Green Velvet Revolution, Live

Folks, here's Nico Pitney's outstanding liveblogging coverage of the extraordinary events unfolding in Iran at the Huffington Post, including news reports, video coming in via YouTube from Tehran, photos, tweets, emails, and satellite communications.

At this stage, the government appears trying to put a lid on widespread street protests by shutting down the country's electricity grid and placing opposition leaders under house arrest.

Remarkable.


UPDATE:

Andrew Sullivan's coverage.

The Liberal blog Daily Kos aggregates coverage in its "Crisis in Iran Mothership."

The regime appears to be blocking Twitter and other social networks, and hunting down those with satellite phones. Not really a trait common to legitimately elected governments.

Ahmedinejad is claiming that the West is waging psychological warfare against Iran.

Perhaps. Or perhaps people everywhere who love freedom honestly think you're an asshole, and would like to see the Iranian people free from the Mullahs' tyranny.

UPDATE 102 am pst:

Pitney reports at HuffPo link, above, that there may be a move afoot to depose Khamenei -- that the election results may have represented a military coup -- and that this is the beginning of civil war.

Fresh pics here, at Tehran Live.

Oddly, Al Jazeera English seems to be downplaying these events. They are not buying the vote fraud story, and are painting the protests as something having to do with Northern Tehran hipsters -- and reporting that concerns about the legitimacy of the results stem from the U.S., Britain, and Canada ... only.

Judge Sotomayor In Context

by Richard B. Simon

President Barack Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, has triggered the predictable controversy that every Supreme Court nominee triggers in this splintered age.

The Republican Party, of course, opposes Sotomayor as a matter of principle. That principle appears to be the principle of opposing whomever a Democratic president nominates to the Supreme Court (much as the Democrats would likely oppose any GOP court nominee). In this case, the Republicans began publicly sketching out their arguments against the nominee before there even was a nominee.

The chosen argument against the Nuyorican Sotomayor is that she is a "racist."

The Republicans point to a speech Sotomayor gave in May, 2001 -- in the pre-9/11 era -- at Berkeley, in which she said "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Of course, we have now seen this quote trumpeted back and forth across the various newsmedia, used as a bludgeon (along with a 3-judge panel decision that struck down the New Haven fire department's promotion exam for being racially biased to white males) to accuse Sotomayor of "racism."

What we haven't seen anywhere, even on news programs where you'd expect better, is the supposedly inflammatory quote in context -- so that we can actually understand what she meant.

Of course, we have to also understand the context in which the speech was given. According to the Times,

It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, a symposium issue entitled "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation"

So, the topic specifically under discussion was the under-representation of Americans of Latin culture (and, in the case of this speech, women) in the American judiciary. And in the speech, Sotomayor is specifically making the point that judicial nominees who are not both caucasian and male were blocked by Congress more often and for longer than caucasian male nominees to the bench:

In at least the last five years the majority of nominated judges the Senate delayed more than one year before confirming or never confirming were women or minorities. I need not remind this audience that Judge Paez of your home Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, has had the dubious distinction of having had his confirmation delayed the longest in Senate history. These figures demonstrate that there is a real and continuing need for Latino and Latina organizations and community groups throughout the country to exist and to continue their efforts of promoting women and men of all colors in their pursuit for equality in the judicial system.

See if you can guess who controlled Congress during those five years.

You have to also know what racism actually is: it is the use of social stratification by physical characteristics, as a means to achieve social control.

The Republicans are asking us to ignore that this speech was given seven years before President George Bush said that he never imagined he'd see an African American president in his lifetime -- that it was incomprehensible to him. It came as a complete surprise that it was even within the realm of the possible.

And Gingrich and Limbaugh, twins born from the same cosmic egg (stamped "1992" and forever lost in that peak year for identity politics in American thought) are pretending that there is no legitimate difference in perspective on matters of justice between a member of a historically oppressed ethnic group or sexual persuasion and that of the Anglo-Caucasian male who has dominated this nation's politics of power for its entire history, often by caveat of law.

And in this, they have no idea that as unpalatably as Sotomayor's single sentence reads in this Age of Obama (and I would bet that audio from the speech reveals that this was not a line spoken entirely in earnest but a laugh line delivered with a New Yorker's stiletto tongue set firmly in cheek), they are proving it accurate.

Who else but privileged multi-millionaires, historically advantaged for their skin tone and sexual organs and having dwelled for decades in or adjacent to the seat of power, would take mortal offense at the very mention of their monopoly?

Who else could see a well-educated federal judge pointing out institutional race bias and dare call that racism, but someone who has never tasted racism's business end?

That, joke or not, was Judge Sotomayor's point.

Don't take my word for it; read the speech yourself.

The Villain, President Cheney

by Richard B. Simon

From analysis of Cheney's "national security speech" -- really an attempt to shield himself from prosecution for war crimes -- a few things become clear.

The first is that, assuming that Cheney wrote this speech and is acting as an independent operator (rather than as unleashed spokesman for the hapless Bush, who has been reduced to reminiscing to high school students about picking up dog feces), Cheney's entire worldview emanates from the trauma of being carried off to the bunker by the Secret Service on the morning of 9/11/01 -- while terrorists successfully attacked America on his watch.

If this is true, it represents a severe case of post traumatic stress disorder -- a potent brew of fear and guilt that resulted not only in such absurdities as the oft-derided (by Jon Stewart) "man sized safe" in the Vice President's office; the removal of Cheney's actual residence from the Google Earth mappng program; and the "undisclosed location" that was Cheney's official home for seven years -- but also such monstrosities as the legalization of torture at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

If one has the oft-derided (by Republican commentators) quality of empathy, the ability to see from another person's point of view, one might understand why Cheney is so angry. He believes that he did everything -- everything -- he could to save the country from another terrorist attack.

