Northman's Fury

This, while not surprising, is certainly noteworthy.

The Bush administration is pushing to take control of the promotions of military lawyers, escalating a conflict over the independence of uniformed attorneys who have repeatedly raised objections to the White House's policies toward prisoners in the war on terrorism.

The administration has proposed a regulation requiring "coordination" with politically appointed Pentagon lawyers before any member of the Judge Advocate General corps - the military's 4,000-member uniformed legal force - can be promoted.

A Pentagon spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the reasoning behind the proposed regulations. But the requirement of coordination - which many former JAGs say would give the administration veto power over any JAG promotion or appointment - is consistent with past administration efforts to impose greater control over the military lawyers.

And it doesn’t take too much imagination to determine the reason for the administration to try and get this greater control.

The JAG rule would give new leverage over the JAGs to the Pentagon's general counsel, William "Jim" Haynes, who was appointed by President Bush. Haynes has been the Pentagon's point man in the disputes with the JAGs who disagreed with the administration's assertion that the president has the right to bypass the Geneva Conventions and other legal protections for wartime detainees.

. . .

One of Haynes' allies on the Bush administration legal team, former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, recently coauthored a law review article sharply critical of the JAGs' unwillingness to endorse the legality of the administration's treatment of wartime detainees.

Yoo, who wrote a series of controversial legal opinions about the president's power to bypass the Geneva Conventions and antitorture laws before leaving government in 2003, called for some kind of "corrective measures" that would "punish" JAGs who undermine the president's policy preferences.

. . .

The new proposal goes further than anything the administration has pushed before because it would affect all military lawyers, not just the top JAGs. Retired Rear Admiral Donald Guter, the Navy's top JAG from 2000 to 2002, said the rule would "politicize" the JAG corps all the way "down into the bowels" of its lowest ranks.

"That would be the end of the professional [JAG] corps as we know it," Guter said.

And as we all know, competent professionals have a liberal bias and must be destroyed at all costs.

Once we get rid of all those “quaint” notions regarding impartiality, oversight, adhering to signed treaties, and so forth, we can get back to basically treating any law we don’t agree with as suggestions without those damned “professionals” squawking.

Dana at the Galloping Beaver has a good post illustrating how our "Environment" Minister acted like a good little minion of the Bush White House to obstruct as much progress as possible at Bali, and CathiefromCanada sums up his "leadership" after the reluctant acceptance of the deal. I just thought it would be nice to add this little snippet of just how crappy our environmental record and policies really are. We're getting our ass kicked by Mexico, not to mention just about everyone else.

Europe is known as a champion of combating climate change. But a developing country famous for its capital's polluted air is also a surprising front-runner: Mexico.

Mexico ranked fourth on the Climate-Change Performance Index, which scores countries on their greenhouse-gas emissions and policy. The policy group Germanwatch released the report this week during the U.N. climate-change conference in Bali. Only Sweden, Germany and Iceland outscored Mexico, with its 110 million people. The United States ranked 55th out of 56 countries, ahead only of Saudi Arabia.

Canada ranks a pitiful 53rd, with Australia filling the gap between us and the US. India and China, who the obstructionists like to claim are the bigger problems facing the world, rank 5th and 40th respectively.

Canadians should be hanging their heads in shame.

The New York Times has a good article, (well, two), about the situation in the Ogaden region in eastern Ethiopia. I suppose it does bear repeating, as I posted on the same thing 2 1/2 weeks ago when McClatchy covered the story.

Some highlights from the NYTimes story:

The Ethiopian government, one of America’s top allies in Africa, is forcing untrained civilians — including doctors, teachers, office clerks and employees of development programs financed by the World Bank and United Nations — to fight rebels in the desolate Ogaden region, according to Western officials, refugees and Ethiopian administrators who recently defected to avoid being conscripted.

