Turns out they’re not selling Christmas ornaments, but rather, “holiday” ornaments…

update: the word “Christmas” magically appeared overnight. Perhaps it was left by Santa.

From the New York Review of Books:

Before the case against Chaplain Yee collapsed, Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Jon Kyl of Arizona, the columnist John Leo, as well as an array of conservative and Christian bloggers would seize on his arrest as evidence that radical Islamicists had taken control of the recruitment of Muslim chaplains into our armed forces. They offered no evidence bearing on his recruitment back into the army, however; by his own telling, Yee was first approached by a Muslim African-American, an ex-marine, at a Ramadan banquet at that hotbed of Islamic ferment, that notori- ous madrasa, the Pentagon.

Yee had scant opportunity to offer a public rebuttal of the charges he faced, or the portrayal of him as a traitor by anonymous government leakers, or the further allegations the charges and leaks inspired. First he was held in solitary confinement; then, on his release, placed under a gag order. “Speech that undermines the effectiveness of loyalty, discipline or unit morale is not constitutionally protected,” he was warned. The gag order stayed in force until his separation from the military—on a hard-won honorable discharge—early this year. His book thus tells a story that reporters who followed his case never got to hear from the accused.

* * *

A detainee who refused to accept a Koran in his cell would be subject to what was known as “a forced cell extraction” by an IRF (for “initial response force”)—six to eight MPs in riot protection gear (plastic masks, chest protectors, shin guards, shields) who would burst in on a cell to subdue a problem detainee in what was commonly known as an IRFing. Here is Yee’s description of these stampedes:

After they suited up, they formed a huddle and chanted in unison…. Then they rushed the block, one behind the other…. The sound of their heavy boots hammered down the steel corridor and their chants ricocheted off the tin ceiling…. The IRF team stopped at the detainee’s cell…. The team leader in front drenched the prisoner with pepper spray and then opened the cell door. The others charged in and rushed the detainee…. The point was to get him to the ground as quickly as possible, with whatever means necessary…. When it was over, there was a certain excitement in the air. The guards were pumped…. They high-fived each other and slammed their chests together, like professional basketball players…an odd victory celebration for eight men who took down one prisoner.

Once “extracted,” the recalcitrant prisoner was placed in isolation in an MSU (for “maximum security unit”) until he was ready to accept a Koran. What are we to make of this struggle in which alleged Islamic “terrorists” refuse to accept Korans from their insistent captors until they’ve been pounded into submission? And how, the chaplain rightly asks, was it “good for the mission?”

* * *

But a month after his arrest, the charge of espionage and other ser-ious charges wer abruptly dropped. Though Captain Yee had been branded a traitor and was still being held in solitary, a navy lawyer said the government lacked the “prosecutorial resources” to continue th case; also, the lawyer said, it needed more time to investigate his “misconduct.” Nothing mor was ever heard of that investigation. The only interpretation that fits the known facts is that th military lawyers assigned to the case found that there was nothing there to support the extrem charges. So now Captain Yee was left to face two relatively minor counts of mishandlin classified documents. (He insists he never had any.) Still, he was held in solitary confinemen for seventy-six days and shackled whenever he was taken from his cell

As the charges against him dwindled to nothing, the conduct of the prosecution became, if anything, more relentless, vengeful, and ugly. Yee’s wife had returned to their home in Olympia, Washington, where she was visited by a female Defense Department investigator who showed her pictures of the chaplain with other women, and told her that he’d been having affairs. When, finally, the prosecution was unable to produce any evidence of his ever having possessed classified documents, let alone of having mishandled them, the criminal case collapsed. Far from acknowledging a miscarriage of justice, the prosecution said it couldn’t disclose its evidence because of national security concerns.

Pathetic.

The U.S. military is paying Iraqi newspapers to publish "good news" stories. A defense contractor, the Lincoln Group, translates the stories into Arabic and then works to get them placed, sometimes with their staffers posing as reporters. The stories appear in the Iraqi press with no indication of their origins.

The LAT article also points out that the military is forbidden to plant propoganda in the American media, but they know perfectly well that the information will "bleed" into our press, and influence coverage.

Is it obvious enough that that’s the point? There is no chance whatsoever that Iraqis are going to be fooled by happy talk when they can see for themselves what’s going on. But if that happy talk happens to find itself on Fox or CNN….?

Billmon wrote a fascinating post on the Lincoln Group last summer, focusing on what seems to be their primary business — chanelling money to Republican hacks, and doing research on the opposition — including looking for dirt? — for both businesses and "select" politicians.