And he did. In seven years plus, no major terror attack (besides the anthrax letters that killed five and sickened seventeen Americans) occurred on U.S. soil. Unless you count the DC sniper shootings that killed thirteen people. Or the attacks on the soil of our NATO allies in London (2005, 37 killed, 700 injured) and Madrid (2004, 201 killed) in direct response to the Bush and Cheney administration's invasion of Iraq. No Americans were killed by terrorists (regardless that between a hundred thousand and a million Iraqis and nearly five thousand U.S. troops have died in the war in Iraq, with over 30,000 major injuries to U.S. troops alone.

Al Qaeda was kept on the run (Bin Laden and much of al Qaeda escaped the clutches of U.S. troops in Afghanistan as Bush and Cheney pulled U.S. Special Forces out, mid-battle, and sent them to Iraq to advance the coming war), its leadership command capability severed (though they did manage to assassinate Pakistani dissident Benazir Bhutto and commit major attacks in Mumbai and in Pakistan.) The Taliban was defeated, routed from power, and replaced in Afghanistan with the democratically-elected government of former Unocal executive Hamid Karzai (Although the Taliban actually advanced in Afghanistan -- Karzai's government controls little outside of Kabul -- and began the surprisingly-easy process of taking over Pakistan itself, advancing to within a hundred miles of the nuclear-armed capital.)

The Bush-Cheney foreign policy has left the world a much more dangerous place. They built a high wall around the "homeland" and fanned the flames of chaos outside it. But in Cheney's view, they staved off the destruction of an American city (well, unless you count New Orleans). And so how could Americans be so ungrateful (the bastard masses!) as to allow the evil, duplicitous Democrats to railroad him for committing war crimes -- to humiliate him again -- when all he did was everything he could -- everything! -- to keep America safe?

All of this presumes, of course, that Cheney was largely responsible for Bush's foreign policy, and that Cheney has not come out purposefully as a target to deflect blame from Dubble-yoo Dog-Doo.

In fact, Colin Powell's former deputy at the State Department, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, long considered to speak for Powell, confirmed last week that

Cheney was co-president. I'd go further than that and say that for national security issues and other critical issues Cheney was the President.

Who can blame Cheney for grabbing the reins? Bush was in over his head from the start. Certainly he was not qualified to defend the country. You leave the kid alone for one lousy month of summer vacation and look what happens. If you want something done right, you can hear the Vice President's wife telling him pillowside, you've got to do it yourself.

Of course, to accept even this, we must presume the best of intentions on his own part. That's what newly-minted Democrat Arlen Specter did for the nearly eight years in which he led the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with legal oversight of the administration. (And what a fine job he did.)

And so we must forget, entirely, that Cheney moved from the Defense Department, where he pushed to outsource military functions to private contractors; then went to work as CEO of the biggest such military contractor-slash-oilfield services provider; then started a war from which that contractor-slash-oilfield services provider profited to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars -- and all the while, the "Vice" President took an annual paycheck from the corporation nearly equal to his pay as "Vice" President -- and sometimes more.

(The Congress and the mainstream news outlets, at least, appear to have forgotten.)

Matthew Alexander, a lead interrogator in Iraq, has written an essay at the Huffington Post, in which he tells us that it is common knowledge among Iraq vets that the foreign fighters did not come streaming into Iraq to kill U.S. troops until after the revelations of torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib:

Anyone who served in Iraq, and veterans on both sides of the aisle have made this argument, knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq. What the former vice president didn't say is the fact that the dislike of our policies in the Middle East were not enough to make thousands of Muslim men pick up arms against us before these revelations. Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives.

He further asserts us the most valuable information that interrogators harvested from both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah came before they were tortured. KSM admitted to planning the planes operation (aka the 9/11 attacks) before he was tortured. Zubaydah gave interrogators the name of Jose Padilla, the "dirty bomber" (who himself was later tortured until he was totally crushed and broken, and information from him inadmissible in U.S. court) before he was tortured. Alexander argues that the non-torture interrogation techniques may have yielded bin Laden's whereabouts; torture never would.

But if normal, long-effective interrogation techniques were working in spades, why resort to interrogation techniques that are just as likely to get the prisoners to say absolutely anything?

As it turns out, interrogators were ordered to turn to harsh techniques when the Bush administration was actively seeking a pretext to trigger an invasion of Iraq. At the request of the Vice President's office, interrogators asked "high value detainees" about links between Iraq and al Qaeda -- while torturing them.

The tactics, borrowed from the SERE training program which trains US troops to resist North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet torture tactics by actually using those tactics on them, pretty much guaranteed that the interrogatees would make false claims -- in this case, false "evidence" linking Iraq and al Qaeda. SERE officials even wrote to argue against the use of such tactics. No one listened.

Maybe Cheney and Bush really suspected an Iraq link to 9/11, and would stop at nothing -- nothing! -- to know the truth. Or maybe they wanted was false positives.

Here's Wilkerson again:

What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 -- well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion -- its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

We know from Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that the Administration planned to invade Iraq from its first Cabinet meeting in 2001 -- many months before 9/11.

According to CNN,

[author Ron] Suskind said O'Neill and other White House insiders gave him documents showing that in early 2001 the administration was already considering the use of force to oust Saddam, as well as planning for the aftermath.

"There are memos," Suskind told the network. "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"

Suskind cited a Pentagon document titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," which, he said, outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from ... 30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq."

In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting asked why Iraq should be invaded.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" O'Neill said.

Now we know that torturing al Qaeda operatives captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and elsewhere was one of those ways.

Bush and Cheney hijacked 9/11 and used it to divert national retaliatory war fervor from capturing bin Laden to invading Iraq -- for reasons that pre-date the 9/11 attacks -- including Iraq's oil.

They let bin Laden go free -- and used him as a bogeyman to scare Americans into giving Republicans control of Congress in 2002; supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and re-electing Bush Cheney in 2004.

