Channelling Sokal

Remember the so-called Sokal Affair? In 1996, a magazine called Social Text published an essay arguing there was a link between quantum mechanics and post-modernism. It was written by Professor Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University. Once it was published, Sokal wrote an article for Lingua Franca magazine telling the world that his Social Text article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," was a hoax.

The thrust of the hoax was explained by Sokal:

For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities. But I'm a mere physicist: if I find myself unable to make head or tail of jouissanceand différance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy.

So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

Everybody had a good laugh at Social Text and many see the hoax as the beginning of the end of postmodernism (so to speak).

Now, it's one thing for a cultural studies magazine to be sucked in by a clever hoax executed by a physicist: surely it's another altogether for an organisation that sets itself up as a magazine of science to be sucked in by a political economist who is isn't even trying to hoax them? Tim Lambert hasn't exactly Sokalled Tech Central, but he's done the next best thing. Again.

Channelling Sokal

Remember the so-called Sokal Affair? In 1996, a magazine called Social Text published an essay arguing there was a link between quantum mechanics and post-modernism. It was written by Professor Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University. Once it was published, Sokal wrote an article for Lingua Franca magazine telling the world that his Social Text article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," was a hoax.

The thrust of the hoax was explained by Sokal:

For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities. But I'm a mere physicist: if I find myself unable to make head or tail of jouissanceand différance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy.

So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

Everybody had a good laugh at Social Text and many see the hoax as the beginning of the end of postmodernism.

Now, it's one thing for a cultural studies magazine to be sucked in by a clever hoax executed by a physicist: surely it's another altogether for an organisation that sets itself up as a magazine of science to be sucked in by a political economist who is isn't even trying to hoax them? Tim Lambert hasn't exactly Sokalled Tech Central, but he's done the next best thing. Again.

A look in the Mirror

On where the buck has and hasn't stopped.

Approach the bench

In the post below about torture, I mention the memo produced by White House counsel, Alberto Gonzalez, and what a vile document it is. Judd Legum from the excellent Center for American Progress emails with this interesting comparison between Gonzalez's memo and an op-ed he (Gonzalez) recently wrote for The New York Times:

Last week, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales forcefully denied that the Bush administration failed to support the Geneva treaties. But Gonzales’ recent statements are belied by his January 2002 memo to the President.

GONZALES SAYS ADMINISTRATION IS A 'STRONG SUPPORTER OF GENEVA CONVENTIONS: "At the same time, President Bush recognized that our nation will continue to be a strong supporter of the Geneva treaties. The president also reaffirmed our policy in the United States armed forces to treat Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in keeping with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention."

- Alberto Gonzales, 5/15/04 (NYT Op-Ed)

VERSUS

GONZALES SAYS GENEVA RESTRICTIONS ARE OBSOLETE: "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians...In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

- Alberto Gonzales, 1/25/02 (Memorandum to the President, as reported in Newsweek 5/16/04)

I guess he feels telling the truth in op-ed pieces for major newspapers is another one of those traditions rendered quaint by current circumstances.

He should be sacked.

Univitation to an occupation

I know you all, quite rightly, bristle a bit with the Vietnam comparisons, and I've never made one before, but this quote today from Condoleeza Rice certainly echoes with comments from that previous era:

"We have known for a long time, particularly in the run-up to June 30, that there were going to be people who would try to derail the political process and the political transition," she said. "You have to keep the political transition on track."

"But the solution to this is ultimately political and Iraqi," said Rice. "It is clearly time for the occupation to end, it is clearly time for the Iraqis to be in control of their own political future."

As an emailer noted, it sounds awfully like this quote from JFK:

In the final analysis, it's their war. They're the ones who have to win it or lose it.

Deja vu all over again. Anyway.

"Clearly time for the occupation to end": that goes even further, substantially so, than comments from people like Colin Powell and Paul Bremer and even Alexander Downer who have gone on the record to say that coalition forces will leave after June 30 "if asked." It's starting to sound like the "cutting" has already started and we are just waiting for a chance to "run". All rhetoric to the contrary.

Of course, this line of thought is underminded, at least in Australia's case, by prime minister Howard's rumoured decision to send more troops and even civilians:

The Prime Minister, John Howard, is expected to announce an increase in Australia's military and civilian commitment to Iraq as early as tomorrow night, when he will deliver a keynote address outlining his approach to the worsening crisis.

Government sources cautioned against expecting a major expansion but said some "tweaking" in the deployment had been considered after the visits of Mr Howard and the Defence Minister, Robert Hill, to Iraq last month. That adjustment could include up to 200 more personnel, government and defence sources said.

Of course, what better time than to float the idea of more troops than at the very moment you are expecting to be asked to come home? But John Howard would never be that sneaky, would he?

And just to follow the main train of thought here, it is also worth noting two other things: all the reports about senior coalition officials voluteering to leave "if asked" also note that these officials think it highly unlikely that they will be asked to leave. But then again, and this is the second point, we are also seeing consistent reports that the Iraqis want the occupiers out. So if by chance some sort of vaguley democratic government emerged between the end of June and January 2005, what with democratic governments being predicated upon the notion of reflecting popular will and all, perhaps such an un-invitation to coalition forces isn't that unlikely?

Then again, they'd hardly be the first democratic government in recent history to ignore the will of their citizens, especially in regard to having troops in Iraq.

Out-of-focus group

Sedgwick mentions the Australian Democrats new campaign slogan: The Lie Detectors. Hate to tell them, but we know who the liars are, and we even know what most of the lies have been, the big ones anyway. Detecting the lies is pretty easy (hint: it happens when they move their lips.) So what else ya got?

Harold

When I was in high school, a Catholic boys school in Canberra, there was a guy who used do some gardening and maintenance of the school grounds. He was short and wiry and we used to see him striding around outside, often pushing a wheelbarrow or a mower or dragging a big heavy hose behind him (think of the image of Bill Murray in Caddyshack). He was probably in his seventies and he walked funny, not really a limp, but more like both his legs were kind of stuck in a bowed position and he'd swivel at the hips moving one entire leg in front of the other as he sped across the basketball courts or the footy field outside our classroom windows. I can remember watching him in a day-dreaming sort of way, slumped down on my desk, half-listening to the maths or English or French lesson I was in the middle of.

Actually, it was during a French class, the year after the Governor-General dismissed the Whitlam government, so 1976 when I was around 16, and we were all sitting there reciting our vous-avez-une-tables? or whatever, when this guy, the gardener with the the funny walk, burst into the classroom and in a rage went up to Mark Lahiff, who happened to be sitting in the front row, and pushed his face into Lahiff's (or Bruce as we used to call him) and, while pointing at his own nose, yelled in Bruce's face, "The Japs give me this nose. The Japs give it to me." Then he turned tail and exited as quickly as he had entered, leaving a slightly startled and cooly bemused (we were too cool to be anything other than cool) classroom of 16 year old boys behind him.

"Poor Harold," Mrs Egan, the French teacher said, or words to that effect. "Nothing to laugh about," she added, turning on us. "Harold was in Changi in case you didn't know."

I told my mum about it that night and as soon as she heard me say the bit about him being in Changi she froze up. The word, for people of her generation, still had the power to curdle bone marrow and I guessed her head was filling with those images of Australian soldiers coming home after doing time in various infamous Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, skeletons with tracing-paper skin clinging to their bones, impersonating living humans.

From then on, as was my mother's tendency, Harold became her personal responsibility, and she regularly took him meals and found paid work for him to do around our house, or at other people's houses, and invited him to Christmas dinners or Sunday lunches or whatever. He would arrive at our front door is his best clothes, a jacket and a tie, and his hair slicked down with Brylcreem and neatly parted down the middle. He was like a character from The Sullivans. We gradually learned--it must have been through osmosis, because I can never really remember having a conversation with him--the bare outlines of his life: Born in Cooma, enlisted in the army, Changi, home to a marriage that hadn't worked out, divorce, estrangement from his children, unemployment, alcoholism and eventually a peaceful death, a few years after we became aware of him, and a Christian burial, the last two milestones largely thanks to my mum.

Harold, like many others, had been beaten in Changi. There are accounts that argue Changi wasn't as bad as some other POW camps, but I'm guessing this was of little comfort to him. The nose he thrust into Bruce's face during that French class had been broken by the butt of Japanese rifle for some trifling offense, reduce to a flap of mangled gristle in the middle of his face. His legs had been broken and not properly set. He had seen people executed.

I was thinking about Harold this weekend.

And I followed a link and watched the video of Nick Berg being beheaded by jihadists. I wish I hadn't. I don't know what I expected, but I guess I had some self-protective idea that the execution would be quick and clean. It wasn't. It was slow and violent and as filthy an action as I have ever seen. The sheer, determined physical strength needed to perform that act, holding him down while cutting him, combined with the mental state to be able to finish it, is what most made me sick to the stomach. And then their satisfaction in displaying what they had done. I think that it is entirely understandable that people would use this act to suggest that the American abuses of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib pale in comparison. Because that's true. There is simply no comparison. I think it is also entirely understandable that people could watch that vile footage and conclude that such people deserve no sympathy. Because they don't.

Nor does anyone vaguely inspired by such violence, who see it as necessary and justifiable act on the path to some religiously inspired utopia. I can truly live without a subtle understanding of the philosophy that allows, encourages, requires such actions to complete its mission. Such people are our enemies, as Christopher Hitchens might say, and on that point he'd be right.

The truth is: such actions set a standard by which we judge ourselves. And we have to ask ourselves, just how close to their side of the ledger do we want to get?

Look at it this way. Why are we in Iraq in the first place? The answer from the Bush administration--and let's take them at their word--is that we are fighting a war on terror. They--we--declared war on a methodology, a form of warfare that we deemed so far beyond the bounds acceptable human behaviour that we decided to eradicate it. It wasn't just the megaterrorism of the Twin Towers we set our sites on, but the full gamut of actions that colluded under that general description of "terrorism." President Bush set the terms of that war very starkly: you are either for us or against us. For terrorism or against it. There was no nuance. No grey. No halfway house.

So let me ask the obvious question: why are the same people--we--allowing nuance and greyness and halfway houses to cloud our thinking about this other methodology? Shouldn't we declare a war on this too? A war on torture that sets the terms just as starkly: you are either for us or against us. You either use such methods or you don't.

The truth is, we have already declared such a war and its terms are spelled out in international documents like the Geneva conventions and various UN documents that demand we treat our enemies better than we would ever imagine that they would treat us. That was where we drew the line between us and them.

