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There’s a first-hand account of the liberation of Paris 60 years ago today in the Washington Post:

I was a 17-year-old Jewish girl who had been hiding under an assumed name with forged identity papers in the Pigalle district of Paris. I’d been waiting since 1940, when France fell, since 1941, when the Germans came for my father, since 1943, when my 13-year-old sister and I — sole survivors of our family — had to abandon our home and go into hiding. I was marking time, focused on one great expectation: deliverance.

Porter Goss, the Congressman Bush has nominated as CIA director has criticized John Kerry for proposing cuts in intelligence funding during the ’90s, so I found this Washington Post story interesting:

President Bush’s nominee to be the director of central intelligence, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), sponsored legislation that would have cut intelligence personnel by 20 percent in the late 1990s.

Goss … was one of six original co-sponsors of legislation in 1995 that called for cuts of at least 4 percent per year between 1996 and 2000 in the total number of people employed throughout the intelligence community…

The Bush reelection campaign has been blasting Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry as deeply irresponsible for proposing intelligence cuts at the same time. A Bush campaign ad released on Aug. 13 carried a headline: “John Kerry . . . proposed slashing Intelligence Budget 6 Billion Dollars.”

But the cuts Goss supported are larger than those proposed by Kerry and specifically targeted the “human intelligence” that has recently been found lacking. The recent report by the commission probing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks called for more spending on human intelligence.

Does the Bush campaign ever tell a straight story?

From a Los Angeles Times editorial about the anti-Kerry swift boat ads:

The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It is: Bring a charge, however bogus … make sure the supporting details are complicated and blurry enough to prevent easy refutation.

Then sit back and let the media do your work for you. Journalists have to report the charges, usually feel obliged to report the rebuttal… But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false. As a result, the voters are left with a general sense that there is some controversy… And they have been distracted from thinking about real issues (like the war going on now) by these laboratory concoctions.

Earlier this year I went to see John Kerry speak at a campaign event. I had to pick up a ticket at local Democratic Party headquarters. I’d learned about this because I was on a mailing list for Kerry supporters. Unlike the folks who attended a recent speech by Dick Cheney, I wasn’t asked to swear fealty to the candidate or the Party—all I had to do was show up and ask for the ticket—but clearly the Kerry camp wanted a friendly crowd.

Kerry got a friendly crowd. We stood in the rain without umbrellas, because they would look bad on the TV news. Bush supporters raised big signs across the street from the park where Kerry spoke. Local TV crews talked to them, and showed the signs, but no dissenting voices disturbed Kerry’s speech itself.

Recently a West Virginia man managed to slip past the rigorous screening out of dissident thoughts at a Bush campaign rally. He heckled a Bush speech. He shouted out questions about outsourcing of jobs and about the Iraq war. It was not the highest form of political discourse. It did damage to the carefully-crafted illusion of unanimous support for El Presidente.

The heckler was shouted down at the rally. Then he was fired from his job as a graphic designer. (A Washington Post story is here.)

Here in the Land of the Free™, if you have something to say—well, you’d just better watch your ass.

The Democratic Convention takes place next week. I’m hoping for word that Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri have been captured or killed.

The White House is pressuring our Pakistani allies to deliver terrorist high-value targets (HVTs) during the Democratic Convention, according to this article in the New Republic. The White House reportedly told a Pakistani intelligence officer that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”—Al Qaeda as counter-programming to the Democratic Convention.

If the Democratic Convention is what it takes to get the Bush Administration to move against Al Qaeda, then let’s have a Democratic Convention every week.

I’m old. When I was a kid, I liked watching space adventure shows on TV: Flash Gordon, Men Into Space, and others. Even as a kid, I understood those shows were fantasies.

If something seemed to be impossible, people used to say, “You could no more do that than fly to the moon.”

Thirty-five years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The old language for impossible things had to be retired.

Lots of photos from the Apollo missions here. For full immersion, Fox Home Video and a company called Spacecraft Films have released DVD sets featuring all the video and onboard motion picture film from Apollo 8, 11, and 15.

Just forty-four days after D-Day, a group of German military officers made their move to assassinate Adolf Hitler and take control of the German government from the Nazi Party.

One of the conspirators, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, planted a bomb in a briefcase in a conference room where Hitler was reviewing war plans. The briefcase got underfoot, and someone moved it to the other side of one of the sturdy wooden supports that held up the conference table. The bomb exploded on schedule, but Hitler survived, shielded from the full brunt of the blast by the table support.

Most of the conspirators were rounded up, paraded through abysmal show trials, and executed in a variety of sadistic ways. The executions were filmed for Hitler’s private amusement.

Hitler took his escape as a good omen. A little more than nine months later, with Germany in ruins, Hitler killed himself.

Today, on the 60th anniversary of the bomb plot, the German Goverment is honoring the men who conspired to assassinate Hitler.

History sits in judgment of us all.

Every year, on Memorial Day, multiplex theaters across the United States should dedicate their biggest screen and their best sound system to showings of Saving Private Ryan.

No other film I’ve seen shows the terrible face of war nearly as well as this one. Everyone old enough to vote should see it. It’s an education for those fortunate enough never to have served in battle themselves.

