The Obfuscation Report

by David Neiwert
We've known for some time that Jonah Goldberg is on the verge of publishing a tome titled Liberal Fascism, though its original subtitle has apparently been pushed around a bit -- it's now "The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods" -- along with its actual publication date, as Roger Ailes has duly noted (Slate's Timothy Noah has more). Of course, it's an absurdly oxymoronic title, a hilariously doomed project from the start, and a brilliant example of conservatives' projection strategy.

Indeed, Goldberg delivers the real proof of that particular pudding today with a Los Angeles Times column arguing for a fitness test of some sort before citizens be allowed to vote.

The subhed pretty much sums up the illogic at play here:

We test immigrants before they can go to the polls; why not everyone else?

Actually, we test immigrants not merely before they go to the polls, but before they can become citizens, with all the rights that entails. And among the foremost of those rights is the right to vote.

The ensuing inanity of Goldberg's argument -- leaping over whole categories of logic to find some reason why we should limit voters' access to the polls -- is crystallized in his closing paragraphs:

Maybe the emphasis on getting more people to vote has dumbed-down our democracy by pushing participation onto people uninterested in such things. Maybe our society would be healthier if politicians aimed higher than the lowest common denominator. Maybe the opinions of people who don't know the first thing about how our system works aren't the folks who should be driving our politics, just as people who don't know how to drive shouldn't have a driver's license.

Instead of making it easier to vote, maybe we should be making it harder. Why not test people about the basic functions of government? Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?

And who, exactly, gets to decide who is fit to vote and who is not? What's a passing mark on Goldberg's fitness test?

But that's only scratching the surface of what's wrong here. What Goldberg conveniently omits from his argument is that this sort of thing has been tried before. They called them literacy tests, and they were used throughout the South and other states as a way to deny African-Americans the right to vote after the Civil War. They were a fundamental component of the so-called "Jim Crow" laws that were only overturned in the 1960s, and a complement to the reign of eliminationist terror that kept blacks oppressed and impoverished for more than a century after they were freed.

Moreover, one would think a Republican would understand voting is the fundamental aspect of citizenship in a Republic -- it's the source of a citizen's franchisement within that Republic. It isn't merely a privilege, such as obtaining a driver's license. It is a right endowed to every citizen, and it is only revoked for reasons of criminality. Indeed, it is one of the defining rights of citizenship. Goldberg is essentially arguing for disposing of people's rights as citizens if they fail his test.

Creating and enforcing a fitness test on citizens before they can be allowed to vote can be described in no other term than as fascist.

You'll recall, perhaps, that scholars of fascism such as Robert O. Paxton and Roger Griffin have remarked on the fascist's insistence that he represents the true national identity; this becomes part of the complex of rage and violence by which others are deemed unfit to enjoy the rights of citizenship and polite society and then, gradually, eliminated.

Goldberg's proposal would be a clear first step in that direction, since its essence is to deny voting rights to those deemed uninformed enough to count. That it resembles so closely the political program of the old postwar Ku Klux Klan -- identified by Paxton as the original fascist organization -- is not mere coincidence.

Conservatives are becoming desperate. Probably mass disenfranchisement is their only hope for retaining much of the vestiges of power after 2008, so Goldberg conveniently floats a balloon like this.

Too bad it has a little smiley face with a Hitler mustache on it.

[P.S. Can someone explain to me why the editors of the LA Times editorial page thought the above photo was an appropriate illustration for Goldberg's piece?]

[Hat tip to Ray C.]

Labels: Conservatives, Fascists, neocons, Republicans

Richard Perle was one of the arch hawks who helped to push America into the Iraq war. Four years on, Suzanne Goldenberg finds him unrepentant

Tuesday May 29, 2007
The Guardian

Richard Perle says he has nothing to apologise for. True, in 1998 he signed on to a letter from prominent neo-conservatives calling on the then president, Bill Clinton, to use force if necessary to oust Saddam Hussein. True, too, that as chairman of the defence policy board from 2001 to 2003, he was an adviser to the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in the pivotal days of planning for the Iraq war. But of the unfortunate consequences that flowed from those events - a war that by some estimates has claimed the lives of 655,000 Iraqis, and more than 3,400 US troops, a war that has entrenched hatred of America and brought suicide bombings to the cities of Europe - Perle says he has no regrets.

