Note from Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: I get from ten up to 20 visitors a day from McLean, Virginia (CIA headquarters). The most I had was 22 from there, the day I put up some somewhat speculative data and predictions about Iran’s nuclear program. Since you guys are so interested, I thought I’d say "hi!"

That was no experiment; it was torture, L.A. Times Opinion, June 8, 2010, by Michael McGough, quoted verbatim:

It’s a startling and stomach-turning allegation: that CIA doctors subjected suspected terrorists to "Human Subject Research and Experimentation." But a new report from Physicians for Human Rights doesn’t deliver on that assertion, which conjures up images of Nazi concentration-camp laboratories.

The “white paper” does, however, document the role medical professionals played in enabling waterboarding and other acts of what any reasonable person would call torture. Their role is shocking even if one accepts the explanation that the CIA’s Office of Medical Services collected data on these “enhanced interrogation techniques” in order to ensure that interrogators didn’t go too far.

Consider these findings by Physicians for Human Rights:

“1. Medical personnel were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures.

“2. Information on the effects of simultaneous versus sequential application of the interrogation techniques on detainees was collected and used to establish the policy for using tactics in combination. These data were gathered through an assessment of the presumed “susceptibility” of the subjects to severe pain.

“3. Information collected by health professionals on the effects of sleep deprivation was used to establish the ‘enhanced’ interrogation program’s (EIP’s) sleep deprivation policy.”

What shocks the conscience about these techniques, and the role of health professionals in enabling them, is not Nazi-like “medical experimentation” designed to amass academic information, but the acts themselves. By overreaching and alleging “human experimentation,” the report distracts attention from its really damning findings.

– Michael McGough

Download the Physicians for Human Rights white paper Experiments in Torture (PDF), hosted here.

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: It splits semantic hairs to argue that this was more “torture” than it was experimentation. I don’t care which you’d rather call it. It was definitely torture to experiment with multiple applications of various pain producing techniques for effectiveness. Waterboarding itself is an exquisite torture, a technique close to deliberate drowning which originated in the Inquisition of Spain long ago. The United States is a signer of four different treaties which prohibit torture. Surely, that should have been enough to stop this madness. The fact that it wasn’t, no matter what Obama and Holder do about it, does does not in any way put these activities outside of criminal acts. Certainly, waterboarding and multiple application of pain producing techiques fall in the realm of criminal, prosecutable activity — torture.

Those who made legal justification of these procedures and those who implemented the policy need to be punished. The operatives who carried this out, both CIA personnel, medical enablers and members of the armed forces, are complicit here in a crime. However, I don’t believe that most of these people understood that at the time. Most are patriotic and decent men (and women) and should perhaps be reprimanded. The people who instituted these programs were well aware of the international treaties governing these activities and the fact that the activities fell within the internationally recognized, legal definitions of “torture”. Bush lawyers like Bybee knew that they were coming up with garbage justifications of illegal activities, they just didn’t care. They were probably ordered by Cheney and Rumsfeld and company to come up with legal justifications, and they produced them. These people need to be punished to the full measure of the law. It’s all very well for Obama and Holder to speak of “moving forward” and looking to the future, but these activities were created and justified by high officials in the Bush administration, and that was criminal, if not a war crime.

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” – Bertrand Russell

“It’s not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” –Henry Kissinger

The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger, Truthout, June 7, 2010, by Chris Hedges of Truthdig, photo by Jim Moyers, quoted verbatim:

Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible.

Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged. The followers of deviant faiths, from Judaism to Islam, must be converted or repressed. The deviant media, the deviant public schools, the deviant entertainment industry, the deviant secular humanist government and judiciary and the deviant churches will be reformed or closed. There will be a relentless promotion of Christian “values,” already under way on Christian radio and television and in Christian schools, as information and facts are replaced with overt forms of indoctrination. The march toward this terrifying dystopia has begun. It is taking place on the streets of Arizona, on cable news channels, at tea party rallies, in the Texas public schools, among militia members and within a Republican Party that is being hijacked by this lunatic fringe.

