cheese it, the cops!

crusader mike points the way toward some strong blogging by arianna huffington on plamethrower. one thing that makes all this more plausible: rove has said he first heard about plame from a journalist. there's suddenly a lot of speculation everywhere that miller's role was not as a (mere) journalist, but as a source of admin disinfo. this would devastate the times from the opposite of the usual angle.

here 's an excellent piece on defede/teele by cockburn/st. clair.

the one thing that seems bizarre about the insanely juicy story of the suicide of arthur teele - the powerful miami pol who shot himself in the lobby at the miami herald after accusations of incredible decadence and corruption - is why the herald would fire the columnist who had the last conversation with teele. jim defede taped the conversation, and said he wasn't going to use  the tape to write a story. i'd have been awfully tempted to hit the rec switch too. and surely you do an investigation or whatever and *you let defede write his column*: which is part of the news. so i don't think we have a clear idea of what happened, or who had what against defede. you don't fire the guy with the scoop at the moment of the scoop.

one interesting connection that might be made in the discussion of officially sanctoned abuse of foreign prisoners, which the administration insists that it has the right to perpetrate, is the alien act of 1798, in which president adams in essence claimed that foreign nationals had no protections under the constitution. obviously the administration's policies entail that foreign nationals in american custody have absolutely no protections under the constitution. (of course even if this were true, there might be other arguments against torturing prisoners: like we'd rather not be torturers or that we are concerned with the treatment of our own people in the hands of others.) unfortunately the constitutionality of the alien act was never tried in the supreme court. but jefferson ran against it (and of course against the sedition act, with which it is paired in history) and won, repealing the law and pardoning and compensating the victims.

long ago when i was a sort of analytic philosopher, i gave a series of arguments to the effect that knowledge is merely true belief, that as against most of the tradition, one did not need a justification, good reasons, sufficient warrant and so on to be said to know something. these papers were published in good journals but i never did get the corresponding book manuscript published, and the whole thing appeared to fall on deaf ears after a brief flurry. but more and more there actually does sedem to be some effect! here's one thing, and i'm going to go out and see what's on the net and bring it back. on that deal...i'll do more later, but people's initial response was always that if we're deleting conditions, let's delete the truth conditions. that is a terrible mistake.

the interview  with shamil basayev last night on abc was quite a scoop. and it was fascinating for basayev's informaility and complete lack of cant. it was just: yeah i'm terrorist. it's my response to genocide .

In the interview, Mr Basayev - speaking through an interpreter - admitted that he was "a bad guy, a bandit".

"Ok, so I'm a terrorist, but what would you call them (the Russians)?

"If they are the keepers of constitutional order, if they are anti-terrorists then I spit on all these agreements and nice words," he said.

The warlord accused Russia of killing thousands of Chechen women, children and old people in what he described as "a colonial war".

When asked if Beslan-style attacks could happen again, he said: "Of course they can. As long as the genocide of the Chechen nation continues... anything can happen."

finally, a bullet that's actually good for people.

this week's column, on mr. and mrs roberts and feminists for life, is in the latimes today. they managed to mis-spell my wife's last name, via the editing process. slick.

right. exactly.

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

now just go ahead and get busy on the other dozen erroneous claims.

via adam: it's never too early to take decisive action, especially when doing so, or even publicly contemplating doing so, is a straight-up suicide.

embroiling alberto in plamethrower is a good thing, and anything that kept the author of the administration's ongoing policies of torture off the supreme court is a very very good thing. however, it appears that the real torture enthusiast is cheney, and i have a funny feeling deriving from scooter libby that cheney also directed the cover-up of the fabrications of intelligence re wmd. so let me say, again: find one other of the dozens of disputed claims wherein pressure was brought to bear to produce or fail to refute by libby, gonzales, rove. then impeach.

sometimes reporters are just plain *weird*:

In the 15 minutes that followed early Saturday, Sharm el-Sheikh, always a little more freewheeling and relaxed than the rest of Egypt, was transformed into an arcade of destruction as arbitrary as it was devastating.

um, an arbitrary arcade of destruction?

i'm not sure exactly why these people want to make sure everyone regards them not only as evil, but as idiotic. we're out here absolutely insisting on our hypocrisy and viciousness, just in case it occurred to you that you didn't want to fight against us after all.

oh for pity's sake. so who was hurt or who was helped by the "leak" of clement's name? why does this matter?