Ethiopia has been struggling with the rebels for years. But with tens of thousands of its troops now enmeshed in a bloody insurgency in Somalia and many thousands more massing on the border for a possible war with Eritrea, the government seems to be relying on civilians to do more of its fighting in the Ogaden, a bone-dry chunk of territory where Ethiopian troops have been accused by human rights groups of widespread abuses.

. . .

Dr. Sadik and other refugees described the militia program as another example of the extremes to which the Ethiopian government will go to control the Ogaden region, which lies on the border of Somalia and is home to mostly ethnic Somalis, who speak a different language and have a different culture than the highland Ethiopians who rule the country.

Several United Nations officials and Western diplomats said they were discussing the militia program in private meetings, but contended they could not comment publicly for fear of provoking the ire of the Ethiopian government, resulting in a possible suspension of humanitarian efforts in the region.

. . .

But Human Rights Watch says it has documented dozens of cases of severe abuse by Ethiopian troops in the Ogaden, including gang rapes, burned villages and what it calls “demonstration killings,” like hangings and beheadings, meant to terrorize the population.

“This is a mini-Darfur,” said Steve Crawshaw, the United Nations advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

. . .

Recent refugees said the military was trying to starve them out and the blockade had been like a noose on some parts of the region, cutting off food supplies.

In October, Save the Children U.K. surveyed more than 600 Ogadeni children and found that 21 percent were acutely malnourished, compared with United Nations surveys that found malnutrition rates of 19 percent in an area of Somalia and 13 percent in Darfur, Sudan. The United Nations considers 15 percent the emergency threshold.

And as for why all of this goes virtually unnoticed:

The Bush administration considers Ethiopia its No. 1 ally in combating terrorism in the Horn of Africa, and the American government provides it with roughly $500 million in annual aid. Last winter, American commanders gave Ethiopia prized intelligence to oust an Islamic movement that had controlled much of Somalia.

Nothing like ensuring that Americans will be hated in the Horn for generations.

John Cole has a nice round-up of something I noticed in late November; the Republican establishment getting all panicky at the thought of the social conservative Christians they've been pandering to for years might have found a candidate that actually believes in all the stuff they've been saying for years to get their votes. And John's finding it as amusing as I do.

I simply can not tell you how much I am enjoying this. The GOP has been pandering to these stupid bastards for years, and every time I pointed it out I was called “anti-Christian” or something or other. Those of us who saw what the party was becoming were told to shut up, that it was good politics.

Enjoy your new GOP, folks. And here is something else to think about- are the evangelicals going to support Romney or Giuliani if you do manage to trash Huckabee enough to secure the nomination for them? Will the eye for an eye crowd learn to forgive and forget? Have fun!

And I've also found my new favourite way to describe elections, courtesy of commenter Shinobi:

Does anyone else feel that this election is like being forced to chose a babysitter from a line up of convicted sex offenders?

A Russian rocket blasted off in Kazahkstan Friday morning, carrying with it a Canadian satellite built to keep a watchful eye over the Arctic.

One of those ironic moments where we have to use a Russian rocket to orbit a satellite whose purpose, in part, will be to keep an eye on the Russians.

It appears that the Bush Administrations' record in terror cases remains consistent.

One of seven men accused of conspiring to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower was acquitted Thursday, and a federal jury in Miami failed to reach a verdict on six others arrested in the alleged terror plot.

Clearly this shows the need for the system of military tribunals set up at Guantanamo Bay to be expanded to domestic terror cases so that men like these can be waterboarded into confessions and tried behind closed doors without access to the evidence against them.

I'm certain they'll be able to get some convictions then.

Libby at the Newshoggers sums up the latest, in what appears to be an endless series, Democratic capitulation to the White House.

But take heart! Help may be on the way to cure what I can only assume is a genetically hardwired cravenness in the Democratic leadership.

Japanese scientists say they've used genetic engineering to create mice that show no fear of felines, a development that may shed new light on mammal behavior and the nature of fear itself.

