This Blog Hates America!

(December 22, 2005 -- 05:56 PM EST // link)

Every so often a reader writes in and asks this question. And it's a pretty good one. So here goes: When was the last time there was a major terror alert? They were something like a regular occurence for the eighteen months or so before the 2004 election. And through 2004 the administration pushed the line that al Qaida was aiming to disrupt the elections themselves. But as near I can tell there hasn't been a single one since election day.

Through 2004, of course, critics of the administration routinely questioned whether the frequency and timing of the various terror alerts were not all or in part for political effect.

How do we explain what appears to be a night and day difference between the year prior to November 2004 and the year since in terms of terror alerts and scares?

-- Josh Marshall

Daschle: We didn't give Bush the power to spy on Americans

Tom Daschle has just put the lie to one of the Bush administration's claims about the legality of the president's warrantless spying program.

The White House argues that George W. Bush had the authority to order warrantless spying on Americans as a result of his inherent power as commander in chief and as a result of a 2001 congressional resolution authorizing him to use force against al-Qaida. Although the use-of-force resolution doesn't say a word about warrantless surveillance, the White House argues that such activities are necessarily a part of using force against those who attacked the United States on 9/11, and that the use-of-force authorization must be read as implicitly eliminating the need to comply with the warrant procedures required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

But in an Op-Ed piece in today's Washington Post, Daschle makes a compelling case for why the 2001 use-of-force authorization can't be read that way. "Literally minutes" before the Senate voted on the use-of-force authorization, Daschle says, the White House asked him to insert into it language that would have allowed the president to use his use-of-force authority "in the United States." "This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens," Daschle said. "I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused."

The significance of it all: Even if you assume that spying is part of the "force" Congress authorized Bush to use in 2001, Congress drew a line at the U.S. border. The White House asked for powers within the United States, and Daschle said no. Thus, you can't read into the use-of-force authorization some kind of implicit permission to do things within the United States when the White House explicitly asked for such authority and Congress declined to grant it.

Or, as Daschle puts it: "If the stories in the media over the past week are accurate, the president has exercised authority that I do not believe is granted to him in the Constitution, and that I know is not granted to him in the law that I helped negotiate with his counsel and that Congress approved in the days after Sept. 11."

-- Tim Grieve, salon.com

11:43:38 AM

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By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer 19 minutes ago

Large demonstrations broke out across the country Friday to denounce parliamentary elections that protesters say were rigged in favor of the main religious Shiite coalition.

Meanwhile, two Arab satellite television channels said that a Sudanese diplomat and five of his countrymen had been kidnapped in Iraq, and a Sudan Foreign Ministry spokesman appealed for their release.

Al-Jazeera's Web site reported the kidnappings but did not give details about where and when the six nationals were seized.

Also Friday, a lawyer for Saddam Hussein said he saw evidence that his client had been beaten.

Several hundred thousand people demonstrated after noon prayers in southern Baghdad Friday, many carrying banners decrying last week's elections. Many Iraqis outside the religious Shiite coalition allege that the elections were unfair to smaller Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups.

"We refuse the cheating and forgery in the elections," one banner read.

During Friday prayers at Baghdad's Umm al-Qura mosque, the headquarters of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a major Sunni clerical group, Sheik Mahmoud al-Sumaidaei told followers they were "living a conspiracy built on lies and forgery."

"You have to be ready during these hard times and combat forgeries and lies for the sake of Islam," he said.

Sunni Arab and secular Shiite factions demanded Thursday that an international body review election fraud complaints, and threatened to boycott the new legislature. The United Nations rejected the idea.

Their demand came two days after preliminary returns indicated that the current governing group, the religious Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, was getting bigger-than-expected majorities in Baghdad, which has large numbers of Shiites and Sunnis.

On Friday, more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Mosul, where some accused Iran of having a hand in election fraud. About 1,000 people demonstrated in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown.

The former leader claimed at his trial this week that he had been beaten by his American captors.

Defense lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi said Friday that he had seen marks on his client's body. Speaking in Amman, Jordan, Dulaimi said that he had filed a compliant Thursday with the court hearing Saddam's case.

