Office of the Independent Blogger

The New York Times tells us today that House Democrats are seriously exploring the creation of an independent ethics arm to enforce new rules on travel, lobbying, gifts and other issues that Democrats intend to put in place on taking power next month and I welcome it. But I’ll wait until these reforms have been enacted and pushed through Congress before I celebrate. Incidentally, that’s the approach I’m taking to The Future of Iraq, as there are so many options out there that I’m not going to waste my energies getting too worked up before something happens. All the same, I’m glad that the Pentagon is putting the thought of more troops out there and I think that that, coupled with a “one-to-one-and-a-half-year deadline” for withdrawal would work well where Iraq’s future is concerned. Though I will say to the Democrats and the White House: do take these measures, each, seriously, because I believe that they would both work better than all other options at fulfilling their stated goals and correcting known problems.

So, Iran held a “conference” of “scholars” and “leaders” about how fake the Holocaust was. You know how fake the Holocaust was? David Duke can explain. That’s right — David Duke went to Iran to denounce the Holocaust with the Iranians. Now I know he’s a Klansman so he isn’t worth a damn but come on, man, you’re an American. You know what’s going on with Iran’s nuclear program and yet you go out there to assault Israel and praise Palestinians? Aren’t you supposed to be a Klansman, therefore hate all colored people, therefore hate the Jews and Palestinians equally? Guess it doesn’t work that way but really, what a screwed up world we live in where Iran hosts a conference then “appoints” a “committee” to find “the truth” about the Holocaust. Yet, believe it or not, it’s not the stupidest thing I’ve heard all day. This is. It’s an article claiming that soy products are creating homosexuals. Need I say more?

Over at Townhall, the first interview with Donald Rumsfeld post-resignation is up, and the most notable thing about the article is his belief that the biggest mistake he, and we, have made in Iraq is grammatical. So Rumsfeld gets asked, “What do you regret about Iraq?” and he says, “Well, I wouldn’t have called it the war on terror” and then he goes off on a Rumsfeldian tangent. About the only good news today is this: word of a Democratic probe of the White House.

Would you like to know, Dear Reader, why Islamic nations are such a threat to the future of the world (bigger than Global Warming and China)? Because of trends like this.

More than 20,000 supporters of an Islamic alliance rallied Sunday, demanding the government withdraw changes to a controversial rape statute that they say go against Islam. The protesters condemned President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, many chanting “Death to Musharraf.” One carried a sign reading, “No to conspiracy for indecency and obscenity.” Musharraf last week signed into law some amendments to the Hudood Ordinance, a 1979 law against rape that human rights activists said punished rape victims while providing legal safeguards for their attackers.

The ordinance required a rape victim to produce four witnesses in court to prove her assault claim. Under the new amendment, judges can choose whether a rape case should be tried in a criminal court where the four-witness rule does not apply or under the Islamic ordinance. The new law also drops the death penalty for sex outside of marriage. The offense now would be punishable with five years in prison or a fine of $165. Human rights groups have hailed the amendments but Muslim groups claim the changes go against Islam. Opposition Islamic groups have held a series of protests against the new law since it was passed by Parliament last month. “We will not only force Musharraf to withdraw the bill through a people’s movement, but we will end all the illegal acts of Musharraf’s government,” said Maualana Fazlur Rahman, a senior figure in the religious alliance and leader of the opposition in the lower house of Parliament.

It’s a step forward on Musharref’s part and a welcome one, but it’s a harsh reminder of what the Islamic World is like. I’d imagine that it’ll be at least thirty years before Islam becomes Progressive and until then, it’s the most dangerous part of the world.

Pervez Musharref is one of the bravest men on Earth and it’s a shame that he must worry about assassination by the majority of his public instead of being hailed for the vision that he has.

Agusto Pinochet is dead. I’m happy to hear that this terrible man has died and I dearly wish for there to be a hell in which he can be punished. His crimes against humanity were never punished and that’s a damn shame.

Oh, and for those of you curious: Bill Frist will never be President. Democrats hate him, Republicans hate him, and he kills cats, so independents don’t like him. Sorry to be the one to break that news.

The last session of the 109th Congress was today and the Washington Post chronicles the last nights. Maybe the most interesting thing in the article, however, is the fact that there are still “postmasters” in this country. Wow!

Arianna Huffington says Hillary Clinton is too “weather vane” to be President. Consider the source: Huffington was Newt Gingrich’s best friend throughout the 1990s, married to a Republican Senatorial candidate (interesting story there: do search Wikipedia for Michael Huffington) and then switched parties in the 2000s. I’ve often said that Huffington simply likes to support the party in exile because she thinks it’s cool, and I stand by that, but I will address her comments about Clinton. Hillary is a strong candidate and an intelligent, savvy woman; however, she is a woman in an America that I don’t think is ready to elect a woman, and she reminds me of Richard Nixon sometimes. (Her secretive and vindicative nature is a staple in almost all biographies of her.)

