At Mother Jones, Justin Elliott writes:

^{Don't Know Much About History}

In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA) published an 85-page monograph called "Military Advantage in History." Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's "futurist in chief," the study looks back to the past—way back. It examines four empires, or "pivotal hegemonic powers in history," to draw lessons about how the United States "should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Though unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to some of history's most powerful empires.

The study looks a little like a high school text book, devoting chapters to Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France and citing texts by Sun Tzu, Livy, and Jared Diamond. It attempts to break down exactly how historic empires sustained their military might across continents and even centuries. The study posits that the historical examples offer "insights into what drives U.S. military advantage," as well as "where U.S. vulnerabilities may lie, and how the United States should think about maintaining its military advantage in the future." ...

Most striking is how the study conceives of the United States in imperial terms. "You'll see some neoconservatives at the beginning of the Bush administration crowing that 'we do have an empire, let's just come out of the closet and say we do,'" said Ivan Eland, the author of a book on America's "informal empire" and the director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute, on hearing a description of the study. "But the administration never did that because empire doesn't sell well with the public." After reviewing the study at Mother Jones' request, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, said he was struck by its "arrogance and immorality." "The presumption that the United States should rule the world, sword at the ready, for the foreseeable future is an unacceptable basis for a just, even-handed foreign policy."

Elliott goes on to point out that it isn't just objectionable ideology to be found in the monograph, but factual inaccuracy as well. Given a chance to review the section on the transformation of the Roman Army over a period of 1000 years, Lee Brice of Western Illinois University, who is the president of the Society of Ancient Military Historians, described it as "so completely incorrect as to be useless."

The entire study, Brice said, is afflicted with "an intense, myopic habit of wanting to make the ancient world fit into modern stereotypes," something that might be expected in "much lower-undergraduate-level work."

It's become habitual over the past nearly eight years to tie such work to the machinations of the Cheney-Bush administration, but imperial thinking is no newcomer to American politics, nor the project of a single administration or two. In this case the idea for the study arose in 1999. Its five authors, employees of federal intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, wrote it for the Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center - a Department of Defense operation that their company has run since 1998. Elliott notes that the Carlyle Group announced in May that it will be taking over Booz Allen's government services operation.

Just as the transformation of the United States from great power to American Empire was not done on the watch of a single administration, it will not be dismantled by a single one. Just getting started on such a project will require a commitment to actually want to dismantle and the political clout to move in that direction.

Gargantuan forces - including a deeply instilled belief among most Americans that the U.S. has no empire - form a strong counterweight to any such moves. One of the strongest of those forces is the election-killing theme that any leaders who try to reduce the imperial footprint - though they do not describe it as such - are "weak on defense." Overcoming that obfuscation, then, has to be the first step.

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted..}

The 2000s, or the "ut-ohs" as a colleague thought we should name this decade back before it started, has turned out to be not so great on the employment front.

As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute writes:

It took longer to regain pre-recession employment levels: Nearly four years passed before the number of jobs in the economy returned to the level reached prior to the recession of 2001. By comparison, after the recession of the early 1990s, it took just over two-and-a-half years to regain peak level employment.

Employment growth remained sluggish: Over the entire business cycle of the 2000s, job growth averaged only 0.6% per year—well below what was needed to keep up with labor force growth. By comparison, over the business cycle of the 1990s, annual job growth averaged 1.8%.

The employment-to-population ratio deteriorated: For the first business cycle on record, the employment-to-population ratio declined over the 2000s, dropping by 1.5 percentage points. Over the 1990s the employment-to-population ratio increased by 1.7 percentage points.

If those statistics glaze you over, here are some to bring the tears, what with unemployment on the rise, and 8.5 million officially out of work (which is an undercount):

Only 37% of the country's unemployed received benefits in 2007, down from 55% in 1958 and 44% in 2001, according to the Labor Department. The others have exhausted their benefits, haven't applied or don't qualify.

Those who don't qualify include many part-time workers, people who quit or were fired, and workers who didn't earn enough money in a one-year "base period" that often excludes the most recent three to six months. Worker advocates say the New Deal-era system hasn't been updated enough to reflect an age of more-frequent job changes, more part-time work and falling union membership. ...

Unemployment insurance was "intended to largely support traditional male breadwinners in traditional, manufacturing-type jobs," says labor economist Lawrence F. Katz. "It's not necessarily set up for people who have multiple jobs, for people who work in and out of different jobs, for people in part-time work."

In Ohio, people filing for unemployment insurance need to have an average weekly wage of $206 -- 27.5% of the state average -- in their base period in order to qualify. That excludes many low-income workers forced to work part time, such as people at temp agencies with erratic work schedules.

Those part-timers aren't just teenagers, or college students, or moms working to "supplement" the family income. In other words, they aren't all volunteers for reduced hours. Many would like a full-time job.

The number of Americans who have seen their full-time jobs chopped to part-time work because of weak business has swelled to more than 3.7 million - the largest figure since the U.S. government began tracking such data more than half a century ago.

The loss of pay has become a primary source of pain for millions of American families, reinforcing the downturn gripping the economy.

Paychecks are shrinking just as home prices plunge and gas prices soar, furthering the austerity across the nation.

As for women, The New York Times recently reported that "for the first time since the women’s movement came to life, an economic recovery has come and gone, and the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen." Every previous recovery since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began.

The need for a new New Deal has been evident for quite some time, and every day it becomes clearer.

   

According to calculations of the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution:

Senator Barack Obama's tax plan would provide a rise in after-tax income of 5.4% for the bottom 20% of Americans in 2012. The top 1/10th of 1% of Americans would see a drop of 12.4%

Senator John McCain's tax plan would provide a 0.9% rise in after-tax income for the bottom 20% of Americans in 2012. The top 1/10 of 1% would see a rise of 11.6%.

Robert Gordon at The Wonk Room pointed out this table a few months ago:

^{Table data by Emmanuel Saez via The Wonk Room at Think Progress.}

Look at incomes for the top 1% of earners — the solid black triangles. You’ll see that in 2006, their share of the nation’s income (22.9%) reached its modern peak. The only year higher? 1928.

Another table shows that the top 10% in 2006 took a bigger share (49.7%) than at any point since 1917. The year 1928 was the runner-up.

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
— Plutarch

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^{See BenGoshi's uplifting photo Diary of modern Hiroshima.}

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted, including the story, South Africa unions stage mass strike.}

Tonight an excerpt from Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew:

Conservatism-in-power is a very different beast from the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita or the conservatism we overhear talking to itself on the pages of Free Republic. For one thing, what conservatism has done in its decades at the seat of power is fundamentally unpopular, and a large percentage of its leaders have been men of eccentric ideas. While they believe things that would get them laughed out of the American Sociological Association, that only makes them more typical of the movement. And for all their peculiarity, these people -- Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years -- have for the last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.

Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.

And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort -- a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the "virtue of selfishness" when it acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.

Diarist and corruption specialist dengre recently took a look at The Wrecking Crew here and here.