It is the original sin from which most post-9/11/2001 Bush administration crimes emanate.

The invasion of Iraq has made the world is a more dangerous place. America's moral authority remains in tatters. The Taliban are within arm's reach of nuclear weapons. The bad guys remain free. Engaged in a propaganda war -- which is, by definition, what a war against terrorists is -- the Bush administration handed the enemy an incomprehensibly stupid and potent victory.

But look who's done well.

The United States remains addicted to oil. The global warming crisis has intensified as the world, "led" by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, declined to act. The ice caps began to disintegrate, opening up yet another potential boon for Cheney's Halliburton, as a newly thawed international Arctic needs roads built, wells drilled, and pipelines lain.

What's more, Iraq's oil industry has been successfully de-nationalized; Exxon and Chevron are back in action in Iraq, from which they had been expelled in the 1970s. Halliburton made billions rebuilding Iraqi oil infrastructure and providing often-shoddy support services for U.S. troops. And Cheney made over a million in pay from Halliburton while in office. He retains 433,000 Halliburton stock options, as well as a Halliburton retirement account.

Come to think of it, it's no surprise that Cheney opposes shutting down Guantanamo -- he hired his own company, Halliburton, to the tune of between $40 and $500 million, to build the damned prison there in the first place.

And he profited from the deal. In 2002, the year Halliburton got that contract, Cheney was paid nearly as much by Halliburton as by the American taxpayer:

Vice President and Mrs. Cheney filed their federal income tax return for 2002 today ... The wage and salary income reported on the tax return includes $190,134 in government salary for the Vice President. In addition, the tax return reports the payment of deferred compensation from Halliburton Company, in the amount of $162,392.

In 2005, when Halliburton received an additional $30 million contract to expand the prison, Halliburton paid Cheney more than the U.S. taxpayer did.

Vice President and Mrs. Cheney released their 2005 federal income tax return today ... The wage and salary income reported on the tax return includes the Vice President’s $205,031 government salary. In addition, the tax return reports the payment of deferred compensation from income earned in 1999 from Halliburton Company in the amount of $211,465.

He'll probably profit from its dismantling.

Cheney has argued for years that the annual salary represents portions of his annual salary for 1999, and that the salary is fixed, and not tied to Halliburton's fortunes. But a Congressional report found in 2003 that Cheney did, indeed, retain financial ties to the company, as they are defined by ethics guidelines that bar such ties, even as he pursued policies from which the company profited in the extreme.

This is pretty basic movie villainy.

Whether he was a man with good intentions who was traumatized and led astray by a damaged psyche, or a truly evil, heartless criminal mastermind who ordered that people be tortured (phony morality be damned!) to gain false evidence to use to sucker the American people into waging a war for oil and profit and is now trying to build an insanity defense, the man must be brought to justice. We paid for this madness -- don't we have the right to at least know which it is, incompetence or evil? We've waited eight years to find out.

If he had class, courage, or dignity at all, he would accept that the country has moved on, that the time for Red Alert mode, for harsh torture and shock and awe and dictatorship had passed -- and like other hard men in our culture who cross the line, he'd disappear. Like Batman or Spider-man or the Mission Impossible team. They accept the ultimate responsibility for their lawlessness. Knowing that no one has your back if you get caught is part of the job. Accepting that is what makes them heroes.

But instead of accepting responsibility for lawlessness that they insist was absolutely necessary to protect country -- which the American people would be inclined to excuse -- Cheney and Bush, cowards both, purposefully sought to make lawlessness legal in order to protect themselves from criminal prosecution in the future. That's how it spread to Abu Ghraib.

Now they deny that the spread of legalized torture was their fault. Support the troops? They are still handing the troops the bag.

If we allow this behavior to pass into history without an accounting, without accountability, it sends the message down the ages that you, too, can take over this country, break its laws, destroy its moral standing, violate the Constitution you swore under oath to uphold, do with it what you will -- and you will get away with it. Because the precedent has been set: when the President authorizes it, it's legal. That ain't Democracy. It's Dictatorship.

Cheney opposes a truth commission? Okay. Make it Congressional hearings and a Justice Department criminal probe. Put him in the dock and watch him snarl at the judge. It will make for good television. And that's a good enough reason in America, isn't it? Maybe he'll bang his shoe on the table.

Still, a hundred bucks says that if Cheney winds up on trial, he dies of a heart attack out on his favorite river in Wyoming before it ever begins. The local doc, an old hunting and fishing buddy, will sign the death certificate, and -- just like Kenny Boy Lay -- no one will ever see the body.

We've seen this movie before.

Dissident Cheney

                       Mark Wilson / Getty Images

by Richard B. Simon

What does Dick Cheney want?

The former Vice President made a high-profile speech Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where his wife is a board member, essentially as a refutation of President Barack Obama's speech condemning torture and making the case for closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The two speeches could not have been a clearer illustration of the difference in policy, tone, and attitidue toward the American people between the Bush and Obama administrations.

Obama's speech was long and methodical and reasoned - typical of Obama's professorial style. His purpose was to herd members of Congress in both parties toward shutting Guantanamo. A Senate vote Wednesday yanked funding for closing the controversial facility, largely in response to Republican arguments that it is just too dangerous to have terrorists on U.S. soil, and in our justice system.

Obama made a pretty strong case that such fear is irrational: over 200 terrorists - including "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui and 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramsi Yousef - are already serving time in the U.S. prison system. No one, he said, has ever escaped from a U.S. Supermax (super-maximum security) prison.

More pointedly, Obama reminded his audience at the National Archives (chosen, apparently, for its authoritative-sounding natural reverb - as well as because it is where the Constitution is housed) that both parties last year chose candidates who abhorred torture and advocate the closing of Guantanamo.