I could support her easily because she ain’t bad in the slightest but she isn’t my first choice. Or second, third or fourth. Fifth, though, is hers.

Here in Illinois, a man was arrested for trying to buy grenades to blow up a shopping mall.

Investigators said Derrick Shareef, 22, an American citizen from Rockford, was acting alone and never actually obtained any grenades. He was arrested Wednesday when he met with an undercover agent in a parking lot to trade a set of stereo speakers for four hand grenades and a gun, authorities said. “He fixed on a day of December 22nd on Friday … because it was the Friday before Christmas and thought that would be the highest concentration of shoppers that he could kill and injure,” said Robert Grant, the agent in charge of the Chicago FBI office. Authorities said Shareef had been under investigation since September, when he told an acquaintance that “he wanted to commit acts of violent jihad against targets in the United States as well as commit other crimes.”

Can you really get grenades for stereo speakers? That’s worse than Milt Pappas for Frank Robinson! (And I’d like to extend the best wishes to Freddy Garcia who was dealt to Philadelphia by the White Sox. Philly is one of my favorite cities, and they’ll be getting some of my attention next year as I wish to watch Garcia who is an Ace.)

Over at This Century Sucks, one of my favorite sites and one that I contribute to, there’s news about a new documentary by a friend of TCS. Check it out.

The New York Post has amusingly run a cover titled “Surrender Monkeys” in response to the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations, and while the article and design are absurd and in no need of further thought, something came to me.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that Hamilton and Baker were on this commission and the 9/11 Commission? It’s no secret that I think the 9/11 Commission was unnecessary and political, that the men on the panel are no more experts than other people who wouldn’t be in government, and I feel similar toward the Iraq Study Group. I’m with them on many of their recommendations, to be sure, but I’m irritated by the fact that a Political Elite was chosen, as usual, and more than that, I’m angry that outsiders had to have been asked to clean up Bush’s mess. If Bush had done his job right the first time, when we went in, we wouldn’t be in this situation where The Old Guard of Washington is asked to mop up the desert.

But Washington is a place in constant need of mopping. It is always dirty and always will be by nature of politics. Today I stumbled across something interesting and thought I’d share it. It’s a list of all Bush officials that have been in scandals.

Good stuff. Well, bad, but good that it’s documented, giving future historians reason to write what today’s are projecting: that Hoover must move over, and that Bush is the worst ever. I’m nearing that conclusion, too.

…fix up Iraq as fast as you can!

Baker’s Commission on Iraq released its report today and called for a withdrawal of troops from combat capacity in 2008, the training of Iraqi soldiers and diplomatic overtures to the Iranians and Syria. If there’s anything we can do in Iraq, in my opinion, that is it: train soldiers in Iraq, prepare to redeploy in 2008 but for a select capacity, and leave the rest up to the Iraqis and the region. Will that happen? Perhaps. We’ll have to wait and see, but let me just say now that my idea for Iraq is similar to the soon-to-be-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He wants us to send up to thirty thousand more troops to Iraq; I do as well. I wish for more soldiers because then we can speed up the training process and improve security, and that would be ideal, in my opinion.

There are very few men with the insight of Fred Kaplan. His latest article about Robert Gates’ confirmation hearings is an excellent read with a unique view of Robert Gates. Kaplan believes Gates’ honesty and independence to be remarkable, and I must say that I concur.

An intriguing sign of his autonomy appeared at the start of the hearing, when he said that his wife couldn’t be with him today because she was escorting the women’s basketball team of Texas A&M University—where Gates has happily been president the last four years—to an out-of-town game. The loyal wife with the adoring gaze is a traditional staple at confirmation hearings. Her absence—and, still more, the blatantly casual reason for her absence—drove home the point that Gates has no need for this job, no stake in the town, and no interests in its arbitrary rituals.

Gates is no Mr. Smith. He was an insider, by all accounts a ferocious bureaucratic infighter, for 26 years, many of them inside the Central Intelligence Agency, some of those as Director Bill Casey’s deputy, hardly a post for keeping one’s hands clean. Many of his answers at today’s hearing had a distinctly calculated quality. Even so, Bush’s other top aides have never paid so much as lip service to such sentiments.