No television can do this movie justice. This is what the big screen was made for.

It would be a fine Memorial Day tradition to try, year after year, to understand the sacrifices that have been made to safeguard our country and our liberty.

The New Yorker considers Unconventional War. The short piece covers a little of the history of the Geneva Conventions, and the Bush administration’s decision to ignore them.

[T]he Geneva Conventions have been surprisingly successful, given that the activity they regulate is in many ways inherently lawless. The reason is not just that gentlemen prefer to slaughter each other in the most ethical way possible. To the extent that the Conventions have been observed, they have been observed mainly because it was in the interest, mutual or individual, of warring entities to observe them. If you took their soldiers prisoner, they might take yours; and if you tortured theirs they might torture yours. If you made a habit of torturing and killing enemy prisoners, then enemy soldiers and enemy units would be reluctant to surrender. As long as the other side was still strong enough to fight, mistreatment of prisoners was, in theory, deterrable; once the other side was too weak to carry on, it was pointless.

I’ve just watched A Man for All Seasons. I recommend it highly. The following scene between Sir Thomas More and hot-headed Will Roper sent a shiver of recognition down my spine:

Roper: So, now you give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

What seems to be coming out of the administration is the idea that public information is a dangerous thing.
—Tom Connors, Society of American Archivists

The Bush-Cheney administration may be the most secretive in U.S. history.

Soon after the administration took office, Vice-President Cheney chaired a National Energy Policy Development Group, which met in secret and issued policies that seemed purpose-built to satisfy a handful of big Bush-Cheney contributors. National energy policies affect the economy, the environment, and our relations with oil-producing nations, but the administration has fought hard to prevent the American people from learning how those policies were decided, and who was invited to participate in the process. They’ve fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep their secrets.

Bush’s Executive Order 13223 attempts to repeal, by executive fiat, the 1978 Presidential Records Act. It lays down new rules to prevent journalists, historians and other scholars from seeing any presidential documents that a sitting or former president doesn’t want them to see. The shroud of secrecy can outlive a former president—he can pass his veto power over the release of information on to his heirs.

The administration resisted the creation of an independent commission to investigate the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Congress created the commission anyway, and the administration’s consistent response has been to throw roadblocks into the commission’s course. For a long time they refused to allow testimony from White House officials. Under tremendous public pressure, they eventually allowed a few officials to testify, in exchange for guarantees that the commission would not seek testimony from others. The administration is blocking access to Clinton-era documents that might show what the government knew, and when the government knew it. Clinton wants the documents released to the commission. Bush wants more secrecy.

Emily Miller, deputy press secretary to Secretary of State Colin Powell, “pulled the plug” while Powell was being interviewed for the Sunday morning news program Meet the Press. I don’t know what she was trying to hide, but her bizarre behavior is entirely in keeping with Bush-Cheney policy.

The entire administration seems to be afflicted with a kind of gag reflex.

A good line, from a Slashdot comment by someone who calls himself “Frigid Monkey“:

No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don’t feel safe.

Rush Limbaugh stands behind U.S. soldiers who are carrying on Saddam Hussein’s unfinished work torturing and degrading the Iraqi people:

I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

Paul Simon can be spooky, sometimes. There Goes Rhymin’ Simon came out in 1973. One song, titled Learn How to Fall, includes this lyric:

Oh and it’s the same old story
Ever since the world began
Everybody got the runs for glory
Nobody stop and scrutinize the plan

On the same album, the song American Tune has these lines:

Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

Don’t we all.

We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq. We are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world. I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is a very smart guy. I don’t always agree with him, but I’ve followed him long enough to realize that he’s right more often than I am. When he says something like this, I start to worry.

Much of Abraham Lincoln’s prose reads like poetry.

Lincoln taught himself, mostly. He learned to write by reading. He spent a lot of time with Shakespeare and the Bible.

Several years ago, I read a two-volume collection of Lincoln’s letters and speeches. What impressed me more than his rhetorical flourishes and biblical cadences was the clarity of his thinking.

At a time when politicians of all stripes thumped the Bible in support of their pet projects, Lincoln was unusual. He didn’t lean much on Received Wisdom. He had a strong moral sense, which was remarkably consistent throughout his public life. But he was a courthouse lawyer: he built his arguments on facts, which could be tested by rules of evidence, and on step-by-step reasoning which could be tested by rules of logic.

Nowadays, presidential candidates of all stripes have teams of political advisors who read the polls and deliver the party line for every issue, and teams of speech writers to deliver polished sound bites that aim for the gut and scrupulously avoid the mind.

Lincoln made up his own mind, and wrote his own speeches. One of the most important speeches of his career was delivered at Cooper Union in New York City in February 1860.

Tonight the actor Sam Waterston will deliver the speech in that same hall. C-SPAN2 will broadcast a tape of the event at 6 PM on May 23.

I got out my book and re-read the speech. It’s a good one. Some references may be a little confusing. For example, southern Democrats derided the young anti-slavery Republican Party by constantly referring to them as “Black Republicans.”

You can read the full text of the speech here or here. Come May 23, you can watch Waterston’s reading on C-SPAN2. It may make you dissatisfied with today’s sound bite speechifying. That’s not a bad thing.