What we're letting the Bush Administration get away with
Today, we have a roundup of some of the various things the Bush administration in specific and the GOP in general and its supporters are getting away with as we speak. This is by no means a definitive list, but it should give you a glimpse of just how many outrages are slipping past us under the watchful eye of the so-called "liberal media".

What International Law?

Some of you may have read through my recent posts on the Bush administration's selective disregard for international law--selective rather than utter, because Bush was perfectly content to cite Saddam's defiance of UN resolutions as justification for his own defiance of UN resolutions. While this receives a certain amount of play in the foreign press, the American media has been almost completely mute on the fact that the war was, put simply, illegal. This is regrettably understandable--to accuse one's own country and head of state of criminal acts is a severe charge indeed, and even implying it would be enough to sink a journalist's career in the times we live in.

Likewise, there is no doubt that our military has and continues to commit war crimes in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In fairness, this is rarely the fault of the grunts on the street, most of whom haven't been educated on all the details of just what kind of conduct is prohibited by international law and treaty, and don't know that the orders they're being given are illegal.

Nevertheless, there is no moral ambiguity in some of what has been done. The US military has acknowledged it has recently been seeking advice from Israel on how to conduct the occupation and counterinsurgency--a country with a thirty-five year track record of human rights abuses, which stands in violation or is the subject of thirty-four UN resolutions condemning such; a country whose counterinsurgency effort can not be called even remotely effective. Indeed, we have already taken a number of pages from Israel's book: US forces kidnapped the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general, leaving a note demanding he turn himself in if he wanted his family released, an act which is in violation of both the Fourth Geneva Convention and US Army law; we've bulldozed the crops of farmers who are suspected of withholding information on insurgents; we've been busy returning to heavy-handed tactics which accomplished nothing of strategic counterinsurgent value.

Gitmo and the Assault on Human Rights

Everyone should have at least heard the names "Guantanamo" or "Gitmo" by now. They are short for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an island of legal limbo for almost seven hundred people, half of whom have been detained for almost two years, and none of whom have had any charges of any sort filed against them. Eighty-four people have already been deemed innocent and transferred to their home countries for release, while 140 more are scheduled to be released at "a politically propitious time".

International law prohibits this kind of indefinite detention without charge or counsel during a time of war, and in an effort to do an end-run around these laws, the Bush administration has invented a new category of human being out of thin air: the enemy combatant. Put simply, once the President decides that a person is an "enemy combatant", be they a foreign national or an American citizen, they have no rights under international or American law, and are entitled to no protections or due process under the Bill of Rights. Once they are in Gitmo, their status and detention are beyond challenge or accountability. The sole judge of who loses all rights by becoming an enemy combatant is the President of the United States.

The administration has defended their legal invention by Presidential fiat, and the camps at Guantanamo, by claiming that they are a necessary tool in the War on Terror. This is becoming a familiar line to anyone who has followed the steady erosion of our rights since 9/11--every time we are asked to give up a measure of freedom or accept an otherwise despicable policy, it is framed as an issue of national security, with the obvious implication being that anyone who opposes these policies is soft on terror. What we are in fact opposed to is the administration's open defiance of basic human rights and fundamental American principles of justice. Seven hundred people are being held without charge, without counsel, without rights, and being thoroughly interrogated--often on the basis of nothing more than a tipoff by a neighbor who turned them in for the reward money.

Guantanamo Bay is a concentration camp. All it lacks are executions, and it may yet get those once the military tribunals start. That it is not being roundly condemned by the American people is a sign of how well this administration's scare tactics have worked.

Where's Osama? and Other Forgotten Villains

Yet have any of these excesses made us safer? For all that we've given up and accepted over the last two years in the name of defending ourselves from terrorism, are we actually any safer? Only one in four Americans seem to think so, and the more they learn, the less likely they are to support the administration's policies. Bush has pushed the country into a war that millions vocally opposed, violated international law in doing so, rent dangerous rifts in alliances which have stood for decades, run roughshod over the Bill of Rights with the odious and Orwellian "Patriot Act", spent incalculable political capital and every shred of goodwill the world held for us after 9/11, and has galvanized anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world to unprecedented levels. Indeed, we have not only given jihadis, terrorists, and insurgents of all flavor 130,000 targets to shoot at, but we have provided them with a gold-plated rallying and recruiting point, and our ongoing heavy-handed tactics and ignorance of Islamic and Arab culture ensure that we are continually creating new generations of people who have reasons to hate America.