"I will take responsibility for what I argued which was that we should remove Saddam, and I am willing to defend that position today," says Perle, who is to be interviewed by Philippe Sands at the Guardian Hay Festival tonight. "Do I take responsibility for the things that went wrong afterwards? I had no influence over those things, unfortunately."

Perle's refusal to shoulder any share of the blame for the catastrophic consequences of his ideas about the world comes at a time when neo-conservative forces seem to be on the retreat in the Bush presidency. Earlier this month, Paul Wolfowitz, another prime force behind the war in Iraq, was forced out of the World Bank, in a scandal which, though officially about outsize pay rises for his girlfriend, was animated by anger about the war.

In January, Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice-president Dick Cheney, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Last November, Rumsfeld was swept aside as Pentagon chief, following the Republicans' election defeat.

With nearly two-thirds of Americans opposed to the war, one could be forgiven for thinking that Perle might be looking for cover. Earlier this year, Vanity Fair magazine published an article raising the astonishing prospect that Perle, one of the most ardent advocates of war on Iraq, had been having second thoughts. Asked whether it would have been possible to contain Saddam without military intervention, Perle told the magazine: "Maybe we could have." A neo-con recants!

But, as soon becomes apparent during our conversation, it is some distance from that glancing admission to a real change of heart, and there is little evidence that the debacle in Iraq has led Perle to question the hawkish views that have guided his life and - not incidentally - made his career in Washington.

Ask Perle for his ideas on how to resolve the standoff over Iran's nuclear arsenal, and the formula is eerily familiar. He is not yet sure the time is ripe to carry out air strikes on Tehran. "But if the only way to prevent Iran from being a nuclear weapons power is to destroy one or more facilities that will give them that capability I see no moral basis for rejecting that option," Perle says.

He would also like to see the US actively working to destabilise Iran by supporting opponents of the regime. The same lessons could then be applied to Syria, he says.

When I arrive at Perle's house in Chevy Chase, still a bastion of liberals just outside the district line of Washington, DC, the front door is open, and he is having a loud telephone conversation in comically accented French. It could have been an auditory hallucination, but it seemed that at one point, he bellowed: 'Je t'aime." A dog skitters across the polished wood floors. Its name is Reagan, and it will spend a fair amount of time in Perle's lap as he talks about Iraq.

A disciple of the cold war hawk and Democratic senator, Henry Scoop Jackson, Perle spent several years as a staffer in the US Senate before gaining a post as assistant secretary of defence in the 1980s administration of Ronald Reagan. It was during his Reagan period that Perle acquired a reputation as someone who preferred to exercise his influence outside the public eye. Much to his annoyance, he is still referred to as "the Prince of Darkness" in Washington circles. He is also known as a neo-con - though Perle objects to that label too, claiming that he remains a registered Democrat.

He moved on to the defence policy board in 1987, and stayed until 2004, when he was forced to step down amid charges that he had used his position to try to influence the sale of a telecommunications firm to a Chinese company.

Perle, who remains associated with a number of conservative think-tanks, came under additional scrutiny for his role as a director of Conrad Black's Hollinger International Inc. His management of his responsibilities to the board led the authors of the Breeden Report, which investigated allegations that Black was defrauding the company, to describe Perle as a "faithless fiduciary".

But those knocks - not to mention the bloody chaos of Iraq - do not appear to have led Perle to a reappraisal of his thinking. "I haven't lost any friends over this," he says. (I don't tell him about the neighbour who yelled out: "Tell him he was wrong about the war," when I stopped to check street directions.) He refuses to say whether he has lost any sleep.

Instead, Perle continues to cling to a view of events in Iraq that has now been comprehensively discredited. Even now, when it is abundantly clear that Saddam Hussein did not have the weapons of mass destruction that were the pretext for the war, Perle insists that it was the right decision to remove Saddam by force. "Even after recognising that some of the information was wrong, the judgment that Saddam proposed a threat and a serious threat was right," he says.

Against the reams of evidence to the contrary - including congressional inquiries into the administration's misuse of intelligence in the run-up to the war - Perle continues to insist that Saddam Hussein was a friend of al-Qaida.

So if the ideas were sound, where did it all go wrong? It is here, perhaps, that Perle makes his most astonishing statement: Washington did not do enough to prop up former Iraqi exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi. But, ever the insider, Perle does not point too high when assigning blame. He carefully avoids fingering President Bush, or his fellow travellers among the hawks and neo-cons - not Cheney, not the former Pentagon officials, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.

