Their credentials as patriots, in the sense that the right wing in this country limits that term, are impeccable. General P.X. Kelley was appointed by GOP icon Ronald Reagan as commandant of the Marine Corps, a post in which he served from 1983-87. Robert F. Turner was an attorney in the Reagan White House who has no problem with warrantless wiretapping or presidential signing statements.

But they have a problem - a great big problem - with the executive order that President Bush signed last week interpreting Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in relation to CIA interrogations. While some observers have praised the order, others have said not so fast - what does this document really say? But most of those critics are what you might call the usual suspects. In other words, groups with words like human rights in their names. Easily ignored, easily mocked, easily smeared. But Kelley and Turner?

Looking fragile and tired in his off-white tropical suit, a grandfatherly Luis Posada Carriles was gently helped out of the car that delivered him to his wife's house in Miami Thursday as the sun went down. It will be the first time in 23 months that he has not spent the night in federal detention. So it was no surprise that, when asked how he felt, he replied, "Estoy muy contento," ("I'm very happy.")  To the Cuban-American community he said, "I'm very grateful."

Happy and grateful and comfortably surrounded by his family, friends and fans while his victims spin in their graves. Except that many of his victims have no graves since they were killed by the bombing of Air Cubana Flight 455 in 1976 when it took off from Barbados. Not all the bodies could be recovered. Among those on board were many teenagers, members of the Cuban fencing team. Says Posada: "No one saw me make a bomb."

Barbados Monument to those killed in the 1976 bombing.  

Tomorrow, Mister Bush, I've planned to put as much distance as possible between myself and any device capable of carrying your image or voice. The sorrow and rage I feel every time I see one of your calculatedly stumble-tongue performances is bad enough. I usually pay attention anyway, since one never knows when you might announce the start of another war or two. But during the remembrance of the day on which "everything changed," no way will I listen to you sanctify five years of international outlawry, torture and slaughter on the blood of those who died in Manhattan, Washington and Shanksville on September 11.

In the PR run-up to the Fifth Anniversary (and, of course, to the November elections), you've pummeled us with your "war on terror" prattle from the Salt Palace, the Capitol Hilton, the East Room, the Cobb Galleria Centre, and wherever the hell it is you tape your Saturday radio addresses.  I feel like the guy who fell onto the conveyor belt at the sledge hammer testing center. So, when I heard you would be visiting the three attack-site memorials on Monday but not giving speeches at any of them, I feeblemindedly hallelujahed that your handlers had chosen to exhibit a sliver of mercy, to let us keep one day untainted to do our mourning and meditating without encountering your bad imitation of a nuclear-armed Lonesome Rhodes. A single day with the conveyor belt off. Thank gawd for a small favor.

Which was soon scrogged by the announcement that you would deliver a televised Nine-Eleven address from the Oval Office. No surprise. The one thing I've been able to depend on since January 20, 2001, is that whenever I catch the slimmest glimmer of hope, you or one of your mentors or minions soon will trample it.

Only one speech would I listen to on Monday, Mister Bush: Your confession.

Promoted by Steven D.

Since the megamedia began their belated awakening, it's become an all-too-familiar horror story. Police show up at the door, arrest a family member, drive somewhere and hand their prisoner over to often-masked English-speakers who transport him to a secret location where he is held incommunicado for months or years, during which he is tortured in various ways. If he survives - he may not - he is released without apology or explanation, or transferred from prison to prison, or carted off to Guantánamo for an extended stay. Or, as happened in Italy three years ago, U.S. intelligence agents collaborate with their foreign counterparts to kidnap the fellow right off the streets and fly him wherever they like: Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Thailand, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe.

Rendition. How many of these cases there are we may never know.

The New York Times reports on another one this morning:

[An Algerian named Laid Saidi who was living in Tanzania] is one of a handful of men to publicly claim they were seized in the [U.S.] rendition program and then mistreated or tortured, before being released without charge or explanation. Like prisoners released from the American military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, they represent not only a mounting political problem, but a potential legal problem for the United States and its allies that have participated in the extrajudicial abductions.

After being held for a week in a prison in the mountains of Malawi, Mr. Saidi said, a group of people arrived in a sport utility vehicle: a gray-haired Caucasian woman and five men dressed in black wearing black masks revealing only their eyes.

