Poisoning the World

Kurt Nimmo is more than a little over the top, but this important story has gotten buried for decades. Depleted uranium munitions kill both our "enemies" and our own people and are another of the really vile secrets of the Iraq war, both versions 1 and 2. Kurt writes:

It is totally astounding. Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush the Junior are war criminals of a caliber not witnessed since the war against the people of Vietnam (2-3 million killed). It is estimated this threesome of mass murder have killed around 1.5 million Iraqis (under the supervision of Bush I and Clinton), at least 3,620 Afghan civilians (according to a count conducted by Marc Herold of the Guardian as of August 2002) and 100,00 Iraqi civilians under the supervision of Bush II (according to research conducted by The Lancet medical journal). Add to this staggering death toll approaching 2 million another 11,000 Americans killed by “Gulf War Syndrome” and you have crimes of Nuremberg tribunal proportions.

Add the World Health Organization (WHO) to the list of culprits. “An expert report warning that the long-term health of Iraq’s civilian population would be endangered by British and US depleted uranium (DU) weapons has been kept secret,” writes Rob Edwards for the Sunday Herald. “The study by three leading radiation scientists cautioned that children and adults could contract cancer after breathing in dust containing DU, which is radioactive and chemically toxic. But it was blocked from publication by the World Health Organization (WHO), which employed the main author, Dr Keith Baverstock, as a senior radiation advisor. He alleges that it was deliberately suppressed, though this is denied by WHO.”

Clinton used the same deadly garbage in Kosovo and Bosnia. Avedon has done a better job than anyone of staying on top of this story.

The story is long, but it is important. At this stage of the game, compiling a list of our warcrimes in the last four years is going to take a more dedicated prosecutor than moi meme. I just turn over rocks and show you what I find there.

Snow Day

Well, this snowstorm has turned out to be an absolute bust in the DC area. I'm a little west of downtown and we've had maybe an 2 inches. Yesterday, the TV weathercritters were making it sound like it was going to be the end of civilization as we know it and The Weather Channel was participating in the frenzy.

The streets are going to be wicked nasty after the sun goes down and the slush freezes, however. I'm in for the night so it's not an issue. Snow food for tonight: three cheese omelet and a salad of wild field greens, french baguette with unsalted butter (hint, keep it in the freezer.) Here's a tip for particularly fluffy omelets: separate the whites and yolks and beat the whites to frothy. Beat the yolks separately with any herbs or spices (no salt! Makes the whites tough.) Make sure the omelet pan is ready to go, then quickly fold the yolks into the whites and turn immediately into your omelet pan before the yolks have time to break down the frothy whites. You get a lovely, light omelet out of this and it only takes a couple of more minutes of work.

Intimate Friends

Tim Grieve writes in Salon:

Oh, that crazy Vladimir

When George Bush sat down with Vladimir Putin in Bratislava last week to deliver his long-awaited lecture on civil liberties and freedom of the press, Newsweek says Putin shot back with an attack of his own: "We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS."

Newsweek , rising to the defense of freedom of the press in these United States, says it’s "all too clear" that Putin sees the relationship between Bush and the American media as being “just like his own.” Presumably, that means that Putin thinks Bush controls the U.S. media in the same way that he controls the Russian media. We can’t imagine where he got that idea.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

This just came in via the Center for American Progress's blog, ThinkProgress. At last, some good news!

With God At The Four Seasons

In April, 2002, Tom DeLay told a church crowd, "He [God] has been walking me through an incredible journey…He is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me."

DeLay's "incredible journey" continues today in a Travis County courthouse, where God's instrument will find himself the "focus of attention" of a civil trial involving allegations of illegal campaign contributions to Republican members of the Texas House. Two of DeLay's major political operatives in Washington and another political ally in Texas were indicted last year in a grand jury investigation, accused of participating in a scheme to make illegal corporate donations to Republican candidates for the Legislature.

Security v. Law

It's Called Torture
By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 28, 2005

As a nation, does the United States have a conscience? Or is anything and everything O.K. in post-9/11 America? If torture and the denial of due process are O.K., why not murder? When the government can just make people vanish - which it can, and which it does - where is the line that we, as a nation, dare not cross?

When I interviewed Maher Arar in Ottawa last week it seemed clear that however thoughtful his comments, I was talking with the frightened, shaky successor of a once robust and fully functioning human being. Torture does that to a person. It's an unspeakable crime, an affront to one's humanity that can rob you of a portion of your being as surely as acid can destroy your flesh.

Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen with a wife and two young children, had his life flipped upside down in the fall of 2002 when John Ashcroft's Justice Department, acting at least in part on bad information supplied by the Canadian government, decided it would be a good idea to abduct Mr. Arar and ship him off to Syria, an outlaw nation that the Justice Department honchos well knew was addicted to torture.

Mr. Arar was not charged with anything, and yet he was deprived not only of his liberty, but of all legal and human rights. He was handed over in shackles to the Syrian government and, to no one's surprise, promptly brutalized. A year later he emerged, and still no charges were lodged against him. His torturers said they were unable to elicit any link between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was sent back to Canada to face the torment of a life in ruins.

Mr. Arar's is the case we know about. How many other individuals have disappeared at the hands of the Bush administration? How many have been sent, like the victims of a lynch mob, to overseas torture centers? How many people are being held in the C.I.A.'s highly secret offshore prisons? Who are they and how are they being treated? Have any been wrongly accused? If so, what recourse do they have?

President Bush spent much of last week lecturing other nations about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. It was a breathtaking display of chutzpah. He seemed to me like a judge who starves his children and then sits on the bench to hear child abuse cases. In Brussels Mr. Bush said he planned to remind Russian President Vladimir Putin that democracies are based on, among other things, "the rule of law and the respect for human rights and human dignity."

Someone should tell that to Maher Arar and his family.

My AmStreet colleague Echidne of the Snakes reads National Review Online so that I, thankfully, don't have to, and brings us this bit of macro analysis from major conservative thinker Jonah Goldberg:

"If, because of a legal regime in the U.S. which guarantees the civil liberties of Americans -- and I'm all in favor of that -- we have to go to other countries in order to successfully interrogate terrorists, then I'm not horrified by that proposition," Goldberg says. And while he concedes that it fundamentally contradicts what the United States stands for, "what undermines what we stand for," he says, "is the publication of all this information."

"There are lots of things that are ugly and terrible about war," Goldberg adds. "I think that people on the right are more comfortable allowing for that."

It sounds to me like the Goldberg sprat missed some of his civics education. People on the right are "more comfortable allowing" violations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Sounds accurate to me.

The Social Contract

Don't Blame Wal-Mart
By ROBERT B. REICH

Published: February 28, 2005

The fact is, today's economy offers us a Faustian bargain: it can give consumers deals largely because it hammers workers and communities.

We can blame big corporations, but we're mostly making this bargain with ourselves. The easier it is for us to get great deals, the stronger the downward pressure on wages and benefits. Last year, the real wages of hourly workers, who make up about 80 percent of the work force, actually dropped for the first time in more than a decade; hourly workers' health and pension benefits are in free fall. The easier it is for us to find better professional services, the harder professionals have to hustle to attract and keep clients. The more efficiently we can summon products from anywhere on the globe, the more stress we put on our own communities.

But you and I aren't just consumers. We're also workers and citizens. How do we strike the right balance? To claim that people shouldn't have access to Wal-Mart or to cut-rate airfares or services from India or to Internet shopping, because these somehow reduce their quality of life, is paternalistic tripe. No one is a better judge of what people want than they themselves.

The problem is, the choices we make in the market don't fully reflect our values as workers or as citizens. I didn't want our community bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., to close (as it did last fall) yet I still bought lots of books from Amazon.com. In addition, we may not see the larger bargain when our own job or community isn't directly at stake. I don't like what's happening to airline workers, but I still try for the cheapest fare I can get.

The only way for the workers or citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and regulations that make our purchases a social choice as well as a personal one. A requirement that companies with more than 50 employees offer their workers affordable health insurance, for example, might increase slightly the price of their goods and services. My inner consumer won't like that very much, but the worker in me thinks it a fair price to pay. Same with an increase in the minimum wage or a change in labor laws making it easier for employees to organize and negotiate better terms.

I wouldn't go so far as to re-regulate the airline industry or hobble free trade with China and India - that would cost me as a consumer far too much - but I'd like the government to offer wage insurance to ease the pain of sudden losses of pay. And I'd support labor standards that make trade agreements a bit more fair.

These provisions might end up costing me some money, but the citizen in me thinks they are worth the price. You might think differently, but as a nation we aren't even having this sort of discussion. Instead, our debates about economic change take place between two warring camps: those who want the best consumer deals, and those who want to preserve jobs and communities much as they are. Instead of finding ways to soften the blows, compensate the losers or slow the pace of change - so the consumers in us can enjoy lower prices and better products without wreaking too much damage on us in our role as workers and citizens - we go to battle.

I don't know if Wal-Mart will ever make it into New York City. I do know that New Yorkers, like most other Americans, want the great deals that can be had in a rapidly globalizing high-tech economy. Yet the prices on sales tags don't reflect the full prices we have to pay as workers and citizens. A sensible public debate would focus on how to make that total price as low as possible.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public, but the good people of Queens decided that the social cost of Wal-mart wasn't a price they were willing to pay. This is the point that Reich is trying, and largely failing, to make: the marketplace imposes costs for low prices elsewhere in the system.

A Trip To Sunny Mykonos on a Snowy Day

Some cold-weather food for the soon to be snowed-in (the left-overs are fabulous, this is multiple day food):

1 roaster chicken
4 lemons
5 cloves of garlic
1 medium onion
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil
Two stalks fresh rosemary
Kosher salt

When you get your fresh roaster home from the store, dump it into an icewater bath liberally laced with Kosher salt for at least an hour. Pull out the gizzards and reserve them for another use (your kitties, for example.)

After the roaster has soaked for at least an hour, drain it and pull the skin over the breast loose but don't damage it or tear it. Just make some space between the skin and the meat of the breast. Slice the lemons thinly and cover as much of the breast under the skin as you can with the lemon slices. Smash two garlic cloves and place the results, one each, on each side of the breast. Fill the cavity with the remaining lemon slices, the chopped onion and garlic, crushed again. Work each of the sprigs of rosemary onto either side of the breast beneath the skin. Coat the entire chicken with a film of olive oil.

Roast in a 350 oven at 20 minutes per pound. Baste often. Let the bird rest for 10 minutes before you carve it. Carve as usual.

Serve with orzo with browned butter and spinach wilted in a little oil and garlic and sprinkled with feta cheese and pine nuts. Your dinner guests will cheer.

On day two, make sandwiches with crusty bread, aioli and spinach. On day three, you are ready to make Greek Avgolemono soup on the carcass.

Chop up the carcass and place in the stock pot with 4 quarts of water. Simmer with 1 cup chopped celery, 1 cup chopped carrots, 1 cup chopped potatoes, all added after the carcass has simmered for one hour. Cook the vegetables in the stock for one hour. After an hour let it cool, skim the grease and remove the bones. Cut up any chicken larger than 1 inch square and return to the soup. Add a can of drained canellini beans. Prepare some good, fresh bread, a plate of cheeses. And some more of that aioli you made the other night. Reduce the soup to a bare simmer. Nothing more than a couple of bubble a minute on the surface. Beat two eggs together with the juice of two lemons. Add them to the soup, stirring the whole time. Don't let the eggs cook. You'll eat well this week and probably keep the flu away.

Serve this with a Greek mezze plate, olives, stuffed grape leaves, a good pita and some hummous. A little ouzo wouldn't be out of place.

I sometimes wish that my friends weren't scatttered all over the country. I have a dream in which I hire a hall and a caterer and you all land here for the party of your lives.

In the Deep Mid-Winter

Winter Storm Warning Issued for D.C. Area

By Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 27, 2005; 2:40 PM

The National Weather Service has issued a heavy snow warning for the Washington area with a possibility of six to ten inches of snow between tonight and Monday night.

A little bit of snow could fall tonight and a whole lot of snow between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday with blowing, drifting and low visibility a distinct possibility.

The weather service noted, however, that "there is still some uncertainty as to the exact track of the storm."

It said that a small shift in the movement of a low pressure system moving up the East Coast could "yield large difference in snowfall accumulations," meaning that some areas could get more rain than snow or a mix of the two.

The warning comes just as moderate temperatures were melting down the snowfall that caused widespread school closings and delays late last week.

Depending on the storm track (the NWS is still hedging) this will be someplace between an annoyance and something that shuts the city down for a couple of days, with the NWS leaning in the latter direction.

Open Thread

Light posting ahead for the rest of the day. We're expecting a major snowstorm tomorrow and I've got a ton of things to do to get ready. I imagine the grocery stores are already a nightmare. I'll be back before evening and expect a regular day while I'm snowed in tomorrow.

Not Our Kind, Dear

Private Health Care in Jails Can Be a Death Sentence
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

Published: February 27, 2005

Brian Tetrault was 44 when he was led into a dim county jail cell in upstate New York in 2001, charged with taking some skis and other items from his ex-wife's home. A former nuclear scientist who had struggled with Parkinson's disease, he began to die almost immediately, and state investigators would later discover why: The jail's medical director had cut off all but a few of the 32 pills he needed each day to quell his tremors.

Over the next 10 days, Mr. Tetrault slid into a stupor, soaked in his own sweat and urine. But he never saw the jail doctor again, and the nurses dismissed him as a faker. After his heart finally stopped, investigators said, correction officers at the Schenectady jail doctored records to make it appear he had been released before he died.

Two months later, Victoria Williams Smith, the mother of a teenage boy, was booked into another upstate jail, in Dutchess County, charged with smuggling drugs to her husband in prison. She, too, had only 10 days to live after she began complaining of chest pains. She phoned friends in desperation: The medical director would not prescribe anything more potent than Bengay or the arthritis medicine she had brought with her, investigators said. A nurse scorned her pleas to be hospitalized as a ploy to get drugs. When at last an ambulance was called, Ms. Smith was on the floor of her cell, shaking from a heart attack that would kill her within the hour. She was 35.

In these two harrowing deaths, state investigators concluded, the culprit was a for-profit corporation, Prison Health Services, that had moved aggressively into New York State in the last decade, winning jail contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with an enticing sales pitch: Take the messy and expensive job of providing medical care from overmatched government officials, and give it to an experienced nationwide outfit that could recruit doctors, battle lawsuits and keep costs down.

A yearlong examination of Prison Health by The New York Times reveals repeated instances of medical care that has been flawed and sometimes lethal. The company's performance around the nation has provoked criticism from judges and sheriffs, lawsuits from inmates' families and whistle-blowers, and condemnations by federal, state and local authorities. The company has paid millions of dollars in fines and settlements.

In the two deaths, and eight others across upstate New York, state investigators say they kept discovering the same failings: medical staffs trimmed to the bone, doctors underqualified or out of reach, nurses doing tasks beyond their training, prescription drugs withheld, patient records unread and employee misconduct unpunished.

This is the kind of health care the oligarchs want to bring to you. Those of you who have insurance. The rest of us won't even have that.

Tribalism

A Subdivision Becomes a Home
New Virginia Developments Forge a Sense of Community

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page A01

Far from desolate, life on the muddy frontiers of sprawl tends to run like a well-oiled, if insular, social machine. The reasons have to do with the very newness of such places and the rootlessness of their residents -- the very things often thought to stifle interaction but which encourage a pioneering esprit de corps, residents say. There is what residents themselves consider the blatant social engineering of clubhouses and gates, along with the shared experience of raising children, picking out pewter cabinet pulls and, for some, chucking convenience for a big house on a golf course.

In some ways, life out here is not unlike life in the shiny, new suburbs of the 1950s. Herbert Gans, a Columbia University sociologist, documented a similar hyperactivity among early residents of Levittown, N.J. In other ways, though, things have changed. There is more racial diversity, and increasingly, there are such features as intranets and paid, professional activities directors -- like cruise directors in developments floating amid farm fields -- which have eased the logistics of community building in an era of long commutes and two-career households.

In Loudoun, the nation's fastest-growing county, examples abound. Behind the rock-and-waterfall entrance to Brambleton, where sidewalks still fade into dirt, Jeff McCauley, 33, said the front porches are not purely ornamental; people actually sit on them. And the community intranet has opened a world of social possibilities.

"I know the joke -- that we're 'the pod people,' " he said. "The reality is the opposite."

Neighbors have listed 32 groups on the intranet, such as Brambleton Buddies, where births ("Baby Maldonado is here!") or requests for help ("Holly is having surgery on Monday") are posted. McCauley used it to start a regular poker group and to find fellow Virginia Tech football fans, who now share beers and rides to games.

"Like three Fridays ago, we went bowling," he said. "I mean, we never did things like that before," he said, referring to his old neighborhood.

Not far away, in Lansdowne on the Potomac, children have regular movie nights in the clubhouse pool, floating on rafts while taking in films. There have been garden galas and bone hunts for dogs.

And in South Riding, a planned community of 4,500 homes, residents have created a system of block captains whose purpose is to facilitate gatherings. "We break it down into blocks of 30 to 35 homes," explained Karin Kuropas, 35. "Our motto is 'Uniting neighbors through information and fun.' "

For a while, the captains organized competitive block parties, in which neighbors tried to outdo one another with elaborate fetes. There were moon bounces, fireworks, hired bands and caterers, until it simply got out of hand.

"I'm saying to people, 'Do a potluck. Do a happy hour,' " Kuropas said. "Let's get back to the basics."

Kristen Reed, stuffing welcome bags for newcomers at South Riding's town hall recently, said that precisely because of the isolation of work and traffic, there is a hunger to socialize.

"You literally need a break -- that's why we started our bunko groups," said Reed, 31, referring to the ubiquitous dice game of the suburbs. "Just to get out of the humdrum."

This is more than a teeny bit of bull***t. It's only community if you are straight, white and married. If you are older, single and female, you aren't included. We are the invisible population.

Back to the Spooks

Within C.I.A., Growing Worry Of Prosecution
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON

Published: February 27, 2005

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 - There is widening unease within the Central Intelligence Agency over the possibility that career officers could be prosecuted or otherwise punished for their conduct during interrogations and detention of terrorism suspects, according to current and former government officials.

Until now, only one C.I.A. employee, a contract worker from North Carolina, has been charged with a crime in connection with the treatment of prisoners, stemming from a death in Afghanistan in 2003. But the officials confirmed that the agency had asked the Justice Department to review at least one other case, from Iraq, to determine if a C.I.A. officer and interpreter should face prosecution.

In addition, the current and former government officials said the agency's inspector general was now reviewing at least a half-dozen other cases, and perhaps many more, in what they described as an expanding circle of inquiries to determine whether C.I.A. employees had been involved in any misconduct.

Previously, intelligence officials have acknowledged only that "several" cases were under review by the agency's inspector general. But one government official said, "There's a lot more out there than has generally been recognized, and people at the agency are worried."

Of particular concern, the officials said, is the possibility that C.I.A. officers using interrogation techniques that the government ruled as permissible after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks might now be punished, or even prosecuted, for their actions in the line of duty.

The details of some of the inquiries have been reported, but the government officials said other cases under review have never been publicly disclosed. Officials declined to provide details of all the cases now under scrutiny. They would not say whether the reviews were limited to incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan, where C.I.A. officers have been particularly active, or whether they might extend to cases from other countries, possibly including secret sites around the world where three dozen senior leaders of Al Qaeda are being held by the agency.

The officials said that the concern within the ranks had been growing since the agency's removal of its station chief in Baghdad, Iraq, in December 2003 in part because of concerns about the deaths of two Iraqis who had been questioned by C.I.A. employees.

The reason for the station chief's removal has not been previously disclosed. Former and current intelligence officials say the action occurred nearly four months before a wider pattern of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became publicly known. The removal was ordered by senior officials at C.I.A. headquarters in Washington within several weeks of their learning about the deaths of the Iraqi prisoners in separate incidents.

Some subtext for this: Gonzales is going to have appoint an independent prosecutor, because he's implicated (remember the torture memos?) Sy Hersh has another story waiting in the wings at the New Yorker on this and it is fair speculation that the chain of command on this goes all the way to the commander and chief.

Given how aggrieved the Agency professionals are by their treatment from Bushco, expect a lot more leaks. You will note that there is not ONE named source in this story. This may be Jehl and Johnston's (and expect participation by Walter Pincus at the WaPo before this is over with) "All the President's Men." Well, one can hope, anyway. I expect we'll learn a whole lot about "l'affaire Plame" before this is over with, as well.

This is the biggest story we've had so far this year. I'm lousy at predictions, but if Jehl and Johnston think they're sniffing a Pulitzer, don't expect this one to die.

Peace and Freedom

Revenge killings of members of Saddam's former regime rise

By Hannah Allam

Knight Ridder Newspapers

Since the Jan. 30 elections, Shiite militants have stepped up their campaign to exact street justice from men who were part of the regime that oppressed and massacred members of their sect for decades. While Shiite politicians turn a blind eye, assassins are working their way through a hit list of Saddam's former security and intelligence personnel, according to Iraqi authorities, Sunni politicians and interviews with the families of those who've been targeted.

Former Baathists have responded in kind, this month killing several Shiites allied with major political factions. Cases under investigation include the killings of two Shiite militiamen outside a popular restaurant in Baghdad a week ago and the deaths of three Shiite militiamen who were in police custody.

In a tactic borrowed from Sunni insurgents, Shiite militants have begun distributing printed death threats. One leaflet that lists several former Baathists targeted for assassination says: "We have given you the chance to repent for your crimes against the people of this country, but we have noticed during surveillance that you are instead trying to restore the glory of the atheist, corrupt Baath Party."

Among those killed in recent weeks:

- Taha Hussein Amiri, a prominent judge who handed down death sentences during Saddam's regime. Two gunmen on motorcycles shot and killed him Feb. 12 as he was being driven to work in the southern Shiite port city of Basra.

- Haider Kadhim, a former intelligence worker. He was shot in the back of the head Feb. 17 after six gunmen disguised as Iraqi security forces talked their way into his home in the Baghdad district of Saidiyah. The attack occurred at 7 a.m. - Kadhim was still in his pajamas, and his mother, wife and daughter were home.

- At least two other former Baathists were killed in Saidiyah in the past month, including Abdulrazak Karim al Douri, who was a major in Saddam's intelligence service and most recently worked at the Interior Ministry. He and a co-worker were killed when gunmen surrounded their car and pumped more than 50 bullets into their bodies, according to death certificates and an autopsy report.

Especially besieged are Shiite Baathists who live in predominantly Shiite or mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods, where targets are more accessible than in homogenous Sunni strongholds. Militiamen have demanded that former Baathists fly white flags to atone for their party membership and let their neighbors know they've renounced their pasts. Those who refuse often end up dead.

"They're doing it in Shiite neighborhoods because it's easier," said Mishan Jubouri, a prominent former Baathist who was one of the few Sunni Arabs elected to the new Parliament. "I know a lot of Shiite Baath Party members who have had to escape to Ramadi or Mosul or Tikrit," mostly Sunni territories.

There's been little or no investigation into any of the assassinations, the slain men's relatives said. Not that they need an investigation to place blame: The families staunchly believe that Shiite militias are behind the killings.

The assassination squads are widely believed to be from the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country's most influential Shiite political party and the biggest winner in the elections.

"I believe they were Badr forces. They're assassinating all the well-known men," said Walid Rasheed, whose brother, a former Baathist named Falah Rasheed, was gunned down Monday outside his shop in Baghdad. "They just want to provoke strife among Iraqis."

Talk about winning your hearts and minds. This kinda flies in the face of Bushist rhetoric about all the wonderful things we're doing in Iraq, doesn't it?

Legislating Safety

EDITORIAL
Port Insecurity

More than 95% of imports from outside North America arrive on ships. Eighty percent of that goes through just 10 ports, with half of all imports passing through the Los Angeles-Long Beach complex, the nation's largest. A dirty bomb tucked inside a cargo container would be devastating, and not just to the population and economy of the ill-fated port city that received it. Between 50% and 60% of the $200 billion in cargo that moves each year through the Los Angeles and Long Beach complex is delivered to destinations outside Southern California. That's furniture, clothing, toys and electronics — and jobs — for much of the nation.

The private sector will have to bear some of the financial burden of protecting ports from terrorist attacks. But the government must play a role as well. And with 90% of federal transportation security funds going to airports, it can't afford to squander the miserly amount it has earmarked for ports by buying biohazard suits for Fargo, N.D., while Los Angeles and New York go begging.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) have introduced legislation that would require Homeland Security to allocate grants based on a port's vulnerability, the potential consequences of an attack and the actual threat as assessed by intelligence officials.

It's beyond belief that such common-sense rules require legislation. But it is now beyond doubt that they do.

Just another sign that making us safer is not high on the list of Bush priorities.

Dreamspinning

This is too weird to leave alone:

Romney links gay marriage, US prestige
Says nation cannot lead and allow legalization

By Michael Levenson, Globe Correspondent | February 26, 2005

SALT LAKE CITY -- Speaking before an adoring audience of Utah Republicans last night, Governor Mitt Romney drew a link between America's prestige around the world and the legalization of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts.

''America cannot continue to lead the family of nations around the world if we suffer the collapse of the family here at home," Romney said, calling the Supreme Judicial Court's legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts ''a blow to the family."

Hours after gay marriage supporters in Boston criticized him for his recent, strident criticism of same-sex marriage, Romney delivered a half-hour speech laced with references to religion, family values, and praise for Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. In the latest in his recent series of out-of-state political appearances, he smiled as Utah Republicans made fun of Massachusetts' liberal reputation in their introductory remarks.

''I'm happy to be in my home away from home, here," Romney said, gushing at the mountain views and the abundance of Republicans. ''I love it here!"

He quoted what he said was an excerpt from the book, ''The Wealth and Poverty of Nations," by Harvard professor David S. Landes, declaring, ''If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.

''America's culture is also defined by the fact that we are a religious people," Romney said. ''We recognize our God not only in our Declaration of Independence, but even in our currency. And we are also unique in that we recognize that the family is the fundamental building block of American society."

Right, the rest of the world deeply admires the way we deny any dignity at all to the relationships of same sex couples. Gov. Romney is fantasizing if he thinks that there is any prestige left for this country anywhere in the world.

The Cost of Empire

Iraq's liberation comes with a ballooning price tag

By Charles V. Pena
Commentary by
Thursday, February 24, 2005

The dollar cost of the Iraq war and subsequent occupation and reconstruction cannot be viewed in isolation. The fiscal year 2005 Defense Department budget that Bush signed last August was $417.5 billion, and the $80 billion supplemental brings military spending to nearly $500 billion. In real terms, that means that U.S. military spending is near an all-time high - exceeded only by spending in 1945-46 at the end of World War II and in 1952 at the height of the Korean War. It is more than peak spending during the war in Vietnam and the Reagan military buildup during one of the most intense periods of the Cold War.

The costs of the Iraq mission, though, are more than just dollars and cents. The prolonged U.S. military presence in Iraq has put a tremendous strain on the U.S. Army. Even if troop levels can be drawn down to 120,000 soldiers as is being currently planned (with another 30,000 U.S. troops in Kuwait to support the Iraqi military operation), the army will continue to be pushed to its limits. In order to maintain unit cohesiveness and meet rotation requirements, the Iraq mission has forced the military to resort to stop-loss orders to prevent soldiers from leaving service when their terms of enlistment expire. And to fill the need for critical skills, nearly 50 percent of the soldiers in Iraq are National Guardsmen and reservists, which threatens the viability of those force components. Indeed, in the past three years more National Guardsmen and reservists have been called to active duty than were cumulatively mobilized since the Cuban missile crisis - and that includes the Vietnam War, the Cuban refugee crisis, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and the 1991 Gulf War.

The Iraq mission has caused Wolfowitz to announce that what was supposed to be a temporary increase of 30,000 soldiers will now be a permanent increase in army troop strength in 2007. A recent letter from the Project for a New American Century to congressional leaders - signed by strange bedfellows including neoconservatives and liberal internationalists - called for increasing the size of the active duty army and Marine Corps by "at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years."

These military manpower pressures raise the specter of another potential cost: the return of the military draft. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Bush insisted, "We will not have a draft so long as I am president of the United States." The president is a man who means what he says and says what he means, so we should take him at his word. But avoiding a draft does not preclude the possibility of mandatory national service with a voluntary military component, as is done in some European countries.

Yet another hidden cost of the Iraq mission is the fact that many members of U.S. Special Forces units are resigning and taking more lucrative private security jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has forced the U.S. military to offer bonuses of up to $150,000 to retain these highly trained soldiers. The true price tag, however, is that the depletion of Special Forces means reducing the ranks of the military units that are the most critical in fighting the war on terrorism against Al-Qaeda.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has surmised that "we will never achieve democracy and stability [in Iraq] without being willing to commit 500,000 troops, spend $200 billion a year, probably have a draft, and have some form of war compensation." Brzezinski conceded that Americans "are not prepared to do that." Clearly, the U.S. cannot afford to sustain the Iraq mission at the current level of commitment for an indefinite period. The Pentagon's budget is not a bottomless pit: With the cost of the Iraq war driving the budget deficit to a record $427 billion, even the Defense Department has been asked to trim its sails a bit.

Charles V. Pena is the director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute (www.cato.org) and an analyst for MSNBC television (www.msnbc.com). He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR

Bush has lost Cato, which should be one of his natural constituents. Now we have to wait for the public to awake from their Mesopotamian slumber.

I See Gay People

Episcopalians Affirm Pro-Gay View
Church's North American Members Back Same-Sex Unions

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 26, 2005; Page A06

Episcopal leaders in North America declined yesterday to apologize for endorsing the ordination of homosexual bishops and same-sex unions despite growing threats of a schism with other branches Anglican church, which has 77 million members worldwide.

The election of an American gay bishop and the blessing of same sex unions in the United States and in Canada have put the U.S. Episcopal Church on a collision course with the rest of the Anglican Communion. A conference of church leaders meeting in Northern Ireland on Thursday called on the Canadian and U.S. churches to voluntarily withdraw from the Anglican Consultative Council, a key decision-making body, until the controversy is resolved.

After a crisis meeting of the leaders of 35 Anglican national churches, the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said that any lasting solution to the crisis would "require people to say somewhere along the line, 'Yes, we were wrong.' " Williams, who is the titular leader of the worldwide church, has been under intense pressure from conservative bishops to crack down on the U.S. and Canadian churches.

The U.S. Episcopal Church was founded in 1789 as the direct descendant of the Anglican Church in the 13 colonies, and now has about 2.3 million members. Long-simmering tensions over the more liberal policies of the U.S. church came to a head in 2003 when an openly gay priest, V. Gene Robinson, was consecrated bishop of New Hampshire.

While U.S. bishops have repeatedly called for dialogue with other churches, they have given no indication that they are prepared to back down in the dispute. In a statement, Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold said that the Episcopal Church had "sought to act with integrity." Griswold told the BBC that Robinson's appointment as bishop of New Hampshire had been "right and proper."

U.S. church officials questioned whether the other church leaders had the right to request that the American church withdraw from the consultative council, which is due to meet in June in the English town of Nottingham. An Episcopal Church spokeswoman, Rev. Jan Nunley, said such a step should properly be taken by the consultative council itself.

Griswold, who attended the Northern Ireland meeting, will consult with his fellow bishops on the next step, Nunley said.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, where power flows from the pope, the Anglican Church functions as a decentralized federation of largely autonomous churches. American bishops recognize the archbishop of Canterbury as the first among equals, but do not feel subordinate to him in an administrative or doctrinal sense.

Reducing five centuries of ecclesiology to two sentences in the final graph is shoddy journalism, and shortchanges both Catholicism and the Anglican Communion. This is another of those stories in which the reporter is looking for analogies between faiths and, not finding them, attempts to create them. It's cheap work.

Update: Terry Mattingly of Get Religion has a whole lot more:

Anglican-beat reporters, please repeat after me once again: The Africans pray, the Americans pay and the British write the resolutions.

Follow the link if you want a lot of insiderish info on Anglican corporate life, well-written.

Reforms In Unlikely Places

Egypt's Mubarak Calls for Democratic Election Reforms
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: February 26, 2005

Filed at 8:03 a.m. ET

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday ordered a revision of the country's election laws and said multiple candidates could run in the nation's presidential elections, a scenario Mubarak hasn't faced since taking power in 1981.

The surprise announcement, a response to critics' calls for political reform, comes shortly after historic elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, balloting that brought a taste of democracy to the region. It also comes amid a sharp dispute with the United States over Egypt's arrest of one of the strongest proponents of multi-candidate elections.

``The election of a president will be through direct, secret balloting, giving the chance for political parties to run for the presidential elections and providing guarantees that allow more than one candidate for the people to choose among them with their own will,'' Mubarak said in an address broadcast live on Egyptian television.

Mubarak -- who has never faced an opponent since becoming president after the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat -- said his initiative came ``out of my full conviction of the need to consolidate efforts for more freedom and democracy.''

The audience before him at Menoufia University broke into applause and calls of support, some shouting, ``Long live Mubarak, mentor of freedom and democracy!'' Others spontaneously recited verses of poetry praising the government.

Mubarak said he asked parliament and the Shura Council to amend Article 76 of the constitution, which deals with presidential elections. Mohammed Kamal, a leading member of the ruling party's policy-making committee, said parliament would propose its amendment within two weeks.

Mubarak said the amendment would then be put to a public referendum before the presidential polls, which are scheduled for September. Kamal said he expected the referendum to be held within nine weeks.

As recently as last month Mubarak had rejected opposition demands to open presidential balloting to other candidates, and he was obviously aware of the historic potential of his announcement.

``If it happens, it would be the first time in the political history of Egypt that a chance is given to somebody who is capable of shouldering the responsibility to protect the people's achievements and future security to come forward for presidential elections with parliamentary and popular support,'' he said.

Egypt holds presidential referendums every six years in which people vote ``yes'' or ``no'' for a single candidate who has been approved by parliament. Mubarak has been nominated by his ruling National Democratic Party to stand in four presidential referendums, winning more than 90 percent of the vote each time.

Mubarak has not officially announced his candidacy for a fifth term, though he is widely expected to be nominated by his ruling party.

Several opposition leaders have demanded that Mubarak amend the constitution to let more than one candidate compete for the presidency. In recent meetings between opposition groups and the government, it was agreed that an amendment would be discussed after September's presidential referendum, making Mubarak's announcement even more surprising.

The move also comes amid a dispute between Egypt and the United States over the recent detention of an opposition leader.

Ayman Nour, head of the Al-Ghad Party, was detained Jan. 29 on allegations of forging nearly 2,000 signatures to secure a license for his party last year. He has rejected the accusation, and human rights groups have said his detention was politically motivated.

The prosecutor general has denied that charge.

His detention has been strongly criticized by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Rice canceled a Mideast visit that had been planned for next week, a decision believed to be in protest of Nour's detention.

Hafez Abu Saada, director of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, praised Mubarak's ``unexpected step,'' which he said reflected local, regional and international pressure.

This came out of nowhere. Anybody got a handle on the angle here?

Friday Night Open Thread

I bought a new cookbook today, so expect some recipes over the weekend to break up all the bad news. I need the occasional break from all the bad news, I don't want to get bitter and jaded. Oh, wait....

I'll also need some time to work up a new proposal for the publisher who is interested in this site. The last one didn't fly, but we had a conversation today and I think I have a much better idea of what they want and need to pull some things together. I'm now going to be paying a high price for never putting a category index on the site and now that I'm pushing 3,200 entries, searching by hand is out of the question. This is going to be work.

But tonight, I'm taking the rest of the night off, watching some TeeVee and drinking a little wine. See you in the morning.

