JFC

Are Americans really this stupid?

OK, OK, I guess we are.

If Chemical Ali is a war criminal

who else is guilty of complicity in those crimes?

Another tragic legacy of the Iraq War

Wounded soldiers.

Another Postcard from PAF

I photographed the historic art deco Niagara Mohawk Building at dusk. As with the image I posted previously, I mounted my camera on a tripod and took five exposures of this image (all shot at f 11 for sharpness, but exposed for varying lengths of time, bracketing the metered exposure by two stops both higher and lower). I combined those five exposures using HDR software, and then made final adjustments in photoshop.

Here's another one, similarly produced, but showing the entire building as dusk falls.





I love doing this stuff.

ma·lev·o·lent

Washington Post series on Dick Cheney

Thanks to my buddy Frank the Geezer for calling my attention to this series of reports.

Postcard from PAF

Click on image for larger view



Local joint at night, photographed and intitally processed using HDR technique, then made to suggest the feel of a painting by superimposing an identical copy as a semi-transparent layer on top of the original image, and running a Photoshop filter transformation on the layer.

Won't win any prizes, but I enjoyed doing it, and the result pleases me.

And now for something completely different

For the moment, PAF is up-to-here with fucking politics. Taking a little joy in beauty and creativity helps to recharge the batteries.

PAF loves digital photography.


I'm getting better, but still on a learning curve. Some resources that I have come to rely on include the sites of Digital Photography Review and Photo.net . Although the latter does include a fair share of stubbornly traditional photography purists and outright photo snobs, both have loads of useful information and allow exchanges of info with experienced photographers in the various discussion forums on each site. Also useful are the how-to articles at Popular Photography, especially the digital processing advice offered by Debbie Grossman.

Among the best books to help the aspiring pixel-pusher learn to use the most powerful features of the otherwise dauntingly complicated Photoshop is Katrin Eisman's Photoshop Restoration & Retouching. Also exceptionally useful is Martin Evening's Adobe Photoshop for Photographers.

What every American should know

about Iraq.

Franklin's challenge

Asked what form of goverment was being constructed inside the constitutional convention, Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have replied "A republic, if you can keep it."

NYT:

In a stinging rejection of one of the Bush administration’s central assertions about the scope of executive authority to combat terrorism, a federal appeals court ordered the Pentagon to release a man being held as an enemy combatant. “To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians," Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote, “even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country.” “We refuse to recognize a claim to power,” Judge Motz added, “that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our republic.”

Chris Floyd reflects:

Although today's ruling is most welcome, it is a tragedy that we have come to this point at all: that a federal court has been forced to consider the "question" of whether a president has the arbitrary power to stick people in military dungeons without charges for as long as he likes. Why should this even be a question, a matter for debate?

Flawed, incomplete, contradictory and corrupted as it may be, the republic is a precious historical achievement. Crying shame if we were to piss it away out of blind fear and militant stupidity.

The Israel Lobby

Mitchell Plitnik and Chris Toensing provide some useful perspective here. In a nutshell, their argument is not so much that the Israel Lobby doesn't exist (it does) or isn't powerful (it is), but rather that the invasion of Iraq cannot be straightforwardly attributed to the Lobby since the main architects of the invasion -- Cheney and Rumsfeld -- were enacting a strategic plan for US military dominance of the Middle East in which the primary motivation was sustaining US global power rather than furthering the interests of Israel. While the pro-Likud neocons saw these goals as convergent, it was the project of global military supremacy that moved the big dogs, who were never themselves died-in-the-wool neocons.

What unites the neo-conservatives with their traditional Cold Warrior confréres Cheney and Rumsfeld is not Israel, however, but a common set of ideas about US power. The convergence of interests first appeared in the aborted Defense Policy Guidance of 1992. This document is the Pentagon’s classified internal assessment, made every two years, of comprehensive military strategy. In 1992, the task fell to Paul Wolfowitz, who set about conceiving a justification for maintaining the military at something approaching Cold War strength. He delegated the actual writing of the Defense Policy Guidance to his top aide Libby, who in turn passed it off to his colleague Zalmay Khalilzad.

What Khalilzad came up with stunned Washington when the draft was leaked to the press: The US was uniquely qualified to be the sole superpower, and to maintain that status, the US should actively block the rise of any possible rival. Khalilzad was specific: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.” The White House swiftly disowned the document, but it found an appreciative reader in Dick Cheney. “You’ve discovered a new rationale for our role in the world,” Khalilzad recalls being told by his boss. Rebuilding America’s Defenses cites the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance as its primary intellectual inspiration. When the Cheney Defense Department was reunited in the administration of George W. Bush, much of this “inspiration” made its way into the 2002 National Security Strategy. Together with Washington’s long-standing interest in Persian Gulf oil, the genealogy of PNAC suggests that the decision to invade Iraq was determined by grand ambitions for US power—not a “desire to make Israel more secure,” as Mearsheimer and Walt assert.

An extended essay in which Michael Massing reviews the controversy is here, and the original essay by Mearsheimer and Walt is here.