At one point during the questioning, Gates noted that 2,889 Americans had died in Iraq “as of yesterday morning”—a sharp contrast (and, no doubt, an intentional one) to the time when then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz appeared before the Senate Committee on Armed Services and did not know how many of his fellow citizens had been killed in the war that he helped put in motion. When Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., threw Gates a soft pitch—asking what he’d learned from his vast experience in Washington—he not only hit it out of the park but carefully tagged all the bases and shook hands with all the basemen as he trotted around the diamond.

Among the lessons he recited: All agencies have to work together to get anything done; consulting with Congress is really important; so is treating people’s views with respect; and respecting the professionals—for instance, listening to military commanders when you’re planning a war—is really, really important, because “if you don’t make them a part of the solution, they will become a part of the problem.” In other words, he was telling the panel: “Anoint me, for I am the anti-Rumsfeld.”

After this excerpted portion of the piece, Reed wonders if Gates is for real and then makes a point that I’ve been making for a long time: ultimately, it’s Bush that matters. Rumsfeld is gone, he points out, and Cheney is isolated. Bush has always been The Decider, and while Gates is a fine man who I believe could be a great Defense Secretary, what matters most is if Bush really wants to change. If he does, it’ll get done; if not, then Robert Gates will be the town’s new Paul O’Neill. A good thing to be, if you believe in heroes. A bad thing if you wish for a President that doesn’t ostracize his advisors and who knows what’s right for the world at-large.

Robert Gates was approved by the Senate Panel hearing his preliminaries, and I like what I heard from his speech.

“It’s my impression that frankly there are no new ideas on Iraq,” Mr. Gates said, noting there are multiple government reviews underway besides the Iraq Study Group. “The question is: is there a way to put pieces of those different proposals together in a way that provides a way forward?” The group headed by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton is expected to propose that American combat troops be pulled back from Iraq, but not necessarily withdrawn from Iraq, by sometime in 2008. Mr. Gates supported the administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. In his testimony today, however, he made clear that his operating style and approach would be in some respects different from Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputies, who have led the Defense Department for nearly six years. He expressed grave reservations about taking military action against Iran, an idea that the Bush administration has not ruled out as it seeks to halt Tehran’s nuclear program.

“I think that military action against Iran would be an absolute last resort,” Mr. Gates said. “I think that we have seen in Iraq that once war is unleashed, it becomes unpredictable. And I think that the consequences of a conflict — a military conflict with Iran could be quite dramatic. And therefore, I would counsel against military action, except as a last resort,” he added. Mr. Gates said that he opposed an attack on Syria, which the Bush administration has criticized, along with Iran, for contributing to the instability in Iraq. Mr. Gates’s most direct statements about Iraq came during exchanges with Senators Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is soon to take over as the panel’s chairman, and John McCain of Arizona, who will become the top-ranking Republican.

“Do you believe that we are currently winning in Iraq?” asked Mr. Levin, who has pushed for announcing a date to begin withdrawals of American troops from Iraq. “No, sir,” Mr. Gates replied, adding that he did not believe the United States was losing, either. As recently as October, Mr. Bush had said that “absolutely, we’re winning” in Iraq, though he also made clear he was dissatisfied with the pace of progress there. But Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican, noted that General Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, had used a formulation at a policy forum in Washington on Monday that was much like the one that Mr. Gates used in his testimony. Mr. Warner, the armed services committee chairman, said the message from last month’s elections was that “change is needed.”

Mr. Gates said he agreed with Mr. Levin that it was “worth looking into”” the idea of withdrawing troops to instill a “sense of urgency” in the Iraqi government to resolve sectarian strife. Moments later, under questioning from Senator McCain, Mr. Gates said there had not been sufficient troops in Iraq immediately after the 2003 invasion. If confirmed, he said, he would consult with ground commanders about whether they wanted additional forces. Mr. Gates also appeared to differ slightly with Mr. Bush’s frequent formulation that Iraq is the “central battlefield” in fighting terrorists. Asked if he agreed with that description, Mr. Gates called Iraq “one of the central fronts in the war on terror” but that the United States also faced a “dispersed” enemy of Islamic militants worldwide. But he was more direct in criticizing the Bush administration’s decision to disband the Iraqi Army and, for a time, to bar from government jobs tens of thousands of Iraqis who were members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

It is all the right thing to say, but the key here is what the President thinks of him and whether or not he agrees and is willing to listen. Preliminary guesses should all be “No,” as I suspect that he’s the same man who fired Paul O’Neill for being pragmatic and considerate of reality. If he’s changed, all the better for the country and Iraq, but this report makes me wonder. How changed can a man be if he’s still arguing over whether or not we’re “winning” the War — with his newly nominated, by him, Defense Secretary. Ugh.

