Inconvenient News

Herman Cain's ideal presidential candidate

2011-10-29T02:39:00.002-05:00

Some years ago Herman Cain told us who his ideal presidential candidate would be. It's worthwhile dredging up Cain's op-ed from 2006 because his background is so little known and this is a window into his thinking that most Americans can easily relate to.

And what does it tell us? That Herman Cain lacks any judgment. Cain argues that the Republican Party should cultivate Tiger Woods to run for president as soon as possible. Cain described Woods as his ideal candidate; the golfer's character and self-discipline would inevitably make him successful in solving all the problems that no actual politicians could fix. In retrospect it is of course ridiculous. But even in 2006 Cain's adulation of Woods would have seemed nauseating as well as dangerously simplistic.

Tiger will be 40 years old in 2016. The Republican Party should begin grooming him now for a run at the White House. His personal attributes and accomplishments on the golf course point to a candidate who will be a problem solver, not a politician.

Tiger's success on the golf course, which will translate to success in the White House, is a product of his character, discipline and leadership by example.

[snip]

If the Democrats maintain control of Congress and the presidency through 2016, the big issues of restructuring Social Security, replacing the tax code and instilling free market forces in the health care system will still not be fixed. If the Republican Party regains the majority in Congress and retains the presidency, there is no guarantee that they will have the courage to make bold changes. Only an outsider will possess the leadership and the conviction to tackle the big issues without regard for the polls, media spin or inane promises of bipartisanship.

Tiger Woods could be an inspiring figure for the country, the likes of which we have not seen since Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ronald Reagan.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Cain to consider what if any relevant views, knowledge, or experience the rich athlete possessed. This is just the perennial portrait of (rich) non-politician [X] as political savior, which is so beloved of the silly and naive.

In this case, at least, subsequent events have invalidated Cain's assessment of Tiger Woods to such a degree that it's fair to say they demonstrate conclusively how little judgment Cain possesses.

h/t Jim Galloway

Update: Turns out that his op-ed was yet another thing Cain was simply 'joking' about.

"That was a joke, okay? Tiger - I - that was a joke," the presidential hopeful said. "Americans got to learn how to have a sense of humor, okay?"

crossposted at Flapola

Ten Years

2011-09-11T15:03:00.002-05:00

The most poignant thing about this anniversary is that ten years ago we Americans shared the common conviction that things could not get any worse.

S&P: Cut Medicare, Social Security

2011-08-06T12:20:00.001-05:00

Nearly lost in all the media hubbub over S&P’s unprecedented decision to downgrade the US credit rating is the blatant fact that it is meddling in US politics. Robert Reich makes the obvious point that S&P’s responsibility is simply to assess whether the US is likely to pay its debts, and that it has no right to insert itself into the question of how much debt the US should decide to maintain. But even Reich does not go far enough.

What S&P is doing is to use its rating leverage to take sides in the ongoing deficit negotiations in Washington. In its justification of the downrating, S&P says (a) it wants more deficit cuts, and (b) that the problem is partisan brinksmanship in those negotiations makes it unlikely that the federal government will accept the necessary package of revenue increases, especially tax hikes, and entitlement cuts needed to attain (a).

We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process.

In other words, the downgrade is about the further negotiations regarding deficit reduction that will resume when Congress reconvenes after the August break, specifically the debate over the balance between tax hikes and entitlement cuts.

Republicans and Democrats have only been able to agree to relatively modest savings on discretionary spending while delegating to the Select Committee decisions on more comprehensive measures. It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options. In addition, the plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.

S&P says that it takes no position on how the two parties work out that balance, as long as they do cut the deficit further.

Standard & Poor's takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures that Congress and the Administration might conclude is appropriate for putting the U.S.'s finances on a sustainable footing.

But that is disingenuous. Everybody in Washington (save perhaps the delusional would-be bipartisans in the White House) knows that the current GOP will never allow any tax increases. Hence what S&P is really saying is it demands to see cuts to Medicare and Social Security. It is threatening to lower the nation’s credit rating even further unless the deficit is cut even further, so the message is clear: Cut entitlements.

All of us saw that Obama and the Democrats allowed themselves to be taken hostage in recent months in order to save the Treasury’s creditworthiness. Now S&P is trying its hand at the same thing.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Another unacknowledged edit by Jeffrey Goldberg

2011-08-04T20:01:00.000-05:00

The more evidence turns up about Jeffrey Goldberg’s revisions of his controversial post “Mumbai Comes to Norway,” the worse his journalistic lapses look and the less satisfactory his explanation appears.

I came across a site that mirrors his Atlantic blog, perhaps using his RSS feed. It preserves two versions of his “Mumbai” post – one with “UPDATED” in its title (from late in the evening of July 22), and the other without (evidently captured earlier that afternoon at 3:22 PM ET). Here is the text of the earlier version:

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence. I know that this sort of statement sounds too Bushian for some people, but I tend to think that many hardcore jihadists -- i.e. ones who are willing to murder innocent people -- develop a deep desire to murder infidels, and only then go looking for specific places to do this murder, and only then gin-up weak rationalizations for the murder. In other words, the list of ostensible grievances is endless.

This version differs from the original piece, posted half an hour earlier. The second paragraph is longer; everything after “Western existence” was added after the original post went up. Notice that this addition is not labeled an ‘update’.

This calls into further doubt Goldberg’s explanation of events. When he learned that I’d turned up evidence of an unacknowledged update to “Mumbai” in which he added material down through its third paragraph (with its alternative theory for the Norway attacks), you may recall, Goldberg quickly added an update to “Mumbai” stating:

(a) that he appended the ‘caveat’ in the third paragraph right after he originally posted “Mumbai” (“I wrote it almost right after I posted originally”)

(b) that he did initially label this addition as an ‘update’

(c) that a subsequent revision of “Mumbai”, because of obscure technical difficulties, accidentally deleted the update label in (b)

This new evidence is hard to square with that story. (i) It shows that there were at least two updates before the third paragraph was added, not one nearly immediate update as Goldberg implied. (ii) The first of these revisions (some 10 to 30 minutes after the original post) was not in fact labeled as an ‘update’, nor was the title of the post. (iii) A further revision (appending the third paragraph) came more than half an hour after the original post, not quickly as Goldberg said. So Goldberg’s account of his revisions of “Mumbai” is in tatters. We also have clear evidence that Goldberg did append some material to his original post without acknowledging the revision.

It’s also worth underlining that Goldberg’s first inclination after he wrote “Mumbai” was to go back to expand and emphasize the unequivocal blame he was heaping on jihadists. So the third paragraph, whenever it finally was added, was an even greater reversal than it had originally seemed (when we didn’t know of this first unacknowledged update).

Notice too that the clause Goldberg inserted surreptitiously in the first paragraph (“if this is jihadist in origin”) is not present yet in this first revision of “Mumbai”. That means very likely it was inserted at the same time as the third paragraph was added. In other words, it’s even clearer now that the inserted clause was meant to work together with the third paragraph in helping to deflect criticism that he had rushed to judgment.

As always, it will be interesting to see whether Jeffrey Goldberg attempts to explain the ever-widening confusion about the history of his revisions of this extraordinary post.

crossposted from Flapola

Jeffrey Goldberg busted

2011-08-04T17:35:00.001-05:00

For the last ten days Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg has struggled to explain how an inflammatory post he published on July 22 was radically altered subsequently to make it seem less imbalanced – without however alerting readers that it had been changed. Goldberg initially blamed the Norway attacks unequivocally on Muslim terrorists. But then as events that Friday were demonstrating how foolish his rush to judgment had been he appended seven new sentences to the original post, raising the possibility of right-wing terrorism and suggesting that all along he was just exploring various theories about who was responsible. Three days later, when Goldberg learned that I’d turned up evidence to show that he’d revised his post without acknowledgment, he went back to the post and added a nearly incomprehensible and dubious update explaning how that transpired. When this ‘gibberish update’ was greeted derisively by various journalists, he quietly slipped yet another explanation into the post briefly restating his version of events and accusing his critics of trying to undermine him for ideological reasons (I call this one his ‘Checkers update’).

Goldberg has maintained throughout – in vague terms – that misleading readers was entirely unintentional and the product of a single technical glitch. Goldberg claims that he originally did set the additional seven sentences apart, preceded by the label “UPDATE”, but later in the day when he appended a further ‘update’ the original label was accidentally omitted.

I’ve found no evidence to back up his story and have provided several grounds for doubting his explanation of events. Furthermore, although Goldberg promised in the ‘gibberish update’ to look into the electronic trail of his various updates to the post and thus clarify what actually transpired, he hasn’t said a word since then about it. I've pointed out repeatedly that he could simply use The Atlantic’s logs to show how his post changed over time. Goldberg has never responded to that suggestion or brought forward any actual evidence beyond his own assertions. His integrity and that of The Atlantic have been called into question, and he has declined to rebut the allegation in detail. Indeed, Goldberg has said that it is his critics who need to prove his story is false.

Well, a serious hole in his story just showed up. It was raised by commenter ‘Robinisms’ at my original post on the Goldberg scandal, who noted another telling (but until then overlooked) change Goldberg made to his original post: Goldberg inserted a new clause into the middle of his first paragraph. This insertion clearly was designed to make his original post seem more circumspect; it adds an element of caution to a paragraph that originally lacked it entirely. It is a change that Goldberg’s explanation plainly does not justify.

I quote the entire post as originally published:

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence.

When Goldberg appended the seven new sentences later that day, these original sentences remained the same with a single exception. He slipped a new clause into the fourth sentence of the first paragraph, which he did not mark in any way as a revision:

It doesn't seem likely, on the surface, if this is jihadist in origin.

The new clause turned the first two paragraphs of the post into a hypothetical exercise, which they had not been in the original. So even if Goldberg did add “UPDATE” before the long section he appended, as he claims, he had doctored the original post sufficiently with the surreptitious insertion of this clause that he might have hoped to deflect criticisms that he had rushed to judgment.

I see no way that Goldberg can explain away this clause under his current story, except by making it even more baroque than it already is.

The very surreptitiousness of this insertion tends to strengthen my original impression that Goldberg's unacknowledged revision was meant to mislead readers.

crossposted from Flapola

Jeffrey Goldberg’s Checkers Update

2011-07-30T15:44:00.001-05:00

It turns out that on Thursday Jeffrey Goldberg slipped yet another update into his “Mumbai Comes to Norway”. It was a response to the public reception of my criticism of his journalistic lapses here and here. Remarkably, Goldberg did nothing to publicize this defense of his integrity, either at The Atlantic or on Twitter (at both of which he was posting very frequently).

So far it is the only sustained attempt he’s made publicly to rebut the charge that he doctored ‘Mumbai’ on July 22 with an unacknowledged revision, since his notorious ‘gibberish’ update last Monday. Here is the latest update in full:

UPDATE ON THE UPDATE ON THE UPDATE (Thursday the 28th): Jay Rosen has pointed out that the previous paragraphs read like gibberish. He's mostly right. Here's a shorter version: I posted, updated,, erased the post by mistake, tried to restore the post, left things out of the post, then fixed the post. There are people out there -- people who are opposed to me on ideological grounds -- who are accusing me of intentionally doctoring the post. They offer no proof, however. All I can say is that the screw-ups were inadvertent.

The last three sentences here are priceless. Goldberg insinuates that his critics are out to get him “on ideological grounds”. He offers no proof for such an explosive charge.

I’m the critic who first accused him of doctoring his post, and I’d like to know why he claims to understand my ideology. And how is that ideology, whatever it may be, at war with his own? Observant readers will notice that the accusation was in fact first published at the newish website Flapola, which “exists to chronicle the absurdities of public discourse”. It’s unclear whether “the people out there” who Goldberg feels are his ideological enemies would also include journalism professor Jay Rosen of NYU. If so, that seems absurd as well. Goldberg’s update reminds one a little too much of Richard Nixon at his worst (“You've got to be a little evil to understand those people out there. You have to have known the dark side of life.”).

Goldberg demands proof that his contrived-sounding story is false. I have offered plenty of evidence, an electronic trail that calls his story into question. For example, I pointed out that the title and web address of ‘Mumbai’ only acquired the word “Updated” around 5 hours after it was originally posted. That’s hard to square with Goldberg’s statement that he added the label “update” to his first revision, which came “almost right after [he] posted originally”. Goldberg is the one with access to The Atlantic’s logs. As I’ve said several times, he could easily produce the “proof”, if those logs backed him up, to prove he’s telling the truth. He hasn’t even bothered.

“All I can say is that the screw-ups were inadvertent.” False, see my last paragraph. Goldberg can produce the evidence he claims would show that he marked the first revision of his post as an “update”. Simply repeating his undocumented assertions proves nothing.

This latest update is rather dismissive. Isn’t his journalistic reputation sufficiently worth defending that Goldberg would produce readily available evidence to back up his story?

crossposted from Flapola

The latest Jeffrey Goldberg scandal

2011-07-29T13:21:00.002-05:00

On Monday Jeffrey Goldberg added a bizarre and nearly incomprehensible note to a highly controversial post at The Atlantic. The note sought to explain and justify an earlier, unacknowledged revision to the piece whose effect had been to make him appear less foolish. He maintains that he misled readers inadvertently by accidentally deleting the word “UPDATE” from that revision. His account was far from adequate and refers to obscure technical difficulties. Goldberg even said that he couldn’t really understand what had happened as he repeatedly revised the post the previous Friday. He promised to look into his electronic trail to figure the situation out.

Since then, however, Goldberg has added nothing to his garbled explanation. It should be a simple matter to extract from The Atlantic’s servers a record of his updates to that post, if in fact it would corroborate and clarify his flimsy account. As things are, Goldberg stands accused of deliberately doctoring a post to mask how outrageous his original post had been. Prominent journalists such as Jay Rosen have called him to task. And yet four days later Goldberg still has produced no evidence on his own behalf. His colleagues at The Atlantic remain silent as well.

There are detailed descriptions of this scandal here and here.

The facts as I understand them are as follows: Last Friday afternoon Goldberg posted a two-paragraph screed, “Mumbai Comes to Norway,” blaming the attacks unequivocally on Islamic terrorists. When events demonstrated how reckless he’d been, Goldberg added a third paragraph raising the possibility of right-wing terrorism. By not labeling this as an update, he left readers to conclude that he was just exploring multiple theories rather than using the massacre to make a bold pronouncement about the worldwide jihadist danger. Later that evening, beginning around 8 PM, Goldberg began adding 4 further paragraphs on stray thoughts, each of which he did carefully label as an “UPDATE”. At the same time he also added “(UPDATED)” to the title. So he was capable of noting updates when there was nothing to be gained from not doing so.

On Saturday, Goldberg posted a roundabout defense of his decision to rush to judgment, “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” It is characteristically disingenuous, particularly about what he had written in “Mumbai”.

On Monday, when he learned (via James Fallows) that I had found cached evidence that he’d made those unacknowledged changes to “Mumbai”, Goldberg hurriedly added another update to the post. This was the aforementioned bizarre explanation for not having labeled the first revision as an ‘update’. It is so ridiculous it really needs to be seen to be believed.

The Atlantic needs to address this disgrace. The ‘Mumbai’ post was reprehensible to begin with. The doctoring of it is a further scandal. Goldberg’s ridiculous excuse-mongering makes matters worse. His refusal to apologize for any of it is worse still.

And as if that weren’t shameful enough, his colleagues at The Atlantic have some answering to do for ignoring or excusing all of this. On Saturday James Fallows called for the Washington Post to apologize for a Jennifer Rubin post that, like Goldberg’s, used the Norway attacks to propagandize about Islamic terrorism. His call was seconded by two other Atlantic writers. But none of them has so much as mentioned Goldberg’s reprehensible “Mumbai” post. In correspondence, Fallows bobbed and weaved when pressed about holding Goldberg to basic journalistic standards.

So will Goldberg and The Atlantic ever properly address this bundle of scandals?

Update Friday July 29: James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. It’s pretty thin stuff. He states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems “that morning” and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to ‘Mumbai’ (from later in the day).

Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't.

Setting aside the fact that Goldberg has said some pretty crazy things – for example, rushing to blame the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists – apparently neither Fallows nor Goldberg has made any effort to dig out those logs to prove that Goldberg misled his readers accidentally as he claims. As I’ve noted repeatedly, it should be a simple thing to produce that evidence if it actually backs up Goldberg’s story. Further, Goldberg said that his memory is hazy and his convoluted account is nearly incomprehensible. So why is nobody at The Atlantic trying to clarify what is otherwise an extreme embarrassment for them?

As regards the issue of whether he should condemn Goldberg’s rush to use the massacre to score points, Fallows argues (a) that others did not condemn Goldberg either, and (b) he didn’t see ‘Mumbai’ until Goldberg had already tried to walk back some of its extremism. Left unaddressed, I think, is whether Fallows and The Atlantic should condemn it now that he realizes it was originally as indefensible a post as the Jennifer Rubin piece he denounced. Goldberg has not admitted that he was wrong to post it. Quite the contrary, he continues to defend the decision. Goldberg is still trying to portray the controversy disingenuously as criticism that he merely ‘suspected’ al Qaeda’s involvement in Norway. That is intellectually dishonest (not to say crazy given that people can go back and read what he wrote).

crossposted at Flapola

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, and journalistic ethics

2011-07-27T18:32:00.003-05:00

On Friday, just after the horrific attacks in Norway, Jeffrey Goldberg posted this two-paragraph screed, “Mumbai Comes to Norway,” in which he pinned the blame squarely and without equivocation upon Islamic terrorists: “Jihadists did this in Norway because they could.” Of course, he had no substantive evidence for the inflammatory assertion. Any rush to judgment is foolish. This was reprehensible. Some of his critics would also say it is characteristic of Goldberg’s work.

Since then no apology has been forthcoming from Goldberg. Quite the contrary, on Saturday he doubled down, posting “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” This purports to be a defense of other writers who similarly had rushed to denounce Muslims for the murders. However that is disingenuous; Goldberg plainly intended the piece as a roundabout way to justify his earlier ‘Mumbai’ post. And yet he managed to say almost nothing specific about what he’d actually written the previous day, though some of what he did say about ‘Mumbai’ was inaccurate and disingenuous. Remarkably, he didn’t even provide a link to ‘Mumbai’. (After I wrote to him criticizing his failure to link to his own work, he published a ridiculous revision of ‘Suspecting’ on Monday in which he blamed that failure on vague technical problems; apparently we’re supposed to believe that his own ‘Mumbai’ post was the one relevant link he was prevented somehow from including.) Thus, Goldberg’s purpose in ‘Suspecting’ was to persuade readers that he had had every reason to join others in blaming Islamists in ‘Mumbai’, and hence was not himself to blame.

In the aftermath, nobody else at The Atlantic has criticized either of Goldberg’s controversial posts much less called for an apology. Indeed, none of their writers have even mentioned them.

This despite the fact that James Fallows on Saturday rebuked the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin and called for an apology for her own rush to judgment. Fallows repeatedly updated that post as he recorded how much time had elapsed without an apology from Rubin. Her piece, as reprehensible as it is, was surely no more extreme than what his Atlantic colleague Goldberg had written and then defended. In fact, Rubin’s original post had acknowledged, by the back door, at least the possibility that the attacks in Norway were not the work of Islamic terrorists. Goldberg’s ‘Mumbai’ post, by contrast, originally expressed total certainty in blaming Muslims.

Fallows’ denunciation of Rubin was quickly joined by two other colleagues at The Atlantic, Steve Clemons (here and here) and Ta-Nihisi Coates. Nevertheless none of them to date has said a thing about their colleague Goldberg’s two controversial posts.

I wrote to Fallows on Saturday asking why Goldberg did not owe an apology as well. In correspondence over several days, Fallows repeatedly defended his colleague, minimized his journalistic lapses, accepted Goldberg’s ridiculous self-justifications or offered his own, and avoided as far as possible taking any action to hold Goldberg to account for such gross unprofessionalism.

It gets even worse.

On Monday I gave Fallows evidence showing that Goldberg had substantially revised his original ‘Mumbai’ post sometime later on Friday, making himself appear less imprudent by appending a final (third) paragraph. That paragraph mentions the possibility the attacks were the work of a right-wing terrorist. This radical revision of the original post was in line with the police report that afternoon about the blond Norwegian who had been arrested. But Goldberg did not mention that he’d made any changes to ‘Mumbai’. His silence left the reader to assume that his absolutely confident assertions about Islamic terrorists at the top of the post were really intended all along to be taken as just one of several possible theories, including the scenario he mentions at the end.

It is egregiously wrong to revise a post so substantially as to alter its meaning or intended interpretation without signaling that a revision was made. In terms of journalistic standards, an unacknowledged revision as radical as this is just as reprehensible as Goldberg’s original offense of rushing out inflammatory allegations without evidence to back them up.

Fallows response upon receiving this information was, at first, to say nothing more than he hadn’t known about the unacknowledged addition of the third paragraph. (I should add that, in his first email to me on Saturday, Fallows had based his defense of Goldberg entirely on this third paragraph, which he described as the “caveat” that raised Goldberg’s post above the level of Rubin’s. To my mind it was transparently an afterthought, one that scarcely mitigated Goldberg’s clear intention to pin the blame on Islamists. But for Fallows it was the key that made it permissible to criticize Rubin while saying nothing about his colleague.)

So I pressed Fallows again about what he would do now that he did know of the unacknowledged revision. Fallows finally said that he would look into it.

A short time afterward on Monday evening, Jeffrey Goldberg revised his ‘Mumbai’ post again, this time in order to justify his failure earlier to mention the first revision. His rambling excuse is such gibberish that a reasonable interpretation would be he intended it to be nearly incomprehensible. It reads like the blather you’d associate more with a Jeffrey Lebowski than a journalist at The Atlantic. This update is easily the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in the established news media.

UPDATE ON THE PREVIOUS UPDATE (Monday the 25th): A number of readers have pointed out that my previous caveat give the impression that it was an instantaneous caveat, when in fact it wasn't. It was written a short while after the original post went up, and was labeled "Update" originally (I've since affixed the word "update" to it again. What happened was that I was driving and had connectivity problems, and so when I added further updates (below), I inadvertently erased the whole post, and had to rescue it from a Word document, but in re-posting that word document (or most of it—I saved only most of it) I dropped the word "update," along with a couple of other things. And then I thought I had saved it and posted it, when it fact the "save" didn't go through until a later "save" of another update. When the post went out on my RSS feed, I believe it still had the word "update" in it. Though I don't know for sure, but will check my RSS feed when I get back. I'm sorry this sounds so confusing, but I want to clear up the impression that I folded in caveats later without saying that they were added later. In truth, I can't figure out what happened, because I thought when I wrote the aforementioned caveat, it had successfully posted, when it seems that it hadn't.

i barely understand the previous paragraph. Suffice it to say I don't want to leave anyone with either the impression that the caveat paragraph was posted simultaneously with the original content of the post, or that it was added hours or days later. I wrote it almost right after I posted originally, but it apparently wasn't saved into text until one of the next times I opened up this post. My bad—no blogging and driving for me. And of course it was my bad not to lard even more caveats into the post in the first place.

Goldberg’s account of why he failed until late Monday evening to mention Friday’s radical update is not even remotely convincing. My reasons for rejecting his convoluted self-justification will be left to another post (see below). My point here is that, on its face, his Monday evening blather strains credulity. And yet Fallows seems to accept it. He told me nothing about what he learned upon looking into the matter. Instead he just sent me without comment the link to Goldberg’s explanation. Fallows has not responded to my further emails challenging the explanation.

In short, James Fallows is again excusing his colleague Jeffrey Goldberg’s egregious practices. Sad to say, it is not for the first time. One would have thought that Goldberg’s journalistic credentials would be in tatters long before now given the appalling record of inaccuracies, blithe inconsistencies, and gross biases that mark him out as a propagandist in foreign affairs. Are there no professional penalties to be paid for shamelessly advocating for a disastrous war as in Iraq? Evidently not. Goldberg’s friends and colleagues repeatedly have shielded him from justified criticism and even promoted him, no matter what he gets up to.

As so often, there appears to be a double standard among Beltway insiders. Those whom one is friendly with are good and serious people simply because one knows them to be, and therefore one’s friends must be placed effectively above criticism. No amount of public embarrassment is allowed to pierce this bubble of impunity.

And there can be few things more embarrassing than the preposterous and pathetic self defense Goldberg published on Monday evening in the final revision of ‘Mumbai’. Never mind for now Goldberg’s obvious disingenuousness, or his tone or the rather terrified-sounding gobbledy-gook prose. I would note simply that the premise of his explanation – that vague technical difficulties were to blame for his failure over three full days to mention the radical revision on Friday of the ‘Mumbai’ post – is nearly identical to the unconvincing explanation he’d already offered in ‘Suspecting’ for his failure to provide a link back to ‘Mumbai’.

I can’t help but notice that Goldberg had posted a longish series of uncontroversial things on Friday and Saturday at The Atlantic, without ever mentioning or seeming to have technical difficulties. But on Monday, as he sees himself under criticism for what clearly was highly controversial writing, Goldberg suddenly became all chatty in his updates to both ‘Suspecting’ and ‘Mumbai’ about how technical difficulties had been undermining him right and left, two and three days earlier, thus spoiling all his very admirable intentions. Curiously, they were spoiling his intentions only with regard to the inflammatory posts. The non-controversial posts all managed to bypass the technical gremlins somehow.

I’m reminded of the phony-sounding, convoluted narratives that undergraduate students offer up so often when they’re caught red-handed in something like plagiarism. Vague and nearly incomprehensible technical difficulties, as it happens, often turn out to be the actual culprits – not the authors themselves, apart that is from their acknowledging some slight element of sloppiness in not overcoming a series of almost unparalleled challenges in order to compel those pesky machines to do things right.

And so too with Jeffrey Goldberg, who assures us that despite his best of intentions it was the machines that made his two controversial posts seem unethical. But he’s set the record straight now because he wouldn’t want to leave his readers with the impression that he radically revised his ‘Mumbai’ post without acknowledging the revision. Except, that is, for the three days in which he did give that impression.

Fallows was right that Rubin owed an apology for her terrible misuse of the terrorist attacks in Norway to push her own agenda. He is wrong not to call for an apology from Goldberg as well. The Atlantic needs to sanction Goldberg for that reprehensible ‘Mumbai’ post, as well as for revising it later to make it seem less extreme while leaving readers for three days to assume that no repairs had been done to it. His excuse mongering on Monday also warrants an investigation, though I doubt it’s possible ever to get to the bottom of whatever it is Goldberg is claiming.

I am leaving to a second post, which can be found here, my detailed description of what Goldberg posted and when, and my analysis of that. I’ll also discuss Fallow’s record in this a little further.