After absolving the intellectuals who planted the seeds of war, and the civilians who were instrumental in its planning, Perle turns his ire on General Tommy Franks, the former commander of forces in Iraq. Among Franks's greatest blunders, Perle says, was his failure to stop the looting that erupted the day the regime fell. "The looting was just a serious and inexplicable mistake, made I believe principally by Franks and the military on the ground," he says. "I have, I concede, a low regard for Franks. I think he is a fool, and I thought that the first time I met him."

Donald Rumsfeld, it will be remembered, famously said about the looting: "Stuff happens." But Perle is understanding of that. "I think Rumsfeld thought, people have suffered under this regime so they are going to burn down the symbols of officialdom," he said.

Are the Iraqi people better off today than they were under Saddam? "That's a very temporal question," he says. In Perle's view, it should be left to a later generation of Iraqis to decide whether their lives are less wretched now than they were under Saddam. Was it worth going to war against a regime that did not after all constitute an imminent threat? "It's the wrong issue to talk about imminence," he says. Would he agree the situation in Iraq is disastrous? Disaster is an overused term, he says. "It is what it is." When you get right down to it, he really isn't all that keen to talk about the reality of Iraq.

For Perle, it seems, war is something that happens to other people. It is also a condition about which ordinary mortals - those not privy to classified reports and reliant on newspapers and television for information - may not necessarily be qualified to hold an opinion. He says he learned that lesson in 1974 when he visited Saigon as the clock was winding down on the US presence in South Vietnam. Perle says he was braced for scenes of gore after following press reports of the conflict. "The war was still going on, and I went to several places in Vietnam. I expected before arriving, as a newspaper reader, to see a moonscape when I arrived, to see devastation everywhere. I arrived in Saigon and apart from the sandbags in front of some government buildings you wouldn't have known there was a war going on. Life on the surface was completely normal," Perle says. "I didn't see the war."

Just a year after his visit, America would make its ignominious exit from Vietnam, helicopters lifting off from the US embassy in Saigon. But Perle says he never felt like he was in a real war zone. Small wonder then, perhaps, that 30 years later, he had no reservations in advocating war on Iraq, and was unable to imagine what might come afterwards.

Labels: Iraq, neocons, PNAC, Richard Perle, war hawks

by Glenn Greenwald

On Friday, Condoleezza Rice announced that Eliot Cohen has been chosen to be the new Counselor of the State Department. It is not hyperbole to say that Cohen is as extremist a neoconservative and warmonger as it gets. Even The New York Sun's Eli Lake -- in an article claiming that Cohen's replacement of Philip Zelikow signals a more militaristic approach for the administration -- points out that Cohen " intellectually is neoconservative" and that "he was an early supporter of the military intervention in Iraq and came out against recommendations from the Iraq Study Group in December to launch negotiations with Iraq's neighbors," i.e., Iran and Syria -- especially Iran.

But Cohen's record is far more extremist than just that. In a November, 2001 Wall St. Journal Op-Ed, Cohen criticized the attempts up to that point to name "The new War" -- all the names chosen were far too limiting and unglorious. Rejecting all the possibilities, Cohen insisted that "a less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV." Even back then, look at what was on Cohen's mind:

Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign. . . . First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran. . . . The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.

Cohen's second priority -- after Iran -- was changing the government of Iraq, and he showcased what would be the false war-justifying propaganda before Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz began the process of feeding it to the President:

The U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism. Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction.

Cohen was most worried that Afghanistan would be the only real Churchillian war we would fight, rather than getting on with World War IV in all its glory: "if after the Afghan campaign ends, the government lapses into a covert war of intelligence-gathering, arrests, and the odd explosion in a terrorist training camp, it will be a sign that it would rather avoid calling things by their true name."

Over the next several years, Cohen became one of the most militant advocates of expanded regional war in the Middle East. A 2003 Asia Times article by Ahmad Faruqui called him "the most influential neoconservative in academe":

Cohen refers to the war against terrorism by a chilling name: World War IV (citing the Cold War as the third world war). . . . Cohen claims that America is on the good side in this war, just like it has been in all prior world wars, and the enemy is militant Islam, not some abstract concept of "terrorism".

