Bush's Shrinking Safety Zone

[Griff]

Here is a lefty link parsing this xo. This one appears to exclude citizens from warrantless searches.

Clinton's general abuse of xo's was, however, a huge problem as some loc folks are finally noticing, since Bush is now playing the game.

[Undertoad]

The lefty site is right.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

The lefty site is right.

I think I would prefer the word 'correct'. Feel free to use 'kosher'.

Anyway, the Bush adminstration's claim is that this is war. Also, considering the request for permanent adoption of the "Patriot" Act, this war will apparently last forever.

[wolf]

Forever? There will always be terrorists and we will always be at war with EastAsia.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yeah, but we don't have to be at war IN EastAsia

[Happy Monkey]

Apparently, the NSA spying started months before 9/11. I guess Congress' authorization of force isn't the actual legal justification for it. I wonder what the next one will be.

[edit]
And no, it can't be "9/11 changed everything" or "if we had these powers before 9/11 we could have stopped it" either.

[Undertoad]

That guy needs a dog. Go to page 37 of the PDF and read the section marked "major policy issues". A reasonable summary of it would be:

We can't do our job unless we monitor at a very high level. We'll do that, and stay within the law.

This guy's summary of it is

We're gonna listen to what we please. We say so in December 2000 because, WTF, the Bushies are coming in, if this Florida thing gets resolved, and we predict they will want it.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

This guy's summary of it is

We're gonna listen to what we please. We say so in December 2000 because, WTF, the Bushies are coming in, if this Florida thing gets resolved, and we predict they will want it.

I don't know where you get that. It's not even close to what he's saying:

What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information.

But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.

...
"The president personally and directly authorized new operations, like the NSA's domestic surveillance program, that almost certainly would never have been approved under normal circumstances and that raised serious legal or political questions," Risen wrote in the book. "Because of the fevered climate created throughout the government by the president and his senior advisers, Bush sent signals of what he wanted done, without explicit presidential orders" and "the most ambitious got the message."

[Undertoad]

It's hyperbole. My point is, the document that he calls out as his smoking gun doesn't say any of that.

[tw]

From the Washington Post of 19 Jan 2006:

In Iraqi Oil City, a Formidable Foe
"When Saddam was in power, we used to go to Mosul, to Tikrit, to Baghdad. . . . It was safer all over," said Salah Aub Ramadan Obaydi, 65, a retired teacher, serving tea and pastries to visiting American soldiers in the curtained sitting room of his east Baiji home. Now "people get shot every day and no one cares."
...

The American convoy tried to turn around, but Iraqi cars blocked the way and people waved the soldiers down an alternative, dirt route along the Tigris nicknamed "Smugglers' Road."

"It was weird," Bartlett recalled thinking. A few hundred yards down the road, bordered by fields, the convoy was hit by a massive explosion.

... He went on, hoping to find his men sitting in the truck. But as he got closer, he recalled, "I didn't see the truck. I started seeing limbs and body parts."

Just like Vietnam. Exactly like Vietnam.

Meanwhile, this is how the enemy destroys a superior adversay when that adversary is lead by mental midgets:

Army to Slow Growth and Cut 6 National Guard Combat Brigades
On recruiting, Harvey said "the future looks promising" for meeting the enlistment target in 2006 after the Army fell short by about 7,000 soldiers last year. Yesterday, the Army said it is raising the age limit for active-duty enlistees from 35 to 40, and doubling the maximum cash enlistment bonus to $40,000 for active-duty recruits who choose a high-priority skill and will serve at least four years.

Cutting back while recruiting more to the ranks of our enemies. Meanwhile, who will be leading the invasion of Iran - because we forced Iran to go nuclear by announcing its invasion. No one else in the world is destroying their economy by fighting a Cold War.

Ironic how some Americans so need enemies as to even invent and inspire them to be our enemies.

[richlevy]

From here.

Attorneys for Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr. said he believed the general had information that would "break the back of the whole insurgency" at a time when soldiers were being killed in an increasingly lethal and bold resistance.

But prosecutor Maj. Tiernan Dolan maintained that Welshofer tortured Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush at a detention camp in 2003, treating him "worse than you would treat a dog."

After six hours of deliberations, the panel of six Army officers spared Welshofer on the more serious charge of murder — which carries a potential life sentence — instead convicting him late Saturday of negligent homicide and negligent dereliction of duty. He was acquitted of assault.

