Ted Kennedy's Cancer In Remission
NYTimes Blurb:
hilzoy: CowardDemocrats in Senate Block Money to Close Guantánamo
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
In an abrupt shift, Senate Democratic leaders said they would not provide the $80 million President Obama requested to close the detention center.
Oh, and Harry Reid? Try showing some courage. Try leadership. You never know; it just might suit you. This certainly doesn't:
"QUESTION: If the United States -- if the United States thinks that these people should be held, why shouldn't they be held in the United States? Why shouldn't the U.S. take those risks, the attendant risk of holding them, since it's the one that says they should be held?
REID: I think there's a general feeling, as I've already said, that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn't want terrorists to be released in the United States. And I think we're going to stick with that.
QUESTION: What about in imprisoned in the United States?
REID: If you're...
(CROSSTALK)
REID: If people are -- if terrorists are released in the United States, part of what we don't want is them be put in prisons in the United States. We don't want them around the United States."
I'm disgusted, and ashamed of my party.
Benen: FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE....
Joe Klein laments the latest nonsense on Gitmo.
Guantanamo is a symbol of American brutality that needs to be expunged to the extent possible by closure, as soon as practicable. We have a system of military prisons that would be perfectly adequate to handle the detainees who are not returned to the home countries. Apparently, President Obama is going to give a speech on this topic on Thursday -- but the Senators just couldn't wait 48 hours while the Republicans and cable newsistas were scaring their constituents. Yet another profile in courage.
I agree with all of this, but it got me thinking about how this debate would go if the situations were reversed, and it was a Republican president trying to close the detention facility and it was (primarily) Democrats engaged in silly demagoguery. What would Hannity, Limbaugh, and GOP leaders on the Hill be saying under those circumstances?
* Democrats believe in the midst of two wars and an ongoing terrorist threat, national security decisions should be made by 535 lawmakers instead of the Commander in Chief.
* Democrats don't trust the U.S. military to be able to lock up a couple of hundred nuts.
* If Democrats are scared of these detainees being locked up on U.S. soil, it's up to them to figure out what to do with the terrorists who are already detained in supermax facilities.
* If Democrats have proof that the nation's prisons are incapable of housing 241 suspected bad guys, or have evidence that these guards who protect us from the bad guys are untrustworthy, they should offer it. Otherwise, they should apologize to the wardens, guards, and security teams, who do important work day in and day out, and who've just been insulted.
It's pretty easy, actually. Instead, Dems seem to be afraid of the GOP attacks. It's frustrating to watch.
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Benen: THEY NEVER LEARN....
Gitmo funding denied May 19: The Senate voted down funding that would close Guantanamo Bay like the Obama administration wants. And this time, it was members of his own party that voted against him. Why are Senate Democrats doing this? Rachel Maddow is joined by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-CA.At some point a few weeks ago, Republicans decided that the closing of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was a political winner. They'd rant and rave about the Obama administration putting terrorists in U.S. "neighborhoods," and Democrats, the theory goes, would back away from a sensible policy.
The argument was absurd, of course, and I'd hoped congressional Democrats would ignore the fearmongering. It looks like the minority party still knows exactly how to push the majority party's buttons.
President Barack Obama's allies in the Senate will not provide funds to close the Guantanamo Bay prison next January, a top Democratic official said Tuesday.
With debate looming on Obama's spending request to cover military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the official says Democrats will deny the Pentagon and Justice Department $80 million to relocate Guantanamo's 241 detainees. [...]
It appears to be a tactical retreat. Once the administration develops a plan to close the facility, congressional Democrats are likely to revisit the topic, provided they are satisfied there are adequate safeguards.
So, this isn't a total collapse in the face of Republican complaints, just a temporary collapse, to be reconsidered later.
As for Republicans, who used to believe the Commander in Chief had complete and exclusive authority over these matters, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is still pushing a measure to block any and all Gitmo detainees from stepping foot on U.S. soil, for a trial or for their detention. His GOP colleagues are enthusiastic about the measure.