And It Doesn't Work

Canadian ambassador talks missile defense

WILLIAM C. MANN

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Domestic political realities played a major role in Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's refusal to buy into the nascent U.S. missile defense system, and his decision does nothing to diminish Canada's commitment to NORAD, the half-century-old joint air-defense monitoring system, Canada's outgoing ambassador said Friday.

Ambassador Michael Kergin also said he sees no basic damage to relations between the North American neighbors.

Interviewed on his last day in Washington, Kergin said details of Martin's decision had been communicated "in a fairly methodical, well-thought-out way" before the prime minister announced it in parliament Thursday.

Martin said he, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew and National Defense Minister Bill Graham deliberated extensively whether to sign on to President George W. Bush's plan for missile interceptors to protect the North American mainland from ballistic missile attack. In his speech, he said Canada "will continue to work in partnership with our southern neighbors on the common defense of North America and on continental security."
....
While U.S. officials, as expressed by the U.S. ambassador in Ottawa, Paul Cellucci, were angered by the decision, Kergin said he did not think it would have any fundamentally negative effects on the countries' relations.

That last line is a real charmer, innit? As if anyone who crosses Bush doesn't pay for it, Big Time....

Oh, pogge, expect major trade sanctions.

Anglican Disunity

Archbishop: Anglicans Could Face Division

58 minutes ago

By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press Writer

NEWRY, Northern Ireland - The issue of homosexuality threatens to split the Anglican Communion and the rift cannot be resolved easily, the archbishop of Canterbury said Friday, a day after church leaders asked the U.S. and Canadian churches to temporarily withdraw from a key council.

Rowan Williams, the spiritual leader of the 77 million-member communion, spoke after a five-day crisis meeting to discuss the election of a gay bishop in the United States and the blessing of same-sex unions there and in Canada, which have precipitated the most serious rift in the body's history.

"We still face the possibility of division, of course we do," Williams said. "That's not going to go away.

"Any lasting solution, I think, will require people to say somewhere along the line, 'Yes, we were wrong.'"

Williams said people who had acted in good faith might later realize "'I hadn't counted the cost.' And that applies in a number of different contexts here."

His comments came after the 35 primates, or church national leaders, meeting near Belfast on Thursday asked the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada to withdraw from the Anglican Consultative Council for three years — a move some feared could be the first step toward a permanent split in the communion.

The crisis erupted when the U.S. Episcopal Church consecrated V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in November 2003. Robinson lives with his longtime male partner. Conservatives also have criticized North American dioceses for allowing blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples.

The two churches also were invited to explain to the council in June the theological reasoning behind Robinson's consecration and the decision by one Canadian diocese to authorize the blessing of same-sex unions.

Thursday's communique said Anglican teaching on sexuality had "been seriously undermined by the recent developments in North America." A 1998 resolution adopted by all Anglican bishops declared that gay sex was "incompatible with Scripture" and opposed gay ordinations and same-sex blessings.

Some conservative Anglicans hailed the statement as a victory.

"The clarity with which the primates have spoken is breathtaking," said Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, a leader of the conservative wing of the Episcopal Church.

"Individual provinces do have the freedom to act as they see fit under their various constitutions, but the exercise of that freedom beyond agreed teaching and practice will imperil their standing and participation in the communion," he said.

Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold, head of the Episcopal Church, stressed that discussions continued. The communique "was written with a view to making room for a wide variety of perspectives," he said.

Andrew Hutchison, the Anglican Archbishop of Canada, said there had been a great deal of warmth and support at the meeting — although he confirmed that some of the primates had refused to participate in communion services with the North Americans.

My heart hurts for all you Anglicans and Episcopalians. This is not going to be an easy problem to solve. Frank Griswold, the American Presiding Bishop, said "We've had thirty years to discuss this issue. It's time to move on" in a press release a couple of years ago. But, clearly, there remain divisions within the American church which are as bitter as those between the industrialized nations and the third world churches.

My take? The Anglican communion's teaching on ever so many subjects has moved beyond Pauline proscriptions that it should move beyond this one, too. And I think that Archbishop Williams should have some hard questions about polygamy for those third world bishops.

Suspicious Minds

Poll: Americans Value Drugs, Question Drugmakers
70 Percent Say Companies Focus on Profits More Than Consumers

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 26, 2005;

By an overwhelming majority, Americans believe prescription drugs significantly improve their health and quality of life, but almost as many say the companies that make them put their own profits ahead of the well-being of consumers, according to a new poll released today.

The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 78 percent of adults say prescription drugs make a "big difference" in people's lives, and 91 percent believe drug companies contribute significantly to society by researching and developing new drugs.

But 70 percent feel the pharmaceutical companies that produce them are more concerned "about making profits" than developing new drugs, according to the survey.

The poll also found that in 2004, a majority of Americans said for the first time that drug companies overall do a "bad job" of serving their customers. In 1997, when the survey began, 79 percent of those polled said that drug companies did a "good job" for consumers.

With public views of the big drug companies becoming more critical, the poll found that a large majority of Americans want the government to do more to reduce drug costs -- with 65 percent saying they wanted more government regulation of prices and 73 percent favoring changes that would allow Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada.

"Rightly or wrongly, drug companies are now the number one villain in the public's eye when it comes to rising health care costs," said Foundation President Drew E. Altman. "People want to rein in the cost of prescription drugs, and just about anything we poll on with that aim gets public support."

Turns out there is good reason to be suspicious not only of Big Pharma, but also the regulation system:

10 Voters on Panel Backing Pain Pills Had Industry Ties
By GARDINER HARRIS and ALEX BERENSON

Published: February 25, 2005

Ten of the 32 government drug advisers who last week endorsed continued marketing of the huge-selling pain pills Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx have consulted in recent years for the drugs' makers, according to disclosures in medical journals and other public records.

If the 10 advisers had not cast their votes, the committee would have voted 12 to 8 that Bextra should be withdrawn and 14 to 8 that Vioxx should not return to the market. The 10 advisers with company ties voted 9 to 1 to keep Bextra on the market and 9 to 1 for Vioxx's return.

The votes of the 10 did not substantially influence the committee's decision on Celebrex because only one committee member voted that Celebrex should be withdrawn.

Eight of the 10 members said in interviews that their past relationships with the drug companies had not influenced their votes. The two others did not respond to phone or e-mail messages.

Researchers with ties to industry commonly serve on Food and Drug Administration advisory panels, but their presence has long been a contentious issue.

Outsourcing and Civil Liberty

I have been aware of the Maher Arar case for many months, primarily by keeping up with the Canadian papers and blogs, since the American press hasn't been particularly interested. Part of Herbert's genius is to waken afresh the outrage in the breast of jaded observers such as myself, and I thank him for it.

Thrown to the Wolves
By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 25, 2005

In the fall of 2002 Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.

Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured.

He wept. He begged not to be beaten anymore. He signed whatever confessions he was told to sign. He prayed.

Among the worst moments, he said, were the times he could hear babies crying in a nearby cell where women were imprisoned. He recalled hearing one woman pleading with a guard for several days for milk for her child.

He could hear other prisoners screaming as they were tortured.

"I used to ask God to help them," he said.

The Justice Department has alleged, without disclosing any evidence whatsoever, that Mr. Arar is a member of, or somehow linked to, Al Qaeda. If that's so, how can the administration possibly allow him to roam free? The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism.

And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a sometimes-clownish outfit that seems to have helped set this entire fiasco in motion by forwarding bad information to American authorities, is being criticized heavily in Canada for failing to follow its own rules on the handling and dissemination of raw classified information.

Official documents in Canada suggest that Mr. Arar was never the target of a terror investigation there. One former Canadian official, commenting on the Arar case, was quoted in a local newspaper as saying "accidents will happen" in the war on terror.

Whatever may have happened in Canada, nothing can excuse the behavior of the United States in this episode. Mr. Arar was deliberately dispatched by U.S. officials to Syria, a country that - as they knew - practices torture. And if Canadian officials hadn't intervened, he most likely would not have been heard from again.

Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant.

Mr. Arar, who is married and also has an 8-year-old daughter, said the pain from some of the beatings he endured lasted for six months.

"It was so scary," he said. "After a while I became like an animal."

A lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf has been filed against the United States by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer with the center, noted yesterday that the government is arguing that none of Mr. Arar's claims can even be adjudicated because they "would involve the revelation of state secrets."

This is a government that feels it is answerable to no one.

It's a fact of anthropology that humans like to set up false dichotomies, to split the world into "Us" versus "Them." It's not true. We are all Maher Arar. What was done to him could be done to any of us.

Old-Time Religion

February 25, 2005 JONATHAN CHAIT:
George Bush's Stepford Critics
# You're likely to recant, zombie- like, if you betray the president.

Enough apostate Bush loyalists have retracted their heretical views that certain recognizable tropes have emerged. First, the heretic's repudiation of his own deeds should obviously contradict his own principles. Take the first known example of the type, Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-Ga.). A former dentist, Norwood had grown infuriated at the callousness of health maintenance organizations and made a patient's bill of rights his crusade.

Bush sought to kill Norwood's bill by promoting a toothless, industry-friendly alternative. In the spring of 2001, Norwood blasted Bush's sham bill as worse than the status quo and vowed to "personally exhaust every effort to defeat" Bush's plan. Then Norwood was summoned to the White House. As one newspaper reported, he "emerged from the hourlong meeting looking haggard" and instantly announced his support for Bush's bill.

Norwood's only explanation for renouncing his life's work was that "what I'm against is not having a change in the law." (To the surprise of no sentient observer, no patient's bill of rights was ever enacted.)

Second, there should be little or no explanation as to how the apostate came to change his mind. Consider John Weaver, a top advisor to John McCain. The lodestar of Weaver's ideology for years had been hatred of Karl Rove — who, Weaver complained, had spread vicious slanders about him when the two worked in Texas politics. Weaver was strategist for McCain's guerrilla campaign against Bush and Rove in 2000.

But then, last spring, Bush and the popular McCain began barnstorming the country together. It came out that their rapprochement had followed a meeting between Weaver and his arch-nemesis, Rove, whom he called "gracious" — perhaps the first time anyone had ever called Rove this. Weaver declared that the pair had "a very honest and very frank discussion, and let's just leave it at that."

Third, the recanting heretic's explanation should make no sense. Indeed, this very implausibility is part of the mystique. In 2002, John DiIulio, the former director of Bush's faith-based initiative, criticized the administration. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm," he said, fleshing out the critique with damning details.

The next day, DiIulio announced that "my criticisms were groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples. I sincerely apologize and am deeply remorseful."

Or, as Galileo said of his declaration that the Earth revolves around the sun: "With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church, and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me."

If I recall, this statement was preceded by an honest and frank discussion.

Recant or be killed, is more like it.

Family Values

I think that we will shortly be able to put a fork in this.

Kansas on My Mind
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 25, 2005

People like myself - members of what one scornful Bush aide called the "reality-based community" - tend to attribute the right's electoral victories to its success at spreading policy disinformation. And the campaign against Social Security certainly involves a lot of disinformation, both about how the current system works and about the consequences of privatization.

But if that were all there is to it, Social Security should be safe, because this particular disinformation campaign isn't going at all well. In fact, there's a sense of wonderment among defenders of Social Security about the other side's lack of preparation. The Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation have spent decades campaigning for privatization. Yet they weren't ready to answer even the most obvious questions about how it would work - like how benefits could be maintained for older Americans without a dangerous increase in debt.

Privatizers are even having a hard time pretending that they want to strengthen Social Security, not dismantle it. At one of Senator Rick Santorum's recent town-hall meetings promoting privatization, college Republicans began chanting, "Hey hey, ho ho, Social Security's got to go."

But before the anti-privatization forces assume that winning the rational arguments is enough, they need to read Mr. Frank.

The message of Mr. Frank's book is that the right has been able to win elections, despite the fact that its economic policies hurt workers, by portraying itself as the defender of mainstream values against a malevolent cultural elite. The right "mobilizes voters with explosive social issues, summoning public outrage ... which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends."

In Mr. Frank's view, this is a confidence trick: politicians like Mr. Santorum trumpet their defense of traditional values, but their true loyalty is to elitist economic policies. "Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization." But it keeps working.

And this week we saw Mr. Frank's thesis acted out so crudely that it was as if someone had deliberately staged it. The right wants to dismantle Social Security, a successful program that is a pillar of stability for working Americans. AARP stands in the way. So without a moment's hesitation, the usual suspects declared that this organization of staid seniors is actually an anti-soldier, pro-gay-marriage leftist front.

It's tempting to dismiss this as an exceptional case in which right-wingers, unable to come up with a real cultural grievance to exploit, fabricated one out of thin air. But such fabrications are the rule, not the exception.

For example, for much of December viewers of Fox News were treated to a series of ominous warnings about "Christmas under siege" - the plot by secular humanists to take Christ out of America's favorite holiday. The evidence for such a plot consisted largely of occasions when someone in an official capacity said, "Happy holidays," instead of, "Merry Christmas."

So it doesn't matter that Social Security is a pro-family program that was created by and for America's greatest generation - and that it is especially crucial in poor but conservative states like Alabama and Arkansas, where it's the only thing keeping a majority of seniors above the poverty line. Right-wingers will still find ways to claim that anyone who opposes privatization supports terrorists and hates family values.

Their first attack may have missed the mark, but it's the shape of smears to come.

Op failure

Listen up. This one, while not entirely accurate, is important.

U.S. Moves To Preserve Iraq Coalition

By Robin Wright and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page A01

The United States is planning increasingly to shift the duties of foreign troops in Iraq from providing security to training Iraq's new army and police to prevent more countries from abandoning the international coalition there and possibly lure others back.

The coalition has included about three dozen nations, which contributed 20,000 to 25,000 soldiers, or about 11 percent, of the foreign troops performing security operations in Iraq, adding to a U.S. contingent of 155,000. But the deployments have been highly unpopular in several countries and a political liability for participating governments, especially with troops forced to stay longer than envisioned to defeat the insurgency.

Since last summer, troops from almost a dozen countries have withdrawn from Iraq or announced plans to leave.

Portugal quietly pulled out its 150 soldiers this month. Next month, the Netherlands will begin withdrawing its 1,700 troops, one of the largest contingents. And Ukraine's new government has signaled plans for a phased pullout of its 1,600 soldiers.

However, Iraq's elections last month and President Bush's goodwill mission to Europe this week appear to be breathing new life into the U.S.-led occupation, officials from European and coalition countries said. The plan to beef up training has sparked new commitments of instructors, funds and equipment, in addition to troops committed to other functions.

"Countries have been very supportive, especially recently," Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of the training mission in Iraq, said in an e-mail. "We have indeed seen the impact of the sense of momentum building here as a result of the elections and the heartening performance of the Iraqi Security Forces during that period and since, despite challenges."

Pentagon officials declined to say how many trainers they seek. But the transformation of the coalition has already started. Australia announced this week that it will soon dispatch 450 new troops to Iraq -- more than double the number of Australian forces now deployed in the country -- to assist with training.

"There has been a change in the outlook for Iraq since the election. We are now at a tilting point," Australian Prime Minister John Howard told a news conference Tuesday. "Everybody now agrees that if the ultimate goal of the withdrawal of foreign forces and the assumption of internal security arrangements, as well as defense against an external threat, is to be undertaken by the Iraqis, they must be better trained. And we have a role to play in that."

Like other coalition members, Australia had withdrawn most of its forces, with its original 2,000-troop deployment down to 900. But most of the remaining force was outside Iraq, deployed in neighboring countries or on ships nearby, leaving about 200 in Iraq and almost none in combat deployments. Other countries are down to two dozen or three dozen troops in Iraq. All of Singapore's 180 deployed troops are on a ship offshore.

NATO's training mission -- designed to bolster U.S. efforts to create viable Iraqi security forces -- has proved more popular with European nations and members of NATO because countries can sign on without appearing to support the U.S.-led war. All 26 NATO nations have pledged support to the training efforts, some offering to send trainers into the country, others offering financial assistance or external training, something U.S. commanders deem vital.

And while the foreign security forces in Iraq shrink, with U.S. forces scaling back to pre-election totals of about 138,000 and other nations withdrawing their troops, U.S. commanders believe the training effort will generate the necessary number of Iraqi forces to replace them. Ideally, they say, the new Iraqi forces will be able to take over for U.S. units in calmer areas of Iraq as new recruits flood in. U.S. military leaders hope the Iraqi security forces will outnumber U.S. troops in the country by the end of this year.

In how many languages can you spell "failed mission?" This is the face of disaster.

Weather Toys

I'm doing this just because I can, and once in a while it's nice to take a break from my snarky, ironic Internet pose and just find things like this cool. Little things give me joy. It's the WaPo's live cam of the area snow, with a ruler stuck in the snow so you can watch it pile up. It's not piling up very much, in fact this storm was quite the flop, but the Fed still got still got sent home early. Rush hours are ugly here when the weather is perfect, so GSA's decision probably saved some lives. I'll support that.

I rescheduled everything I was planning to do today: around here it doesn't take very much snow at all to turn the entire area into gridlock, but we've had less than half the snow they forecast and everything could have gotten done.

Oh, well. I remember my first snow storm after moving here in '85. Another co-worker and I, another Minnesota expat newly arrived in the city (and a co-worker of mine from a previous career in Minnesota, go figure) had an afternoon appointment away from the office. It started snowing around 10 AM but we weren't concerned, we were Minnesotans and have driven in everything. We left the office at 2:00 for a 2:30 meeting a couple of miles north of our office on Wisconsin Ave just above Georgetown. In 30 minutes, we'd gone four blocks. The streets had frozen and there were buses scattered diagonally all over Wisconsin. At that moment, I realized that the weather has nothing to do with my prowess in the snow. The systems around here aren't set up to deal with snowy weather, and the drivers sure aren't used to it. I respect the fact that these are the operating conditions and make alternate plans.

