This morning we launched the largest military offensive operation since the beginning of our invasion in Iraq. The target was the area of Samarra.
All of the news reports so far have been sure to mention the fact that there were 50 aircraft, 200 “tactical vehicles”, and 1500 troops engaged in the attack. I couldn’t help but notice that these numbers were mentioned in every report I heard, whereas other numbers were not. One number not included was the population of Samarra (200,000+). Another figure notably missing was the projected death toll, both in terms of the “insurgents” who were the targets of the attack, as well as the innocent bystanders which will inevitably be killed in this type of operation.
As with most reports on our dealings in Iraq, few will ask many questions; although many questions certainly need to be asked. How will we gauge whether this operation (or the invasion in general) is “successful”? What death ratio of “insurgents” to innocents will be considered acceptable? If the trend we have seen so far is any indication, the few who do ask such questions will initially be ignored. If they get loud and persistent enough, they will be reassured with patriotic generalities or outright lies.
And then, the truly sad part comes when the very few remaining who will challenge and expose the lies eventually do so, because the vast majority of people just don’t really care. When the facts came out that disproved the administration’s WMD stories, the outcry from the public was nearly insignificant, because by that point most of them had allowed themselves to be re-convinced of alternate justifications for our illegal actions.
When the truth about the illegal NSA wiretapping program came out, I don’t remember a single mainstream news organization demanding an answer for how the president reconciled the speech he made on 4/20/2004 when he explicitly stated that the US government does not wiretap without court orders with the fact that he personally ordered that exact type of spying to occur beginning several years prior to the speech.
Unfortunately, people just don’t seem to want to ask such questions anymore. Perhaps it’s because we live in a “new age” of terrorism (or at least new to us). Perhaps people want to feel safer so badly that they’re willing to suspend their disbelief and not delve to deeply into the assertions that they are being made safer by various activities at home and abroad. It doesn’t actually matter whether such actions are in fact making them safer, and they sure as heck don’t want to think about the possibility that they may be making them less safe. It’s so much easier just to believe it, and try not to think about the negative side effects, like the loss of life and liberty.
18 Comments
No innocents deaths are acceptable, in Irag or America.
Interesting comment from you, Dave. If you support our recent actions (or pretty much any war, for that matter), you are by definition saying that a certain level of innocent death is acceptable in order to acheive a particular goal, however unclear that goal may be in this case. Not that I’m saying that’s always wrong or unnacceptable, but I definitely think it is in this case.
Since I don’t think you were commenting back when the wiretap story broke, I’m interested in your take on it.
Innocent deaths are unacceptable ( what I have said is what I have said, please don’t add ” by definition” to my statements, thanks ),
it is a matter of where the responsibilty lies.
I would have to look more into the latest actions and who are instigating the ” insurgents ” sunni or shites, sadr or osama or ? I dont know.
You might say this, in irag, is Bush’s, of course.
As in- I would say the hiroshima innocent deaths were the direct responsibility of Tojo and the Emperor of Japan.
several means more than two.
brain fart!
Wait. I take that brain fart back. Double brain fart.
Hopefully the brain fart was in reference to your nitpicking about the word “several” (which I will explain below); if not I don’t get it.
In case it makes it any better, I will clarify / correct myself: President Bush signed the orders authorizing the illegal monitoring in 2002, and then proceeded to re-authorize it more than thirty times over the course of the next several (more than two) years. The program continues to this day, approaching four years.
The reference to the April 2004 speech was just one specific point in time (among others) that he knowingly lied through his teeth about it, explicitly saying that the NSA has to get court orders to wiretap citizens, when he obviously clearly knew otherwise.
You are correct in pointing out that this particular speech was only about two years after he signed the order, so at that point in time he was only knowingly lying about what had been going on for two years, not “several”. I stand corrected on that minor point, which is pretty insignificant compared to the huge issue of the president lying to cover up criminal spying activity that he personally authorized.
Dave, as for your comment, I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying, but I’ll hazard a guess. It sounds like you’re saying that whenever one side (we’ll call them party “A”) does something wrong, they then bear full responsibility for the repercussions of the retaliation by party “B” (the victims of party A’s wrongs) whatever party B may choose to do?
If that’s the case, then I would have to disagree strongly. Our actions in Iraq (with a “q”) are completely our own responsibility, whether or not you believe they were justified (which is a different issue).
If you’re trying to say that the “insurgents” are responsible for any collateral damage that occurs when we take action against them, how far do you extend that logic? If we were to nuke the whole country and kill them all, can we wash our hands of it by blaming the “insurgents”, Osama, or Hussein? I don’t think so.
