equivalent to organ failure,” in other words, right up to the point of death.
The other thing was that they came up with the idea of intentionality. If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty. The third principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo is not part of the United States; it is exempt from the writ of U.S. courts. Now, in the process of ratifying–sorry, passing the McCain torture–the torture prohibition, McCain’s ban on inhumane treatment, the White House has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three key principles. In his signing statement on December 30, President Bush said …
“I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do to defend America.”
Okay, that was the first thing. The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision that if a C.I.A. operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that’s a defense. So they got the second principle, defense for C.I.A. torturers. The third principle was – is that the White House had Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain’s amendment by inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory. . .
In other words, the veto threat acheived for President Bush policy that, from his point of view (desire to use torture), is better than if the McCain amendment had never been proposed.
Bush willing to go to the mat for deal he claims he didn’t even know about
President Bush is just daring someone to stop him. Tiny details of super-secret machinations behind the Dubai port deal are just beginning to peel away. For example, Josh Marshall today cites an apparent White House leak revealing that many standard operating procedures concerning business documents and other matters that are usually attached to foreign transactions were waved in this case.
What seems to be emerging is a story of close-knit inside dealing that has trumped the usual standards and practices for foreign ventures operating on US soil. Personally, I don’t know if this Dubai firm presents any risk to national security. But I am convinced that the Bush administration sees security concerns too basically trumped by the deal.
Despite lingering questions about 911-UAE connections and other supposed Terror War issues (two 911 hijackers came from UAE, and the state was the main transshipment point for the clandestine nuclear-weapons-component supply network of Pakistani engineer AQ Kahn), no big Terror War issues seem to have been raised. According to a New York Times story today by Elisabeth Bumiller and Carl Hulse, the
deal to hand over operations at major American ports to a government-owned company in Dubai did not involve national security and so did not require a more lengthy review
What is really striking in this deal, I think, is the immediate threat of a presidential veto against any action Congress may take to block it. Yesterday, reporters David Sanger and Eric Lipton wrote Wednesday in the New York Times that Bush
said Tuesday that he would veto any legislation blocking a deal for a state-owned company in Dubai to take over the management of port terminals in New York, Miami, Baltimore and other major American cities
This from a president who, “rarely makes veto threats, and he has not vetoed a single bill in his more than five years in office”.
Does that not seem like a strange way for the president to react to something so small that only last week, he claims not to have known anything about it?
Here is how CBS News phrased the mystery in a report including an interview by Gloria Borger with the Dark Lord himself, Richard Perle:
Yet why the president was ill-informed remains puzzling. One explanation is that Mr. Bush and his senior staff couldn’t brief Congress, because they didn’t know. The panel that makes the decisions, The Committee on Foreign Investments, is not run by high-level Cabinet members listed on its Web site. Instead they usually rubber-stamp decisions made by staffers, Borger reports.“The committee almost never met, and when it deliberated it was usually at a fairly low bureaucratic level,” Richard Perle said. Perle, who has worked for the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush administrations added, “I think it’s a bit of a joke.”
So we are to believe that the decisions by a rubber-stamp committee that almost never met has slipped through something the White House did not know about but now finds so important that a veto of any attempt to stop the deal is threatened?
How much more evidence do we need that we are under an out-of-control band of radical statists in this administration? Maybe this episode will stir up the few true conservatives left who might be able to help set some limits.
Here is the full text of the statement President Bush released on November 4, 2004 on the passing of Shaykh Zayid bin Sultan Al Nahayan of the UAE:
The United States mourns the passing of a great friend of our country, Shaykh Zayid bin Sultan Al Nahayan of the United Arab Emirates. Shaykh Zayid was the founder and President of the UAE for more than 30 years, a pioneer, an elder statesman, and a close ally. He and his fellow rulers of the seven Emirates built their federation into a prosperous, tolerant, and well-governed state. I offer my condolences and those of the American people to the family of Shaykh Zayid and to the government and people of the United Arab Emirates on their great loss.
