Not Following the Script

President Bush’s ardent defenders like to complain about how roughly he’s supposedly treated by that classic conservative bugaboo, the Liberal Media. In fact, Bush is apparently so scarred by all these terrible media types that he brags about not reading newspapers or watching the news.

Of course, the reality is that the White House press corps tends to be so farcically deferential to the President that they refuse to call him on even wildly bizarre or false statements. Watch Bush’s next press conference and you’ll see how the supposedly Bush-hating press corps tosses softballs instead of actual questions.

It is therefore particularly instructive to take note of the White House’s reaction to Bush’s June 24 interview with Radio and Television Ireland. Irish reporter Carole Coleman, you see, apparently committed the sin of wanting actual answers instead of scripted responses.

For example:

COLEMAN: Mr. President, you’re going to arrive in Ireland in about 24 hours’ time, and no doubt you will be welcomed by our political leaders. Unfortunately, the majority of our public do not welcome your visit because they’re angry over Iraq, they’re angry over Abu Ghraib. Are you bothered by what Irish people think?

BUSH: Listen, I hope the Irish people understand the great values of our country. And if they think that a few soldiers represents [sic] the entirety of America, they don’t really understand America then. There have been great ties between Ireland and America, and we’ve got a lot of Irish Americans here that are very proud of their heritage and their country. But, you know, they must not understand if they’re angry over Abu Ghraib – if they say, this is what America represents, they don’t understand our country, because we don’t represent that. We are a compassionate country. We’re a strong country, and we’ll defend ourselves – but we help people. And we’ve helped the Irish and we’ll continue to do so. We’ve got a good relationship with Ireland.

COLEMAN: And they’re angry over Iraq, as well, and particularly the continuing death toll there.

BUSH: Well, I can understand that. People don’t like war. But what they should be angry about is the fact that there was a brutal dictator there that had destroyed lives and put them in mass graves and had torture rooms. Listen, I wish they could have seen the seven men that came to see me in the Oval Office – they had their right hands cut off by Saddam Hussein because the currency had devalued when he was the leader. And guess what happened? An American saw the fact that they had had their hands cut off and crosses – or Xs carved in their forehead. And he flew them to America. And they came to my office with a new hand, grateful for the generosity of America, and with Saddam Hussein’s brutality in their mind. Look, Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, against the neighborhood. He was a brutal dictator who posed a threat – such a threat that the United Nations voted unanimously to say, Mr. Saddam Hussein –

COLEMAN: Indeed, Mr. President, but you didn’t find the weapons of mass destruction.

BUSH: Let me finish. Let me finish. May I finish? He said – the United Nations said, disarm or face serious consequences. That’s what the United Nations said. And guess what? He didn’t disarm. He didn’t disclose his arms. And, therefore, he faced serious consequences. But we have found a capacity for him to make a weapon. See, he had the capacity to make weapons. He was dangerous. And no one can argue that the world is better off with Saddam – if Saddam Hussein were in power.

COLEMAN: But, Mr. President, the world is a more dangerous place today. I don’t know whether you can see that or not.

BUSH: Why do you say that?

COLEMAN: There are terrorist bombings every single day. It’s now a daily event. It wasn’t like that two years ago.

BUSH: What was it like September the 11th, 2001? It was a – there was a relative calm, we –

COLEMAN: But it’s your response to Iraq that’s considered –

BUSH: Let me finish. Let me finish, please. Please. You ask the questions and I’ll answer them, if you don’t mind. On September the 11th, 2001, we were attacked in an unprovoked fashion. Everybody thought the world was calm. And then there have been bombings since then – not because of my response to Iraq. There were bombings in Madrid. There were bombings in Istanbul. There were bombings in Bali. There were killings in Pakistan.

COLEMAN: Indeed, Mr. President, and I think Irish people understand that. But I think there is a feeling that the world has become a more dangerous place because you have taken the focus off al Qaeda and diverted into Iraq. Do you not see that the world is a more dangerous place? I saw four of your soldiers lying dead on the television the other day, a picture of four soldiers just lying there without their flight jackets.

BUSH: Listen, nobody cares more about the death than I do –

COLEMAN: Is there a point or place –

BUSH: Let me finish, please. Please. Let me finish, and then you can follow up, if you don’t mind. Nobody cares more about the deaths than I do. I care about it a lot. But I do believe the world is a safer place and becoming a safer place. I know that a free Iraq is going to be a necessary part of changing the world. Listen, people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope and there’s no chance to raise their families in a peaceful world where there is not freedom. And so the idea is to promote freedom, and at the same time protect our security. And I do believe the world is becoming a better place, absolutely.

(The interview and a transcript are available online.)

Horrors! How dare Coleman take her job as a journalist seriously and refuse to swallow unquestioningly what the President deigns to allow her to have? How dare she disrespect the leader of the free world by actually seeking answers to her questions instead of being satisfied with canned responses?

The White House reacted swiftly, canceling a planned interview Coleman was going to have with Laura Bush and generally acting like a spoiled brat.

But wait, there’s more: Coleman was required to submit her questions in advance. Bush refused to give the interview at all unless he knew exactly what she was going to ask. He fully expected her to simply roll over as do so many American reporters so infuriatingly, and was completely unprepared when she acted like a real journalist instead of a stenographer.

We now know this is standard operating procedure for the Bush Administration. In The Price of Loyalty, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill revealed that Cabinet meetings are scripted down to the last detail, with White House political apparatchiks telling participants in advance what they will talk about, what position they will take, for how long they will speak, and so on. Any deviation from the script was frowned upon most severely.

Take a moment to consider the implications of the President of the United States – the most powerful man in the world – being utterly unable to function without a script.

Every week or two, C-SPAN broadcasts Prime Minister’s Questions from the British House of Commons, where the Prime Minister is required to answer questions from other Members of Parliament. Whenever Tony Blair is shown thinking on his feet, without resorting to evasion, stock comebacks or double-talk, it becomes painfully obvious that Bush wouldn’t last ten seconds in there. Likewise, the European media would never let a national leader get away with the sort of drivel that the American media so exasperatingly allows from Bush.

In the meantime, I have a request for Coleman: please quit your job in Ireland and come to work in America. We desperately need a journalist on the White House beat who actually practices journalism.

The Rule of Law

Almost, but not quite, lost in the hoopla over yesterday’s “transfer of sovereignty” in Iraq from the United States to a handpicked interim government (whose Prime Minister was incidentally a CIA asset in the 1990s and reportedly helped orchestrate a bombing campaign in Baghdad) was a pair of Supreme Court decisions reminding us that government’s wartime powers are not infinite.

One case concerned the 600-odd detainees at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who were accused of being connected with al Qaeda or the Taliban, while the other concerned an American citizen arrested in Afghanistan. All were declared “enemy combatants” by the Government and locked away without charges, without a trial, and without any access to an attorney. (A third case, concerning an American citizen arrested in Chicago and declared an enemy combatant, was punted back to the lower courts on procedural grounds. The case of Jose Padilla is not over.) President Bush, through the Justice Department, claimed the unilateral and unlimited power to lock up anyone at any time as part of the “War on Terror,” and told the courts to butt out by barring detainee access to judicial review.

But whoa! Not so fast, the Court said. Even in wartime, even under military jurisdiction, defendants have the right to their day in court. The Court rejected the Administration claim that detainees have no access to American courts as Guantanamo Bay is not in the United States, pointing out that the Government has “complete jurisdiction and control” over the base. So from a legal standpoint, detainees at the base are in the US and thus have access to the courts.

The Court, however, reserved its sharpest rebuke for the case of an American citizen arrested in Afghanistan and locked up as an enemy combatant. By an 8-1 vote, the Court ruled that Yaser Esam Hamdi cannot be held indefinitely without a fair opportunity to rebut the charges against him. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.” Even Justice Antonin Scalia, not normally known for being a strong advocate of individual rights against government power, said that “the very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.” Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, saying that “this detention falls squarely within the Federal Government’s war powers, and we lack the expertise and capacity to second-guess that decision.” (In other words, we should trust the Administration with blind faith and shut up, despite the fact that most thinking adults have a problem with “because I say so” reasoning coming from the President.)

