Question: How Much Longer Can We Endure the Torture of Our National Pride?

Answer: As long as our leaders remain certified.

How much longer will Senator Kit Bond remain a certified life guard?


How much longer will Brig. General Thomas Hartmann remain a certified liar?

How much longer can we afford to wait?

No longer.

Thirty retired admirals and generals have penned a letter to Senate and House intelligence chairmen John Rockefeller and Silvestre Reyes - urges the passage of Section 327 of the Conference Report on the Intelligence Authorization Act. It would restrict the CIA from waterboarding by confining the agency to interrogation techniques permitted by the Army Field Manual:

Dear Chairman Reyes and Chairman Rockefeller:

As retired military leaders of the U.S. Armed Forces, we write to express our strong support for Section 327 of the Conference Report on the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, H.R. 2082. Section 327 would require intelligence agents of the U.S. government to adhere to the standards of prisoner treatment and interrogation contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Human Collector Operations (the Army Field Manual).

We believe it is vital to the safety of our men and women in uniform that the United States not sanction the use of interrogation methods it would find unacceptable if inflicted by the enemy against captured Americans. That principle, embedded in the Army Field Manual, has guided generations of American military personnel in combat.
The current situation, in which the military operates under one set of interrogation rules that are public and the CIA operates under a separate, secret set of rules, is unwise and impractical. In order to ensure adherence across the government to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions and to maintain the integrity of the humane treatment standards on which our own troops rely, we believe that all U.S. personnel - military and civilian - should be held to a single standard of humane treatment reflected in the Army Field Manual.

The Field Manual is the product of decades of practical experience and was updated last year to reflect lessons learned from the current conflict. Interrogation methods authorized by the Field Manual have proven effective in eliciting vital intelligence from dangerous enemy prisoners. Some have argued that the Field Manual rules are too simplistic for civilian interrogators. We reject that argument. Interrogation methods authorized in the Field Manual are sophisticated and flexible. And the principles reflected in the Field Manual are values that no U.S. agency should violate.

General David Petraeus underscored this point in an open letter to the troops in May in which he cautioned against the use of interrogation techniques not authorized by the Field Manual:

What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight. . . . is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect.... Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone "talk;" however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual (2-22.3) on Human Intelligence Collector Operations that was published last year shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees.

Employing interrogation methods that violate the Field Manual is not only unnecessary, but poses enormous risks. These methods generate information of dubious value, reliance upon which can lead to disastrous consequences. Moreover, revelation of the use of such techniques does immense damage to the reputation and moral authority of the United States essential to our efforts to combat terrorism.

This is a defining issue for America. We urge you to support the adoption of Section 327 of the Conference Report and thereby send a clear message - to U.S. personnel and to the world - that the United States will not engage in or condone the abuse of prisoners and will honor its commitments to uphold the Geneva Conventions.

Sincerely,

General Joseph Hoar, USMC (Ret.)
General Paul J. Kern, USA (Ret.)
General Charles Krulak, USMC (Ret.)
General David M. Maddox, USA (Ret.)
General Merrill A. McPeak, USAF (Ret.)
Admiral Stansfield Turner, USN (Ret.)
Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn, USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Donald L. Kerrick, USA (Ret.)
Vice Admiral Albert H. Konetzni Jr., USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Charles Otstott, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Harry E. Soyster, USA (Ret.)
Major General Paul Eaton, USA (Ret.)
Major General Eugene Fox, USA (Ret.)
Major General John L. Fugh, USA (Ret.)
Rear Admiral Don Guter, USN (Ret.)
Major General Fred E. Haynes, USMC (Ret.)
Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, USN (Ret.)
Major General Melvyn Montano, ANG (Ret.)
Major General Gerald T. Sajer, USA (Ret.)
Major General Antonio 'Tony' M. Taguba, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General David M. Brahms, USMC (Ret.)
Brigadier General James P. Cullen, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Evelyn P. Foote, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General David R. Irvine, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General John H. Johns, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Richard O'Meara, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Murray G. Sagsveen, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Anthony Verrengia, USAF (Ret.)
Brigadier General Stephen N. Xenakis, USA (Ret.)

