And neither do you.

From Asia Times, Kaveh L Afrasiabi writes:

Iran gambles over Georgia's crisis

Representing a serious new rift in US-Russia relations, the conflict in the Caucasus, paralyzing the UN Security Council and igniting Cold War-type rhetoric between the two military superpowers, is simultaneously a major distraction from the Iran nuclear crisis and may even spell doom for the multilateralist "Iran Six" diplomacy. This involves the US, Britain, Russia, France, China and Germany in negotiations over Iran's uranium-enrichment program, which some believed is aimed at making nuclear weapons.

Much depends on the scope and duration of the Georgia crisis and, yet, there is also the obverse possibility that Moscow, intent on polishing its tarnished image - as a rogue power coercing its smaller neighbors and violating their territorial sovereignty - may even double its efforts on other fronts to compensate for the damage to its international standing, given the US's threat of kicking Russia out of the Group of Eight.

As far as Iran is concerned, the Georgia crisis is not confined to South Caucasus and has broader implications for region, including Central Asia and the Caspian area, that are both positive and negative. That is, it is a mixed blessing, one that is both an ominous development signaling a new level of Russian militarism as well as a crisis of opportunity, to forge closer ties with Russia and enhance its chance of membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the grouping dominated by Russia and China.

Yet, the immediate gains for Iran may not exceed the net losses in the long run and Tehran may have blundered by not forcefully criticizing Moscow's violation of Georgia's sovereignty. Iran and Georgia have strong historical connections: Iran was in possession of Georgia for some 400 years until the humiliating defeats at the hands of tsarist Russia in the early 19th century, culminating in the Russia-Iran Treaties of Gulistan in 1813 and Turkmanchai in 1828. Under these, about a third of Iranian territory was ceded to Russia, including Georgia and Armenia.

Then and now, Iran remains weary of Russia's imperial intentions and, more recently, this was evident seven years ago when in the aftermath of a failed summit on the division of Caspian Sea, the then-president Vladimir Putin ordered a massive naval maneuver in the Caspian Sea as a stern message to Iran.

Should Putin, now premier, succeed with his "splendid little war" in South Caucasus, Russia's neighbors to the east must expect to see more samples of Russian power projection, again a prospect that simultaneously entices and yet terrifies Iran and is bound to have contradictory policy ramifications for Tehran's decision-makers.

Thus, on the one hand, no matter how cordial present Iran-Russia relations may be, the big neighbor's power and increasing militarism impacts Iran's national security calculus and may strengthen the arguments of those who are in favor of a nuclear defense strategy.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story, Court says ok for jurors to consult Bible passages during death sentencing deliberations, and extensive environmental news.

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Ron Suskind over the course of two days about his new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. While many eyes focus on the wacked-out hatemonger Jerome Corsi and his fact-starved screed Obama Nation, Suskind's book has turned a few heads, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers's, whose committee will be investigating Suskind's long-suspected-but-never-proven charges regarding the Cheney-Bush administration's ramp-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Conyers participated in the second day of the interview on Thursday. Here is an excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: Ron Suskind interviewed Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. Dearlove said Britain received intelligence in the beginning of 2003 about Iraq’s lack of WMDs, but the Bush administration buried the information. Dearlove told Suskind, "The problem was the Cheney crowd was in too much of a hurry, really. Bush never resisted them quite strongly enough."

Ron Suskind joins us again here in our firehouse studio. We’re also joined on the phone by Congress member John Conyers, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Congressman Conyers has said his committee will review some of the explosive findings in Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! For those listeners and viewers who didn’t get a chance to hear you lay out the allegations, Ron—well, first, many people wrote in through the day, and we’re going to be reading some of their questions to you. But why don’t you lay out the kernel of the key allegation you have made about this letter?

RON SUSKIND: The Iraq intelligence chief is a one-year saga that started in January of 2003. The United States and Britain get together. They open a secret back channel to this man. He slips out of Baghdad, meets with a British intelligence official in Amman, Jordan. The information flows up through the White House. They’re the real customer here. And he says, from the start, there are no WMD. He of course has real credibility here as the Iraq intelligence chief, the number one man. He oversees the biological program himself, and he said it’s over.

He also said the mind of Saddam Hussein is something you all don’t understand. He’s really afraid of the Iranians and their nascent nuclear program. He doesn’t want them and others in the region to see that he’s a toothless tiger, that he has no weapons. He doesn’t even believe the United States would ever want Iraq.

All of this ends up being made very public later. It’s all briefed right up to the White House to the President starting in January of 2003. The final report’s delivered in February. At that point, we cut off the channel to Habbush. But, of course, we already have an arrangement with him, the United States. We resettle him in Amman, Jordan. As the summer unfolds, it becomes clear to the world, the things that Habbush told us ahead of time. We pay him $5 million, the United States. We hide him.

And then the letter. In the fall of 2003, when the White House is facing the most serious charge of the Bush presidency, that we went to war under false pretenses, they come up with a plan of how they might use Habbush, the White House. They order the CIA to have a fabricated letter created ostensibly in Habbush’s hand, backdated July 2001, solving all the White House’s political problems. As one of the key on-the-record sources says, it was a check-the-box for all of the problems politically the White House was facing in the United States.

That, of course, is illegal. You cannot have the CIA run disinformation campaigns on the American public. Just imagine the havoc that would ensue if that were not a law. That’s why right now Congress is investigating. ...

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Ron Suskind, about what it would mean for Congress to investigate? We now know the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Conyers is talking about investigating, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. What were you able to gather? What could they gather?

RON SUSKIND: The fact is, the book, as readers now around the country know, lays this out, letter and verse, with great clarity, again, with on-the-record sources, and a great number of off-the-record sources, as well, were helpful in the overall project.

What you can see now, I think, is Congress having an opportunity to exercise some of its constitutional mandates, which has been very difficult during the history of this administration, as Chairman Conyers and certainly even more people on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence know. They have not been briefed on key issues, as well as key issues in and around this matter of Habbush. You know, the fact is, is that the administration has consistently, consistently undercut Congress’s role of oversight, which of course is statutory in its clarity and its legal strength, to oversee what the administration does, especially in matters of secrecy. This was all set up very, very carefully so Congress will be briefed so they’ll know what’s happening so we don’t have essentially a secret foreign policy carried forward by any president. This is an opportunity for them to finally exercise, essentially, their obligations in Congress.

 

"...finally exercise..." Better late than never. But investigations are nothing without consequences.

What follows is the National Security & Foreign Policy plank of the Netroots Political Platform, a collaborative process that began three weeks ago in Austin. As with any collaborative process, it took some wrangling. You can read about how that came about in FerrisValyn's Mothership Diary here. It includes links to the other planks posted so far. You can also find links to those planks and the Diaries about them at the bottom of this post.

