Some of you reading this may not follow baseball, but in the good old days, if a pitcher on Team A hit a batter for Team B, Team B's pitcher would retaliate with a fastball to the head of one of Team A's batters. This kind of mutually-assured-destruction both teams honest. But what works for baseball does not always work in real life.

The Iraq war has been a part of our lives since 2003. Thanks to the miracle of modern publishing, we can get the inside story on how the war has been fought while the war is still raging. Thanks to the miracle of modern blogging, we don't have to actually read those books to know what the insiders think. The latest relevation is that the cowboy in the Oval Office was foaming at the mouth in discussing war strategy with his generals, including commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who recently published a book, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story (hat tip to TomDispatch, from whom I'm quoting below).

Let me briefly set the scene, as Sanchez tells it on pages 349-350 of Wiser in Battle. It's April 6, 2004. L. Paul Bremer III, head of the occupation's Coalition Provisional Authority, as well as the President's colonial viceroy in Baghdad, and Gen. Sanchez were in Iraq in video teleconference with the President, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Assumedly, the event was recorded and so revisitable by a note-taking Sanchez.) The first full-scale American offensive against the resistant Sunni city of Fallujah was just being launched, while, in Iraq's Shiite south, the U.S. military was preparing for a campaign against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: "We've got to smash somebody's ass quickly," the general reports him saying. "There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power." (And indeed, by the end of April, parts of Fallujah would be in ruins, as, by August, would expanses of the oldest parts of the holy Shiite city of Najaf. Sadr himself would, however, escape to fight another day; and, in order to declare Powell's "total victory," the U.S. military would have to return to Fallujah that November, after the U.S. presidential election, and reduce three-quarters of it to virtual rubble.) Bush then turned to the subject of al-Sadr: "At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone," he insisted to his top advisors. "At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out."

Not long after that, the President "launched" what an evidently bewildered Sanchez politely describes as "a kind of confused pep talk regarding both Fallujah and our upcoming southern campaign [against the Mahdi Army]." Here then is that "pep talk." While you read it, try to imagine anything like it coming out of the mouth of any other American president, or anything not like it coming out of the mouth of any evil enemy leader in the films of the President's -- and my -- childhood:

"'Kick ass!' [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell's tough talk. 'If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!'"

This reminds me of Bush's comment in 2003 when someone told him that his war generated resistance from the insurgency:

President Bush said Wednesday that American troops under fire in Iraq aren't about to pull out, and he challenged those tempted to attack U.S. forces, "Bring them on."

The cowboy loves war, when someone else is fighting it. He put the soldiers there, and many come back to the United States in a coffin. After urging the insurgency to bring it on, they did bring it on, killing American soldiers.

The recent report from the U.S. Congress outlining how the Bush administration lied its way into the Iraq war was on the front pages for a day or two, but it will fade into the darkness soon enough as the national Attention Decifit Disorder plunges into the next crisis, be it gas prices or unemployment. We may wring our hands over the inattention that this report is receiving, but it actually makes sense that this news is short-lived. The mentality that ignores the disgraceful march to war in Iraq is the same mentality that re-elected George W. Bush in 2004.

We knew damned well that the Iraq war was a mistake and that the President and his cronies pulled out all stops for war. Unprovoked war based on misinformation and lies is bad enough. It's even worse when that war loots the national treasury and distracts us from the real effort to destroy the people who actually attacked us on 9/11. The Democrats did not want the presidency badly enough. Had they wanted it as badly as the Republicans did, John Kerry would have attacked Bush each and every day for the unlawful war which has done far more harm than good.

The American public wanted to be lied to. After September 11, Americans wanted war, against anyone. It was easy to blame Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks. After all, he hates us, we hate him, and he's a terrorist. The Bush administration encouraged the American people to believe that Saddam had a relationship with bin Ladin and that they would share weapons, even nuclear weapons, in their united front against us. This and other falsehoods were enough to cause over 70 percent of the American people when the war started to believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. The Bush administration manipulated public fears and ignorance, and now over 4,000 American soldiers are dead and many thounsands of them are wounded for life.

So I blame Bush and the criminal enterprise that occupies the White House and the American people for this war. The government knows how to manipulate public opinion just as the advertising industry knows how to make us buy products that we don't really need. The interconnected propaganda schemes that drive American capitalism also work in the context of war, which is as profitable to private corporations as any miracle drug or electronic gadget. We wanted war, we wanted to be lied to, and we got both.

Here is a summary of the report which exposes the run-up to war as the propaganda effort that it was:

The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

In a statement accompanying the report, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said: “The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”

. . .

The report was especially critical of statements by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney that linked Iraq to Al Qaeda and raised the possibility that Mr. Hussein might supply the terrorist group with weapons of mass destruction. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote.

