Sen. McCain: Why do you settle for headlines instead of results?

The popular image of Sen. McCain is the conservative maverick. Plain-spoken, direct, he's the guy willing to break with his president if his principles led him elsewhere.
I was one of the many impressed by his championing the 2005 McCain amendment barring prisoner abuse. He went up against the President, and won the day.

Except he didn't, he got the photo op - and very little else:

"The McCain vote, of course, garnered front-page coverage around the country and on the networks. "President Backs McCain on Abuse," declared The New York Times.

What was mostly missed, however, were two key facts. First, the amendment, worthy as it was, wasn’t as strong as advertised. It contained no enforcement clause: soldiers or CIA agents couldn’t abuse prisoners, the bill stated, but it didn’t provide for any penalties if they did. The amendment, in other words, was mostly a statement of principle, without teeth.

What’s more, McCain’s amendment was undercut by another little-noticed amendment that was passed as part of the same defense appropriations bill. Sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham, Carl Levin, and John Kyl, the amendment — which was combined with McCain’s measure to become the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) — states that testimony gained through "coercion" can be used in military tribunals. Unlike the McCain amendment, which merely reaffirms existing laws, the Graham-Levin-Kyl measure muddies what had been clear waters. The amendment’s portion of the DTA also severely restricts detainees’ access to U.S. courts and strips them of the right to habeas corpus. It limits detainee cases to a single hearing in front of an appeals court, at which detainees have no clear right to present the facts of their case."
-Eric Umansky, CJR

Now Sen. McCain's back in the papers - having once again locked horns with the White House. The papers sign his praises, and rhapsodize about how he's standing on principle again.
And now, once more - we have to ask: what did you accomplish, Senator?

"...Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation. Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes."
-Washington Post Op Ed

"On other issues, the three rebel senators achieved only modest improvements on the White House’s original positions. They wanted to bar evidence obtained through coercion. Now, they have agreed to allow it if a judge finds it reliable (which coerced evidence hardly can be) and relevant to guilt or innocence. The way coercion is measured in the bill, even those protections would not apply to the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

The deal does next to nothing to stop the president from reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. While the White House agreed to a list of "grave breaches" of the conventions that could be prosecuted as war crimes, it stipulated that the president could decide on his own what actions might be a lesser breach of the Geneva Conventions and what interrogation techniques he considered permissible. It’s not clear how much the public will ultimately learn about those decisions. They will be contained in an executive order that is supposed to be made public, but Mr. Hadley reiterated that specific interrogation techniques will remain secret.

Even before the compromises began to emerge, the overall bill prepared by the three senators had fatal flaws. It allows the president to declare any foreigner, anywhere, an "illegal enemy combatant" using a dangerously broad definition, and detain him without any trial. It not only fails to deal with the fact that many of the Guantánamo detainees are not terrorists and will never be charged, but it also chokes off any judicial review."
-NYT Op Ed

"Let's assume for the sake of argument that there ought to be a series of interrogation tactics that fall short of grave breaches but that ought still not to be permissible. That sounds right, indeed. But, the problem [with this deal] is [its] complete deferral to the President on this determination. There were other ways it could have been done, including legislative oversight, judicial determination (i.e. like a FISA court review), or some interrogation "body" that would assess the use of such tactics in specific circumstances. It didn't have to just go to the President; Congress could have equally allowed presidential tough tactics but still reserved some oversight over the use and consistency of those tactics (that fall short of a grave breach).
It is this concession to the President that is mind-boggling in almost all respects because the hold-outs could have given the President the less than grave tactics without giving him the sole authority to determine what they were."
--Juliette Kayyem

McCain has run into the Administration's buzz saw more than a few times, and he keeps coming away with little more than headlines.

So the question is, is that all he wants?

The one cat I'll miss...

On a more frivolous subject - Today the navy retires the F-14 Tomcat.

As a kid, this was the plane I dreamt about growing up to fly. I remember my dad telling me about planes that could shoot down the enemy at a range of 200 miles. "Never even see the enemy," dad would say. He was talking about this bird.

The truth was a little more modest:
A Tomcat with six AIM-54 Phoenix missiles and a AWG-9 radar system could track two dozen targets while engaging six of them at better than 100 miles.

The targets would need to be bomber-sized, and the only test of this had results that were always charitably interpreted - but still! It was a cool bird, swing wings and then there was VF-84 paint scheme which was multiple shades of kick-ass.

It was a movie star (Final Countdown, Top Gun, Executive Decision) it was....

...it was pricey. It cost Thirty-six million per unit. A full salvo for an F-14 cost over two million.

..and it was old.

Still, it was the plane I was stuck on as a kid, and while it's had a good run - it's still a bit sad to see it sent off to the boneyard like any other relic.

One more icon crossed off the list.

