The Stain Will Never Wash Away

Today in the Washington Post, an editorial page that definitely has gone far more conservative than in the days of Richard Nixon, takes on a subject which continues to sicken me.

It is bad enough to be a citizen of a country that condones torture of military combatants.

It is horrendous when we also condone torture that leads to death, and then politely look away while the barbarous military and CIA murderers continue to hold onto their jobs, much less go to jail.

President George W. Bush, do you want to know how you will be remembered in history? Try on this mantle: an American President who condoned the bombing of innocent women and children, the OK'd the torture and slaying of captured military combatants and who lied repeatedly to the American public. If only you could find an intern to give you a blow job, we would have a chance of impeaching you.

From the Post:

Homicide Unpunished

Tuesday, February 28, 2006; Page A14

ONE OF THE most shocking photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shows a grinning guard giving a thumbs-up sign over the bruised corpse of an Iraqi detainee. Subsequent investigation showed that the deceased prisoner, an Iraqi named Manadel al-Jamadi, died of asphyxiation on Nov. 4, 2003: He was tortured to death by Navy SEAL and CIA interrogators who took turns punching and kicking him, then handcuffed his arms behind his back and shackled them to a window five feet above the floor. Nine SEALs, a sailor and several CIA personnel were implicated in the killing. As it turned out, the Abu Ghraib guard who posed with the body, former Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., was not involved.

Two years after the photo came into the hands of Army investigators, the result of the case is this: Mr. Graner is serving a 10-year prison sentence for his role in the nonlethal abuse of other detainees at Abu Ghraib -- and no one involved in killing Mr. Jamadi has suffered serious penalty. Nine members of the Navy team were given "nonjudicial punishment" by their commanding officer; the 10th, a lieutenant, was acquitted on charges of assault and dereliction of duty. None of the CIA personnel has been prosecuted. The lead interrogator, Mark Swanner, reportedly continues to work for the agency.

The de facto principles governing the punishment of U.S. personnel guilty of prisoner abuse since 2002 now are clear: Torturing a foreign prisoner to death is excusable. Authoring and implementing policies of torture may lead to promotion. But being pictured in an Abu Ghraib photograph that leaks to the press is grounds for a heavy prison sentence. In addition to Mr. Graner, seven lowly guards appearing in photos, none of whom were involved in fatalities, have been sentenced to prison. But according to a well-documented new report by Human Rights First, only 12 of 98 deaths of detainees in U.S. custody have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official. In eight cases in which prisoners have been tortured to death, the steepest sentence meted out has been five months in jail.

The report documents many of these cases in devastating detail. There is, for example, the case of former Iraqi Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who in November 2003 was beaten for days by Army and CIA interrogators, then stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord and smothered. The case was classified as a murder, but only one person was court-martialed, a low-level warrant officer. After arguing, plausibly, that his actions were approved by more senior officers under a policy issued by the then-commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, his punishment was to be restricted for 60 days to his home, workplace and church.

The Mowhoush case was heavily publicized, which may explain why some action was taken. The Army itself has labeled 34 prisoner deaths as homicides, but in more than half of those no charges were brought. In close to half of the 98 cases it surveyed, Human Rights First reported, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. "In dozens of cases," the report says, "grossly inadequate reporting, investigation and follow-through have left no one at all responsible for homicides and other unexplained deaths." Commanders, starting with President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and extending through the ranks, have repeatedly declined to hold Americans accountable for documented war crimes.

Mr. Rumsfeld and the military command have grown so confident of their impunity that they don't even try very hard to defend themselves. "Some 250 people have been punished in one way or another," Mr. Rumsfeld replied last month when asked about abuse cases. Spokesmen offered a similar response last week to the Human Rights First report. Sadly, it has been left to retired officers, such as Brig. Gen. David R. Irvine, to speak honestly about this shameful record. The "torture and death" catalogued by Human Rights First, he wrote in a response to the report, "are the consequence of a shocking breakdown of command discipline on the part of the Army's Officer Corps. . . . What is unquestionably broken is the fundamental principle of command accountability, and that starts at the very top."

Incompetence

Katrina. Iraq. Meirs. The list is endless. Far worse than being a right-wing pup, this president is incompetent. And, finally, we are beginning to see it mentioned by the media.

