JosephH

Kyrgyzstan has put off voting on evicting the U.S. from Manas until Russia has paid what they've promised...

If you fall off your roof is it a ripper...? Worst fall in the past 20 years for me was down the front stairs - desperate.

Wow, redefining 'neocon' - is that the latest way the Right and Republicans are distancing themselves from the Bush administration policies and neocon debacle you all so ardently embraced? Hmmm, interesting. And "JEW" - I find it clever how the Right treats 'jew' as sort of a political jackknife - commonly rolled out to both support and discredit ideas you disagree with while at the same time whining about 'them' and 'their influence' under your breath. Dude, read the signatories to all the principle neocon letters - 'jews' are represented, they in no way 'are' the neocons. Wolfowitz is always mentioned because he, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, was a principal architect of the Iraq War and of the regional strategy within the Bush administration. Pretty pathetic argument on your part as they go...

Kleptomania does not typically yield to treatment very often...

More Obama 'pragmatism' disappointing the folks who elected him. This administration is shaping up to be to the Clinton Whitehouse what W's administration was to Reagan's - full of folks looking to 'get it right the second time' - I have my doubts... Under Obama, same stance on rendition suit

From my perspective that's quite an eclectic leap of an assessment and one which way, way prematurely attempts to broadly fix causation and specific meaning to current events. Rather than 'testing' Obama, I see every nation on the planet - 'friend' and 'foe' alike - posturing and playing the strongest possible cards they can at the Obama table. I'd do nothing different if I were running some country. Oil prices have collapsed underneath Russia and Iran with Iran far more affected than Russia, but still putting Russia in a tough place domestically. And even a passing familiarity with Russian history should be enough to understand their posturing and appearing "tough" is as much for internal consumption as it is for ours. What I see in Kyrgyzstan is the Russians attempting to keep momentum in following though with the opportunities presented in the wake of Bush's complete debacle in Georgia. That, and it's part of Putin's on-going struggle to reassert and restore Russian influence over many of it's prior satellites. And I'd further say the above assessment of the Manas air base events is completely ass-backwards - rather than Russia doing the forcing, it's likely Kyrgyzstan (which is crawling with U.S. oil/gas lobbyists) is realizing now is its time, if ever there was one, to play the Russians against the U.S. We've been paying them a $1b package and they just hustled the Russians for $2.33b package - not a bad improvement and it gave the Russians some leverage to boot. Also, the idea that the Bush administration could crudely lean on the Russians with a missile defense system in their backyard without some serious blowback is stupid. Obama hasn't even started with the Russians, but it would be pretty damn hard to f#ck it up more than Bush's crew has. Ditto with Pakistan and India - the Bush's crew couldn't have screwed the pooch worse with their incompetent and ham-handed approach to 'diplomacy' with both. Let's see, giving India, a non-signatory to the NPT, a big nuke deal (pissing off Pakistan); years of payola to Gen. Musharraf (pissing off India) leading directly to the rise of democrats with no motivation to assist the U.S. since we had been helping suppress them. And the U.S. doesn't have clean hands in the Mumbai attack either after years of turning its back on Pakistan's use of the money we give them for the transit of our material to Afganistan. Everyone has known the entire time part of our cash stream was being diverted to provide support to ex-Afgan jihadists as a backhand way for Musharraf to keep the Indian army pinned down in Kashmir. Let's not kid ourselves - bankrolling Lashkar-e-Taiba was part of the price we've paid for the war in Afganistan. The Bush administration showed zero interest in helping resolve the stalemate in Kashmir (or in conflict resolution in general) and allowed Pakistan to become an even greater nightmare than it's ever been. And Iran and badmiton, please, don't even get me started...

Regarding Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy per Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (October 2003 to July 2004): Every president in war time and in crisis—Lincoln, Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, just to name three—exercised extraordinarily broad powers. They pushed the law and stretched the law and bent the law, and many people think they broke the law. And we’ve largely forgiven them for doing so because we think that they acted prudently in crisis. So Lincoln—he did all sorts of things after Fort Sumter. He spent unappropriated moneys. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Now, there’s a way of looking at the Cheney-Addington position on executive power which is not unlike some of the most extreme assertions of Lincoln and Roosevelt. But there are important differences. One is that both Lincoln and Roosevelt coupled this sense of a powerful executive in times of crisis with a powerful sense of a need to legitimate and justify the power through education, through legislation, through getting Congress on board, through paying attention to what one might call the “soft” values of constitutionalism. That was an attitude that Addington and I suppose Cheney just did not have. The second difference, and what made their assertion of executive power extraordinary, is: it was almost as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake.