Friday Morning GOP Blogging

The last decent Republicans?

All right! I may be cheating. But I'm desperate enough to reach all the way back to March.Fired attorneys, left to right, Carol Lam, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California; David Iglesias, former U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico, Daniel Bogden, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada; Paul Carlton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, H.E. "Bud" Cummins, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Arkansas, and John McKay, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, as they were all sworn in before testifying to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill last March.

I have zero respect for Republicans. I caught a moment from their last so-called 'debate' on C-Span the other night. I think they had a rule that there would be no questions on the two I's, Iraq and immigration.

Tancredo asked some other candidate a question about immigration and was shouted down by a chorus of multiple voices.

No! No!
Not fair!
You can't ask that!
Any answer will be disallowed!

That last was from the moderator!

Pertaining to the other I-word, Moira Whelan of Democracy Arsenal compiled the table below, comparing the last two Iowa debates as far as their coverage of the subject 36% of Americans consider the most important- Iraq:I hear a lot of the spinelessness of Congressional Democrats these days. But the spinelessness of this crop of Republican presidential candidates - with one notable exception, apparently not debating - is without parallel. This collection ranges from twits to twerps, not one of which is worth warm spit in a cold bucket.

Walter Cronkite, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and the Occupation of Iraq

I used to listen to Cronkite (every night) and Winfrey comes up more than a day late and a dollar short.




Marty Kaplan says that Oprah is to Iraq as Walter was to Vietnam:

. . . I watched Oprah Winfrey stump for Barack Obama this weekend . . . It's about reassuring the overwhelming majority of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq that they are, in fact, an overwhelming majority. It's also about giving courage or cover to every Democratic member of Congress . . . .

How do people know what other people think? The sad truth is that it doesn't come from talking to one another; it comes from the media.

. . . . no journalist can today occupy the place that Walter Cronkite did when, at the end of a CBS documentary about the 1968 Tet offensive, he said the U.S. was in a stalemate in Vietnam and should get out . . . . Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert actually do tell the truth, and they mercilessly deconstruct the biases of "fair and balanced" faux news and fatuous "narrative" narratives, but their audience sizes limit their impact, and their matter is more than matched by Republican media anti-matter.

But Oprah -- well, in an age that has thoroughly blurred the boundary between news and entertainment, Oprah may actually be the twenty-first century's de facto national anchor. She really does channel -- and change -- Middle America.

. . . . Oprah's audience will take from this the message that their own opposition to the war isn't a betrayal of the troops, as the Republicans claim; isn't giving comfort to the terrorists, as the administration asserts; isn't moral cowardice, as the Right's bile-spewing whiner intelligentsia insists. And maybe the message that current and aspiring members of Congress will take from Oprah's unembarrassed anti-war message is that it's not political suicide to stand with the decisive majority of the American people, that being called bad names by your opponents will not kill you. . . .

If Oprah can feel it and think it and say it, then you can feel it and think it and say it. What's not in question is the message to Democratic politicians, especially incumbents, still weaseling on Iraq: If you've lost Oprah, you've lost Middle America.

I concede that Kaplan makes some strong and eloquent points here. No Doubt. But let me review the historical antecedents involved here.

In the wake of his visit to Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite concluded his 27-Feb-1968 broadcast with his famous and unusually personal Report from Vietnam:

. . . we'd like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective.

Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I'm not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. Another standoff may be coming in the big battles expected south of the Demilitarized Zone. Khesanh could well fall, with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there . . it is doubtful that the American forces can be defeated across the breadth of the DMZ with any substantial loss of ground. Another standoff. On the political front, past performance gives no confidence that the Vietnamese government can cope with its problems, now compounded by the attack on the cities. It may not fall, it may hold on, but it probably won't show the dynamic qualities demanded of this young nation. Another standoff.

We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds . . . it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. . . .

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. . . . But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

Cronkite had been either neutral or pro-war before he was against it. But with this single and unique (for him) editorial, this peerless broadcast journalist opened an immense credibility cap for Lyndon Baines Johnson who immediately reacted by turning to his aides and saying,

If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America.

