When last we tuned in, Daniel Drezner was advancing the specious claim that the Bush administration had a coherent and clearly articulated grand strategy, and that this grand strategy was a reason to vote for George W. Bush in November. Now he advances the even more specious claim that the Bush administration not only has a coherent and clearly articulated grand strategy, but that the Bushies' grand strategy is not "unilateralist": danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: Brad DeLong, cartoonist extraordinaire: I'm puzzled... unilateralsm... that's nowhere in [Gaddis's] Foreign Policy essay.... Drezner has no reason to be puzzled. This is what Gaddis wrote: John Lewis Gaddis: Can we count on multilateral support if things go badly? Here the Bush administration has not been thinking ahead. It's been dividing its own moral multipliers through its tendency to behave, on an array of multilateral issues ranging from the Kyoto Protocol to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the International Criminal Court, like a sullen, pouting, oblivious, and overmuscled teenager. As a result, it's depleted the reservoir of support from allies it ought to have in place before embarking on such a high-risk strategy. There are, to be sure, valid objections to these...

Via First Draft: ,P.Ordered to just walk away : Saturday, August 07, 2004 MIKE FRANCIS,/P. BAGHDAD -- The national guardsman peering through the long-range scope of his rifle was startled by what he saw unfolding in the walled compound below. From his post several stories above ground level, he watched as men in plainclothes beat blindfolded and bound prisoners in the enclosed grounds of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. He immediately radioed for help. Soon after, a team of Oregon Army National Guard soldiers swept into the yard and found dozens of Iraqi detainees who said they had been beaten, starved and deprived of water for three days. In a nearby building, the soldiers counted dozens more prisoners and what appeared to be torture devices -- metal rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals. Many of the Iraqis, including one identified as a 14-year-old boy, had fresh welts and bruises across their back and legs. The soldiers disarmed the Iraqi jailers, moved the prisoners into the shade, released their handcuffs and administered first aid. Lt. Col. Daniel Hendrickson of Albany, Ore., the highest ranking American at the scene, radioed for instructions. But in a move that frustrated and infuriated...

Tom Lasseter--still covering Iraq for Knight Ridder--says that Allawi is in big trouble: KR Washington Bureau | 08/06/2004 | Deepening anti-U.S. rage casts doubt on Iraq leaders' ability to restore order: After the past two days of fighting in southern and central Iraq, the difference between firebrand cleric Muqtada al Sadr and Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi couldn't be any more clear: Al Sadr has an army, and Allawi does not. In Iraq, security is politics. When Allawi took office, the self-styled strongman lost little time before declaring that his government wouldn't tolerate the insurgency that's swept the country. But as in previous battles, when al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia began to overrun Najaf and several neighborhoods from Baghdad to Basra, the Iraqi police force and national guard fought for a little while, then ran. And as in previous battles, Iraq's Achilles' heel was revealed: To defend their country, Allawi and the interim government must go to the American military, an institution that's widely reviled by many Iraqis as an occupational force run amok. Allawi's Cabinet has approved an emergency provision that would allow for something like a state of emergency to be declared, and he's expected to announce at...

David Finley sends along a depressing piece of reporting from Knight-Ridder's Tom Lasseter: Posted on Tue, Jul. 20, 2004 ** ** In the face of stubborn insurgency, troops scale back Anbar patrols ** *By Tom Lasseter* *Knight Ridder Newspapers* RAMADI, Iraq - After more than a year of fighting, U.S. troops have stopped patrolling large swaths of Iraq's restive Anbar province, according to the top American military intelligence officer in the area. [...] After losing dozens of men to a "voiceless, faceless mass of people" with no clear leadership or political aim other than killing American soldiers, the U.S. military has had to re-evaluate the situation, said Maj. Thomas Neemeyer, the head American intelligence officer for the 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, the main military force in the Ramadi area and from there to Fallujah. "They cannot militarily overwhelm us, but we cannot deliver a knockout blow, either," he said. "It creates a form of stalemate." In the wreckage of the security situation, U.S. officials have all but given up on plans to install a democratic government in the city, and are hoping instead that Islamic extremists and other insurgent groups don't overrun the province in the same...

According to Time: ZAMAN DAILY NEWSPAPER (2004071410372): Famous academic Francis Fukuyama, one of the founding fathers of the neo-conservative movement that underlies the policies of US President George W. Bush's administration, said on July 13 that he would not vote for the incumbent in the November 2 US Presidential election. In addition to distancing himself from the current administration, Fukuyama told TIME magazine that his old friend, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, should resign. In 1997, Fukuyama together with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush, signed a declaration entitled 'The New American Century Project'. That declaration set the groundwork for the neo-conservative movement. Fukuyama began to distance himself from the administration during the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The tension between the two came to a head prior to the invasion of Iraq. Fukuyama opposed the war. Fukuyama is still angry at the Bush administration since they refuse to admit to the mistakes they have made. Fukuyama had warned that after the war, Iraq would be dragged into an internal conflict and would export terror to the world. Fukuyama said that because of those reasons he could not vote for Bush in the upcoming elections....

James Harkin of the Financial Times writes about Paul Krugman in the... Arts and Weekend section? Paul Krugman's terse opening transparency on the overhead projector looks more like a private aide-memoire than material for a public address: "Like Basil Fawlty, don't mention the war. Talk instead about political economy." Krugman has been invited to the London School of Economics, a bastion of liberal Americans abroad, to deliver a lecture entitled, "Whither America?" A small, bearded man with a glint in his eye, he is dwarfed by the imposing lectern on the stage of the LSE's Old Theatre. In front of him, undergraduates in sweatshirts and trainers sit alongside middle-aged men in pinstriped suits who have just arrived from the office.... After September 11, Krugman's column in The New York Times was one of the first to poke its head above the parapet and lay into the conduct of the Bush administration's "war on terror". Since then, the left has elevated Krugman to hero, an eloquent and apparently unimpeachable critic of Bush's tax-cutting and of his stewardship of the American economy. He begins diligently, all graphs and bar charts. The Bush administration's series of tax cuts, he announces, are not a...

The lost honor of Gary Farber, and of all the rest of us Americans too: Gary Farber: AGAIN, MANY ABU GHRAIB PRISONERS were not only not terrorists, they weren't even accused of being terrorists. I keep reading... rantings ... that variously claim that, after all, the Abu Ghraib prisoners were all murderers, killers, and terrorists, and obviously no one should care about them.... But, as reported many times, many were either just mistakenly arrested, or were, at worst, common criminals: NEWSWEEK: ...military-intelligence officers... pressured the military-police guards there to "soften up" their charges between sessions. That, at least, is the defense of the six MPs.... So why did Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. order a young woman to pull her shirt up to her neck? She was an accused prostitute. MPs allegedly ordered Hussein Mohsen Matar to masturbate, and rode on his naked back as he crawled on all fours. He was an accused thief.... Not only did military police torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib, they often tortured the wrong prisoners. The case files of 26 abused detainees... obtained by NEWSWEEK... 13 of the victims were there for criminal offenses.... At least eight of the other 13 who were initially picked...

Holden of Atrios finds the Los Angeles Times taking a look at what our Secretary of State knew and when he knew it: Eschaton: Posted by Holden: Secretary Colin L. Powell, UN Security Council, February 5, 2003  My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples... The LA Times  delves into the SSCI report and finds that the State Department's very own analysts tried to delete a number of lies from Powell's speech: The analysts, describing many of the claims as "weak" and assigning grades to arguments on a 5-star scale, warned Powell against making an array of allegations they deemed implausible. They also warned against including Iraqi communications intercepts they deemed ambiguous and against speculating that terrorists might "come through Baghdad and pick-up biological weapons" as if they were stocked on store shelves.   On the Mobile Weapons Labs: In one section that remained in the speech, Powell showed aerial images of a supposed decontamination vehicle circling a suspected chemical weapons site. "We caution," State Department analysts wrote, "that Iraq has given … what may...

Matt Stoller and Andrew Northrup point us at Ed Cone. Either Sy Hersh has gone completely insane, or the House needs to vote to impeach George W. Bush tonight: EdCone.com:Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher." (I transcribed some of his speech from this streaming site. Hersh starts at about 1:07:50.) He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes." The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society." Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis... with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq. "The disaffection inside the Pentagon is extremeley acute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him...

