Links on Senate intelligence report, elections, Bush and the Guard, and the gulag

Following are few links on stories I'm following.

Torture in the gulag

Gryn at Daily Kos has a report on a speech by Seymour Hersh: Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has the videos - Hersh 07/15/04. 

I haven't watched the speech, but Gryn links to it. (July 7, 6:15PM video, apparently).

Soccardad at the Left Coaster provides several other links on this: Update on the Abu Ghraib Children's Story 07/15/04.

Postponing elections

Patrick of Patrick's Place refers to my earlier posts on postponing elections and asks: "Do we want to be reactive to everything, or do we want to complain about any attempt to be proactive to a threat?"

Josh Marshall has provided a succinct answer to that question in the context of postponing elections, one on which I could not improve:

The rationale is that we need to have some policy in place for a possible election postponement before some precipitating event actually occurs. But my understanding is that we already have a policy in place on postponements: i.e., we don't do them.

Gimme that ole-time religion, it's good enough for me!

Robert Dreyfuss is pretty skeptical about the whole business:

Al Qaeda is bad news, but we’ve always been able to live with bad news. Meanwhile: Newsweek is reporting that Tom Ridge is cooking up a plan to cancel the November election in case of terrorist attack. I wonder if that attack might come in, say, Palm Beach County?

The San Francisco Chronicle also has advice on the idea of postponing the national election: Don't even think about it Editorial 07/13/04.  "The Bush people should drop the idea, lest the hint that terrorism could curb the rights of Americans be an added incentive to our enemies."

The relatively new (2004) blog The Thorn Papers from a Mississippi-based blogger takes a dim view of the whole idea.  And in a July 10 post, he noted a news article with anonymous intelligence sources quotes as saying that terrorist attacks were planned on polling station on the day of the presidential election, especially in New York and Los Angeles.  He notes:

Atacks on polling stations. In NY and LA. Hmmmmm. I guess al Qaeda wouldn't dream of hurting Americans in some solid republican state, would they. No, of course not. But in the interest of performing our patriotic duty to cower in fear, shop online, and just trust Bush to let Cheney protect us, you liberals on the coasts should just stay home on November 2. For your own good.

Senate intelligence report

Josh Marshall has been writing quite a bit about this at his Talking Points blog, starting with July 9.

Sid Blumenthal thinks the report provided some very important insights in the way the Bush crew operates: Learn the code Guardian (UK) 07/15/04.  Blumenthal's weekly columns normally appear simultaneously in the Guardian and Salon.com.

What the report does not note is the name or background of the NIE's [National Intelligence Assessment] director: Robert Walpole, a former national intelligence officer on nuclear weapons, a factotum of the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld. Walpole had demonstrated his bona fides in an incident that prefigures the WMD debacle, the writing of the alarmist report of the Rumsfeld commission in 1998, which asserted the ballistic missile threat from "rogue states" was imminent. That claim, used to bolster the case for a Star Wars programme, had beenrejected by a similar commission two years earlier.

Jules Witcover looks at the report's role in puncturing prewar hype Baltimore Sun 07/14/04:

This initial report dealt only with the reliability of the prewar intelligence, not with its use by the White House. By prior agreement between Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, the committee will now examine the use of that intelligence, but will not release its conclusions until after the November election.

That delay, clearly insisted upon by the Republicans, is a deplorable dodge of congressional responsibility. It's the same way Congress, and especially the Democratic leadership, ducked a serious debate before the 2002 congressional elections on whether use of American force was warranted against Iraq without broad international support.

This time, the Democrats doubtless wish they hadn't agreed to having the second part of the committee's report released after the election. But as the minority party in a Congress in which their say has been all but silenced by the well-disciplined Republican leadership on agenda issues across the board, the Democrats had no choice.

In any event, they already have ample political ammunition against the embattled president on his launching of the war and its chaotic aftermath.

Bush and the National Guard

No, this story hasn't died, no matter how hard most of our sad version of a political press corps has tried to ignore it.

Paradox at the Left Coaster is excited to see John Kerry getting more proactive on this issue: Kerry Finally Draws His Knife 07/13/04

The Bush campaign has, somewhat bizarrely, instead of trying to finesse the issue of Kerry's wartime service record, have made it almost unavoidable for Kerry to take on the issue with Bush head-on: Aiming for John Kerry's Purple Heart by Joe Conason Salon.com 07/16/04, one of a series of reports by Conason on the Swift Boat Liarsfor Bush group.

David Neiwert has forgotten the story: Input, please 07/02/04

Salon.com has also just run a new piece on it: The case of the missing Bush documents by James Moore 07/15/04.

Miscellaneous

Helena Cobban takes a hard look at the results of a previous "humanitarian" intervention, the one in Kosova.  Which, for the record, I personally supported.

The Myth of 'Humanitarian' War 07/15/04.  Although I'm not convinced by her argument, she has some excellent points, including this "Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact":

Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing 'humanitarian' war aims... Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of 'humanitarian' rhetoric... Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an 'unjust' or even 'unjustified' war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping.

She links to this article:  Kosovo Report Criticizes Rights Progress by U.N. and Local Leaders New York Times 07/14/04.