Prairie Weather

UK? "Critical." That's the highest alert possible.

The announcement came after a meeting of the government emergencies committee Cobra, following a burning car being driven into a Glasgow airport terminal.

The BBC has just said that one of the men in the car was carrying "a device" which would, they believe, link this attack to the attacks in London.

Possibly even more frightening is that these attacks may not be linked to known terrorism organizations, fueling theories that new, unidentified groups may be out there, according to analysts working in the UK.  In other words, groups for which there is no intelligence whatsoever, nothing to rely on.

More at the Washington Post.

"Privilege log"

How solid is the Judiciary Committee's demand for a "privilege log"?

The privilege log, a detailed log "identifying those documents which are subject to the President's assertion of executive privilege," comes up in the matter of "conditional offers of clemency that the President recently granted to sixteen Puerto Rican nationalists" during the Clinton administration.  It deals with the extent to which Congress can oversee/second guess advice given by -- in this case -- the Department of Justice and other departments to the president in the matter of pardons. 

Again, it's the Senate Judiciary Committee -- this time demanding information presumably justifying Clinton's decision to grant clemency.  The Justice Department responds.  The tone is very different from that now used by the White  House.

Habeas corpus is the issue

It's shocking to be reminded that Congress removed habeas corpus when it passed the Military Commissions Act.  That's what's at stake now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the detainees' rights case.  Maybe Stephen Abraham's affidavit will tip the Court's decision in favor of detainees.  Abraham is the "Army reserve officer and lawyer who said the tribunal's members rely on vague information and are pressured into ruling against the suspects."

But that wouldn't be good enough for me.  I want a Congress with a conscience -- we thought that was what we were getting in November.  I want a Congress which will roll back the Military Commissions Act and restore habeas corpus.  I don't want to rely on the increasingly arrogant and wrong-headed Court for moral leadership. 

Congress may be getting closer to remembering what a conscience is:

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) said Democrats are considering a plan to cut Guantanamo's budget by half, which would keep the prison afloat for several more months and give the administration time to transfer the detainees. Moran said there is concern among some lawmakers that an immediate shutdown would put into question the secure detention of the prison's most dangerous inmates.

In a letter to Bush released yesterday, more than 140 House members joined Moran in calling for the facility's closure and said detainees should be allowed to protest their detentions in federal courts through habeas corpus petitions.

Language of Republican dissent becomes more urgent

In a moving op-ed piece, we learn how Oregon's Senator Gordon Smith became an opponent of the war.  Now he's gone from being one of two Republicans who decried the endless war to being a leader in a growing group.  That's good.  Particularly interesting are the changes in the language of Republican dissent.

Smith's apostasy last December looked like this.

Senator Smith woke up one morning last December with the alarm set to news and traffic — another day, another dozen American soldiers dead. He had his Groundhog Day moment, he says. “I just went from steamed to boiled.”

Later, on the floor of the Senate, he said the words that are still echoing around the political world:

“I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. This is absurd. It may even be criminal.”

Now he's more urgent, more precise.

“If I could take back any word, it would be ‘criminal,’ ” he said. “I’d replace it with the word ‘insane.’ ”

What drove him over the edge was Ricks' book, "Fiasco."  It left him "sleepless and angered."

Not many elected officials have actually expressed themselves on the war in a way we can relate to.  It's not just Democrats and dissenters, though, who are "sleepless and angered" by the cold arrogance with which both the president and the vice-president relate to the war they created.  There's something both "insane" and "criminal" in their public -- and almost certainly private -- manner.  After all, they have never served anyone's purpose but their own.

Senator Smith, on the other hand, has called the families of each fallen Oregon soldier.  After 103 of these calls, he is fully awake to the human costs and the sheer madness of the war.

Some people question the timing of the senator’s change of heart. Smith is vulnerable in this blue state, they say, and his conversion is just a ploy to save his seat. But there is something else at work here. Smith has the seat once held by Senator Mark Hatfield, another Republican who defied his party on matters of war and peace. Hatfield was a Navy man, a veteran of Iwo Jima and one of the first Americans to see Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped. All that carnage changed his world view.

Smith was never in the armed forces. His biggest regret in life, he says, is that he never wore his country’s uniform. But unlike some chicken-hawks who did not serve — chief among them, Vice President Cheney, with his numerous draft deferments — he is not trying to make up for lost courage.

Some Plame documents released

A federal appeals court said Friday it would release some of the documents it reviewed when deciding to force journalists to testify in the CIA leak investigation.

The ruling followed a request by The Associated Press and Dow Jones, which asked for the release of the sworn statements Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald gave to justify subpoenas for New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in 2005.

Fitzgerald wanted the reporters' help in his investigation of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to syndicated columnist Robert Novak. The news organizations argued that Fitzgerald never needed the testimony of reporters because he knew the source of the leak all along.

...The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was not persuaded by the media's argument but said some of the materials no longer needed to remain secret.

We have the evidence to support withdrawal. We have enough for impeachment.

But do we have, as Thomas Powers puts it in a coruscating essay, "the civic courage"?

Writing in the New York Review of Books, and reprinted by permission at Tom Dispatch, Powers indicts George Tenet for, well, mistake of the probably "inexcusable" kind. 

...Mistakes are one thing, excusable even when serious; inexcusable would be charges of collusion in deceiving Congress and the public to make war possible. Tenet's overriding goal in his carefully written book is to deny "that we somehow cooked the books" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. If he says it once he says it a dozen times. "We told the president what we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it."

But repetition is not enough. Tenet's problem is that the intelligence and the war proceeded in lockstep: no intelligence, no war. Since Tenet delivered the (shockingly exaggerated) intelligence, and the President used it to go to war, how is Tenet to convince the world that he wasn't simply giving the boss what he wanted? Tenet naturally dislikes this question but it is evident that the American public and Congress dislike it just as much. Down that road lie painful truths about the character and motives of the President and the men and women around him.

Powers then walks us through every step of the way, from early meetings with British officials, to Cheney's unseemly visits to the CIA to add pressure, to dealing with Blair's doubts, to warnings from intelligence analysts about the unreliability of sources, to Powell's personal weakness and disgrace, to the trumping up of documents in the matter of Niger yellowcake, to warnings from European intelligence agencies about false intelligence, and to the horrified reactions from stalwart inspects, like Hans Blix and El Baradei.

Through it all, Tenet "didn't see" or "didn't hear" an awful lot of intelligence which countered the administration's search for justifications.  Tenet, in fact, probably should be in jail by now, that dulling medal of freedom dangling around his neck.  Maybe Powers' article will cause enough of a stir for Congress to take notice.

Thomas Powers concludes we aren't going to find our way out of Iraq unless we face how we got into Iraq.

...Getting out of Iraq will not be easy, and the necessary first step is to find the civic courage to insist on knowing how we got in. Tenet's memoir is an excellent place to begin; some of what he tells us and much that he leaves out point unmistakably to the genesis of the war in the White House -- the very last thing Tenet wants to address clearly. He sidles up to the question at last on page 301: "One of the great mysteries to me," he writes, "is exactly when the war in Iraq became inevitable."

What Tenet doesn't want to remember is that on September 12, 2001, Iraq was not merely a crazy idea in Richard Perle's and Paul Wolfowitz's heads, but was already part of official strategy.  It but remained for a pliant CIA director to come up with the goods.  Tenet obliged.

Update 6/30/07:  Christine Shelton, intelligence analyst, writes in the Washington Post about Tenet's equivocations and dishonesty, but from a somewhat different vantage point.