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^{The Overnight News Digest has been posted and includes this story, CIA officials deny fake Iraq-al-Qaida link letter.}

Energy is one of three key issues Senator Barack Obama has said he will address immediately upon taking office in January. That’s good. Because America desperately needs a dynamic, integrated, comprehensive, forward-looking, well-constructed, planet-friendly energy plan. One that focuses on demand as well as supply. That doesn’t consider conservation a dirty word. That gauges risk realistically. That recognizes the mistakes of the past. A plan which remembers in every paragraph that the elephant in the room is not $5-a-gallon gasoline, but the far more onerous costs of murderous pollution and its partner, global warming.

Oren Lyons has a message relevant to this conversation. He says: "Business as usual is over."

Lyons is the Faithkeeper of the turtle clan of the Onondaga, one of the Six Nations, the tribes who collectively call themselves the Haudenosaunee, but who most Americans know as the Iroquois. For centuries the Six Nations have followed one great law that underpins all their others. Before they make a major decision, a public policy decision, they take into account the effects this will have on the next seven generations. The objective was to "have always in view not only the present, but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground – the unborn of the future Nation." This kind of decision-making takes careful deliberation.

The Democratic and Republican Senators who label themselves the "Gang of 10" have turned this approach upside-down. In place of deliberation they seek speed: Get an energy plan on the books well before November 4. Short-term gain and hang the long-term consequences. It is the worst possible move for the worst possible motivation. Despite its bipartisanship, it is business as usual.

And it ought to be squelched.

While many people may laugh at the very idea of the Haudenosaunee’s great law – may view it as hilariously out-of-touch with modern reality – it doesn’t matter whether or not our leaders consider how today’s energy choices will affect the next generations, they will be affected. For lawmakers to pass this legislation on the fly, after decades of dithering, would amount to thumbing their noses at our grandchildren. Putting the Gang of 10’s slapdash compromise proposal on the fast-track in the waning days of an administration that has saddled us with a terrible energy policy – one which many of gang assisted in enacting  – would be cynical indeed.

Not that the proposed New Era, the Energy Reform Act of 2008, contains nothing laudable. It does. And it deserves to be closely looked at, advantages and drawbacks thoroughly evaluated. It should be compared with other plans. Its unintended consequences ought to be imagined. But this simply cannot be achieved in the two months between now and adjournment September 26.

Senator Obama has stirred no little controversy by hinting that he would be willing to yield on this proposed legislation a little, allowing things he doesn’t want in order to get things he does want. Compromise is no bad thing in itself. But what kinds of compromise? Toward what ends? With what benefits? What costs? And to whom will these costs and benefits accrue? If the compromise turns out to have been a bad bargain, how difficult will it be to repair the damage?

All questions that should not be hastily answered.

Take three examples from the proposal that the Gang of 10’s co-leader Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia says is not yet completely written.

Relax the ban on offshore drilling. Anathema to many, and not just "radical environmentalists," as Sean Hannity would characterize them. What are the reasons for the ban? Have those reasons changed after 27 years? If the ban were relaxed, what good things might this mean for Americans? And for others on the planet? What bad things? Would it lower the cost of oil products, including gasoline? How soon? A lot or a piddling amount? Would that be a good thing or would it merely help put off the inevitable day of reckoning? Would a limited relaxation form a wedge to end the ban altogether? If a decision were made to relax the ban, would it also include revamping current government leasing arrangements and raise oil-company royalties paid for production on taxpayer-owned land? Would leasing audits stop being a joke? What about the land the oil companies already lease but have failed to drill on? When polluting accidents occur, would companies pay the full costs of the damage or operate as they do now? Would the oil brought up from the deep go to the American market exclusively? Would this really do anything to achieve the energy independence first called for by Richard Nixon?

Encourage the building of coal-to-liquids plants. Should taxpayers shell out billions of dollars in grants and loan guarantees to private industry for an untested technique called carbon capture and storage? Even if CCS were successful, would coal-to-liquids emit as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as petroleum-based fuels? If that were the case, how might this affect efforts to cut the U.S. contribution to the atmosphere’s carbon load? Are their cheaper ways – efficiency and conservation measures, for example – to fill the coal-to-liquids niche? What effect might coal-to-liquids have on generating electricity? Why include something in "compromise" legislation that has already raised the ire of a full complement of environmental groups even though it has the imprimatur of the Western Governors’ Association?  

Build new nukes. The proposed legislation would not directly open the door to building new plants, but it’s not necessary to read between the lines to see that intent.  Should new nukes be part of an American energy mix? Certainly President Bush and Senator John McCain think so. Some well-known environmentalists agree, although no major eco-organization supports the idea. Are nuclear power plants essential to cutting carbon emissions? Are new-generation technologies that have not yet been tested on a commercial scale – thorium-based and pebble-bed reactors, for instance – the answer to those who raise safety concerns? Can waste be effectively dealt with? What’s the better choice between spinning turbines by burning coal, which kills thousands of Americans each year, and spinning them by splitting atoms? What about nuclear’s vulnerability to terrorism? If more nuclear power is the energy answer or part of the answer, on what grounds other than rank hypocrisy can any country be denied the right to operate a full nuclear-fuel cycle which each of the eight nuclear power countries already does? Nuclear advocates often point to the French, who now produce 76% of their electricity with nuclear power. Should the U.S. adopt the French model in which nuclear power plants are built and operated by a state-owned corporation?  

To reiterate, these questions and many others raised in the Economic Reform Act cannot be answered on the Gang of 10’s timetable. To pass this legislation under such circumstances would be the depth of recklessness.  

Sixty-four years after the decision was made to arm and bolster Saudi dictators for access to oil, 55 years after the CIA ousted the leader of Iran to maintain access to oil, 27 years after Jimmy Carter’s energy plan was abandoned by Ronald Reagan, seven years after Vice President Cheney met secretly to craft policy with his pals in the oil industry, what exactly is the hang-up with delaying an energy plan for the six measly months that remain until a new administration and new Congress are sworn in?

The United States is on the cusp of what could finally be the beginning of a new energy paradigm. Or business as usual could prevail. How the country goes forward in the energy realm – and let us hope that it finally goes forward – should be up to the new President and the 111th Congress, not George Bush and the 110th. Six months from now is the time for any compromises in this matter, not now.

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Proposals on energy can be read at the Daily Kos project Energize America, the Energy Smart Communities Act, the Apollo Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s A Responsible Energy Plan for America, and the European Commission’s Energy for a Changing World.

Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute write:

^{Job market recession persists}

On average this year, payrolls have contracted by 66,000 per month. Job loss in the private sector has occurred more quickly, however, dropping an average of 83,000 jobs a month since it peaked in November 2007. Private sector payrolls are down 665,000 since then, including the loss of 76,000 last month. Since government employment is less sensitive to the business cycle, the private sector losses are more indicative of the full extent of labor market weakness.

This persistent and deepening slack in the job market, in tandem with accelerated inflation, is leading to significant real wage and benefit losses for most workers. Average weekly hours slipped slightly last month to 33.6 hours per week, the lowest level since November 2004. This put downward pressure on weekly earnings, which rose 2.8%, before inflation in July, the same rate as the previous month and the slowest pace of weekly earnings since September 2005. With inflation running between 4-5%, the buying power of weekly paychecks is dropping sharply.