In a desperate attempt to continue capitalizing on American sentiment towards 9/11, the administration continues to sell the Iraq war as being central to the war on terror. Nothing could be further from the truth. No credible evidence exists that Saddam Hussein had any connection to al Qaeda or to 9/11--quite the contrary, during the run-up to the Iraq war a verified audio statement by Osama bin Laden called upon Muslims in Iraq to rise up against their secular leader. We took out the Taliban in Afghanistan with ruthless efficiency, sent bin Laden into hiding, and positioned ourselves to rebuild Afghanistan as a modern, democratic country--yet ever since George Bush decided to take out Saddam, Afghanistan and bin Laden have become afterthoughts. The country is still in ruins, its hand-picked leader Karzai an ineffective puppet, the peacekeeping forces impotent and besieged, and opium production is reaching record highs. Yet Bush is now dismissing bin Laden as unnecessary to the war on terror, and seems to have left Afghanistan in the dust in what may be a chilling preview of our Iraq policy a year from now. The Weapons of Mass Destruction, the threat of which was so imminent and deadly that we had to halt the ongoing UN inspections and go to war /right now/, have failed to materialize--indeed, we're not even really looking that hard despite the absolute conviction our administration had that they existed in vast amounts.

The truth is that Iraq is a distraction which had nothing to do with al Qaeda or the stated goal of eradicating terrorism. Terrorism is not an enemy which you can seek out and meet on the field of battle, it is a tactic used by desperate, fanatical, or brainwashed individuals in an attempt to induce policy change in a more militarily powerful opponent. It is a deplorable tactic when (as is usually the case) inflicted upon civilians, but it must be understood for what it is: a tactic which grows out of root causes. Osama bin Laden could not have asked for a more valuable godsend than the foreign policies of George W. Bush, because ever since we rolled over the Taliban in Afghanistan, we have conducted our foreign policy in ways guaranteed to exacerbate and validate the recruitment points of al Qaeda and Ansar al Islam. We are playing into every American stereotype which exists in the Muslim world, when we should be working peacefully to address the real-world grievances which terrorists use and twist in order to recruit believers to their causes.

Valerie Who?

Two months ago, the media was all abuzz with talk of a scandal that could rival Watergate: a senior administration official had outed a CIA operative who worked on WMD issues, and had done so for a blatantly partisan vendetta. The Justice Department opened an investigation into the mess, which said something in and of itself: the CIA can recommend an investigation into an unauthorized disclosure of classified information, but for the Justice Department see fit to open one, there must be something credible in the allegations. Democrats, predictably, called for an independent counsel in light of the fact that Bush appointed John Ashcroft, creating an unmistakable conflict of interest. Republicans, predictably, denounced all such calls as partisan, despite their eagerness to appoint one to investigate the sex life of our last President.

Instead of a blowjob, however, we now have blowback: not only did this blow the cover of a senior intelligence operative, it also jeopardized the lives of everyone with whom she's had contact abroad, destroyed valuable intelligence assets and sources, outed a CIA front company under which she'd filed past political contributions, and set back the CIA's ability to counter the spread of WMDS to a degree that has yet to be determined.

This should be one of the biggest stories of this presidency. In terms of seriousness and damage to the country, Watergate and the Clinton impeachment can't even begin to hold a candle to it. Yet it's as if there's a total media blackout on this: nothing to see here folks, routine investigation, move along. For a few weeks, it was all over the papers--and then, nothing. I defy you to find a single article about it younger than a month which isn't on a weblog.

Bribery and Extortion: On the Domestic Front

Sadly, this is par for the course in the GOP these days. The recent passage of the Medicare bill, which was denounced by members of both parties as a giveaway for special interest groups, occurred under highly questionable circumstances. The bill was set to be narrowly defeated in the House, but passed--after a three hour roll call, the longest in Congressional history. The purpose of this extended roll call was to allow the President to be roused from bed, and for he and other Congressional leaders to make phone calls and put pressure on GOP Congressmen to vote the party line. In the end, they succeeded in changing two votes--enough to pass the bill.