Some Netroots notables have taken issue with some planks, with the whole idea of this kind of platform, and with the whole idea of platforms as a modern expression of progressivism and party policy at all. One of those is someone for whom I have deep and longstanding respect, Chris Bowers of OpenLeft. He has taken what is about the strongest possible stance in this matter.

One can argue, of course, that platforms are irrelevant - as in, nobody pays attention but the handful of people who write them. Or that party chiefs ignore them. Or that they are obsolete, belonging to the mid-20th Century and before. Or that they are inelastic, curtailing pluralism and creative thought, the very antithesis of progressivism. Or that, if they must be signed by everybody in the party, that they are totalitarian. But I can't quite understand how one can make ALL those arguments in the same breath. Although, I suppose one can be irrelevant and totalitarian simultaneously.

Nobody who participated in this process is, I think, arguing that everybody agree with every line of this platform. Nobody could. I certainly don't. For instance, I think Chris is absolutely right about the plank he excoriates as an example in his critique. But the impetus for this platform was anything but totalitarian. I personally see it not as a closed circle, not a manifesto, not something we pledge allegiance to, and definitely not the last word. Just a democratically achieved document that provides those who read it some idea of what a few score participatory democrats who thought hard about the subject and debated it among themselves think the Democratic Party ought to stand for.  That hardly makes me or them armband-wearers. We're not carrying cattle prods to keep anyone in line.

Without further ado, the National Security & Foreign Policy plank:  

Helen Benedict writes at In These Times:

Why Soldiers Rape
^{Culture of misogyny, illegal occupation, fuel sexual violence in military}

An alarming number of women soldiers are being sexually abused by their comrades-in-arms, both at war and at home. This fact has received a fair amount of attention lately from researchers and the press — and deservedly so.

But the attention always focuses on the women: where they were when assaulted, their relations with the assailant, the effects on their mental health and careers, whether they are being adequately helped, and so on. That discussion, as valuable as it is, misses a fundamental point. To understand military sexual assault, let alone know how to stop it, we must focus on the perpetrators. We need to ask: Why do soldiers rape? ...

In the military, however, the situation is even worse. Rape is almost twice as frequent as it is among civilians, especially in wartime. Soldiers are taught to regard one another as family, so military rape resembles incest. And most of the soldiers who rape are older and of higher rank than their victims, so are taking advantage of their authority to attack the very people they are supposed to protect.

Department of Defense reports show that nearly 90 percent of rape victims in the Army are junior-ranking women, whose average age is 21, while most of the assailants are non-commissioned officers or junior men, whose average age is 28.

This sexual violence persists in spite of strict laws against rape in the military and a concerted Pentagon effort in 2005 to reform procedures for reporting the crime. Unfortunately, neither the press nor the many teams of psychologists and sociologists who study veterans ever seem to ask why.

The answer appears to lie in a confluence of military culture, the psychology of the assailants and the nature of war. ...

Furthermore, the military has an abysmal record when it comes to catching, prosecuting and punishing its rapists. The Pentagon’s 2007 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military found that 47 percent of the reported sexual assaults in 2007 were dismissed as unworthy of investigation, and only about 8 percent of the cases went to court-martial, reflecting the difficulty female soldiers have in making themselves heard or believed when they report sexual assault within the military. The majority of assailants were given what the Pentagon calls "nonjudicial punishments, administrative actions and discharges." By contrast, in civilian life, 40 percent of those accused of sex crimes are prosecuted.

Which brings us to the question: Do the reasons soldiers rape have anything to do with the nature of the wars we are waging today, particularly in Iraq?

+ + +

On a personal note, I keep getting these e-mails which impute opinions to me that I don't necessarily have. Or, at least, that the sender can't possibly know if I have because I haven't expressed them publicly. Many of these are connected to the Night Owls thread. About two-thirds of the time, I don't comment on the link and excerpt in that thread. That's because Night Owls is an open thread, and the link and excerpt are meant to stir discussion. Sometimes they do. Sometimes posters ignore them and find their own subject(s) to discuss, as on any open thread.

Just because I post an excerpt at Night Owls doesn't mean I agree with it. Or disagree with it. To reiterate, it's meant to be a conversation starter. So, for all you e-mailers out there, especially the ones with the potty mouths, if I offer an opinion - sometimes an extensive one - about the excerpt, then you know where I stand on the subject. If I don't, you don't. So save your electrons.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted, including the reminder that we have 157 more days of Mister Bush.

The following letter, written July 30, appears in the current issue of The Nation. I am reprinting it in full and urge you to join those 22,500 people who, like me, have already signed it. A sampling of people who signed the letter early on is reprinted at the end of the text.

Change We Can Believe In An Open Letter to Barack Obama Add your name to this Open Letter calling on Barack Obama to stand firm on the principles he so compellingly articulated in the primary campaign. Dear Senator Obama We write to congratulate you on the tremendous achievements of your campaign for the presidency of the United States. Your candidacy has inspired a wave of political enthusiasm like nothing seen in this country for decades. In your speeches, you have sketched out a vision of a better future--in which the United States sheds its warlike stance around the globe and focuses on diplomacy abroad and greater equality and freedom for its citizens at home--that has thrilled voters across the political spectrum. Hundreds of thousands of young people have entered the political process for the first time, African-American voters have rallied behind you, and many of those alienated from politics-as-usual have been re-engaged. You stand today at the head of a movement that believes deeply in the change you have claimed as the mantle of your campaign. The millions who attend your rallies, donate to your campaign and visit your website are a powerful testament to this new movement's energy and passion. This movement is vital for two reasons: First, it will help assure your victory against John McCain in November. The long night of greed and military adventurism under the Bush Administration, which a McCain administration would continue, cannot be brought to an end a day too soon. An enthusiastic corps of volunteers and organizers will ensure that voters turn out to close the book on the Bush era on election day. Second, having helped bring you the White House, the support of this movement will make possible the changes that have been the platform of your campaign. Only a grassroots base as broad and as energized as the one that is behind you can counteract the forces of money and established power that are a dead weight on those seeking real change in American politics. We urge you, then, to listen to the voices of the people who can lift you to the presidency and beyond.

In a hearing Thursday to dismiss charges in the second war crimes trial at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer, a licensed psychologist who had ordered the torture of a juvenile detainee, refused to testify under Section 831, Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Article 31 prohibits compulsory self-incrimination as a right under the Fifth Amendment. And the judge in the case ruled that a Pentagon official cannot participate in the trial by military tribunal of Mohammed Jawad, a detainee captured in Afghanistan and held in extrajudicial detention at Bagram Theater Internment Facility and at Gitmo for the past five and a half years.