Scientists at Tokyo University say they were able to successfully switch off a mouse's instinct to cower at the smell or presence of cats - showing that fear is genetically hardwired and not learned through experience, as commonly believed.

Add this to some black market stem-cell research into spinal implantation, and the Democratic "leaders" may actually prove worthy of the title.

I wasn't going to write about the alleged rape of Jamie Leigh Jones because as with most criminal cases, I'm not privy to enough information to truly make an informed comment. On the other hand, I have no problem commenting on some of the reactions to the alleged rape, as some of them tend to be quite instructive.

The first is via mattbastard, who picks up this comment from Bread and Roses:

This has been an idea that has stayed in me [consistently] since hearing about this terrible act.

How many Iraqi children have been killed by the hoodlums of Blackwater, other ‘contractors’ and even some members of the regular armed forces? How many women raped, people maimed and humiliated in front of their loved ones?

Yet, when it happens to a pretty blonde white girl from Texas, with apparently connections to the Republican establishment - shit flows down from a great height, in the press, on TV and all over the internet.

The individual act is bad enough - but that it is only despicable when it happens to one of ‘us’ leaves me very uncomfortable.

[Bold in quoted version]

At least this commenter is uncomfortable at the double standard. Chris Jones at RedState doesn't show any such qualms:

I have been a strident defender of allowing contractors to be immune from prosecution in Iraq. I don't really lose any sleep over Blackwater having to shoot one or more people for whatever reason.

Immunity for "contractor on Iraqi" crime is one thing, but I never considered that immunity would extend to "contractor on contractor" crimes. Or more specifically "American on American" crimes. Shooting an Iraqi in a war zone is one thing, but American contractors gang-raping a 20-year old American woman is f*cking outrageous.

[Emp. mine]

As with so many other things, it's only important when it happens to "us". That Iraqis are being victimized, at probably far greater numbers and with more heinous crimes, simply doesn't matter. Immunity is fine and no punishment for such crimes is required. Just don't touch an American!

So says Chris Hitchens, who is terribly disappointed that the latest NIE appears to have put the brakes on his dreams for another glorious war against people he doesn't like, not to mention making his hero W look like an even greater idiot for continuing the WWIII rhetoric despite almost certainly knowing of the findings, though of course Chris gives Bush the benefit of the doubt and claims that the NIE's conclusions were sprung on Bush out of the blue.

How getting rid of the CIA would change the results of the other fifteen intelligence agencies who had input into the report, Hitchens fails to mention.

As Cernig notes, the wingnuts are loving the thrust of Hitchens latest diatribe. After all, it's much easier to start a war under false pretenses when there isn't anybody telling everybody that they are false pretenses.

But what I found truly interesting about the article, is that Hitchens is using the destruction of videotapes showing the probable torture of terror suspects by the CIA, which any good wingnut will tell you, is absolutely necessary to gain the kinds of critical intelligence required to win the "War on Terror", to claim that the intelligence the CIA obtained on Iran must be politicized, suspect, and can't be trusted. So we must rid ourselves of the CIA to win the "War on Terror", or so we can at least start bombing Iran, which is all the neocons really want, intelligence be damned.

Via the Beav, one of those, "You can't make this shit up moments", from the Bush White House, courtesy of White House press secretary Dana Perino

Appearing on National Public Radio's light-hearted quiz show "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me," which aired over the weekend, Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and she didn't know what it was.

"I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

Now, I'm younger than Perino is, so I also managed to miss out on any personal memories of the crisis, but someone apparently decided that the nearest the world has ever gotten to a full-fledged nuclear war was worthy of a mention in school history classes, not to mention movies, books, and re-enactments on period-based TV series. How the hell do you miss this kind of stuff?

As Dave puts it, in the Bush White House, history is, "something that will judge George Bush sometime in the nebulous future."

The latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program four years ago has claimed one casualty: CNN has postponed speculative documentary "We Were Warned -- Iran Goes Nuclear."

