Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.

To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.

Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.

Steve meant so much to us.

We will miss him terribly.

Turks mass for Kurd attack

Turkey's military massed more troops and tanks on the border with Iraq Thursday as the country's military chief said he was ready to stage a cross-border offensive to fight Kurds.

His latest remarks appeared to put Erdogan's government under pressure to ask for approval from parliament to send soldiers into Iraq to fight separatist Kurdish guerrillas.

The United States opposes any unilateral Turkish military action, fearing it could destabilize northern Iraq - the most stable part of the war-torn country.

Past cross-border operations have yielded mixed results, with many guerrillas sheltering in hide-outs and emerging to fight again once the bulk of Turkish units withdrew from Iraq. A government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the military could set up a buffer zone in northern Iraq to block Kurdish rebels from entering Turkey.

Labels: Iraq, Kurds, Turkey

So far, no flippant responses from the Defense or Justice Departments to the latest news that yet another GTMO detainee, this time a Saudi national, has managed to kill himself at our gulag beach resort at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Around this time last year, when three detainees killed themselves, GTMO commanding officer Rear Adm. Harris insisted that this was some kind of gesture of "asymmetrical warfare".) While we do get the usual explanation of a detainee "found not responsive", we get no details such as the name, or whether the detainee was one of those scheduled for release (because they're all "the worst of the worst", of course), or in this case, the manner of suicide.

The WaPo article relies on insanely under-stated official estimates of "around 40 suicide attempts by 25 detainees". We know, for example, from our interview with Joshua Colangelo-Bryan that his own client Juma Al-Dossari may have exceeded that number all by himself, and that suicide attempts were rampant. What has happened, of course, is that the military has simply stopped counting suicide attempts, and calling them other things. Well, three of the Orwellianisms managed to work last year, and a fourth this year. That's around 1% of the current detainee population. Given that, unlike the usual super-max prison, where those held have been tried and convicted of something and have a determinate sentence (even if its a long one, or a life sentence), the GTMO detainees have simply been determined guilty by executive fiat, and may face life, or may be released tomorrow, again, by executive fiat and whim. And unlike the usual super-max, they are subject to the kind of officially sanctioned abuse and torture, which, stateside, some lawyer and judge might find offends the Eighth Amendment.

No matter. A "cultural advisor" is on hand to make sure that the prisoner's body is treated with the kind of respect that the prisoner was denied while he was alive (doubtless using protocols written by former chaplain Capt. James Yee, interviewed here.)

And so it goes. Another day at the office, if the office is Joint Task Force Guantanamo. This ongoing stain on our nation's integrity continues. Our friends at Cage Prisoners count this as day 1967 of illegal imprisonment at GTMO; my Bush Countdown Calendar tells me we have 600 days left of this Administration.

Deep sighs all around.

Readers interested in legal issues and related matters associated with the "war on terror" may also find talking dog blog interviews with attorneys Tina Foster, Brent Mickum, Marc Falkoff H. Candace Gorman, Eric Freedman, Michael Ratner, Thomas Wilner, Jonathan Hafetz, Joshua Denbeaux, Rick Wilson, Neal Katyal, Joshua Colangelo Bryan, Baher Azmy, and Joshua Dratel (representing Guantanamo detainees and others held in "the war on terror"), with attorneys Donna Newman and Andrew Patel (representing "unlawful combatant" Jose Padilila), with Dr. David Nicholl, who spearheaded an effort among international physicians protesting force-feeding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, with physician and bioethicist Dr. Steven Miles on medical complicity in torture, with law professor and former Clinton Administration Ambassador-at-large for war crimes matters David Scheffer, with former Guantanamo detainees Moazzam Begg and Shafiq Rasul , with former Guantanamo Bay Chaplain James Yee, with former Guantanamo Army Arabic linguist Erik Saar, with law professor and former Army J.A.G. officer Jeffrey Addicott, with law professor and Coast Guard officer Glenn Sulmasy, with author and geographer Trevor Paglen and with author and journalist Stephen Grey on the subject of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, and with journalist and author David Rose on Guantanamo related issues to be of interest.

