James Madison - "Impeach Bush Over Purgegate!"
WASHINGTON — Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cannot be tried on allegations of torture in overseas military prisons, a federal judge said Tuesday in a case he described as "lamentable."
U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan threw out a lawsuit brought on behalf of nine former prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said Rumsfeld cannot be held personally responsible for actions taken in connection with his government job.
The lawsuit contends the prisoners were beaten, suspended upside down from the ceiling by chains, urinated on, shocked, sexually humiliated, burned, locked inside boxes and subjected to mock executions.
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First had argued that Rumsfeld and top military officials disregarded warnings about the abuse and authorized the use of illegal interrogation tactics that violated the constitutional and human rights of prisoners.
Hogan appeared conflicted during arguments last year. On one hand, he said he was hesitant to allow allegations of torture to go unheard. On the other hand, he said the case was unprecedented.
"This is a lamentable case," Hogan began his 58-page opinion Tuesday.
No matter how appealing it might seem to use the courts to correct allegations of severe abuses of power, Hogan wrote, government officials are immune from such lawsuits. Additionally, foreigners held overseas are not normally afforded U.S. constitutional rights.
"Despite the horrifying torture allegations," Hogan said, he could find no case law supporting the lawsuit, which he previously had described as unprecedented.
Allowing the case to go forward, Hogan said in December, might subject government officials to all sorts of political lawsuits. Even Osama bin Laden could sue, Hogan said, claiming two American presidents threatened to have him murdered.
"There is no getting around the fact that authorizing monetary damages remedies against military officials engaged in an active war would invite enemies to use our own federal courts to obstruct the Armed Forces' ability to act decisively and without hesitation," Hogan wrote Tuesday.
Had the Rumsfeld lawsuit been allowed to go forward, attorneys for the ACLU might have been able to force the Pentagon to disclose what officials knew about abuses such as those at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and what was done to stop it.
"The court ruled that innocent civilians tortured by the United States cannot seek recourse in the federal courts to hold responsible U.S. officials legally liable," said ACLU attorney Lucas Guttentag. "We believe that the law and Constitution require more, and that the former secretary of defense must be held accountable for his policies that led to this abuse."
The Justice Department had no immediate comment.
Hogan also dismissed the charges against other officials named in the lawsuit: retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, former Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski and Col. Thomas M. Pappas.
Karpinski, whose Army Reserve unit was in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison, was demoted and is the highest-ranking officer punished in the scandal. Sanchez, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq, retired from the Army and said his career was a casualty of the prison scandal.
It is pretty difficult to agree with everything the new Democratic majority has done, but they deserve credit for succeeding spectacularly in keeping the Bush administration against the ropes. And against the ropes is exactly where the dangerous cabal needs to be...too busy trying to counterpunch, flailing away wildly and unable to implement more of their nefarious and stygian anti-democracy plots.
It wasn't long ago that the Bush administration could have fired every federal prosecutor for refusing to bring falsified charges against a political enemy, and the Soviet-like Politburo Republican Congress would have turned a blind eye to the whole affair. Today's fired attorney scandal would have simply been the latest in a long line of dangerous democracy destroying schemes implemented by an out of control Republican Party and their wannabe Emperor.
To their credit, the Congressional Democrats carefully uncovered the facts and used them to leverage a panicked administration into a series of public missteps and lies that left the White House tangled in one giant knot. For the better part of a month the case has been building and building. Each turn of the screw - every new rock that the Democrats uncovered sent another slug scurrying for cover.
Then, just when it appeared the administration had begun to fight back, finally found something of a footing...the Democratic House approved a war funding bill that set a date for the troops to be withdrawn. Once again, the Bush White House was sent reeling...once again, the President was forced to appear before the cameras and pitch another temper-tantrum.
More importantly, however, is the fact that the Democrats' action has diverted the administration's attention away from how to best lie about the purged prosecutors, and forced them into trying to figure out how best to lie about the Democrats' war-funding bill.
Maybe the Democrats aren't perfect, but they appear to be kicking the political snot out of Emperor Decider and that counts for a lot!
