Month: November 2005

Red carpet for Chalabi

Well, Ahmad Chalabi’s going to be coming to Washington soon. And who is rolling out the red carpet for his “rehabilitation” there but… his old pal at the WaPo, Jim Hoagland!
Chalabi’s chutzpah in seeking a major rehabilitation in DC– after the emergence of lots of evidence has emerged that not only does he have a close political relationship with the mullahs’ regime in Teheran, but also that he has handed over significant amounts of confidential US national-security information to them– is in itself quite astounding. Right now, indeed, as he makes his way to DC, he has decided to take a stopover in Teheran. (Don’t get me wrong. I am all for seeing the easing of tensions between the US government and the regime in Teheran, and the establishment of solid means of communication between them. Ahmad Chalabi, however, is not the kind of person one would like to see anywhere near to playing an “honest broker” role of this type!)
But Chala’s chutzpah in seeking rehabilitation in DC is not so surprising– hey, this is the guy who bounced back in the Middle Eastern and global arenas after having defrauded scores of thousands of investors in his “Petra Bank” scam in Jordan in the 1980s. What amazes me is his continuing success in being able to bamboozle and hold in his camp a number of apparently intelligent and well-connected members of the western polite who are far from hanging their heads in shame at this point at the revelations of their friend’s multiple shenanigans.
Hoagland is a case in point. As Douglas McCollam noted in this important piece in the Columbia Journalism Review in July/August 2004, Hoagie had been one of the main (and apparently very willing) tools used by Chala’s exile-based “Iraqi National Congress” as it systematically tried to build up the case for the US to invade Iraq. Hoagie, it should be noted, is no starry-eyed neophyte in the world of journalism. He is a decades-long veteran of the WaPo’s “Foreign Service” who has been an “Associate Editor” of the paper for several years now. He has no excuses except pure ideology for the pugnacious and quite uncritical role he played before March 2003 as he beat the drums for war.
There is obviously a lot more to say about the irony and chutzpah of Ahmad Chalabi than I have time to say here. Lots more to say, too, about Jim Hoagland. I guess he doesn’t really like having his role investigated. CJR’s McCollum wrote that when he called Hoagie to ask for comment on the piece he was writing last year Hoagie, “who has championed the INC for years, abruptly hung up on me before calling back to apologize graciously.” (If you haven’t read what McCollum wrote about Hoagie’s role in the INC’s pre-war disinformation campaign about Saddam’s alleged links with and international Islamist terrorism, you should go back there and do so.)
And now, in his latest fauning, excuse-laden piece about Chalabi, Hoagland tries to get a sly little dig of his own in against McCollum. Using very heavy “irony” he asks:

    Chalabi? Isn’t he the aforesaid Arab con man of journalistic and political lore who tricked alert politicians such as Jay Rockefeller, and the entire CIA, into believing Hussein was moments away from blowing them to kingdom come? The same guy who provided the opportunity for shallow journalistic exposs and a magazine cover — on the Columbia Journalism Review, of all places — that were redolent with whiffs of anti-Arab stereotyping that would have been denounced if other ethnic groups had been so targeted?

The suggestion that McCollum’s piece “would have been denounced [as anti-Arab stereotyping] if other ethnic groups had been involved” is outrageous. It comes out of literally nowhere. There is no hint of ethnic stereotyping in what McCollum wrote, and Hoagie should immediately retract and apologize for that suggestion.
Hoagie goes on with the crux of how he is hoping, this time round, to “sell” his old buddy Ahmad to the US public:

    Yes, Chalabi is back, in Iraq and in Washington. He visits here this week at the invitation of an administration that listened to him before the war — except of course when he opposed the occupation and other things they wanted to do — and then tried to eliminate him from Iraqi politics in Allawi’s favor. I know, the story line gets confusing, but remember, we are in Valerie Plame deep-cover territory here.
    The visit would be a good occasion for the American public to catch up on the thing that interests Hagel — the chances of democracy in Iraq — and on how Chalabi would hurry American troops home. Rockefeller, Harry Reid and other Democrats could ask him in person how he so brilliantly tricked them, and then explain that in detail to their constituents.