LBJ knew at that moment he would have to change course. A month later Johnson declined to run for reelection and announced that he was seeking a way out of the war. David Halberstam wrote that this "was the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman."

Against this Cronkite standard, how does Oprah's out-of-the-closet anti-war endorsement of Barack Obama measure up?

• Oprah's conversion is late. Winfrey was pro-Iraq invasion and occupation before she was against it. She has arrived late to an anti-war position. As a matter of fact, coming out of the closet last Saturday, she is 62 months later than then State Senator Obama (Oct'02), who was publicly against the invasion before it was launched. Compare Cronkite and Winfrey statements relative to LBJ's and GWB's 2nd-term elections (1968 and 2004): Cronkite's editorial was delivered 8+ months before LBJ's re-election and Winfrey's coming-out followed GWB's re-election by 37½. Assuming Winfrey's opinion-molding influence was on a par with Cronkite's, how much would have her more timely conversion saved our country and the world in terms of unnecessary blood, treasure and delay in national redemption?
  


• Cronkite and Winfrey had/have different audiences. In 1964, Cronkite was the TV anchor of record. He was peerless in terms of delivering an objective and authoritative version of the day's news, sort of what we are supposedly treated to by Jim Lehrer and the PBS News Hour currently. His audience tuned in because they were stakeholders in the consequences (economic and political) of the current events of the day. As such, they were voters. Winfrey's audience, I would wager, are significantly less likely to be voters. Cronkite's viewers were policy wonks; Winfrey's day-time listeners are a different kind of junky, pursuing a little encouragement and information about weight loss, stress, fashion, etc.


• Cronkite addressed the fortunes of a war effort and his remarks had consequences for a sitting (and conscientious) President; Winfrey is primarily addressing the fortunes of a favored presidential candidate who might force an early end of our current Iraq war occupation.
  

Don't get me wrong. I am glad that Oprah Winfrey is endorsing my favored candidate. She brings incredible heat to any table she draws her chair up to, as the You-Tubes from the past weekend attest. I have to cop to having had her pull me to my feet in front of my C-Span with her Miss Jane Pittman routine.

Winfrey reflects on the Ernest Gaines novel which later became an iconic, Emmy Award-winning movie, "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," (a story of a woman born into slavery who lived to see the day when she could drink in the "Whites Only" fountain in a segregated town). Winfrey recalled actress Cicely Tyson's performance:

When Miss Jane Pittman would encounter young people throughout that film, she would ask, 'Are you the one?’ I remember her standing in the doorway, her body bent, frail, old, holding the baby in her arms, saying, 'Are you the one, Jimmy? Are you the one?'

I believe in '08, I have found the answer to this question. It is the same question that our nation is asking: Are you the one? Are you the one?

I am here to tell you, Iowa, he is the one.

Deep down, I get Oprah Winfrey. Neither of us are single-issue voters. If we were only voting for peace, we would be pushing for Senator Gravel, Representative Kucinich or the pandering governor from New Mexico. Both of us see more is at stake in the 2008 election than filling in the latrine of mass graves Bush has left us Americans in Mesopotamia. If Oprah can prevent Hillary Clinton from playing Richard Nixon to George Bush's LBJ, more power to her. She may have missed or fallen short of her Walter Cronkite moment. But Oprah Winfrey is right on the one key point.

Now is the time.

Belief In the Separation of Church and State Ought to be a Litmus Test for the White House

It's happening again. The press and media gave Bush a pass for his intellectual one-downsmanship to Al Gore in 2000.

Now, it's cutting slack for two front-running Republicans contending for the 2008 nomination, Massachusetts Ex-Governor Mitt Romney and Arkansas ex-Governor Mike Huckabee.











In its treatment of both, the MSM is ignoring the issue as to whether acceptance of the separation of Church and State ought to be a requirement for the highest state in the land.

Tim Rutten says the Press Is Preying on the wrong Question, and has three of his own:
. . . . Start with the fact that nearly all this week's political coverage focused on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and the speech he gave in Texas on Thursday, asking voters not to reject his candidacy because he's a Mormon. Much of the media response to that address was built on superficial, mostly misleading comparisons to John F. Kennedy's landmark 1960 address before Protestant clergymen hostile to his Catholicism. What was missing was any discussion of the numerous and very legitimate questions that ought to be asked about religion and the candidacy of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, whose surging popularity in Iowa sent Romney to the podium in the first place.