In a related release yesterday, the BLS reported that the Employer Cost Index—a comprehensive measure of average wages and benefits—fell 1.8% in real terms in June 2008 compared to June 2007. That is the largest real decline in this data series’ history (dating back to the early 1980s).

Along with the decline in weekly hours worked, another important sign of the extent to which our current workforce is underutilized is the increase in part-time workers who would prefer full-time jobs. In July, there were 5.7 million part-timers in this category, 1.4 million above last year’s level and the highest level since the BLS settled on a way of measuring this condition in 1994. Since these involuntary part-timers are included in the underemployment rate noted above, they are partly responsible for its spike last month.

Meanwhile, as Chye-Ching Huang and Chad Stone at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted in a new analysis on Wednesday:

Average pre-tax incomes in 2006 jumped by about $60,000 (5.8 percent) for the top 1 percent of households, but just $430 (1.4 percent) for the bottom 90 percent, after adjusting for inflation, according to a new update in the groundbreaking series on income inequality by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Their analysis of newly released IRS data shows that in 2006, the shares of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of households were higher than in any year since 1928. ...

Some 42 percent of total income gains since 2002 have accrued to the top 1 percent of households, and 66 percent have gone to the top 10 percent of households.  As a result, by 2006, the share of income flowing to the top 1 percent of households had surpassed the level it reached in 2000, at the peak of the 1990s expansion.

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted, including the story, Ivory Poaching At Critical Levels: Elephants On Path To Extinction By 2020?}

Adam Zagorin  in a story at Time magazine and the BBC’s "Newsnight" have today given fresh ammunition to the long-held view of human rights advocates and European investigators that the United States has used and may be continuing to use the British-owned atoll of Diego Garcia and its territorial waters as a rendition hub and detention center for suspected terrorists. Whether suspects have been tortured there remains unknown, but this also is widely suspected.

^{Source: British Territory Used for US Terror Interrogation}

According to a former senior American official, it appears another locale can be added to the international roster of interrogation sites — one both more obscure and potentially more controversial than the alleged sites in Poland and Romania. The source tells TIME that, in 2002 and possibly 2003, the U.S. imprisoned and interrogated one or more terrorist suspects on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean controlled by the United Kingdom.

The official, a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings after Sept. 11 who has since left government, says a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being held and interrogated on the island. The identity of the captive or captives was not made clear. According to this account, the CIA officer surprised attendees by volunteering the information, apparently to demonstrate that the agency was doing its best to obtain valuable intelligence. According to this single source, who requested anonymity because of the classified nature of the discussions, the U.S. may also have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia's territorial waters, a contention the U.S. has long denied. The White House meetings were also attended by a variety of other senior counter-terrorism officials.

Zagorin also spoke to Richard Clarke, a counter-terrorism expert who worked for Bill Clinton and a year for George W. Bush. Clarke, who has sharply criticized the Bush administration since his departure in 2003, told Time: "Given everything that we know about the Administration's approach to the law on these matters, I find the report that the U.S. did use the island for detention or interrogation entirely credible." If the island were used for interrogations or detentions without British approval, Clarke added, it "is a violation of U.K. law, as well as of the bi-lateral agreement governing the island."

In response to the BBC and Time stories, Frank Donaghue, Chief Executive Officer of Physicians for Human Rights, called for an investigation by U.S. Congress and Parliament to hold CIA Director Michael Hayden and other senior Bush officials "accountable" and to determine what members and former members of the British government knew and when they knew it about what was happening on Diego Garcia. He also called for Red Cross access to all prisoners at Diego Garcia and other "black sites." (Here is a video link to his statement.)

"The US and the UK must at last come clean about the scope of extraordinary rendition and secret detention—a violation of American and British law, human rights standards, and the rules and regulations of NATO. ... Both Congress and Parliament must set the record straight about what happened at Diego Garcia. PHR knows from our twenty-one year history of documenting torture around the world that secret detention opens the floodgates to torture and other gross human rights abuses." ...

"The Bush Administration's detainee treatment and interrogation policies have damaged our nation's reputation as human rights leader. ... Seven years of secrets whispered in secret rooms must give way to on-the-record testimony and open hearings."

The United States has repeatedly denied using the island it leases from Britain for such purposes. Top British officials have parroted those denials every time the subject comes up. In February, however, in a moment of "gross embarrassment" for the Labor government, Foreign Secretary David Miliband was forced to apologize to Parliament because the United States had admitted that a review of old records showed it had twice used Diego Garcia as refueling stops while rendering suspected terrorists.  Members of all three major parties were not pleased, and a House of Commons Human Rights Report issued early this month used strong language to describe the situation and to demand a thorough inquiry.

If the latest revelations pan out that U.S. officials used Diego Garcia for detention and possibly torture and then lied about it to their British counterparts, a major diplomatic incident could be in the offing. If it were to turn out the British were secretly told about rendition and detention on the island, the political  consequences could well be worse. Whichever, Miliband – already under fire within the party for alleged disloyalty to Prime Minister Gordon Brown  – is certain to find himself a target of sharp criticism in this matter. So may Brown himself.  

No telling what the reaction will be on this side of the Atlantic, where years of knowledge about extraordinary rendition, torture, secret prisons and lying about them has yet to produce the requisite level of rage to generate any effective political reaction.

The administration reaction was predictable. The State Department told the BBC today:

"The CIA and the Department of Defense categorically deny having interrogated any terrorist suspects or terrorism-related detainee  on Diego Garcia in any cases since September 11, 2001. With the exceptions of the two cases in 2002, in which detainees transited Diego Garcia that previously have been disclosed to the UK Government, there have been no other instances in which terrorist suspects or terrorism-related detainees transited or were held there."

An outright lie if Zagorin’s source has it right.

In the story, Time names three suspects who may have been at Diego Garcia. The first two of these were originally reported by the U.K. human rights group Reprieve:

Kuwaiti-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of involvement in several bombings, including the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Bali disco bombing in 2002. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and turned over to American authorities. Since 2006, he has been held at the United States Naval Base Guantánamo Bay where he was tortured by means of waterboarding and is said to have confessed to several plots, including the ’93 bombing.

Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born associate of Osama bin Laden known for his skill with heavy weapons who became the top military strategist for al Qaeda in November 2001. He was captured in 2002, transferred to an unknown secret CIA prison and later to Thailand where he was waterboarded. His "confessions" have come under sharp criticism, not only for how they were obtained but for the quality of information they provide. He is now at Guantánamo Bay  

Time reported five years ago that Hambali had been held at Diego Garcia. The real name of the Indonesian-born leader of the organization Jemaah Islamiyah is Riduan Isamuddin. He is a suspect in many bombings, including the 2002 attack on the Bali disco, in which 202 people were killed. He is currently detained at Guantánamo Bay.

The BBC reported that one of its sources, the Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, who investigated al Qaeda links to the March 11, 2004, Madrid train bombings, said he had been told that suspected terrorist Mustafa Setmarian Nasar was detained and interrogated on Diego Garcia after his arrest in Pakistan in 2005. After being turned over to U.S. authorities, he joined the ranks of the disappeared, a "ghost prisoner" whose whereabouts today are unknown.