Obama, as usual, spoke to the American people as if we were adults, capable of understanding and acting upon complex problems.

Cheney's tact was a bit different. He seemed ... defensive.

Despite the gymnastics of Congressional Republicans, who alternatingly abhor and embrace the policies of the Bush Administration, the national debate on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody in the War on Terror has seemed to settle on the conclusion that what the Bush Administration legalized as "enhanced interrogation techniques" amounted to torture - which is illegal, by both international and U.S. law.

Cheney has broken tradition in recent weeks to defend his administration's policies by attacking their aggressive rollback by Obama. Whether he is acting truly as a free agent, or still as the subterraneally quasi-official attack dog remains to be seen.

What is clear is that Cheney is trying to seize control of the debate, to reframe it in terms that don't cast him as a war criminal who would be liable to prosecution under international law.

Because that is exactly where this has been heading.

Cheney's speech is very clearly an attempt to re-frame the torture debate as "the criminalization of policy differences" in order to escape any sort of prosecution.

Cheney first attempts to establish his credibility by asserting that he has no hidden political agenda. He was never running for office, he is out of politics, and he is simply free, as a citizen, to speak his mind. He expects us to ignore the very real threat of personal legal jeopardy - in fact, his entire argument is based on us accepting that he is in no legal jeopardy, because all his actions were legal.

Cheney introduces his argument by saying:

The point is not to look backward. Now and for years to come, a lot rides on our president's understanding of the security policies that preceded him. And whatever choices he makes concerning the defense of the country, those choices should not be based on slogans and campaign rhetoric, but on a truthful telling of history.

So he is here to give us the Cheney version of "a truthful telling of history."

He gives some background on the U.S. response to terrorist incidents during Bill Clinton's tenure - culminating with the 9/11 attacks, nearly nine months into the Bush-Cheney term.

"From that moment forward," he says, "instead of merely preparing to round up the suspects and count the victims after the next attack, we were determined to prevent attacks in the first place."

It's a reasonable attack on the entire government response before 9/11. He continues by describing the threat spectrum the administration saw - including "the training camps in Afghanistan and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists." This is the same conflation of Hussein and al Qaeda, within the same sentence, that the administration used to lead the nation into Iraq.

"These are just a few of the problems we had on our hands," he continues. "And foremost on our minds was the prospect of the very worst coming to pass: a 9/11 with weapons of mass destruction."

He then gives a personal anecdote about his experience on 9/11, being whisked to a bunker beneath a White House believed to be about to be hit by an airplane. And he gives us an honest glimpse into the Bush White House mentality from then on:

"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities."

Cheney details Bush administration policies and successes, including dismantling Libya's nuclear program and breaking up the A.Q. Khan black market nuclear technology network.

Then he begins his attack.

So we're left to draw one of two conclusions, and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event, coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. Whichever conclusion you arrive at, it will shape your entire view of the last seven years and of the policies necessary to protect America in the years to come.

He presents a false dilemma - either we continue all of the Bush Cheney national security policies - including torture, pre-emptive wars, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens without warrants - or we treat 9/11 as a "one-off event" that is indicative of no further threat.

Obviously, in Cheney's worldview, conservatives are on one side, and liberals are on the other. There is, as he will assert later, "no middle ground" in what he is carefully framing as a political debate between the two ideologies.

Cheney next admits that the administration created legal framework in which intelligence operatives could interrogate detainees.

In seeking to guard this nation against the threat of catastrophic violence, our administration gave intelligence officers the tools and the lawful authority they needed to gain vital information.

This seems to be an admission that the intelligence agents did not have the lawful authority "needed to gain vital information" - to use what Cheney will call "enhanced interrogation tactics" - until the administration gave it to them.

He then cites the Constitutional authority of the executive branch, as well as the Authorization of the Use of Military Force, the 2002 bill that gave the Bush Administration a blank check to do anything at all in pursuit of the terrorists:

We did not invent that authority. It's drawn from Article Two of the Constitution, and it was given specificity by Congress after 9/11 in a joint resolution authorizing all necessary and appropriate force to protect the American people.

One of Cheney's goals is to spread responsibility, then, to the Congress.

He then attacks the New York Times for doing journalism - for investigating and revealing Bush administration policies that violated the law - and moves directly into his defense of the interrogation practices in question:

In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations.

He takes responsibility without actually taking responsibility:

In top-secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.

And states his core message:

The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do.

Cheney ironically accuses the Obama administration of selectively declassifying documents, to tar the previous Administration with memos directing the interrogations from the White House, without releasing the documents that he has requested, which he says would detail not just the interrogation practices, but the answers they yielded. These answers, Cheney maintains, kept Americans safe.

The Obama administration has not denied this - but Obama has said that there are better, more effective ways to garner information from detainees and/or suspects, which do not sacrifice America's core values in the name of expedience.

Yet Cheney continues to work to frame the debate:

Over on the left wing of the president's party, there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists. The kind of answers they're after would be heard before a so-called truth commission. Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense and political opponents as criminals.

It's hard to imagine a worse precedent filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessor.

In Cheney's view, there is no validity in seeking to learn the truth about the Bush administration's policies. There is no valid reason for investigating whether the policies were lawful; and if not, how illegal policies such as torture were justified and legalized. In Cheney's view, the only reason anyone would want to have a "truth commission" (which in actuality has been proposed as an alternative to criminal proceedings, or to political hearings in Congress) is to "criminalize the policy decisions" of the Bush administration.

It is reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's and Slobodan Milosevic's attacks on the legitimacy of the Iraqi court and the War Crimes Tribunal, respectively.

And at this point in the speech - and increasingly with every iteration of the root "criminal," you start to sense that this man is afraid. He is trying to kill the very idea that what they did may have been illegal - and in so doing, to try to control the Bush-Cheney administration's legacy in history, which is fast being written to include torture, and then perhaps to keep himself out of prison.

