New York Times

By ANDREW E. KRAMER
Published: September 22, 2007

BAGHDAD, Sept. 21 — American diplomats on Friday resumed travel in convoys escorted by Blackwater USA, the private American security contractor, three days after the Iraqi government banned the company following a shooting in which at least eight Iraqis were killed.

It was not clear if the resumption of convoys was a signal of some political compromise between the State Department and the Iraqi government, which had demanded that the United States drop Blackwater as its protector, or whether it simply meant that American officials felt they could not afford to remain grounded. The State Department relies on Blackwater for its security outside the fortified Green Zone.

<snip>

Mirembe Nantongo, a spokeswoman for the American Embassy, said a limited number of diplomats traveled outside the Green Zone on Friday. They were likely to be accompanied by Blackwater guards, she said but declined to give details. “As a general rule, in a limited manner, Blackwater is operating,” she said.

Ms. Nantongo said the decision to resume diplomatic convoy traffic had been taken “in consultation with the Iraqi authorities,” but she would not elaborate on whether the Iraqis had approved the Blackwater escorts, after the din of official Iraqi criticism toward the company earlier this week.

<more>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/world/mi...

This weekend I have been disturbed by two things. The first is the Chimp's shameless pardon of Libby. Why does this guy get absolutely NO JAIL TIME, after he was found guilty by a jury of his peers? The $250K fine is simply not sufficient as a trade-in for confinement. Leaving the punishment as simply a fine, since the probation is questionable, demonstrates to the millions of people in our country who have gone to prison that money talks. If you have influential friends you will fare better than the average person. If you are white, you will be punished less severely than if you are a person of color. Where was Bush's magnanimous sense of justice when, as Governor of Texas, he refused to pardon or commute the sentences of many convicted felons? Please don't say that in his dotage he has found compassion.

The second thing that has been bugging me is the indequate coverage of the plight of farm animals in flooded regions of Texas and Oklahoma. Hey, Chimp! If you didn't know, these animals are part of the critical infrastructure. They are starving because there feed is underwater or ruined by the storms. Many have drowned. This is part of our food stock, and the government should be doing more to try to save these farm animals. Just as with so many of the disasters that have left so much suffering, we do not have an adequate plan for dealing with this type of assault on the food supply.

on the Gonzales years at Justice?

There are some great quotes out there from both sides of the aisle:

Sen. Arlen Specter, top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"It's embarrassing for a professional to work for the Department of Justice today."

"It is hard to see how the Department of Justice can function and perform its important duties with Mr. Gonzales remaining where he is," said Specter, R-Pa.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich:

"With this Justice Department, the buck always stops somewhere else, and the fall guy is always the last guy out of the door," said Conyers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...

Rory Stewart's book about his 2002 walk through Afghanistan, is a remarkable footnote.

"Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in
fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial
administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work
seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They
recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a
single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers
the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a
local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through
institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens.
They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't
their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly,
the population would mutiny.

"Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperi-
alism. Their implicit deniial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand
of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no
credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual
officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to
be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or
revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact
their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they,
unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism,
exploitation and oppression.

"Perhaps it is because no one requres more than a charming illusion of action in
the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public
knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in
Afghanistan."

fn pp. 247-8.

*****

It seems that Mr. Stewart's analysis has lessons that can be applied in a number of other areas, nor simply foreign policy.

By Andrew Cohen

Part II: Alberto Gonzales, Presidential Enabler
The career of Alberto R. Gonzales, before he ascended to the office of Attorney General of the United States in early 2005, is marked particularly by three episodes that link directly to the quality and nature of the job he has performed since taking office. In each instance, history has not been kind either to Gonzales' actual substantive work or to the ethical and moral judgment he exercised on behalf of his client at the time. In each case, the advice Gonzales offered, legally dubious to begin with, created not just political embarrassment and backlash for his bosses but unfortunate, even catastrophic results for the nation.

