Because Diplomacy's for Sissies

Well, he did it:

The United States and European allies launched airstrikes on Friday night against Syrian research, storage and military targets as President Trump sought to punish President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical attack near Damascus last weekend that killed more than 40 people.

Britain and France joined the United States in the strikes in a coordinated operation that was intended to show Western resolve in the face of what the leaders of the three nations called persistent violations of international law. Mr. Trump characterized it as the beginning of a sustained effort to force Mr. Assad to stop using banned weapons, but only ordered a limited, one-night operation that hit three targets.

These "limited operations" have a way of morphing into full-scale war.

I suppose this was inevitable, considering that neither Trump nor his National Security Advisor, John Bolton, believe in diplomacy, both being bullies. Of course, we lost the chance for a diplomatic solution a while ago -- not that it's entirely our fault: Assad's a real piece of work, and with Russia and Iran behind him, the stage is set for a real mess. And a condemnation in the UN has about as much force as -- well, come up with your own example of completely ineffectual.

As far as I'm concerned, the question of whether Putin has any control over Trump is open -- and I think that's a real issue here -- but then, Trump is enough of a wild card that "control" becomes meaningless.

We'll see if this remains "limited":

Today's Must-Read: No Secrets

Between our president and our enemies, at least. Here's a really scary article by Howard Blum at Vanity Fair on Trump blowing the Israelis' cover.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, President Donald Trump, and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on May 10th, 2017.

By Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/Getty Images.

On a dark night at the tail end of last winter, just a month after the inauguration of the new American president, an evening when only a sickle moon hung in the Levantine sky, two Israeli Sikorsky CH-53 helicopters flew low across Jordan and then, staying under the radar, veered north toward the twisting ribbon of shadows that was the Euphrates River. On board, waiting with a professional stillness as they headed into the hostile heart of Syria, were Sayeret Matkal commandos, the Jewish state’s elite counterterrorism force, along with members of the technological unit of the Mossad, its foreign-espionage agency. Their target: an ISIS cell that was racing to get a deadly new weapon thought to have been devised by Ibrahim al-Asiri, the Saudi national who was al-Qaeda’s master bombmaker in Yemen.

It was a covert mission whose details were reconstructed for Vanity Fair by two experts on Israeli intelligence operations. It would lead to the unnerving discovery that ISIS terrorists were working on transforming laptop computers into bombs that could pass undetected through airport security. U.S. Homeland Security officials—quickly followed by British authorities—banned passengers traveling from an accusatory list of Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptops and other portable electronic devices larger than a cell phone on arriving planes. It would not be until four tense months later, as foreign airports began to comply with new, stringent American security directives, that the ban would be lifted on an airport-by-airport basis.

In the secretive corridors of the American espionage community, the Israeli mission was praised by knowledgeable officials as a casebook example of a valued ally’s hard-won field intelligence being put to good, arguably even lifesaving, use.

Yet this triumph would be overshadowed by an astonishing conversation in the Oval Office in May, when an intemperate President Trump revealed details about the classified mission to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and Sergey I. Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Along with the tempest of far-reaching geopolitical consequences that raged as a result of the president’s disclosure, fresh blood was spilled in his long-running combative relationship with the nation’s clandestine services. Israel—as well as America’s other allies—would rethink its willingness to share raw intelligence, and pretty much the entire Free World was left shaking its collective head in bewilderment as it wondered, not for the first time, what was going on with Trump and Russia. (In fact, Trump’s disturbing choice to hand over highly sensitive intelligence to the Russians is now a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia, both before and after the election.) In the hand-wringing aftermath, the entire event became, as is so often the case with spy stories, a tale about trust and betrayal.

Since I'm feeling charitable this morning, I'll just note that I don't believe Trump was purposely undermining Israeli (and Western) intelligence efforts in the Middle East (although he's repeatedly shown that he has no love for the intelligence community). It's that he's a show off ("Looky what I got!"), pathologically insecure, completely ignorant of foreign affairs, has no concept of consequences -- that there even are such things -- and fairly stupid.

And he's managed to do incalculable damage to our intelligence efforts.