How pathetic. Inhofe may be criminally dimwitted, but even he probably realizes that there are already plenty of terrorists serving out sentences in American facilities, which are awfully good at keeping bad guys locked up for life. Can't GOP lawmakers pretend to be grown-ups on this?
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hilzoy: The Uighurs: Coda
Newt Gingrich talking to Chris Wallace on Fox News (h/t):
"WALLACE: Well, let me get -- let's take one example, the Chinese Uighurs, Chinese Muslims...
GINGRICH: Right.
WALLACE: ... who were arrested in Afghanistan, brought to this country. The Pentagon says they're not enemy combatants. At least one federal judge has said they're not a threat. But if they go back to China, they're going to be prosecuted.
GINGRICH: Why is that our problem? I mean, why -- what -- if the -- if the -- what -- what is it -- why are we protecting these guys? Why does it become an American problem?
WALLACE: So what, send them to China and...
GINGRICH: Send them to China. If a third country wants to receive them, send them to a third country. But setting this precedent that if you get picked up by Americans -- I mean, the Somalian who was recently brought here who's a pirate -- I mean, if you get picked up by the Americans, you show up in the United States, a lawyer files an amicus brief on your behalf for free, a year later you have citizenship because, after all, how can we not give you citizenship since you're now here, and in between our taxpayers pay for you -- this is, I think -- verges on insanity."
Obviously, we can't send them back to China. They would be tortured or killed there, and knowing that, we are forbidden under international law to send them there.
The Uighurs became our problem when we imprisoned them. We were the ones who set up a system whereby we paid bounties to people for turning in foreign fighters. We were also the ones who decided (pdf), against decades of precedent, not to hold Article 5 Tribunals to determine which of the people we captured were actually combatants and which were not. That is: we set up a system in which people had incentives to turn in the innocent, and then we decided that we could dismantle our normal systems for telling the innocent from the guilty.
We have kept these men in jail for seven and a half years. They have wives and families who spent (pdf) the first four years of their imprisonment not knowing whether they were dead or alive. Some of them have children they have never met -- children who are seven years old now. If this is not our problem, I do not know what is.
I was brought up to believe that when I made a mistake, I should admit it and try to do whatever I could to make it right. I think this is true of me, and I think that it is true of my country. We should not let innocent people languish in prison just because we are afraid, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they might do something bad. It's foolish -- it's not as though no one will be able to keep track of the Uighurs if they are released. But more than that, it's cowardly and ignoble.
I would hope that my country is better than that. I hope that we have the minimal decency not to allow ourselves to be convinced by demagogues that we should be afraid to admit our mistakes and try to make things right. I would hope that we would actually investigate charges that people were "trained mass killers instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001" before we decided to let them rot in jail for no good reason.
I'd hope we would have the grace to do this even if the person making the charges wasn't someone who blamed liberals for a murder in which a woman cut another woman's abdomen open and stole her unborn child.
And I would hope that politicians would show some leadership and remind us that we are better than this. (Here I want to give a shout-out to Rep. James Moran, who has been very strong on this issue.) We do not have to be at the mercy of our most groundless fears. We do not have to let bullies like Newt Gingrich or blowhards like Jonah Goldberg dictate the terms of debate.
We can be better than that.
My main motivation for doing this is just the thought: the Uighurs are innocent, and they deserve better than this. But it's also worth noting what rides on this, and what is, I suspect, motivating some of the politicians who are using the Uighurs to score political points.
Barack Obama wants to close Guantanamo. To do so, he needs to find countries to take some of the detainees in. Many countries are quite understandably asking: if the United States won't take them in, why should we?
The Uighurs are the most obviously innocent of all the detainees. Uighur communities have offered to take them in and help them resettle. There are a lot of things in their favor. If Republicans block their release in this country, they can block the release of any detainee in this country. And if they do that, then the task of closing Guantanamo down will become much, much more difficult, perhaps impossible.