Monica Goodling, a senior Justice Department official involved in the firings of federal prosecutors, will refuse to answer questions at upcoming Senate hearings, citing Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, her lawyer said Monday.
Goodling was Gonzales' senior counsel and White House liaison until she took a leave of absence earlier this month. She was subpoenaed last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee along with several of Gonzales' other top aides.
Gonzales' truthfulness about the firings of seven prosecutors on Dec. 7 and another one months earlier also have been questioned. On March 13 at a news conference, Gonzales denied that he participated in discussions or saw any documents about the firings, despite documents that show he attended a Nov. 27 meeting with senior aides on the topic, where he approved a detailed plan to carry out the dismissals.
Goodling was one of five senior Justice Department aides who met with Gonzales for that Nov. 27 discussion. Department documents released Friday to Capitol Hill show she attended multiple meetings about the dismissals for months.
She also was among aides who on Feb. 5 helped Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty prepare his testimony for a Senate hearing the next day — during which he may have given Congress incomplete or otherwise misleading information about the circumstances of the firings.
Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.
The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.
Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.
More news...
• I have been sentenced to death by my sister
Chimera: sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells
He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.
The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep's foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.
"We would take a couple of ounces of bone marrow cells from the patient,' said Prof Zanjani, whose work is highlighted in a Channel 4 programme tomorrow.
"We would isolate the stem cells from them, inject them into the peritoneum of these animals and then these cells would get distributed throughout the metabolic system into the circulatory system of all the organs in the body. The two ounces of stem cell or bone marrow cell we get would provide enough stem cells to do about ten foetuses. So you don't just have one organ for transplant purposes, you have many available in case the first one fails."
At present 7,168 patients are waiting for an organ transplant in Britain alone, and two thirds of them are expected to die before an organ becomes available.
Scientists at King's College, London, and the North East Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle have now applied to the HFEA, the Government's fertility watchdog, for permission to start work on the chimeras.
But the development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race.
Dr Patrick Dixon, an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: "Many silent viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV."
Animal rights activists fear that if the cells get mixed together, they could end up with cellular fusion, creating a hybrid which would have the features and characteristics of both man and sheep. But Prof Zanjani said: "Transplanting the cells into foetal sheep at this early stage does not result in fusion at all."
lAnimal Farm is on Channel 4 at 9pm tomorrow
Kissinger's extradition to Uruguay sought over Operation Condor
| RAW STORY Published: Monday March 26, 2007 | |
| P |
An attorney for a victim of Uruguay's 1973-1985 dictatorship has asked his government to request the extradition of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger over his alleged role in the notorious Operation Condor.
Condor was a secret plan hatched by South American dictators in the 1970s to eliminate leftist political opponents in the region. Details of the plan have emerged over the past years in documents and court testimony.
The Latin American dictatorships of the time "were mere executors" of a "plan of extermination" hatched in the United States by a group led by Kissinger, said attorney Gustavo Salle, who represents the family of Bernardo Arnone.
Uruguayan prosecutor Mirtha Guianze has received the request and is studying the case, according to news reports.
A leftist activist, Arnone was arrested in October 1976 and flown to Argentina with a group of political prisoners that vanished and were presumably executed.
Kissinger played a dominant role in US foreign policy between 1969 and 1977, and was a strong supporter of right-wing regimes across Latin America.
The extradition request comes as the topic of rights violations during Uruguay's dictatorship is making headlines again, with Salle citing evidence from declassified US State Department documents.
Witnesses are set to testify in April in a case that began in September against eight retired regime officials over rights violations.
March 25, 2007
Judiciary Corruption, THE WALK and President Pelosi
By Rob Kall
Meet the Press tends to get me thinking, extrapolating, and writing.
US Attorney David Iglesias told Tim Russert, today, that he felt leaned on when Senator Pete Domenici and congresswoman Heather Wilson asked him about pressing charges against a Democrat running in a tight race. Iglesias should have filed charges-- against the senator and congresswoman-- for interfering in the judicial process. Domenici and Wilson should be criminally charged and should resign.