Here is the official summary from the report:

--Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.

--Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.

--Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.

--Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.

--The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.

--The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

All of this is very depressing. The news makers may think this is old news; after all, we all knew that Bush lied, right? Except that few news makers are focusing on the true implications of this report. Keith Olbermann at MSNBC interviewed Richard Clarke, himself a Bush whistleblower whose book in 2002-03 was among the first to expose Bush as an incompetent man-child overly focused on Iraq instead of the real enemy. This report vindicates Clarke, and he has some choice words for his former employer. Click below and enjoy.

I always wondered how the United States got away with establishing a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That's Cuba! Enemy territory! I can understand why the United States wants a base there. Our government has bases everywhere. But why does Cuba put up with it? Maybe because the country that has tried to kill Fidel Castro many times has the muscle to put bases and detention centers wherever it pleases.

But all the military might in the world can't stop the Constitution from applying to Guantanamo Bay. That's because the Executive Branch, where the President does his business, was reigned in on Thursday by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that even enemy combatants and detainees can challenge their detention under the Habeas Corpus rules which protect everyone else in U.S. territory.

Habeas Corpus is a latin phrase which means that you can ask a court to review the legality of your detention. It's one of the oldest legal concepts in Western Civilization. It's what separates the free from the oppressed, and when I say oppressed, I mean OPPRESSED, those who live under totalitarian regimes and can be swept off the streets for no reason and without any recourse. Without Habeas Corpus you can spend years in jail simply because you held different political views, or some other frivolous reason. No matter how bad the Bush administration or any other tyrant abuses power in the American political system, there's always Habeas Corpus.

Here is a summary of the ruling by the New York Times' excellent Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse:

The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration’s handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, at the administration’s behest, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants.

Congress and the administration had passed a shortened alternative to a habeas procedure for the prisoners in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that procedure “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.”

Justice Kennedy declared: “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

The decision . . . was categorical in its rejection of the administration’s basic arguments. Indeed, the court repudiated the fundamental legal basis for the administration’s strategy, adopted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of housing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the United States Naval base in Cuba, where Justice Department lawyers advised the White House that domestic law would never reach.

Here's the opinion, for those who care to muddle through the legal jargon.

For international human rights lawyers, the decision handed down by the Supreme Court is groundbreaking, like Roe v. Wade for abortion rights activists or Brown v. Board of Education for domestic civil rights lawyers. What's most interesting is that the Court sees right through the justification for locating the detention center in another country. That tactic does not mean that the U.S. Constitutional protections of Habeas Corpus cannot apply.

The Supreme Court is consistently striking down the Bush administration's contorted legal rationales for the treatment of detainees in the War on Terror. This brings us back to Civics 101: separation of powers, a concept we all learned about but never really paid attention to. In fact, we would laugh at the concept that one branch is not allowed to get too powerful and that each branch of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) serves as a check on each other. It all seemed so quaint. Schoolkids got the point, but was this rock-paper-scissors theory really useful in real life? It is now. As one commentator notes in quoting from the opinion, "Even though the two political branches — the President and Congress — had agreed to take away the detainees’ habeas rights, [Justice] Kennedy said those branches do not have 'the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.'"

The moral of the story is that the Bush presidency is out of control, and has done whatever it pleased in the name of security and, of course, politics. Separation of powers is no longer a cute theory of government. It prevents this country from falling into the abyss completely.

The company man says nothing. He does what he is told, he doesn't ask questions, and he averts the eyes to the unethical practices of his masters. And why wouldn't he? His masters pay him a lot of money, and no one wants to be remembered as disloyal, or a traitor. The hero is the man who steps forward and tells us how the sausage is made.

For years, we laughed and laughed at Scott McClellan, the hapless spokesman for the Bush administration. Scottie stood before the Washington press corps and fended off questions like a skilled tennis player. We knew that he was just a front man, but he seemed pathetic all the same. Can't they find a better guy than this?

The company man stays quiet, but the hero does not. Scott McClellan came forward with his memoirs, telling us what we already knew (Bush is corrupt, the war is a scam, et al), but what makes his tell-all a surprise is that he was not a policymaker like the others whose books blew the lid off the Bush fun-house. Scottie was the last one the tell the truth.

Today's newspaper:

Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman turned Bush administration critic, took to Capitol Hill on Friday to decry an insular and secretive White House that he said lied about the leaking of a CIA officer's name and "overstated" intelligence in the rush to war in Iraq.

McClellan, who served as President Bush's press secretary from 2003 to 2006 and is the author of a controversial new book, also said Bush squandered the public's trust by not following through on promises to fire those involved in disclosing the identity of CIA officer Valerie Wilson - also known as Valerie Plame - and to publicly divulge details about the case.