Beyond, there be dragons

Sam Gardiner, Col. USAF (Ret.), lecturer at the National War College, and frequent commentator has published a paper on Iran through the non-partisan Century Foundation. His observations are not encouraging. In addition to believing that something is in the works, he is not optimistic about the military option:

"When I finished the 2004 Iran war game exercise, I summarized what I had learned in the process. After all the effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers. "You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. You have to make diplomacy work." I have not changed my mind. That conclusion made sense then. It still makes sense today."

We torture

Maybe this was the article that ruined my mood for today, but it is an excellent piece of work- the kind that should happen more often: A look back at the media coverage of a huge story.

The story is America's treatment of detainees. There's good and bad in the way journalists and editors did and didn't cover the story - but the end result of all of this is a realization I'd been fighting off for some time.

The article is Eric Umansky's Failures of Imagination, and it is quite the read.

There weren't bad apples in the torture scandal, there was bad policy. Immoral policy. And there has been precious little coverage and virtually no oversight.

The Detainee Treatment Act and the McCain Amendment of 2005 are revealed for the hollow farces that they are, and time and time again we are shown how easily the press is stonewalled, misdirected, or flat-out lied to.

Air raid

I try not to be an alarmist. This is my playpen, I post what I want here - but I genuinely try to post stuff that is sourced enough to be credible. If it's editorial, I'll just link to it.

Josh Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo.com has posted something that is downright scary. Not "ooh, I have shivers" ghost-story crap - but honest-to-Jehovah scary:

Quite a bit has come out in the last week or so pointing to the conclusion that the Bush administration is making serious preparations for a major military strike on Iran. The tea leaves are always difficult to analyze because you have to weigh the fact that a strike is totally irrational against the fact that the administration is led by folks whose irrationality has been demonstrated again and again. The one piece of data that makes me think they're really going to try it, however, is the news that Don Rumsfeld has apparently put Abram Shulsky (head of what was once the 'Office of Special Plans' (OSP)) in charge of a new DOD outfit, modeled on the OSP, to stovepipe bogus Iran intel from the likes of Manucher Ghorbanifar straight to administration leaders.
That tells me that fundamentally Condi Rice is just window-dressing, like her predecessor Colin Powell, that the Cheney-Rumsfeld Axis remains in place and in charge and that we'll probably be at war with Iran before too long unless someone can stop them.

Now, there are always alarmists out there - and this is the internet for crying out loud - but there's more than Mr. Marshall's bad vibe.

Time magazine is reporting that the U.S. Navy is getting orders that look like something is up.

The first message was routine enough: a "Prepare to Deploy" order sent through naval communications channels to a submarine, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers and two mine hunters. The orders didn't actually command the ships out of port; they just said to be ready to move by Oct. 1.
But inside the Navy those messages generated more buzz than usual last week when a second request, from the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), asked for fresh eyes on long-standing U.S. plans to blockade two Iranian oil ports on the Persian Gulf.

Posturing is part of statecraft, we could be doing this to ratchet up the pressure on Iran (memo to the President: good luck with that), and as stupid and wasteful as that would be - I sure hope that's the case.

If we move on an Iranian Port for real - that is an act of war. We'll call "quarantine" or some safe for TV term, but it would be an act of war.

I don't believe in October surprises, not from this President. But I genuinely fear that he is so sure of himself (again) that he will (again) do grievous harm to America.

Who in the heck likes corn?

Consumer reports has an interesting article about Ethanol fuel - specifically, E85.

The ethanol myth
Despite the avid support of the Bush administration and major American car companies, E85 is unlikely to fill more than a small percentage of U.S. energy needs. ...

-E85, which is 85 percent ethanol, emits less smog-causing pollutants than gasoline, but provides fewer miles per gallon, costs more, and is hard to find outside the Midwest.
-Government support for flexible-fuel vehicles, which can run on E85, is indirectly causing more gasoline consumption rather than less.
-Most ethanol is being blended in a 10 percent mix to reduce smog-producing emissions and stretch gasoline supplies.

Worth a read.

Yard sale

After Katrina hit, my mom's neighbor, T had an unwelcome visitor: a yacht had landed on the back of his house. It had appeared the night before the storm, tied up to the dock across the bayou.

The storm surge had lifted it off its moorings and over the 15-foot pilings and onto T's house. His house was pretty much gutted, so the boat didn't really add to the damage - it just added hassle.

T had originally expected (as most would) that the owner would come to claim their boat. They didn't. Turns out, this boat wasn't your run of the mill flotsam. The owner didn't own the neighboring dock, didn't have rights to moor it there and - this is the kicker - the owner had it insured up the ying-yang.

After checking out the boat, T figured out why: the boat was a total mess, and likely had been for quite some time before the storm. In fact, this boat wasn't even from the area: it had sailed into the bayou only the night before and tied up under cover of darkness.