Some may scream that the Court has blocked the ability of the President as Commander in Chief to conduct war operations. But what the Court has actually done is remind us that when anyone is accused of wrongdoing, the Government has to prove its case in a public trial; it cannot just declare someone guilty and lock them up without any chance for the accused to challenge it. Even in wartime – especially in wartime – our basic freedoms do not go out the window, and for the Administration to claim the unlimited power to toss anyone into a legal black hole shows a frightening arrogance. After all, Americans have historically held a dim view of a President who claims the unchecked power to do anything without answering to anyone.

“It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation’s commitment to due process is most severely tested,” the Court said in its ruling, “and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad.” Well put.

Prove It

Last week, the 9/11 commission released a report saying in plain English that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, especially on 9/11. Since this was one of the Bush Administration’s favorite propaganda lines, the report simply could not go unchallenged, and the White House promptly marshaled its media allies to hammer away at the commission’s findings.

Said hammering is taking three forms:

1. This conclusion was reached by lower-level staffers and not the commissioners themselves. This one didn’t fly for very long; after all, one would think that said staffers would be unable to release a paper under the commission’s name and on the commission’s website without the commissioners’ approval.

2. 9/11 connection? We never said there was a 9/11 connection. Oh, please – don’t insult our intelligence. For months before and after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others said ad nauseum that Iraq and al Qaeda were two peas in a pod, and repeatedly insinuated (and sometimes more) that Iraq was behind 9/11. For example:
a. “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” (Bush, 9/25/02)
b. Invading Iraq “is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” (Bush’s official war notification letter to Congress, 4/19/03)
c. “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of al Qaeda.” (Bush, 5/1/03)
d. “If we’re successful in Iraq, we will have struck a blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” (Cheney, 9/14/03)
e. “Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged.” (Condoleezza Rice, 9/17/03)

3. All right, so maybe Iraq wasn’t involved with 9/11, but they were still involved with al Qaeda. This one doesn’t wash either. The commission release clearly said that Baghdad ignored al Qaeda’s repeated attempts to procure training camps and weapons from Iraq.

As one aspect of the Administration’s PR counterattack, the arch-conservative Washington Times trumpeted an unconfirmed – and very obviously planted – allegation that a senior official in Saddam’s militia was also a member of al Qaeda, but the story fell apart just hours later with the realization that there were actually two different people with similar names. Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to help out by claiming he personally warned Bush soon after 9/11 that Saddam was planning terrorist attacks within the US, but that also went nowhere when the White House sheepishly admitted that the story was groundless and no such warning was ever given.

Most ludicrously, Cheney was trotted out on CNBC Thursday night to mutter darkly that the White House “probably” held back evidence from the 9/11 commission proving that Saddam collaborated with al Qaeda and that – again – he just might have had a hand in 9/11 after all.

Putting aside the question of whether or not the Administration deliberately withheld very relevant facts from the commission, I say to Cheney: Prove it. Release your evidence. If it supports what you claim, then you should have no problem with making it public. After all, your Administration has in the past leaked sensitive information for political purposes, so this shouldn’t be such a big deal. (Remember Valerie Plame, the CIA operative whose cover was blown in retaliation for her husband publicly saying the African uranium story was a crock?) But it seems infinitely more likely that if there were such a smoking gun, it would have been loudly publicized long before now. Instead, it seems that any new “evidence” would be just more of the same: more rumors, more conjecture, and more speculation.

The Administration ideologues, hell-bent on war with Iraq no matter what, saw only what they wanted to see and took unsupported allegations to be gospel truth. They ignored everyone who told them it wasn’t true. They knowingly poured deceptive garbage into the public consciousness to scare Americans into going along with their schemes. And now that they’ve been caught red-handed, they are completely incapable of doing anything other than spouting the same nonsense. How pathetic.

Don’t Bother Me with the Facts

It has become standard operating procedure in the Bush Administration that if the facts don’t jibe with the ideology, one just ignores the facts and keeps plowing on straight ahead. Such is the Administration’s response to the 9/11 commission’s discrediting of one of its favorite canards: that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were partners in mayhem, that the invasion of Iraq was part of the War on Terror, and there was no substantive difference between Iraq’s secular dictatorship and al Qaeda’s theocratic terrorism.

“We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States,” the commission reported in direct contradiction to the standard Administration line. “Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded.”

In any other Administration, it would quickly be realized that this particular dog no longer hunts and a proven-wrong sales pitch would be abandoned. But after three years of this Administration, we know better.

Proving himself to be utterly unable to step outside his ideological box, President Bush responded to the report by flatly denying it and just repeating the same thing. “There was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” he insisted somewhat peevishly. (In his defense, perhaps he was never told of the commission’s findings. After all, he has bragged on the record that he doesn’t bother to keep up with world events from any independent sources, preferring instead to be spoon-fed by his staff.)

Not content simply to give the impression of being disconnected from reality, Bush went on to deliver a real whopper: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

Oh, really? That will be a surprise to millions of Americans who were intentionally deceived by White House rhetoric, both specific and general, into thinking just such a connection existed. Vice President Cheney kept mentioning the mythical Prague meeting between lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent long after it was debunked by American and Czech intelligence. Other officials, including Bush himself, were a little more careful, choosing instead to use buzzwords such as “Saddam,” “September 11” and “al Qaeda” endlessly in the same sentences to plant the impression of a connection without actually saying so. Either way, Bush’s statement comes off as either shamelessly dishonest or utterly idiotic.

Some say that the White House’s staying “on message” no matter what shows resolve and steadfastness. But when you keep on using the same lines long after they’ve repeatedly been exposed as false, that’s not resolve, that’s arrogant stupidity. Whether it’s deliberate or delusional, the thought of such blatant deceit coming from the most powerful people in the world is not a comforting one.

Once More, with Feeling

How many times must it be said?

Iraq was not involved with al Qaeda.

Iraq was not involved with al Qaeda.

IRAQ WAS NOT INVOLVED WITH AL QAEDA!

For two years, an unvarying drumbeat of misinformation has poured out of the White House claiming that Iraq and al Qaeda were thick as thieves. Combined with the constant insinuation that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, it was a major selling point in the campaign to scare Americans into supporting the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. This was done over the protests of State Department and CIA analysts pointing out that no such connections have been shown to exist, and the secular Saddam Hussein and the Islamist Osama bin Laden were well known to loathe each other. Since the fall of Baghdad, no evidence of such a link has been discovered.

This minor inconvenience has failed to slow down the propaganda machine in any way. Indeed, as recently as this week, Vice President Cheney claimed that Hussein “had long established ties with al Qaeda.” President Bush dutifully backed him up, saying that the alleged post-invasion presence in Iraq of al Qaeda deputy Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi constitutes “the best evidence of [Iraqi] connection to al Qaeda affiliates and al Qaeda.” The conservative media, especially William Kristol’s Weekly Standard magazine and the NewsMax.com website, have valiantly attempted to flog this particular dead horse, insisting that Hussein and bin Laden were bosom buddies.

Now the 9/11 commission, aided by testimony from senior FBI and CIA analysts, has added its weight to this debunking, having failed to uncover any credible evidence of Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration. While finding that al Qaeda did make overtures to Iraq (among other countries, including Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan) asking for training camps and weapons, those overtures were ignored. The supposed and much-ballyhooed April 2001 meeting in Prague between lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent never happened. Iraq was not involved with 9/11 in any way.

So a central pillar of the Bush Administration’s argument for invading Iraq has been discredited – again. Every time Bush or Cheney insists, in the face of all logic and facts, that Hussein and bin Laden were partners in jihad, they are further exposed as self-deluded liars who are utterly unable to deviate from a proven-false party line. The rationales to justify the war and the chaos which followed have grown fewer and fewer. But don’t expect any realization of that fact in the White House.