Robert Gates might be the gatekeeper, but George Walker holds all the keys. If he wants to open new doors, Gates is there, but don’t be stunned if he doesn’t. This is a President with a highly dysfunctional decision process both in his head and chain of command.

There will be no more fear and loathing at the United Nations directed toward John Bolton as he has announced his impending resignation, and America is better off for it. The man is a known liar who manipulates intelligence in all the wrong ways for all the wrong reasons, who screams at his aides and chases his wife from their home, as well as forcing her to engage in group sex, according to their divorce papers.

If only Bill Clinton had done such a thing then the whole world would’ve looked into it. But I am aware of John Bolton’s character (that mustach gave it away) and I am more than happy to see him go. I know that Bolton didn’t set the UN on fire as he was expected to, but he was the wrong man for the job for a variety of reasons, mainly: he’s a firebrand, a liar, a bully, baboon and a pervert, and that is not what America should send to the UN. I’ll be one of the first to criticize the UN, but I won’t tear down their walls, which is what Bolton would do and what an ideal candidate, wouldn’t. He stalled progress at the United Nations and makes big deals over nothing. (Each boxquote will correspond with the respective link behind these parenthesis.)

[1]“If Bolton left tomorrow, progress would be possible on almost every front where it is now stalled,” one senior Western diplomat fumed. “He has succeeded in putting almost everyone’s backs up, even among some of America’s closest allies. His main achievement has been to break the unified coalition of the North and unify the previously fragmented South.” Hitherto seen as weak and divided, the UN camp known as G-77—in fact, a loose grouping of 131 developing or “southern” nations plus China—has begun flexing its muscles and speaking with one voice.

[2]Less than two weeks before the White House announced his resignation, Ambassador John Bolton’s U.N. mission blocked an effort to celebrate the end of slavery in our hemisphere. Next year marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As far as anniversaries go, it seems like a good one to recognize, doesn’t it? It should not be a real bone of contention to say that one is against slavery; and, upon hearing of the anniversary of its abolition in one region, to acknowledge that as a good thing; to recognize the cost of the practice in the millions of lives uprooted and forced into extreme suffering; and to celebrate the efforts which ended the horrific practice.

To do so, a number of Caribbean countries got together to propose a commemorative resolution before the United Nations. Guess who refused to sign? That’s right: Ambassador John Bolton’s United States. In a letter, the Bolton-led U.S. mission to the UN explained their objection to two words (the U.S. preferred “the emphasis” to “emphasizing”) in the document. (You can read the document here.) After a couple dozen U.S. congresspeople kicked up a fuss — most of them members of the Congressional Black Caucus — the U.S. mission reportedly backed down, and consented to sign the document without their preferred language, according to sources close to the process.

Thank God.

The big news of the weekend is the news that Rumsfeld wrote critical memos before resigning. The story, excerpted:

Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction. “In my view it is time for a major adjustment,” wrote Mr. Rumsfeld, who has been a symbol of a dogged stay-the-course policy. “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.” Nor did Mr. Rumsfeld seem confident that the administration would readily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from shifting course, he suggested the administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations.

“Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis,” he wrote. “This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not ‘lose.’ ” “Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist,” he added. The memo suggests frustration with the pace of turning over responsibility to the Iraqi authorities; in fact, the memo calls for examination of ideas that roughly parallel troop withdrawal proposals presented by some of the White House’s sharpest Democratic critics.

It’s no surprise to me. What I wonder is When did Rumsfeld come to these brilliant conclusions? and Was this a memo for the history books more than a memo for the President? Really, I believe that the memo is an attempt to rewrite history in later years more than a serious attempt to change the President’s point of view and admit his errors from the deepest depths of the heart and cranium.

The Chicago Reader has been documenting police torture in Chicago since the 1990s, and the archive can be found here. It’s always disgusting, showing us the darkest realm of the human soul and the Justice system that has protected those who have abused their authorities. The latest report on the matter is here, and it is a DOOZY.

LAWYERS WHO DEFEND police-torture victims in Chicago long ago reached a harsh conclusion about Cook County’s criminal judges: most have a vested interest in refusing to acknowledge police brutality. Now these lawyers can point to a case so extreme it’s almost funny: a judge who apparently ruled on his own performance as a prosecutor, deciding there was no taint to a confession that the judge himself had written. Judge Nicholas Ford passed judgment on assistant state’s attorney Nick Ford. Ford had no problem with Ford’s work. It’s a case that’s unusual only in degree. Four years ago a group of 17 attorneys whose 12 clients alleged they’d been tortured submitted a remarkable petition to chief criminal court judge Paul Biebel. They wanted Biebel to disqualify the Cook County judiciary from any further involvement in their cases—in essence, to grant them a change of venue to some other county. The attorneys argued that 50 of Cook County’s 61 criminal court judges had ties to institutions or individuals who’d benefit from there being no investigation of torture cases.

