In comments to my previous post, the issue of Ashcroft’s badness is briefly discussed. Conrad commented that (paraphrase) Janet Reno is more despicable because of the deaths at Waco, but I don’t buy the comparison. Waco was an awful mistake and a tragedy, but it did not typify Reno’s performance or her concept of what being attorney general means. Ashcroft is consistently dreadful on a daily basis. And dangerous, too.

There are few members of the Bush team that I truly “hate.” Hate is a strong word and if you throw it around a lot it loses its power. I reserve it for the very worst, like Ashcroft.

There was good reason so many of us feared the appointment of a backward-thinking pentecostal to oversee the Justice Department. These fears have been justified many times over, and Paul Krugman today summarizes them in a column that’s sure to raise lots of eyebrows. It’s brilliant, and I urge you to read the entire thing.

Travesty of Justice
By PAUL KRUGMAN

No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.

For this column, let’s just focus on Mr. Ashcroft’s role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn’t even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure.

We can’t tell directly whether Mr. Ashcroft’s post-9/11 policies are protecting the United States from terrorist attacks. But a number of pieces of evidence suggest otherwise.

First, there’s the absence of any major successful prosecutions. The one set of convictions that seemed fairly significant — that of the “Detroit 3” — appears to be collapsing over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. (The lead prosecutor has filed a whistle-blower suit against Mr. Ashcroft, accusing him of botching the case. The Justice Department, in turn, has opened investigations against the prosecutor. Payback? I report; you decide.)

Then there is the lack of any major captures. Somewhere, the anthrax terrorist is laughing. But the Justice Department, you’ll be happy to know, is trying to determine whether it can file bioterrorism charges against a Buffalo art professor whose work includes harmless bacteria in petri dishes.

Perhaps most telling is the way Mr. Ashcroft responds to criticism of his performance. His first move is always to withhold the evidence. Then he tries to change the subject by making a dramatic announcement of a terrorist threat.

For an example of how Mr. Ashcroft shuts down public examination, consider the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former F.B.I. translator who says that the agency’s language division is riddled with incompetence and corruption, and that the bureau missed critical terrorist warnings. In 2002 she gave closed-door Congressional testimony; Senator Charles Grassley described her as “very credible . . . because people within the F.B.I. have corroborated a lot of her story.”

But the Justice Department has invoked the rarely used “state secrets privilege” to prevent Ms. Edmonds from providing evidence. And last month the department retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I. officials, which was presumably what Mr. Grassley referred to.

For an example of changing the subject, consider the origins of the Jose Padilla case. There was no publicity when Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002. But on June 6, 2002, Coleen Rowley gave devastating Congressional testimony about failures at the F.B.I. (which reports to Mr. Ashcroft) before 9/11. Four days later, Mr. Ashcroft held a dramatic press conference and announced that Mr. Padilla was involved in a terrifying plot. Instead of featuring Ms. Rowley, news magazine covers ended up featuring the “dirty bomber” who Mr. Ashcroft said was plotting to kill thousands with deadly radiation.

Since then Mr. Padilla has been held as an “enemy combatant” with no legal rights. But Newsweek reports that “administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention — that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological `dirty bomb’ — has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used in court.”

But most important is the memo. Last week Mr. Ashcroft, apparently in contempt of Congress, refused to release a memo on torture his department prepared for the White House almost two years ago. Fortunately, his stonewalling didn’t work: The Washington Post has acquired a copy of the memo and put it on its Web site.

Much of the memo is concerned with defining torture down: if the pain inflicted on a prisoner is less than the pain that accompanies “serious physical injury, such as organ failure,” it’s not torture. Anyway, the memo declares that the federal law against torture doesn’t apply to interrogations of enemy combatants “pursuant to [the president’s] commander-in-chief authority.” In other words, the president is above the law.

The memo came out late Sunday. Mr. Ashcroft called a press conference yesterday — to announce an indictment against a man accused of plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio. The timing was, I’m sure, purely coincidental.

That new website the Chinese government is providing the people to rat out sites they don’t like — or sites run by people they want to get revenge on — is being carefully positioned as an anti-pornography site. In fact, parents all throughout the Mainland are breathing a sigh of relief, knowing their children will go to bed a little bit safer, a little more protected against the dangers of dirty pictures, thanks to the Great Cyber Nanny and her new scare-you-to-death informer site.

People, especially parents, generally applauded the opening of the website.

“It’s good for fostering a healthy environment for the growth of our kids,” said a netizen.

(Great journalism, too.)

Of course, we all know better. This is the kind of informer system that would make Chairman Mao or Comrade Beria or Secretary Ashcroft or Heinrich Himmler proud. It’s a huge step backward for freedom of expression in China, making just about anyone prone to accusations of posting “unhealthy” material. Whatever that is.

