Redstate

By Mark Kilmer Posted in Elections — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

No fisticuffs. And no McCain. Biden had a mantra, and Weldon has a source, of sorts. Russert wants to reinstitute conscription, while Schieffer wants to close Guantanamo. Duncan Hunter knows every item of food eaten by the prisoners at Guantanamo, and Lindsey Graham thinks health care is the solution to the Army's recruiting problems.

TIME magazine reports that the 20th hijacker was forced to urinate in his pants, which guest-host John King found degrading "to a Moslem man." So did Feinstein and Hagel; in fact, Feinstein says she's holding hearings on it next Wednesday.

I don't know what Steph's on these days.

[Read on for the complete summary…]

CURT WELDON AND JOE BIDEN ON MTP. These two guests did not belong together. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania) and the ranking Dem on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Joe Biden, were host Russert's guests on Meet the Press, and they interacted very little.

Weldon's hawking a book, Countdown to Terror, written with information gathered from an Iranian source who was in the government of the late Shah, evidently in an effort to prevent another terrorist attack against the U.S. Biden, on the other hand, was hawking Biden. But they were both in Iraq recently.

Weldon said that the greatest part of the insurgency came from Iran, not from Syria.

Russert quoted Vice President Cheney as saying the insurgency in Iraq was in its last phase. Biden disagreed. He said that there is a dichotomy between the reality and the rhetoric, and because of this, the President risks losing the support of the American people. The President should "come clean with the American people," he insisted.

Weldon insisted that the Iraqis' level of training was significantly lower than what is being represented by the Administration.

Russert pointed out a 40-percent shortfall in recruiting for the Army and Marine Corps. Weldon insisted that the morale was good, the numbers were disappointing, and they need to think about "additional incentives" to join. Russert wants the draft. Weldon said no. Biden said no, but the President must "level with the American people. … They're beginning to think this is a black hole."

Biden said that "we're going to have to face" the question of the draft in the future, and the "President has to tell them straight out: 'here comes the hard part.'" Biden insists that the President must level with the American people, tell them how difficult it will be, but the American will be with him if he levels with them. But he has to level with the American people.

In the age of the compact disk, Biden was a broken record.

Weldon talked about his source, whom he identified only as "Ali." He would not confirm information gleaned from The American Prospect by Russert that Ali is on old Shah of Iran hand named Fereidoun Mahdavi. He did admit, though, that Ali is a close friend of Iranian Arms merchant Manucher Gorbanifar, whom you might remember from Marine Lt. Colonel Oliver North's testimony in the summer of 1987.

Weldon pointed out that Gorbanifar "is a creation of the CIA," the same CIA who created Ahmed Chalabi and who has been criticizing his source. But Weldon insisted that the CIA had sent him a classified letter praising his source.

Biden insisted that our policy in Iran should not be regime change, but the President has to level with the American people.

Weldon insisted that our problem in Iran was not the people or the mullahs; rather it was one man: Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the supreme ruler of the country.

DUNCAN HUNTER AND A HUMAN RIGHTS GUY ON FNS. Former House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter and Tom Molinowski of Human Rights Watch were host Christ Wallace's guests on Fox News Sunday.

Hunter repeatedly listed the food being served to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, listing also prayer oil, prayer mats, prayer beads, calls to prayer, indications of the direction of Mecca, etc. Molinowski, perhaps mindful of the public relations disaster staged recently by Amnesty International, "set the rhetoric aside" but said that the Cuban camp "is a huge problem for the United States around the world. ... It's a legal black hole to which no law applies."

Hunter quipped: "I would respond that no one has been killed at Guantanamo." Molinowski insisted that thirty had died elsewhere. Wallace brought up the number of cases the Pentagon said it had handled in all the facilities, and Hunter insisted on sticking to the case of Guantanamo, where no one had been killed.

Hunter went down the list of food, prayer oil, prayer beds… and he quipped that the ACLU would file suit if the military organized such things for our own troops.

There we conflicting statements from Hunter, though, and I am not certain if the prisoners at Guantanamo are served honey-glazed chicken on Sundays or on Mondays. He did point out, though, that the M.R.E.s often fed to our own soldiers would be considered a form of torture by some standards.

GRAHAM AND LEAHY ON FTN. Senators Pat Leahy of Vermont and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina were host Bob Schieffers cordial guest on this week's Face the Nation. Leahy thinks we should close Gitmo. Using the exact rhetoric of Human Rights Watch's Tom Molinowski on FNS, the Vermont Senator argued that Gitmo was a "legal black hole" where no law applies. It is a bad symbol in the world, and we should either close it or have the Bush Administration explain to the world who is there and why. He basically said that the President of the United States must be accountable to and set policy by the whimsy of international opinion, even that based on mischaracterizations and falsehoods.