Labels: cartoons, politics

Phil Nugent had some thoughts on defunding the federal government this weekend, you are encouraged to read them. The man's an amazing ranter, and I mean that with absolute respect. But it sent me off on a tangent of my own, and about the time I realized that my comment was going to get truncated over at No More Mister Nice Blog's place, where Phil crossposted, I decided perhaps it'd be better over here where a smaller audience might mean no one points out my various and prominent flaws in logic. (Unless you feel like it, in which case, have at it.)

For some reason, I'm pro-government. Always have been. People who say things like "Government doesn't solve problems", or "Name one good thing the government's ever done", or "Capitalism can do that better" baffle the living hell out of me.

Give me a few minutes, and I could name at least three dozen government programs that are important enough they need doing but that capitalism isn't capable of, or interested in. Let's start with orphan drugs. People with rare diseases, for which drugs aren't available because any given company can make more manufacturing Cialis than something maybe a thousand or so people across the US take. Unless we're willing to just write these people off, telling them, well, yes, a cure exists, but you can't have it because there's not enough profit in making it, taxpayer subsidies seem like a good solution.

Rural electrification, there's another good one. No for-profit company is going to string wire all the way out to some tiny hamlet in the Ozarks for the sake of a few hundred people. For that matter, no for-profit hospital is going to spend much if any time treating the indigent in their ERs if they're not made to. For-profit schools is another good way to say "MacDonald's Training Academy", and no kid is going to learn literature or citizenship or art there. Anybody want to explore the concept of capitalistic fire departments? Remember, your non-covered neighbor's housefire can very quickly become yours, and even if the fire department saves your home, you'd have less damage if they put out the fire when it was still two houses away. Road building, police departments, prisons, the military, you want to see what happens when they go capitalistic, Iraq is rather instructive.

There's an awful lot of stuff I'm perfectly happy to pay taxes for so everybody can use, and so no one person or group controls how it gets used. If civil courts are replaced with the sort of arbitration my bank tells me is my only option if we have a disagreement, those of us who aren't hiring and paying the arbitrators will never see justice. If the roads are maintained by auto companies, you can just keep your bike in your garage. If Microsoft is the only source of funding for the local aquarium, you can expect to have to wait outside with the field trip kids while they hold their monthly employee banquet. When the Wall Street Journal gives PBS more money than anybody else, you can expect to see programming where some B-list columnist quizzes guests as to whether the economy is going "great" or "really great".

So government can absolutely solve problems, and paying taxes is how we have a government with an interest in and an ability to solve problems that are important, rather then just profitable. And right off the bat, I have an adversarial stance toward anyone who tells me smaller government is inherently better--which is not to say I'm any happier with those who propose that larger government is inherently better. It's not the size, as they tell us, it's what you do with it.

The thing is, I don't actually know anyone who goes around saying that big government is inherently good, unless you count the walking pathologies we've come to refer to as "authoritarians", and even they aren't really arguing for bigger government, just more powerful government. And even that only in certain, narrowly constrained areas (like, "any part of the law that will control the behavior of people who aren't me"). So when I find myself arguing about the appropriate role of government, it is almost exclusively with republicans, and usually with the drown-it-in-the-bathtub sort.

I will continue to contend that a big part of why we have Bush is that we let Clinton get away with pretending we had a "budget surplus". I know, I know, we really only did it because it made the GOP's Congressional witchhunters look bad to be going after a guy who accomplished the budget restraints they were never capable of, etc. I was never a huge fan of Clinton, and a couple of his noteworthy policies still strike me as unnecessarily vicious, which is not to say, as they do, that he might not be entertaining to have a beer with. But even so, I found myself defending him in conversations with people who still regard The Clenis as the Antichrist. And defending him frequently. I suspect it was probably pretty common for liberals to have a few policies with which they agreed with Clinton, and to defend him on that basis to people who thought calling Hillary a "dyke", Chelsea a "dog", and Bill a "scumbag" was the height of wit.