Instead we have the Bush administration authorising the use of methods that abandon those standards--the values we thought defined a certain "us" against a certain "them"--and instead apparently adopting the standards of torturers and terrorists. We are lectured and consoled by administration apologists, using the footage of Nick Berg as their example, that we are not as bad as them. Well bully for us.

We even have the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, advising the President on how the Geneva Convention no longer applied:

"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," Newsweek magazine quoted the memo as saying.

Well fuck your judgement of quaintness, Mr Gonzales. And the judgement of every other mealy-mouthed appeaser of torture-related activities that's been trotted out, from Donald Rumsfeld down to the darkest ditches of the blogosphere and the conservative-central of talk radio. No, what has happened under US auspices to captured terrorists and Iraqi prisoners isn't anywhere near as bad as what was done to Nick Berg. But we crossed a line. We put a toe in "their" room--literally. It was as if, having declared a war on terrorism, we decided that it was okay to to set the occasional little terrorist bomb of our own, as long as we did it with right intentions, and with all due care, and as long as the intended victims were really, really bad, as long as they were, you know, terrorists, and as long as it wasn't as bad as flying planes into the World Trade Center.

The truism that we are not as bad as them should be irrelevant and insulting to us, not comforting. We measure ourselves by our willingness to distance ourselves from such barbarity as that inflicted on Nick Berg, not by the fact that we haven't reached that level of depravity. I'm no fan of the terminology, but if a "war on torture" is what is needed to drag the Bush administration and their apologists in this matter off the slippery slope to which they seem to have committed themselves, then I'm happy to use it.

And in that war, you are either with us or against us.

OH, YEAH: And torture doesn't work anyway.

ELSEWHERE: Kevin Drum picks up on the Gonzales memo.

British justice

It seems the Brits are going to charge some of their soldiers with causing a death in custody in Iraq:

...the scandal widened with six British soldiers to be charged over the torture and death of an Iraqi in military custody.

The charges against soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment would be the first levelled at British troops since the war began.

Which reminded me of this story from March last year:

Three British soldiers in Iraq have been ordered home after objecting to the conduct of the war. It is understood they have been sent home for protesting that the war is killing innocent civilians. The three soldiers - including a private and a technician - are from 16 Air Assault Brigade which is deployed in southern Iraq. Its task has been to protect oilfields.

The brigade includes the Ist and 3rd battalions of the Parachute Regiment, the 1st battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, a Royal Horse Artillery regiment, and a reconnaissance squadron of the Household Cavalry.

The three soldiers, based in Colchester, Essex, face court martial and are seeking legal advice, defence sources said yesterday.

Whatever happened to these guys, and do you think they might be glad they got out when they did?

In the name of the father

Lucky new mum and person-obviously-bereft-of-baby-name-book, Gwyneth Paltrow, isn't married to Australian blogger, Robert Corr.

I am he said

Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, announced today that he will never die, that he is actually getting younger and more gorgeous, and that he cannot imagine the country surviving, let alone thriving, unless he is installed as leader in perpetuity.

"The country has a stark choice at the next election," Prime Minister Pan announced today. "They can either choose an all-powerful immortal such as myself, or a wizend 43-year old like Mark Latham who is bound to die. Really, I am truly fabulous and I see all, know all, am all. I am Australia. Australia is me, from the top of Ayers Rock to the centre pitch on the MCG. I am the father of the nation. The son, the daughter, the labrador. The only way to Australia is through me. I am the future, the hope, the salvation. I am stardust; I am golden. I am love."

Our endless numbered days

Here's a few excerpts from some stuff I've been reading and listening to lately. All a bit random, but anyway.

I'm nearly through Brian Matthews' history-cum-personal-memoir about the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Of course, the book wouldn't be nearly as good as it is if Matthews himself wasn't such a fan of Aussie Rules (even if he is a St Kilda tragic). Anyway, here's one little anecdote that I liked. He's in the middle of an account of the 2002 Preliminary Final between Collingwood and Port Adelaide and has just described Nathan Buckley, the Collingwood captain, bursting through, in traditional fashion, the banner to lead his team out onto the field. Cut to:

When, for example, the Dalai Lama arrived at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport from Adelaide in 1991 and was loaded onto a media-mobile and whisked from the plane to the arrival concourse, he was greeted by a huge crowd of supporters and activists and confronted by wall-sized, orange banners exhorting FREE TIBET, CHINA OUT OF TIBET, and other cries of anguish. His entourage stopped, which meant that a few hundred disembarking passengers heading for their baggage also stopped behind him.

When the impasse had lasted a few minutes, with the Dalai Lama gazing benignly at the banners and his acolytes, a warmly ironic voice rang out from the back of the growing queue: Y're supposed to run through the banner, mate, not just bloody stare at it!'

I'm also reading The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor a novel by Irish writer, Flann O'Brien. Apart from having one of the--what?--saddest? most poignant? openings I've read in a while, it also includes this dedication:

I honourably present to

GRAHAM GREENE

whose own forms of gloom I admire,

this masterpiece

I've mentioned before my mild obsession with singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt, especially the album he did with Lambchop called, The Salesman and Bernadette, but he's got plenty of other fine albums and the two I've had on most lately are the two Brute albums, Nine High Pallet and Cobalt Blue. I say mild obsession, but I'll add that I haven't enjoyed discovering someone's body of work as much as Chesnutt's since I was a kid and getting into all the bands I used love back then, and probably still love now. You know the line from Almost Famous, I'm sure, that sums up every music junkies' addiction: "To blindly love some silly piece of music... or some band so much that it hurts... please..."

Chesnutt has hundreds of those moments. One song on high rotation is a folksy little ballad called 'Expiration Day'. The opening verse of that song is quintessential Chesnutt:

I'm a machinist at the Springfield armory

just slightly ahead of my time
but I don't make much money
so I sell eggs and chickens on the side

When we were at the beach last weekend I picked up a bunch of guitar magazines, nearly all of which, of course, featured interviews with the artist formerly known as God in honour of his new album of Robert Johnson covers (read Chris's review of the album). It all makes for fascinating reading, but I was pretty taken with this comment by Clapton:

'More recently we used to open shows on the Blues tour with Terraplane Blues, with Andy Fairweather-Low sharing the guitar load, because it's incredibly difficult for one man to do what Johnson was doing on the guitar, and he's sometimes also singing almost in a completely different time signature altogether - you'd have to practice every day for years.'

So there you go: there some things even God can't do. In a similar vein, here's his assessment of 'Stop Breakin' Down Blues':

EC: This Is one of those songs where you sit back and go "how does tie do that, all at the same time?" The guitar, the amazing right hand, and the scat-singing...all Independent... it's totally, totally remarkable. You can understand Keith (Richards) hearing it for the first time and wondering how many people were playing. This is the only song where I didn't play and sing simultaneously - we just ran out of time.'

Oh yeah. The post title comes from an album by these guys. Read a review and it sounds great. Anyone know it?

Published and be damned

And damned he is. More here.

Royal blush

I mean, I'm very happy for the happy couple and everything, but is anyone else in Australia puking over coverage like this:

With a soundly delivered "ja", the remarkeable journey of Mary Elizabeth Donaldson from Australian commoner to European crown princess ended when she and her prince exhanged marriage vowes in Copenhagen Cathedral last night.

No offence, your excellency.

UPDATE: Of course, I should've realised. His excellency attended.

Donald Gaynor

I suspect at the sight of these advertisements, the Iraqis will be employing a form of the expression I heard the other day - you can't buff a turd.

Speaking of the latter -- Donald Rumsfeld wants you to know he's a survivor. Respect.

It's all relative

There might be a sudden increase in blogging at this site over the next few weeks. The following visitors are due in from Australia later today: My son's grandparents; my wife's parents; my in-laws.

Q&A;

The greatest Defense Secretary in the history of humanity--I understand he is superb--made a surprise visit to Baghdad today and did a Q&A; with the troops.

Quoth Rummy: "It's generally a lot more fun here than it is back home.....We can take anything you can dish out."

Here's some of the questions he was asked, and I suspect some of them dished out a little more than he anticipated:

Sir. Secretary, you have said that you would like to reduce the number of troops in Iraq. Instead, more troops are being sent over, and an increasing number of troops are reservists. What will be -- (inaudible) -- and the fact that reservists who are involved in -- (inaudible).

Sir, my unit, the 2nd Brigade -- (inaudible) -- Cav, we have five out of the six red zones in this country. And with the up- armored humvees, the new -- (off mike) -- humvees they're bringing over with the -- (inaudible) -- those doors are not as good as the ones on the up-armored humvees -- (inaudible). We even lost quite -- we lost some soldiers due to them, and we're trying to make a change -- (inaudible). The question is, are we going to get more up-armored humvees?

And the second question I wanted to ask is, they have the new -- (inaudible) -- vests out that covers your -- (inaudible). We need those because we have taken some casualties due to the shrapnel from IEDs going through the side. The front parts are good, but the sides are not. Thank you.

Mr. Secretary, Specialist -- (inaudible) -- Washington. My question is about R&R.; And I've been on other deployments than this --
I've been on -- every deployment -- (inaudible) --SEC. RUMSFELD: Which deployment?---To Kosovo, sir. And on our R&R;, our flights were paid for, our R&R.; This time we're told we're going to have to pay for our own tickets -- (inaudible) -- back to Washington. Is that true? And if it's not, will we be reimbursed for paying for our own plane ticket, sir?

Good evening, Mr. Secretary. Captain -- (inaudible). Sir, my question is, you testified in Congress just the other day, right before you flew out to see us and....Yes. This is the second time you've testified this week, sir, for pay and allocations in the budget for the armed forces. Do we foresee an increase across the board so we maybe get more additional -- armored kits, or armor, hazard pay, weapons, basic health and comfort items for soldiers overseas?

First Sergeant (inaudible) of the 250th MI from Southern California. And my question is -- (inaudible). I've been deployed now for five months and I've been struggling to try to get my handicapped son some health care, some physical therapy. And out-of-network issues are -- (inaudible) -- his progress. Sir, do you have -- (inaudible) -- help me get my son -- (inaudible)?

Now, you said -- the part I couldn't understand because of that mike, what kind of issues are keeping you from doing that? The new physical therapies that are out there, out-of- network facilities, and the cost of installation of special equipment; -- (inaudible) -- installation, and labor is always more than the equipment itself.