Read the whole thing. It's appalling.

Via Balloon Juice.

What You Expect to See, Revisited

Read this post from Digby, adding more detail to the 2007 massacre in New Baghdad.

And then think about what I noted about moral waivers and the bleed effect of the behavior of independent contractors -- who are not governed by any rules of engagement.

I think the courts martial should start with whoever elected to cover up the story to begin with -- and then work their way up, for a change.

What You Expect To See . . .

or what you want to see?

One of Sullivan's readers left a comment that brought home the latest atrocity to hit the news:

Soldiers are trained to kill and sometimes in the heat of combat they will engage in killings that are not strictly justified, for example, at Haditha. But this -- all of it -- was simply gratuitous and the killing of the wounded journalist and the shooting up of the minivan trying to pick him up to save his life went beyond gratuitous and was just plain sadistic murder.

Forty years ago, when Charlie Company went into My Lai to inflict some collective punishment, a helicopter pilot watching from above saw the carnage and did something to stop it. Nowadays, helicopter pilots make movies of their killings and beg a wounded man to make a suspect move so they can pump more 1 1/4" rounds into him. How completely depraved.

The incident he's referring to, of course, is this one:



Wikileaks claims it has verified the authenticity of the video, although Charli Carpenter at Lawyers, Guns & Monney was not convinced. It appears, however, from a comment left in that thread, that the Pentagon has confirmed the authenticity of the video. (Read the comments to Carpenter's thread, by the way -- very rational and interesting, except for the obligatory jerk who seems to think the people who caused 9/11 were journalists and children -- Reuters is the real enemy, apparently.)

There are a lot of possible explanations here, most of which are advanced in the comments to Carpenter's post. I'm not sure I buy the "see what you expect to see" thing, though, although there's a lot of support for that one. What I'm seeing here is a shoot first, look later approach, which is not good at all.

But let me add my own thought to Sullivan's reader's first comment above, which seems particularly apt considering that DADT repeal is on the front burner again (well, for everyone except the White House): because of shortfalls in recruiting, the Pentagon has been issuing record numbers of moral waivers -- to white supremacists, gang members, and convicted felons, some of whom were convicted of violent crimes. But gays are not fit to serve. I'm not claiming that gays are necessarily going to do better in a situation like this, but considering that we're more likely to be starting off with a different mindset, it seems likely.

Footnote: take this also in the context of some of the reports we've had of "hazing" of a distinctly sexual -- and sadistic -- nature, the investigations of contractors such as Blackwater for their behavior in the field (where they're not supposed to be to begin with), and you start to get a pretty ugly picture. Particularly since the military, true to form, is finding nothing wrong with this. From the Collateral Murder site, which also has the original 38-minute video:

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Frankenstein's monster was a pussycat compared to what we've created.

The Torture Club

Interesting article in Slate on a recent decision in Padilla vs. Yoo that may finally give us, as the citizens whose names have been blackened by the previous administration, some relief.

In 2002, Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote a memo recommending that Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago in the wake of 9/11 and held on suspicion of plotting a dirty-bomb attack, be classified as an enemy combatant. Yoo also wrote memos arguing that American law does not prevent the president from ordering such enemy combatants tortured. This January, after enduring years of abuse in prison, Padilla sued Yoo for violating his constitutional rights.

And a week ago, Judge Jeffrey White ruled that Padilla's allegations were plausible enough to justify denying Yoo's motion to dismiss the lawsuit. White was appointed by George W. Bush the year Yoo was writing his memos.

Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, the calls to "move forward" and "not dwell on the past" on the issue of torture, Guantanamo, rendition, and the like are just a way to keep the Bush administration jackasses off the hook. And it doesn't do Obama's credit any good in this quarter for him to be acceding to this bullshit. (I did wonder how much he was going to love unlimited presidential power once he was in the Oval Office. I guess we're starting to get the idea.)

(As an aside, I also have to wonder what kind of wars are going on over at DoJ, staffed at this point with a strong contingent of Bush loyalists who got moved into civil service jobs from their political appointments once Bush finally figured out that he would not be serving a third term.)