Michael Hirsh, Newsweek.com column:

"How then did we arrive at this day, with anti-American Islamist governments rising in the Mideast, bin Laden sneering at us, Qaeda lieutenants escaping from prison, Iran brazenly enriching uranium, and America as hated and mistrusted as it ever has been?

The answer, in a word, is incompetence.

We now have testimony from enough Republicans and Bush loyalists -- from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill to former CIA senior director Paul Pillar -- that the administration knew all along how flimsy its WMD case against Iraq was. We also now know, from [CIA officer Gary] Berntsen and others, that the administration knew then how solid the intel on bin Laden's and Zawahiri's whereabouts was.

So catastrophic was Bush's decision to shift his attention and resources to Iraq, when bin Laden was panting at Tora Bora, that one is tempted to rank it with Adolf Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, at a time when Great Britain was prostrate and America was still out of the war (a decision that almost certainly cost Hitler the war then and there).

Yes, Iraq may some day become a legitimate democracy. But for now it is mainly a jihadi factory, cranking out new generations of hardened bomb-ready Islamists, as we have seen with the cross-pollination that has brought Iraqi-style suicide bombs back to Afghanistan."

Prescience

"The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible.

"A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.
The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

"All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady irresistible charm."

E.B. White (1899-1985)
Here is New York, 1949

More on our faux Aggie!

I'm glad to see that some of our media have picked up on George C. Deutsch is just a symptom of what is massively wrong about the Bush Administration's approach to health and science.

Here is the Washington Post's editorial today on it:

The Politics of Science
Thursday, February 9, 2006; Page A22

IT IS A RARE thing for the biography of a 24-year-old NASA spokesman to attract the attention of the national media. But that is what happened this week when George C. Deutsch tendered his resignation. Mr. Deutsch had, it emerged, lied about his (nonexistent) undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University. Far more important, several New York Times articles over the past week or so have exposed Mr. Deutsch as one of several White House-appointed public affairs officers at the agency who tried to prevent senior NASA career scientists from speaking and writing freely, especially when their views on the realities of climate change differed from those of the White House.

Mr. Deutsch prevented reporters from interviewing James E. Hansen, the leading climate scientist at NASA, telling colleagues he was doing so because his job was to "make the president look good." Mr. Deutsch also instructed another NASA scientist to add the word "theory" after every written mention of the Big Bang, on the grounds that the accepted scientific explanation of the origins of the universe "is an opinion" and that NASA should not discount the possibility of "intelligent design by a creator."

The spectacle of a young political appointee with no college degree exerting crude political control over senior government scientists and civil servants with many decades of experience is deeply disturbing. More disturbing is the fact that Mr. Deutsch's attempts to manipulate science and scientists, although unusually blatant, were not unique. Just before Christmas, the federal Environmental Protection Agency issued "talking points" to local environmental agencies. These suggestions were intended to help their spokesmen play down an Associated Press story that -- using the EPA's own data -- showed that impoverished neighborhoods had higher levels of air pollution.

At the Food and Drug Administration, the director of the Office of Women's Health recently resigned because she believed that the administration was twisting science to stall approval of over-the-counter emergency contraception. Off the record -- because they fear losing their jobs -- some scientists at the Department of Health and Human Services say that Bush administration public affairs officers screen their appearances and utterances more carefully than anyone ever did. Scientists at places such as the Agriculture Department, not a part of the government known for its publicity hounds, have made the same claim.

In every administration there will be spokesmen and public affairs officers who try to spin the news to make the president look good. But this administration is trying to spin scientific data and muzzle scientists toward that end. NASA's Mr. Hansen was right when he told the Times that Mr. Deutsch was only a bit player. "The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies," he said. We agree.

George C. Deutsch: Ersatz Aggie or Intelligent Design?

George C. Deutsch.

A name to remember. He will probably resurface with the Bush administration as the next commissar of wiretapping.

But at least he will not have NASA to fuck up anymore.

The story of Deutsch's neo-Nazism at NASA had me steaming this weekend. A 24-year-old former Bush campaign intern appointed to the NASA press office by Bush was the guy who had been suppressing NASA scientists from speaking out about global warming, among other things. He also was credited with having brow-beaten a NASA webmaster for not including "theory" on references to Big Bang, and calling for equal treatment of so-called intelligent design.