Add to those four names that of suspected 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh. The Yemen-born bin al-Shibh was captured in Pakistan on September 11, 2002, and held for several years at an undisclosed location, then transferred to Guantánamo Bay. That location was Diego Garcia, according to author Stephen Grey in his 2006 book, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program.

If there were these, it seems only prudent to suspect there were others.

For nearly six years, human rights groups have been saying the United States uses the atoll as a secret CIA detention and interrogation center for suspected terrorists and has rendered some of them from the island to third countries where they face the likelihood of torture. Some have suggested that the CIA might have tortured prisoners on Diego Garcia itself.

Britain expelled the 2000 residents of Diego Garcia to the Seychelles between 1968 and 1973, and then on to Mauritius. While Britain maintains sovereignty, it has leased the atoll rent-free to the United States since 1966. Starting in the 1970s, the U.S. has turned the place into a major base for the Navy and Air Force, part of a "lily pad" style of strategic basing, the idea for which arose in the 1960s as former colonies around the world gained independence. About 1700 U.S. military personnel are stationed there, along with 1500 contractors and 50 Britons.

In December 2002, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who four years later won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on rendition and secret prisons, mentioned Diego Garcia as a detention and interrogation center.

This sparked a letter from Human Rights Watch to British Prime Minister Tony Blair noting that Britain would be complicit in torture if it allowed the practice on British soil, including in its overseas territories.

In March 2005, Human Rights First, a legal advocacy group, issued its scorching Behind the Wire report, stating,  "The U.S. government is holding prisoners in a secret system of offshore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability or law." The Abu Ghraib abuses reported the previous year, the report said were "just the tip of the iceberg."

In June 2005, the United Nations special rapporteur on terrorism spoke of prisoners being held on ships in the Indian Ocean. In 2006 and again in 2007, in its report on European complicity in rendition and detention, the Council of Europe stated that Diego Garcia had been or was still being used to detain prisoners. Again, the usual denials. These in spite of the fact that a retired U.S. general, Barry McCaffrey, had said in May 2004 and December 2006 that the island was being used for these purposes.

In response to concerns raised in Parliament, Labor leaders have repeatedly said they were given "categorical assurances" by Washington that the remote island was being used neither for rendition nor detention. No need to investigate further, they said.

It was thus a major red-face moment for Miliband last February when Washington admitted that a search of its records indicated two rendition flights had refueled at Diego Garcia. Sorry, said CIA Director Michael Hayden, a mistake was made. Miliband offered a public apology. Not the most pleasant duty for the Foreign Secretary to have to deal with given that the U.S.-U.K. alliance supposedly is built on trust.

Hayden’s comment included:

In fact, on two different occasions in 2002, an American plane with a detainee aboard stopped briefly in Diego Garcia for refuelling.

Neither of those individuals was ever part of CIA's high-value terrorist interrogation program. One was ultimately transferred to Guantanamo, and the other was returned to his home country.

These were rendition operations, nothing more. There has been speculation in the press over the years that CIA had a holding facility on Diego Garcia. That is false. There have also been allegations that we transport detainees for the purpose of torture. That, too, is false. [My emphasis - MB]

Torture is against our laws and our values. And, given our mission, CIA could have no interest in a process destined to produce bad intelligence.

Interviewed by the BBC Thursday, Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democratic leader in Britain, was asked if he thought British officials had been duped by the Americans.  "We don’t know," he said, noting that the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition has set its sights on Diego Garcia but is still being stonewalled.

Campbell asked what the reaction would be if the situation were reversed and the U.S. Senate were looking into similar British behavior on U.S. soil. It would be encouraging to be able to say to Sir Menzies that outrage and demands for action would carry the day. But even after the past 18 months of Democratic control of Congress, who can argue that such would be the case? Certainly knowledge of rendition, waterboarding, secret detention and other actions have generated little more than a whimper so far.

 

At the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten writes:

^{The putsch that imperiled America}

According to an article by New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer in the latest New York Review of Books,"President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and a small handful of trusted advisors sought and obtained dubious legal opinions [on national security] enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions." She details how they used these legal opinions to dramatically expand executive power. ...

The putschists were driven by ideology, not partisanship, Rutten says. Which is why some Republicans in the administration - including some very conservative ones - refused to go along.

Others have been less scrupulous for reasons that do them even less credit than ideological fanaticism. Take, for example, former Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II. In a sworn statement, Air Force Col. Morris Davis -- the former top prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions -- says he resigned after being pressured by Haynes to move forward with politically "sexy" prosecutions even though Morris believed the evidence against the defendants had been obtained by torture. Davis said he also told Haynes that a few acquittals at Guantanamo, if warranted, would send a message that the commissions sitting there were fair, just as the not-guilty verdicts against some Nazi defendants had done for the Nuremberg trials.

Haynes' response was emphatic, according to Morris: "We can't have acquittals! We've got to have convictions! ... If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?"

At some point, the American people will demand a precise accounting of how and why their government and its officials behaved in this reckless, appalling fashion. That will require following the chain of command into the White House. When it happens, you can bet that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington et al will demand every protection of the law and insist on every comma of the due process they've derided as mere inconvenience.

Rutten clearly is an optimist. Certainly, if the handcuffs were to be snapped on Cheney, et al., they would demand the due process to which every citizen has a Constitutional right, or used to. But will there be a "precise accounting"? As noted in Ixnay on Letting Bygones Be Bygones, even some who call themselves progressives argue against investigating the crimes of the Cheney-Bush administration after the reins are turned over in January.

The idea of a new committee along the lines of the investigatory 1975-76 Frank Church Committee, much less anything stronger, has not yet caught on. Too many more important issues to deal with, goes the reasoning. A new administration shouldn't appear vengeful, should look forward instead of backward. If some progressives are taking that view, what can be said of the rest of the population?

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted.}

The 5.4 temblor that hit Southern California Tuesday morning didn’t cause any major damage or injuries. But in the dozen or so seconds of wondering whether the crescendo of shaking was going to be the Big One before it became obvious that it wasn’t, I had plenty of time to remember that I hadn’t recently checked the expiration dates of the food the three people in my household have stashed in our disaster kits. That’s one kit for each car – food, bottled water, a change of clothes and shoes, a mini-flashlight, sunscreen, assorted first-aid items, some cash and batteries. My wife and stepdaughter also have small kits at their job sites.

At home, we have cached 180 gallons of purified water and enough packaged meals-ready-to-eat for two weeks, battery-powered lanterns, candles and several other just-in-case items. We also have a plan for how to get back together if we are separated when something major happens.

A few friends think we’re a little deranged. What surprises us, on the other hand, is how many people have made absolutely no preparations in case a disaster strikes. It’s almost as if they, like the people of Bali, refuse to buy vehicle insurance because this is like daring the gods to do something bad to you. When the subject came up at a party some years ago, one person excused his lack of preparation on the grounds that he refused to be ruled by fear, as if stocking up on spare water and sundries is akin to building a bunker to shield against an asteroid strike.

Being prepared depends mostly on where you live. We don’t keep any hip-waders around. For many Kossacks, however, that might be a good idea.