Welshofer stood silently and showed no reaction when the verdict was announced. He could be dishonorably discharged and sentenced to a maximum three years and three months in prison at a Monday hearing.

n an e-mail to a commander, Dolan said, Welshofer wrote that restrictions on interrogation techniques were impeding the Army's ability to gather intelligence. Welshofer wrote that authorized techniques came from Cold War-era doctrine that did not apply in Iraq, Dolan said.

"Our enemy understands force, not psychological mind games," Dolan quoted from Welshofer's message. Dolan said an officer responded by telling Welshofer to "take a deep breath and remember who we are."

I wonder if GWB is going to have this guy stand up in the gallery during his next State of the Union?

Many armies have had to deal with insurgents, and all of them have had to deal with uniformed enemy. How they did so is a measure of who they were.

In WWII, elements of the German military had very brutal, and to some degree effective measures for dealing with insurgencies. Their methods were the grist for many propoganda films and even parodies for decades.

The reasons McCain is upset about stuff like this is that Welshofer's attitude was probably similar to the attitudes of the guards and officers running the 'Hanoi Hilton'. They assumed prisoners had intelligence and propoganda value. They probably felt that breaking them would be a patriotic duty and might save lives.

Up until now, we have publicly taken the high road. We could demonstrate to the world our expectations about how our soldiers were to be treated. We could argue to the United Nations before or after we punished countries who tortured our soldiers that we were holding them to our standards. By being consistent, we could make the case that we were not hypocrites.

The dead man may have been an enemy, but he was also an officer in uniform. He probably did not belong to Al-Qaeda. At the worst, he may have been tied to the insurgents, although that fact was never determined. In the end, he did not provide any useful intelligence and his death probably hurt us.

Assuming Welshofer is convicted, he will probably be pardoned in 6-12 months. It's too bad all of the Joint Chief positions are filled, because he might just be the guy the administration is looking for to retool the Army to more effectively fight terrorism. If there is ever any large scale unrest in this country, he might even get the chance to try out his skills in Virginia.

Fort Carson is located south of the city which neighbors mine. Funny thing I over heard two summers ago.

I went to Chinamart, trying to find some potting soil made in the USA. I was standing in the check out line with my 20 pounds of good American earth in my cart. The two men in front of me were soldiers stationed at Ft. Carson. They began to discuss the death of an Iraqi officer who had been strangled with an electrical cord while zipped in his sleeping bag. The two young men thought this incident was an example of some good, clean fun. They spoke as if they had personally witnessed what they were talking about.

I felt horrified to overhear this bit of conversation. I thought at the time that they were exagerating, the way young men sometimes do when speaking of war time experiences.

Last Veteran's day, the local PBS station showed a documentary about the experiences of young Air Force pilots who were graduates of the US Air Force Academy which is up north of here on the opposite end of town from Ft. Carson. The men in the documentary had been "guests" at the Hanoi Hilton. They said that under torture a man will say anything his captors demand him to say. They described what they had to endure. I had to bail from watching about half way through.

Information obtained by torture is worse than no information at all. If American soldiers are captured over in the Middle East and experience the hospitality of a "Baghdad Hilton," it will hardly be any great surprise. And the US will have no higher ground of moral outrage to express.

The Air Force Pilots who had been captured in the Vietnam War said that one of the things that kept them going was their own inner knowledge of their integrity and that of their country.

South of Colorado Springs and back east in the White House, the integrity component sees to be curiously absent these days.

[BigV]

On a lighter note (hey, you gotta laugh, or you're gonna cry):

All the news you need to know!

Well, THAT made me feel ever so much better! Got any more good news for us?

[tw]

The United States spends more money on Iraqi aid then is spent to aid all African nations combined - except Eqypt. And yet still Saddam was able to provide Iraqis with more. Is it not a good thing that we have saved the Iraqi people from themselves? That our president is a business major who knows how to get things done - in Iraq as in New Orleans?

From the NY Times of 9 Feb 2006:

Iraq Utilities Are Falling Short of Prewar Performance
Virtually every measure of the performance of Iraq's oil, electricity, water and sewerage sectors has fallen below preinvasion values even though $16 billion of American taxpayer money has already been disbursed in the Iraq reconstruction program, several government witnesses said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday.