Obsidian Wings

WTFO Open Thread

Lacking profanity, words fail.

Consider this an open thread.  I couldn't think of anything relevant to say that didn't require crippling censorship.  Feel free to post your own links to baffling and/or inhuman behavior.  These have to be replicants.

John Bolton: Negative Space

by hilzoy

There's an interesting article in tomorrow's Washington Post about a variety of logjams that have come unstuck since John Bolton left the State Department. The most important:

"For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.

Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs. (...)

The nuclear dispute with Russia attracted less public attention but proved important internally. A program designed to dispose of 68 tons of weapons-grade plutonium stalled in 2003 when agreements expired and the Bush administration would not renew them unless they included stronger language holding Russia accountable for any nuclear accidents in its territory and protecting U.S. contractors building disposal facilities from liability, even in the case of premeditated actions. Russia refused, and the Bolton-led talks went nowhere for two years.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), one of the architects of the plutonium program, grew incensed that such a technical impasse could hold up a program of "global importance." He showed up at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee last year to berate Bolton on the matter.

"I submit that Mr. John Bolton, who has been assigned to negotiate this, has a very heavy responsibility" for the impasse, Domenici said at the hearing. "And I hate to say that I am not sure to this point that he's up to it."

Rice pressed for the issue to be fixed, leading to a new framework that the two sides hope to ratify at the Group of Eight summit in Scotland in July. "I'm pleased," Domenici said, "because I'm finally getting some very positive feedback." "

This is really, really important. I wrote a post before the elections on this administration's record on nuclear non-proliferation generally, and Russian loose nukes in particular. There are huge quantities of weapons-grade nuclear material sitting around in Russia, poorly guarded and vulnerable to theft. Osama bin Laden has said that he thinks that it is his religious duty to get nuclear weapons. Obviously, if he got them, chances are very good that he would try to use them on us, which would be devastating. Given all that, it's truly astonishing that we actually secured less nuclear material during the two years after 9/11 than during the two years before 9/11 (Matthew Bunn and Anthony Weir, Securing the Bomb, p. 5). The idea of letting our efforts to secure plutonium stall because we wanted to make sure that US contractors were not liable even for their premeditated actions is just absurd. Apparently, it was John Bolton who held it up, and now that he's out of the State Department, we can get back to the job of keeping plutonium out of the hands of terrorists.

The story cites several other examples:

"Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Bolton had also resisted using the so-called New York channel for communications with North Korea, a one-on-one meeting used sporadically through Bush's presidency and most recently revived in May. And fellow U.S. officials said Bolton had opposed a new strategic opening to India offering the prospect of sharing civilian nuclear technology, a move made in March."

More communication with North Korea; a new approach to Iran: these are important things. I'm glad Bolton isn't around to screw them up. But the Russian plutonium development is the really big news here. It's long past time to get serious about that one.

Clean-up Duty

by hilzoy

A brief post to note two ideas floating around the blogs that I think are wrong, and to note another which is questionable, and provide the resources for anyone who wants to check it out further. The two ideas that are wrong concern the Downing Street memos; the third concerns Thimerosal and autism.

Father's Day

This morning, I was woken up by two enthusiastic, smiling girls.  This happens to me all the time.

Father's Day is one of those myriad of holidays that I think we could all do without.  As a guy, these occasions (sorry: Occasions) are mostly obligations to think of a suitable gift and then go out and purchase it, whereas for women (in general, and I know there are exceptions) these are opportunities to gift or be gifted.  And it's entirely possible that this joyfully gifting/grumpily gifting separates not entirely based on sex, and I'm sure that'd make for a very interesting post for someone else to explore.  Consider it a gift.

Today, though, my enthusiastic girls (in this case: shut up. They're my daughters, age 8 and 4) took joy in gifting me, and I took joy in the enthusiastic spirit in which the gifts were given.  So here's the rub: today my wife is at work.  If that were me, she'd be all wounded and offended that I had somehow failed to plan properly, and that I was failing to acknowledge her on her Day.  And that idea would have an uncomfortable amount of truth to it; I'm miserly on the acknowledgement, and I am in fact dismal at planning my time.  I simply don't do it well.  For me, though, the day to myself is a gift.  And it's not entirely to myself; my daughters are home with me.  But I get to sit and read and have a beer while they swim together in the pool, and it doesn't get much better than that.  And as importantly, my wife is working today so that we can go on vacation a day earlier than her earned vacation would otherwise allow, which is yet another gift.  My wife is the one who plans.  She's the one who plots the course of our family and executes.  To a disturbingly large degree, I'm along for the ride.

We've talked about this a great deal.  Absent Lydia's planning, we'd still be doing things and going on vacation, only less impeccably and with more pitfalls.  And certainly less responsibly, because she also does the financial planning.  Probably the single largest issue in our marriage is my lack of directedness where it comest to planning and executing.  So, as a dad on Father's day, I spend today in appreciation that as a father, I'd be nothing at all without my wonderful daughters and enormously capable and beloved wife.  And in anticipation of ten days on the beach, playing in the sand with my daughters.  Thank you, Lydia.  Fatherhood is a gift beyond price.  So, Dads, take today as the gift that it truly is, and consider where your life would be without your wife and children.

To echo Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, you make me want to be a better person.  And I hope that at least occasionally, I suffice.

I, Too, Know All About These Kittens

(Apologies to The Editors, who we hope will be back online soon. They do it better, and they did the original.)

This kitten thinks listening to Christina Aguilera is torture.

This kitten would be a lot less comfortable in a real gulag.

This kitten has embraced dhimmitude.

These kittens are eating away at the moral fiber of our nation.

This kitten wants to tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes.

This kitten is a party of no.

Images Evoked

by Charles

The paragraph made famous by Dick Durbin:  "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis,

Soviets in their gulags,

or some mad regime -- Pol Pot...

...or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

The photos are just snapshots, giving the barest glimpse of the wholesale atrocities that led to the murder of millions in each of the respective countries.  Can we agree that, no matter how the words are weaseled, putting American in the same sentence with Nazis, gulags and the Khmer Rouge has no place in civil political discourse?  If you don't agree, fine, then accept that consciously or unconsciously, like it or not, the above images come to mind when such rhetoric is employed.  From where I sit, those are the images now tied to the United States of America when those associations are made (hat tip to Donald Sensing for the photos).  Can we agree that throwing down the Nazi and gulag cards is simply not a thing reasonable people should do?

Speaking of agreement, having read Durbin's statement in its entirety, I found myself agreeing with pretty much all of it, offending paragraph notwithstanding.  I agree with Durbin that that the detainees should not be given prisoner of war status.  I agree with Durbin that Gitmo should stay in operation.  I agree with Durbin that we should abide by the Geneva Conventions and the rulings of the Supreme Court.  I agree with Durbin that our treatment of many detainees has been deporable.  I agree with Durbin that all detainees should be treated humanely.  Because of my broad agreement with what he said, that is why it is so unfortunate that an otherwise sensible and temperate speech was drowned out and frittered away with abusive, counterproductive and unimaginative hyperbole.  Taking a step beyond what Durbin recommended, President Bush should appoint a bipartisan commission--similar in authority and scope to the 9/11 Commission--to expeditiously investigate all incidences of mistreatment, fold all the separate investigations into a single authority, hold accountable those responsible and make recommendations as necessary.

The Accidental Isolationists

By Edward

The irony of President Bush's willingness to charge boldly ahead, leading the world into an era in which democracy flourishes and tyrants scramble into the shadows, is that if/when we reach that horizon we're likely to find that the path we chose there has left us isolated, with only gold-diggers for friends. It's not only the Europeans, or increasingly Britain, I'm taking about here.The US, or rather the Republican leadership, seems hellbent on systematically alienating and/or pissing off every international organization on the planet.

Their total disdain for the UN is legendary, and an alien landing on earth in the past month would need be forgiven for concluding that the gravest threat facing the United States was a terrorist organization named Amnesty International, and even the G8 (you read the right) is being forced to take sides against their Grand Boobah or risk drowning their coastlines.

But the most shameful, if not most shortsighted, on this growing list of increasingly lukewarm "friendships" was instigated on Monday when the GOP leadership codified, in a most transparent bullying effort, its growing annoyance with the International Committee of the Red Cross in a report titled "Are US Interests Disserved by the International Committee of the Red Cross?"

Now, ICRC president Jakob Kellenberger, has responded, maturely,

"The US government and the ICRC have good and trustful relations," said Kellenberger.

"The ICRC is not -- and does not feel -- above criticism and is open to constructive dialogue with those who have different opinions. However, dialogue does not appear to be the primary objective of the authors of the (report)."

The ICRC has a longstanding tradition of confidentiality, but extracts from its reports criticizing the treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo emerged in the press last year, provoking the ire of US conservatives.

The Senate report claims that the ICRC set out to "inaccurately and unfairly accuse the US of not adhering to the Geneva Conventions."

Details also recently surfaced of a purported angry exchange between ICRC staff and the US military, in which an aid worker allegedly compared the American soldiers to the Nazis.

Kellenberger dismissed this.

"Contrary to what is stated in the document, the ICRC has never compared US soldiers to the Nazis and the ICRC has never leaked to the public or the media any of the confidential reports submitted to the US authorities," he told reporters.

The report alleged that the ICRC was involved in trying to "reinterpret and expand international law so as to afford terrorists and insurgents the same rights and privileges as military personnel."

Kellenberger said this was misplaced.

"To be neutral doesn't mean putting all the actors of a conflict on the same level."

However, he said, "you are not taking sides between parties to a conflict because you may lose access to detainees if one of the parties feels that you are not neutral."

In comparison with Kellenberger's measured (and might I note, humbly accountable) response, the GOP charges read like the paranoid rantings of a megalomaniac king battling the first stages of insanity, lashing out at imaginary would-be assassins, and scaring the bejesus out of the rest of the world when they consider the arsenal the raging nutjob has.

Eventually, the GOP will have no more scapegoats. There will be no one left to blame for the mistakes made in this war except the leaders who took us into it. God have pity on us if we need these folks to help us one day.

Mo Better Yo!

by hilzoy

I have no doubt that all our readers are sitting there, watching their bank balances grow to alarming proportions, and asking themselves: what on earth am I going to do with all this money? Since we at ObWi live to serve, we present not one but two (2!) worthy causes that you can use to alleviate these concerns.

First, The Poor Man needs to buy a dedicated server. He has put up a bewildering variety of options on the link I just gave; as someone who is in serious kitty porn withdrawal just now, however, I urge you to pick the efficient "just donate" option, rather than the much slower "buy books form Barnes and Noble and he gets 5%" option, unless you were planning to buy the Gutenberg Bible anyways.

Second, Gary still needs money. Many have clicked, but few have donated. For shame.

Lightning Strikes

Yesterday was spent, among other things, considering the latest bits of news, reading the discussion on Durbin's recent comments regarding prisoner abuse, seeing what other bloggers were saying about it, and attempting to fight the good (rhetorical) fight over at Tom Maguire's place, here.  I get in my car and drive down, and the lightning of inspiration strikes: I'll compose a new post that pulls my views on this matter together, and then maybe explores some new ground (for me).  Then the sky is ripped open, and rain pours from a gaping wound (maybe, somewhere, among the mud huts, pelting the women and children) and lightning of a different sort begins to strike, many more times than I can count.  The rain comes down so heavily that people have just given up the reckless-abandon approach to getting where they're going, and pretty much have all turned on their flashers and reduced speed to fifteen miles per hour or so.  A couple of blocks before I get to Emily's school, the road is flooded up to my floorboards.  And that's at the high spots.

I get home, looking forward to doing some writing, and...some things are broken.  The new receiver that I just spent a LOT of effort building an enclosure for, fishing wires to, etc is now dead.  The DVD player is dead.  I get on the laptop, and the wireless network is down: the wireless router is dead.  Oh, and the main computer is also dead.  Fortunately, the surge protectors they're all plugged into seem to be unscathed; I might need those again.  So, bummer of a night, and then it was time to prepare for this evening's party, which is our first in a longer time than I like to admit to.

