Sullivan and Marty Lederman at Balkinization have fittingly harsh judgments on what today’s New York Times article “Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations” tells us about the Bush Justice Department’s blind eye toward torture. (“A place of inspiration” is how former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales described DOJ.) Lederman, who worked many years at Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, writes:
With respects and condolences to the family and many admirers of Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana-the second-longest-serving sheriff in the parish’s history and an extraordinary politician even by Louisiana standards. Mr. Lee lost a five-month battle with leukemia on Monday, Oct. 1. He was 75. The son of Chinese immigrants, Lee was born in the back room of his family’s laundry on Carondelet Street in 1932. He was a protégé of the late U.S. congressman Hale Boggs. Regularly outspoken, often controversial, sometimes impolitic, but always reelected (in 1994 his approval rating was 84 percent), Harry Lee served seven terms.
John Nichols of The Nation reports that on Thursday the Senate voted 94–1 to raise the federal debt limit by $850 billion (now up to $9.815 trillion) and to grant the White House at least $9 billion in new war funding and more. (See Nichols’s article in full below.) Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold was the only senator to vote against the measure. Senators Clinton, Obama, Biden, McCain, and Brownback—all presidential candidates who, says Nichols, “are more involved in campaigning than governing”—did not vote. Feingold said:
Becoming the second Democratic presidential candidate (after Barack Obama) to warn the White House away from hostilities against Iran, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut has written a letter notifying the White House that the Senate’s 2002 authorization of military force against Iraq does not authorize war against Iran:
Never mind the small token troop reductions the president mentioned Thursday night. The Bush administration has no intention of ever withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq-indeed, Cheney and other neocons want to deepen the blood-quagmire by striking Iran (see below)-but something has got to give. The war is costing $10 to $12 billion per month when the nation is already perilously in debt because of massive high-end tax cuts. But we refuse to be told, “No, you can’t have sturdy infrastructure because the money’s tight-we’re at war.” If that were an honest argument, the White House or Congress would move to reverse some of the Bush tax cuts, share the sacrifice. But no.
Here is heartening news: The first of the major Democratic presidential candidates tells the White House not to start a war against Iran. Now, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, what say you?
(Reid, Pelosi-care to add your voices? John Warner? Retired generals?)
The Huffington Post presents exclusive excerpts of a major policy speech to be delivered in Iowa today (9/12) by Senator Barack Obama in which the Illinois senator will declare: “George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear-loud and clear-from the American people and the Congress: you don’t have our support, and you don’t have our authorization for another war.”
“Congress does not have to pass legislation to bring an end to the war in Iraq—it simply has to block passage of any bill that would continue to fund the war. This requires not 67 or 60 Senate votes, or even 51, but just 41—the number of senators needed to maintain a filibuster and prevent a bill from coming up for a vote. In other words, the Democrats have more than enough votes to end the Iraq War—if they choose to do so.”Media Misrepresent Dems’ Options on Iraq War” FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) 9/13/07
War critics, peace activists, read E. J. Dionne’s column “Democrats’ Last, Best Hope” in the Sept. 11 Washington Post. Dionne says that in his opening remarks before the Petraeus/Crocker hearings on Sept.10, Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, asked whether “Iraq is the war worth the risk of breaking our army and being unable to deal with other risks to our nation.” Skelton said war critics should transcend the narrow question about whether the surge has succeeded or failed, and keep the focus on a broader debate about “the overall security of this nation. . . . [W]ith so many troops in Iraq, I think our response to an unexpected threat would come at a devastating cost.”
We like this man, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. In 2002 he voted Nay to authorizing military force against Iraq. On Friday, Sept. 7, Durbin put the White House on notice that he, the Assistant Majority Leader, will not vote for any more Iraq war funding that is not...
The Times of London reports that the Pentagon has drawn up plans for a massive three-day strike against 1,200 targets in Iran to “take out” its military capabilities.
Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.
Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus.”
We do not know quite how to express the quality of gratitude and belongingness we feel when we hear the President of the United States, once again, on his 16th? visit to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, refer to our stricken area as “this [or that] part of the world,” as he has done in post-Katrina visits going back at least to early 2006. It would be one thing if he were talking about the tsunami in Indonesia . . . Oyster at Your Right Hand Thief and David Kurtz at TPM Café have both noted this seemingly habitual phrasing, which can only be felt as off-putting. And it can only be interpreted as the speaker’s distancing of himself from responsibility for the area described. (In its patent intent to annoy, the locution is similar to Republicans’ machine-like repetition of “the Democrat party” instead of “the Democratic party.”) For a president who claims to be a Texan through and through, this construction of speech doesn’t sound very neighborly.