In one of the alternate universes I occupy, I am also an amateur meteorologist (strange but true, and I've won some forecasting competitions.) There are some excellent computer models which demonstrate why snow casting in this part of the world is so hard to get right. They are pay sites, so I'm not linking. Suffice it to say, this is one of the spots in the country which is really difficult for precip forecasts in general, winter or summer, and I don't blame the NWS for failing to call it right so often. I can bash out a forecast most days for someplace like New Orleans or Oneonta, New York, which will be at least as successful as Accu-weather's. But in this part of the world, I'm as far off as NOAA most of the time.

For the locals: here is the li nk to the local NWS site in Sterling, Virginia. For those of you in the neighborhood, this is the data all of the local weathercasts are using for their base date. They may buy additional data from Accuweather and they probably own some of their own modeling tools, too, but the NWS data is the normative stuff everyone starts with.

Wherever you live, you can Google "nws+[your city]+forecast" and get the site of your local National Weather Service Office. Each of them do zone forecasts, so even if your location is relatively remote from the office, they'll have a map-based tool to get the forecast for you from the front page. The NWS websites aren't the prettiest around but they have a lot of data if you are willing to do some clicking around, and the best weather radar loops you are going to get for your area (doable but not fun on dial up, needs flash and java.)

Yes, Bump attempts to be a full service site. And pogge I don't want to hear a bit of guff out of you about what snow wimps we are down here. I'll put my month of August against yours anytime.

Frail Buck

Warning From the Markets

Published: February 24, 2005

When a seemingly innocuous remark from the central bank of South Korea makes the dollar tank, as happened on Tuesday, all is not well with the United States' position in the world economy.

The dollar has been on a downward trajectory for three years, thanks in part to the Bush administration's decision to try to use a cheap dollar to shrink the nation's enormous trade deficit. (A weak dollar makes exports cheaper and imports costlier, a combination that theoretically should narrow the trade gap.) To be truly effective, however, a weak dollar must be combined with a lower federal budget deficit - or even a budget surplus, something the administration clearly hasn't delivered. So predictably, the weak-dollar ploy hasn't worked. The United States' trade deficit has mushroomed to record levels, as has the United States' need to borrow from abroad - some $2 billion a day - just to balance its books.

Enter South Korea. On Monday, its central bank reported that it intended to diversify into other currencies and away from dollar-based assets. And why not? It holds about $69 billion in United States Treasury securities, or 4 percent of the total foreign Treasury holdings. Such dollar-based investments lose value as the dollar weakens, leading to losses that any cautious banker would want to avoid. But as the Korean comment ping-ponged around the world, all hell broke loose, with currency traders selling dollars for fear that the central banks of Japan and China, which hold immense dollar reserves - a combined $900 billion, or 46 percent of foreign Treasury holdings - might follow suit.

That would be the United States' worst economic nightmare. If it appeared that the flow of investment from abroad was not enough to cover the nation's gargantuan deficits, interest rates would rise sharply, the dollar would plunge further, and the economy would stall. A fiscal crisis would result.

As long as we continue running these enormous deficits backed up by Asian held paper, the danger continues. World markets are dangerously out of balance. The dollar at 1 PM EST: down vs. the Pound Sterling and the Yen.

U.S. Economy: January Durables Orders Decline

Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. durable goods orders fell 0.9 percent in January, the first drop in three months, as lower demand for planes and automobiles overshadowed a surge in capital equipment. Jobless claims rose from the lowest level in more than four years.

Oil Surges to 4-Month High as Supplies Rise Less Than Forecast

Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil rose above $52 a barrel in New York, a four-month high, after the Energy Department reported that U.S. stockpiles rose less than forecast.

Supplies rose 608,000 barrels to 297 million barrels last week, leaving inventories 8.5 percent higher than a year ago, according to the report. Thirteen analysts surveyed by Bloomberg expected a 1.2 million barrel increase, according to the median of forecasts. Imports plunged to the lowest since September as refineries cut operating rates by 1.5 percentage points.

Credulous Kessler

An 'A La Carte' Coalition Between U.S. and Europe

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 24, 2005; Page A17

Two years ago, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, much of the opposition in Europe focused on the need to restrain the American "hyperpower" from running roughshod over international norms.

But as President Bush nears the end of his goodwill tour of Europe this week, it is increasingly clear the attitude has shifted. With the United States pinned down in Iraq, where the continued deployment of nearly 150,000 troops has severely strained the U.S. military, European leaders no longer expect further military expeditions in Bush's second term. And so they have been gracious -- but assertive, thus reflecting how far the United States has fallen from "hyperpower" status -- a term coined about America by French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine.

Indeed, analysts said, European leaders are increasingly united against U.S. positions and feel emboldened to go their own way on such issues as Iran and China.

Francois Heisbourg, director of the International Foundation for Strategic Studies in Paris, said there is no longer an Atlantic partnership so much as what he called an "a la carte partnership" between Europe and the United States. On some issues, the two sides agree and try to work together, and on others there is disagreement and discord. There are also issues on which they disagree but are willing to find common ground, he said.

"This is the new world," Heisbourg said. "The mission determines the coalition," he added, deliberately echoing an assertion made by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Heisbourg said the divisions created by the Iraq war had also changed the dynamic within Europe, with officials trying to form a more united front on key issues. Europeans who had been more assertive in their stand on the war, such as the French, have become more restrained while the British, who had argued that Europe had little choice but to support the United States, have leaned back toward the rest of Europe. "Those at the center, such as Germany, have become more bold in stressing their Europeanism," he said.

The net effect is a Europe more willing to go its own way even as the Bush administration has engaged in a charm offensive in recent weeks to rebalance relationships badly frayed by the Iraq war.

Philip H. Gordon, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said Europeans were deeply concerned when the Bush administration came into office in 2001 and took a number of unilateral steps, such as rejecting the Kyoto climate change treaty and pushing to abandon the antiballistic missile treaty.

"Europeans were worried we might be right and we did not need them," Gordon said. "They claimed to doubt we were so powerful but were worried we were. Now they see we are not."

He said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's trip to Europe earlier this month and Bush's this week are viewed as "an American admission that allies are a little more necessary to us than we thought."

In the meantime, Gordon said, European nations have pressed ahead with negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, despite initial misgivings by the Bush administration. Yesterday, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley suggested Bush was mulling working with the Europeans to persuade Iran to give up the program.

On China, despite strong U.S. objections, European officials have made it clear they will lift an arms embargo imposed after the Tiananmen Square crackdown 15 years ago. European officials have also pressed ahead with setting up a European defense planning operation apart from NATO, rebuffed U.S. efforts to weaken the International Criminal Court and embraced the Kyoto treaty.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter, said that when he told a French newspaper last week the United States now understands that it is predominant but not omnipotent, the editors made that point its headline.

Compare and contrast this piece with the Tyson/Priest article below. All international cooperation will be window dressing for this administration.

Peace and Freedom

The Downside of Democracy
# What if the U.S. doesn't like what the voters like in the Mideast and beyond?

By Juan Cole, Juan Cole is professor of modern Middle Eastern and North African studies at the University of Michigan. He maintains a blog on Middle East affairs, Informed Comment.

With the emergence of Shiite physician Ibrahim Jafari as the leading candidate for Iraqi prime minister earlier this week, the contradictions of Bush administration policy in the Middle East have become even clearer than they were before.

President Bush says he is committed to democratizing the region, yet he also wants governments to emerge that are friendly to the U.S., benevolent to their own people, secular, capitalist and willing to stand up and fight against anti-American radicals.

But what if democratic elections do not produce such governments? What if the newly elected regimes are friendly to states and groups that Washington considers enemies? What if the spread of democracy through the region empowers elements that don't share American values and goals?

The recent election in Iraq is a case in point. The two major parties in the victorious Shiite alliance are Jafari's party, the Dawa, founded in the late 1950s to work for an Islamic republic, and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, the goal of which can be guessed from its name. To be fair, both have backed away from their more radical stances of earlier decades. But both parties — and Jafari himself — were sheltered in Tehran in the 1980s by Washington's archenemy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and both acknowledge that they want to move Iraq toward Islamic law and values.

The victorious Shiite fundamentalists have already taken steps that may be making the Bush administration nervous. They made it clear that they would attempt to incorporate their paramilitaries into the new Iraqi army. SCIRI has the Badr Corps, made up of about 15,000 men under arms trained originally by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and Dawa has its own paramilitary.

The two parties also announced that they would try to bring into the government's armed forces members of the Al Mahdi militia of Shiite nationalist Muqtada Sadr, which have fought hard battles against the U.S. military in Najaf and elsewhere. Jafari has previously said that he hoped to bring Sadr into the Iraqi government. Jafari likewise has protested U.S. military action in Fallouja.

In interviews, Jafari has warned against deliberate attempts to undermine Iraq's relations with neighboring Iran, which he has visited on several occasions for consultations since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

To be fair, Jafari has emerged as a moderate and skillful politician, and his devotion to his faith should in principle be no more objectionable than Bush's own devotion to Christianity. Yet it certainly seems that his new government will adopt policies far less welcome in Washington than those of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

In the current struggle over whether the fundamentalist Lebanese Shiite party, Hezbollah, should be designated a terrorist organization, it seems clear that both the Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq will side with Hezbollah.

The fact is, democracy is an unruly process; it doesn't always yield the results we want or expect. Bush likes to talk in terms of good versus evil, to suggest that the forces of freedom and democracy are doing battle with the defenders of tyranny — but he should be aware that the world isn't always that simple.

Bush's "my way or the highway" code doesn't take into account that the highway is a really big place.

As I read Juan's piece this morning (and he must have no life these days, I saw him on the Newshour last night, he's the "go-to" expert these days) I was thinking about the Fineman article I posted last night. Bush has no imagination for long-term goals or anything that goes beyond a personal "win" in the immediate sense. Watch him take his ball and go home when he doesn't get what he wants as he looks for opportunities for revenge. He's a classic bully and the rest of the planet has figured that out.

The Moderates

Specter Unbound

By Ruth Marcus
Thursday, February 24, 2005; Page A21

President Bush would be wise to "pick up the phone" and consult with Democrats before choosing a new Supreme Court justice. "The advice clause in the Constitution has been largely ignored." If there is a vacancy on the high court, "the far right is going to come hard at a nominee if it is not a nominee of their choosing. But I think there's a much broader base in America than the far right." Changing the Senate rules to prohibit filibusters of judicial nominees -- the "nuclear option" -- could have deleterious short-term effects and run the long-term risk of eroding the rights of the minority. "If we go to the nuclear option . . . the Senate will be in turmoil and the Judiciary Committee will be hell."

What is surprising about these comments is not so much the substance as the speaker: the new Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter. If you thought that his brush with losing the committee chairmanship had chastened the legendarily contrarian Specter, if you thought his recent diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease might have tempered his approach -- well, that wasn't the Specter on display in a visit with The Post editorial board yesterday. Instead, the discussion featured Specter Unbound: the Specter who voted against Robert H. Bork rather than the one who rallied to the defense of Clarence Thomas.

Specter had some cautionary words for Democrats as well -- chiding them for opposing qualified nominees such as Miguel Estrada, urging them to allow votes and avoid an ugly showdown, and placing blame -- properly so -- on both sides for inflaming and escalating the judicial nomination wars. For two decades, he said, Democrats and Republicans have been blocking the other side's judges, using increasingly unappetizing tactics. "Now," he said, "it's a situation where nobody wants to back down." Still, he reserved his toughest words for the extremists of his own party, pressed for accommodations from his own side and made clear that his cooperation with the administration would have its limits. All he had promised the president, Specter said, was a "prompt airing" for his nominees and a vote out of committee. "Those are the extent of my commitments," he said flatly.

This may be the Specter conservatives feared -- but it also seems like the chairman the committee (and the country) needs. The 75-year-old former district attorney -- as he is so fond of reminding listeners -- can be demanding and prickly: His aides are so well-trained that they not only arrive with notepad, water and coffee in tow but take care to break open the little plastic tab on the coffee cup so the senator doesn't have to be bothered. Specter is proud of the new traffic light setup he's installed in the committee hearing room to regulate speaking times, but some of his colleagues are none too pleased with what's likely to be a quixotic effort to keep their verbosity in check. But he is also smart and serious and -- most of all -- independent-minded at a time when there is all too little thinking that deviates from the party line on either side of the aisle.

Of course, it's just that attitude that almost cost Specter the chairmanship in November. His post-election comments that a Supreme Court nominee who opposed abortion rights was not likely to win Senate confirmation was reported as a warning to the president, and the groups that had hoped to unseat the moderate Specter in favor of a more conservative Republican then mobilized in an effort to deny him the chairmanship. Or, as Specter not so diplomatically put it, "the far right was ready to pounce on me if I'd done nothing but said the Lord's Prayer, and that was a crevice and they went after it."

This op-ed makes me want to ask a whole bunch of other questions Marcus didn't: are there other moderate R committee chairs? Who are they? Who else is liable to buck the conventional wisdom in the caucus?

Snow Day

All of this middle of the night posting is by way of preserving for me some Golden Hours. I want to be between the sheets and listening when the snow starts to fall at dawn.

The words "cozy and safe" mean something to me. In the case of a snowstorm, it means waiting it out in a bed with flannel sheets and then making sausage, eggs and coffee. I may toss a log in the fireplace later. And then I'll pick up the novel I was reading before the weather caught my interest.

Update: Yup, the city is shut down tight.

Empire

Pentagon Seeking Leeway Overseas
Operations Could Bypass Envoys

By Ann Scott Tyson and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 24, 2005; Page A01

The Pentagon is promoting a global counterterrorism plan that would allow Special Operations forces to enter a foreign country to conduct military operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador there, administration officials familiar with the plan said.

The plan would weaken the long-standing "chief of mission" authority under which the U.S. ambassador, as the president's top representative in a foreign country, decides whether to grant entry to U.S. government personnel based on political and diplomatic considerations.
The Special Operations missions envisioned in the plan would largely be secret, known to only a handful of officials from the foreign country, if any.

The change is included in a highly classified "execute order" -- part of a broad strategy developed since Sept. 11, 2001, to give the U.S. Special Operations Command new flexibility to track down and destroy terrorist networks worldwide, the officials said.

"This is a military order on a global scale, something that hasn't existed since World War II," said a counterterrorism official with lengthy experience in special operations. He and other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the proposal is classified.

We'll go where we wanna go, kill who we wanna kill, and fsck you, host nation, we're the only hyperpower in the world. Eat our dust. Fsck you. We are the champions of the world. Bow down and acknowlege us or be crushed.

I'll curious to see how Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brz spin this on the weekend chat shows.

More Bad Reporting

Bush May Weigh Using Incentives to Dissuade Iran
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: February 24, 2005

WIESBADEN, Germany, Feb. 23 - President Bush said Wednesday that he and German, British and French leaders had discussed negotiating tactics to try to get Iran to give up its suspected nuclear weapons program, and his national security adviser later left open the possibility that Mr. Bush would consider offering incentives to dissuade Iran from its nuclear ambitions.

The tactic of incentives, favored by the Europeans, had been roundly rejected by the Bush administration as recently as two weeks ago.

Despite the glimmer of what the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, described as a "convergence" of the Americans and Europeans on the tactics to be used in negotiations with Iran, the president gave no indication that the United States would directly join in the talks, as the Europeans want.

Mr. Bush made his remarks in the Rhine city of Mainz at a joint news conference with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany in the Electoral Palace, a reconstructed German Renaissance building that was once the home of the archbishop of Mainz. The president was on the third day of a four-day trip to Europe to repair relationships ruptured after the war with Iraq, and he and Mr. Schröder had talks that focused on Iran, touched on their disagreement over the Kyoto Treaty on global warming and generally helped publicly smooth over the rift between the nations.

Mr. Bush also sought to soothe growing fears in Europe that Iran would become the next battleground for the United States.

"You know, yesterday I was asked about the U.S. position, and I said all options are on the table," he said, referring to comments he made at the European Union headquarters in Brussels. "That's part of our position. But I also reminded people that diplomacy is just beginning. Iran is not Iraq."

On Tuesday at a news conference at the European Union, Mr. Bush said bluntly, "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous." But then he immediately added, to some laughter, "And having said that, all options are on the table."

The president also emphatically declared that blame for any lack of progress in the talks should be placed on Iran, not on the White House or Europe.

"The reason we're having these discussions is because they were caught enriching uranium after they had signed a treaty saying they wouldn't enrich uranium," Mr. Bush said of the Iranians. "They're the party that needs to be held into account, not any of us."

In his public comments about Iran's uranium enrichment, Mr. Bush appeared to have misspoken, because the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty permits uranium enrichment for commercial purposes as long as a country declares the activity and allows inspections.

In Iran's case, it hid enrichment facilities from the International Atomic Energy Agency for a number of years, but when caught, said all of its nuclear activities are solely for commercial purposes. The United States has charged that Iran is secretly pursuing weapons development, but the agency says that it has found no concrete evidence of such a weapons program.

Now if we can just get the NRO over the idea that Bush has anything like a coherent foreign policy or a clue about what the rest of the world has said in print, I think everything will be hunky-dory. Um, Ms. Bumiller, the president doesn't "mis-speak," he reshapes reality with his mighty hands and lips. Haven't you figured that out by now?

Next to Heaven

This is for serious foodies. If you've never tasted truffle, you haven't really lived. The news that there is now a domestic product and it is marginally more affordable than the imported product caused celebration in this household.

Smells Like $500
Move over, Perigord: The black diamonds known as truffles are quite happy to grow in North Carolina.

By Walter Nicholls
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 23, 2005; Page F01

ROLESVILLE, N.C.

A gray minivan bumps down an unmarked lane one recent morning and pulls into what appears to be a neatly groomed, dormant orchard. On the sloping, one-acre plot stand 500 filbert trees, bushes really, that produce hazelnuts. It's harvest time. But no one is here for the nuts.

Farmer and entrepreneur Franklin Garland and his dog Ginger, a 5-year-old standard poodle, get right to work.