Cohen argues that the US should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces in the Muslim world, beginning with the overthrow of the theocratic state in Iran and its replacement by a "moderate or secular" government. After September 11 he was one of the first neoconservatives to call for an attack on Iraq, even though there was no credible evidence linking Iraq with the attacks on the US or al-Qaeda.

It likely goes without saying by now that the reason Iraq was so quickly at the forefront of Cohen's mind in the aftermath of 9/11 was because invading Iraq and changing its government was long one of Cohen's dreams, and the 9/11 attacks became the pretext dressed up as the "justification" for Cohen's dream to come true.

This continues to be the most astounding, significant, and alarming trend -- as the recognition grows even in Beltway elite media circles that the people who designed and sold the Iraq war to the American public are completely untrustworthy and discredited figures, they are exactly the ones who continue to exert the most influence, by far, on the President, and their influence seems only to be growing. Here is a question which Tim Russert asked Lindsay Graham this weekend -- a question that is three years overdue but nonetheless welcome -- after Graham kept insisting that Americans give the Great Surge Plan " a chance" to succeed:

MR. RUSSERT: But many Americans will say that those who supported the war are saying, "Trust us, see this through," the same people who said, "There are weapons of mass destruction. General Shinseki's wrong, we don't need hundreds of thousands of troops. We will be greeted as liberators."

SEN. GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: "The cost of the war," according to Lawrence Lindsey, "won't be more than $200 billion."

SEN. GRAHAM: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: "There won't be any sectarian violence." All those judgments were wrong. Why should the American people continue to believe in those same people who had so many misjudgments leading up [to] and executing the war?

The premise of Russert's question is exactly right, and it is one of the most crucial propositions to emphasize -- "Why should the American people continue to believe in those same people who had so many misjudgments leading up to and executing the war?" They should not, of course. And we know exactly who "those same people" are. Eliot Cohen is not just one of them, but he is one of their leaders. He has been wrong about everything. If he had his way, we would have far more wars than we have already.

The Cohen appointment is clearly another instance where neoconservatives place a watchdog in potential trouble spots in the government to ensure that diplomats do not stray by trying to facilitate rapproachments between the U.S. and the countries on the neoconservative War hit list. In that regard, behold the head-patting reaction to the Cohen appointment from one of the country's most radical Iran obsessives:

Michael Ledeen, a former government official and conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cohen's appointment was good news.

"You want your leaders to hear disagreements," he said. "You don't want monotonous conformity."

Unlike the more political neoconservatives, who are very careful about what they say and go to great lengths to conceal their ultimate goals, Cohen has been an academic and thus more explicit about the theoretical underpinnings of his worldview. In a 1998 essay in (fittingly enough) The New Republic, Cohen called for the U.S. to build up and modernize its military capabilities faster and more aggressively, and to "justify" that plan, he laid out his neoconservative vision of the role of the United States in the world:

Another way to put it is that the United States needs an imperial strategy. Defense planners could never admit it openly, of course, and most would feel uncomfortable with the idea, but that is, in fact, what the United States at the end of the twentieth century is--a global empire.

Talk of "cooperative security" masks the reality that in any serious military confrontation, the central question is whom the United States asks to cooperate. . . . One cannot separate the so-called "soft power" of the United States--the global dominance of its culture, beginning with its language--from its military strength.

Rock fans around the world listen in English; so do fighter pilots. The same information technologies that make the Internet a decidedly American phenomenon provide the nervous systems of American military power. Free trade rests on common consent, to be sure, but would it exist absent America's military dominance?

Even Cohen recognized what a profound departure from America's founding principles it is to call for America to dominate the world as The Great Imperial Power:

The United States is today by far the most powerful state on the planet. If it chooses to remain so, citizen and soldier alike must brace themselves for the occasional imperial fiasco. More important, they will have to accept the uncomfortable notion that they are wielding military power in a way that is historically unusual for a country that has long viewed empires with proper republican suspicion. America's strategic vision will thus have to peer inward, as well as out, if we are to play our new role in the world successfully.

These are the radical principles laid out unabashedly by the Bush State Department's new Counselor, which are the same principles still driving the administration. We are in the middle of World War IV. We have numerous countries against whom we must wage war. The highest strategic priority is to change the government of Iran, with whom we can never negotiate. And the ultimate goal is to rule the world with our military force as the Supreme Imperial Power.

