It's a Big Ad

It's not like I normally push the joys of amber nectar, but this latest campaign by Carlton Draught is an endearing mix of Iron Chef melodrama with Aussie bloke larrikinism.EDIT 11.30pm 25 JUL 05: Apparently the ad was created by by George Patterson Partners and shot in New Zealand, using 300 actors and more than 20,000 computer-generated men. The director credit to the "Academy Award-winning

It's a Big Ad

It's not like I normally push the joys of amber nectar, but this latest campaign by Carlton Draught is an endearing mix of Iron Chef melodrama with Aussie bloke larrikinism.EDIT 11.30pm 25 JUL 05: Apparently the ad was created by by George Patterson Partners and shot in New Zealand, using 300 actors and more than 20,000 computer-generated men. The director credit to the "Academy Award-winning

Why is the Administration protecting terrorists?

Maybe the Administration really IS complicit in Islamic terrorism as a means of keeping Americans scared so they'll accept the Bushistas' creeping fascism. How else to explain this:

The Justice Department blocked efforts by its prosecutors in Seattle in 2002 to bring criminal charges against Haroon Aswat, according to federal law-enforcement officials who were involved in the case.

British authorities suspect Aswat of taking part in the July 7 London bombings, which killed 56 and prompted an intense worldwide manhunt for him.

But long before he surfaced as a suspect there, federal prosecutors in Seattle wanted to seek a grand-jury indictment for his involvement in a failed attempt to set up a terrorist-training camp in Bly, Ore., in late 1999. In early 2000, Aswat lived for a couple of months in central Seattle at the Dar-us-Salaam mosque.

A federal indictment of Aswat in 2002 would have resulted in an arrest warrant and his possible detention in Britain for extradition to the United States.

"It was really frustrating," said a former Justice Department official involved in the case. "Guys like that, you just want to sweep them up off the street."

[snip]

As law-enforcement officials in Seattle prepared to take that case to a federal grand jury here, they had hoped to indict Aswat, Ujaama, Abu Hamza and another associate, according to former and current law-enforcement officials with knowledge of the case.

But that plan was rejected by higher-level officials at Justice Department headquarters, who wanted most of the case to be handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York City, according to sources involved with the case.

Ever since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Justice Department had funneled terrorism cases to its New York office, which had a lot of experience in that area. This frustrated law-enforcement officials in Seattle, who thought they also had a track record for handling terrorism prosecutions — such as that of Ahmed Ressam, trained by al-Qaida and arrested Dec. 14, 1999, in Port Angeles with the makings of a powerful bomb hidden in his rental car.


Justice Department supervisors in Washington, D.C., gave the Seattle office the go-ahead to seek an indictment against Ujaama only.

Ujaama was indicted by a Seattle grand jury in August 2002, charged with trying to set up the Bly camp and with aiding the Taliban. He pleaded guilty to aiding the Taliban and agreed to testify against Abu Hamza and others.

Aswat was not charged but was referred to in the indictment as "co-conspirator #2."

In May 2004, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced an 11-count indictment by a federal grand jury in New York against Abu Hamza, who allegedly sent Aswat to Oregon to scout out the proposed training camp. A department news release said "the indictment alleges that Abu Hamza was a terrorist facilitator with global reach — from aiding hostage takers in Yemen, to attempting to set up a jihad training camp in Oregon."

At the time, however, federal prosecutors chose not to indict Aswat for reasons that are not clear. Asked why Aswat wasn't indicted, a federal official in Seattle replied, "That's a great question."

So? Are they really that incompetent, or are they in on it?

(via Atrios)

Blogrolling in our time: Sunday Edition

A big brilliant blogroll welcome to Looking at the Stars. Because we who are inspired by Oscar Wilde quotes have to stick together.

Go read this poston the journalistic blowjob given to John Roberts by Jodi Wilgoren et al.

Ha!

What book are you? I am:

Incredibly witty and funny, you have a taste for irony in all that you see. It seems that life has put you in perpetually untenable situations, and your sense of humor is all that gets you through them. These experiences have also made you an ardent pacifist, though you present your message with tongue sewn into cheek. You could coin a phrase that replaces the word "paradox" for millions of people.

I can't argue with that.

Try it yourself, and let us know what book YOU are!

(Hat tip: ShakesSis)

It's déjà vu all over again

Remember the infamous 18-1/2 minutes missing from an audio tape recorded in Nixon's office?

How does a 12-hour gap sound?

