The Strident Centrist Blog

This past weekend I attended the National Conference for Media Reform here in Minneapolis, and if anyone has any doubts that reform is needed, the events of the last 12 or so hours should remove all doubt.

Last evening Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, who until a few months ago was a Democratic candidate for president, introduced a 35 article bill for the impeachment of George W. Bush. The event was covered live by C-Span as part of their routine gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House when it is in session. Kucinich read the entire bill for the record from the well of the House. I learned of what he was doing from comments being made on the blog Emptywheel shortly after 9:00 pm CDT, at which point he was up to Article 22. It took him at least another hour and a half to finish, so I can only assume that he was at it for at least three hours in total, and more likely closer to four or more. The House adjourned almost immediately after he finished.

I checked a few mainstream media sites last evening, but there was not a word. OK, maybe they didn’t have advance knowledge of what was going to happen and all their reporters had gone home for the night when Kucinich was recognized by the chair. But now it’s been almost 8 hour since it ended, and there is still nothing. I’ve checked the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Star Tribune, the websites of the three major over-the-air television networks, and KSTP TV here in Twin Cities (the ABC outlet). Nothing. Not a word, even in deep links in the News/Politics sections I’ve checked for some (but not all) of them.

Wouldn’t you think this deserves a mention at least on page A 16?

Update: I just checked the NPR site, specifically the “Morning Edition” page, and still nothing.

Update 2: Kargox at Kos has a post up about the probable fate of Rep. Kucinich’s bill in the House. Meanwhile there are no stories about the bill on such high-traffic, left of center blogs as TalkingPointsMemo or the Washington Independent.

The six students who constitute the Republican Club at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, somehow raised the $15K fee to entice former Attorney General John Ashcroft to speak last night. It may be a while before he speaks on another campus, or at least has a Q & A afterwards, unless it’s of the likes of Regents or Oral Roberts Universities.

A student who goes by the name Elsinora (at least on the internet; sometimes) asked how he could have approved of waterboarding in light of the fact that one Yukio Asano was convicted and sentenced to 15 years for waterboarding American prisoners during World War II. When she pursued the matter after he tried to suggest there were differences in the procedures, he became completely unhinged: (more…)

Darius Rejali is an Iran-born professor at Reed College who wrote Torture and Democracy, which was published last fall. Horton of Harpers interviews him following his customary Six Questions format.

Torture casts a very long shadow. When a state tortures, many decent professionals retire, leaving the police forces, the military and the intelligence services in disgust. So those who stayed behind create a culture of impunity. Torture also has a powerful deprofessionalizing ethic, damaging other intelligence efforts. Why do the hard work of using proper police and interrogation techniques when you’ve got a bat?. Considering that most recent whistleblowers have had to hide in fear, including the man who revealed the Abu Ghraib tortures, it will be difficult to recruit good people to do this work. How can you prevent waste or fraud, much less torture, if you are not going to protect whistleblowers? You can’t.

According to the National Post, a hot story in Great Britain is the art forging business of the Family Greenhalgh. The art talent was son Shuan, now 46 and still living at home with Mom and Pop, now in their 80s, who did the marketing.

After many successful years, and scores of sales, the Greenhalghs were caught out by that old devil hubris. Shaun, deeply impressed by his own talent, forgot that serious chicanery requires careful attention to detail. He sent the British Museum what was apparently an ancient Assyrian stone relief showing a soldier and horses with cuneiform writing. It looked great until someone noticed a minor spelling mistake in the writing and someone else said that the harness on the horses was from the wrong period.

I’ve put another essay up linked to the front page entitled “The Constitutional Crisis, The Democrats and Bipartisanship.” Check it out.

No, I’m not talking about Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell, or the sexual assault scandals at the Air Force Academy or elsewhere. It’s about something far more ominous: thumbs on the scales of strategy and tactics evaluations. From the Army Times:

The most elaborate war game the U.S. military has ever held was rigged so that it appeared to validate the modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts it was supposed to be testing, according to the retired Marine lieutenant general who commanded the game’s Opposing Force.

That general, Paul Van Riper, said he worries the United States will send troops into combat using doctrine and weapons systems based on false conclusions from the recently concluded Millennium Challenge 02. He was so frustrated with the rigged exercise that he said he quit midway through the game.

. . .

The Defense Department spent $250 million over the last two years to stage Millennium Challenge 02, a three-week, all-service exercise that concluded Aug. 15. The experiment involved 13,500 participants waging mock war in 17 simulation locations and nine live-force training sites.