Update, Wed. July 27: This evening at 6:39 ET, shortly after these two pieces were posted and crossposted at two other sites, the google cache for the original version of Goldberg's 'Mumbai' post was overwritten with the current version of the page. However I have a screen grab of the original version, should anybody wish to consult it. I have quoted its text in its entirety.

Update Two, Friday July 29: James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. It’s pretty thin stuff. He states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems “that morning” and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to ‘Mumbai’ (from later in the day).

Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't.

No Shame at The Atlantic?

2011-07-27T18:28:00.005-05:00

As discussed here, The Atlantic disgraced itself over the weekend with two posts about the Norway attacks by Jeffrey Goldberg, subsequently updated disingenuously and bizarrely. Goldberg initially blamed the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists, and then rather than retract and apologize for his reprehensible first post, he performed stupefying back-flips trying to justify the unjustifiable. In addition, three other Atlantic authors (James Fallows, Steve Clemons, and Ta-Nehisi Coates) made common cause in rebuking a Washington Post author (Jennifer Rubin) for her own grotesque rush to judgment, but nevertheless have managed to avoid even mentioning their colleague Goldberg’s offenses. Fallows in particular was notified of one especially egregious impropriety Goldberg engaged in, but rather than condemn it Fallows appears to have accepted Goldberg’s dubious and convoluted excuses. It’s a bundle of journalistic lapses shamelessly committed and just as shamelessly swept under the carpet.

The purpose here is to describe the events as I understand them and assess them in detail.

On Friday July 22, Jeffrey Goldberg posted “Mumbai Comes to Norway”. The link is to a cache of the original version of the post. The text reads:

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence.

It is inflammatory. The entire piece, beginning with the title, presumes that the attacks were of course committed by Muslims. There isn’t even the slightest trace of doubt about that. The second bombastic paragraph could not be more sweeping or authoritative: Islamists seek to kill us because we exist, and softness invites attack. That is rhetoric in search of evidence, which Goldberg was eager to find in the current massacre.

Journalistic ethics, which don’t encourage rushing to judgment, certainly would have required Goldberg to issue a retraction as soon as possible after it became clear that afternoon that the only suspect in custody was a native Norwegian.

Instead, Goldberg revised ‘Mumbai’ by bolstering his second paragraph with two further sentences and adding a third paragraph. The third paragraph mentions the possibility that it was a case of right-wing terrorism, only to suggest further ways that it could still be linked to Muslims. He also remarks that he is “confused” about who was responsible. The effect of this radical revision was to make his extremely imprudent, one-sided, and indefensible original post seem less so.

Later that evening Goldberg made three further revisions to ‘Mumbai’ with stray thoughts and links. These are labeled “UPDATE”, “UPDATE 2”, and “UPDATE 3”. By stages he seems to be relinquishing his obsession with the non-existent Muslim connection.

Here is a cached version of the updated ‘Mumbai’ from around dawn the following morning. Notice that the original, radical revision still is not set apart as an update (in fact it begins in the middle of the second paragraph), and thus gives the impression that the third paragraph in particular was actually part of the original argument.

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface, if this is jihadist in origin. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence. I know that this sort of statement sounds too Bushian for some people, but I tend to think that many hardcore jihadists—i.e. ones who are willing to murder innocent people—develop a deep desire to murder infidels, and only then go looking for specific places to do this murder, and only then gin-up weak rationalizations for the murder. In other words, the list of ostensible grievances is endless.

Of course, this could an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. I'm as confused as the rest of you are about the authorship of these attacks. There have been early claims of responsibility by jihadist groups, followed by denials, followed by reports that a blonde "Nordic-looking" man was the one who opened fire on the youth camp. Was this "Nordic-looking" man an Adam Gadahn-type, or someone not motivated by jihadist ideology? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting story from Atlantic.com about why jihadists seem to have it in for Norway, if indeed this attack was jihadist-inspired. And because this might be domestic right-wing extremism in origin, I'm looking for something to read about Norwegian extremist groups. If anyone has any recommendations, I'll post and link.

UPDATE 2: This looks promising -- http://bit.ly/rlnhB2

UPDATE 3: I'm sure someone on the Internets has pointed this out already, but if these are the acts of a Norwegian lone wolf—massive car bomb and point-blank massacre in a different location hours later—then this guy is a true terror prodigy, the Muhammad Atta of Norway. Terrorism is hard to do. This is one of the reasons the U.S. hasn't been hit by an organized plot since 9/11. Most psychopaths are incompetent at killing. This is our saving grace.

Later that morning an “UPDATE 4” was appended to ‘Mumbai’, which is how the post remained for more than two days, until Monday evening.

A blogger who posts at AbsurdBeats tells me that on Friday she read the original unrevised version of ‘Mumbai’, and later several times returned and saw the radically revised version before any of the further revisions that were marked as an “UPDATE” had been added. At no point did she see any indication that the radical revision (the 2nd/3rd paragraphs) was acknowledged as an update. On Monday evening she commented about that fact in this thread at The Atlantic:

It was two paragraphs straight-up on jihadis and why they might attack Norway, with, if I remember correctly, some mention of the impending deportation of Mullah Krekar; it could even have been those first two paragraphs of what is now a much longer post.

There was no "Of course, this could an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. . . . " That was added later, although, lacking an "update" notice, makes it appear as if it were a part of the original post.

The apparent implication, that Goldberg had been audacious in transforming his commentary to such an extent, was troubling so I searched for and found a cached version of the original post from Friday afternoon (which is linked and quoted above). I sent this evidence of an unacknowledged revision to James Fallows (with whom I’d been corresponding about Goldberg). He said he’d look into it. Shortly afterwards, late on Monday evening, Goldberg revised ‘Mumbai’ a final time. The passage quoted below begins with the second paragraph and includes all the changes he made then:

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence. I know that this sort of statement sounds too Bushian for some people, but I tend to think that many hardcore jihadists—i.e. ones who are willing to murder innocent people—develop a deep desire to murder infidels, and only then go looking for specific places to do this murder, and only then gin-up weak rationalizations for the murder. In other words, the list of ostensible grievances is endless.

UPDATE: Of course, this could an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. I'm as confused as the rest of you are about the authorship of these attacks. There have been early claims of responsibility by jihadist groups, followed by denials, followed by reports that a blonde "Nordic-looking" man was the one who opened fire on the youth camp. Was this "Nordic-looking" man an Adam Gadahn-type, or someone not motivated by jihadist ideology? Stay tuned.

UPDATE ON THE PREVIOUS UPDATE (Monday the 25th): A number of readers have pointed out that my previous caveat give the impression that it was an instantaneous caveat, when in fact it wasn't. It was written a short while after the original post went up, and was labeled "Update" originally (I've since affixed the word "update" to it again. What happened was that I was driving and had connectivity problems, and so when I added further updates (below), I inadvertently erased the whole post, and had to rescue it from a Word document, but in re-posting that word document (or most of it—I saved only most of it) I dropped the word "update," along with a couple of other things. And then I thought I had saved it and posted it, when it fact the "save" didn't go through until a later "save" of another update. When the post went out on my RSS feed, I believe it still had the word "update" in it. Though I don't know for sure, but will check my RSS feed when I get back. I'm sorry this sounds so confusing, but I want to clear up the impression that I folded in caveats later without saying that they were added later. In truth, I can't figure out what happened, because I thought when I wrote the aforementioned caveat, it had successfully posted, when it seems that it hadn't.

i barely understand the previous paragraph. Suffice it to say I don't want to leave anyone with either the impression that the caveat paragraph was posted simultaneously with the original content of the post, or that it was added hours or days later. I wrote it almost right after I posted originally, but it apparently wasn't saved into text until one of the next times I opened up this post. My bad—no blogging and driving for me. And of course it was my bad not to lard even more caveats into the post in the first place.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting story from Atlantic.com about why jihadists [… etc.]

Even if one cares to believe this explanation, it is not an adequate excuse. Goldberg left the first revision unacknowledged for three days. He acknowledged it only after he learned somebody had discovered the situation, and did so only on a post that most readers had long since left behind.

It’s also disingenuous. “A number of readers” pointed out how he had misled? What number? It looks as if Goldberg prefers not to admit that he acted only after I turned over to Fallows a cache of his original post. (The term ‘caveat’ is how Fallows had been describing Goldberg’s third paragraph in our correspondence; see below.)

And as regards his “my bad not to lard even more caveats into the post in the first place”, there were no caveats whatever in the original post. Not one. To talk about “even more caveats” is to deny the very nature of his original post. How extraordinarily ironic to conclude this update with a fiction that denies the very consequence of the update.

As regards the substance of his explanation, it is nearly incomprehensible, perhaps intentionally so. I have rarely read such gibberish. To me these seem like the plaintive and desperate words of somebody who has been caught red-handed in an unethical operation. In so far as I understand the ‘facts’ Goldberg alleges, I don’t find them credible. Here are some reasons why:

(a) The first revision actually began in the middle of the second paragraph. That’s hard to square with his explanation. He would have had to have ‘dropped’ two hard returns as well as the word “UPDATE” in his Word document when (as he claims) he reposted the whole text. He would also have to have forgotten within a very short time that he had updated and that there were now meant to be four rather than three paragraphs. Besides, Word documents don’t tend to delete late changes when you close them, unless you put some effort into losing material.

(b) All four other updates are numbered in order (except the second, which is simply labeled “UPDATE”). How does it happen that the first “update” has so little purchase that it doesn’t even affect the numbering system?

(c) His claim that he was distracted from blogging while driving, while barely possible, suggests he should be arrested for recklessness.

(d) The “UPDATE” in the post’s title and in its web address appeared only some 2 ½ to 5 hours after ‘Mumbai’ was originally posted, to judge by a review of cached pages from The Atlantic (see e.g. the google caches of Derek Thompson’s posts that day). Goldberg claims (above) that he added the ‘caveat’ paragraph “almost right after I posted originally” and not hours later, and that initially he notified readers that the ‘caveat’ was an ‘update’. So why does neither the title nor the web address for ‘Mumbai’ include ‘update’ until hours later on Friday evening?

(e) Goldberg posted other things at The Atlantic on Friday afternoon and evening with no apparent technical difficulties.

(f) His vague tale of repeated, obscure technical difficulties compounded by his own haplessness plus an astoundingly convenient three-day episode of amnesia sounds contrived. I’ve heard all too many similar tales from undergraduates when they’ve been caught plagiarizing papers. Such tales make a virtue of patheticness, and Goldberg’s explanation is nothing if not pathetic.

(g) Just as his excuse here is predicated on insurmountable technical difficulties, so too his excuse with regard to a lapse in his second controversial post (see below) is predicated on insurmountable technical difficulties. Both excuses were dredged up and published on Monday, after Goldberg found his lapses facing criticism. In both instances, the alleged technical difficulties evidently impinged on his work only to the extent that he was facing criticism.

(h) His explanation does not appear to be subject to proof. Apart from some probably unverifiable claims about technical difficulties, it ends up being a non-explanation. Goldberg says “I can't figure out what happened” and he leaves himself ample room to evade, revise or abandon the few assertions he does seem to make.

(i) It is transparently true that on Monday Goldberg could not get even the most basic things right about his ‘Mumbai’ updates from Friday. He slaps the new label “UPDATE” before the third paragraph rather than where it belongs, before the fourth sentence in the second paragraph. So how was he able on Monday to provide so many other florid details (however vaguely described) from his various technical adventures, and how was he certain that he labeled the first revision as an ‘update’, when he couldn’t even remember where the original post ended?

It would be a fairly simple matter to extract evidence to support his story of multiple updates from The Atlantic’s servers, if his version of events is accurate. That would also permit Goldberg to clarify what he says he can’t figure out. However no such evidence or clarification has been forthcoming for the last two days. The matter has simply been dropped.

On Saturday July 23 Jeffrey Goldberg returned to the fray with “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” It purports to be a defense of others, especially Jennifer Rubin, who had rushed to blame the attacks on Muslims without waiting for actual evidence.

Clearly though it was designed at least as much as a justification for his now embarrassing ‘Mumbai’ post. He mentions his own controversial post in passing, but without much information a reader would need to understand what he’d written. It’s especially remarkable that he neglected to link to ‘Mumbai’ or cite its inflammatory title, though he linked to plenty of other people’s posts in ‘Suspecting’.

Some of what he says is frankly disingenuous. His main line of defense is that people like Rubin were justified in their speculation if only because The Atlantic had reposted an old piece by Hegghammer and Tierney on Norway’s problem with al Qaeda. He implies it influenced his decision to write ‘Mumbai’.

So it would have been possible, from reading The Atlantic alone, to suspect al Qaeda involvement in the Norway attacks. I myself suspected this, and wrote so.

The truth is that Goldberg noted the Hegghammer/Tierney article only as a late update to ‘Mumbai’.

He also doesn’t acknowledge that ‘Mumbai’ originally, even more than Rubin’s terrible post, blamed the attacks definitively and exclusively on Islamic terrorists. In fact, he disingenuously said:

To be sure, I wrote into my coverage a bunch of "to be sure" statements, along the lines of "if this in fact a jihadist attack," and, "perhaps this was an act of right-wing extremism," but I certainly suspected al Qaeda involvement initially.

There were not in fact a “bunch” of such statements, even in the fully updated version, just the two phrases he (mis)quotes. In any case the relevant point – about assessing the rush to blame Islamists – is that Goldberg’s original post contained not even one such statement.

On top of ‘Mumbai’, this was disgraceful stuff. I wrote to Goldberg explaining that I found ‘Suspecting’ to be disingenuous about what he had actually written, and asking why he had neglected to provide a link so that readers could assess his assessment of himself. Goldberg didn’t respond, but on Monday he revised ‘Suspecting’ to take account of such criticisms. The revision strikes me as a travesty.

To begin with, although he added a link to ‘Mumbai’ (as well as the title), Goldberg managed to imply that his earlier failure to do it had been caused by technical difficulties. Apparently, too, we’re supposed to imagine that by bad luck it was only his own post that he had been prevented from linking to:

I've added a link to the piece I wrote (I'm having terrible Interweb problems where I am, and this process of adding a couple of links has now been going on for a half-hour) […]

The very chattiness calls attention to its phoniness. The implication doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; was he having “Interweb problems” on Saturday as well? Anyhow there’s really no excuse in an internet apologia not to link to one’s post that one is trying to justify.

Additionally, Goldberg replies to the criticisms of ‘Mumbai’ by turning them into the worst kind of straw man. I[t i]s too preposterous to bother quoting here, but [this] serves as a measure of how seriously [he] engages with legitimate criticisms of his work. Even when he has posted something as scandalously unbalanced as ‘Mumbai’, Goldberg can’t face up to what he has done wrong. He prefers evasion and smokescreens and denial.

This is of course relevant to any assessment of the convoluted excuse he posted later on Monday evening for having failed to label his first revision of ‘Mumbai’ as an ‘update’.

To sum up, we had two posts from Jeffrey Goldberg that fell well short of journalistic standards, in both their original forms and in their disingenuous updates. ‘Mumbai’ in particular was reprehensible from the start and ought to have been corrected, apologized for, and sanctioned.

When I saw that James Fallows had (rightly) rebuked Jennifer Rubin and called for an apology from the Washington Post for her own rush to judgment, I asked Fallows why The Atlantic doesn’t owe an apology as well for Goldberg’s ‘Mumbai’. He replied that he hadn’t read it until after he’d posted on Rubin, but anyway Goldberg had “included some ‘caveats’ that she didn’t.” He meant the third paragraph of ‘Mumbai’.

On Monday evening after discovering that the third paragraph was in fact an unacknowledged revision, I sent the evidence to Fallows. His response was simply to state that he didn’t know about an unacknowledged revision. It was only after I pressed him on it (“And now that you do?”) did Fallows allow that he would “look into this”.

I never learned what the investigation found, but a short time later Fallows sent without comment a link to Goldberg’s final revision of ‘Mumbai’ with its seemingly preposterous excuse for misleading readers.

Even though the ‘caveats’ he mentioned on Saturday had disappeared into thin air on Monday, Fallows did not and has not criticized Goldberg publicly. In fact, neither he nor the other Atlantic authors who took Rubin to task (Steve Clemons and Ta-Nehisi Coates) have so much as mentioned Goldberg’s controversial posts in writing. Fallows at least is well aware of them. This is the purest double-standard, and in Fallows’ case a circling of the wagons.

The Atlantic faces a tangle of journalistic lapses:

(a) Jeffrey Goldberg’s original reprehensible ‘Mumbai’ post

(b) Goldberg’s failure to signpost for readers a radical revision of ‘Mumbai’

(c) Goldberg’s seemingly incredible excuse for (b)

(d) Goldberg’s disingenuous ‘Suspect’ post

(e) the failure, or refusal (?), of Atlantic authors, especially James Fallows, to hold their colleagues to the same journalistic standards they hold others to

It is a harvest of shame.

Update, Wed. July 27: This evening at 6:39 ET, shortly after these two pieces were posted and crossposted at two other sites, the google cache for the original version of Goldberg's 'Mumbai' post was overwritten with the current version of the page. However I have a screen grab of the original version, should anybody wish to consult it. I have quoted its text in its entirety.

Update Two, Thursday: This Goldberg tweet at 7:52 PM on Friday is very probably nearly contemporaneous with the first addition to 'Mumbai' that he actually labeled as an "UPDATE" (which includes this: "I'm looking for something to read about Norwegian extremist groups. If anyone has any recommendations, I'll post and link.") That helps to confirm what I said here, that the first time his 'Mumbai' title included the word "UPDATED" was between 5:30 and 8:00 PM. The label "UPDATE" did not come into play until five hours after the post originally went up.

I’ve tidied up the English in one sentence here, marking additions with square brackets [ ].

Update Three, Friday July 29: James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. It’s pretty thin stuff. He states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems “that morning” and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to ‘Mumbai’ (from later in the day).

Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't.

General David Petraeus still lying about progress

2011-06-13T11:18:00.001-05:00

Gareth Porter has uncovered a US military document that confirms Gen. Petraeus misled Americans repeatedly in 2010 about supposed progress under his command. It is part of a long pattern of seemingly deliberate deception by Petraeus.

The document, a graph from Task Force 435, demonstrates that the vast majority of Afghans captured during the 2010 surge, initially identified as Taliban fighters, were released by the US military within two weeks. The rate of release within 2 weeks was about 80%. It’s something that the Task Force commander himself acknowledged publicly last November. Porter calculates that subsequent reviews by the US military led to the release of at least another 10% of those initial prisoners within a few months. So the US military recognized that its operations in 2010 had detained large numbers of innocents and no more than 10% of these prisoners were actually associated with the Taliban.

But David Petraeus suppressed that information. Instead, in August 2010 and then again in December 2010 Petraeus released the inflated figures for prisoners and pretended that these represented the number of Taliban fighters who’d been captured. In other words, he deliberately misled the public by reporting 10 times as many Taliban fighters in custody as were actually captured.

Petraeus’ numbers for Talibans killed may also be inflated, though there is no documentation available to serve as a check on those assertions.

Petraeus has a record of deceiving the public. In 2007, when he was under pressure to show progress after six months of the surge in Iraq, Petraeus made a deceptive presentation to Congress. Though that presentation was greatly hyped in advance, it turned out to be extremely flimsy. He provided no written report, and instead showed Congress a series of slides that purported to represent progress in suppressing violence in Iraq, especially in Baghdad.

The problem was, as I revealed at the time, Petraeus’ slides for rates of violence in Baghdad were deceptive. They color-coded the city neighborhoods by sectarian majorities, and on Petraeus’ slides those neighborhoods all remained unchanged during the surge. That was a falsification of the largest factor in the ongoing civil war, the ongoing sectarian cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods – which reached a peak during the very period Petraeus was reporting upon.

The Pentagon had already produced accurate slides portraying violence on correctly color-coded neighborhoods (for the so-called Jones Report). So it is hard to see why Petraeus’ slides should have been so deceptive on such a basic issue – unless deception was the goal.

In April 2008 Petraeus returned to give Congress another report on progress in Iraq. This time, without explanation or apology for his previously misleading presentation, Petraeus showed slides of Baghdad that were accurately color-coded. Substituting accurate for inaccurate slides was a tacit admission that his earlier presentation had been deceptive.

In his September 2007 testimony to Congress, Petraeus was also accused of relying on selective statistics for sectarian violence, with the purpose of exaggerating the progress achieved under his command.

There appears to be a pattern of falsification by General Petraeus.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Michele Bachmann, dumbest member of Congress?

2011-03-12T14:01:00.001-05:00

To be deemed the stupidest member of Congress in these times would be quite a distinction. For years Michele Bachmann has been campaigning for the honor. Her bizarre misunderstandings about basic financial matters, for example, are legendary. Now I wonder whether she’s finally taken clear possession of that title. Speaking in New Hampshire on Friday about one of her favorite topics, the American Revolution, she showed that she has no understanding of the war’s most famous incident:

“It’s your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world, you are the state of Lexington and Concord (sic), you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard,” Bachmann told a group of Republican activists at a fundraiser here on New Hampshire’s sea coast. “And the question to my fellow members of the House, and there are some, when will we start the battle for liberty in Washington D.C.?

This ignoramus then apparently repeated the same mistake to at least one other audience in NH on Saturday morning…and indeed more than once in the speech.

"What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty," the potential GOP presidential candidate said. "You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history."

Politico’s story seems to refer to the same blundering speech on Saturday.

It’s bad enough to be ignorant of this seminal moment in American history. Worse still, Bachmann can’t be bothered to get basic facts straight even as she’s revving up a presidential bid. And she repeats her mistake without any apparent concern for accuracy, nor even an awareness that she’s blathering away in front of an audience that is surely far better informed than she is.

She must find that it pays to be ignorant.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Newt Gingrich, Loving America One Woman at a Time

2011-03-09T15:58:00.001-05:00

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, a serial adulterer, has helpfully explained to TV evangelist Pat Robertson’s network that some "not appropriate" things "happened in [his] life" partly due to his patriotism and his superb work ethic.

Newt Gingrich: “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them. I found that I felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness. Not God’s understanding, but God’s forgiveness. I do believe in a forgiving God. And I think most people, deep down in their hearts hope there’s a forgiving God.

There’s more blather along those lines at the CBN link. It’s clear that Newt, having sought and (apparently) obtained God’s forgiveness, is now seeking the presidency. These are the lines along which he hopes to defend his repulsive personal life.

The first tactic will be to describe his vile behavior using passive/semi-passive circumlocutions (‘mistakes were made’). The second is to be photographed with God at his side as often as possible, preferably doing His work castigating non-Christians and the non-forgiving.

And thirdly, Newt plans to trumpet his squalid record as further evidence he’s a super duper patriot. I can already envisage his campaign motto for 2012:

Loving America One Woman at a Time!

crossposted at unbossed.com

When senators won’t take your call

2011-03-05T11:29:00.002-05:00

This nauseating NYT profile of David Koch does have one perhaps unintentionally revealing passage. The very rich personage in this puff piece is quoted here referring to a prank call made last month by a Koch impersonator to the governor of Wisconsin, a conversation in which Scott Walker earnestly reassured the fake-billionaire that he could be counted on to crush the public unions.

Mr. Koch joked that the call could cause him problems. “I was thinking to myself, ‘My God, if I called up a senator or a congressman to discuss something with them, and they heard ‘David Koch is on the line,’ they’d immediately say, ‘That’s that fraud again — tell him to get lost!’ ” he said with a laugh.

I wonder how many non-rich Americans presume that, in the natural course of things, they can simply ring up a senator in Washington to “discuss something with them”? This is the explanation for the Supreme Court’s rather curious insistence that giving money to political causes has to be viewed as a form of free speech. For without it, how can you be sure that your phone call to a senator will even be taken?

Update The new danger that his calls might be ignored seems to be an obsession now for David Koch. He said something very similar in a Boston Globe interview: the other day:

"Right now, if I make a call to some important person and say my name is David Koch, they’re probably going to reject the call, thinking I’m another fraudster."

I wonder which people qualify as unimportant?

crossposted at unbossed.com

The drowning technique called waterboarding

2011-02-03T13:19:00.005-05:00

It's good to see that the New York Times has finally decided to call a spade a spade. For years it has followed the Bush administration’s lead in using euphemisms and circumlocutions to describe the notorious and plainly illegal interrogation techniques inflicted on prisoners held overseas and accused of terrorist activities. Though it has expressed some pride in the alleged candor of its terminology, the Times had always avoided calling torture by its name.

In particular, the Times employs several evasive phrases to describe so-called waterboarding: ‘the near-drowning technique’; ‘the simulated drowning technique’; and most bizarrely ‘the controlled drowning technique’. Collectively, they ratify the position adopted by the Bush administration by insinuating that drowning can be something other than drowning in the right circumstances. But drowning describes the filling of lungs with liquid, nothing more or less. It’s not something that can be ‘simulated’ or ‘near’, and ‘control’ is beside the point. You wouldn’t apply any of those terms to castration, say, if the government inflicted that on prisoners and then worked to reverse or mitigate the damage done. So why did the Times try for so many years to soften the plain fact that the US government was having men drowned?

Now at least the Times is starting to find the courage or sense to state the plain truth. In just the last day in an editorial as well as in an article reviewing Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir the NT Times has taken to using the unadorned expression "the drowning technique called [or 'known as'] waterboarding".

It seems that the Times made a recent decision to permit, perhaps even to prefer, honest language in this regard. On Jan. 19th of this year it posted an article on Guantanamo prosecutions by Charlie Savage that also used the same frank expression.

It appears that the Times was feeling its way tentatively toward candor back in November of 2010. On Nov. 14th it referred to "the drowning technique called waterboarding" in an article about an investigation of Dr. James E. Mitchell, a rogue psychologist who promoted torturous interrogation techniques under the Bush administration. However 4 days earlier it had used and subsequently retracted that language in an article on the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute anybody for destroying CIA videotapes of several interrogations that employed torture.

This appears to be an interesting case study in the Times’ timidity in the face of Orwellian language. The article as originally published contained the following details [highlighting is mine]:

The role of once-secret memorandums about interrogation techniques by politically appointed lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has been controversial. The documents, which leaked in 2004 when the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was in the headlines, asserted that the president, as commander in chief, has the constitutional power to override anti-torture statutes. The memos also claimed that certain techniques — like stripping prisoners naked, keeping them awake for long periods, slamming them into walls, and subjecting them to the drowning technique called waterboarding — did not amount to torture

~~More than two months later (sometime after Jan. 15, 2011)~~ At some later stage the article was revised. Only the newer version is available at the Times’ website. The most extensive alteration, indeed the only one that I find (this is not indicated by the Times), is that the foregoing paragraph was edited down to produce the following:

Mr. Holder was referring to once secret Justice Department memorandums asserting that certain interrogation techniques, like stripping prisoners naked, keeping them awake for long periods, slamming them into walls and subjecting them to waterboarding, would not violate antitorture laws.