Carefully chosen word, “tolerant”.
President Bush (November 7, 2003): “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.”
Curiously, in the landmark speech on freedom and democracy cited above, President Bush omitted any mention of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In his laundry lists that day, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, (and the Palestinians too) are all cited as Arab/Muslim governments “beginning to see the need for change.” But there is nothing, good nor bad, concerning UAE.
In a recommended piece from December 2004, Counterpunch writer Brian Cloughley reminds us of the actual relations President Bush has been conducting with UAE, along with a description of the state of democracy there:
The UAE is efficiently run and seems a happy enough country, providing you are not a Filipino domestic slave/servant or interested in democracy or the rights of women or other silly things. Dubai is a rich and thriving place of outstanding kitsch and vulgarity and is a popular destination for tourists who like that sort of thing…But don’t let’s kid ourselves that there is ever going to be freedom to vote in the UAE. The last ruler died November 2, and Bush sent this kind message: “The United States mourns the passing of a great friend of our country, Shaykh Zayid bin Sultan Al Nahayan”. . .Then Bush informed us that the dead autocrat was “. . . an elder statesman, and a close ally. He and his fellow rulers built their federation into a prosperous, tolerant, and well-governed state.” And Colin Powell echoed him: “Sheikh Zayed … was a friend. He stood both at home and abroad as a symbol of benevolent and wise leadership characterized by generosity, tolerance, and avid pursuit of development and modernization.”
Modernization, eh? And tolerance as well. Now that is really amazing, considering that Colin Powell’s own State Department tells us the place “has no political parties. There is talk of steps toward democratic government, but nothing concrete has emerged.” Does Washington have a different definition of “tolerance” to the rest of us?
There is not a word about democracy in the UAE, but who bothers about democracy when “US President George W Bush received here [Washington] yesterday evening Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan . . . UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs . . . President Bush hailed UAE-US relations, citing as an example the visit of Sheikh Hamdan to the US and the subsequent outcome of the meetings of the joint committees between the two countries.”
And the State Department explains all the lovey-dovey stuff by saying: “The United States has enjoyed friendly relations with the UAE since 1971. Private commercial ties, especially in petroleum, have developed into friendly government-to-government ties which include security assistance . . . The air force is currently awaiting an expected 2005 delivery of 80 advanced US F-16 multirole fighter aircraft.”
Which they need like a hole in the head; but never mind, it’s only US citizens’ petroleum taxes that pay for them.
As long as it has oil for Washington and buys F-16s the UAE is keeping the world safe for democracy. It doesn’t matter that democracy doesn’t exist in the country itself, because it will continue to receive every bit of support from Bush no matter what it does. As it happens, I think that benevolent autocracy as it applies in the UAE is what suits the country (apart from total lack of women’s rights)…
Others have been pointing out the suspected ties between Osama bin Laden and the Dubai royals. I have even posted in the past about mysterious al-Queda-linked characters and financial transactions from Dubai to the 911 terrorists, including “a $100,000 payment wired by Saeed Sheikh from Dubai to one of hijacker Mohamed Atta’s two bank accounts in Florida.”
The 911 Commission report is very hazy on these terrorist-financing issues, inconsistencies about which I posted again last year.
More information is trickling out now about inside-administration ties. US Treasury Secretary John Snow,
whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan’s cruise ship terminal and Newark’s container port. Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush’s cabinet.[An]other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World’s European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.
So, in a very rare occurance, I find myself agreeing with the likes of Senate Majority Leader Frist that this port deal may not be such a good idea.
Two kinds of sick: US torture theory and the ignorant media mouthpieces who support it
“You know, if you look at — if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I’m — yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City — the movie. I mean, I don’t — it’s just me.” –Rush Limbaugh, on his radio program, May 3, 2004. (SELF-INFLICTED PAIN and SENSORY DISORIENTATION: Alfred McCoy has a very different interpretation of what is going on here.)