He goes on to deflect the hot light onto lawyers and intelligence operators by asserting that a truth commission would impugn their service to country.

He threatens Obama by suggesting that an investigation of the interrogation methods will lead to the American people being left unprotected:

I would advise the administration to think very carefully about the course ahead. All the zeal that has been directed at the interrogations is utterly misplaced, and staying on that path will only lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people.

It is classic Cheney: do exactly what I want you to do, or risk another attack. This was the entire core message of the (effective) 2004 Bush Cheney re-election campaign.

Cheney spends some time talking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged master plotter of the 9/11 attacks, focusing the torture debate on him:

It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about his beheading of Daniel Pearl.

Cheney is basically saying it's not torture - and, anyway, we only did it to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The latter assertion is a seeming admission that, well, sure it's torture - but it's okay to use torture on guys like this who are obviously villains. It's an argument that comes up later.

More interestingly, Cheney says:

In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib with the top-secret program of enhanced interrogations.

At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulation and simple decency. For the harm they did to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice.

This charge mirrors the administration's own conflation of Iraq and al Qaeda.

But Cheney does not appear to recall that Major General Geoffrey Miller was tasked with exporting interrogation techniques from Guantanamo to Iraq, and specifically to Abu Ghraib".

Cheney is still trying to pin Abu Ghraib on the lowest men (and women) in the chain of command - but Charles Graner and Lynndie England always maintained that they had been asked - by CIA interrogators -- to "soften up" the prisoners for interrogation. This flows directly from the "Gitmoization" of the Abu Ghraib prison - the migration of the interrogation practices which Cheney admits to having purposefully made legal from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib.

This is exactly why you don't legalize torture. In theory, you can torture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Osama bin Laden all you want, and not many people would complain. But once you make it legal, it spreads beyond your control.

At Abu Ghraib, innocent men who were not hardened terrorists or even al Qaeda affiliates were subjected to this treatment, because Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon sought better intelligence on the insurgency.

Still, Cheney asserts that

it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.

"Those personnel," he continues, "were carefully chosen from within the CIA and were especially prepared to apply techniques within the boundaries of their training and the limits of the law.

And then Cheney admits what we've known all along: that the Bush administration specifically sought to define the line so that "interrogation" stopped just short of torture:

Torture was never permitted. And the methods were given careful legal review before they were approved. Interrogators had authoritative guidance on the line between toughness and torture, and they knew to stay on the right side of it.

Cheney goes on to impugn the motives of those who want to see the rule of law reinstated in this country, and some kind of accounting for lawless behavior.

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.

There is no such thing, in Cheney's mind, as legitimate concern for the rule of law. Any outrage about the Bush administration's legalization of torture is "feigned" and based on a false story. Any indignation is "contrived" and all discussion of morality surrounding the mistreatment of detainees is "phony."

Perhaps he is referring to Pelosi and others who may have been briefed on, and at least tacitly approved policies such as waterboarding (though had the leaders of the minority party in Congress objected to these policies, they would have had no lever for airing or acting upon dissent; we know that such briefings were conducted under threat of prosecution - members of Congress were forbidden to discuss the meetings with anyone.)

But it is difficult to not read this as an assault on anyone who expresses outrage, indignation, or any moral qualms about the Bush administration's policies.

"I might add," Cheney continues, "that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about values.

He then concocts a straw man, and attacks an argument that no one has made publicly:

Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance.

When Cheney says "Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings; they were trying to prevent future killings," he appears to be responding directly to the Convention Against Torture, which states:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Then he comes back to his central attack:

[T]o call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe.

This is a guilt appeal (how dare you "libel" the dedicated professionals who save lives) coupled with a personal attack on Obama (for false "righteousness") that ends in the requisite fear appeal: Not only is this not torture, but we must continue to do it in the future, or we will be attacked again - and it will be all your fault.

Cheney goes on to say that Obama's attempts at political reconciliation are dangerous. He asserts that there is "no middle ground" in the War on Terrorism:

[I]n the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half-exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States; you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States.

It's Cheney's way, one hundred percent, or a nuclear attack. Moreover, any policy that falls short of the line just short of torture is a "half measure."

This is the definition of totalitarianism.

Cheney continues, attacking some perceived "political correctness" before discussing the closing of Guantanamo Bay, another policy with which he disagrees. Closing the prison camp, Cheney says, will please Europe, but it won't make Americans more safe.

He refutes the notion that Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses were used as "recruitment tools" by al Qaeda, and mocks any such concern, again, as fainthearted concern about a loss of American values. Yet it has been largely Cheney allies such as Senator Lindsay Graham and General David Petraeus, who have spoken out against releasing photographic evidence of prisoner abuse, lest they provide propaganda tools for al Qaeda and inflame the international press.

In any event, Cheney is more interested in making an impression on terrorists than on our NATO allies. He argues that a debate over foreign policy - a debate which, after a national election largely repudiated his policies, he started - shows weakness to the terrorists. Therefore, of course, we must not debate whether Bush policies were legal - we must simply continue them.

He asserts again that if we are wise,

Instead of idly debating which political opponents to prosecute and punish, our attention will return to where it belongs: on the continuing threat of terrorist violence and on stopping the men who are planning it.

He again touts the lack of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil as evidence of the rightness of the policies, always bringing it back to this idea of criminalization:

After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven-and-a-half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.

Throughout the final quarter of the speech, Cheney attacks the very idea that the interrogation policies represent a failure to adhere to America's core values. And anyway, there is nothing more American than preventing Americans from being killed. And there is nothing morally wrong with treating suspected terrorists unpleasantly:

For all that we've lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were neither innocent nor victims.

At its core, Cheney's argument is that the interrogation policies are not torture, and that they therefore were legal. He argues that anyone who says otherwise is merely expressing phony outrage in pursuit of a political goal: the criminalization of political opponents.

