PostWatch

New Rights Created For Unlawful Combatants

That would be one way to write a hed about the military tribunal bill just passed, but that's not the Zeitgeist so we get Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill, the "analysis" piece by R. Jeffrey Smith (The A1 story is Senate Approves Detainee Bill Backed by Bush).

I'm not a Constitutional lawyer, and I welcome correction from polite and informed individuals. But I don't believe that before today, the American government has ever spelled out judicial rights for unlawful enemies, a term that technically means hostiles who wear no uniform and use innocent civilians as shields when they're not also targets. In other words, terrorists.

So to say Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill is akin to saying Right To Vote Absent From Resident Alien Law. In fact, if I weren't nursing a dastardly sore throat today, I'd write an essay about how much of the debate over this bill signifies ignorance about the unique rights--the justly unique rights--of  citizenship.

Speaking of which, in my diminished Dayquil state, since when were enemy combatants of any type ever entitled to writs of habeas corpus, the right to present oneself before a court to determine whether you're lawfully being held?  The lack of that right for unlawful enemy combatants prompted Sen. Specter to say the bill would "set back basic rights 900 years." He's referring to the Magna Carta, but a mere 140 years ago Saint Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for American citizens. I have no unique insight on that action but it is the kind of thing one hopes the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee might have plugged into his calculator.

Meanwhile the Post's "analysis" by Smith includes this little tour:

President Bush's argument that the government requires extraordinary power to respond to the unusual threat of terrorism helped him win final support for a system of military trials with highly truncated defendant's rights. The United States used similar trials on just four occasions: during the country's revolution, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and World War II.

Gee, just four times. The Mexican-American War is an interesting outlier, the closest thing in this collection to a mere expansionist conflict. The others consist of the creation of the our country, a.k.a the world's greatest democracy; the survival of the world's greatest democracy that coincidentally freed millions of slaves; and the defense of liberty and freedom on a global scale.

So yeah. Just those four times. I wonder if we're facing any kind of important threat today. I'll have to google.

But let me share my shorthand method for determining the bill was a good idea: Washington Post bloggers hate it. In This Time, Congress Has No Excuse, Andrew Cohen writes:

Of all the stupid, lazy, short-sighted, hasty, ill-conceived, partisan-inspired, damage-inflicting, dangerous and offensive things this Congress has done (or not done) in its past few recent miserable terms, the looming passage of the terror detainee bill takes the cake. At least when Congress voted to authorize the Iraq War legislators can point to the fact that they were deceived by Administration officials. But what's Congress' excuse now for agreeing to sign off on a law that would give the executive branch even more unfettered power over the rest of us than it already has?

They hate it; I love it. It's a time-saver.

And This Guy Is A Priest

The Post runs Danforth Warns of Christian Right but Says Tide Will Turn by Peter Slevin on A4. Danforth is Episcopalian priest and former Republican senator; the story focuses on his new book. Danforth is a decent man but when you write a book titled Faith and Politics and put quotes around "Moral Values" in the subtitle, you sense where he's coming from:

The potency of the Christian right in the Republican Party is limited, former senator John C. Danforth of Missouri is telling audiences this month. A lifelong Republican moderate disturbed by his party's direction, he contends that the political center has a future.

Describing himself as a "a Republican for the old reasons," Danforth, 70, is promoting a new book that describes religion as a divisive force in the United States today and accuses the religious right and its political supporters of creating a sectarian party.

It's a point of view, but one that tries to nudge religious belief out of the public square, which is kind of odd for a priest.

"The problem with many conservative Christians is that they claim that God's truth is knowable, that they know it, and that they are able to reduce it to legislative form," Danforth writes. "The popular question, 'What would Jesus do?' can be difficult enough to contemplate with respect to everyday interpersonal relations. It is mind boggling when applied to the complex world of politics."

Well, God doesn't write legislation--not exactly--and Christians shouldn't pretend that He does. But "God's truth" is at least alleged to be "knowable," at least by, er, priests. That's kind of the point.

I'm Just Sayin'

I know I'm late to this, but when the Post writes Part of Iraq Intelligence Report Released, isn't that what the Post and the New York Times did with the same report? Ah, but now we can set up stories like White House Refuses Release of Full Intelligence Report, an AP file online. Got it.