These three strands of Gonzales' professional DNA, pre-Justice Department, turn out to be remarkable predictors for his troubled and disappointing role as Attorney General. And, indeed, many people did predict two years ago that Gonzales as Attorney General would be just as pliant to the wishes of George W. Bush as they believed him to be as White House counsel and, before that, as counsel to then-Texas Governor Bush. For example, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt.), then ranking member of the Senate Judicial Committee, looked Gonzales in the eye at the latter's confirmation hearing in January 2005 and said: "My concern is that during several high-profile matters in your professional career you've appeared to serve as a facilitator rather than as an independent force in the policy-making process."

Gonzales reassured Sen. Leahy--and anyone else who cared to lodge the same complaint back then-- that he knew the difference between the two roles-- and it is likely that he did and does. But let us judge him by his deeds and not his words. The Attorney General's record at the Justice Department strongly suggests that he has still acted as a docile and dogged "facilitator" for White House initiatives rather than as a wise, high-minded legal counselor willing and able on occasion to exercise independent judgment and power. And the road to the current scandal over the dismissal of federal prosecutors, and to the Justice Department's rabid support for warrantless domestic surveillance, and to its tepid defense of civil liberties for resident aliens, all are paved with the stones that Gonzales and Bush laid down before the former took the oath of office in early 2005.

For the first two examples, I lean heavily upon the distinguished work of Alan Berlow, who brilliantly chronicled in the July/August 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly Gonzales' appallingly unprofessional work on death penalty cases when he was counsel for Governor Bush. According to Berlow, Gonzales "repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence" (emphasis in original) in a series of memoranda Gonzales prepared for the governor's review as part of the state's clemency process. Berlow believes that this was not mere negligence on the part of Gonzales--that would have been bad enough-- but rather part of a concerted effort by both men to ensure for both political and ideological reasons that there would be no clemency petitions granted. The dice were loaded, you might say, by the man who now is the nation's top lawyer.

<more>

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconfer...

********
For Part I of the series, see

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconfer...

Rebecca Solnit
Wednesday March 14, 2007
The Guardian

Was I a good American? How good an American was I? Did I do what I could to resist the takeover of my country and the brutalisation of my fellow human beings? How much further could I have gone? Were the crimes of the Bush administration those that demand you give up your life and everyday commitments to throw yourself into maximum resistance? If not, then what were we waiting for? The questions have troubled me regularly these last five years, because I was one of the millions of American citizens who did not shut down Guantánamo Bay and stop the other atrocities of the administration.

I wrote. I gave money, sometimes in large chunks. I went to anti-war marches. I demonstrated. I also planted a garden, cooked dinners, played with children, wandered around aimlessly, and did lots of other things you do when the world is not crashing down around you. And maybe when it is. Was it? It was for the men in our gulag. And the boys there. And the rule of law in my native land.

Before the current administration, it had always been easy to condemn the "good Germans" who did nothing while Jews, Gypsies and others were rounded up for extermination. One likes to believe that one will be different, will harbour Anne Frank in one's secret annex, smuggle people across the border, defy the authorities who do evil. Those we scornfully call good Germans merely did little while the mouth of hell opened up.

I now know the way that everyday life can be so absorbing, survival so demanding, that it seems impossible to do more on top of it or to drop the routine altogether and begin a totally different life. There is the garden to be watered, the aged parent in crisis, the deadline looming; but there are also the crimes against humanity waiting to be stopped. Ordinary obligations tug one way even when extraordinary ones tug the other way. The Bush administration is by no means the Third Reich, but it produced an extraordinary time that made extraordinary demands on US citizens, demands that some of us rose to - and too many did not.

<more>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/st...

Special Report
Rough Justice - The Case Against Alberto Gonzales
Part I

By Andrew Cohen

Posted at 12:47 PM ET, 03/13/2007
Alberto Gonzales: A Willing Accessory at Justice
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is the 80th attorney general of the United States and if recent events in the law and at the Justice Department are any indication, he is rapidly staking a claim to being among the worst. To test that claim and evaluate the man who is not just nominally called the "nation's top lawyer," we must answer three questions. To what extent did Gonzales' public record before taking office give us clues about what sort of Attorney General he has turned out to be? Has he so far been up to the task as it is ideally defined? And, finally, does he deserve to continue to serve in office?

