My perspective on this tragedy is that I know his father, Professor Emeritus David Hesla. David Hesla is a beloved and somewhat eccentric professor, one of the original members of my home department of the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. Among other things, he wrote the best book on Samuel Beckett that I’ve ever read (Art of Chaos). Not too long ago, he and my original dissertation adviser were granted Heilbrun Awards to support their current research. Prof. Hesla looked as happy as I have ever seen him, waxing enthusiastic about three projects that he was working on.

This is truly horrible news. Those of us who know David Hesla have been in contact, and everyone is stunned and heartbroken for David.

We weep for ourselves as well. By all accounts, we lost one of the very, very good guys in Thor Hesla. It has taken me several days to be able to write this blog post.

Thor Hesla, 45, of Atlanta, worked for BearingPoint Management & Technology Consultants, which had a contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development to help war-ravaged Afghanistan rebuild, a company spokesman said. He was one of the eight people killed in the bombing and shooting attack Monday on the Serena Hotel in Kabul. Authorities in Kabul said an American, a Norwegian journalist and a Filipina who died of her wounds Tuesday were among those killed. A longtime family friend, Margaret Hylton Jones, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Hesla was aware of the danger of Afghanistan, his most recent assignment after stints in Kosovo, South Africa and Kazakhstan. Hesla “put his affairs in order” before leaving for the assignment, which began Nov. 1, Jones said, including updating his will. He took his father, a retired Emory University professor, on a trip to New York and spent time with his 12-year-old niece and 10-year-old nephew.

The Memorial Site for Thor Hesla is http://www.rememberthor.com. There you will find a lot more information about Thor and what he was doing in Kabul, planned memorial services, reminiscences, 100 things Thor didn’t want you to know, official recognition letters, a sTHORy about how Thor was strangled by a dwarf in Pristina, Kosovo, and much more. A book will be made from the site to benefit Doctors Without Borders.

• See the hilarious Salon article Thor wrote in 1999: Ten modest proposals to help Ann Coulter get a date.
• A Legacy guestbook can be found here.
• In lieu of flowers, you can send a donation in Thor’s name to Doctors without Borders.

News Links:

• American killed in Afghanistan a ‘passionate believer’ | CNN
• Atlanta man killed in attack on Kabul hotel | AJC
• American Killed in Afghan Attack ID’d | AP
• 
  Analysis: Terror attack in Kabul | UPI
• Taliban Threaten Restaurant Attacks | AP

My commentary couldn’t be any better than this, folks. Please watch it – and link to it.

Click to view video

Transcript:

Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the President’s cataclysmic deceptions about Iran.

There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole — or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked — at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so — whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief.

It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency, an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.

After Ms. Perino’s announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear now.

In August the President was told by his hand-picked Majordomo of Intelligence Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what “everybody thought” about Iran might, in essence, be crap.

Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president Ahmadinejad:

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War Three, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”

And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.

Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans? Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used to scare us about Iraq?

In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.

A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.

Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush. The Chicken Little of Presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.

And the mind reels at the thought of a vice president fully briefed on the revised intel as long as two weeks ago — briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago — a vice president who never bothered to mention it to his boss.

It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan’s presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes, string-puller.

Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable – that Dick Cheney is either this president’s evil ventriloquist, or he thinks he is.

What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and this gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation — or a criminal one?

Mr. Bush — if you can still hear us — if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you’re the Remington Steele — you must disenthrall yourself.

Mr. Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts have become optional, the intel is valued less than the hunch, and the assistant runs the store.

The problem is, Sir, your assistant is robbing you — and your country — blind.

Not merely in monetary terms Mr. Bush, but more importantly, of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: Honesty, Law, Moral Force.

Mr. Cheney has helped, Sir, to make your Administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860’s and 1870’s and 1880’s — the ones that abandoned Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland…

Presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr. Bush, Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them — the opponents whom history proved right.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland… Bush.

Would that we could let this President off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron, but a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian, snake-oil salesman.

The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post’s website, and it is staggering.

March 31st: “Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon…”

June 5th: Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons…”

June 19th: “consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon…”

July 12th: “the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons…”

August 6th: “this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon…”

Notice a pattern?

Trying to develop, build or pursue.. a nuclear weapon.

Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the President, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror — but there may not even be a tree there…

McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.

August 9th: “They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program…”

August 28th: “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons…”

October 4th: “you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon…”

October 17th: “until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren’t real, yeah, I believe they want to have the **capacity**, the **knowledge**, in order to make a nuclear weapon.”