This is sort of disgusting, but no more than I'd expect of the Supreme Court as presently constituted:

In order to hold high-ranking government officials liable, plaintiffs need strong evidence that the officials personally authorized the conduct. Just last month, the Supreme Court made it a lot harder to get that evidence: It dismissed the lawsuit brought by Javaid Iqbal, who was rounded up in New York after 9/11 along with thousands of other Muslims, against John Ashcroft. The court held that Iqbal hadn't provided enough preliminary evidence to justify "subjecting high ranking Government officials ... to the burdens of discovery." That's right—he didn't have enough evidence to go get the evidence he needs to prove his claims.

Maybe Judge White's decision will help to circumvent that kind of crap -- this Court is no friend to American citizens at all.

The Rule of Law

It's nice to know that, even if our own government is afraid of it, someone, somewhere, still believes in it:

One of America’s NATO allies—which supported the Bush Administration’s war on terror by committing its troops to the struggle–has now opened formal criminal inquiries looking into the Bush team’s legacy of torture. The action parallels a criminal probe into allegations of torture involving the American CIA that was opened this week in the United Kingdom.

Spain’s national newspapers, El País and Público reported that the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent into torture at the prison in Guantánamo. The criminal complaint can be examined here. Público identifies the targets as University of California law professor John Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II (now a lawyer working for Chevron), former vice presidential chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, now a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.

This means that these men are subject to arrest and extradition in 24 countries, automatically. The cherry on top:

Judge Baltasar Garzón is involved in the investigation, according to the El País report. Garzón is Europe’s best known counterterrorism magistrate, responsible for hundreds of cases targeting the activities of ETA and related Basque terrorist organizations. He also spearheaded the successful investigation of Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organizations operating in the Maghreb region, including Spanish enclaves in Morocco. But Garzón is best known for his prosecution of a criminal investigation against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet that resulted in the issuance of an arrest warrant for Pinochet while he was visiting England.

Impeccable credentials, I'd say.

More on the implications of this from Andrew Sullivan.

Sadly, my first reaction is: why is Obama sitting on his hands? (Yeah, I know, but still. . . .)

More on Padilla

A little follow-up to this post from yesterday. Unlike some commentators, I'm not so sure that the jury returned the right verdict, particularly after reading these observations by Hilzoy:

Judging by the press reports, the evidence was weak and the jury somewhat odd ("On the last day of trial before the Fourth of July holiday, jurors arranged to dress in outfits so that each row in the jury box was its own patriotic color -- red, white or blue.") Moreover, the NYT reports this disquieting detail:

The jurors, seven men and five women from Miami-Dade County, would not speak publicly at the courthouse and left through a side entrance. But one juror, who asked that her name not be used, said later in a telephone interview that she had all but made up her mind before deliberations began.

“We had to be sure,” the juror said in Spanish. “We wanted to make sure we went through all the evidence. But the evidence was strong, and we all agreed on that.”

Now, having one's mind pretty much made up is before deliberations start is not unusual. Been there. Jury deliberations are more on the order of trying, sometimes quite vociferously, to reach consensus than actually making up minds. However, given the tone of the juror's remarks, I'm really wondering whether some of those minds weren't made up before the trial started. I mean, look at some of the "evidence":

To find him guilty of the murder conspiracy charge, the jury had to believe that Padilla intended, when he left the United States in 1998, to commit murder overseas.

On this point, the evidence was relatively thin.

On none of the calls does he explicitly call for killing or any other type of violence. A prosecution witness said that he attended the same training camp as Padilla -- to help defend Muslims in places where they might be under attack, not to become a terrorist.

Moreover, prosecutors never identified exactly whom Padilla and his co-defendants wanted to kill.

But in closing arguments prosecutors mentioned al-Qaeda more than 100 times, by one defense count, and urged jurors to in essence think of al-Qaeda and groups affiliated with it as an international murder conspiracy.

Not terribly convincing, particularly since, as Andrew Cohen pointed out in WaPo (from yesterday's post):

[P]eople who have followed this case closely know that Padilla ultimately was convicted on evidence that federal authorities did not believe amounted to a crime when it was gathered back before 2001.

My real concern is not whether or not Padilla is guilty of what are, all things considered, minor charges. Like a few other people, such as Hilzoy in this post and Digby, I'm aghast at the government's methods in this case and their rationale as expressed in what has become known as the "Jacoby Declaration" (pdf). As Hilzoy points out, this is an official government document, reflecting official policy of this administration and, by extension, us. This paragraph alone is chilling:

I assess Padilla's potential intelligence value as very high. I also firmly believe that providing Padilla access to counsel risks loss of a critical intelligence resource, resulting in a grave and direct threat to national security.

That's just the beginning. Remember, we are talking about an American citizen arrested on American soil. (Andrew Sullivan's correspondent notwithstanding, O'Hare International Airport is part of the City of Chicago, which is, although a hotbed of blue-collar liberalism, still an American city. In fact, Chicago's just about as American as it gets.) As Hilzoy points out:

Bear in mind that the Sixth Amendment holds that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall (...) have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence." Of course, Padilla was not at that time charged with any crime, which is why one might have thought that the Fifth Amendment might have been relevant: "No person shall be (...) deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Possibly there are exceptions for prisoners of war, but Padilla was arrested at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, not in the mountains of Afghanistan.

In other words, adhering to Constitutional requirements in the treatment of American citizens is a threat to national security. Sorry, this is unacceptable, and in light of the effects on Padilla of his confinement and the application of what can only be called torture, the case should have been thrown out. See Glenn Greenwald's comments on the possibility of a "fair trial" for Padilla in light of the history of his incarceration.

Worse still, the notion that Padilla received a "fair trial" is dubious, to put it mildly, and will undoubtedly be vigorously contested on appeal. Last year, the New York Times obtained a copy of a video from Padilla's imprisonment which showed techniques that can only be described as torture -- systematic sensory deprivation and gratuitous humiliations which clearly broke Padilla as a human being in every sense that matters, all before he had been charged, let alone convicted, of anything. Whether a person subjected to a torture regimen of that severity can possibly receive a "fair trial," in light of his obvious inability to participate meaningfully in his own defense, looms darkly over this entire proceeding.

There is more on this at Majikthise, including excerpts from an interview with a psychologist who interviewed Padilla:

Also he had developed, actually, a third thing. He had developed really a tremendous identification with the goals and interests of the government. I really considered a diagnosis of Stockholm syndrome. For example, at one point in the proceedings, his attorneys had, you know, done well at cross-examining an FBI agent, and instead of feeling happy about it like all the other defendants I’ve seen over the years, he was actually very angry with them. He was very angry that the civil proceedings were “unfair to the commander-in-chief,” quote/unquote. And in fact, one of the things that happened that disturbed me particularly was when he saw his mother. He wanted her to contact President Bush to help him, help him out of his dilemma. He expected that the government might help him, if he was “good,” quote/unquote.

Lindsay Beyerstein's comment is worth noting:

By destroying Padilla, the government cheated us all out of justice. If Padilla had gotten the speedy trial that he was entitled to as an American citizen, he might have been legitimately convicted. Instead, the government tortured an American citizen and undercut the legitimacy of their prosecution.

Marty Lederman has an illuminating commentary at Balkinization, as does Jack Balkin (whom I believe I linked to yesterday).

What's interesting about this, although not in the least surprising, is that the administration is crowing about its "victory," even though this case has demonstrated that "enemy combatants" can be tried in the civilian courts, which puts the lie to its rationale for its detention policies. Glenn Greenwald has some relevant comments in the post linked above. (Read Greenwald's whole column -- it's relevant to a lot of what I've said here, and if I'd found it sooner, I could have saved myself some time.)

In the meantime, we are not safer at all, mostly not from our own government.

Update:

See also Barbara O'Brien's comments here and here especially on the right nutjob reaction.

On Torture

Andrew Sullivan has a series of posts on the Republican party as the party of torture. I can't add anything to what he's said (at least not right now), but I think you should take a look at them.