I might agree with your attempts to homogenize responses across party lines if an overwhelming body of evidence and facts weren't publicly available in fine detail that the neocons / Bush administration worked backwards from a set of desired outcomes they viewed as pre-ordained if the U.S. were to restore it's pre-eminence. The neocon ( Cheney / Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz) agenda pre-existed well before 9/11. Their specific responses to 9/11 were all entirely aligned and consistent with that agenda. Again, the entire prisoner pipeline from points of origination, through intermediate prisons, and on to gitmo - along with the intel protocols, legal cover, and military commissions - were at every turn designed to be offshore, out-of-sight, and out-of-mind of the American public until final pronouncements of assigned guilt were made on short TV announcements. What would have been fundamentally different under any democratic Presidency is the entire rubric will not have been constructed, deployed, and cloaked behind Executive power, the enhancement of which was itself was a principle objective of the same team. The Constitution wouldn't have been trampled and subjugated to a political agenda. And none of this is supposition or guessing, but simply read from the trail of their own proud and detailed documentation at every undeniable step of the way.

I beg to differ with the idea this is a generic issue and the Bush administration's distinction was only about scope and scale; quite the contrary. While there are certainly 'generic' aspects to numerous [institutional] baseline 'anti-terror' protocols, context is everything. Context, and the tone or tenor it conveys, are what define the boundaries, scope, and scale of the infrastructure and implementation, regardless of the appropriateness of the methods. It's not really a fine line either - but rather the distinction between a deliberate professionalism and effective scope on one hand, and ground forces operating under 'terrorist' capture performance measures, a CIA run amok, 'interrogation' contractors, Abu Ghraib, gitmo, and the corrosion of the the Constitution on the other. And when you get the circularly resonating and self-reinforcing themes of 'evil', democracy, privatization, executive power, nation-building, 'reconstruction', and 'terror' all cranked up in the blender known as the Mideast along with a half trillion in cash you just knew it was going to be a train wreck of magnificent proportions. Where I see 'ideology' coming into play is precisely in that divide - do we define and employ such measures effectively, say in the same manner of a sniper rifle, or do we wield them more like cluster munitions from 40,000 feet with little control over the results or collateral damage. The former would dictate a degree of legal transparency, international cooperation, professionalism, and restraint - the latter delivers a horrorfest which always reveal itself in its excess, incompetence, and blame. Carried to extreme, your conjecture for me is a lot like saying the holocaust was (institutionally) inevitable whether Hitler came to power or not. I think the end-to-end pipeline, protocols, and infrastructure around in-country 'capture' and extrordinary rendition of 'terrorists' had little to do with effective intelligence, domestic security, or military objectives and everything to do with an absurd theatre designed to deliver a demonstrable product and justification for the expansion of Executive power and war. The gitmo military commission show trials were designed to be the media events at the end of that pipeline, and guilt, innocence, and [mil/intel] value had little to do with feeding grist to the mill. P.S. That John Yoo and others are free to write articles rather then inprisoned for treason is a mistake that will come back and bite us on the ass some time in the future.

If what's left of my memory serves me right you had to visit Devils Lake back around '75 or so and get ruthlessly whipped and sandbagged by the locals day after day to qualify. (Thinking about reproducing them though, will keep you posted...)

Also, with regard to torture - Rumsfeld and Cheney explicitly shopped for, designed, and built the capability and policy up from, North Korean torture techniques as persisted in our military in the form of SERE training. This was not in any way some innate, lingering capability we used all the time - this was a deliberate and far-ranging policy, methods, and infrastructure play - extrodinary rendition, jet leases, 'interrogation' subcontractors (including Syria and Egypt), gitmo, Abu Ghraib, CIA and DoD policy and protocols, and reasoned treaty abrogations. All part of the plan. The only part they skipped in their planning (what's new) was producing a 'legal' basis for their actions, glibly decrying none was necessary as it all fell under Executive perogative and priviledge. You can tie this behavior directly back to the Nixonian belief that "if the President does it, it isn't illegal" - a belief held far more widely than just by Nixon himself. Post 9/11, Gore, like Obama is now, would have built a vetted legal and Constitutional basis for the use of any extrordinary methods which in turn would need to be authorized on a case-by-case basis by him personally. The entire fabric of any such protocols should have been, and will be, reviewed and vetted by the Congress and SCOTUS and not simply cloaked behind a veil of Executive priviledge.