"The continuing cloud of suspicion over the White House is not something I can remove, because I know only one part of the story," McClellan said during several hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. "Only those who know the underlying truth can bring this to an end. Sadly, they remain silent."

McClellan was a longtime Bush aide whose best-selling book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," has caused a political uproar. It contains sharp criticism of the president and his senior aides on a variety of topics, including the handling of prewar intelligence and the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

Memoirs like this are common in our political world. An analysis in this weekend's New York Times Book Review focuses on the many times that people came forward with ugly relevations about the presidents they worked for. Some of these memoirs changed the way we viewed those presidents forever. Who can forget Richard Clarke's book a few years ago which revealed that Bush was looking for war with Iraq right after 9/11, and that Bush and his cronies ignored the warning signs of an imminent terrorist attack? The point of the Times article is that these books are not all that great, and they fail as literary efforts. Meanwhile, some idiot Republican Congressmen attacked McClellan at the hearing yesterday because he was disloyal. But the real moral of the story is that some secrets cannot be kept under wraps. You can't keep these secrets forever, in politics especially. It's like holding in an upset stomach. What compels a nice boy like Scott McClellan to spill the beans on his former boss? I call it American diarreah.

It comes as a shock to many people that the United States remains one of the few countries in the world that still applies the death penalty. What makes sense here does not make sense elsewhere. The death penalty is final, and final means final. You can't bring him back if we discover later on that he didn't commit the crime, and the newspapers have been reporting for two decades now about innocent men released from death row because DNA evidence proved beyond any doubt that the guy simply didn't do it.

The death penalty debate is a strange one, however. Many people profess to oppose the death penalty, but they can be persuaded that this punishment is appropriate for the most brutal and vicious crimes. In that case, then, these people actually do support the death penalty. But what about one of the most unconscionable crimes of them all, say, child rape?

The child rapist has no defenders. He will not survive in prison, and not because of the death penalty. The child rapist is at the bottom of the totem pole in the strange hierarchy that inmates devise to judge each other. Murder is one thing. Crimes against children are something else.

Many Americans still support the death penalty. Many judges and executioners do not. That's because they see death up close, and they know two things: innocent people can be put to death, and even the killer may in his own way not deserve that punishment. There are better ways to punish, and no one suggests these men should go free. The question before the Supreme Court this year was a difficult one: if we all hate child rapists, and if the courts have not specifically limited the death penalty for murder, should child rapists be put to death?

The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, said no. Child rapists cannot be put to death. Why did the Court do this? The Court does not just exercise its judgement in deciding its cases based on the judges' own values. It has to follow precedent. The case law in this area requires the Court to consider evolving social standards in determining whether certain punishments violate the Cruel and Inhuman Punishment Clause of the Constitution. In that light, the national consensus has tilted away from death for child rapists, and few states recognize that punishment. In addition, the punishment is disproportionate to the crime, however vile it is. Death is only proper for the most serious crimes, which at this point is murder and murder alone. Even then, death is not appropriate for the mentally retarded and juveniles, as they do not have full mental responsibility for their criminal acts. Accordingly, the Court tells us:

Based both on consensus and our own independent judgment, our holding is that a death sentence for one who raped but did not kill a child, and who did not intend to assist another in killing the child, is unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

. . .

Consistent with evolving standards of decency and the teachings of our precedents we conclude that, in determining whether the death penalty is excessive, there is a distinction between intentional first-degree murder on the one hand and nonhomicide crimes against individual persons, even including child rape, on the other. The latter crimes may be devastating in their harm, as here, but “in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public,” they cannot be compared to murder in their “severity and irrevocability.”

A quick scan of the news this evening shows that the usual gang of pro-death penalty supporters are outraged by the Supreme Court's decision. There is nothing more emotional than the death penalty debate. The pro-death crowd wants to fry 'em all, fry' em now. Since I believe emotion has no place in public policy, these concerns are easily responded to with the following logic: the government should not be killing anyone, and the financial costs of ensuring the right guy committed the crime make the process prohibitive. Innocent people have walked off death row, and the killer or child rapist still gets life in prison, or something close to it. the death penalty solves nothing.

Note that this court decision was decided by a vote of 5-4. One vote made the difference. Think about that when you vote in this year's presidential elections (the president picks the Supreme Court justices). For those of us who oppose the death penalty, it is a good sign that the Court over the past few years has made it harder and harder for the states to enforce the death penalty, a curious trend in light of the conservative modern Supreme Court. As one commentator notes, "the Court’s five-Justice majority said at one point: 'When the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the constitutional commitment to decency and restraint.' For a Court not yet ready to end the long-running constitutional experiment with the death penalty, it was a revealing utterance of near-revulsion at the process."