Sir, there are many DOD civilians who are here in the theater, and many of us are unarmed. And many times we're placed in harm's way in convoys and we have no means to protect ourselves. And I know there's been many memos and letters I've seen floating around saying it's the policy to arm civilians if they need to be armed, if they're in harm's way. But there seems to be a resistance -- (inaudible) -- to actually provide arms to us. I was wondering what the current policy is on that.

And my question is about stability when we return home. I, like a bunch of people here and including my brothers, who are in Afghanistan right now, are on our second tours already within two years. I volunteered to come back over here because it's my duty to serve, but a lot of people don't get a chance to say hey, I'm ready to come back. Is there a plan for stability? So far, from what I've seen, sir, is you can volunteer for certain units, the ones that are coming back -- (inaudible).

Interesting to note too, that General Myers (him of the moral highground) also made the following comment in regard to getting in new equipment:

Congress is -- will provide any amount of resources.

Is that right.

Born-again patriots

Spiked has an interesting article up about how the pictures from Abu Ghraib made their way into the public sphere. Basically, author Brendan O'Neill argues, they were leaked to the press by disgusted and disgruntled and relatively senior people from within the US armed forces. In fact, he goes further, and suggest that the media deserve almost no credit for breaking the story, and he notes, for instance, that they "let the story slip through their hands on more than one occasion":

Many claim that the torture story shows good old-fashioned investigative journalism in action. 'Who was the first to tell the world about what was going wrong at Abu Ghraib prison?' asks one commentator. 'Answer: America's weekly the New Yorker. Who first aired photos of American soldiers tormenting their Iraqi prisoners? Answer: America's CBS TV network…. Credit goes to the American media.'

Some journalists have certainly done some good work in revealing evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib, in particular veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker, the journalist who managed to get hold of the US military's internal 53-page report on the torture as well as of the photos. And once the story became public the media was key in making it the big global issue of the day. But over the past four months the media have been slack on the Abu Ghraib story, allowing it to slip through their hands on more than one occasion.

...Tracing how the photos became such hot public property reveals something striking, not only about the torture scandal, but about the coalition itself. This is a story, not of investigative journalism or antiwar activists exposing imperialist America to the world, but rather of America exposing its own uncertainty for all to see. The photos appear to have come from within US military or political circles; they were effectively volunteered for public consumption by elements within the military or higher up in the Pentagon, seemingly as part of a process of internal unravelling and deep disagreement over aspects of the war. In a sense, the publication of these photos to international outrage can be seen as the externalisation of America's own self-doubt about Iraq, and about its own mission in the world.

....The driving force for the torture scandal was not in Washington's or New York's newsrooms. This story, it seems, did not come about as a result of journalists chasing it; rather, it was effectively handed to the media by disgruntled military men.

'The leakers are driving the story', says Connie Coyne of the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah. 'I do not think the press would have moved on this story if the leakers had not provided photographs of what was going on.'

I think it's a telling point in both its aspects--the failure of the media and the willingness of people on the inside to make the issue public.

It has almost become a leitmotif of contemporary democracies. How often over the past few years, especially in regard to matters associated with the invasion of Iraq, have we seen a media willing to be a conduit for Bush administration propoganda only forced to confront the spin after an unignorable comment from a Richard Clarke or a Joseph Wilson? A similar pattern is apparent in Britain and Australia.

The Abu Ghraib photos are just the latest instance, and its a depressing trend. Read the whole article--there really is heaps more in it.

Incidentally, it includes a few other tidbits that I, for one, wasn't aware of:

On 12 May, CBS broadcast a video diary shot by a female soldier in Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq, in which she confessed to hating Iraqi detainees and having thrown rocks at them. The Washington Post has announced that, thus far, it has only published 10 of 1,000 shocking photos from Abu Ghraib in its possession.

Sounds like we are a long way from the end of this. Then again, maybe the media will just let it drop again.

CODA: One other little grab worth highlighting from the article concerns big, brave truth-seeking pundit, Bill O'Reilly:

According to one of the American military families that was reportedly central to the CBS News report about torture in Abu Ghraib, much of the media have shied away from the story over the past two months. Ivan Frederick, father of Staff Sergeant Frederick, an army reservist turned prison guard who was one of those interrogated by US military command in Baghdad over the events in Abu Ghraib, has tried to make the torture story into news. He feared that his son, and other soldiers, would be made into scapegoats for bigger 'command lapses' in Iraq detention centres, and that the best safeguard against such scapegoating was to make as many people as possible aware of what had occurred. In March, Frederick reportedly sent letters to 17 members of US Congress and various media outlets, but got 'virtually no response' (10).

In desperation he turned to David Hackworth, a retired US colonel who now runs a website criticising US military strategy and calling for a better deal for American soldiers. Hackworth tells me that Frederick had tried to contact Bill O'Reilly, who presents the popular O'Reilly Factor news show on Fox News, and many other media types, but nobody wanted to touch the story.

Eric Clapton training wheels

This little do-dah--a CD-GT1--is from the why-didn't-they-have-these-when-I-was-growing-up files.

It's a CD player into which you can plug your guitar (or mike) and play along with your favourite song, riff or solo. The idea is that it allows you to slow down, for instance, a solo without changing the pitch. You can then set the solo, at whatever speed, to play on a continuous loop so that you can figure out (theoretically) how to play it. You can use headphones or speakers to listen and it runs on batteries or AC. As well, it has a bunch of effects knobs--chorus, delay, distortion--presumably so you can match your sound (somewhat) to whatever it is you are trying to play. It includes a few other features as, most usefully, a guitar tuner.

Pretty neat, for all us once and future wannabes. (Around $US200)

The elephant in the room

I think this is a fantastic development and it really is about time. The new media monitoring organisation, Media Matters for America, is running a television advertisement criticising Rush Limbaugh and his comments about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. I haven't seen it yet, but there is an transcript of the ad and explanation for the campaign at the MMA website:

Media Matters for America today launched an aggressive television ad campaign spotlighting highly controversial comments on the torture of Iraqi prisoners made by Rush Limbaugh, the political commentator with the largest radio listenership in the U.S. The 30-second ad contrasts the Bush Administration's denunciation of Iraqi prisoner torture with Limbaugh's May 4th statements comparing the torture to a college fraternity prank and people 'having a good time.'

VOICEOVER: 'SECRETARY RUMSFELD CALLED THE TORTURE OF IRAQIS SADISTIC...CRUEL...'

RUMSFELD: 'FUNDAMENTALLY UN-AMERICAN.'

VOICEOVER: 'BUT HERE'S WHAT RUSH LIMBAUGH SAID:'

LIMBAUGH: 'THIS IS NO DIFFERENT THAN WHAT HAPPENS AT THE SKULL & BONES INITIATION...I'M TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE HAVING A GOOD TIME. THESE PEOPLE -- YOU EVER HEARD OF EMOTIONAL RELEASE? YOU EVER HEARD OF NEEDING TO BLOW SOME STEAM OFF?'

VOICEOVER: 'THIS IS THE MOST LISTENED-TO POLITICAL COMMENTATOR IN AMERICA?'

I'm surprised his obnoxious comments--and they are vile even by his low standards of partisan hackery--didn't attract more criticism at the time, and I'm still curious as to whether any of his regular listeners have criticised him on air (presuming they were able to get through).

There is an argument, I guess, that such advertisements simply provide Rush with more exposure and therefore might end up being counterproductive. I'd reject that assessment out of hand. Part of the reason Limbaugh thrives is that he is considered beyond the pale even by conservatives (who nonetheless benefit from his commentary) and so he is ignored. Given Limbaugh's undeniable influence, it is simply dumb to give him a free run in this way. So it's great to see an organisation that not only recognises the importance of taking him on, but has the money to do it in an effective way.

(Via The Poorman.)

Holy cow

The world's biggest democracy did its democratic thing and elected--against all expectations--a new government. India's ruling Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, was surprisingly beaten by the party of Nehru and (Indira) Ghandi, the once-dominant Indian National Congress, and it looks like the wife of assassinated former PM Rajiv Ghandi, Sonia, will become prime minister, though there is still some doubt about this. Partly what is at issue is the fact that she is Italian born and Christian.

Not only does the election result reflect a grassroots revolt against recent economic reforms, but it brings into sharp focus the relationship between Pakistan and India. There had been some progress on that front in recent months and hopefully the change of government won't affect the progress made - though it easily could given that part of the current success was down to a good relationship between (now) former Indian PM, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and his Pakistan counterpart, the ever-so slightly dictatorial Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Any deterioration in relationship between the two nuclear powers has immense regional and international ramifications.

Anyway, pretty amazing stuff.

ELSEWHERE: Chris has some comments.

It ain't exactly Everest

What is it with certain Americans and their need to think of themselves, if not exactly pure, then at least better than everybody else? Wishing to be good is worthy but insisting that on your moral superiority is a tad nauseating. Um, especially under the circumstances presented by Abu Ghraib:

"This is a terrible tragedy. We're not going to ever say it's not," (General) Myers said. But "I think we absolutely have the high moral ground" in Iraq, he told reporters.

You and whose army, General?

UPDATE: Look honestly, I have no trouble lauding US achievements and admitting to being a one-eyed fan of many things the nation does and has done. I'm nothing but an admirer of its founding documents and would wish that some of the authors of those were around to help us out today. I wish certain people in leadership positions in my own country took more seriously some of the values embodied in those documents. I've loved living here, especially at time such as this, and I've mentioned this many times on this site. But frankly, stuff like the comment from General Myers quoted above is simply hubristic nonsense and is particularly out of place, if not downright offensive, at the moment. People like him need to get over themselves.

There is simply no room for backpatting amongst the higher echelons of the US military or political leadership, and comments like Myers' indicate to me--and, I'll warrant--to a large percentage of the world's population, especially amongst US allies, that certain US leaders are more concerned with their own precious self-image than they are with trying to fix things, let alone in achieving an actual moral highground. It is especially offensive and blinkered when we know that the US has been more than willing to engage in illegal interrogation pratices, torture, either by outsourcing prisoners to other countries or by conducting events themselves, as the NYTimes notes on its front page this morning:

The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.

Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees. Interrogators were trying to find out whether there might be another attack planned against the United States.