Set in a classified scenario in 2007, the experiment’s main purpose was to test a handful of key war-fighting concepts that Joint Forces Command had developed over the last several years.

Gen. William “Buck” Kernan, head of Joint Forces Command, told Pentagon reporters July 18 that Millennium Challenge was nothing less than “the key to military transformation.”

. . .

“This is free play,” he said. “The OPFOR has the ability to win here.”

“Not so,” Van Riper told Army Times. “Instead of a free-play, two-sided game as the Joint Forces commander advertised it was going to be, it simply became a scripted exercise. They had a predetermined end, and they scripted the exercise to that end.”

Van Riper, who retired in 1997 as head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, is a frequent player in military war games and is regarded as a Red team specialist. He said the constraints placed on the Opposing Force in Millennium Challenge were the most restrictive he has ever experienced in an ostensibly free-play experiment.

Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed the Opposing Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units, he said

“We were directed … to move air defenses so that the Army and Marine units could successfully land,” he said. “We were simply directed to turn [the air-defense systems] off or move them. … So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be.”

Retired Ambassador Robert Oakley, who participated in the experiment as Red civilian leader, said Van Riper was outthinking the Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.

. . .

“By that time there wasn’t enough time left to intercept them,” Oakley said. As a result of Van Riper’s cunning, much of the Blue navy ended up at the bottom of the ocean. The Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and “refloat” the fleet in order to continue, Oakley said.

. . .

But by preventing the Opposing Force from employing the full range of its capabilities, Van Riper said, Joint Forces Command sacrificed intellectual rigor on the altar of expedience. In an Aug. 14 e-mail he sent to “professional friends” — a copy of which was obtained by Army Times — Van Riper expressed bitter frustration with what he viewed as the experiment’s failure to challenge the command’s future war-fighting concepts, of which he acknowledged he had been “a vocal critic.”

H/t to Fabius Maximus

If you haven’t been following the FISA controversy very closely because of the distractions of living a more or less normal life, it’s likely that you’re a bit confused as to what the dispute is really all about. As Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse pointed out during his speech on the Senate floor this morning, confused is exactly what the Bush-Cheney administration wants you to be. Fortunately the good Senator, who is a former US Attorney, does an excellent job of clarifying things. Here are a few key paragraphs:

The Protect America Act, passed in the August stampede, contains no statutory limitation on this administration’s ability to spy on Americans traveling abroad whenever it wants, for whatever purpose. (more…)

John Dean points out that there are ten investigations of one sort or another that are underway into the Torture Tape Destruction. One of them is a suit the ACLU filed against the CIA in June, 2004, after being stiffed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents regarding the treatment of prisoners. In September of that year, the judge in the case, one Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York, ordered the government to “produce or identify” all responsive documents within thirty days. Let’s pick up with Dean:

Now, in the action before Judge Hellerstein, he ACLU has moved to hold the CIA in contempt of court, based on the Judge’s September 15, 2004 ruling. It is difficult to see why the CIA is, in fact, not in contempt, given the nature of the FOIA request and the judge’s order. (more…)

Ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson must have spewed the coffee out of his nose the other day when he read this Dana Perino exchange with a reporter:

QUESTION: . . . On these CIA videotapes, did either the President or Vice President or Condoleezza Rice, when she was National Security Advisor, or Steve Hadley, see them before they were destroyed?

Perino offered this artful phrasing:

PERINO: I spoke to the President, and so I will have to defer on the others. But I spoke to the President this morning about this. He has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction before yesterday. He was briefed by General Hayden yesterday morning.

Here’s Larry recalling how interested high level officials were in an incident he was involved in during the Reagan administration:

I know from my time at the CIA how presidents and national security staffs react to intelligence on high priority matters. They are ravenous and they are constantly pushing for more info. I remember, for example, being tasked on an urgent basis to review and analyze Spanish language documents the CIA obtained from a Nicaraguan military defector that described the mutual concern of Soviet and Sandinista officials about U.S. supplied shoulder fired surface to air missiles that were downing helicopters in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. At the time, the war in Nicaragua was one of the top five policy priorities of the White House. And the White House was eager to know what the defector had to say.

So please answer these questions. In the summer of 2002 was terrorism and the threat of terrorism at least one of the top three policy priorities for the Bush Administration? Was the White House interested in any details about the capture or interrogation of Abu Zubaydah?

All Larry really wants to know is how good the popcorn was.

From a piece by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen today’s Washington Post:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

. . .

Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

Marcy Wheeler has more, as does Josh Marshall. First this, from Marshall: (more…)