Matthew Yglesias gives us another example of "I'm too lazy to actually search their websites, but I don't remember hearing about women's rights organizations talking about issue X..."
There are a lot of issues here. First, I don't remember hearing the Ladies Against Women talking about the plight of women in Sudan. But, there are at least a few search hits at their website, though they seem to be celebrating the Sudan Peace Pact which I don't know much about but doesn't look all that good.
In fact, when I look around a bunch of other right-leaning websites I don't find much concern about the events in the Sudan either. If right wingers were so concerned about the Sudan, instead of trying to score political points, they might start, you know, trying to do something about it by lobbying Congress, raising awareness, etc... That's much more productive than bashing people who are actually doing those things even though you imagine they're not.
More generally this really is about the so-called Liberal Media. When there was the big flap about Augusta National not allowing women members, a lot of people correctly argued that there are perhaps more important things to worry about. Well, there are, but those issues don't get you booked on Crossfire, or even the Newshour. The media loves to talk about issues like that, then blame the spokespeople they book on their shows for talking about them... then they'll proceed to devote 4 hours straight to the issue themselves. The media pretend they don't set the agenda, as if members of feminist organizations can come on their shows and talk about anything they want to, and that they regularly do, but of course that's crap.
Similarly, when we were in the run-up to the war, the media wouldn't book any people with actual credentials to take the "anti-war" side - they'd book actors and then spend most of the interviews asking them why they should care what the hell some stupid actor thinks. There were more credentialed people out there willing to speak out, but the liberal media didn't want to hear from them.
TV producers choose which issues they want to cover and who they invite on to discuss them. Then they pretend they're just passive actors, passing on the news of the day. It's a lie. They control what and who they show.
Obviously there's a role for private industry in a war zone. But, there's a big problem when things heat up - they aren't obligated to stay.
Kellogg, Brown and Root, a division of Halliburton and one of the biggest contractors, vowed on Monday "to stay the course and move forward with the logistical support to troops," but with unspecified changes in delivery and security procedures.
But John McCarthy, director of projects for TTS Group, a British company whose Kuwaiti affiliate ships cargo into Iraq, said his company would not operate north of Basra, in the relatively secure south.
"I wouldn't do that any more than put my hand on a hot stove," McCarthy said in a telephone interview.
The U.S.-led military operation is responsible for providing overall security through Iraq, but specific protection depends on the cargo, area and threat level, officers said.
To the extent that our troops are relying on these contractors to keep them in bullets and food... if those contractors scamper off into the night they could be well and truly screwed.
Bush decided terrorism was less important than missile defense, Ashcroft thought he'd rather focus on traditional law enforcement, but Freeh's priority was pleasing his congressional GOP patrons by dedicating time and attention to investigations of Clinton administration pseudo-scandals.
Freeh was incompetent and he covered his ass by pleasing the media and the Republicans by feeding them a constant stream of faux scandals. I'm shocked that there are Republicans out there who don't understand that any Democrat who has been paying attention hates Freeh as much or more than anyone. Freeh is going to be partisan alright - he's going to do his best to torpedo the Clinton administration's reputation one last time in order to try and save his own miserable skin. The Democrats on the commission had better realize that he is not on their side.
WASHINGTON, April 12 -- Draft reports by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks portray Attorney General John Ashcroft as largely uninterested in counterterrorism issues before Sept. 11 despite intelligence warnings that summer that Al Qaeda was planning a large, perhaps catastrophic, terrorist attack, panel officials and others with access to the reports have said.
They said the draft reports, which are expected to be completed and made public during two days of hearings by the commission this week, show that F.B.I. officials were alarmed throughout 2001 by what they perceived as Mr. Ashcroft's lack of interest in terrorism issues and his decision in August 2001 to reject the bureau's request for a large expansion of its counterterrorism programs.
The draft reports, they said, quote the F.B.I.'s former counterterrorism chief, Dale Watson, as saying he "fell off my chair" when he learned that Mr. Ashcroft had failed to list combating terrorism as one of the department's priorities in a March 2001 department-wide memo.
"We've got to get more senior Iraqis involved, former military types involved in the security forces," Gen Abizaid said. "In the next couple of days, you'll see a large number of senior officers being appointed to key positions in the ministry of defence and in Iraqi joint staff and in Iraqi field commands. And General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition forces in Iraq] and I are very much involved in the vetting and placing of these officers and I can tell you the competition for these positions have been fierce."
As part of the de-Ba'athification process put in place by the US-led coalition after the overthrow of Mr Hussein's government, Paul Bremer, the chief civil administrator in Iraq, insisted on disbanding the Iraqi army despite suggestions from some in the US military that experienced officers would be needed to staff the new army.
