In her recent AlterNet column, Iliana Segura gets a lot right:

If the United States really wants to improve the situation in Afghanistan, it should start by ending the occupation. It should then cough up money for humanitarian aid and reconstruction. (One estimate puts the tab at $10 billion.) This is not just for the sake of Afghanistan, but for the sake of Americans as well, who are no safer today than they were when the planes hit the towers. Ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is the first, crucial step in that elusive goal of "winning hearts and minds" that the United States claims to be so committed to in the region. As Iraq has demonstrated, occupying armies are not a deterrent to terrorism. Occupying armies breed terror.

You would think that amidst the GWOT we would be taking national security seriously and that seriousness would be demonstrated by a meaningful security clearance process. But not so.

crossposted from unbossed

The NGO network in Afghanistan (Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief – ACBAR) reports that the number of civilian casualties caused by all sides has "surged" and that insecurity has spread to previously stable areas.

The number of insurgent attacks for each of the months of May (463), June (569) and July is greater than the number of such attacks in any other months since the end of major hostilities following the international intervention in 2001...

July was reportedly the worst month for Afghan civilians in the past six years, with 260 civilian casualties recorded...

Now, due primarily to a stepped up air operations, Afghanistan, "the good war" is turning bad.

I love a good show trial.

Prosecutors in the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver unveiled a graphic video on Monday of the September 11 attacks and other al Qaeda operations that is likely to play a repeated role in pending war crimes cases.

I finally understand the rationale for the latest FISA revisions.

When George Bush signed into law the Fourth Amendment Abrogation Act of 2008 (known to some as the FISA “compromise”) he praised the bill for granting him the powers necessary to fight the “ter’ists” who “hate us for our freedom.”

By enacting a piece of legislation that eliminates much of our freedom, the terrorists now have less reason to hate us.

QED. GWOT™ won. Mission accomplished.

(Two other random observations after the jump. . . .)

So.

Here we are, in the near-aftermath, where the smoke has to some extent lifted on the legacy of our descent headlong into imperial madness.

We have now come to the point where those who bear the burden for enabling this lunacy are coming forward to prostrate themselves before us, and beg for mercy from those of us who knew the depths of their sociopathic zeal from day one.

One particularly sad example of those swept into the tide of bolstering aggressive war is supposed ‘liberal intellectual’ Christopher Hitchens; who emerged from a cocoon of rage and self-perceived emasculation following 9/11, reborn into a freshly-winged neo-con.

A man so indoctrinated with loathsome contempt for religion; he saw in his unlikely allies on the right an opportunity to wield his angry sword against those branded as fanatics.  Yet, the ultimate irony finds him in bed with the very same monotheist ‘fascists’ he so desired to rid the world of at any cost.

Senator Lindsey Graham(R-SC). We know him very well, don't we? Well, I happened upon his senate web-site today to see what the old Bush neocon enabler was up to, and low and behold, he was in full attack mode against our presumptive nominee, Barack Obama. Grab a bag of popcorn and a cream pie(or cowpie) and follow me under the fold. You're going to love this one folks.

Tacitus, writing of the first Senate meeting after the death of Augustus Caesar (Annals 1.8):

Messala Valerius further proposed that the oath of allegiance to Tiberius should be renewed yearly, and when Tiberius asked him whether it was at his bidding that he had brought forward this motion, Valerius replied that he had proposed it spontaneously, and that in whatever concerned the State he would use only his own discretion, even at the risk of offending. This was the only style of adulation which yet remained.

The pathetic and quite ridiculous record of the Roman Senate's capitulation to imperial power is rife with analogues to the collapse of the US Congress during the last two generations in matters of national security and international affairs. And this without the Romans' excuse that they feared for their lives.

During the Principate, the Roman Senate essentially struck a deal with successive emperors. Caesar could consolidate actual power and govern as he wished as long as Senators retained some outward signs of power and the status that went with the dignity of holding high office. The appearance of being consulted occasionally by the emperor, the public repute that came from "debating" matters of state, the feeling of importance, the Senators were willing to exchange for actual independence. Rather than try to check the emperor's aggrandizement of power, they merely sought to be co-opted. "Deliberation" meant finding out what the commander in chief of the armies wanted and giving it to him - occasionally giving even more than he asked, just to flex the Senate's atrophying muscles.

Any fool of a Senator who made the slightest show of actual independence was immediately undercut by his fellows. So eager were they to win the favor of Power, and so painfully aware of the network of spies that potentially knew of every word they spoke.

All of this is brought to mind by the supine behavior of the US Congress during the last week, especially its precipitous abandonment of the Fourth Amendment in exchange for mere assurances that the President will have to consult them now and then in the future about his rationales for spying upon citizens without warrant. To be consulted is to be important. It signifies that Congress still matters - although (or rather, because) it balks at nothing it is asked to endorse.

This explains so much in the record of Congressional Democrats that voters find perverse. Members of Congress are intent above all on protecting the fragile illusion that they still wield power. To dare a showdown with the president on any issue of importance is to risk shattering the appearance of power and hence their self-image. Rather than try to check the president's aggrandizement of power, too many members of Congress merely seek to be co-opted.