The Associated Press (via CNN.com) is reporting that Abu Musab al-Zarkawi's first wife says he was set up by al-Qaeda in a deal with Washington:

Meanwhile, al-Zarqawi's wife told an Italian newspaper that al Qaeda leaders sold him out to the United States in exchange for a promise to let up in the search for Osama bin Laden.

The woman, identified by La Repubblica as al-Zarqawi's first wife, said al Qaeda's top leadership reached a deal with U.S. intelligence because al Zarqawi had become too powerful.

She claimed Sunni tribes and Jordanian secret services mediated the deal.

"My husband has been sold to the Americans," the woman said in an interview published Sunday. "He had become too powerful, too troublesome."

She was identified only as "Um Mohammed," which means "mother of Mohammed" and would be a nickname, not her full name.

The Rome-based newspaper said the interview was conducted in Geneva and described her as Jordanian and about 40 years old.

[promoted by BooMan]

In 1966, President Lyndon Baines Johnson set the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Not coincidentally, it was the same weekend that twenty of us chose to read aloud the list of the American dead in Vietnam from the steps of the state capitol building in Denver. There were, at the time, 5000 dead from that murderous, useless war, dating from December 1961 by Army count. Nine Father's Days later, there would be nearly a dozen times as many. On that cusp-of-summer weekend, forty years ago, one name I read out was of my close high school friend: Manny Miller, aged 19, killed in action October 19, 1965.

Today, we reached another milestone in Iraq. Twenty-five hundred American military personnel have died or been killed, every one of them thanks to the avarice, cold-blooded ruthlessness and corrupt ineptitude of the Bush Regime. Of the 2500 dead, White House press secretary Tony Snow said today: It's a number."

Proving what a perfect spokesman he is for the chickenhawks who concocted this war and murdered the 2500 as surely as if they made them kneel with their thumbs tied behind their backs and personally beheaded them. The Bush Regime would surely prefer these 2500 to be just "a number." Nameless statistics. Known only to their friends and kin, not the wider community of America whose future and freedom they were supposedly sent off to kill and die for.

Speaking the names of these dead men and women will not end the war in Iraq, nor American involvement in it, anymore than did our read-out of names in 1966. More than symbolic activism is required. But some things are worth doing regardless. So, on this Father's Day, I and five friends will publicly pronounce the 2500 names of the American dead from this list below. Plus however many more are dead by then.

[promoted by BooMan]

A little later than this time tomorrow evening, George W. Bush - or, as I used to call him before I reacquired my childhood manners, Dubyanocchio - will have 1000 days left to botch, bash and butcher whatever he didn't get his hands on in the first 1920 days of his term as President. One thousand days to redistribute to his pals what they haven't already snatched. Keith Olbermann can begin a real countdown.

1000 days.

Cripes. I could, if I wished, begin collecting retirement benefits from Social Security before Mister Bush's scheduled departure. The very system he tried to shove down the slippery slope to destruction as his first domestic priority in 2002. Before he's out of the Oval Office, I'll also be eligible to get into a movie for a 25% discount, which is a good thing because who knows what the Decider's decisions may do to my family's income or the economy in general over the next 1000 days.

1000 days. Twenty-four thousand hours. One million, four hundred-forty million minutes. Eight-six million, four hundred-thousand seconds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Sigh.

To those of us who have been following the Administration's hard line on Iran, it was a tad surprising that so many folks in wwwLand seemed shocked this past weekend when Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and Peter Baker, Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks in The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has been generating plans for attacking Iran, some of which include the use of nuclear weapons.

Had they all forgotten Mister Bush's famous pre-Inaugural line to NBC's David Gregory 15 months ago?

Gregory: About Iran, will you rule out the potential for military action against Iran if it continues to stonewall the international community about the existence of its nuclear weapons program?

Bush: I hope we can solve it diplomatically, but I will never take any option off the table.

[promoted by BooMan]

I spent my first nine years in southern Georgia. And if there's any label that can universally be applied to the South of my youth, it's "polite."