Iglesias tells Tim Russert he didn't even report Domenici, and Wilson, though, inappropriate and illegal as their efforts at tampering were, because of his "loyalty," Iglesias reports. Loyalty to Domenici, a mentor who helped him get the job? Yes. Loyalty to Heather Wilson, a fellow Republican? Yes, and also, to the Republican party? Probably. What about loyalty to justice? To the law? Iglesias is no innocent. He was fired because he just wasn't the total whore who put politics before the law that the white house wanted. He just violated the law a little bit. Yes. It was a part of his job as US attorney to report efforts to influence justice. He didn't do it. That was reason to fire him. His failure to act as a political hitman was not.
The fact is, as Tim Russert says, "in each of these districts a corruption investigation was going on."
Arlen Spector says that while firings are at the "pleasure of the president" bad reasons are not tolerable.
Bush, through Rove and Gonzales, arranged for the chief prosecutors to be fired, taken off the job, removed from heavy duty investigations of Republicans. This reason for firing is not "at the pleasure of the president" no way, not ever, never, even though this is the despicable lie that right wing echo chamber members keep repeating. Whenever you hear the words "at the pleasure of the president" you're hearing someone supporting the spin campaign being orchestrated by the whitehouse.
John McKay, another fired US Attorney, in answer to Tim Russert's question as to whether Gonzales can continue to run the Justice Department said that it's up to the President and AG Gonzales. What a weak, cover-his-ass answer. At least, he then said, "There is a cloud over the Justice Department and that has to be removed." It's clear he's afraid to tell the truth, that he knows the vicious way this administration will make his work future toast if he just says what he thinks about his fellow Republicans in the Justice Department.
Of course, Gonzales was just the trigger man for Bush. President Bush is the one who should be removed.
When we look at the history of the US. This horrendous abuse of justice will be ranked right up there with some of the worst, most criminal acts by a government official.
Mainstream Media Collusion in Preventing the Corruption Story From Being the Top News
It is time for the mainstream media to be making the criminal firing of these attorneys as the big news story, not the battle between Bush and the congress. That's the spin Bush wants. Every time the news talks about the conflict between congress and the President, Bush Wins.
The story is about the worst abuse of the justice system in recent history. Bush's failure to pull Gonzales just makes him more guilty. This WILL be the lynchpin that leads to Bush's impeachment. We better get to work on Cheney, or he could be Bush's replacement. Cheney has to go first.
Getting back to Meet the Press. Russert comments that three of the eight attorneys fired were among the top ten prosecutors in terms of convictions.
He asks Arlen Spector, about Gonzales--
"Do you believe he has the integrity, independence and candor to continue..."
Spector replies--
"Integrity-- lets see."
"Independence-- there's a real question... I want to hear from him directly, vis a vis the white house, what kind of independence he showed."
I don't think he ever got to candor.
Next, Russert asks Dick Durbin to comment on some remarks he's made about what he wants to ask Karl Rove.
Durbin wants to ask Karl Rove's influences on other attorneys who were retained. Did he ask politically motivated actions of others. How many others did play ball? How many were contacted by members of congress or higher up... to influence elections."
Spector says that he thinks the president is wrong for not wanting a transcript, that he'd prefer to have the hearings public, but that rather than hearings before both bodies, it could be streamlined.
Spector could very well be one of the Republicans who break the Bush Wall. He's worked hard (not so hard in recent years) to maintain a reputation for loyalty to the law and fairness. Already, he is leaning in some good directions, challenging Bush. Already, he is saying that there is no way the attorneys should have been fired for bad reasons, and that Gonzales better be able to explain.
If Spector turns on Gonzales, it is a turn against the president. The right and the MSM will try to spin it differently, but there is no getting around it. Like an inoperable tumor that has intertwined itself into the brain or spine, Bush has embraced Gonzales so tightly, so protectively, if Gonzales goes down, Bush's corruption will have to be faced. He may avoid, using presidential immunity defenses, direct testimony against him, but the nation will know. The congress will know.
THE WALK
There will be more Republicans who can no longer deny they, like the wives of sexual predators of children, live in a house where massive abuse is going on. Their fear for their continued survival, their loyalty to a damaged relationship will fail to maintain the lie. They may not speak out, but they will find others who feel the same way, and soon enough, they will make THE WALK.