Senator Graham thinks closing Guantanamo Bay would be "overreacting. We need a place like Guantanamo Bay," wherein we can put these enemy combatants. We can't put them in Vermont, Graham suggested, so Cuba is "as good a place as any."

Graham advocated a "uniform, standard policy" for dealing with these prisoners who were not "uniformed troops subject to the Geneva Convention." Leahy criticized the Administration for coining the category "enemy combatant," which he characterized as existing in a "netherworld."

Leahy said prosecute them or let 'em go.

Schieffer shifted to Iraq. Graham said that we didn't send enough troops in at the start, and Leahy decided that everyone agreed that we didn't. Graham said that the security situation in Iraq is much worse than it was two months ago, but the political situation is much better. And, he insisted, we are two years away from leaving.

Schieffer wanted to know if Congress was about to defund the war. Leahy said that it was not, because "we have a Republican Congress." Only Republicans would fund the war? Schieffer didn't have time to ask, if he would have, because Leahy added parenthetically that Democrats would fun the troops too. But he said that if the public opinion polls got worse for the war, Congress would cut off the funds.

Leahy said that we'll eventually need the draft, while Graham insisted the solution was to offer better health care to the recruits.

Schieffer then talked to someone who wrote a book about Bill Clinton.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS CHATS WITH... Oh, never mind. ABC's This Week was an inexplicable waste of time this morning, with Steph first talking to Barney Frank and others about housing prices. He spoke with Republican Representative Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones of North Carolina about pulling our troops out of Iraq. And then he talked to Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, who recently split with JenBen and Bono.

JOHN KING TALKS TO HAGEL AND FEINSTEIN ON LE. Substituting for usual host Wolf Blitzer on CNN's Late Edition, John King talked to Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Diane Feinstein of California. Asked if Gitmo should be kept open, Hagel said he didn't know. We need a facility to hold these people, he intoned, but we can't do it forever. And we need to do it in coordination with other nations in a "diplomatic dynamic." He said that closing Gitmo "might be the best thing for all of us."

Feinstein said she "leans toward closing it." She doesn't think the Geneva Conventions "have always been followed," but she is going to begin hearings Wednesday in the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to come up with "recommendations, not that the Administration would listen, but for our own consciences."

No clear messages from these two.

King blamed the Administration for sending conflicting messages, though, with Rumsfeld stipulating that no one is considering closing Gitmo and the President stating that he's "considering other options."

Feinstein said that some of the people in Guantanamo Bay are innocent and are their merely because someone lied about them. She thinks these people should be "treated fairly."

Hagel said that "we're losing the image battle around the world." We need to "factor those dynamics into our broader policy." (He did the thing with the hands to indicate "broader.")

King cited a TIME Magazine piece about someone who might be the 20th hijacker. They wouldn't let the man urinate until he answered questions, and then they made him go in his pants. Hagel said that this is against everything that is American: "wrong and dangerous and very dumb, and very short-sighted."

The same detainee, King said, they strip-searched, made him stand nude, bark like a dog, and walk around with pictures of nude women hung around his neck. Feinstein argued that even though he was the "20th hijacker," he didn't know that he was. She suggested that having him see a medic implied that they were torturing him.

John King asked if doing those things "to a Moslem man" crosses Hagel's threshold. Hagel said that it does. He added that he fought in Vietnam. He spoke of a "culture that develops," stuff that "fills a vacuum."

They were outraged.

After a commercial King played a clip of President Bush stating that Feinstein had found no abuses of the Patriot Act. Feinstein said that while "this was true at the time," she still hasn't found anything. She didn't say that they've since found abuses. She also called for the renewal of the Patriot Act.

Hagel said that it is important to have "immediacy" to deal with terror threats.

King brought up that Jamie Gorelick said that the 9-11 Commission thinks that Congress is not reforming itself. He played a clip. Hagel said that they have reformed but are willing to do more. Feinstein said that if she were chairman of the Intelligence Committee, she'd handle the oversight differently. She didn't specify how, but she acknowledged that she is not chairman. (She's not even the ranking Dem.)

I know that Blitzer has the seniority, the brand name, and the dibs, but King is the better host.

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No judicial nominees, no John Bolton, no Tom DeLay. John McCain was absent, possibly because he's at our near the saturation point, and Joe Biden was left repeating the same phrases while Curt Weldon argued with Russert (The American Prospect's proxy) about his source.

It's Sunday.