Despite the excesses of the Age of Bush — notably the embrace of torture and willful subjugation of the rule of law — the U.S. remains a substantially open and just society. So it was inevitable that the consequences of the administration’s foulest deeds would begin nipping at the heels of the perpetrators sooner or later.

As far back as 2004, participants in White House meetings with Vice President Cheney, David Addington and Alberto Gonzales understood that these torture regime architects were objecting to calls for minimum treatment standards for detainees not just because of their belief that the U.S. had to be protected from future terror attacks but because they needed to protect themselves from future legal repercussions, and backpedaling would be evidence that they understood they were legally liable.

And so amidst the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II, a proceeding that comedian Stephen Colbert darkly joked was “the most historic session of traffic court ever,” there are the first serious discussions about whether Cheney, Addington, Gonzales and others should be considered war criminals themselves.

While charging these officials with war crimes would certainly appeal to the emotional side of people like myself who as a proud American takes personally how my country has been hijacked by thugs in pinstripes, it is beyond the pale to think that a U.S. court of law would address the war-crimes issue as such. (That would be more likely were any of these officials to set foot in a number of European countries.)

More pertinent to the discussion — and there must be a discussion and not merely a partisan lynching party led by left-leaning screaming memes — is whether these officials knew that what they were doing might be illegal.

The answer is an emphatic “yes” because of the great lengths to which they went to first deny the existence of torture as a policy and then to wrap themselves in the obfuscations of a handmaiden by the name of John Yoo, whose singular talent in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel was to take desired outcomes such as giving torture a veneer of legality by green-lighting its use by backfilling with gibberish-filled memos. Attorney General Michael Mukasey actually has managed to outdo Yoo in advancing legal flotsam such as his view that Justice’s lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of the president and the president cannot commit crimes when he acts under advice of these lawyers.

How then to proceed?

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to previous torture-related posts.

…the consequences of his actions could be severe.

The comments on my Sunstein post are terrific. Thanks to everyone involved. Certainly worth remembering is that impeachment is hardly the only option. And even if we do nothing at all (and I am not suggesting that!!!) there is still the whole wide world to consider.

In early June Attorney Philippe Sands talked with Dave Davies on Fresh Air about interrogation techniques and how Britain’s handling of the IRA could teach the U.S. a thing or two. Sands is the author of Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, an international human rights attorney, and has worked on several high-profile cases including the extradition of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The Pinochet portion of the interview is fascinating. Sands explains why, decades after his alleged crimes, he was arrested in London. Pinochet was friendly with Margaret Thatcher, felt safe in Britain, so went there for medical treatment in 1998:

[I]t was the 16th of October, there was a knock on his door and a number of police officers came in and arrested him. And they arrested him because a Spanish prosecutor by the name of Judge Garzon had issued an arrest warrant for allegations of torture, and indeed a whole lot of other crimes, carried out in Chile in the period 1973 to 1990. So much, much earlier on. And the significance about those acts, the acts of torture and related acts, is that they fall within something called universal jurisdiction. That’s to say they are international crimes which any country in the world has an obligation to prosecute if an individual turns up in their country, or to extradite the person to a place where that person will be prosecuted. [E.A.] And so Pinochet arrives in the UK, a Spanish prosecutor makes the request, and the British authorities have no option but to take action on the Spanish request…

Sands explains that after 18 months of legal proceedings the decision was that Pinochet could, in fact, be extradited to Spain to face trial for allegations of torture.

“The case,” says Sands, “established the principle that even a former head of state who is alleged to have committed torture will not be able to gain immunity from the jurisdiction of courts.”

Davies asks, of course, are any of the officials of the Bush administration vulnerable to prosecution?

I think they’re extremely vulnerable to investigation… And that goes right to the top. It goes to Mr. Rumsfeld, it goes to Mr. Rumsfeld’s lawyer, Jim Haynes, and others down the chain of command who played an active role in authorizing the techniques of interrogation; which is why the issue of where it all started becomes so important, and why the administration’s narrative that it started at the bottom and then just trickled up is, I think, necessary to explore much further.