The walk is the walk by at least one dozen Republican senators to the Whitehouse. They will walk there to tell Bush and Cheney it is time for them to go, that they are ready to support impeachment, if necessary, but willing to help negotiate resignations that minimize the risk of prosecution.
This will not be easy. Should the Dem congress allow Bush and Cheney to resign with some immunity from prosecution? The temptation will be to resist giving Bush and Cheney any slack. But allowing them to resign, perhaps with a confession of some sort, with public testimony-- along the lines of South Africa's truth and reconciliation hearings-- might go a long way to get us back on track.
My guess is the Republicans would want to see a Republican replacement. That would NOT be acceptable. Nancy Pelosi is next in line and she should become the first Female President. My guess is the republicans will put this off until spring 2008, after the presidential primaries are far along, especially, after the California primary, when it will be too late for Pelosi, as the incumbent president, to declare she is running for president for the 2008 race. After all, if "THE WALK" happens this spring or summer, and Pelosi has even six months to show a strong track record, she has a very good chance of becoming the leading contender in the Democratic presidential primary race.
It IS getting interesting, isn't it?
Which Senate Republicans do YOU think will be among those who take THE WALK to the whitehouse?
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 22, 2007; A01
The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.
Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.
She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.
"The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public."
Eubanks, who served for 22 years as a lawyer at Justice, said three political appointees were responsible for the last-minute shifts in the government's tobacco case in June 2005: then-Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum, then-Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler and Keisler's deputy at the time, Dan Meron.
News reports on the strategy changes at the time caused an uproar in Congress and sparked an inquiry by the Justice Department. Government witnesses said they had been asked to change testimony, and one expert withdrew from the case. Government lawyers also announced that they were scaling back a proposed penalty against the industry from $130 billion to $10 billion.
High-ranking Justice Department officials said there was no political meddling in the case, and the department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) concurred after an investigation.
Yesterday was the first time that any of the government lawyers on the case spoke at length publicly about what they considered high-level interference by Justice officials.
Eubanks, who retired from Justice in December 2005, said she is coming forward now because she is concerned about what she called the "overwhelming politicization" of the department demonstrated by the controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Lawyers from Justice's civil rights division have made similar claims about being overruled by supervisors in the past.
Eubanks said Congress should not limit its investigation to the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.
"Political interference is happening at Justice across the department," she said. "When decisions are made now in the Bush attorney general's office, politics is the primary consideration. . . . The rule of law goes out the window."
McCallum, who is now the U.S. ambassador to Australia, said in an interview yesterday that congressional claims of political interference were rejected by the OPR investigation, for which Eubanks was questioned. He said that there was a legitimate disagreement between Eubanks and some career lawyers in the racketeering division about key strategy and that his final decision to reduce the proposed penalty to pay for smoking-cessation programs was vindicated by the judge's ruling that she could not order such a penalty.
"Her claims are totally false in terms of [us] trying to weaken the case," McCallum said. "Her claims were looked into by the Office of Professional Responsibility and were found to be groundless."
In June 2006, the OPR cleared McCallum, concluding that his "actions in seeking and directing changes in the remedies sought were not influenced by any political considerations, but rather were based on good faith efforts to obtain remedies from the district court that would be sustainable on appeal."
Keisler and Meron did not return telephone calls seeking comment.
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled last August that tobacco companies violated civil racketeering laws by conspiring for decades to deceive the public about the dangers of their product. She ordered the companies to make major changes in the way cigarettes are marketed. But she said she could not order the monetary penalty proposed by the government.
The Clinton Justice Department brought the unprecedented civil suit against the country's five largest tobacco companies in 1999. President Bush disparaged the tobacco case while campaigning in 2000. After Bush took office, some officials expressed initial doubts about the government's ability to fund the prosecution, Justice's largest.
Eubanks said McCallum, Keisler and Meron largely ignored the case until it became clear that the government might win. She recalled that "things began to get really tense" after McCallum read news reports in April 2005 that one government expert, professor Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School, would argue that tobacco officials who engaged in fraud could be removed from their corporate posts. Eubanks said she received an angry call from McCallum on the day the news broke.
"How could you put that in there?" she recalled him saying. "We're not going to be pursuing that."