Remembering Reagan

When Ronald Reagan left the White House and retired from public life back in 1989, it was well known that at 78, he would not be as active an ex-President as others, from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter. When he announced in 1994 that he was suffering from the disease sadly nicknamed the Long Goodbye, Alzheimer’s sprang to the forefront of the public consciousness. And now that he is gone, we find ourselves looking back collectively.

Known as the Great Communicator, Reagan brought an almost royal classiness to the White House unseen since the days of JFK. Everything was white-tie, the finest china, the fanciest guest list. Reagan’s cheerful what-me-worry optimism was a decided change from Jimmy Carter’s often dour seriousness. He could always be counted upon to deliver a stern face or a comforting expression when called for, and as we are constantly reminded, he made America "feel good about itself again."

Unfortunately, that's not all he did.

Reagan also brought an air of selfishness and utter insensitivity to many issues. Whether it was declaring that ketchup was good enough as a vegetable for school lunches, announcing on Thanksgiving Day that unemployment benefits would be taxed, or never offering anything close to a balanced budget then blaming Congress for fiscal excess, the Reagan Administration too often displayed the uglier aspects of the “Me Decade.”

Reagan ignored the early years of the AIDS epidemic while cutting social spending to the bone and beyond, crippling health care, education, housing and other public services. His tax policies recklessly redistributed wealth upwards, increasing the number of families below the poverty line by a full third. His mania for deregulation paved the way for the savings and loan scandal, the bill for which you and I are still paying through our tax dollars.

He brought about an end to the Cold War by embarking on an uncontrolled arms race, forcing the Soviets to bankrupt their economy in a vain effort to keep up – and it was revealed only after the Soviet Union collapsed that its military was nowhere near the fearsome beast he claimed it was.

For someone who claimed to champion freedom across the globe, it should be noted that Reagan winked and said nothing when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians -- the very same atrocities which George W. Bush exhumed fifteen years later to justify invading Iraq. He was Our Man in Baghdad at the time, you see, and thus could do no wrong. It will be interesting to see how the commentators who now rush to heap posthumous praise on Reagan handle this little matter...but it's more likely that it will be simply ignored.

His anti-Communist “evil empire” rhetoric made its way into the popular culture of the 1980s, emerging in such gratuitously Soviet-bashing movies as Red Dawn, Invasion USA and Rocky IV as well as the TV miniseries Amerika. (It’s not like this was new to him. Back when he was head of the Screen Actors Guild, he was an FBI informer, ratting on his fellow thespians at the first hint of any political thought deemed unorthodox.)

But Reagan’s most lasting impact may well be not the tripling of the national debt nor the relentless government-is-the-enemy GOP mindset, but rather the transformation of the Presidency into an endless PR campaign. His handlers knew all too well that since Reagan the man was a genuinely nice guy, looked good on TV and could deflect inconvenient questions with a smile and a wave, Reagan the President could get away with almost anything. And so Reagan the President was able to push through policies that hurt children, the disabled, the sick, and the elderly – people who were usually incapable of fighting back – while Reagan the man stood above it all, untouchable.

Reagan was the Teflon President; nothing stuck to him. No matter how many policy disasters came about, from the secret wars of El Salvador and Nicaragua to the constitutional morass of Iran-Contra, he personally was never held accountable for anything. As House Speaker Tip O’Neill recounted in his memoirs, a constituent whose disability benefits had been cut came to him for help. As they discussed the problem, the constituent told O’Neill he was being too tough on Reagan and asked him to lay off. “Who do you think is cutting your benefits?” O’Neill asked, stunned. “It’s not him,” came the confident reply, “it’s the people around him.”

Reagan was the perfect figurehead President, delegating the actual responsibility to his staff while reserving the TV appearances for himself. No one else could have gotten away with blundering his way through a press conference with one misstatement and gaffe after another; no one else could have gotten away with looking strongly into the camera and blaming other people for his own mistakes.

And because of his personal appeal and charisma, he got away with it all. Once, in an inadvertently aired microphone test, he chose to quip, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” In the face of queasy public reaction, Reagan’s response, instead of admitting that nuclear annihilation might not be such a laughing matter after all, was to blame the media for reporting it in the first place. And people agreed, brushing it off as a tempest in a teapot rather than as a disturbing insight into the most powerful man on Earth.

After he left office, the conservative movement transformed him from a mere mortal into a full-fledged political saint, determined to name monuments and buildings after him in all fifty states, even trying to get his face added to Mt. Rushmore. The invocation of his name and memory was so powerful that when the conservative media pounced on rumors that CBS’ planned miniseries The Reagans was insufficiently worshipful, the network was scared into yanking it.

Reagan’s death has hastened this transformation, and the current media coverage tends to overlook the dark side of his Administration. Part of this is simply what normally happens when anyone dies: accentuate the positive while glossing over the bumpy parts. But we should not let this prevent a full and honest appraisal of his Presidency, no matter who it offends ideologically.

Back to the Gulag

In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, the Communist government maintained the Gulag, a network of prisons and labor camps across the country (but mainly in the frozen tundra of Siberia) to hold anyone even remotely suspected of insufficient support for the Revolution, having the wrong ethnic identity, and other supposed offenses. (For a vivid depiction of life in the camps, from the endless cold and hunger to the helpless dread one felt at falling into this legal nowhere, I recommend Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.)

A half-century after Josef Stalin’s death, the United States is in grave danger of creating a Gulag of its own. Not in terms of below-freezing prisons in Alaska, but in terms of a legal black hole.

Two years ago, an American citizen and former gang member named Jose Padilla was arrested by federal agents after stepping off a plane in Chicago. In tandem with the White House, the Justice Department said he was an al Qaeda agent, unilaterally declared him to be an “enemy combatant,” and ordered him locked up in a Navy brig in North Carolina. Since then, he has been forbidden to see anyone, from his family to his lawyers, and has been under deep interrogation. He was never charged with any crime and was never put on trial for anything. He was just pronounced guilty and was made to disappear. (It takes a wry sense of irony to note that Padilla’s arrest and enemy-combatant designation was demagogically announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft in, of all places, Moscow.)

Now, the Justice Department has defended its handling of the Padilla case for the first time, and the way in which it has done so is astonishing. Deputy Attorney General James Comey held a press conference the other day at which he announced that Padilla planned to blow up apartment buildings and commit other crimes. Anticipating reporters’ questions, Comey freely said that if Padilla had been put on trial instead of being declared an enemy combatant, “he would very likely have followed his lawyer’s advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right. He would likely have ended up a free man, with our only hope being to try to follow him 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and hope – pray, really – that we didn’t lose him.” He also ominously said that “we’ll figure out down the road what we do with Jose Padilla.”

So the only way to deal with an American citizen who may or may not have been in league with al Qaeda was to make him disappear, that the right of any accused person not to be forced to testify against himself is little more than a technicality, and that Padilla would probably have been acquitted had he claimed that right? To me, this sounds an awful lot like an admission that a court case would likely have been painfully weak. But having invested a lot of political capital in proclaiming him to be a terrorist – especially by blaring accusations in a full press conference without ever bothering to give him any chance to respond – the Justice Department cannot now back away from it.

This is not, of course, to say that Padilla is without doubt an innocent victim of circumstance, blameless and pure. Far from it; we do not know for sure whether he actually committed any of the offenses of which he has been accused. All we have is the government’s claims that he did – and they refuse to put those claims to the test in court.

The American system of justice is based on the notion that anyone accused of wrongdoing is entitled to a fair trial at which the government would have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Dispensing with all that and just declaring someone to be guilty without even charging him with anything is, quite simply, un-American. The concept that the government has the unchallengeable power to take anyone, particularly an American citizen, and throw them in jail without charges, without a trial, and without end is nothing short of scary.