This is the actual ad for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, opening in just a few days.

I think they’re kind of cute together.

Had this occurred under Clinton, all hell would have broken loose.

As the government prepared for war in Iraq in the fall of 2002, a senior political appointee in the Defense Department chose oil services giant Halliburton Co. to secretly plan how to repair Iraqi oil fields, and then briefed Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff and other White House officials about the sole-source contract before it was granted.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said the new details about the $1.8 million contract, disclosed last week in a Pentagon briefing for congressional staff members, raise new questions about whether the vice president or his office played any role in decisions to give what became billions of dollars worth of government business to Halliburton, where Cheney was chief executive from 1995 to 2000.

Cheney has said neither he nor his office influenced decisions to give contracts to Halliburton.

In a letter to Cheney yesterday, Waxman said the circumstances “appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts.”

“They also seem to contradict the Administration’s repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of contracts to Halliburton,” wrote Waxman, senior Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee and one of the sharpest critics of the government’s ties to Halliburton.

Kevin Kellems, a spokesman for Cheney, played down the importance of Waxman’s letter, suggesting it was politically motivated. “We stand by our previous statements,” Kellems said.

No outrage? No special prosecutor? No calls for our secretive VP to step down from his ivory tower and give us a more complete explanation? No, of course not; we’re at war. He can do as he chooses.

So asks Republican pundit and former Bush attack dog Andrew Sullivan, as he contemplates new evidence that Rumsfeld knew about plans to use attack dogs as a torture device (call it what you will — torture is torture) at Guantanamo. They were never used there, but they were at Abu Ghraib.

Impeachment hearings, anyone?

The article Sullivan points to proves what most of us have known all along: Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez is a liar, and he’s probably toast.

But wait, that’s not all. Today Mark Kleiman points to an article in a conservative British paper indicating the investigations will become a whole lot worse over the next few days. Documents are about to come out that show the abuse was approved at “the very highest levels.” Bad apples indeed. Heh.

Xinhua needs some help with translating headlines into English:

Families of Chinese workers killed in Afghanistan get aids

What a difference an “s” makes.

Many were appointed by Reagan and Bush Senior. Does this tell us something? This is extremely unusual.

A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America’s national security and should be defeated in November.

The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush’s foreign policy, according to several of those who signed the document.

“It is clear that the statement calls for the defeat of the administration,” said William C. Harrop, the ambassador to Israel under President Bush’s father and one of the group’s principal organizers.

Those signing the document, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, include 20 former U.S. ambassadors, appointed by presidents of both parties, to countries including Israel, the former Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia.

Others are senior State Department officials from the Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations and former military leaders, including retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East under President Bush’s father. Hoar is a prominent critic of the war in Iraq.

Some of those signing the document — such as Hoar and former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. McPeak — have identified themselves as supporters of Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But most have not endorsed any candidate, members of the group said.

It is unusual for so many former high-level military officials and career diplomats to issue such an overtly political message during a presidential campaign.

This is simply unprecedented. These are not whiny liberals or people pushing a book or getting revenge. This represents the epitome of the concerned citizen. It is part of a groundswell of dissatisfaction among the military and among national security experts — even those who, in normal times, would almost certainly side with the Republicans.

It’s definitely the most interesting time I’ve ever seen in America’s political history. It’s also definitely time for a big change.

My good friend Joseph Bosco over at Longbow Papers is having serious problems with his blogging technology, and at the moment he is unable to post at all. He can’t say exactly when he’ll be able to post again, but hopefully it’ll be very soon. Joseph is one of China’s most prolific bloggers, so I know the misery he must be going through, held hostage by technology. Hurry back, Joseph.

As one commenter writes, this blog in general and this post in particular could be an Onion parody of blogging. There are nearly 60 comments (at the moment) to the Polling post, each more hilarious and vicious than the last.

Poor lady; but she definitely brought it upon herself. Her post on Iraqi oil is another strong contender for a bimbo award.

Links via Pandagon. There’s also a rather biting observation about the Polling post over at Sadly, No:

There’s dumb (D.) There’s fucktard dumb (FD.) And then there’s clueless fucktard dumb (CFD.) That was somewhere below CFD.

Update: She has closed her comments, and frankly I don’t blame her. She got flamed alive. (At least her site traffic soared from its average of about 200 hits a day to about 2500.) Some of the comments to Sadly No’s post are worth reading — especially the ones suggesting we try to deal with her kindly.

Accocrding to this gossipy article, a lot of observers believe Jiang is unhappy with Hu Jintao’s performance, and wants to see Zeng replace him. It’s worth a glance, if only to see how the old players interact with one another, and to be reminded of just how much clout the lizardy Jiang still wields (not that this was ever in doubt).