Matthew Yglesias asks why we don't have true headlines and leads, like "President Defends Iraq War by Making S*** Up": matthew: Bush Hatin': Why do I hate George W. Bush? Let me count the ways. Or, rather, let me just count one. In response to the SSCI Report which clearly establishes that the reasons the president gave us for going to war involved several key factual claims that turn out to be false, the president had two viable options. One would be to concede that the reason offered (a direct, short-term military threat posed by Iraq) reflected the imperatives of Security Council politics rather than the administration's real thinking and instead offer up one of the two dozen or so "right reasons" for war that various pundits have offered over the past several years. Another would be to say that the stated reason was the real reason and that the factual judgments underlying it were reasonable ex ante, though ex post we can see that they were wrong. This is the William F. Buckley position: "if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have supported that." Instead of picking one of these two alternatives, however, the president (once...

Michael Isikoff shows off his considerable journalistic skills once more: MSNBC - 'The Dots Never Existed': Colin Powell was putting the finishing touches on his speech to the United Nations spelling out the case for war in Iraq. Across the Potomac River, a Pentagon intelligence analyst going over the facts in the speech was alarmed at how shaky that case was. Powell's presentation relied heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, dubbed "Curve Ball" inside the intel community. A self-proclaimed chemical engineer who was the brother of a top aide to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, Curve Ball had told the German intelligence service that Iraq had a fleet of seven mobile labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons. But nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant—except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source. He recalled that Curve Ball had shown up for their only meeting nursing a "terrible hangover." After reading Powell's speech, the analyst decided he had to speak up, according to a devastating report from the Senate intelligence committee, released last week, on intelligence failures leading up to the...

Robert Waldmann reads the New York Times before I do, and learns that Iraq was on the menu as early as September 20, 2001--which is, of course, what Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke said, and what the Bushies vehemently denied: Robert's random thoughts: Muhammad Al-Zubaidi... INC efforts to pump up stories about Iraqi WMD and alleged ties to al Qaeda.... not a very credible source.... The bit in the NYT article which I found most interesting, has nothing to do with Al-Zubaidi: On Sept. 20, 2001, with the Pentagon hallways still reeking of smoke and disaster, Mr. Chalabi met with the Defense Policy Board, a group of private citizens that advises the secretary of defense. The clear consensus was that Mr. Hussein had to be removed from power in Iraq, in the interests of stabilizing the region and thwarting his support for terrorists, according to Mr. Brooke, who accompanied Mr. Chalabi to the Pentagon. So, over at the Pentagon, minds were made up by September 20 2001. This is obviously true, but had been denied when Clarke made the claim. Notice the odd attitude towards evidence. It is not that they are trying to decide what to do, so they...

Joshua Micah Marshall is unhappy with the Washington Post's Susan Schmidt: Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: July 04, 2004 - July 10, 2004 Archives: I'll dispense with the literary prologue and get right to the point. Susan Schmidt is known, happily among DC Republicans and not so happily among DC Democrats, as what you might call the "Mikey" (a la Life Cereal fame) of the DC press corps, especially when the cereal is coming from Republican staffers. This morning she has an article on the Senate intel report and Joe Wilson, specifically focusing on the relevance of Wilson's reporting on Niger (the report says analysts did not see Wilson's findings as weakening claims that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger) and his wife's role in recommending him for the assignment. We'll discuss the broader issues of Plame's role in Wilson's assignment and the underlying question of the alleged Iraq-Niger negotiations. A clearer-eyed take on Wilson and report can be found here in this story by Knight Ridder. But for now a few points on Schmidt's treatment. In her fourth paragraph Schmidt writes that "contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did...

The Poor Man is completely dumbfounded to learn that, when Richard Cheney said he had access to information the 911 Commission had not seen, Cheney was lying. What a surprise! The Poor Man: Surprise, Surprise: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Sept. 11 commission, which reported no collaborative links between Iraq and al Qaeda, said on Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney had no more information than commission investigators to support his later assertions to the contrary. The 10-member bipartisan panel investigating the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington said it reached its conclusion after reviewing available transcripts of Cheney's public remarks asserting long-standing links between the former Iraqi president and Osama Bin Laden's Islamist militant network. "The 9-11 Commission believes it has access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9-11 attacks," the commission said in a statement."...

Joshua Micah Marshall uses sarcasm as he contemplates the latest work by New York Times reporter James Risen--a work cooked up from 100% peddled self-interested government leaks without any application on the reporter's part of common sense, or any inclusion of context or mention of critical and dissenting voices. Truly an opportunity for him--and all of us--to bang our heads against the wall: A remarkable turn of events. We know that the chief architects of the war -- at the White House and the Pentagon -- waged a running battle with the CIA for the eighteen months leading up to the war, both on the WMD front and on their too-skeptical take on Iraq's ties to al Qaida. It was the Intelligence Community that was the proverbial stick in the mud holding up the aggressive posture favored by these other forces within the administration. But it now turns out that while the White House claimed the CIA was too cautious and naive about the dangers emanating from Iraq, in fact, the Agency was hoodwinking the president into believing the worst about Iraq and keeping him and his advisors in the dark about the weakness of their claims. You might...

Joshua Micah Marshall reminds us of the Washington Post's two-faced Jim Hoagland. But even I had failed to grasp exactly how two-faced he is. In October 2002 it was finally the case that some in the CIA were willing to buck careerism, recognize the obvious danger of Saddam Hussein, and no longer bury evidence. In February of 2004 it is incompetent alarmists at the CIA who exaggerate the Iraqi threat--and poor naive George W. Bush who believes them: washingtonpost.com: Jim Hoagland: CIA's New Old Iraq File: Sunday, October 20, 2002; Page B07 washingtonpost.com: Jim Hoagland: Failing Grade for Spies:Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page B07 Imagine that Saddam Hussein has been offering terrorist training and other lethal support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda for years. You can't imagine that? Sign up over there. You can be a Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. Or at least you could have been until recently. As President Bush's determination to overthrow the Iraqi dictator has become evident to all, a cultural change has come over the world's most expensive intelligence agency: Some analysts out at Langley are now willing to evaluate incriminating evidence against the Iraqis and call it just that....

A year and a half ago, Daniel Davies asked the question: D-squared Digest -- A fat young man without a good word for anyone: can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly... give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics: (i) It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration. (ii) It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it). (iii) It wasn't in some important way completely f***** up during the execution. It's just that I literally can't think what possible evidence [Tom] Friedman might be going on in his tacit assumption that the introduction of democracy to Iraq (if it is attempted at all) will be executed well rather than badly.... One contributing factor was the staffing of the CPA by right-wing ideologues without much experience and without many smarts but a lot of belief. From TBogg, serving as wingman for Paul Krugman: &#187&#171TBogg&#187&#171: Let's see what Krugman wrote: If the occupiers often seemed oblivious to reality, one reason was that many jobs at the C.P.A. went to people whose qualifications seemed to lie mainly in their personal and political connections...

Michael Ignatieff admits that he has no place to hide: The New York Times > Magazine > The Way We Live Now: Mirage in the Desert: ...the administration's arrogance. Gen. George C. Marshall began planning the postwar occupation of Germany two years before D-Day. This administration was fumbling for a plan two months before the invasion. Who can read Bob Woodward's ''Plan of Attack'' and not find his jaw dropping at the fact that from the very beginning, in late 2001, none of the civilian leadership, not Rice, not Powell, not Tenet, not the president, asked where the plan for the occupation phase was? Who can't feel that U.S. captains, majors and lieutenants were betrayed by the Beltway wars between State and Defense? Who can't feel rage that victorious armies stood by and watched for a month while Iraq was looted bare? Someone like me who supported the war on human rights grounds has nowhere to hide: we didn't suppose the administration was particularly nice, but we did assume it would be competent. There isn't much excuse for its incompetence, but equally, there isn't much excuse for our naivete either.... For Ignatieff to say that there is "no excuse"...

Paul Krugman bangs his head against the wall as he contemplates the sorry record of the Coalition Provisional Authority: The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Who Lost Iraq?: ...The Iraq venture may have been doomed from the start — but we'll never know for sure because the Bush administration made such a mess of the occupation. Future historians will view it as a case study of how not to run a country. Up to a point, the numbers in the Brookings Institution's invaluable Iraq Index tell the tale. Figures on the electricity supply and oil production show a pattern of fitful recovery and frequent reversals; figures on insurgent attacks and civilian casualties show a security situation that got progressively worse, not better; public opinion polls show an occupation that squandered the initial good will. What the figures don't describe is the toxic mix of ideological obsession and cronyism that lie behind that dismal performance. The insurgency took root during the occupation's first few months.... But what was Paul Bremer III, the head of the C.P.A., focused on? According to a Washington Post reporter who shared a flight with him last June, "Bremer discussed the need to privatize...