"Find a truffle, Ginger. Find a truffle, Ginger," Garland repeats as the pair start down the first row, both heads tilting toward the ground.

Ginger uses her sensitive nose to detect aromatic, farm-raised black truffles -- Tuber melanosporum -- the highly prized, irregularly shaped fungi that are native to the Perigord region of France. Under the right conditions, they grow underground in a symbiotic relationship with the roots of the filbert tree (Corylus avellana). But this day, friendly Ginger is distracted by strangers nearby and can't seem to focus on fungus.

"She's being a total dingbat," says Garland's wife, Betty. "We should have brought another dog. In 20 minutes, we would have two pounds."

At her side is Todd Gray, chef and owner of Equinox restaurant in downtown Washington. Gray is a relatively new Garland customer who pays $500 per pound for the odorous truffles harvested yearly, from mid-November to mid-March, in this flat region of the state on the eastern edge of the Piedmont.

At Equinox, Gray shaves truffles over pasta dishes, minces them into sauces for beef and veal, and sprinkles tiny truffle batons on grilled scallops. Last Wednesday night, at the James Beard House in New York, Gray served a creamy Carolina truffle risotto with bacon-wrapped monkfish.

Today he's come for the first time to see the source for himself. "This is the real deal," says the chef, a native of Fredericksburg who is noted for his use of regional and seasonal ingredients. "I couldn't believe it when they sent me a sample. It had that great pungency, with that characteristic nutty, eucalyptus and tobacco smell."

I'm going to have to make the pilgrimage to North Carolina myself. Black truffle is best served with simple and fairly bland food and just allowed to take over. What it can do with a dish of noodles and simple alfredo sauce, quenelles of lobster and skate or plain cod steamed in white wine will absolutely knock your socks off. In the holiest of holies of human experience, truffles run a close second to sex.

I spent one summer after grad school touring Italy with a festival orchestra in the area where Italy grows their own. There was one week there in Umbria where I ate truffles twice a day and I'll never forget it. If you are ever in Spoleto, the restaurant to go to is La Pozza de la Mensa, The Table Lamp. Order three courses with truffles. You deserve it. And please, please, please, take me with you.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Loyal Bumper VC sent this along (thanks, VC!) and I'm happy to present it for your reading and commenting enjoyment. It needs no further commentary from me.

The win-at-all-costs president
Secret tapes show Bush’s combative side
ANALYSIS
By Howard Fineman
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 2:58 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2005

WASHINGTON - Here are two stories about young “Georgie” Bush that you may not have heard, but which are worth recounting as he travels the globe as a world leader.

But the key words are “had to do.” No Bush wants to play rough, of course. But to win — or at least maintain their dignity and pride — they have to.

Hear Her Sing

FBI abandons whistleblower secrets claim

By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor

Washington, DC, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- The Department of Justice has abandoned its claim that allegations made by a fired FBI translator are secret, paving the way for a court case that will air embarrassing allegations about incompetence, poor security and possible espionage in the translation unit of the Bureau's Washington Field Office.

At issue are the claims of Sibel Edmonds, a contract translator for the FBI hired in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Edmonds reported that many of those hired to work in the unit could barely speak English; that they left secure laptop computers lying around while they went to lunch; that they took classified material home with them; and -- even more disturbing -- that one co-worker had undeclared contacts with a foreign organization that was under FBI surveillance.

She said bureau operations -- including counter-terror ones -- were compromised as a result.

Edmonds is suing the FBI, claiming she was fired for bringing to light these problems -- which have been identified by several inquiries as significant contributing factors to the success of the Sept. 11 plot.

The Bureau has repeatedly tried to have the case thrown out, claiming that it cannot be heard without jeopardizing national security.

In two unclassified briefings for congressional staff in June and July 2002 senior FBI officials acknowledged the truth of a number of Edmonds' allegations, including those against a co-worker, Melek Can Dickerson, who had worked for an organization that was the target of surveillance in a counter-intelligence probe until she joined the bureau in October 2001 -- and did not disclose the work on her application.

yankee doodle comments:

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Sibel Edmonds case, this article is well worth reading (and in the Moonie Times, too! Will wonders never cease?). If our pathetic excuse for a media gives this case the airing it deserves a whole bunch of Bush’s 9-11 derelictions will come into public view. But it is equally important for the panalopy of sins it spotlights in the aftermath of 9-11: the abuse of power to cover up mistakes, improper classification of embarrassing documents, the attempt to declare information already released to the public domain retroactively classified, usurpation of powers belonging to the legislative branch…

Lenten Reflections

Fr. Jake attended a Lenten "quiet day" with the other priests of his diocese yesterday. The leader was an author whose books I have greatly enjoyed, and she offered some themes for reflection that are so good that I will pass them on to you:

If today were the last day of your life, what would you want more than anything else to do?

If you were on your deathbed, looking back over your life, how would you want the world to have been blessed by your having been here?

Someone once said, "May you live until the word of your life has been expressed." What is the "word" you want your life to express?

If God were to whisper in your ear, This is why I sent you here. This is what I sent you to do," What would God say next? Find out.

Margaret also shared a well known saying that I had never heard before; "The two most important days of your life were the day you were born and the day you knew why."

I've "known why" a few times in my life, and the "why" has changed more than once. How about you?

Cool Tools

Things you learn while clicking around the blogosphere. This is news to me:

Ask Metafilter
Answers from the hive mind

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Bump News

Mel Goux has just been elected First Vice Chair of the
Fulton County Democratic Party in Georgia. Click the link and go congratulate (although, judging from some of the other things she said in her email, perhaps condolences are more in order.)

Way to go putting your shoe-leather where your values are, Mel!

President Coward

Protestors kept far away during Bush visit to Germany
By Jenny Booth, Times Online

George Bush arrived for his first visit to Germany since the war in Iraq amid suffocating security that closed some of Germany’s busiest roads and left the centre of Mainz eerily empty except for police.

Manhole covers were welded shut, street mailboxes removed and police with sniffer dogs searched boats at marinas.

Rhine river traffic was stopped for the day, and residents in parts of town the US President was visiting were told to shutter their windows and stay off their balconies while he was there.

One boat with an anti-Bush protester on board managed to sail towards a bridge shortly before the President’s motorcade crossed it, police confirmed. The online version of Focus magazine said that three police launches intercepted the boat before it reached the bridge.

At least 4,000 anti-war demonstrators turned up to a rally in Mainz amid heavy snow, but were being kept at a safe distance from the security cordon, out of Mr Bush's sight. Police mingled with large crowd of protestors, handing out leaflets asking them to demonstrate quietly.

Mr Bush and Gerhard Schroeder, the German Chancellor, are still patching up strains from the Iraq crisis, which Schroeder now terms "a legend that should finally be buried."

In a joint news conference this morning, Mr Schroeder sought to play down any differences the United States and Europe have concerning Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

"We absolutely agree that Iran must say no to any kind of nuclear weapons," he said.

"Iran must not have any nuclear weapons. They must waive any right to the production thereof."

Bush is such a coward that he has to be protected from protesters. I find this both fascinating and distasteful. Have we ever had a president more removed from the people he supposedly "serves?"

"Fighting" the Flu

I listen to NPR in the morning and often find myself wanting to throw things at my radio. Lucky for the radio, I'm usually wearing fuzzy slippers in the morning. The Nipper has done a slightly better job than the rest of the media in reporting the avian influenza story (which broke out into the networks last night) but this treatment is downright silly.

Flu Fears Threaten Thai Cockfighting Tradition

by Jon Hamilton

NPR.org, February 23, 2005 · This month marked the start of the Year of the Rooster, but in Thailand, where fighting cocks are considered a national treasure, the rooster has become an embattled creature.

Thai officials say they're trying to protect people. So far, only a few humans have been infected -- including at least one owner of a fighting cock. But each new infection increases the chance that bird flu will jump from chickens to humans. Disease experts say that could start a flu pandemic that would kill millions of people around the world.

Henry Niman's Recombinomics does a much better job with real news:

Pandemic Avian Influenza Evolution

Thus avian influenza has been achieving a pandemic potential on several fronts involving H5N1, H9N2 and human H1N1 genes. However, the monitoring or even announcing the existence of such viruses remains scandalous.

It's Still the Economy, Stupid

Meyerson's argument is a bit of a mess, but at least he is making it:

ISO: Working-Class Democrats

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, February 23, 2005; Page A19

Few Americans of any class give stellar marks to Bush on the economy. The Bush recovery is anemic by historical standards, and for working-class Americans it's altogether sickly. We are now into the 11th quarter since the recovery began in late 2001 and during that time, the Economic Policy Institute tells us, private-sector wages and salaries have risen by a scant 3.9 percent. If you average all the recoveries from 1949 through 1982, private-sector wages and salaries had risen by 18.2 percent by the time those recoveries were 11 quarters old.

So how did the white working class come to prefer Bush to Kerry on matters economic? At one level, we shouldn't read too much into the polling: The lack of trust that white workers felt toward Kerry on security questions surely spilled over to their assessment of him on other topics, too. Moreover, the Republicans did a better job of defining Kerry as a cultural plutocrat (no great achievement, that) than Kerry did of defining Bush as the economic plutocrats' favorite president. Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg has observed that Kerry did not turn to populist themes in the campaign's final weeks, and that this hurt him particularly among white working-class women.

All this is true, and yet I think the Democrats kid themselves if they think this problem is Kerry-specific. To begin, de-unionization has taken a huge chunk out of Democratic vote totals.

Unionized working-class whites tend to vote Democratic at least 20 percent more than their nonunion counterparts, but with private-sector unionization now fallen to less than 8 percent of the workforce, there aren't enough unionized whites to put a state such as Ohio into the Democratic column.

Bill Clinton's repositioning of the party, of course, was supposed to have made it safe for working-class whites to vote Democratic again. Under Clinton, the Democrats became the party of fiscal responsibility. By ending welfare, Clinton sought to eradicate what many working-class whites saw, however incorrectly, as the Democrats' tilt towards blacks. No longer were the Democrats the party of racial preferences that they had been in the 1970s and '80s. And nothing that John Kerry said in 2004 reversed that repositioning.

But if the Democrats are no longer quite the party of racial preferences, they are not quite the party of class preferences either.

To be sure, they oppose the privatization of Social Security and support the provision of universal health care, and every poll shows that the American people back their positions. But on a broad range of economic matters, Democrats have alarmingly little to say to working-class Americans. For the past 35 years, as short-range share value has come to dominate our form of capitalism and the burden of risk has been shifted to the individual employee, far more manufacturing jobs have been sent abroad from the United States than from any other advanced industrialized nation. As the middle fell out of the economy, the Democrats advocated job retraining and, eventually, some form of managed trade, but these policies were too little and too late.

Today's working class isn't found largely in factories; it's in nursing homes, on construction sites, in Wal-Marts. Republicans talk to its members about guns, gays and God. Democrats often just stammer. And given the imbalance of power in today's de-unionized workplace, Democrats couldn't do much better than Bush when it comes to boosting wages in this raise-less recovery.

Democrats win when they deliver prosperity and security for working Americans, and in today's capitalism, those have become increasingly unattainable goals. Which is why, as they only now gear up their think tanks, Democrats need to promote alternatives to the kind of shareholder-driven capitalism into which our system has descended, to the detriment of millions of underpaid, insecure workers. They need to side with Main Street over Wall Street. Like the conservatives 40 years ago, the Democrats need to offend their own elites to build an America that reflects their best values, and in which working people can and do count on them for support.

This isn't just a "raiseless" recovery, it's a jobless recovery. Dems need to hit that hard, and I want to hear more about it from the Center for American Progress in their daily updates.

Snow Day

There go my Thursday plans:

WINTER STORM WATCH

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC
327 AM EST WED FEB 23 2005

.A LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM OVER THE GULF STATES TODAY WILL STRENGTHEN
AND MOVE NEAR CAPE HATTERAS ON THURSDAY. THIS SYSTEM...COUPLED WITH
THE COLD AIR MOVING IN FROM THE NORTH...WILL ALLOW SNOW TO DEVELOP
THURSDAY AND THURSDAY NIGHT ACROSS THE MID ATLANTIC.

DCZ001-MDZ002>007-009>011-013-014-016>018-VAZ021-025>031-036>042-
050>057-WVZ048>055-232100-
ALBEMARLE VA-ALLEGANY MD-ANNE ARUNDEL MD-
ARLINGTON/FALLS CHURCH/ALEXANDRIA VA-AUGUSTA VA-BERKELEY WV-
CALVERT MD-CARROLL MD-CHARLES MD-CLARKE VA-CULPEPER VA-
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA DC-FAIRFAX VA-FAUQUIER VA-FREDERICK VA-
FREDERICK MD-GRANT WV-GREENE VA-HAMPSHIRE WV-HARDY WV-HARFORD MD-
HIGHLAND VA-HOWARD MD-JEFFERSON WV-KING GEORGE VA-LOUDOUN VA-
MADISON VA-MINERAL WV-MONTGOMERY MD-MORGAN WV-NELSON VA-
NORTHERN BALTIMORE MD-ORANGE VA-PAGE VA-PENDLETON WV-
PRINCE GEORGES MD-PRINCE WILLIAM/MANASSAS/MANASSAS PARK VA-
RAPPAHANNOCK VA-ROCKINGHAM VA-SHENANDOAH VA-SOUTHERN BALTIMORE MD-
SPOTSYLVANIA VA-ST. MARYS MD-STAFFORD VA-WARREN VA-WASHINGTON MD-
327 AM EST WED FEB 23 2005

...WINTER STORM WATCH IN EFFECT FROM THURSDAY MORNING TO LATE
THURSDAY NIGHT...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN STERLING VIRGINIA HAS ISSUED A WINTER
STORM WATCH FOR MARYLAND WEST OF THE CHESAPEAKE BAY AND EAST OF
GARRETT COUNTY...EASTERN WEST VIRGINIA...NORTHERN AND CENTRAL
VIRGINIA AND WASHINGTON DC.

THE BEST POTENTIAL FOR HEAVY SNOWFALL IS ACROSS SOUTHERN MARYLAND AND
NORTH CENTRAL VIRGINIA. THIS INCLUDES THE TOWNS OF LEXINGTON PARK
MARYLAND...FREDERICKSBURG AND CHARLOTTESVILLE VIRGINIA.

AT THIS TIME...BALTIMORE MARYLAND AND WASHINGTON DC METROPOLITAN
AREAS WILL BE ON THE NORTHERN FRINGE OF THE HEAVIEST SNOW.
HOWEVER...ACCUMULATIONS OF 5 INCHES OR GREATER ARE STILL POSSIBLE
WITHIN THESE MAJOR METRO AREAS.

A WINTER STORM WATCH IS ISSUED WHEN HAZARDOUS WINTER WEATHER IS
POSSIBLE. AT THIS TIME...THERE IS A POTENTIAL FOR SNOW
ACCUMULATIONS OF 5 INCHES OR GREATER BEGINNING THURSDAY MORNING
THROUGH LATE THURSDAY NIGHT.

PEOPLE PLANNING TO TRAVEL THURSDAY AND THURSDAY NIGHT SHOULD BE
PREPARED FOR POTENTIALLY HAZARDOUS DRIVING CONDITIONS. STAY TUNED TO
NOAA WEATHER RADIO AND OTHER LOCAL MEDIA FOR FURTHER UPDATES.

$$

LEE/ALLEN

Passing from the Stage

The Waning Reign of Monarchs
Man and Nature Believed to Be Conspirators In Devastation of Mexico's Butterfly Population

By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 23, 2005; Page A01

CERRO PELON, Mexico -- High on a remote mountaintop, Alfredo Cruz Colin gazed at a panorama of giant pines and firs where millions of orange and black monarch butterflies spend the winter after flying up to 2,000 miles from Canada and the United States. He saw two things: one of North America's most spectacular natural wonders and trees that could be sawed down and sold for $300 each.

"We can contemplate the butterflies," said Cruz, a lawyer. "Or we can send our children to school and feed our families" with the cash from the cut trees. "It's a tough choice."

The winter migration of monarch butterflies to Mexico, a stunning sight that draws vast numbers of tourists to mountain forests 100 miles west of Mexico City, has been devastated this year. One of the chief causes is logging that destroys butterfly sanctuaries, according to Mexican and U.S. environmentalists.

The butterfly population this winter is the lowest since researchers began detailed surveys 12 years ago and perhaps the smallest since the 1970s, when international scientists first discovered the colonies in central Mexico, according to Lincoln P. Brower, a biology professor at Sweet Briar College in central Virginia and an authority on monarch butterflies. He estimated that the population was at least 75 percent smaller than last year's.

In the last two years the butterflies carpeted an area spanning more than 20 acres, but this winter they cover a little more than five acres, said Ernesto Enkerlin, chief of protected areas for the Environmental Ministry. "We are not happy about having fewer monarch butterflies," he said.

The reason for the dramatic drop appears to be a combination of particularly cold, stormy weather in North America in recent years, herbicide use in the United States and Canada that is killing milkweed plants where butterflies lay their eggs, and persistent illegal logging in Mexico, according to a report issued last week by a panel of monarch researchers chaired by Brower.

Experts and officials agree that all three factors have contributed to the decline in the butterfly population, but there are differing views on whether the greater blame lies with nature or man. Brower said that without further study, it was impossible to determine what portion of the damage was caused by each factor.

But it is clear that the northeast face of this mountain has "been stripped of forest and burned," completely destroying long-established butterfly sanctuaries and leaving only one small butterfly area this year, said Brower, who has visited the site almost every year since the mid-1970s.

Conservationists are also concerned about threats from herbicides, which they say are killing thousands of acres of wild milkweed plants in the midwestern United States and Canada. While genetically engineered crops such as soy beans and corn are resistant to the chemicals, the weed-killers are causing massive destruction of butterfly eggs on milkweed leaves, they said.

"Why should we care?" said Brower. "For the same reasons we should care about the Mona Lisa or the beauty of Mozart's music."

If you have broadband, there is a stunning photo gallery. See beauty before we banish it from the world.