Three years ago, shortly after Katrina wrecked the Gulf Coast, killed nearly 2000 people and left tens of thousands stranded without power or potable water for days, the Kossack AlphaGeek, a Silicon Valley technical executive with professional  experience in risk assessment and disaster-readiness planning, performed a tremendous service with a five-part series on the subject.

In his introductory piece, he wrote:

The psychology of disaster preparedness

In order to effectively prepare for disaster without becoming overwhelmed, you must be able to make realistic judgments about risks.  On one hand, it is an effort for most people to "think the unthinkable", to contemplate scenarios which are far outside the routine of their daily lives.  It is difficult for most people to imagine a world where fresh water does not flow from the taps, electricity is something you can't take for granted, and the grocery store shelves are empty... assuming the stores are even open.

On the other hand, there's a phenomenon I think of as the "armageddon fallacy".  This is the temptation, once that our Pandora's Box of fears and concerns has been opened, to imagine extremely unlikely events as real threats.  We must be cautious to exercise good judgment when considering risks, as the "armageddon fallacy" is a surprisingly easy trap to fall into.  Keep in mind that your plan, at some point, will be shared with friends and family.  This incents most people to stay clear of the Crazy Talk Express to Armageddon Town when making a plan.

Here are links to all five parts:

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 1 of 5 - Assess your risks!

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 2 of 5 - Plan to survive!

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 3 of 5 - Plan to survive!

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 4 of 5 - Gear, supplies and training

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 5 of 5 - Conclusion

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The Overnight News Digest has been posted, including a story on Audit questions millions in Blackwater contracts.

In the 1970s, Fawn Brodie wrote a biography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait. The book, which as its title suggests, was a look at the third President's private life, was one of what was then a new genre, a psychohistory. Many well-known historians, particularly some of the leading Jefferson biographers, pilloried Brodie's work, especially her detailed speculations that this American icon had carried on an affair over three decades with Sally Hemings, his slave, called, in the terminology of the time, a quadroon.

Consequent to this lengthy affair, Brodie wrote, several children, including Eston Hemings (1808-1856), may have been born. The rumor of mixed-race Jefferson children was published in his own time, and the repetition of what heavily credentialed historians considered calumny brought some sharp criticisms Brodie's way, especially since she had no PhD and her two degrees were in English. Nonetheless, the book became a much-talked-about best-seller in 1974, and I count myself lucky to have a "Best Wishes" signed copy acquired during the author's book tour at the time. It's a fine piece of writing.

An obituary in Saturday's Los Angeles Times caught my eye. It was for 81-year-old Eugene Foster.

Eugene Foster, the retired pathologist who  orchestrated the DNA testing that showed Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of the children of slave Sally Hemings, died Monday at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, according to his son-in-law Brian Pusser. He was 81.

Historians had speculated for nearly two centuries that Jefferson's affair with the household slave had produced offspring, because of rumors at the time and because the children strongly resembled the nation's third president.

Some of the children also said they were Jefferson's descendants. But most experts had dismissed the speculation as idle gossip.

In 1996, after suffering mockery from experts who said it couldn't be done, and using what was then a new DNA technique to track down male ancestry, Foster and amateur historian Winifred Bennett found...

...four male lineages to test: Jefferson's lineage, descended from his paternal grandfather because Jefferson himself had no direct male heirs; the lineages of Thomas Woodson and Eston Hemings Jefferson, Sally Hemings' oldest and youngest sons; and that of the Carrs, two of Jefferson's sister's sons, who were widely thought to have fathered Hemings' children.

Hemings' other children left no surviving male heirs.

Their conclusion: The Y chromosome of a descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson matched that of Jefferson's lineage, that of Woodson's descendants did not, and none of them matched the Carrs'.

One of those Foster and his team found was a direct descendant of Sally's son Eston Hemings, John Weeks Jefferson. Members of his family had decided in the 1940s not to tell the children about any connection between themselves and President Jefferson because to do so would have meant acknowledging black ancestry, not something a prominent white family in Evanston, Ill., would risk at the time.

The Foster study was released a decade ago, and published in Nature. But it didn't end the controversy. The view of some Hemings's descendents and the majority of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation is that Jefferson did father children with his slave, perhaps all of her children.  

After extensively reviewing Foster's findings, the TJF reported in January 2000:

The results clearly show that the male-line descendants of Field Jefferson and Eston Hemings have identical Y-chromosome haplotypes (the particular combination of variants at defined loci on the chromosome). Scientists note that there is less than a 1 percent probability that this is due to chance. Thus the haplotype match is over one hundred times more likely when Jefferson and Eston Hemings are genetically related through the male line. This study by itself does not establish that Hemings’s father was Thomas Jefferson, only that Hemings’s father was a Jefferson.

A year later, scholars commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society argued the opposite case, that Hemings only played a minor role in Jefferson's life and that he fathered none of her children.

Subsequent to the DNA report, descendants of Hemings and descendants of Jefferson have met in various venues, including on the Oprah show, where their similarities to  each other and to Thomas Jefferson were noted.

White and black descendants of the two have also met at tense reunions held by the Monticello Association. Although some positive connections were made, the members of the association, which, among other things owns the cemetery where Jefferson is buried, voted overwhelmingly in 2002 to refuse membership to any of Hemings's descendants, arguing that the evidence for Jefferson-Hemings progeny remains disputed. No new vote has been taken.

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted.}

A kind of political air freshener seems to have dulled the nostrils of some progressives. Either that or for them the aroma of the festering lesion anchored in the executive branch and fed by tendrils deep in the muck of Congress on both sides of the aisle has abated. The odor of Constitution-dismantling legislation and executive orders, the rendition and detention and torture and murder associated with the "war on terror," the spying on citizens, and the all-round knavery magically seems to have transformed itself into a bowl of pot pourri.    

Made insensate by this, some progressives say that, come January, if the man behind the desk in the Oval Office is Barack Obama, we should forget about eight years’ of doings by George W. Bush, Richard Bruce Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and their cabal. Establish a committee along the lines of the 1975-76 Frank Church Committee as the ACLU and others have suggested? Nah. Waste of time. Just like impeachment. A diversion of attention from crucial issues when our nation is hurting and there is so much important stuff to accomplish: energy, health care, getting out of Iraq.

In the interest, therefore, of moving forward on what’s essential, their reasoning goes: "Let bygones be bygones."

What’s the point of talking about investigating next year anyway since Mister Bush will probably pardon these guys five minutes before he leaves office? Just be glad they’ll be out of our hair even if that means they’re off the hook. Leave them to their conspicuous consumption and other plutocratic games. The future is what matters. Move on.

Ugh.

By Your Correspondent

WACO, Texas (SNRK News Int’l) – For the second time in a week, an internationally sought-after fugitive has been captured. Osama bin Laden, atop the FBI’s Most Wanted list since 1998, was arrested earlier today in Crawford, Texas, a small town near the city of Waco. Serbian Bosnian Radovan Karadžić, wanted for war crimes in the Bosnian war of 1992-95, was captured Monday in Belgrade.