I realize it was a nit but I think your in general blowing things out of proportion. I think your taking the Bush quote out of context and making questions about the NSA program way more clear cut than they actually are.
And the brain farts were because I was having a hard time subtracting two from four and six and all.
I am most certainly not taking the Bush quote out of context. Just to alleviate any doubt and head off such an assertion before it arose, I linked to the full text of his speech in my original post, directly from the whitehouse web site. To further clarify, the relevant portion is as follows:
There is nothing unclear about this quote, or its context whatsoever.
As for me blowing it out of proportion, I beg to differ. To me, having a president that secretly authorizes illegal spying on American citizens is a huge deal.
And, if I remember correctly, so is the fact that he lied about it, in an attempt to hide / deny his actions.
The illegality of this wiretapping is clearly and explicitly defined in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. There is no denying this.
The assertion (by the administration and Alberto Gonzales) that the authorization by congress of the “use of force” shortly after 9/11 encompasses these actions is preposterous. Sorry, but you can’t make a huge generalization about a peripherally (at best) semi-related measure and use it to justify violating a carefully and explicitly stated law. If you’re going to paint with that broad of a brush, than *any* action the president chooses to take is therefore automatically justified, because he was “authorized to use force”.
In the end, even if you disagree on the legality of the wiretaps, it is undeniable based on that speech (in full context) that he knowingly lied about this issue.
One important distinction is the program in question concerns international calls. Bush wasn’t talking about all wiretapping the NSA is ever involved in. I agree the speech is misleading–just that your blowing out of proportion, it was a secret program after all–but the NASA does not follow the same rules when engaging in foreign intelligence gathering. I believe constitutional and intelligence experts are at the least divided over the program’s legality or at least holding back judgment given the amount of information currently available to them.
The wiretap restrictions in the FISA do apply to any calls that US citizens are involved in, domestic or international. If you read the text of the act, it is talking about exactly what is happening here (the government monitoring calls to foreign individuals for the purposes of intelligence gathering and preventing terrorism). It is all clearly spelled out in the act as being illegal.
To say that Bush was talking about some other type of wiretapping in this speech is just plain silly. It would require a lot of reading into what he said in order to infer that he meant “all wiretaps except these certain ones”. In fact, it’s even impossible to read that in, because he specifically states that he’s talking about wiretaps for “chasing down terrorists”. There is no possible confusion (or even loophole) here.
Sure, there are people debating whether in this particular case the wiretaps were illegal, but in everything I’ve read (and from the administration’s issued statements) their arguments hinge solely on the presumption that the authorization of “use of force” covers this activity, and overrides the specific rules of the FISA.
I say this is BS, and I think any clear-thinking, honest person would agree. Of course there are some with political motivations who will argue the point, as there always are, but to me that argument just does not hold water.
If the administration can broadly apply the authorization of “use of force” to such an unrelated activity, they could just as easily apply it to justifying things like torture or just walking up to someone on the street and shooting them in the head. Sure, it’s illegal, but “congress authorized the use of force”, so anything goes, eh?
Wait a second! Did I just catch a slip of secret info?
Did you hear through your JPL contacts that there actually is a space-based, super-secret spy satellite system monitoring our every move? I knew it!
Disagree away - no surprise there.
We have been through this before and this will not be another long discussion on my part.
Iraq and the continued killing is the baathists, was sodamn insanes responsilbility and now others who are exploiting it such as sadr. They could all just go through the democratic process. Joe Liberman, leading dem. former pres. candidate ( shunned by the general network news ), stated that in general the Iraq people and society have improved greatly in the last year and they will self govern successfully.
But osamo/sadr/baathists et. al. pay people $ 150 to plant ied’s, it’s not about politics for most, and they pay more if you blow yourself up. al queda is using these dumb people as cannon fodder.
” nuke them all “, hardly going to happen.
But if as a white paper put out by one of these al queda nuts stated they will light off 7 nukes in 7 cities in america, there will be an awful Final backlash.
I am saddened by all of this death. I am not on bush’s or clinton’s side or the side of killing.
Tim Mcviegh, a noble American freedom fighting insurgent, or just another murderous thug, had an idea, is that what you want to do and think is right to rage against the empire this way?, to blow up some building killing more?
There is a double standard going on with the view of bush and clinton though, perpertrated by the STEADY Drumbeat of the BSN - BullShitNews network.