Gimme a break. Time for all this tired old hack to retire, at the very least. (If not, to be aggressively investigated regarding the nature of his ties to Chalabi and the role he played in helping spread and add credibility to Chala’s disgraceful pre-war disinformation.)

Skulduggery at the Iraqi polls? ( I am “shocked, shocked!”)

Gareth Porter (JWN commenter) has written a piece for IPS stating that,

    Reports compiled by the U.S. military in Iraq from its informants and by non-governmental organisations from independent Iraqi sources provide the first detailed picture of a campaign of ballot fraud by Kurdish authorities in Nineveh province, the key to the outcome of the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum.
    They show that officials of the Kurdish Democratic Party bused non-resident Kurds to vote in polling stations in various non-Kurdish areas of Nineveh and created a climate of fear and intimidation in the province that reduced the vote against the constitution on the Nineveh plain. They also support Sunni charges of fraudulent vote totals in the province.

Porter writes,

    The final official vote total for Nineveh was 395,000 “no” and 323,000 “yes”. However the [Independent Election Commission in Iraq] in Nineveh had told the media on Oct. 16 and again on Oct. 17 that 327,000 people had voted for the constitution and only 90,000 against, with only 25 out of the 300 polling stations in the province remaining to be counted.
    Thus, between the two counts, 5,000 yes votes had apparently disappeared and 295,000 no votes had mysteriously materialised — all from only 25 polling places. No explanation has ever been provided by election authorities for those contradictory data. The U.S. military’s informant supports the view that Kurdish and Sunni vote totals in Mosul were significantly altered.
    In the towns north and east of [the province’s capital,] Mosul, the military’s reporting suggests the main factor in distorting the vote was the use by Kurdish authorities of “flying voters” and voter intimidation…

The picture appears a little unclear from this account. First of all, it is quite amazing if the IECI was in any position to give any kind of an original estimate as early as Oct 16 or Oct 17, given the weather and other conditions in the country at the time and the logistical challenges in gathering and counting so many paper ballots. If IECI people were giving estimates at that time– and I do recall something like that– then those estimates themselves can have been based on little more than thin air and wishful thinking. (Rather like Condi Rice’s “calling” of the referendum on the morning of the 16th…. What an amazing feat of non-reality-based chutzpah that was, eh?)
Oh, right. Here is an informative IPS report by Gareth Porter datelined Oct. 19, in which he reported that the IECI had claimed that 326,000 people in Nineveh had voted Yes and 90,000 had voted No.
So I guess if the IECI had been giving out such an unlikely estimate that early, pretty soon afterwards someone must have taken them aside and said, “You know, those figures are just simply not credible… You’ll have to do better than that!” So off they went and came back with the 55%-45% result: “Oh sorry, chaps, our side has still ‘won’ — even if we did it with only 45% of the total!”
One of the sources of reporting on the shenanigans in Nineveh that Porter used in his latest piece was Michael Youash of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project, a Washington DC-based group that is concerned with protecting the interests especially of Iraq’s most vulnerable groups, which it defines as “ChaldoAssyrians and also Turkmens, Yezidis, Shabaks and Mandaeans”. Much of Youash’s information had come, in turn, from members of those minorities inside Nineveh.
(By the way, can anyone tell me anything about the Shabaks? You know “Shabak” is the Hebrew word for the Shin Bet, and I’ve a feeling that many reports of Israeli covert activities in northern Iraq might have originated with references to members of Iraq’s own Shabak community… But no-one I’ve spoke to seems to know very much about them… )
Anyway, clearly at a time big inter-group strife in the country, members of all of its small minorities must be feeling very vulnerable, and in danger of getting run over by the nearest demographic/sectarian steamroller, whether it’s the Kurds or the Shiites or the Sunnis– or squezzed hard between two of the steamrollers… Sort of like the Gypsies/Roma in the war-torn lands of former Yugoslavia: always distrusted, always vulnerable.
But I digress. Actually, there is very little at all that sincere lovers of democratic practice can feel good about regarding the modalities, conduct, or outcome of the Iraqi referendum. Porter’s report just adds to the already depressing nature of the general picture.