Elizabeth Dilling, who wrote “The Red Network” and was a Nazi sympathizer, is touted as required reading by trash-talk television hosts like Glenn Beck. Thomas Jefferson, who favored separation of church and state, is ignored in Christian schools and soon will be ignored in Texas public school textbooks. The Christian right hails the “significant contributions” of the Confederacy. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, has been rehabilitated, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is defined as part of the worldwide battle against Islamic terror. Legislation like the new Jim Crow laws of Arizona is being considered by 17 other states.

The rise of this Christian fascism, a rise we ignore at our peril, is being fueled by an ineffectual and bankrupt liberal class that has proved to be unable to roll back surging unemployment, protect us from speculators on Wall Street, or save our dispossessed working class from foreclosures, bankruptcies and misery. The liberal class has proved useless in combating the largest environmental disaster in our history, ending costly and futile imperial wars or stopping the corporate plundering of the nation. And the gutlessness of the liberal class has left it, and the values it represents, reviled and hated.

The Democrats have refused to repeal the gross violations of international and domestic law codified by the Bush administration. This means that Christian fascists who achieve power will have the “legal” tools to spy on, arrest, deny habeas corpus to, and torture or assassinate American citizens—as does the Obama administration.

Those who remain in a reality-based world often dismiss these malcontents as buffoons and simpletons. They do not take seriously those, like Beck, who pander to the primitive yearnings for vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. Critics of the movement continue to employ the tools of reason, research and fact to challenge the absurdities propagated by creationists who think they will float naked into the heavens when Jesus returns to Earth. The magical thinking, the flagrant distortion in interpreting the Bible, the contradictions that abound within the movement’s belief system and the laughable pseudoscience, however, are impervious to reason. We cannot convince those in the movement to wake up. It is we who are asleep.

Those who embrace this movement see life as an epic battle against forces of evil and Satanism. The world is black and white. They need to feel, even if they are not, that they are victims surrounded by dark and sinister groups bent on their destruction. They need to believe they know the will of God and can fulfill it, especially through violence. They need to sanctify their rage, a rage that lies at the core of the ideology. They seek total cultural and political domination. They are using the space within the open society to destroy it. These movements work within the confining rules of the secular state because they have no choice. The intolerance they promote is muted in the public assurances of their slickest operators. Given enough power, and they are working hard to get it, any such cooperation will vanish. The demand for total control and for a Christian nation and the refusal to permit any dissent are on display within their inner sanctums. These pastors have established within their churches tiny, despotic fiefdoms, and they seek to replicate these little tyrannies on a larger scale.

Many of the tens of millions within the Christian right live on the edge of poverty. The Bible, interpreted for them by pastors whose connection with God means they cannot be questioned, is their handbook for daily life. The rigidity and simplicity of their belief are potent weapons in the fight against their own demons and the struggle to keep their lives on track. The reality-based world, one where Satan, miracles, destiny, angels and magic did not exist, battered them like driftwood. It took their jobs and destroyed their future. It rotted their communities. It flooded their lives with alcohol, drugs, physical violence, deprivation and despair. And then they discovered that God has a plan for them. God will save them. God intervenes in their lives to promote and protect them. The emotional distance they have traveled from the real world to the world of Christian fantasy is immense. And the rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and evidence, are hated and ultimately feared, for they seek to pull believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them.

There are wild contradictions within this belief system. Personal independence is celebrated alongside an abject subservience to leaders who claim to speak for God. The movement says it defends the sanctity of life and advocates the death penalty, militarism, war and righteous genocide. It speaks of love and promotes fear of damnation and hate. There is a terrifying cognitive dissonance in every word they utter.