But the bottom line is very, very clear. If you engage in torture, if you are complicit in torture, if you participate in torture, you expose yourself to the risk of investigation anywhere in the world. And that is a risk that applies to anyone of any nationality, and being a former administration official doesn’t help. [E.A.] So the immunity that the administration has tried to create with the Military Commissions Act will have no effect outside the United States, nor will any possible pardon by President Bush, which apparently is being suggested in relation to some of these characters.

So what, I wonder, do we all think of that?

One of the underreported and unappreciated aspects of the Age of Bush is that despite the appearance of unanimity some administration officials, typically careerists and not political appointees, were horrified at the embrace of torture and other extralegal actions and spoke up. They were silenced and in some case were fired, demoted or resigned.

When an official whose loyalty to the rule of law ran deeper than their loyalty to the administration tried to fight back, they usually were met by a human chain saw by the name of David Addington. After the president and vice president, the chief of staff and former legal counsel to Dick Cheney has been the most powerful if relatively unknown man in Washington over the past seven-plus years.

History is filled with people like Addington who believed absolutely that they were doing right for god and republic but whose actions were so awful that what they saw as patriotism was in fact traitorous.

By that calculus, the foul deeds of Benedict Arnold, Alger Hiss and Aldrich Ames pale in comparison to Addington’s actions.

Indeed, Addington is in a class of his own. Before the fires at the World Trade Center and Pentagon had even been extinguished, Addington asserted himself as the indispensable man even though his legal, political and military bona fides were overshadowed by his far right-wing views, as well as a paranoia that extended to keeping his office locked at all times and a ruthless mastery of the art of confronting outright or backstabbing anyone who got in his way.

There were career lawyers in the Justice Department who had substantial experience with terrorism, but few in or out of the White House were conversant in presidential powers. Neither was Addington, but he was quick to fill this vacuum with his extreme opinions as the chief lawyer for another paranoiac, the vice president.

Although Condoleezza Rice was nominally President Bush’s national security advisor, it was Cheney who ran the national security show. Unfortunately for the victims of 9/11 and the nation as a whole, like Rice he still had a Cold War mindset, did not have the foresight to see the threat Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda represented and blew off the confidential papers and briefings that warned of this imminent danger with his trademark arrogance.

From the outset, Addington pushed what came to be known as “The New Paradigm,” a absolutist doctrine at the fringes of even conservative legal thinking that the president had the authority to disregard virtually all legal boundaries, including the Constitution, if national security required it.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to recent torture-related posts.

In keeping with the myriad outrages that it has perpetrated in fighting the so-called Global War on Terror, the Bush administration has not lacked for cojones.

Congress was a mere handmaiden or not consulted at all when the White House decided to establish a parallel court system to try terror suspects, when it tossed the Geneva Conventions into the Potomac and embraced the use of torture, when it established a plan to secretly rendition suspects to the Rumsfeld Gulag, and when it twice refused to heed the Supreme Court’s warnings that these suspects could not be stripped of all constitutional rights.

But when the top court ruled in June that a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that denied Guantánamo Bay detainees the right to file habeas petitions with civilian courts for determinations as to whether they were being held illegally, the Justice Department found itself painted into a tight corner entirely of its own making.

How to handle the tricky matter of making available civilian courts to Gitmo detainees, some of whom are seriously nasty people?

What should be done with Gitmo detainees now that the whole reason for the prison for so-called enemy combatants has been undermined by the Supremes?

And pray tell what would happen if detainees whose home countries will not accept their return are released inside the U.S.?

Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who has shown that his own cojones are even bigger than predecessors John Ashcroft and Albert Gonzalez in telling Congress to buzz off while the Justice Department did the White House’s bidding, suddenly has had a change of heart. Or so it would seem.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

Being Israel and protecting the values on which it was founded is one helluva tough job, but a funny thing happened on the way to the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state: It has subsumed some of those values for political convenience and is kissing George Bush’s ass when it comes to torture.