‘Old’ CIA hand’s plea for the Geneva Conventions

The NYT had a good op-ed in today in which Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, made an eloquent plea for the US Supreme Court to uphold the principle that all detainees under US control should enjoy the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
From 1986 through 1989 Bearden was “the senior American intelligence officer during the final three years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.” In the op-ed he describes how his experience persuaded him that that respect of the Geneva Conventions by the CIA and its allies there brought two notable benefits:

    1. It offered the best chance (on the grounds of reciprocity) that operatives for the US and its allies who might be taken captive by their opponents would receive something like decent treatment, and
    2. It offered the best chance that captured opponents would be kept alive if captured by CIA allies in Afghanistan; those captives might then become willing sources of intel for the CIA and its allies, and when released– either during or after the war– might become spokespeople for the view that the US was a decent, humane country. (He has a particularly good story there about Aleksandr Rutskoi.)

Well, I am sure that Milt Bearden’s insistence on strict observance of the Geneva Conventions was too frequently honored by the anti-Soviet “mujahideen” in Afghanistan only in the breach. Still, he seemed quite insistent in his piece that he and the rest of the CIA folks there had tried to enforce strict Geneva observance– and also that those attempts to uphold Geneva really helped the US effort in Afghanistan.
That was, of course, the “old”– pre-Porter Goss– CIA. Very 20th century. How much of that ethos still survives there, after Bush put his old buddy Porter Goss in as Director with instructions for a broad house-cleaning? Who knows? (Mind you, Wednesday’s story about the CIA’s global gulag did reveal that there are some present-day qualms inside the Agency about the way it treats detainees. So maybe the ‘old’ CIA is not completely dead…)
I guess, though, that this is really a measure of how bad things have become in the US imperium these days. If even wily old former CIA operatives like Milt Bearden now feel they need to speak out to protest the administration’s abuses– well!

60 percent disapproval of Bush

Oh yes! Today, the WaPo reported that its latest poll had the US public disapproving of the President’s performance in office by 60 percent to 39 percent.
Plus, this:

    several pillars of Bush’s presidency have begun to crumble under the combined weight of events and White House mistakes. Bush’s approval ratings have been in decline for months, but on issues of personal trust, honesty and values, Bush has suffered some of his most notable declines. Moreover, Bush has always retained majority support on his handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism — until now, when 51 percent have registered disapproval.
    The CIA leak case has apparently contributed to a withering decline in how Americans view Bush personally. The survey found that 40 percent now view him as honest and trustworthy — a 13 percentage point drop in the past 18 months. Nearly 6 in 10 — 58 percent — said they have doubts about Bush’s honesty, the first time in his presidency that more than half the country has questioned his personal integrity.

And on Iraq, this:

    Iraq remains a significant drag on Bush’s presidency, with dissatisfaction over the situation there continuing to grow and with suspicion rising over whether administration officials misled the country in the run-up to the invasion more than two years ago.
    Nearly two-thirds disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation there, while barely a third approve, a new low. Six in 10 now believe the United States was wrong to invade Iraq, a seven-point increase in just over two months, with almost half the country saying they strongly believe it was wrong.
    About 3 in 4 — 73 percent — say there have been an unacceptable level of casualties in Iraq. More than half — 52 percent — say the war with Iraq has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States.
    The same percentage — 52 percent — says the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored, and only about 1 in 5 — 18 percent — say the United States should withdraw its forces immediately. In the week after U.S. deaths in Iraq passed the 2,000 mark, a majority of those surveyed — 55 percent — said the United States is not making significant progress toward stabilizing the country.