We might conclude that, as he claims, he is asserting all this in service to the national debate - but he does not believe we should even have a debate. He says he wants to speak truth to the historical record - yet he opposes a truth commission to find facts objectively. He wants us to believe that he is above politics - yet Cheney does not appear to believe that there is such a thing as legitimate moral indignation or outrage. There is only cynical political posturing, self-interest, and self-righteousness.

By Cheney's own reckoning, then, we must conclude that this speech is an attempt to confuse the public's sense of the debate by claiming that it is not about legalizing criminality but about criminalizing politics. Any investigation into Bush administration interrogation policy is tantamount to criminalizing political differences, rather than legitimate inquiry into whether political leaders acted criminally, whether in the public interest or not.

In addition, by tying Democrats to a policy (Obama's) that he forcefully asserts endangers the country (i.e., lead to another terrorist attack), while asserting that no motive outside of partisan gain is even fathomable, Cheney appears to be betting his own fortunes, and those of his party, on the success of the terrorists.

Finally, by making himself a forceful and very high-profile critic of the Obama administration, Cheney is trying to cast himself as a political dissident. This will allow Cheney - and his lawyers - to argue that any pursuit of legal charges or even investigation of Cheney is the result of political persecution for his vocal criticism.

It is a pre-emptive attack against an existential threat: the threat of prosecution for war crimes.

Killing Cap And Trade

by Richard B. Simon

As yet another major, eons-old ice shelf crumbles off Antarctica, Senate Democrats who represent states with large oil and coal industries have moved to prevent long-needed legislative action to stave off catastrophic global warming.

Members of Congress, it turns out, often have no understanding of how the world actually works -- regardless of party. Just as clear is that a human will not believe that something is so if his or her paycheck depends on it not being so. That is as true for a politician as it is for an industrialist or his peon -- and the Fossil Barons control so much wealth, the politicians and peons are become one and the same.

And so, Republican and Democratic Senators from Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Alaska, Oklahoma and more, whose state industries rely on selling products that, when used correctly, cause mass species extinctions -- possibly including our own -- do not believe what is before their very eyes: the ice caps are crumbling into the sea.

The sea level is rising, if slowly. And if Anarctica sheds all its ice into the ocean, sea level will rise by 186 feet. That will take care of most major American cities, and displace hundreds of millions -- if not billions -- of human beings around the globe. The widespread displacement that rising sea levels will cause leads to resource poverty; to starvation; to disease and calamity spreading in all directions; to war. We won't need to worry about Iran driving Israel into the sea. We'll have driven the sea into Israel, using only the carbon atom.

The U.S. has its first chance ever to pass meaningful legislation to regulate and begin to reduce the real amount of the most common greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, emitted into the atmosphere every year in this country -- which has been, for decades, the world's largest emitter.

But, to these wise "moderate" women and men in the Senate, preventing global cataclysm remains a distant second, if not third, fourth, or twelfth place, behind protecting profits and jobs in their home state oil and coal industries.

What they are opposing, on economic grounds, is a cap and trade system to reduce the carbon emissions that are causing the planet to overheat.

A cap and trade system seems complex -- but it is not. Every business entity that emits CO2 as part of its ordinary operations receives, from the government, a credit -- permission to emit X amount of CO2, for the year. If the business -- say, a coal fired power plant -- emits more than X amount in a year, the plant has two options: reduce emissions by making technological improvements, or purchase credits from another entity that does not need the entire allotment, such as one that chosen to refit already.

This creates a market for industrial carbon credits (not to be confused with carbon offsets).

Every year, the bar is lowered: the amount of CO2 permitted is decreased. And each credit, as the supply of them decreases, is worth more and more money.

A business that eliminates its CO2 emissions altogether profits by selling its credits -- the right to pollute X amount of carbon in a given year -- on the ever-tightening carbon credits market.

Carbon-intensive businesses can upgrade and update their equipment on a pace that makes the most sense for their bottom lines, which is what companies do. But they can't do nothing.

They can put off major plant upgrades for as long as it makes sense to buy credits, rather than new technology. A power plant can save and plan for several years toward plant upgrades to reduce emissions, while buying time in the form of carbon credits.

This is a market-based, capitalistic solution, and it works; we have done this since the 1990s with sulfur oxides emitted by midwest power plants and factories, which had been causing acid rain deposition, killing northeast lake ecosystems. Cap and trade also did not, as its opponents invariably decried, adversely affect the economy.

Friedman favors a carbon tax. That is a viable option, too, which would force us all to consider the cost of using the atmosphere as a garbage dump, every time we add to it. It is more direct, and even less complex.

These are not "command-and-control" solutions. They are all based on the combination of smart regulation and market forces. It's a matter of shaping the market.

We should empathize with fossil state senators wanting to protect their constituents' jobs in a time of national economic crisis -- and more so with those constituents, who need work. But if we found out that we were growing a food crop that poisoned our children, guaranteeing certain premature death, would we continue to allow that crop into our food supply, merely to protect the jobs of those farmers and farm hands who tend it? Or would we eliminate the poison crop, and help retrain those hands to find work elsewhere? Or, better yet, help those farmers transition to a new crop?

Global warming is a global problem, where for many decades, those who have not benefited from industrialization have been forced to bear the externalized costs of industrial business, the prices that neither the buyer nor the seller has to pay, because they are passed on to some other entity, external to the transaction. A sucker, in other words -- the poor suckers into whose rivers, whose atmosphere our factories shit. As in, we don't have to pay to get rid of our industrial waste. We'll just dump it into the river, and some other sucker will clean it up down the road, down stream, down the generations.

For example, when I buy a gallon of gasoline, I pay once at the pump, again in my income taxes for industry subsidies, again when taxpayers are forced to clean up environmental damage, and again (and again and again) when taxpayers must reimburse China (with interest) what we borrowed to fund the Iraq War.