The Miseducation of the West

Kudos to Islamic envoys accepting the latest peace-making gesture of Pope Benedict. But in Pope Assures Muslims, Envoys Of His Commitment to Dialogue on A18, Reuters' Robin Pomeroy illustrates the kind of casual oversight that makes it so hard for Westerners to understand what's going on in the world:

But the pope also quoted from an address by his predecessor, John Paul II, calling for "reciprocity in all spheres" of relations between Islam and Christianity. This was a reference to Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries where Christians do not enjoy full religious freedom.

In Saudi Arabia, it is illegal for Christians to worship in public.  Don't even think about building a Church. Even worshiping in private risks harassment, arrest, and imprisonment.

So yeah, in countries like Saudi Arabia, Christians do not enjoy full religious freedom.

Love the lede, too:

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy, Sept. 25 -- Pope Benedict XVI assured Muslims on Monday that he respected them and was committed to dialogue, in an unprecedented encounter designed to defuse anger over his use of a quotation suggesting their faith was spread by the sword.

First, that's a sloppy way to describe most of the anger, staged or otherwise. But to affect journalistic disinterest about whether Islam expanded through conquest.... If Pomeroy wrote about the Flat Earth Society, one wonders whether we'd read about anger over the use of a quotation suggesting the earth is round.

Howard Dean: Chris Wallace 'Tough But Fair'

I happened to catch Chris Wallace on the Sean Hannity radio show, and heard something new:  Two weeks ago DNC Chief Howard Dean told Wallace he was "tough but fair." This is an entertaining contrast to Dean's current statement characterizing Fox News as part of the right-wing propaganda machine.

I don't have a recording, but I took brief notes.

Wallace said that two weeks ago, he got lots of emails from conservatives raging about how he could be so harsh in his questioning of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Dean followed Rice in a separate appearance, and according to Wallace, Dean told him "I can't believe you questioned her that tough."  After his segment, Dean signed the guestbook with the comment Tough but fair.

That was then, this is now. Now is Howard Dean saying President Clinton has had enough of the right-wing revisionist history from the propaganda machine. Guess he couldn't believe he questioned him that tough.

Wallace also expanded on why he believes the Clinton outburst wasn't planned:

• Hey, the guy was jabbing me and my notes!
• Clinton's communications director, Jay Carson, immediately told Wallace's producer that the interview had to end immediately. (Obviously, it did not)
• Clinton remained hostile after the interview, and was heard yelling at his staff for allowing him to be placed in such a position, threatening them with being fired if that ever happened again.

I imagine that happens often.

A confession: I voted for Clinton, the first time he ran for president. Fool me once etc.

Howard Kurtz, Peggy Fox, And Our Jewish Virginia Senator

In the same column I blogged earlier today, Howard Kurtz covers practically every conceivable angle concerning WUSA's Peggy Fox and her questioning about George Allen's Jewish ancestry. Kurtz simultaneously wonders what Fox and Allen were really up to. I don't think there's a big mystery about Allen. This was a touchy and painful issue for Allen's mother, including the Nazi imprisonment of her father and the mores of postwar America. You don't push around your own 83-year-old mother. You don't mercilessly interrogate her, unless you have a heart of stone. If she asks you to keep your mouth shut, you give her the benefit of the doubt regardless of your own calculations.

Me, I'll focus on Fox, whose various e-mailed semi-answers about the exchange are up to the standards of any spin-meister. In this column alone, her responses include:

• The story isn't about me
• I can't talk to you about why I asked it
• I asked it because voters have a right to know if candidates are "genuine"
• "I regret the way I worded the question and the way Senator Allen turned the spotlight onto the question itself...

I'll bet you do. One response that is hinted at but obscured was buried by the Post when it obliterated its link to a Michael Shear story filed online. As PostWatch fans know, that story included Fox's early reaction:

...It was just a question about a fact. He's attacking the media. If you don't like the question, attack the media."

My guess: WUSA told Fox to cool it. That explains the shift from "it was just a question about a fact" to "I'm sorry about how I asked it."

I wonder if Kurtz saw the early online story.

Clinton Doesn't, Kurtz Does

There is one way someone can believe that Fox News journalists don't ask Republicans tough questions--if you don't watch Fox. And Chris Wallace is the absolute last person on that network to be charged with a "little conservative hit job," in the words of the unbalanced Bill Clinton, whose calculated tirade* over the weekend followed softball sessions on the other networks.