After two years in a legal limbo, Jose Padilla deserves a trial. If he is found guilty of being an al Qaeda terrorist-in-training, lock him up and throw away the key. If he is found innocent, set him free and allow him to get back to his life. But we will never know the truth unless the government is willing to make an actual case instead of just announcing him to be guilty. Doing anything else is a mockery of justice, plain and simple.

Busted!

Two months before America invaded Iraq last year, a particularly massive contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil infrastructure was awarded to Halliburton by the Army Corps of Engineers. The award was under most unusual circumstances: there was no competitive bidding and no ceiling to the payment amount, both of which were contrary to the usual process. In a nutshell, a multi-billion dollar contract was simply given away.

By a staggering coincidence, Halliburton’s CEO had left the company in 2000 to become Vice President of the United States. Despite Dick Cheney’s repeated denials that he had anything to do with the deal, there has always been more than a whiff of cronyism about it. (It did not help that since becoming Vice President, Cheney has annually received hundreds of thousands of dollars in “deferred compensation” from Halliburton.) It was blatantly obvious that Halliburton could never have gotten the contract under such conditions in a million years without its former boss now being VP, but it could never be proved.

Until now.

Time is now reporting that Cheney, far from keeping his old company at arm’s length, actively coordinated the sweetheart deal. The magazine obtained a copy of an internal E-mail message, dated March 5, 2003 and written by a Corps of Engineers official, saying that the contract had been approved and that the White House would be officially informed the next day.

“We anticipate no issue,” the message goes on to say, “since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP’s office.”

Cheney’s spokesman Kevin Kellems responded to the article by claiming the E-mail was just “a heads-up...in anticipation of controversy over the award of a sole-source contract to Halliburton.” This does not, however, sound like much of a heads-up to me. Rather, it says loud and clear that the deal was engineered to benefit Cheney’s old cronies, ethics be damned.

Anyone else would instantly recognize that it’s just plain wrong for a government official to be actively involved in the awarding of a contract to one’s former colleagues. The fact that the contract was awarded under such ludicrously favorable terms makes it all the more clear that Cheney simply doesn’t get it. Does he really believe that the rules don’t apply to him, that the normal ethics laws are, to steal a phrase from Leona Helmsley, “for little people?”

As the fiascos keep piling up with no end in sight, Cheney has become a major liability to the Bush re-election effort. But since this Administration never holds anyone in power accountable for anything, don’t expect any consequences.

It's Just a Movie

Much ado has been made about 2004’s first big-scale “blockbuster” film, The Day After Tomorrow. The movie has all the usual hallmarks of a summer popcorn flick – standard cookie-cutter characters, cheesy dialogue, some good solid destruction, and a ton of money spent on special effects. In short, it’s supposed to be a nicely diverting time-waster.

Directed by Roland Emmerich, who made Independence Day as well as Godzilla (you win some, you lose some), the film is about a new Ice Age triggered in only a week or so by global warming. The result is typical summer-movie death and disaster, with the trailers showing some very exciting-looking shots of twisters demolishing downtown Los Angeles and a tsunami drowning New York. (Of course, trailers are notorious for showing only the best parts of the movie, but that’s beside the point.)

Some environmental groups have glommed onto the film, pronouncing it to be a sort of wake-up call to the dangers of global warming. (It’s not like that hasn’t been done before. Look at Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. Actually, don’t look at it; it’s not very good.) Al Gore, the Ben & Jerry guys, and others have gone on record saying that the premise is rooted in accurate (if highly exaggerated) science and that basically everything in the movie is George W. Bush’s fault.

On the other side, detractors claim the film is little more than pseudo-science tree-hugging propaganda, and have compared it to the 1983 TV film The Day After, in which the Americans and Soviets annihilate each other in a nuclear war. They also point out that the film is “inspired” by a book written by alien-abduction claimant Whitley Streiber and conspiracy-theory radio host Art Bell, insinuating that a movie based on anything from these guys can’t possibly be taken seriously.

For their part, executives at 20th Century Fox are reportedly thrilled about the free publicity they’re getting from all this commotion.

But far from being some heavy-handed political polemic, it appears that The Day After Tomorrow is really just a summer disaster movie. No more, no less. (After all, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.) It’s a throwback to the sensational disaster flicks of the 1970s just as Independence Day was a throwback to the alien-invasion movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Like TV shows which breathlessly describe their plots as “ripped from today’s headlines” to bring in audiences, the screenwriters used global warming for the film’s hot topic (ha!).

The reviews are starting to come in, and like movies in general, some are good, some are bad, and some are average. But many say that people who get into screaming matches over the film’s supposed message are missing the point; that it’s just a big, splashy spectacle of a summer movie. So don’t make such a big deal about it, and if this kind of flick is your cup of tea, enjoy.

Too Little, Too Late

Throughout the last thirteen months of warfare in Iraq, a common criticism is that the Bush Administration had no plan and no strategy for dealing with the chaos. It was as if the White House and the Pentagon were in a permanent holding pattern, praying that they could keep the situation relatively under control until the magic date of June 30, scheduled to be the supposed “handover of sovereignty” to Iraqis. After that, whatever happens can be passed off as somebody else’s problem.

This endless dithering, based primarily on the hope that things would eventually get better, has taken its toll. Polls routinely show that a clear majority of Americans oppose President Bush’s Iraq policy, and indeed it is painfully clear that there is no policy, just stalling for time. After weeks in which he has largely let his staff do the talking – and after months in which the situation in Iraq disintegrated into a truly catastrophic quagmire – Bush himself went before the cameras last night to lay out his long-awaited plan for getting us out of this mess.

The address can be summed up in four words: too little, too late.

In his speech, with one eye firmly fixed on Election Day, Bush outlined his “five steps” to handing over power to Iraqis and getting out. As he put it, “We will hand over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government, help establish security, continue rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, encourage more international support, and move toward a national election that will bring forward new leaders empowered by the Iraqi people.” In the midst of the cheerleading, listing the accomplishments while glossing over the setbacks, it is interesting to note that while Bush laid out goals, he did not in any way mention the process in making them happen aside from the vaguest of generalities. It’s as if all these things are expected to happen by themselves.

Bush claimed that despite the post-June 30 presence of 138,000 American soldiers, with more to come if needed and with no withdrawal timetable of any sort, “the occupation will end and Iraqis will govern their own affairs.” This one is simply laughable. American troops will be able to go where they want, when they want, and will not be answerable to any supposed Iraqi government. So in other words, the occupation will continue, no matter what it’s called. (Indeed, post-speech reaction in Iraq shows that the Iraqi people realize this all too well.) And when you get right down to it, the new Iraqi government will have almost no power to speak of.

The speech contained some moments of unintended humor, such as when he insisted that “at every stage, the United States has gone to the United Nations,” conveniently forgetting that the Administration was dragged kicking and screaming into doing so, finally bypassing the UN entirely when that body refused to provide a blank check for war.

He also attempted to blame the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal on “a few American troops,” and in a desperate effort to just make the whole thing go away, he proposed tearing down the Saddam-era prison in favor of one yet to be built. (It was, indeed, the only tangible proposal in the whole speech.) But the “anything goes” policies emanating from the highest ranks of the Pentagon which formed the basis of the abuse were quietly ignored.

What was not mentioned was quite significant: the never-found WMD arsenal (which, if you recall, was the ostensible reason for the invasion), the fact that the vast majority of Iraqis see us as occupiers rather than liberators, and, of course, the numerous policy failures which allowed the situation to degenerate as far as it has. Then again, Bush is notorious for never, ever, admitting that he or anyone around him have ever been wrong about anything, so that one was probably too much to hope for.