Michael O'Hanlon, military analyst at the Brookings Institution, said on Monday: "This really is a reversal. The bottom line is that he [Bremer] eliminated all previous military. The question was what piece do you bring back and how. He had the opportunity to do just this."
I'm one who thought (though this is one of those areas where I don't claim to know squat) that the disbanding of the Iraqi military was a mistake. But, that's not the same thing as thinking the dismissal of senior officers was a mistake. It's more than a bit interesting that we're bringing them back on board...
The Center for Constitutional Rights is one of my latest sponsors. They're taking up the Guantanamo detainees' case, for which they were rewarded with death threats. Of course, in defending the Guantanmo detainees they're really defending the right of all of us to not be snatched up by a government - ours or another - and held indefinitely without charges. They're up against the Supremos on April 20.
I don't know everything about the organization, but I'm one of those people who thinks everyone deserves the best possible legal representation, no matter how horrible the charges against them are. They're also representing Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was deported to Syria.
And, of course, given the number of people who have actually been released from Gitmo after an extended stay, we know that not all of them were that evil...
Mr. FINEMAN: Who leaked that name? That's getting big behind the scenes, and I think it's going to be a bigger story than we know, because the question now is not just who leaked it but who lied to investigators about the leak.
I've posted about this before, thought not recently, but Kos has a post about the loss of the aura of American invincibility. Part of the 763 ever-changing reasons to invade Iraq was to prove we could. I assume that the people who made this decision were well aware that we could easily topple just about any government on the planet, so when we say "to prove we could" we're talking about something a bit more complicated than that. What we mean is that we could do it cheaply, roughly within the bounds of international consensus of appropriate use of force and the amount of collateral damage, and that what was left in its place would be better and more Democratic than what we took out.
Well, thanks a lot - in both Afghanistan and Iraq they've managed to prove that all of those things actually aren't true. We can still destroy the world with a few well-placed nukes, but we can't just cut off and replace the head anywhere we want.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military intends to kill or capture rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who launched an uprising this month with his militiamen clashing with coalition soldiers in several towns and cities.
"The mission of U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr," Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, said in a video conference from Baghdad with correspondents in the United States.
I have no idea what they should do about Sadr. But, I do know that the issue isn't Sadr per se, but the events he can set in motion. His death or capture will cause a reaction...
Yglesias is right to point out, yet again, that there's almost no discernible difference between how the government should respond to threats of a "normal" hijacking and how one should respond to threats of hijacking planes to fly them into buildings. Aside from being much less likely to consider shooting them down, there is no difference at all.
As Jon Stewart said on Franken's show - Bush isn't dumb, we are. If we were smarter he couldn't talk like this and not have the country throw up their hands in a collective 'WUUUUUUH?'
It's sort of cute that conservatives are suddenly shocked that there are people expressing opinions on the radio in a less than respectful fashion. William Raspberry is so shocked by it he's decided to write a column decrying the evils of the new Franken show, even though he's never actually heard it.
So, Jack Cafferty just informed us that John Kerry is making a big mistake by pulling out a "misery index" because in 1979 Jimmy Carter did something similar and his focus on the negative aspects of the economy caused him to the lose the subsequent election.
Cafferty didn't bother to point out one key difference... in 1979 CARTER WAS PRESIDENT and thus, you know, could be held responsible for all that malaise.
It's late, so I'm not going to throw out a bunch of smart stuff. But, just a couple quick comments on looming dangers.
1) Greenspan's foot is to the floor, and so is Congress's. If there's a negative shock for some reason - any reason - there's nothing else they can do.
2) This housing bubble is of serious concern. If long term interest rates go up for any reason, we could see an epidemic of foreclosures and potentially bank crashes. eek.
I really can't believe Bush's remarks today. The final in the series of "we didn't have the names, the dates, and the flight numbers, so there was nothing we could do."
I have no objection to Christians, Christianity, or writing about them positively in newspapers. But, this kind of uncritical boosterism isn't "journalism."
Jim Henley, who plays in the sandbox of the "pro-war" side far more than I do, has a should-read post about the various mixed feelings of being anti-war. I think what Jim - and the media generally - doesn't emphasize is the fact is that while I don't doubt that many soldiers in Iraq perceive that "anti-war" folk are somehow against them, I also don't doubt that there are many soldiers there who believe that the "pro-war" folk are the ones who are against them.
Like Jim, I have immense sympathy for the troops - even those (hopefully few) who may be guilty of committing horrible unnecessary atrocities. In their situation I can imagine my behavior could be atrocious as well. I have no sympathy for the people who wrongly put them there, or for their cowardly non-enlisting supporters. They put these men and women in an impossible situation. One should not be surprised by their reactions.