As I discovered yesterday, a good chunk of the right half of blogdom was driven nearly mad by Durbin's apparent likening of our troops to Nazis.  But there are some exceptions; as pointed out at Maguire's place, some people are taking a somewhat different stance on prisoner abuse, although they're still missing the point of Durbin's comments.  Lovely.  I wish I had some more time today to take this up in detail, but it's going to have to wait.  I may very well wind up doing more posting while I'm on my beach vacation (end of next week, and I've never looked forward more to a vacation in my life) than when I'm at home.

But to encapsulate my views: the fact that we're not as bad as Nazis and not as bad as Pol Pot and not as bad as Castro gives me scant comfort.  The fact that we've "only" got eight or so (from the Maguire thread) documented instances of abuse at Gitmo does not make it all right.  Whether Durbin was a genius or an idiot for getting even close to pulling the Godwin chain is immaterial.  Yes, you can argue for days about that, if you like, but it's actually beside the point.  For me, Durbin's a throwaway: you can take him completely out of the picture, and it changes the point of our recent series of conversations not at all.  No, this is all about who we are as a nation: are we a nation that tolerates inhumanity, or are we a nation that treats prisoners, even those who we hold to have no honor, honorably?  For me, the degree to which we're the latter is insufficient.  And the degree to which we're making sure that abuse doesn't happen again, or even acknowledging that it occurred in the first place, is...well, it's completely missing.

None of these ideas are mine.   Gary Farber and hilzoy (notably !!!here!!!), among others, have been instrumental in bringing me around to what I now hold to be true and good.  And today, I had someone question my patriotism for the first time.  You might say I've arrived.  Oh, and hilzoy, I think we ought to permalink that post on the front page.  Everyone who comes here to read ought to read that first.

Which in itself is a good topic for a post: is it better to hold a position purely out of patriotism, or is it better to take that position out, take it apart, consider as many aspects of it as you can, and then reassemble it, letting it exist apart from one's patriotism?  I'm thinking that for me, it's the latter.  It's our duty as citizens to question authority.  Not to reflexively, inanely question authority, but to agree with authority when authority is agreeable to your morality, and disagree otherwise.  Abdicating one's responsibility to think and decide for oneself is, I submit, devoid of all things good.

Consider this, too, an open thread.  Or you can discuss various sorts of surge protectors if you like.

The "I" Word

It won't happen. Surely, there's no way, in this climate, with the sort of powers they have at their disposal. And yet, if you listen closely, folks are beginning to whisper, and the volume of their collective whispers is beginning to rise. From the Nelson Report, via Marshall:

[There is] an increased press and Congressional focus on the so-called “Downing Street Memo”, from the then-head of Britian’s secret service to Prime Minister Blair, stating flatly that President Bush and his top advisors had determined to go to war with Iraq well in advance of playing out the UN process.

Such an interpretation is, of course, arguable, as per the Bush/Blair press conference last week, about which you will have read, and will read more tomorrow, given a suddenly large push by more than 100 Hill Democrats. Our point for tonight is that this memo, really a series of memos, has had a strange life...but after a delayed reaction in this country, it seems to be leading somewhere...where, exactly, is the question.

We can report, not as a partisan, but as an observer who happened to be working for a Congressman deeply involved in the Pentagon Papers fight of 1971, that old hands note eerie similarities to the start-up process of questions raised, and the potential for Congress to become more seriously involved.

Two examples of related concerns to the “Downing Steet” memos: DOD Secretary Rumsfeld’s pre-positioning of thousands of troops and large stores of equipment, months before the final decision was made; the top-level White House involvement in the “torture memo” process that led directly to the international humiliation of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, despite internal warnings from then-Secretary of State Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage.

Add those up, add your own examples, and you will know why you hear conversations in the past couple of days using the “impeachment” word...not as a prediction, this is way too soon and/or extreme for now...but as part of an attempt to measure historic parallels, and to think aloud on how far this process might go. Maybe nowhere? Or, maybe we’re just seeing the beginning of something. We mention it tonight because the conversation is being held less quietly than before, and politics in Washington may be about to get even worse, if you can imagine anything worse.

I, for one, cannot imagine anything worse, but then, I'm a pessimist.