The official, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser to the tribunals, had previously been barred from the trial of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver, who was convicted last month of "providing material support" to al Qaeda. In both instances, according to the Associated Press, the general was kept out of the trials because of his political interference. Hartmann was eager, testified former prosecutor Air Force Col. Morris Davis, to keep Jawad's case at the top of the queue because it would be a grabber for Americans. The Pakistani-born Jawad, who was 16 or 17 at the time of his capture, allegedly tossed a grenade at a U.S. convoy in December 2002.

The judge did not grant the motion to throw out the charges against Jawad. The motion was based on claims that Jawad had been tortured physically at Bagram, where his nose may have been broken, and by means of threats, linguistic and physical isolation, as well as sleep deprivation at Gitmo. Twice, Jawad was kept in extreme isolation for 30 days. Sleep deprivation and prolonged periods of isolation are widely recognized as torture by non-governmental organizations, human rights groups, governments, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the U.S. State Department, and federal courts as well as state courts.

Although the Bush administration, in the person of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had expressly said the Geneva Conventions did not apply in the case of the Gitmo detainees, a perspective later overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court, the approved torture techniques were to be used only when there was a good reason to believe that the detainee possessed "critical intelligence," clearly not the case for the young Jawad, who was not being held on terrorism charges. Rather, the accusation against him then, as now, was that, in effect, if he committed the act he was charged with, he had behaved like any soldier in a war zone. (Jawad has always denied throwing any grenades.)

The torture practices used against Jawad can cause physical deterioration, panic, rage, loss of appetite, lethargy, paranoia, hallucinations, self-mutilation, cognitive dysfunction, disorientation and mental breakdowns, any of which, alone or in combination, can spur the detainee to give interrogators more information than he might otherwise surrender. The techniques had a particularly severe effect on Jawad, who attempted suicide on Christmas Day, 2003.

It is especially egregious that these practices were carried out on a juvenile. But worst of all, according to a source familiar with the case who spoke with Daily Kos but asked not to be identified, the torture was ordered by Lieut. Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer, a PhD psychologist operating as part of Gitmo's Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT). BSCTs are not mental health providers. Their primary mission is to support military interrogations. Their role has been widely criticized by prominent psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Stephen Soldz and Steven Reisner.

According to an unclassified but highly censored document that the anonymous source has read, when an interrogator came to Zierhoffer and said he thought the techniques being applied to Jawad should be temporarily halted because they were causing him to dissociate, to crack up without providing good information, she recommended that the torture continue. This was a clear violation of the Convention Against Torture, and a clear violation of Principle A of the American Psychological Association, the first sentence of which reads: Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm. At the time, Zierhoffer was still a member of the APA, which she joined in 1997. Her membership lapsed in 2005.

According to a story by Adam Zagorin and Michael Duffy in the June 12, 2005, issue of Time magazine, Inside the Interrogation of Prisoner 63, Army Major John Leso is named in the logs as the psychologist supervising Mohammed al-Qatani’s interrogation, who many believed to be the "20th hijacker." According to the interrogation logs, Qatani (Prisoner 63) almost died during his questioning. Charges of war crimes and terrorist acts against him were dismissed May 13 but he remains at Gitmo.

As recently as 2007, Major Leso was stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, which includes the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school (SERE) for Army Aviation, whose purpose is to train soldiers to resist torture. Government sources and reports show that SERE training was reverse-engineered as a means to break enemy soldiers. Leso is still a member of APA and could be disciplined by the organization if it so chose. Zierhoffer, having left the organization in 2005, cannot.

The significance of that date is that it was the year of the first disclosures, in The New York Times, about Red Cross reports of psychological torture involving psychologists. The APA consequently formed a task force called PENS (President’s Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security). Its report, subsequently discredited by ethicists inside and outside psychology as a whitewash, allowed psychologists to participate in interrogations if they were "legal," which was defined as being in compliance with Bush administration interpretations of what constitutes legal. Did Zierhoffer resign her membership because of the increased scrutiny?  

As reported here Tuesday in Torture Generates Turmoil at the APA, the organization has faced growing concern about its stance on torture, and particularly its unwillingness to say that psychologists should not participate in BSCTs when violation of international law is occurring or likely to occur.

Today, Leonard S. Rubenstein, president of Physicians for Human Rights, which operates the Campaign Against Torture, sent a letter to the president and vice president of the APA:

The emerging information is alarming because it shows not only the involvement of individual psychologists in abusive CIA and military interrogations, but an institutionalized program of psychological torture supervised by teams of CIA psychologists and the Pentagon’s Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT), staffed predominantly by psychologists.

To date, the APA has been muted about these revelations. It has twice passed resolutions reaffirming its opposition to torture and ill treatment but the Association has never explicitly condemned the operations and policies authorizing such abuses, nor concluded its ethics investigations of psychologists who have engaged in such conduct. ...

It is past time for the APA to explicitly and categorically reject the use of psychologists and psychology to perpetrate a widespread, command-ordered program of torture and abuse. General statements opposing torture fail to fully address the reality of what psychologists have done.

The letter asks APA to take six steps: acknowledge that psychologists were "deeply and structurally involved" in detainee torture and degrading treatment; condemn such behavior as unethical; demand that Congress set up an independent commission to investigate the role of military and intelligence psychologists in torture; appoint a blue-ribbon APA panel to review the role of psychologists in torture; initiate disciplinary measures against any APA member alleged to have participated in torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment; reform APA's ethical rules.

Said PHR CEO A. Frank Donaghue:

"The APA must hold psychologists who were involved in the abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. custody accountable. The APA should implement critical reforms to its ethics code.  On the top the list is ensuring that psychologists be required to adhere to the highest ethical standards, rather than be allowed to descend to the lowest interpretations of the law."

Each new revelation that emerges in the cases of the detainees that the Bush administration tried to turn into non-persons rekindles the rage of anyone who believes in civilized behavior and the rule of law. But none is more chilling than the knowledge that medical professionals and psychologists willingly participated in violating the most basic human rights, and that, in the latter case, their leading professional organization has yet to deliver clear and firm objections against that behavior.  

Republicans love to wear their serious mask when they tell everyone how concerned they are about families being hurt by high oil prices. For more than a quarter century, with the assistance of some equally myopic Democrats, they've maintained an energy policy that has meant gung-ho support of Middle East dictators (brought to power by a coup d'etat when necessary), generated wars, contributed to global warming, coddled voracious energy corporations, and, most recently, left auto-dependent Americans gasping as they watched the pump numbers blur past while filling their tanks.

Behind the mask, they're secretly smiling. Because in a year when they've got precious little with which to woo voters, the steep rise in oil prices has given them one thing with which to hammer the Democrats, a wish come true: more drilling on off-shore taxpayer land. Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer nails it as the "drillusion." That it is. Unfortunately, everything points to a Republican victory in this matter. Chances are that by October 1, what the drill, drill, drill advocates led by South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint are brilliantly calling "American Energy Freedom Day" will come to pass. Even though it's baloney. And even though "Freedom Day" would not only open all off-shore land to potential leasing but also oil shale land in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.  