Before August 9th, it is: Trying to develop, build or pursue.. a nuclear weapon.

After August 9th, it’s: Desire, pursuit, want… knowledge, technology, know-how… to enrich uranium.

And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003, and you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on October 17th, and that term “suspending” is just a coincidence?

And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week.

Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be… legally true — something like “what the definition of “is” is — but with the subject matter being not interns, but the threat of nuclear war.

Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial… but ethically, it is a LIE.

It is indefensible!

You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.

You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.

And moreover, you must have realized that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz, and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board are now also bald-faced liars.

We are to believe that the intel community, or maybe the State Department, cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you… look bad?

And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?

You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August, but you also knew it was ALL… accurate.

And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent, you merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside, while you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of — as you phrased it on August 28th: a quote “nuclear holocaust” — as you phrased it on October 17th, quote: “World War Three”!

My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase “George Bush has no business being president.”

Well, guess what?

Tonight, hanged by your own word and convicted by your own deliberate lies, you, sir, have no business… being president.

Good night, and good luck.

…a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million. … nearly one in two households in Baghdad had lost at least one member to war- related violence, and 22% of households nationwide had suffered at least one death. It said 48% of the victims were shot to death and 20% died as a result of car bombs, with other explosions and military bombardments blamed for most of the other fatalities.

Here are some more startling stats – via Tom Engelhardt’s excellent article Here Are the Real Numbers That Tally Iraq’s ‘Progress’:

Number of U.S. criminal investigations underway for contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan: 73.

Cost to Pentagon of shipping two 19-cent metal washers to a key military installation abroad, probably in Iraq or Afghanistan: $998,798.00.

Amount paid by the U.S. military to two British private security firms, Aegis Defence Services and Erinys Iraq, to protect U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reconstruction teams in Iraq: $548 million ($18 million a month, with a private army of 2000 – about three military battalions).

Percentage of Iraqi national police force which is Shiite: 85%.

Number of Iraqis in American prisons in Iraq: 24,500.

Number of juveniles (11-17), held in those prisons: Approximately 800 (85% Sunni).

Number of foreign suspected jihadis held in those prisons: 280.

Estimated number of full-time al-Qaeda-in-Iraq fighters: 850 (2-5% of the Sunni insurgency).

Number of times President Bush mentioned al-Qaeda in a speech on the Iraqi situation on July 24, 2007: 95.

Number of Iraqi civilian deaths in August: 1,809 (the highest figure of the surge year so far).

Number of Iraqi “bus people” now in exile in neighboring lands: 2.5 million.

Amount spent by the average household in Baghdad for a few hours of electricity a day: $171 a month ($400 is a reasonable monthly wage).

Number of U.S. Army suicides: 17.3 per thousand, the highest rate in 26 years – not including unconfirmed reports or those who served and then committed suicide at home. In 2006, 99. Since 2003, 118 U.S. military personnel have committed suicide in Iraq itself.

Percentage of people across the globe who “think U.S. forces should leave Iraq within a year”: 67%, according to a just-released BBC World Service poll of 23,000 people in 22 countries. Only 23% think foreign troops should remain “until security improves.”

Percentage of citizens of U.S.-led “coalition” members in Iraq who want forces out within a year: 65% of Britons, 63% of South Koreans, and 63% of Australians. Even a majority of Israelis want either an immediate American withdrawal (24%), or withdrawal within a year (28%); only 40% opt for “remain until security improves.

Percentage of Americans who think U.S. forces should get out of Iraq within a year: 61% (24% favor immediate withdrawal, 37% prefer a one-year timetable).

Percentage of people across the globe who think the United States plans to keep permanent military bases in Iraq: 49%.

Percentage of Americans who believe, that the U.S. mission in Iraq will be seen as a failure in the long run: 57%, (only 29% disagree).

These from “The General Lies” by Robert Scheer:

Percent of Iraqis who believe security has deteriorated since the surge began: 70%.

Percent of Iraqis who believe attacks on U.S. forces are justified: 60%.

Percent of Sunnis (whom the general and ambassador claim are joining our side) that want to see us dead: 93%.

Recommended reading:

America’s Deadly Shock Doctrine in Iraq by Naomi Klein explains how the U.S. set about to destroy the Iraqi national psyche and then push through a disastrous privatization of its economy. The link will lead to an excerpt from the new book.

U.S. Secret Air War Pulverizes Afghanistan and Iraq by Conn Hallinan reports on the U.S. military’s increasingly reliance on deadly air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan as the ground occupations fall apart, killing untold numbers of civilians.