In the original version I highlighted the parts that were removed subsequently. You can see how much that is purely factual has been stripped out of the original, all of it quite unflattering to the Bush administration. The later omissions included the phrase "the drowning technique", which was not even replaced by one of the Times' traditional evasive phrases.

It seems that the Times wasn’t quite ready last November to see the stark language of truth being used. But the policy of evasion regarding waterboarding (at least) has now been reversed.

Admittedly, the Times has twice in the past described waterboarding as “the torture technique”, in an editorial from 2008, and in a second one from 2009. But as far as I can determine it has never stated that candidly as a fact in a news story. And in any case it is only quite recently that the Times has become willing to go on record describing waterboarding as “the drowning technique”.

So two cheers for the new found courage of the New York Times’ sort-of convictions.

Update: It's not certain when the editing down of the Nov. 10 article happened, so the wording was revised to reflect that.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Birthright citizenship ninnies

2011-01-04T19:06:00.003-05:00

Over and over I'm amazed at the people who pass themselves off as experts on the "controversy" of birthright citizenship in the US. Nearly all of them exhibit a profound and perverse ignorance of both history and law. Typically they present the matter (falsely) as a question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment went too far in granting citizenship to all children born here - including (shudder) many sprang from the wrong sort of parents.

Here's Marc Lacey of the NY Times repeating this idiocy once again:

The next big immigration battle looming on the horizon centers on illegal immigrants’ offspring, who are granted automatic citizenship like all other babies born on American soil. Arguing for an end to the policy, which is rooted in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, immigration hard-liners describe a wave of migrants like Ms. Vasquez stepping across the border in the advanced stages of pregnancy to have what are dismissively called “anchor babies.”

It's about damn time that somebody set these clowns straight. Bigotry is all fine and good, I suppose, but how are we supposed to have a properly divisive public debate on this non-issue when the facts are all turned upside down?

Birthright citizenship is NOT "rooted in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution". It dates back to the Declaration of Independence, even before the (current) Constitution was adopted. English Common Law had traditionally made people born in English lands (including these colonies) subjects of the King.

As Supreme Court Justice Noah Swayne said in 1866 (United States v. Rhodes):

"All persons born in the allegiance of the king are natural-born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens. Birth and allegiance go together. Such is the rule of the common law, and it is the common law of this country…since as before the Revolution."

So it was simply assumed in 1776 that all people born in the states would become citizens; there was no need for an explicit assertion of that Common Law principle in the text of the Constitution (which does however refer to 'natural-born citizen[s]', thus demonstrating the principle was recognized).

All the 14th Amendment did, therefore, was to extend the normal expectation of birthright citizenship to the former slaves. For goodness sakes, how else could residents of America become citizens before 1865 if not for the principle that birth here made you a citizen?

I'm not going to discuss the more complicated question of how and when aboriginal Americans became US citizens, since that is not relevant to the faux-controversy du jour.

I will however mention this: Not only was this "issue" never seriously contested until recently, we can observe the principle of birthright citizenship being confirmed in federal court in the early 19th century...long before the 14th Amendment. For example, in 1830 (Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbor) a court case involved the question of citizenship for children born here during the Revolutionary War. This is a nice case for our purposes. The Supreme Court found that children born in New York in 1776 in the months before the British occupation possessed automatic American citizenship, whereas children born afterwards while the British army actually held the city became English subjects at birth.

In short, birthright citizenship is rooted in English Common Law, not in the 14th Amendment. Those who pretend that they're addressing a "controversy" about how the 14th Amendment was intended to apply are simply talking nonsense.

PA GOP violates the law and the rights of service members

2010-10-28T10:36:00.002-05:00

I’ve just received a flier in the mail from the Pennsylvania GOP that’s in clear violation of military law. It supports the re-election of Republican Congressman Charlie Dent (PA-15) and attacks his Democratic opponent, John Callahan. The flier, promoting Dent’s supposed support for military veterans, prominently employs a large photo of combat troops from the 1st Army Division. They are listening intently to an unseen speaker, presumably while on tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. At least one name tag is clearly visible.

Large bold letters accompany the photo: “Charlie Dent has received an “A” rating from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and he’s endorsed by the VFW.” Under the photo, very small print provides a disclaimer of sorts: “This photo does not imply endorsement by the Deparatment of Defense or any of its branches of the U.S. military.”

What the disclaimer does NOT say is that the PA GOP obtained permission from the DOD to use the photo in such a partisan campaign advertisement…much less the permission of the individual service members. I cannot believe that the GOP did obtain such permission because that would never have been granted. The US military has always been, from its very constitution, strictly apolitical.

The UCMJ prohibits all active duty personnel from engaging in political activities that would tend to represent a military service member as aligned with a particular candidate or party. Any allowable political activity must be conducted out of uniform. Here is a summary of DOD directives on permissible and impermissible political activity:

Any activity that may be viewed as associating the Department of Defense or the Department of Transportation, in the case of the Coast Guard, or any components of such Departments directly or indirectly with a partisan political cause or candidate shall be avoided.

[…]

Members of the Armed Forces on AD engaging in permissible political activities shall…

3. Refrain from participating in any political activity while in military uniform, as proscribed by DoD Directive 1334.1 (reference (f)), or using Government facilities or resources for furthering political activities.

Without their knowledge or permission, these soldiers have been co-opted against military regulations into Charlie Dent’s re-election campaign.

For any party to use a photograph of active duty troops in a partisan campaign ad is despicable. The PA GOP needs to apologize and Rep. Dent should distance himself from this attempt to use the US military as props in his campaign.

How do you subdue a people who will fight to the death over pine nut foraging rights?

2010-07-26T11:55:00.002-05:00

Herodotus records a Delphic oracle warning the early Spartans against trying to subdue Arcadia “where men eat acorns”. When the Spartan military marched into Arcadia anyway, they met disaster. Acorn-foraging became a by-word for the ruggedness of the famously indomitable population in that remote mountainous region.

So I took notice when I came across this SIGACT among the nearly 92,000 Afghan war documents published yesterday. It’s a report of September 2007 from the remote province of Nuristan, along the Pakistan border. This region was the setting for Kipling’s “The man who would be king”. Here’s the part of the report that caught my attention:

There is a feud/civil conflict developing between 3 villages (Nanglam, Mashpah, and Malel) over pine nut foraging rights. 1 Afghan national has been killed, and 2 injured. Waliswol Muhammad Ali is attempting to mediate.

So how does anybody imagine that coalition forces can ever impose their will upon a population that is willing to fight to the death over pine nut foraging rights?

A simple question encompassing a world of problems for the US-led occupation. Afghans are desperately poor, their economy rudimentary, and their society rough hewn. They fight to defend their honor and minor slights can lead to feuds lasting generations. Even where ethnic and sectarian rivalries are absent, such as in Nuristan, social fractures between families and villages are the very stuff of the social fabric. I cannot conceive why any outsiders would suppose they could ever bend such people to their will.

Indeed Nuristan now is firmly back under Taliban rule. Americans increasingly came under brutal attack in the province, as a 2008 document singled out the by NY Times shows. Less than a year after this report, the US military suffered its worst casualties of the war in an attack at the village of Wanat. A little more than a year later, the US withdrew all its forces from the province after one base was nearly overrun.

For all the confusion of bad intelligence and chaos on the ground in Afghanistan, the evidence of these Wikileaks documents could hardly be clearer about one thing: Coalition forces are way out of their depth in trying to get a purchase on rural Afghan society.

crossposted at unbossed.com

The New Pentagon Papers

2010-07-25T22:53:00.007-05:00

The nearly 92,000 secret documents from 6 years of US military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, obtained by Wikileaks and published simultaneously today by the New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel, bring to mind nothing so much as the Pentagon Papers published in 1971. They’re a very different kind of dossier, of course. The latter was an official Defense Dept. study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The current dossier is more random – and thus in many ways more enlightening - a trove of on-the-ground reports from military and intelligence operations.

But what it shares in common with the Pentagon Papers is this: It provides a devastating portrait of

a disastrous guerilla war that the public had already turned decisively against

military operations that both tactically and strategically are a mess beyond any reasonable hope of repair

intelligence operations that are acquiring almost no accurate, much less actionable, information about anything

American officials who appear to have no answers to the daily intractable problems they face in an increasingly unpopular occupation

an Afghan population that has huge and legitimate grievances against heavy-handed US attacks

an Afghan government that is corrupt, incompetent, and mistrusted in more ways than most of us could have imagined

grossly untrustworthy Afghan army and police forces

obscenely fraught relations with our untrustworthy “allies” in the region

an enemy that is better armed and more adaptable and successful than the public has been told

the history of a war that went to pieces far earlier than the US government had told the public

specific details about military operations that contradict what the US public had been told in the past

In short, just as with the Pentagon Papers, it is nearly impossible to read through the current dossier and conclude that this occupation is winnable; that the US military ever has had a coherent plan; that the government that American lives are being sacrificed for is solid, trustworthy, or has integrity; that our forces really know what is going on in the country they’re bogged down in; or that the US government has been honest about what we face there.

So the publication of these documents could prove to be a turning point in US involvement in Afghanistan. The Pentagon Papers proved to Americans, even to people who hadn’t been paying close attention to policy debates about the Vietnam War, that they’d been deceived for years by their own government’s grossly misleading public assessments of the situation there. The publication of these New Pentagon Papers ought to produce the same result.

The difference between 2010 and 1971, however, is that in an earlier day Americans in large numbers were prepared to sit down and read and discuss the secret documents. Today, I’m not so sure they’ll even bother. After all, virtually none of these documents fall below the 140-character threshold that appears to constitute the limit to attention spans in the US these days.

In addition, almost the entire Republican caucus in Washington is devoted to the idea that the single policy of Barack Obama’s that they can support is his decision (twice) to escalate the war in Afghanistan. It’s hard to imagine the opposition party allowing these unwelcome new facts to influence in any way their proud advocacy for an open-ended war on the Asian continent. I rather doubt that many in Congress from the President’s own party will want to embarrass him about the depressing picture these documents portray.

Obama himself, the last time he doubled the troops in Afghanistan (in December 2009), emphatically denied that Afghanistan was like Vietnam.

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized and we're better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history.

His administration certainly won’t be eager now to discuss whether Afghanistan is a quagmire. Even less will it want to allow public debate to be dominated by the apparent parallelism in the leaking of embarrassing documents that undercut the rationale for war. Not surprisingly, as soon as the world press reported on this dossier the White House released a statement denouncing the act of journalism as such rather than addressing the many concerns that readers of these documents would legitimately have.

I note in passing that on the main page of the White House website, under the heading ‘Issues’ you will find neither ‘Afghanistan’ nor ‘War’ (though ‘Rural’ and ‘Family’ both are somehow considered significant ‘Issues’).

So I guess we shall see whether the publication of the New Pentagon Papers has the effect that by rights it should have upon the course of this failed occupation.

In closing, I’d note the thing that struck me (as an historian) most forcefully about this trove of documents. I’ve already alluded to it. Nearly all the human intelligence gathered in the region by the US and evidently a good deal of the signal intelligence is highly fictionalized and therefore worthless - except as a reflection upon how grave our forces’ problems are there. Informants have many reasons to make things up, they’ve figured out what they can sell to us (some of this preposterous information is actually paid for), and US forces don’t have much reliable information to apply in testing the credibility of its sources. The task for Americans in Afghanistan is very much like trying to track a criminal suspect through a carnival hall of mirrors; something is going on, but who can say for sure what, where, when. This report from the Guardian is the best I’ve seen at highlighting that aspect of the documentary record:

Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred.

A retired senior American officer said ground-level reports were considered to be a mixture of "rumours, bullshit and second-hand information" and were weeded out as they passed up the chain of command. "As someone who had to sift through thousands of these reports, I can say that the chances of finding any real information are pretty slim," said the officer, who has years of experience in the region.

If anything, the jumble of allegations highlights the perils of collecting accurate intelligence in a complex arena where all sides have an interest in distorting the truth.

"The fog of war is particularly dense in Afghanistan," said Michael Semple, a former deputy head of the EU mission there. "A barrage of false information is being passed off as intelligence and anyone who wants to operate there needs to be able to sift through it. The opportunities to be misled are innumerable."

[…]

Afghanistan has a long history of intelligence intrigues that stretches back to the early 19th century. Afghans have learned to use intelligence as a tool to influence the foreign powers occupying their land. In the past quarter century it has become a lucrative source of income in a country with few employment opportunities.

As many on-the-ground truths as can be found by digging through the New Pentagon Papers, there are at least an equal number of on-the-ground fabrications, falsifications, and frauds. Lies can be as revealing as truths, but only if you’re willing to look the lies square in the face.

crossposted from unbossed.com

Here’s why you shouldn’t trust right-wing media ‘scandals’

2010-07-22T22:48:00.006-05:00

It’s really very simple, as anybody can attest who has ever seriously looked into a ‘scandal’ promoted by a right-wing news outfit: They do not scruple to lie, misrepresent, distort, deceive, selectively misquote, omit necessary context, and conceal critical information in order to score a partisan point. Nothing they say should ever be trusted without independent verification. Indeed my experience is that very rarely is it worth the bother even to try to verify their claims, so egregiously inaccurate and hyperbolic are their arguments. Such people view themselves as playing a role in the conservative propaganda machinery headed by Fox News and radio-ranting luminaries such as Rush Limbaugh. As such, they will fall over backwards to excuse even the most repulsively dishonest and manipulative behavior by their fellow partisans.

Almost incredibly, it appears that the Obama White House and much of the conventional media figured this obvious truth out only within the last day or so, after falling for yet another transparent fraud committed by the notorious huckster Andrew Breitbart. I would have thought that the last 19 years furnished ample evidence that right-wing media has little more than contempt for mamsy-pamsy standards of truthfulness and integrity – ever since it produced and flogged around a grossly misleading public opinion poll in order to boost the nomination of Clarence Thomas after he’d been accused of sexual harassment.

A case study

There shouldn’t be any doubt that right-wing media ‘scandals’ should be greeted with extreme skepticism, and yet the naïve continue to stumble along without ever taking a good hard look at how these frauds are perpetrated. So here is an example, chosen almost at random from the many daily ‘scandals’ flogged by right-wing blogs. Like so many other ‘scandals’ promoted by conservatives since 2008, this piece is transparently race-baiting. It has also been reproduced and quoted widely and uncritically. But above all, it’s marked by preposterously misleading assertions. The post is predicated entirely on the assumption that readers will not check the source material and discover its deceptions.

The author, William Tate, argues that the “Obama administration…faces a new [racial] bias claim” from the TARP Special Inspector General, Neil Barofsky. Tate would have us believe that Barofsky charges Obama with ensuring that GM and Chrysler dealerships were slated for closure based upon the race/gender of their owners.

Wonder of wonders, Tate is being deceptive. What follows are three obvious ways in which Tate has tried to mislead.

(i) Tate’s main evidence is a quotation that he rips out of context from the the TARP SIG report (PDF). Here is how the quotation is rendered by Tate:

[D]ealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships. [Emphasis added.]

He reproduces this one sentence without providing anything like adequate context. Quite the contrary, by careful choice of his words, Tate implies (a) that this was the method by which all closure decisions were made for both GM and Chrysler, and (b) that the Obama administration “forced” this method on them. Neither thing is true.

In fact, the quotation relates only to GM, which devised its own method without much oversight from the Obama administration (Barofsky’s report suggests there should have been more governmental involvement, not less). Furthermore, the quotation relates to a secondary, not the primary (much less the sole) method for selecting GM dealerships for closure. The primary method was based purely on two objective criteria for how well dealerships were performing. Those that met both criteria were slated for closure. Then some 1252 marginal dealerships, those that met one but not both criteria for closure, were reviewed in more detail and 364 of them were given reprieves on several bases. The main basis for these reprieves, the report says explicitly, was to save rural dealerships. The quotation reproduced by Tate refers only to the remaining marginal reprieves, where a GM dealership was retained even though it wasn’t rural.

In other words, Tate selectively quotes a single sentence from a complex discussion in order to whip up racial resentments by falsely suggesting that racial preferences factored in all the decisions to close GM and Chrysler dealerships, putting thousands of workers out of jobs.

The truth is far less explosive: At most, a small number of marginal GM dealerships were given reprieves because of racial/gender preferences.

Here is the full paragraph that Tate carefully edited:

GM officials attributed these inconsistencies (in granting reprieves to some but not all of the marginal dealerships) primarily to a desire to maintain coverage in certain rural areas where they have a competitive advantage over import auto companies that are not typically located in rural areas, although ultimately close to half of all of the GM dealerships identified for termination were in rural areas. Other dealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships.

For what it’s worth, later in the TARP SIG report there may be hints that those relatively few gender/racial preferences were based on corporate legal advice, perhaps due (?) to past accusations of GM-wide bias. In any event, it’s clear that Tate’s goal is to stoke racial animosities by misrepresenting what the Inspector General says. Here is Tate’s take-away from his selective quotation:

Thus, to meet numbers forced on them by the Obama administration, General Motors and Chrysler were forced to shutter other, potentially more viable, dealerships. The livelihood of potentially tens of thousands of families was thus eliminated simply because their dealerships were not minority- or woman-owned.

A series of bald assertions that simply are not true. Tate must know that they’re false, for why else would he omit the word “Other…” at the start of his quotation? He’s counting heavily on his readers’ gullibility.

(ii) Tate then proceeds to argue that “a reading of the IG's study makes plain that some dealership closings forced by the administration were based largely on politics”. He means that Obama wanted payback against Republican (rural) areas of the country he didn’t win in 2008.

Tate’s evidence? The fact that Barofsky states “ultimately close to half of all of the GM dealerships identified for termination were in rural areas.”

That is where raw, hard, sewage-filled Chicago politics came into play.

That’s it, Tate has nothing beyond a factoid about rural GM closures. Tate does not of course quote the full sentence nor supply the context, as I do above. Had he done so, it would have become immediately apparent to his readers that GM sought to lessen rural closures; that all closed dealerships were selected by an objective standard for poor performance; and that the standard was created by GM, not the White House.

The Barofsky report states explicitly that “SIGTARP found that [Obama’s] Auto Team was not involved in determining which dealerships to terminate.”

So not only is there not a shred of evidence that the Obama administration manipulated the closure process based on politics, the report indicates as clearly as possible that Tate’s central point is false.

(iii) Toward the end of his post, Tate puts in blockquotes three passages that he introduces as “details contained in the Barofsky report” and “essential underlying facts” in the report that the Treasury Dept. has not disputed. The first passage is the selective quotation discussed in part (i). Thus Tate implies that all these passages come from the Barofsky report. In the post as a whole, otherwise, Tate uses blockquotes only for quotations from the SIGTARP report.

But the second and third passages are in fact not quotations but Tate’s own hyperbole, each with only a short phrase snipped from the report. You’d have to be reading carefully, however, to figure out that these blockquotes are not marking actual quotations. Nor is Tate’s hyperbole here an accurate summary of the contents of the Barofsky report. The third passage in particular is egregiously misleading:

A disproportionate number of Obama-forced closings were of rural dealerships, in areas unfriendly to Obama, even though such closures could "jeopardize the return to profitability" for GM and Chrysler.

The latter part (about returning to profitability) is not an undisputed viewpoint, nor should Tate imply that it is one held by the Inspector General. It’s an opinion voiced by a representative from the Center for Automotive Research who was asked to critique the thinking of the Auto Team. Indeed that person describes any such jeopardy as “the worst case” scenario. Furthermore, there’s nothing in the SIGTARP report to prove that “a disproportionate number of…closings were of rural dealerships”. We aren’t given the proportions of rural and non-rural closings. And of course the report does not talk about political considerations in rural closures because it found no political involvement in the decisions.

From beginning to end, this flimsy piece is worse than a fiasco. It's not predicated on a misreading of the report, or mere sloppiness. It is deliberately and carefully disingenuous. It selects a few stray bits of authentic material and presents them in a package of analysis of such gross dishonesty as to transform these tatters into what appears, on first glance, to be a coherent tapestry of 'scandal'. The image collapses at the lightest touch, however, leaving behind only its filthy shreds.

The same is true of nearly all right-wing media 'scandals'.

Update: Here's a classic right-wing response to Tate's dishonest piece. Unlike nearly all conservative commentators, who simply swallowed Tate's lies whole, Ed Morrissey acknowledges the plain fact that the Obama administration had nothing to do with selecting the dealerships to close. None the less, Morrissey flails around trying to save Tate's false allegation (his title: "TARP audit on dealer shutdowns: Ethnic, gender issues trumped economics") by the most convoluted and bizarre argument imaginable. Among other things, it involves citing Tate for a "fact" that his own flimsy argument hinges on - the false assertion that "Barofsky actually found that closing dealerships wouldn’t save the automakers all that much money". (Barofsky said everybody agreed dealerships needed to be closed, but there were legitimate differences of opinion about the speed/timing of closures and the main benefits from them.)

In the end, Morrissey just flat out drops the question of "ethnic, gender issues". What's more, Morrissey then doesn't even come close to providing evidence to support his too clever reframing of Tate's racial argument - "why politics trumped business concerns" in the closure decisions. Instead, Morrissey just shifts the discussion to a different issue altogether by quoting another right-wing nut. Like Tate, Morrissey anticipates that the reader will swallow the hyperbolic allegations without noticing that they're unsupported. To judge by his commenters, that's exactly the reaction he gets. His post is a subtler version of Tate's manipulation, but no less deceptive.

crossposted from unbossed.com

Say goodnight to President Petraeus

2010-06-15T12:23:00.001-05:00

Today Gen. David Petraeus was being questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee about the quagmire in Afghanistan. As John McCain bemoaned that the US was planning not to extend indefinitely the surge Petraeus had wanted (on which see yesterday’s PR blitz by the Pentagon about vast Afghan mineral wealth), the general suddenly gawped and fainted. The hearing was suspended for a day to allow Petraeus to recover. He claimed afterwards that he was simply dehydrated…as if there were no beakers of water around.

With this public relations catastrophe, it’s now much less likely that Petraeus will be able to convert his apparent presidential ambitions into reality. For one thing, it raises further concerns about Petraeus’ physical fitness. Anyhow it’s simply not presidential to faint when you’re being asked difficult questions about your job performance, especially for a general. And, yes, Petraeus is painfully aware that his failure to stem the tide in Afghanistan is going to be a huge obstacle in his further ambitions.

I’ve never bought the hype about Petraeus’ supposed military genius and capabilities.

General Petraeus had built up the local police by recruiting officers who had previously worked for Saddam Hussein's security apparatus.

Although Mosul remained quiet for some months after, the US suffered one of its worse setbacks of the war in November 2004 when insurgents captured most of the city. The 7,000 police recruited by General Petraeus either changed sides or went home. Thirty police stations were captured, 11,000 assault rifles were lost and $41m (£20m) worth of military equipment disappeared. Iraqi army units abandoned their bases.

The general's next job was to oversee the training of a new Iraqi army. As head of the Multinational Security Transition Command, General Petraeus claimed that his efforts were proving successful. In an article in The Washington Post in September 2004, he wrote: "Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being re-established." This optimism turned out be misleading; three years later the Iraqi army is notoriously ineffective and corrupt.

General Petraeus was in charge of the Security Transition Command at the time that the Iraqi procurement budget of $1.2bn was stolen. "It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history," Iraq's Finance Minister, Ali Allawi, said. "Huge amounts of money disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal."

In any case Gen. Petraeus’ regular interference in domestic politics, such as his infamous op-ed published late in the 2004 presidential campaign, and even more his intrusion into the political debates regarding proposed surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been dangerous for our democracy. The Founders of our Republic were rightly worried that military officers’ ambitions would destabilize the nation. Petraeus has not only pushed his ambitions to an extreme not seen perhaps since Douglas MacArthur, he has even gone so far as to provide misleading testimony to Congress to further those ambitions. In his September 2007 testimony on the surge in Iraq, Petraeus used falsified maps that seemed designed specifically to obscure the extent of ethno-sectarian cleansing that had gone on in Bagdad while he was in command. Petraeus has never alerted Congress to that falsification much less publicly corrected his testimony.

I don’t trust the man, and I’ll be happy to see any presidential ambitions go quietly into the night.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Vast deposits of naïveté discovered in America

2010-06-14T11:22:00.005-05:00

This morning political commentators are all atwitter about James Risen’s NYT article about mineral reserves charted in Afghanistan by a USGS survey. In years to come these reserves could turn Afghanistan into another Saudi Arabia, we’re told. Bloggers have lapped this “news” up.

Risen presents the information as if he had a major scoop.

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

In fact, however, the survey was conducted between 2004 and 2007. Risen claims that it’s results were ignored until recently, when the Pentagon “came upon” the geological survey data while looking for ways to boost the country’s economy.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

Utter nonsense. In 2007 the Afghan government touted the survey to the world. In the time since then, it has been working to attract international developers for its copper and iron reserves – which appear to be the most valuable and accessible ones. Already in 2007 a Chinese company won a competition to lease the largest copper mine, agreeing to pay the Afghan government $400 million per year in taxes.

It’s hard to conceive that in the foreseeable future Afghanistan will be able to derive more than a few billion dollars per year in taxes/mineral royalties by exploiting its reserves to the fullest possible extent. For comparison, the current Afghan GDP is thought to be around $16 billion. In 2007, the UNODC estimated that opium accounted for half of the country’s ‘licit’ GDP, or about $4 billion. So mining is not going to turn Afghanistan into a rich state much less eliminate the opium trade.

Risen and his sources are trying to sell us a pipe dream.

The fact that the USGS survey is being recycled now as "news" tells you everything you need to know about how grim the actual news coming out of Afghanistan has become this year. The Pentagon “heroes” of Risen’s story are selling this “news” to (a) buy time with the US public for military policies that are failing in the field, and (b) distract attention from the fact that America is doubling down on behalf of a corrupt, ineffective, and illegitimate Karzai government. If Afghanistan has vast mineral wealth, as we’re supposed to believe, then perhaps it makes slightly more sense (in a blood-for-copper kind of way) that the US now appears to be committed to staying there forever.

The genesis of this NYT article can be attributed to the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda machinery, as Marc Ambinder at least recognizes to his credit.

The way in which the story was presented -- with on-the-record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM, no less -- and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war.

That could hardly be clearer. The narrative as presented by Risen is bizarrely slanted in favor of the Pentagon, and furthermore is full of glaring holes. What’s more the outdated “news” is being recycled in a way that is highly reminiscent of the DoD’s standard operating procedures under the Bush administration, whenever it needed to distract attention.