Bin Laden was whisked away in a convoy of big black SUVs. His whereabouts at this time are unknown. Government sources, who refused to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the press, said the 51-year-old bin Laden has been living under the alias of Sam Benjamin Jr. A quick Googling revealed that, in 2005, Benjamin won the Dallas-Ft. Worth-Waco-Austin Realtor of the Year Award for exceptional sales volume at his company, Alkiyder Homes and Condos.

Nobody at the White House, FBI, CIA, Transportation Security Administration, National Security Administration, Secret Service, Pentagon, Homeland Security,  National Reconnaissance Office, National Counterterrorism Center, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Dick Cheney’s Cabal, Defense Intelligence Agency or Crawford Police Department would speak to your correspondent on the record about the capture. At the State Department, however, a Miss Condoleeza Rice answered the phone and firmly told us, "There was no way we could have known bin Laden would change his name and move to Texas."

                                                               

^{At right, ‘Sam Benjamin Jr.’ at the Alkiyder Homes & Condos Web site}  

Chris Bowers at OpenLeft wonders, What Is Your Favorite Contradictory McCain Attack?:

1. Seventeen days after taking a trip abroad to Columbia [sic] and Mexico, five weeks after giving a paid campaign speech in Canada, and two months after criticizing Obama for not going to Iraq, the McCain campaign criticizes Obama for taking a trip abroad that includes a stop in Iraq

2. Eleven days after holding a press conference to claim that Obama  is a serial flip-flopper, McCain argues that Obama is the most extremist member of the Senate.

3. Five days after releasing a documentary criticizing Obama for flip-flopping on Iraq, the McCain campaign argues that Obama is too inflexible on Iraq.

Whether it's Roe v. Wade or off-shore drilling or a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, McCain has taken opposite sides. Is it flip-floppery? Or is it flim-flammery?

He was anti-Grover Norquist before he was pro-Grover Norquist. He opposed torture before he yielded to White House demands. He was for campaign-finance reform before he was against a reform provision he sponsored two years earlier. He opposed presidential candidates campaigning at Bob Jones University before he favored it. He was anti-ethanol, then for it. He supported flying the Confederate flag on government property before he rejected the practice. He was for talking with Hamas until he was against it. He favored privatizing Social Security before he said he never was in favor of privatizing Social Security. He opposed the Bush tax cuts for the rich until he voted for them, twice.

Just before he steps off the Double-Talk Express, McCain must spin around three times and click his deals to decide which side of his mouth he is going to speak from.

At the risk of exhausting our pixel supply, here's your chance to name your favorite McCain contradiction.

(If you think you remember one, but not quite, you might try out nica24's extensive collection of links: h/t to peraspera.)

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Bryon York over at NRO's The Corner whines:

It's a small passage from Obama's Berlin speech, but this formulation, common in some circles, grates on some ears, like mine:

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

Yes, the victims were from all over the globe — places like Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and Manhattan, and Queens, and Staten Island, and New Jersey — all over.  And most were Americans, weren't they?  Wasn't that the point of the attack?  This isn't to diminish the loss of anyone on September 11, but people come from all over the world to be Americans, and the great majority of people who died that day were Americans.

York points to Factcheck.org, which states that only 21 of the death certificates handed out as a consequence of September 11 were of foreign nationals from eight countries.

There were 327 foreign nationals killed in the September 11 attacks. They were commemorated on the fifth anniversary, with Condoleeza Rice in attendance, as you can read about in this story, Five-Year 9/11 Remembrance Honors Victims from 90 Countries. Some, it is true, were dual citizens. But Britain alone lost 67 of her citizens that day, as you can read about in this story, British victims of 9/11 remembered by royal couple.

York's take on this not only begrudges other countries their loss, but also renders that loss a provincial, American loss. Obama is attempting, years after the fact, to remind the world of the opposite, of the universal horror of that day and the way that people from every corner of the globe - from France to Iran - stood in solidarity with New York and Washington on September 11. And, of course, by implication, how attitudes like York's within the administration squandered that sense of solidarity.  

York is certainly petty in downplaying the deaths of non-Americans in the attacks. But worse, inherent in his screech is the reverse of his xenophobia, a rejection of the notion that we as Americans could ever feel solidarity and a sense of humanist bonding with people of another country. Screw the Enlightenment, we're not cosmopolitan, we've got no broader sense of common humanity. It's us versus the world, and if you don't live here, you don't f'n matter.

Pathetic.

For the typical politician, speaking in Berlin as an American on the way to the White House would surely be viewed as a most daunting prospect. After all, most Americans can say at least one line from each of two President's speeches in Berlin that were considered watersheds: JFK's quite brief "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in June 1963, and Ronald Reagan's tear down this wall speech in June 1987.

How could you top those speeches by two icons?

You give the speech that Barack Obama gave today.

Of course, turning those words into reality is a bigger job than can be accomplished by a single presidency. But even while many of us may disagree with particular pieces of that speech, it contains the core principles for a decent foreign policy, one that serves as a model for cooperation and peace rather than distrust and war.

I have in the past four decades often found myself at odds with American foreign policy, so much so that I went to prison to oppose it. And knowing history, including the history of my own Indian people, I have reasons enough to be jaded about much that the U.S. has done in the world in the far and near past and recently. I am not very forgiving of those who shaped many of those policies, vicious and hypocritical and resting as they did on a rubric of pernicious American exceptionalism.

Not, of course, that everything the U.S. has done on the world stage has been evil. As a nation we've also had our many good moments, with 1948 in Berlin being one of them, as Obama spoke to so eloquently today.

I think I can reasonably say that I don't see America and especially American foreign policy through rose-colored glasses. And I can guarantee that I will find myself in opposition to aspects of that policy should Obama win the Presidency. Already I have arenas of disagreement with him on foreign policy.

But today, I was given hope for change. It made me proud to be an American.

As with all policy, foreign policy is more than words. Carrying out a new vision, tearing down all those walls and confronting all those problems, whether of genocide or global warming, will be far harder than speaking in the warm sun before an appreciative crowd. But I was inspired today to believe it can happen. Thank you, Senator Obama.

"A World that Stands as One"

Thank you to the citizens of Berlin and to the people of Germany. Let me thank Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier for welcoming me earlier today. Thank you Mayor Wowereit, the Berlin Senate, the police, and most of all thank you for this welcome.

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father – my grandfather – was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning – his dream – required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West. And so he wrote letter after letter to universities all across America until somebody, somewhere answered his prayer for a better life.

That is why I’m here. And you are here because you too know that yearning. This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. And you know that the only reason we stand here tonight is because men and women from both of our nations came together to work, and struggle, and sacrifice for that better life.

Ours is a partnership that truly began sixty years ago this summer, on the day when the first American plane touched down at Templehof.

On that day, much of this continent still lay in ruin. The rubble of this city had yet to be built into a wall. The Soviet shadow had swept across Eastern Europe, while in the West, America, Britain, and France took stock of their losses, and pondered how the world might be remade.

This is where the two sides met. And on the twenty-fourth of June, 1948, the Communists chose to blockade the western part of the city. They cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin.

The size of our forces was no match for the much larger Soviet Army. And yet retreat would have allowed Communism to march across Europe. Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin.

