Did the General betray us after all?

I've been willing to give General Petraeus the benefit of the doubt so far. I didn't watch this last testimony, but read that he was making an effort to remain intellectually honest, and preserve his role as a general and non-politician. And he was put in an impossible position of trying to "win" a war he didn't start. I didn't see great evidence (though I didn't look all that hard) that he was a loyal more to Bush than at least what he sees as the truth, and to me, it seemed that most of the bloggers saying that were dismissing Petraeus's statements based on that assumption, rather than checking their veracity. And mostly, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and try to reserve my opinion, because the guy's son was a college teammate of mine, and it just felt wrong badmouthing the guy's father.

But this is just inexcusable. This is knowingly lying about the actual conditions in Iraq to further the story that the surge is a "success." This is precisely what all the bloggers were claiming he was doing! I had faith that he could be a stand-up man, resistant to pressure of the Bush administration and really just trying to do what is best for our military. But he knows as well as us what happens to people that tell Bush something he doesn't want to hear. And being replaced is unacceptable with his particular political ambitions. It seems MoveOn was right all along, not that I would have doubted if I had cared to look.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan gives a reader's take. It's an interesting idea that if Petraeus were to stand up to Bush, he'd just be replaced, so he might as well do the best for his soldiers but giving Bush what he wants. And I do essentially argue that the first part is true above. However, Bush trusts Petraeus to the occasionally subverting the chain of command. Thus, doesn't it make sense that in this particular case, if Petraeus both actually believed what was best is different from what Bush wants to hear (as evidenced by his manipulating the graphs), he has an obligation to say so to Bush as an honorable man and general? Isn't there a good enough relationship there to not necessarily assume he will be discarded and to do what's right? I guess not, if he perceives his own future presidency is at stake.

UPDATE 2: Petreaus says, pretty definitively, that he will never hold public office. So then, why is he lying at all? Does he think we have to believe things are going well for the army to get it's job done? Is he blind to the very idea that withdrawal might be right? Seriously, if he's not gonna run for office, then really, why not tell the truth? He may be the only person Bush will listen to.

Botnets = Dirty Bomb?

Raise your hand if you understand computer security well enough to comprehend how a massive online attack shutting down our communications and financial networks might work. Anyone? Anyone at all? Perfect, then that's the right claim for the next round of fear-mongering.

It's also reportedly just the first step in having the nation's most powerful spy agency begin to take over information security responsibility for large chunks of the net. In January, President Bush signed an order, National Security Presidential Directive 54, that begins that process. The details are murky, since the order itself is classified.

To sell the plan to the private sector, Chertoff and other officials will likely talk about Chinese hackers infiltrating the military's most secure unclassified servers, and perhaps offer another iteration of the claim that a serious computer attack against the United States would deal an economic blow that makes the September 11 terrorist attack look like a parking ticket.

Beyond the hype, of course, there are some serious threats that will go under the microscope at RSA -- most prominently the pernicious influence of botnets, the large collections of compromised Windows machines that are used for online crime ranging from spam to phishing. The largest of these are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of computers strong.

But in keeping with the tone set by the United States, botnets are being recast as the equivalent of a dirty bomb. Consider the title of one panel on the malware: "Protecting the Homeland: How to Win the BotNet Battle?"

THREAT LEVEL's been on this for a little while. It seems that the fear from the War on Terror is wearing off, and we need a new threat so that we can entrust the government with more spying powers over Americans. That's really what is always comes down to isn't it?

The sad thing, as the post mentions, is that there are real security issues that will be overlooked by our government in their quest for even more sweeping powers. Sound familiar?

Let's give this an Orwell rating of 3, for inventing a new war, and attempting to further implement Big Brother directly. A 4 rating would have to be a successful sweeping change, and I'm not gonna bother with rating an event like the creation of Newspeak - that would be beyond 4. I'll give a full rationale for the ratings soon.

Greenwald nails it again.

The U.S. establishment media in a nutshell.

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

"Abortion" is not a fruitful search.

If you can't overturn Roe v. Wade, why not just put out an all encompassing health services search engine that simply pretends abortion doesn't exist? Again, if you don't know it's there, you can't even think of doing it.

I think we need something like the Washington Post fact checker's Pinocchio rating, but rather an Orwell rating to grade each event's relation to our slow slide into 1984. This would maybe be a Orwell rating of 2 (out of four, since I'm using the Pinocchio scale). Not sure what exactly this rating means - perhaps I need to flesh it out more. But 2 sounds about right.

UPDATE: They apparently reversed the censorship the same day. At least someone had some common sense.

War Criminals

Is John Yoo a bigger war criminal than Bush or Cheney? He certainly gave them the license to torture.

World Court rulings are now not binding on States

Interesting case:

It seems to be a case where Bush actually wanted to comply with international law, but because we haven't ratified it, the Supreme Court stopped him. But then there's the question of whether World Court ruling is binding by international law, which we agreed to be bound when ratifying the UN Charter. I dunno the answer - maybe this is why I'm going to law school. Interesting stuff.

Obama's passport file and the Surveillance State

Since January, Barack Obama's passport file has been illegally accessed at least three times by employees of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, each time triggering an automatic investigation that can easily be leaked and turned into a media story. In fact, this is exactly what happened in 1992 with Bill Clinton. If this is a political move and not just employees' foolish curiously - given the administration's extreme disrespect for the law, I don't doubt it for a second - this is incredibly disgusting. But it's just the latest trend and not at all out of line with what we've seen from King George's Surveillance State.

...incidents like the snooping into Obama's passport file are not the exception, and are not even merely the rule, but are the pervasive and inevitable outcome of allowing government officials to spy on Americans without real oversight.

Yeah...

UPDATE: What on Earth is going on here? Does anybody actually believe it was harmless curiosity when it happened to both campaigns?

UPDATE 2: Make it a trifecta. Am I being too cynical to think they did it to McCain too to remove suspicion that it was political? I'm sure they would have known that the time this happened in 1992 would be uncovered, and that it'd be spun oppositely now, right? Wow, I sometimes amaze myself at how readily I can accept certain conspiracy theories with regard to this administration. But at this point, they've almost all turned out true, and just when you think it can't get worse, it turns out their imaginations are better than yours.