Antiwar.com Blog

By a strong 60-40 margin San Francisco voters approved Proposition I, which bans military recruiters from public schools. The measure also asks the city government to consider funding scholarships for education and training that could provide an alternative to military service (but doesn’t mandate any such funding).

They’re not much exercised about prewar lies, but exposing US gulags – well, they’re not having any of that:

Congress’s top Republican leaders yesterday demanded an immediate joint House and Senate investigation into the disclosure of classified information to The Washington Post that detailed a web of secret prisons being used to house and interrogate terrorism suspects.

The Post’s article, published on Nov. 2, has led to new questions about the treatment of detainees and the CIA’s use of “black sites” in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The issue dogged President Bush in his recent trip to Latin America and has created consternation in Eastern Europe.

“If accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences, and will imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) wrote in a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

That’s right: it’s the disclosure that so outrages these paragons of morality.

While we’re on the topic of your tax dollars and the toilets they end up feeding…

When’s the last time you took a vacation? Did you stay in a place like this? No? Well, maybe Ahmed will steal a towel for you. It’s the least he could do, really.

Writing in 1968, Will Durant, in his The Lessons of History, says that “in the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.”

And then this gem: “When the states of Europe freed themselves from papal overlordship and protection, each state encouraged nationalism as a supplement to its army and navy. If it foresaw conflict with any particular country it fomented, in its people, hatred of that country, and formulated catchwords to bring that hatred to a lethal point; meanwhile it stressed its love of peace.”

Josh Marshall posts:

Someone was willing to say it: Chalabi deserves a subpoena, not photo-ops with administration bigwigs. See Rep. Miller’s (D-CA) speech on the floor of the House just yesterday.

Yeah, well, I said it first.

An interesting torture story developing today. From publius:

According to Drudge (always a shaky way to start), Frist and Hastert are going to announce an investigation not into our mini-gulag in Eastern Europe, but into the leak of the black sites to the Post.

This is EXACTLY why the Espionage Act should be read in the way that I read it. By roping Libby within its scope, you give the government a perfect weapon to punish all unfavorable reporting on national security issues. Inevitably, people will abuse the power – because that’s what people tend to do. An expansive reading of the Espionage Act will remove a check to corrupt and illegal practices – which is precisely what Frist and Hastert (surely at the direction of others) are trying to do.

Then, here’s digby:

Whole Lotta Love

Wow. CNN is reporting that Trent Lott just said that the Washington Post leak was probably perpetrated by a Republican Senator! Apparently, the gulag was discussed at the Republican-Senator-only meeting last week in which Cheney begged them to back-off the anti-torture policy.

Lott said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Man a majority leader scorned is fearsome creature, ain’t he?

I do find it fascinating that Cheney was discussing this Gulag opernly in front of the GOP caucus after they had just recently voted 90-0 for the anti-torture amendment. Seems old Dick is a little slow on the uptake. He didn’t learn a thing from his earlier leaking campaign, did he?

Think Progress has the video.

Related: Fox News: “Why All The Fuss About Torturing People?”

Michael Ledeen is whining about reports that supposedly accuse him of forging the fake Niger documents. There’s just one problem, though: no one that I have read on the subject is making any such accusation. The La Repubblica series by Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo says that Ledeen was the conduit for the forgeries, “stovepiping” them — or their content — from Rome to Washington via the Office of Special Plans — the Pentagon’s parallel intelligence-gathering operation that did an end-run around the CIA.

As for my own contribution to the story, it explicitly states Ledeen was a “conduit” for the report, and that the forging was done by others.

Ledeen, the master of obfuscation, is confusing the issue: but then that’s not too surprising. He’s eager to deny his own reported role in this shameful affair, but it seems distinctly odd that he’s doing so by overstating it — basically accusing himself of crimes no one has fingered him for. He ought to give himself a break — and give us one, too. No one is fooled by this strenuous smoke-blowing. But I can’t help thinking that where there’s so much smoke, there has to be a certain amount of fire …

UPDATE: Several readers have pointed to this bit of “dialogue” between Ledeen and “James Jesus Angleton,” whose shade Ledeen communes with (via ouija board) to set us mortals straight, to correct my contention that Ledeen is “whining” about being tagged as a forger:

“JJA: The ones that say you forged them? I didn’t know your French was
good enough…

“ML: No, no, not those. Anyway hardly anybody said that, mostly they
accused me of schlepping them, not forging them.”

If we remember that Angleton is, after all, quite dead, and that Ledeen’s by-now-tiresome literary device is just that — a device — we are confronted with the curious conundrum of Ledeen smearing himself out of one side of his mouth, and correcting himself out of the other.