Unhampered by its few internal dissenters, and despite ample evidence proving otherwise, the bogus GOP line has it that drilling for oil in previously protected areas of the outer continental shelf will reduce gasoline prices and lead to energy independence. So, drill, drill, drill is the chant, another example of the framing that the GOP has perfected over the decades. It seems to be working. Hard-hit by higher fuel prices and collateral damage to prices of goods dependent on oil, a majority of Americans – often a very large majority – tell pollsters they want more drilling, even at the expense of environmental protections, even in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

If Republicans really cared about the little guy being battered by oil prices you'd think maybe they'd argue for more energy assistance in the budget for people who heat their homes with oil this coming winter. Or support the kind of stimulus plan that Senator Obama has offered. But no. Because their real goal is to hold America ransom for Exxon's and Chevron's profits.

Since House adjournment, a small coterie of Republicans has been protesting on the floor every day, demanding that Speaker Nancy Pelosi call the House back into session for an "up or down" vote on ending the congressional ban on additional off-shore drilling, in place since 1981. Until Monday, Pelosi had held her ground. Now she says she might be flexible about such a vote when the House reconvenes if it is part of some larger package that includes, among other things, releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a move that in the past drove down a temporary spike in oil prices.

Then there is the Gang of 10, that group of conservative Republicans and centrist/center-right Democrats who are in the process of banging into a compromise a collection of energy proposals that includes substantial government incentives to business and consumers for renewable alternatives, coal-to-liquids technology, some help for nuclear power, and, of course, the opening of more drilling leases. Before he left on vacation, Senator Obama, who has placed energy policy as one of his three top priorities if he wins the Presidency, indicated some flexibility on oil drilling as it relates to the Gang of 10's plan.

That plan has played to mixed reviews among Democrats, progressives, and environmental advocates in and out of wwwLand. There is a widespread – though far from universal view – that accepting the Gang's approach is the politically astute, expedient and smart thing to do. Undercut the GOP advantage on the drilling issue by yielding to the inevitable, as some have put it, and thereby inoculate Democrats on Election Day. A cheap bargain, the argumnet goes, because companies will never drill anyway or the new President can reverse the deal come January.  

Thus, on the cusp of a new administration, after 27 years of lousy energy policies that have brought us to our current situation, there is a scurry to pass a cobbled-together energy policy – still not completely written – with just a couple of weeks of discussion. One final victory for a lame-duck administration run by oil men and their pals whose secret energy meetings on government time we are still not privy to. Odds are there will not be a reversal of this policy once passed.

Just one of the areas that deserves far more debate is, surprise, oil and gas leasing. When  leases on private land pay royalties of 12% to 25%, why should taxpayers only receive 12% to 16%? What about decades of royalty underpayments on taxpayer-owned land and Indian tribal land and allotments? What about the 68 million acres already being leased but not being drilled? Why grant more oil-shale leases when the five current demonstration leases are years from producing commercially viable oil from a source whose promise of bonanza has failed three times in the past 120 years, bankrupting dozens of companies and soaking up hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies?

Nonetheless, the rush is on, and the Republicans have an ace up their sleeve. The ban on additional off-shore leases must be renewed each year by September 30. The extension is attached as a rider to the annual appropriations bill. Senator DeMint says 36 of the 49 Republican senators have signed a letter to Senate leaders opposing a renewal of the ban. Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling is said to have gotten 136 House Republicans to sign a similar letter.

CongressDaily (subscription only) reports:

"Many people aren't aware that these bans on drilling must be renewed every year, and that all we have to do is to allow these prohibitions to expire on Oct. 1," DeMint said in a statement released Tuesday.

"In just 50 days, Americans will have the freedom to pursue their own energy resources here at home," he added. DeMint argued that it was "irrational to say 'no' to American energy" because it was needed to reduce independence on foreign oil and bring down gas prices.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has likened this attempt to block the renewals to the 1995-1996 government shutdown forced by a stalemate over spending bills between President Clinton and congressional Republicans. That effort, led by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, wounded the GOP.

"If they want to shut down the government, denying millions of senior citizens their Social Security checks, in order to side with big oil companies, then they should go right ahead," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said today. "But as Speaker Gingrich found out, the entire Republican Party will pay a terrible price in November for such a silly and desperate stunt."

The problem is that Democratic defections over oil leasing might make it difficult to get the ban renewal attached to the appropriations bill in the first place. Reid has said he might try to renew the bans with a continuing spending resolution. This would be a means of going around the annual appropriations bill by adopting current spending levels until the 111th Congress convenes in January with a bevy of new members. But that approach would require 60 votes to break a likely GOP filibuster, and Reid simply doesn't have them. He may not even have 50.

As unlikely as is finding 60 votes in the Senate and 218 in the House to renew the ban, it's nothing compared with getting the 67 Senate votes and 290 House votes required to override a Bush veto. And if the ban is attached to a continuing resolution, then the question arises: Who wins the battle over drilling vs. everything else the government does?

No Social Security checks go out, Veterans' Administration hospitals start turning people away, and, of course, gas prices remain near $4. With three weeks to sort it all out, right in the middle of a watershed election campaign, who would really "pay a terrible price in November"?

The smart money says we're headed for another lame energy policy, not a far-sighted, planet-friendly, grandchildren-friendly, well-integrated, comprehensive package of proposals but a mish-mash of contradictory elements that nudges us into a different lane of the disastrous road we've been hurtling down since we took our first sip of Saudi crude six decades ago.

Ken Silverstein at Harper's Wednesday delivers a deeply satisfying one-two punch against David Broder, the so-called "dean" of Washington political reporters.

Broder was on-line with readers when this exchange occurred:

Re: Speaking Fees: A few weeks ago, the paper's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, wrote a critical piece about your acceptance of speaking fees and the fact that you have spoken before groups that lobby Congress on several occasions. How much do think this revelation hurts your credibility? Personally, I find it difficult to take you seriously on any of the issues (like health care) where you accepted fees and accomodations from advocacy groups in the area.

David S. Broder: You are certainly entitled to judge my work by whatever standard you wish. I iwould simply point out to you that I have never accepted a speaking fee from a health care or medical group since I started covering that policy area 16 years ago.

In fact, Howell was spurred to write her piece by Silverstein's digging in June.

What he found, and what Broder admitted to when Howell pressed him, was that he had broken the Washington Post's rules regarding accepting speaking engagements without advance permission from an editor. While he didn't accept a fee from Western Conference of Prepaid Medical Service Plans (mostly Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans) when he spoke at their event last October, they did cover travel and hotel accommodations for him, Silverstein discovered, noting that "at minimum he is parsing words." And Broder did at the same time write a column sympathetic to a health care plan Blue Cross likes.

