The Toledo Blade — and independent, family owned paper — ran a four-part series last month uncovering perhaps one of our bleakest military episodes: the war crimes of the Tiger Force unit in Vietnam. Briefly, in 1967, this unit went on a seven-month killing spree that was by no means confined to “enemy combatants;” they killed unarmed men, women, and children. Salon:

The paper also uncovered for the first time that a secret four-year Army investigation had concluded that 18 members of Tiger Force had committed war crimes, but no charges were ever brought. Instead, the investigation was simply filed away in 1975, during Donald Rumsfeld’s first run as secretary of defense.

Given this, you’d think the story would be all over the national press. Today, Salon wonders why this Pulitzer contender isn’t on a TV near you.

He’s pledging a significant portion of his wealth, and encouraging others to do the same, in order to prevent Bush’s re-election. This Whiskey Bar post discusses his actions in more detail, and the challenges he’ll face once the Rove Machine starts to notice they have a well-funded enemy.

White House security officials are demanding that Scotland Yard effectively shut down central London for Bush’s three day visit later this month.

American officials want a virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protestors. They are demanding that police ban all marches and seal off the city centre. But senior Yard officers say the powers requested by US security chiefs would be unprecedented on British soil. While the Met wants to prevent violence, it is sensitive to accusations of trying to curtail legitimate protest.

(Via BoingBoing, who appear to finally have a stable server.)

A high school in South Carolina conducted a drug sweep with local officers — who entered the school with guns drawn, and restrained some students face down on the floor for the duration of the raid. CNN and CBS News are also on the story.

They found nothing beyond the suspicions of K-9 officers that some backpacks had at some point had drugs in them. Or liver treats, I guess. No arrests were made.

Apparantly, “avoiding the surveillance cameras” was one of the things that tipped the administration off to the enormous amount of drug activity in the school. Think carefully about that: it’s basically the “if you’ve got nothing to hide, then why worry about privacy?” argument, and now they’re teaching it in high schools. Good God.

Back in 1998, former President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft published a piece in Time called “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam.” It contained several points that continue to apply today, 12 years after Bush’s famously secong-guessed decision not to roll to Baghdad after ejecting Iraq from Kuwait.

Well, the article — often cited by war opponents in the run up to the new invasion — has been removed from the Time web site. Not only that; the archived table of contents for the issue in question no longer lists the article.

Fortunately, the folks at the Memory Hole have a copy, along with a scan of the original magazine pages. I suppose Time could insist it be removed on copyright grounds, but that would just be creepy, wouldn’t it?

MoveOn has the text of a speech given by Al Gore yesterday. Some choice quotes:

[F]or the first time in our history, American citizens have been seized by the executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families. President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an “enemy combatant.” Those are the magic words.ÊIf the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment. Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then itÕs almost impossible for that person to prove his innocence Ð because he canÕt talk to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesnÕt even have the right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as ÒinalienableÓ can now be instantly stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by any other branch of government. How do we feel about that? Is that OK?

There’s also a fine quote from the Israeli high court in 1999:

This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it.ÊAlthough a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. ÊPreserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individualÕs liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security.ÊAt the end of the day they (add to) its strength.

Just a reminder, dear readers. Just a reminder.

A Marine Corps Intelligence Analyst may have been forced out of the service because he has “liberal views.”

I know the military gets to play by its own rules, but this seems absurd. Well, only sort of, now that I think about it; this is also the military that discharged six Arabic linguists last year because, you know, they’re gay, and never mind that whole “we have a shortage of Arabic expertise” thing.

Rumsfeld is having a little trouble with the press; it seems he’s been denying statements he made in the months leading up to the war in re: the Iraqis welcoming us as liberators and Saddam’s supposed WMDs.

Um, Rummy? These guys take notes for a living, and some of them have those newfangled video cameras. Just a hint.

Senator John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the one investigating the Iraqi prewar intelligence and our march to war, which we now see as founded on errors if not outright lies). Apparantly, one of his staff members wrote a memo which “laid out options for handling a report the committee is preparing that will largely focus on weaknesses in intelligence gathering and analysis by the intelligence community.”

The plan, according to this memo, was first to work within the committee, which, as the Post notes, has a strong and unusual history for bipartisanship, in order to explore the allegations and suspicians rampant in D.C. and elsewhere that there was improper or questionable behavior on the part of White House officials.