The movement is, for many, an emotional life raft. It is all that holds them together. But the ideology, while it regiments and orders lives, is merciless. Those who deviate from the ideology, including “backsliders” who leave these church organizations, are branded as heretics and subjected to little inquisitions, which are the natural outgrowth of messianic movements. If the Christian right seizes the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, these little inquisitions will become big inquisitions.

The cult of masculinity pervades the movement. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a muscular man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and castigating the corrupt. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is deeply appealing to those who feel disempowered and humiliated. It vents the rage that drove many people into the arms of the movement. It encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is stoked through bizarre conspiracy theories, many championed in books such as Pat Robertson’s “The New World Order,” a xenophobic rant that includes attacks on liberals and democratic institutions.

The obsession with violence pervades the popular novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. In their apocalyptic novel, “Glorious Appearing,” based on LaHaye’s interpretation of biblical prophecies about the Second Coming, Christ returns and eviscerates the flesh of millions of nonbelievers with the sound of his voice. There are long descriptions of horror and blood, of how “the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin.” Eyes disintegrate. Tongues melt. Flesh dissolves. The Left Behind series, of which this novel is a part, contains the best-selling adult novels in the country.

Violence must be used to cleanse the world. These Christian fascists are called to a perpetual state of war. “Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ's] return is heresy…” says televangelist James Robinson.

Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, instability in Israel and even the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen as glorious signposts. The war in Iraq is predicted, believers insist, in the ninth chapter of the Book of Revelations, where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of men.” The march is inevitable and irreversible and requires everyone to be ready to fight, kill and perhaps die. Global war, even nuclear war, is not to be feared, but welcomed as the harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms hundreds of millions of apostates to a horrible and gruesome death.

The Christian right, while embracing a form of primitivism, seeks the imprint of law and science to legitimate its absurd mythologies. Its members seek this imprint because, despite their protestations to the contrary, they are a distinctly modern, totalitarian movement. They seek to co-opt the pillars of the Enlightenment in order to abolish the Enlightenment. Creationism, or “intelligent design,” like eugenics for the Nazis or “Soviet” science for Stalin, must be introduced into the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline—hence the rewriting of textbooks. The Christian right defends itself in the legal and scientific jargon of modernity. Facts and opinions, once they are used “scientifically” to support the irrational, become interchangeable. Reality is no longer based on the gathering of facts and evidence. It is based on ideology. Facts are altered. Lies become true. Hannah Arendt called it “nihilistic relativism,” although a better phrase might be collective insanity.

The Christian right has, for this reason, its own creationist “scientists” who use the language of science to promote anti-science. It has fought successfully to have creationist books sold in national park bookstores at the Grand Canyon and taught in public schools in states such as Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. Creationism shapes the worldview of hundreds of thousands of students in Christian schools and colleges. This pseudoscience claims to have proved that all animal species, or at least their progenitors, fit on Noah’s ark. It challenges research in AIDS and pregnancy prevention. It corrupts and discredits the disciplines of biology, astronomy, geology, paleontology and physics.

Once creationists can argue on the same platform as geologists, asserting that the Grand Canyon was not created 6 million years ago but 6,000 years ago by the great flood that lifted up Noah’s ark, we have lost. The acceptance of mythology as a legitimate alternative to reality is a body blow to the rational, secular state. The destruction of rational and empirically based belief systems is fundamental to the creation of all totalitarian ideologies. Certitude, for those who could not cope with the uncertainty of life, is one of the most powerful appeals of the movement. Dispassionate intellectual inquiry, with its constant readjustments and demand for evidence, threatens certitude. For this reason incertitude must be abolished.

“What convinces masses are not facts,” Arendt wrote in “Origins of Totalitarianism,” “and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses’ inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because it convinces them of consistency in time.”

Augustine defined the grace of love as Volo ut sis—I want you to be. There is, he wrote, an affirmation of the mystery of the other in relationships based on love, an affirmation of unexplained and unfathomable differences. Relationships based on love recognize that others have a right to be. These relationships accept the sacredness of difference. This acceptance means that no one individual or belief system captures or espouses an absolute truth. All struggle, in their own way, some outside of religious systems and some within them, to interpret mystery and transcendence.

