Ohiocore

Bob Novak is a Useless Turd

So the Supreme Court has refused to hear their case, and Time magazine appears ready to hand over their reporters' email, correspondence and notes to a government Special Prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case. That case, you'll recall, is where (multiple) White House staff deliberately revealed to reporters the identity of Plame, an undercover CIA agent, in order to wreak vengence on her husband, who publicly and authoritatively refuted Bush's claims that Iraq pursued Nigerian "yellow cake" uranium (i.e., for WMD).

The revelation of Plame's identity constitutes a criminal violation of Federal law, and prompted the halfass response from the White House that they would "get to the bottom of it". Typical cynical tripe. It was clearly deliberate and strategized at high levels for multiple staff to go making the same revelation to various national reporters at the same moment. Their recalcitrance after the fact was equally coordinated: Bush "got to the bottom" of nothing. So ultimately, after the cursory Justice Department "investigation", a Special Counsel was appointed, in a pro forma concession the violated law might still exist, and that maybe somebody should care.

The bizarre dimension here is that the reporters for Time and the New York Times were not the first ones to reveal Plame's identity. Bob Novak was. Yet he is sitting chill while other cats take the heat, and possible prison time. Wonder why? In part, no doubt, because he is a chief apologist and propagandist for the Bush Administration, which is why he went with the story in the first place, while others deferred (some until after he put the story out, and some for good). To be clear, the trade-off was American national security & foreign intelligence interests and the actual livelihood of a CIA official for political defamation of a reputable (and in this case wholly correct) critic. I know just the man for the job: Bob Novak.

Compare the CNN inteview with Novak, apparently representing his attorney, with the story in the Washington Post.

Novak: "There needs to be a federal shield law preventing that as there are shield laws in 49 out of 50 states."

Post: "Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have shield laws protecting reporters from having to identify their confidential sources."

I'm going to guess the Post has the more accurate number. They certainly have more content:

The grand jury investigating the leak expires in October, and the journalists, if jailed, would be freed at that time. The case represents one of the most serious legal clashes between the media and the government since the Pentagon Papers case more than 30 years ago... [New York] Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. said: "We are deeply disappointed by Time Inc.'s decision to deliver the subpoenaed records." He noted that one of its reporters served 40 days in jail in 1978 in a similar dispute.

Anybody know the 1978 case in question?

A brain architecture artifact.

The deco cast alumninum statues of Justice and Law that Ashcroft concealed are uncovered again. Major reports talk money:

"Covering the statues with curtains cost the US government $8,000" [BBC]

"The sculptures... cost U.S. taxpayers a total of $7,275" [Post]

Those dollar figures are separated by 69 years (2002 and 1933, respectively), but the cost is still remarkable. I'd bid on those curains if the government surplus would put them up on ebay!

It is nothing to report that Vice President Cheney lies. This is well known and unremarkable. But the characteristic style of this administration's public address is somehow novel. It goes like this:

1. Start by repeating the lie that you have practiced, in your head. Not out loud!
   
2. Quick! Introduce some minute detail of partial truth, relying on the utterly compliant media not to contextualize the otherwise self-incriminating statement.
   
3. If they swallow that, then you're ok: finish the lie.
   
4. Not enough? Follow with a literal-truth non-sequitur to support the lie. How can they call you a liar when what you say is true? Truth supporting lies is still truth, right?
   
5. If they swallow that, go for the kill: overstate the lie in the most grandiose over-arching wildly counterfactual terms possible. Make it so far gone that, if held, it would ential this and future lies, and render (this) discussion immaterial.
   
6. Invoke nationalism/patriotism/jingoism for rhetorical flourish. Smile, shit-eater.
   

From the excerpted interview transcript at Washington Post, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dick Cheney:

"The treatment they're getting ¹-- they got a brand new facility down at Guantanamo. We spent a lot of money to build it.² They're very well treated down there.³ They're living in the tropics.⁴ They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want.⁵ There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people.⁶"

Translation:

¹. The lie: Guantanamo prisoners -- oops, not prisoners -- detainees are "well treated". Shit, was that out loud?

². Truthy fragment: Brand new facility. Don't suggest "we were paid a lot of money" in Cheney's Halliburton/KBR contracting tens of millions of dollars to build exactly the facility he describes... and an upcoming $30 Million additional facility. It is new, isn't that nice?

³. Now the lie, with vigor: They're very well treated.

⁴. Non-sequitur: ah, the tropics. Like it's a friggin' catered pleasure spa vacation for them. Like they live better than you do, chump... You should hate and envy them... but mostly hate.

⁵. The BIG lie: "Everything they could possibly want": Except their families, basic freedoms, a trial by law, a newspaper, years of their life back, a home cooked meal, a professional occupation, standing amongst their peers, a future, a lawyer to represent them. Maybe some want a healthy sex life, to understand quantum mechanics, to drive a late model Mercedes, or to see the face of God. Or just dignity, self-determination and independence. All trivial hypothethical things.

Because in reality, they have everything they want. They want what we tell them to. But that's not all! They already have everything they could ever possibly want. Because we control their desire today, tomorrow, and each of their days thereafter. They will live and die before wanting a single saltine cracker more than they already have. Death before cracker.

They are the culture of death, remember? This is the way they want it.

No, of course you cannot ask to speak to them about it you arrogant upstart.

⁶. America good. America-killers bad. Godblessamerica. And we're done.

And we are done.

At the end of recounting the sharp exchange between Donald Rumsfeld and Senator Edward Kennedy this week, CBS News tosses in an interesting tidbit that I can't find anything else about anywhere online:
"the Wisconsin Democratic Party, at its state's convention earlier this month, passed a resolution that would seem to cover all the bases. The delegates called for immediate steps to be taken to impeach Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush."

Google News seems to have nothing else on the topic!

Kellogg Brown & Root, the routinely corrupt subsidiary of Halliburton, has added another $30 Million in Guantanamo construction contracts, to build the 220-cell "Camp Six" by next June. Why this would be necessary after reducing the number of "enemy combatant detainees" by half makes for interesting speculation. NYTimes includes a rehash of Pentagon spokespersonspeak, that it "is designed to be safer for the long-term detention of detainees and the guards... It is also expected to require less manpower to operate." So is it just detain more with less? Let's check numbers. From Miami Herald:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said this week that prison camp construction has already cost about $100 million, and the Pentagon spends $90 million to $95 million a year to run it.

So how much cheaper will the new facility be to run? It won't even contain half of the existing detainee stock, so the old facility will have to remain operational in some form. For the prison site, this contract constitutes a capital outlay equal to one-third of the total operating cost. So if this were a regular cost/benefit evaluation, we should conclude that Rumsfeld intends to hold the detainees there for at least as many years after the completion of Camp Six as the fraction of operating cost saved. So if $15 million annually could be saved (1/12th the total operating cost), the fiscal corollary would be that they intend to keep the prisoners for at least 12 years after the completion of the new facility. That would be June 2018.

Of course saving money is rarely the point of a government contract, and certainly not this one. This $30 million is just a piece of the larger $500 million contract Halliburton has with the Navy.

The Herald continues in a more detailed account:

Army Col. David McWilliams, a spokesman for the Southern Command, said the military had submitted the proposal for the more permanent structure long before the current debate. It was unclear why the announcement of its approval came this week...

The Bush administration had initially included $41.8 million for the new prison and high-tech fence in its supplemental appropriations request. that sought $81.9 billion in war-on-terror funding.

It was not immediately clear whether the price of the project had dropped to $30 million or whether other contracts would provide related work at Camp 6.