Max Sawicky for National Security Advisor! MaxSpeak, You Listen!: 100 AND COUNTING: I think this report supports my argument, to wit: 1) Insofar as we are fighting non-terrorist anti-American forces, the [Iraq] Occupation is wrong and not a practical enterprise; 2) To an important extent, our conflict with non-terrorist anti-American forces creates a political power vacuum that facilitates anti-American terrorism. By "non-terrorist" I mean forces who have no interest in a violent, international jihad against the U.S., but who simply want the U.S. military out of Iraq. To be sure, these forces will kill you just as dead as the jihadists, nor do I support them. But to fail to make this distinction is a fundamental strategic error and marks the path to Hell This is a very well-put thumbnail summary of strategic realities on the ground in Iraq. Realities that, as best as I can see, the current administration pretends not to see....

The Philadelphia Inquirer writes an editorial that tells it like it is: Philadelphia Inquirer | 06/20/2004 | Editorial | Bush and Iraq: A poll of Americans taken in March of this year found that 57 percent of those polled believed that Iraq under Saddam Hussein substantially supported al-Qaeda or was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Where did they get that misguided idea? Why, it was from their president, their vice president, their defense secretary, their national security adviser and other key players in the war on terror, of course. Through assertion, implication and innuendo, the Bush administration - backed by an amen chorus of talk-show babblers and oped writers who filled in the blanks that White House rhetoric artfully left - has labored to plant the notion that invading Iraq was a logical, urgent response to Sept. 11. What other impressions did the Bush team work to insinuate into public opinion, before and after its preemptive strike at Hussein? That Iraq had a robust weapons program and was ready and willing to hand off biological or chemical weapons to a terrorist group; and that it would soon have a nuclear bomb. That the bulk of the Iraqi people...

The Financial Times is not a happy camper: Financial Times Leader: The Bush administration has misled the American people. It has isolated the US, as American diplomats and commanders pointed out this week. And its bungling in Iraq has given new and terrifying life to the cult of death sponsored by Osama bin Laden. Above all, it inspires little confidence it is capable of defeating the spreading al-Qaeda franchise, which always was the clear and present danger....

On February 26, 2003, Daniel Davies wrote: D-squared Digest -- A fat young man without a good word for anyone: I find myself with a few spare minutes and make the mistake of reading Thomas Friedman again. His conclusion after a long, dull and witless ramble... reads "If [it is] done right, the Middle East will never be the same. If done wrong, the world will never be the same". There's not much you can say to that except "shut up you silly man". But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone... give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics: It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration. It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it). It wasn't in some important way completely f***** up during the execution. On June 17, 2004, New Republic editor Peter Beinart writes: The New Republic Online: Partisan Review I tried hard not to be partisan. I distrusted the Bush administration and feared it would be politically empowered by the war. But such thoughts felt petty and limited at such...

Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. Now we have the Secretary of Defense directing that the U.S. military violate the Geneva Convention not so that we can "effectively" interrogate a dangerous terrorist and senior officer of Ansar al-Islam, but so that we can fail to interrogate a dangerous terrorist and senior officer of Ansar al-Islam. This is a truly astonishing blend of immorality, criminality, and incompetence: Michael Froomkin writes: Discourse.net: The Disappeared: Today’s bombshell is in the New York Times, Prison Abuse: Rumsfeld Issued an Order to Hide Detainee in Iraq. Let’s count the shockers (we can still be shocked, can’t we?) and estimate the fallout. Shockers: 1. Rumsfeld (at the CIA’s request—we’ll get to that), ordered what seems at least a technical war crime: putting a confirmed POW in solitary and hiding him from the Red Cross. 2. It’s not a unique case; there is/was a class of “ghost detainees”—disappeared people. This from a country that (with some justice) tied itself up in knots over the fate of its own POWs...

An interesting juxtaposition. Dan Froomkin writes: washingtonpost.com – White House Briefing: President Bush yesterday pointed to Abu Musab Zarqawi as the "best evidence" of a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.... [H]e... [put] himself at odds with the Sept. 11 commission and the intelligence community.... Communications between Zarqawi and al Qaeda that Bush alluded to yesterday took place several months after Hussein was removed from power. And a new report released this morning by the Sept. 11 commission declares that there is "no credible evidence" that Hussein's government collaborated with the al Qaeda terrorist network on any attacks on the United States, including the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings.... "Before the war, intelligence officials said, Zarqawi was operating with the Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group Ansar Al Islam in Kurdish-held northern Iraq, not in territory under the control of Hussein's regime...." Dana Milbank writes in today's Washington Post that Bush "renewed an assertion that Hussein had longstanding ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network, one of the justifications underpinning the Iraq war. The alleged link between Hussein and al Qaeda has taken on more importance with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.... Vice President Cheney... said in a speech...

Michael Froomkin is a large mammal. But I always knew that. He writes: Discourse.net: The Kindness (and Notice) of Strangers: I am very deeply grateful for all the kind comments and email that people have been sending me in response to my recent blog posts. And the traffic spike — about four times the old volume — is most welcome. Plus it’s also fun to have so many new links that, however temporarily, discourse.net has been promoted to a Large Mammal in the Truth Laid Bear EcoSystem (#343 on links, #66 (!!) on traffic). One thing that I especially appreciate is being linked to by Ken MacLeod, who is just an amazingly wonderful science fiction writer. (Pity it has to be part of MacLeod’s elegy for a better nation.) I think MacLeod’s The Cassini Division is one of the best science fiction books of its decade (at least), and the whole series of which it forms a part is wonderful…even if I never did quite fit all the parts together…even if he says in one of his prefaces that we weren’t supposed to be able to… Let me second the praise of Ken MacLeod. And let me state that I,...

Only the Medium Lobster carries the arguments for torture through to their logical conclusion: Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.: The Medium Lobster has been disquieted of late at by the latest round of Iraq torture scandal news. There has been much uproar - among that irritating minority which have not been studiously scrutinizing the week's top story, the beatification of Ronald Reagan, at least - regarding the powers of the president and the incompatibility of torture with a liberal democracy. In the midst of all this, the Medium Lobster would like to offer those with cooler heads some perspective as to the merits of harsh interrogation. Imagine there is some weapon of mass destruction planted by terrorists in the heart of a city, ready to go off - a "ticking bomb," if you will. Would it be wrong to torture a terrorist to find the location of such a device and save the millions of lives at risk? Hardly. Now, what if instead of torturing a terrorist, interrogators had to torture a confederate of that terrorist - some associate who would know where the terrorist was so they could locate that ticking bomb? Is that dirtying...

Michael Froomkin writes about the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel's cheers for torture. It seems very clear to me that Jay Bybee should not be a judge, on the 9th Circuit or anyplace: Discourse.net: OLC's Aug. 1, 2002 Torture Memo ("the Bybee Memo"): The Washington Post has placed online the full text of an August 1, 2002 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to White House Legal Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales. A few words of context before substance. The OLC is sometimes called “the Attorney General’s Lawyer”. It’s an elite bureau in the Justice Dept. staffed by very very intelligent and highly credentialed people. Its primary function is to give opinions on matters of constitutionality regarding interdepartmental and inter-branch relations, and to opine on the constitutionality of pending legislation. By all accounts working at OLC is one of the most interesting jobs in government if you are interested in constitutional law or the working of government. In August 2002, the head of the OLC was Jay Bybee, now a sitting judge on the 9th Circuit. His signature appears on page 46 of this memo. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who requested this memo, is...

George Bush acknowledges that it was U.S. policy to torture detainees--and that such torture is legal inasmuch as he as president has the power to suspend whatever laws he chooses. That, at least, is the only way I can read Bush's remarks yesterday. Dan Froomkin has the goods: washingtonpost.com – White House Briefing: Given several opportunities at yesterday's press conference to express his opposition to torture, President Bush responded repeatedly with a legalistic answer that leaves him vulnerable to continued speculation about the role he and his top advisers played in setting interrogation rules in the war on terror. Dana Milbank and Dana Priest write in The Washington Post: "President Bush said Thursday that he expects U.S. authorities to follow the law when interrogating prisoners abroad, but he declined to say whether he believes torture is permitted under the law. "Pressed repeatedly during a news conference here about a Justice Department memo saying torture could be justified in the war on terrorism, Bush said only that U.S. interrogators had to follow the law. Asked whether he agrees with the Justice Department view, Bush said he could not remember whether he had seen the memorandum." James Harding writes in the Financial...