The Party of Torture
Torture, Moral Vanity, and Freedom
Email of the Day
The Military Versus Torture
The Party of Torture

My only comment is that John McCain, in the latest Republican presidential debate, said what I've been saying all along: It's not about them, it's about us.

Update:

Jack Balkin also has some good comments.

Words Fail Me

Here's a really sickening story about one of the less desirable members of Congress.

Tell me again how hateful and vitriolic the left is.

Given the focus on John Edwards' haircuts, Barack Obama's lame jokes, and the almost complete invisibillity of Democrats in the Gonzales testimony, does anyone want to guess how many major media outlets are going to play up this story?

Tell me again about the press' liberal bias.

The Torture President

I haven't had a chance to read this story yet, ironically enough, since I work at this paper. And Andrew Sullivan beat me to the link.

Nuts.

Now That I'm Calmer

Suddenly, the Army moves into action. From this morning's WaPo:

Walter Reed and Army officials have been "meeting continuously for three days" since the articles began appearing [in the Washington Post], Weightman said. A large roundtable meeting with Army and Defense Department officials will take place at the Pentagon early this morning to continue talks about improvements in the outpatient system, he added.

Weightman said the medical center has received an outpouring of concern about conditions and procedures since the articles appeared and has taken steps to improve what soldiers and their families describe as a messy battlefield of bureaucratic problems and mistreatment.

"We're starting to attack how we'll fix and mitigate" some of the problems, he said.

Of course, why does it take a series of articles in one of the country's leading papers to get this started? Why isn't there anyone in the hierarchy who can take a look and say "This is unacceptable" and make things happen?

Of course, things like this probably have an impact:

For the past three years, Michael J. Wagner directed the Army's largest effort to help the most vulnerable soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. His office in Room 3E01 of the world-renowned hospital was supposed to match big-hearted donors with thousands of wounded soldiers who could not afford to feed their children, pay mortgages, buy plane tickets or put up visiting families in nearby hotels.

But while he was being paid to provide this vital service to patients, outpatients and their relations, Wagner was also seeking funders and soliciting donations for his own new charity, based in Texas, according to documents and interviews with current and former staff members. Some families also said Wagner treated them callously and made it hard for them to receive assistance.

Wagner claims innocence; former staff members say not. It's just one example of the corruption, waste, inneficiency, and misdirected priorities in the military.

John Aravosis seems to have at least part of the explanation. Wonkette came up with the meat:

Turns out the VA “misunderstood” the DoD numbers, because the Pentagon doesn’t want anybody adding up the 25,000 or so troops hurt in “non combat” situations to the 22,000 or so it admits have been injured in battle.

Blimes says it hardly matters if somebody falls off a ladder or gets blown apart by insurgents — if they survive, they will be in the VA health-care system for the rest of their lives. A soldier shot by “friendly fire” is no less hurt than one hit by whoever it is we’re supposedly fighting over there.

As for the Pentagon, it has ensured Blimes will never find those numbers on DoD websites again, because all the damning evidence has just been changed on the military websites.

(There's a link to Bilmes' paper at Wonkette.)

We've seen this way too much from the Pentagon. The first reaction always seems to be to cover it up. How about a little transparency in the military? Or maybe a new security classification: CYA.

That is by no means the end of the horror stories. From Army Times:

A soldier goes before a physical evaluation board if a medical evaluation board — a team of doctors — determines he is not able to do his job because of his injury. The physical evaluation board then determines again if the soldier should stay in the military and, if not, how much the Defense Department will compensate the soldier. If the soldier receives a disability rating of 30 percent or higher, he gets a disability retirement check based on years of service, rank and the rating percentage. He and his family will also receive medical benefits for life. If the rating is lower than 30 percent, he gets a one-time severance payment.

Since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the number of soldiers wading through the paperwork, physicals and appointments has doubled at Walter Reed. According to a Defense Department directive, it should take a total of 120 days from start to finish, but the average stay for Walter Reed soldiers is 270 days. The soldiers navigate a complicated system with the help of counselors with little more experience — or rank — than they have, and who lack training, according to a March 2006 Government Accountability Office report.

