THIS MODERN WORLD

The demonstrators arrived angry, departed furious. The police had herded them into pens. Stopped them from handing out fliers. Threatened them with arrest for standing on public sidewalks. Made notes on which politicians they cheered and which ones they razzed.

Meanwhile, officers from a special unit videotaped their faces, evoking for one demonstrator the unblinking eye of George Orwell’s “1984.”

“That’s Big Brother watching you,” the demonstrator, Walter Liddy, said in a deposition.

Mr. Liddy’s complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.

Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated.

Story.

A British reader sends a link to this story. The anonymous sourcing makes it difficult to know how reliable an account it is, but it seems worth noting:

Tony Blair and George W Bush decided to invade Iraq weeks earlier than they have admitted, a new book by a human rights lawyer has claimed.

The book by Philippe Sands says the two leaders discussed going to war regardless of any United Nations view.

And it suggests the US wanted to provoke Saddam Hussein by sending a spy plane over Iraq in UN colours.

Downing Street said on Thursday it did not comment on discussions that “may or may not have happened” between leaders.

‘Disarm Saddam’

The revelations come in an updated edition of Mr Sands’ book Lawless World, which caused controversy when it was first published early last year.

The government has always insisted military action was used as a last resort against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Mr Blair told MPs on 25 February 2003: “Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully.”

But the new book centres on a two hour meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair at the White House three weeks earlier, on 31 January.

Professor Sands, a QC and professor of international law at University College London, says the two-hour meeting was also attended by six advisers.

The book quotes from a note it says was prepared by one of the participants.

According to the note, Mr Bush said the military campaign was pencilled in for March. Mr Blair is quoted as saying he was “solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam”.

The book claims Mr Blair only wanted a second UN Security Council resolution because it would make it easier politically to deal with Saddam.

And it says Mr Bush, told Mr Blair the US “was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours”.

If the Iraqis Saddam fired on them, the would be in breach of UN resolutions, he suggested.

Mr Bush is also quoted saying it was possible an Iraqi figure would defect and be able to give a “public presentation” of weapons of mass destruction.

The note said Mr Bush thought there was also “a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated”.

The book also claims the president “thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups”.

None of this is especially surprising, if true, but neither was the Downing Street Memo, really. It all just confirms what any sufficiently cynical human being understood to be happening at the time. (And here, I use the term ‘cynic’ as Ambrose Bierce defined it: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.)

An article in the Washington Post a few days back described the ways in which social psychologists are using high tech tools like brain scans to study political bias.

The new interest has yielded some results that will themselves provoke partisan reactions: Studies presented at the conference, for example, produced evidence that emotions and implicit assumptions often influence why people choose their political affiliations, and that partisans stubbornly discount any information that challenges their preexisting beliefs.

Nothing too surprising there. But here’s where it gets really interesting:

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy — but only in candidates they opposed.

When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats — the scans showed that “reward centers” in volunteers’ brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.

Apparently there’s more truth to the term “political junkie” than any of us realized.

The new documentary Why We Fight features a retired New York City policeman and Vietnam veteran named Wilton Sekzer. It examines his turbulent emotions after his son Jason was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

At first Sekzer just wants revenge, and he understands the Bush administration to be saying Iraq was somehow responsible. So not only does he support the Iraq war, he asks the Pentagon to write his son’s name on a bomb. They do, and drop it east of Baghdad.

Obviously Sekzer wasn’t alone in feeling this way about 9/11 and Iraq. Until recently, polls showed a majority of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the attacks.

Those possessing a cerebellum know this didn’t happen by accident. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the White House Iraq Group ran focus groups to discover the most popular rationale for a war, and found it was an Iraq-9/11 connection.

Of course, they never (quite) came out and directly asserted there was such a connection. People would have asked for evidence. Instead, they repeatedly implied Saddam did it: “9/11…Saddam…terrorism…Iraq…Al Qaeda.” They correctly assumed many Americans—particularly those who don’t parse every single word politicians say for fine shades of meaning—would make the connection themselves.

But what’s gotten little attention is that, in 2004, a Bush official actually admitted this was a conscious strategy.

In other words:

(1) To put it in concrete terms, they sat in their offices and figured out the best way to fool a retired New York City policeman gutted by grief for his dead son.
(2) They were so proud of their cleverness they couldn’t help bragging about it to a reporter.

This appears in a November, 2004 article in Esquire about Dick Cheney. If you read the whole thing, you’ll see the “senior administration official” was probably Paul Wolfowitz or Scooter Libby:

But what were the real reasons for going into Iraq? I’d asked a senior administration official.

There were two basic reasons, the official said. “One was to be rid of the Saddam Hussein regime”… The other was containment…

As it was, the administration took what looked like the path of least resistance in making its public case for the war: WMD and intelligence links with Al Qaeda. If the public read too much into those links and thought Saddam had a hand in September 11, so much the better.

As Why We Fight shows, Wilton Sekzer was stunned when—many months after the invasion—George Bush explicitly said there was no evidence Iraq was involved in 9/11. He felt duped and betrayed. And now not only is his son gone, so is any faith he had in the U.S. government.

But that’s only bad from HIS point of our view! From the Bush administration perspective, if their marks fall for the con, so much the better.

…but it’s a little weird when the Pentagon is doing the criticizing:

NEW YORK A Tom Toles editorial cartoon published in The Washington Post on Monday and on its Web site has drawn a very rare and very strong protest letter to the editors from all six members of The Joint Chiefs of Staff, E&P has learned.

The letter, not yet published by the Post, charges that the six military leaders “believe you and Mr. Toles have done a disservice to your readers and your paper’s reputation by using such a callous depiction of those who have volunteered to defend this nation, and as a result, have suffered traumatic and life-altering wounds. … As the Joint Chiefs, it is rare that we all put our hand to one letter, but we cannot let this reprehensible cartoon go unanswered.”

A Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed the contents of the letter to E&P late this afternoon. That the newspaper had received such a letter was first reported on the popular AmericaBlog site, which is run by John Aravosis, this afternoon.

The spokeswoman said a letter from all six joint chiefs to anyone, let alone a newspaper, is rare, but the cartoon so offended them, they wanted to let their feelings be known. “It was expressing their disappointment with the paper and outrage at using that image to make a political point,” said Lt. Col. Diane Battaglia. “That is a rare occurrence, but the level of inappropriateness prompted a response of unanimous support.”

Story here. The target of the cartoon is obviously Rumsfeld’s callousness, but I’m sure we’re about to hear plenty of howls of outrage about how Tom Toles hates the troops.

… see the cartoon (and read more from Aravosis) here.