But most depressingly, Bush continued to insist that the Iraqi insurgency is composed simply of a ragtag collection of “terrorists” and Saddam Hussein’s “elite guards,” rather than what it really is – a broad-based nationalist uprising aimed not at bringing back the bad old days but at throwing the Americans out. By doing so, and by seeing the conflict purely in black and white terms rather than as a complex state of affairs, he sows the seeds for more and bloodier failures.

“We must keep our focus,” Bush said, but that focus has been terribly lacking throughout this whole nightmare. The White House and the Pentagon had one goal in mind on invading Iraq: overthrowing Saddam Hussein. But once that was accomplished, there was no plan to deal with what would happen next. We have seen the consequences.

The thing we need right now is a clear sense of direction from the Bush Administration, one based not on phantom deadlines or re-election bids, but on a realistic plan to get us out of the military and diplomatic disaster which threatens to be the true legacy of George W. Bush. Unfortunately, that sense was nowhere on display last night.

The Truth Comes Out

Yesterday, American troops and Iraqi policemen raided the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi, seeking a dozen of his closest associates on fraud, theft, corruption and kidnapping charges. “Let my people go,” Chalabi thundered into the cameras like some Moses by the Tigris. And in one of the strongest signals yet that we have officially worn out our welcome in Baghdad, he added, “We are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq, but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their affairs.”

To understand just why this is a big deal, it should be mentioned that two years ago, Chalabi was the toast of Washington. As the head of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqis living in exile out of the country, he had a single overriding vision – to overthrow Saddam Hussein and set up shop in Baghdad as the leader of a new Iraq. But he had virtually no support in Iraq, so to accomplish that, he needed some heavy-duty firepower to do the job for him.

So he came to America, whispering seductively into the ears of people high up in the neoconservative establishment that Hussein had a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and others all believed him hook line and sinker. And by a staggering coincidence, all were obsessed with the notion of “finishing the job” left over from the 1991 Gulf War, when the military drive to throw Iraq out of Kuwait refrained from going on to Baghdad. Combining that with the desire to seize control of Iraq’s oil and their grand schemes of remaking the Middle East, they were primed and ready to listen to Chalabi.

The Clinton Administration, which was also the recipient of INC reports, did not trust Chalabi or his cohorts, seeing them as craven opportunists who were more interested in taking power for themselves than anything else. Undeterred, Chalabi provided a couple of defectors who claimed to have worked at Iraqi WMD sites, and their words were splashed all over friendly media outlets. Other defectors (including Hussein’s son-in-law) who reported that all such weapons had been destroyed were ignored.

The fact that Chalabi was convicted of fraud and embezzlement and was a fugitive from justice in Jordan, the fact that he had not been in Iraq in decades, the fact that he had no backing among the Iraqi people – all were disregarded. He was telling people precisely what they wanted to hear, and that was all that mattered.

When George W. Bush became President in 2001, Chalabi’s allies ascended to power, and immediately began planning his long-dreamed invasion of Iraq. All the while, the INC kept feeding fantastic stories to the Administration, to Congress and to the American media, all of which were accepted without question. Secretary of State Colin Powell used the tales as the basis for his now-infamous presentation to the UN Security Council. (He has since disowned his own testimony as being based on “inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading” information.) Career analysts in the CIA and the State Department, who had dealt with Chalabi before and concluded that he could not be trusted, cautioned their superiors against putting so much stock in him, but their warnings were ignored.

When the invasion finally came in March 2003 and Baghdad fell, Chalabi got what he wanted. He was appointed to the handpicked Iraqi Governing Council and was groomed to be the next leader of Iraq.

But as the search for Hussein’s much-ballyhooed WMD dragged on and nothing was found, the relationship began to sour. The highest American ranks finally began to realize that Chalabi just might have fed them intentionally false information in a successful attempt to dupe Washington. (Oh, and those famous defectors provided by the INC? Turns out their supposed bombshells were wrong, they contradicted each other on key details, and in some cases they never worked at the supposed weapons sites at all.) For his part, Chalabi did not help matters when in February he bragged to the London Daily Telegraph that, “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.”

As a result, he was eased out of power and marginalized. He remains on the IGC, but without authority, and his chances of becoming President of Iraq are now zero. His American funding, amounting to $335,000 a month, has been cut off.

So at long last, the truth about Chalabi finally comes out. He played us like Nintendo for his own purposes, telling people in power exactly what they wanted to hear. He had no compunctions about causing thousands of deaths and widespread destruction to get what he wanted.

This does not, however, let the Bush Administration off the hook. They were obsessed with the notion of “getting” Hussein at any cost and by any means necessary. Didn’t matter how it happened, as long as it happened. And so they willingly let themselves be conned like a backwoods tourist playing three-card monte in New York.

Chalabi said Hussein was bristling with terrible weapons, and he was believed. He said Hussein was in league with al Qaeda, and he was believed. He said American troops would be unconditionally welcomed as liberators, and he was believed. Anyone who pointed out that Chalabi was a power-hungry crook, that there was no evidence to support his claims, or that all might not go according to plan – they were simply ignored.

We are now paying the price for our leaders’ pathetic vendetta. We are paying for it with a sea of budgetary red ink which we are blithely handing off to our children. We are paying for it with our ruined international credibility. And most tragically, we are paying for it with the blood of our dead and wounded soldiers. Any Administration, Republican or Democratic, which allows itself to be so drastically hoodwinked does not deserve to remain in office.

With This Ring I Thee Wed

Earlier this week in Massachusetts, gay and lesbian couples, some of whom have been in committed relationships for decades, started getting married at courthouses and clerk’s offices to the cheers of onlookers. Despite the apocalyptic warnings of gay-marriage opponents, fire and brimstone did not rain down, the earth did not open up and swallow everyone whole, and predatory homosexuals did not whisper into the ears of impressionable children, “Join us, all this can be yours.” When I turned on the news, instead of moral rot and the nation going to hell in a hand basket all I saw were people who love each other very much.

Just look at Tanya McCloskey and Marcia Kadish, who got married in Cambridge shortly after the clerk’s office opened for business Monday morning. They emerged from City Hall to applause and congratulations, their faces radiant and happy, their souls aglow.

Oratory is heard for hours on end as to how gay and lesbian weddings “threaten” marriage, as if straight marriages across the country will magically fall apart if two men or two women get hitched. For his part, right-wing radio personality Michael Reagan went so far as to opine that if gay marriage is allowed, no straight person in America will be allowed to get married without having at least one gay experience first. President Bush also weighed in on the issue, favoring second-class citizenship for gays and lesbians by denying them the right to get married.

The opponents of gay marriage claim that marriage is reserved solely for straight people, one man and one woman. Gays and lesbians are not allowed. If they really want the legal benefits of marriage, they can join in a civil union (if that is allowed in the first place) and hope for the best. The problem with this, of course, is that it treats gays and lesbians as unworthy of the full benefits of marriage. Telling people “no marriage for you, but here’s a civil union instead” contains more than a whiff of the “separate but equal” doctrine used for decades to justify racial segregation. Now it’s used to justify sexual segregation.

Despite what gay-marriage opponents claim, the basis of a successful marriage is not one set of XX chromosomes and one of XY. Just ask Britney Spears or anyone else who gets married in a drunken fog only to get it annulled within hours or days. Nor is it based on the ability to make a baby, as anyone who has ever undergone fertility treatments or adopted a child will testify. A successful marriage, rather, is based on two people who share love, trust, support and a determination to combine their lives.

Finding that special someone with whom you want to share your life is already all too rare. As we are constantly reminded, the divorce rate in America has hovered around fifty percent for the last few years. Is the solution really to bar a specific class of people from getting married in the first place?

No, discrimination is never the answer. Love and happiness, not DNA, is the basis of marriage. Love is in the air in the Bay State, and I for one applaud it. More states should follow Massachusetts’ lead.

Deeper and Deeper

The Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal just keeps getting worse.