So the budget thing came in handy, especially to jab at republicans and conservatives who advocated balanced budget amendments all the while venerating Reagan. But it was pretty predictable the sort of problems that would come from letting it be framed as a surplus. Especially it should have been predictable after we got a good look at what Dubya had done in Texas, though surprisingly few people seemed to regard it as any sort of valid indicator of anything.

So we had this money that was theoretically unspoken for, and the GOP, as they do, announced that the government was stealing your money! More than it needed! Because that's what governments do! And it is only justice--justice, I say--to return it to the people from whom the government stole it! And thus the grand GOP experiment of bribing the voters with their own money--and never delivering anyway--brought us to Dubya, Worst President Ever.

The worst part of allowing him to bribe his way into the White House with that money is, it damned well was never a surplus in the first place. It was the money we'd promised to all sorts of people and programs that we cut during the Reagan/Bush years, and, yes, during the Clinton years as well. We took the money out of schoolkids' mouths, we took it away from health inspectors and teachers and hospitals and research and civil servants in all those boring but necessary positions.

The reason at the time was that we couldn't afford it, not with these huge budget deficits. So we cut right back to the bone all the social stuff that helps hold the country together, and when we had the money again, instead of going back to re-fund those programs, we pretended it was a surplus. We pretended, for example, that teachers were doing just fine on smaller classroom budgets, or that poor families had learned to go elsewhere for food, and that these were solutions that were workable for the long term.

Regardless of whether every poor family found a non-governmental solution (and I can promise you a lot of them didn't), it's pretty close to obscene to have pretended that if they weren't objecting loud enough for us to hear them, then there was no problem. (Meanwhile, we made damned sure they couldn't get anywhere near any sort of position from which to complain.)

But the minute people started referring to that as a "surplus", rather than "finally having the money to meet our obligations", the GOP candidates were all set up to start yelling about how we needed to give all that extra money back to "the people who paid it". (Or at least those whose major tax burden was income tax, which is not the case for most people.)

That was predictable. And it was predictable that a whole lot of idiots would buy into it. And now we have Bush, and we're struggling to meet even the already grotesquely inadequate budgets for our social programs--and will be doing that for the foreseeable future.

Life sucks, and sometimes you have to make choices. If Junior drives the family car into the neighbors' living room, maybe the family has to talk to the dentist about making smaller payments while they do something about the mess. But if it turns out the damage wasn't quite as much as it was expected to cost, the family doesn't continue to skip dental bills and instead buy a big screen TV with the money. They sure as hell don't triple Junior's allowance with the money they're keeping back from dental bills.

Personally, I've never for the life of me been able to imagine why we let the GOP control the government when they don't seem to understand what the point of it is. Phil's got me a little closer to understanding it, and it was worth the read just for that.

(The title of this post, for the record, is an Arrogant Worms song.)

Some senior administration officials still relish the notion of a direct confrontation. One ambassador in Washington said he was taken aback when John Hannah, Vice President Cheney’s national security adviser, said during a recent meeting that the administration considers 2007 “the year of Mexico” and indicated that a U.S. attack was a real possibility. Hannah declined to be interviewed for this article.

For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from Mexico, and the latest information from inside the Miss Universe pageant have the players in motion.

Mr. Giuliani laughs, he gestures expansively, he even pokes fun at his tendency to wax a wee bit authoritarian. (He suggests a touch of the cane was necessary to impose discipline on that liberal asylum known as New York.) He shakes hands with reporters he once viewed as “jerky” and assures them he is fine with tough questions about abortion, where he has settled on a position supporting a woman’s right to choose, and about gun control

He dresses in the one-size-too-large suits he has favored since his days as a federal prosecutor, with the top shirt button fastened and tie knotted tight. It is difficult to imagine anyone asking him a “really dopey” (two favorite Giuliani words now in abeyance) question about his favored style in underwear, as someone once did of Bill Clinton.