Torture and rumors of torture. In my email inbox this morning... If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined--even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today. The scariest part: "[Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened." UPDATED: I failed to note that the taker of these notes is the excellent Rick Pearlstein, whose book about Goldwater is in my to-read pile: Seymour Hersh spoke... at the University of Chicago.... I took some scattered notes. The remaks will be disjoined--as will be the notes--but chilling. He asserted several things that he says he didn't have nailed down enough to write, but that he was confident of.... He then turned to the 40th president, referring obliquely to 138 names, then...

The Poor Man is unhappy about the state of Fallujah: The Poor Man: Defeat In Fallujah: The Washinton Post reports that the "truce" in Fallujah has essentially handed the city over to "the insurgency", or whoever the hell they are: Under an agreement made last month with U.S. Marine commanders, a new force called the Fallujah Brigade, led by former officers from Saddam Hussein's demobilized army, was to safeguard the city. The unruly gunmen -- many of them insurgents who battled the Marines through most of April -- were supposed to give way to Iraqi police and civil defense units. Instead, the brigade stays outside of town in tents, the police cower in their patrol cars and the civil defense force nominally occupies checkpoints on the city's fringes but exerts no influence over the masked insurgents who operate only a few yards away. The Marines gave the brigade the task of apprehending the killers of four American contractors whose bodies were burned, mutilated and hung from a bridge in March, capturing foreign fighters and disarming the insurgents. None of that has happened. I'm afraid this is probably the model for the future Iraq. The country will be handed over to...

In a calm, measured, reasonable, sane sort of way, Phil Carter goes absolutely apeshit. I see no way to evade the conclusion that George W. Bush has failed to fulfill his constitutional obligations under Article II §3, and deserves to be impeached. Now. Phil Carter writes: INTEL DUMP - Archives 2004-06-08 - 2004-06-14: Jess Bravin reports in Monday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about a classified legal memorandum prepared by the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel that appears designed to find every legal workaround possible to justify coercive interrogation and torture at Guantanamo Bay. This report comes in the wake of disclosures about other memoranda — one written in early 2002 by UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo while with the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and a second written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales — justifying the White House's overall Guantanamo Bay plan. This latest memo, signed in April 2003, goes much further than those though — it specifically authorizes the use of torture tactics, up to and including those which may result in the death of a detainee. The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by...

The Poor Man reports that Donald Rumsfeld has joined the ranks of the shrill and unbalanced, and is in The Poor Man: Donald Rumsfeld Is Shrill And Unbalanced: the grips of irrational Bush-hatred: "The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday. The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them. ''It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,'' Rumsfeld said at an international security conference." If even Donald Rumsfeld believes that Al Qaeda is growing stronger, who is left to defend the Bush administration's conduct of the War on Terror?...

They really do lie about everything. And rely on the press being too stupid to notice. Don't they? From Atrios: Eschaton: Flopped Reader r writes in: George W. Bush last Feburary, on Meet The Press (emphasis added): Russert: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein? President Bush: They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion. George W. Bush yesterday , Rose Garden press conference: Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. Chalabi is an Iraqi leader that's fallen out of favor within your administration. I'm wondering if you feel that he provided any false information, or are you particularly -- THE PRESIDENT: Chalabi? Q Yes, with Chalabi. THE PRESIDENT: My meetings with him were very brief....

Betray important U.S. intelligence secrets, and all that happens to you is that you lose your subsidies? Why isn't Ahmed Chalabi in a U.S. jail right now? Why are we ruled by these fools? The New York Times > Washington > Chalabi Reportedly Told Iran That U.S. Had Code: Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran.... The Bush administration... asked The New York Times and other news organizations not to publish details.... The administration withdrew its request on Tuesday, saying information about the code-breaking was starting to appear in news accounts.... American officials said that about six weeks ago, Mr. Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security that the United States was reading the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service, one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East. According to American officials, the Iranian official in Baghdad, possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi's account, sent a cable to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, using the broken...

Once again, the only commentator in the entire world capable of explaining the Bush administration's current Iraq policy at an appropriate level is Fafblog!'s Fafnir: Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.: The President's New Plan for Iraq: An FAQLast night the president got up on TV and explained a new five-step plan to guide Iraq to sovereignty and stability. Wow - five whole steps! But what is the plan and what will it mean for Iraq and the US? Fafblog, your number one source of news and information when it isn't takin four or five day weekends, is on the case with a handy FAQ:Q: What are the new five steps?A: They are: 1. Handing over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government. 2. Establishing security. 3. Continuing to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure. 4. Moving toward a national election in Iraq.Q: Those are good steps!A: We are glad you like them.Q: How are they different from the old five steps?A: They are the same as the old five steps, but they have the newly-added quality of newness.Q: But -A: We are staying the course.Q: How sovereign will the new sovereign Iraq government be?A: It will be so sovereign. You have...

When future histories of espionage are written, will the United States's attack on Iraq be classified as the greatest intelligence coup of the century? The Iranian intelligence agencies planting false information and getting the United States to remove their enemy, Saddam Hussein? Political Wire: Quote of the Day: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy." -- Former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, quoted in The Guardian. According to the article: "Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq."...

Mark Kleiman has a Chalabi quiz: Mark A. R. Kleiman: Chalabi quiz: Which is the most embarrassing element of the Chalabi situation? 1. That we've been paying Chalabi to tell us lies. 2. That Chalabi duped us by spreading the same false intelligence he was peddling to us to foreign intelligence agencies, whose reports when appeared as "confirmation" of his original fabrications. 3. That the original source of the fabrications may turn out to have been the Iranian intelligence service, using Chalabi to induce the U.S. to invade Iraq. 4. That, in return for the disinformation the Iranians were feeding us through him, Chalabi was passing genuine American secrets to Iranian intelligence. 5. That no one in Washington seems to have been authorized to give Chalabi or his crew that sensitive information, raising the specter of possible Espionage Act prosecutions. 6. That Chalabi managed to get himself seated right behind the First Lady for the State of the Union in January. 7. That a number of prominent American neocons have decided to support Chalabi against their own government, using in some cases strikingly anti-American language. 8. That the raid enraged Chalabi against the United States without reducing his ability...

Joshua Micah Marshall provides today's treason report: Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: May 16, 2004 - May 22, 2004 Archives: A note from a reader who is a former US government official ... OK, the press has now understood that Chalabi was providing US intelligence to the Iranian intelligence service. That's a start. Here are some questions you might want to ask: Where did he get the intelligence to leak? Who gave Chalabi the leaked classified information? Was it lawful to provide Chalabi with classified USG military information that included such things as where our troops were and what they were doing? Who is under investigation as a result of the intercepts of the Iranians discussing the intelligence provided by Chalabi? Who are the investigators? Has this been referred to the Department of Justice? Did his provision of that information to Iran result in the death of US soldiers in Shi'ia areas? Are the intel leaks the reason for the raids of Chalabi's home? Are the intel leaks the reason they cut off his income? Why did the USG say that Chalabi was not a "target" of the raids on his home? (It's possible other members of his...

Nietszche was right. And we have done more than looked into the abyss. And now the abyss has much more than looked into us: The Road to Surfdom: In a post below about the US mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, a commenter, Paul Johnson, made the following observation: Being led around on a leash is hardly torture. I bet you copped worse than that in your Public School days. There are people around who pay good money to get hooded and led along on a leash. Lindy was just setting herself up for a post-Army job at Hilda's House of Pain and Domination. This is a pretty typical response from some (by no means all) on the right, those who seek to dismiss the charges against US troops and others for prisoner abuse as something not worth getting worried about. I look forward to his jokes about the following report: Brutal interrogation techniques by U.S. military personnel are being investigated in connection with the deaths of at least five Iraqi prisoners in war-zone detention camps, Pentagon documents obtained by The Denver Post show. The deaths include the killing in November of a high-level Iraqi general who was shoved into a sleeping...

Lieutenant Colonels taking the Fifth... LA Times: When the Graner hearing convened in Iraq, the first government witness to refuse to testify was Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who as director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the prison oversaw the military intelligence operations. Next on the witness stand at the Graner hearing was Capt. Donald J. Reese... commander of the 372nd Military Police Company. The last prosecution witness to plead the 5th was Adel L. Nakhla, a U.S. civilian contractor employed by Titan Corp. and working as a translator in Baghdad......