This, in a nutshell, is the idiocy of this Administration. Don't go for quality and experience in making appointments. Just pick the same idiotic people who share your same idiotic religious beliefs and neo-Nazi fanaticism. Need I mention FEMA? Or the EPA? Or the Attorney Generalship? Or the State Department (if you read the story today!)

But justice has a strange way of surfacing. Read on, and only a faux Texas Aggie could screw up this big in the national news:

A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA


By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: February 8, 2006

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the resignation.

"Under NASA policy, it is inappropriate to discuss personnel matters," said Dean Acosta, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs and Mr. Deutsch's boss.

The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming.

"As we have stated in the past, NASA is in the process of revising our public affairs policies across the agency to ensure our commitment to open and full communications," the statement from Mr. Acosta said.

The statement said the resignation of Mr. Deutsch was "a separate matter."

Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.

According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003."

Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case.

"George Carlton Deutsch III did attend Texas A&M University but has not completed the requirements for a degree," said an e-mail message from Rita Presley, assistant to the registrar at the university, responding to a query from The Times.

Repeated calls and e-mail messages to Mr. Deutsch on Tuesday were not answered.

Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.

After Mr. Anthis read about the problems at NASA, he said in an interview: "It seemed like political figures had really overstepped the line. I was just going to write some commentary on this when somebody tipped me off that George Deutsch might not have graduated."

He posted a blog entry asserting this after he checked with the university's association of former students. He reported that the association said Mr. Deutsch received no degree.

A copy of Mr. Deutsch's résumé was provided to The Times by someone working in NASA headquarters who, along with many other NASA employees, said Mr. Deutsch played a small but significant role in an intensifying effort at the agency to exert political control over the flow of information to the public.

Such complaints came to the fore starting in late January, when James E. Hansen, the climate scientist, and several midlevel public affairs officers told The Times that political appointees, including Mr. Deutsch, were pressing to limit Dr. Hansen's speaking and interviews on the threats posed by global warming.

Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue of political control of scientific information.

"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."

"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."

Groundhog Day Plus One

From Air America Radio:

This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fall in the same week.

It is a rich juxtaposition:

One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, and the other involves a groundhog.

Addicted to Oil

Surely, this is some kind of joke. It certainly will be tonight on Jon Stewart's show, you better believe.

Bush’s Mideast oil vow not meant literally

By KEVIN G. HALL
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025.

His energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president did not mean it literally.

What Bush meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025. But America still would import oil from the Middle East because that is where the greatest oil supplies are.

Bush’s reference to Mideast oil made headlines because of his assertion that “America is addicted to oil” and his call to “break this addiction.” He vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing “more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.”

He pledged to “move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”

“This was purely an example,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.
He said the broad goal is to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.

Asked why the president used the words “the Middle East” when he didn’t really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that “every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.”
Imports account for about 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption.

Manimal Watch!

The State of the Union address by former Texas Gov. George Bush hasn't really stirred up anyone's emotions - either for or against. There just wasn't much there there.

But the most unexpected line in last night's address has to be Bush's rousing condemnation of human-animal hybrids -- not a major topic on anyone's radar, at least until now.

Leave it up to Karl "I Love Amerika" Rove to come up with a new common enemy for us to worry about. If terrorists are not enough, what about them manimals!

And very true, we have none on George Bush's watch, nor likely will we. Though I would pay to see the mating of Karl Rove with a female gorilla.

Dr. Moreau, meet George Bush. I'm sorry, but the President is insisting that you no longer create wolfmen, cheetagirls, monkeymen and armadillogirls on your island. Yes, we know it's science, but the President is not so sure he even believes in science, much less your so-called research into bettering the species by inserting lion DNA into embryos. But, Dr. Moreau, please do not abort the ones you already have begun. They are God's creatures, even with those snouts, and every fertilized egg is precious. But you can freeze them if you want to.

Do you think that Bush, or one of his lackeys, accidentally read a Newsweek article (probably in the john) about mice with injected human adult stem cells? Is that where he got the idea that manimals are as dangerous to our way of life as Osama?

Will there be war, like in the X-Men movies, with the mutants? Can two manimals marry, as long as they are of the same sex? Do you think King Kong was really a manimal? You have to wonder where his parents were. At an old ape's home on Skull Island?

It does make you wonder what animals are doing behind our backs.