marccooper

Why NOT John McCain?

My latest column out tonight for L.A. Weekly. Why NOT John McCain?

By Marc Cooper

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal threatens to become another Watergate. George W. Bush’s approval ratings are nosediving. A huge majority thinks America is on the “wrong track,” and an almost equal number think the war’s being mismanaged.
But John Kerry continues to elicit about as much excitement as a Snickers bar in the diabetes ward.

That’s all about to change, we’re told, as soon as Kerry selects a veep. This past weekend, Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa had a suggestion for Kerry on this matter: Choose Dick Gephardt. “He can carry a state,” said Hoffa.

Now, Jimmy’s kind of a friend of mine and it’s never pleasant to disagree with a Hoffa but . . . He can carry a state? That’s it? Is it to this sorry level of entropy that Democratic politics have retreated? That’s all we want nowadays from a VP? That he can take Missouri?

Maybe Democrats should aspire to something more ambitious. Like choosing a VP who can lock down the election in November. And do you know a single person who believes that if, by some happenstance, John McCain became Kerry’s running mate they wouldn’t win? Why aren’t Democrats in the streets clamoring for this formula? Why aren’t there petition drives under way to persuade Kerry and McCain to join together?

One answer comes from Donna Brazile. You remember her. She was the mouthy genius who ran the unforgettable Al Gore campaign four years ago. “McCain has not been pro-choice. He’s not been out front on affirmative action. He’s not been out front on core issues that have defined the Democratic Party,” Brazile says in pooh-poohing McCain. It’s an odd statement coming from a strategist who fronted for Holy Joe Lieberman. Indeed, who are you more comfortable with? Lieberman or McCain?

I can see no compelling reason for Democrats not to go with McCain. They chose Kerry only because he was the Electable Anybody But Bush. Why not go all the way down that road? McCain, unlike Kerry, is really electable. Some prominent Democrats like senators Joe Biden and Bill Nelson have already come to this conclusion. Biden says as a second best McCain could be secretary of defense. But that’s not good enough.

Wait, McCain is a Republican, you say. He is pro-life, yes. He’s a hawk, that’s true. But he also has two things that both Kerry and (increasingly) Bush sorely lack: popularity and integrity. Vice presidents don’t appoint judges and don’t decree executive orders. So who cares what McCain’s ideological sins might be?

On the other hand, McCain teamed up with Kerry to defuse and debunk the POW-MIA myth, he worked with anti-war protesters to normalize relations with Vietnam, he led the fight along with liberal Russ Feingold to ban soft-money contributions, he’s standing up to defend Arizona’s beleaguered Clean Money elections system, he’s fought the NRA on gun control, and he’s rather doggedly pushing the Abu Ghraib investigation up the command ladder. (McCain also detests George W. Bush, never forgiving him for the pile of manure that got dumped on him in the 2000 primaries.)

Instead of wringing their hands over what a McCain selection would mean for their own party (they didn’t seem to care when right-winger Lieberman was selected), Democrats ought to think what that choice would mean for Republicans. It could unleash a long-needed political realignment, one that could give Democrats a new majority and that could severely shake up and divide the GOP. Moderate, suburban, secular, rational Republicans would be given a solid alternative to voting for a party increasingly dominated by its ultra-ideological Jacobin faction.

The results could be much more far-reaching than November. McCain’s presence in the executive, what in other countries is called a “national unity” government, might mean a real shot to pass some key legislation through a Congress more than likely still to be dominated by Republicans (or at best a combination of the GOP and conservative Democrats). Under current circumstances, indeed, it matters little what the details of Kerry’s legislative plan might be — because it ain’t gonna pass anyway.

But with McCain as VP, cobbling together a congressional coalition that might pass some sort of health-care program, some sort of immigration reform, more political reform and, yes, even some rollback of the Bush tax cuts doesn’t seem so impossible.