This has great pertinence because Israel apparently is one of the relatively few countries that would roll out the welcome mat for administration officials who approved of and participated in the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere in the Rumsfeld Gulag in violation of international law. As a consequence, they might risk arrest as war criminals in, say, France, Germany or Italy.

Said Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff of those officials — all practicing attorneys — in a pointed public statement:

“Haynes, Feith Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and — at the apex — Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In the future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court.”

It should be noted that Wilkerson can be outspoken to the point of intemperance, and he is no friend of the conservatives who run Israel.

It is no surprise that he would mention Saudia Arabia, a safe country for sure for those administration lawyers given its own religious and cultural embrace of torture. But Israel? A nation that emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s embrace of the very torture techniques that the CIA and other U.S. operatives have used?

How terribly sad.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to previous torture-related posts.

From Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, here’s an in-depth explanation of why the Bush Administration’s negotiations with that nation on the U.S. anti-missile shield have gone so terribly wrong - and an inside look at how the White House managed to turn relations with one of our staunchest allies sour. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that under the Bush Administration, Chinese interrogation methods designed to elicit false confessions during the Korean War became the basis for the training of interrogators at Guantanamo (NYT). 

It seems there was a certain chart used in training the interrogators came to light during June 17 hearings by the Senate Armed Services committee.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”…

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force
study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners…..The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”(NYT)

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Read the rest of this entry »

“OK, we’re in Baghdad, what next?”

Before the invasion, an Army commander asked that question and never got an answer, according to a new 700-page study by the Army itself based on 200 interviews by military historians with active or recently retired officers on what went wrong in Iraq after the man in a flight jacket stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier to declare victory.

In what amounts to the non-Rumsfeld story of the disaster, we finally get first-hand accounts of the making of a quagmire, and it is not a pretty picture.

“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV [postwar] planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the study notes. “The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place.”

The Bush Administration, the Pentagon and its Iraq commander, Gen. Tommy Franks were plentifully supplied with wishes but short of methods to realize them.

Read the rest of this entry.

It is a commentary on our times that any report from Afghanistan and Iraq in the news blogs/media now provokes at best a cynical remark, or worst a yawn. But there are a few indefatigable columnists/journalists whose assessments of the ongoing tragic drama continues to provide fresh insights. Simon Jenkins, a distinguished journalist, is one of them.

In a recent column in The Sunday Times, Jenkins makes interesting observations about Taliban and Al-Qaeda. “In seven years in Afghanistan, America, Britain and their Nato allies have made every mistake in the intervention book…They disobeyed the iron law of postimperial intervention: don’t stay too long. The British ambassador threatens ‘to stay for 30 years’, rallying every nationalist to the insurgents’ cause. The catalogue of western folly in Afghanistan is breathtaking.

“…All hope was buried in a cascade of hypotheticals. Victory would be at hand ‘if only’ the Afghan army were better, if the poppy crop were suppressed, the Pakistan border sealed, the Taliban leadership assassinated, corruption eradicated, hearts and minds won over. None of this is going to happen. The generals know it but the politicians dare not admit it.

“The Taliban’s chief objective is not world domination but a share of power in Afghanistan. While they cannot defeat western troops, they can defeat Nato’s war aim by continuing to build on their marriage of convenience with Al-Qaeda, which supplies them with a devastating arsenal of suicide bombers.

“What is sure is that Al-Qaeda, as a (grossly overrated) ‘threat to the West’, will not be suppressed without Taliban cooperation. This means reversing a policy that naively equates ‘defeating’ the Taliban with ‘winning’ the war on terror. Fighting in Afghanistan is as senseless as trying to suppress the poppy crop. It just costs lives and money.”

More here…

In “McCain: Four More Years of Mumbling?” Michael Reagan says, “…a quick look at the amazing progress in present day Iraq accomplished by the president reveals a greatness that offends liberals.”

While I agree with Michael Reagan that we definitely do not want “Four more years of mumbling,” and although I am not a “liberal,” I am offended, but–please–not by President Bush’s “greatness.” In fact let’s take a look at this president’s “greatness,” by examining what greatness is not.