And that’s when the airlift began – when the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.

The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold.

But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. "There is only one possibility," he said. "For us to stand together united until this battle is won...The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty...People of the world, look at Berlin!"

People of the world – look at Berlin!

Look at Berlin, where Germans and Americans learned to work together and trust each other less than three years after facing each other on the field of battle.

Look at Berlin, where the determination of a people met the generosity of the Marshall Plan and created a German miracle; where a victory over tyranny gave rise to NATO, the greatest alliance ever formed to defend our common security.

Look at Berlin, where the bullet holes in the buildings and the somber stones and pillars near the Brandenburg Gate insist that we never forget our common humanity.

People of the world – look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.

Sixty years after the airlift, we are called upon again. History has led us to a new crossroad, with new promise and new peril. When you, the German people, tore down that wall – a wall that divided East and West; freedom and tyranny; fear and hope – walls came tumbling down around the world. From Kiev to Cape Town, prison camps were closed, and the doors of democracy were opened. Markets opened too, and the spread of information and technology reduced barriers to opportunity and prosperity. While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history.

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope. But that very closeness has given rise to new dangers – dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean.

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all.

In this new world, such dangerous currents have swept along faster than our efforts to contain them. That is why we cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats, or escape responsibility in meeting them. Yet, in the absence of Soviet tanks and a terrible wall, it has become easy to forget this truth. And if we’re honest with each other, we know that sometimes, on both sides of the Atlantic, we have drifted apart, and forgotten our shared destiny.

In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right, has become all too common. In America, there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe’s role in our security and our future. Both views miss the truth – that Europeans today are bearing new burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world; and that just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe.

Yes, there have been differences between America and Europe. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more – not less. Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.

That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

We know they have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a Union of promise and prosperity. Here, at the base of a column built to mark victory in war, we meet in the center of a Europe at peace. Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together; in the Balkans, where our Atlantic alliance ended wars and brought savage war criminals to justice; and in South Africa, where the struggle of a courageous people defeated apartheid.

So history reminds us that walls can be torn down. But the task is never easy. True partnership and true progress requires constant work and sustained sacrifice. They require sharing the burdens of development and diplomacy; of progress and peace. They require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.

That is why America cannot turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward. America has no better partner than Europe. Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads, and people to assemble where we stand today. And this is the moment when our nations – and all nations – must summon that spirit anew.

This is the moment when we must defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it. This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it. If we could create NATO to face down the Soviet Union, we can join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the networks that have struck in Madrid and Amman; in London and Bali; in Washington and New York. If we could win a battle of ideas against the communists, we can stand with the vast majority of Muslims who reject the extremism that leads to hate instead of hope.

This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. No one welcomes war. I recognize the enormous difficulties in Afghanistan. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO’s first mission beyond Europe’s borders is a success. For the people of Afghanistan, and for our shared security, the work must be done. America cannot do this alone. The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now.

This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love. With that wall gone, we need not stand idly by and watch the further spread of the deadly atom. It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era. This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.

This is the moment when every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday. In this century, we need a strong European Union that deepens the security and prosperity of this continent, while extending a hand abroad. In this century – in this city of all cities – we must reject the Cold War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent.

This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many. Together, we must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet. This is the moment for trade that is free and fair for all.

This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East. My country must stand with yours and with Europe in sending a direct message to Iran that it must abandon its nuclear ambitions. We must support the Lebanese who have marched and bled for democracy, and the Israelis and Palestinians who seek a secure and lasting peace. And despite past differences, this is the moment when the world should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close.

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations – including my own – will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

And this is the moment when we must give hope to those left behind in a globalized world. We must remember that the Cold War born in this city was not a battle for land or treasure. Sixty years ago, the planes that flew over Berlin did not drop bombs; instead they delivered food, and coal, and candy to grateful children. And in that show of solidarity, those pilots won more than a military victory. They won hearts and minds; love and loyalty and trust – not just from the people in this city, but from all those who heard the story of what they did here.

Now the world will watch and remember what we do here – what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words "never again" in Darfur?

Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don’t look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people?

People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time.

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived – at great cost and great sacrifice – to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world. Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom – indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us – what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America’s shores – is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.

Those are the aspirations that joined the fates of all nations in this city. Those aspirations are bigger than anything that drives us apart. It is because of those aspirations that the airlift began. It is because of those aspirations that all free people – everywhere – became citizens of Berlin. It is in pursuit of those aspirations that a new generation – our generation – must make our mark on history.

People of Berlin – and people of the world – the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. Let us build on our common history, and seize our common destiny, and once again engage in that noble struggle to bring justice and peace to our world.

Six years ago today, Matthew Rycroft, private secretary to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, wrote a secret memorandum to the U.K.’s ambassador to the U.S., David Manning. The memo contained the minutes of a meeting held that same morning between Blair and a few senior foreign policy advisers. It was exposed by the Sunday Times nearly three years later. Two paragraphs stood out.

Rycroft spoke about a trip that Sir Richard Dearlove had recently taken to Washington. Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, is referred to officially as "C":

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

And there was this:

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

Many people who were attentive to the White House’s public statements saw hints that a decision already had been made to invade Iraq well before that secret memo was sent to its select group of addressees. There was the 2002 State of Union in late January and the West Point graduation speech in June.

But concerns raised by these speeches were tempered somewhat by the idea that Congress wouldn’t go along, that public support was soft, that the media would yank on the reins, and that the British weren’t on board. This all spurred most observers to believe that an invasion might encounter too many obstacles to go forward. Unless, that is, some definitive evidence could be delivered showing that Saddam Hussein had massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction and was close to building nuclear bombs.

Providing such evidence was exactly what the neoconservative war hounds had been intent on doing, as we now know, ever since September 11 – using the terrible events of that day to achieve what former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill had told us in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty and former counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke had written in Against All Enemies. That is, they proposed from their very first National Security Council meeting in February 2001 to invade Iraq, eight months before al Qaeda’s attacks. Even after September 11, however, getting the public and Congress to go along, as the Downing Street memo stated  in the summer of 2002, required that the facts be "fixed around the policy." Fixed, as in exaggerated and concocted.

On May 1, 2005, Michael Smith at the Sunday Times revealed Rycroft’s memorandum. It was still April 30 in the U.S. when the news appeared, and a Diarist named smintheus picked up on it at Daily Kos, where he garnered comments from five Kossacks. The follow-up Diary the next morning drew more than 300 comments. By May 5, John Conyers, then the ranking Democratic Congressman on the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee, who had first read of the Downing Street memo at Daily Kos, sent a letter to the White House signed by 89 of his colleagues asking for answers.  

Soon, frustrated by the thin gruel of traditional media coverage, there was a blogswarm to Awaken the Media, formation of various Web sites, including After Downing Street, and the The Downing Street Memos, and a blogger grouping called the Big Brass Alliance.