According to the petition, 3 of the 50 judges were former Chicago police detectives and 2 of those had worked with the notorious former police commander Jon Burge; 3 other judges had previously defended the city in lawsuits alleging police brutality; and 16 judges were former assistant state’s attorneys directly involved in the torture cases, men and women who’d either testified on Burge’s behalf at police board hearings that led to his firing or who’d taken confessions allegedly coerced by physical means, prosecuted suspects whose statements of guilt were allegedly obtained by torture, or supervised the prosecution of defendants alleging electric shock, suffocation, attacks on the genitals, severe beatings, or other physical abuse at the hands of Burge’s detectives. Even judges who as prosecutors had had no direct or supervisory participation in the torture cases were suspect, the petition argued, because they’d presumably want to protect their former colleagues. And it noted that six judges, all former ASAs, had appeared as witnesses on Burge’s behalf at police board hearings when the city was trying to fire him for torture.

The core of the attorneys’ argument—that judges with law enforcement or prosecutorial backgrounds cast a blind eye in police brutality cases—was made against a fluid judiciary. Judges retire and are replaced. New ones are hired to relieve caseloads. Yet it would seem the blind-eye infection alleged by the defense attorneys has persisted despite the changing cast of characters. This July, special prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle released the report of their investigation into alleged police torture by Burge and his detectives in the years 1973 to 1991. Boyle said he believed torture had occurred in “about half” of the 148 cases their staff examined during their four-year investigation. If he was right, detectives committed hundreds of acts of torture, because in abusing a victim they almost never stopped with a single act. And as no officer ever admitted to any coercion, those detectives presumably committed hundreds of acts of perjury. In how many of those cases did a skeptical judge suppress a confession because he or she felt it had been coerced? Zero. (Judge Earl Strayhorn once suppressed a confession for the “oppressive atmosphere” in which it was given, but he didn’t conclude that physical abuse had taken place.) And not a single judge publicly recommended that any officer be prosecuted for giving false testimony under oath. Nor did the state’s attorney’s office prosecute a single officer for perjury, misconduct, or assault. And it’s from the ranks of those prosecutors that most of today’s criminal court judges have come.

Dishonesty is the trait I loathe above all others, and I believe that the abuse of power and authority is an extension of it. There’s nothing quite like a Judge who pretends to be impartial but has his hand around the gavel ready to silence the truth, nothing quite like a boss at work who harasses an employee knowing full-well that the employee will never fight back, or a person who tells someone to shut up and not speak after screeching at them knowing that they can’t respond. Knowing that about me, I’d hope you understand, Dear Reader, how incredibly disgusting I find this entire scenario to be.

Someday, when I have authority over something and someones — well, if I ever turn out anything like these men, please write me angry messages because intellectual curiosity, honesty and the open mind are the keys to a great country and a great person.

Fred Kaplan’s latest piece on Iraq addresses the Baker Commission’s forthcoming recommendation that we withdraw soldiers in the next one to two years and calls for us to ask Syria and Iran to work with us in fixing the country given. I can’t say I invite the Iranians or Syrians to Iraq easily as I consider them to be awful regimes and untrustworthy. Frankly, the situation in Iraq is absolutely no-win, and there may not be a solution at all. The ending of Kaplan’s piece was especially striking.

The days of America’s unilateral influence in Iraq are long over, if they weren’t mythical from the outset. Look at this week’s fiasco. Prime Minister Maliki canceled a dinner with President Bush—just brushed off the president of the United States, the country that’s sacrificed thousands of young men and women and spent hundreds of billions of dollars to keep Maliki’s government standing—because keeping the date would have upset Muqtada Sadr, the most powerful Shiite militia leader, who apparently now has more leverage than the United States and its 150,000 troops.

It’s pathetic, but it’s also a wake-up call. Our leverage is minuscule, and it’s declining by the day. To talk of grand schemes—partitioning Iraq or pressuring Maliki to form a “reconciliation government” and amend his constitution—is, quite apart from their merits, plainly absurd, because we have no control over what the Iraqis do. We still have some control, though, over what we do and, maybe, over what we can persuade others to do with us. The only choices are to give persuasion a whirl or to sit and watch a piece of the world fall apart.

Should we speak to the Iranians and Syria? Yes. Absolutely, but I can’t say it’ll amount to much and it may very well be more trouble than it’s worth, considering that those countries have no reason to support the West and are nothing at all like the West despite what some would have you believe. Oh, this War won’t end well.