“Greatness” is not taking our nation into a disastrous war based on lies, cooked intelligence, exaggerations and deception.

“Greatness” is not mismanaging such war at the expense of over 4,000 of our finest and bravest

“Greatness” is not Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, torture, waterboarding, black prisons and extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, the end of habeas corpus, kangaroo courts, warrantless NSA wiretapping on Americans…

“Greatness” is not Walter Reed, the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch lies, neglecting our veterans, outing a CIA operative.

“Greatness” is not Katrina, the firing of U.S. Attorneys, the Terry Schivo “case.”

“Greatness” is not, “Osama Bin Laden, where are you?”, “Heckuva job, Brownie,” “We don’t torture,”

“Greatness” is not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Paul Bremer, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith, John Bolton, Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Tom Delay, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Halliburton, Blackwater…

“Greatness” is not a vast increase in our budget deficit; an increase of over 60 percent in our national debt; attempts to privatize social security; pillaging Medicare, Medicaid, and children’s health care; declaring war on stem cell research, efforts to mitigate global warming, evolution science, abstinence programs; swift boating your political opponents.

“Greatness” is not the failure to implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations; the failure to bring a modicum of peace and stability to the Middle East.

“Greatness” is not using signing statements (more than 150 of them) to obey and implement only those parts of the law one likes.

“Greatness” is not corruption, nepotism,cronyism, Dick Cheney’s secretive Energy Task Force, lost White House emails, ignoring subpoenas, stonewalling, subverting justice.

“Greatness” is not Recession, an economy in tatters, mounting fiscal deficits, tax relief only for the wealthy…

“Greatness” is not promising to “restore honor and integrity to the White House,” and doing just the opposite.

“Greatness” is not diminishing the image of and respect for our country abroad

“Greatness” is not, to begin with, getting selected by the Supreme Court with a little bit of help from Katherine Harris and “dimpled chads.”

Sorry, Michael, but this kind of greatness offends not only “liberals,” but every American.

Behind the media popcorn of Scott McClellan’s revelations, relatively unnoticed is a new book by the former American commander in Iraq that should be red meat for historians.

This week’s Time has an excerpt from “Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story” by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez that nails his Pentagon boss Don Rumsfeld, along with the rest of the Bush Administration, for “gross incompetence and dereliction of duty” at the start of the unfolding disaster.

This is no out-of-the-loop flunky’s account of what happened, but the testimony of the man in the middle of it all, one of the generals whose advice Bush maintained he would follow but obviously did not.

Read the rest of this entry.

After six years at Guantanamo Bay prison, the only journalist yet to be incarcerated there, Sami Al-Hadj, was released last week. The case of Mr. Al-Hadj, who was a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, has sparked renewed outrage around the world.

It’s not easy reading for an American, but a good sampling of the emotion in the Arab world over the case can be found in this article from Algeria’s French-language Le Quotidien d’Oran.

K. Selim writes for Le Quotidien d’Oran in part:

“The United States is indeed a democracy: Within its own borders, the rule of law is enshrined. But beyond its walls, only the law of the jungle prevails. Read the rest of this entry »

There is angst on North Africa - otherwise known as the Maghreb - over the second-class treatment meted out to the region by the Bush Administration.

And since this is where the Pentagon intends to headquarter its new African Command - and since it hosts a blossoming al-Qaeda presence - this is not an inconsequential matter.

In the latest in a series of articles WORLDMEETS.US has translated that one might call “we can’t get no repect,” Read the rest of this entry »

With the drip drip of revelations that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the so-called War on Terror began not with commanders and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but at the highest levels of the Bush administration, arguments that these insiders should and could be tried as war criminals have become more credible.

Just not tried in the U.S., of course.

As if we needed to be reminded that the White House has worked as hard to prevent these insiders from facing the consequences of their dirty deeds as they worked to rationalize the use of Nazi-like torture techniques, there is a provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that would immunize them against prosecution.