The two-hour spec, which was slated for Dec. 12 under the "CNN Presents" banner, was "set partially in the future," featuring a what-if scenario as former government officials -- playing fictional cabinet members -- debate how to deal with the Iranian threat.

You almost have to feel bad for them. After all, war is such a ratings booster.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people are suddenly of the opinion that NIEs should be scrutinized and looked over now that one says something they don't want to hear. And it's so nice of the Washington Post and the New York Times to take a break from their liberal bias to allow these folks to explain this to the rest of us.

In the Washington Post, John "Yosemite" Bolton discovers that the politicization of intelligence is a problem now that it doesn't support his chosen policies.

But even he doesn't go so far as Valerie Lincy and Gary Milhollin at the New York Times, who've apparently decided to channel Normon Podhertz and contend that the 16 intelligence services of the United States have apparently decided to take Iran's side, and they list out a whole host of the standard and easily debunked chickenhawk talking points about Iran's nuclear program to "prove" that the intelligence community has their heads up their collective asses to even think that Iran isn't still working hard to acquire a nuclear weapon.

The real fun part is watching them all use the horribly messed up previous NIEs to contend that we should dismiss this one as politicized. (At least they've learned a little bit from N-pod's first outburst and focus on the 2002 Iraq NIE and not the 2005 Iran NIE. I mean, to use the 2005 NIE, which the 2007 NIE tells you is wrong, to claim the 2007 NIE can't be trusted and the 2005 NIE was right?)

Its really fun to watch.

Dan Bartlett on right wing blogs:

That’s what I mean by influential. I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.

Yep.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, what do you call doing the same thing over and over again regardless what the result is?

Last week there were a couple of stories documenting just how far the US has fallen in terms of its respect for human rights and international law.  The first was where a Canadian judge ruled that our government should no longer require asylum seekers who transited the US to return there to seek asylum, since their record on rights violations placed such asylum seekers in jeopardy.

The second was almost confirmation of the first, where the US declared its right to kidnap anyone, anywhere, that they suspected of a crime, even for people in countries where they have extradition treaties and who are supposedly allies.

In any case, a couple more legal challenges to the Guantanamo Bay detentions reach the US Supreme Court today, and the BBC has a look at a very old precedent for such a place.

This is Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who was one of Charles II's henchmen after the restoration of the monarchy in England in the 17th Century. Briefs for both sides in the Supreme Court hearing mention his activities.

Clarendon set up his own Guantanamo Bay, believed to have been in Jersey, in the hope that his prisoners could be kept away from the courts and in particular from the right of habeas corpus.

The rather interesting part is the Earl’s fate.

In the end, he failed and was himself impeached before fleeing abroad.

It's too bad that the Democrats are invertebrates and as a result, Bush and Cheney and the rest won't share Clarendon's fate, but I do find it noteworthy that the Bush administration is arguing for powers that the British monarchy of a century before the American Revolution considered going too far.

Shamanic at the Newshoggers has a sort of mea culpa post regarding the latest NIE assessment of Iran.

For the last four years, I accepted as common sense that the two remaining "Axis of Evil" nations were hard at work on nuclear weapons because I believed that the lesson we bestowed from our Iraq adventure is that the United States won't go to war with a nuclear power.

It reminded me that back in September, I took a look at that accepted wisdom and came to the conclusion that it didn't make rational sense for Iran to pursue nuclear weapons.

As a long-term strategic goal, there really isn’t anything wrong with this argument. It is all quite logical. Possessing a nuclear weapon would make Iran’s strategic position a lot safer for the regime. What’s missing from the analysis is the fact that Iran is a long way from possessing a nuclear weapon, with all the vulnerability that implies, so one should also consider what makes strategic sense for the Iranians to do now.

Thanks in large part to US pressure, Iran’s nuclear program is under intense scrutiny and already the US is doing everything in its power to isolate and coerce the regime through sanctions and the possible listing of the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. To stave this off, Iran needs as much support from the rest of the international community as it can get, particularly from Russia and China. Any sniff of a weapons program and that support will disappear and the threat of punitive US action goes up dramatically.