The LAT made a good start, but I hope they’re still digging on this story.

I’ve got the last generation, pre-video (I think it was called the “photo” iPod, or something like that). When I leave it laying around for a few days unused, it goes into a deep energy-conservation mode, after which, maybe half the time, all my music disappears. The files haven’t been deleted–the instant I connect it to my computer, the music immediately reappears in the menus. It’s as if it forgets how to access the music files, but hooking it up to iTunes immediately jogs its memory. Which is fine, unless I happen to be three thousand miles away from my computer when it happens. Anybody ever experience this one? Am I just shit outta luck, or is there a patch?

Crooks and Liars has audio.

It’s pretty clear that this whole obsession with “defamation” is directly related to the embarassment he suffered when The Smoking Gun posted documents from that sexual harassment lawsuit. TSG is one of the few sites I’ve actually seen him mention by name, in the context of rants about “hate-filled left wing websites.” It’s an interesting definition of defamation — the reporting of true but inconvenient facts.

By the way, that blacklist of his is a bit of a disappointment so far. New York Daily News, St. Pete Times and MSNBC? I assume they’ve each run less than complimentary stories about O’Reilly–might be fun to dig them up and see what they did that stuck in his craw so badly.

They told us last January what they had in mind. So I guess this should really not come as any surprise:

As the American military pushes the largely Shiite Iraqi security services into a larger role in combating the insurgency, evidence has begun to mount suggesting that the Iraqi forces are carrying out executions in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods.

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation.

Some Sunni men have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.

Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison. In a secret bunker discovered earlier this month in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly Sunni inmates appeared to have been tortured.

Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, and other government officials denied any government involvement, saying the killings were carried out by men driving stolen police cars and wearing police and army uniforms purchased at local markets. “Impossible! Impossible!” Mr. Jabr said. “That is totally wrong; it’s only rumors; it is nonsense.”

Many of the claims of killings and abductions have been substantiated by at least one human rights organization working here - which asked not to be identified because of safety concerns - and documented by Sunni leaders working in their communities.

American officials, who are overseeing the training of the Iraqi Army and the police, acknowledge that police officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the militias with which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out killings and abductions in Sunni communities, without direct American knowledge.

But they also say it is difficult, in an already murky guerrilla war, to determine exactly who is responsible. The American officials insisted on anonymity because they were working closely with the Iraqi government and did not want to criticize it publicly.

The widespread conviction among Sunnis that the Shiite-led government is bent on waging a campaign of terror against them is sending waves of fear through the community, just as Iraqi and American officials are trying to coax the Sunnis to take part in nationwide elections on Dec. 15.

Sunnis believe that the security forces are carrying out sectarian reprisals, in part to combat the insurgency, but also in revenge for years of repression at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s government.

Ayad Allawi, a prominent Iraqi politician who is close to the Sunni community, charged in an interview published Sunday in The London Observer that the Iraqi government - and the Ministry of Interior in particular - was condoning torture and running death squads.

All from the op-ed page. First, this bit from David Brooks’ oddly myopic homage-to-warriors on Sunday:

Every time you delve into the situation in Iraq, you come away with the phrase “not enough troops” ringing in your head, and I hope someday we will find out how this travesty came about.

Yes, it’s truly a mystery how this travesty came about. Mercy me, I can’t for the life of me figure it out. It’s sure a puzzler, no question about it.

Second, this peculiar assertion from John Tierney (who is required by the Official Cranky Libertarian Rulebook to make counterintuitive arguments in support of Wal Mart):

The average income of shoppers at Wal Mart is $35,000, compared with $50,000 at Target and $74,000 at Costco. Costco is touted as the virtuous alternative to Wal Mart because it pays better wages, but it needs to because it requires higher-skilled workers to sell higher-end products to its more affluent customers.

All I can figure here is that Tierney has never set foot in either Wal Mart or Costco, because the merchandise in each is essentially the same. All we’re really talking about is the difference between cheap DVD players and slightly less cheap DVD players. It’s not as if the aisles of Costco are filled with society ladies in furs and pearls, demanding a highly refined workforce to cater to their discriminating needs.

Costco shoppers may well have a higher average income, but the reason is simple–warehouse stores sell in bulk. In order to save money over the long run, you have to spend significantly more upfront. And while I think it is commendable that Costco pays its workers a decent living wage, it’s not because of the customer service. Which is not a slam on Costco workers–the whole point of a warehouse store is that it’s mostly a do-it-yourself experience. Which Tierney would know if he’d ever been inside one.