What it shows is that the US government thinks we’re suckers. The reaction of commentators to Risen’s “blockbuster” suggests that the government has pretty much got it right.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Rand Paul: Coal miners have gotta die

2010-05-21T15:44:00.003-05:00

This ought to go down well in rural Kentucky, far from his suburban base. Rand Paul implied this morning on ABC that sometimes coal miners just have to die. That’s the upshot of Paul’s perverse assertion that Americans shouldn’t be so ready to blame the mining corporations for disasters that occur in their mines. After complaining that the White House is unfairly blaming BP for its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Paul added:

And I think it’s part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it’s always got to be someone’s fault. Instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen. I mean, we had a mining accident that was very tragic and I’ve met a lot of these miners and their families. They’re very brave people to do a dangerous job. But then we come in and it’s always someone’s fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.

As a simple matter of fact, it always is someone’s fault when mining disasters occur. Mines are artificial. When they become deadly, it must be due to human agency. Nearly all deadly mining accidents in recent times are due ultimately to poor adherence to mining regulations, precisely because it costs money to uphold safety standards. No mining deaths are acceptable or excusable. Finding where fault lies in a mine disaster is exactly what the government should be doing, not looking the other way fatalistically.

Many commenters today have focused on Paul’s bizarre defense of BP, while nearly ignoring his even more shocking statement excusing the killing of coal miners. As environmentalists have warned for years, oil spills are a nearly inevitable part of offshore drilling (however badly BP screwed up in this case). It is not inevitable however that coal miners must die – at least not unless profits are put before safety. The notion that it’s a normal cost of business for a certain number of miners to die comes directly from the coal barons themselves. Even more than Paul has drunk deep from the oil companies’ wells, he has most shockingly imbibed the full ideology of the most ruthless coal corporations.

In his ABC comments Paul was trying to exculpate Massey Energy over the horrific disaster recently in one of its West Virginia mines, which took 29 lives. It was caused by methane gas buildup. Methane levels are strictly controlled for a reason. Had Massey wanted to spend the money, it could in fact have prevented any such buildup. The non-unionized Massey has long been notorious for its poor safety record. A single one of its mines in Pike County, Kentucky has been cited by MSHA for more than 3000 violations since 2005. This even though it appears from the immediate aftermath of the West Virginia disaster that inspections of Massey mines have been quite lax (MSHA suddenly began to find all manner of Massey violations that it had overlooked heretofore).

Rand Paul is simply indifferent or oblivious to the facts of the matter. Miners just gotta die because they do. That’s the privilege of the ideologue, to ignore the real world, actual history, and human suffering.

For Paul, an unfettered free market is a panacea for all of society’s problems…you know, the things created by government itself. Businesses can never be shown to be predatory or unscrupulous because that would tend to legitimize government regulation. Far better to let those miners perish, in the dark out of sight, than to rethink the purity of his ideology…not that it remains entirely pure whensoever the libertarian’s self-interest or personal preferences might be advanced through the agency of government. But hey consistency, hobgoblins and all that.

Speaking of consistency, political commentators in the corporate media have for more than a decade been insisting that the extremists on the right wing are mirrored by others on the left. That’s simply untrue. Specifically, there is no left-leaning equivalent of the fanatical Tea-baggers such as Rand Paul who would offer glib justifications for looking away when men are killed recklessly.

There used to be such leftists – all the way back in the 1930s, when some of Stalin’s apologists in America thought a few deaths here and there shouldn’t force them to rethink their rank ideology. But none of those clowns ever made their way into mainstream politics, most eventually smartened up and the rest long since faded into deserved obscurity.

By contrast, the unfettered-corporations-shall-be-our-saviours-but-taxes-are-the-spawn-of-satan kind of right-wingers have been very much with us without cease for more than a century. Their hold on the Republican Party is as strong as it has been for quite a while. There are plenty of these half-baked ideologues already serving in Congress, and now a truly pernicious version of this type has won the Republican Senatorial primary in Kentucky. There is no left-wing analog to the kind of craziness that has become mainstream within the Republican Party nationally, and there hasn’t been for decades.

Update: AP reporter Michele Salcedo interprets Rand Paul's comment on ABC as a reference to a smaller mine disaster at the Dotiki Mine in Kentucky, in which 2 miners died in a roof-collapse in April. Dotiki, operated by Webster Coal, has also been cited for safety violations many hundreds of times in recent months. Seventeen of those citations were for failing to secure the mine roof and walls adequately. And like Massey, the non-unionized Webster routinely contests many of the MSHA citations. The owner of Dotiki Mine, Alliance Resource Partners, has a miserable record of maintaining safety standards.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Torturing Americans

2010-03-08T15:47:00.003-05:00

Until about six years ago in the US we shared a broad consensus that torture was reprehensible, unjustifiable, illegal, and un-American. Then the public learned that the Bush administration allowed, then that it ordered the cruel treatment and torture of prisoners overseas. Hundreds of years of consensus suddenly began to unravel as Bush’s supporters sought to excuse these horrors. Led by Dick Cheney, who holds that the application of water torture against suspected terrorists is “a no-brainer”, Republicans boldly advocated for increased use of prisoner abuse. Reputable pollsters now regularly ask the US public whether they support torture, something which is prohibited under federal law as well as international treaties.

Central to the new enthusiasm for torture and cruelty – aside from a culture that celebrates sadism and an utter disregard for the rule of law – is the quaint notion that such abuse will be meted out only to foreigners. Torture’s cheerleaders imagine, or would have others imagine, that an impenetrable bulwark of some sort protects Americans from suffering similar abuse at the hands of our own government. That’s historically naivete on a grand scale.

But it’s also wrong as a matter of law. We’ve known or should have realized that long ago. Furthermore, it’s wrong too as a matter of fact. It turns out that two US citizens who voluntarily acted as whistleblowers to the FBI were, for that reason, imprisoned by the government, held incommunicado and without charge, and subjected to the now standard forms of prisoner abuse.

(i) First, let’s talk about the legal standing of the cruel mistreatment of prisoners, thanks to the practices of the Bush administration. The US public does not seem to realize that the infamous “enhanced interrogation techniques” may be applied against Americans because the federal government has determined that they are neither torture nor cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment (a determination never over-ruled in law). Can an American arrested for conspiracy to defraud, say, be subjected to hypothermia and “stress positions”? I’d venture that he may.

The “torture memo” authors created a golden shield for any government official who inflicted those EITs on prisoners by arguing that the techniques do not qualify as torture under US statute, nor do they meet the constitutional standard of cruel or unusual punishment. The latter ought to be particularly worrying for Americans.

The question arose because when Congress ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), it attached several reservations and understandings to the ratification. One of these concerned Article 16, which requires signatory states to prevent (without exception) the cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners held under their jurisdiction. The Congressional reservation declared that the prohibitions outlined in Article 16 were already covered by the US Constitution’s guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment (the 5th, 8th, and 14th Amendments), and therefore the US would treat Article 16 as a reassertion of those constitutional guarantees.

Even though the Bush administration and its “torture memo” authors argued that the Constitution does not apply to non-American prisoners held abroad (a position the Supreme Court rejected), it did have to admit that the CAT does apply to them. Therefore it could not inflict mistreatment that violated Article 16, that is to say, that violated the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The “enhanced interrogation techniques”, so argued the Bush administration, did not rise to the level of cruel and unusual punishment.

That is a long way of saying what few in the US dare to acknowledge: That if the government could apply those forms of abuse to non-American prisoners, then it can use the same legal rationale for abusing American prisoners in similar fashion. Any prisoners…for the Constitutional protections don’t have exceptions based on time or place or circumstances. If it wasn’t cruel to subject prisoners at Gitmo to prolonged sleep deprivation and waterboarding, then in principle it would not be cruel to do the same to a common criminal suspect.

(ii) As a matter of fact, Americans citizens have already been subjected to these cruel techniques. Through a federal lawsuit directed against Donald Rumsfeld that is now set to proceed, we learn more (via) about two FBI whistleblowers working in Iraq who were imprisoned in 2006 and mistreated by US forces, though the US military was fully aware of who the two men were. The details of their allegations are laid out in this March 5 ruling by US District Judge Wayne Andersen (PDF). The Judge rejected Rumsfeld’s attempt to have the lawsuit dismissed, holding that his qualified immunity from being sued for his actions as Defense Secretary did not indemnify him against a legitimate complaint such as this one.

Allegedly the two men, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, began working with the FBI to expose corruption by the contractor they were working for in Iraq, Shield Group Security. When SGS all but held Vance and Ertel hostage outside the Green Zone, two US officials they were working with in Iraq arranged for the US military to rescue them. Back in the US Embassy, they then gave further evidence of SGS corruption to an FBI agent and two Air Force intelligence officers.

A few hours later, however, the US military arrested Vance and Ertel, took them to two successive military camps, and began subjecting them to various forms of abuse approved by the Bush administration: strip searching, prolonged solitary confinement, violence (being slammed into a wall), threats of violence, threats of indefinite detention, false allegations, psychological manipulation, extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation, extremes of sound and light, yelling, denial of food, water, and medical care. In other words, they were subjected to many of the standard “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Vance and Ertel were refused permission to see an attorney, and were told that they were being held as “security internees”. They were given a kangaroo court hearing at which they were denied attorneys, denied the right to know the evidence against them, denied the right to confront witnesses against them, and their requests to have witnesses and evidence introduced on their behalf was denied as well. Nor could they testify for each other.

Ertel was held for a further three weeks, Vance for nearly three months, after these hearings. Neither were ever charged with any crimes.

They are suing Rumsfeld because he specifically and repeatedly (in 2002 and 2003) authorized the interrogation techniques that were applied to them while in US military custody. They also charge Rumsfeld with denying their due process rights.

Judge Andersen found that the plaintiffs made a sufficiently compelling case that Rumsfeld is accountable for these alleged abuses that the case should go forward. With particular regard to their allegations of physical and psychological abuse while in custody, his ruling, he declared, …

…represents a recognition that federal officials may not strip citizens of well-settled constitutional protections against mistreatment…

Andersen may be right that the issue of mistreatment of prisoners has been, well, settled in law. Whether it is also settled in public opinion any longer, however, is more a matter of debate.

Perhaps if this suit against Rumsfeld does go to trial, American citizens will finally begin to comprehend that if torture and cruelty is suitable for anybody, then it is suitable for everybody.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Lies are awkward things

2010-03-08T12:04:00.002-05:00

Now that many prominent Republicans are denouncing the McCarthyite smear campaign against DOJ attorneys being orchestrated by Keep America Safe, Liz Cheney and William Kristol are scrambling to recast themselves as innocuous good-government types. Indeed. Their attacks were simply misunderstood, they say. KAS never meant to impugn the loyalty or “values” of the lawyers hired by the Obama administration, its leaders began to claim late last week. Instead they just wanted DOJ to release the lawyers names. Later, when the names had been released, it turned out that they just wanted DOJ to explain whether those attorneys were working on any issues related to Guantanamo prisoners. It’s just a call for transparency, you see, not at all a political hatchet job - as Kristol helpfully explained in his characteristically dismissive tone:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that another left-wing advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, is circulating a letter condemning what the letter describes as “a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in previous legal practice, either represented Guantanamo detainees or advocated for changes to detention policy.” The Human Rights Watch letter mischaracterizes the “attacks” as saying “that the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees.” In fact, the main issues in the debate have been whether Congress and the public are simply entitled to know who these lawyers are, and the question of whether former pro bono lawyers for terrorists should be working on detainee policy for the Justice Department.

In other words, Cheney and Kristol hope to wriggle free of the McCarthyism charge because the KAS ad smeared the DOJ attorneys with innuendo, which is after all subject to interpretation. Unfortunately for KAS, however, its campaign also dealt in deliberate lies as I pointed out last Thursday here. At the time I emailed KAS spokesman Aaron Harison asking him to explain the assertion in question. Though he’s a veteran of John McCain’s rapid-response team from the 2008 election, Harison still has not responded to my query more than three days after I sent it to him.

Lies must be awkward things to walk back.

The lie, boldly stated by Harison last week, is that the DOJ attorneys under attack had represented “terrorists, many of whom killed Americans”. As I explained here, that is utterly false.

I sent Harison an email at KAS asking for an explanation of that comment: "Which terrorists specifically are you referring to, and which DOJ lawyers represented them?" No response has been forthcoming.

Little wonder. The lie is not incidental. It’s a bald-faced lie. It is a gross escalation of the campaign by Keep America Safe to evoke public fear and loathing of the DOJ attorneys. And it has nothing to do with transparency, or what issues these attorneys are working on, or whatever other plausible sounding rationales that KAS might dream up in the future to try to justify its egregious attack. KAS won’t address this lie because it cannot and maintain the fiction that it has been misunderstood.

Lies are very awkward things.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Further Annals of Illiteracy

2010-03-07T12:48:00.001-05:00

The knee-jerk analysis of Instapundit is generally so slipshod as to merit no notice, but this op-ed is remarkable by even his own low standards. Glenn Reynolds argues that whereas the vast majority of Americans think the federal government lacks the consent of the governed, nearly two-thirds of our political rulers imagine that they do have this consent. And the other third who don’t “presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.” He construes a revolutionary scenario from this alleged chasm in perceptions (which somehow he likens to Schlitz beer), though Reynolds holds out hope that America can be “transformed” now without violence.

The chasm into which he thinks the country’s political structure is tumbling, however, is a figment of his own illiteracy.

Reynolds bases his argument on a poll that he hasn’t read carefully. The right-winger Scott Rasmussen produced a survey last month on public perceptions of whether the government has the consent of the governed. Only 21% of his respondents overall thought so, though 63% of a group he terms the “Political Class” believe that it does. Reynolds assumed for no apparent reason that the “Political Class” are politicians in Washington. That’s simply false.

Rasmussen for some time has been pushing the Republican-friendly notion that the nation is divided between a group of “Mainstream Americans” who have a “populist” distrust of government, and a group Rasmussen tendentiously calls the “Political Class”, that is to say people who have considerable trust in government. To identify these notional groups, Rasmussen regularly asks the following three loaded questions of poll respondents - the apparent intent being to show that a large proportion of the public has negative views of the (Democratically controlled) federal government.

The questions used to calculate the Index are:

-- Generally speaking, when it comes to important national issues, whose judgment do you trust more - the American people or America’s political leaders?

-- Some people believe that the federal government has become a special interest group that looks out primarily for its own interests. Has the federal government become a special interest group?

-- Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors?
To create a scale, each response earns a plus 1 for the populist answer, a minus 1 for the political class answer, and a 0 for not sure.

Those who score 2 or higher are considered a populist or part of the Mainstream. Those who score -2 or lower are considered to be aligned with the Political Class. Those who score +1 or -1 are considered leaners in one direction or the other.

Simplistic, leading and manipulative, yes, but clear in any case. Reynolds didn’t bother to read Rasmussen’s description of who comprised his “Political Class”. Either that or Reynolds decided it would be fun just to make things up and see how many fools fall for the stunt.

VA Attorney General: Colleges have no authority to renounce bigotry

2010-03-05T17:27:00.000-05:00

The proudly homophobic new Attorney General of Virginia, Kenneth Cuccinelli, didn’t waste much time in trying to force Virginia’s public colleges and universities to eliminate the protections against discrimination that they’ve extended to sexual orientation. The Washington Post has obtained a letter dated March 4, 2010 that he sent to every public institution of higher learning. In it, Cuccinelli advises them that they lack the authority to foreswear such bigotry without explicit approval from the state’s General Assembly and from him. Since the Assembly has considered and rejected attempts to extend anti-discrimination protections for sexual orientation to all state employees, says Cuccinelli, by adopting their own policies the colleges and universities are flying in the face of the Assembly’s deliberate acceptance of bigotry against homosexuals.

Cuccinelli is a real piece of work. Here is the Virginia Pilot’s assessment of his candidacy last October:

He sponsored a bill to waive unemployment compensation costs for companies that fire workers for not speaking English on the job. The measure would have affected only legal workers because illegal immigrants don’t qualify for unemployment benefits.

Cuccinelli’s views on reproductive rights don’t align with those of most Virginians. He favors legislation that would grant legal rights to fetuses at conception. He has sponsored bills requiring strict regulations that would put most abortion clinics out of business. He voted against a bill stating that contraception is not abortion.

He declined to commit to a nondiscrimination policy against gays and lesbians observed by former Attorney General Bob McDonnell: “ My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that. ... They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society.”

To put it politely, Cuccinelli’s election would bring embarrassment to Virginia, instability to the state’s law firm and untold harm to the long list of people who don’t fit his personal definition of morality.

Cuccinelli’s letter is available here (PDF). It is a fiercely determined attempt to bend the state college administrations to his will. Cuccinelli admits hastily that their Boards of Visitors “have the authority to make needful rules and regulations”, but proceeds to ignore that power in his discussion of why they should overturn their anti-discrimination policies. They “are, at all times, subject to the control of the General Assembly.” Hence, Cuccinelli argues, if the Assembly hasn’t ordered them to renounce discrimination against homosexuals then they’re actually overstepping the limits of their authority to regulate themselves if they do renounce it.

Besides, Cuccinelli asks, what would happen if homosexuals take these anti-discrimination policies seriously and get all uppity and legal on you when you do discriminate against them?

If you think that this right wing nut’s argument is preposterous, then you aren’t alone. The opening of his letter is revealing. Cuccinelli is very coy about what inspired him to raise this issue in the first place. He refers vaguely to “several inquiries” that “have been made” (by whom?) into the colleges’ authority to develop their own non-discrimination policies, and to “more questions” that arose (from?) about the application of his office’s advice. So, he says, the current letter is being sent out to “ensure that no confusion exists” about, well, what he wants the colleges to do.

In other words, Cuccinelli decided it was high time to meddle. He's an angry sort of man and he should succeed in stirring up more anger before he's finished.

Another lie from the McCarthyites at Keep America Safe

2010-03-04T23:51:00.003-05:00

This week Keep America Safe released a video broadly impugning the loyalty of several lawyers hired by Obama’s Justice Department. The lawyers had represented or otherwise contributed to court filings on behalf of several prisoners held at Gitmo. Keep America Safe, led by Liz Cheney and William Kristol, demanded that DOJ release their names and dubbed them ‘the al Qaeda 7’. The video asked “Just whose side are they on?”, implying clearly that the lawyers cannot be trusted to place the interest of the US above those of the ‘terrorists’ they once advocated for. Said KAS spokesman Michael Goldfarb:

“They have propagandized on behalf of our enemies, engaging in a worldwide smear campaign against the CIA, the U.S. military and the United States itself while we are at war.”

After this crude smear campaign by KAS caused widespread revulsion, another spokesman, Aaron Harison, and Cheney herself tried to deny that the ad “question(s) anybody’s loyalty”. But of course McCarthyism is exactly the game that KAS is up to. Harison drove that point home today by adding a shiny new lie to the gross innuendo and fear-mongering that KAS specializes in.

The DOJ lawyers in question, Harison said, had chosen to defend “terrorists, many of whom killed Americans”. No matter how you look at it, that allegation is false.

The DOJ lawyers represented or contributed to filings for various Guantanamo prisoners, but none of them have been convicted of killing anybody.

Only one of those prisoners, Omar Khadr, even faces such an allegation. But Khadr hasn’t been proven to be a terrorist – and he’s certainly not “many” terrorists. The allegation is that while a boy he killed a single US soldier, not multiple “Americans”. Furthermore, the unproven allegation is based on flimsy evidence and a seemingly coerced confession.

So even if you assume that each and every Gitmo prisoner is indisputably and most definitely a terrorist and that all allegations are true (as Dick Cheney and his brood have tried to train us to do), you still can’t back up the claim that “many” of the men represented by these DOJ lawyers “killed Americans”. It’s a lie.

Not a simple lie. There’s nothing simple about the elaborate smear campaign that KAS is orchestrating. Just a damned lie.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Politico points fingers

2010-02-28T16:03:00.001-05:00

At Politico, Michael Calderone is wringing his hands over journalists’ failure to properly vet presidential candidates. John Edwards, he complains, was allowed to get away with lies and indulge in a “compulsive vanity that left some people close to him questioning his judgment and even his grip on reality”. And “that failure is worrisome in a changed political world” in which politicians can quickly gain a lot of popular support without necessarily having much credibility or substance. He goes on to quote Marc Ambinder on those who helped to shield Edwards’ bizarre obsessions and manipulative behavior from scrutiny: “If you enable it, you are responsible in some ways for the fallout.”

This is the same Politico that made itself utterly notorious during 2009 by serving as an uncritical mouthpiece for the dishonest, vacuous, and tendentious ravings leveled by Dick Cheney against the new administration. The former vice president’s disdain for the truth has been exposed so many times over the years that you’d think no journalists would grant him much credibility on anything, least of all any topic where he has an axe to grind. And yet, even when exposed to withering criticism from all sides for serving as Cheney’s stenographers, Politico continues to try to defend their news judgment and, yes, even Cheney’s grip on reality.

Last month Jason Linkins put his finger on the main reason why Politico has persisted in this tawdry love affair with Cheney:

If it were possible to, say, hog-tie [Politico editor] John Harris with Wonder Woman's truth-compelling Golden Lasso, here's what he'd say about the Politico and Dick Cheney: the paper and the former vice president are in a co-dependent, enabling relationship. Cheney is willing to provide the paper with exclusive commentary on topics of his choosing, that Politico can then use to garner page views and attention from other media outlets, who deem the things Cheney says to be newsworthy. The cost that Cheney exacts from Politico is the promise to not apply any sort of critical thought to his ramblings. And so, the two combine to create mutually beneficial, journalism-like word salsa, contrived and calibrated for maximum attention-getting.

Then, Cheney goes back to his hidey-hole, where he can avoid confrontation.

Lies, compulsive vanity, poor judgment, weak grip on reality, lack of credibility and substance. If only they could fit all that on the masthead over at Politico, they’d really be cooking.

Yoo climbs down from his cross

2010-02-25T01:25:00.001-05:00

Showing the same poor judgment that informed virtually every sentence of his perverse OLC output, John Yoo decided to go into print with this deliciously self-pitying tribute to his own martyrdom at the hands of an unappreciative world. It turns out that Yoo has not been doing the rounds for the last several years trying to defend his shoddy legal work under the Bush administration in order to retrieve his own shattered reputation. No, his motives, he assures us, have been pure and selfless. Yoo was intent instead on saving the Obama presidency by “winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe”.

Yep, what with all those OLC memos of his that have been withdrawn, renounced and subjected to ridicule, Yoo single-handedly saved a president who nonetheless turned on him and hounded him - by viciously “letting loose” an investigation that began under Bush, and, oh yeah, allowing his Attorney General to investigate everybody else except Yoo’s complicity in torture. Don’t you just hate when that happens?

Actually, Yoo is far too modest in his claims. His legacy to America is much greater and can’t be circumscribed by the term of a single presidency. No, as I commented last month, his gift to constitutional democracy ultimately is the Justice Department’s refusal to punish Yoo and his OLC cohorts for having indemnified government officials who engaged in egregious lawlessness and human rights abuses. Yoo has worked to guarantee that every president in the future may violate clearly established law with impunity for himself and his assistants, by the simple device of hiring unscrupulous lawyers to produce the necessary advice, however preposterous, sufficient to shield the wrongdoers from future prosecution. Call it an all-out assault on the rule of law. It’s quite a legacy, and worth coming down from one’s cross to receive our thanks and plaudits.

And that’s quite a cross Yoo has going there for him. He’s determined to settle scores with any who dare to investigate him, especially the ethics officials at OPR who produced a scathing report last year on Yoo’s torture memos. One paragraph in Yoo’s WSJ op-ed is unusually…instructive.

Rank bias and sheer incompetence infused OPR's investigation.

Self-awareness was never John Yoo’s strong point.

OPR attorneys, for example, omitted a number of precedents that squarely supported the approach in the memoranda and undermined OPR's preferred outcome.

This from the man whose memos famously omitted to discuss any number of precedents that undermined the Bush administration’s preferred outcomes.

They declared that no Americans have a right of self-defense against a criminal prosecution, not even when they or their government agents attempt to stop terrorist attacks on the United States.

Umm, no, OPR did not do that.

OPR claimed that Congress enjoyed full authority over wartime strategy and tactics, despite decades of Justice Department opinions and practice defending the president's commander-in-chief power.

No they didn’t.

They accused us of violating ethical standards without ever defining them.

No, they didn’t.

They concocted bizarre conspiracy theories about which they never asked us, and for which they had no evidence,

No they had plenty of evidence, though admittedly they might have had a good deal more if Yoo had not deleted and expunged all record of so much of his email correspondence.

even though we both patiently—and with no legal obligation to do so—sat through days of questioning.

Whoops, back up on his cross.

Anyway, this op-ed is worth drawing attention to if only because of the accompanying illustration. Notice how Uncle Sam is hampered in his self defense by the scales of justice. So I guess it’s alright to throw those out now.

David Addington did approve of cruel CIA interrogation techniques

2010-02-24T17:00:00.001-05:00

So far Dick Cheney’s notorious former legal counsel and confidant, David Addington, has managed to maintain the pretense that he was not directly involved in authorizing the use of torture and cruel or degrading treatment of prisoners under the Bush administration. Now we have documentary evidence of his direct involvement.

The very right-wing Judicial Watch has just released a batch of CIA documents it obtained through a FOIA request. Judicial Watch is seeking to embarrass congressional Democrats by showing that the CIA briefed them under Bush about the abusive interrogation methods. Whether or not the documents actually manage to embarrass those Democrats, one of them does embarrass Addington.

Here they are (PDF). One formerly classified memo from February 4, 2003 summarizes a CIA briefing given to Sen. Roberts and the staffers for Sen. Rockefeller regarding the ongoing abusive CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects. It reads in part (my emphasis):

The enhanced [interrogation] techniques were described in considerable detail, including how the water board was used. The [CIA] General Counsel described the process by which the techniques were approved by a bevy of lawyers from the NSC, the Vice President’s office and the Justice Department, including the Criminal Division and the Attorney General, who opined that the techniques were legal under U.S. law.

The Vice President’s lawyer is almost certainly Cheney’s eminence gris, David Addington.

In the past Addington has frequently been linked to the development of torture and abusive techniques. But none of these allegations have been documented and Addington has denied or evaded the charges.

In 2004 Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman reported (the original link evidently is defunct) that aides to presidential counsel Alberto Gonzales said that it was Addington, not Gonzales, who drafted the January 25, 2002 memo that argued some provisions of the Geneva Conventions were “quaint” and “obsolete”. Addington continued for years to lead the fight in denigrating the applicability of the Geneva Conventions, so he may well have been involved in drafting the January 25, 2002 memo.