Romney, after all, simply does what most religiously affiliated Americans do; he practices the faith into which he was born. Huckabee, by contrast, is a Baptist minister. Has the notion of distinct temporal and spiritual spheres -- each with its proper concerns and distinct competency -- really been so utterly obliterated that the political press simply shrugs at this?

1. Doesn't anybody think it's worth asking whether it's proper or even desirable for a clergyman to occupy the White House?

One of the suspicions Romney was forced to address was the notion that, as a Mormon chief executive, he would be compelled to accept direction from his church's leaders, even if it means acting in ways contrary to the nation's interest. In other words, some ancient Mormon elder in Salt Lake City is going to pick up the telephone and order President Romney to do something kooky. Huckabee, by contrast, already believes kooky things for religious reasons -- in things like creationism, which he thinks should be taught in the public schools.

2. Doesn't anybody thing it's worth asking whether a nation fighting to remain technologically competitive can afford a president who -- for religious reasons -- wants to encourage as many children as possible to join him in scientific illiteracy?

Then there's the issue of the Iowa campaign ads in which Huckabee declares he is "the Christian candidate." We're all sophisticated enough to understand that's a not-so-subtle way of saying that, as a Mormon, Romney isn't a Christian in the eyes of most evangelicals. However, neither are Catholics, Unitarians or Quakers, let alone Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Bahais or -- God help them -- the despised atheists. That's the thing about religious bigotry -- and the ad is nothing less -- once it is set loose, like the angel of death, it has a logic of its own.

3. Surely, somebody in the national campaign press corps must think this is an issue worth raising with the avuncular Arkansas pastor?

Obviously not, and that sort of institutional blindness to what is at stake in the current struggle over religion and politics made it all but inevitable that Romney's address Thursday would be misunderstood by much of the media. First of all, it was nothing like Kennedy's storied speech in setting, intention or content.

• Kennedy was straightforward; Romney was clever.
• Kennedy spoke to a hostile audience of Protestant clergymen and took their questions afterward; Romney spoke to a hand-picked crowd at a Republican presidential library and took no questions.
• Kennedy defended -- indeed, insisted on -- separation of church and state; Romney simply asked that what is essentially a religious test for office be expanded to include his religion.
• Kennedy and his advisors sought the advice of one of American-style religious liberty's foremost defenders -- the great Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray; Romney sought the counsel of political handlers skilled in stage managing the religious right.

Much of consequence flows from that difference. . . . Kennedy, who used the word Catholic 14 times in his speech, could tell the ministers:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. . . . If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.

Kennedy pointed out that, as a member of Congress, he had opposed government aid to parochial schools or even the appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican.

OTOH

Romney, who used the word Mormon only once, told his audience:

In recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America -- the religion of secularism.

It was, beginning to end, an appeal to a single GOP constituency, the evangelical right, which now applies a religious test for office. Unlike Kennedy, Romney doesn't have any problem with such a test -- he just wants it graded on a steep enough curve to include Mormons.

Just as, when as a candidate, Bush displayed ignorance of the world around him and an impaired English speaking ability in 2000, so Huckaby and Romney display denial of one of the major working principles of the American democratic experiment. These ex-governors ought not be given a pass on the separation of church and state. It's a deal-breaker.

Bush Loses Ground With Military Families

Democrats No Longer Seen as the Anti-Soldier Party

A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll has measured a sea-change in the opinions of our military and military families.

Nearly six out of every 10 military families disapprove of Bush's job performance and the way he has run the war, rating him only slightly better than the general population does.

The son of poll respondent Mary Meneely, 58, is an Air Force reservist, and served one tour in Afghanistan. Meneely commented that Bush,

...went into Iraq without justification, without a plan; he just decided to go in there and win, and he had no idea what was going to happen. There have been terrible deaths on our side, and it's even worse for the Iraqi population. It's another Vietnam.