That is the neoconservative vision at its core. And the untold damage it has wreaked on our country has not diminished their influence in any way in this administration. They are still in control, particularly in the area they care about most -- the Middle East. And they have dealt with their greatest fear -- war-avoidance with Iran prior to regime change -- by installing one of their very own extremists to scrutinize and check the State Department.

This is really the debate America needs most, but is also the one we are furthest away from being able to conduct -- is the goal of the U.S. really to maintain and expand imperial world domination? The dangers to our country from that pursuit are grave and obvious. They are precisely the ones about which, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Dwight Eisenhower most urgently warned, and Jefferson similarly emphasized continuously that the most important obligation a country has is to avoid war except when the nation's security is directly attacked.

But that, more than anything, accounts for the current predicament of America. We have ceased adhering in these matters to the principles of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower, and have instead become a nation of Dick Cheneys, Victor Davis Hansons, Richard Perles, and Eliot Cohens.

These are -- to use Russert's phrase -- "those same people" who caused the Iraq disaster and have their sights set on further damage still. They do not want to avoid war at all, but instead believe that it's glorious and elegant and empowering. They want to ensure a state of Permenant War, complete with all of the internal constrictions of liberty which wars inevitably entail, because they view the United States not as a republic, but as an empire which -- in order to fulfill all sorts of agendas -- can, should and must rule the world with superior military force. There is a temptation to dismiss "those same people" as irrelevant extremists, but as Cohen's Friday-announced appointment reflects, they are anything but irrelevant.

UPDATE: Over at This Modern World, Jonathan Schwarz cites an anecdote from Gen. Wesley Clark which reflects both the radicalism and (one must never forget) the sheer ineptitude that has driven this administration's Cohenesque War project from the start.

UPDATE II: Unrelated (mostly, not completely) to the topic of this post, The Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, will be hosting his weekly chat today at 12:00 noon EST, where readers can pose questions to him regarding his column.

Labels: American Enterprise Institute, Eliot Cohen, imperialism, neocons, World War IV

by Glenn Greenwald

There is a fascinating (and increasingly vitriolic) argument bubbling over in National Review's Corner between Andrew Stuttaford, on the one hand, and the roster of tough-guy Cornerite Warriors (Andy McCarthy, Mark Steyn, and Iran-obsessed Michael Rubin of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute) on the other, concerning the Bush administration's participation in an upcoming regional diplomatic conference to include both Syria and Iran. And just incidentally, Brit Hume last night eagerly sought to assuage the concerns of worried Fox viewers by conveying his colleague Tony Snow's assurances that this was all planned long ago.

Over at the Corner, Stuttaford has been arguing for the wisdom of negotiating with the Iranians, the gravest neoconservative sin there is. And the Churchillian Warriors, of course, have declared this to be the ultimate act of Chamberlain-ish appeasement -- it's the same as sponsoring a group hug with bin Laden and Hitler at the same time, etc. -- and are mocking Stuttaford for failing to realize that Iran represents such Pure Evil that no negotiations with them are possible. That is all standard warmonger fare.

But what is so notable here -- and what one finds in almost every debate about Iran -- is that while the Warriors will mock and oppose every attempt to resolve the U.S.-Iranian conflicts short of war, they never have the courage to expressly say what it is that they actually favor. The reason for that refusal is clear: they oppose negotiations because they crave full-on military confrontation with Iran (or, at the very least, the use of force to bring about regime change), but they know that expressly advocating that will cause them to be stigmatized as the dangerous radicals that they are. So they keep using code to talk about the need to show strength and toughness towards Iran and never appease them -- and they mock every option designed to avoid war -- while lacking the courage of their convictions to say what they actually think.

For that reason, Stuttaford has been repeatedly asking the Warriors what they think we ought to do about Iran if negotiations are so misguided, and they keep refusing to answer. Finally Rubin was forced to address the question, and he began this way: "What would I suggest? When it comes to economic measures, Patrick Clawson provides some useful suggestions." He does not, of course, say that we should confine ourselves to those "economic measures," because that's not what he believes. He thus proceeds to reject various other measures (while never saying which ones he favors) and then finishes with this pronouncement:

Nor do I believe it in U.S. interests to acquiesce to the Revolutionary Guard and Office of the Supreme Leader with nuclear arms. Their ideology matters; it would be unwise to project our own values upon those circles in Iran which would control such capability. With regard to much more precise options, such things are better discussed in private, and I would be glad to do so.