But only in the U.S., of course.

Overseas is another matter, and any Geneva Conventions signatory nation has the right — indeed, the responsibility — to detain someone suspected or accused of violating Article 3 of the conventions.

Indeed, courts in Italy and Germany have issued warrants demanding the arrest of CIA operatives for kidnapping and torturing citizens and residents of their nations, although the warrants have not been executed for diplomatic reasons.

And an effort to prosecute former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in France for the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the flagship accommodation in the Rumsfeld Gulag, has foundered because no court was willing to take on this hot potato.

But with every new revelation comes a flurry of articles suggesting that Bush administration big shots, present and former, might want to think twice before jetting off to Europe this summer for some sightseeing.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, and here for an index of torture-related stories and links.

The repercussions of a recent New York Times article about how the Pentagon manipulated the American media have begun to be felt in the foreign press.

Serge Truffaut writes for Montreal’s Le Devoir,

“The old adage that “the first casualty of war is truth” is one to which the Pentagon has stuck to with unheard of will, strength, and consistency. Thanks to the Benedictine work a journalist from The New York Times - and there is no better word to describe it- we now know that the U.S. executive has applied itself to building a propaganda machine so powerful, that it highlights the disdain that Bush and company feed on with respect Read the rest of this entry »

See, it’s not all about John Yoo. The U.S. didn’t just start torturing its detainees because a government lawyer said it was okay, or because some executive-branch extremist like David Addington determined that anything and everything was permissible in a time of war, or because some dim-witted troops at Abu Ghraib just didn’t know any better. At some point, early on, a decision to allow torture, to enable it, must have been made — and it must have been made at the highest levels of government. To put it another way, the decision to turn America into a nation that tortures must have been made at the top. The so-called “principals” must have signed off on it and Bush himself must have signed off on it.

And, it seems, they did just that. Here’s ABC News:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

*****

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

That’s right — not underlings like Yoo, not lawyers and academics, not bureaucrats and soldiers, but the very top officials in the U.S. government: Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, and Ashcroft. They signed off on it. They were the enablers of torture. They were the ones who turned America into a nation that tortures.

And they must be held accountable.

(Reality check: They won’t be. First, there’s the national security barrier — the details won’t get out. Second, Congress isn’t about to do anything — consider the do-nothingness of the post-2006 Democratic Congress. Third, while a Justice Department staffed with Obama or Clinton appointees could launch an aggressive investigation, it is unlikely that such a seemingly partisan political investigation, however legitimate in reality, would get very far.)

Gen. Tommy Franks was off the mark when he called Douglas Feith the dumbest effing guy on the planet. On 60 Minutes last night, Feith showed that stupidity alone is not enough to describe a clueless academic intoxicated by power and willing to stoop to intellectual dishonesty that would shame any used-car salesman

“What we did after 9/11,” he told Steve Kroft, “was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack.”

“So you’re saying,” an incredulous Kroft followed up by asking, “you didn’t think it was that important to go after the people who were responsible for it–more important to go after people who weren’t responsible for it?”

Feith, who helped cook the intelligence to justify the invasion, was pimping his doorstop book that blames everyone else, especially L. Paul Bremer, who ran the Iraq occupation for the first two years, for the ensuing fiasco.

If he had had his way, Feith claims, he would have turned the country over to con man Ahmad Chalabi, who fed him and his Neo-Con rubes $33 million of false information to lie us into the war.

Dumb isn’t enough. Try shameless, arrogant and deceitful. There is at least one like him on most campuses. Just our luck that this specimen ended up in Rumsfeld’s Defense Department.

Cross-posted from my blog.

It will doubtless come as no surprise to readers of the Moderate Voice that people around the world have been outraged by the Bush Administration’s conduct of the Iraq War. But the passing of the fifth anniversary of the war has triggered a particularly strong upwelling of anger, which one can get a sense of by reading this article by Reinaldo Spitaletta of Colombia’s El Espectador.