Addington also reportedly played a key role in shaping the August 1, 2002 Bybee Memo authorizing a list of abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding - which plainly was treated as torture under established US law. The recently released OPR final report into misconduct by the DOJ torture memo authors (especially John Yoo and Jay Bybee), focuses at length upon revisions to the draft Bybee memo that seemed to be requested in July 2002 by Addington and Gonzales. The OPR report highlights what appears to be an elaborate attempt by Yoo, Bybee, Jennifer Koester (another unindicted torture memo author), and others in the Bush administration to cover the tracks that led back to the direct involvement of Gonzales and Addington in shaping the Bybee Memo. I’ll write more later about this episode because it is critical, I believe, to understanding why David Margolis rejected the OPR’s finding that Yoo and Bybee engaged in misconduct. Suffice it to say here that the apparent attempt by Yoo and others to shield Gonzales and Addington from any direct responsibility for the Bybee Memo involves a series of bizarre and incredible assertions, laid out by OPR at pp. 46-53. Among other oddities, nobody from DOJ or the White House who attended a critical July 16, 2002 meeting to discuss the draft memo can remember what Gonzales or Addington said about it, even though that meeting immediately preceded the most controversial additions to the memo.

Philippe Sands has also reported that Addington was part of a high-level delegation (which also included Gonzales) that visited Guantanamo prison in September of 2002 and pressured the military there to introduce more abusive interrogation techniques.

With the help of friends over the years, Addington issued dismissive and vague denials that he was directly involved in drafting or shaping any torture memos or advocating for specific abusive practices. When called to testify before Congress about his activities, Addington was snidely dismissive of questions and frequently evasive. He did however deny that he pressured anybody at Gitmo in 2002 to adopt abusive techniques. Addington also insinuated that he made no suggestions to the OLC lawyers at the July 16, 2002 meeting. In response to their briefing about the draft Bybee Memo, Addington claims, he said nothing more than “Good” before sending them on their way.

In short, until now David Addington has managed to bob and weave, obfuscate and deny every time he has been implicated in direct involvement in shaping or authorizing torture and abuse of prisoners. Now however we have a CIA document that says the Vice President’s lawyer approved of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” being used by the CIA at the start of 2003.

Say so long to plausible deniability, David.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Is honesty a “known, unambiguous obligation or standard”?

2010-02-19T20:49:00.004-05:00

The final Justice Department assessment of the professional conduct of the torture memo authors (PDF) has been ~~dumped~~ released unceremoniously this Friday afternoon. The assessment is not posted, nor is there a press release about it, at the DOJ website.

The draft report(s) by the Office of Professional Responsibility had found John Yoo and Jay Bybee guilty of misconduct – rather remarkably, given that OPR investigations of wrongdoing by Justice Department officials almost always lead nowhere. However, as anticipated (see here), in its final assessment the DOJ softened the draft (OPR) findings to the point that Yoo and Bybee were found only to have exercised “poor judgment”. Absent a finding of misconduct, they will not be disbarred or in Judge Bybee’s case, face impeachment. Indeed it looks like there’ll be no penalty at all for having given the green light to the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody.

David Margolis, an associate deputy attorney general, is the man who decided to let Yoo and Bybee off with a slap on the wrist. His reasoning? Essentially he argues that “a finding of misconduct depends on application of a known, unambiguous obligation or standard to the attorney’s conduct. I am unpersuaded that OPR has identified such a standard.”

I’ll have more to say later about this final assessment and the politics behind Margolis’ decision once I’ve digested the whole thing. For now, I’ll simply note that Margolis (who is said to be extremely sensitive to which way the political winds are blowing in DC) is talking through his hat here. The memos generated by Yoo and Bybee are rife with gross inaccuracies and demonstrable falsehoods. Is it not a known and unambiguously accepted standard that attorneys are obligated to be honest and scrupulous in their representations of law and jurisprudence? At a minimum?

To cite but one example, which I reported on here last August, John Yoo falsified what the UN Convention against Torture says in his memo from April 28, 2003. In that memo, Yoo claimed that …

"the [Torture] Convention permits the use of [cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment] in exigent circumstances, such as a national emergency or war."

Yoo’s memo added no qualifications, no evidence, no citation, and no argument to justify that statement. The statement is absolutely false, as I documented in my post last August. In other words, Yoo lied in order to provide the Bush administration with a back-door justification (“national emergency”) for torture where none exists legally.

Whatever else one may think of the dubious propositions advanced by Yoo in that memo, it could not possibly be any clearer that he has engaged in misconduct in this instance.

Why does David Margolis not recognize honesty and factual accuracy as an unambiguous obligation for Justice Department attorneys?

Update: In his assessment of the OPR report, Margolis does in fact get around to the question of honesty - admitting that professional rules obligate DOJ attorneys to refrain from provinding to a client advice that is knowningly or recklessly false or issued in bad faith. Their legal work also must be competent.

Nevertheless, Margolis goes on to consider and dismiss all the evidence that the OPR report assembled to show that John Yoo's work to justify the torture and abuse of prisoners was incompetent and knowingly or recklessly false or issued in bad faith. It's a tour de force of seeing-no-evil. I simply cannot imagine how any candid investigation of John Yoo's legal output could avoid the conclusion that he knowingly falsified both law and case law in the baddest of faith.

crossposted at unbossed.com

The warmonger's transparent lies

2010-01-30T23:36:00.000-05:00

AA Gill describes what it was like listening to Tony Blair's testimony to the Chilcot inquiry on Friday, from inside the press room:

The verbiage crept out of the screen and slid off my brain like spit off a window.

It's the most trenchant description I've read of Blair's comportment at the hearing into the Iraq War: His lies were as transparent as spit.

The OPR’s Torture Memo report will be an assault on the rule of law

2010-01-30T17:07:00.001-05:00

According to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Reponsibility (OPR) is about to release an investigation that lets off the 2002 Torture Memo’s authors, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, with no more than a mild rebuke.

The report originally criticized them strongly for misconduct in producing that brief for torture with reckless disregard for legal precedent. But Bush’s Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, didn’t care for that finding. First he and then Eric Holder allowed the CIA to weigh in on the OPR draft report, whose criticisms of Yoo and Bybee were then toned down radically.

Reportedly the final draft will charge them only with showing “poor judgment”, a finding so flaccid that it does not even require a DOJ referral to state bar associations for disciplinary action against Yoo and Bybee. Bybee, a federal judge, could have faced impeachment.

The dumbing down of the findings clearly have politicized the OPR report, which is remarkable given that Yoo and Bybee stand accused of tailoring their legal opinion to suit the wishes of top Bush administration officials. It amounts to another searing searing indictment of the Holder Justice Department for failing to hold any high ranking officials accountable for the torture of prisoners under the Bush administration.

Perhaps worse, it encourages future presidents to develop further the Bush administration’s diabolical experiment in indemnifying government officials against gross lawlessness. What Bush’s lawyers were busy doing in the aftermath of 9/11, essentially, was generating junk legal opinions as a smokescreen behind which the CIA and others could operate with impunity no matter how egregiously and transparently illegal their activities. If they were ever threatened with prosecution, they could claim that they acted in good faith based upon these (junk) opinions. Now the OPR, by failing even to recommend that Yoo and Bybee be disbarred for their handiwork, is about to wink at that practice. It’s an assault upon constitutional democracy.

I’ll have more later on this subject. In particular I wish to highlight something that appears to be overlooked in commentary so far. That is, the revision of the report shields not only Yoo and Bybee, but also Alberto Gonzales and David Addington. It may well be that protecting the latter two (and thus their patrons, Bush and Cheney) was the main object in blunting OPR’s findings.

Two questions for Tony Blair

2010-01-29T00:54:00.000-05:00

On Friday former Prime Minister Tony Blair finally will address the Chilcot inquiry, where he will face questions about the Iraq War. The inquiry so far hasn’t uncovered much new information, partly because the British government continues to refuse to make public some of the most embarrassing documents that any serious inquiry would have to refer to. Still, the British papers are full this week of suggested questions to put to the man who backed George Bush’s invasion to the hilt. However technical, these proposed questions will never succeed in getting the slippery Blair to actually come clean about anything significant.

In fact, Blair is inclined to charge that the Chilcot inquiry trivializes the larger questions about Iraq.

He complained to a friend: "It's called the Iraq inquiry, but where are the Iraqis?"

Fair enough, why not put the Iraqis back into the picture? Here are two questions that I propose ought to be put to Tony Blair on this, perhaps the last occasion when he’ll be grilled in public about his decision to invade Iraq. These are questions that, curiously enough, nobody ever seems to think to raise with Blair (or Bush).

1. How many Iraqis have died in the Iraq War?

2. Have you ever attended any of their funerals?

CIA torture pitchman admits he scammed the public

2010-01-28T11:02:00.001-05:00

Remember John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who popped up in December 2007 to tell America how wonderfully effective – and expeditious – the CIA’s torture of the prisoner Abu Zubaydah had been? Kiriakou said that he knew for a fact that Zubaydah revealed all manner of dangerous al Qaeda plots after being waterboarded a single time.

It was music to the ears of right-wing torture apologists…though Kuriakou’s most important assertions couldn’t be squared with the other information we already had about Zubaydah’s torture (in particular that it had generated all manner of unreliable allegations).

Now Kiriakou is back, hawking a book. Guess what? On the next to last page, he admits that it was all a campaign of misinformation.

At the time of his first interview on ABC News, I argued that Kiriakou’s account was full of bizarre contradictions because “it is an elaborate game of spin gone badly awry”.

If you listen to this long, multi-part interview at ABC, you can’t help but notice the mountain of BS that Kiriakou piles up. It’s quite clear that what he’s attempting to do is to provide cover for the CIA and, perhaps, the Bush administration.

For example, he admits just enough of what we already know about the facts of this program, while larding it with slabs of self-justifying circumstantial assertions, as to slip into “evidence” a range of unproven and, on closer inspection, dubious propositions. All of these dubious propositions tend in one direction, to excuse or mitigate any of the kinds of charges that are being directed against those who engaged in, acquiesced in, or ordered the torture of prisoners in CIA custody.

It was a crude campaign of misinformation. The US news media (ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito especially) conducted themselves deplorably in propagating this nonsense uncritically.

Indeed, as Jeff Stein documents, when evidence subsequently trickled out that Kiriakou wasn’t actually present in Thailand during Zubaydah’s interrogation, and that the prisoner was in fact waterboarded at least 83 times, ABC began to backtrack quietly by posting an endnote on line to its report – in which Kiriakou tried to explain his false assertions.

"When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being water boarded on one occasion. It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."

So there you are, dear reader, just in case you happened to go back recently to the original 2007 ABC report to see what revisions had been made to it. Quietly. But don’t go looking for the videos of the interview with Kiriakou, which ABC promoted like mad back in 2007. ABC has taken those videos down.

And Kiriakou himself still isn’t very forthcoming. At the very end of his new memoir he admits offhandedly that he didn’t know what he was talking about when, with the imprimatur of various news outfits, he presented himself as having first-hand information about the effectiveness of torture. It was all just hearsay that he was embellishing:

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

For what it’s worth, Kiriakou now claims that he himself was duped into becoming the frontman for a CIA misinformation campaign. Believe that at your peril. There were many accessories to torture, and Kiriakou can’t be eager to be placed in their ranks.

A harvest of shame all around.

SCOTUS eviscerates campaign finance regulations: What to do about it

2010-01-21T23:40:00.001-05:00

No doubt by now you’ve heard that the Supreme Court’s “conservatives” took an axe to regulations that for a century have limited corporate spending on political campaigns. By the slimmest of majorities, SCOTUS ruled today that corporations and unions may spend without limit on political issues and in support of candidates because they have free speech rights under the 1st Amendment just as any actual human being.

The ruling threatens to open floodgates to spending on a massive scale by corporations seeking to advance their own interests against the interests of, well, actual human beings. It should also do nicely to enhance the public’s cynicism about corporate influence over legislators (and elective judges). By itself the mere potential for uncontrolled corporate spending will tend to distort political calculations and legislative/judicial decisions – and the public’s perception of those things. The impact could be most severe in congressional elections where corporate spending or its potential will be most likely to overwhelm actual humans’ spending.

National Republicans are overjoyed at the ruling because they gladly and loudly shill for corporate interests. Democrats are talking about trying to limit the damage caused by this cataclysmic change to campaign financing by enacting new legislation. But what kind? Lyle Denniston expresses skepticism that Congress will be able to find any constitutional and practical solution to this crisis.

To my mind, however, the first step is pretty obvious. Congress should prohibit any corporation from engaging in this new political spending if it has any non-American shareholders or owners. Because after all, foreigners have no 1st Amendment protections.

The “logic” behind the SCOTUS ruling is that a corporation composed of individuals ought to possess the legal attributes of its individual owners. Thus the same logic ought to require that partial foreign ownership renders the corporation a foreign body at least in part. The foreign parts of a corporation have no constitutional right to free speech. And since there is no practical way to distinguish the legal rights of the parts from the rights of the whole corporation (that presumption underpins the SCOTUS ruling), then it’s impossible to give American constitutional rights to part of a corporation but withhold them from another part.

Hence it is constitutionally permissible to deny a partly foreign-owned corporation from spending on political speech within the United States. Congress should act to do so immediately.

Why make this a priority? There can’t be many large corporations that are entirely owned by American persons. Indeed large corporations would not find it easy to determine the legal status of their actual human owners (that’s the rotten core of the Supreme Court’s insistence on treating corporations as if they were homunculi, or composite persons). And it should be obvious that the last trade-off that corporations will want to make, in order to be able to interfere directly in political contests, is to drive away foreign investors.

In short, I think the threatened cataclysm to the country’s political system can be contained rather nicely in this way. With such legislation it may turn out, in fact, that the Supreme Court’s “conservatives” have mainly empowered labor unions to spend freely while doing relatively little to bolster the (already great) clout of corporations.

Update:

In the oral (re-)argument of this case before the Supreme Court on September 9, 2009 (PDF), the question of foreign ownership was brought up immediately by Justice Ginsburg (beginning on page 3 of the transcript). Ted Olson, representing Citizens United, conceded that Congress might be able to prohibit foreign-owned corporations (however defined) from engaging in this kind of unlimited electoral spending. Olson argued that Congress would however need to show that it has a compelling governmental interest in acting to prohibit that.

Clearly Olson was discomfited by the line of questioning. Justice Alito rushed to his assistance by asking whether foreign-owned media corporations (cough! Fox News) have less freedom of speech than American-owned ones. Olson was happy for the help.

The deliberate conflation of news corporations with corporations generally was a central pillar of the "conservatives" attempt to justify handing 1st Amendment protection to any and all corporations. Pushed to one side was the basic fact that the Constitution specifically guarantees freedom of the press, whereas it has nothing to say about either the rights or supposed "personhood" of corporations.

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!

2010-01-11T18:37:00.000-05:00

Here are two Civil War re-enactor “officers” who don’t seem to have a clue concerning what war is about. They squabbled on the “battlefield” and ended up charging each other with assault.

The Union and Confederate cavalry commanders engaged in a horseback scuffle as they re-enacted the Battle of Stanardsville were found not guilty of reciprocal assault charges in Greene County General District Court on Wednesday.

During the scuffle, the Confederate commander, Doug Nalls, lost his hat and fired his revolver. At issue was whether the hat was knocked from his head by a blow from Joseph Ferguson, his Union counterpart; whether Nalls fired his gun deliberately; and which happened first.

Greene County Commonwealth’s Attorney Ronald Morris said he thought there was evidence to support assault charges against both men.

“What went on here went way beyond what was authorized,” he said.

[…]

The Confederate colonel’s father, Wayne Nalls, testified that he waded into the fray on foot, to try to separate the men.

“And I told them both to shut up,” he said.

[…]

“The feud on the battlefield goes on,” [a disappointed Ferguson] said. “All re-enactors are in danger from the actions of bullies on the battlefield.”

Ain’t war a hoot?

Associated Press 26 days late to the story

2010-01-08T23:36:00.003-05:00

Here is an example of astounding incompetence by journalist Pete Yost and the Associated Press. Today he produced a not-very-enlightening report for the AP on a ruling by U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan in a habeas case brought by a Guantanamo prisoner, Musa’ab Omar al-Madhwani. Yost states – rather vaguely – that the ruling was made "this week".

That’s false. Judge Hogan made his ruling on December 14, 2009 (PDF). By the next day there were multiple news reports available on the ruling, such as this from the WaPo and this at McClatchy.

So how did Yost get this so badly wrong? The short answer is pure sloppiness. A longer answer would point out that Yost appears to have little independent understanding of what Hogan’s ruling entailed; and that this item on the Madhwani ruling from the Courthouse News Service appeared today shortly before Yost produced his report.

For what it’s worth, the Courthouse summary of Hogan’s ruling was prompted by the publication (dated January 6th, 2010) of a one-page order formally denying the habeas petition. Why Courthouse News is producing these summaries weeks after the rulings are actually handed down is another question. In any case, it seems likely that Yost relied uncritically upon this unreliable service, without even doing minimal diligence to check whether the ruling was recent or indeed had already been reported in the news media. It's noteworthy that the Courthouse News summary did not supply a date for Hogan’s ruling; you’d have thought that would have been a red flag for Yost.

What’s more troubling than Yost's sloppiness is the failure of the Associated Press editors to catch this fiasco before it was released. This is the outfit, remember, that has been up in arms about bloggers who dare to link to its "news" reporting. At the rate they’re going, the AP shouldn’t have to worry much longer about anybody linking to their "work".

New strategy for reviving the auto industry

2010-01-07T12:37:00.001-05:00

Desperate to revive their industry worldwide, carmakers are putting a new twist on the traditional strategy of planned obsolescence. They’re developing cars that will be crashed much more often by the simple device of installing video screens in dashboards. Since most crashes involving distracted drivers are not absolutely fatal, many of the vehicles will in course be replaced. The NY Times indicates that computer chip makers see their own bonanza:

The automakers’ efforts are backed by companies that make chips for PCs and that want to see their processors slotted into the 70 million cars sold worldwide each year.

“Cars are going to become probably the most immersive consumer electronics device we have,” said Michael Rayfield, a general manager at Nvidia, a chip company that on Thursday plans to announce a deal with Audi. “In 2010, you will sit in these things, and it will be a totally different experience.”

Speaking of immersive devices, there should also be an uptick in the coffin making industry.

Senate health care bill encourages teenage pregnancy

2009-12-20T23:52:00.006-05:00

The condescension toward women in the congressional health care “reform” bills is simply staggering. In both the House and Senate versions, poor women are not to be allowed the same freedom as men to make their own health care decisions, at least insofar as they might decide to have an abortion. Instead, congressional Democrats have been busy devising various ways to make abortions as inaccessible as possible to the poor. The idea seems to be that any woman churlish enough to need health care subsidies has to be willing to allow the country’s religious zealots to exercise a veto over her medical care. It’s just a condition of poverty that women become second-class citizens.

True, Democrats in the Senate, taking what they describe as a principled stance on behalf of women’s rights, have come down firmly on the side of permitting poor women to spend their own damn money on abortion coverage, maybe. But that’s only if religious bigots at the state level don’t succeed in banning insurance-exchange health plans from covering abortions altogether. Senate Democrats have decided to allow individual states to do that because, I guess, a woman’s right to have a legal abortion varies from state to state as well as by income level. Who knew?

Soreheads might object that the legislation will effectively help to force some poor women to bear children they can’t or don’t want to rear. Fortunately, Senate Democrats are sensitive to that charge and have thoughtfully added provisions to sweeten the deal for these poor put upon women. They’re going to pay them to have the babies:

In what they described as an effort to reduce the demand for abortion, Democrats would provide money to help pregnant teenagers and new mothers so that they could stay in high school and attend college.

The federal government would provide $25 million a year for a “pregnancy assistance fund.” The money could be used for “maternity and baby clothing, baby food, baby furniture and similar items,” the proposal says.

The provision to subsidize the babies for young girls was added, you won’t be surprised to learn, by that notorious abortion scold, Sen. Robert Casey. The sole purpose of the subsidies is to reduce the number of abortions. In his press release, Casey proudly points to the support his provision receives from various conservative Christian groups ("faith leaders") – because, evidently, their opinions on health care matter more than those of the rest of us.

Oddly enough, however, he says nothing at all about what he or they make of the most astounding aspect of this provision: It encourages teenage pregnancy by offering financial rewards to pregnant teens.

The US already has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world. Pregnancies carry significantly higher medical risks for teenagers. You might expect the federal government to want to continue its longstanding efforts to reduce teen pregnancies. But you wouldn’t have counted on the dauntless Bob Casey, who found a way to use health care negotiations to reverse course and actually encourage teens to have babies by subsidizing them.

“Hey,” Casey must have thought, “if subsidies will encourage people to get health insurance they otherwise wouldn’t want or be able to afford, why not …"

Update: Whatever it is I'm against it was the first to draw attention to this provision, commenting that the Democrats were creating this fund "to convince pregnant women and teenage girls that forced childbirth is okay".

Obama: We’ll be in Afghanistan forever

2009-12-01T23:47:00.001-05:00

Consider these two starkly juxtaposed sentences from President Obama’s West Point speech tonight:

And as commander-in-chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

That makes no damned sense, as critics and political opponents will point out again and again in the coming years. If Afghanistan constitutes a “vital national interest”, then the US cannot afford to walk away from the country until all tranquility breaks out.

In fact Obama later went on to box himself in even more decisively:

I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.

This is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards and al-Qaeda can operate with impunity.

We must keep the pressure on al-Qaeda.

[…]

To abandon this area now and to rely only on efforts against al-Qaeda from a distance would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

If al Qaeda remains permanently wedded to a base of terrorist operations in Afghanistan directed at the US, as Obama asserts, then what possible justification is there for setting a withdrawal date in 2011? Or for talking about any manner of withdrawal as long as “pressure” is needed on al Qaeda? Why “abandon” Afghanistan starting in 2011 when it’s “an unacceptable risk” now?

Obama’s attempt to justify the inherent contradictions of his position doesn’t come close to addressing our supposedly vital stake in Afghanistan or the dangerousness of al Qaeda. What he says is simply that the cost of an open-ended commitment is too great to bear, and besides a timetable for withdrawal is needed to force the Afghan government to take responsibility for its own security. All that tells us is that the American government has little to work with in Afghanistan, a country that by the way is vital to our national security.

Obama’s pronouncements that the US has “vital” interests in Afghanistan imply that we’re never pulling out. He may or may not fully realize that.

Further evidence on the rush to war against Iraq

2009-11-30T23:31:00.000-05:00

Last Tuesday Britain opened yet another investigation, the so-called Chilcot inquiry, into the circumstances that led to the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Like the four previous official inquiries, this one looks set to be a pretty tame affair. It is being conducted by careerists who have little incentive to embarrass the government. John Chilcot, who heads the inquiry, served on the notorious whitewash in 2004 known as the Butler inquiry. So far at the Chilcot inquiry, the self-serving testimony of Tony Blair’s closest advisors has told us little we didn’t already know. The former British ambassador to the US, Christopher Meyer, stressed that the UN inspections of Iraq were a charade and were not permitted to interfere with George Bush’s pre-determined timetable for war. But we knew from the Downing Street Memo as well as from the March 18, 2002 letter of Christopher Meyer that the “UN route” was always intended to be a charade.

An article in the Mail on Sunday, however, provides a few new details. First of all, we learn that on July 29, 2002 the UK Attorney General secretly wrote a letter to Blair reiterating what he’d stated at the July 23 war council (as recorded in the Downing Street Memo): that regime change was not a legitimate grounds for invading Iraq and that no legal grounds existed for such an attack. The Mail reports that Blair went so “berserk” to receive this letter that he told the Attorney General not to commit his thoughts on the subject to writing again in order to preserve deniability. Blair also excluded the AG from most future Cabinet meetings and kept the contents of the July 29 legal opinion secret so as to be able to sell the war to his Cabinet and Parliament. (Blair has all along denied that he was ever told that an invasion would be illegal. Three days before the invasion started, the Attorney General was persuaded by Blair to reverse his opinion on the legality of it.)

Secondly, we learn that around the time of the AG’s letter, Blair and Bush spoke on the phone. According to David Rose’s source inside the White House, their conversation showed that both leaders had decided that war was all but certain.

A few days [after July 26, 2002], Bush and Blair spoke by telephone. A senior White House official who read the transcript told me: 'The way it read was that, come what may, they were going to take out the regime. I remember reading it and thinking, "OK, now I know what we're going to be doing for the next year."'

Later, both leaders would state repeatedly that they had not decided to go to war. But the official said: 'War was avoidable only if Saddam ceased to be president of Iraq. It was a done deal.'

At exactly this time, Bush was (illegally and secretly) approving the transfer of $700 million in appropriated funds from operations in Afghanistan to build infrastructure for the invasion of Iraq. Of course it was a done deal.

Is there a dictionary in the White House?

2009-10-31T10:41:00.003-05:00

After relenting last month in the face of a lawsuit by CREW, the Obama administration finally has begun to release the names of visitors to the White House - as promised during the 2008 presidential campaign. In announcing the release of the first batch of names, a White House blog post is entitled:

Transparency like you’ve never seen before

Does the author, special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform Norm Eisen, really understand what “transparency” means? Or are we supposed to be impressed with the administration’s archness? Will we or will we not “see” meaningful transparency, I’m left wondering.

The problem appears to be due less to an attitude of ironic detachment than to a basic gap in language skills, if we can judge by this sophomoric error in the text of Eisen’s post:

The release also compliments [sic] our new lobbying rules, which …

The new Obama administration has sometimes given the impression that it believes it can substitute rhetoric in place of following through on campaign promises. That approach to policy is doomed to failure however if your well rounded phrases really aren’t well turned at all. Clumsy rhetoric raises questions of both competence and sincerity.

Today marks a major milestone in government transparency -- and an important lesson in the unintended consequences of such vigorous disclosure.

I can’t conceive of what “vigorous” disclosure might possibly be. What I’m looking for in government disclosure is something more along the lines of “candid”, “unstinting”, and “full”. Why can’t the Obama White House just leave the tarnished word “vigorous” on the trash heap of the Bush administration? Please.

We need less deference to US presidents, not more

2009-09-10T13:51:00.002-05:00

Politicians and pundits are all atwitter today because a Republican member of Congress shouted out “You lie!” during the President’s speech, when Obama declared that health care benefits would not be extended to illegal immigrants. Their outrage is directed not so much at the accusation, which was false, as at the fact he displayed disrespect for the country’s chief executive.