Clinton lied and killed many innocents in Kosovo to deflect the Monica affair to save his own personal ass from impeachment, but ‘” that was justified and a rescue mission against the horrible sadam “- say the liberals, oh I mean misloeivec ( however you spell his name )- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War#The_NATO_bombing_campaign
Not to mention the burning alive of American children Clinton IS responsilble for at Waco, 60 + people died, and other ” incidents ” with other groups.
If you are going to try bush you better make a seat next to him for clinton.
I didn’t hear or see the outrage in the news.
don’t know why it says anonymous, I put my name on the above.
All of this seems so motivated by a hatred of bush and republicans, not the evil, politicizing the iraq war.
May I see your denounciation blog postings of kosovo and waco?
Dave, your first comment was kind of all over the map, so it is a bit difficult to formulate a response to.
As for trying to distract from the issues in this post (current events) by bringing up things that happened in the previous administration (such as Kosovo and Waco), I don’t really think it’s a valid point.
Firstly, I, along with most other people, didn’t have a blog back when those things were happening. If I did, I’m sure I would have posts to reference for you (although there certainly was plenty of news coverage, unless you were living under a rock).
Usually when I make posts on my blog about subjects like this, they involve current events. It would be pretty difficult to try and make sure I went back through history and tried to give equal time / posting space to everything else that has ever occurred.
In any event, you are completely wrong when you suggest that this post is motivated by a hatred of Bush and/or republicans, because it most certainly is not. It is also in no way an attempt to “politicize” the Iraq war. So please don’t try to dismiss anyone who you don’t agree with by trying to ascribe inferior motives to their words or actions.
I post on this stuff because I think it matters. I don’t “hate” Bush or republicans, and I’ve said so too many times on here for you to even suggest that. I also despise any attempt to use issues like the Iraq invasion/occupation and/or 9/11 for “political” purposes, and have spoken out against both republicans and democrats for doing just that consistently in the last few years. No one else has even come close to politicizing 9/11 the way the current administration has, but I criticize such attempts regardless of who perpetrates them.
Speaking of history, however, if you told the soldiers that have given their lives for this country’s freedom throughout our history that there would eventually be an administration in office that created “free speech zones” which were actually chain link fences designed to corral protesters blocks away from the event they were protesting, I think they may have some choice words to say about it.
If you went on to let them know that the government had declared that it was now acceptable for them to spy on citizens by eavesdropping on and recording their conversations without notice, or that we have decided that it’s OK to invade and overthrow other countries who are not even threatening us much less attacking us, or that we make use of secret detention facilities in foreign lands, where we take prisoners without trial or even charge and hold them for years, and refuse to denounce the use of torture in said facilities, they would have some questions for you, in addition to their choice words. The first question would probably be “why aren’t you doing anything about it?”
I don’t think it’s silly distinction. What I think is silly is for you to make the legality of the NSA program so clear cut when there is so many experts across the political spectrum saying it is legal. I wanted to link to an op-ed article that explains why the program is legal by John Schmidt who was the associate attorney general under Clinton but it’s not available for free anymore. So I found an article by a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report that defends the program. Of course I could link to many, many conservative legal scholars as well as the Gonzales’ arguments which I think are much better, but I realize you’ll just blow those ones off, but there not just based on the AUMF but also on the president’s power as commander and chief under article two of the Constitution. I think another very important detail in this whole story which you may not be aware of comes from a decision of the FISA court in 2002 that reads:
To make this into some big thing about Bush trying to make a case for being allowed to walk up to random people in the street is and shoot them in the head is absurd demagoguery–this is about a narrow issue of gathering foreign intelligence information. I think any “clear-thinking, honest person”–especially one without legal expertise–would have to at least concede that there are nuanced arguments for and against the program and that specific details of the program are needed to make a final judgment.
I realize that the shooting people in the street is an absurd extreme, but the point I’m making with it is that if you’re going to apply the “authorization to use force” to something like wiretapping, you could just as easily apply it to any other illegal activity you chose.
That is why the argument that the broad application of something like use of force to something like wiretapping is flawed, because if you accept that logic, there is literally pretty much nothing you can’t apply the same argument to, thereby giving them a free pass to ignore any laws they choose to.
There may be other arguments out there that don’t involve the reasoning that the use of force authorization overriding the illegality of the wiretaps, but that is the position that Gonzales and the Bush administration have taken, so that’s what I’m discussing.
Sure, there may be other legal loopholes which some could use to excuse the behavior, as to whether or not it is technically illegal, but even if that is so, I still believe it is wrong, as is lying about it to cover it up.