Greg Jaffe and David Cloud write that the command of Combined Joint Task Force 7 was informed of what was going on in Abu Ghraib last November: WSJ.com - Officials in Iraq Knew Last Fall Of Prison Abuse: Senior U.S. military officials in Iraq, including two advisers to the top commander there, reviewed a strongly worded Red Cross report detailing the abuse of prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison last November -- but the Army did not launch an investigation into the abuses until two months later. The senior legal adviser to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, helped draft a formal response to the Red Cross's November repor.... Gen. Karpinski said that she also discussed the report with Gen. Sanchez's top deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, in a late November meeting. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gen. Karpinski said officials at first generally disbelieved the Red Cross report. One military intelligence officer at the meeting in late November drew laughs, she said, when he joked, "I've told the Commander to stop giving the Victoria's Secret catalogues to detainees" -- a reference to the Red Cross's complaint that some prisoners were being forced...

Michael Froomkin is puzzled that campuses--filled with people who would be drafted were there to be an activation of the military draft--are so quiet: Discourse.net: The Curious Case of the Surprisingly Quiet Campuses: Rumors, some documented by Nick Confessore, abound that the US government has advanced plans to reinstate the draft shortly after the November election. It’s always good when our government does serious contingency planning — had they done more of it (and listened to those who did it) before the invasion of Iraq we might not be in this mess. And contingency plans don’t always mean an actual policy. But these rumors suggest something beyond the ordinary ‘maybe’ scenarios. Plus, they fit in with the Army’s obvious serious shortage of troops. As a colleague of mine pointed out the other day — amidst a discussion of how to ensure that his draft-age son gets into the sort of unit that doesn’t take casualties — the really weird thing is how little we’ve been hearing about this on campuses... Nick Confessore provides the clues to the answer: TAPPED: May 2004 Archives: ...recruiters are telling inactive reservists that they're going to be called up one way or another eventually, so...

Ah. Even the Bush administration occasionally smells the coffee: The Agonist: U.S. to Halt Payments to Iraqi Group Headed by a Onetime Pentagon Favorite: The United States government has decided to halt monthly $335,000 payments to the Iraqi National Congress, the group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, an official with the group said on Monday. What took them so long?...

Fareed Zakaria is scared: MSNBC - No Security, No Democracy: Power is slowly shifting to Iraqi leaders on the ground with men and arms. Politics abhors a vacuum, and in Iraq, local militias are filling it.... ... [T]he United Nations must give its stamp of approval to the new government. It should encourage figures like Ayatollah Sistani to bless it as well. If forces from within and outside Iraq all come together to support it, the interim government has a chance at success. That means Iraq will get some breathing space to build institutions, create a constitution and hold elections. On the other hand, if the interim government comes under fire from radicals and disgruntled power seekers, it might well collapse. The future of Iraq will become a competition among political groups, many of them with armies and antidemocratic leanings that will run their areas of control with brute force. "It's Nigeria in the 1960s," says Larry Diamond. And that ended in a bloody civil war. What is more likely than civil war, however, is an ending like that of Ariel Sharon's "Peace for Galilee"--his early 1980s invasion of Lebanon. A strong neighboring power with substantial internal allies imposes its...

Not only does the Bush administration DO EVIL, it DOES EVIL INCOMPETENTLY--a course of action in which, as Mark Kleiman quotes Michael Walzer, there can be neither honor nor profit. Mark A. R. Kleiman: Videotapes? Please, not videotapes: The Observer reports that there is a unit called the Extreme Reaction Force at Guantanamo, whose mission is dealing with instances of prisoner recalcitrance. One Guantanamo alumnus reports having been treated rather badly (though not by Abu Ghraib standards) for what he says was no more than resisting having his cell searched for the third time in one day: They pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows. No, that's not the bad news. The bad news is that it's all in a videotape archive, as part of SOP: Every time the ERFs were deployed, a sixth team member...

Phil Carter goes X-Files on us as Donald Rumsfeld and company tell the CIA and Military Intelligence to go Medieval on detainees: INTEL DUMP: Authorized at the highest levels?The New Yorker has published Sy Hersh's latest piece on the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. I think his first piece was the biggest, because of the bombshell it literally dropped on the White House and the nation. But this article may contain the most damaging allegations of all for the Pentagon's senior leadership. According to Hersh, the use of "torture lite" and other coercive tactics was not only condoned at the highest levels -- it was explicitly ordered under a covert "special-access program" by the SecDef and his top lieutenants.The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned...

A Sign That We May Finally Have a Real Press Corps: Joshua Micah Marshall finds the Washington Post's Jim VandeHei writing this (why, however, has he taken so long?): The Bush campaign has repeatedly accused the senator of "politicizing" Iraq. Bush-Cheney chairman Marc Racicot told reporters Wednesday that Kerry is relentlessly "playing politics" and exploiting tragedy for political gain. Racicot, for instance, told reporters that Kerry suggested that 150,000 or so U.S. troops are "somehow universally responsible" for the misdeeds of a small number of American soldiers and contractors. Racicot made several variations of this charge. But Kerry never said this, or anything like it. As evidence, Racicot pointed to the following quote Kerry made at a fundraiser on Tuesday: "What has happened is not just something that a few a privates or corporals or sergeants engaged in. This is something that comes out of an attitude about the rights of prisoners of war, it's an attitude that comes out of America's overall arrogance in its policy that is alienating countries all around the world." What Racicot did not mention was that Kerry preceded this remark by saying, "I know that what happened over there is not the behavior...

Dan Drezner writes abut how CPA ex-advisor Larry Diamond is banging his head against the wall: danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: A sobering account of Iraq -- from a CPA advisor: Larry Diamond -- one of the biggest supporters of the notion that democracy can travel across cultures -- was an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq starting in January. No longer. The San Francisco Chronicle has a long story about Diamond's experiences in the field. He's still optimistic about democracy promotion -- but not about Iraq: The story of Iraq, this onetime optimist believes, is a tale of missed opportunities. "We just bungled this so badly," said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "We just weren't honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country." Diamond was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and spent several initially hopeful months in Iraq -- lecturing on democracy, even in mosques, encouraging people to participate and helping shape laws that embodied his vision. He returned to Palo Alto in early April for a short break, then ran into an emotional brick wall,...

Hesiod is skeptical of certain passages in Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack: Counterspin Central: The unofficial "FIRST AMENDMENT ZONE.": WANNA BUY THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE? I laughed out loud when I read this: With some fanfare, McLaughlin stepped up to brief with a series of flip charts. This was the rough cut, he indicated, still highly classified and not cleared for public release. The CIA wanted to reserve on what would be revealed to protect sources and detection methods if there was no military conflict. When McLaughlin concluded, there was a look on the president's face of, What's this? And then a brief moment of silence. "Nice try," Bush said. "I don't think this is quite -- it's not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from." Card was also underwhelmed. The presentation was a flop. In terms of marketing, the examples didn't work, the charts didn't work, the photos were not gripping, the intercepts were less than compelling. Bush turned to Tenet. "I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we've got?" From the end of one of the couches in the Oval Office, Tenet rose...

Rumsfeld's subordinates say that International Red Cross accusations that the U.S. was routinely violating the Geneva Convention in Iraq never rose to their or Rumsfeld's level. Colin Powell says that isn't true. He says ICRC concerns did rise to Rumsfeld's level--and to Bush's level as well. Colin Powell is accusing Donald Rumsfeld and his subordinates of being liars, and Joshua Micah Marshall is bemused. Of course, things have been worse. We used to see the Secretary of State accused of having a love child by one of his own slaves, and the Secretary of the Treasury accused of leaking advance information about government financial policy to his rich New York friends so that they could profit from bond price movements. Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: May 09, 2004 - May 15, 2004 Archives: Okay, I think the wheels are now officially off this car. The Baltimore Sun quotes Colin Powell as saying that "we kept the president informed of the concerns that were raised by the ICRC and other international organizations as part of my regular briefings of the president, and advised him that we had to follow these issues, and when we got notes sent to us...

Senator Lindsey Graham is a grownup. He is also a right-wing freak, but at this point I'll settle for what I can get: TAPPED: May 2004 Archives: As Republican senator Lindsey Graham -- an actual grown-up who understands the damage those images do to our nation and our men and women in uniform -- said on CNN last night, "When you are the good guys, you've got to act like the good guys." I believe that we are, or at our worst at least aspire to be, the good guys......

Juan Cole reads the Washington Post: Juan Cole * Informed Comment *: The WP reports, Taguba said that when control of the prison was turned over to military intelligence officials, they had authority over the military police who were guarding prisoners. But Stephen Cambone, the Pentagon's undersecretary for intelligence, said that was incorrect, that authority for the handling of detainees had remained with the MPs. What is going on here is that Taguba is giving an honest and faithful account of what happened. He says that the military intelligence guys got command control of the MPs. Cambone knows that this is against army regulations and should be denied, not openly admitted. Either way, Taguba is right that this is what happened. Which again raises the question: why is Colonel Pappas still in command of the 205 Military Intelligence Brigade? That makes no sense from any view of the situation that I can imagine. Brigadier General Karpinski is gone from Iraq. Why not Colonel Pappas?...