For obvious reasons, the oil companies are not signing on to the new green revolution -- they have learned over time that they have so much money, they can ride out whatever fickle storms wash across public opinion. They are still banking on Americans moving beyond concern about global warming. They are planning their operations to drill under the extinct polar ice caps.

Chevron is running ads that air every day on PBS, at the beginning and end of the News Hour -- a repetition tactic, repeating the same message, day after day after day, at three o'clock and four o'clock, at six o'clock and seven. It is a desperate and manipulative propaganda campaign, which uses powerful emotional appeals -- pictures of babies, for example, people jogging, and people in ethnic garb -- to re-frame the problem as merely one of supply -- in Chevron's eyes, the problem is that there's not enough energy to meet the demand of growing global population.

The problem is merely one of finding enough energy, you see -- and that's why it will take "all forms of energy" to meet the needs of the future -- especially oil.

The ads are designed to get us to forget all about global warming. In this iteration, they'd rather frame the Iraq War as having to do with oil than even mention that their product causes global catastrophe and extinction. Never mind the consequences of continuing to burn oil into the atmosphere "for the foreseeable future" -- the period of time in which we'll still use oil, according to Chevron. Some other sucker will pay the price.

Of course, the ultimate sucker is all of us. For who will pay the price of evacuating Manhattan to higher ground, to relocating Floridians into the Ozarks? Who will pay to guard the borders against the starving, vengeful throngs of desperate humanity? Hint: not Chevron.

We have long ignored the consequences because they are felt elsewhere -- but, Senator Landrieu of Louisiana, how many millions of deaths by drowning in strengthened hurricanes and monsoons, how many ruined crops in desertified breadbaskets will it take before another set of airplanes or bombs comes crashing into our capital cities in protest? Senator Lincoln of Arkansas, how many lives displaced or destroyed by catastrophic global warming, sea level rise, flooding, megastorms, ecosystem collapse, disease, and resource war is a coal miner's meager paycheck worth?

The purpose of adding a carbon tax or using cap and trade is to internalize the externalities -- to include the actual costs of burning carbon into the atmosphere into the actual price of the carbon-based fuels.

So, like, if you were to wage war to keep the oil flowing to your SUV truck, you'd pay for it at the pump, rather than in your income taxes -- or putting it on the national credit card, as we've been doing since 2002.

And if you were going to use a fuel that meant that you would have to pay to someday move Manhattan to higher ground in the Catskills or the Poconos, maybe you'd do well to include the cost of the eventual move in the price of the fuel. It's actually cheaper to pay it up front.

Still, once you had to start paying that price -- the actual price -- day after day after day after day after day, just to get to work, maybe you'd think harder about getting to work some other way.

It Was Torture

by Richard B. Simon

Allow me first to come clean.

When I heard that U.S. troops had captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I fantasized about his torture.

So I am complicit. This is a democracy. I shouldn't expect its leaders to be any better than I, nor any smarter, or any wiser.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is essentially the arbiter of war crimes. Red Cross observers are allowed to examine a host country's detention facilities, to check on the status of the prisoners, and issue report back to that nation's government.

The report back to the Bush Administration on the treatment of prisoners in the "War on Terror," leaked to author Mark Danner, who reports on the report in the New York Review of Books, ruled that the treatment amounted to "torture."

Torture is illegal, under international law, and under United States law.

The Bush Administration made it "legal" -- partly by claiming for the executive branch a dictatorship, wherein anything goes, so long as the President wills it.

Regardless of the travesty done to U.S. law, this means that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, perhaps John Ashcroft, and all other top officials who came up with the Bush Administration's interrogation policies appear to be guilty of international war crimes.

If the were any other country, we'd denounce its rulers, call them demented villains, drag them into court. Demand regime change. Now we know for certain why the Bush Administration wouldn't join the International War Crimes Tribunal.

I will never in my life forget the Thanksgiving -- a handful of years ago -- when I announced to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and their inlaws that the Bush Administration and its Republican Party would be remembered by history in the same breath as Nazis of Germany and the Communists of the Soviet Union. You could hear their jaws hit the floor.

All except my grandfather. He knew. He actually served in Italy, fought the fascists up close. He knows from dictatorship. My uncle later complained that my Granfather pretended to spit at his big-screen television set -- "Ptui!" -- when Bush appeared therein, as if this were some unfathomably insane response.

You've heard in this space for a long time that the United States was torturing detainees; that that torture was not limited only to al Qaeda suspects, nut that it had been exported to Iraq, to Abu Ghraib.

And so my good brother Emilio sends me a brilliant op-ed by the sometimes weaselly political shill Paul Begala, that discussed Bush lawyer John Yoo's approval of the crushing of a terrorist suspect's child's testicles -- and says "this reminded me of you."

Because over the weekend, up pops the noble gentlemen Dick Cheney, who can't help but attack the fledgling Obama Administration as it attempts to remantle the country.

Of course, we should have known that the Bushists, after breaking all of America's moral codes, would not be able to help but defy precedent and attack its successors during a national crisis.

No one from the Democratic Party, and no one from the Clinton Administration, leapt up to attack Bush and Cheney's handling of 9/11. But the Bushists emerge from their torpor to raise doubts about Obama's policies -- particularly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially on the handling of detainees.

That's because they know, in what's left of their hearts, that in a just world, the gallows awaits them, just like it awaited Saddam.

Dick Cheney and George Bush have killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq.

They have presided over rape rooms and tortures.

They have devastated your country's economy, attacked their own people, and courted environmental disaster on behalf of your corporate allies.

They destroyed the rule of law in a country founded solely on the rule of law.

They couldn't help it. They would do it again. It was the only choice, you see.