Yet many GOP Congressman stood their ground, and in one of those cases, House Republicans may have violated Federal law and Congressional ethics rules. According to Nick Smith, a Republican Congressman from Michigan, fellow Republican House members offered to see to it that his son would receive a $100,000 donation if he would change his vote. This carrot then changed to a stick with the threat to derail his son's campaign.

The above link delves into this with a thoroughness that makes it unnecessary for me to belabor the point any further. In short, this is open-and-shut bribery: if Smith takes this to the authorities and has the integrity to testify against his own party members, people will go to jail.

GOP Gerrymandering

Given the degree to which the Republicans control all three branches of government, and the tactics they've shown themselves willing to use to get themselves elected, it should come as no surprise to see what they're willing to do to ensure they stay in power. The latest in this litany of tactics is creative redistricting--in which Republican-controlled State legislatures redraw the boundaries of the voting districts to ensure that demographic data solidifies or increases their hold on the State's seats.

Normally, redistricting is done once every ten years, immediately following the Census. However, the GOP has been taking advantage of its stranglehold on State legislatures to push through off-schedule redistricting--essentially, changing the rules mid-term simply because they have the power to do so. This became fairly well-publicized for a short time when Texas Democrats fled to a neighboring state to break the quorum required to conduct the vote. Unfortunately, most of the publicity centered around portraying the Democrats as pulling a partisan stunt, instead of highlighting the extremely unethical nature of what the GOP was trying to do.

Two rulings were issued yesterday that were relevant to this--on a high note, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the GOP Legislature violated the State Constitution when redrawing the maps off-schedule. While this sets no precedent for other states, it is sure to be watched--and is a victory in and of itself.

On the downside, a Federal panel quashed the subpoenas ordering House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to testify in the court challenge of the Texas redistricting case. The degree to which the GOP leadership has orchestrated these end-runs around the law is of vital importance to these cases, and more pressure needs to be applied to our elected representatives to publicize this ongoing injustice.

Tweaking the Ballots

Another tactic in the ongoing GOP attempts to end-run or change laws it finds inconvenient: did you know that George Bush almost ended up being a write-in candidate in a number of states? The Republican National Convention is being held later than usual in 2004, on September 2nd--ostensibly to avoid conflict with the Olympics. The fact that they're holding it in New York to allow them to exploit 9/11 sentimentality for political purposes seems to have escaped the national attention span, and would probably go unremarked and unreported--were it not for the fact that Alabama, California, Illinois, and other states have filing deadlines before September 2nd.

Faced with either moving the date of their Convention away from 9/11 or accepting that Bush would miss the filing deadline in these states and have to run as a write-in candidate, Republicans opted instead for a third choice: they either pulled strings to get themselves exempted from the law, or rammed through legislation to change the deadlines. Fortunately, at least one state has yet to capitulate to this kind of manipulation of our system: Illinois.

Electronic Voting Fraud: The Diebold Controversy

None of this may matter, however, if the current generation of Diebold electronic voting machines begin to see widespread use. The scenario sounds like something out of the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists: the CEO of the company contracted to supply the nation with electronic voting machines declares at a fund-raiser that he's dedicated to delivering his state's votes to the incumbent. The machines his company produces leave no paper trail, have no provision for a recount, has countless security holes and methods for abuse, and undergo demonstrably substandard QA testing. The company has ruthlessly exploited the DMCA to issue cease and desist orders to websites that posted a leaked Diebold memo, which provided definitive proof of some of the worst allegations against the company and its software.

Yet these are the facts--and the only thing more shocking than these facts is that more people aren't outraged enough about it.

Part of the problem, unfortunately, is that the Bush administration, the GOP as a party, and many of their supporters are guilty of /so/ many crimes, ethics violations, or plain old moral bankruptcy that it's difficult to mount a coherent narrative against them that does justice to the full extent of the outrage. It's difficult to know where to begin when there are levels of corruption and criminal misconduct that I haven't even begun to touch on in the foregoing. And unfortunately, most of these issues--while crucially important--are too complex to distill down into a bite-sized, simple talking point that can be used to counteract the lies or draw attention to that which goes unreported.

But don't let that daunt you. We have to start somewhere.