That's not all. Silverstein writes:

...Broder has apparently spoken at least three other times before health care groups:

   At the Association for Community Health Improvement in 2005, at the Hyatt Regency in Tampa, Florida. The group is a coalition of for-profit and non-profit hospitals, government health officials, community health centers.
   
   At the American College of Physicians, during a lobbying visit the group paid to Washington in the summer of 2005.
   
   At the American Academy of Family Physicians in 1999, in Orlando, Florida.

Was Broder paid for these speeches, or did he accept travel and accommodations for the trips to Florida? Maybe the Post should find out.

Silverstein chose kindness in saying that what Broder did in another instance was to "flagrantly mislead" readers, when "lied to" would have been just as accurate. The columnist had told Howell when she was writing her column critiquing him that he had attended an American Council for Capital Formation event, "but did not give a speech" to the group, as Silverstein reported. But, in fact, an ACCF publication reported on Broder’s speech to the group and included a photograph of him addressing the crowd.

A question worth investigating for some individual with time on her hands, or of a collaborative group, is how many columnists are paid for speaking engagements and subsequently, without disclosing their financial interests, write favorably about the groups who paid them. The only difference between this kind of behavior and what Armstrong Williams did is that former Tribune Media Services/Los Angeles Times Syndicate columnist took taxpayer money for his shillery.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted, including the story, A quarter of all home sales result in loss.

At The Christian Science Monitor, Ben Arnoldy writes:

^{Internet attacks on Georgia expose a key flaw for more than 100 nations.}

As Georgian troops retreated to defend their capital from Russian attack, the websites of their government, also under fire, retreated to Google.

In an Internet first, Georgia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reopened its site on Google's free Blogger network and gave reporters a Gmail address to reach the National Security Council.

The attacks have deluged the websites of the president, various ministries, and news agencies with bogus traffic. The jam not only shut down those sites but also clogged Georgia's Internet access, exposing its reliance on Russian Internet pipelines. ...

"The lesson here for Washington is that any modern conflict will include a cyberwarfare component, simply because it's too inexpensive to be passed up," says Bill Woodcock, research director at Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit Internet research institute in San Francisco. "The best [defensive] strategy is always preparedness. We've spent eight years completely ignoring that, while the Chinese and Indian governments have been paying really close attention and investing many tens of billions of dollars."

Georgia's Internet infrastructure has two big weaknesses. First, most of its external connections go through Russia. Second, there's a lack of internal connections called Internet exchange points. So when a Web surfer in Georgia calls up a Georgian Web page, that request routes through another country, which is similar to driving to Mexico to get across town in San Francisco, says Mr. Woodcock, whose organization helps countries build their own Internet exchange points.

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Total fatalities of U.S. military in Iraq since March 2003: 4139

Total fatalities of coalition military in same period: 4453

Total fatalities of Iraqis as a consequence of the invasion and occupation: Uncertain, but ranging as high as 1.4 million

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The Overnight News Digest is posted. including the story, Diary shows Tojo resisted surrender till end.

The Republican National Committee's spies have been stalking Senator Obama and his family during their vacation in Hawai`i, looking for more signs of elitism.

And sure enough, after eating popcorn and watching the Dark Knight with another couple at the Ward 16 Theater, they headed off for what CBS News called "the posh Mariposa Restaurant. The restaurant is located on the third floor of the Neiman Marcus department store and has a view of the ocean."

Ritzy. How much more elitist can they be? Surely they could have found something more appropriate in Myrtle Beach. Something properly vetted by Cokie.

Our own spy at the RNC tells us that since John McCain has now gotten himself up to speed on the Google, we can expect him to start making inroads with the kid vote. He is, we're told, learning all about them at their Facespace and Mybook and Tweeter sites. Moreover (you heard it here exclusively), sometime in the next couple of days, McCain will turn his mediocre standing in the polls skyward with his first rap song. Sorry no visuals.

He's Not Like You and Me.

He's thin and fit and he doesn't bowl. He drinks orange juice and his church is strange, y'know. His flag pin is AWOL and his name is Hussein. He eats fancy food at fancy restaurants instead of instant chow mein. He was born of exotic parents in a land of coconuts and bamboo. His wife is mouthy and his hue is taboo. He ain't really 'murkan, Larry Johnson tells me, so it must be true.

Please, make it be November already.

Unlike the people in Stalin’s Soviet Union, no U.S. official risked disappearing into the prison for dissent. Senior State Department and Defense Department official, field commanders, intelligence and FBI officers, and frontline soldiers dissented. They were usually ignored. A few were threatened with administrative sanctions; a few were reassigned; a few requested reassignment. The possibility of dissent makes the silence and complicity of senior and frontline medical personnel in the abuse and neglect of prisoners that much more inexplicable and inexcusable.         – Dr. Steven H. Miles, M.D., Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror

Despite Dr. Miles’s book, despite Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, despite reports such as the Physicians for Human Rights' Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and its Impact, Americans still don't have anywhere near a full picture of what happened after the Cheney-Bush administration decided to spit on the Geneva Conventions, redefine and fine-tune torture and treat human beings like the inferior creatures it thought them to be.

What we do know is horrible enough. Most horrible of all is knowing that medical personnel and psychologists violated the most basic ethics of their professions – Do No Harm – by participating in and helping to design "enhanced" interrogations designed to break prisoners. Some did break. Some were killed. This systematic torture focused on sensory and sleep deprivation, overstimulation, and dependency creation. Massive amounts of pain and fear were also included. For their part, psychologists "reverse-engineered" the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program – designed to help American soldiers and marines resist torture – as a means to teach interrogators how to employ torture against captives.  

Let me repeat that. Training established to help American prisoners of war cope with, or at least anticipate, their captors' efforts to break them down was "reverse-engineered" as a means to break down prisoners at Guantánamo and "black sites" run by the CIA or military intelligence operations in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Talk about becoming the enemy.

We also know that, even after the supposed banning of some measures that had been previously approved by the Secretary of Defense, these techniques continued at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, and probably other prisons, even while the Inspector General was putting a seal of approval on the whole affair.

As Josh White wrote in the Washington Post last Friday:

At least 17 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to a program that moved them repeatedly from cell to cell to cause sleep deprivation and disorientation as punishment and to soften detainees for subsequent interrogation, according to U.S. military documents.

Defense Department investigations of abuse had previously revealed that the program was used in a limited manner and only on high-value detainees, but the documents indicate that the program was far more widespread and that the technique was still used months after it was banned at the facility in March 2004. Detainees were moved dozens of times in just days and sometimes more than a hundred times over a two-week period.

Military police logs for cell blocks at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, show that guards used the program -- dubbed the "frequent flyer" program in official documents -- on numerous detainees and noted the program in their 2003 and 2004 records. The logs, reviewed by The Washington Post, also indicate that the frequent cell movements took place on the same days a Navy admiral was visiting Guantanamo to assess possible detainee abuses.