But isn't their climbdown on FISA a profound humiliation? Sure, but I'd bet they can rationalize it away.

This report, about the Bush administration's arrogation of unchecked power over terrorist-suspects, nicely frames several related issues. First, it highlights how the federal courts, unlike Congress, have repeatedly rebuffed Bush's power grabs in obvious and principled fashion. While the administration was trying to monopolize certain powers that properly belong to the judiciary, it was not able to throw any sops in the direction of the courts. Naturally the courts resented the Executive's aggrandizement and saw nothing to gain by rolling over for the President.

The article also points out that the Bush administration sometimes refused to pull the rug out from under the courts in the tried and true way - by getting Congress to legalize whatever lawlessness it was engaged in. Here is an example of WH pigheadedness over the due process case of Yaser Hamdi from 2004.

Jack L. Goldsmith...[described] a White House meeting he attended... in which Paul D. Clement, of the solicitor general's office, warned that the administration might lose the case before the Supreme Court, despite its "solid legal arguments." Goldsmith said he suggested that the administration seek a congressional sign-off for the entire detention program, something that would make it harder for the court to strike down the program.

Goldsmith's view was supported by Clement, then-National Security Council lawyer Bellinger and Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II -- but not, Goldsmith said, by David S. Addington, then legal counsel to Vice President Cheney.

"Why are you trying to give away the president's power?" Addington asked, according to Goldsmith, who explains that Addington thought it might suggest that the president could not act on his own.

Why concede in any way that the president cannot make something legal just by willing it so? That question has been the leitmotif of the multi-year quest by Addington and Cheney to create an all powerful Unitary Executive.

And it brings us back to what I presume is the primary rationalization among members of Congress for their cowardly FISA legislation. They can claim, almost with a straight face, to have won the larger constitutional struggle by tying the Executive down to an "oversight" process that involves both the Legislative and Judicial branches.

Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the bill "will prevent any repeat of warrantless surveillance undertaken by the president and will hold our government accountable for its actions, past and future, through strengthened court review and congressional oversight."

By a delusion such as Rockefeller's, the WH has conceded power by agreeing to consult very occasionally with a few representatives of the other branches about the warrantless wiretapping that it alone will direct. It is a delusion, and very much in line with the imperial Roman Senate's illusions of grandeur.

Of course it is a delusion, what could be clearer? For the US Congress is rushing once again to give the President everything he asked for, and more.

The proposal — particularly the immunity provision — represents a major victory for the White House after months of dispute. “I think the White House got a better deal than they even they had hoped to get,” said Senator Christopher Bond, the Missouri Republican who led the negotiations.

It might be that none of them can (or could) travel outside of their respective countries of national residence for fear of arrest and indictment by foreign (read here European) governments.  This, and more, is laid out at the following link:

http://www.slate.com/...

Yesterday, Barack Obama stood up for our Constitution.

Today, the demogogue running as the prospective Republican nominee struck back:

"Once again, we have seen that Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a September 10th mindset," McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann said.

TPM

More, after the fold.

Obama campaign responds with Richard Clarke.  See Update IV.

See Update V for John Kerry kicking serious McCain but on behalf of Obama.

Barack Obama at Update VI: Republicans have no "standing to suggest that they've learned a lot of lessons from 9-11."

One of the most striking things I've noticed about conservatism/Republicanism over these past eight years (and, in many senses, the past thirty) is the consistent idea that the entire world is in black and white. Good and evil. There is no room for ambiguity, for debate, for the very idea that something may not be able to be debated in absolutes.

Even something like the Ten Commandments, for instance, something that religious Christian people of all stripes do their very best to adhere to, well, we are supposed to follow those strictures as absolutes. That is what God commanded in the Old Testament, no? And yet today many people who wear their faiths on their sleeves, such as our President, claim to follow such tenets, all while violating them.

"Thou shalt not kill"--except in self-defense, the death penalty, war, and so on. "Thou shalt not bear false witness"--except when deemed necessary by the liars themselves. Just a couple of examples of what you'd call moral relativism, except these are examples that don't apply to the party frequently accused of being the moral relativists: liberals. Instead, they apply to conservatives, who commit such acts with impunity, all while pointing fingers at us liberals, accusing us of being moral relativists.

Jump....

"Senior American officials ought to go to jail for this".

That's what Jerrold Nadler said last week after having heard testimony that US officials deported Canadian citizen Maher Arar to Syria even though they knew he would be tortured upon his arrival there.

The White House likes to pretend that it has not created a kafkaesque spiderweb of prisons and military tribunals, despite all the evidence to the contrary: kidnapping, the purchase of prisoners for "bounties", torture and abuse, coerced confessions, locking up known innocents for years at a time, secrecy and lies, destruction of evidence, poor access for lawyers and human rights watchdogs, prolonged imprisonment without trial, a series of kangaroo-court procedures, reprisals against military lawyers who uphold standards of justice, and the flagrant politicization of trials. Well, add another stone to the mountain of evidence against this "administration".