We should not let that happen without a fight.
The junior Senator from Virginia disappoints.
BarbinMD (DK):
Thomas Frank on the politicians who love styling themselves as "gangs" and the media who eats it up:
What the Gangs of D.C. nearly always represent -- and what distinguishes them from a mere troupe, squad or faction -- is power, glorious power. Gangs are but a handful and yet they control our fate; they divert the streams of history; and they do so secretly, away from public view. [...]
In this sense, the Gangs of D.C. are a continuation of the original. We haven't really forgotten China's Gang of Four; we just don't find much that's objectionable about oligarchy anymore. Power is sexy, and the media's lustful admiration for gang rule is merely a Beltway form of pornography.
Watch this one:
digby: Remedial Hissy
Uhm, everyone recognizes that this Pelosi flap is a manufactured hissy fit, right? The point is to make the whole discussion of torture politically radioactive for Democrats in the same way that questioning the surge became radioactive after Betrayus. It's a classic political kabuki designed to twist the Democrats into pretzels.
Here's a piece wrote for The Big Con sometime back on the subject. It's a testimony to the continuing success of the tactic that even in their lowest moments, the Republicans can still work up a good hissy --- and that the villagers and the Democrats still buy it. Even now:The Art of the Hissy FitI first noticed the right's successful use of phony sanctimony and faux outrage back in the 90's when well-known conservative players like Gingrich and Livingston pretended to be offended at the president's extramarital affair and were repeatedly and tiresomely "upset" about fund-raising practices they all practiced themselves. The idea of these powerful and corrupt adulterers being personally upset by White House coffees and naughty sexual behavior was laughable.
But they did it, oh how they did it, and it often succeeded in changing the dialogue and titillating the media into a frenzy of breathless tabloid coverage.
In fact, they became so good at the tactic that they now rely on it as their first choice to control the political dialogue when it becomes uncomfortable and put the Democrats on the defensive whenever they are winning the day. Perhaps the best example during the Bush years would be the completely cynical and over-the-top reaction to Senator Paul Wellstone's memorial rally in 2002 in the last couple of weeks leading up to the election.
With the exception of the bizarre Jesse Ventura, those in attendance, including the Republicans, were non-plussed by the nature of the event at the time. It was not, as the chatterers insisted, a funeral, but rather more like an Irish wake for Wellstone supporters -- a celebration of Wellstone's life, which included, naturally, politics. (He died campaigning, after all.) But Vin Weber, one of the Republican party's most sophisticated operatives, immediately saw the opportunity for a faux outrage fest that was more successful than even he could have ever dreamed.
By the time they were through, the Democrats were prostrating themselves at the feet of anyone who would listen, begging for forgiveness for something they didn't do, just to stop the shrieking. The Republicans could barely keep the smirks off their faces as they sternly lectured the Democrats on how to properly honor the dead -- the same Republicans who had relentlessly tortured poor Vince Foster's family for years.
It's an excellent technique and one they continue to employ with great success, most recently with the entirely fake Move-On and Pete Stark "controversies." (The Democrats try their own versions but rarely achieve the kind of full blown hissy fit the Republicans can conjure with a mere blast fax to Drudge and their talk radio minions.)
But it's about more than simple political distraction or savvy public relations. It's actually a very well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation (or Ritual Humiliation) as this well trafficked internet article defines it:
Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and "insensitivity" or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.The article goes on to lay out several defining characteristics of ritual defamation such as "the method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool." Perhaps its most intriguing insight is this:
The power of ritual defamation lies entirely in its capacity to intimidate and terrorize. It embraces some elements of primitive superstitious belief, as in a "curse" or "hex." It plays into the subconscious fear most people have of being abandoned or rejected by the tribe or by society and being cut off from social and psychological support systems.In a political context this translates to a fear by liberal politicians that they will be rejected by the American people -- and a subconscious dulling of passion and inspiration in the mistaken belief that they can spare themselves further humiliation if only they control their rhetoric. The social order these fearsome conservative rituals pretend to "protect," however, are not those of the nation at large, but rather the conservative political establishment which is perhaps best exemplified by this famous article about how Washington perceived the Lewinsky scandal. The "scandal" is moved into the national conversation through the political media which has its own uses for such entertaining spectacles and expends a great deal of energy promoting these shaming exercises for commercial purposes.