Last week’s high-profile hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee featured numerous instances in which the official line, that the abuses were committed solely by rogue soldiers who kept their superiors in the dark, fell apart in the wake of testimony by said superiors that, well, maybe they did know about it here and there. For his part, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in his Senate testimony earlier this month, repeatedly claimed that he didn’t know any details about the abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges, and he certainly never authorized or encouraged anything like this.

Now we have Seymour Hersh, who originally broke the scandal in last month’s New Yorker, with a new claim of something appalling: that a secret Pentagon program code-named Copper Green “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”

And who signed off on this program? None other than Donald Rumsfeld.

The program, on which President Bush was reportedly briefed, was designed to take away responsibility for prisoner interrogation in Iraq from the CIA and give it to the Pentagon, bringing the environment more into line with the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A former intelligence officer quoted in Hersh’s article described the program as “grab whom you must, do what you want.” (For the record, a Pentagon press release vociferously criticized the Hersh report, calling it “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.”)

According to Hersh, military intelligence officers took over the interrogation process and were given free rein to do whatever they wanted. With so many interrogators, contractors and others walking around Abu Ghraib out of uniform, even the military officer supposedly in charge of the prison, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was unsure who was who. The end result, according to a Pentagon consultant, was one in which “the ends justify the means.”

As for Rumsfeld’s denials, Hersh says the secretary was notified of the abuses just days after military policeman Joseph Darby blew the whistle two months earlier. It may well be that Rumsfeld simply ignored those reports, believing them to be routine interrogation procedures under the new rules. (In the aftermath of the revelations, the Pentagon supposedly revised the interrogation policies to explicitly prohibit such abuses, although it’s far more telling that most of the attention was given to barring photography.)

As if all that wasn’t enough, it was also revealed that the Pentagon program was rooted in a memo by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, written shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in which he claimed that al Qaeda prisoners were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. “In my judgment,” Gonzales wrote, “this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

“Quaint?” The prohibition of torture and other physical pressures is “quaint?”

Then again, the Bush Administration has always claimed that al Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo were not subject to the Geneva Convention’s protections. And since the object of the secret Pentagon program was to “Gitmo-ize” the operations at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, we should not be terribly surprised that the situation spun out of control as spectacularly as it did.

In a way, the Abu Ghraib scandal is indicative of the Iraq mess as a whole; the Administration marched us into this situation with ideological blinders firmly in place, refusing to even consider the possibility that all might not go exactly as according to plan. The only response to anything going wrong is a desperate attempt to spin the story into something – anything – less damaging.

But when this spin-proof scandal emerged (after all, it’s kind of difficult to put a happy face on physical and sexual abuse), the White House dug in and refused to hold anyone other than grunt-level soldiers accountable. The problem is that this approach no longer works. It is now public knowledge that these tactics were approved by those higher up the chain of command, and it remains to be seen how (or indeed if) the Administration will react.

Friendless

It had to happen eventually. After ten seasons of the “I’ll Be There for You” theme song, a couple of hundred episodes and enough coffee to set the hardest heart aflutter with caffeine overload, Friends had its grand finale last night. Even with the truly monstrous level of hype with which NBC flogged the upcoming show for weeks, we all knew this particular series could not possibly end on an unhappy note, and we were not disappointed. (Note: If you missed it, here come some spoilers, so you may want to skip this until you do see it. If you did see it, or if you didn’t and don’t care, read on.)

To recap: Monica and Chandler became the proud parents of twins via adoption and headed to their new life in Westchester, Phoebe and her new husband Mike resolved to have kids of their own, and Ross and Rachel finally ended up together. (He really was her lobster after all.) Even Gunther, after pining away for Rachel for most of the series, finally confessed his love only to be shot down. Only Joey did not have a life-changing event in the finale, but take heart -- a spinoff in which he moves to Los Angeles is coming this fall.

Friends gave us quite a few memorable moments over its ten-year run. Ross gave away his first ex-wife when she married her girlfriend in a ceremony officiated by Newt Gingrich’s sister, drove off the second when he mistakenly said Rachel’s name during the ceremony, and then divorced the third one (Rachel herself) after a drunken Las Vegas wedding. Chandler and Monica fell in love, scrambled to hide their relationship, brought it out into the open, got married, dealt with infertility and decided to adopt. (To which one of my son’s favorite babysitters, who was herself adopted, cheered, “Adoption rules!”)

Joey played a doctor on Days of Our Lives until the writers killed him off by dropping him down an elevator shaft, got the lead in a horrendously bad detective show where his sidekick was a robot, and along the way slept with every woman in sight. Rachel became a high-powered fashion executive, hired a hunky assistant solely for his looks (it seems the sexual harassment rules of the '90s never quite found their way into her office), and had a daughter out of wedlock. Phoebe became the surrogate mother for her brother’s triplets, made a music video, and tried to seduce Chandler, all while having the same delightfully ditzy presence through the years.

Me, I’m still wondering how everyone was able to afford those big Manhattan apartments while working as...well, nothing, apparently, as everyone always had time to hang out in a coffee shop in the middle of the day.

The show mirrored trends in the entertainment industry, not always for the better. As TV turned to the anorexic look, Rachel and Monica both changed from perfectly attractive and curvy women who were constantly inundated with men to shrill, bony stick figures who couldn’t get arrested. The allegedly Jewish characters of Ross and Monica always had Christmas trees everywhere with an occasional menorah or Jewish star barely visible in the background. Why couldn’t we see an episode where Ross takes his son Ben to synagogue or Monica has everyone over for a Passover Seder? (Ross did, however, dress up as the “Holiday Armadillo” to teach Ben about Chanukah.)

But, in the end, when you got right down to it, Friends was about six people who always stuck it out through thick and thin, navigating plot points both reasonable and ridiculous, uttering jokes ranging from classic gags to the occasional clunker. And as much as we wanted to smack them from time to time, they ended up being just regular people, with neuroses and bizarre personalities just like everyone else.

So let’s raise a cup of our favorite coffee to Friends. As long as it lives on in syndication, continuing to make the show’s creators and stars filthy rich, it will continue to be part of television history. And I still want to know if that orange couch from Central Perk will go to the Smithsonian.

Not the Way a Liberator Behaves

For a full year, in the face of ferocious international disbelief and skepticism, the Administration has tried to sell the invasion of Iraq as a war of liberation, not of occupation. The Iraqi people, it was said over and over again, were freed from the darkness of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and brought into the light of American emancipation. With a relentless public-relations endeavor, the White House has valiantly attempted to put the best face on an ever-mounting military and diplomatic disaster.

All these efforts have now been destroyed.

The revelation that American soldiers physically and sexually abused Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison (which, in a bitter irony, was the main torture chamber used by Saddam’s regime) has demolished America's image in Iraq and much of the Arab world. We are now seen as torturers, worse than simple occupiers and certainly not liberators. Every photograph showing grinning American men and women posing with naked Iraqis and forcing them into sexual poses is a guaranteed recruiting poster for the insurgency which has wreaked so much havoc on the occupation.

The disclosure that American military brass in Iraq not only knew this was happening but actually approved it merely adds another layer of disgust. Weeks ago, the Pentagon issued a secret internal report detailing the abuse; a few soldiers directly implicated were quietly disciplined and everything was hushed up. It never even reached Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s desk.

Then CBS got hold of the report and the photos, publicizing them on 60 Minutes II. The reaction was immediate, and expected. President Bush declared he was shocked, shocked, that such a thing could happen, but steadfastly claimed that only “a few people” were involved. Fox über-pundit Bill O’Reilly and other conservative media voices, after taking a moment to mumble that yes, it’s terrible, the people who did this should be punished, ripped into CBS for reporting it.

The floodgates are now opening. More and more Iraqis are coming forward to say that they, too, were physically abused by their American captors. Women report rape and/or the threat of rape. Men report frequent beatings as a regular part of interrogation. Amnesty International’s report says that while allegations of such mistreatment are all too frequent, “virtually none...has been adequately investigated by the authorities.” The British newspaper The Guardian reported that when the Red Cross came to visit Abu Ghraib, their inspectors were kept away from the prison facilities. It was only in recent weeks that the American occupation authorities even released prisoner lists, ending months of agony for thousands of Iraqi families who literally did not know whether their loved ones were alive or dead.