The Defense Department claims the program stopped in 2004. A spokesperson told White that all prisoners are treated humanely.

Cough, cough.

"Frequent flyers." Think about the kind of mentality that not only designs torture methods but turns them into a joke.

Twenty-four-year-old Mohammed Jawad, who will soon go on trial by military tribunal for trying to kill U.S. forces in Afghanistan with a grenade, has sought to have all the charges against him dropped because of abuse he suffered, including that caused by frequent moves.

Air Force Maj. David Frakt, Jawad's lawyer, said the newly revealed records demonstrate that:

"...no one actually knows the full scope of the abuses at Guantanamo" and that "all of these allegedly comprehensive investigations were whitewashes."

"This is only the tip of the iceberg," Frakt said. "This program was approved at the highest levels. ... It suggests that people had simply lost their ability to distinguish right from wrong."

With all due respect to the major, that puts the best face on it. Because among those engaged in vetting, monitoring and carrying out this program approved at the highest levels were some of the very people we count on to help us distinguish right from wrong. In some cases, they evaluated the status of a prisoner and informed interrogators that he was good for another round or two of "questioning."

This must stop, wrote psychoanalyst Stephen Soldz in a Sunday Boston Globe Op-Ed, Ending the psychological mind games on detainees:

Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct of abuses against detainees in US custody at Guantanamo, the CIA's secret "black sites," and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologists should not be taking part in such practices.

Yet a steady stream of revelations from government documents, journalistic reports, and congressional hearings has revealed that psychologists designed the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" techniques – which included locking prisoners in tiny cages in the fetal position, throwing them against the wall head first, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding.

Jane Mayer ... reports that the central idea was the psychological concept of "learned helplessness." Individuals are denied all control over their world, lose their will and become totally dependent upon their captors.

What angers Soldz and hundreds of other professional psychologists and psychoanalysts is that their organization, the American Psychological Association, has taken an official position that the presence of psychologists makes detainees safer at interrogations. That view, Soldz declares every chance he gets, is ludicrous. In fact, the policy enables the torturers.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Glenn writes that, according to Mayer's book:

...Martin E.P. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a former president of the psychology association, accepted a CIA invitation to lecture at a naval training center about his theories of  "learned helplessness."

Mr. Seligman's widely respected research suggests that when people and animals are traumatized at random intervals, they tend to give up: They stop seeking to rationally help themselves, and they stop responding to ordinary incentives.

Mr. Seligman insists that his 2002 lecture was intended only to help train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if they are captured. But in his 50-person audience that day were Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell, psychologists who operate a consulting firm that helped the CIA develop interrogation techniques that some critics have called abusive. According to Ms. Mayer's book, Mr. Mitchell has long been fascinated by learned-helplessness theory. (Through a lawyer, Mr. Mitchell denied to Ms. Mayer that his CIA interrogation techniques were inspired by Mr. Seligman's work.)

Few people in the psychology association believe that Mr. Seligman consciously assisted in the development of detainee abuses. But many say that the association needs to make a more thorough public accounting of how the work of Mr. Seligman and other prominent members may have been misused by government agencies.

Soldz, and four other authors addressed the Seligman matter at some length in the July 23 issue of Dissident Voice:

This history, along with the current, well-documented authorizations for detainee abuse, should have provided sufficient warning to APA leaders and to individual psychologists about the moral risks in aiding the national security apparatus, especially under the present U.S. administration. But the APA has not taken the lead in helping psychologists confront these dangerous ethical situations. To the contrary, the APA has been insensitive to the use of psychological techniques in torture and to the role of psychologists in aiding that torture. This insensitivity itself has shocked many psychologists here and abroad.

So, for the second year in a row, the issue of torture and illegal detention will be a hot one at the APA's annual convention, which begins Thursday in Boston. Soldz will be on hand for a protest. In addition to rejecting the APA's position on torture and interrogations, the protesters will be backing the candidacy of Dr. Steven Reisner for the presidency of the organization as well as the "Aye" vote on a referendum that would reinforce the first principle of the APA ethics code: "Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm."

Reisner, a psychoanalyst, is a senior faculty member and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, an adjunct professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University, and a consultant to the United Nations on stress and trauma. He is a leader of Psychologists for an Ethical Psychology, and, with Soldz and others, a leading critic of the APA's position. In April, the mail-in nominating procedure for the APA presidency gave Reisner the most votes (more than 30%) of any of the five candidates who will compete with each other for the post in October,

The mail-in referendum has tough opposition. It states:

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva  Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.

You can read the entire resolution with all its whereases, pro and con statements and pro and con rebuttals here.

For the past few years, the APA bureaucracy and a good piece of the membership has played a game of on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand regarding the role of psychologists and psychoanalysts in the kinds of interrogations brought to us by Donald Rumsfeld and other outlaws in the current administration.

There's just one problem with the APA's hemming and hawing approach: Torture is not a nuanced issue.

At the Guardian Rachel Williams writes:

^{Rape victims told alcohol consumption may cost them compensation}

Rape victims seeking compensation are having their payouts reduced if they had been drinking before they were attacked.

Campaigners called on the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) to end the application to rape victims of a clause that says awards in all types of cases can be cut if consumption of alcohol "contributed to the circumstances that gave rise to the injury". ...

One woman, who believes she was raped after having her drink spiked, told the Guardian it "felt like a slap in the face" when she read that the standard award of £11,000 [approximately $21,200] would be reduced by 25% in her case, to £8,250 [$16,000].

"The evidence that we have shows that your excessive consumption of alcohol was a contributing factor in the incident," she was informed by the CICA. ...

CICA pays compensation to eligible applicants in Scotland, England and Wales who have been victims of physical or psychological injuries from a violent crime. The payment system, which ranges from £1000 to £250,000, was established in 1964 and now sets specific amounts for each injury. An additional payment up to £250,000 is obtainable in cases of lost wages. Payments are based on what victims would likely have received in civil litigation. In the 2007-2008 fiscal year ending last March, CICA paid 39,183 victims a total of £235 million. About 1400 of those were rape victims.

After complaints about the rape exclusion for alcohol, the justice minister, Bridget Prentice, said:

"Although I cannot comment on the individual decisions of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority I can be clear that it is not our policy to reduce the level of award to a victim of rape due to alcohol consumption.

"This stance supports our view that a victim of rape is not in any way culpable due to alcohol consumption. It is never an individual's fault if he/she gets raped; regardless of how much he/she has drunk."

Somebody in authority obviously thought otherwise.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story, As Latin Nations Treat Gays Better, Asylum Is Elusive.