This series will look at each question in depth. But, here, briefly, are the answers. First, Gonzales' cronyistic record in both Texas and as White House counsel did indeed presage many of the serious problems Gonzales now faces at the Justice Department. He has run true to form over the past two years and has diverted hardly at all from his long history of dogged obedience to the President, which often has come at the cost of institutional independence and adherence to the rule of law. Second, Gonzales is seen by many legal historians and scholars as an abysmal failure--not quite as bad as the worst attorneys general in our history, but much closer to the bottom than to the top. And, third, given the burgeoning scandal over the dismissal of federal prosecutors at the request of the White House, there appear to be few legitimate reasons why he deserves to stay in office. What follows, then, is really a bill of particulars drawn up by some of the nation's leading lawyers and historians, that attempts to support these conclusions.

But first, a step back. To understand better the case for or against Gonzales, to place it more squarely into context, it is important to understand that the attorney general in our federal system has to straddle a line between law and politics, between being the people's attorney and his boss' loyal cabinet member. It is not an easy thing to do and few attorneys general have done it even remotely well. The dichotomy in many ways mirrors the one that everyday attorneys face with their own clients-- am I an advocate who must facilitate what my client already has decided to do? Or am I a counselor who may tell my client on occasion that what he or she wants to do is illegal or just plain wrong?

History has given us very little guidance about where this line is to be drawn. Actually, the history of the Office of the Attorney General is a rather uninspiring one. The position was included in the Judiciary Act of 1789, the Book of Genesis when it comes to the federal judicial system, but it took nearly a century for the attorney general to have any sort of a meaningful "justice department" to run. Originally, for a few decades anyway, the attorney general was not even part of the President's formal cabinet and now, of course, some of the duties of the original attorney general reside in the White House counsel's office. Gonzales, remember, came from that office to his current post when John Ashcroft read the writing on the wall and resigned as attorney general at the start of President George W. Bush's second term in office.

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http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconfer...

Published: January 18, 2007

Of the many ways that President Bush has trampled civil liberties and the balance of powers since the 9/11 attacks, one of the most egregious was his decision to order wiretaps of Americans’ international calls and e-mail without court approval. It was good news, then, when the administration announced yesterday that it would now seek a warrant from the proper court for that sort of eavesdropping.

The president’s decision hardly ends this constitutional crisis. Among other things, the public needs to know why Mr. Bush broke the law for more than five years and what should be done to ensure there will be no more abuses of the wiretap statute.

But we’re pleased that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Mr. Bush had decided to end the warrantless program. He said the administration had worked out a way to speed the process of getting a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to intercept communications to and from the United States “where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member or agent of Al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.”

He said the court — created by the 1978 law on domestic wiretapping — issued an order on Jan. 10 governing this new process and that eavesdropping under “the terrorist surveillance program” would be subject to the court’s approval. There are still some big unanswered questions. For one thing, because the new warrant process is secret, we don’t know whether the court has issued a blanket approval for wiretapping, which would undermine the intent of the law, or whether the administration agreed to seek individual warrants.

<more>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/opinion/...

Niyazov, dead President-for-Life of Turkmenistan.

The Turkmenbashi
. ordering the construction of an ice palace near the capital in spite of Turkmenistan's
climate and pressing social needs, while * is conducting the never-ending war and is building
the biggest U.S. Embassy in Iraq that anyone short of Sam Walgreen could have imagined.
. Was the head of two branches of government and appoints the members of the judiciary--so guess what--
he has all three, while * decided to press the Unitary Executive, a massive power grab for his branch
at the expense of the others.
. banned news presenters from wearing make-up as Niyazov had difficulty telling male and female readers
apart, while * gives both male and female reporters a load of cr*p everytime he takes questions,
not discriminating (on the basis) of sex
. had private conversations are monitored by government informers, while * favored mining private telephone
conversations to uncover possible terrorists.
. All Turkmen people knew jokes about Türkmenbaşy, just as every American knows jokes about *.