So Rubin is unwilling to say publicly what he thinks the U.S. should do with regard to Iran. He is willing to unveil his great insights only in secret, closed-door meetings at the AEI at shadowy gatherings of our nation's neoconservative foreign policy geniuses, but is not willing to advocate those ideas to his fellow citizens in public forums.

What could possibly account for such timidity? Rubin is not a government official. He resigned from the Baker-Hamilton Commission in petulant protest over the Commission's bizarre and oh-so-inexplicable refusal to follow his neoconservative wisdom in light of all the great things it has accomplished in Iraq and elsewhere (as Greg Djerejian put it at the time: "James Baker and Lee Hamilton, doubtless, must have been crushed--that the penetrating insights Rubin would have brought to bear are now lost forever").

Rubin is just a private citizen. His opinions are not classified. If he really believes so much in the grave threat posed by Iran to the U.S., why wouldn't he be willing -- even eager -- to use his platform at National Review and the AEI to publicly advocate to his fellow citizens what he thinks we ought to do about Iran? Why keep his special insights a secret?

Many neoconservatives lack the courage of their convictions this way about many topics -- they hint at their extremist ideas without having the courage or honesty to expressly state them. That practice is consistent with the founding principles of neoconservative theory. Neoconservatism does not believe in the virtues of democratic debate, but instead views itself as the vanguard of a superior elite which formulates wise policy in secret and then deceitfully packages it in digestible Manichean form to the idiot masses (that is how we travel from a long-standing, pre-9/11 desire to invade Iraq for all sorts of geopolitical reasons to a marketing product "justifying" that invasion based on the claim that 9/11 Changed Everything, Saddam was connected to those attacks, he would give his Bad Weapons to the Terrorists, and Freedom is On The March).

This sort of intellectual cowardice and deceit is illustrated by another example. Several days ago, Mark Levin, writing at National Review, complained about a New York Times article reporting on U.S. actions against Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, claiming that the Times "gives up more of our strategic secrets." After excerpting part of the article, Levin -- following the "kill-the-traitor" code which Frank Gaffney has been urging -- concluded as follows:

Oh, do I long for the good old days when Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, punished such acts of betrayal. And no, I am not joking. This is a wholly gratuitous assault on our national security by the reckless Times corporate management. There is simply no public interest in disclosing any of it. For all the liberal talk about the need to build coalitions and work more closely with other countries, when we do the Times and media outlets like it are the first to try to destroy those relationships. The Washington Post did the same with black sites in Europe.

As usual for neoconservatives, Levin is brave enough only to talk in code. He "longs" for the day when our government "punished such acts of betrayal" -- by the Times and Dana Priest of the Post -- but he stops short of specifying what he means. What punishment would he like to see, and against whom? After I read Levin's piece, I wrote him the following e-mail (with the subject: "Interview Request - Salon"):

Mr. Levin - I'm working on a piece for Salon about the argument being made by some conservatives that the Bush administration should follow the steps taken by Abraham Lincoln with regard to those who undermine our military missions (either generally in the war on terror or in Iraq), and that the administration should take more aggressive steps to punish disclosure of classified information.

I'm focusing on several articles written lately by Frank Gaffney in The Washington Times about Lincoln and treason, and I would like to include your post from several days ago (this one) in which you say: "Oh, do I long for the good old days when Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, punished such acts of betrayal. And no, I am not joking."

Would you be available for an interview, or even just by e-mail, could you specify which specific punishments you think are appropriate here for the NYT? And which types of punishments do you think are appropriate for similar instances of prior disclosures of classified information by the Times (NSA, Swift, etc.) and those of other papers (such as the Post's disclosures of the secret Eastern European prisons for terrorists).

Thanks -

Glenn Greenwald

It's been a couple of days and Levin has not responded (I sent a similar email to Frank Gaffney asking about similar remarks in his last Washington Times column, and he has also not responded). There may be several reasons for the lack of response -- time constraints, an unwillingness (for whatever reasons) to be interviewed by me, etc. But whatever the explanation is, people who advocate things like Michael Rubin, Andy McCarthy, and Mark Levin always find ways to evade saying expressly what they are really advocating. They like to speak in code and stir up extremist sentiments but lack the courage to follow through on their argument and say what they mean.