The chief prosecutor, Jaafar al-Mousawi, told The Associated Press on Friday that he hadn't seen a complaint but planned to visit Saddam and his seven co-defendants to review their health and "listen to their demands and supply them with everything they need."

Meanwhile, gunmen Friday attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint in the city of Adhaim, in religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala province, killing eight soldiers and wounding seventeen, an Iraqi army officer said on condition he not be identified for fear of reprisal.

"There were too many to count," said Akid, a 20-year-old soldier from Diwanayah being treated for gunshot wounds to both thighs. "They tried to kill everybody."

Akid, who would only give his first name for fear of reprisal, said his battalion of about 600 men had already suffered over 250 desertions after a Dec. 3 ambush in Adhaim killed 19 Iraqi soldiers.

"They gave up," he said. "They said, 'The hell with this.'"

In Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt outside a Shiite mosque, killing four people and wounding eight, Diyala police said. Among the dead was a policeman guarding the mosque.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday that President Bush had authorized new cuts in U.S. combat troops in Iraq, below the 138,000 level that prevailed for most of this year. Rumsfeld did not reveal the exact size of the troop cut, but Pentagon officials have said as many as 7,000 combat troops could be leaving.

Criticisms of last week's elections are seen by some as jockeying for position by both Sunnis and former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, before negotiations on forming a new coalition government begin. No group is expected to win a majority of the legislature's 275 seats.

The formerly dominant Sunni minority fears being marginalized by the Shiite majority, which was oppressed during Saddam's reign.

Associated Press writers Jason Straziuso, Robert Burns and Anthony Castaneda contributed to this report.

"Munich"

Moshe Ivgy, Ami Weinberg and Lynn Cohen in "Munich". Photo by Universal Pictures

Steven Spielberg tries to untangle the knotty Palestinian-Israeli problem. Does he succeed? And should he be commended just for trying?

By Stephanie Zacharek

Dec. 23, 2005 | Among Hollywood's big guns, Steven Spielberg is a rarity: a filmmaker who's willing, every so often, to tangle with moral ambiguity. Or who at least knows moral ambiguity when he sees it. His 1993 "Schindler's List" has plenty of detractors, people who see the picture as Spielberg's milking of an unspeakable human tragedy for dramatic value. But I think Spielberg's motives are far less calculated than that view suggests, and they stem from a touchingly simple need: telling the story of Oskar Schindler's efforts to save people whose persecution was, to him, indefensible by any morally rational stretch of the imagination was Spielberg's way of seeking out a bit of recognizable human behavior in the face of inhuman cruelty. (That's not the same thing as making a "feel-good" Holocaust movie, as he has been accused of; Spielberg doesn't stint on the horrors of genocide, and he's always aware of how few people, in the grand scheme, Schindler was able to save.)

Love him or hate him -- and some of us have both loved and hated him over the years -- Spielberg is often as interested in notions of personal responsibility and guilt as he is in pure storytelling. And at his best, he helps us make the distinction between the facile and somewhat detached motto favored by Christian teens, "What would Jesus do?" and the more probing realist-humanist question, "What would -- or should -- I have done?"

Which brings us to the thorny tangle of Spielberg's latest, "Munich," a fictionalized version of a real-life story: After the Palestinian terrorist group Black September kidnapped and murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, Israel responded -- secretly -- by assigning a team of underground hit men to seek out and kill 11 men whom Israeli intelligence had identified as masterminds of the plot. "Munich," its script by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner, was inspired by Canadian journalist George Jonas' controversial book, "Vengeance." (The book's sources have been questioned. The new edition, published to coincide with the movie's release, contains a defense of its veracity by journalist Richard Ben Cramer. Neither the Israeli government nor the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, has officially acknowledged that these assassination teams existed.)