On March 2, 2006, Col. Robert Norton, deputy director, Government Relations, for the Military Officers Association of America, told the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs that since October 2003, medical evaluation boards have averaged 67 days and physical evaluation boards have taken between 87 and 280 days.

“Taken together, the convalescence, [medical evaluation board] and [physical evaluation board] processes appear to average between nine and 15½ months for Army soldiers,” he said.

Whether we'll see any action from Congress is an open issue at this point. There's hope, now that the Republicans are in the minority, although I don't expect much from the Senate -- I think Reid lacks the will and he doesn't have that stable a majority. As for the Republicans, Robert Novak, of all people, shines a little light on their attitude toward our vets (note that this is a year ago -- it's not like no one knew there were problems):

"We are looking more and more like the Democrats we replaced," a House committee chairman told me Wednesday. That comment came before he learned, to his surprise and sorrow, that the House Republican leadership had removed Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey as chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. The extraordinary purge buttressed the growing impression of arrogance as Republicans enter their second decade of power in the House.

The party's House leaders purportedly removed Smith, a tireless promoter of spending for veterans, to save money. But two days earlier, the same leaders pulled every string during a closed-door caucus to defeat reforms against pork barrel spending. Those disparate moves are united by a common purpose of making decisions from the top down. Smith was a committee chairman who did not take orders. The defeated spending reforms came from conservatives outside the leadership. . . .

The leadership's problem with Smith has been his insatiable desire to make life better for veterans during 24 years on the Veterans Affairs committee (six years as vice chairman, four years as chairman). That fits the job description set by conservative Democrat Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi during his 12-year chairmanship.

Don't look for any help from the right side of the aisle. I think it's time for John Murtha to take a hand.

(Note to country: Do you get the feeling the Republicans don't really care about you?)

AmericaBlog has a summary of yesterday's stories on this.

OK, one last time: these are the young men and women who are out there fighting for us. (I never served. I missed the draft for Vietnam -- high lottery number -- for which I was more than thankful, and now I'm too old -- until the Pentagon gets even more desperate for recruits. I wouldn't have made a very good soldier anyway -- I don't respond well to authority. I admire those who can pull it off.) It's unconscionable that a bunch of draft-dodgers in the White House and Congress would stand there and accuse anyone who disagrees with their hormonally charged fantasies of world domination of not supporting the troops when they are pulling shit like this.

Now I'm pissed all over again.

This Makes Me Angry

Really, really angry. The next time some yahoo claims that anyone opposing the failed Bush war doesn't support the troops, refer them to this article from WaPo and ask them about the administration's "support for the troops."

While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.

On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.

Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.

"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."

Is this the administration's "support": "OK, you've stopped bleeding. We're done with you."

Apparently it is. Here's Bush's help for veterans:

The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans’ health care two years from now — even as wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.

Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012.

After an increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly — by more than 10 percent in many years — White House budget documents assume consecutive cutbacks in 2009 and 2010 and a freeze thereafter.

The White House claims this doesn't represent a "policy shift." So they're playing with VA numbers to make the borrow-and-spend White House look good, I guess.

And here's a a follow-up to the original WaPo piece.

Perks and stardom do not come to every amputee. Sgt. David Thomas, a gunner with the Tennessee National Guard, spent his first three months at Walter Reed with no decent clothes; medics in Samarra had cut off his uniform. Heavily drugged, missing one leg and suffering from traumatic brain injury, David, 42, was finally told by a physical therapist to go to the Red Cross office, where he was given a T-shirt and sweat pants. He was awarded a Purple Heart but had no underwear.

David tangled with Walter Reed's image machine when he wanted to attend a ceremony for a fellow amputee, a Mexican national who was being granted U.S. citizenship by President Bush. A case worker quizzed him about what he would wear. It was summer, so David said shorts. The case manager said the media would be there and shorts were not advisable because the amputees would be seated in the front row.

" 'Are you telling me that I can't go to the ceremony 'cause I'm an amputee?' " David recalled asking. "She said, 'No, I'm saying you need to wear pants.' "

David told the case worker, "I'm not ashamed of what I did, and y'all shouldn't be neither." When the guest list came out for the ceremony, his name was not on it.