I'm kind of sorry I missed Face the Nation today. George W. Bush's golf buddy, Bob Schieffer, has been pretty tough on his old friend of late, and today was no exception, as reported at the Huffington Post (emphases mine):

What did White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card learn from Alberto Gonzales and when did he learn it...and what did he do with that knowledge? This "whole new can of worms" (to quote CBS News' Bob Schieffer, on this morning's Face The Nation) is to me the breaking news question of the day. Why? Because on today's Face The Nation, Alberto Gonzales admitted that he called Andrew Card right after he was notified that the Justice Department had opened its investigation of the Plame leak...even though he formally notified The White House staff 12 hours later.

On Face The Nation, Gonzales said the Justice Department contacted him at 8pm and, after responding by saying something to the effect that everyone had gone home for the night, Gonzales asked if it would be okay if he waited until 8am the next day to notify The White House Staff to "preserve all records" etc. Gonzales got permission to do so, but then - again this is Gonzales speaking on Face The Nation - he said he contacted Andrew Card to informally tell him what had happened.

I wish you could have seen Bob Schieffer's face as he came back from commercial break to his next guest, Senator Joe Biden, who he then took up this issue with. Bob Schieffer said to Joe Biden (I'm paraphrasing here...I'll post the transcript when it's available) "You know, everyone in The White House has these BlackBerrys. And you have to wonder what sort of message Andrew Card emailed at 8pm to the other people in The White House...what sort of documents could have been shredded in those 12 hours." There was little Joe Biden needed to add to what Bob Schieffer said. But Watergate - and the famous 18 1/2 minute gap on the audio recording (remember Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods posing for a picture in which she tried to demonstrate how she could have accidentally erased those 18 1/2 minutes from the tape?) - suddenly became the "pink elephant" in the room. You could see it on Schieffer and Biden's faces.

This is what Frank Rich mentioned today as well -- that you can shred a hell of a lot of documents in 12 hours. This is called "obstruction of justice", for those tempted to justify anything the Bush Administration does.

Now, if these documents are on hard disks as well (and presumably they are), they can be retrieved easily enough by companies specializing in retrieving data -- unless the disks were low-level formatted or otherwise destroyed, which hardly seems likely. I just wonder if Patrick Fitzgerald's office is tech-savvy enough to realize this.

So it would seem that the sharks are closing in, wouldn't it? Except that as this savvy Buzzflash reader notes, it would be completely in character for Bush 43 to do a pre-emptive pardon of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, or anyone else that Fitzgerald decides to indict, in order to avoid embarrassment, or possible exposure of impeachable crimes on his part -- because Bush 41 already did it:

Let's imagine for a moment that a member of the Bush Administration was pardoned by the president after being indicted for say, leaking a CIA undercover agent's name to the public. And let us also say for the purposes of this question that the Executive Clemency order was issued after the indictment was proffered but before the case was prosecuted. The very timing of this pardon would virtually steal the golden fleece of justice from American citizens before our Justice system could work its magic.

So then let's further imagine that the federal prosecutor had no choice but to challenge the legality of the executive branch's pre-empting the full and fair prosecution of the law.

Now, finally, here's the question to be posed to Judge Roberts...- "If the President issued this imaginary pardon BEFORE the conviction, and the resolution of this imaginary case came all the way down through the system to end up on your docket, how would you, as a Justice of the Supreme Court, likely rule?

"Bearing in mind, of course, that the subject being prosecuted might well be innocent. Or guilty. We'd never know for sure unless you issued a verdict against the President, finding it to be an abuse of power. Now for the purpose of this question, let's say that the pardoned subject was very close to the President himself, having been a member of his immediate Cabinet ever since the beginning of the first term in office. And because of his position, likely knew and could provide testimony against the very person who had actually cooked up this foul conspiracy and set it in motion in the first place.

"If only he could be compelled to testify. And that's the real twist to this whole puzzle we're asking you to solve. Let's say that due to strong loyalty and friendship, this person could not be compelled to reveal the source any other way than by being threatened with the possibility of prosecution and the resultant serious jail time for criminal conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

"Now wouldn't that be a fine kettle of fish if, by the sheer timing of his pardon, the President was allowed to protect himself, or perhaps shield some other guilty party in his Administration from prosecution for this most serious offense against homeland security?"

Now before you, dear reader, accuse me of a most fantastic flight of fancy that would never actually come to pass in the real world, let me explain. I didn't just pull this specter of an inopportunely timed pre-emptive pardon out of thin air.

In fact, I am only reframing an earlier case that actually set a legal precedent, which was pulled off by none other than George H.W. Bush. That's right, the father of our current president, and former head of the CIA successfully kept special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh from exacting justice for crimes committed during the Iran Contra illegal war which was secretly run out of the basement of Ronald Reagan's White House.