The sacredness of the other is anathema for the Christian right, which cannot acknowledge the legitimacy of other ways of being and believing. If other belief systems, including atheism, have moral validity, the infallibility of the movement’s doctrine, which constitutes its chief appeal, is shattered. There can be no alternative ways to think or to be. All alternatives must be crushed.

Ideological, theological and political debates are useless with the Christian right. It does not respond to a dialogue. It is impervious to rational thought and discussion. The naive attempts to placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthens its legitimacy and weakness our own. If we do not have a right to be, if our very existence is not legitimate in the eyes of God, there can be no dialogue. At this point it is a fight for survival.

Those gathered into the arms of this Christian fascist movement are desperately struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. We failed them; we owe them more: This is their response. The financial dislocations, the struggles with domestic and sexual abuse, the battle against addictions, the poverty and the despair that many in the movement endure are tragic, painful and real. They have a right to their rage and alienation. But they are also being used and manipulated by forces that seek to dismantle what is left of our democracy and abolish the pluralism that was once the hallmark of our society.

The spark that could set this conflagration ablaze could be lying in the hands of a small Islamic terrorist cell. It could be in the hands of greedy Wall Street speculators who gamble with taxpayer money in the elaborate global system of casino capitalism. The next catastrophic attack, or the next economic meltdown, could be our Reichstag fire. It could be the excuse used by these totalitarian forces, this Christian fascism, to extinguish what remains of our open society.

Let us not stand meekly at the open gates of the city waiting passively for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching toward Bethlehem. Let us shake off our complacency and cynicism. Let us openly defy the liberal establishment, which will not save us, to demand and fight for economic reparations for our working class. Let us reincorporate these dispossessed into our economy. Let us give them a reality-based hope for the future. Time is running out. If we do not act, American fascists, clutching Christian crosses, waving American flags and orchestrating mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, will use this rage to snuff us out.

Chris Hedges, who writes a column every Monday for Truthdig and who graduated from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America“. He was a reporter for many years with The New York Times. His latest book is “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”

One Christian Liberal’s Thoughts

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Well I am liberal and I am Christian, although many fundamentalists try to claim that this combination is not possible. To me, Jesus’ life on earth represents the embodiment of many good and liberal ideas, brought forth and demonstrated in a completely Godly life. Long ago I spent a lot of time reading books on religion and Christian theology. I see no conflict between science and religion. I see no problem with multiculturalism. And I am damned Christian. ((Or just damned if you ask the folks in Wooster’s thriving fundamentalist community, those few who know about me.)) I have no problem with homosexuality (though very much heterosexual) and I think Muslims may have as much chance of getting into heaven (or Paradise) as Christians do. God gave these cultures different religions for a purpose only He knows. Always remember that God is God and humans shouldn’t try to set themselves up as some kind of doctrinal God, giving doctrinal religious laws (or religiously based political laws) to people. Now in Texas they are removing Jefferson and separation of church and state from the textbooks. The religious right is trying to turn America into a fundamentalist theocracy. Laws should be reserved for political bodies and religions should stay out of that. The advice Jesus gave about this was to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s,” stated as two separate propositions.

The Pharisees used Jesus’ violations of doctrinal law as a reason to crucify him, didn’t they? Jesus disliked the Pharisees for a reason. Jesus said that all the laws and doctrine which had come before can be fully summed up as “love God” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” THAT I believe. The only Christian doctrine I recognize is love.