The methods employed by the C.I.A. are so severe that senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have directed its agents to stay out of many of the interviews of the high-level detainees, counterterrorism officials said. The F.B.I. officials have advised the bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, that the interrogation techniques, which would be prohibited in criminal cases, could compromise their agents in future criminal cases, the counterterrorism officials said.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush signed a series of directives authorizing the C.I.A. to conduct a covert war against Osama bin Laden's Qaeda network. The directives empowered the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda leaders, but it is not clear whether the White House approved the specific rules for the interrogations.

The White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment on the matter.

The C.I.A. detention program for Qaeda leaders is the most secretive component of an extensive regime of detention and interrogation put into place by the United States government after the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan that includes the detention facilities run by the military in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

There is now concern at the agency that the Congressional and criminal inquiries into abuses at Pentagon-run prisons and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan may lead to examinations of the C.I.A's handling of the Qaeda detainees. That, in turn, could expose agency officers and operations to the same kind of public exposure as the military now faces because of the Iraq prison abuses.

In response to those who will feel tempted, or already have commented, that at least the US isn't as bad as those like the group who beheaded Nick Berg, there is really nothing else to say. If you're standards of behaviour have dropped that low--if that is the moral highground of which General Myers is boasting--and it seems as if it is--then you have no right speaking on behalf of genuine American ideals. Get a grip.

(BTW: you may also want to remind yourself of this little photo and note the accompanying comments by Jim Hoagland.)

Bloguejam

The new blogjam is up and its another fine, if final, effort by David Tiley. Thanks to David for filling in for me for the past few weeks. As I'm still busy with other things, His Excellency Lord Sedgwick of Strathmore (OA, DFC, DSC, VC, KPMG, WTF, IOOF), cartoonist, failed lothario and figurehead of a proudly independent country, founded by thieves and whores, that swears allegiance to the Head of State of a foreign country has kindly offered to step into the breach for a couple of weeks. All hail.

Oh yeah - and Gianna is trying out the new, all-improved Blogger set up and has shifted from here, where most of the furniture still is, to here.

Frankencon's monster

Ahmed Chalabi, the neo-con leader of choice for post-Saddam Iraq, has been talking to Iranian television:

Iran's state-run Al Alam Television recently broadcast an interview with Ahmad Chalabi, the hand picked Iraq Governing Council member who worked closely with top-level U.S. officials ahead of the Iraq War, but has lately been on the outs with the U.S. administration.

The interview on Al Alam satellite television, which broadcasts in Arabic, is the latest indication that Iranian authorities are working with Chalabi despite his one time cozy ties with top U.S. officials. Chalabi, who is a secular Shiite, said in the interview that he will try to intervene to cool the insurgency spearheaded by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Sounds like it might have been a pretty interesting interview. In it he said that

He would attempt to find a place for Muqtada Al Sadr--the radical Shiite cleric currently holed up in mosque in Najaf and wanted for murder by US authorities--and his movement in the new government: 'Chalabi proposed involving the Al Sadr movement in the new Iraqi government to end clashes between Al Sadr's supporters and U.S. forces in Najaf and elsewhere: “From the beginning I said that Al Sadr's movement should be represented in the Iraqi governing council." He continued: "I personally supported one candidate from Al Sadr's movement for the governing council. Al Sadr's movement is strong in Iraq; the late Muhammad Al Sadr had a big influence on the Iraqi people because he confronted Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When Hussein felt that Al Sadr had too strong an influence on people in Iraq, he killed him in that manner.” It is known that the late Al Sadr was brutally assassinated by Saddam’s intelligence services. Chalabi added, “Al Sadr was martyred, but his influence is ever lasting. His movement must enter the political arena in Iraq. We must separate legal and criminal issues from the political process.” Chalabi was referring to the fact that Muqtada Al Sadr is wanted by the U.S. military for allegations of being involved in a high profile assassination....Chalabi said Brahimi's intention to exclude Al Sadr movement from the new Iraqi government was "wrong."'

UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is working to a pan-Arabist agenda: “Brahimi is Algerian and he is committed to pan Arab nationalism," Chalabi said. "I heard him say that in one of his a televised interviews, that is the truth; his relations with Iraqi groups are in essence built with groups that have a nationalist orientation.”

US policy is driven by domestic election considerations: “The Americans are preoccupied with the coming U.S. elections," he said.

It is still uncertain what role Chalabi will play in Iraq after the "handover" at the end of June, but it's pretty clear he shouldn't be let near anything that looks like power.

Perhaps the neo-cons made no bigger mistake than adopting Chalabi as their great white hope, but it is clear from essays such as this--more a love-letter, actually--written in May 2001 and arguing for the Bush administration to invade Iraq, that they were totally smitten with their guy:

We will also be thankful that Ahmad Chalabi, the chief voice of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), hasn't given up and retired to a life of ease in London.

...We don't know for sure how good a national leader Chalabi would be. An observant Muslim, he has the old patrician Arab ability to speak across perhaps the most important socio-religious dividing line -- between traditionalists and moderns. But we can't finally assess Chalabi's gravitas until the White House backs him on the battlefield, in Congress, and before Washington's foreign-affairs, defense, and intelligence bureaucracies.

Anyone who has met him knows that Chalabi has presence, but the critical factor for his leadership would be America's support. Once Chalabi was chosen by us, everyone else -- the Kurds, the Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs, the Turks, Iranians, Kuwaitis, and Saudis -- would view him in an entirely new light. ....

Chalabi's perseverance in the face of so much executive-branch flak ought to incline us strongly in his favor. And he has already shown that he can be an adequate leader. Under very adverse circumstances, and with considerable resistance from Washington, Chalabi organized successful military operations in northern Iraq in 1995 and 1996. These weren't major battles against Republican Guard shock troops, but that Chalabi was able to move the INC into combat at all, with only haphazard assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency, is impressive.

Chalabi also established his own intelligence service, which dwarfed the reach and understanding of the CIA's clandestine service. One of the principal reasons the clandestine service's Near East Division loathes Chalabi is that he tried to warn Langley that its coup d'etat plans with the Iraqi National Accord -- an opposition group that supposedly had cells within elite units of the Iraqi Army -- had been thoroughly penetrated by Saddam. The INC, which wasn't supposed to be privy to the existence of the coup attempt, detailed quite accurately the trap Saddam was springing. The notorious "Bob," an intrepid, talented CIA case officer stationed in northern Iraq, believed the INC's information and tried to warn headquarters to begin immediately testing its INA assets for doubles. Langley refused. When Saddam tore the INA scheme apart, Chalabi became one of Langley's least favorite people.

Chalabi's acute grasp of the American scene -- he went to MIT and the University of Chicago and has many influential friends in the worlds of finance, politics, and the press -- also has not endeared him to bureaucratic Washington, which naturally prefers dependent foreigners ignorant of the real corridors of power. When the going gets tough in Iraq, as it surely will if there is war, we will be thankful that Chalabi can discuss in nuanced English the complexities of the situation on the ground. If we had to depend on the CIA's intelligence resources, our understanding would be thinner, our approach much more likely to be wrong.

And Chalabi is unquestionably pro-American, in a deep, philosophical sense, which is rare among Middle Easterners, particularly expatriates. There appears to be little rancor in the man, which there certainly could be given the number of his people who died in the summer of 1996 owing to American tergiversation.

Anonymous U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers have repeatedly labeled Chalabi via the press as corrupt, suggesting that he cares more about personal profit than anything else. A banker in Jordan in the 1970s, Chalabi is rumored to have stolen millions from his Petra bank. The rumors are probably unfounded, the product of Chalabi's being on the losing side in Hashemite-Jordanian-Palestinian financial squabbles. He made enemies among influential Jordanians closely tied to Palestinian banking circles, which have a near monopoly over Jordan's commerce.

But even if the rumors are true, so what? Chalabi hasn't been trying for the last eight years to become the CEO of KPMG. He hasn't watched friends die because money is the center of his life. If Chalabi weren't rich, he couldn't devote so much time and money to the fight against Saddam Hussein. One would think that George Tenet's CIA, which has probably been at the root of most of the attacks on Chalabi, would know well that good, even noble, men can take money. In the Middle East, there are much deadlier sins than greed.

As Chalabi continues his series of engagements on Iranian television, I wonder if any of the PNACers are still willing to so blithely dismiss his shady deals and laud him as "unquestionably pro-American"?

PNACs from Mars

I was reading back through some old stuff put out by neo-con central, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). It really reinforces what I said below about the desire of the Bush administration and their commentariat to do something to "show the world" that they were willing to be as tough as when it came to how they would deal with the world. The whole PNAC approach is simply built upon the idea of establishing US dominance in the world and part of that was geared towards showing that America was willing to lose blood and treasure in pursuit of its goals, and was willing to do whatever it takes to establish the US as the meanest kid on the block.

I don't think you can get to the bottom of the Abu Ghraib practices without coming to terms with this overpowering desire within the intellectual class that wrote the script for the Bush administration.

Take this article by Reuel Marc Gerecht of the The Weekly Standard (and ex-CIA) which is published on the PNAC website. Time after time, he cites the importance of America being willing to flex its muscles. In fact, the whole article, published in May 2001 and which argues for an invasion of Iraq, is predicated on changing the dynamic of what they saw as Clintonian softness:

In 1990, the United States very nearly did not go to war because of Washington's fear of American casualties, which led many on the left and the right to find no irreconcilable conflict between U.S. national interests and Saddam's hunger for Lebensraum. Contrary to the common depiction of him as a mad hatter, Saddam acted in a perfectly rational manner when he ridiculed the resolve of Uncle Sam in 1990. Anyone who thinks this besmirches the old man should read the Congressional Record of that year. George Bush senior's greatest accomplishment as president was his success at pushing Congress and the equally queasy bureaucrats and soldiers of Washington, D.C., to back his fight in Mesopotamia. Once Saddam has his nuke -- as he inevitably will if he stays in power -- will Washington gird its loins again, even if Saddam has not lately invaded any neighbors?

...In recent years, Republicans often attacked the Clinton administration's foreign policy for its ineptitude, weakness, and lack of vision. Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993; President Clinton in reprisal fired cruise missiles at an empty Iraqi building. Yet such superpower frivolousness was the product of a purposeful, consistent, and quite serious intellectual choice by President Clinton and his closest advisers: Above all, the United States would not again risk going to war in the Persian Gulf.