There are, of course, at least two glitches in this sunny scenario. McCain might actually mean it as he insists this week that there’s no way he would serve as VP. And then there’s Kerry, who might not want to get upstaged by an immensely more attractive John McCain. Even if he could help carry a whole lot more than Missouri. -- +--

From Baghdad: "Total Indifference" over Rummy's Fate

“Nobody in Iraq gives a tinker’s damn whether or not the U.S. Secretary of Defense gets fired,” says Tish Durkin in a wonderfully-worded piece written from ground level in Baghdad for The New York Observer. “For purposes of comparing the outrage here with the outrage back home, perhaps the most striking of the Iraqi themes is that of total indifference as to whether Donald Rumsfeld is kept on, pushed out, or melted down and drizzled over porcini mushrooms.”

Durkin went into this story as a hawk. But the more time she spends in Baghdad, the more doubts she accumulates.

Mr. Rumsfeld may or may not end up being purged. But if he is, any sigh of relief that is breathed will be breathed in one capital only. Americans, as is our habit when nationally mortified, will count a great price as paid and move on. Iraqis will stay right where they are.
It has long since become a matter of policy here that whenever the real, long-term interests of the Iraqi people conflict with the perceived immediate impulses of any undecided voter in any swing state, the latter shall prevail. Therefore, one mustn’t delude oneself that what ordinary Iraqis say about Abu Ghraib is going to influence what official Americans do about Abu Ghraib.

Durkin hopes that “in its particulars, this scandal will turn out to be as aberrant as it is abhorrent” but that, unfortunately, for most Iraqis the tales coming out of Abu Ghraib have the ring of truth. The revolting behavior of the prison guards might be limited to a small minority of soldiers, but it embodies an ethic that permeates the occupation.

Day after day in Iraq, in countless instances great and small, America absolutely comes off as a country-club democrat, convinced that freedom, democracy and human rights are the exclusive entitlement of those with full membership in the United States, and that everybody else is lucky to be a busboy… The aggregate perception is that nobody cares what the Iraqis go through as long as Iraqis are the only ones going through it. And nobody believes what the Iraqis say if it’s only Iraqis who are saying it.

This article makes a sobering, disturbing point. In the domestic political wrangling over Iraq, the Iraqi people are usually the lowest priority. And the damage wrought by Abu Ghraib may or may not sink Rumsfeld, or ultimately, Bush. But in the meantime, it has shredded America’s moral standing inside Iraq.

Powell on WMD's: "Deliberately Misleading"

All the hullabaloo over the dolt on Colin Powell’s staff who tried to short-circuit some tough questioning on yesterday’s Meet The Press has obscured the real bombshell to come out of the Secretary of State’s colloquy with Tim Russert.

Sounding like a Kennedy Democrat, Powell admitted the administration’s WMD case for invading Iraq was not truthful. "[I]t turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading," he said when asked about the decisive presentation he made to the UN in the run-up to war.

Much of today’s news coverage missed that sentence. My Nation magazine colleague David Corn didn’t.

JAG's. And JAG-Offs.

So, maybe you don’t trust Seymour Hersh. He’s too liberal for you? His latest story (see yesterday’s posting) claiming that the Iraqi prisoner abuse has direct roots in a Rumsfeld-managed policy seem fishy to you?

Well, then, here’s two more stolid sources that have equally damning tales to tell. ABC News reports that the U.S. military’s uniformed lawyers -- the so-called JAG’s – as far back as two and a half years ago pressured the Pentagon’s civilian leadership to better guarantee the rights of prisoners.

"But, the JAG lawyers say political appointees at the Pentagon ignored their warnings, setting the stage for the Abu Ghraib abuses, in which military police reservists photographed each other subjecting Iraqi prisoners to physical abuse and sexual humiliation."

"If we — 'we' being the uniformed lawyers — had been listened to, and what we said put into practice, then these abuses would not have occurred," said Rear Admiral Don Guter (ret.), the Navy Judge Advocate General from 2000 to 2002.
Specifically, JAG officers say they have been marginalized by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, and William Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel, whom President Bush has nominated for a judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit….Under condition of anonymity, one current JAG officer told ABCNEWS that for the last two years, "the military lawyers have always been the ones speaking for greater protections and recognitions of rights for detainees — and the political appointees have argued for no recognition of rights and careful control of the process. That's an argument, to date, that the political appointees have won…Matters got so frustrating that in May and October 2003, eight senior JAG officers took the rare step of going outside the chain of command to meet secretly with the New York City Bar Association, warning of a "disaster waiting to happen.”