Well, that isn’t quite true, there is one Christian idea, which man has made into a doctrine, that is tied up in fate and not really understandable to man, but it makes sense. I have known people, wonderful people, who will die as nonbelievers. I have tried to talk to some few of these and plant seeds in their minds, yet I feel that probably there is nothing I can do about their strong unbelief. A few I have known for many, many years. I cannot explain why God would choose to allow such obviously good – and kind and loving – people to die outside of the knowledge of his love except by some idea which follows the concept of predestination. Of course, equally, I cannot explain why I thought of myself as Christian for years and thought I must be saved yet did not really know I wasn’t and really wasn’t saved. All that – our individual fates and God’s will – seems to me to be something a mere human mind can never understand. I will not claim to ever understand God’s purpose in allowing really nice people to live and die outside of His love, seemingly, as Christianity teaches, to know some kind of punishment for not accepting that God is God and believing in Him. Yet I know all too well that this happens all the time. It truly troubles me, too. Perhaps it must mean that somehow God forgives them and that the idea God would punish anyone for beliefs or lack of belief is wrong. I know that as reported, Jesus here on earth loved everyone he came in contact with, regardless of their beliefs. Is not God love? Just because the Bible speaks of hell, do you not think that hell would be reserved for those who deliberately do wrong in their lives, know they are wrong and evil, and yet live evilly anyway? That sort of punishment I understand, but not the idea of punishment just because a person cannot understand and accept the reality of God and have faith. Many of these nonbelievers live lives that can only be described as caring and in every regard but faith, very Christian lives. The idea of hubris — intellectual pride — is very much present in a few of the people who are in this situation whom I have known. Faith is a decision. But though man may plants seeds which might lead to faith, I think the conclusion and decision to have faith is something which no one but God understands and can have any influence over. Predestination. But I will simply realize that I have a limited human mind and leave all that up to God.

Very recently I accepted Jesus fully into my heart and rededicated myself to living a truly Christian life in the full knowledge of Jesus’ caring love. In other words I can say now that I am saved. People who do not know what this is and what this means whom I have known – myself included – sometimes may scoff at this word “saved,” but now, to me, this is very real. I hope my few friends who are not Christian will tolerate me and still be my friends without belittling this or talking down to me about it. What that translates to in my actual life is I believe that I will have to be far less selfish. Very well, I welcome the discipline involved and am so grateful to God that I did not have to live my whole life, and then die, outside of His love…. I am a very lucky — and unworthy — man.

I tried to put most of my views on Christianity on two pages here at Evans Liberal Politics, A Plea for Tolerance of Muslims: What Would Jesus Do? (Final Update), which is strongly about what I feel Christian tolerance and caring and love should actively consist of; and Straight Talk on Caring. Jesus only had one value, while he was on earth, and that was CARING, actively, for all those who encountered him. That includes the Roman pagan centurian Cornelius, whose son Jesus healed, and the Samaritan woman, whom Jesus counseled despite the fact that devout Jews were not “supposed to” talk with those outside of Judaism. What about “love thy neighbor” and “judge not lest ye be judged” don’t these people get? I would like to think that a loving God would not damn someone because of what religious doctrine they followed, but rather, if God judges us, he must do so based upon how loving (or caring) a life we have lived, and nothing more or less. I do not claim to understand anything much more about salvation, I only know that I was not saved, and now I am.

Finally, I think it is important to differentiate between individual fundamentalist Christians, who mostly are very kind, decent and committed souls who wish nothing but to live Biblically based lives, and the national church organizations representing them, which in many cases are engaged in very questionable, highly right wing or perhaps arguably “Christian fascist” agendas and call for many changes which to me, aren’t very Christian. At least if it matters to you how Jesus lived his life and what is caring for all Americans. The national organizations are far more of a danger than are the individual, decent Christian people, many of whom are my neighbors. I know them to be very good, kind and giving people. ~ Paul

See Parallels in Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Fundamentalism, TheWorldandI.com, December, 2004, by Peter Huff.

See Secular fundamentalism, The New York Times, Opinion, December 19, 2003, anonymous.

See Fundamentalism, Lectures for Religion 166: Religious Life in the United States. Wake Forest University, July 27, 2008.