Josh Holland at Alternet writes:

^{Big business has prepared a war chest of at least $150 million to stop progressive economic legislation that would seriously tax the rich}

...it may be a bill that many Americans have never heard of that sparks the most pitched battle Washington has seen since the Civil Rights Act. It's called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) -- a measure that would go a long way toward guaranteeing working people the right to join a union if they so choose -- and it has the potential to reverse more than three decades of painful stagflation, with prices rising and paychecks flat, for America's middle class and working poor.

The Chamber of Commerce, D.C. lobbyists, firms that rely on cheap labor and a host of "astroturf" front groups are building a war chest that could reach hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to build a firewall against EFCA and other efforts to put a check on corporate power and rebuild a declining middle class. ...

According to a report in the National Journal that received less attention, "several business-backed groups ... (including) two fledgling coalitions fighting labor-supported legislation and the conservative political group Freedom's Watch are trying to raise $100 million for issue advocacy and get-out-the-vote efforts to benefit about 10 GOP Senate races."

It's the EFCA -- the idea that working people who want to join a union can -- that has corporate America quaking in its collective boots. The bill passed the House easily in 2007 -- by 56 votes -- and had majority support in the Senate. But it didn't reach the 60 votes required to kill a GOP-led filibuster, and that massive war chest being amassed by the corporate Right is, in part, an attempt to maintain a firewall of at least 41 anti-union senators -- mostly Republicans joined by a few corporatist Dems -- to kill the bill in the 2009 Congress. President Bush threatened to veto the legislation if it had passed in 2007, but this time around, they fear that a Democrat will be sitting in the White House. Obama was a co-sponsor of the 2007 legislation; McCain opposed it.

The prospect of a filibuster-proof majority that's sympathetic to the needs of ordinary working Americans, according to the National Journal, is making "business groups jittery."

It would nice if "business groups" were as jittery as people who live paycheck to paycheck.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted, with ample material on the war in Georgia and this story, Afghan president urges military action in Pakistan.

Scott Horton at Harper's writes:

^{The Justice Department’s Truthiness Problem}

In her recent book, Dark Side, Jane Mayer interviews senior political appointees, all card-carrying Republican conservatives with long records of faithful service to the Republican Party, who describe the atmosphere of fear and intimidation which the White House had carefully cultivated in the nation’s erstwhile temple of justice. The message was clear: the Justice Department existed to do the White House’s political bidding. Any suggestion of independence or fidelity to the law would be rudely crushed. Many were convinced their phones were being tapped illegally. Some even feared that they might be targeted for a hit or "accidentally" run over by a truck (the favored tactic of the Ukrainian mafiosi with whom Karl Rove was seen hobnobbing at Yalta only a few weeks ago). Any hint of caution about the White House’s agenda would be enough to destroy a career. This is the environment in which the Justice Department launched roughly six criminal probes into Democratic political figures for every one targeting a Republican. It was a Justice Department hijacked and converted into a partisan political attack machine.

Still, the Inspector General’s report concluded that the hacks were there to stay. Glenn Fine took a "forgive and forget" attitude towards the perpetrators, recommending no criminal action against them, though that was plainly a viable option. And most disturbingly, the Inspector General report stopped with Sampson and Goodling, not venturing to peel back the curtain to look at the person who trained them and for whom they were working: Karl Rove. ...

In other administrations, the fact that two senior Justice Department officers were refusing to cooperate with a criminal probe would be shocking news. The fact that they had to be subpoenaed to answer questions about their official conduct at the Justice Department would grab headlines. For the Bush Justice Department, however, it’s just another day, hardly any different from those that preceded or will follow it. Indeed, the sense among senior Justice staff with whom I have spoken is that Schlozman and Spakovsky are, relatively speaking, small fry. The focus remains on the investigation of the U.S. attorneys’ scandal, which involves serious allegations of wrongdoing and the prospect of a criminal probe of the Department’s four most senior political appointees, starting with Attorney General Gonzales. Still the real focus of inquiries into the scandal is not on the Justice Department at all, but rather its former political puppetmaster, Karl Rove.

The Inspector General’s report on the U.S. attorney’s scandal is due to be released before Labor Day, the traditional start of the presidential campaign.

More words to add to the gigantic pile that indicts the Cheney-Bush administration. Metaphorically speaking, of course. As for real indictments, puhleez.  

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Senator Obama and his family are on vacation in Hawai'i, but when you're running for the Presidency, they never let you escape the microphones for too long. Here's a photo of him. You can find more in Haole in Hawaii's Diary, Obama Event in Honolulu, A Photo Diary

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The Overnight News Digest is posted, and includes this story, Abkhazia Threatens Georgia with Second Front.

By now you've probably heard about the brainless July 29 police assault on Cheye Calvo of Berwyn Heights, Md., and his family. First the cops plant marijuana on them, then storm the house, terrorize Calvo, his mother-in-law, and his wife, and shoot dead their two Labrador retrievers. Despite having apparently been investigating a pot-smuggling ring for some time, the cops didn't even know that Calvo is the community's mayor.

Doug Donovan at The Baltimore Sun wrote:

After the raid, Prince George's County police officials who burst into the home of Berwyn Heights' mayor last week seized the same unopened package of marijuana that an undercover officer had delivered an hour earlier.

What police left behind was a house stained with blood and a trail of questions about their conduct. No other evidence of illegal activity was found, and no one was arrested at Mayor Cheye Calvo's home in this small bedroom community near College Park.

This week Prince George's police arrested two men for orchestrating a plot to deliver marijuana to the addresses of unsuspecting recipients - among them, Calvo's wife, Trinity Tomsic.

Yet neither county Police Chief Melvin C. High nor Sheriff Michael A. Jackson have apologized to him, his wife or her mother, Georgia Porter, for the raid that traumatized the family and killed their black Labrador retrievers, Payton and Chase.

Yesterday, Calvo called on the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights decision to investigate the raid and other similar actions by Prince George's law enforcement. He said officers burst into his house without knocking or announcing themselves, in violation of the warrant they had.

And for what? Weed. Even the most avid drug foe cannot say with a straight face that marijuana comes within a country mile of equaling the negative impact on society of alcohol. But, of course, one is legal and the other is prohibited and the law must at all costs be enforced.

It would be encouraging at this juncture if the word "unbelievable" could be used to describe what happened to Mayor Calvo and his family. But it is completely believable to anyone who has even cursorily followed the grotesqueries of what Richard Nixon first called the War on Drugs 37 years ago. These sorts of "mistaken" raids happen frequently, but don't get the publicity that an infuriated white mayor in an upscale community can elicit. Calvo and his family were lucky one of them wasn't shot like a dog. It wouldn't have been the first time.

In this case, apparently, not only did the police step over the bounds of commonsense and decency - Calvo claims they shot one Labrador as it was running away - they may well have acted illegally and lied about it.

According to Rosalind S. Helderman at the Washington Post:

Prince George's County authorities did not have a "no-knock" warrant when they burst into the home of a mayor July 29, shooting and killing his two dogs -- contrary to what police said after the incident. ...