… Yesterday, here in Charlottesville, we moved to our “winter schedule” for the weekly peace vigils. Once the country comes off summer time it gets dark that much earlier in the evening. So for visibility and safety we shift the vigil to 4:30 p.m. through 5:30 p.m. In summer it’s 5 through 6.
Whenever we make our twice-yearly shift, we catch the attention of a bunch of regular rush-hour drivers who haven’t seen us there for a while. Yesterday, it was the 4:30 through 5 p.m. drivers who hadn’t seen us since spring. They seemed delighted to see us there again. Many gave prolonged honks of support or let rip with little riffs on toot-too-too-toot-toot– toot-toot!
Our honk rate has definitely gone up a lot since April.
It was the end of a beautiful, balmy afternoon. In the nearby, pedestrianized downtown area many townspeople were just hanging out, enjoying the Indian summer sunshine. A crowd of black teens were slouching around outside Christian’s Pizza, trading jokes. The street-traders in Central Place– a large proportion of whom are Tibetan immigrants– chatted among themselves quietly as their bright piles of winter scarves and hats sat unsold. A couple of moms with small kids wandered out of the new Italian gelateria licking on large waffle-cones. A few dry yellow leaves drifted down from the trees.
Peace is so amazing, and most people who enjoy it don’t even realize that!
Personally, I’m really delighted that– in the midst of all the campaigns of fear- and hate-mongering that the pro-war folks have been continuing, 18 percent of Americans now, according to that waPo poll, support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Wow. Those people, it seems to me, see completely through all the many arguments produced by the “oh, we have to stay there to make things better” crowd and all the “Pottery Barn Rules” folks.
During the peace vigil, my friend Heather said, “Oh I can’t believe we might be here this time next year, as well.” Well yes, Heather, quite likely we will be. But I venture to suggest that our little vigil– and all the other things people in the peace movement have done over the past four years– has actually made a difference. It’s kind of good to feel that way… even if we still have a long way to go, an additional 82 percent of Americans to persuade…

Empire and the discourse of “justice”

Part 1: Pursuing “justice”:

No political leader in history ever rallied support for a project of  imperial
aggrandizement and war by declaring to his followers and the outside world
that he wanted to pursue an unjust cause.  On the contrary, every leader
who engages in war declares very loudly indeed that his cause is not only
just but also, beyond that, imperatively so.  (That is one of the many
problems with “just war” theory.  Every leader of a belligerent nation
is convinced that his cause is just: So why do wars happen at all then, if there is one single, self-evident definition of what justice is?)

George W. Bush’s present set of wars in the Global War on Terror is no
exception.  I’m sure JWN readers all remember the declaration he made, immediately after 9/11, that
“Either we’ll bring Osama Bin Laden to justice or–”  and this had a
peculiarly ominous ring to it– “we’ll bring justice to him.” How much better it would have been, though, if the US government had simply stuck to the version of “bringing OBL to justice” rather than trying to “bring justice to” him and countless other US foes around the world…

Over the past four years we’ve seen the Bush cabal pursue its campaign
of “bringing justice to” its opponents in a number of different ways, in a
number of different places.  In Afghanistan and Iraq it did so through
war, and in the case of Syria it has done so by the deployment of…
a UN-appointed “Special Prosecutor”.

The UN’s appointment of German national Detlev Mehlis to play exactly the
same investigative role in Lebanon and Syria that is played within the US
justice system by a Special Prosecutor had a couple of significant features
to it:

  1. Particularity.  Activists and leaders in political opposition
    parties get assassinated regularly throughout the world, in a number of contexts.
     But never before the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in Lebanon last
    February has the UN Security Council responded by rushing to create this
    quite unprecedented form of a judicial investigating mechanism in response
    to such an  act.
  2. The international politics of it.  “Containing” Syrian
    power had already, from August 2004 on, proven to be something that the
    Bushies and the French could agree strongly on.  After Hariri’s killing,
    upping the ante against Syria and its allies inside the Lebanese system  certainly
    looked like a campaign that could continue to help Washington and the bastions
    of “Old Europe” in France and Germany mend the fences that had earlier been
    badly torn by the Bushies’ reckless and unilateral rush to invade Iraq.

Please note that I am not arguing here that the full facts about
the killing of Hariri should not be sought out and made public, and those
reponsible tried in a court of law.  Indeed, I believe they should be.
 I am just noting some political facts about the context of the Mehlis
investigation that cannot be ignored.