On the other hand,
. in 2004, there was a leaflet campaign in the capital, Aşgabat, calling for the overthrow and trial of Niyazov. The authorities were unable to stop the campaign and the President responded by firing his interior minister and director of the police academy on national television.<10> He accused the minister of incompetence and declared: "I cannot say that you had any great merits or did much to combat crime," while *saw his popularity ratings plummet and only after resounding defeats of members of his party, sacrificed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, but lavished his terrible performance with praise, just as he did with other croney-appointees who failed miserably in their public responsibilities.

Based on material about Saparmurat Niyazov at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saparmurat_Ni...

by Dean W. Richardson, D.V.M.

<snip>

In my experience, the unique feature to Barbaro's case is that we have managed to at least get this far despite two simultaneous problems. Each of them alone often has been cause for euthanasia. I think it is a fair statement to say that our management challenges concerning Barbaro's care and treatment have been more difficult than the specific intraoperative surgical challenges.

Another aspect of Barbaro's case that has been different is that there have been literally no bounds as to what we could try to keep him comfortable as we attempted to save his life. Owners Roy and Gretchen Jackson always have been willing to do whatever it would take, as long as the horse stayed comfortable. I hope the public at large has come to realize that there are horse owners out there like the Jacksons who are truly interested in doing the right thing for their horses.

A third important component of Barbaro's care has been the meticulous feeding program we have had him on from the outset. One of the most important considerations in a horse convalescing from a major injury is to get enough nutrition into him. Many hospitalized horses do not eat enough, and those that have suffered severe weight loss are not willing to eat as well as they need to eat.

So we have been meticulous in trying to make sure that he eats a very high-calorie, high-protein diet with appropriate supplements. We have paid close attention to that because, as any racehorse trainer will tell you, there is little chance to make a really good athlete out of a horse that does not eat well.

<more>

http://www.thoroughbredtimes.com/commentar...

+++++++++++
Dr. Richardson makes some very interesting comments on his experiences with Barbaro's care...not viewing his own surgical accomplishments as all that unusual for the field, not seeing Barbaro's case as making that much impact as a teaching case. Nevertheless, he does not minimize the challenge and emphasizes the importance of the team--veterinarians, the Jacksons and the horse himself--as well as the rest of the folks involved in Barbaro's care.

The Times November 09, 2006

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know’ February 2003

‘I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.’ 2003

‘We do know of certain knowledge that he is either in Afghanistan or in some other country or dead’ 2001

‘Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and do bad things . . . Stuff happens’ On looting in Iraq after the 2003 invasion

‘Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war’ 2003

‘You get a lot more with a kind word and a gun than you do with a kind word alone’ Quoting Al Capone to express views on international diplomacy in 1998

‘As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time’ 2004

‘We do have a saying: if you’re in a hole, stop digging . . . erm, I’m not sure I should have said that’ 2002

‘Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the President and do wonders for your performance’ 1974


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-...

We have two of the most substantively devastating releases that could possibly occur just a few days prior to the midterm election day. Vanity Fair http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feature... brings a preview of an article that will be available December 6 in which prominent neocons attempt to absolve themselves from the horror that is the Iraq war. They are falling all over themselves to proclaim that while the original idea for attacking Iraq had merit, the execution of that idea, translating it into bricks and mortar/ lives and deaths, was incompetent. The great people who were involved in actualizing the war concept--well maybe they weren't so great or maybe they had never had true testing before. Even so, there are people, not these neocons, themselves, mind you, but people in the current administration who bear the responsibility for Iraq--then and more importantly--now. And you know who they are. But it's not us neocons. Maybe neoconservativism has been laid to rest for a generation. At least the neoconservatism that these bleating idiots designed.