A second option, the memo continues, is to loudly dissent if the report is too narrow, and “castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry.”

Finally, the memo discusses the possibility of an independent, Democrat-only invesigation, “when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority.”

Put another way, it seems to be a contingincy plan for what they can do to encourage an real investigation, which must include White House actions, particularly in light of their ongoing battle with the CIA. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? I mean, after all, it’s completely reasonable for them to suspect that the Majority might obstruct efforts to investigate one of their own, particularly in the climate we have now; the Democrats — and concerned Republicans — should be planning for other ways to get to the bottom of this.

Well, the memo was never approved or formally circulated, but it’s been leaked somehow. Or, perhaps, nefariously acquired by the opposition; Sen. Rockefeller even suggests such an acquisition would have required trash-sifting or improper computer access.

Now, of course, the GOP is hopping mad at this “politicization” of the intelligence process. So horrifying and awful was this memo to Senante Majority Leader Bill Frist that he cancelled all business of said committee, pending an “apology.” Newt Gingrich said yesterday that he thinks the President should refuse to cooperate with the investigation altogether.

That’s just plain bizarre. You don’t have to take my word, or anyone’s word, for what’s actually in this unsent, unapproved memo; the text is available online (at Fox, no less). It’s no smoking gun, and I think my summary above is fair. The GOP’s response to it is frankly astounding, and suggests some very scary things about what such an investigation might find.

Do you see what’s happening here? Josh Marshall does:

The Republicans are trying to protect the administration from a host of disclosures about shenanigans in the lead up to the war. They’ve seized on this memo (which is a bit embarrassing for the Dems, certainly, but hardly more than that) and are trying to use it to secure even further partisan control over the intelligence oversight process — or, in other words, to prevent any serious inquiry into what happened in the lead-up to the war.

The GOP knows, or at least suspects and fears, that the “proof” for WMDs in Iraq never existed, or was based on manifestly inferior intelligence and analysis that the CIA tried to contain (part of their job is to prevent misleading data from setting policy, which is appropriate; this Administration has been rabid for the raw data, and analysis be damned — partly, I suspect, so that PNAC policies could become flesh). They also know what they did to a sitting president over a blow job, when no weapons of any kind were in the mix, and they fear payback — particularly in an investigation based on something other than being sore losers in ’92 and ’96.

There’s more discussion, if you want it, over at Whiskey Bar, where they see a pattern emerging that’s pretty scary.

Mark Morford, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle explains how important “Protection from Pornography Week” is, or was. An excerpt:

After all, porn ruins families. And communities. And children. And puppies. And the upholstery. This is the government line. This is what they would like you to believe. This is why they invented Protection from Pornography Week. Because you need to know They Care. They are on guard. Because you, as always, are under attack. Here is the message: Despite how porn is a multibillion-dollar, record-breaking, insanely popular, widely accepted, gigglingly discussed, generally harmless, often exceedingly sexy and fun and unstoppable force of skin and fake orgasm and cheesy background music and money shots and thrust thrust thrust, it doesn’t really matter. It is pure evil, they say. And it’s coming for your children. Unless, you know, it’s not. Unless porn remains merely that beloved slippery devil so reviled by every sanctimonious group in modern history, that final frontier of bogus moralism and excessive alarmism and puffed-chest indignation and oh my God who pray who will save the children. Statistics are of little use over at the official government PPW site. They do not talk about anything so frivolous as details, such as the porn biz raking in upward of $12 billion per annum, which is more than ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox combined. Or that the combined subscriber base of Penthouse and Playboy exceeds that of Newsweek and Time . Or that more money is spent on porn than on, say, church. Or the NFL. Or Starbucks. Or socks.

Heh.

The White House has announced a new policy on questions from lawmakers, particularly with regard to questions about how it’s spending money.

Now, all such questions must be submitted in writing through the relevant Congressional committees. It is of course a complete coincidence that the chairs of all these committees — and therefore the gatekeepers for all questions — will be Republicans, and that said chairs will be unlikely to forward any Democrat-authored queries to 1600 Pennsylvania.

Former POW Jessica Lynch is now a civilian, and is not shy about speaking her mind in re: the Pentagon’s portrayal of her capture and, in particular, her rescue.

In an ABC interview quoted in this Washington Post story, she says “I’m no hero. . . I’m just a survivor.” She also laments the over-dramatic rescue coverage (“Yeah, I don’t think it happened quite like that”) and expresses her irritation at being used as the Pentagon’s poster soldier.