Following public releases last week of large new batches of Abu Ghraib photos and a devastating UN report calling for the closure of the Pentagon dungeon at Guantanamo Bay, the US has once again dismissed any criticism. Mealy-mouthed Scott McClellan once again was sent out to dissemble.
McClellan (Feb. 16 briefing):I think that what we are seeing is a rehash of allegations that have been made by lawyers representing some of these detainees. We know that these are dangerous terrorists that are being kept at Guantanamo Bay. They are people that are determined to harm innocent civilians, or harm innocent Americans. They were enemy combatants picked up on the battlefield in the war on terrorism. They are trained to provide false information. And al Qaeda training manuals talk about ways to disseminate false information and hope to get attention.But the International Committee for the Red Cross has been provided full access to the detainees. The military treats detainees humanely, as directed by the President of the United States. And the United Nations should be making serious investigations across the world, and there are many instances when they do, when it comes to human rights. This was not one of them. And I think it’s a discredit to the U.N. when a team like this goes about rushing to report something when they haven’t even looked into the facts. All they have done is look at the allegations.
However, the stalest old news here is the notion that these are just the unfounded allegations of dangerous terrorists.
At this point, we could expect a skeptical press corps to point out to McClellan that his assertions are entirely false. A brief perusal of the UN report shows that it is based on voluminous amounts of evidence found in various documents released by the Pentagon itself, and observations recorded by US law enforcement personnel. Not only that, the UN report attacks the notion that all or even most of those persons housed at the dungeon are inhuman monsters picked up in the course of a gallant battlefield effort to stamp out terrorism. In fact, the UN says, US detention practices are arbitrary:
25. Many of the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay were captured in places where there was – at the time of their arrest – no armed conflict involving the United States. The case of the six men of Algerian origin detained in Bosnia and Herzegovina in October 2001 is a well-known and well-documented example,[24] but also numerous other detainees have been arrested under similar circumstances where international humanitarian law did not apply. The legal provision allowing the United States to hold belligerents without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities can therefore not be invoked to justify their detention.
But it was way too much to expect that US media would care to look under these covers, even though the path is well worn by the ACLU and CCR.
Media Matters has an excellent analysis of an example of sickening failure of skepticism on torture by NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, who “provided McClellan’s dubious defense of Guantánamo without challenge,” despite the fact that “McClellan’s claims had previously been undermined by both the International Committee of the Red Cross and internal U.S. government emails.”
This is a superb Media Matters post that refutes fully McClellan’s falsehoods.
Meanwhile, the ignorance just piles up at the news channels. An example there was MSNBC’s Scarborough Country for Feb. 16. The host stood up against the tainted UN and for all the American lives being protected by US humanity-robbing torture techniques in the “gloves off” Terror War:
And I have just got to say to all you, friends, the reason that I don‘t understand why anybody listens to the United Nations anymore is, you just look at their track record over the past 10 years. A million people killed in Rwanda, the U.N. does nothing. Two million killed in Sudan, the U.N. does nothing. Kosovo, the U.N. stays on the sidelines.Bosnia, U.N. stays on the sidelines. Torture in Iraq, more people killed in Iraq than any other country in the Middle East, under Saddam Hussein, the United Nations does nothing.
And these people are going to come to us and lecture us about trying to figure out what happened on 9/11 and what is happening right now with people that are trying to kill you, your families, and your neighbors in America today. They‘re trying to do it. And because we‘re trying to get information from these terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, we are the target of attacks from a corrupt bureaucracy that shouldn’t even be able to stay in New York City another day.
Sadly, this passes for a reasonable argument in America today. Well gee, they’re the worst of the worst, so whatever we do to them is okay. Scarborough just dodges the very serious issues of law and basic rights to a fair trial raised by the report, and makes the issue about some unspecified general failings of the UN, rather than the inhumane policies of the UN’s most-influential member.