Look, we all know that bureaucracies are the devil's work, but this is beyond incompetence. This is what we get when "support for the troops" means sending them off to fight Halliburton's war and then forgetting about them when the war chews them up and spits them out. Gods forbid the prreznit should actually have to see someone his war has damaged.

So help me, if some Bush-wacko accuses me of not supporting the troops because I think we need to get out of there, I'll just deck the SOB.

Update:

Some additional commentary by Kevin Hayden at American Street.

And myths will arise about how anti-war liberals mistreated the troops. In reality, it’ll be liberals working in underpaid non-profit agency jobs that will be dressing the psychic wounds of the injured long after the rest of the country’s forgotten them.

He also links to this post by Philip Carter at Intel Dump.

This is the tip of the iceberg. The Walter Reed hospital sees the most seriously wounded military personnel who come home. These personnel often require significant medical, mental-health, and rehabilitative care, and this is a mammoth undertaking. I am extremely disturbed to see these problems at the military's flagship hospital. We owe our wounded sons and daughters more.

But these wounded are not the only warriors who are suffering right now. We have had roughly 1.4 million troops rotate through the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of operation. Hundreds of thousands of reservists have rotated through mobilizations since Sept. 11, 2001. Our military will likely remain engaged in these wars for the foreseeable future, and hundreds of thousands more will rotate through these two theaters. Yet despite these operational facts, the VA budget continues to atrophy. Veterans seeking disability ratings must wait between 6-12 months to receive an adjudication. Veterans without a service-connected disability rating who do not meet a stringent "means test" may be excluded from the system entirely. Although the VA has been rated as the nation's finest medical system, it increasingly cannot deliver that care to the population it exists to serve. Why?

Why, indeed?

Update II:

Given the huge amount of waste and embezzlement in Iraq on the part of the independent contractors and the no-bid contracts to well-connected firms, I guess we can see where the money that should be going to our vets is really headed. See this comment by Skippy at American Street. You can also see how the Investor's Business Daily is supporting the troops.

Dream Ticket

Rumsfeld-Bolton.

Yes, there are people who are serious about this.

The Obligatory Post on Saddam Hussein

My man-on-the-street reaction: old news. In the public perception, he was dead two years ago. And, all things considered, it doesn't matter:

But members of the Army's 2nd Battalion, 17th Field Artillery Regiment, on patrol in an overwhelmingly Shiite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, said the execution wouldn't get them home any faster — and therefore didn't make much difference.

"Nothing really changes," said Capt. Dave Eastburn, 30, of Columbus, Ohio. "The militias run everything now, not Saddam."

As for the trial and all of it, I think I do consider that Greg Djerejian has the right of it:

But it is clear as day that this judicial process, not least the rush to execution, positively reeked of victor's justice. This is not to say the trial could not have been even worse, as genuine attempts by some in the USG were made to assist the Iraqi authorities in putting together a credible tribunal. But, like the rest of the Iraq War, it was mostly a fiasco (see here for detail regarding some of the many shortcomings in the process).

To be sure, an international war crimes tribunal sitting in the Hague, or a South African style Truth and Reconciliation Commission, either would have been far better than the process we witnessed--particularly given the critical imperative of forging better national reconciliation among Iraq's different ethnic groups and sects. And, yes, as David Kurtz points out, we cannot help sensing in the motley gaggle of hooded hangmen (pictured above) a revanchist, vigilante-style justice that gives the lie to the impartiality of the entire process.

Above all, however, what saddens me in all this was that Saddam was not methodically tried and convicted while alive, not only for the murder of the males of one hapless Shi'a villlage on the outskirts of Baghdad, but for the entire gamut of his despicable crimes--his brutal campaign of genocide in Kurdistan, his massacres of thousands upon thousands of Marsh Arabs, his command decisions during the long Iran-Iraq war, and more. Could we not have tried him in the Hague, even if it lasted past Bush's Presidency, say, on the whole panoply of crimes he was rightly accused of, with witnesses, prosecution and defense teams better protected, rather than under a state of seige, with fewer grave shortcomings in standards of judicial procedure, and above all, with a better sense that justice had been pursued deliberately rather than in a vengeful (however understandable) rush to execution?

