Palau

If you see a snake, just kill it – don’t appoint a committee on snakes.

Americablog makes a very good point in a post on Nicholas Kristof’s continuing attack on Cheney–

[On Rove] “Either he’s still under investigation, and the White House needs to demand that its surrogates stop saying Rove is off the hook, or he IS off the hook, and the White House can finally tell us what Rove did or didn’t do.

Either way, it’s astounding that Rove has codeword security clearances and is STILL apparently being granted access to the top intelligence secrets in our nation, during wartime no less, when a cloud hangs over his head for two years now as to whether he’s a traitor. It’s difficult to believe that anyone would be permitted to retain such high-level access to our nation’s most sensitive intelligence once a legitimate concern has been raised about their being a security risk.” (My emphasis)

I hadn’t really thought about it, but I suppose that’s so. We haven’t yet heard that Cheney, Rove et al‘s security clearances have been revoked, so one can only assume they are still able to see secret material and have access to the nation’s security machinery and personnel.

That is very scary. They may be innocent of the actual crime of leaking – only until they’re proven guilty, that is – but they certainly have shown they can’t be trusted. Cheney is damned as a untrustworthy liar by his own closest aide, Libby. They can’t claim Libby is lying, because tbat would mean all his testimony was untrue, and if his testimony is untrue, well, then Cheney lied. Conversely if Libby’s testimony is true, Cheney lied. This is the man who would step into Bush’s shoes should, glory of glories, Bush be impeached. That traitorous slime like Rove and Cheney are so close to the nuclear button beggars belief.

So when and how does one’s security clearance get revoked? What do you actually have to do, and how is it done? I should’ve known bloggers would be on it:

David Sirota back in July:

Precedent Shows Rove’s Security Clearance Must Be Revoked

It is appalling that during an ongoing investigation, a White House adviser who has acknowledged helping leak classified information to the media still has access to the government’s most secret information. That’s right – Karl Rove still can peer into all the secret material he wants, maybe even to punish another honest opponent of the Bush administration. It’s why critics are rightfully demanding that, short of firing Rove, President Bush must at least immediately revoke Rove’s security clearance. And if the past is any guide, that request has historical precedent.

As a quick review of the last decade of news shows, the government has quickly revoked the security clearance of lower-profile figures that Rove when they have become embroiled in allegations of leaking or mishandling classified/sensitive material:

SECURITY CLEARANCE REVOKED FOR ALLEGATIONS OF PASSING CLASSIFIED INFO TO MEDIA: “Mr. Maloof’s Pentagon career was damaged in December 2001, when his security clearances were revoked. He was accused of having unauthorized contact with a foreign national, a woman he had met while traveling in the Republic of Georgia and eventually married. Mr. Maloof said he complied with all requirements to disclose the relationship. Several intelligence professionals say he came under scrutiny because of suspicions that he had leaked classified information in the past to the news media…” [NY Times, 4/28/04]

SECURITY CLEARANCE REVOKED FOR REVEALING CIA SECRETS TO MEDIA: “Richard Nuccio, a former State Department specialist on Guatemala whose top-secret security clearance was revoked last year for allegedly exposing CIA secrets” to the New York Times. [AP, 3/20/97]

SECURITY CLEARANCE REVOKED FOR MISUSE OF SECRET INFO: “[Former CIA Director] Deutch’s intelligence clearances were revoked last year because he had violated security rules by keeping classified information on computers at his house.” [NY Times, 2/6/00]

These past examples were very serious matters. That’s why the government moved to revoke security clearances – and that’s why Rove’s clearance also need to be revoked. Clearly, these past examples are in the same league of seriousness as a top White House official leaking classified information to the media and compromising national security in order to punish a political opponent. That’s why the exact same response is warranted. No person – not even the President’s top political guru – should be above the law, and above historical precedent in protecting America’s national security.

A formal request also was made in July – I wonder if they had a a reply?