Not enough grim news? Then, turn to Newsweek’s report on how Colin Powell “hit the roof” in early 2002 when the Bush White House consciously decided to skirt the Geneva Convention in treatment of Afghan prisoners. Powell won only a “partial victory” as Bush plodded ahead with re-writing the rules that would be used in U.S.-run detention centers. Eventually, the harsh treatment employed at Gitmo and other secret U.S. jails was "exported” to Iraq. Says Newsweek:

“Today there is no telling where the scandal will bottom out. But it is growing harder for top Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld himself, to absolve themselves of all responsibility. Evidence is growing that the Pentagon has not been forthright on exactly when it was first warned of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib. U.S. officials continued to say they didn't know until mid-January. But Red Cross officials had alerted the U.S. military command in Baghdad at the start of November...
Now more charges are coming. Intelligence officials have confirmed that the CIA inspector general is conducting an investigation into the death of at least one person at Abu Ghraib who had been subject to questioning by CIA interrogators. The Justice Department is likely to open full-scale criminal investigations into this CIA-related death and two other CIA interrogation-related fatalities.”

As I argued last week, maybe it’s better if Rumsfeld stays. His premature departure might dampen the will to continue investigating.

SecDef Death Watch (Chapter 2)

Seymour Hersh’s third installment on the Iraqi prison torture story is out today. And it’s more bad news for Rumsfeld. And for General Richard Myers. And for General Geoffrey Miller, camp leader at Abu Ghraib. The story also focuses on the noxious role played by Rummy’s Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, who entertained us for a couple of hours last week during those congressional hearings.

The abuse inflicted on Abu Ghraib prisoners, including the sexual humiliation, says Hersh, was the direct outgrowth of a program promoted and approved by Rummy. And that the notion that a handful of young soldiers simply spun out of control, Hersh reports, is but a “cover story.” The first targets of the program, known as Green Copper, were “high-value” Al-Qaeda types in Afghanistan. Then, last summer, the same program to squeeze prisoners and essentially trash the Geneva Convention was imported into Iraq.

Much of Hersh’s reporting is based on CIA sources who might be doing some spinning of their own. But if that’s the case, it indicates accelerated attempts by the spooks to distance themselves from a tainted and politically decaying Defense Secretary.

Either way you look at it, Rumsfeld remains radioactive and is destined for the dumper. Here’s Hersh’s lead:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence
officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community
by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion
and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more
intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official,
in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation
stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s
clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

It know seems possible that, after all, this scandal does owe to only a few “bad apples.” But it looks like there all the ones at the top.

Anti-Dogma

Information penetrates in direct inverse proportion to its predictability.

In that spirit, I share with you two challenging, contrarian pieces. Both are from leftists—Jose Ramos-Horta and Ian Williams. Both boldly depart from accepted dogma.

Ramos-Horta, winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize is the foreign minister for the tiny nation of East Timor. He writes an extraordinarily unpredictable pro-war piece for the Australian. Extraordinary because Ramos-Horta helped lead a national liberation movement for a people – the East Timorese—who suffered veritable genocide at the hands of the Indonesians. And it was a slaughter that the U.S. government, at best, winked at. At worst, there was American complicity. But Ramos-Horta can see shades of grey.

I personally disagree with Ramos-Horta’s pro-Iraq War conclusions. It seems to me that the entire adventure is counter-productive. But I think his arguments deserve a full reading. Here’s a few excerpted graphs:

"As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonise over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without UN or international approval -- and in both cases they were right to do so.