A Gitmo defense lawyer stumbled upon a Pentagon manual that advises interrogators to destroy their hand-written notes in order to thwart any inquiries at trial into wrong-doing by officials.

Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay were told to destroy their notes to stop them potentially being used to highlight the mistreatment of detainees, according to a US military lawyer.

William Kuebler, a lieutenant commander who is defending Omar Khadr, a Canadian national facing trial for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, said the classified instructions were included in an operations manual that prosecutors allowed him to see last week...

He told reporters the instruction was contained in a US military manual of standard operating procedures, or SOPs, for interrogators that was shown to him during a pre-trial review of possible evidence.

The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify ... Keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimise certain legal issues," the document was cited as saying in an affidavit signed by Kuebler...

Kuebler said the operations manual, from January 2003, was attached to a 2005 report into alleged detainee abuse at Guantánamo, but that the section covering the manual was not made public at the time.

Omar Khadr was 15 years old when the military imprisoned him. His defense alleges that interrogators coerced a false confession from Khadr partly through abuse and threats to rape him:

Mr. Khadr's defence team at Guantanamo Bay had asked the prosecution to provide handwritten notes relating to Mr. Khadr's interrogations in both Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

"Counsel for the government claim that, after a diligent search, they have been unable to locate and unable to provide responsive materials," LCdr. Kuebler writes in his affidavit.

It looks like Kuebler is right that the Pentagon insured that interrogators "routinely destroyed evidence" that might have been used to defend the Khadr and other detainees.

For its part, the Pentagon didn't even try to defend the destruction of evidence when the SOP was exposed.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said he was reviewing the matter Sunday evening.

Destruction of evidence is in fact routine at Guantanamo. Last December we learned that in 2005 the CIA ordered the destruction of videotapes of interrogations, apparently at the behest of the White House.

If the Guantanamo tribunals really are legitimate courts of law, as the WH insists, then the destruction of videotapes and interrogators' notes ought to count as obstruction of justice. This report from March remains relevant:

“They thought they were saving themselves from legal scrutiny, as well as possible danger from Al Qaeda if the tapes became public,” said Frederick P. Hitz, a former C.I.A. officer and the agency’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, speaking of agency officials who favored eliminating the tapes. “Unknowingly, perhaps, they may have created even more problems for themselves.”

In a suit brought by Hani Abdullah, a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal judge has raised the possibility that, by destroying the tapes, the C.I.A. violated a court order to preserve all evidence relevant to the prisoner. In at least 12 other lawsuits, lawyers for prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere have filed legal challenges citing the C.I.A. tapes’ destruction, said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer representing 16 prisoners.

“This is like any other cover-up,” Mr. Remes said. “We’ve only scratched the surface.”

Indeed, as the new revelation about the Pentagon manual demonstrates. Kuebler's find has been reported widely outside the US. Shame that there's only a single, brief report in the American news media.

++++

See also the diary by Christian Dem in NC.

Update [2008-6-9 18:11:51 by smintheus]: See also Lyle Denniston on the ramifications of Kuebler's discovery for the important habeas cases now before SCOTUS, Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States.

Of all the things I've heard from McCain, this is the one that ticks me off the most.

SURRENDER? We Democrats want to SURRENDER?  So, after being called defeatocrats and traitors, now we want to surrender?

You senile SOB, we ALREADY surrendered a long time ago!

We have surrendered our standing in the world, we have surrendered our democratic ideals, we have surrendered our allies, we have surrendered our military strength, we have surrendered our economic standing, and we have surrendered human and civil rights, all on the shoulders of this war conceived by a bunch of addlebrained simpletons who couldn't see past their copies of the PNAC manifesto.

I'll educate some more after the jump...

Driving East on 8th Avenue in Gainesville, Florida, betrween 34th and 23rd streets, you come to the Memorial Mile organized by Local chapter 14/78 of Veterans for Peace, an impressive extended tribute to the American troops (Soldiers, Marines, Naval Personal and Airman) killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  
Its composed of 4577 individual grave markers, 4077 from Iraq and 500 from Afghanistan, four abrest, 8"x12" tombstomes, bearing the name, age, date of death, hometown and rank of each of the dead.
Just driving by takes a while, long enough for the message to sink in. [If you hit the link, don't miss the traffic sign as the road narrows toward the end].

Gen. David Petraeus, the four-star general who has been leading troops in Iraq, has been tapped to become the next commander of U.S. Central Command.

Secretary of State Robert Gates made the announcement at a news conference in Washington D.C. on Wednesday morning

Well, Well, Well. Any one still thinks were not going to invade Iraq?

The Global Wars on Truth, Talent, Torture, Treason, Trust, and Taxes are a Slam Dunk.

Roger Cohen in today's New York Times on-line edition talks about his experiences covering the war in Bosnia (while there still was war in Bosnia - which ended before Hillary set real or imaginary foot in-country.)  

After excoriating the Clintons' for their belated response to the atrocities occurring at that time in Bosnia (and Rwanda) he goes on to say that what is important is not Hillary's sniper-lie, but rather what's behind the lie that should really trouble American voters (and the world.)