Some might say that this is much ado about nothing, that the Iraqis in prison did terrible things and deserve what they get. While there is no doubt that Saddam’s regime did indeed commit heinous crimes against the Iraqi people, the basic truth remains that we are better than this. No self-respecting American soldier should ever take part in such activities, and no officer should ever sanction them. This is not the way a liberator behaves.

It will be very difficult for the American occupation authorities to recover from this blow to its credibility, but it is not impossible. The government should take the following steps, immediately if not sooner:

1. Punish those responsible for these outrages, not just the individuals who committed them but their superiors who allowed them to happen. The accountability should lead as far up the chain of command as needed; nobody should be immune due to their rank or position.
2. Open the prisons to unlimited inspection by human rights groups such as the Red Cross and Amnesty International. The short-term disgruntlement over this will be more than outweighed by being able to prove to the world that the abuses have stopped.
3. Allow prisoners to see their families. Post security guards if needed, but Iraqis need to be able to see that their loved ones are alive and well.

Sunshine has always been the best disinfectant. Once the abuses have been ended and the perpetrators have been disciplined – and get more than just a slap on the wrist – the better chance we have of regaining the trust of the Iraqi people and the Arab world.

Then again, as pretty much everything about the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been exposed as lies, deception, and wishful thinking, it may well be too late.

Too Much Democracy?

At a time when Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq while attempting to install a Western-style democracy (according, that is, to the White House’s reason du jour for invading and occupying that country), one would think democracy is a good thing.

Apparently not, according to Senator Zell Miller of Georgia. He has a solution to all the peskier aspects of democracy, such as some Senators taking seriously their Constitutional imperative to provide “advice and consent” on judicial nominees. As he put it in a speech on the Senate floor yesterday, “What this Government needs is one of those extreme makeovers they have on television, and I am not referring to some minor nose job or a little botox here and there.”

His solution is blindingly simple: repeal the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which junked the back-room appointment of Senators by state legislatures and opened the process up to popular election. In pursuit of this lofty goal, he introduced S.J. Res. 35, a proposed constitutional amendment to do just that.

So let me get this straight – Miller’s answer to arguments over unfunded mandates, judicial nominations, and a border fence with Mexico (which he blames on “nutty environmentalists”) is less democracy? He claims that an appointed Senate would be free of “special-interest tyranny,” and that “we now have too many Senators who are mere cat’s-paws for the special interests.” Of course, in his world, the state legislatures are beacons of citizen responsiveness, a far cry from the reality of how they actually work.

To give him credit, he knows his proposed amendment is, to put it mildly, a long shot. “I know it doesn't stand a chance of getting even a single cosponsor, much less a single vote beyond my own,” he said.

You have to admit, the notion of keeping the people out of the people’s business does have a distinct appeal. It would be so much easier without all this messy debate, these untidy disagreements, this awkward hindrance to the government’s business that is democracy.

But on further reflection, this may not be quite the act of political buffoonery it appears to be. One of the chief Republican complaints of recent years is that the Senate occasionally refuses to confirm a few of the more odious of President Bush’s judicial nominees. (It should be mentioned that despite all the GOP fuss, Senate Democrats blocked just four nominees, approving 173 more.) So what better way to turn the Senate into a toothless rubber stamp than by turning it into a tool of the state legislatures?

Ever since the 2000 Census, Republicans around the country have put a lot of effort into gerrymandering state legislatures to maximize potential Republican districts and minimize potential Democratic ones, usually by breaking up traditionally Democratic districts so they form parts of several GOP-majority districts instead of combining into a single one. Engineering as many Republican-dominated legislatures as possible means, under Miller’s proposed amendment, a larger number of Republican senators – meaning a Senate far more likely to go along with whatever a Republican President may care to do. If a Democrat gets elected President, the same scheme would guarantee a recalcitrant Senate.

And Miller, by a staggering coincidence, is a rogue Democrat who votes with the Republicans nearly all the time and is in thick with the GOP leadership. Indeed, this year he wrote A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat, in which he bashes his ostensible party for supposed loony leftism.

It seems to be quite a plan. Fortunately, no one has yet gone on record as co-sponsoring it.

Adoption for Your Amusement

What were they thinking?

Last weekend, the ABC news magazine show 20/20 ran a promotional spot for an upcoming segment called “Be My Baby.” “Barbara [Walters] will bring you what might be called the ultimate reality show,” co-anchor John Stossel proclaimed. “As you watch, a pregnant teenager will decide which of five couples gets her baby.”

It was utterly repulsive, and gave the impression that ABC was running some sort of depraved contest with a baby as the grand prize. The network was flooded with calls from horrified viewers and quickly backtracked, saying that the segment isn’t really what the promo said it is, but rather a thoughtful examination of open adoption. Nevertheless, the spot was hurriedly (and wisely) replaced with a considerably more restrained one.

As anyone who has ever adopted a child knows, adoption is not a game. It is not a competition. It does not have winners and losers. Rather, it is a very personal process which makes would-be parents look deep within themselves and determine whether or not they really want to have children. Our son was adopted, so I speak from personal experience.

For her part, Walters should have known this, as her daughter was adopted as well. The fact that she did not object to this promo (she is, after all, the show’s main talent; it seems highly unlikely that it would not have been run by her) speaks volumes about her judgment.

Of course, this is not to say that adoption is a taboo subject. The Discovery Health Channel’s show Adoption Stories profiles families and their children via adoption, going through the process from start to finish, and does so with respect and good taste. ABC could learn a thing or two from it.

Fooling Some of the People

Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and even all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.” The White House is having great success at fooling some of the people.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, one of the most ubiquitous propaganda lines used by the Administration was that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were bosom buddies. Ground into our brains with endless insinuation, we were indoctrinated to believe that by invading Iraq, we were striking back against the people who attacked us on 9/11, that it was but one battle in the “war on terror,” that there was no difference between the secular Hussein and the Islamist bin Laden. It was so spectacularly successful that even American troops sent to Iraq fell for it, as shown by the examples of “this is for 9/11” comments heard from more than one soldier.

Of course, it wasn’t true. Iraq and al Qaeda were well known to loathe each other and each saw the other as mortal enemies. The Administration, having been told as such by CIA and the State Department, knew this full well, but went right on saying otherwise. After all, the American people were far more likely to support an unprovoked invasion of a country which didn’t attack us if they thought they were connected to those who did, and if they believed Iraq was directly responsible for 9/11, so much the better.

We now have more proof on just how successful this misinformation campaign was. The Program in International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland just released the results of a study showing that 37% of the American people believe that Hussein gave “substantial support to al Qaeda” with another 20% believing that he was “directly involved in carrying out the September 11th attacks.” Additionally, 45% believe that “clear evidence” was found linking Hussein and al Qaeda. None of these are even remotely true, but that didn’t stop the Administration from touting them anyway.

When a similar study was published earlier this year, the White House’s response was the same as their reaction to anything they don’t like – they simply ignored it and plowed ahead saying the same thing. Even in last week’s press conference, President Bush claimed that al Qaeda “lost an ally in Baghdad” when Iraq was invaded.

Just how divorced from reality is the White House? We all know that they tend to look at everything through rose-tinted glasses – for example, the Administration’s ludicrous insistence that the ongoing carnage in Iraq is actually a sign of success. (So if everyone is killed, does that mean we win?) Willfully ignoring repeatedly established fact, however, is very different. Numerous children’s stories say that if you believe something hard enough and long enough, it happens. So, apparently, does the White House.

