WhirledView

The Guantanamo Hilton

By PLS

Veep Dick Cheney describes the Guantanamo detention center as if it were a state-of-the-art resort hotel—on the American Plan, of course.

Yes, guests are forced to take the meals along with the lodging, but this is a good thing, Cheney notes. Detainees aren’t gaunt and scrawny-looking like their relatives back in those poverty-stricken native villages. Lucky detainees!

Cheney talks about comfort, too. He rhapsodizes about the hot and cold running water, the showers the detainees might not have in their own homes.

Pretty soon we’ll be hearing about the sheets’ thread count.

A Primer for first-time U.S. political appointee ambassadors

By PHK

For those few of you who may not know, around 30 percent of American Ambassadors “earn” those positions through patronage. They buy these usually cushy European, Canadian and Caribbean posts by contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Presidential candidate’s election bid. It used to be that the spare change came out of an individual’s pocket, but more recently the key has been successful campaign fund-raising among the party faithful. George Mascolo’s “Embassies for Sale: Want to Become Bush’s Next Ambassador?” in the June 27 Der Spiegel reminded me once again of the pitfalls of this quaint, largely made-in-the USA custom.

American political appointee Ambassadors are usually neophytes – all too often innocents abroad – as opposed to career people who have worked their way up the ranks of the all too hierarchical U.S. foreign service and have had extensive exposure to the country, language and culture to which they are being assigned – e.g. the professionals usually know something about the country of their posting, or if not, know how to make an Embassy function, the policies of whatever the administration is in the White House and how to deliver them as well as basic Ambassadorial does and don’ts.

As someone who worked for both political and career Ambassadors in a number of European and Southeast Asian posts, here are a few - albeit unsolicited - pieces of advice to the neophyte. I call them – for lack of a better term - ten rules for U.S. Ambassadorial political-appointees:

The Bush Speech

by CKR

More of the same, most of the commentariat is saying, and I agree.

There is some speculation out there that Bush was trying to rally "his base" yet one more time. I would like to put forth alternative explanations for why his speeches and actions are so narrowly drawn.

Perhaps Bush doesn't realize that there are other viewpoints beyond "his base." Or perhaps he doesn't see them as valid and therefore to be addressed. Or perhaps he is so stuck in the viewpoint of "his base" that he can't get out of it.

This would have to include his advisors and speechwriters as well. They have seen what independent thought and questioning of the President has gotten, say, General Shinseki and have taken the message.

Perhaps President Bush is quite candid when he tells us he doesn't read the polls.

Tuesday Getting Ready to Go Blogging

by CKR

My later cactuses bloomed this week, the walking-stick cholla and the larger prickly pears. I have two chollas in my yard, but only one of them bloomed. I was told that the chollas might be of a special subspecies with orange flowers, but this one is the standard magenta. The other didn't bloom this year and is maybe fifty feet closer to the type location of the orange-bloomers...

The larger and later-blooming prickly pears have yellow flowers with a hint of red at the base of the petals. I have two kinds in my yard, I think. The other one has similar flowers but spines with a brownish coloring. One of these days I'll check them out in the books. I started looking at my guidebooks, and for some of the distinctions you have to count spines and other details that I just don't have time for right now.

The Times Gets It Wrong - This Time About Plutonium

by CKR

U.S. Has Plans to Again Make Own Plutonium

Oh man! Big problems for nonproliferation! The warmongers are at it again!

Well, no. The story is about the impending production of plutonium 238 in a reactor at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. Plutonium 238 can't be used to make a nuclear weapon. It is a pretty fierce alpha emitter and thus heats itself up. That heat is used to provide electrical power to space probes like Cassini and, yes, spy devices.

The substance, valued as a power source, is so radioactive that a speck can cause cancer.

No again. Or rather yes, if you pay close attention to the words. Can cause cancer. So can natural chemicals in parsnips and celery, not to mention smoking and chewing tobacco. And some of the metals, like selenium, which are needed in small amounts to maintain health.

Politics Italian Style and the CIA

By PHK

Has “Operation Clean Hands” struck again?

I was troubled – if that’s the right word - by news reports from Milan yesterday of an Italian judge’s arrest warrant for 13 American CIA officers and operatives charged with the seizure of an Egyptian cleric on a Milan street two years ago and his abduction to Egypt for further questioning concerning possible links to Al Qaeda. According to the New York Times today, the 42 year old cleric in question was under surveillance by Italian security at the time of his abduction and has not been heard of since 2004 when he, presumably was rearrested by the Egyptians.

This story I fear is the tip of an iceberg – or perhaps the beginning of a political avalanche - with potential negative implications for Prime Minister Berlusconi’s longevity in office not to mention George Bush’s questionable defense of the U.S. government’s rendition of terrorist suspects.

What's going on beneath the surface? What were the Italian judge’s motives in taking on this politically charged case? What did Berlusconi really know at the time of the abduction? And how did the Milan magistrate learn of the abduction to begin with - let alone obtain all the details needed for the arrest warrants – a few of which, at least, have been leaked to the media.

The Downing Street Memos

by CKR

WhirledView, so far, has been aligned with the MSM in ignoring the Downing Street memos. Let me now add a few words to the fray.

The memos indeed show us nothing new. Simply from President Bush’s body language and obvious impatience in the summer of 2002, not to mention Vice-President Cheney’s dissing of Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors, I figured that they all had made up their minds for war. So it’s not surprising to see a meeting of the British government at that time trying to come to terms with what their large Atlantic brother was preparing to do.

The memos themselves give few specifics in terms of the exact words of one player or another, but taken together they show a clear pattern of fixing the intelligence (yes, as in fixing an election), developing ploys to justify attacking Iraq, and a lack of planning for what the war might yield.

The memos are the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers: not so voluminous, but definitive. Some brave (or fed-up) soul in the higher reaches of the British government is taking a tremendous risk to tell us the truth, not unlike Mark Felt, who played it differently than Daniel Ellsberg.

It’s the job of the press to flesh out the details: find knowledgeable Americans who might nod their heads, Felt-style, when asked about specifics, dates of meetings, who attended; dig through the government records and file freedom of information requests. Perhaps some Woodsteins-to-be are doing this even now; we wouldn’t hear about it until they had a story.

Meanwhile, indignation and frustration are providing a lot of words. Some of them are good, but the story line risks being lost in those words.

Apology Wars

by CKR

Today Karl Rove is “it.” The Democrats are demanding an apology for his remarks about liberals and 9/11.

A few days ago it was Senator Dick Durbin, who obliged, twice. Before that it was Michael Jackson and the media who reported on his trial, and Bill Frist for his telediagnosis of Terri Schiavo.

Why the (manufactured) outrage, the necessity for humiliating the (supposed) offender?