CREW Asks President Bush to Suspend Rove Security Clearance Pending Outcome of Plame Investigation; Letter Sent to Bush Today

7/11/2005 2:25:00 PM

WASHINGTON, July 11 /U.S. Newswire/ — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter today to President George Bush requesting that he immediately direct Karl Rove’s security clearances be suspended pending the outcome of the government’s investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

As reported today in Newsweek, Karl Rove was a confidential source for Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper on the identification of a covert CIA agent. Rove disclosed that Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s trip to Iraq to investigate charges that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger was authorized by Mr. Wilson’s wife, a CIA employee working on issues related to weapons of mass destruction. At that time, Valerie Plame, Ambassador Wilson’s wife, was a covert operative with the CIA whose identity as such had not yet been publicly revealed.

Under federal law, it is a crime to “intentionally disclose () any information identifying” a covert agent ?to any individual not authorized to received classified information.” 50 U.S.C. (Section) 421(a). Thus, by disclosing to Matt Cooper Ms. Plame’s relationship with the CIA and thereby identifying her as a covert agent, Mr. Rove appears to have committed an illegal act.

“Considering that it is a federal crime to identify covert agents, and that President Bush signed executive orders identifying the vital role the President plays in protecting national security secrets from unauthorized disclosure, it is appropriate for the President to suspend Mr. Rove’s clearance pending the investigation’s outcome,” Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today.

“The evidence uncovered so far raises serious questions about Mr. Rove’s conduct and his ability to safeguard highly sensitive classified information. Until those questions are resolved, CREW believes it is not appropriate for Mr. Rove to have continued access to classified information. Anything short of suspension raises an unacceptable risk to our nation’s security,” Sloan wrote to the President today.

I’ll leave the last word on what should be done to such people to tht quintessential undercover agent, Harriet Tubman :

Never wound a snake; kill it.

We Are the Borg, Bring It On

No More Mr Nice Guy picks up on the current Rethug talking points, so you don’t have to:

Monday, October 31, 2005

WE ARE BORG

On the right side of the Internet, there’s a strikingly broad range of opinions on the Alito nomination:

I think that at this moment, many, many conservatives, confident that the American people want judges to be judges, and not legislators, are stretching, flexing their muscles, and pounding the chest, whispering menacingly, “Bring. It. On.”
–Jim Geraghty at National Review Online

If, as expected, the Kennedy-led, mindless-Reid cabal is intent on all out war pitting the Left against the Right, then bring it on.
—BAH at A Certain Slant of Light

If there is going to be a battle between liberals and conservatives, it’ll happen now. Bring it on.
—Bob Mendenall at Bob Blog!

But if it?s a fight for what?s right, I say, bring it on.
—Blogboing

The Demos are making noises about a filibuster. Bring it on.
—Daisy Cutter

Bring it on Schummer, Kennedy and Biden.
—Dick McDonald at The Right Scale

Bring it on.
—Bill Nienhuis at PunditGuy

BRING IT ON
Mike B. at useless! worthless! insipid!

BRING. IT. ON.
–marc at Hubs and Spokes

It’s War

Bring it on, libs.
—thoughtomator at thoughtomation

Bring it on liberals!!!
—Jim Wickre

It’s Time For The Left To Bring It On
—Richard at Hyscience

And to the Left — Bring it on!
—Mark Jakubik at Legal Right

It goes on and on…….. here

Outstanding

Athenae of First Draft on the reaction to the Scalito nomination:

“You know what I’d like? A law dictating that before a husband stuck his dick in his secretary, he had to notify his wife and ask permission. I’d like the state to mandate that before a guy told a woman he’d love her til death did them part and then dumped her while she was pregnant because the spark was just gone, he had to get her written okay. I’d like a law requiring the sick fuck who beats his wife to seek her permission before every blow. I’d like a law to force men who’ve forced women to bear 13 babies to just get it snipped at that point, because their wives are just downright exhausted.

You never see those laws, do you? God DAMN, Glenn, I wonder why? Maybe you could post about it for a while, instead of making veiled references to men being “on the hook” for supporting children?

In a post full of offensive bullshit that’s the part that revolts me the most. This whole idea of the tyranny of child support plays right into the conservative victim mentality, where if it wasn’t for the blacks, or the Jews, or the Ay-rabs, or the women, or the liberals, they’d just be king of the world. As if the only thing holding them back from their dreams is the woman who made them pay child support, the goddamn bitch. If not for her, why you’d be CEO of your own landscaping business instead of picking up roadkill, wouldn’t ya, Bubba? If somehow all minorities, women, liberals, all disappeared from the earth I just know you’d throw down the Cheetos, take your hand off your tiny little pecker and go right out and run for Congress!