This owner was only too happy to cash out and walk away.

He hadn't counted on two factors:
1) T (having lost his house and everything in it) was in a seriously pissy mood; and
2) T is an attorney.

T calls this guy's insurance company and assures them that the boat is overinsured. He then finds out that there's some law that allows him to claim the boat as his salvage (since it arrived on his land and wasn't claimed within X period of days). T doesn't want it, but can bring the guy's insurance settlement to a screetching halt just by filing a claim. Then he goes trolling for ways to sue this turkey for parking his boat on his property.

A year plus later, T's still living in a FEMA trailer, overhauling his house - but jerkwad boatowner finally ponies up the dough to haul the wreck off of T's yard. Plus damages. Plus, they had to haul it out via the bayou. And everyone got to watch and point.

Score one for the good guys.

A spade is a spade...

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) in response to a G.O.P. colleague remarking that Democrats are "tired of fighting terrorism."

The problem with the President's interview with NBC's Matt Lauer...

What genuinely disturbs me about his performance here is this:

He keeps hammering on two points, despite pointed, direct questioning.

1. I need to protect the country (or “your family”).
2. I don’t want to say things that will cause the enemy to adjust their tactics.

The first is just rhetoric and is just nonsensical in terms of responding to a question.

The second actually might have some merit, if the President demonstrated what he meant by it.

He could say, for example:

“If I told you that a specific tactic x was not allowed, it would tell our enemies that. Right now an interrogator can bluff a prisoner into believing that they will be subjected to this tactic – but as soon as I say that this technique is prohibited, and interrogator cannot even bluff using this tactic.”

But he doesn’t say that – he sticks to his talking points and leans into the reporter and makes the question about Matt Lauer’s family. “Don’t you want me to keep your family safe?” as in the classic salesman’s fake-out ‘question’ “Are you the kind of person who enjoys saving money?”

People who talk like that make you distrust them. You may answer their question, you may politely indulge them and let the matter drop. But you’ll remember what they said and what they didn’t. And you’ll think of them as dishonest.

A President with a good reason for withholding information should be able to convey this intelligently. President Bush just comes across as someone who has been handed a script and told not to deviate from it – no matter how foolish it makes him appear.

Well, mission accomplished, Mr. President.

You looked foolish, weak and dishonest.

Scramble, scramble...

This amazingly scrambly performance harkens back to the President’s “what’s the difference” interview with Diane Sawyer.

Did you ever…? I've never seen a President so bad in front of a camera.

Another K.O.

Apt commentary on America's literal and figurative open wound.

The obvious question

Where were you...?

Velvet glove

Here's the response from my local ABC affilliate:

The Path to 9/11 is a dramatization, not a documentary, drawn from a variety of sources. The events that lead to 9/11 originally sparked great debate, so it’s not surprising that a movie surrounding those events has revived the debate. The attacks were a pivotal moment in our history that should never be forgotten and it’s fitting that the discussion
continues.

Clearly, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression. We are aware of that. We also know that [our city]has a reputation for being an unbiased community that supports all viewpoints and we will allow our viewers to make their own conclusions.

Thank you for your comments!

Even less than what I'd expected, but at least they were prompt. I mean really, this isn't a movie depicting events that happend centuries ago - about which there are competing theories.

These are events where the participants are still alive and are loudly denoucing ABC's depiction.

I told them this, but I'm probably only allowed one bite at the apple.

Nipping at their heels

In response to the recent coverage on how the movie The Path to 9/11 got so many things wrong, I wrote the following to my local ABC affilliate:

I'm writing to find out if your network's intent is to air the miniseries The Path to 9/11.

While there is little point in dissecting pure entertainment programming for its factual content - programming that purports to be factual and based on independent research ought to be held to its own standards.

The Path to 9/11, has been criticized as "inaccurate" by members of the 9/11 commission, as well as participants in the events the movie claims to portray.

The co-commissioner of the 9/11 commission has wondered how the movies writers, "could have misinterpreted the 9/11 commission’s finding the way that they had."

If this was your ordinary movie of the week, I wouldn't be bothering you about it - but this movie claims to depict events that will define our lives for decades. It is being distributed to schools - and it is factually incorrect.

Recent events have taught us that public opinion can be swayed by inaccurate statements, especially if they are presented forcefully and are shielded from critical analysis. Your role as a network is to inform as well as entertain. To air programming that misleads your viewers about 9/11, of all things, is surely something that you would avoid.

I'm asking you, as one of your viewers, to at least provide your viewers with the counterpoint to this movie. Tell them where experts see inaccuracies. Don't just tell them that parts have been fictionalized; show them where the fiction is.

If you at least do this, you can raise the level of debate on 9/11 above partisan finger pointing - and perhaps we as a nation can start talking about things more important than television shows.