For me and others who had for various reasons resisted calls for impeachment prior to 2005, the Downing Street Memo was a turning point. Here was the kind of evidence that we had hoped would someday come to light, evidence that - together with what Clarke and O’Neill had already provided, plus the Valerie Plame affair and the lack of WMDs in Iraq - directly called into question the administration’s claims that the decision to go to war was not made until February 2003. Here was strong evidence that the President had lied to Americans, broken his oath of office and violated national and international law. Not incontestable proof, but certainly grounds for inquiry.  

On June 16, 2005, spurred by the revelations in the secret memo, John Conyers held an unofficial hearing with 35 other Democrats, hearing testimony from, among others, former Ambassador Joe Wilson and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. It was there that the prospect of a Resolution of Inquiry into impeachment was first raised.

That, of course, was 37 months ago. Much vitriolic talk about impeachment has gone down since then. But very little of it has taken place in the halls of Congress despite considerable new information. Additional memos, like the one David Manning wrote on January 31, 2003, have come to light. Plus, it was learned that a classified version of a National Intelligence Estimate stated that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat. Just before the congressional vote on the authorization to use force in Iraq in October 2002, the Bush Administration released a declassified version for public consumption which conveniently deleted NIE's no-imminent-threat assessment.

This Friday, thanks to a long-term grassroots effort as well as the unwillingness to yield by a handful of Congressional Democrats, most notably Dennis Kucinich, impeachment will be on the table at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. This could and should have started in 2007. Only time will tell whether "better late than never" applies.

It was just a few years ago the very idea that the Arctic was showing signs of increased summer melts was hooted down as alarmist. The threat to native species and native cultures presented by the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment was laughed off as just another crazy, radical, environmentalist scheme to mess with the economy. Except for a few wigged-out pockets of denial amplified by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, most of the laughing has ceased. Not, of course, that the Cheney-Bush administration has retreated from its censorship of science, as noted here by smintheus, to provide one example. In that instance, the censorship came about for the purpose of getting some new Arctic oil leases into the ... uh ... pipeline without pesky scientific concerns being allowed to introduce obstacles into the discussion.

Discussion of the situation is made more difficult because the melting is not a steady downward plunge. This year, for instance, as of a week ago, Arctic sea ice extent clocked in at 3.44 million square miles. This was well below the 1979-2000 average of 3.83 million square miles. But it was 0.41 million square miles above the value for July 16 last year.

So, you can expect to hear any day now from the usual suspects that the wider extent of ice this year proves the Arctic may not be heading for ice-free summers in the next couple of decades. This claim, of course, will ignored data showing that, while first-year ice is thicker than was predicted this summer, multi-year ice is much thinner than seen in 2006 and 2007. In other words, the long-term trend and consequences are not in doubt, whatever spikes may occur year-to-year.

Meanwhile, nationalists and entrepreneurs seem to have no doubts about the melting. There continues to be a laying of claims to the Arctic seabed, which began last year when famed explorer Artur Chilingarov led a Russian North Pole expedition and planted a Russian flag 13,390 feet below the surface, and remarked: "The Arctic is Russian. We must prove the North Pole is an extension of the Russian landmass"

Paul Coring at the Globe and Mail wrote Tuesday:

"We were there first and we can claim the entire Arctic, but if our neighbours like Canada want some part of it, then maybe we can negotiate with them," says Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the flamboyant Russian ultranationalist, who happily hands out pictures of a Russian flag sitting on the seabed at the North Pole. ...

Supposedly cooler heads prevailed in Greenland this spring at a meeting of the five circumpolar countries: Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States. They agreed "to the orderly settlement of any possible overlapping claims" in a joint communiqué called the Ilulissat Declaration.

But the race to claim the top of the world and, more importantly, reap the vast bonanza of oil and gas believed to lie beneath the Arctic seabed is only just getting under way. ...

No surprise, then, that Russia is conducting naval exercises in the Arctic. Canada had soldiers stamping about in the North this spring, and some analysts fear power projection, not talks at the UN, will decide who controls the Arctic.

Under the Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries can extend their zones beyond 200 nautical miles (about 370 kilometres) from their coasts if they can prove the outer edge of the continental shelf extends beyond that distance. Hence, the contentious Russian claim to the Lomonosov Ridge.

The prize may be huge. One study estimates 400 billion barrels of oil lie beneath the Arctic seabed, beyond the existing 200-nautical-mile economic zones where countries can regulate and control drilling. That's a little less than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia and Iran combined.

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.

• Pollster.com has a brand new look today, but the same polling goodness. As with every makeover, however, there have been a few glitches, which Mark Blumenthal laments. For one thing, the map that shows 214 strong or lean Electoral votes for McCain should actually read 199. Technical issues are delaying immediate changes in the numbers. 214? 199? We'd settle for either of those results in November. - DemFromCT/Meteor Blades
• As the Young Republicans gathered to cry in their beer over the state of their Party, one offered his hope for a McCain turnaround:

  If McCain can convey his straight-shooting independence and show his authentic sense of humor through compelling YouTubevideos and smart interaction via the blogosphere, he can pull in Gen-Next and millennial voters, says [David] All.

  May I suggest this one? - BarbinMD

• Laura Frank at the Rocky Mountain News writes today of Deadly denial: For sick nuclear workers, shifting rules form quagmire of despair

  "Federal law says that the process of compensating sick nuclear weapons workers must be fair and consistent, but the Bush administration's labor department has fallen short of those standards. Indeed, the department has found multiple ways around the law, sometimes just flat-out ignoring it, a Rocky Mountain News review of scores of workers' cases, government documents, program data and internal communications found.

  - Plutonium Page

• Gregg Zoroya at USAToday reports:

  Soldiers who are physically or mentally ailing can wait two months to a year before the Army acts to medically discharge them or return them to their units, according to a House investigation. That's two or three times longer than the Army goal set last year. ...

  The committee investigation found that wait times had improved but that increased numbers of wounded soldiers caused delays to worsen in the last six months. "They're just under-resourced at a time when they are overwhelmed by the number of people that need assistance," says Rep. Susan Davis, D-Calif., the subcommittee chairwoman.

  And who would be the source of this under-resourcing? - Meteor Blades

• Sustainable agriculture advocate Margaret Krome, Policy Program Director for the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute in East Troy, Wisc., has a nice column up about Netroots Nation in The Capital Times. She was a panelist in Austin at The Recipe for Change in America's Food System. She writes that "I was awed by the people I met." We imagine many people you met were awed by you, too, Margaret. - DemFromCT/Meteor Blades



• Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb chieftain wanted for massacres of Muslims during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, hid in plain sight in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, practicing alternative medicine under an alias, until he was arrested Monday. The photos show his transformation from 1995 to 2008. Experts say that the complicated nature of the  case means it will take years to wind its way through the court at The Hague. While Bosnian Muslims celebrated in the streets of Sarajevo Monday night, there was a different reaction elsewhere, according to the Associated Press: "This is a hard day for Serbia," said Tomislav Nikolic, leader of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party. "Karadžić was a myth and a legend of the Serbian people."

  - Meteor Blades

• The House Judiciary Committee has just a week and a half left to consider contempt of Congress charges against Karl Rove before the House recesses for all of August, not to return until September 8th.

  
  The petition circulated by Brave New Films calling on the committee to act sits at just under 100,000 signatures. Why not help put them over the top? - Kagro X