War- any war - is about weighing the costs against the benefits. The moral calculus for different people will vary, as we have different beliefs about threats and consequences, and different weights placed on our deaths vs. their deaths, on military vs. civilian casualties, on the overall cost, etc... But, no matter what the benefits of "success" are (what that is I don't even know), as the situation and perception about the actual costs - in lives and in money - change, it's perfectly rational for peoples' perceptions about this adventure change. To not change your mind in the face of changing facts is the insane thing. To believe that "winning" is all-important, even once we've lost any sense of what that means, is a belief which simply sacrifices more lives to spare some fragile egos.
Pointing out that it was a mistake to send these people to their deaths does not dishonor them - it rightly dishonors the civilian leaders who sent them there. These people served their country when asked, even if their civilian leaders can be faulted.
Over at Kos there's a decent roundup of the discussion of Viceroy Jerry's decision to close down Sadr's paper. Not having been a regular reader of it, I really don't know the degree to which the claim that it incited violence against US troops is true. But, frankly, I don't really care. I'm no supporter of Sadr, and nor is the concept of "Freedom of Speech" really relevant in a war zone. What is important is that the people over there need to recognize that no matter how legitimate any particular action may be from a legal/moral perspective, they need to remember that those actions have reactions. Apparently Viceroy J didn't bother to plan for the possible consequences of shutting down the paper. That doesn't make him an evil guy - it makes him incompetent.
Like Billmon, I really don't understand how anyone expected the US-trained Iraqi army to "fight on our side." Sure, you could expect them to take part in small security operations perhaps, but not join in for large scale military battles.
A couple readers wrote in to tell me that on Matthews' weekend show, Howard Fineman said that the Plame scandal is going to blow up bigger than any of them imagined. Or something like that.
Once upon a time we had a Secretary of Defense. He had a vision of wars which would be fought with air power, special forces and psyops, his collection of invincible robots, and a small number of lightly armored cannon fodder. His vision is wrong. People are now getting killed because of him.
Anyway, read the article at the link (which is only indirectly related to this post). It's interesting and disturbing. But, I want to puke every time I rememmber how the pathetic Heathers used to swoon at Big Don's every press conference. Oh well, it's not their kids getting killed.
Roger Ailes discusses the latest battle in the war on straw, courtesy of Easterbrook and Kitty Parker. In their world the only possible response to having awareness of a possible attack by al Qaeda was to carpet bomb Afghanistan. Therefore, all the people who are criticizing Bush should just shut their pie holes, because there's no way they would've supported such a thing in 2001.
At the risk of being called a Saddam-loving French Islamofacist, might I point out that more measured, and rational, responses to the information Bush possessed -- like heightened precautions at airports and more careful review of existing information -- might have solved the immediate problem, whereas the responses imagined by our fantasizing friends -- "the bombing of Afghanistan" and "an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan" -- likely would not have.
The issue isn't, of course, that Bush failed to stop 9/11 - it's that he apparently failed to do anything to try and stop 9/11. I'm tired of how Bob Kerrey has framed the issue this way also - "attack Afghanistan or do nothing" are the only options he understands. Now, going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan earlier may have been the right thing to do, but either way it doesn't speak to the more immediate question:
After getting information about possible hijackings in the US, what additional measures did the Bushies implement or at least propose implementing?
Stop the war talk, let's just talk basic domestic security.
Answer Fallujah The April 1 headline screamed "Four Slain Americans Savaged by Frenzied Mob." Unfortunately, it was no April Fool's Day joke.
How many of our countrymen and -women must lose their lives before terrorists are dealt with using the only means they understand: all-encompassing, completely deadly, damn-the-consequences brute force?
The entire city of Fallujah should be firebombed from the air, just as we did with Dresden. Many people died. It was war. So is what we are engaged in now. That whole city, and every man, woman, and child in it, should be reduced to nothing but charred ashes.
A message needs to be sent to those who would commit such actions as the terrorists in Fallujah did. The only reason they continue to do so is because they can. "Let the punishment fit the crime" is an old saying that in many cases falls short. The punishment should be more severe than the crime, if possible, so as to act as a deterrent to future crime.
When Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated, it was done to send a message, to act as a deterrent and to save American lives in the future. Did innocents die? Unfortunately, yes.
To all of you reading this I say: just think of the innocents who perished on 9/11 in this country. And the thousands more who will die if we do not act decisively to deter such atrocities as Fallujah.
Craig Unger suggests the 9/11 commission should ask Ashcroft and Mueller how 140 Saudi citizens were allowed to fly around the country - and then out - starting when the airspace was still closed.