My friend RO sends this link to an LRB-sponsored debate about the Lobby and its influence.

When is an occupation not an occupation?

According to the Post, the military is planning for post-occupation occupation.

A reduction of troops, some officials argue, would demonstrate to anti-American factions that the occupation will not last forever while reassuring Iraqi allies that the United States does not intend to abandon the country.

We're going; but before we go, we're staying.

So the strategy seems to be to try to confuse the Iraqis by talking out of both sides of our mouths, telling them that the "occupation" of Iraq is ending and drawing down the overall numbers of US troops, while maintaining the indefinite presence of US military garrisons in Iraq. I dunno, I kinda think they'll see through this little ruse and continue to resist the occupation even after we start calling it something else.

For more on the long-term non-occupation of Iraq based on not-quite-permanent basing of US troops there, see Tom Engelhardt here.

"Cosmic Top Secret"

No really. (Scroll to bottom of linked page)

Presumably this information is not to be shared with super-intelligent disembodied life forms from another galaxy. Either that, or they've got Cheech and Chong working in the classification department.

Targeting Professors

The Washington Post reports that in addition to the now horrifyingly routine daily bombings, kidnappings, and attacks on civilians, academics and other professionals are being specifically targeted by more extreme salafist elements of the Iraqi insurgency:

Gunmen also shot three professors from Islamic University in Baghdad, killing two and wounding one, and killed the head of the Education Ministry's department of research and development as he drove to work, police said.

"It is part of the campaign to attack every positive thing in Iraq," said an Education Ministry spokesman, Basil al-Khatib, who blamed the attacks on extremists who oppose modernity and want to drive "all elite and educated people from Iraq." He complained that the national government "is not acting" to prevent further attacks against teachers, "it only talks."

At least 211 university professors and 104 officials from the ministry have been assassinated in Iraq since the war started in March 2003, Khatib said. In addition, 91 professors have been kidnapped, and their fate is unknown, he said.

PAF finds it ironic that the hatreds of the most extreme Islamists mirror the preoccupations of those in the US who insist that we must destroy "Islamofascism" and denounce those who don't think about the world in terms of this kind of simple-minded crusade.

More on the execrable Horowitz here and here.

The Pentagon doesn't want you to see this

Why do you suppose that is?

Defending Freedom

BBC:

Human rights groups have asked the US to reveal the whereabouts of 39 people who have allegedly been held in secret CIA-run prisons.

A report compiled by six human rights groups listed the names of people who remain unaccounted for after having passed through US custody.

The groups urged the US to stop using secret prisons for terror suspects.

The US last year admitted the existence of such prisons in its “war on terror” but said they were no longer in use.

President George W Bush said last September that all secret prison sites were “empty”.

The groups says they compiled their report, entitled Off the Record, from government and media sources and from interviews with former prisoners.

“It’s time for the US government to come clean,” said Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director of Reprieve, one of the groups involved in the appeal.

“These 39 people have been missing for years, and the evidence shows they were in US custody at some point. Where are they and what has been done to them?

...Human Rights Watch and Cageprisoners are the other two organisations seeking information on the 39 “ghost detainees”.

The groups fears the missing people may have been moved to countries where they might be at risk of torture.

They say children as young as seven are among those detained. [PAF's emphasis]
“The duty of governments to protect people from acts of terrorism is not in question,” said Claudio Cordone of Amnesty International.

“But seizing men, women and even children, and placing people in secret locations deprived of the most basic safeguards for any detainees most definitely is.”

In September 2006, Mr Bush said 14 detainees had been held at secret CIA prisons that used interrogation methods that were “tough” but “lawful and necessary”.

He said the prisoners had since been transferred to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the CIA was not holding any more terror suspects.

A secret gulag with ghost prisoners is scary enough, but children???

Global Military Supremacy ain't cheap

Robert Dreyfuss:

How astonishing are the budgetary numbers? Consider the trajectory of U.S. defense spending over the last nearly two decades. From the end of the Cold War into the mid-1990s, defense spending actually fell significantly. In constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon's budget dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at the end of President Ronald Reagan's military buildup in 1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996. (That compares to post-World War II wartime highs of $437 billion in 1953, during the Korean War, and $388 billion in 1968, at the peak of the War in Vietnam.) After the Soviet empire peacefully disintegrated, the 1990s decline wasn't exactly the hoped-for "peace dividend," but it wasn't peanuts either.

However, since September 12th, 2001, defense spending has simply exploded. For 2008, the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001. Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing "Global War on Terrorism"—which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—for FY 2008, the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion. In other words, even without the President's two wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. Given that the United States has literally no significant enemy state to fight anywhere on the planet, this represents a remarkable, if perverse, achievement. As a famous Democratic politician once asked: Where is the outrage?

But we gotta have all that stuff for what General J.C. Christian calls "the Great War for the Re-Subjugation of Brown People" so that we can, you know, bring 'em Freedom. At gunpoint. Because Freedom isn't free. Or something.