Marine Maj. Gen. Conway decides that it is better to have Fallujah policed by ex-Baathist soldiers commanded by generals whose addresses the Marines know. The alternative? U.S. Marines kill 1,000 Fallujah insurgents, 10,000 Fallujah civilians, and flatten half the city. I have no idea whether Conway is right or not. I do know that he is there, on the ground, and that his critics are not. washingtonpost.com: Gamble Brings Old Uniforms Back Into Style By Rajiv Chandrasekaran | Washington Post Foreign Service | Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A01 FALLUJAH, Iraq, May 6 -- The crackle of gunfire, omnipresent here just a week ago, has been replaced with the din of car horns. Shops that had been shuttered during a month-long siege by U.S. Marines, giving this city on the Euphrates River the feel of a ghost town, have begun to reopen. Attacks on the few remaining American troops in the surrounding desert have nearly ceased. But the seeming normalcy has come with a cost. Fallujah is now caught in a time warp. Iraqi soldiers wearing their crisp, olive-green army uniforms -- a sight unseen since former president Saddam Hussein's government was toppled more than a year ago --...

The state is that organization that claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a prescribed territory. An effective state enforces that monopoly by punishing--using violence--against those whom it judges have engaged in the illegitimate use of violence. A modern state operates through (a) bureaucratic routines that are standard operating procedures for dealing with situations, and (b) a chain-of-command, by which lower-level functionaries are commanded by and responsible to higher level functionaries all the way up to the fount of sovereignty itself (which is, in most modern states, a prime minister responsible to a democratically-elected legislature). The government of the United States of America claims--by virtue of U.N. resolutions and by right of conquest--to be, on a temporary and caretaker basis, the state ruling Iraq. But does it claim a monopoly over the legitimate use of force and violence in Iraq? Not at all. Proconsul Bremer's guards are not soldiers--are not legionnaires--but hired contractors. Blackwater and Erinys and CAI and Titan and all the others threaten and use violence without any contact with the chain-of-command. And what is the chain-of-command? Who, for example, was in charge of Abu Ghraib prison. Originally it was Brig. Gen. Karpinski, commanding...

Matthew Yglesias is haunted by the following dialogue: Matthew Yglesias: May 09, 2004 - May 15, 2004 Archives: Kurtz: "What did they tell you?" Willard: "They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound." Kurtz: "Are my methods unsound?" Willard: "I don't see any method, at all, sir."...

Ogged of Unfogged writes: Unfogged: Oh my Lord. U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys. This will define America for generations. (Note, please, that they "have sex" with the woman, but "rape" the boy.) Do you really think it's alarmist to point out that Americans can be put away indefinitely on nothing more than one man's whim; that we have a collection of legal black holes: at Guantanamo, on ships around the world, in Iraq; that our soldiers blithely torture detainees; and that fully half the country still thinks the President is doing a good job? Do you wonder how totalitarian regimes come about? This is how: with the consent of the governed. Look, I, and my friends and family, all live in urban areas, assuming our share of the risk of terrorist attacks. If this is being protected, I'll take my chances. I don't want to live like this, and I...

It looks from today's hearings that Colonel Pappas, commander of the 205 Military Intelligence Brigade, is to be the designated fall guy. Lieutenant General Lance L. Smith, Deputy Commander, United States Central Command, says that Pappas was the one giving orders about what was to happen in Abu Ghraib--in charge of the interrogations and with "tactical control" over the MP guards. Rumsfeld says that Pappas's orders were to treat everybody in Abu Ghraib according to the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld Speaks to Senate Armed Services Committee (washingtonpost.com): MCCAIN: My question is who was in charge of the interrogations? SMITH: The brigade commander for the military intelligence brigade [Pappas]. MCCAIN: And were they -- did he also have authority over the guards?  SMITH: Sir, he was -- he [Pappas] had tactical control over the guards, so he was... MCCAIN: Mr. Secretary, you can't answer these questions? RUMSFELD: I can. I'd be -- I thought the purpose of the question was to make sure we got an accurate presentation, and we have the expert here who was in the chain of command. MCCAIN: I think these are fundamental questions to this issue.  RUMSFELD: Fine. MCCAIN: Were the instructions to the guards... RUMSFELD: There's two sets of responsibilities, as your question suggests. One set is the...

washingtonpost.com: Rumsfeld Speaks to Senate Armed Services Committee: U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the the treatment of Iraqi Prisoners Friday. The transcript follows....

Kevin Drum asks: The Washington Monthly: BROKEN PROCESS OR OFFICIAL POLICY?....Apparently everyone's been trying to warn Bush and Rumsfeld about possible abuse of prisoners in Iraq for months now. And not just the usual bleeding hearts: David Kay: "I was there and I kept saying the interrogation process is broken. The prison process is broken. And no one wanted to deal with it. It was too, too distasteful. This is a known problem, and the military refuses to deal with it." Paul Bremer: "Bremer repeatedly raised the issue of prison conditions as early as last fall — both in one-on-one meetings with Rumsfeld and other administration leaders, and in group meetings with the president's inner circle on national security. Officials described Bremer as 'kicking and screaming' about the need to release thousands of uncharged prisoners and improve conditions for those who remained." Colin Powell: "According to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration...whenever Powell or [Richard] Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to endure what our source characterizes as 'around the table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners....'"...

Michael Froomkin asks why he doesn't see things like this in his daily newspaper: Whiskey Bar: Donald Rumsfeld's Battle With The Truth: Donald Rumsfeld's Battle With The Truth "Beyond abuse of prisoners, there are other photos that depict incidents of physical violence toward prisoners, acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman."Donald RumsfeldTestimony to the Senate Armed Services CommitteeMay 7, 2004 "I'm not a lawyer. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture … I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word."Donald RumsfeldPress BriefingMay 4, 2004 ________________ "Let me be clear: I failed to recognize how important it was to elevate a matter of such gravity to the highest levels, including the president and the members of Congress."Donald RumsfeldTestimony to the Senate Armed Services CommitteeMay 7, 2004 According to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration. ... whenever Powell or Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to...

Timothy Burke gives a Primal Scream: “Stop with the hindsight”, says one writer. “Be patient,” says another. Oh, no, let’s not stop with the hindsight. Not when so many remain so profoundly, dangerously, incomprehensibly unable to acknowledge that the hindsight shows many people of good faith and reasonable mien predicting what has come to pass in Iraq. Let’s not be patient: after all, the people counseling patience now showed a remarkable lack of it before the war. One of my great pleasures in life, I am ashamed to say, is saying “I told you so” when I give prudential advice and it is ignored. In the greatest “I told you so” of my life, I gain no pleasure at all in saying it. It makes me dizzy with sickness to say it, incandescent with rage to say it. It sticks in my throat like vomit. It makes me want to punch some abstract somebody in the mouth. It makes me want to scrawl profane insults in this space and abandon all hope of reasonable conversation. That’s because the people who did what they did, said what they said, on Iraq, the people who ignored or belitted counsel to the contrary,...

Joshua Micah Marshall notes that: L. Paul Bremer is saying that Abu Ghraib is not his fault--that he warned the Pentagon last fall, and that Rumsfeld ignored him. Ship. Rat. The Bush White House thinks that even though Rumsfeld has done a very bad job, firing him would tell the world that the Bush White House thinks that Rumsfeld has done a very bad job--and the Bush White House can't have that. It does look as though using MPs to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation was deliberate and settled Military Intelligence policy. Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: May 02, 2004 - May 08, 2004 Archives: From an article in the Post: "Some U.S. officials said Rumsfeld was resistant to repeated warnings from Iraq governor L. Paul Bremer -- delivered as early as last fall -- that the United States was detaining too many Iraqis for too long and in poor conditions. Bremer told Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials that if the problem persisted, the political fallout in Iraq would be serious, the officials said." And following up on Thursday's post about the prohibitive political costs of canning Rumsfeld, this from the same article in the Post: "A...

David Kay says: "I was there and I kept saying the interrogation process is broken. The prison process is broken. And no one wanted to deal with it," Kay said. "It was too, too distasteful. This is a known problem, and the military refuses to deal with it." (Or did Military Intelligence not think it was a problem?) Anything less than severe action, which he described as a "hanging," against a two- or three-star general in charge means "in the Middle East, they are always going to believe we did it as part of a sanctioned process," Kay said. "I am terribly worried that if we only charge the seven or 15 reservists who were involved and condemn the contractors who were involved and maybe the one-star reserve general who was in charge of this overall military prison unit, I think we will have done a horrible mistake," Kay said. American intelligence agencies remained fooled because Iraqis who wanted Saddam toppled kept feeding them false stories about his hidden stockpiles of chemical and other weapons, Kay said. "They told us about weapons in order to get us to invade Iraq," he said. "They moved U.S. policy, and we didn't catch...