It therefore makes even more strategic sense, at least for now, for the Iranians to keep their noses clean on the nuclear issue. As long as they comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they can continue to argue for their treaty right to civilian power generation and the nuclear fuel cycle that goes with it.

. . .

Whatever their long-term goals, the current nuclear threat from Iran is nothing I’d lose sleep over.

As it turns out, the Bush administration already knew there was no active weapons program, (and, as Iran Affairs points out, there still isn't any evidence that there ever was one), not that it stopped them making threats then, or even now that the NIE is out.

This leads me to another piece by N-Pod.

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

The really fun part is that he uses the total muck-ups of the 2002 Iraq NIE, and the now-contradicted findings of the 2005 Iran NIE to make his case that the intelligence community just can't be trusted. This politicization of the US intelligence services is probably one of the worst legacies the Bush administration will leave his successors.

On the surface, this doesn't look much different from the refusal of antiwar folks to accept the previous judgments. The difference is that the previous NIE's contradicted all other available data, where this one actually agrees with it. It won't stop the true believers, but its a bucket of cold water on their hopes to fire up the crisis further.

I Predict:

The biggest is the claim that Iran had a nuclear weapons program up to 2003, which is already being used as a vindication of the Iraq invasion in much the same way that Libya's "giving up" of their program has been. "See, we showed everybody we were serious about WMD's, (by invading a country that didn't have any), and now the bad guys are getting rid of theirs."

Instapundit delivers:

This story lets the Bush Administration take credit for pressuring Iran into stopping its weapons program by invading Iraq -- meaning that the invasion really did end a major WMD threat -- and also punt further serious action on the Iran issue to the next administration.

Beauty

On the whole, quite good news since it severely weakens the case for military action. Without an active nuclear weapons program, the "imminent danger" is just part of the steaming pile of BS the Bush administration is infamous for, and it should be interesting to see what this effect this report will on the administration's efforts to impose further sanctions on Iran for a program it's just admitted is purely civilian in nature.

That said, there are enough sops to the hawkish members of the administration that they'll still be spinning it to their utmost advantage. The biggest is the claim that Iran had a nuclear weapons program up to 2003, which is already being used as a vindication of the Iraq invasion in much the same way that Libya's "giving up" of their program has been. "See, we showed everybody we were serious about WMD's, (by invading a country that didn't have any), and now the bad guys are getting rid of theirs."

The reason this is problematic is because there is no more evidence of this program than the one the administration has been claiming is on the brink of developing a bomb for the last several years. By early 2004, Iran was voluntarily complying with the Additional Protocol, which allowed snap inspections and go-anywhere access to IAEA. They couldn't find any evidence of a weapons program, despite, one expects, pointers coming from the US as to where to look. So it not only ended, it vanished without a trace.

And wouldn't you know it, John Bolton has an explanation for all of that.

“The decision to weaponize and at what point is a judgment in the hands of the Iranians,” he said. He added that the finding that Iran halted a weapons program could just mean that it was better hidden now.

Yep, this hasn't ended the debate, but it has made the wingnuts job far more difficult, and for that we should be thankful.

Some of the Republican presidential candidates have dismissed medical marijuana as unnecessary or “too dangerous.” Now they’re being offered $10,000 to come up with the scientific evidence.

The Medical Marijuana Project, a group advocating the use of medical marijuana, will be in New Hampshire on Monday with a mobile billboard offering to contribute $10,000 to the campaigns of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain or Mitt Romney if any of the candidates can substantiate their statements about medical marijuana.

A good way to show just how ridiculous some of these claims are. Of course, we're talking about a party where several candidates don't believe in evolution, so the fact that they don't have the science right is unlikely to bother many of their supporters.

The debate just keeps going, as do the stories. The first is about some claims made at a conference.