The political cost to progressives and liberals for their inability to properly deal with this tactic is greater than they realize. Just as Newt Gingrich was not truly offended by Bill Clinton's behavior (which mirrored his own) neither were conservative congressmen and Rush Limbaugh truly upset by the Move On ad -- and everyone knew it, which was the point. It is a potent demonstration of pure power to force others to insincerely condemn or apologize for something, particularly when the person who is forcing it is also insincerely outraged. For a political party that suffers from a reputation for weakness, it is extremely damaging to be so publicly cowed over and over again. It separates them from their most ardent supporters and makes them appear guilty and unprincipled to the public at large.
Ritual defamation and humiliation are designed to make the group feel contempt for the victim and over time it's extremely hard to resist feeling it when the victims fail to stand up for themselves.
There is the possibility that the Republicans will overplay this particular gambit. Their exposure over the past few years for incompetence, immorality and corruption, both personal and institutional, makes them extremely imperfect messengers for sanctimony, faux or otherwise. But they are still effectively wielding the flag, (or at least the Democratic congress is allowing them to) and until liberals and progressives find a way to thwart this successful tactic, it will continue. At this point the conservatives have little else.
What do you suppose today's enforcers of proper decorum would say to this?
Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place - the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. -- Mark Twain
- TPM: Lawmaker: CIA Already Being Probed For Misleading Congress
As they go after Nancy Pelosi over those CIA briefings, Republicans have been putting the burden of proof on the Speaker, suggesting that it's all but unheard of for the CIA to mislead others in government. But in fact, the agency is currently being probed for doing exactly that on a different issue -- and the effort was initiated by one of Pelosi's fiercest critics on the torture briefings kerfuffle.
Last night, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who chairs the oversight subcommittee of the House intelligence committee, told MSNBC's Ed Schultz (h/t Democratic Underground):
On our subcommittee we are beginning an inquiry into a situation ... initiated by the ranking minority member to look at a situation where the CIA did mislead the Congress ... a documented issue of the CIA misleading the Congress.
A Schakowsky spokesman told TPMmuckraker that she was referring to the findings of a CIA inspector general report, portions of which were released last fall, which concluded that the agency had withheld crucial information from Congress and DOJ investigators who were probing whether CIA personnel committed crimes relating to the shooting of a missionary plane in Peru in 2001.
As the New York Times described it last November:
A C.I.A. surveillance aircraft mistakenly identified the plane as a drug-smuggling aircraft, and a Peruvian military jet shot it down, killing an American missionary and her 7-month-old daughter. The Justice Department closed its investigation into the matter in 2005, declining to prosecute agency officers for any actions related to the episode.
But [the inspector general's] report, parts of which were made public on Thursday, said that the Justice Department investigators and Congress were never allowed access to internal C.I.A. reviews that portrayed the downing as one mistake among many in the agency's counternarcotics program in Peru. The report said the agency routinely authorized interceptions of suspected drug planes "without adequate safeguards to protect against the loss of innocent life." (our itals)
It continued:
The inspector general's report said that after the downing of the missionaries' plane, the C.I.A. had conducted internal reviews "that documented sustained and significant violations of required intercept procedures." But it said that the agency had denied Congress, the Department of Justice and the National Security Council access to these findings.
...The report ... says that C.I.A. lawyers from the office of the general counsel "advised agency managers to avoid written products lest they be subject to legal scrutiny" in connection with the downing of the plane.