Previous surveys had demonstrated an erosion of support for Bush and the war among military personnel, including a 2005 poll by Military Times of their active-duty readers.

Now the disapproval of Bush appears to have transferred to his party. Republican leanings of military families that began with the Vietnam War -- when Democratic protests seemed to be aimed at the troops as much as the fighting -- have shifted, the poll results show.David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland, concludes,

You generally expect to see support for the president as commander in chief and for the war, but this is a different kind of war than those we've fought in the past, particularly for families.

That's because it's not war, Davey, but an occupation. An illegitimate, un-welcomed, and unwanted occupation.

This is Praise-a-Republican-Friday

And, as promised, this space is reserved for any readers and lurkers so disposed to do so.

Personally, however, at this early hour, I cannot summon the effort to do so. At the end of the day, I'll paste up something from repeaters such as Chuck Hagel or Ron Paul, etc., just to serve as a space-holder.

In the meantime, since some of my best friends are Republicans, maybe I'll take one to lunch.

All of a Sudden, Iraq Is Off the Table?

What's missing from our radar screen?

PEJ

I mean, the above graph does not even represent the total NEWZ. None of this flack has to do with today's domestic mass terrorism (9 dead) in Omaha, courtesy of the NRA; the missing snowboarders courtesy of the storm in the Northwest; the death of Southern rap innovator 'Pimp C' at the age of 33; the arrest of 'Canoe-Man' five years after his official death; late-nite TV hosts paying their own writers out-of-pocket; Mr. & Mrs. Dennis Quaid suing a major pharma over an overdose to their twins! None of this non-political non-news is a factor for the table that produced this chart.

This chart tells us that nothing of material concern has happened in Iraq in the last 24. This graph ignores all news from Iraq, good or bad.

Such as (in no particular order):

• Five British families are appealing to the Shia kidnappers for the safe return of their sons.
• US State and Defense Departments are tightening rules for security mercenaries and contractors.
• US Military Deaths in Iraq have reached 3,886.
• 1,100 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq in November.
• The cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq is projected to be $1.9 trillion (in 2002 dollars); and is now running at $6 billion a month or about $200 million a day, (according to the CBO), and increasing about $200 million a day.
• New Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is pulling the entire Australian deployment out of Iraq.
• Giving up on attaining any progress toward political cohesion through cajoling and bankrolling Iraqi politicians cowering in the Green Zone, our occupying forces are now betting on subsidizing and retaining all tribal level volunteers, vigilantes, bounty-hunters, privateers, gangsters and militias with their hands out for a grubstake.
• The newest and latest surge being the exponential growth of Sunnis expelled from Syria, returning at a rate faster than they can be serviced by the NGO's. (1.5 million are yet to return.)
  

(I hope some reader who is knowledgeable can supply me with the required number of 0's and commas to numerically represent $1.9 trillion.)

The point is, we are not at war. Not in Iraq, anyways. Maybe in Afghanistan (sometimes referred to as the 'forgotten war'), where war in the form of self-defense and retaliation was mandated upon us by the attacks of 9-11. Maybe we ought to be at war with the self-afflicted militarist occupation of our own country. (There's a thought.)

But we are not at war in Iraq. If we were, Iraq would be front-page, or front-of-the-hour news 24-7. My fellow Americans would be sucking our multi-media's spigots for each little morsel of news we could get. But the truth is, instead of warfare for glorious victory, our insanely brave, professional and competent troops have been assigned to a grinding, toiling, pointless, hopeless and endless task of policing a hostile nation. Forcibly occupying a hostile nation is the most inglorious of all missions to which troops can be assigned.

That is why our misleaders don't want Iraq and Iraqis spoiling our nightly news. They are not embarrassed. But they know the American people are increasingly embarrassed. Soon, their embarrassment will exceed the guilt of their earlier compliance. So our own occupiers, the Busheney junta, is unbelievably grateful for the premature opening of the American political primaries (the more 'debates' the better) and for all the Hugo Chavez's, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's, Vladimir Putin's and Pervez Musharraf's of the world. Anything to deflect the glare of the spotlight away from the scene of their original crime in Mesopotamia.

If it's not on teevee, it's not happening. Out of sight, out of mind.