Once that decision had been made, everything else -- the slow-motion evisceration of United Nations weapons inspections; the abandonment of the U.S.-supported opposition group the Iraqi National Congress; Washington's embrace of the lame coup attempt by the opposition group Iraqi National Accord; the collapse of the sanctions regime; the revival of anti-Americanism in the "Arab street"; the resurrection of Saddam Hussein as the great defender of the Muslim Middle East; the mantra, repeated ever more emphatically by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that Saddam was trapped "in a box" (which, of course, any oil analyst or Jordanian taxi driver could have told her was nonsense); and the increasingly pro-Iraqi attitudes of Paris, Moscow, and Beijing -- all this became inevitable.

Totalitarians have a sixth sense for democratic weakness. A carnivore, Saddam Hussein probably knew early on (a good guess would be June 1993, when President Clinton cruise-missiled the empty intelligence headquarters) that Washington had no will to fight. By August 1996, when the United States failed to use its airpower to defend the Iraqi National Congress's lightly armed forces against Baghdad's mechanized brigades, there was no doubt.

America's hayba -- its ability to inspire awe, the critical factor in the Middle East's ruthless power politics -- had vanished. And once hayba is lost, only a demonstration of indomitable force restores it. A U.S. election, followed by President George W. Bush's slightly bigger bombing run over Iraq on February 16, doesn't cut it after years of pointless raids accompanied by American braggadocio.

He even as severe misgivings about that wuss, Colin Powell, being left in charge of anything:

President Bush's choice for secretary of state, Colin Powell, further complicates the situation. The Iraqis know well that General Powell fought hard against President Bush's decision to go to war in 1990. Once engaged, he famously promised to "kill" the Iraqi Republican Guards -- Saddam's praetorians -- and then didn't. As secretary of state, he quickly voyaged to the Middle East to solicit very publicly the opinion of former Arab "partners" in the Gulf War coalition, telling all that Washington was after "smarter" (read fewer) sanctions. He made appeals for renewed U.N. weapons inspections without making ironclad military threats to reinforce America's determination to search Iraqi installations.

In other words, the general sent a signal that the Bush administration was retreating. With one trip, Powell unintentionally dissipated the tougher-than-Clinton aura of George Bush II in the dynastically minded Middle East. He provoked memories of Warren Christopher.

It's all about making Saddam, and by extension, the region, scared:

The United States must not try to win a popularity contest in the Arab world -- the very act of doing so will make us appear weak. We will not grow stronger merely by reinvigorating sanctions; nor will Saddam grow weaker. If we are to protect ourselves and our friends in the Middle East, who are many, we have to rebuild the awe which we have lost through nearly a decade of retreat.

Sooner rather than later, we have to answer one question: Is Saddam Hussein a serious enough threat to the United States that he must be countered, if necessary with force of arms? If we believe that George Bush senior was right in 1990 -- that Saddam is a Middle Eastern Hitler destined to slaughter and wreak havoc in his region and beyond -- then the answer is "yes," and we must be prepared to give battle. If the new Republican administration answers "yes," but then stutters -- essentially the Clinton approach -- it may make an even bigger mess in the Middle East than its predecessor.

Now, there is certainly an argument that you have to be prepared to use force when necessary, and to use it unflinchingly (as was justified in Afghanistan after 9/11) but we can easily see here the line being crossed between that valid approach and the simple desire to be feared. And we are currently living through the consequences of having such a mindset guiding policy. In fact, it is utterly frightening just how much of what the article presents as received wisdom--from the issue of WMD to the desirability of installing Ahmed Chalabi as pro-US leader after ousting Saddam--has proved to be so completely and utterly wrong.

If this attitude, this craving to establish a no-more-mister-nice-guy approach to the region and foreign policy in general, has permeated the Bush administration to the extent that it appears to have, then no wonder people like Douglas Feith were bagging the boring old Geneva Conventions, and no wonder the attitude found its way down through the ranks, via military intelligence, to the jailers at Abu Ghraib. And no wonder apologists like Rush Limbaugh are still justifying such brutality on the same grounds, that "at least now they'll take us seriously", as per this recent broadcast:

Uh, I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they're going to think we are serious. Maybe they're going to think we mean it this time, maybe they're going to think we are not going to kowtow to them, maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver!

As the body-bags keeping coming out of Iraq, as the likelihood of terrorist attacks increases by the minute, and as an entire new generation is bought up hating western democracy and wanting to blow it up, I'm sure the "brilliance" of the entire escapade, the entire Iraq operation, will be plain for all to see.

Class act

Regular Surfdom commenter, Maja (Mick), has started up a new group blog called From the Trenches. Great looking site and interesting approach.

The gift of the prime minister

One aspect of our (Australia's) system of government that I absolutely detest is that federal elections are at a time--within certain restrictions--of the choosing of the prime minister of the day. That is, the date of elections is not fixed. So we have to put up with endless, useless, boring and insulting speculation of this nature:

Prime Minister John Howard today identified a five-month window between July and November when he would hold the federal election.

But he said he was yet to make up his mind, despite last night's Budget being focussed on helping families and giving tax cuts ahead of the election.

"I haven't made up my mind when the election is going to be, it obviously has to be some time in the second half of this year, it could theoretically be in the early next year but that's not normal," Mr Howard told ABC radio.

"Just exactly when in that six-month period, or I guess five-month period, because nobody likes elections in December anymore, I don't know, I haven't made up my mind."

I don't care who the prime minister is, but this sort of game playing is an insult. Why should voters have to put up with such uncertainty and jockeying for what must ultimately be miniscule political advantage? Just tell us when we're going to have the bloody election and stop treating us with such contempt.

Anyway, Labor are obviously pretty convinced we're in for an August vote. Barely gives me enough time to decide whom to vote for.

AND ALSO: Speaking of prime ministerial gifts, the budget just bought down is clearly designed to buy votes at the upcoming election, as any reasonable person would expect. But of course, the prime minister himself denies the thought even entered his mind and rejects completely the notion that he is trying to bribe anyone. In so doing, he manages to redefine the word 'bribe':

Prime Minister John Howard today rejected suggestions tax cuts and extra money for struggling families in the Budget were bribes to win votes.

He said when the economy was strong the first thing the government wanted to do was help families because they were the future of the nation.

"It would be seen as a bribe if it was not sustainable, if it was something that clearly we could only afford this year and would have to claw back in future years," Mr Howard told ABC Radio.

No, prime minister. A bribe is an offer of advantage to someone designed to influence their actions, in this case, an offer of money in exchange for votes. It has nothing to do with sustainability. Where does he get this stuff from?

So we've got our bribe; now tell us when the election is!

And so it continues

Using US abuses of Iraqi prisoners as an excuse (as if they've ever needed an excuse before), some al Qaeda operatives behead an American hostage:

A video posted Tuesday on an Islamic militant Web site based in Egypt showed a group affiliated with al Qaeda beheading an American contractor in Iraq, saying the death was revenge for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. The video showed five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks, standing over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit -- similar to a prisoner's uniform -- who identified himself as Nick Berg, a U.S. contractor whose body was found on a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday.

... After reading a statement, the men were seen pulling the man to his side and putting a large knife to his neck. A scream sounded as the men cut his head off, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" -- "God is great." They then held the head out before the camera.

"For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused," one of the men read from a statement.

"So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way."

Sick doesn't even begin to describe such an act. And I guess we can expect more of this sort of outrage.

CODA: The report goes on to detail why they believe the group of criminals responsible were from al Qaeda, but it is worth noting that if they actually are associated with al Qaeda, then this is quite a change of MO, isn't it? It's off topic, but this further enforces the idea of how meaningless the name 'al Qaeda' is in terms of identifying a discreet group of terrorists, and the media really needs to address their use of the term. (And yes, I know it is a minor point in the context of the main story.)

Abu Ghraib - mission accomplished

I guess everyone's noticed by now, but the Bush administration basically sees the developments in Abu Ghraib as a positive achievement. We know that in large part the invasion of Iraq was simply an excercise in muscle-flexing--a pre-emptive attack on a likely target to showcase the world's only superpower's technological edge in conventional warfare, as well as a demonstration of their willingness to use their muscle. A key element of invading the irrelevant Iraq was simply to address the notion that the administration had got into its head that the baddies thought the US was soft, that it didn't have the stomach for battle or the loss of life that goes with it.

The abuses of Iraqi prisoners, most of them ordinary people rounded up in wide-ranging sweeps with little regard for innocence or guilt, is all about the same thing. It's a muscle-flexing excercise designed to show that "we" are willing to fight dirty too. From their creation of the category of "enemy combatant" which has allowed the arrest and indefinite detention of citizens and non-citizens alike in legal blackholes like Guantanamo Bay, to their willingness to outsource torture to other regimes, to their public disavowal of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners, to the now-emerging systemic abuse of prisoners in Iraq, this administration has made clear that they will violate any rule of civilised behaviour in pursuit of their no-more-mister-nice-guy strategy.

So don't expect Secretary Rumsfeld to resign. Over the last few days we've seen the President make a very public trip to the Pentagon to endorse Rumsfeld and designate him a "superb" Secretary of Defense. The Vice President also joined in the celebrations of all things Rummy by announcing that "As a former secretary of defense, I think Donald Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had," and that "People ought to let him do his job".

How much clearer do they have to make it that they basically don't have problem with all this torture stuff?

Besides, who cares if Rumsfeld resigns? At this stage it would be like fiddling with the radio dial as the car accelerates towards a brick wall. If Americans don't like the idea of their government encouraging and organising the torture of prisoners around the world (and I'm sure most of them don't) then they should elect an administration that doesn't like it either.

At the moment, Rush Limbaugh, who has described the murder, rape and abuse of Iraqi prisoners as "thoughtful", is setting the moral tone of the nation.

The unbearable whiteness of me

An unscheduled stop at the beach for the weekend has left Surfdom (not to mention me) idle for a few days. It was a good couple of days away, even if the water temperature put future plans for more children in doubt. Still managed to get a red neck sitting on the sand reading (a great book about the MCG, of which, more later). Anyway, back up and running here soon and I'll get to the stack of emails as soon as I can too. Anything been happening? Bush still President, is he?

Ukranian uranium

I suspect this story might get buried a bit today, but it is worth pointing out:

UKRAINIAN security forces seized two containers of a radioactive material seen as a likely ingredient for a "dirty bomb", police said today. In a joint action, Ukraine's police and state security agents arrested three men from the southern city of Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula and seized two containers of cesium-137, police spokesman Yuriy Kondratyev said.

An unspecified number of people were detained throughout Ukraine.