But a review of the warrant indicates that police neither sought nor received permission from Circuit Court Judge Albert W. Northrup to enter without knocking. Northrup found probable cause to suspect that drugs might be in the house and granted police a standard search warrant.

"There's nothing in the four corners of the warrant saying anything about the Calvos being a threat to law enforcement," said Calvo's attorney, Timothy Maloney. "This was a lawless act by law enforcement."

Unlike other illegal raids against innocent people, this is probably going to be an expensive one for the police. Meaning an outlay of county cash in a settlement decree plus the bad publicity. Which is as it should be.  

But ultimately it will surely turn out as just another quickly forgotten bump in the road for America's $50 billion-a-year drug interdiction effort.

After nearly four decades of official war and a more informal effort for decades before that, what has all this accomplished? Drugs are used by people across ethnic, gender, class and educational lines. Today they are cheaper and often of higher quality than in the past. They are more accessible to young people. Programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education are failures. The percentage of people incarcerated for non-violent drug-related crimes is shocking, and even though drugs are used by all segments of society, most of those imprisoned for drug crimes are likely to be poor and non-white. When they emerge from the slam again, they are tainted as drug felons, barred from getting education loans, and face, as do all felons, a tough time finding employment, with all the costs to society of that multifaceted problem.

Crime itself, including much violent crime and a huge proportion of thefts, is exacerbated by drug laws, as is corruption among public officials, including, all-too-often police. Meanwhile, those who need treatment beds for drug addiction have a hard time finding them because of lack of funding that might be available if so many people weren't being stuck in prison beds.

A few years ago, some brave mayors of long incumbency and a few retired police chiefs - notably Norm Stamper of Seattle and Joe McNamara of San Jose - said it was time to stop the insanity and remake American drug laws. Not across-the-board wholesale legalization, but sensible reform, including recognition of the fact that tens of millions use marijuana.  However, despite the profound wreckage caused by this long-running war, there isn't a handful of nationally prominent politicians who will dare stand up to say or do anything about it.

You’re an asshole, John Edwards. Adultery is a private offense, of course, a matter to be resolved between you and your wife. How she chooses to deal with this ought not to be something that holier-than-thou pundits argue she should behave the way so many did in the case of Hillary Clinton in regards to Bill’s philandering. If she forgives you, as millions have done for their straying spouses, then count yourself lucky.

But I don’t forgive you. And I suspect many of your long-time supporters will not either. How can we? Your betrayal of us and the Democratic Party was not a private matter.

We can all complain with justification that sexual hypocrisy is rife in this country, that it would greatly benefit our collective psyche if everybody would do to others what they expect others to do for them: mind their own business. But it isn’t that way now. Politicians are necessarily in the public eye, and while many a good citizen doesn’t blink at what you’ve just admitted, many do. And that fact can cost us dearly at elections.

One can argue persuasively that it shouldn’t matter.  But should isn’t the real world, and it’s delusional to operate these days as a politican with the idea that what you have done doesn’t affect how some people might vote.

You knew when you declared for the presidency that this affair hung over you, that it might easily come to light. That it could, had you gained the nomination, have wrecked the party’s chances for winning the White House, tamped down support for Democrats running for seats in Congress, and set progressives back a decade. You knew that when you kept your name in the hopper for the vice presidency.

But you kept running anyway. You lied. And you got others to lie for you. You did this knowing full well the damage that could be done, not to your marriage, but to the party and the aspirations for better governance of those who looked to you as a leader who could help bring it about.

Your populist message was and is a crucial one, the source of much of your support, the reason that many of us backed you even though your past record on an array of issues, including Iraq, gave us pause. We gave you credit for changing your mind. Your speaking out for the needs of a sector of the population previously ignored by other candidates created a powerful and loyal constituency.

You have made it clear that you cared more about yourself than about that constituency. Than about us. You were willing to take a chance that you would be nominated for the Presidency and that the revelation of this affair would put a Republican in the White House, ironically, a Republican who betrays and mistreats the women in his life, too.

Do us all a favor, eh? Disappear for the next three months.
 

 

At Mother Jones, Justin Elliott writes:

^{Don't Know Much About History}

In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA) published an 85-page monograph called "Military Advantage in History." Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's "futurist in chief," the study looks back to the past—way back. It examines four empires, or "pivotal hegemonic powers in history," to draw lessons about how the United States "should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Though unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to some of history's most powerful empires.

The study looks a little like a high school text book, devoting chapters to Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France and citing texts by Sun Tzu, Livy, and Jared Diamond. It attempts to break down exactly how historic empires sustained their military might across continents and even centuries. The study posits that the historical examples offer "insights into what drives U.S. military advantage," as well as "where U.S. vulnerabilities may lie, and how the United States should think about maintaining its military advantage in the future." ...

Most striking is how the study conceives of the United States in imperial terms. "You'll see some neoconservatives at the beginning of the Bush administration crowing that 'we do have an empire, let's just come out of the closet and say we do,'" said Ivan Eland, the author of a book on America's "informal empire" and the director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute, on hearing a description of the study. "But the administration never did that because empire doesn't sell well with the public." After reviewing the study at Mother Jones' request, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, said he was struck by its "arrogance and immorality." "The presumption that the United States should rule the world, sword at the ready, for the foreseeable future is an unacceptable basis for a just, even-handed foreign policy."

Elliott goes on to point out that it isn't just objectionable ideology to be found in the monograph, but factual inaccuracy as well. Given a chance to review the section on the transformation of the Roman Army over a period of 1000 years, Lee Brice of Western Illinois University, who is the president of the Society of Ancient Military Historians, described it as "so completely incorrect as to be useless."

The entire study, Brice said, is afflicted with "an intense, myopic habit of wanting to make the ancient world fit into modern stereotypes," something that might be expected in "much lower-undergraduate-level work."

It's become habitual over the past nearly eight years to tie such work to the machinations of the Cheney-Bush administration, but imperial thinking is no newcomer to American politics, nor the project of a single administration or two. In this case the idea for the study arose in 1999. Its five authors, employees of federal intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, wrote it for the Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center - a Department of Defense operation that their company has run since 1998. Elliott notes that the Carlyle Group announced in May that it will be taking over Booz Allen's government services operation.

Just as the transformation of the United States from great power to American Empire was not done on the watch of a single administration, it will not be dismantled by a single one. Just getting started on such a project will require a commitment to actually want to dismantle and the political clout to move in that direction.

Gargantuan forces - including a deeply instilled belief among most Americans that the U.S. has no empire - form a strong counterweight to any such moves. One of the strongest of those forces is the election-killing theme that any leaders who try to reduce the imperial footprint - though they do not describe it as such - are "weak on defense." Overcoming that obfuscation, then, has to be the first step.

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted..}