Let me introduce a historical analogy…

Continue reading “Empire and the discourse of “justice””

U.S. running secret prison in East Europe

Today’s WaPo has a very disturbing story by Dana Priest in which she reveals new details about the globe-circling gulag that the CIA has run since September 2001.
At least one branch of this gulag is in a Soviet-era compound in a newly ‘democratic’ country of Eastern Europe, she writes. She adds,

    The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
    The hidden global internment network … depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.
    The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
    The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
    While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

Addendum, 9:40 a.m.: Of course, it is the mistreatment that the CIA can give to its detainees that Dick Cheney is currently trying to protect, by seeking a special exemption for the CIA from the anti-torture legislation now being considered by Congress. I heard a radio interview with Sen. John McCain yesterday in which he sounded very confident that the Senate would continue to uphold the principle of no special exemptions for the CIA or anyone else from the anti-torture provision. Let’s hope so…
Priest gives a lot of details about how, starting in the days immediately after 9/11, this program of completely secret, off-the-books detentions grew rapidly, and without either oversight or much planning. Some of the detention sites previously used in it were closed down, for various reasons. (That included the “super-secret” CIA unit at Guantanamo, though as we know the military-run portion of the prison there continues to hold hundreds of detainees.)
She writes:

    “We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’ ”
    It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.
    Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning…

So where are these helpful “host” countries? As described by Priest, one is still Afghanistan, where the CIA has run a secret detention camp called the “Salt Pit” at various different locations since 2001. Another was previously Thailand, where high-ranking Qaeda captives Abu Zubaida and Ramzi Binalshibh were both taken during 2002. “But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in the matter.” (It is of course quite possible that the place held more those two CIA prisoners at the time.)
And which is the East European country that’s still involved in the program?
By my best reading of Priest’s report, it seems that while there may in the past have been more than one such country involved, at present there is at least one. She writes:

    The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

If I were a democrat in such a country and I suspected that my government was allowing the CIA to run such a prison system on the national soil , I would demand that my government cease its cooperation with this scheme immediately.
Let’s get this straight. As Priest writes straightforwardly and quite correctly, “It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States” (which was why they felt they had to seek sites not on US soil, in the first place.) So in order to save the appearance of the rule of law inside the US, the CIA has been quite happy to export its besmirchment to other, much more vulnerable countries.
For what it’s worth, if I were a democrat in Hungary, I would start asking a lot of questions about whether the CIA is running one of its “black” prisons in my country. Hungary, you will recall, was the place where in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the government rapidly acceded to US requests that it open up a training center for Ahmad Chalabi’s alleged thousands of supporters who needed some quick military training. (Fewer than 800 of them ever showed up.)
According to Dana Priest, the “black sites” have hosted the detention of “More than 100 suspected terrorists” take from various places– though she immediately notes that that number does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq. So if any significant portion of the detainees picked up in Iraq are put into the black system– as quite possibly happens to a large proportion of the non-Iraqis taken prisoner there– then the number of detainees may be quite a lot higher than simply 100.
Of the 100, Priest notes that more than 70 came to be deemed of less than high “significance”– hey, maybe some of them were completely innocent; we may never know– and those ones were “rendered” over to the untender mercies of other compliant governments.
She makes a couple of intriguing references in her piece to the emergence of some disquiet about the system among serving and former CIA officers familiar with it. (Which is no doubt what motivated some of them to seek her out and talk a little both about the program and about their doubts regarding it.)
Here’s how she concludes the piece:

    Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.
    Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable.
    “It’s just a horrible burden,” said the intelligence official.

Look at that second paragraph there. Some CIA officers argue that the secrecy surrounding the program “is not sustainable.” What are their precise fears? That if the truth came out, the program would have to be ended? Or, that anyone who had been involved in administering it might be liable to prosecution under the laws of the countries they’ve been working in?
… At a broad level, though, you really have to wonder at the twisted logic of all the people involved in designing and running such programs. In the name of “democracy” you subvert the rule of law in other countries? In the name of “freedom” you deny even the most basic habeas corpus protections to detainees– quite possibly, for the entire rest of their lives?
Of course, it is not the “democrats” inside Hungary or any other non-American place who need to take the lead in ending this system. It should be all adherents of (small-d) democracy right here in the belly of the beast, here in the USA.