I don't necessarily agree with the "motley crew" idea -- I think that's very much a Western pundit take on the circumstances, which, after all, are taking place in a non-Western context. There are good reasons for the hoods, as there have always been but probably even more so in this case, and I'm sorry they're not wearing official uniforms, but we should remember that, along with the styles of Western dress, we've also exported some of the modes of Western informality.

I think no matter where the trial were held, or under what forms, there would be a certain element that would label it "revenge." As it happened, it's just that much easier for anyone who wants to to make that assumption.

As for Djerejian's plaintive cry for a more thorough, far-reaching, and careful trial, "even if it lasted past Bush's Presidency," surely that was the whole point: so far, this is the high point of the Bush presidency, the trial and executiion of a minor dictator for crimes that were, in the sum total of his activities while in power, also relatively minor. Update: Apparently Josh Marshall feels the same way about it:

Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Jane Hamsher has some insights on the whole greasy-dirty feel of this episode. (I can't condemn it on the basis of disapproving the death penalty, which I do, because I can't take something like the death penalty as an abstraction. Sometimes, when it gets down to cases, there's just nothing else you can do if you are going to make the correct statement. As it stands, it's just another botch disguised as victory by the incompetents in charge.)

Of course, one has to wonder about the motivation for the timing of the execution:

"His execution on the day of Eid ... is an insult to all Muslims," said Jordanian pilgrim Nidal Mohammad Salah. "What happened is not good because as a head of state, he should not be executed."

The Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice, marks biblical patriarch Abraham's willingness to kill his son for God. Muslim countries often pardon criminals to mark the feast, and prisoners are rarely executed at that time.

Speaking of the Bush presidency, Glenn Greenwald draws the necessary, if somewhat obvious, connection. From the president's statement:

Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial -- the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people's determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.

If Alan Moore were writing for The Onion, you might get something close to this.

Take a look at this post by Barbara O'Brien at C&L as well. Food for thought.

Presumption of Guilt

Here's the NYT story on the detention of Donald Vance, who was not only a U.S. citizen, but was working for the FBI tracking abuses.

Expand this treatment to several thousand people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and several secret prisons scattered around Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and gauge the reaction you get from some of our own citizens. The presumption too often is that they must be guilty of something, else they wouldn't have been detained. I've run into it myself in discussion groups -- the automatic assumptoin that all of these people are dangerous terrorists, when the fact point to the conclusion that most of them have been innocent. No suspicion that our own military and intelligence services are incompetent or abusive, or that the administration has given a green light to behavior that we have traditionally condemend in the strongest possible terms. "They're all terrorists."

We have had since our founding a basic principle of law in this country: the accused is innocent until proven guilty. There have always been some who presume guilt, but they've been marginalized. Now they're catered to.

Bush deserves to burn in a Christanist hell for doing that.

The Torture Bill

And the Democrats finally speak out:

Hillary Clinton's speech on the Senate floor.

It's a great speech. Even Andrew Sullivan liked it.

Scroll down for comments by Obama, Edwards, Kerry, Feingold, Dodd. (For some reason, all of Atrios' permalinks go back to the top of the page.)

The "mavericks" voted against habeas corpus. I think the whole "rebellion" was stage-managed.

Here's an aglen I hadn't thought of, from Jack Cafferty:

President Bush is trying to pardon himself. Here’s the deal: Under the War Crimes Act, violations of the Geneva Conventions are felonies, in some cases punishable by death. When the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Convention applied to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, President Bush and his boys were suddenly in big trouble. They’ve been working these prisoners over pretty good. In an effort to avoid possible prosecution they’re trying to cram this bill through Congress before the end of the week before Congress adjourns. The reason there’s such a rush to do this? If the Democrats get control of the House in November this kind of legislation probably wouldn’t pass.

You wanna know the real disgrace about what these people are about to do or are in the process of doing? Senator Bill Frist and Congressman Dennis Hastert and their Republican stooges apparently don’t see anything wrong with this. I really do wonder sometimes what we’re becoming in this country.