Cesium-137 is considered a likely ingredient for a so-called "dirty bomb", in which conventional explosives are combined with radioactive material. Cesium-137, a highly radioactive material, is used in soil-testing gauges in construction and is found in photoelectric batteries and vacuum valves. It explodes if it comes into contact with water, and exposure can cause blood diseases, sterility and birth defects.

Police and state security agents acted on a tip-off that two buyers from the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, were ready to purchase cesium at an estimated price of $US60,000 ($82,310) per container, Kondratyev said. Each container weighed 85 kilograms, he said. The origin of the containers was not specified.

Then again, if that cheered you up on the subject "missing materials that might be used in a dirty bomb", don't read this article.

And don't go near this one.

And really, avoid this one at all costs (apart from the fact that it's pdf).

A glass darkly*

Atrios speculates on the international fallout from the prison abuse scandal in Iraq:

For decades America's standing in the world had 3 main components - military, economic, and moral superiority. The last one of course was never perfect, but despite our numerous failings over the years an idealized view of the US has persisted. Though somewhat mythic, it has been to some degree embraced and admired around the world. Heck, even noted America-hater Noam Chomsky has stated this is the best country in the world.

Unfortunately, I think Tresy gets a lot closer to the truth of the matter:

Meanwhile, outside the United States, the Abu Ghraib story doesn't so much "damage" our reputation, as it merely cements it.

And if you read that, and the rest of Tresy's challenging post as "anti-American," then you're part of the problem, not the soution.

==========================

*"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." I Cor. 13:12 (KJV).

Joseph Wilson 8

The Joseph Wilson book is nowhere as important, as explosive or as gripping as the Richard Clarke tome. Nonetheless, despite some misgivings about the style, it makes for a good read and offers further interesting insight into the machinations of inside inside the Beltway.

As with the Richard Clarke book, however, as a mere citizen (of whatever democracy), you kinda wish these guys defaulted a little more heavily to public accountability than only "coming out" when something happens that either affects them personally or is so awful that it forces them to overcome their professional instincts to spin or cover up. Once again, it is a book that simply underlines how much of the normal operations of government are hidden from we the people, something I discussed at a bit more length here.

A classic case of now-you-tell-us comes in the section where Wilson explains his reaction to Colin Powell, particularly Powell's address to the United Nations (pp.315-318):

Nobody's watching

One of the firms supplying contractors to work in Iraq is an organisation called CACI. You can find a profile of the company at their website.

Also at their website is a message from their CEO responding "to Allegations in the Media About Its Employees in Iraq and to Financial Community Interests." It basically says, they are shocked, shocked that any of their employees might be involved in the sorts of prison abuses that have recently come to light.

In which case, they may want to rethink the terms in which they advertise their jobs. Take this ad for Interrogator/Intel Analyst Team Lead Asst.:

Clearance Minimum Security Clearance Requirement: Top Secret (TS)

The Job

To Apply: If you are not registered, please register. Only logged-in job seekers with a resume can apply for a job.

Interrogator/Intel Analyst Team Lead Asst.

Assists the interrogation support program team lead to increase the effectiveness of dealing with Detainees, Persons of Interest, and Prisoners of War (POWs) that are in the custody of US/Coalition Forces in the CJTF 7 AOR, in terms of screening, interrogation, and debriefing of persons of intelligence value. Under minimal supervision, will assist the team lead in managing a multifaceted interrogation support cell consisting of database entry/intelligence research clerks, screeners, tactical/strategic interrogators, and intelligence analyst.

Might be a good idea to tighten up that "under minimal supervision" clause. Just a thought.

(The ad was mentioned on Crossfire last night.)

And just in case your interested in the requirements for jobs like this, here's some more detail:

Required

Position requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent and five to seven years of related experience, preferably in intelligence field. Requires a Top Secret Clearance. Strong writing and briefing skills, with competency in automation, research and basic software applications. Familiar with intelligence collection capabilities/planning, as well as analytical procedures.

Desired
Minimum of 5 years in intelligence field. Requires a Bachelor's degree or equivalent. Requires a Top Secret Clearance. Strong writing and briefing skills, with competency in automation, research and basic software applications. Familiar with intelligence collection capabilities/planning, as well as analytical procedures.

ELSEWHERE: Some more, and with bad attitude.

Experience preferred

I wonder, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison revelations, if persisting with John Negroponte as the US ambassador to Iraq really sends the right message?

End of an error

Fred Hilmer is to quit as CEO of the Australian newspaper group, Fairfax:

Mr Hilmer said that he told the company's chairman, Dean Wills, he wished to hand over to a successor for both business and personal reasons.

Fairfax was in a strong position but needed a chief executive with a "5-7 year committment".

He said: "From a personal perspective I am not able to make the commitment for the time period that I believe is now required.

"While I enjoy working with my colleagues at Fairfax, I will be 60 next year, and would like to pursue other interests and activities that were placed on hold when I was recruited to this role nearly six years ago."

Asked if any other factors influenced his thinking, Mr Hilmer pointed to comments by Australian blogger, Professor Bunyip.

"I've been a regular reader of Bunyip over the last year or so and he has made realise how worthless and useless I am and how I have taken the standards of reportage at the Sydney Morning Herald to levels well below those maintained by Bunyip himself. His incisive commentary on everything I do has been a real eye-opener. And the wit: it's pretty hard to beat a line like the 'Silly Moaning Hilmer.' When he first coined that title, I knew my time was up. I mean, how does anyone recover from a blow like that?

"As a final recommendation, I would suggest the company hire Bunyip forthwith. Employees of the newspapers could once again hold their heads high."

Bunyip was unavailable for comment.

Firm believers

Reader Sean points out this article in The Australian:

Feeling apologetic means never having to say you're sorry

The Department of Defense mailing list has gone to the trouble of sending around the following message:

Please disregard earlier AFPS story, "Rumsfeld Apologizes to Iraqi Victims of Prison Abuse," datelined May 5, 2004, and issued on this listserv.

Please use the revised text, which follows:

And then follows the full story which you can find here. The link to the previous story is no longer operative, in fact, it takes you to the new story.

The two articles are virtually identical except for the opening and the title. The orginal went like this:

Rumsfeld Apologizes to Iraqi Victims of Prison Abuse

By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, May 5, 2004 – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld apologized today to Iraqis abused by American prison guards in Abu Ghraib.

"Any American who sees the photographs that we've seen has to feel apologetic to the Iraqi people who were abused and recognize that that is something that is unacceptable and certainly un-American," Rumsfeld said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

The secretary left open the door that compensation could be paid to the abuse victims.

The updated article reads as follows:

Prison Abuse 'Unacceptable, Un-American', Rumsfeld Says

By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, May 5, 2004 – "Any American who sees the photographs that we've seen has to feel apologetic to the Iraqi people who were abused and recognize that that is something that is unacceptable and certainly un-American," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today.

Rumsfeld discussed the alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison on ABC TV's "Good Morning America." The secretary left open the door that compensation could be paid to the abuse victims.

I guess they really don't want us to get the impression that the Secretary would apologise. So noted.

Video killed the radio star

You know, if you really look at these pictures, I mean, I don't know if it's just me, but it looks like anything you'd see Madonna or Britney Spears do on stage.

Maybe you can get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something you can see at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City: the Movie.

Rush Limbaugh from his monologue, 'Babes Doing the Torture in Baghdad.'

Tortured prose

Digby summarises some comments made by an Arab analyst interviewed on CNN about the President's interview with Al Arabiya Television. The long and the short of it is that the analyst thinks he came across a condescending. You can read a transcript of the interview here. I'm no expert on Arab opinion, but Bush sounds condescending when he talks about most his Western allies, so I find it easy to believe this is how he came off in the Middle East.

One thing that struck me was this little turn of phrase. When he was asked about the June 30 transfer of "sovereignty" he referred to "the entity to which sovereignty will be passed." Passive voice and no referrent.

Anyway, it was another part of the interview that I thought I might mention:

Q Mr. President, critics are saying that by your action in Iraq actually invited al Qaeda and other terrorists to do business with you over there. Could you address that?

THE PRESIDENT: Sure. Do you remember September the 11th, 2001? Al Qaeda attacked the United States. They killed thousands of our citizens. I will never forget what they have done to us. They declared war on us. And the United States will pursue them. And so long as I'm the President, we will be determined, steadfast, and strong as we pursue those people who kill innocent lives because they hate freedom.

And, of course, al Qaeda looks for any excuse. But the truth of the matter is, they hate us, and they hate freedom, and they hate people who embrace freedom. And they're willing to kill innocent Iraqis because Iraqis are willing to be free. Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country. And we will help them rid Iraq of these killers.

Where to begin?

Peerless

The Captain Oveur of the blogosphere is getting a bit touchy:

And in case anyone thinks I wrote the above to deflect attention from the Iraqi prisoner case, let me repeat: jail for the guilty. In Bobby Fuller Four terms: breakin' rocks in the hot sun. But, of course, I haven't served, and to some that means I have no right to have an opinion.

I suppose this makes me a Chickenjudge.

This would be a terrific, snarky riposte if it wasn't for the existence of a little institution called the jury system. But keep 'em coming.

Backbenchers

I get a little uncomfortable when "young people" are this well organised. More later.

Joseph Wilson 7

Here's Joseph Wilson's reasonably detailed account of how uranium is produced in Niger and in outlining the process, who owns the company etc, he goes some way to showing how unlikely it is that any attempt to sell yellowcake to Iraq would go undetected. Read this post in conjunction with Joseph Wilson 5.

The account begins on page 23:

I was soon having a steady series of appointments with former officials, European expatriates, Nigerien businessmen, and international aid workers. Not all of the conversations focused on the uranium industry; some of my callers were interested in discussing the local business climate, while others wanted to talk about America and Americans.

From these conversations, three pertinent areas of discussion emerged: the business of uranium mining; the bureaucracy that would have governed any decision to sell yellowcake; and the general atmosphere in the country at the time of the alleged sale.

Niger's uranium is extracted from two mines, both located in the center of the country in the Sahara Desert, a day and a half's drive from the capital along the road to Algeria. The mines are owned by a consortium, comprising foreign companies, along with the Niger government through a state-owned corporation. The day-to-day management of the mines is in the hands of a French mining company, COGEMA. German, Spanish, and Japanese companies are partners, but only COGEMA has actual possession of the ore from the time it is in the ground until it arrives at its destination.