Orwell Speak

Starving Amtrak to Save It
By NORMAN Y. MINETA

Published: February 23, 2005

There are some who have suggested that our reforms are aimed at killing Amtrak. Not true. If we wanted to kill Amtrak, we wouldn't have to lift a finger. But we know that intercity passenger rail is too important to just stand by and watch it die.

Today, trains carry as many passengers between New York and Washington as the airlines do. In the Northeast, on the West Coast and in the Midwest, train ridership is growing. The problem is not that Americans don't use trains, it is that Amtrak has failed to keep up with times, stubbornly sticking to routes and services, even as they lose money and attract few users.

This is why dozens of state and local governments are planning new investment in passenger train service. A good example is the Cascades service that connects Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, British Columbia. The State of Washington has upgraded stations and tracks, and purchased new, higher-speed trains. It subsidizes the operating costs, while Amtrak's role is reduced to running the trains under contract. Ridership on the system has more than tripled since 1995. This is the kind of initiative that we should be helping.

Unfortunately, the federal government can do little to support such projects directly, because all of its money goes to Amtrak. Amtrak then decides how to invest those federal dollars, and in the past it has starved new initiatives to cover its operating losses. Even worse, the company has over the years shifted money away from much-needed repairs, maintenance and upgrades for tunnels, bridges and tracks to cover those losses.

The only way to improve our passenger rail is to put it on the same footing as other types of transportation - a federal-state partnership to plan, build and maintain the physical aspects of the system while allowing Amtrak and other train operators to do what they do best: operate trains.

Thus the reform package that the administration will soon reintroduce to Congress would establish a 50-50 partnership between the federal government and the states for investment in passenger rail improvements, and would introduce fair and open competition when picking someone - be it Amtrak, a regional organization, a state agency or a private company - to run the trains.

This proposal does not call for an end to Amtrak. Instead, it allows us to work with states and local entities to add federal support for the investments they are already making in tracks, tunnels, bridges and stations. At the same time, it would free Amtrak to focus on its core mission of running trains on time.

The answer to Amtrak's problems is not throwing more money into a flawed system. It will take top-to-bottom reform, which can be achieved only if Congress, the states and Amtrak's board work with us to save the system and make it worthy of its riders.

Julia, my AmStreet colleague, notes that what Bushco wants to do is kill Amtrak. Whenever you hear them say one thing, expect the opposite.

Sleepyhead Open thread

I have got to sleep in this morning because I need to be working late tonight. Please forgive me if the posting rate is slow in the morning.

Breaking the Army

Will there be a draft?
As military recruiting stumbles and needs grow, some say draft may be impossible to ignore.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

The US Army is beginning to face the same sort of recruiting problems that have already plagued the National Guard and Reserve, The Washington Post reported Monday. Since the Army's fiscal year began last October, it has only signed 18.4 percent of its target of 80,000 new recruits. That's less than last year's and well below the 25 percent target the Army had set for itself to meet by this time.

"Very frankly, in a couple of places our recruiting pool is getting soft," said Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief. "We're hearing things like, 'Well, let's wait and see how this thing settles out in Iraq,' " he said in an interview. "For the active duty for '05 it's going to be tough to meet our goal, but I think we can. I think the telling year for us is going to be '06."

While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush have repeatedly said there is no need for a draft, and one of the military's top recruiters said only last week that a draft would not improve the quality" of soldier, Delaware Online reports that several well-known conservatives and moderates sent congressional leaders a letter in January that said, "the United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume.

In that letter, retired military leaders such as Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey joined with defense analysts such as Michele Flournoy and political commentators such as William Kristol in asking Congress "to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. ... it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active-duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years."

While the letter contained no explicit call for a draft, peace activists in particular say there is no way for the military to reach these numbers without instituting a draft. Some have started campaigns to teach young people of military age about "conscientious objection, the possibility of a draft, and countering military recruitment in schools."

Rolling Stone magazine reported in late January that two of Mr. Rumsfeld's deputies met with the head of the Selective Service Agency in February of 2003 to " debate, discuss and ponder a return to the draft." According to a memo from that meeting made public under the Freedom of Information Act:

"Defense manpower officials concede there are critical shortages of military personnel with certain special skills, such as medical personnel, linguists, computer network engineers, etc." The potentially prohibitive cost of "attracting and retaining such personnel for military service," the memo adds, has led "some officials to conclude that, while a conventional draft may never be needed, a draft of men and women possessing these critical skills may be warranted in a future crisis." This new draft, it suggests, could be invoked to meet the needs of both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, US military recruiters are trying a variety of new options to entice more recruits into both the active force and the National Guard and Reserve. The Connecticut National Guard is planning to start a magazine, launch a show on local cable TV, double its current 32 member recruiting team, and make many more visits to local high schools in its efforts to "boost its ranks." Recruiters say they are ready to promise that new recruits won't be sent overseas for a year.

USA Today reported Monday that the US Army and some elite commando units "have dramatically increased the size and the number of cash bonuses they are paying to lure recruits and keep experienced troops in uniform." For some special elite units, the Pentagon is offering up to $150,000 in bonuses, while more than 49 percent of the job categories in the Army can now receive $15,000 bonuses, and "16 hard-to-fill job categories, including truck drivers and bomb-disposal specialists" are eligible for $50,000 bonuses.

But Rolling Stone also reports that military recruiters agree that, unless "America's elites" are willing to join the military, it will be harder for them to persuade "average Americans" to make the same sacrifices.

In a recent meeting with military recruiters, [Charlie Moskos, a professor of military sociology at Northwestern University] discussed the crisis in enlistment. "I asked them would they prefer to have their advertising budget tripled or have Jenna Bush join the Army," he says. "They unanimously chose the Jenna option."

Recruiters face other problems in convincing National Guard and Reserve soldiers in particular to reenlist or for new recruits to join. The Baltimore Sun reports that 41 percent of these soldiers are losing "thousands of dollars" through a pay gap between civilian salary and military pay.

And National Public Radio's Morning Edition reports that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says "hundreds of injured Army reservists and National Guard members – including many wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan – have lost medical care and pay because they were dropped from active duty status."

Finally, Time Magazine Canada looks at US troops who have chosen not to return to Iraq or Afghanistan and have fled to Canada instead. Still, the US military notes that the actual number of deserters has fallen to less than one percent of the total force, the lowest total since 1998.

What they don't tell you: we're in trouble and the enlistee shortage is the canary in the mine shaft. The American economy is set up to shuttle poor white and black high school grads into the military. If the DoD can't meet their targets with this population, there is a problem. The Time Canada numbers are artificially low.

Strong and Getting Stronger

Dave Johnson rings the bell yet again today:

Was Bush Giving A Speech?

Closed down 174.

The Other F-Word

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest is turning out some extraordinary work these days:

Checks and Balances and the "F-Word"

I think we are entering a new phase of American history. These are not normal times, the pendulum is not swinging back, and historical trends of American politics no longer apply. American democracy was built on a system of checks and balances, and mechanisms of oversight and accountability. But the checks and balances and oversight and accountability are being removed. There is no Congressional oversight of this administration, the Justice Department does not investigate its crimes, the Federalist Society judges block all attempts to enforce the laws and the new media is no longer functional. The military acts as an arm of The Party and The Party is firmly in control of the State. The system of controls and protections that was carefully built over the last two centuries was put in place for reasons, by people who learned the lessons of history. I can not think of a time in history when a society left itself so wide open to tyranny from its leadership without it occurring.

Another Bush Experiment

Afghan Living Standards Among the Lowest, U.N. Finds
By CARLOTTA GALL

Published: February 22, 2005

While there has been rapid progress, said Zphirin Diabr, associate administrator of the United Nations Development Program, the country has a long way to go just to get back to where it was 20 years ago. The figures, as President Hamid Karzai says in the report's introduction, paint a gloomy picture.

Average life expectancy for Afghanistan's 28.5 million people is 44.5 years, at least 20 years lower than that of neighboring countries, the report said. Ambassador Christopher Alexander of Canada, whose government helped pay for the report, said that illustrated Afghanistan's post-conflict predicament and the prevalence of poverty.

One of two Afghans can be classified as poor, and 20.4 percent of the rural population does not have enough to eat, getting less than the benchmark of 2,070 calories a day. More than half of the population has suffered from the effects of a prolonged drought, the report said.

One-quarter of the population has at some time sought refuge outside the country, and 3.6 million remain refugees or displaced people.

Most glaring are the inequalities that affect women and children, still some of the worst social indicators in the world today, said Alistair McKechnie, country director of the World Bank, which financed the report along with the Canadians and the United Nations. One woman dies from pregnancy-related causes about every 30 minutes, and maternal mortality rates are 60 times higher than in industrialized countries, the report said.

One-fifth of the children die before the age of 5, 80 percent of them from preventable diseases, one of the worst rates in the world. Only 25 percent of the population has access to clean drinking water, and one in eight children die from lack of clean water.

Afghanistan now has the worst education system in the world, the report concluded, and one of the lowest adult literacy rates, 28.7 percent. Annual per capita income was $190 and the unemployment rate 25 percent, said Hanif Atmar, the minister of rehabilitation and rural development.

"Obviously this is a warning," the minister said of the report. "It shows why we are poor, how and in what way we can solve this."

This is the wonderful Afghan experiment in democracy that Bush likes to run on about. Hamid Karzai is the mayor of Kabul and the war lords and tribal sheiks remain in charge of most of the country.

Collapse of the American Empire

By KIRKPATRICK SALE

It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and left, and people were actually able to talk openly about an American empire, it is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue. And indeed it is now possible to contemplate, and openly speculate about, its collapse.

Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.

The article is an excellent precis of the argument Jared Diamond makes in Collapse, and worth reading in it's entirety. I quote the summary in the conclusions because that seems to be so much a part of our values/morals conversation. I believe that Diamond is correct and that the values which served us mostly well in adapting to modernity have a dark side when they emerge into the post modern period. This is one of the reasons why we see income inequity expanding, rates of health insurance falling, increased poverty, rising unemployment and falling literacy.

It's a sign of how far we've fallen into a corrupt mixture of individualism and capitalism that there can even be any controversy over Social Security.

Hypocrisy Now!

Doubts Raised Over Bush's Faith-Based Commitment

By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 22, 2005; 8:32 AM

As David Kuo, a former high-ranking official in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, faulted President Bush last week for not pushing the centerpiece of his "compassionate conservative" agenda, I was taken back to a hot summer day in Indianapolis nearly five years ago -- the day then-candidate Bush delivered the first policy speech of his first presidential campaign.

There are similarities between this and the gay marriage issue. In an interview with The Post in January, President Bush made it clear that this was not exactly his top priority. Social conservatives were also dismayed to learn last month that when Senate leaders drew up a list of 10 priorities, a constitutional ban for gay marriage wasn't among them. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said on Fox News recently that Senate leaders might not push the amendment this year, but perhaps next.

He really IS "all hat, no cattle."

About Face?

Editorial: Bush's Mideast shift

Does U.S. President George Bush finally get it? That is what skeptical Europeans are asking themselves, after hearing Bush deliver a fence-mending speech yesterday in Brussels to launch his second term.

Bush made an eloquent plea for European help in advancing freedom and democracy throughout the Mideast, including Iraq.

While his audience sat on their hands for the most part, he drew applause for two significant declarations about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that may help bridge the transatlantic rift over Iraq.

He finally acknowledged that the Palestinian/Israeli dispute is "an unsettled grievance that is used to stir hatred and violence across the Middle East." He also said a peace deal is his "greatest opportunity and immediate goal," adding that "a settlement ... is now within reach."

The Europeans would like to believe these words signal a shift to a better-balanced U.S. Mideast policy.

Until recently, American officials rejected the European view that resolving the Mideast impasse will help drain the swamp that breeds recruits for terror organizations.

The U.S. claimed to see no linkage between the 9/11 attacks and the Mideast conflict. Bitter experience in Iraq seems to have led Bush to reconsider. He now agrees the Mideast impasse breeds terror.

Bush also did an about-face in Brussels by describing peace as his "immediate goal." Until now, he has been notoriously disengaged.

By vowing to "raise the flag of a free Palestine," Bush won additional applause, and balanced his demand that Iran give up nuclear ambitions, that Syria quit Lebanon and that both stop aiding terror.

The Star, like most of the international editorial pages I've scanned this morning, remains sceptical. I remain so, too. I've seen no sign that Bush has anything like a clue on a final status solution to the I/P situation.

Just Yack

It's a mighty cold day in Hell when I find myself agreeing with the likes of Mark Steyn, but the weatherpeople are talking snow tonight. As chance would have it, this actually came up in lunchtime conversation yesterday with a friend who's at least as lefty as I.

Atlanticist small talk is all that's left
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 22/02/2005)

Nato will not be around circa 2015 - which is why the Americans are talking it up right now. An organisation that represents the fading residual military will of mostly post-military nations is marginally less harmful than the EU, which is the embodiment of their pacifist delusions. But, either way, there's not a lot to talk about. Try to imagine significant numbers of French, German or Belgian troops fighting alongside American forces anywhere the Yanks are likely to find themselves in the next decade or so: it's not going to happen.

America and Europe both face security threats. But the difference is America's are external, and require hard choices in tough neighbourhoods around the world, while the EU's are internal and, as they see it, unlikely to be lessened by the sight of European soldiers joining the Great Satan in liberating, say, Syria. That's not exactly going to help keep the lid on the noisier Continental mosques.

So what would you do in Bush's shoes? Slap 'em around a bit? What for? Where would it get you? Or would you do exactly what he's doing? Climb into the old soup-and-fish, make small talk with Mme Chirac and raise a glass of champagne to the enduring friendship of our peoples: what else is left? This week we're toasting the end of an idea: the death of "the West".

Where is the population growth in the world? It ain't in the post-Judeo-Christian west.

Taking Dictation from Karl

Looking for Help in Iraq, Bush Meets With NATO Leaders
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: February 22, 2005

BRUSSELS, Feb. 22 - President Bush met with NATO leaders today about the alliance's future role in Iraq, hoping to receive a pledge for more training aid.

The alliance's 26 members are expected to announce that to they will take part in a modest program to train Iraq's military.

Mr. Bush, who is holding summit meetings with both NATO and the European Union on his four-day European visit, said, "The Iraqis have defied the terrorists and showed the world they want to live in a free society, and we're there to help them."

The president spoke after a breakfast meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and later met with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and Viktor A. Yushchenko, the new president of Ukraine.

Mr. Bush's meetings came after he warned Russia on Monday that it "must renew a commitment to democracy and the rule of law," but said he believed that the nation's future lay "within the family of Europe and the trans-Atlantic community."

The president's words opened his first trip across the Atlantic since his re-election and were part of a speech aimed at building a new relationship with Europe after the dispute over the American-led invasion of Iraq.

Mr. Bush's 31-minute speech in the grand setting of Concert Noble, a 19th-century hall, declared that in a "new era of trans-Atlantic unity," the United States and Europe must work together to rebuild Iraq, seek peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, insist that Iran not develop nuclear weapons and demand that Syria end its occupation of Lebanon.

Bumiller's egregious stenography of Bush's argument by assertion is not limited to her wonder that Brussels contains a 19th-century hall. If the credulous US media thinks that anything is going to change, they really have drunk the Kool Aid.

Apologies for the slow rate of posting this morning. My read-around of the papers started at 5 but I can find so little worthy of your attention that I'm loathe to post for the sake of posting. Your time is worth more than that.

I did run across one thing yesterday that's probably worth memorializing. A couple of you pointed out Susie Madrak's superb piece of reportage yesterday on the Iraq casualty count. She's not the only one who has been sceptical about the "official" numbers released by the DoD. John Pike at GlobalSecurity.org has been crunching his own set of numbers and has some damn fine graphical representations of the data. He explains his methodology here.

In the Sands

Americans and rebels begin talks on timetable for withdrawal from Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn

22 February 2005

American officials are talking to negotiators from the anti-US resistance in Iraq, whom they have denounced in the past as foreign fighters and remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Insurgent leaders and Pentagon officials have confirmed to Time magazine that talks have taken place for the first time in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

The Sunni guerrillas want a timetable for a US withdrawal, first from Iraqi cities and then from the country as a whole. American officials aim to see if they can drive a wedge between nationalist guerrillas and fanatical Islamist groups.

Abu Marwan, a resistance commander, is quoted as saying that the insurgents want to "fight and negotiate". They are modelling their strategy on that of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. This means creating a united political organisation with a programme opposed to the US occupation.

US military commanders are now dubious about the chances of winning an outright military victory over the Sunni rebels who have a firm core of supporters among the five million-strong Sunni Muslim community. The US military has lost 1,479 dead and 10,740 wounded in Iraq since the invasion began in March 2003.

The talks so far are tentative but they indicate a recognition on the part of the US that it will need a political solution. Those willing to sit down with US diplomats and officials are "nationalists" composed primarily of former military and security officers from Saddam's Hussein's government.

The former Marine [Scott Ritter] also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called "a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom," were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.

Asked by UFPPC's Ted Nation about this shocker, Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

Farewell, Dr. Thompson

WaPo's Joel Achenbach writes a terrific appreciation of Hunter S. Thompson, who wasn't just a writer, he was a force of nature.

For all of Thompson's theatrics and self-abuse, he could write like a demon. His prose accelerated across the page like a sportscar with the top down. He kept himself squarely in the picture, to great comic effect. We understood that he needed drugs the way other people needed oxygen, that he had an odd fondness for guns and violence, and that he loathed Richard Nixon and most authoritarian institutions. Otherwise, he wasn't very complicated. He didn't gum up his narrative with soul-searching. He really served as a big eyeball, if perhaps a rather glazed one.

"I was still very close to the helicopter, watching the tires. As the beast began rising, the tires became suddenly fat; there was no more weight on them....The helicopter went straight up and hovered for a moment, then swooped down toward the Washington Monument and then angled up into the fog. Richard Nixon was gone."