Eric Bana plays Avner, a Mossad intelligence officer drafted to lead the hit squad. He approaches the job with mild reluctance, since his wife (Ayelet Zurer) is pregnant, and he'll be cut off from her until his work is done. We don't quite know what makes Avner accept the job -- presumably, patriotism and anger over the massacres, although as Bana plays him, Avner is so grounded and even-tempered that we have to guess at what his convictions are. (Bana gives a sturdy performance here, but there are some clues to his character that might have been strengthened in the writing.) "I'm going to go along with this until I don't," he tells his wife, suggesting that he hasn't thought through -- or doesn't yet dare think through -- the implications of the mission.

Before long, Avner's sharing a flat in Frankfurt with four compatriots: Belgian toy maker turned bomb maker Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz); South African getaway driver Steve (Daniel Craig); German forger Hans (Hanns Zischler); and Carl (Ciaran Hinds), the cleanup man who steps in after the assassins have done their work to make sure no evidence has been carelessly left behind. On the team's first night together -- Avner has prepared a brisket for dinner -- the five sit around a table, introducing themselves and talking about their various specialties. Carl, his solemn, enormous eyes blinking behind heavy-rimmed glasses, describes his job this way: "Me -- I worry."

The team's work -- their orders have come from Mossad officer Efraim (Geoffrey Rush), a government servant so dutiful and inscrutable he barely seems like a human being -- is ruthless and specific. "Use guns if you have to," they've been told, "but bombs are preferable." They're also urged to spare civilians at all costs. So they begin methodically hunting down their targets, often with the help of a shady Parisian contact, Louis (Mathieu Amalric, in an astonishing, finely chiseled performance), who runs his family business, an outfit capable of tracking down anyone, anywhere. The assassins begin with a Palestinian poet and translator living in Italy, a seemingly gentle soul who has passed information to the terrorists; their next target, a Parisian-based Palestinian, represents a trickier job and one that could take the lives of the man's wife and daughter as well.

We feel the weight of these acts before the assassins do, which is all part of Spielberg's exquisite, unnerving cleverness. The poet-translator, chatting so jovially with a shopkeeper, seems like such a nice guy; it gives us no pleasure to see a bullet go through his chest. (He has just come back from the store, clutching a bag of groceries; a milk bottle inside shatters -- shades of John McGiver's murder in the original "The Manchurian Candidate" -- and the man's blood puddles on the floor in a milky swirl, possibly a visual metaphor for the commingling of purity and guilt.) And the second target's young daughter, who will supposedly be at school when the bomb planted in her family's flat goes off, suddenly rushes back into the building just as the device is about to be detonated. Spielberg pulls the strings taut in this sequence; his intent is to make us squirm, and if his technique is a little obvious, at least his ideas are clear: If you want revenge, this is the risk you run. Each act of violence makes us feel queasy with complicity; it's just a matter of time before the men committing these acts feel it too.

And eventually, they do feel it. But, strangely -- or maybe not -- the movie begins to lose its power just as the assassins start to reckon with their actions. The movie's middle section raises some difficult questions about the uses, and the occasional necessity, of violence. At one point Carl, responding to some of the team members' sudden doubts about the validity of what they're doing, asks them how they think the Israeli state came to be in the first place. "How do you think we got the land?" he asks. "By being nice?"

In Greece, while attempting to kill one of the team's most significant targets, Avner encounters a young member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (who believes Avner is part of a European espionage outfit, not an Israeli one). "You don't know what it is not to have a home," he tells Avner, and we can see the flicker of enlightenment in Avner's eyes. He seems to be pondering, for the first time, the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and also failing to realize that while homelessness could be seen as motivation for terrorism, it doesn't excuse it). From there, we see Avner struggling more and more with the ethical weight of his mission. And when he finally sees his toddler daughter, for only the second time, he realizes he wants out. His ultimate realization: Violence begets violence.

And he's not wrong. But the problem with "Munich" is that Spielberg has made a beautifully crafted, intelligent picture that raises some very complicated, and not easily dismissed, moral questions -- only ultimately to find the easiest way to dismiss them. Avner's realization that violence doesn't solve anything is cemented just before the movie's final shot: It's 1973; Avner now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife and daughter, and the last thing Spielberg shows us is the World Trade Center in the distance.