On the other hand, media specifically targetting military members, families and retireds, have had it with Rumsfeld and call for his resignation. http://armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-... The military has had a long tradition of taking orders and following the mandate of political leaders. While they may have felt Iraq was an ill-advised target for the lean and mean war that Bush's strategists demanded, they gave it a go. They held their counsel as they have traditionally--until it just was not possible to do any longer. From a few voices of retired commanders to the many voices of the men and women on the ground, the opposition has grown steadily. It is the palace coup in camouflage, Mr. Bush.

As the Army Times aptly puts it: Donald Rumsfeld must go.

Thank you, Alberto Fernandez, for being far enough up in the State Department that you are able to get your comments made part of the public record. Thank you, for your remarks that underscore what many Americans already knew, but perhaps the slow 30 percenters want to ignore: "that there is a strong possibility history will show the United States displayed "arrogance" and "stupidity" in its handling of the Iraq war." http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/21/fernandez...

Perhaps your boss is on the verge of acknowledging that there is truth in what you say, and that it takes courage to admit that the smart, the educated, the well-advantaged have made the classic mistakes that have brought death, destruction and division to the world-wide arena yet again.

I wish you well, Alberto Fernandez. I'll buy tickets when you come to my city to speak about how you, a State Department careerist, had the courage on the job to speak the truth.

Daily Star Lebanon

By Nader Hashemi
Commentary by
Tuesday, September 12, 2006


How can one rationally explain the rise of Islamic fundamentalism today? In the age of reason, rationality and secularism, why have large numbers of people in the Muslim world gravitated toward and embraced a narrow, fundamentalist conception of the world? From radical groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to more mainstream organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jamaat-e Islami in Pakistan, the Muslim world seems dominated by fundamentalists. History and sociology, rather than ideology, provide a lens to help grapple with a growing social phenomenon.

Throughout human history, great social transformation and political turmoil have been accompanied by religious revival - a natural occurrence. This is an observable sociological and historical phenomenon that transcends borders, ethnicities and civilizations. During the Mongol occupation of Russia (1237-1480), for example, the Orthodox Church experienced one of its greatest periods of growth. A similar phenomenon occurred in the United States in the mid-19th century with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Stated simply, social upheaval engenders a reaction where one seeks stability and security through a return to the basic and the familiar, often represented by religion.

Scholar James Piscatori has perceptively noted that "religion, precisely because in the past it answered questions about life and death and provided its followers with moral links to each other, becomes the means by which individuals hope to answer the new question of what it is to be modern, and, in so doing, to gain perhaps a reassuring, common world-view. In this respect, born-again Christians and veiled-again Muslims are responding to the same broad phenomenon." The upheavals associated with modernity, as Piscatori suggests, are central to understanding the rise of religious fundamentalism.

It should be emphasized that modernization is a traumatic process. In the Western experience it took several hundred years for secular and democratic institutions to develop, many through a process of trial and error. The historic intra-Christian wars of religion, the Industrial Revolution, political persecution, genocide, worker exploitation, the rise of nationalism and two world wars resulted in a profound change in all spheres of life - political, social, economic, intellectual and religious.

<more>

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?ed...

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 11, 2006; Page A12

Vice President Cheney offered a veiled attack yesterday on critics of the administration's Iraq policy, saying the domestic debate over the war is emboldening adversaries who believe they can undermine the resolve of the American people.

"They can't beat us in a stand-up fight -- they never have -- but they're absolutely convinced they can break our will, the American people don't have the stomach for the fight," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

The vice president said U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq "have doubts" the United States will finish the job there. "And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we've had in the United States," he said. "Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists."

Cheney unapologetically defended the 2003 invasion that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, saying the administration would have done "exactly the same thing" even if it knew before the war what he acknowledged knowing now -- that Iraq did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Yet he also gave a bit of ground, as he was pressed repeatedly by interviewer Tim Russert about statements that turned out to be wrong or damaging to his credibility.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...