A biomedical engineer with ties to the company that makes Tasers insists that the stun-guns are safer than Tylenol.

"You have Tylenol in your home? As far as an electronic controlled device killing you, this stuff is safer than Tylenol," Dr. Mark Kroll said Thursday in Las Vegas.

I don't know if that's literally true, of course, but last I checked, the police rarely force a bottle of Tylenol down a person's throat. Of course, we wouldn't want to appear biased, either.

Kroll said even though he consults with Taser International, the maker of Tasers, and sits on the company's advisory board, he said he does not speak for the company.

Others at the sudden death conference, which ends Friday, also had ties to Taser International — three researchers in attendance are consultants with the company, while Taser paid for 10 of its employees to attend.

John Peters, who directs the U.S. Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, said his organization is not influenced by Taser International, despite the ties.

. . .

He conceded that his conference did not include the work of researchers who raised safety questions about Tasers.

"Their studies were very small, they were isolated," he said. "I thought it wasn't a good fit."

No, I don't suppose research questioning Taser's safety would be a good fit for an organization that works to prevent In-Custody Deaths. I wonder if they were named by the same people who labeled Bush's "Clean Air Act", or "Healthy Forests Initiative".

Then we have the lovely story the RCMP just put out that Robert Dziekanski was still alive when medical personnel arrived to attend to him. The medical personnel in question, on the other hand, are quite clear that he was dead when they arrived.

RCMP Cpl. Dale Carr, of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, which is investigating the Polish immigrant's death on Oct. 14 at the Vancouver International airport, said on Friday that Dziekanski was still alive by the time medical personnel arrived.

"Based on the continuous monitoring and the assessments that the officers and the [airport] security officer were doing, it was their impression that Mr. Dziekanski had a pulse and that he was breathing up until the time that medical emergency personnel arrived."

Well, the mounties in question are hardly medical professionals, so I guess we'll just have to chalk it up to inexperience that they failed in their "continuous monitoring" to note that the man's pulse and breathing had stopped. Which I suppose explains the next bit.

Within six minutes, the Richmond Fire Department arrived on the scene.

Immediately, a crew initiated a medical assessment and asked police to remove Dziekanski's handcuffs, but the officers refused.

"Our officers assessed and felt that it was not a safe environment to have those handcuffs removed," Carr said.

But the Richmond Fire Department said that when fire crews checked his vitals, he had no pulse and was not breathing.

"Our crews, while they were doing their assessment, had asked for the handcuffs to be taken off," said Lake. "The RCMP had indicated that he had been violent before and they didn't want to take the handcuffs off and so our crews continued with their assessment.

"He definitely had no pulse and no breathing," Lake said. "Clinically yes, I guess he was dead."

So, as a result of their "continuous monitoring", the RCMP felt that the clinically dead Dziekanski was still too much of threat to remove his handcuffs. It was only after the BC Ambulance Service arrived that the mounties were apparently convinced that it was safe enough for them to take the cuffs off the dead man.

When asked by CBC News about the fire department's claim that Dziekanski was already dead when they arrived and why officers would still perceive a threat and not remove his handcuffs, a spokesperson for the RCMP said that's a question for the public inquiry.

Maybe they should have saved their story for the public inquiry as well, or at least until they come up with one not so easily debunked.

The last is a follow-up from the Taser video I linked to last month in Utah. The officials have concluded the Taser use was justified, even if the cop did everything else wrong, and John Cole has a few choice words that are all too relevant to the RCMP these days as well.

Got it? The Trooper screwed up, pushed the situation when he didn’t even need a signature, refused to make any attempts to defuse the situation, then didn’t behave correctly (turned his back on Massey), but the tasering was ok because it was a “scary situation” for the cop.

Ain’t being a cop great! You can screw up every part of your job, have your superiors admit publicly that you screwed up, and you are still justified doing whatever you want if you can claim you got ‘scared.’ It is time to take the toys away from the police and teach them how to do their jobs without the quick “fix” of the taser.