Yet as the last eight years have made clear again and again, we need to show less respect to the president…much less. It’s our political class in particular that needs to learn how to be boldly and loudly confrontational whenever the president is behaving outlandishly.

To take but one example of an occasion when confrontation and, yes, bold disrespect was desperately needed for the welfare of the country, and yet totally lacking, there was George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 2003.

It was a speech that nearly made my blood run cold. Bush strongly hinted at a secret and very ugly covert program to torture, assassinate, or ‘disappear’ terrorist suspects around the globe. The audience in Congress reacted not in shock or horror or disgust. They didn’t revile the President or demand an explanation for what he was bragging about. They didn’t shout “You un-American scum!” No, they just applauded enthusiastically.

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries.

And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

(APPLAUSE)

For whatever it’s worth, we now know that the great majority of terrorist suspects detained by the US were eventually released without charge – setting aside those who were killed in custody, of course. We still have not learned who these “many others” were or what their “different fate” turned out to be.

In the same speech Bush told his famous lies about Iraq, asserting falsely that Saddam Hussein had continued active nuclear and biological weapons programs in the 12 years since the Gulf War. Bush stated, falsely, that “we know” that Hussein had mobile biological weapons factories. The President repeated the canard, already exposed as nonsense, that aluminum tube imports into Iraq were intended for nuclear weapons centerfuges. Bush even cited a claim disproven by the CIA, based upon a forged document, that Hussein was seeking to import more nuclear material. Bush mischaracterized the UN resolution as an ultimatum to disarm, when in fact Iraq had no such weapons. Bush also described Hussein, falsely, as failing to cooperate with inspectors’ demands to destroy the non-existent weapons. Bush even went on to assert, falsely, that Hussein was sponsoring Al Qaeda. He concluded by announcing that even without UN authorization, he intended to invade Iraq to depose Hussein. No member of Congress had the decency, however, to shout out “You lie”. Instead, this farrago of transparent lies and proud war-mongering was greeted with applause, repeatedly.

Twelve years ago, Saddam Hussein faced the prospect of being the last casualty in a war he had started and lost. To spare himself, he agreed to disarm of all weapons of mass destruction.

For the next 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement. He pursued chemical, biological and nuclear weapons even while inspectors were in his country.

Nothing to date has restrained him from his pursuit of these weapons: not economic sanctions, not isolation from the civilized world, not even cruise missile strikes on his military facilities.

Almost three months ago, the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam Hussein his final chance to disarm. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations and for the opinion of the world.

The 108 U.N. inspectors were sent to conduct--were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California. The job of the inspectors is to verify that Iraq's regime is disarming.

It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened.

[…]

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving.

[…]

And this Congress and the American people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained.

Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.

We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.

(APPLAUSE)

[…]

The United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraqi's--Iraq's illegal weapons programs, its attempts to hide those weapons from inspectors and its links to terrorist groups.

We will consult, but let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.

(APPLAUSE)

In the same speech, by the way, Bush stated that America had a crisis in health care and he was making reform a priority.

Our second goal is high quality, affordable health for all Americans.

(APPLAUSE)

The American system of medicine is a model of skill and innovation, with a pace of discovery that is adding good years to our lives. Yet for many people, medical care costs too much, and many have no coverage at all.

These problems will not be solved with a nationalized health care system that dictates coverage and rations care.

(APPLAUSE)

Instead, we must work toward a system in which all Americans have a good insurance policy, choose their own doctors, and seniors and low-income Americans receive the help they need.

(APPLAUSE)

Instead of bureaucrats and trial lawyers and HMOs, we must put doctors and nurses and patients back in charge of American medicine.

(APPLAUSE)

So far so good. But Bush’s proposals, when they finally emerge, do nothing to address bureaucracy, give health care to the poor, improve its quality, or bring costs down. It turns out that he’s advocating nothing more than tort reform for medical malpractice lawsuits, and a Medicare drug plan (for those who already had good medical coverage at low cost).

Instead of applauding deferentially, why didn’t any member of Congress demand to know “Where does that leave the poor and uninsured?”

As a country we’re practically addicted to deference toward our presidents. We even reflexively call him “The Commander in Chief” – as if that presidential role applied to anybody not currently serving in the military. We really need to unlearn those habits of deference that the nation picked up during the Cold War, and recognize anew that presidents gain or lose respect primarily by their actions.

I’m not advocating rudeness for the sake of rudeness, much less the anger and incivility that has coarsened our public discourse during the last generation. I’m certainly not excusing the shameless slanders that Obama’s Republican opponents have made their forte.

But I do think we need to welcome and encourage thoughtful, honest, and frank confrontation of the most powerful and least accountable members of our political class.

Republicans demand equal time to harangue students

2009-09-04T12:52:00.001-05:00

Next Tuesday President Obama plans to talk to high school students in Virginia and make the speech available simultaneously to schools around the country as a White House video feed. His focus will be encouraging students to do well in school and to take their studies seriously.

As might be expected, when news of the plan became public it immediately caused a furor among conservatives, who are used to having only Republican presidents talk to students. Schools are being inundated with complaints about the attempt by that man in the White House to indoctrinate children with his 'socialist agenda' and to create a 'cult of personality' such as exist in Cuba and North Korea. Initially Republican critics sought to prevent schools from letting students see that man in the White House speak, or keep their children home from school to teach them a kind of civics lesson.

Today, however, GOP leaders settled on a more aggressive strategy. Congressional Republican leaders demanded that the television networks grant them equal time to respond to the President's message on September 8.

Schools in several states quickly agreed to show students the GOP rebuttal, and in Texas one school system near Dallas that already announced it will not allow Obama's address to be seen decided to make the Republican rejoinder mandatory.

The Republicans have selected Bill O'Reilly to deliver their rebuttal. His spokesman announced that O'Reilly will focus on the danger of personality-driven politics. He'll also stress that students should cease from studying foreign languages, which he'll describe as 'unAmerican', and disrespect their teachers, who are unionized. O'Reilly will especially encourage students to engage in bullying and harrassment. In the long term, he'll say, they should try to drop out of school before they can be confused by too much information.

Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory: Obama plans to oppress you via Facebook

2009-09-01T22:43:00.003-05:00

This nutter at the right-wing National Legal and Policy Center is advancing the latest conspiracy theory about a "secret plan" by that man in the White House to destroy our freedoms: Barack Obama will be tracking what we say about him on Facebook and, you know, taking names and stuff. Very reminiscent of the fake controversy whipped up by right-wingers when the White House asked people to forward information about any crazy rumors they heard being spread by the anti-health-care reform crowd.

The truth, as usual, is rather mundane.

Here's the breathless introduction to a post intended to stoke fear among the clueless:

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.

Later we're told that this is "an ambitious plan to harvest huge amounts of information from the web":

Given the White House’s recent abuse of its New Media operations, this huge, new secretive program is yet another sign that this Administration is at best indifferent to privacy rights and at worst prepared to violate civil liberties for political purposes.

Obama, our nutter declares, is doing this "out of an over-abundance of power".

The truth is immediately discernible from the document in question, a White House bid-solicitation (PDF), which presumably the author expects few of his readers to bother to, you know, read. Since the solicitation was actually published by White House order, it's hard to discern what makes it a "secret plan".

Anyway, the WH is merely hiring somebody to make permanent records of whatever the Executive Office of the President puts up on public sites like Facebook, and the comments made by the public in response, and transfer those records to the National Archives. All of this is pursuant to the President's obligations under the Presidential Records Act. That's all. No plan to destroy our liberties via Facebook. No over-abundance of power. Just a President following the law.

So how long will it take for the whole right wing in America to become convulsed with paroxysms of terror at this latest menace to civilization from the Democrats?

crossposted at unbossed.com

Making liars pay a price

2009-09-01T12:00:00.001-05:00

This article by Edward Wasserman is generating some discussion about what the traditional media should do when influential people spread misinformation to the public. Propaganda works essentially by means of repetition, so reporting the lies only to correct them typically assists in disseminating them. No wonder that so many Americans believe the nonsense being spread by opponents of health care reform, given that the US media, without bothering to explain the details of the proposed reforms, has played those myths up even when reporters did point out that the complaints are imaginary.

Wasserman is of course right that merely debunking persistent lies doesn't work to deflate them. But his proposed solution won't work either.

Wasserman, taking his cue from Greg Marx's post at the Columbia Journalism Review, argues that the trad media should somehow train itself to just ignore the liars and thus deprive their lies of oxygen. But that takes no account of Fox News, viral emails, televised blab fests, and all the modern means of disseminating politically convenient lies.

As tristero points out, that solution would have done nothing to halt the disastrous rush to war against Iraq with all the misinformation being spread by the Bush administration and its busy little helpers. But tristero's solution, for the media to learn to mock the liars, is unlikely to happen. And though it would be a good start, it's insufficient because rebuttals are necessary as well. It's hard to harness ridicule to serious fact-checking.

A better solution is for the media to make sure that the liars pay a steep price for every lie they try to disseminate. Here for example is a scenario offered by Wasserman:

Suppose some headline-loving political eminence announces that the reason the health system is in crisis is illegal immigration. Now, you could refute that with experts, with numbers, with facts. And it wouldn't matter a bit -- not if you lead your newscast with him, if you let that week's debate revolve around his claims. You'd still whip up rage, you'd still give him a soapbox, you'd still bleed off attention from the issues lawmakers need to tackle to fix healthcare, you'd still create a population that believes something that isn't so.

The real solution seems pretty self-intuitive: Make the story about a liar spreading lies. Put your politician on the defensive by making him the focus of the story. Describe how he is making things up, call them 'lies', show the extent to which he's doing it deliberately, and let him try to defend himself. If he weasels out or backtracks, ask him when he's going to set the record straight publicly and if he'll be apologizing to the people he misled. If necessary, target the liar repeatedly and remind your audience of other lies the politician has foisted on the public.

In other words, confront the sons of bitches who are screwing up political discourse by spreading lies. Make it clear that there's a heavy price to pay for lying, and lies will become less attractive.

Didn't any reporters in America ever learn how to deal with schoolyard bullies? Punch the political bullies hard in the nose and they'll leave us in peace. Maybe literally.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Shining light on CIA torturers cum whiners

2009-08-30T12:08:00.000-05:00

This report by Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick is already generating criticism as yet another installment in the Washington Post's repulsive effort to build public support for Dick Cheney's defense of abusive interrogations (regarding which see this satirical commentary on yesterday's installment). I think something more subtle is going on in today's piece. Pincus and Warrick are airing Cheney's argument that the investigation of CIA abuses damage morale at the Agency, only to cut it down by showing repeatedly that any complaints at the CIA are limited to those few officials who took part in the abuse and now stand to be held accountable for it.

Not only does the current article not align itself with Cheney's position, it provides ammunition against Cheney's argument that we should be concerned about the mental anguish of torturers who now have to suffer through an investigation of their conduct. In fact, some of that ammunition is new and will prove useful in rebutting Cheney's talking points.

For example, the article highlights the outrage that was felt by many CIA officials at the reports that were trickling back about the abuse of prisoners. Here it quotes CIA Inspector General John Helgerson saying that he was cheered on by the rank and file officer when he began his investigation into CIA wrongdoing:

Helgerson now says he received a steady flow of information, questions and encouragement during his inquiry. "Frankly, I could not walk through the cafeteria without people walking up to me, not to complain but to say, 'More power to you.' "

Former senior officials say that they were concerned with what was an unprecedented program and that as reports came in from secret sites alleging improper activities, they took action, including sending reports to Helgerson.

The article's central point is made right at the outset, in the last clause of the report's first sentence – which hangs there as a rather pointed rebuke of the torturers' self-serving whining:

Morale has sagged at the CIA following the release of additional portions of an inspector general's review of the agency's interrogation program and the announcement that the Justice Department would investigate possible abuses by interrogators, according to former intelligence officials, especially those associated with the program.

From there Pincus and Warrick go on to quote one of the lead advocates for abusive CIA programs, Alvin Krongard (who retired and went to work for Blackwater), to the effect that the release of Helgerson's report and hence the prospect of investigations means that morale at the CIA has dropped "down to minus 50". That's an assertion that the rest of the article proceeds to show is grossly inaccurate, so Krongard is exposed as an alarmist at best. In any case, Krongard's complaint is directly juxtaposed to a comment by Helgerson:

At the same time, former inspector general John L. Helgerson, whose review of the program was largely declassified Monday, said that the release, though painful, would ensure that the agency confronts difficult issues head on, instead of ignoring or trying to bury them.

As every complaint is aired, the reporters undercut it by showing that it isn't necessarily representative of the views held throughout the Agency. Indeed, they also point out that nobody can reasonably claim to know what all CIA officers think (a rhetorical trick that is essential to the arguments advanced by the Cheney/Krongard faction that claims to speak for the poor put-upon CIA officer):

It is impossible to extrapolate from the small sample contacted by Washington Post reporters about the effect the varied inquiries are having on the thousands of agency employees, more than one-third of whom are spread around the world. But among the dozens of officials who were part of the program and either remain active or have retired, feelings run high about how the White House and the Justice Department have handled the issue.

It's primarily those who are implicated in torture who are raising a fuss about investigations and the release of information about their activities.

The article also points out that CIA officers were wary of the abusive interrogation program from the start and had immediately anticipated that there would be legal problems in the future when the program was exposed...despite Bush administration lawyers' attempts to reassure the CIA that it had been indemnified and was free to torture away.

Read in this light, the Pincus/Warrick column does a public service by dismantling one of Cheney's most emotive talking points.

crossposted at unbossed.com

How slaves became an asset

2009-08-29T15:22:00.000-05:00

The Washington newspaper today provides a forum for anonymous senior officials in the former Confederate government to make the case that slavery served a crucial service to the country during the crisis that began in 1861. They clearly are seeking to bolster the defense of harsh slave-holding techniques offered repeatedly by President Jefferson Davis and especially Vice President Alexander Stephens since they left office.

The anonymous Confederate officials stress something that has been little reported in the press: Large numbers of slaves and ex-slaves supplied absolutely critical intelligence to the Union side during the war. One of the most important of these slaves, William Jackson, belonged to Jefferson Davis himself. Such formerly truculent, unreliable, and frankly quite scary foreign workers were transformed into productive and effective spies, a major asset to the Union in its war with the Confederacy. None of that would ever have happened, the former CSA officials point out, without the ground having first been prepared by the much-criticized coercive conditions of slavery.

"What do you think changed the servants' minds?" one former senior Confederate official said this week after being asked about the effect of involuntary servitude. "Of course it began with that."

The Washington paper describes how William Jackson became so cooperative that he would give long lectures to Union intelligence officers on a wide variety of subjects:

Jackson "seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to discuss the inner workings of the Confederate cabinet and the CSA's plans, ideology and operatives," said one of two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about army interrogations remains classified. "He'd even use a chalkboard at times."

These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to Union officials as WJ from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the Union called its "preeminent source" on the CSA. This reversal occurred after Jackson was subjected by his master to years of beatings and prolonged shackling, among other harsh techniques of involuntary servitude.

[...]

One former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the sessions were carried out said Jackson, like several other servants, seemed to have decided that it was okay to start cooperating after he had endured a certain amount of abuse during his servitude.

The Washigton paper adds a small caveat before proceeding to advance further the case for slavery (though it prefers to use the term 'involuntary servitude').

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting servants to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of involuntary servitude, the evidence is clear: The servants cooperated with the Union armies, and to an extraordinary extent, only when their spirits were broken during the painful months after their capture and sale in America. These methods often included the very things that have provoked the greatest outcry in the public – shackling for long periods in stress positions, prolonged isolation, extremes of cold and heat, undernourishment, and transport over the Atlantic in degrading conditions.

The Washington paper also notes that southern slaves flocked to the Union standard and fought in the Union army, sometimes quite courageously. This too is attributable to the harsh conditioning that the slaves underwent in the years before they became valuable assets to the United States.

The Washington paper also quotes an abolitionist to the effect that slavery is illegal now as well as economically unproductive. But it makes nothing further of that.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Cheney is afraid of the DoJ torture investigation

2009-08-28T22:06:00.006-05:00

You might reasonably have surmised that Dick Cheney fears where an investigation into the torture and mistreatment of terrorist suspects could eventually lead. Until now Cheney has restricted himself to lying about the effectiveness of the CIA and DoD interrogation programs, claiming to know decisive information that remains classified, and denouncing those who seek to investigate the government officials who abused prisoners under the color of law. But now we have some direct evidence of how rattled Cheney has become by Attorney General Holder's decision to initiate what is after all an extremely limited investigation. Its scope currently is limited to the CIA interrogations that employed even more abuse than the torture memos had actually authorized.

In an interview that will be aired on Sunday, Cheney made a couple of really remarkable statements according to McClatchy's Warren Strobel. First, Cheney endorsed the behavior of CIA officers who blatantly ignored the restrictions placed upon interrogators by government lawyers. This only a few days after the release of a 2004 CIA Inspector General report that revealed lurid details of prisoner abuse! Cheney had to know that he would be derided and denounced for coming out in favor of such things as mock executions, promises to rape and murder the family members of suspects, and threats with a gun and electric drill.

And secondly, Cheney rather transparently tried to build distance for himself with regard to the use of waterboarding, for which he has been the most vocal public advocate since at least 2006 (his original endorsement of waterboarding was a story broken here at unbossed). Cheney wants us to believe that though he was aware of the existence of the practice in general, he wasn't informed about any particular applications of waterboarding to specific prisoners. This even though reams of evidence have accumulated that interrogators who employed waterboarding were in very regular contact with CIA headquarters, and that the White House was deeply interested in the progress of those particular interrogations to the point of asking for multiple updates for days on end!

Here is how Strobel describes the Cheney interview:

Cheney, who strongly opposes the Obama administration's new probe into alleged detainee abuse, was asked in the Fox News interview whether he was "OK" with interrogations that went beyond Justice's specific legal authorization.

"I am," the former vice president replied.

"My sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks," he said. "It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well."

[...]

Cheney said in the interview with Fox's Chris Wallace, according to a transcript, that he was aware of the waterboarding, "not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy that we had approved."

What Cheney fears is pretty obvious. First, he believes that the investigation into a few CIA officers who scandalously flouted the torture memos' rules for coercive interrogations could provide the sharp edge that might pry open the whole sordid program of systematized abuse and expose it to judicial and public scrutiny. It was a program that Cheney apparently sponsored and helped to design.

Secondly, Cheney fears that he could then become a target of investigation. He is especially vulnerable to prosecution because of the close interest he took in the most abusive interrogations. One might be able to persuade a slightly gullible grand jury that the "conditioning" or "exploitation" of prisoners (hypothermia, for example) does not constitute torture. But waterboarding universally has been considered torture since at least the times of the Great Inquisition. Cheney seems to think now that he needs to build a case that he was no more aware of actual instances of waterboarding than anybody else who was briefed on the CIA program.

Cheney may also be aware that his likeness has now been put on one of the "Torture Team" playing cards that the Center for Constitutional Rights has created ("Collect and prosecute them all"). He's in the big leagues now.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Purpose redacted

2009-08-26T18:13:00.000-05:00

Among the documents that the ACLU forced the government to release is this CIA guide to its use of abusive rendition and interrogation techniques from late 2004 (PDF). It acknowledges that the goal of these processes is systematically to condition the prisoners into a state of "learned helplessness and dependence". And this in a document faxed to the Justice Department. By summarizing these abusive techniques in clinical fashion, the CIA has fashioned a deeply horrifying record of what it became under George W. Bush, one that in the past we might have associated with the Stasi's files.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this repulsive document is one of the many redactions. In the second (?) paragraph, the CIA describes the purposes of its interrogations of terrorist suspects at "Black Sites" (its term). At least one of those purposes is redacted. In other words, the purpose remains classified! This is one with the evolving series of justifications that the CIA has offered over the years for the interrogation program. It cannot decide quite what it wants the rest of us to believe was the ultimate rationale for treating prisoners in ways that plainly are unAmerican.

Here is what remains unredacted of the CIA's rationale for the abusive interrogation program:

The purpose of interrogation is to persuade High-Value Detainees (HVD) to provide threat information and terrorist intelligence in a timely manner, to allow the US Government to identify and disrupt terrorist plots [... redacted line]
[...] and to collect critical intelligence on al-Qa'ida [... 4 lines redacted]

[...] In support of information previously sent to the Department of Justice, this paper provides additional background on how interrogation techniques are used ...

Thus at least one of the stated purposes has been redacted here. That is a silent demonstration of what many have suspected all along, that under George Bush and Dick Cheney abusive interrogations were a policy in search of a rationale. Were they about obtaining intelligence from captives while it was still most current? Disrupting as many plots around the world as possible? Learning about Al Qaeda? Or some of the other reasons that have been proffered in the past? Identifying and arresting further terrorists? Building cases for prosecuting terrorist suspects? Fear of an imminent attack upon the US? Or just showing that the US was determined to 'take the gloves off', in Cheney's phrase? Even at this late date, the CIA can't bring itself to say.

As the ACLU's Alexander Abdo said to Greg Sargent, "This is the most detailed description provided by the CIA of its rendition program to date... It confirms accounts provided by victims of rendition.”

Those prisoner accounts of their experiences during extraordinary rendition flights and flights to Guantanamo prison, as I've remarked here repeatedly, go back to the beginning of 2002. Hence the earliest accounts predate by several months the attempts by the Bush administration lawyers to generate torture memos to justify retrospectively all manner of mistreatment of terrorist suspects, from "conditioning" to "coercion", that were already in common use around the globe. As the prisoner accounts show, the mistreatment had been systematized from the outset – very much in the manner described in this CIA memo (which has a section describing methods to be used in the capture and transfer of prisoners on rendition flights).

This fact leaves a great many Bush administration officials, including the authors of those egregious memos, exposed to prosecution for ordering or abetting torture and abuse of prisoners. They had relied upon legal memos to function as 'get out of jail free' cards, under the pretense that everybody from the White House down to the actual interrogator were just following the advice of the administration's lawyers. But much evidence has accumulated that that advice was cooked, with administration officials soliciting exactly the opinions they wanted and playing footsie with lawyers until the desired advice was forthcoming.

The Bush Administration claimed that Justice gave legal advice to the CIA and that the CIA followed and applied it. But the IG report reveals a strikingly different relationship. As the OLC memos were written, there was a sort of waltz between CIA and Justice lawyers in which different hypotheticals were offered up in solicitation of opinions—something on the order of “If we told you we did x, what would you say about it?” This suggests the OLC memos were effectively negotiated. It also appears that CIA requested a number of after-the-fact variations to protect practices that clearly exceeded guidance. Why does this matter? It undermines the ability of CIA employees and contractors to “rely in good faith” on the OLC memos, because it shows that OLC wasn’t really giving legal advice. Instead it was issuing “get out of jail free” cards. A good example comes with waterboarding: “With respect to two detainees at those sites, the use and frequency of one EIT, the waterboard, went beyond the projected use of the technique as originally described to DoJ. The Agency, on 29 July 2003, secured oral DoJ concurrence that certain deviations are not significant for the purposes of DoJ’s legal opinions.”

Now it is even clearer that the advice was several months too late to justify practices that had already been worked out, systematized, and put into practice. That reinforces the interpretation that the legal opinions were cooked, and thus that those implicated in the prisoner abuse cannot now claim that they were relying upon legal advice that they assumed in good faith to be reliable.

In fact, the 2004 CIA Inspector General's report on terrorist interrogations shows conclusively that many within the CIA did not believe that the official policies were legal. It reports that CIA officers feared and indeed assumed that they would be subject to investigation and prosecution for engaging in torture and abuse. Some CIA officials took a strong stance against the program on the grounds of its illegality.

The Inspector General’s review was launched by complaints coming from valued senior employees who felt that the Bush Program (as John Yoo has dubbed it) was wrong. One of them actually expresses his worry that those involved will be hauled before the World Court at some point because of [and that’s redacted!] This makes clear that good employees of the agency opposed the Bush Program, were vocal in their opposition, and focused concern on the program’s illegality. The OLC memos were intended to silence these complaints, but they only accentuated the agency’s morale problems by enmeshing it in obviously illegal and immoral conduct. By contrast, the number of CIA personnel involved in pushing it through and supporting it is tiny—probably not many more than two dozen—though their voices are heard very loudly.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Another Bush administration legal fiction

2009-08-25T00:01:00.004-05:00

The ACLU finally has managed to force the Obama administration to release a less severely redacted version of the May 2004 report on the CIA's abusive treatment of terrorist suspects (PDF). The report was done by the CIA's Inspector General, John Helgerson, and (to judge by what remains unredacted) seems to be fairly critical of those abuses and of their legal underpinnings. There's plenty to say about the contents of this report – for example, the bizarre tortures it catalogues (summarized here).

One thing stood out in the early pages of the document: Bush administration lawyers wrote an undated memo sometime before June 16, 2003 which among other things advanced a flagrantly false interpretation of the UN Convention against Torture.

That memo, "Legal Principles Applicable to CIA Detention and Interrogation of Captured Al Qa'ida Personnel", does not appear to be publicly available yet. It was drafted by lawyers at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (almost certainly John Yoo) and then finalized by the CIA Office of General Counsel. Here is what the Helgerson report states the memo said about the UN Convention:

The analysis adds that "the [Torture] Convention permits the use of [cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment] in exigent circumstances, such as a national emergency or war."

The UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment says no such thing. The OLC/OGC lawyers evidently were insinuating that the Convention drew a very major distinction between the prohibitions against torture on the one hand, and against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment on the other. Article 2 of the Convention states explicitly that there are no circumstances that may be used to justify torture:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

It is true that the Convention does not repeat the Article 2 statement when it later discusses "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment". However that discussion (in Article 16) is extremely brief and to the point: that governments should prevent 'cruel etc. treatment' as they do torture and should give its victims the same legal recourse as victims of torture. There is no implication whatsoever in the Convention that "exigent circumstances" permit the use of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Indeed, the US wrote the following to the UN Committee against Torture ten years ago regarding its implementation of the Convention (Report of the United States to the UN Committee against Torture, October 15, 1999, UN Doc. CAT/C/28/Add.5, February 9, 2000, para. 6):

No exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification of torture. US law contains no provision permitting otherwise prohibited acts of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to be employed on grounds of exigent circumstances (for example, during a "state of public emergency") or on orders from a superior officer or public authority, and the protective mechanisms of an independent judiciary are not subject to suspension.

So, when do the torture memos written by John Yoo and friends rise beyond the level of bad lawyering and into the much shadier territory of deliberate falsification for the purpose of facilitating, enabling, or encouraging torture? Because at that point I'd think even the timid Eric Holder's Justice Department would be forced to prosecute them.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Does anybody at the Washington Post read?