Spitaletta writes, “Is it worth killing over 450,000 people, mostly civilians? Yes. And destroying a culture thousands of years old? Yes. And as if the matter was of little consequence, torturing prisoners in a jail? Yes, indeed. That’s how the president of the United States, George W. Bush, sees it, now five years after invasion of Iraq.”

As for the Iraqis, Spitaletta writes, “Perhaps it never occurred to the Gringos that their bombers, their infantry, their paraphernalia - yes- of mass destruction, would be unable to overcome an entire people … the Iraqi people, who today are suffering through the most unspeakable criminal invasion, know that never in their history has any foreign occupier triumphed. Neither the Romans nor the British. Today, without jobs, without social security, without tranquility but with the living hope of expelling the invader, they continue their resistance. And for those who have been displaced and mutilated - for the humiliated Iraqis of today - it will all be worth it to reverse the situation and defeat the troops of the superpower.”

By Reinaldo Spitaletta

Translated By Douglas Myles Rasmussen

March 25, 2008

Colombia - El Espectador - Original Article (Spanish)

Is it worth killing over 450,000 people, mostly civilians? Yes. And destroying a culture thousands of years old? Yes. And as if the matter was of little consequence, torturing prisoners in a jail? Yes, Read the rest of this entry »

A reader responding to my post on what a Democratic president and Congress should do about the Bush administration’s many scandals had a pretty good idea, albeit tongue in check: Send The Decider, Cheney, Gonzo, Rummy and Company to the Navy brig at Guantánamo Bay where they would be held without rights and waterboarded to see if they would yield any good intelligence.

The idea in fact has great appeal in the wake of a startling development:

Colonel Morris D. Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo and an outspoken champion of the administration’s extralegal military commission system, has agreed to testify at Gitmo on behalf of detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden.

Davis acknowledges that Hamdan is guilty as sin, but the commission system itself needs to be put on trail because of its inherent unfairness, including the potential for rigged outcomes.

The Air Force colonel is not the first career military lawyer to part ways with the Bush administration over its perverse compunction to turn the Rule of Law on its ear in order to railroad terror suspects, but he is certainly is the most promiment to put his career on the line.

Davis’ change of heart is somewhat mitigated by his reputation as a hot dog and the fact that he is nearing retirement, but it nevertheless is a salutatory act of conscience and would be deeply embarrassing to the White House if it had a conscience.

Having been eligible for the draft and an all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam since I was 18, 1968 was the year that I turned 21 and finally was old enough to drink and vote, which I did in that order and with great enthusiasm.

I had a front-row seat for this year of great change — including antiwar protests, the King and Kennedy assassinations, and the coming of age of the civil rights and women’s movements — but nowhere were those changes manifested so powerfully than in the presidential race that year.

This presidential election year also is shaping up to be one of potentially great change, which begs the question:

Were the changes of 1968 more important than the changes of 2008 could be?

That is a difficult question because America and the world have changed (there’s that word again) in myriad ways over the last four decades, so for the purpose of trying to tease out an answer, I’ll reframe the question thusly:

Were Americans individually and the nation generally better off in 1968 than in 2008?

Thus framed, the answer to that question is a big fat “yes,” and so the answer to my initial question is that the changes of 2008 — at the very least the much anticipated end of the Age of Bush — may indeed be more important.

Since we’re looking at year versus year through the prism of presidential politics, it should be noted that there is an obvious similarity and two obvious differences.

The similarity is the looming presence of costly and unpopular wars in both 1968 and 2008.

The first difference is that unlike 1968, the U.S. today is the sole superpower, has an unprecedented global reach and is the subject of profound loathing abroad, notably among the people whose most radical elements can do the American homeland harm.

The second difference is that in 1968 most of the opposition President Johnson faced was from within his own party over his stewardship of the Vietnam War, which prompted him to opt out of running for reelection, while in 2008 President Bush has gotten a free pass from most of his prospective heirs apparent, who dutifully worship at his altar although he is extraordinarily unpopular and is the chief reason the Republican hegemony in Washington is coming to such an unceremonious end.

Read the rest of this entry »