The sheer gall in constantly rolling out the same rhetoric which has already been shown to be false is breathtaking, and also rather unsettling. If President Bush sincerely believes in a nonexistent Hussein-bin Laden connection despite all the evidence against it, one wonders what else he believes. Then again, he was quoted in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack as refusing to consult his father (the first President Bush) on the matter of Iraq, saying that “He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice...there’s a higher Father that I appeal to.” Sounds like we now have a governmental decision-making process literally based on blind faith rather than reason and experience.

On the other hand, Bush et al may simply be having a good laugh at our expense, popping champagne corks in the Oval Office and celebrating their success in having put such a whopper over on the American public.

I’m not sure which one is scarier.

Israel Is Always Wrong

Let me get this straight – Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announces that his country will unilaterally withdraw from all of the Gaza Strip and a large part of the West Bank, evacuating all Jewish communities within, and turning them over to Palestinian control. In effect, Sharon is giving up on negotiations, finally admitting that there is no partner for peace on the Palestinian side, and cutting Israel’s losses. Not surprisingly, the Greater Israel proponents are infuriated, seeing the disengagement plan as nothing less than surrender to Palestinian terrorism.

The response from the Palestinians and their allies, on the other hand, is rage, threats and condemnation.

The portion of the media that is friendly to the Palestinians denounced the Sharon plan as a “land grab” for holding on to part of the West Bank, conveniently ignoring that under the plan, Israel will in fact give up a large amount of land and pull out. The media also went ballistic when President Bush endorsed the plan, saying that he does not support a Palestinian “right of return” which would allow the Palestinian refugees and their descendants to move to Israel instead of a Palestinian state, destroying the Jewish state demographically.

(The “right of return” has been the subject of much misconception and misinformation over the years, so here’s a short primer on the topic:

In 1947, the United Nations approved a partition plan for what was at the time British Mandatory Palestine, dividing it between the Jewish and Arab communities, with Jerusalem to be internationalized. The Jews accepted the plan while the Arabs, threatening riots and chaos, rejected it, and when Israel declared independence in 1948, the surrounding Arab nations instantly declared war and invaded. While the fighting was ongoing, about half a million Arabs fled their homes in what is now Israel. Some were genuinely expelled by Israeli soldiers, in a tragedy long acknowledged by the Jewish state. But most left because they were told to do so by their own leaders, who promised they would only be away for a short time until the Jews were pushed into the sea. When the Jews perfidiously fought back and won, the Arab leaders promptly abandoned the refugees to the UN, who built camps to hold them as an allegedly temporary solution.

Over the years, Israel has made numerous attempts to rectify the refugee situation, only to have each and every one, even substantive improvements to the camps, rejected by the Arabs. Even when the PLO took over the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, nothing at all was done with the camps. This is because the Arabs do not want a solution to the problem; they want to keep the refugees as desperate and miserable as humanly possible, to be used as weapons against Israel, both in terms of propaganda and as a ready source of terrorists.

It is an interesting historical parallel that about half a million Jews fled or were expelled from various Arab countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Unlike the Arab response to the Palestinians, the Jews were welcomed to Israel with open arms and quickly integrated into Israeli society. Thus, there is no Jewish refugee problem.)

Turning back to the current situation – what is wrong with this picture? The Palestinians are given large tracts of land on which to build a state, no reciprocal action necessary, and their reaction is to threaten war.

The simple fact is that, according to the Palestinians, everything Israel does is wrong. No exceptions. Nothing short of national suicide will satisfy them, because that is what they want. If you pay attention to the Arabic-language Palestinian media, you will quickly learn that the PLO speaks out of both sides of its mouth. In English, they call for negotiations, justice and peaceful coexistence. In Arabic, they call for the destruction of Israel and the expulsion and/or massacre of its Jewish citizens. (For numerous examples translated into English, see the websites of Palestinian Media Watch and the Middle East Media Research Institute.)

Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once said that “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” When they were offered an independent state in 2000 at Camp David and again at Taba, which would have taken up all of Gaza, virtually all of the West Bank, parts of East Jerusalem, and a portion of the Negev Desert to make up the difference, it was rejected with a hail of bullets and bombs. It was the best deal they will ever be offered. In this time of relentless terror, each proposal the Palestinians reject is guaranteed to be replaced with a worse one.

Hopefully, they will realize at some point that Israel is not going anywhere, and that it is in everyone’s best interests to accept a two-state solution. (This also applies to the Israelis who claim all of the West Bank and Gaza as literally God-given. The Palestinians aren’t going anywhere, either.) If the Palestinians turn their energies away from terrorism and hatred and instead focus on building a new society dedicated to peace and a new Middle East, there’s nothing they can’t accomplish.

But they have to take that first step before anything else. And, sadly, no one sees that happening anytime soon.

Rock Bottom for Reality TV

I know it has been said many times before that reality TV has sunk so low it cannot go any further. And each time, it has been proven wrong as it outdoes itself again and again, each time enthralling viewers with its train-wreck fascination. From the smarmy almost-prostitution of Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire to the merry voyeurism of Big Brother and its clones to the greedily self-delusional women of Joe Millionaire (not to mention the sequel!), the genre keeps plumbing new depths.

Personally, I thought the absolute worst came with The Littlest Groom, in which a 4'5" man looked for love among women of similar height, with a few average-height women thrown in for good measure. It was little more than a multi-hour short joke and brought back memories of the 1938 film The Terror of Tiny Town, which starred "Jed Buell's Midgets in a rollickin', rootin', tootin', shootin' drama of the great outdoors."

How foolish of me. For now comes along the very latest in reality television – surgery for your amusement! ABC did it first with Extreme Makeover, in which "lucky individuals are chosen for a once-in-a-lifetime chance" to be refurbished by a team of "the nation's top plastic surgeons, eye surgeons and cosmetic dentists." The now-rebuilt people are shown delighted with their new bodies as they return to whatever passes for normal life with them.

But, as we all know, good enough simply cannot be left alone; showing before-and-after photos just isn't sufficiently humiliating and/or titillating. So Fox (who else?) got into the game with The Swan, which not only puts these allegedly lucky people under the knife, but also pits them against each other in a beauty pageant afterwards. Or, as the Fox website puts it, "Each week feathers will fly as the inevitable pecking order emerges. Those not up to the challenge are sent home. Those who are will go on to compete in a pageant for a chance to become 'The Ultimate Swan.'"

Not be left out, MTV chimed in with I Want a Famous Face, featuring people who for whatever reason want to be transformed into a look-alike of their favorite star, whether that be Jennifer Lopez, Brad Pitt, or what have you. For sheer wretchedness, this one actually edges out The Swan, as difficult as that is to imagine. What kind of person would be so obsessed with, say, Britney Spears, that she would actually volunteer to go under the knife and be altered into a freakish clone? Or what kind of man would want to become a shadow of Elvis? And to have it all shown on television. (One wonders what their lives will be like in 20-30 years, when Pamela Anderson is just a bad memory.)

What's next for reality TV? How about The Death House, where condemned prisoners compete against each other; the winner gets a pardon and the loser gets the chair – broadcast live, of course. (No, wait, they already did that in the film The Running Man. Oh, what the hell, put it on anyway and call it a remake.) Or perhaps Sexy Mamas, in which wannabe parents experiment with new sexual positions and fertility treatments, with the winners getting pregnant. (This one can be shown twice: once on network TV with all the naughty bits fuzzed out, and once on pay-per-view with everything displayed for all to see.) Maybe Who Wants to Be My Mommy and Daddy?, where viewers all across America get to vote on which couples can adopt which children. (The really scary part is that this idea was actually pitched to a network but thankfully was not picked up. A patent application was submitted, however.)

We all know why reality television is king of the airwaves. It's cheap to produce, has a ready-made audience of voyeurs, and has an even readier-made pool of applicants who are so dazzled by the chance to get on the boob tube that they will risk national humiliation, disfiguration, and worse. I for one desperately hope that the genre will burn itself out, and soon. I'm not sure how many more editions of Temptation Island can be shown before people start throwing their TVs out the window.