Faced with defeat or bloody stalemate on the ground, the allies have turned to air power, much as the U.S. did in Vietnam. But, as in Vietnam, the terrible toll bombing inflicts on civilians all but guarantees long-term failure.

“Far from bringing about the intended softening up of the opposition,” Phillip Gordon, a Brookings Institute Fellow, told the Asia Times, “bombing tends to rally people behind their leaders and cause them to dig in against outsiders who, whatever the justification, are destroying their homeland.”"

Six Years After 9/11, Why We’re Losing the War on Terror by David Cole and Jules Lobel argue that the Bush administration and its extralegal policies have taken the U.S. from being the object of the world’s sympathy to the object of their scorn.

The proposition that judicial processes and international accountability — the very essence of the rule of law — are to be dismissed as a strategy of the weak, aligned with terrorism itself, makes clear that the Administration has come to view the rule of law as an obstacle, not an asset, in its effort to protect us from terrorist attack.

Our long-term security turns not on “going on offense” by locking up thousands of “suspected terrorists” who turn out to have no connection to terrorism; nor on forcing suspects to bark like dogs, urinate and defecate on themselves, and endure sexual humiliation; nor on attacking countries that have not threatened to attack us. Security rests not on exceptionalism and double standards but on a commitment to fairness, justice and the rule of law. … The preventive paradigm has compromised our spirit, strengthened our enemies and left us less free and less safe.

In New York City, firefighters and first responders at the World Trade Center read the victims’ names for the first time today.

The majority of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, but Americans still try to draw some link to Iraq. Meanwhile, al Qaeda is in Iraq now.

This administration has made us less safe, less secure. We could have handled this so differently…

It looks like a show to which I could easily have become addicted.

Here’s ten minutes on Guantanamo. What’s not to love? Never mind the cast (wow. the cast.) – this is a succinct overview of the views of the left and the right. Based on the real situation, naming names too. Democrats would love it except that they are implicated here too.

Click to view video

Having the debate we should be having.

Nicely done.

On Staged “Terrorist” Attacks and Dictatorship

Impeach Now or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy, Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch

Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran. Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of “executive orders” that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, “terrorist” events in the near future.

(thanks to John Gamble)

On Executive Order “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq,” July 17, 2007

This order allows the Executive Branch to freeze assets – without evidence, notice, oversight, trial or appeal – in a chain of perceived culpability. Even representative legal services could be interpreted to be a form of support.

The Treasury Secretary has sole discretion to determine who is in violation of this order, in ‘consultation’ with the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State. That last part is verbiage; Treasury has the power per this order. Even better, the Secretary of Treasury has the explicit authority to delegate this decision to any flunky or flunkies of his choice per Sec. 6. This order applies to all persons within the United States. If Treasury declares that a person is a ‘SIGNIFICANT RISK’ to commit violence in Iraq, or a ‘SIGNIFICANT RISK’ to support violence in Iraq in any way, or to have assisted in any way a person who is a ‘SIGNIFICANT RISK’ to do so, all their assets are to be immediately frozen.

It is a further violation of the order to make a donation to such a person whose assets have been frozen. (I was being literal when I said ’starve’ them. Such a person would have no legal means of acquiring food, clothing, or shelter. They couldn’t buy it with frozen assets, nor accept it as a gift, and stealing is already illegal.)…

Oh, I probably don’t need to mention the obvious, but the lack of due process, lack of evidentiary requirements, and the vagueness surrounding exactly what constitutes a violation make this order a totalitarian dream. And there is no end to the ‘daisy chain’ it creates, either. If you donate money to a person whose assets were frozen because they gave money to a person who was declared to be a ‘significant risk’ to commit or support violence in Iraq, then you are subject to the order, subject to have your assets frozen, and anyone helping you thereafter gets the same treatment. This order is far in excess of the presidential orders from 20+ years ago that were circulated to make us afraid of the government.

(From Shakesville, via Frogs and Ravens)

On Obstruction of Justice and the Expansion of Executive Privilege

No, the documents will not be forthcoming. No, they don’t have to testify. No, they won’t be held in contempt. No, Congress will not be allowed to pursue this matter.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.” But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. …

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration’s stance “astonishing.” “That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”

The administration’s statement is a dramatic attempt to seize the upper hand in an escalating constitutional battle with Congress, which has been trying for months, without success, to compel White House officials to testify and to turn over documents about their roles in the prosecutor firings last year.