Who was it who released portions of the report last fall, and, according to Schakowsky, initiated the current inquiry?
That would be Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the intel committee. At the same time that he released the report's excerpts, Hoekstra said he was asking DOJ to look into whether the CIA had obstructed justice, and called the incident "about as ugly as it gets." Schakowsky told Schultz last night that Hoekstra is "furious" about the incident.
That's the same Pete Hoekstra, of course, who's been front and center in portraying the agency as the embodiment of transparency and integrity in an effort to vilify Pelosi over the torture briefings. Appearing on CNN yesterday, Hoekstra called Pelosi's claims that the CIA had misled her "outrageous accusations."
But given that the agency is currently being probed on similar grounds -- in an inquiry initiated by Hoekstra himself -- perhaps Pelosi's claims aren't quite so outrageous after all.
Late Update: Thanks to reader XP, here's a bit more on Hoekstra's response to the IG report on the Peru shooting. Under the headline, "Republican Rep. Hoekstra Accuses CIA Of Coverup", CNN reported last November:
Rep. Pete Hoekstra on Thursday criticized "rogue" CIA employees involved in a joint CIA-Peruvian anti-narcotics program of withholding information after declassification of a CIA report identifying "routine disregard" of safety procedures that led to the plane being shot down.
...
"This issue goes to the heart of the American people's ability to trust the CIA," the Michigan lawmaker said Thursday. "Americans deserve to know that agencies given the power to operate on their behalf aren't abusing that power or their trust."
Benen: ELIMINATING THE SECURITY GAP....
Struggling in most areas of public policy, most notably the economy, Republicans have gone after President Obama on national security grounds -- the one area that has favored the GOP in recent years. It's led to a multi-prong offensive on everything from handshakes to Gitmo to torture.
And based on one new study, it's not working.
A new Democracy Corps poll released by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner today shows that after 100 days in office, President Barack Obama has, at least for now effectively erased doubts that Americans have historically harbored about the Democratic Party's vision and competence on national security.
For the first time in our research, Democrats are at full parity on perceptions of which party would best manage national security, while they have moved far ahead of the GOP on specific challenges such as Afghanistan, Iraq, working with our allies, and improving America's image abroad.
Nearly two-thirds of likely voters -- 64 percent -- approve of the job Obama is doing on national security. That is 6 points higher than his already strong overall job approval rating (at 58 percent, the highest we have yet recorded). On other aspects of national security -- from Iraq, to Afghanistan, to terrorism, to the president's foreign diplomacy -- the same is true: higher job approval ratings than on the President's overall job approval.
Given their approval of the president's performance on foreign affairs, voters flatly reject the claims from former Vice President Cheney and other Republicans that Obama's policies put America at risk. By nearly a 2 to 1 margin, Americans say that President Obama is doing better, not worse, than his predecessor, George W. Bush, when it comes to national security.
In fairness, Democracy Corps is a Democratic outfit, and Stan Greenberg, who conducted the survey, is a Democratic pollster.
But the results don't seem necessarily tilted. In fact, Obama's approval rating in the poll (58%) is lower than in most other national surveys of late.
If accurate, the numbers show the GOP losing its one key policy advantage. While the poll shows Americans preferring Republicans on "ensuring a strong military," Dems now lead on U.S. policy in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in foreign policy in general. Asked which party they prefer on counter-terrorism, the two parties were tied.
A narrow majority of Americans said Bush's policies "undermined" U.S. security interests, and a large majority said Obama is doing better than his predecessor on national security.
Joe Klein added, "[W]e should not underestimate the significance here: Obama is trying to do something far more complicated and sophisticated than Bush--comprehensive diplomacy takes time and great skill. It doesn't have the immediate satisfactions of a bang-bang, three-week rush to Baghdad.... But, for the moment, the American people seem content with a more nuanced foreign policy, which is very good news, indeed."
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