My news for Scarborough is that there is nothing American about imprisonment without trial–the main point of the UN report. And what on Earth can guys kept in a tiny box for four years still be telling that can protect anyone?
Alfred McCoy and history of US-sponsored torture
Sickening media mouthpieces like McClellan, Limbaugh, Scarborough, and the pussy-cat reporters like Miklaszewski enable the Bush Administration to lie about US engagement in torture without challenge. Yes, you better believe it. This is torture the US is perpetrating.
Read this astonishing book and you’ll understand much about the torture photos
University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred McCoy explains much about the roots of this torture in his new book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Here’s the flavor of it from a striking Feb. 17 Democracy Now! interview:
McCoy: …if you look at the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, okay? In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A. torture. It’s very simple. He’s hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental C.I.A. techniques, developed at enormous cost.
There you have it. The US-sponsored torture illustrated by the photos is clearly, most certainly not just the work of a few deranged pranksters on the night shift playing out harmless Britney Spears fantasies. Rather, it is the product of the entire history of the CIA throughout the Cold War, and now the Terror War under the orders of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
Also go here for additional segments with Alfred McCoy. (Look for Feb. 14 and Feb. 16 Flashpoints programs.) I implore all readers to listen to the interviews cited. McCoy describes a sickening history. It’s understanding is essential for any chance for future redemption of America’s soul.
Iraq palace construction trumps reconstruction
Atrios caught my eye with one of his pithy items yesterday. Rumsfeld, apparently, has given up on reconstructing Iraq:
We’re not there to do nation-building. They’re going to have to build their own nation. It’s going to be an Iraqi solution, ultimately.
This follows reports out over the last few weeks that the US has all but cancelled any remaining efforts at reconstruction.
Rumsfeld and company must be counting on everybody forgetting how they used to talk about the mission, as Atrios reminded us.
President Bush (May 1, 2003): We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We’re helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. [emphasis added]
Today we can look into the eye of the dictator and see that he is Bush. Here is a story posted at CorpWatch this past week:
Baghdad Embassy Bonanza
Kuwait Company’s Secret Contract & Low-Wage Labor
by David Phinney, Special to CorpWatch; February 12th, 2006
…
the massive $592-million project may be the most lasting monument to the U.S. occupation in the war-torn nation. Located on a on a 104-acre site on the Tigris river where U.S. and coalition authorities are headquartered, the high-tech palatial compound is envisioned as a totally self-sustaining cluster of 21 buildings reinforced to 2.5 times usual standards. Some walls as said to be 15 feet thick or more. Scheduled for completion by June 2007, the installation is touted as not only the largest, but the most secure diplomatic embassy in the world.The 1,000 or more U.S. government officials calling the new compound home will have access to a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food court and a commissary. In addition to the main embassy buildings, there will be a large-scale Maine barracks, a school, locker rooms, a warehouse, a vehicle maintenance garage, and six apartment buildings with a total of 619 one-bedroom units. Water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be independent from Baghdad’s city utilities. The total site will be two-thirds the area of the National Mall in Washington, DC.
The upshot of this whole story is that the dictator’s palace is being built by virtual slave laborers, 900 of whom “live and work for First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting (FKTC) on the construction site of the massive project.”
Why should I be surprised and so sickened by the mendacity and hypocrisy of the president and his ministers? I guess I just recall all of the pre-war propaganda concerning Saddam’s palaces, where the bad man supposedly was storing weapons and sinking the wealth purloined from his people, instead of giving them the basic services and infrastructure they needed. Now the US is shameless in the same role.
Scary wind
End of another false spring
What was it, the fifth or sixth false spring since Christmas? The photo was taken about an hour before sunset with the new video camera at full zoom looking down our side street toward the Penobscot River. Now after dark, a frigid reminder that it’s still February is roaring in on a 50 mph wind. Hear the sound…
This afternoon the Mount Washington Observatory recorded sustained wind velocity of 120 mph with gusts up to 137 mph!