CNN covers the same interview, as does the New York Times, which includes this quote, absent from the other two stories:

“From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing,” Ms. Lynch told Diane Sawyer, adding, “I’m so thankful for those people, because that’s why I’m alive today.”

It would have been very, very easy for her to just accept and support the Pentagon’s initial version — a blonde Rambo bravely fighting off Iraqi hordes, only to be captured and held in an enemy prison hospital, under heavy guard, awaiting her fate until a daring commando rescue spirited her away — instead of telling the truth, especially in light of the gung-ho war effort. There were no other survivors from her group; hers would be the only voice. It’s impressive that instead of doing so, she tells the truth — that she was terrified, that her gun jammed, that she fired not a shot, that she remembers no mistreatment in the hospital, and that the treatment she did receive saved her life. She thanks her rescuers, too, of course, though she still wonders why they filmed her rescue.

Surely the reason isn’t “calculated PR,” right? I mean, we can completely discount the reports from hospital officials that they attempted to alert US forces of Lych’s whereabouts as soon as she was stable, right? Surely the Pentagon wouldn’t manipulate something like this for public opinion, right?

I just wish I was sure.

This article from the Economist dicusses the horror that is Bush’s fiscal policies in some detail. The phrase from the title of this post comes from a Republican analyst, and is used in reference to their spending habits. Whatever happened to “fiscally conservative” Republicans? Aren’t the Democrats supposed to be the spendthrifts?

Now the GOP is complaining about electronic voting machine trouble in Fairfax County. They’ve even filed suit. Maybe with everybody pissed off, we can do something about ’em.

The USA-PATRIOT Act, like the mob-targeting RICO Act before it, is now being used opportunistically by the FBI in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism.

A Shreveport man has been found guilty of obscenity for selling X-rated tapes to undercover officers. Dan Birman, 23, is the owner of Fantasy Video, and now faces 6 months to 3 years in prison, and a fine of up to $2,500. Lincoln Parish DA Bob Levy appears to be on some sort of Ashcroftian anti-porn crusade, and set out to prove that Shreveport’s community standards don’t allow for explicit sexual behavior on tape. The conviction is on appeal.

Now community standards are notoriously fluid things; I suspect it’s possible to show that question to be settled either way, depending on the evidence brought to trial (how about those in-room motel movie rental records?). The bigger problem here isn’t porn vs. puritans; it’s the fact that the D.A. and the state troopers apparently don’t have enough actual crime to pursue — you know, with victims, and maybe even violence — so they decided on an undercover porn operation. I’m sure the good people of Lincoln parish feel much safer now.

The FCC has approved the controversial Broadcast Flag, ignoring thousands and thousands of protest letters. This is a profoundly bad idea; it puts technological innovation in the hands of the content providers, and strikes another blow against the whole idea of Fair Use (a copyright doctrine the RIAA, MPAA and Broadcasters would dearly love to destroy). It also creates a huge class of “legacy” equipment: for example, a DVD recorder purchased next summer (if the rule stands) won’t be able to create DVDs that will play on your current player.

Coverage:

• BoingBoing
• At the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Via PC World

Fortunately, a legal challenge is already in the works. Keep your fingers crossed, folks.

And we’ve got to stop it. Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian. Returning to Canada from vacation in Tunis last September, he flew from there to Zurich to New York, intending to continue on to Montreal. US officials detained him in New York, refused his requests for an attorney, would not tell him what charges or allegations resulted in his arrest, and eventually deported him — to SYRIA, where they knew he would be tortured or killed. He was held for over a year in total — ten months in Syria — before finally being released on October 5, thanks to the efforts of his wife and Canadian authorities.

This is his statement. Read it, and try to figure out why our Shining City on the Hill decided to detain a Canadian citizen on nebulous grounds and ultimately — and deliberately — subject him to the treatment they knew Syria would provide.

Longtime Heathen and fellow Mississippi expatriate R.N. called my attention to this entry at Talking Points Memo. Apparently, the Mississippi Secretary of State has already notified Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore and both Mississippi district US Attorneys about allegations of voter intimidation in minority counties. Here’s a PDF of the letter sent by Secretary Clark.

I’m very glad Clark has taken quick action here, but the fact that he needed to makes me feel ill.