Oh, I know, some of you think the South of the 1950s was the home of lynchings, chain gangs and forcing people of certain pigmentation, like my grandparents, to step off the sidewalk when a real human needed to pass. The home of old times being misremembered but not forgotten, of nigger this and nigger that, of fire-hoses and share-croppin'. True enough, but underneath it all was politeness. Practically the first words out of my mouth were "ma'am" and "suh." I can still feel the sting from the backhand to the mouth I caught on the two occasions when I forgot to employ those honorifics. Today, half a century later, whether to clerks, cops, CEOS, neighbors, whoever, I call them what I was taught. Proving, I guess, that violent child abuse can modify behavior.

Today, too, I confess that I am disconcerted by the incivility of modern political discourse. The incendiary name-calling, the profanity, the obscenity, the hyperbole just makes that Southern piece of me scream: how very, very rude.

So tone it down, people.

[promoted by BooMan]

I'm having difficulty filling the hole Dubyanocchio left in his Iraq speech Monday at George Washington U. The patriotic phraseology that every liberty-loving human being on the planet can't help but agree with was fulsomely present. The progress-is-being-made, let-me give-you-some-inspiring-anecdotal stuff was accounted for. So was the rancid sales-pitch-as-personal-story angle, this time in the proud words of a loving gold star mother's desire that the president "complete the mission" so that her son will not have died futilely.

Exactly what one might expect from the keyboard of Abe Lincoln fan William McGurn, the president's chief speechwriter, culled a year ago from that fortress of pamphleteering, The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Exactly what one might expect if one forgets that Abe told the truth.

But nowhere in those 4700 words did the president ever mention "the desperate insurgents." I could barely swallow. I searched three times. Gone. Missing altogether. Poof! It was as if the Hare Krishna chanters had started leaving out hare rama.

So has the Administration's daily dose of desperation been replaced? Has a memo gone out with a new talking point to the desperate dozen below? Because, if not, what are they gonna say?

Desperationistas



Desperateviks



Desperadoes

................................................................

For years, I've been complacent. Oh, I sent money. I slapped on bumper stickers. I voted for the right politicians. I swore at the passage of the latest restrictive statute. I sighed when a court ruling was announced. I shook my head in disgust upon learning that another doctor had felt compelled to buy a bulletproof vest or a shoulder holster. I got into a cocktail party argument every now and again. All along, I called myself pro-choice. A backer of reproductive rights. But, like a lot of people I know, I was lazy about it. Stupidly lazy. No more.

Here are three reasons why:

Bill Napoli

Julie Bartling

Mike Rounds

In the spring of 1917, Hotochee, my grandmother's 14-year-old sister, stood barefoot in the spongy soil on the north shore of Lake Ochochobee and married Davis, an 18-year-old farmer's son. Three months later, just before his own son was born, Davis enlisted in the Army. In October, he was shipped to France. Nobody knows if he got to Paris. By Christmas he had disappeared during an artillery barrage a couple of hundred yards from the German trenches. Gone. Never seen again.

Hotochee never remarried. Until she died in 1966, she spent a half-century waiting for Davis to come home. It wasn't that she didn't know in her head that he had probably been turned to fleshy shrapnel by the Kaiser's guns. But her heart made her look hopefully every time a man came into her line of sight.

We were crawling along an unfamiliar side street of South Pasadena last Friday, on our way home from dinner with the family of an Iranian friend, a one-time fugitive from the brutal Shah and brother-in-law of a three-term southern California Congresswoman. A black Lincoln Navigator edged away from the curb in front of us. Streetlights burn dim and stand far apart in the neighborhood, and I didn't get a good look at the bumper sticker on this submarine-sized car until it braked for the stop sign where the side street turns into the main drag. In crimson letters on a white background: "Nuke Iran Now!" Palpable rage embraced in three words.

I know the feeling. When I see a bumper sticker like that, I'd like to flip my special accessories dashboard open and fire a nuclear-tipped missile up the guy's tailpipe. You know, one of those tactical mini-nukes that certain elements in and close to the Bush Administration are pushing the development of for the express purpose of being the first and second nation to have unleashed atomic warfare on the planet. Just press the Execute button and vaporize the guy and his vehicle right there in the intersection. Voilà! Problem solved. One more fanatic extinguished. Peace restored to my psyche. Collateral damage be damned.

Football doesn't really spin my wheels. But the guys pictured above could make my day two Sundays from now when they perform during halftime at Superbowl XL.