Lastly, this shiny piece of nonsense from John J. Miller’s guest piece on the end of the Olin Foundation (the only one of the three not hidden behind the Select firewall):

So, is it possible to create a liberal version of the John M. Olin Foundation? I have my doubts. The success of any idea certainly depends to some extent on whether it can muster financial support, and it may also benefit from effective marketing. But in the end, not all ideas are equal. Some are simply better than others…(C)onservative ideas took flight not because wealthy philanthropists were suddenly willing to finance them, but because they identified actual problems and offered sensible solutions.

Yes, of course. What’s that famous phrase? Something about an idea repeated loudly and long enough becoming true–but only if it’s a really good idea to begin with. Because lord knows, those are the only kinds of ideas that our species ever embraces.

UPDATE: Tbogg responds to Tierney’s thesis that Wal Mart is a force for good in society.

For all of you conservatives who love to praise the “free market”, let me call bullshit on this enduring lie that the President frequently cites to sell his immigration plan. From yesterday’s speech :

As we enforce our immigration laws, comprehensive immigration reform also requires us to improve those laws by creating a new temporary worker program. This program would create a legal way to match willing foreign workers with willing American employers to fill jobs that Americans will not do. Workers would be able to register for legal status for a fixed period of time, and then be required to go home. This program would help meet the demands of a growing economy, and it would allow honest workers to provide for their families while respecting the law.

The “jobs Americans won’t do” lie was also recently advanced in the Washington Post by a spokesman for the Labor Department and a “panicking” farmer (via Kevin Drum) :

“There are just some jobs people don’t want to do,” Nassif said. “It’s the most developed nation in the world using a foreign workforce, and people need to recognize that. We need to make them legal.”

Jack Vessey said he listed openings for 300 laborers at the state office of employment last week to prepare the lettuce fields for harvest. “We got one person,” he said. “He showed up and said, ‘I’m not going to do that.’”

The key to unraveling this bullshit is that the anonymous laborer quoted above likely ended his gripe with “unless you pay me more”. The President wants you to think this is because American workers are shiftless elitists, but it’s the employers and their shills who are the assholes here.

What people like the George W. Bush don’t understand is that capitalism is not a one-way street. When the demand for workers is high and the supply of laborers is low, the rational solution would be for employers to raise wages, increase benefits, or both to ensure that supply catches up to demand. But that would mean actually spending more money, and we can’t have that.

Instead, employers have found a way to get around their obligations by employing “undocumented” workers (and thus creating a demand for illegal labor). Why are these men and women willing to do the same job that Americans are unwilling to do for less money? Well, they’re here illegally, for one. They probably don’t speak English well and have little familiarity with existing labor laws. They’re doing a job that’s unskilled while under the constant threat of deportation. Sounds like the new face of indentured servitude to me, but the President and his allies are trying to figure out ways to make it acceptable.

But here’s the key to all of these proposals : These illegal workers aren’t being offered citizenship, but membership in a “guest worker program”. Bush and co. don’t give a damn about the working class in this country, they just want to make sure that the crooks aren’t penalized for breaking our labor laws. The solutions bandied about would create a pseudo-citizenship which will protect employers but do little to lift immigrant workers from the bottom rung on the economic ladder. When residence is closely tied to employment, the threat of deportation doesn’t go away, it just gets hidden a little better.

Which makes this whole debate even more galling. Immigrants are being exploited, American workers are getting screwed, and the whole debate is happenening as if these two groups of victims are on opposite sides. If you want to stop illegal immigration, you don’t need to build a fence. The supply of illegal labor will go away once the demand for it ceases. We don’t need new plans, we need to rigorously enforce the laws already on the books. If that means that employers are going to have to pay more to the people doing the jobs that “Americans won’t do” and pass those costs on to the consumer, then it’s hardly our place to question the wisdom of the invisible hand, right?

Also, it should be stressed again that George Bush and his allies should be ashamed of themselves for slandering us with their anti-worker rhetoric. Aren’t you paying attention, America? The President of the United States just called you an indolent snob. He thinks you’re too lazy to do an honest day’s work and too effete to do work that will get your hands dirty. Doesn’t that piss you off? It should.

Yesterday I finished off a post with a vague suggestion that domestic politics may play a role in recent speculation about troop withdrawals in advance of next year’s elections — something the New York Times spells out today –  but it isn’t the whole story, and cynicism about this administration’s political machinations, while warranted, could get in the way of understanding something more important: We could simply be shifting to a different kind of war, one in which American ground troops play a relatively small role, but which may be even more dangerous for Iraqis.