"He upheld the arrest of a 12-year-old girl who       was handcuffed by transit police on the Washington-area metro system for       eating a single french fry. "No one is very happy about the events that       led to this litigation," he wrote, but he said that the police did not       violate the girl's rights under the Constitution's Fourth Amendment       guarantee against unreasonable searches."
another victory for the awesome majesty of the law. as i recall this girl was kicked out of my alma mater, alice deal junior high school, on the basis of her conviction for felonious fryconsumption.
   

the awful majesty of the law is crowned with glory, or rather with...a toupee. just as my judicial functions are, astonishingly, performed in complete detachment from my personal opinions, my hair is performed in complete detachment from my scalp.

anne applebaum has a good piece in today's washpost, about the ways microsoft, cisco and others have marketed technology to the chinese to help them censor web content. it's worth saying that this is not surprising, since these same companies are basically dedicated to the idea of the web a territory that can be owned, with content that can be controlled by them. wouldn't it rock if someone could hack and destroy the chinese infrastructure?

anyone who knows anything about my old teacher stanley fish knows that he digs pissing people off, or perhaps merely bewildering them by agreeing with them. but i admit to some confusion about today's op-ed in the nyt, though perhaps i have missed the last few moves in fishism.

And that is why the only coherent answer to the question "What does the Constitution mean?" is that the Constitution means what its authors intended it to mean. The alternative answers just don't work: the Constitution can't mean what the text alone says because there is no text alone; and it can't mean what present-day society needs and wants it to mean because any meaning arrived at under that imperative will not be the Constitution's.

the argument is that there is no candidate for meaning but intent, so every view that purports to have anything to do with the meaning of the constitution is equally embroiled in the intent of those that wrote. it seems a bit shocking to me that fish would so forget his wittgenstein. surely the intentions themselves are generated in an encounter with an antecedently existing set of linguistic practices: they are not subjective, and all sorts of collateral evidence bears on these practices. if scalia's position is that there's no sense quarreling about hamilton's sheer internal states on august 3 1787 at 3pm, he's surely got a point: what *could* these words mean (=what could hamilton have meant by them?). that's a matter of public linguistic practices about which empirical evidence can be given. of course, fish's intentionalism is going to blow all this up ultimately, as he hints throughout. and i think ultimately fish's discussion of this matter is precisely as useless as he believes it is. p.s.  adam  draws my attention to  protein wisdom's discussion.

just saw perhaps the worst movie ever made - or at least the worst waste of talent: john travolta, uma thurman, danny devito, james woods, ced the entertainer etc in "be cool." it had its comedic moments, i guess, but they were swamped in a mind-numbingly earnest and mind-crushingly stupid plot about the attempt of the cast to break the next beyonce, or whatever. the girl is cute as a button and emits idiotic lowestcommondenominator pale blackpop pap of the "believe in yourself" variety while everyone gasps at her transcendent talent. truly, cinema idiotique. meanwhile i saw a recent western called "renegade" that looks b-movie conventional by the cover, with the only participant you ever heard of being juliette lewis. but it disintegrates from standard "you killed my ho" revengeplot to a complete meltdown into the most amazing peyote trip ever achieved on screen: the plot's never even resolved, just transmuted into snakes which are transmuted into persons which are transmuted into spinning madalas depicting the cosmic circle of life or something.

so as i keep saying, the scandal, to be a scandal, has to expand from plame. it seems obvious that it could: people at the cia, e.g., have to be bitter about being scapegoated after doing exactly what they were assigned to do: provide evidence even of the flimsiest of most fabricated variety. george tenet, though paid off with his medal of freedom or whatever, must be seething somewhere. there are thirty people who would tell the washington post the truth about how they were pressured to produce information of a certain kind and pressured again to conceal their misgivings. and then stomped on from then until now to be quiet. it can't be that hard to find these people, because they've got to be angry. so get busy, even if it means that you won't be playing softball this weekend with scooter libby.

last week's creators column was about plamethrower.

i've beeb driving around the countryside, hanging out with my son sam, who's staying with my ma down on the bliue ridge and going to nature camp, and with my bro jim and his wife judy in germantown md. so i know what you're asking, in your desperate stae: what has sartwell got on his cd player as he trawls hither and thither in serch of meaning or perhaps  mere sanity? first off, i'm in a white stripes phase, along with many of my children. "elephant," i really think, is the best rock album of the past x years, but all the stuff is good. the new one - "get behind me satan" - took a while to grow on me, but did. mellower than previously, but deepening jack's continued effort to master and re-appropriate the various traditions of american music. that's what i love: it's very traditional music but fresh as hell. part of this is actually the drumming, which is weird. almost rigid, almost incompetent, but somehow perfectly refreshing to the song structures. also i'm listening to some reggae, as always. i got "freedom blues," by jah cure, a twentysomething jamaican who's been in prison for rape and robbery in jamaica since he was 17. though he's creditied with a roots revival, i still think there's a way to go. but i do keep putting the thing on. and groundation: perhaps the finest marleyesque roots band working today. they come from the bay area, and the singer is astonishing, though perhaps a little mannered after a long set of songs. anyway...