…So why do some think Iraq should be any different? Only a year after his overthrow, they seem to have forgotten how hundreds of thousands perished during Saddam Hussein's tyranny, under a regime whose hallmark was terror, summary execution, torture and rape. Forgotten, too, is how the Kurds and Iraq's neighbours lived each day in fear, so long as Saddam remained in power… Saddam's overthrow offers a chance to build a new Iraq that is peaceful, tolerant and prosperous. That's why the stakes are so high, and why extremists from across the Muslim world are fighting to prevent it. They know that a free Iraq would fatally undermine their goal of purging all Western influence from the Muslim world, overthrowing the secular regimes in the region, and imposing Stone Age rule."

The other piece that caught my attention tonight comes from journalist (and my friend) Ian Williams. Ian’s a major figure of the democratic (as opposed to the Stalinist) Left. He pens a critical review of fellow leftie Chalmers Johnson’s new book, The Sorrows of Empire. While hardly a fan of Bush, Ian refuses to succumb to Johnson’s dogmatic view of the administration as a well-oiled machine of Empire:

"This underscores the problem with Chalmers Johnson’s book, The Sorrows of Empire: He concludes there is a coherent imperialist plot on the part of the U.S. establishment, yet the evidence suggests there are lots of plots, not many of them coherent… Johnson does himself and his conclusions no credit by pandering to infantile left dogmas. If everything were, as he hints, a neoimperialist conspiracy, it might almost be reassuring. In fact, on the evidence of the impressive range of sources he has quoted, what is really worrying is the irrationality of this administration’s policy."

Barking Dogs

NBC News has secured this exclusive photo from inside Abu Ghraib prison that suggests that the Military Police were, indeed, being “run” by Military Intelligence. The photograph was taken during the interrogation of several Iraqi prisoners who are seen naked in a heap on the floor.

The soldiers numbered as 4,5,7, and 8 are identified as military intelligence officers. Number 2 is a contract translator. The man marked number 1 is Army Spc. Charles A. Graner (Click on the photo to enlarge it to a more viewable size).

The photo was provided to NBC by Graner’s lawyer as evidence that his client and the other MP’s were following orders from M.I.

Meanwhile, in Friday morning’s L.A. Times Graner is accused of being the “ringleader” of the group that abused and beat the Iraqi prisoners. The accusation comes from fellow guard Spc. Jeremy Sivits who will be court-martialed next week.
According to the Times, Sivits “described an atmosphere in which several military policemen repeatedly laughed, joked and mocked Iraqi detainees as they stripped them naked, struck and kicked them and forced them to hit each other.”

Also check out the posting immediately below for more on the abuse story and Rumsfeld.

"Water Boarding," "Camp Redemption" And Other Idyllic Thoughts

I got a good laugh driving back from Nevada this afternoon and listening to Hardball on satellite radio as Chris Mathews described Don Rumsfeld’s and General Dick Myers’ photo-op trip to Iraq as a replay of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in The Road to Baghdad.

No dummy that Rummy. He spent a grand total of seven hours in-country… and then high-tailed it out of Dodge. Who can blame him? Baghdad, as Rummy pointed out some time ago, is almost as dangerous as Washington D.C. Not a good place to be after dark.

About the only “news” coming out of this diversionary measure was an announcement by Abu Ghraib prison commander Major General Geoffrey Miller that inmates will soon be transferred to an outdoor tent facility to be known as "Camp Redemption."
What little pencil-pusher came up with that harrowing name? Redemption for whom?

Reminds me of the Father Bush invasion of Panama that was equally ludicrously dubbed as “Operation Just Cause.” I was on the first press charter into liberated Panama (which by the way also went through a spasm of looting). By the time we hit ground one wag had renamed the whole shebang as “Operation Just Because.”

Back to Rumsfeld. I’d say that his snap inspection of Abu Ghraib was a bit late, no? USA Today has an excellent piece cataloguing the myriad lost opportunities that Rumsfeld and the Pentagon had over the last half-year or more to stop the abuses.

The story line in the next few days will be the fight to get the new batch of abuse pictures released to the public. Rumsfeld’s position is that doing so might violate the rights of the Iraqis under the terms of the Geneva Convention.