George Orwell writes

[W]hen the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

We had to stay in Iraq forever, Cheney has argued for years, because if we were to leave, bin Laden would think we are weak.

And here comes Cheney, unaware that he is bin Laden to Obama's Bush.

Every time bin Laden popped up with a new tape, he told us that we must do the exact opposite of what the Bush Administration was doing -- essentially reenforcing Bush's arguments that we needed to "stay the course." (The disastrous course, which would have continued unimpeded had the Democrats not taken control of Congress in 2006. Only then did Bush sack Rumsfeld and institute "the surge." Until that "accountability moment," everything had gone just exactly perfectly.)

The new, self-styled boogeyman is Cheney, popping up once a month, telling us that Obama's rollback of the Bush Cheney lawlessness will endanger America. Ignoring that torture and asinine detention policies have led ex-Guantanamo detaineed to come back as Taliban commanders and suicide bombers. Would these guys have been returned to the battlefield if they'd been detained as simple prisoners of war, rather than in the lawless Bush "War on Terror" detention system?

No. They would still be in detention, until bin Laden formally surrenders.

But we would not have been able to torture them.

In the same week, Ari Fleischer begins the parade of Bushist thugs crawling out from under their rocks, where they are unemployed (the return of poetic justice), untouchable by decent folks running clean operations, arguing the same.

And now Cheney is arguing that the damage done to the economy was not Bush's fault, but the result of 9/11, essentially handing bin Laden the propaganda victory he sought from the beginning -- to bankrupt the U.S. as the mujahedin did the U.S.S.R.

What has become clear in recent months is the psychopathology of the Bushists.

Bush and Cheney were supposed to be a gang of toughs, oil wildcatters from Wyoming and Tejas, the kinds of places you don't want to be caught after dark if you're queer or brown or funny-looking, or you have long hair or funny clothes, or you drink strong coffee or drive a car built in Scandinavia.

9/11 happened on their watch.

The terrorists aimed a plane for the White House.

They missed on the latter count, but Cheney and Bush were obviously shaken, and remained so. They swore this would never happen again, if they had to destroy the country themselves to prevent bin Laden from humiliating them again.

And that's what they did. The United States suffered seven and a third long long years the ravages of governance by men and women wracked with post traumatic stress disorder.

It's no way to run a country.

But now that Bushism has been totally discredited, even by their own ideological allies, who enabled their every single move, and threw the system of checks and balances out the window (just listen to Republican Senators Arlen Specter and John Cornyn, complaining that Vermont Senator Leahy's Truth Commission to investigate terror War lawlessness would be an abdication of Congress' oversight function, as if they hadn't abdicated it nearly a decade ago) they're back, trying to salvage a legacy that they don't seem to even understand is in total shambles, to save themselves from the harsh verdict of the historians, who rank Bush 36th out of 42 former Presidents.

But we now know that the arbiter of war crimes found that the leaders of our democracy engaged in them. Just like Milosevich, just like Saddam, just like Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini and Bashir and Stalin and the worst of history's actors. And just like all of them, they did it in the name of Protecting the Homeland.

This is a democracy. We are responsible. Our leaders represent us. We choose them. We must bring them to justice, or else how are we any better from Ahmedinejad who says that the Holocaust never happened?

Leahy's Commission is a way to remove it from the Republican vs. Democrat frame. The Republicans don't want that, because then they can't assert that for every truth ("The Bush Administration instituted torture"), there is an equal and opposite Republican version ("it's not torture if we have a piece of paper from Bush and Cheney's personal lawyers that say it isn't").

The Bushists are reemerging to muddy the ethical waters. It's what they do best -- disseminate misinformation and disinformation, to confuse the electorate.

Just as America is beginning to get its moral footing, they seek to pull the rug out, to protect their own asses.

What else is new?

Apocalypse, Now

  London, 2070? (Image: Christopher Hudson, from The Daily
  Mail UK)

The news trickles in from the international conference on global climate change in Copenhagen this week -- and it ain't good.

The reality is as bad as the worst-case scenarios of the climate models we've been looking at over the last several decades.

That means widespread catastrophe, impending.

No kidding.

We need urgent, urgent action -- and, thanks to the decade of inaction by the climate criminal Bush, the Exxon stooge, it is too late to stave off catastrophic global heating (as James Lovelock calls it.)

The question that remains is, can we stop emitting carbon; start actually removing carbon and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; move humans from coastal areas and fortify or rebuild coastal cities quickly enough to prevent the displacement of hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of human beings, and the ensuing massive global disruption (a.k.a. "war") that massive populations on the move will mean?

Lovelock believes that for the species to actually survive the pending heat age, we will have to move to the Arctic. Not all of us, mind you -- most of us will die, and so will our offspring.

You start to understand why the extraordinarily wealthy have engineered the most massive redistribution of wealth, upward, in human history. Certainly the Bush family will be able to stake its claim on Arctic land and hire its own private army of mercenaries for protection.

What's worse is that "global dimming" may mean that if we stop emitting all pollution tomorrow, the sunlight (and heat) that has been blocked by particulate pollution may actually exacerbate global heating.

So much for the smartest animal.

We need to deal, people. Hard core. No more fucking around.

Nuclear power, solar, tides, wind. Get out of the car. Stop using so much electricity.

Elect only politicians that get it. Ignore the ones that don't. They're only muddying the waters because A. they don't understand the science or B. they are sucking at the golden teat of the energy industries, or C. all of the above.

They're still trying to convince you that tacking 3-4% onto the tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans is the most massive and egregious redistribution of wealth in history. How about taking the health, welfare, and well-being of the entire human race, every coastal city, every productive agricultural belt and sacrificing them to the oil companies, so they can look for oil under where the ice caps used to be?

Finally, let's hang George Bush from a lamp-post. The full Saddam.

Do you get it yet? He sold out the human race for a few million silver pieces from Exxon.