Mr. Giuliani has made upgrades. The comb-over, his decades-long insistence on combing his hair across a substantial expanse of cranium, is history. His remaining hair is slicked back and comes to rest in a tight nest of graying curls.

In Atlanta, Mr. Giuliani offers to take questions, and a stout blond woman in a red pantsuit shoots straight up, raising her hand and nearly shouting, “I think you are sooooo handsome.”

(In 1994, a woman in Queens translated the same compliment into New Yorkese; she peered carefully at Mr. Giuliani and acknowledged, “You look a lot better in person.”)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly two dozen officials who received hefty performance bonuses last year at the Veterans Affairs Department also sat on the boards charged with recommending the payments.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press raise questions of conflict of interest in connection with the bonuses, some of which went to senior officials involved in crafting a budget that came up $1.3 billion short and jeopardized veterans' health care.

The documents show that 21 of 32 officials who were members of VA performance review boards received more than half a million dollars in payments themselves.

The bonuses were awarded even after government investigators had determined the VA repeatedly miscalculated "if not deliberately misled taxpayers" with questionable methods used to justify Bush administration cuts to health care amid the burgeoning Iraq war.

Annual bonuses to senior VA officials now average more than $16,000 — the most lucrative in government. The VA said the payments are necessary to retain hardworking career officials.

According to the White House Office of Personnel Management, roughly three of every four senior officials at the VA have received some kind of bonus each year.

Labels: criminal, republicans, veterans

…
They actually thought they could unite Iraq, while dividing America.

Whenever Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had a choice between seeking political advantage at home or acting in a bipartisan fashion to buy more unity, time and space to do all the heavy lifting needed in Iraq, they opted for political advantage.

When Franklin Roosevelt fought World War II, he made a conservative Republican, Henry Stimson, his secretary of war and did all he could to hold the country together. The Bush- Cheney team, by contrast, summoned us to D-Day and then treated it like it was just another political wedge issue, whenever it suited them.

It has not worked. As Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, put it:

“You cannot govern like Winston Churchill some of the time and like Grover Norquist most of the time.”

...
“Democrats need to be careful, though, that they don’t let their rage with the hypocrisy of Mr. Bush make them totally crazy, and blind them to the fact that they ? we ? still need a credible plan to deal with the very real threat to open societies posed by Islamist terrorism.”
...

A) Actually say out loud that they’re stunned that the GOP is acting exactly as they said they would and have for the last 30 years and,

B) Urgently council the only people in a credible position to oppose their rising fascist tide to pull their punches…

Iraqi gunmen soldiers attack village killing 15.

Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms Iraqi Army regulars entered a village east of Baghdad early today, removed families from their homes and opened fire on the men, killing 15 of them, an Iraqi general and a Kurdish political party said.

The victims were Kurdish Shias, according to a statement posted on the website of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The gunmen Iraqi soldiers entered the village of Hamid Shifi, about 60 miles from Baghdad and forced families from their homes, said Brig. Gen. Nazim Sherif.

The assailants Iraqi soldiers then separated the women and children, ordered the men to stand in a single file and gunned them down, he said. Sherif said villagers had received no threats before the attack, which he blamed on al-Qaeda. The village is in Diyala province, an area northeast of Baghdad where violence has violent skirmishes in the Iraq Civil War have risen sharply in the past six months.

Meanwhile five US soldiers were killed in four separate attacks by insurgents Iraqi soldiers dressed as civilians in Iraq yesterday and today, taking to eight the number of American soldiers killed in the past 48 hours, the US military said.
…

In one of the worst attacks, a roadside bomb followed by gunfire killed two soldiers and wounded two others in northeastern Baghdad yesterday, the military said in a statement today.

Another soldier was killed in western Anbar province, a stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency side of the Iraq Civil War, and a fourth was shot dead near Baghdad, also yesterday.
…