So the US Dems have spines? (Maybe…)

This afternoon, the leader of the democrats in the US Senate, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada abruptly activated something called “Rule 21” which forced the Senate to go into a closed session to discuss a Democratic demand that the Intelligence Committee complete a long-delayed investigation into the intel that underlay the invasion of Iraq.
The “unilateral” way in which Reid did this marked a sharp break from the kowtowing “collegiality” that has marked the Democratic senators’ relations with their GOP (Republican) counterparts until now. Senate Majority (i.e. Republican) Leader Bill Frist yelped that the Dems were “hijacking the Senate”.
Reid’s move was, however, quite legal. Senate employees cleared nearly all the non-Senators out of the chamber, dimmed the lights (why?), made sure electronic devices were turned off, and secured the entrances so the senators could have their “closed-door” deliberation. It lasted a couple of hours; and according to this AP report by the end of that time the Republicans had ” agreed … to a bipartisan review of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into prewar intelligence.”
At issue was the second phase of an investigation into the pre-war intel that the Intelligence Committeee started work on last year. The AP report said, “A six-member task force — three members from each party — was appointed to review the Intelligence Committee’s work and report to their respective leaders by Nov. 14.” But apparently the Dems were afraid the work was being delayed.
Just before he invoked Rule 21, Reid stated,

    The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions.

Fighting words! Some analysts– most notably Mark Schmitt at TPM Cafe— almost immediately identified Reid’s moment of feistiness as a “tipping point” or “power shift”. He wrote:

    there is often a moment when the effective majority switches, when the minority takes control of the agenda well before an election. It happened in 1994 when Gingrich forced the Crime Bill back to conference. It happened in 1996 when Kennedy forced the Senate to take up the minimum wage increase. After those events, the majority never quite had control of the agenda again.
    I think the same thing just happened today when Harry Reid took the Senate into closed session to force a discussion of the delayed Intelligence Committee report on misuse of intelligence.
    Bill Frist’s ability to run the institution now lies completely in ruins.

Not so fast there. It will take a lot more evidence than Reid’s single action of today to persuade me this is so. (And over at his own blog, Schmitt admits that, “I”ve never been a very good political prognosticator.”)
Yes, it would be great to think that the Democrats in the Senate could suddenly develop spines. But we’d need to see a lot more real protest, and a clear and principled anti-Bush movement developing in the country, before we could be confident of that. The party system in this country is so very different from that in most of the other countries I’m familiar with… Here, the social fragmentation and wide geographic dispersal of the citizenry means that parties don’t really have a forceful, continuing, and coherent political existence apart from being machines for winning elections. So the fact that the Senate Democratic leader has suddenly taken one semi-forceful action certainly doesn’t mean that tomorrow every Democrat in the country will take up the cause of “Show us where the lies were!” in a coordinated manner.
And then, of course, there’s the whole sad question of– even if we do find out all the details of who told which lie to whom, who fabricated which lie for whom, in the run-up to the war– well… So what?? What do the Democrats plan to do about it??? John Kerry’s little bleat last week about hoping to pull “20,000” US troops out of Iraq by Christmas really didn’t seem convincing or forceful, at all.
Well, maybe I’m too cynical. Maybe there is something new stirring in the Democratic Party…
Here in Virginia, and in a lot of other states, there will be some fairly interesting elections happening next Tuesday. Here we’re going to have elections for many state-level offices including the Governor, Lieutenant Governor (a separate race), Attorney General, and many state legislators. In Virginia, governors can only serve one four-year term each. Our present Governor, Mark Warner, is an android-looking political centrist who governed fairly effectively as a Democrat while having to deal with both houses of the state legislature here being strongly dominated by Republicans. Now, the present Lieut. Governor, Tim Kaine– also a Democrat– is running to replace him. The last polls I saw showed Kaine ahead of his GOP challenger by a hair.
Well, all politics is local; and in the case of some of these state-level races very local indeed. But I suppose that next week’s elections might give us one general impression of how much fight the Democrats have in them in various parts of the country… And of course, the other big issue at the national level right now is the latest Supreme Court nominee. But I’m too tired to write anything cogent here about that.