I'll post their response if I ever get one.

It's that kind of day

Promise me

Things change, memory morphs into new things - and things that stay the same are seen from a new angle. My grandmother told me this story many times as a joke. "Isn't it funny what kids will say?" that sort of thing. It's just not the same anymore.

When my dad was a boy, he and my grandmother were out walking in town and they saw an elderly man trying to go up a flight of stairs. He was struggling, and had to stop repeatedly.

My dad and Gramma walked by, but my dad kept looking back at the man.

"What's wrong with him?" he asked.

"Nothing," Gramma said, "he's just old."

My dad looked back at the man and then at his mother. "I don't want to grow old, mom."

Gramma laughed, "Everybody grows old, that's just how it is."

Dad didn't let it go. "Promise me, promise me I'll never grow old!"

"Ok," she said, "I promise, you'll never grow old."

I don't believe in prophecy. Hell, I don't believe in much of anything anymore - but I just can't get that out of my head.

It's a year later, and I'm still in the goddamned car - wishing this was all some bad dream.

Olbermann throws down. "Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet."

I cannot add anything to the drubbing Keith Olbermann gave to Secretary Rumsfeld and to the administration - so I'll just link to it.

Mr. Olbermann, as a fellow American - I'd like to shake your hand.

"...plenty of blame to go around.." but, we'd rather you don't focus on our share

One year ago today, the gulf coast woke up to the notion that the Cat 3 hurricane that had been going to Texas, was now a Cat 5 storm headed for New Orleans. One year ago, we were told our government was ready: the supplies were prepositioned; emergency responders were poised and ready; and the coast would be taken care of.

Today, we all know what a complete load of bunk that turned out to be.

Six months after the disaster - there was still garbage in the streets and people living in tent cities. Aid agencies were asking for blankets so people could sleep warm for the first time in months. Those out of power blamed those in power, those in power blamed everyone (and therefore, everyone else). The administration would have you believe that their slice of blame is on par with what others deserve.

I'm sorry, but that's just not gonna wash with me.

"...let's pretend that both Nagin and Blanco performed beautifully throughout the whole thing. Let'e pretend (and this is hard) that Nagin made all the right calls, ordered the mandatory evacuation at the proper time, and marshalled all of New Orelans' meager resources in preparing for disaster. Let's further pretend that Blanco was a model of foresight and was ready to be the grease that helped the enitre disaster machine run smoothly, cooperating fully with both Nagin and Bush. The only thing that stays the same in this scenario is the federal response.

New Orleans is still completely screwed."

Read more here.
(background - Mr. Brodedrick worked for the Feds, and he was worse than useless.)

Yeah. What about that?

A friend forwarded me an editorial written by a former colleague of mine. He's saying something that needs to be said over and over until the glorified stenographers who call themselves a press corps finally get the message.

This man was a Vietnam vet, and he has lost all patience with those who view their role as journalists as simply providing a bullhorn for right-wing character assassins.

He writes:

...I ask: How dare these cowards attack our veterans in these underhanded, vicious and deceptive ways? How dare this bunch of chicken hawks, so eager to propound wars like Vietnam and Iraq, yet never fight in them, deride those of us who served and who may actually know something about body bags, and travesty and death?

To the reporters and editorialists and nightly anchors I ask: Where is the analysis of these accusers? ...

Had I been smarter, better connected, more politically astute, I may have managed to stay home myself. But no chicken hawk, able to avoid war service for himself and his family, should question the service, the commitment, the dedication and the patriotism of those who have faced the fear and the fire and who dare to take part in the democracy they believed they were sent to protect.

Read the rest here.

National Security Archive FOIA Request Yields 9/11 Air Traffic Control Transcripts

Because more information is a good thing:

National Security Archive has posted the 9/11 Air Traffic Control Transcripts

1328:16+
UAL-93 *** (mayday) *** (hey get out of here) ***

1328:48+
UAL-93 *** (get out of here) *** (get out of here) ***

1329:14+
LOR-R [Lorain Radar - Ground control] United ninety three verify three five zero.

1329:20+
LOR-R United ninety three verify you're at flight level ah three five zero.

....[LOR-R repeatedly attempts to contact the UAL-93]...

1331:55+
UAL-93 *** please sit down. keep remaining seating. we have a bomb on board, so ***

1332:05+
LOR-R er uh calling cleveland center you're unreadable say again slowly.

1335:36+
LOR-R ah United ninety three if able * ah squawk trip please.

1336:51+
LOR-R [Cleaveland center announces that UAL93 is turning south and east and climbing].

1339:10+
UAL-93 ah this is the captain uh would like to all remain seated there is a bomb aboard and we go back to the airport and to have our demands so please remain quiet.

This is the last time UAL-93 appears in the transcript.