In his Media Notes column today, Howard Kurtz quotes Wallace on this incident, just as we'd expect him to, but falls short in the reporting department. Clinton's chief conspiracy charge is that he's being asked questions that Wallace's puppet-masters haven't posed to Bush Administration officials. Kurtz:

Asked about Clinton's complaint, a Fox spokeswoman pointed to Wallace's interview two weeks ago with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Wallace pressed her about the lack of prewar ties between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, but he did not ask about U.S. efforts against bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Carson [a Clinton spokesman] noted that the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole was officially linked to al-Qaeda after Bush took office.

But as Patterico has shown--and as I say, anyone who watches Fox regularly would consider unremarkable--Wallace has indeed asked about U.S. efforts against bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Patterico:

Here’s what Wallace asked Clinton today:

[H]indsight is 20 20 . . . but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

And here is what Wallace asked Donald Rumsfeld on the March 28, 2004 episode of Fox News Sunday:

I understand this is 20/20 hindsight, it’s more than an individual manhunt.  I mean — what you ended up doing in the end was going after al Qaeda where it lived. . . . pre-9/11 should you have been thinking more about that?

. . . .

What do you make of his [Richard Clarke’s] basic charge that pre-9/11 that this government, the Bush administration largely ignored the threat from al Qaeda?

. . . .

Mr. Secretary, it sure sounds like fighting terrorism was not a top priority.

Longer discussions about Clinton's actual record are abundant, including this one by NRO's Byron York. I'm sympathetic to Ed Morrissey's Can't We All Get Along vibe as far as pre-9/11 mistakes by Clinton and Bush is concerned, but if Clinton is going to ask us to examine the record, no problem.

*Update: Calculated or spontaneous anger, that is the question. I just happened to catch Chris Wallace on the Sean Hannity show, and as reported elsewhere, Wallace doesn't believe this was planned. But Wallace also said something new--two weeks ago DNC Chief Howard Dean told Wallace he was "tough but fair." This is an entertaining contrast to Dean's current statement characterizing Fox News as part of the right-wing propaganda machine. More here in a separate post.

Oh No You Didn't

Associated Press chief Tom Curley writes a laughable defense of Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer being held by military authorities in Iraq after being nabbed with an alleged al Qaeda operative and an arms cache. The rigor of this column is indicated thus:

Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi photographer who helped the Associated Press win a Pulitzer Prize last year, is now in his sixth month in a U.S. Army prison in Iraq. He doesn't understand why he's there, and neither do his AP colleagues.

This from one of the pinnacles of American journalism. Curley then adds that the The Army says it thinks Bilal has too many contacts among insurgents. Oh that's an honest assessement. Eventually he manages to discover a sliver of the information that seconds ago he was wholly ignorant of:

He has taken pictures the Army thinks could have been made only with the connivance of insurgents. So Bilal himself must be one, too, or at least a sympathizer.

But if you rely only on this editorial, and indeed on the Post itself, you'd never know about Hussein's allged al Qaeda connection and the little matter of being nabbed alongside an arms cache. Neither this Op-Ed nor this squib on Sept. 18 say anything about the circumstances surrounding his capture.

Michelle Malkin has been writing about Hussein for months as a photographer suspected of colluding with the enemy. You don't have to believe every charge against Hussein, but his advocates should at least try to contend with them. Instead, Curley ignores the accusations in high-dudgeon mode, accusing the military of trying to discredit or silence news they don't like. This is rich, I must quote it in full:

Both official and unofficial parties on every side of a conflict try to discredit or silence news they don't like.

U.S. military. Al Qaeda terrorists and other assorted murderers, You know, parties on every side of a conflict.

Malkin will run this farce through a blender, and I'll leave the fisking to her, but I hope she doesn't injure herself from laughter after reading Curley's assertion that After more than five months of trying to bring Bilal's case into the daylight, AP is now convinced the Army doesn't care whether Bilal is or isn't an insurgent. Five months, ay? Too bad you don't run one of the world's largest newsire services distributed to thousands of newspapers and virtually every broadcast network on earth. That way you could have somehow informed the public when Hussein was arrested. And I would have put up flyers, just to be sure.

Oh well, you can always start a blog. Just don't forget about al Qaeda and the arms he was captured with--people might question your credibility.

Cross-posted at Newsbusters

UPDATE: I told you guys at AP that Malkin was going to take this on. But do they ever listen to me at AP? No, they do not. Malkin:

What do you do when you are a global news organization under fire for suppressing five-month-old news of the capture of one of your employees by American troops in a Ramadi apartment with an alleged al Qaeda leader and a weapons cache?