Sayonara Scooter

Washington Post:

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was sentenced today to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000 for lying to investigators about his role in leaking the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

During sentencing, Hizzoner allowed as how Libby "got off course" -- as if somehow poor Scooter had just lost his way and wandered off in what turned out to be an inappropriate direction. But neither lack of supervision nor Libby's ability to follow directions was the real problem here. In fact, there is reason to believe that Scooter was very closely following the course laid down for him by his boss, and then lying to cover for him. As is customary in these affairs, Mr. Big walks.

Permanent Bases would be Illegal

But really long-term temporary bases, that's another matter.


Gotta love them Checks and Balances.

Is Cheney the font of all Evil?

If he's not, it's not because he isn't trying.

Thoughts on Kevorkian

Jack Kevorkian has been released from prison eight years after being convicted of aiding euthenasia. The man Kevorkian was convicted of helping to die was an ALS patient.

ALS is an incurable, untreatable degenerative disease in which the motor neurons which control muscle movement deteriorate and muscles atrophy and patients become paralyzed. They become incapable of speaking, eating, and eventually breathing. The disease does not affect those parts of the nervous system which support conscious thought, so ALS patients are fully aware of the deterioration of their bodies. People may survive for a time with the benefit of feeding tubes and ventilators to do their breathing for them (most famously, perhaps, Stephen Hawking), but this disease is always eventually fatal. Most people live 2-5 years after diagnosis, trapped in a deteriorating body.

This is a cruel, remorseless, relentness disease. And there is not a damn thing the medical people can do about it. Nothing.

I know this not because I'm a medical professional (I'm not), but because I watched my mother die of ALS. Her brother also died of ALS, which means that there is some chance that the kind of ALS which killed my mother is the genetic variety. If that were true, I would have a 50/50 chance of contracting the disease myself. And if I did, then my daughter would face the same 50/50 odds.

So I have thought about this in a very direct and personal way. If I contracted this disease, I would not want to experience the progressive breakdown of my body prior to my inevitable death. Why should I, or anyone, be compelled to go through that? Why should my family have to watch it? Yet, to choose otherwise I would be obliged to make myself and anyone who chose to help me into a criminal. That means, to avoid criminalizing loved ones, friends and medical advisors, I would be forced by law to try to do this all by myself, alone, by whatever crude means I could muster. And so I ask myself, would it even be possible to do that in a way which didn't inflict further trauma and suffering on my family, forcing them to confront some ugly scene which would make the loss of a loved one that much more horrible? Would I choose to do that to my family?

Trapped, and trapped again.

For me, these are the questions that Kevorkian's punishment bring up.

I admire and appreciate what he did to minimize the suffering of others. I wish there were more like him, and that the rest of us could accept that, sometimes, for some people, death is not the worst thing that could happen. And we should tolerate, even support, those who make this choice.

More on pre-war intelligence

Walter Pincus in the Post:

On Aug. 13, 2002, the CIA completed a classified, six-page intelligence analysis that described the worst scenarios that could arise after a U.S.-led removal of Saddam Hussein: anarchy and territorial breakup in Iraq, a surge of global terrorism, and a deepening of Islamic antipathy toward the United States.

Titled "The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq," the paper, written seven months before the war began, also speculated about al-Qaeda operatives taking "advantage of a destabilized Iraq to establish secure safe havens from which they can continue their operations," according to a report about prewar intelligence recently released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The report said the CIA paper also cautioned about outcomes such as declining European confidence in U.S. leadership, Hussein's survival and retreat with regime loyalists, Iran working to install a friendly regime "tolerant of Iranian policies," Afghanistan tipping into civil strife because U.S. forces were not replaced by United Nations peacekeepers and troops from other countries, and violent demonstrations in Pakistan because of its support of Washington.

Before the war, while the Bush administration was putting a spotlight on the CIA's intelligence on Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be wrong, it either buried or ignored the agency's more accurate assessments of the problems that could emerge in the aftermath of regime change in Iraq, the Senate report said.

I can't stop being angry about this.

Drawdown is not withdrawal, it's the strategy for normalizing imperial occupation

ABC News:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates envisions "some presence" on the part of the United States that, he said, "provides reassurance to our friends and to governments in the region, including those that might be our adversaries, that we're going to be there for a long time."

A senior official said one long-term plan would have 30,000 to 50,000 U.S. forces in Iraq for five to 10 years beyond 2009.

During that period, the bulk of the troops would be deployed to bases at strategic points throughout Iraq to respond to crisis in those areas. Camp Victory would continue to operate as the U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad.

UPDATE: from NYT

Administration officials and top military leaders declined to talk on the record about their long-term plans in Iraq. But when speaking on a not-for-attribution basis, they describe a fairly detailed concept. It calls for maintaining three or four major bases in the country, all well outside of the crowded urban areas where casualties have soared. They would include the base at Al Asad in Anbar Province, Balad Air Base about 50 miles north of Baghdad, and Tallil Air Base in the south.

“They are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner,” said one senior official deeply involved in the development of Iraq strategy.

We're talking about a long-term occupation here, boys and girls; 21st century empire; unending hatred, resistance, and cycles of violence.

Just because

anti-imperial sentiments

from U.S. Grant.