In the 1980s, when large Canadian deposits of uranium began to be exploited at a much lower cost than the mineral could be mined for in Niger, it coincided with the general decline of the worldwide nuclear power industry. This meant that Niger's two mines were soon producing yellowcake at a loss. The mines are kept open in order to ensure a dedicated supply of product for the nuclear power industries in the consortium countries. No market for Niger's uranium exists, however, beyond these countries. In fact, the Nigerien government has sold no uranium outside the consortium for two decades.

Uranium production schedules are established annually at a meeting of the consortium partners and are set to meet their current needs. They are reviewed every couple of months to take into account possible changes within those narrow parameters. In order to accommodate some hypothetical extraordinary demand by the Nigerien government for an extra supply of the product, the partners would have had to meet to adjust everything from the volume of production to the size of the workforce, as well as ramping up transportation and security. The volume of the alleged sale—five hundred tons—would have represented close to a 4o percent production increase. There is no doubt that such a significant shift from historic production schedules would have been absolutely impossible to hide from the other partners, and most certainly from the managing partner, COGEMA. Everyone involved would have known about it.

A government decision authorizing the sale of five hundred tons of uranium to Iraq would have required several decisions, each of which would have been fully documented. Because the conduit for Niger's participation in the uranium consortium was via a state-owned corporation, the government ministry in charge of the corporation, the ministry of mines, would have had to be informed and to concur in the decision to make the sale. The alleged transaction was between two sovereign countries, so the foreign ministry would also have had to agree to the sale, taking into consideration such niceties as international law, at a time when Iraq was subject to international sanctions. The sale would also have been subject to a Council of Ministers decision representing the interests of the government as a whole. In short, any documentation covering the sale would have to carry the signatures, at a minimum, of the prime minister, the foreign minister, and the minister of mines. If any documents did not contain the valid signatures of those officials, then they could not be authentic.

Furthermore, a government decision authorizing such a sale would have automatically been published in the Nigerien equivalent of the Federal Register, and it would have had tax and revenue implications that would quickly have become known to the bureaucracy, which would be salivating at the prospect of such a windfall. In a country chronically short of cash, an unexpected infusion of money would have been eagerly anticipated and much talked about. A five-hundred-ton sale would have had to be negotiated at a premium of above-market prices, both to cover the costs of production and to ensure a reasonable profit. Even with uranium prices down 80 percent from their mid-1970s peak of over fifty dollars a pound, the premium on five hundred tons might still have yielded up to tens of millions of dollars, quite a sum to sweep under the rug in a poor country.

Of course, it is reasonable to ask if it were possible to arrange the transaction outside of official scrutiny, and Wilson addresses that:

But what about an off-the-books transaction? Theoretically, this was a possibility, given that a military junta had been in power at the time of the alleged sale. Neither the Mainassara regime, nor the short-lived Wanke regime, had been responsible to any other authority in the land. But the transfer of five hundred tons of uranium yellowcake would have been impossible to conceal. Even an illegitimate transaction would have led to the acquisition of thousands of barrels, adjustment of shipping schedules with bills of lading and other documentation to cover the lightly refined ore's movement out of the country. There would have been records somewhere reflecting this significant increase in production. It simply could not have happened without a great many people knowing about it, and secrets widely known do not remain hidden for long. And again, COGEMA, as the managing partner, would have had to know and be complicit.

So in summary: there had been two other investigations of the Iraq/Niger claim conducted by high-level US officials at the US embassy in Niger, one by the senior military person and one by the ambassador herself. They had concluded there was nothing to the claim and had passed that information to Washington. Wilson's was therefore the third investigation and he came to the same conclusion. His account of uranium production also shows how unlikely it was that the sale of any yellowcake to Iraq would go undetected. This information was included in his official report, made within hours of his arrival back in Washington DC. If they still weren't convinced, they could've asked COGEMA, the French managing company or any of the other consortium partners.

And yet the claim was still included in the State of the Union speech and retailed by senior administration officials, often-times relying on so-called British evidence to justify themselves. Wilson has this to say about the British report and makes his summary comments on the affair on pp.302-303:

The first public reference to the uranium charge had been in a British white paper published in September 2002, three months before receipt of Iraq's weapons declaration. In it, the British asserted that Iraq had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. I had read the press reports on the white paper, and though I was mildly curious about which country in Africa the British were talking about, I did not inquire. After all, there are four African countries that produce uranium: Niger, where I had started my career; Gabon, where I had served as ambassador; and South Africa, where I had also worked. The fourth was Namibia, where I had not served. I thought it possible that the British were referring to South Africa, though that seemed unlikely, or perhaps Namibia.

I wouldn't learn for six months that the country referred to in the British claim was, in fact, Niger. At the State Department, the charge that Iraq had sought uranium there clearly had no credibility. But I would soon discover that ideologues there, and in other parts of the administration, were determined to keep pushing the lie about an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction, no matter how many times it would be refuted.

The fact that Wilson was brought in at all suggests less the idea of employing suitable caution--triple-checking the information--than a certain desperation on the part of the administration to find something, anything, that might allow them to use a link between Saddam and yellowcake as part of their case to support an invasion they had already decided to launch. And as I've said, despite triple checking the story, the bogus claims still made their way into the SOTU. The administration only backed away from them after Wilson publicly revealed his information. And then they outed his CIA wife.

Misspokened

Ever on the look out for ways to help the President avoid those embarrassing silences at press conferences, I'd just like to bring this article to his attention (of course he reads the blogs) in which officials from his administration go on the record to note a recent Presidential error:

UNITED NATIONS, May 4 -- The Bush administration on Tuesday joined in a high-level diplomatic statement that stressed that the key issues dividing Israelis and Palestinians must be negotiated by both sides, just weeks after President Bush pronounced that Israel could keep some West Bank settlements and Palestinian refugees should not resettle in Israel. U.S. officials and foreign diplomats described the statement as an effort by the Bush administration to repair the international damage from the president's remarks last month, which had drawn sharp criticism in the Arab world and from European allies.

Bush's comments, made with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at his side, had alarmed diplomats overseas because some perceived that the United States and Israel had cut their own deal on Sharon's plan to unilaterally separate from the Palestinians. U.S. officials now appear eager to erase that perception, both in private negotiating sessions and in public statements afterward.

Your welcome, Mr Bush.

Jospeh Wilson 6

Before putting up the rest of the post about the production of uranium in Niger (see Joseph Wilson 5), here's a little extract covering an amusing account of Republican National Committee Chairman, Ed Gillespie. Anyone who's seen Gillespie spruik will know he's generally pretty effective at getting the Republican spin du jour across and this part of the Joseph Wilson book tells you why: Gillespie is a liar when it suits his purposes (pp.389-90):

On September 30, while waiting in the CNBC green room to appear on Capital Report, I received a call from a friend alerting me that he had just seen the Republican National Committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, on CNN saying that I had contributed money to the Gore and Kerry campaigns. I wondered if there was something wrong or unpatriotic about my having done that. The point he was trying to make, I suppose, was that it was justifiable for a Republican administration to expose the identity of an undercover CIA officer, if she happened to have a husband who had contributed to Democratic campaigns. But what Gillespie failed to mention was that I had also contributed to the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush and to Orange County Republican Ed Royce several times.

As my friend and I were talking, Gillespie walked into the CNBC green room. I removed my cell phone earpiece and asked him if he was aware of my contributions to Republicans. He admitted that he did know of them. "They are part of the public record," he said. So he knew but had decided not to disclose all the information he had about them. I went on Capital Report a few minutes later and corrected the record, saying it was clear that the administration had mobilized party apparatchiks to attack me, falsely, on partisan grounds.

When Gillespie was later asked by Vanity Fair about his selective use of my campaign donation history, he disputed my account that he had done so, claiming he "referred to Wilson's contributions to Bush on the air." But not until I challenged him on it. The transcript of his interview with Judy Woodruff on CNN is clear:

Gillespie: "So I think that there's a lot more to play in here. There is a lot of politics. The fact is that Ambassador Wilson is not only a, you know—a former foreign service officer, former ambassador, he is himself a partisan Democrat who is a contributor and supporter of Senator Kerry's presidential campaign."

Later,
Gillespie: "What I've said is that Ambassador Wilson is clearly— has a partisan history here, as someone who supports John Kerry, who was just on your air talking about the problem here. This is a guy who's a maxed-out contributor to John Kerry...."

There had been no mention of contributions to any Republican by me. He had tried to shift attention from what the administration had done to Valerie and me, and later lied to Vanity Fair about it.

And what the hell, while we're at it, here's Wilson's account of appearing on the Sean Hannity cable program (pp.305-306):

FROM OCTOBER 2002, SHORTLY AFTER THE PUBLICATION of my first opinion piece, up to the beginning of the war in March 2003, my own contributions to the debate on Iraq continued, mostly on cable news broadcasts. I appeared three times on Hannity & Colmes, the FOX political talk show that resembles the old Morton Downey, Jr. show more than it does serious debate. Scan Hannity, easily one of the least interesting people I have ever spoken to, takes more interest in pushing an extremist right-wing agenda than in promoting an honest discussion of the issues. He also has no idea what he is talking about, at least on foreign policy, and does a great disservice to his audience. His tactic of making ad hominem attacks on the integrity and patriotism of those whose views he does not share may make for amusing entertainment, but it denigrates the serious discussion we should have before we send our military marching off to war. Fair and balanced it is not.

I accepted invitations to appear on Hannity & Colmes, and on the equally vapid O'Reilly Factor, because I thought those programs drew audiences that deserved to have the benefit of another point of view on which to base their political judgments. Issues of war and peace are so critical to the future of our country and our national security that they rate more than simply propagandistic treatment. War is not entertainment; it is serious business. So, like other concerned citizens, including former Maine Congressman Tom Andrews, the head of the Win Without War coalition, and Mike Farrell, the longtime Human Rights Watch activist and costar of TV'S M*A*S*H, I laid out my case for tough disarmament on these shows.

To his credit, Bill O'Reilly was a polite interviewer and at least listened to the airing of all sides of the issue. Hannity, on the other hand, made his guests mere props for his political rants. On my final appearance on Hannity's show, he began the segment by implying that I was an appeaser and a Bush-hating Democrat, neither of which bore any relationship to my position on the war or to who I am. I responded forcefully, pointing out that his position as host did not allow him to spout lies about his guests. He went ballistic when I wouldn't let him interrupt me and threatened to cut off my microphone. I decided then that I wouldn't waste any more time on his program, as he clearly wasn't interested in providing his audience with any views other than his own.