Afterward, McCallum, Keisler and Meron told Eubanks to approach other witnesses about softening their testimony, Eubanks said.
Matthew Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids was one of the witnesses whom Eubanks asked to change his testimony. Yesterday, he said he found her account to be "the only reasonable explanation" for what transpired.
Two weeks before closing arguments in June, McCallum called for a meeting with Eubanks and her deputy, Stephen Brody, to discuss what McCallum described as "getting the number down" for the $130 billion penalty to create smoking-cessation programs. Brody declined to comment yesterday on the legal team's deliberations, saying that they were private.
During several tense late-night meetings, McCallum repeatedly refused to suggest a figure, Eubanks said, or give clear reasons for the reduction. Brody refused to lower the amount. Finally, on the morning the government was to propose the penalty in court, she said, McCallum ordered it cut to $10 billion.
The most stressful moment, Eubanks said, came when the three appointees ordered her to read word for word a closing argument they had rewritten. The statement explained the validity of seeking a $10 billion penalty.
"I couldn't even look at the judge," she said.
Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.
Confusion at the Postby: JBThu Mar 22, 2007 at 12:47:21 PM CDT |
| I have been reading the Washington Post for well over 50 years. Fact is, I delivered 200 newspapers every morning at 4:30 a.m. and read the paper while I walked my paper route. Today, though, we have pretty good evidence that the editors of the Post are not reading their own paper, for if they were, they certainly would not have come up with this piece of crap editorial, suggesting that a Constitutional confrontation is more than the corruption in the Department of Justice deserves. Had they read this piece by Carol D. Leonnig in the very same edition on the interference by Bush appointees in the prosecution the the criminal tobacco corporations, these editors might have concluded differently. The ugly fact is that with a brain like Rove running the Executive, there is no chance that Justice could have been spared the politicization that destroys the Rule of Law. Senator Shumer is absolutely correct in saying that if Bush refuses to let Meiers and Rove testify under oath there are plenty of disgruntled Justice employees who will! We are on our way to a crisis in Washington and the nation will not stand for more bullcrap as an answer to its questions. Bush should understand that loyalty to Rove will bring his administration down. JB |
Nearly everything in life is about context. So let's put into context Mister Bush's latest heel-digging-in, "know ya'are but whattam'I" pitch-o-fit with the Democrats and see why it is doomed to political failure.
The President and his Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress and the American people as to why several federal prosecutors were fired. The administration claimed the attorneys were released for doing a poor job, but White House communication records revealed that Mister Bush and his people fired the attorney's for failing to be sufficiently 'loyal Bushies'. They just weren't willing enough to create fake charges and hang them on Democrats. And, contrary to FOX News' insistence, the administration's manipulation of America's justice system does matter. Honestly, what could possibly be more important than the rule of law?
Even most Congressional Republicans acknowledge that George W. Bush's administration, including the Attorney General, supposedly the nation's top law enforcement official, lied to Congress and the American people. The reality and the facts are indisputable. And therein lies the rub - oh, and the context.
Despite the President and Attorney General's truth deficiencies, Mister Bush tried to swindle a sweet deal for Karl Rove, i.e. to have him testify off-the-record and in private. Of course, having been told lie after lie Democrats smelled a rat...an attempt by the White House to avoid having to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Mister Bush and the 'loyal Bushies' are trying to justify their stance by pretending to have -- by dumping 3,000 pages of information -- cooperated with Congress in an unprecedented way. The reality, however, is that there is a gap in the documents that the White House released. Mister Bush would like Congress and the American people to believe that, regarding his plan to fire the attorneys, all communication came to an abrupt halt in mid-November and that nobody in the administration said or wrote another word regarding the issue until early December. The near month-long gap in e-mails aside, reports have suggested that the White House redacted (blacked out) 100 pages of the released documents.
What are they so desperately trying to hide?
Again, the administration is trying to game the system. They are telling yet another lie by omitting nearly a month's worth of important communication, while telling the American people that they've given Congress 'unprecedented' cooperation.