If an American believes that our country is being gravely threatened by the New Nazi Germany in Iran and that nothing short of military action will save us, I would think they would be eager -- even feel compelled -- to go out and make that case and try to awaken their fellow citizens from their slumber in the face of this Great Persian Threat. And if someone believes that there are traitors in our media -- or in our Congress -- who should be prosecuted, convicted, and hanged, I would think they would be out making that case by specifcally fingering the Media or Congressional Traitors and specifying the fate they deserve. Those who believe that there are influential people in our political institutions breaking the law and who deserve prosecution ought to make that case clearly.

One of the principal reasons why political extremists are able to masquerade as mainstream figures is because they are permitted to engage in this intellectually dishonest exercise where they advance radical and contemptible ideas only through innuendo and code. Their meaning is clear, but they are able to maintain a safe distance from the arguments they are pushing because they lack the courage to embrace them openly (Michael Rubin: "such things are better discussed in private, and I would be glad to do so") and are never pressed to be more explicit.

Anyone who mocks the idea of negotiating with Iran while insisting that it is "intolerable" to allow them to acquire nuclear weapons or continue to "meddle" in Iraq should be pressed to say clearly what they do advocate. And those who spew dirty little innuendo about "punishment" and "accountability" for those who "undermine" the war and troop morale or who "give comfort to the enemy" ought to be asked precisely who they mean and what "accountability" they favor exactly.

The fact that an idea is radical or held by a tiny fringe does not prove that it is wrong. But when advocates of such ideas are too afraid to express their ideas honestly and out in the open, that is a pretty compelling sign that even they know how rancid and repugnant those ideas are.

Labels: American Enterprise Institute, cowards, liars, neocons

by Glenn Greenwald

That this is even notable at all, or that it has to be said, is by itself significant:

A top Pentagon leader weighed in yesterday on the war debate and appeared to undercut the argument advanced by the White House and many GOP lawmakers that a congressional debate challenging the Bush plan would hurt troop morale.

"There's no doubt in my mind that the dialogue here in Washington strengthens our democracy. Period," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee. He added that potential enemies may take some comfort from the rancor but said they "don't have a clue how democracy works."

It is not, of course, only "potential enemies" who "don't have a clue how democracy works." The same can be said for Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman and their most extremist war supporters who spent the last month insisting that debates over the Leader's decisions must be stifled and that those who express opposition are helping the Enemy. The spectacle of watching American political leaders and their loyal pundit-allies instruct Americans of their duties to "be quiet for six or nine months" with regard to the Leader's actions is almost too extreme for words.

One of the more egregious examples of not "having a clue of how democracy works" -- independent through related -- is documented here by Isaac Chotiner, who highlights remarks by former federal prosecutor and current National Review commentator Andrew McCarthy, in which McCarthy accuses pro bono lawyers for Guantanamo detainees of "volunteering to help the enemy use [] our courts as a weapon of war against us" (and, just incidentally, someone should ask former prosecutor Rudy Giluiani his view of that particular controversy). That was preceded by The Corner's Clifford May's dissemination of absolutely reckless and fact-free innuendo that these lawyers are receiving secret payments from Saudi Arabia and other Terrorists helpers.

It is only those who are losing a debate who have a desire to suppress it. And it is only those who are acting illegally who are desperate to avoid judicial scrutiny of their behavior. In 2002, attempts to equate scrutiny and criticism of the Bush movement with pro-Terrorism and anti-Americanism was a potent and effective tool of intimidation. But now, it just seems desperate, the last gasps of a political movement which is dying and which knows it is, and whose only hope is to forcibly coerce acceptance of their views -- and foreclose examination of them -- by insisting that open debates are themselves improper and therefore must cease at once.

That rationale is the hallmark of every petty tyrant, and (as surging anti-war sentiment and the last election demonstrate) most Americans, when freed from exploitive fear-mongering, instinctively recoil from it. When even the Bush administration's top General publicly repudiates their principal weapon of coercion, it is a clear sign of how weakened and discredited they have become.

UPDATE: I'm reminded in comments that Anonymous Liberal has written the definitive post on the matter of the Guantanamo lawyers, the threats directed at them by Bush Pentagon official Cully Stimson, and the smearing of them by National Review Cornerites, including (needless to say) Mark Steyn.

Labels: finished, neocons