Yes, It Is

Is Print Dead? 'The Washington Post' Ponders It

By E&P; Staff

Published: February 20, 2005 11:30 PM ET

NEW YORK In a lengthy article titled "Hard News: Daily Papers Face Unprecedented Competition," Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post on Sunday sketched an exceedingly unpleasant future for the print newspaper as we know it.

Post Publisher Boisfeuillet Jones Jr.: "It's challenging, and the newspaper is adapting and operating more effectively in many areas. If we focus on doing the business of journalism well, the newspaper and Web site should both be able to grow revenues."

It probably won't be everyone's cup of tea, and it was only two years ago that I told people that I couldn't imagine wanting to read any serious amount on my monitor. Now, it feels weird to read dead tree: it's so limited. The big US dailies update their websites throughout the day, so why would I want to spend 50 cents on something that's already out of date when it's delivered?

Flu News

Scientists face challenge assessing bird flu risks
By Clive Cookson in Washington
Published: February 21 2005 02:00 | Last updated: February 21 2005 02:00

The "very frightening" outbreak of virulent bird flu in Asia could lead to the most devastating human pandemic in history - or it could continue just to produce isolated deaths of people who are in close contact with poultry, the chief influenza scientist at the US Centres for Disease Control said yesterday.

Dr Nancy Cox told the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "There is a real challenge in public health in mobilising people into action without trying to scare them to death. If we knew for sure that a pandemic with, say, a 10 per cent fatality rate was going to occur, we could proceed in a more deliberate way."

She said scientists around the world were racing to answer some of the many questions about the ability of the H5NI strain of avian flu to mutate into a form that transmits itself easily between people. The virus has killed millions of birds in eight Asian countries. So far it has infected 55 people - almost all associated with poultry rearing or production - and killed 42 of them.

Although this 76 per cent human fatality rate looked terrifyingly high, Dr Cox said it might be exaggerated by under-reporting of less serious cases of H5N1, which might not be recognised as avian flu. "Some studies are going on to get a better handle on what the real case fatality case is," she said. For example, poultry workers exposed to the virus would be checked for any H5N1 antibodies in their blood.

Even if the real fatality rate was much lower, a mutation that made the virus easily transmissible between humans could still cause more deaths than the 1918-19 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed around 50m people with just a 1 per cent fatality rate, Dr Cox said.

Henry Niman of Recombinomics comments:

Although the issue of the "real case fatality rate" has been brought up many times, measuring "any H5N1 antibodies in their blood" may not provide much information on the the case fatality rate for the H5N1 in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia that has resulted in reported human fatalities. It is this version of H5N1 that is the most likely precursor to a bird flu pandemic strain.
....
Indirect evidence for the lethality of the virus in mammals also comes from the H5N1 outbreak at the tiger zoo in Thailand. Although many of the 441 tigers were probably not exposed to H5N1 because of quarantine away from the sick tigers, 147 tigers died, which would give a case fatality rate between 33% and 100%, depending on how many of the 441 tigers were actually infected with H5N1.

Thus, all of the hard data for H5N1 in Vietnam and Thailand for 2004 indicates the virus is quite lethal in children, young adults, and tigers and these data provide little support for large numbers of individuals infected with H5N1 in 2004 that did not die.

UPDATE: This moved on the wires this afternoon:

CDC chief says avian flu is biggest threat

Feb 21, 2005 (CIDRAP News) – The nation's top disease-control official proclaimed in a speech in Washington, DC, today that avian influenza is the single biggest threat the world faces right now, according to wire service reports.

"I think we can all recognize a similar pattern probably occurred prior to 1918," she was quoted as saying. Experts believe the virus that sparked the 1918 pandemic probably originated in birds.

These are very strong words from Dr. Gerberding, one of the most circumspect of US public health officials.

Utility Flaws

Insurgents Wage Precise Attacks on Baghdad Fuel
By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 20 - Insurgent attacks to disrupt Baghdad's supplies of crude oil, gasoline, heating oil, water and electricity have reached a degree of coordination and sophistication not seen before, Iraqi and American officials say.

The new pattern, they say, shows that the insurgents have a deep understanding of the complex network of pipelines, power cables and reservoirs feeding Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

The shadowy insurgency is a fractured movement made up of distinct groups of Sunnis, Shiites and foreign fighters, some of them aligned and some not. But the shift in the attack patterns strongly suggests that some branch of the insurgency is carrying out a systematic plan to cripple Baghdad's ability to provide basic services for its six million citizens and to prevent the fledgling government from operating.

A new analysis by some of those officials shows that the choice of targets and the timing of sabotage attacks has evolved over the past several months, shifting from economic targets to become what amounts to a siege of the capital.

In a stark illustration of the change, of more than 30 sabotage attacks on the oil infrastructure this year, no reported incident has involved the southern crude oil pipelines that are Iraq's main source of revenue. Instead, the attacks have aimed at gas and oil lines feeding power plants and refineries and providing fuel for transportation around Baghdad and in the north.

In an indication of how carefully chosen the targets are and how knowledgeable the insurgency is about the workings of the infrastructure, the sabotage often disrupts the lives of Iraqis, leaving them dependent on chugging, street-corner generators to stave off the darkness and power televisions or radios, robbing them of fuel for stoves and heaters, and even halting the flow of their drinking water.
....
The new pattern of sabotage, he said, lays the groundwork for chaos - a deeply resentful populace, the appearance of government ineffectuality, a halt to major business and industrial activities. The second side - the suicide bombings, assassinations and kidnappings - he said, is aimed in large measure at sowing discord among ethnic and religious groups.

"And I think they, honestly, stand a better chance with the first than the second," Mr. Kadhim said.

I wonder which part of "we're losing" the MSM hasn't gotten yet.

Not in Kansas Anymore

Weather Service Memo Says Cuts Could Curtail Lifesaving Warnings

By Brian Faler
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A25

A National Weather Service official said Congress has cut the agency's budget so drastically that it will impair its ability to warn the public of all sorts of foul weather, which, in turn, "will" lead to "unwarranted loss of life."

The warning, which came in an internal memo, said the budget Congress approved late last year will require the agency to slice a number of operations and programs "critical" to its duties. "The reductions in the FY 05 budget for the National Weather Service (NWS) will have a critical impact on its vital life-saving mission," the memo said. "These impacts will be 'felt' throughout the nation."
The unsigned, undated memo said the agency should expect to be forced to cut its staffing, training for weather forecasters and equipment maintenance. "The logical conclusion over all these impacts is obvious, warning lead times will shorten and tornado detection rates will decrease (as will most other NWS performance standards) leading to the troubling and tragic conclusion that there will be unwarranted loss of life," it said.
....
The imbroglio comes as Congress begins to debate the agency's -- and the rest of the federal government's -- budget for the next fiscal year. The NWS, which provides meteorological and oceanographic data and forecasts used across the country and around the globe, saw its operating budget shrink in fiscal 2005 by about $13 million, or 2 percent, to $617 million. The agency now faces a cumulative shortfall of $37 million, union and weather service officials said.

Some groups, such as the union, are demanding that lawmakers close the gap. President Bush has proposed increasing the agency's operating budget for fiscal 2006 by $35 million. But union officials said most of that increase is earmarked for new projects and inflationary adjustments, and would do little to make up a shortfall they said was crimping the NWS's day-to-day operations.

"We're not talking about some bureaucratic office position being held vacant. We're talking about somebody who's sitting in Dodge City, Kansas, looking for tornadoes -- his position being vacant. And we're talking about the parts that fix their radar maybe not being available," said Dan Sobien, a Weather Service meteorologist in Tampa, who is also vice president of the union.

"I work in an area where below-freezing temperatures have a significant economic impact on the area -- people look to our forecasts," he said. "If we get it wrong, then everyone's going to pay a whole lot more for tomatoes and citrus and all those other things that they grow down here in the winter. So there's a big economic impact, too -- probably a lot more than the $30 [million] or $40 million" shortfall.

Feeling safer?

Torture at Home

Brooklyn's Abu Ghraib'

Terror suspects allege abuse

Daily News Exclusive

By LARRY COHLER-ESSES
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Some prisoners held at Brooklyn's federal Metropolitan Detention Center say they were abused by guards.

Defense attorneys call it Brooklyn's Abu Ghraib. On the ninth floor of the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, terrorism suspects swept off the streets after the Sept. 11 attacks were repeatedly stripped naked and frequently were physically abused, the Justice Department's inspector general has found.

The detainees - none of whom were ultimately charged with anything related to terrorism - alleged in sworn affidavits and in interviews with Justice Department officials that correction officers:

# Humiliated them by making fun of - and sometimes painfully squeezing - their genitals.

# Deprived them of regular sleep for weeks or months.

# Shackled their hands and feet before smashing them repeatedly face-first into concrete walls - within sight of the Statue of Liberty.

# Forced them in winter to stand outdoors at dawn while dressed in light cotton prison garb and no shoes, sometimes for hours.

"In December, they left me outside for more than four hours [wearing] only a jumpsuit and a light prison coat," Ahmed Khalifa, an Egyptian, told the Daily News. "I asked them to let me inside. They were laughing and pointing to me. When I finally got back inside, I felt like I had frostbite."

The Justice Department's inspector general has substantiated some of the prisoners' allegations - and some incidents were captured on videotape. But the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any federal correction officer at MDC.

"I was informed the videos amounted to nothing more than shoving, but no serious injuries," said one Justice Department official, who would speak only on condition he not be identified.

But Inspector General Glenn Fine, whose staff reviewed 380 MDC videotapes, reported in 2003 that "These tapes substantiated many of the detainees' allegations." Furthermore, the officers were not just a few bad apples but "a significant percentage of those who had regular contact with the detainees," Fine wrote last March.

The Justice Department currently is reconsidering its rejection of a News Freedom of Information request for the tapes, after the paper filed an appeal.

Meanwhile, interviews by The News with 12 ex-detainees - all but one now deported for visa violations - and a review of sworn complaints filed against the Bureau of Prisons adds shocking detail to the earlier findings of what occurred at MDC.

The picture that emerges mirrors some of the abuses the International Committee of the Red Cross denounced recently as "tantamount to torture" when inflicted by U.S. military authorities on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

This is systemic, not a "few bad apples." Once you've demonized a group, you can do anything to them.

Madness and Lies

Pentagon is lying its way out of an unwinnable war - again

Col. David Hackworth
Published: Sunday, Feb. 20, 2005

As with Vietnam, the Iraqi tar pit was oh-so-easy to sink into, but appears to be just as tough to exit.

This should be no big surprise! Most slugfests - from bar brawls to military misadventures like Vietnam and Iraq - take some clever moves to step away from once the swinging starts.

This is why most combat vets pick their fights carefully. They look at their scars, remember the madness and are always mindful of the fallout.

That’s not the case in Washington, where the White House and the Pentagon are run by civilians who have never sweated it out on a battlefield. Never before in our country’s history has an administration charged with defending our nation been so lacking in hands-on combat experience and therefore so ignorant about the art and science of war.

Now the increasingly flummoxed Bush team is stealing the page on Vietnamization from Nixon’s Exit Primer, coupled with the same deceitful tactics he used to get us out of the almost decade-long Vietnam quagmire: telling lies.

The Nixon gang kicked off its con in 1969 via a killer of a PR snow job to pacify an American public whose support for the war was exhausted. The guts of this spin show were: We have clobbered the enemy; the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) is main-event material and ready to take over the fighting; and we can bring our troops home. This propaganda was supported by ARVN combat-readiness reports systematically doctored by our brass to show that the units we were advising were good-to-go.

I was on the ground as an adviser to ARVN when the campaign launched, and I was completely floored. Even the elite outfits - Rangers, Special Forces, paratroopers - were not fully capable of defending their country when put to the test. And these gung-ho troops were ARVN’s finest. Average ARVN grunts down in the ordinary infantry divisions were so ineffective that they couldn’t have fought their way out of a day-care center without massive U.S. air support.

Meanwhile, U.S. units started redeploying. Two years after the last grunt climbed on the last silver “freedom bird” and headed home, ARVN folded like a wet noodle.

All that blood, sacrifice and billions of American taxpayer dollars went for naught because politicians hadn’t worked out the endgame before Round One. And then their solution-without-honor was to lie their way out of a no-win war.

Thirty-five years later, President Bush told the nation that Iraq had nine fully trained combat infantry battalions. Just as he was proclaiming the prowess of the Iraqi army, a major in the Iraqi Training Command told me that the soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, when committed to their first battle, threw down their weapons and ran. “Not sure where the president is getting his info, but we have only one battalion that’s good-to-go,” he said.

Inquiring minds want to know: Is our president still being fed bad skinny comparable to the intel incorrectly linking Saddam to Sept. 11 or claiming that Iraq was chockablock full of weapons of mass destruction?

More recently, Pentagon hype claimed 140,000 trained and equipped Iraqi troops were set to go toe to toe against an estimated 15,000 insurgents. But when congressional pressure from both Republicans and Democrats lit fires around the feet of both Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, they were quick to admit that only 40,000 Iraqi soldiers were ready to meet the tiger. The rest, according to Myers, “were useful in less-taxing jobs . . . in relatively stable southern Iraq.”

The hard truth is that it takes a good 10 years to build an army from the ground up. And the major emphasis must be placed not on numbers such as how many battalions have been fielded or how ready the recruits are, but rather on good, old-fashioned officer training. Until this happens and the corrupt Iraqi officer leadership - from gold bar to four stars - gets a good scrub, our troops are stuck in the tar.

I watched Gen. Myers testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. His words had so little relationship with the facts on the ground in Iraq that my jaw dropped.

Yesterday's Observer revealed the following:

A British official was involved in drafting rules permitting extreme interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad, centre of the controversy over the use of torture by US forces against Iraqi prisoners.

Last night it emerged that the government has been forced to retract claims that no British military officer had seen or been involved with the crucial document allowing guards to subject detainees to interrogation methods including the use of dogs, sleep deprivation and stress positions, in breach of the Geneva Convention.

Last year the jail achieved notoriety when photographs emerged of guards forcing prisoners to strip naked and simulate sex acts. Other photographs showed detainees being set upon with dogs and beaten.

The Armed Forces Minister, Adam Ingram, has admitted in a letter to a Plaid Cymru MP, Adam Price, that a senior British Army lawyer assigned to the coalition's legal department in Baghdad contributed to 'comments provided by his superior' when drafting the document.

It is not known if the officer supported or opposed the document, but the revelation raises serious questions about who in the Army's chain of command knew of the interrogation techniques being employed at Abu Ghraib and when.

The British officer made a weekly report to his superiors and was also under a responsibility to alert them if he felt international law governing the treatment of detainees was being flouted.

'For the government to now admit that their earlier statement was incorrect and that a senior British lawyer had some role in the drafting process is very worrying,' Price said. 'The use of techniques such as sensory deprivation are illegal under British military law. It's against the Geneva Convention, too. The alarm bells should have been ringing. I would have expected the British chain of command to have been alerted to the Americans' practices.'

Once the moral sinkhole opens, everybody falls into it.

Light Day

Bumpers, today has been light while I've been working on something for the book. It's going to take me a bit to get the right mix of keeping a standard "feel" for Bump and doing some extended writing. We'll figure it out. But I've been on the computer since 5 this morning and I'm done for the day. The upshot is that I think the intro is mostly done and tomorrow should look like a much more normal Bump day. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

They're Watching

Continent Is Divided, Though Views Soften
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

Published: February 20, 2005

A poll published this month by the German Marshall Fund, for example, indicates that only 11 percent of French and Germans approve of Mr. Bush's handling of foreign affairs. Europe remains frustrated that the United States has refused to hear its voice on issues as wide-ranging as the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the standing of the world criminal court, engagement with Iran and structural change in the United Nations Security Council.

Other, more philosophical, differences persist as well. The Europeans tend to regard poverty and the dismal failure to bring peace to the Middle East as the root cause of terrorism; the United States tends to blame the absence of democracy. In discussing national security, the Europeans emphasize the word "stability," the Americans the word "liberty," even if it borders on what the Europeans might consider adventurism. Washington's strident statements about liberating Iran, for example, have spread concern across the Continent that America may try to use military force there.

The European Union is poised to lift its 15-year arms embargo on China this summer; the Bush administration opposes such a move. Washington wants the union to declare Hezbollah, the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group, a terrorist organization; many European governments, including that of France, note that it is also a recognized political party in Lebanon.

While some officials and analysts of the trans-Atlantic alliance were dazzled by the charm-infused, fence-mending performances by Ms. Rice and Mr. Rumsfeld on their trips to Europe, others remain unimpressed.

Mr. Rumsfeld's speech in Munich was aimed at bridging gaps. But he ended by saying that the United States would continue to intervene militarily without NATO when necessary. That language did not convince even the Americans present that a new day in relations had dawned.

"The tone was different," former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen said at the conference. "The tune was the same."

Since Bushco is all about rhetoric with nothing to back it up, I'm not expecting anything to change.

Right Turn

Europe's Jews Seek Solace on the Right

By CRAIG S. SMITH

Published: February 20, 2005

PARIS — A curious thing is happening in Belgium these days: a small but vocal number of Jews are supporting a far-right party whose founders were Nazi collaborators. The xenophobic party, Vlaams Belang, plays on fears of Arab immigrants and, unlike the prewar parties from which it is descended, courts Jewish votes. Perhaps 5 percent of the city of Antwerp's Jews gave it their votes in the last election.

The Belgian example is extreme, but it represents the sharpest edge of a much broader political shift by European Jews - away from the left, particularly the far left, and toward the center and right, in the face of rising displays of anti-Semitism and the European left's embrace of the Palestinian cause.

This drift from the left has "been going on steadily for the last 20 or 30 years," said Tony Lerman, who runs London's Hanadiv Charitable Foundation, which supports Jewish life in Europe.

Of course, the shift is not monolithic and some of it is also associated with a rise in Jews' social and economic status. In the vast majority of cases it represents a move toward tolerant parties of the center or center-right rather than a leap to the far end of the spectrum - where many xenophobic parties remain unfriendly to Jews as well as to Arabs. So the number of Jews on the far right remains a very slim minority.