I'm going to try to turn the "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?" over to Michael Froomkin. He's better at it than I am. (And I'm losing so many brain cells from banging my head against the wall to endanger my research productivity.) Discourse.net: NYT Says $25 Billion Iraq Supplemental is no Big Deal: Which is a better, fuller, explanation of the state of play? Is it the account offerd by Notes on the Atrocities: Nickel and Diming February. Bush’s budget comes out with no additional request for funds for Iraq. Monday. A senior administration official says there’s no “resource problem in Iraq.” Today. WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration asked Congress Wednesday for an additional $25 billion for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, congressional Republicans said, a retreat from the White House’s earlier plans not to seek such money until after the November elections…. It seemed likely that the $25 billion proposal would be only the first portion of funds that will be needed for next year. Or is it the account (on page A15!!!) of the New York Times, White House Asks G.O.P. in Congress to Add $25 Billion which begins with the...

Something I now wish I did not know, but that I must know to be a proper citizen. Graydon observes: Electrolite: The rot.: The grinning fellow with the thumbs up is wearing nitrile gloves. Those are used for much the same set of purposes as latex gloves, only they're physically much sturdier, and less likely to cause skin sensitivities in the wearer with prolonged use. So they're used in surgical applications to avoid the risk of sterility punctures from surgical instruments, or for a number of kinds of solvent based materials handling. That fellow is wearing the lined, long-wearing kind; the cotton liners are flipped down over much of the glove cuff. He's wearing them with the same degree of disregard wood finishers who wear them all day, most days, do, and with absolutely no regard for their sterility. Anybody who wants to argue for it all being passive -- for values of "passive" as would shame the devil to utter -- psychological coercion is advised to think very carefully about those gloves....

Needlenose has a "pigs with wings" reaction to a Tom Friedman column: COMMENTS: Bad news for the administration: now they've really lost the support of NYTimes columnist Thomas ("I like the war but my wife doesn't") Friedman. The good news? The Peyote seems to be kicking in: Mr. Bush needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the heads of both NATO and the U.N., and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. There, he needs to eat crow, apologize for his mistakes and make clear that he is turning a new page. Second, he needs to explain that we are losing in Iraq, and if we continue to lose the U.S. public will eventually demand that we quit Iraq, and it will then become Afghanistan-on-steroids, which will threaten everyone. Third, he needs to say he will be guided by the U.N. in forming the new caretaker government in Baghdad. And fourth, he needs to explain that he is ready to listen to everyone's ideas about how to expand our force in Iraq, and have it work under a new U.N. mandate, so it will have the legitimacy it needs to...

Phil Carter reads the Taguba report and writes: ...posted the full report by Army MG Antonio Taguba.... (Query: why was this investigation not conducted by the Army IG or by another outside entity, rather than a 2-star in the area?) One of the themes that runs through the report is a lack of meaningful training for the MPs and MP units charged with guarding prisoners at Abu Ghraib.... [...] Analysis.... First, I have to call BS at this line of investigation, and this line of defense. The actions depicted on the photographs now shown around the world are not the kinds of things you need training to abhor. In fact, any adult ought to know better, and certainly, any Army sergeant or officer ought to know better. This is a basic matter of common sense and human decency. You don't need to know the rules under the Geneva Convention, and you don't have to be a lawyer, to know that it's wrong to shove a chem light into a detainee's rectum and take a picture of it. I think this is a specious argument, and that it will fail spectacularly before a military jury of officers and NCOs. Second,...

Why do they pretend? Notes on the Atrocities: Nickel and Diming: February. Bush's budget comes out with no additional request for funds for Iraq. Monday. A senior administration official says there's no "resource problem in Iraq." Today. "WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration asked Congress Wednesday for an additional $25 billion for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, congressional Republicans said, a retreat from the White House's earlier plans not to seek such money until after the November elections.... It seemed likely that the $25 billion proposal would be only the first portion of funds that will be needed for next year."...

Michael Froomkin looks for and links to the full text of Major General Taguba's Abu Ghraib report: Discourse.net: Full Text of Abu Ghraib Report?: Does anyone know where the full text of the report by United States Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba about atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison can be found?... it’s here, on MSNBC . And here we have the CACI Open Conference Call: CACI International to Hold Conference Call to Discuss Reported Allegations Concerning its Employees in Iraq on Wednesday, May 5, 2004 at 9:05 am ET. There will be brief statement by management with a question-and-answer session to follow. Interested parties can listen to the conference call on the Internet by logging on to CACI's Internet site at www.shareholder.com/caci/medialist.cfm at the scheduled time. A replay of the call will also be available over the Internet beginning on May 5th at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, and can be accessed through CACI's homepage (www.caci.com). CACI International Inc provides the IT and network solutions needed to prevail in today's new era of defense, intelligence, and e-government. From systems integration and managed network solutions to knowledge management, engineering, simulation, and information assurance, we deliver the IT applications and infrastructures our...

Explananda has a Shorter George Will: "Somehow racially loaded smears from Republicans seem less funny when I'm a potential target."...

The Father of the Aardvark bangs his head against the wall: Abu Aardvark: Iraqi editor quits: Yet another example of the disaster which is the Bush administration's approach to the Arab media: "The head of a U.S.-funded Iraqi newspaper quit and said Monday he was taking almost his entire staff with him because of American interference in the publication. On a front-page editorial of the Al-Sabah newspaper, editor-in-chief Ismail Zayer said he and his staff were ''celebrating the end of a nightmare we have suffered from for months ... We want independence. They (the Americans) refuse.'' Al-Sabah was set up by U.S. officials with funding from the Pentagon soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein last year. Since its first issue in July, many Iraqis have considered it the mouthpiece of the U.S.-led coalition, along with the U.S.-funded television station Al-Iraqiya." What can an aardvark say here that Zayer didn't say better? Media independence and controlling the media just don't mix. Americans really shouldn't need Iraqis to explain the basics of press freedom to us....

Major General Taguba, in the report that General Myers has not read on his investigation that George W. Bush does not know has been conducted. If anybody has a full copy, I'll read it: Los Angeles Times: Excerpts From Prison Inquiry: Military Intelligence (MI) interrogators and other U.S. Government Agency interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses…. stated in his sworn statement... "I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section, wing 1A, being made to do various things that I would question morally…. Also the wing belongs to MI, and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse." Sgt. Davis also stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said, he stated: "Loosen this guy up for us. Make sure he has a bad night. Make sure he gets the treatment." … Finally, Sgt. Davis stated: "The MI staffs to my understanding have been giving … compliments … like, 'Good job, they're breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They're giving out good information, finally, and keep up the good work.' Stuff like that."... U.S. civilian contract personnel (Titan Corporation,...

Daniel Drezner says that because the Arab World did not express appropriate rage and shame at the murder of four American contractors in Fallujah, it has lost its moral right to outrage at what has happened in Abu Ghraib. That's how I read his "spare me the righteous indignation of the Arab street," anyway: danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: Torture in Iraq: No question, these reports are a stain on America's image to the world. I share the disgust and revulsion that Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldberg have expressed on this issue. Here's the thing, though -- I feel a similar involuntary revulsion at reading press reports on the reaction of "the Arab street" to these pictures. Does anyone think that any of the Arabs interviewed for this story displayed even the slightest hint of rage or shame at the Arabs who burned four American civilian contractors in Fallujah in March? I'm not even remotely suggesting that this redeems anything done by U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib. And tactically, this will obviously inflame Arab resentments. But spare me the righteous indignation of the Arab street. Two questions: First, I am most familiar with his type of argument when...

General Karpinski's take on Abu Ghraib: The New York Times > International > Middle East > Officer Suggests Iraq Jail Abuse Was Encouraged: General Karpinski said the special high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib had been under the direct control of Army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command... she suspected that they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation. She said that C.I.A. employees often joined in the interrogations at the prison, although she said she did not know if they had unrestricted access to the cellblock.... Prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks, witnesses told Army investigators, according to the report obtained by The New Yorker. Much of the abuse was sexual, with prisoners often kept naked and forced to perform simulated and real sex acts, witnesses testified. Mr. Hersh notes that such degradations, while deeply offensive in any culture, are particularly humiliating to Arabs because Islamic law and culture so strongly condemn nudity and homosexuality. General Karpinski said she was speaking out because she believed that military commanders were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and...