There you go: and I bet you thought Sean Hannity was the Carl von Clausewitz of cable television.

Le Blogjam

David has the latest edition of blogjam up for your reading pleasure. A distinct international flavour this week, as well as a call for some thoughts on your favourite blog commenter. Drop him a line.

On lining up your ducks

I happened to be in the car a lot more than is usual for a Tuesday and, of course, was flicking around amongst the rightwing talk shows as I drove around, mainly looking for parking spots, and I was absolutely struck by all these Republican partisans on the AM band urging the President to "speak to the Arab nations" of the world and express his disgust at what US troops did to Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. And I'm thinking, well yeah, that's a good idea, but it's a little out of character for all these rightwing pundits to be urging this on the President, but good on them I guess.

Then tonight, via Atrios, I see that President Bush has announced that he "is planning to do interviews with Arab television to underscore his feelings about photographs of naked prisoners and gloating U.S. soldiers."

Gee, it's almost like they knew.

I won't be in the car as much tomorrow but let me guess: hours of congratulations from the same radio jocks to the President for this initiative, all introduced as a seamless continuation of their previous, independent, exhortations that he do just what he's decided to do. So everybody's happy.

Jospeh Wilson 5

In the next two extracts from the Joseph Wilson book, I wanted to give some sense of just how flimsy the idea of Iraq getting yellowcake from Niger was from the get-go.

After reading these sections it's hard to avoid the following conclusions: that it was well-known within the intelligence agencies and the administration itself that any claim Saddam was seeking yellowcake was highly suspect. Highly.

Second, that it was even less likely--next to impossible--that even if he had been looking to do a deal that he could have done a deal. The chances of the quantities mentioned being produced undetected are remote and therefore it is almost inconceivable that, even if the quantity supposedly sought was produced that it would have been passed to Saddam without the United States knowing well in advance.

Given all this, you can only conclude that the inclusion of the Niger claim in the State of the Union speech, in an earlier speech in Cincinnati, and the ongoing refusal by senior Bush administration officials to disavow the story suggests that they were deliberately trying to mislead people about the threat Saddam posed. There is just no way--even before Wilson was sent to Niger--that they didn't know that any claim of Iraqi dealings with Niger did not reach the requisite level of certainty to be included in the State of the Union speech.

So we begin on page 13, when Wilson is first invited to speak to the CIA about a possible visit to Niger:

The participants in the meeting were drawn from the intelligence community's experts on Africa and uranium, and included staff from both the CIA and the State Department. As I shook hands with a group of mostly young men and women, a couple of them mentioned that they had met me at previous briefings over the years. I did not know any of them personally nor did I recognize anyone by name or by sight. They were interested and interesting professionals but as anonymous as you would expect in a bureaucracy that places a premium on secrecy and discretion. That said, they were a knowledgeable and dedicated fraternity of public servants, and I was struck by their commitment and their professionalism, toiling in obscurity so that the rest of us can be safe.

My hosts opened the meeting with a brief explanation of why I had been invited to meet with them. A report purporting to be a memorandum of sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq had aroused the interest of Vice President Dick Cheney. His office, I was told, had tasked the CIA to determine if there was any truth to the report. I was being asked now to share with the analysts my knowledge of the uranium business and of the Nigerien personalities in power at the time the alleged contract had been executed, supposedly in 1999 or early 2000. The Nigeriens were the same people I had dealt with during and after my time at the National Security Council, people I knew well.

The report, as it was described to me, was not very detailed. For example, it was not clear whether the reporting officer—not present for this meeting—had actually laid eyes on the document or was simply relaying information provided by a third party. The amount of the uranium product—a lightly processed form of uranium ore called yellowcake—involved was estimated to have been up to five hundred tons but could also have been fifty, suggesting that the account had been written from memory (and an imperfect one at that) rather than with the document at hand. It would have been of keen interest to me to know who might have signed the contract on behalf of the Niger government, but no information was provided on this either.

I was skeptical, as prudent consumers of intelligence always are about raw information. Thousands of pieces of data come over the government's transom on any given day, but a lot belongs to the category of "rumint," rumors passing as fact, no more reliable than Bigfoot sightings. Rumint is a necessary if unfortunate reality in a world where many people will sell you what they think you want to hear, as opposed to simple facts.

I guess you could say there are a few loose ends worth tying up, but the quality of the information seems very low at this point. Additionally, what Wilson doesn't know is that there have already been two other reports out of the US embassy in Niger addressing the issue and both have concluded that there was nothing to claim:

......My first formal stop was to meet with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick. She was a career foreign service officer who had been in Niger for two years. Though this was her first post in Africa, my impression was that she had penetrated the local culture and society and enjoyed a position of trust and confidence. She understood both the needs of Niger and the limitations of Washington's willingness and ability to help, managing to satisfy the most urgent priorities of the one without alienating the other with unrealistic demands. I liked her. Her briefing was crisp. She gave me an update on the progress the government had made since the last time we had met, on my visit two years earlier.

....In return, I explained what I hoped to achieve from my mission. At this point, she told me that she had already discussed the allegation with President Tandja and said she was satisfied with his denial and his explanation of why such a uranium deal could not possibly have taken place. She had also, she said, accompanied Marine General Carleton Fulford—the deputy commander in chief of U.S. armed forces in Europe, and the officer in charge of our military relations with the armed forces of African nations—to meetings with President Tandja and members of his government. General Fulford, she told me, was equally persuaded that the story of Niger uranium sales to Iraq could not be true. Their reports to the State and Defense Departments, respectively, had been widely circulated in the American intelligence community. It was a surprise to her when she learned of my mission because she had believed she and General Fulford had already definitively discredited the yellowcake rumor.

While this was the first I had heard that the allegations I was here to investigate had already been looked into, she and I agreed that the contribution I could make would be to establish contact with officials from the former government. While they were still invited to embassy functions, they were no longer among her principal contacts. By contrast, I had spent many hours with them over the years, working on the most sensitive issues they had faced as they tried to maneuver the military junta out of office, and I had no doubt that I might still learn much from them.

So at this point we have a CIA briefing based on very flimsy intelligence and the revelation that two other investigations have already been conducted by the local embassy into the allegation and that both have concluded there was nothing to the claim that Saddam was seeking uranium in Niger. These other two reports had been passed onto the State Department and the DoD.

In the next post (this one is getting too long) I'll quote the relevant sections on uranium production in Niger, including Wilson's simple suggestion for a further way of checking the validity of the Iraq/Niger claim.

Ahem

The fact that Ahmed Chalabi was central to the Bush administration's plans for regime change in Iraq is enough to tell what their real intention was--to install a sympathetic puppet regime. They might have even kidded themselves that there was some higher purpose but my guess is that if your real plan is to set up a functioning liberal democracy then you would no sooner include Chalabi in your plans than you would include Celine Dion in the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame. For those who might argue, well, at least he was better than Saddam the obvious answer is: come and see me a year after Chalabi was put in charge. If anyone doubts the stupidity of involving Chalabi in the "new Iraq" project, and his potential for the worst sort of corruption, it is probably worth reading this Salon article.

The article explains in some depth the way in which Chalabi "conned the neocons", even though that formulation understates by an order of magnitude the con that was involved: via the neocons the idea of an invasion of Iraq was sold lock, stock and barrel to the Bush administration, and through them to the conservative government of Australia and the Labor government of Great Britain, to name just the most obvious marks. What emerges is a picture of a person, Chalabi, willing to say anything--from lies about WMD to promises to engage in friendly relations with Israel--to have himself installed as leader of the "new Iraq". The damage done is summed up neatly:

President Bush's ability to impose order on this mess (of present-moment Iraq) is not obvious, and he doesn't have more than a couple of weeks to figure out a solution. With photographs of U.S. troops torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners inflaming the Arab world, U.S. casualties soaring, the June 30 date to turn over sovereignty looming and no exit strategy in sight, Bush's Iraq adventure has turned into a deadly mess that seems certain to make the U.S. more at risk from terrorism, not less. Bush brought this trouble on himself by buying into the neocons' interpretation of the dynamics of the Middle East, and into Ahmed Chalabi's plans for Iraq -- maybe most disastrously by buying Chalabi's assurances that a secular government dominated by Israel-friendly Shia was possible. If Bush and the neocons wanted to know about Chalabi's real deal-making nature, the signs were there for them to read. But they didn't want to know.

The amazing thing is: Chalabi still has a lot of neoconservative support, which means he has some very influential members of the Bush administration in his corner. What's more, his organisation is still on the US payroll to the tune of around $350,000 a month.

On the bright side there are two good things to say about all of this. The first is that Chalabi's unsuitability has been recognised by enough people before he got his hands on control of Iraq, and now, thanks in no small measure to the United Nations' representative Brahimi, it is most unlikely Chalabi will have a role in the post-June 30 version of Iraq, let alone the post January 5, 2005 version.

The second is that at least some of the neocons conned in this sting operation are themselves likely to be removed. Douglas Feith is for the highjump pretty soon apparently, according to the Salon article. Of course, they should all go, never to be let near anyone in power ever again, but I guess that ain't going to happen. So let's at least be grateful for small mercies. Additionally, it is worth noting comments like these from former supporters:

"Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat," says L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. "He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's got another." While Zell's disaffection with Chalabi has been a long time in the making, his remarks to Salon represent his first public break with the would-be Iraqi leader, and are likely to ripple throughout Washington in the days to come.

Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi's nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.

Chalabi's ties to Iran -- Israel's most dangerous enemy -- have also alarmed both his allies and his enemies in the Bush administration. Those ties were highlighted on Monday, when Newsweek reported that "U.S. officials say that electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American political plans in Iraq." According to one government source, some of the information he gave Iran "could get people killed." A Chalabi aide denied the allegation. According to Newsweek, the State Department and the CIA -- Chalabi's longtime enemies -- were behind the leak: "the State Department and the CIA are using the intelligence about his Iran ties to persuade the president to cut him loose once and for all."

It is clear that Chalabi should be let nowhere near any sort of position of influence again--he should simply be persona no grata as far any US administration is concerned. The same is true of those so-called "wise men" and "grown ups" and "realists" and "idealists" of the Defense Department who fell for Chalabi's con. But really, the only way to flush that neoconservative cabal out of the bowels of US foreign policy is to change the administration in November.