It's unclear what Spielberg means by that juxtaposition. Is he making a blanket statement about the evils of retaliating against terrorists? Is he making the point that, in 1972, Americans felt safe from the kind of terrorism visited upon the Israelis in Munich, but it was really just a matter of time before we'd experience it for ourselves? Spielberg is too intelligent a filmmaker to trade in accidental images, but his meaning isn't at all clear here, and the World Trade Center is too loaded a symbol to use as indistinctly as Spielberg does.

Spielberg does so much right in "Munich" that it's disheartening when he goes wrong. In the finest scene in the movie, Avner is invited out to the French countryside to meet Louis' father, known only as Papa (he's played, wonderfully, by Michael Lonsdale). The scene is so beautifully staged -- and so subtle in the way it gets at the link between patriotic duty and the importance of family, even in the face of immoral acts -- that it sets a standard the rest of the movie doesn't quite live up to.

And there are bigger problems: The picture opens with a swift primer on the Munich hostage massacre, blending news footage with filmed re-creations of the events. It's a stunning sequence, a compact way of both laying down essential details for the audience and making them feel the horror of the murders. But through the course of the movie, Spielberg revisits the murders in flashback, filling them in with increasingly more graphic detail. In the movie's most egregious scene, Spielberg intercuts shots of the hostages being murdered with Avner making love to his wife -- this may be Spielberg's clumsy way of affirming that the political is personal, but it's a case where, I think, Spielberg is cheapening and trivializing tragedy. (I also wonder how the graphic depiction of the murders must look to the surviving members of the hostages' families. Exploring the needlessness of violence by showing violence is all well and good, but perhaps not at the expense of people who have already suffered so greatly from it.)

"Munich" is both astonishing and frustrating. It's not easy to tell how much of the tone comes directly from Spielberg and how much comes from Kushner, who was called in to polish the script after Roth completed it. But it appears that both want to force some kind of satisfying resolution onto these very tricky moral issues. And although this picture is a world apart from Spielberg's atrocious, small-spirited "War of the Worlds," in some ways both movies speak to Spielberg's inability to wrestle with the potential justifiability of violence. In "War of the Worlds," the U.S. military shows up, in all its bravado, to fight the giant aliens with its tanks and guns. But in the end -- an ending straight out of the H.G. Wells source material -- lowly bacteria are what prove to be the aliens' undoing. Violence is bad, it's ineffective -- and luckily, with bacteria around to do all the dirty work, it doesn't have to be effective.

Violence isn't the answer, Spielberg tells us in "Munich." But the artists and filmmakers who are fondest of that handy platitude are never able to tell us what the answer is, particularly in cases involving terrorist acts, acts that generally exist outside the context of sane moral reasoning. Diplomacy, obviously, is a much more civil and ethical way of solving disputes than violence is. But if terrorists were responsive to diplomacy, we'd have to call them by another name. And "Munich" doesn't begin to consider the differences between the terrorists of '72, fighting for the concrete goal of a Palestinian state, and contemporary Islamic terrorists fighting for the amorphous goal of an Islamist paradise on Earth.

By the end of "Munich," when Avner has finally begun to question what he's done in the name of his country and his religion, we may find we've forgotten one of the saddest and most revelatory moments of the movie's beginning: Early in the picture, we see Golda Meir (played by Lynn Cohen) deliberating, with her cabinet, whether to take action against those who enabled the Black September terrorists. She paraphrases the climax of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." And then, her voice clouded with weary resignation, she says, "These people -- they've sworn to destroy us. Forget peace. We have to show them we're strong." There's no rah-rah nationalism in her stance, or in her voice. Spielberg stages the moment to make it clear that this was a decision made with reluctance, not self-righteous certainty. "Munich" is fascinating when Spielberg gives himself the latitude to work in these shades of gray, but their shadowy uncertainty is hardly comforting. No wonder he prefers the resolute hopefulness of black and white.

-- By Stephanie Zacharek

7:39:34 AM

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Dying Lesbian Denied Pension; Partner Could Lose Home

(December 22, 2005 -- 05:56 PM EST // link)

Daschle: We didn't give Bush the power to spy on Americans

"Munich"