2009-08-24T14:29:00.001-05:00

Anne Kornblut, one of the best WaPo reporters, makes a gross factual error her report on the circumstances under which terrorism suspects will be interrogated in the Obama administration. There's to be a new unit of specially trained interrogators. The unit's purpose allegedly will not be to obtain information to put the prisoners on trial, but "to glean intelligence, especially about potential terrorist attacks". That was also the thrust of George W. Bush's infamous interrogation programs. The new unit will be housed in the FBI but report directly to the National Security Council. It will operate under the rules set out in the newly (2006) revised Army Field Manual.

Kornblut parrots the line propagated initially by the Bush administration, and repeated by Democrats: that the AFM strictly adheres to the Geneva Conventions and prohibits all forms of torture, abuse, and degradation of prisoners. Quite the contrary is true. The new Army Field Manual rules (while a vast improvement over the outrageous practices used by the CIA and DoD and authorization from the Bush administration) do in fact specify ways that prisoners may be abused. The abuse is euphemistically termed 'separation' and codified in Appendix M of the Manual.

Here is Kornblut's assessment of the new interrogation policy:

Using the Army Field Manual means certain techniques in the gray zone between torture and legal questioning -- such as playing loud music or depriving prisoners of sleep -- will not be allowed. Which tactics are acceptable was an issue "looked at thoroughly," one senior official said. Obama had already banned certain severe measures that the Bush administration had permitted, such as waterboarding.

The phrase "gray zone" ought to be an immediate tip off that the author is spinning the truth. There is no legitimate doubt that the use of deafening noise and sleep deprivation to 'soften up' prisoners is torture and illegal in the US. It was the Bush administration that sought to convince Americans that long prohibited practices somehow fell into a middle ground between the legal and the illegal. They did succeed in convincing most major news outlets to refrain from calling torture 'torture', which is why reporters like Kornblut continue in this absurd pretense.

In any case, can Kornblut or her editors be bothered to read documents? The Army Field Manual (PDF) explicitly permits interrogators to use isolation and sleep deprivation on prisoners. References are to sections of Appendix M of the Manual. Prisoners may be confined in total isolation for up to 30 days, and even longer if approval is sought up the chain of command (M-29). Furthermore, the Manual states (on the very last page of its last appendix) that prisoners need not be permitted more than 4 hours of sleep per day (M-30). Anybody who goes for weeks on only four hours of sleep will quickly become subject to all the psychological disturbances that sleep deprivation is notorious for.

Parenthetically, I note a passage worthy of Franz Kafka in Appendix M of the Manual. It asserts blandly (M-4) that 'separation' "is consistent with the minimum humane standards of treatment required by US law, the law of war, and does not constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment as defined in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and addressed in GPW Common Article III" (emphasis mine). The US is of course bound by more than the Detainee Treatment Act, but the Field Manual ignores that fact (making no mention, for example, of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment). Instead, the Appendix consistently pretends that its procedures are acceptable because they are not banned by the 2005 legislation.

Valtin has a lengthy discussion of how the Army Field Manual codifies some of the Bush administration's torture practices.

Meanwhile, no word yet about whether the new government's interrogation unit will continue (as the CIA did under Bush) to employ Blackwater to fly terrorist suspects from their confinement in Guantanamo prison to secret prisons around the world, including such hell holes as Uzbekistan. The purpose of these 'extraordinary renditions' was to subject the prisoners to "special treatment", according to an internal Blackwater memo obtained by Der Spiegel. As if the torture employed at Gitmo were not special enough.

Incidentally, the memo also reveals that the CIA's contract with Blackwater to establish roving assassination squads was overseen by none other than Alvin B. Krongard, the former Executive Director of the CIA (and upon his retirement, a director of Blackwater). He is the brother of Bush's corrupt and partisan Inspector General for the State Department, Howard Krongard, whose hacktacular career we described here two years ago.

crossposted from unbossed.com

Plead guilty, it's easier, quicker, and cheaper for everyone

2009-08-22T15:37:00.001-05:00

In 2004 the CIA Inspector General produced a damning report on the Agency's abusive interrogations of terrorist suspects under inhumane conditions of confinement abroad. Due of a FOIA request, that report will be made public on Monday. In advance of its release, Newsweek and the Washington Post report that CIA interrogators threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and with an electric drill. They also staged several mock executions to terrorize terrorist suspects. Under the UN Convention against torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment as well as under federal law, it is a crime to threaten a prisoner with injury or death.

The CIA also reportedly charged prisoners a small fee to keep visits from friends and relatives down to a minimum.

Guard: Don't fight it, son... confess quickly... Before they get into the expensive procedures. If you hold out too long you could jeopardise your credit rating.

He can be rolled

2009-08-21T10:49:00.000-05:00

A watershed occurred today in the history of the Obama administration. For the first time, a major voice in the corporate media has stated what many other political observers must have been thinking for months now: that the President has shown that he can be rolled. Whether or not one agrees with that assessment, it has now become a definite part of the political landscape in Washington by virtue of having been enunciated in the press. The debate is on, whether Obama "can be rolled".

Sooner or later the President will have to address the problem of that perception, whether he wants to or not. It will seep into every major political struggle for the foreseeable future. If Obama cannot demonstrate the opposite - that he's willing and able to push back against his political opponents - then it will become a dominant perception and a nearly intractable political force for the remainder of his presidency.

Here is Paul Krugman in the NY Times:

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Krugman's other point, that once in office President Obama has refused to dance with them that brung him, is well taken but also widely acknowledged by now. What Krugman has introduced into the mainstream of national political debate is the perception that Obama has been demonstrating that he seeks to avoid confronting his political opponents and doesn't have the will to make them pay a price for toying with him.

So, this is the point where we will see whether Obama can finally shake himself free of the delusions that post-partisanship is possible or even desirable in today's Washington; that by virtue of good will he can he turn congressional Republicans from opponents into allies; that it's possible to enact legislation to meet the country's pressing needs with the help of a party that has long opposed precisely those reforms that are most critical now.

We'll also discover whether the President has figured out by now that Americans really are not very interested in political process but rather in seeing results. Even without any bipartisanship whatever, new legislation that addresses the current crises or that makes a positive difference for people will be welcomed by voters. On the other hand, if getting Republican votes makes a bill ineffective, nobody will think any better of the President because the lousy measure was achieved through bipartisanship. Instead, Americans will just think less of Obama and of Democrats if they cannot advance their own agenda while holding the White House, the Senate, and the House.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Can right-wingers read? Pt. 3

2009-08-10T10:49:00.001-05:00

Debra Saunders complains that leftists have forgotten that dissent is patriotic now that a Democrat occupies the White House. A shame that Republicans on the whole didn't seem to think so during the last eight years.

But what's her evidence of vast left-wing hypocrisy? A gross – and apparently deliberate - misreading of a blog post at the White House website. Saunders goes so far as to rewrite the post to transform it into the very thing she wants to decry. Her best defense, in the circumstances, would be that she cannot actually read.

Here's her account of what she insinuates is a WH plan to track dissent against the President's healthcare policy:

Imagine it's four years ago and an aide to President George W. Bush posted a blog on the Whitehouse.gov Web site that bemoaned Internet criticism of the Iraq war, then continued: "These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversations.

Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or see something on the Web about anti-war protests that seem fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."

Substitute the words "health insurance reform" for "anti-war protests," and you get the exact wording of a blog posted by Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media, on Tuesday.

But the WH blog post doesn't concern dissent or opinions. Phillips is quite clear that WH wants to learn what kinds of false information about health care reform are being circulated beneath public scrutiny, so that it has a chance to rebut them publicly. Pretty simple and reasonable request, I'd say, asking people to tell them what dumb lies they've been hearing.

Saunders can't be bothered to address what Phillips actually writes. So instead she transforms his "disinformation about health insurance reform" into "criticism of the Iraq war", and "health insurance reform" into "anti-war protests". In other words, she equates questions of fact with political opinions in order to insinuate that the right to express dissenting political opinions is under threat.

It appears to be calculated deception by Saunders. A more charitable explanation of course would be that she's simply illiterate.

What follows is the full text of the WH blog post in question (minus a video link):

Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things."

Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.

In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House's Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to "eliminate" private coverage, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

[Video clip]

For the record, the President has consistently said that if you like your insurance plan, your doctor, or both, you will be able to keep them. He has even proposed eight consumer protections relating specifically to the health insurance industry.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov

Here are the complete videos that Linda refers to. First from the AARP:

[Video clip]

And then from the President's news conference:

[Video clip]

crossposted at unbossed.com

Exiled by health insurance

2009-08-06T15:27:00.000-05:00

I'd guess that many readers have heard of Americans who are tied to poorly paying or unsatisfactory jobs because they or a family member have health problems and simply cannot give up their employer's health insurance. With a pre-existing condition, they become immobilized almost as if they were indentured. Well, there are other ways that the arcane and illiberal health insurance industry in the US oppresses Americans as if it were a law unto itself. One phenomenon, little discussed, is the way that some of our fellow citizens are forced to live in exile abroad due to the exigencies of the for-profit American health insurance industry.

I've lived in several countries that, unlike the US, have rational and humane health care systems - especially in the UK with its National Health Service. The British NHS is one of the favorite whipping boys of American opponents of health care reform. I found that it worked well; it provided good basic care, quickly and inexpensively. I'd trade the mess of a health care "system" we now have in the US for an NHS in a heartbeat. I'd happily settle for a single-payer system such as Medicare for all.

However I won't support any of the health care reform bills currently being excreted by Congressional committees. Each of them bolsters the failed private insurance industry by mandating that we buy insurance, while tacking on a weak and highly exclusionary (i.e. small) public option in the pretense that it might somehow bring under control an already long out-of-control industry.

This history of the public option by Kip Sullivan explains in detail why the heavily watered-down public option proposals embodied in the various bills coming out of Congress are doomed to fail. It is essential reading.

How unrepresentative is Baucus' healthcare group?

2009-08-03T14:48:00.001-05:00

Healthcare reform has been stalled in Congress all summer as Sen. Max Baucus (Montana) slowly hashes out a "compromise" bill in private with a small group of colleagues, originally seven in number. The majority were Republicans, though they're vastly outnumbered in the Senate. Now that Orin Hatch has dropped out of the group, Democrats have parity in the remaining gang of six.

Many bloggers – though few corporate journalists - have pointed out that Baucus' group is grossly unrepresentative of America. All six senators come from sparsely populated states, five of which lie between the Rockies and the Mississippi. Between them, there's not a single large city. They have less than 4% of the country's population.

Well, here's another way to measure the unrepresentativeness of Baucus' group, via this new survey from Gallup of political affiliations across America. Gallup finds that Democrats have an edge of 5% or more in party identification over Republicans in all but 13 states. But four of the senators in Baucus' original group of seven come from those 13 Republican bastions.

Perhaps more significant still is the almost total absence of Democratic senators from solidly Democratic states. These are the members of the Senate who are best positioned, politically, to make the case for reforms that Democratic voters want.

But in Baucus' group there's only a single Democratic senator from any of the 37 states where Democrats have a significant advantage in voters' party identification (Jeff Bingaman from NM). To take just the 29 states that Gallup rates as "solidly Democratic" (with an edge of 10% or more in party ID), together they have 48 senators who are Democrats (or caucus with Democrats). Those 48 senators are represented by only a single voice at Baucus' private sessions.

Little wonder then that Baucus immediately ruled out considering a variety of single-payer programs that many Democratic voters support, like Medicare for all Americans. Little wonder too that Baucus has cut out of his private negotiations both his fellow Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee and the entire Democratic caucus to an astounding degree:

"At some point, [Baucus is] going to have to worry about getting Democratic votes,” said one Democratic Senator, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “If they think that we’ll take whatever it is that comes out because we want to get something passed, they’re wrong."

[...]

However, the level of consultation with Democrats stands in contrast with how Republican negotiators are briefing their Members. Senators said Enzi, who is the ranking member on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, briefs leaders every day on the talks. And all three of the GOP negotiators have agreed to brief the entire GOP Conference before they sign on to any deal with Baucus. But Democrats said Baucus is unlikely to run any deal by his caucus before he shakes hands on an agreement with Republicans.

Baucus must figure that when you're talking to barely any Democrats from the most Democratic states, why bother talking to fellow Democrats at all?

crossposted at unbossed.com

CIA Director: Mistakes were made

2009-08-01T13:44:00.002-05:00

The Sunday Washington Post publishes an extraordinarily disingenuous op-ed (I know!) in which Leon Panetta, taking his cue from a foreign spook, argues that Congress should not hold anyone in the CIA accountable for past wrongdoing because the country needs to be "totally focused" on the present.

Last month, at a meeting overseas of intelligence service chiefs, one of my counterparts from a major Western ally pulled me aside. Why, he asked, is Washington so consumed with what the CIA did in the past, when the most pressing national security concerns are in the present? It was a very good question.

Panetta evidently did not point out to this foreigner that the US is a nation of laws, or that other significant parts of the federal government (such as the Justice Department and FBI, SEC, FEC, Treasury Department, the EPA, and Interior Department) regularly manage to investigate wrongdoing in the past (where wrongdoing traditionally is to be found) while performing other duties as well. It would be interesting to know whether the IRS is finding that tax cheats have adopted the Obama administration's line, "No investigating the past!"

Panetta lards his preposterous argument with several bizarre assertions. For example:

The CIA no longer operates black sites and no longer employs "enhanced" interrogation techniques.

Tell that to the hundreds of prisoners who are still held and abused in total isolation at Bagram.

The most galling passage, however, is this one:

The time has come for both Democrats and Republicans to take a deep breath and recognize the reality of what happened after Sept. 11, 2001. The question is not the sincerity or the patriotism of those who were dealing with the aftermath of Sept. 11. The country was frightened, and political leaders were trying to respond as best they could. Judgments were made. Some of them were wrong. But that should not taint those public servants who did their duty pursuant to the legal guidance provided. The last election made clear that the public wanted to move in a new direction.

In other words, sincerely frightened fools – as long as they're patriotic - may arrange to violate the law with impunity if they make sure legal memoranda get passed around. And when one party loses the White House in an election, all its crimes get forgiven.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Washington Post goes Minitrue

2009-07-29T20:08:00.001-05:00

In Orwell's Nineteen eighty-four, Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth ('Minitrue') rewriting past pronouncements to fit the facts to the party's doctrine and to efface any traces of potentially embarrassing statements. If he were in DC today, Smith might be working instead for the Washington Post.

Over at the outstanding health-care reform blog of Physicians for a National Health Program, Dr. Don McCanne has caught the Post rewriting one of its stories seemingly in order to eliminate information embarrassing to Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA). The original version of the story pointed out that BCBSA had commissioned a study by the Lewin Group research firm but, since BCBSA was dissatisfied with the results, the study never was released to the public. Later the WaPo revised the story and posted the new version on line – without however noting that it had been altered. The revised story completely eliminated the information about the suppressed BCBSA study.

Health-care analysis by the Lewin Group has been widely cited by Congressional Republican opponents of reform. Lewin claims that it provides independent and objective analyses of policy options.The Post story, by David Hilzenrath, demonstrated that Lewin has a considerable conflict of interest in health-care research. It is owned by Ingenix, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, which is one of the largest insurers in the US. Furthermore, both the parent company and subsidiary were exposed by the New York Attorney General for having generated skewed medical data that was used to pad the insurer's bottom line.

Here is a part of the Post's story that was rewritten. First, the version as posted on line at 6:46 PM on July 22, 2009. The emphasis is mine.

Lewin's clients include the government and private groups with a variety of perspectives, including the Commonwealth Fund and the Heritage Foundation. A February report contained information that could be used to argue for a single-payer system, the approach most threatening to private insurers, [Lewin Vice President John] Sheils noted.

But not all of the firm's reports see the light of day. For example, a study for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association was never released, Sheils said.

"Let's just say, sometimes studies come out that don't show exactly what the client wants to see. And in those instances, they have [the] option to bury the study -- to not release it, rather," Sheils said.

Asked to comment, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association spokesman Brett Lieberman said, "We're still working with Lewin on a study, and, you know, we don't talk about our studies until they're done."

In testimony last month to a House committee, Lewin disclosed its affiliation with UnitedHealth and Ingenix in its written submission, but in his oral testimony he did not bring it up until asked, according to a transcript.

"The Lewin Group is committed to providing independent, objective and nonpartisan analyses of policy options," the firm said at the front of its written submission to the Energy and Commerce Committee. "To assure the independence of its work, The Lewin Group has editorial control over all its work products," the firm added.

Notice that there are 262 comments on that version of the article at the WaPo website. The comments slow to a trickle after about 8 AM on July 23.

Now here is a rewritten version of that story, dated to July 23 but with no time stamp. This version has only 5 comments attached to it (beginning in the wee hours of the morning). Two sections of the story (bolded in the earlier version) have simply been excised. The excisions eliminate embarrassing revelations about (a) the non-publication of the study sponsored by Blue Cross Blue Shield (some of whose affiliates are in strong opposition to the Democrats' health care reform proposals), and (b) the seeming reluctance of Lewin Group to disclose its corporate ownership to Congress (though UnitedHealth has a vast stake in any reform proposals under consideration).

Lewin's clients include the government and groups with a variety of perspectives, including the Commonwealth Fund and the Heritage Foundation. A February report by the firm contained information that could be used to argue for a national system known as single-payer, the approach most threatening to insurers, Sheils noted.

But not all of Lewin's reports see the light of day. "Let's just say, sometimes studies come out that don't show exactly what the client wants to see. And in those instances, they have [the] option to bury the study," Sheils said.

"The Lewin Group is committed to providing independent, objective and nonpartisan analyses of policy options," the firm said in a recent submission to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Though it is owned by UnitedHealth, the Lewin Group "has editorial control over all its work products," the firm added.

Neither version at the Post mentions that the story has been revised; that an alternate version exists; or that any 'corrections' needed to be made.

Although the PNHP blog doesn't notice this fact, another three paragraphs toward the end of the first version of the story were eliminated in the Post's rewrite. The eliminated paragraphs cited examples where the Lewin Group had positive things to say about the "public plan" under consideration. Here is what was deleted in the rewrite:

Lewin's findings have been somewhat distorted in the political debate. The firm's analysis of the public option is far from one-sided.

As Sheils explained it to the Energy and Commerce Committee, people would opt for the public plan because they would find it more attractive -- mainly because it would charge much lower premiums.

Politicians have argued that the public plan would place bureaucrats between patients and doctors. However, Lewin wrote that, like traditional Medicare, the federal program for the elderly, a public plan would do less than private insurers to restrict medical care.

Why this additional information also needed to be excised is far from clear to me.

Earlier in the article, a single word was changed. Here is the original sentence:

Ingenix supplied its parent company and other insurers with data that allegedly understated the "usual and customary" doctor fees that insurers use to determine how much they will reimburse consumers for out-of-network care.

The later version changes "usual" to "reasonable". No doubt this was just a matter of tidying up facts, but again, the Post can't be bothered to acknowledge the correction.

crossposted from unbossed.com

Why there can be no free market in health care

2009-07-26T14:48:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman argues that those who believe the competition of the marketplace will be able to provide the best possible health care are fantasizing because there is no free market in the normal sense. That basic point should be where any serious discussion of health care reform starts. Yet it has been excluded from the one-sided debate going on in Washington. That's because most of the politicians and their corporate buddies don't intend to allow actual health care reform. Instead they're proposing to tweak the for-profit health insurance industry, though nearly all agree it's a large part of the problem.

Krugman highlights two things that differentiate health care from that archetypal marketplace where buyers and sellers can craft mutually beneficial arrangements.

There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don’t know when or whether you’ll need care — but if you do, the care can be extremely expensive.

[...]

This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care.

[...]

The second thing about health care is that it’s complicated, and you can’t rely on experience or comparison shopping.

[...]

Between those two factors, health care just doesn’t work as a standard market story.

[...]

There are [around the world] ... no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work.

To summarize Krugman's argument, the buyer can't really make fully rational choices about what and how much health care insurance to buy based upon either supply or need.

There's a third and even more fundamental point that needs to be stressed, though Krugman passes it by. It's this: Unlike TVs or bread or blue jeans, health care is not something the 'consumer' can take or leave, or find a substitute for. When you need it, you need it. It's not about possessing things, it's about pain or retaining the ability to function or life itself. Ultimately it's about freedom.

It's about the third of Roosevelt's four freedoms: Freedom from want.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

[...]

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

Indeed as FDR remarked very simply in that famous address to Congress in 1941:

We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.

There is no legitimate marketplace anywhere in the world for human liberty. In most parts of the modern world, adequate health care is considered to be not a marketable commodity but a human right. So it ought to be considered in the US as well...not merely for those who already qualify for Medicaid or Medicare, but for all of us.

Instead, what the politicians in DC are debating is how to bolster the failed for-profit model of American health insurance by application of just the smallest possible public remedy. The issue, in their minds, has become 'How little can we do?' rather than 'What needs to be done?'.

Bob Somerby has perfectly distilled how far President Obama has climbed down from actually trying to fix what is essentially wrong with the health care fiasco in the US. Now the administration's goal, evidently, is to prune back perhaps 30-50% of the health-care spending that is wasted under the American for-profit model. Because permitting considerable waste, evidently, is a good thing as long as it keeps the politically powerful health-insurance industry at least somewhat fat and happy. Here is Obama at his Wednesday press conference:

Right now, premiums for families that have health insurance have doubled over the last 10 years. They've gone up three times faster than wages. So what we know is that, if the current trends continue, more and more families are going to lose health care, more and more families are going to be in a position where they keep their health care but it takes a bigger bite out of their budget.

Employers are going to put more and more costs on employees or they're just going to stop providing health care altogether.

We also know that health care inflation on the curve that it's on, we're guaranteed to see Medicare and Medicaid basically break the federal budget. And we know that we're spending _ on average we, here in the United States, are spending about $6,000 more than other advanced countries where they're just as healthy.

And I've said this before, if you found out that your neighbor had gotten the same car for $6,000 less, you'd want to figure out how to get that deal. And that's what reform is all about. How can we make sure that we are getting the best bang for our health care dollar.

[...]

And that's why I say, if we can - even if we don't reduce our health care costs by the $6,000 that we're paying more than any other country on Earth, if we just reduced it by $2,000 or $3,000, that would mean money in people's pockets, and that's possible do.

Talk about setting your sights low. It seems that the entire exercise of pushing through this legislation is directed toward retaining the massively inefficient, incoherent, and harmful American health-insurance industry we've grown to hate, but trimming back some small part of its wastefulness...so that our fellow citizens will be gouged somewhat less in the future than they would otherwise be.

That's not true reform, but rather an inoculation against real reform at the very time that the public is demanding action. All the health-care 'reform' legislation coming out of congressional committees this summer is to a greater or lesser degree inadequate to addressing the actual crisis we face. At best, it might produce barely perceptible results beginning perhaps a decade from now by acting as a very modest check against some of the run-away costs. It's main effect will be to blunt the movement to reform health care in the US, however, by bringing it into utter disrepute.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Can right-wingers read? Pt. 2

2009-07-16T15:02:00.000-05:00

The recently released inspectors general report on Bush's warrantless surveillance programs had almost nothing positive to say about them or John Yoo, who provided specious legal justifications for those programs on demand. Today Yoo lashes back at the inspectors in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. His matrix of illogic is so dense that the piece appears to be intended to make your eyes bleed. In the interest of public welfare, I'll supply a summary:

Shorter John Yoo: I don't understand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. And neither do you.

There are so many deplorable gaps and misstatements (as with his many Bush-ear OLC opinions) that the question naturally arises: Can John Yoo read?

Yoo doesn't understand the clear meaning of the FISA law or how it was updated since 1978.

Yoo isn't aware that the FISA law came into existence in 1978, long after Franklin Roosevelt's death.

Yoo makes a constitutional argument without displaying any apparent awareness of the text of the Constitution.

Yoo doesn't understand what was at issue in Youngstown v. Sawyer, with its landmark ruling by the Supreme Court on the balance between Congressional and Presidential power.

Yoo quotes from but evidently hasn't read the Federalist Papers.

Yoo hasn't even read what he himself wrote about the Patriot Act in 2003.

Traditionally it has been John Yoo's writings that have evoked horror and disgust. But the deeper problem appears to be Yoo's reading ability.

Can right-wingers read?

2009-07-16T14:03:00.001-05:00

Any post with a title such as that probably should be an ongoing series.

Today the right-wing nuts hostile to health care reform have seized upon and uncritically parroted a frivolous accusation made by the hyper-right-wing Investor's Business Daily. Their absurd claim is that the House Democrats' health care bill would outlaw private health insurance. The evidence? A single sentence snatched out of context from a document of more than 1,000 pages.

Here's the accusation:

The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:

"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

What IBD neglects to mention is that the subheading that this sentence occurs under reads: GRANDFATHERED HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE DEFINED. That's what "such coverage" in the quoted sentence refers to. The bill does of course allow other health insurance plans to be developed in the future, but they're just not grandfathered.

You'd have thought that before making the accusation, or parroting it, the right-wingers would have read the relevant part of the bill (PDF). Brings us back to our original question.

One high-profile right-wing nut who evidently didn't bother to read the bill before parroting IBD, later posted this hilariously revealing update:

Reader Patrick Ying disagrees:

Investor’s Business Daily did not continue to read the bill to page 19. “Individual health insurance coverage that is not grandfathered health insurance coverage under subsection (a) may only be offered on or after the first day of Y1 as an Exchange-participating health benefits plan. ” It does not outlaw individual private coverage – you can still buy the plan on the Exchange where they will compete with the public option, not be replaced by it. The advantage of the Exchange, is that the coverage no longer has one of the problems of individual coverage – skyrocketing premiums should you become ill.

Hmm. We should have more time for all this stuff to be sorted out. Instead they’re ramming it through as quickly as possible. That makes me suspicious.

The "stuff" will be sorted out by those who bother to read it, of course. Hmm. Now that is suspicious.

The weaknesses of the FISA inspectors general reports

2009-07-11T15:49:00.000-05:00

In my recent post highlighting aspects of the newly declassified version of the report about Bush's warrantless surveillance, I took it for granted that the inspectors general produced a thoroughly inadequate overview of the programs. Perhaps I shouldn't have left that unsaid.

One year ago almost to the day I predicted that any such FISA investigations by the intelligence agency inspectors general would be hobbled and blinkered, and would result in reports that have little merit. That commentary is still worth reading. One thing to add to it, now that we've seen the first such IG report: Two of the five inspectors involved (for CIA and DoD) are in fact "Acting" inspectors general – which makes their independence and authority all the shakier.

No surprise then that practically everything that matters is treated poorly or not at all in the unclassified version of the IG report.

It tells us nothing about which topics the inspectors general wished to but were unable to investigate adequately.