duh.

one person you might call, while you're callin, is valerie plame. ask her whom to ask.

ok. so as i say, if you're reporting the rove leak story, don't ask yourself whether the leak violated the law. ask yourself: what were the elements of the administration case for war? where did the "information" come from? who was in a position to confirm the claims or throw them into question? and were they, and how were they, pressured not to reveal misgivings or contradictory information? were they, and how were they, pressured into providing the evidence or into failing to provide contradictory evidence? this is what the story is, and if a pattern emerges, much less outright blackmail etc, the scandal is among the worst in american history.

with regard to colin powell's address to the un, feb 5 2003: admittedly most of what he said was sheer innuendo, or completely irrelevant. but among the vague factual claims or moments with some sort of content:

(1) there were two snatches from wiretaps of iranian officials. the actual contents were extremely ambiguous, though powell dutifully conbstructed an interpretation. now: who provided the material and who translated the conversations; and, in particular, who constructed the interpretations? ask them why they constructed the interpretations they did and what sorts of pressures they have been under since.

(2) We know that Saddam's son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam's numerous palace complexes. We know that Iraqi government officials, members of the ruling Baath Party and scientists have hidden prohibited items in their homes. Other key files from military and Intelligence agents to avoid detection. scientific establishments have been placed in cars that are being driven around the countryside by Iraqi intelligence agents.

(3) "While we were here in this council chamber debating Resolution 1441 last fall, we know, we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq. Most of the launchers and warheads have been hidden in large groves of palm trees and were to be moved every one to four weeks to escape detection."

(4) "We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities.        Let me say a word about satellite images before I show a couple. The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, pouring for hours and hours over light tables. But as I show you these images, I will try to capture and explain what they mean, what they indicate to our imagery specialists.
Let's look at one. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells.
Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers."

so: who provided these interpretations, and what questions were raised, by whom, and where are these people now?

(5) "        At this ballistic missile site, on November 10, we saw a cargo truck preparing to move ballistic missile components. At this biological weapons related facility, on November 25, just two days before inspections resumed, this truck caravan appeared, something we almost never see at this facility, and we monitor it carefully and regularly."
you follow me. there are many specific factual assertions that turned out to be false. how ere these assertions generated? why did powelll put gthem forward with such confidence? and what was done to keep them from being continuously pointedly undermined.

 

 

true, true : there's only one real supreme court choice. only it's not roy moore. i'm getting all my homedogs together and we're gonna make bush appoint steven tyler.

i've never been a big fan of "don't ask, don't tell." still, the military has obviously been effective in creating a system entirely commanded by gay practitioners of s&m, a kind of extremely heavily armed village people. memo to don rumsfeld: you go, girl.

nobody is as creative, as effective, or as gay as the heroes who are interrogating the way-cute enemy combatants at gitmo. the treatment didn't rise to the level of torture, but did constitute dating.

Schmidt said that to get him to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra, forced him to wear a thong on his head, told him he was homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator, Schmidt added, and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women and forced him onto a leash, to act like a dog.

my creators column is on original intent, etc.

so the idea from the rove/cooper material that valerie plame sent her husband to check the niger rumors put a different inflection on the whole deal. perhaps plame was herself the primary target of the leak of her name. and perhaps she was running or was involved with a kind of underground cia movement to try to \actually check the incredibly superficial intelligence approach wherein the higher-ups were feeding the admin whatever would help them go to war. the idea that plame would independently or without high authorization start checking such things makes no sense otherwise. it leads you to speculate too that the publication of such information also (as in wilson's piece in the times) also originated in a rank-and-file rebellion against the distortions of intelligence and manipulation of intelligence agencies.

Cooper, according to an internal Time e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine, spoke with Rove before Novak's column was published. In the conversation, Rove gave Cooper a "big warning" that Wilson's assertions might not be entirely accurate and that it was not the director of the CIA or the vice president who sent Wilson on his trip. Rove apparently told Cooper that it was "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip," according to a story in Newsweek's July 18 issue.