One of the happy (re)discoveries at the Rising Tide 2 conference of Katrina bloggers this past weekend was the New Orleanians’ sheer vitality, creativity, and ingenuity-their will to survive, to renew, to make the city better than it was before. We came away reinvigorated, reassured that in at least one American city democracy and citizen activism are alive and well. (If you keep busy, it doesn’t hurt quite as bad-and anyway, struggling for your very survival has a way of concentrating the mind.) In part because some public officials are lame and passive, and others are working but overwhelmed and underfunded, gutsy determined citizens are taking into their own hands the work of rebuilding, forming civic associations, alerting fellow citizens about opportunities and dangers (potential funding, criminal activity on the streets or in City Hall), etc.
See the Rising Tide blog here. Prepare to meet people you’re gonna like.
“In Levees We Trust.” Engineer Timothy Ruppert gave an excellent one-hour overview of Army Corps of Engineers repairs accomplished and planned through 2011. He compared Corps’ Louisiana work to flood protection systems in the Netherlands and London. Tim Ruppert is president of the Louisiana section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Stay tuned-we’ll be writing more about Tim and his report soon.
Here is an eloquent and hard-hitting letter from New Orleans City Council Member Shelley Midura-first seen on Your Right Hand Thief (thanks, Oyster). Please join us in pressing the White House (202-456-1111; comments@whitehouse.gov) to “second” Midura’s motions.
[Note: Midura is now blogging on DailyKos. She writes: “I hope you can take the time to click on the link to my open letter to President Bush, Press Release and Fact Sheet . . . New Orleans will not allow the discussion of our recovery to be anything but factual and done via the reality based community and not through spin and talking points.”]
Excerpts from the Commander’s remarks to the American Legion in Reno, Nevada, Aug. 28. Hear any echoes of Dick Cheney’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 (almost five years ago to the day)?
“[W]e are advancing freedom and liberty as the alternative to the ideologies of hatred and repression. . . .
Rising Tide 2, the second annual Katrina bloggers’ conference in New Orleans, is only a few days away: Aug. 24-26, with Sat. 25th the main event at the New Orleans Yacht Club (map here). RT2’s theme this year is “No Holding Back” (which we interpret as determination, efforts?-we hope they’re not referring to the levees). A $20 ticket gets you in to a gathering of bloggers, writers, activists, and more, all coming together to talk and brainstorm and organize actions on behalf of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast’s recovery. Kickoff is 7:00 Friday at Buffa’s on Esplanade (1001 Esplanade, corner of Burgundy). Tickets can be purchased through PayPal. Rising Tide’s toll-free phone number is 866-910-2055.
BBC reports that Vice President Dick Cheney-who predicted in March 2003 that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” and claimed in May 2005 that the insurgency was in its “last throes”-is ready to declare the surge a success. Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, Juan Cole at Informed Comment counters that in July, normally a low-casualty month in Iraq because of the searing heat, U.S. military deaths were nearly double the casualty rate in July 2006.
The Washington Post reports that state and local officials are irked-and worried about future chaos and blame games-because the White House and DHS are ignoring their input in shaping the National Response Plan, a document intended to guide federal, state, and local emergency response. The plan was supposed to be ready by June 1, the official start of the hurricane season, but it is still being revised-behind closed doors.
Run, don’t walk, to your newsstand now to buy the Aug. 13 issue of Time, featuring a 14-page special report, “Why New Orleans Still Isn’t Safe.” With a stark image of a drainage canal floodwall, the cover teases: “Two years after Katrina, this floodwall is all that stands between New Orleans and the next hurricane. It’s pathetic. How a perfect storm of big-money politics, shoddy engineering and environmental ignorance is setting up the city for another catastrophe.”
Our friends at the American Society of Civil Engineers are concerned like everyone else about the catastrophic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. ASCE is calling attention to the degraded condition of America’s roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, and proposes an Action Plan for the 110th Congress, including the establishment of a National Infrastructure Commission.