A few hours later, along comes Seymour Hersh, with a much less vague, but similar suggestion. I was thinking of a dirty war, with American "advisers" aiding Iraqi commandos. To some extent they seemed to have backed out of that plan — after realizing, as Billmon says, that while "they thought they were riding with the bad boys, the real bad boys were out riding with the Iranian secret police" — but I wasn’t convinced that it hadn’t simply become more complicated to figure out whose monsters were whose. But Hersh offers evidence of something even more frightening:

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield.”

He continued, “We want to draw down our forces, but the President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004.” The war against the insurgency “may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win,”

This is precisely why it has always concerned me when anti-war rhetoric focuses entirely on what the war is doing to our soldiers, and when "Bring the soldiers home" is seen as a complete remedy. Getting Americans out of Iraq is essential. But you can bring most of the soldiers home — enough so that Americans lose interest in the ones that remain — and still maintain an American presence that does enormous damage to Iraq.

After reading Hersh’s piece, I think I also understand better the somewhat surprising comment Ayad Allawi made to the Observer this weekend — that abuse in Iraq today was worse than it had been under Saddam. Yesterday I said I didn’t think that was quite the break with the United States that it first seemed. According to Hersh, there’s no break at all:

Some officials in the State Department, the C.I.A., and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government have settled on their candidate of choice for the December elections—Iyad Allawi, the secular Shiite who served until this spring as Iraq’s interim Prime Minister. They believe that Allawi can gather enough votes in the election to emerge, after a round of political bargaining, as Prime Minister. A former senior British adviser told me that Blair was convinced that Allawi “is the best hope.” The fear is that a government dominated by religious Shiites, many of whom are close to Iran, would give Iran greater political and military influence inside Iraq. Allawi could counter Iran’s influence; also, he would be far more supportive and coöperative if the Bush Administration began a drawdown of American combat forces in the coming year.

Blair has assigned a small team of operatives to provide political help to Allawi, the former adviser told me. He also said that there was talk late this fall, with American concurrence, of urging Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite, to join forces in a coalition with Allawi during the post-election negotiations to form a government. Chalabi, who is notorious for his role in promoting flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before the war, is now a deputy Prime Minister. He and Allawi were bitter rivals while in exile.

A senior United Nations diplomat told me that he was puzzled by the high American and British hopes for Allawi. “I know a lot of people want Allawi, but I think he’s been a terrific disappointment,” the diplomat said. “He doesn’t seem to be building a strong alliance, and at the moment it doesn’t look like he will do very well in the election.”

The second Pentagon consultant told me, “If Allawi becomes Prime Minister, we can say, ‘There’s a moderate, urban, educated leader now in power who does not want to deprive women of their rights.’ He would ask us to leave, but he would allow us to keep Special Forces operations inside Iraq—to keep an American presence the right way. Mission accomplished. A coup for Bush.”

Allawi’s statement is partly a campaign speech, aimed at Sunnis. It seems to distance him from the U.S. — surely not a bad campaign strategy in Iraq — but it’s really directed at the people this administration has decided it can’t work with anyway. Drilling holes in people isn’t working, so now we’re going to try massive bombing campaigns, almost surely while complaining about the human rights abuses of people we worked with, financed, and trained only moments ago.

It worked with Saddam.

It just gets better and better:

Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country’s first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam’s regime.

‘People are doing the same as [in] Saddam’s time and worse,’ Ayad Allawi told The Observer. ‘It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.’

In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq’s escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam’s secret police, he said.

Allawi, who was a strong ally of the US-led coalition forces and was prime minister until this April, made his remarks as further hints emerged yesterday that President George Bush is planning to withdraw up to 40,000 US troops from the country next year, when Iraqi forces will be capable of taking over.

Allawi’s bleak assessment is likely to undermine any attempt to suggest that conditions in Iraq are markedly improving.

‘We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,’ he added. ‘A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.’

He said that immediate action was needed to dismantle militias that continue to operate with impunity. If nothing is done, ‘the disease infecting [the Ministry of the Interior] will become contagious and spread to all ministries and structures of Iraq’s government’, he said.

In a chilling warning to the West over the danger of leaving behind a disintegrating Iraq, Allawi added: ‘Iraq is the centrepiece of this region. If things go wrong, neither Europe nor the US will be safe.’

More.

Chris Wallace on (of course) Fox.