On Bush’s Veto Choices

The White House said that President Bush would veto a bipartisan plan drafted over the last six months by senior members of the Senate Finance Committee to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program which is set to expire Sept. 30. The vow puts Mr. Bush at odds with the Democratic majority in Congress, with a substantial number of Republican lawmakers and with many governors of both parties, who want to expand the popular program to cover some of the nation’s eight million uninsured children. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bipartisan plan “would reduce the number of uninsured children by 4.1 million.”

On the Iraq War and Occupation

The Iraq war is lost, Peter Galbraith

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning — a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes — but by the consequences of defeat.

Constitutionally, Iraq’s central government has almost no power, and the Bush administration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of proposals that would have made for a more workable sharing of power between regions and the central government. The U.S. Embassy stopped the U.N. from presenting these proposals because it hoped for a final document as centralized as (and textually close to) the interim constitution written by the Americans. …

For the most part, Iraq’s leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don’t agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq’s future, including the new constitution. The Kurds’ envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99 percent of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98 percent voted for an independent Kurdistan.

But even if Iraq’s politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn’t end the insurgency or the civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq’s being run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as their long-standing oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things….

In laying out his dark vision of an American failure, Bush never discusses Iran’s domination of Iraq even though this is a far more likely consequence of American defeat than an al-Qaida victory.

On Lack of Accountability for Weakening our Intelligence Network and Outing a CIA Agent

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against members of the Bush administration in the CIA leak scandal. Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had accused Vice President Dick Cheney and others of conspiring to leak her identity in 2003. Plame said that violated her privacy rights and was illegal retribution for her husband’s criticism of the administration. Bates argued that such efforts (treason?!) are a natural part of the officials’ job duties, and “immune from liability.” Bates dismissed the case against all defendants (Cheney, White House political adviser Karl Rove, former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage) and said he would not express an opinion on the “constitutional arguments.”

How many CIA operatives and informants are dead or compromised because of this? How much vital intelligence have we missed because of this? Review again the kind of work that Valerie Plame had been doing…

Bates? A Bush appointee, additionally appointed by Chief Justice Roberts in February 2006 to serve as a judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is currently overseeing the warrantless spying operations.

• 1995-1997: Served as Deputy Independent Counsel to Whitewater investigator Ken Starr and its intensely partisan investigation.
• December 2002: Ruled that Congress lacked the standing to sue Cheney over access to the records of the energy task force. The lawsuit was an attempt by U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker to make Cheney reveal the names of industry executives who were instrumental in shaping the national energy policy. Bates said that turning over that information “would hobble an administration’s essential, legitimate ability to receive frank information and advice.”
• 2004: (Glimmer of light) Rejected the Bush Administration’s argument that a U.S. citizen detained abroad under U.S. control cannot invoke habeas corpus (Abu Ali v. John Ashcroft). “The Court concludes that a citizen cannot be so easily separated from his constitutional rights.”
• August 2006: Ruled that it was okey-dokey for the president to sign a bill that had not been passed by Congress.

On 6-24-2007

• AFGHANISTAN-NATO Kills 60 Taliban Terrorists In Operations In Afghanistan-Pakistan Border
• AFGHANISTAN-Lashkar Gah-Soldiers attacked by Afghan roadside bomb
• AFGHANISTAN-Lashkar Gah-Over a dozen Taliban, coalition soldier killed
• AFGHANISTAN-Andar-Taliban seize 18 Afghan mine clearing experts
• AFGHANISTAN-Musa Qala-Taliban behead local police chief’s son
• COLOMBIA-Buenaventura-Bomb kills at least two in troubled Colombia port
• GAZA-Palestinian Territory-BBC Journalist wearing bomb belt seen in new video
• INDIA-Nagpur-Cops on high alert due to letter threat
• IRAQ-Mosul-Iraqi journalist shot to death on her way home
• IRAQ-Hillah-Car bomb strikes Hillah
• IRAQ-Baghdad-Chemical Ali sentenced to hang
• LEBANON-Khiyam-Car bomb kills 6 U.N. soldiers in Lebanon
• LEBANON-Metulla-Lebanon Bomb Kills 4 U.N. Peacekeepers
• NIGERIA-Osogbo-Plans to Bomb Campaign HQ Exposed
• PAKISTAN-Kashmir-At Least 11 SOG Personnel Injured in Bomb Blast
• SOMALIA-Mogadishu-Four Wounded in a Grenade Explosion in Mogadishu
• SOMALIA-Mogadishu-Unknown gunman shoots two people dead
• USA-Riverside-University Of California Bomb Threat Initially Suspect May Have Had Serious Motives
• VENEZUELA-Caracas-Chavez Predicts Resistance War With US