[snip]

Allowing former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and five others to skate away scot-free from their heinous actions likely did more harm than anyone ever thought possible.at the time. Besides making it possible for others higher up in that earlier Administration to avoid any threat of embarrassment or inconvenience that an indictment might have rendered, it also set a dangerous precedent and virtually guaranteed that there would be an escape plan for future White House Cabinet members as long as the President could be tied to the crime solely by the threat of their testimony.

All future Presidents could be virtually forced to shield his cabinet from prosecution. He would be required to protect himself from being tainted with the ever-standing threat of any- or- all being plea-bargained into (at the very least) tying him (or others in the Cabinet) with foreknowledge of virtually any crime.

The well-timed Presidential pardon is thus a program which provides Plausible Deniability Version 3.0 for the entire posse.

On Feb. 28, 2001, House of Representatives Judiciary Committee held hearings on the constitutional limits of the President with regards to the power of Executive Clemency. During those hearings, one member eloquently expressed his opinion that "Improperly exercised, the pardon is a travesty of justice—an act borne not of mercy, but of tyranny"

Besides pardoning his Secretary of Defense, Bush Sr. also ordered that the records produced as a result of the Iran Contra hearings be permanently sealed from public disclosure. Executive Order 12356 (also known as the "Weinberger Declaration") classified that material as "Top Secret" due to the probability that the material within would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to our national security. Yet his pardons weren't determined to pose a treasonous threat, because they were held to have only possibly protected him from prosecution.

I can't wait to see how the wingnuts justify such a pardon. 10 bucks says the words "at a time of war" are used, along with the ever-popular "9/11 changed everything."

Last I looked, though, 9/11 didn't allow presidents to protect their own crooked deeds, especially deeds that compromised national security.

Ribbet.

Hey, we put a ribbon magnet on the Hummer, what the heck do they want, anyway?

U.S. troops and their families are becoming justifiably tired of having to carry the whole weight of Bush's war on their shoulders while the folks at home refuse to sacrifice a damn thing:

The Bush administration's rallying call that America is a nation at war is increasingly ringing hollow to men and women in uniform, who argue in frustration that America is not a nation at war, but a nation with only its military at war.

From bases in Iraq and across the United States to the Pentagon and the military's war colleges, officers and enlisted personnel quietly raise a question for political leaders: if America is truly on a war footing, why is so little sacrifice asked of the nation at large?

There is no serious talk of a draft to share the burden of fighting across the broad citizenry, and neither Republicans nor Democrats are pressing for a tax increase to force Americans to cover the $5 billion a month in costs from Iraq, Afghanistan and new counterterrorism missions.

There are not even concerted efforts like the savings-bond drives or gasoline rationing that helped to unite the country behind its fighting forces in wars past.

"Nobody in America is asked to sacrifice, except us," said one officer just back from a yearlong tour in Iraq, voicing a frustration now drawing the attention of academic specialists in military sociology.

Members of the military who discussed their sense of frustration did so only when promised anonymity, as comments viewed as critical of the civilian leadership could end their careers. The sentiments were expressed in more than two dozen interviews and casual conversations with enlisted personnel, noncommissioned officers, midlevel officers, and general or flag officers in Iraq and in the United States.

Charles Moskos, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University specializing in military sociology, said: "My terminology for it is 'patriotism lite,' and that's what we're experiencing now in both political parties. The political leaders are afraid to ask the public for any real sacrifice, which doesn't speak too highly of the citizenry."

No, it doesn't. And when you have the 101st Fighting Keyboarders and the College Republicans giving lip service to supporting the troops, but of course the Jonah Goldbergs and the Nathan Taylors and the Ben Shapiro's have far more important things to do than actually ENLIST in the military, or even send a fucking USO care package. Why NOT just let the kids from the poor towns in the red states do it all.

But these armchair generals are simply following the lead of their own Fearless Leader, who when his country called him, found a cushy way out (Ann Coulter's claims that Bush was in more danger flying sorties over Texas than any soldier in Vietnam was notwithstanding).

These are the people who decry the "if it feels good, do it" society, and yet these are the people who advocate tax cuts for the wealthy at a time of war, who refuse to acknowledge our need to wean ourselves from fossil fuels while American young people are dying in an oil-rich country, who vote for Congressional representatives who vote to slash veterans benefits, and who refuse to put their own asses on the line to fight the war of the president they worship.

Every time a Jonah Goldberg says that he can't go to Iraq because he has a wife and baby at home, it's a slap in the face to every man stuck in Fallujah who couldn't be there when his child celebrated his first birthday.

If we are not willing to sacrifice anything at all in order to fight this war, then it's a war we have no business fighting. Period. And if this president of lies and deceit can't come up with a compelling reason why we're there, then he should get us the fuck out of there, and step down for fucking it up this badly.