I feel for white Christian men, really. Somebody’s always trying to keep them down.”

New Releases…

” “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” was made on a shoestring budget of $1.8 million and will be released in about two dozen theaters. But its director, Robert Greenwald, hopes to show the movie in thousands of homes and churches in the next month. The possibility that it might become a cult hit like Michael Moore’s 1989 unsympathetic portrait of General Motors, “Roger & Me,” has Wal-

Mart worried.

So, Wal-Mart has embarked on a counteroffensive that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. Relying on a preview posted online, Wal-Mart investigated the events described in the film and produced a short video contending the film has factual errors. (Mr. Greenwald denies there are errors and says that Wal-Mart has not seen the final cut.)

Wal-Mart has also begun to promote a second film, “Why Wal-Mart Works & Why That Makes Some People Crazy,” which casts the company in a rosier light. Wal-Mart declined to make its executives available for the Greenwald film, but it participated with the second film’s director, Ron Galloway. The war room team helped distribute a letter, written by Mr. Galloway, that challenges Mr. Greenwald to show the two movies side-by-side.”

I’ll be looking out for the DVD – I wonder if it’ll be cheaper at Asda?

The Guardian reviews a TV mini-series I’d loge to see, though it’s only avaailable on Arab tv:

“This season there is a new rebel, a show called al-Hour al-Eyn, The Beautiful Maidens, which got past the censors and has run for an hour every night during Ramadan, to culminate in a final episode tomorrow night. The acting is good and the directing sophisticated, but the series stands out because it offers a rare, nuanced criticism of militant extremism that is neither patronising nor imposed from the west. It is one of the few times that Arabs have seen the debates they have in private echoed in popular entertainment.

The Middle East Broadcasting Company, which airs the series, is one of the main satellite channels in the Middle East, with a potential audience of many millions across the Arab world. “I want the whole of society to see it. The young to the old, ordinary people, everybody,” the Syrian director of the series, Najdat Ismail Anzour, told the Guardian.

The story tells of a group of families from across the Arab world who live together in a compound in Saudi Arabia. Each family has their own problems and aspirations. All hoped that moving to Saudi Arabia would provide both financial and religious fulfilment. In reality it has done little to resolve their personal troubles.

At the same time a group of Saudi militants preaches, talks and trains in the mosque and desert, enticed by the calling of their hardline cleric. “Jihad needs courageous knights,” one tells another as they prepare to fight.

Before long the militants attack the compound. Several civilians from among the different Arab families are either killed or injured, including children. Real news footage is woven in from the many actual attacks on Saudi compounds in recent years. “The world is horrifying now,” says one of the injured as he looks over the wreckage of their homes. “Inside ourselves we are dangerous and horrifying and we should start to change.” Only in the final episodes do the militants begin to question their actions.”

Every blogger and his dog has made the same comparuison as as I did in the previous post, that of the US and the fictional Gilead of Atwood’s novel ( see previous post). So much so that it has become a trope of the left blogosphere.

But. whenever I think it’s an overwrought, overused comparison, I get pointed (thanks to TBogg) to something like this, which shows that no dystopian novelist can be accused of hyperbole given the current insanity that is the United States.

[…]

But the twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, continue to defy the law, the authorities and dissidents say: under the direction of leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, women are still being removed from their husbands and assigned to other men, and girls under 18 are ordered to become brides of older men on a day’s notice, all despite the presence of full-time outside law enforcement.

DeLoy Bateman, a high school science teacher here who left the church several years ago, says his daughter’s marriage was recently broken up by church leaders. She was ordered to become the bride of her father-in-law, a man twice her age, Mr. Bateman says.

“This just makes me want to cry,” said Mr. Bateman, a lifelong resident of Colorado City. “They tore up this marriage and ordered her to have sex with this older man. I’ve lost my daughter and her children to this church. I have to stand outside on the sidewalk and beg if I want to see my grandchildren.”