Courtesy of Juan Cole, Ray Close, former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, writes: Juan Cole * Informed Comment *: The proposed plan to turn over control of the Fallujah security situation to an Iraqi force under the command of four retired generals is much more significant than might at first be apparent. On the strategic level, with regard to overall American policy in Iraq, it represents a defeat for those who have contended all along that the insurgency is being carried on by a small group of thugs who do not enjoy widespread support within the Iraqi population at large. Today Donald Rumsfeld is explaining that he is merely acceding to the recommendations of local American military commanders that this compromise arrangement be substituted for the original plan for an all-out assault ---- weakly shifting from himself to them the responsibility for this sudden abandonment of both tough tactics and tough rhetoric. This represents a humiliating defeat for those who have argued that the United States had no choice but to "pacify" Fallujah, arrest the insurgents, confiscate their weapons, and reestablish the authority of the American military occupation forces. The new plan would accomplish none of those explicit and...

The full San Diego Zinni interview: Q&A | The San Diego Union-Tribune | Gen. Zinni....

Colin Powell, please call Emmanuel Goldstein at once: MaxSpeak, You Listen!: WHY ORWELL MATTERS: "Because a large military presence will still be required under U.S. command, some would say 'Well you are not giving full sovereignty'. But we are giving sovereignty so that sovereignty can be used to say, 'We invite you to remain'. That is a sovereign decision," Powell said. No one, absolutely no one, is getting out of this administration with even the shreds of a reputation....

Over at A Fistful of Euros, Edward muses about the anger of the British Foreign-Policy Mandarins at Tony Blair's failure to impart wisdom to George W. Bush. In return for the British alliance on Iraq, they think, Blair should have been able to shape American behavior in the direction of sanity to a much greater degree. Yet he didn't: A Fistful of Euros: Damaging The UK?: The Financial Times has what I consider to be an important editorial this morning. It concerns a letter 52 former ambassadors and international officials have written to Tony Blair telling him he is damaging UK (and western) interests by backing George W. Bush's misguided policies in the Middle East. The FT describes this as "the most stinging rebuke ever to a British government by its foreign policy establishment" and comments wryly: "It would be comforting to imagine that their comments will be heeded." The FT does not mince it's words: In any case, the notion that so-called Arabists - expert in the language, culture and politics of Arab countries - should be excluded from policy because of their alleged predilection to "go native" should be discredited by the way the Pentagon, which shut out...

Anthony Zinni is not a happy camper: SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Military -- Retired general assails U.S. policy on Iraq: Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni wondered aloud yesterday how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be caught off guard by the chaos in Iraq that has killed nearly 100 Americans in recent weeks and led to his announcement that 20,000 U.S. troops would be staying there instead of returning home as planned. "I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus," said Zinni, a Marine for 39 years and the former commander of the U.S. Central Command. "Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?" At a Pentagon news briefing yesterday, Rumsfeld said he could not have estimated how many troops would be killed in the past week. For years Zinni said he cautioned U.S. officials that an Iraq without Saddam Hussein would likely be more dangerous to U.S. interests than one with him because of the ethnic and religious clashes that would be unleashed. "I think that some heads should roll over Iraq," Zinni said. "I think the president...

From DefenseTech. They're the finest soldiers that the world has ever seen. They're not military police. They shouldn't be driving around in unprotected jeeps: Defense Tech: NEWSWEEK: Almost a quarter of the coalition combat deaths in Iraq could have been prevented -- if the Pentagon had bothered to invest in fully armoring its vehicles. That's the damning conclusion of a story in Monday's Newsweek. As Iraq's liberation has turned into a daily grind of low-intensity combat — and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld grudgingly raises troop levels — many soldiers who are there say the Pentagon is failing to protect them with the best technology America has to offer... A breakdown of the casualty figures suggests that many U.S. deaths and wounds in Iraq simply did not need to occur. According to an unofficial study by a defense consultant that is now circulating through the Army, of a total of 789 Coalition deaths as of April 15 (686 of them Americans), 142 were killed by land mines or improvised explosive devices, while 48 others died in rocket-propelled-grenade attacks. Almost all those soldiers were killed while in unprotected vehicles, which means that perhaps one in four of those killed in combat in...

Via Lance Knobel. Tory Max Hastings bangs his head against the wall. It is one thing to be the Greeks to American Romans like Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Patton, Marshall, and Acheson. It is quite another thing--and unbearable to Hastings--to find oneself faced with Bush, Rice, Cheney, and Wolfowitz: Davos Newbies : Davos Newbies Home: Max Hastings is an old-style Tory, famous as a journalist for strolling into Port Stanley ahead of the British troops during the Falklands War, and later editor of The Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard. Max likes the military and understands it. So his article today had particular bite: "So much bad news turned up at Chequers over the weekend that the prime minister might be forgiven if he failed to spot the latest barrage of suicide bombings in Iraq. But Britain's 8,000 troops on the ground noticed, and are not happy. They are prisoners of an American command whose incompetence is manifest, whose soldiers are unsuited to their task, whose failures of policy have been laid bare." He goes on to make an important point about the relationship between Britain and the US, and between all of Europe and the US. "If we are really...

Writing in the Nation, Eric Alterman tells us what he learned from reading Plan of Attack. I don't know when I'll read it: I don't think it would be healthy for me to get depressed to any further extent. And close engagement with the details of this administration--on any issue--is always depressing. There still is time for the grownup Republicans to make their move. A vote of no confidence in George W. Bush by the Republican Senate caucus, followed by a naming of McCain or Lugar or Domenici to be the preferred Republican presidential candidate would have a 75% chance of setting a process in motion that would leverage Bush out of there. And the replacement Republican candidate would have as good a chance of winning the November election as George W. Bush would. And such a vote of no confidence would certainly improve the quality of our country's government and our country's likely future. Woodward Returns: Here's what I learned: 1. For foreign policy purposes, Dick Cheney is President: Cheney wanted this war from way back when; it was Bush who needed convincing. As Slate's Tim Noah points out, "The closest Woodward comes to showing Bush making a final...

Over at the Daily Kos, a Democrat from Connecticut writes: Daily Kos || Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.: Ny Times: WASHINGTON, April 24 -- Facing one of the grimmest choices of the Iraq war, President Bush and his senior national security and military advisers are expected to decide this weekend whether to order an invasion of Falluja, even if a battle there runs the risk of uprisings in the city and perhaps elsewhere around Iraq. After declaring on Friday evening in Florida that "America will never be run out of Iraq by a bunch of thugs and killers," Mr. Bush flew to Camp David for the weekend, where administration officials said he planned consultations in a videoconference with the military commanders who are keeping the city under siege. But in interviews, administration and senior military officials portrayed Mr. Bush's choices as dismal. "It's clear you can't leave a few thousand insurgents there to terrorize the city and shoot at us," one senior official involved in the discussions said on Saturday. "The question now is whether there is a way to go in with the most minimal casualties possible." No decision to begin military...

A report from Iraq: AAN: Text of Redacted Memo by U.S. Official in Iraq I have conflicting impressions of where Iraq is going. It is easy to see progress in Baghdad. Driving from Jadriya to Mansour around 7 p.m. on March 4, shops were bustling. Women and girls, some with hair covered and other not, crowded shops selling the latest fashions from Italy via Lebanon, cell phones and electrical gadgets, fancy shoes, and cell phones. Baghdadis are out and about, looking more self-assured. Gone is the confusion that permeated Iraqi society in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall. Shwarma and ice cream shops do a booming business, and families patronize restaurants. Twenty-somethings and teenagers meet in internet cafes. The internet cafes that we see from the roadside on the main streets are just the tip of the iceberg; many mahalla have their own internet cafes set off in alcoves off side streets. Even in poorer areas like Baghdad al-Jadida, new plastic signs plaster the sides of buildings. Pundits and others harp on lack of security, but shopkeepers pile electrical appliances, clothes, bicycles, and other goods on the street. New cars crowd the street, as well as older models long forbidden (Saddam...

I cannot tell whether Matthew Yglesias is more amused or disgusted at the "professionalism" of the Bush administration: Matthew Yglesias: April 18, 2004 - April 24, 2004 Archives: This and this, especially when combined, are really just ridiculous. The CPA website features a photo of John "No Death Squads Here" Negroponte standing in front of Guernica while to his left is a bunch of HTML code ripped off from the Brookings Institution. WTF?...