STP, if you go read any number of the policy letters like this or this at the neocon's website 'Project for the New American Century' (note that's a 'the' and not an 'a' in the title) and check the various signatories, you'll see that is explicitly not the case. 9/11 just gave them the pretext and cover they needed to initiate an attack Iraq they already had in mind. And prior to 9/11 the Bush administration was having numerous internal debates on how the could just attack Iraq. Also, the DoD was actively planning for an invasion of Iraq well before 9/11.

Maybe just make that some large chunks of rebar with bent eyeloops on one end.

Bill, let's at least be clear on the record and history of this issue. The history of the issue is that Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted 'extrordinary' rendition and torture by both outsourced and American personnel (CIA and it's contractors). CIA personnel were reluctant and pushed back wanting some form of legal cover, albeit after they started and realized how deep they had gotten themselves in the process. The Bush administration, after ignoring them and pushing back, reluctantly set about manufacturing a "legal" basis for those 'activities'. The task of penning what are now known as the 'torture memos' fell to an eager Jay Bybee and John Yoo. As a backgrounder to the torture memos, though, you have to understand Cheney, Rumsfeld, Roberts, Alito, Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, and a whole cadre of other Bushies grew-up in their youths in the Nixon and Reagan administrations - all thinking both presidents (and they themselves) got a raw deal relative to the impeachment and Iran-Contra trials. That, and they were solidifying a 'neoconservative' identity and agenda at the time that would only ever be actualized in whole rather than piecemeal. The solution to both the previous slights to the Executive, and how to implement the neocon agenda, was for them to collectively and rigorously advocate for a strong, if not imperial, Executive. We know they found the vehicle to realize all their dreams in a Bush candidacy. The torture memos did, however, dovetail nicely with their overall neocon legal strategy and effort to 'bulk up' Executive and U.S. power once they got in office - even if some viewed them as bringing more light to their efforts than desired, and serving as a distraction to greater goals. In particular, they worked well within, and as an expression of, efforts under way to claim the Executive had the right (some would say the responsibility to) abrogate U.S. treaty obligations because international treaties in general were viewed as usurping the [god-given, natural] authority derived from, and due to, the U.S. as a / THE superpower (especially even the whiff of a 'World Court'). War, torture, rendition, gitmo, suspending habeas, wiretaps, treaties, etc. - all expressions of a 'righteous' and proper exercise of Executive power. Bottom line - there was and is zero real legal basis for the Bush adminstration's use of extrordinary rendition and torture - it was a tail-wagging-the-dog exercise. The only possible way legal cover for them can exist is in the context of the overall view of an 'imperial' Executive prevailing. But so far even Bush's right-leaning, activist-loaded SCOTUS doesn't quite have the stomach for much of that view of the Executive. That, and they intended for such power to be wielded by a "permanent Republican majority". Much of what you see happening with Obama, other than Chicago pragmatism (a city that's no stranger to rendition and torture), is the unwillingness of the Executive to yield new powers. It's in some ways to be expected from Obama and his [Clintonian] crew (who also feel slighted), but am in no way happy about it...

I love choss as much as the next completely desperate addict, but even I have a certain choss-to-rock requirement which Crown Point fails miserably. Plus, I'm not sure it's not more of an art project when you can make all your own holds. Last time I got on something like that I pulled a loose 1/2" x 6" x 3" sharp blade of rock out from under my right hand. Several tons of rock in a 10' diameter circle centered on my naval immediately cut loose. Uggh...

That's why you'd use the 12" - they'd probably stay in a fall even if they didn't stick.

P.S. be sure and secure all your bits and pieces well, and maybe even pick a few of these 1/2" x 12" SS bolts...

That's looks like some serious nasty. Good luck with that and please report back with a TR on how it all goes.

Climbing isn't the only concern managed by an under-staffed and funded BRSP. Ben put the signs up Saturday afternoon because they weren't going to be staffed Sunday morning sufficiently to do it then. "Scooting" was perfectly fine on Saturday afternoon - it no longer is.

Yes.

I'd say whether you're talking the WSP, WDFW, BRSP or Jim, picking your battles counts. Lisa, the WSP SW Resource Steward, explicitly doesn't want the trees involved, but she and Erik also understand LOTLP is a special place, and that the safety line serves a real purpose, so they've been flexible on that in discussions. I personally wouldn't approach Jim on moving the rap, though any of you are welcome to take a run at that.

I've avoided violating the sanctity of LOTLP during any of my activities - I'll leave that to the official order of the grail. I have a few chopped ropes as well, though, if they are needed either place...

Sybil was that old movie about a woman with multiple personalities. You're not out there drilling on one day and chopping the next are you?

Man, that's just unclean...