Other residents and investigators tell similar stories about the church, which continues operating under the direction of its absolute leader, Warren Jeffs, in spite of his being one of the country’s most-wanted fugitives, indicted on sexual abuse charges along with eight of his chief followers.

“It’s just like the mob,” said Gary Engels, a former police detective who has been retained by county officials to investigate child abuse accusations here. “The church is able to keep iron-fisted control even though the top leaders are fugitives.”

The police are complicit: most are church members and 3 have been prosecuted.

This is what the Dominionists want, no separation of church and state. It’s they who have their grip on Bush’s nuts, and now they’re squeezing, hard, hence the nomination of Judge Alito.

Compare and contrast the Islamic and Christian theocratic views on women:

“The word “hijab” comes from the Arabic word “hajaba” meaning to hide from view or conceal. In the present time, the context of hijab is the modest covering of a Muslim woman. The question now is what is the extent of the covering? The Qur’an says:

“Say to the believing man that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that will make for greater purity for them; and Allah is well acquainted with all that they do. And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; and that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what must ordinarily appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands…” (Qur’an 24:30-31)

These verses from the Qur’an contain two main injunctions:

A woman should not show her beauty or adornments except what appears by uncontrolled factors such as the wind blowing her clothes, and
the head covers should be drawn so as to cover the hair, the neck and the bosom.”

New Testament Teaching for Women

The New Testament makes several specific statements pertaining to women’s dress in the epistles of Paul and Peter.

“I will that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting. In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; but (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works” (1 Timothy 2:8-10).

“Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; while they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear. Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price. For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands” (I Peter 3:1-5).

Paul admonished women to dress according to certain standards and listed them in this order: modesty, inexpensive and nonornamental attire, and clothing that becomes godliness. To be modest means to be decent and respectful. The apostolic Christian woman seeks to emulate all the fine virtues of Christian womanhood, so she carefully and prayerfully selects her attire in order not to unduly expose her body to the stares of the public. She is not so old-fashioned as to look like a monstrosity, but she is deliberately methodical in choosing clothing that will dignify her womanhood without provoking the stares of the opposite sex.”

So tell me How are these people in Utah any different from Hizb-ut-Tahir, who want to establish a Caliphate, exactly? Both are cults, both are in favour of the subjugation of women according to their scripture and both are evangelical.

But the point of my post, which relates directly to the two pictures of children at the top. The girl on the left is American from a Christian family: on the right Moslem and French. Both appear veiled and for substantially the same scriptural reasons.

Fine, if you’re an adult. Believe what you want, wear want you want, worship whatever in your own way. Tolerance is the watchword, no matter how loony the beleif. But these girls have no choice. I can respect the choice of hijab for an adult woman; many say it takes the whole sexual tension out if the equation, and I can see how it would be a relief to be taken at your real value.

It’s not true though. Even if you cover up your secondary sexual characteristics you can’t escape surface judgements, it’s just the value system that you’re judged upon is different. Not how revealing youer clothing is, but how modest it is. It’s just religious objectification rather than sexual, keeping women occupied with their appearance so as not to have any energy to actually engage politically.

We may think we have succesfully fought off theocracy so far, but there’s a generation of girls coming up who have been brought up this way and have had no choice about it. Perhaps they’lll be the next generation of true believers, in which case I worry for the future and the coming religious wars. Or maybe, when they hit adolescence and realise just how badly they were conned, there’ll be a youth rebellion the likes of which we never anticipated. I’m hoping for the latter.

For those who think it’ll never happen here and the government will step in, think again:

The Arizona attorney general, Terry Goddard, whose own office is already active here, has asked the Justice Department to investigate the local police, saying they “seem to be aiding and abetting” criminal behavior by discouraging witnesses in sexual abuse cases from testifying; a third of the force has been decertified by Utah and Arizona for criminal conduct.

In a recent letter to the United States attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, Mr. Goddard wrote, “I believe that the officers of the Colorado City Police Department have engaged in a pattern of conduct that deprives individuals of their constitutional and civil rights.”

The Justice Department has not decided whether to intervene.