Why, of course. This would be a much more serious violation than, say, “water boarding” – that new X-treme sport indulged in by the CIA. Reuters has this report. This morning The New York Times described it this way:

“In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.
These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A… Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees…”

Pushing people underwater until they can’t breathe stops “short of torture?” This would come as big news to the former Brazilian and Chilean secret police who were convinced that this technique was one of their dandiest tools of torture. Fools.

Justifying Torture

The web-broadcast beheading of Nicholas Berg has led some to conclude that – by contrast—what happened at Abu Ghraib wasn’t so bad. They are half right. The torture (or in RummySpeak the “stress positions”) inflicted by U.S. troops indeed pales against the barbarity of the beheaders.

But it was, nevertheless, torture. What we’ve heard today from some of the U.S. Senators who viewed the 1000 additional photos out of Iraq confirms that.

My friend, Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman (author of “Death and the Maiden” ) refers back to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and argues in The Guardian that torture is never justified:

“Make no mistake: every regime that tortures does so in the name of salvation, some superior goal, some promise of paradise. Call it communism, call it the free market, call it the free world, call it the national interest, call it fascism, call it the leader, call it civilisation, call it the service of God, call it the need for information; call it what you will, the cost of paradise, the promise of some sort of paradise, Ivan Karamazov continues to whisper to us, will always be hell for at least one person somewhere, sometime…

…Torture is not a crime committed only against a body, but also a crime committed against the imagination. It presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine someone else's suffering, to dehumanise him or her so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness, those who know and close their eyes, those who do not want to know and close their eyes, those who close their eyes and ears and hearts.”

'Army Times:' Dump Rummy; CBS Airs First Abuse Video Weds Nite

FLASH… CBS News 60 Minutes II will air the first of the rumored Iraqi prisoner abuse videos on Wednesday night. Says Reuters: “An American soldier's video diary showing her disdain for Iraqi detainees who died in her charge [my emph.] is to be broadcast by a U.S. network on Wednesday in a further escalation of the prisoner abuse scandal that has shaken the Bush administration and provoked world outrage.”

Now, read the editorial below calling for Rummy’s head and General Myer’s ass. Is it from the Village Voice? Or The Nation? Maybe The Progressive?

Try again. It’s the lead edit in this week’s Army Times. That’s right. The Army Times.

This same edit ran in the Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Corps Times. Though privately-owned, these publications are considered the “bibles” of the military world and reach more than 90% of enlisted personnel and officers. Enough of a preamble.

ArmyTimes.com

Published: May 17, 2004

Editorial: A failure of leadership at the highest levels

Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.

There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

In addition to the scores of prisoners who were humiliated and demeaned, at least 14 have died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has ruled at least two of those homicides. This is not the way a free people keeps its captives or wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious world.

How tragically ironic that the American military, which was welcomed to Baghdad by the euphoric Iraqi people a year ago as a liberating force that ended 30 years of tyranny, would today stand guilty of dehumanizing torture in the same Abu Ghraib prison used by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen.

One can only wonder why the prison wasn’t razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime.

Army commanders in Iraq bear responsibility for running a prison where there was no legal adviser to the commander, and no ultimate responsibility taken for the care and treatment of the prisoners.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also shares in the shame. Myers asked “60 Minutes II” to hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put U.S. troops at risk. But when the report was aired, a week later, Myers still hadn’t read Taguba’s report, which had been completed in March. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also failed to read the report until after the scandal broke in the media.
By then, of course, it was too late.

Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world.

If their staffs failed to alert Myers and Rumsfeld, shame on them. But shame, too, on the chairman and secretary, who failed to inform even President Bush.

He was left to learn of the explosive scandal from media reports instead of from his own military leaders.
On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness — a failure that amounts to professional negligence.

To date, the Army has moved to court-martial the six soldiers suspected of abusing Iraqi detainees and has reprimanded six others.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the MP brigade that ran Abu Ghraib, has received a letter of admonishment and also faces possible disciplinary action.

That’s good, but not good enough.

This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.

— Military Times editorial, May 17 issue

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