See Psychological Issues of Former Members of Restrictive Religious Group, JimMoyers.com, by Jim Moyers.

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In the last-ditch warrantless wiretapping accountability case, Judge Vaughn Walker has ruled that the Bush administration illegally eavesdropped on American lawyers representing Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity, and that the attorney could pursue civil remedies.

The lawyers alleged some of their 2004 telephone conversations to Saudi Arabia were siphoned to the National Security Agency without warrants. The allegations were initially based on a classified document the government accidentally mailed to the former Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation lawyers. The document was later declared a state secret and removed from the long-running lawsuit weighing whether a sitting U.S. president may create a spying program to eavesdrop on Americans’ electronic communications without warrants

“Plaintiffs must, and have, put forward enough evidence to establish a prima facie case that they were subjected to warrantless electronic surveillance,” U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled, in a landmark decision. Even without the classified document, the judge said he believed the lawyers “were subjected to unlawful electronic surveillance.” (.pdf)

It’s the first ruling addressing how Bush’s once-secret spy program was carried out against American citizens. Other cases considered the program’s overall constitutionality, absent any evidence of actual illegal eavesdropping.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department staunchly defended the lawsuit. The classified document was removed from the case at the behest of both the Bush and Obama administrations that declared it a state secret.

Marcy is reviewing the decision at emptywheel, and highlights this snippet of the ruling, which perhaps reflects Walker’s impatience with the government over the long history of this case.

Walker gets a little snippy when explaining why the government’s arguments about why they shouldn’t have to prove they didn’t wiretap al-Haramain illegally.

Under defendants’ theory, executive branch officials may treat FISA as optional and freely employ the SSP to evade FISA, a statute enacted specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.

…[snip]…

In an impressive display of argumentative acrobatics, defendants contend, in essence, that the court’s orders of June 3 and June 5, 2009 setting the rules for these cross-motions make FISA inapplicable and that “the Ninth Circuit’s rulings on the privilege assertion therefore control the summary judgment motions now before the Court.” Doc #672/105 at 6. In other words, defendants contend, this is not a FISA case and defendants are therefore free to hide behind the SSP all facts that could help plaintiffs’ case. In so contending, defendants take a flying leap and miss by a wide margin.

And that’s without even looking at Bush’s claim that Congress can’t tell the President he can’t wiretap Americans.

As of yet, the Justice Department hasn’t responded, but an appeal seems likely.

See, Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal, The New York Times, March 31, 2010, by Charlie Savage and James Risen.

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FISA dominates, Bush
wiretapping held illegal

In the clearest sign yet that the Obama administration is re-energizing tribunals for captives at a Guantanamo it wants closed, the Pentagon this week installed a retired three-star admiral with national security and international law experience to run the war court.

The appointment also comes as Congress is still resisting a White House plan to hold military trials in Illinois, and while the administration is reviewing Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to hold the Sept. 11 mass murder trial in Manhattan.

Retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald replaces Susan Crawford as the war court gatekeeper or Convening Authority for Military Commissions. Crawford, a Bush-era appointee, decided which cases could be tried, which experts could get government funds to help defend suspected terrorists and which captive’s treatment amounted to torture.

MacDonald’s last job in the military was as the Navy’s top lawyer. He had repeatedly testified at Congress as a bullish backer of the at-times controversial tribunal system.

Retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Swift, who took the war crimes case of Osama bin Laden’s driver to the U.S. Supreme Court, said the appointment signals the new White House’s continued commitment to military trials.

“He holds a master’s in international law from Harvard. He’s experienced in National Security matters. He was the Navy JAG corps solve-the-problem guy,” he said. “If it’s high profile, difficult and needs a solution, one generally calls Bruce MacDonald.”

MacDonald arrives at a key military commission moment: As the White House is deciding whether to reverse Holder’s decision in November to bring alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators to New York for civilian trial. They are now at Guantánamo in a compound for former CIA prisoners.