You run to a sympathetic news organization to help you whitewash the story and smear the U.S. military. Naturally....

Oh yes, read it all. In the words of Michelle Malkin, sweet merciful crap.

(And thanks for the link)

Four Times A Charm: Another Post Lie About Wilson & Niger

Let's see, what new invention can the Post promote about Joe Wilson, Niger, and Iraq seeking uranium? After all, in at least three stories this year various Posties including Howard Kurtz erroneously reported there was no basis for that claim, and as of this morning none has been corrected despite a note to ombudsman Deborah Howell from, er, me, in July.

So today we have an AP dispatch on A5:

Among the documents Libby wants to use at trial, attorneys said Friday, are records related to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger. Wilson, Plame's husband, discounted reports that Saddam Hussein's regime had an agreement with the African country to buy uranium for a nuclear weapons program - a claim that Bush later included in his State of the Union address.

But Wilson's private account didn't completely "discount reports" about Saddam seeking uranium from Niger, and President Bush never claimed that Saddam had an agreement to do so.

In public, Wilson certainly repudiated reports about Saddam seeking uranium, but even the newsroom should know by now that Wilson told his debriefer that a former prime minister of Niger thought Saddam was seeking uranium. Some intellgence experts thought Wilson's trip bolstered the claim. Susan Schmidt got this right on July 10, 2004, reporting on the findings of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. The Washington Post's editorial page got it right on Sept. 1. Apart from an old story by Schmidt, why do the multilayered fact-checking reporters keep getting it wrong?

Today's AP story introduces another fiction. Let's return to that graf:

Wilson, Plame's husband, discounted reports that Saddam Hussein's regime had an agreement with the African country to buy uranium for a nuclear weapons program - a claim that Bush later included in his State of the Union address.

Who ever reported that Saddam actually had an agreement to buy uranium? If there was such a report--it's been awhile--President Bush certainly didn't include it in his State of the Union Address. The fabled 16 words:

The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

The Associated Press and the Washington Post have Nexis-Lexis. I have Ask.com. I'm pretty sure they say the same thing.

Note: The link provided in this post is to the online version of the story, with a byline by Matt Apuzzo, filed late Friday evening. The Post's search engine isn't turning up the shorter version of this story, sans byline, that appears in Saturday's dead-tree edition on A5. That version ends with Apuzzo's false statement cited above, and quoted in full at the top of this post.

For summaries of Kurtz & Co. misrepresenting the record, click on "Continued."

This Demonstration Classified "Eyes Only"

I can't improve upon this opener by Meryl Yourish, so I won't try:

Can you find a news source for the rally against Ahmadinejad at the UN yesterday? Correction: Can you find a non-Jewish media source, or a non-blogger source, for the rally?

I can’t. Except for the New York Sun.

I checked AP. Nothing. Reuters. Nada. I checked Google News. Nothing. 1010WINS. Nothing. I checked WABC, NY1, all the New York media sites. Gridlock alerts are the only thing you can find about the march. After all, it’s not newsworthy...

The demonstration she's talking about--oh, you haven't heard about it either--drew "tens of thousands," and up to 35,000 according to various descriptions I've been able to find, not in the Washington Post because like the rest of MSM it deemed it unworthy. And you know, much of the time you can find something in washingtonpost.com's feeds of Reuters and the Associated Press, but five pages of results show nothing (The top of the first page of results is shown at right).

The Post does cover a demonstration of about 15,000 people. In Hungary.  I'm not saying that isn't newsworthy--the nation's leader was caught on a tape talking about how he had duped his countrymen before a recent election.

But...hello. From the New York Sun:

As world leaders convened for the second day of the United Nations General Assembly, tens of thousands of supporters of Israel gathered across the street from United Nations headquarters to protest President Ahmadinejad of Iran and to call for the unconditional release of the Israeli soldiers kidnapped on July 12. The international and national leaders who stepped up to the podium also challenged the United Nations to take preventative action against the Iranian leader who threatens the Jewish people with genocide....

There's a Robin Wright story on A15, Iranian Leader Defends Controversial Stands, but it includes nothing about the demonstration in the very same city Wright occupied, and it sadly misses the opportunity for the headline Lunatic Iranian Leader Downplays Nazi Genocide of Jews but sometimes it's hard to really nail the thing on deadline.

As one of Yourish's commenters says:

The easy solution is to call the local media and say “We are having a big rally to protest Bush!!” That is when they will show up.

More at Captain's Quarters