The craziest part about the entire scenario is that the administration is playing this game in hopes of claiming Democrats aren't interested in the facts, only partisan politics. This is the land of political make believe and pretend that the nearly irrelevant Mister Bush now finds himself. He and the 'loyal Bushies' actually believe they can repeatedly and publicly lie to Congress and the American people; then attempt to game the system with their "extremely generous offer" that conspicuously omits nearly a month of important communication; refuse to allow Rove and others to testify publicly and under oath; and then claim the Democrats are simply playing political games and not interested in the truth. This is the context in which this political scandal is playing out.
Incredibly, the President and his band of 'loyal Bushies' are hoping against hope that the American people won't remember the content or the context of this particular scandal. The biggest problem facing Mister Bush's scheme is that the American people probably trust Charles Manson more than they trust him and that is the political context in which he now lives.
During today's hearings on global warming, global warming denier James Inhofe was asking Al Gore questions, but didn't want to hear the answers because he thought the responses would take "too much time". Barbara Boxer then explained to Inhofe how things work in Senate now.
Download (16260) | Play (13930) 
Download (8485) | Play (9928)
Boxer: "You're not making the rules. You used to when you did this, you don't do this anymore. Elections have consequences"
Everyone in the chamber appeared to love Boxer's comments also.
Wow. CNN’s Jack Cafferty really doesn’t like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. After calling him the definition of a “weasel,” Cafferty asked America whether the AG should resign. Surprisingly (or not), CNN didn’t get one e-mail saying Gonzales should stay.
 | |
| AP Photo / Jerome Delay Saddam Has the Last LaughThe man who once famously took a sledgehammer to Saddam Hussein’s statue now says “the Americans are worse than the dictatorship.” That’s a growing sentiment in George W. Bush’s Iraq, where a majority of people view attacks on coalition forces as acceptable. |
In the reputed cause of keeping us safe, the Bush administration has gutted our defenses and left us more vulnerable than ever.
Is that merely some rabid charge thrown about by the irresponsible liberal blogosphere? No, that's the U.S. military talking, which goes even farther by depicting its readiness condition as a "death spiral."
In a perverse way, it's a good thing we're fighting them there, because we have very little to fight them with anywhere else, according to an eye-popping account from the Washington Post: "Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge."
Who, specifically, is this doomsaying band of brothers that sounds like the Bush-hating, Bush-bashing blogosphere in throwing around phrases like "death spiral"? Well, there's the Army chief of staff: "We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it." There's the Army's vice chief of staff, who describes his forces' readiness capability as "stark." And there's the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, who, when "asked last month by a House panel whether he was comfortable with the preparedness of Army units in the United States," replied bluntly, "No ... I am not comfortable."
"More troubling," the report continued, "is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover." In response the Pentagon has recommended the Army and Marine Corps' expansion by 92,000 troops. And that's just for starters.
But here's what's even more troubling to me and what seems like only a few others. The real death spiral we find ourselves in is more along the lines of what economist, historian and political scientist Chalmers Johnson gloomily outlines: something you might call "democracy's death spiral."
In an excellent, don't-miss interview with BuzzFlash.com, the Blowback-trilogy author goes back to the future with this profound and, I think, prophetic caveat: "History tells us there’s no more unstable, critical configuration than the combination of domestic democracy and foreign empire. You can be one or the other. You can be a democratic country, as we have claimed in the past to be, based on our Constitution. Or you can be an empire. But you can’t be both."
Yet "both" is what we're led to believe we're nobly pursuing, as we not only rebuild but now rapidly expand our military forces -- for our own good. And our "own good" will entail an ever-swelling military-industrial complex in support of an ever-inflating global fighting force engaged in increasingly numerous conflicts at deficit-bloating, economy-destroying costs.
Oh, and democracy-destroying costs, too. For empires demand unidimensional direction. They need one voice, one leader, one "decider." They cannot and will not tolerate 535 elected representatives and scores of constitutionally conscientious magistrates forcing their two-cents' worth into the mix. That system spells "messy" -- just about the only thing Donald Rumsfeld got right in six years -- and empires don't do messy. They are, rather, exceedingly unilinear in purpose and thought.
In the third of his trilogy, Nemesis, Professor Johnson writes that the United States "is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences."
That path is getting shorter by the day.