Given MacDonald’s National Security experience, Swift said, “his appointment is absolutely consistent with persistent reports that KSM is going back to commissions. He’s the type of guy one would trust with this mission.”

MacDonald, a Naval officer since 1978, became the Navy’s Judge Advocate General in 2006, a post that earned him a prestigious third star.

He got his law law degree in 1987 from the California Western School of Law, according to his Pentagon biography, and has both defended and prosecuted sailors.

He retired in August, a month after he testified at the Senate of his concerns that not enough staff or funds were made available to defense lawyers. He reported to work at the Defense Department Monday as “director” of the Office of Military Commissions. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced his appointment Thursday.

Read the full article, here.

President Barack Obama’s relations with the Israeli government have hit a new low, but the tensions on display this week between him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be reviving another presidential project: Obama’s quest to improve America’s image in the Arab and Muslim world.

Obama raised high expectations among Arab leaders and citizens with his promise of dramatic change from the days of George W. Bush and high-profile gestures in the first days of his administration, but the administration’s awkward retreat last year from an initial demand of a total Israeli freeze on settlements dissipated much of that goodwill.

Now, Obama’s return to the question of Israel’s continuing construction in East Jerusalem has signaled an acceptance of some Arab criticism of Israel. At the same time, Obama’s willingness to cross swords with the Israelis comes at a domestic political cost: The pro-Israel group AIPAC released a letter Friday with the signatures of three-quarters of the members of the House, pressing the administration to retreat from public confrontation.

The question facing Obama is whether he will be able to turn a perception of increased “evenhandedness” into an Arab engagement in the peace process that the administration sought, but did not get, last year.

“The administration has used [the Jerusalem conflict] as an opportunity to bring back the settlement issue and to show that they’re willing to talk tough on settlements,” said Stephen Gordon, a Mideast scholar at the Brookings Institution. “I think that has sent the signal that, yes, we are committed to the peace process; yes, we are going to be evenhanded; and, yes, we recognize that this conflict is important to people in the Arab world.”

Obama’s new focus, and the intense pressure his administration has placed on Netanyahu, have stirred deep concern among Israel’s allies on Capitol Hill, they say, because it represents an acceptance of the Arab narrative that Israeli intransigence lies at the heart of the Middle East conflict. And some observers see it in the context of a subtle, but major, shift in American strategy toward resolving it.

Read the full article, here.

UPDATE: See, Baker Schools Huckabee on Israeli Settlements, Daily Kos, March 28, 2010, by Dennis Morrison.

Watch, The Listening Post – Strained US-Israel relations – Pt 1, YouTube, AlJazeera English, March 27, 2010: 13:09.

Watch, Palestinian leader insists on settlement halt for Israel talks, YouTube, Agence France Presse, March 27, 2010: 0:31.

Watch, Israel : There Will Be No Building Restrictions in East Jerusalem, YouTube, Superlorgreen, March 22, 2010: 1:55.

Watch, Key leaders to skip Arab summit, YouTube, AlJazeeraEnglish, March 25, 2010: 2:26.

Watch, AlJazerra English News Update with News on Arab Summit, YouTube, AlJazerraEnglish, March 27, 2010: 2:28.

Israeli tanks roll into Gaza

Israeli tanks and bulldozers rolled into Gaza Friday while navy ships began firing along the Gaza coast.

Tension has been high all week following the deaths of four Palestinian youths. The youths were accused by the Israeli army of throwing stones at them.

The tension reached breaking point on Friday afternoon when militants clashed with Israeli army soldiers resulting in a gun battle which left two Israeli soldiers and two militants dead. Two other Israeli soldiers were wounded, one seriously. The Israeli army confirmed it had entered Gaza and clashed with militants. One of its soldiers killed was the deputy commander of his regiment. The other was in the reserves.

Britain expels Israeli diplomat
in Dubai passport row