It tells us virtually nothing about the most controversial "Other Intelligence Activities" (which even Bush's own DoJ lawyers rebelled against in 2004). It tells us nothing about whether any or all of these programs were illegal. Nothing about why DoJ officials concluded that many of the programs were illegal. Nothing about what pressure if any was brought on government lawyers to produce opinions testifying to the programs legality. Almost nothing about why John Yoo was given carte blanche to whip out such opinions, without any oversight in the OLC.

It tells us very little about who was responsible, and by what steps, in the creation of seemingly illegal surveillance programs.

It tells us nothing about who was being surveilled, or how, or how often, or how many people were affected. Nothing about how many purely domestic communications were intercepted. Nothing about whether legally privileged or business or personal or political or journalistic communications were intercepted. Nothing about increases or decreases or other changes in the programs over time.

It tells us nothing about what the cooperating telecoms knew, or how willingly they cooperated.

It tells us very little about how much new and actionable intelligence these seemingly illegal programs produced. It tells us little about how much 'poisonous fruit' ended up befouling terrorism prosecutions being brought by the FBI.

And it doesn't seem to make any attempt to assess whether the statements made about the programs by Bush administration officials were on the whole accurate.

crossposted at unbossed.com

The Anita-Hillification of Frank Ricci

2009-07-11T15:47:00.000-05:00

When Anita Hill was set to testify at Clarence Thomas' Senate confirmation hearings in 1991, reactionaries feared that her comments would be unhelpful to Thomas and promised to demonize her. For example, here was GOP Senator Alan Simpson:

"She will be injured and destroyed and belittled and hounded and harassed, real harassment, different from the sexual kind, just plain old Washington variety harassment."

Now many self-styled 'liberals' appear intent on demonizing an upcoming witness in Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, firefighter Frank Ricci. The reason again this time is that the testimony might be unhelpful to the nominee.

In the last few days there has been a surge on line of poorly reasoned and tendentious commentaries whose purpose is to depict Ricci as overly litigious ("Ricci...then sued, yet again") and even as hypocritical ("Ricci was singing the opposite tune"). This operation has involved a classic whispering campaign:

Supporters of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor are quietly targeting the Connecticut firefighter who's at the center of Sotomayor's most controversial ruling.

[...]

On Friday, citing in an e-mail "Frank Ricci's troubled and litigious work history," the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters' attention to Ricci's past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.

[...]

No People for the American Way officials could be reached Friday to speak on the record about the press campaign.

What none of those involved in the campaign seem to acknowledge is that (a) there were fully 18 firefighters who brought suit against New Haven, and (b) at issue in the confirmation hearings is not the motives of any of the plaintiffs but rather Sotomayor's controversial decision to agree to a summary judgment in that case. The NYT's Adam Liptak described that decision as "remarkably cursory" and "baffling". Many commentators and jurists (including it seems the entire Supreme Court) fault that summary judgment as wholly inadequate to the case.

The appeals court’s cursory treatment suggested that the case was routine and unworthy of careful scrutiny. Yet the case turned out to be important enough to warrant review by the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in April and is likely to issue a decision this month.

The result Judge Sotomayor endorsed, many legal scholars say, is perfectly defensible. The procedure the panel used, they say, is another matter.

There is evidence that the three judges in the case agreed to use a summary order rather than a full decision in an effort to find common ground.

[...]

The district court judge in New Haven, whose opinion the appeals court panel affirmed and adopted, did identify three earlier Second Circuit decisions concerning the use of race by the government in hiring and promotional exams. But they did not involve precisely the same issues.

[...]

In the end, according to court personnel familiar with some of the internal discussions of the case, the three judges had difficulty finding consensus, with Judge Sack the most reluctant to join a decision affirming the district court. Judge Pooler, as the presiding judge, took the leading role in fashioning the compromise. The use of a summary order, which ordinarily cannot be cited as precedent, was part of that compromise.

Such a 'compromise', however, would appear to be in violation of the 2nd Circuit's own rules, which require that summary judgments be used only "in those cases in which decision is unanimous and each judge of the panel believes that no jurisprudential purpose would be served by an opinion". Ricci v. DeStefano seems like a classic instance where major legal issues needed to be resolved, there being no clear binding precedents. Thus a summary judgment would have been inappropriate.

That is the issue that Sotomayor's advocates wish to cloud by attacking the lead plaintiff, Ricci. Like the other plaintiffs, he obviously thinks he has a legitimate grievance given that Sotomayor's three-judge panel heard lengthy arguments in the case but then dismissed it without even providing a clear justification.

As for the question of Ricci's motives, it's irrelevant whether or not his own resentment of wrong-doing is too finely calibrated. Despite Dahlia Lithwick's injudicious attempt to portray Ricci as a serial litigator, the fact is that he has brought suit only twice. None of those who are lambasting Ricci as a troublemaker have much at all to say about the facts of his 1995 suit against the New Haven fire department. The most awkward fact, for his critics, is that the city settled the suit completely in Ricci's favor in 1997 before it went to court. Even as a 20-year-old, it seems that Ricci was unusually well qualified and highly praised as a firefighter. The entire basis for Ricci's earlier suit was that he'd been discriminated against illegally because of his dyslexia. His later, more famous suit also centered on a claim of illegal discrimination. Whatever the merits of the cases (both of which Ricci won), those are consistent points of view and very far from hypocritical.

The fact that Ricci also once was fired in another Connecticut town in 1998 and then filed a complaint with the state Labor Department, which he lost, tells us little by itself. Ricci claims that he was fired for investigating safety violations. The town was fined for such violations subsequently. It's not always easy to win disputes before labor boards, and even harder to prove that firings were due to retaliation. We'd have to know many more details in this episode to have any chance of clarifying what actually happened - much less gauging whether Ricci behaved responsibly. I suspect that in different circumstances – that is to say, if his critics were less unsympathetic to him – they'd be perfectly happy to apply the term 'whistleblower' to Ricci in regard to his 1998 complaint.

It's pretty sad that ordinary citizens can't testify about their knowledge of high-profile judicial nominees without calling down ideological wrath upon themselves.

crossposted at unbossed.com

IG report on Bush's warrantless surveillance program

2009-07-10T17:31:00.002-05:00

The shameful FISA 'modernization' law passed by Congress last July, which retroactively legalized the egregiously illegal (and still mysterious) electronic surveillance of Americans instituted by George Bush, had at least one modestly useful provision: It required the inspectors general of the DoD, DoJ, NSA, CIA, and ODNI to produce a report on the history and scope of the secret Bush surveillance. The unclassified version of the IG report has now been made public (PDF).

It tells us few details about the surveillance programs and its conclusions are so tame as to be risible. On the other hand, it does contain some food for thought.

First, very strikingly, several top Bush administration officials refused to be interviewed by the inspectors general for this report. The IG investigation was mandated by Congress in exchange (it was a terrible 'bargain') for permitting the lawlessness of the Bush surveillance programs to be swept under the carpet permanently. But the following key figures in the White House, the DoJ, and the CIA gave the inspectors general the brush off: Andrew Card (Bush's Chief of Staff); David Addington (Cheney's CoS and Counsel); John Ashcroft (AG); John Yoo (DoJ's Office of Legal Counsel); and George Tenet (CIA).

Second, the report acknowledges what many of us surmised in 2007 from circumlocutions used by Alberto Gonzales in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee - that what Bush termed the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' (the interception of international communications into the US by suspected Al Qaeda operatives) constituted only one of the warrantless surveillance programs that Bush was authorizing without seeking permission from the FISA Court. The IG report lumps all of Bush's other warrantless programs, essentially mysterious to us, under the rubric "Other Intelligence Activities". Together the TSP and the OIA are termed the "President's Surveillance Program" (PSP).

The inspectors general tell us nothing substantive about these "Other Intelligence Activities". Their report does however note that when John Yoo's legal memos (see below) were reviewed in 2003 by DoJ officials Jack Goldsmith, Patrick Philbin, and James Comey, they were found to be particularly weak in regard to justifying the "Other Intelligence Activities".

Third, it's worth emphasizing that the repeated presidential authorizations for warrantless surveillance programs, for years on end, were made under a presidential assertion that a more or less permanent state of emergency existed. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel did its part in undermining the Constitution by holding, again and again, that the existence of a threat of terrorism within the United States made warrantless surveillance "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment. The 'evidence' for such a permanent threat, assembled regularly by the CIA, consisted in part of the surveillance that had already been conducted without warrant. In other words, it was a self-perpetuating cycle.

The Presidential Authorizations were issued at intervals of approximately every 45 days. As described in the next section, with each reauthorization the CIA and later the NCTGC prepared an assessment of current potential terrorist threats and a summary of intelligence gathered through the PSP and other means during the previous authorization period. The Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel reviewed this information to assess whether there was "a sufficient factual basis demonstrating a threat of terrorist attacks in the United States for it to continue to be reasonable under the standards of the Fourth Amendment for the President to [continue] to authorize the warrantless searches involved" in the program. The Office of Legal Counsel then advised the Attorney General whether the constitutional standard of reasonableness had been met and whether the Presidential Authorization could be certified "as to form and legality." Each of the Presidential Authorizations included a finding to the effect that an extraordinary emergency continued to exist, and that the circumstances "constitute an urgent and compelling governmental interest" justifying the activities being authorized without a court order.

Fourth, Alberto Gonzales opined to the inspectors general that the involvement of the Justice Department in this legal sham every 45 days was important because (a) it helped to convince the private telecoms to go along with programs that violated the clear letter of the law, and (b) it would help in the event of future investigations into those involved in implementing the illegal programs.

[Alberto Gonzales] also stated that it was important that the cooperating private sector personnel know that the Attorney General had approved the program. In addition, Gonzales said that for "purely political considerations" the Attorney General's approval of the program would have value "prospectively" in the event of congressional or inspector general reviews of the program.

Fifth, from 2001 to May 2003 John Yoo was the only person at the Office of Legal Counsel, and one of only three non-FBI personnel at the Justice Department, to be read into the warrantless surveillance programs. Yoo's nominal supervisor at OLC, Jay Bybee, was kept out of the loop and had "no idea" how his deputy John Yoo drafted the OLC memos that (according to Gonzales) gave "a sense of legitimacy" to the programs. Those memos were of course scandalously incompetent, a fact that caused consternation at OLC after Yoo's departure.

Sixth, the lawyers got involved in generating opinions in support of the legality of the programs only after Bush had begun authorizing them in October 2001. That was when Attorney General Ashcroft was read into the program, and the same day he authorized it. At OLC, John Yoo did not produce his first memo supporting the legality of these warrantless surveillance programs until November 2, 2001. The NSA lawyers as well were kept out of the loop until after Bush authorized the program in consultation with NSA Director Hayden – at which time the NSA lawyers dutifully "supported the lawfulness of the resulting program".

Seventh, George Bush's account of the genesis of the warrantless surveillance is definitively shown to be false (as I had surmised here two years ago). After the controversial programs became public, Bush tried to portray himself as an innocent bystander in their development. Bush wanted voters to believe that he'd merely implemented something that the NSA Director had wanted to do.

The spying that would become such a divisive issue for the White House and for General Hayden grew out of a meeting days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush gathered his senior intelligence aides to brainstorm about ways to head off another attack.

"Is there anything more we could be doing, given the current laws?" the president later recalled asking.

General Hayden stepped forward. "There is," he said, according to Mr. Bush's recounting of the conversation in March during a town-hall-style meeting in Cleveland.

By all accounts, General Hayden was the principal architect of the plan. He saw the opportunity to use the N.S.A.'s enormous technological capabilities by loosening restrictions on the agency's operations inside the United States.

Well, not quite all accounts. At the time this NYT report appeared, I commented that it was incoherent because its sources tried to portray Cheney –improbably - as doing little more than cheerleading on behalf of Hayden's initiative. More likely, I thought, the pressure for warrantless surveillance programs came from Cheney first, and Hayden eventually bowed to the pressure.

The new IG report confirms that my interpretation of events was right (from page 5):

In the days immediately after September 11, 2001, the NSA used its existing authorities to gather intelligence information in response to the terrorist attacks. When Director of Central Intelligence Tenet, on behalf of the White House, asked NSA Director Hayden whether the NSA could do more against terrorism, Hayden replied that nothing more could be done within existing authorities. When asked what he might do with more authority, Hayden said he put together information on what was operationally useful and technologically feasible. This information formed the basis of the PSP [President's Surveillance Program].

Shortly thereafter, the President authorized the NSA to undertake a number of new, highly classified intelligence activities.

So, the IG report has nothing about a dramatic face-to-face meeting between Bush and Hayden. Instead, Tenet was sent to pressure Hayden to have the NSA do more, and we can infer that Hayden responded that he would expand surveillance if he received explicit authorization.

This section of the history of the programs is critical, but notice how briefly and vaguely the inspectors general treat it. In particular, nobody is identified as having sent Tenet to talk to Hayden. Tenet merely chats with Hayden "on behalf of the White House". Who in the 'White House'? We're not told, and that fact speaks volumes I think. It was Cheney, and the inspectors general don't care to say so at least in their unclassified version of the report.

Eighth, much of the declassified IG report is devoted to a detailed narrative of how lawyers at the post-Yoo Justice Department refused to continue backing the surveillance programs in March of 2004. Little here appears to be new, though I do not remember knowing that after Bush reauthorized the programs without DoJ concurrence, FBI Director Mueller told Bush that he would remove the FBI from participation in the programs. Mueller also threatened to resign if Bush required the FBI to continue participating in the program.

Ninth, in 2006 the Justice Department's Inspector General investigated the value to the FBI of the intelligence generated by the warrantless surveillance programs. As referred to in this combined report, the classified 2006 study appears to have found that the programs generated lots of useless 'leads' and relatively little of any value (it "concluded that although PSP-derived information had value in some counterterrorism investigations, it generally played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts").

Meanwhile Michael Hayden as CIA director, and some of his immediate subordinates, have touted the importance of PSP-derived information in CIA activities. However the Inspector General for the CIA found that the CIA was not tracking the information it received in such a way as to be able to substantiate such claims about its importance. CIA officials also told the Inspector General that much of the PSP-derived information was "vague or without context", rendering it of little use.

Tenth, the DoJ Inspector General's report found that Alberto Gonzales' testimony about the warrantless surveillance programs to the Senate Judiciary Committee was "confusing, inaccurate, and had the effect of misleading" those who hadn't been read into the program. Gonzales falsely told the Committee that the March 2004 dispute between the DoJ and the White House was unrelated to the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" whose existence Bush had acknowledged. Gonzales also falsely said that DoJ lawyers had no concerns about that program's legality.

Rather bizarrely, however, the DoJ Inspector General's report concluded that Gonzales "did not intend to mislead Congress".

crossposted at unbossed.com

How the mighty have fallen

2009-07-08T16:00:00.003-05:00

Former Attorney General and White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, helped to preside over a great many crimes as a flunky in the Bush administration. Who'd have thought, that scandalous record along with his scrumptiously perforated memory eventually made Gonzales nearly unemployable after he was pushed out of office in 2007. The best he's been able to turn up have been very small, temporary jobs.

Now he's found another temporary employer, Texas Tech. Despite Karen Tumulty, it appears pretty obvious that the University is less than eager to draw attention to its association with Gonzales.

As Texas Tech announced in a July 7 press release, Gonzales will be advising them on a "minority student leadership training and development program" and teaching a single undergraduate course this fall in the Political Science Department. It's a department with around 45 graduate students, so the assignment of an undergraduate course to Gonzales speaks volumes about how he's viewed by the faculty.

Remarkably, the people quoted by the University press release do not include the PoliSci chairman or any of the department's faculty. A reporter at the Austin American-Statesman who broke the story on the 7th did obtain a statement from someone inside the department, but it was a staff member and merely confirmed that Gonzeles was teaching a single course.

His appointment as a temporary/part-time 'visiting' professor very probably did not require any vote by the department's faculty – and one suspects that is how Gonzales managed to get it. It looks like a decision made at the upper levels of the administration and more or less imposed on the PoliSci Department. Nothing about Gonzales' appointment nor the undergraduate course he's teaching appears anywhere on the department's website.

Apparently the appointment was made in a way to evade attention as much as possible. The University released the information only after the Austin reporter had pried it out:

In a press release issued hours after I inquired, the university said that as of Aug. 1, Gonzales will join the Texas Tech University System...

If the decision to hire Gonzales was made at all recently, it smells as if the Texas Tech administration wanted to do it while most of the faculty were away from campus during the summer. There will be no faculty meetings for several months, at which resistance to the Gonzales appointment might have been organized or complaints expressed.

The University press release does not acknowledge that any controversy at all exists regarding Alberto Gonzales.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Questions about the Ricci ruling

2009-06-29T23:59:00.001-05:00

Does anybody seriously believe that New Haven's mayor, or the CSB he appointed, would have taken a stand against certifying the firefighter exam results if minorities had performed disproportionately well on it? That New Haven politicians would have argued, for example, that oral examination boards constituted so as ensure that minorities made up 2/3 of each board created a disparate impact against white applicants?

If not, then it makes a mockery of the city's professed concern that Title VII's provision on disparate impact required it to throw out the results.

The judgment handed down today by SCOTUS' conservative bloc in Ricci v. DeStefano actually was a remarkably liberal ruling. It's altogether too rare for the Scalia wing to stand up for the common man who's been kicked in the teeth arbitrarily by the powerful.

In this case, it was the Ginsburg wing of the Court that proved to be reactionary. The firefighters who did well on the exam, she said, "understandably attract the court's sympathy"... but nevertheless the Court ought to tell them to bend over again just because it can. The reason it can is that the grandiosely flawed (and unevenly enforced) law on disparate impact permits the Court, if it chooses, to join in treating job applicants as fodder in ideological jousts.

For what it's worth, I suspect that if New Haven had tossed out exam results in which minorities performed disproportionately well, the two blocs of the Supreme Court would have taken the opposite views of Title VII than the ones they adopted here.

crossposted from unbossed.com

WaPo on health-care reform 'centrism'

2009-06-28T12:46:00.002-05:00

The Post publishes a typically silly look at Democratic activists who are pushing their party's conservative Senators to stop undermining the 'public option' (the very mildest reform proposal that has any chance of substantially improving America's health-care disaster). But in the Post's view, the Democratic obstructionists are 'centrists' and the liberal activists are, well, pointy-headed fools of course.

The rising tensions between Democratic legislators and constituencies that would typically be their natural allies underscore the high hurdles for Obama as he tries to hold together a diverse, fragile coalition. Activists say they are simply pressing for quick delivery of "true health reform," but the intraparty rift runs the risk of alienating centrist Democrats who will be needed to pass a bill.

Pity the poor 'centrists', who almost alone in Washington it seems must submit to listening to constituents' views. What makes these Senators' views 'centrist'? Evidently it's because they oppose reform that 76% of the public strongly backs (PDF), and side instead with the tiny minority of Americans who oppose a public plan.

The Post eventually gets around to acknowledging this inconvenient fact - however in a fashion utterly characteristic of this Tory paper.

"Democratic senators are taking millions of dollars from insurance and health-care interests and getting lobbied by those donors and coming out against a position that 76 percent of Americans agree on," said Adam Green, interim chief executive of Change Congress.

While recent polls show high initial support for a government option, the number declines if told the insurance industry could fold as a result.

In other news today, the Post reports that a large majority of the American public supports the safe disposal of used batteries but support falls away when people are told that as many as 23 states may need to be evacuated and turned into colossal landfills.

I don't know which polls the Post is referring to, but the recent NBC/WSJ poll (linked above) does not posit such a dire consequence as: 'The insurance industry could fold if you get your pesky public plan, so what do you think of it now?' It did ask people whether they thought employers might drop their health care plan if a public plan were created; and whether a public plan might limit access to doctors and medical treatment options. But that's very different from the dire scenario that the Post claims pollsters are putting to the public. Maybe it's only those damned elusive 'centrist' pollsters who are asking such questions.

The rising tensions between Democratic legislators and constituencies that would typically be their natural allies underscore the high hurdles for Obama as he tries to hold together a diverse, fragile coalition. Activists say they are simply pressing for quick delivery of "true health reform," but the intraparty rift runs the risk of alienating centrist Democrats who will be needed to pass a bill.

"Democratic senators are taking millions of dollars from insurance and health-care interests and getting lobbied by those donors and coming out against a position that 76 percent of Americans agree on," said Adam Green, interim chief executive of Change Congress.

While recent polls show high initial support for a government option, the number declines if told the insurance industry could fold as a result.

What if having the government create a new health insurance plan made many private health insurers go out of business because they could not compete? In that case would you support or oppose creating a government-run health insurance plan?

As the Post's own blogger Ezra Klein pointed out, that question is arbitrarily alarmist.

Meanwhile at Open Left Adam Green describes the foolishness of the line of questioning he endured from the Post reporter, Ceci Connolly.

crossposted from unbossed.com

NPR: It's 'liberals' who think imprisonment without trial is unAmerican

2009-06-26T16:22:00.001-05:00

From NPR's report this morning on a radical proposal to give the government the power to lock people up indefinitely without trial, we learn that it is only 'some liberals' who object:

Some conservatives say it will turn the battlefield into CSI: Afghanistan, requiring soldiers to collect evidence as they're being shot at. Some liberals say holding people without trial is fundamentally un-American.

Evidently conservatism has no view at all about upholding the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution:

No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law [...].

Nor the Sixth Amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial...

The proponent of this legislation, Benjamin Wittes, a faux-liberal pundit now lodged at Brookings, has been pushing all manner of national security 'reforms' that undercut fundamental American liberties. Wittes wants to see a parallel system of justice created, 'national security courts', to make it easier to convict people by stripping away rights and due process protections.

His current proposal, what purports to be a draft of legislation to create a 'system' of 'preventive detention' (i.e. indefinite imprisonment without trial), tries to help Barack Obama dig himself out of the ditch he drove into with his pronouncement last month that he wishes to have the power to pick and choose from a variety of courts and military tribunals in which to put certain terrorism suspects on trial. The venue will be chosen to favor conviction, and if conviction is insufficiently certain then any prisoner deemed dangerous will continue to be held without trial indefinitely. In other words, the Obama proposal is to create a specious facsimile of due process for terrorism suspects.

Wittes is happy to pitch in to help foist a law for imprisonment without trial upon the US because, as he helpfully explained to NPR, it's effectively what George W. Bush had been doing as president.

Those concerns lead many to ask why Wittes is pushing for indefinite detention at all. We already have it, he says. Detainees have been held at Guantanamo for years. Thousands more are imprisoned in Afghanistan. The Supreme Court has said the United States can detain some terrorists for the duration of hostilities against al-Qaida and the Taliban. So, Wittes says, "There's no question that we're detaining people outside of the criminal justice system. The question is what the rules are for that detention and who makes those rules."

Next month, perhaps Wittes will also get around to drafting helpful legislation to legalize the forms of torture that the Bush administration inflicted on terrorist suspects.

America, here is your neoconservative

2009-06-25T22:10:00.000-05:00

Neocon Gary Schmitt is in a snit over the US soccer team's unprecedented victory in the FIFA confederations cup semifinals against Spain. His rant at the American Enterprise blog perfectly embodies the neoconservative philosophy that knowledge is an impediment to understanding.

Schmitt formerly devoted his vast abilities to cheerleading for an invasion of Iraq at the Project for a New American Century. Fresh off that resounding success, he's now taking on the threat posed by the rise in popularity of soccer inside the US. A veritable dagger aimed at the soft underbelly of the American heartland.

He denounces the US victory because the Spaniards had more shots on goal but still lost the match.

As someone who didn’t play soccer growing up, but had a dad who did and whose own kids played as well, I can say unquestionably that it is the sport in which the team that dominates loses more often than any other major sport I know of. Or, to put it more bluntly, the team that deserves to win doesn’t. For some soccer-loving friends, this is perfectly okay. Indeed, they will argue that it’s a healthy, conservative reminder of how justice does not always prevail in life.

Well, hooey on that. And, thankfully, Americans are not buying it. In spite of the fact that one can drive by an open field on Saturdays and usually see it filled with young boys and girls playing soccer, the game’s popularity has not moved anywhere toward being a major sport here in the United States.

Had this super patriot ever bothered to learn how to play soccer (as I once did), he might have figured out that the whole point of the game is to shoot the ball into the back, not just the front, of the net.

Fouad Ajami, tutor to presidents

2009-06-22T15:59:00.001-05:00

Almost everything that neocon Fouad Ajami writes is good for a laugh. Typically he serves up a preposterously incoherent mix of half-digested stray facts, heavily larded with a peculiar kind of incomprehension and preening about his own brilliance. His op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal is no exception. Perhaps I've already said too much about this once influential ninny, but it's hard to resist taking a stick to Ajami's latest excretion.

The central point, if there is one, appears to be that Ajami is smarter than Barack Obama, whose Iranian policy he considers to be weak and naive. He wants the President to be confrontational with the Iranian leadership. Ajami holds up Ronald Reagan as the model for clear-minded and hard-nosed foreign policy in the Middle East. Apparently Ajami forgets that Reagan sent that Bible and cake to the mullahs in Iran – oh, yeah, and a whole bunch of arms too. Hmmm...maybe it was Reagan's support of Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran, or perhaps his alleged October Surprise, or the Lebanon debacle, that impressed Ajami so much.

But that's just one of the many inconsistencies that render his 'argument' incoherent. Ajami can't decide whether Mousavi actually won the election, or was defeated by a popular Ahmadinejad. Even so, though he can't quite bring himself to say so explicitly, Ajami seems to think that Obama needs to take a strong stance against the Iranian regime and support the street protesters. Obama, he thinks, is subject to delusions about the possibility of a new detente with Iran.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted -- just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power.

I wonder how many people in Washington are unaware that Iranian hardliners employ anti-Americanism to their own advantage? Anyway, try to reconcile the foregoing with this:

We must rein in the modernist conceit that the bloggers, and the force of Twitter and Facebook, could win in the streets against the squads of the regime. That fight would be an Iranian drama, all outsiders mere spectators.

If the struggle in Iran will be decided by the Iranians themselves, as of course it will be, then how could supportive rhetoric from an American president be of much assistance to the demonstrators? What's more, since Ajami admits that whipping up anti-Americanism helps the hard-liners to hold onto power, wouldn't it be counter-productive for Obama to declare that the demonstrators have US backing?

Yet Ajami dares to complain about "the administration's incoherence".

A final point: Ajami descibes President Carter as having "lost" Iran, as if that country ever belonged to the US. It's the same arrogance he displayed in the spring of 2003 when Ajami declared that "We are now coming into acquisition of Iraq". Ajami is so damned confused that he can't even distinguish between "ours" and "theirs".

crossposted from unbossed.com