But the fact that there are any at all is a measure of the degree to which many of Europe's 2.4 million Jews feel abandoned by the left and are still searching for a comfortable place in European politics.

Meanwhile, they are becoming increasingly active in the mainstream right.

In Britain in the last 60 years, the number of left-of-center Jewish members of Parliament has dropped from more than two dozen to about a dozen, primarily older, members while the number in parties of the center and right has climbed from none to about half a dozen. The Tories' would-be finance minister, Oliver Letwin, is Jewish, as is the party's new leader, Michael Howard. Mr. Lerman says Jews in Britain are now identified in public opinion more with the Conservative Party than the Labor Party.

This is a reminder of how different European political dynamics are from those in the US. American liberal Jews also feel a lot freer to be critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

Courting the Old World

This is a useful exercise. But one might ask the question, "Does Europe want to be courted?"

Winning Back Europe's Heart

Published: February 20, 2005

What do Europeans want from the United States? As President Bush prepares for his first trip to Europe since his re-election - a five-day swing through Belgium, Germany and Slovakia - the Op-Ed page asked a variety of Europeans to name the single most important thing Mr. Bush could do to reinvigorate trans-Atlantic relations.

No New Wars
By ELFRIEDE JELINEK

Give a Little
By BONO

Be True
By STEFAN HRIB

Rogue Dollar
By ROBERT SKIDELSKY

All for One
By GIANNI RIOTTA
[Hi, Gianni!]

NATO for Everyone
By GUILLAUME PARMENTIER

Listen Up
By TARIQ RAMADAN

Posted by Melanie at 06:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Faking It

FRANK RICH:
The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

By my count, "Jeff Gannon" is now at least the sixth "journalist" (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration's "marriage" initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ("In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting," went the script) pretending to "sort through the details" of the administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such "reports," some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal "covert propaganda" by the Government Accountability Office.

The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration's total $250 million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.

Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the six known shills is only a small piece of the administration's overall propaganda effort. President Bush wasn't entirely joking when he called the notoriously meek March 6, 2003, White House press conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion "scripted" while it was still going on. (And "Jeff Gannon" apparently wasn't even at that one). Everything is scripted.

The pre-fab "Ask President Bush" town hall-style meetings held during last year's campaign (typical question: "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?") were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York's Daily News, "unsuspecting viewers" tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were "watching a completely open forum." A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind?

It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn't using taxpayers' money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was assigned "minders" - attractive women who wouldn't give him their full names - to let the revelers know that Big Brother was watching should they be tempted to say anything remotely off message.

The inability of real journalists to penetrate this White House is not all the White House's fault. The errors of real news organizations have played perfectly into the administration's insidious efforts to blur the boundaries between the fake and the real and thereby demolish the whole notion that there could possibly be an objective and accurate free press. Conservatives, who supposedly deplore post-modernism, are now welcoming in a brave new world in which it's a given that there can be no empirical reality in news, only the reality you want to hear (or they want you to hear). The frequent fecklessness of the Beltway gang does little to penetrate this Washington smokescreen. For a case in point, you needed only switch to CNN on the day after Mr. Olbermann did his fake-news-style story on the fake reporter in the White House press corps.

"Jeff Gannon" had decided to give an exclusive TV interview to a sober practitioner of by-the-book real news, Wolf Blitzer. Given this journalistic opportunity, the anchor asked questions almost as soft as those "Jeff" himself had asked in the White House. Mr. Blitzer didn't question Mr. Guckert's outrageous assertion that he adopted a fake name because "Jeff Gannon is easier to pronounce and easier to remember." (Is "Jeff" easier to pronounce than his real first name, Jim?). Mr. Blitzer never questioned Gannon/Guckert's assertion that Talon News "is a separate, independent news division" of GOPUSA. Only in a brief follow-up interview a day later did he ask Gannon/Guckert to explain why he was questioned by the F.B.I. in the case that may send legitimate reporters to jail: Mr. Guckert has at times implied that he either saw or possessed a classified memo identifying Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative. Might that memo have come from the same officials who looked after "Jeff Gannon's" press credentials? Did Mr. Guckert have any connection with CNN's own Robert Novak, whose publication of Ms. Plame's name started this investigation in the first place? The anchor didn't go there.

The "real" news from CNN was no news at all, but it's not as if any of its competitors did much better. The "Jeff Gannon" story got less attention than another media frenzy - that set off by the veteran news executive Eason Jordan, who resigned from CNN after speaking recklessly at a panel discussion at Davos, where he apparently implied, at least in passing, that American troops deliberately targeted reporters. Is the banishment of a real newsman for behaving foolishly at a bloviation conference in Switzerland a more pressing story than that of a fake newsman gaining years of access to the White House (and network TV cameras) under mysterious circumstances? With real news this timid, the appointment of Jon Stewart to take over Dan Rather's chair at CBS News could be just the jolt television journalism needs. As Mr. Olbermann demonstrated when he borrowed a sharp "Daily Show" tool to puncture the "Jeff Gannon" case, the only road back to reality may be to fight fake with fake.

You use propaganda when the truth is ugly.

Utter Failure

News About Iraq Goes Through Filters
by Dahr Jamail
(Published on Thursday, February 17, 2005 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Eason Jordan, a CNN executive, told a panel that the U.S. military deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq. He said he "knew of about 12 journalists who had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy," said Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts who was on the panel with Jordan.

When we hear this statement with the knowledge that 63 journalists have been killed in Iraq, in addition to the fact that in a 14-month-period, more journalists were killed in Iraq than during the entire Vietnam War, one begins to get the feeling that the military clampdown on the media is more than a myth or a conspiracy theory.

(Editor's note: Jordan has since resigned from CNN, telling fellow CNN staffers: "I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise.")

I've personally witnessed photographers in Baghdad who have had their cameras either confiscated or smashed by soldiers, who were, of course, acting on orders from their superiors. And no, the journalists weren't trying to photograph something that would jeopardize the security of the soldiers.

Even Christiane Amanpour, CNN's top war correspondent, announced on national television that her own network was censuring her journalism.

Most Americans don't know that on any given day, an average of three U.S. soldiers die in Iraq as a result of 75 attacks every single day on U.S. forces or that Iraqi civilian deaths average 10 times that amount.

Most Americans also don't know there are four permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq, with the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root diligently constructing 10 others.

Most Americans don't know overall troop morale in Iraq resembles that of the Vietnam War, with tours being extended and stop-loss orders imposed.

Nor do most folks know where billions of their tax dollars have been spent that were supposed to be used in the reconstruction of Iraq.

But who can blame Americans when the military and mainstream media continue, day in and day out, to distort, deny and destroy the truth before it reaches the audience back home? An international peoples' initiative called the World Tribunal on Iraq met in Rome to focus on media complicity in the crimes committed against the people of Iraq as well as U.S. citizens who are paying with their blood and tax dollars to maintain the occupation. The tribunal found Western mainstream media outlets guilty of incitement to violence and the deliberate misleading of people into the war and ongoing occupation of Iraq.

Makes you wonder what else Americans aren't being told about Iraq. After spending eight of the past 14 months reporting fromIraq, I can tell you the points made here are just the tip of the iceberg.

This is what makes me absolutely nuts while I'm sitting here at the computer scanning the Internet for news with CNN on in the background. The utter softballs those so-called reporters toss when "interviewing" administration figures makes me want to throw things at the television.

Human Crime

The final proof: global warming is a man-made disaster
By Steve Connor, Science Editor in Washington

19 February 2005

Scientists have found the first unequivocal link between man-made greenhouse gases and a dramatic heating of the Earth's oceans. The researchers - many funded by the US government - have seen what they describe as a "stunning" correlation between a rise in ocean temperature over the past 40 years and pollution of the atmosphere.

The study destroys a central argument of global warming sceptics within the Bush administration - that climate change could be a natural phenomenon. It should convince George Bush to drop his objections to the Kyoto treaty on climate change, the scientists say.

Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and a leading member of the team, said: "We've got a serious problem. The debate is no longer: 'Is there a global warming signal?' The debate now is what are we going to do about it?"

The findings are crucial because much of the evidence of a warmer world has until now been from air temperatures, but it is the oceans that are the driving force behind the Earth's climate. Dr Barnett said: "Over the past 40 years there has been considerable warming of the planetary system and approximately 90 per cent of that warming has gone directly into the oceans."

He told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington: "We defined a 'fingerprint' of ocean warming. Each of the oceans warmed differently at different depths and constitutes a fingerprint which you can look for. We had several computer simulations, for instance one for natural variability: could the climate system just do this on its own? The answer was no.

"We looked at the possibility that solar changes or volcanic effects could have caused the warming - not a chance. What just absolutely nailed it was greenhouse warming."

America produces a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, yet under President Bush it is one of the few developed nations not to have signed the Kyoto treaty to limit emissions. The President's advisers have argued that the science of global warming is full of uncertainties and change might be a natural phenomenon.

The only question which remains is how much of the damage can be mitigated at this stage. Americans don't seem to embrace the amount of lifestyle change which would be necessary to make a dent in greenhouse gasses.

Sorrows of Empire

Clash over 'Kurdish veto' looms in Iraq
By Charles Clover in Baghdad
Published: February 18 2005 10:45 | Last updated: February 18 2005 20:43

A law promulgated during the US-led occupation of Iraq, which governs how the country's new constitution is to be written, has been largely rejected by members of the United Iraqi Alliance, which has a majority of seats in the new parliament.

The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), which was brought into force last March by former US administrator Paul Bremer, was originally intended to head off a political crisis by, in effect, granting Iraq's Kurdish population a veto over the new constitution.

But while it solved a short term problem, the inclusion of the so-called "Kurdish veto" clause in the TAL seems set to cause a new crisis, as both Shia and Sunni Arabs say they now hope the new parliament will simply cancel it, before debate over the constitution starts in earnest.

Many Alliance members, including Ibrahim Ja'aferi, widely believed to be the leading candidate for prime minister, have said the law must be either amended or scrapped altogether.

Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Sahgeer, a high ranking Shia cleric and Alliance member, said of the veto: "Of course this is unacceptable. There is no such thing as a democracy in which the minority decides, and the majority plays no role."

The Alliance is dominated by Shia religious parties, which follow the word of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's highest ranking Shia cleric.

He registered his objections to the law last spring but has said nothing publicly about it since.

Kurds, who won the second largest bloc of seats in parliament, insist the clause stays, and a western diplomat told journalists yesterday that an effort to get rid of the law, or even the veto clause, could trigger a walkout by Kurds, "and everyone understands those risks", he said.

I have this sneaking suspicion that we're going to be living with Pro-Counsel Bremer's mistakes for a long, long time. I'm still stunned by the perfection of the cock-up Bush made in Iraq.

Wintry Mix

Whoops. This one snuck up on me. Gotta find some time for panic grocery shopping today. Looks like we'll have another event at mid-week. I can't really complain, it's been a mild winter.

Us and Them

1942-Style Bigotry Targets Muslims in the U.S. Today

By Lillian Nakano, Lillian Nakano is a third-generation Japanese American from Hawaii and was active in the redress campaign as a member of Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress. She lives in Torrance.

Feb. 19, 1942, was a day that changed the lives of Japanese Americans forever. I was a teenager growing up in Hawaii when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which set into motion the removal and incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry in inland concentration camps.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a tense atmosphere of suspicion and hysteria engulfed the West Coast and Hawaii. Decades of anti-Japanese and anti-Asian legislation and racism had already laid the foundation for the events that soon took place. We were rounded up without due process even though we had nothing to do with the attack. Our family was shipped to California, then to Arkansas and finally to Wyoming, where we spent the duration of the war.

Upon our release from the camps, Japanese Americans began to pick up the pieces of wrecked lives, in the face of continuing racism and hostility. For years, we suppressed our anger, bitterness and shame about the unfair treatment we got.

Today, many in the Japanese American community will attend the annual Day of Remembrance events in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities, with the goal of teaching new generations the lessons from that painful time. Some of my fellow Americans are now being targeted because they are Muslim, Arab or Middle Eastern. When the attacks of Sept. 11 happened, I mourned for the innocent lives that were lost. But I also began to identify and sympathize with the innocent Muslim Americans who immediately became victims of the same kind of stereotyping and scapegoating we faced 63 years ago. They too have become targets of suspicion, hate crimes, vandalism and violence, all in the name of patriotism and national security.

Feb. 19 is a day I do not wish upon anyone else. Now, the lessons are not just about events in a distant past, but events as they are occurring on a daily basis.

Let's not forget the infamous words of Gen. John DeWitt — who was in charge of West Coast defenses — in 1943, "A Jap is a Jap." Or Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who said, "Their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or even trust the citizen Japanese." How painfully familiar it seemed to see Muslim and Arab Americans suspected and ostracized as potential terrorists solely on the basis of ethnicity and religion.

In the 1970s and '80s, inspired by the civil rights struggle, the Japanese American community fought a 10-year-long campaign and won redress and an apology from the U.S. government in 1988. This was to be the official government acknowledgment that the internment was morally and legally wrong, and we were given hope that such an event would not be repeated.

Yet today there are renewed attacks on civil liberties in the name of the "war on terrorism." Legislation such as the Patriot Act and the government's willingness to arrest and charge innocent people contribute to an atmosphere that could lead to future internment camps.

Fear factor: 44 percent of Americans queried in Cornell national poll favor curtailing some liberties for Muslim Americans

THACA, N.Y. -- In a study to determine how much the public fears terrorism, almost half of respondents polled nationally said they believe the U.S. government should -- in some way -- curtail civil liberties for Muslim Americans, according to a new survey released today (Dec. 17) by Cornell University.

"Our results highlight the need for continued dialogue about issues of civil liberties in time of war," says James Shanahan, Cornell associate professor of communication and a principal investigator in the study. Shanahan and Erik Nisbet, senior research associate with the ILR Survey Research Institute, commissioned the study, and Ron Ostman, professor of communication, and his students administered it.

The full Cornell study is here in PDF.

We humans love to find our group by demonizing others. The emblematic book of cure for our age is Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation". I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Company Store

F.D.A. Is Advised to Let Pain Pills Stay on Market
By GARDINER HARRIS

Published: February 19, 2005

GAITHERSBURG, Md., Feb. 18 - A panel of experts voted unanimously on Friday to advise the Food and Drug Administration that three leading painkillers - Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx - can cause worrisome heart problems. But it also advised against banning the drugs, though by narrow margins in the cases of Bextra and Vioxx.

Most of the advisory panel's members said that the agency should do the following: place warnings on the drugs' labels detailing their heart risks; ban consumer advertising for the drugs; and require each prescription to include a guide outlining the risks.

"I think physicians need to be more thoughtful about how they use these drugs in the future," the panel's chairman, Dr. Alastair Wood, said after the meeting. "It would be a brave man or woman who started a patient with a clear history of heart disease on these drugs."

Dr. John Jenkins, director of the Office of New Drugs at the F.D.A., agreed, saying the panel had made clear "that they felt that these agents should maybe not be as widely used."

Several panel members said that patients in need of pain relief should first try naproxen, sold as Aleve by Bayer, before taking any of the three painkillers known as cox-2 inhibitors - Celebrex and Bextra, made by Pfizer, or Vioxx, made by Merck.

The panel voted 31 to 1 that Pfizer should be allowed to continue selling Celebrex, which members said was safer than the other two. The vote on Bextra was 17 to 13 with 2 abstentions, and 17 to 15 on Vioxx.

Vioxx has been off the market since September, when Merck withdrew it after a study showed that it doubled the risk of heart attacks and stroke, but the company told the panel that it might reintroduce the drug.

The F.D.A. is not bound to follow the advice of its panels, but it usually does. Dr. Jenkins said that the agency would announce regulatory decisions within weeks. Merck, he said, would not be allowed to reintroduce Vioxx without coming to agreement with the agency.

Though it is unlikely that the three painkillers will again approach their previous combined sales of $6 billion a year, Pfizer and Merck shares rose sharply, with investors apparently relieved that the panel did not seek to ban the drugs.

What they aren't telling you: none of this stuff works a whole lot better than Ibuprofen, whose risks are much better known. These are drugs which make a whole lot better money, however. If you think your safety is on the top of the FDA's mind, think again.

Consultation

I'll just post this and let you to decide what to make of it.

Iraq or No, Guard Bonus Lures Some to Re-enlist

SPRINGER, N.M. - Lisa Marez could not manage a smile as this town cheered the return of her husband's National Guard unit with a parade of pickups and police cars, followed by a celebratory calling of names in the high school gym. Just days earlier, she had learned that her husband, Sgt. Jesse Guillermo Marez, had accepted a bonus to re-enlist for six more years, virtually guaranteeing another tour in Iraq.

Sergeant Marez, who in civilian life in Albuquerque works as a machine operator at a weapons laboratory, stoically explained that he supported the war in Iraq and was not afraid to return. He also said he would soon receive a re-enlistment bonus of $15,000, part of the National Guard's effort to bolster its ranks after missing its recruiting goals for the first time in a decade last year.

"The money's a nice extra incentive," Sergeant Marez, 27, said in early February inside the gym before the ceremony for his unit in this small northeast New Mexico town.

"I'd like to put it in the bank for a while, maybe save some for college expenses," he said, pointing to his 10-year-old son, Michael.

Whether to pay down debt, splurge on a vacation, buy a car, make a home down payment or cover education costs, the bonuses are being embraced by some members of the National Guard as an unexpected bounty. The National Guard introduced the bonuses in mid-December in hopes of strengthening its forces, which now constitute a large part of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sergeant Marez is one of two soldiers in his 57-member unit, about 90 percent Hispanic and mostly men from northern New Mexico, to re-enlist for six years while still stationed in Iraq. They can thereby collect their bonuses free from taxes. A third person in the unit, the 515th Corps Support Battalion, re-enlisted for three years for a $7,500 bonus.

The re-enlistment rate rose nationwide in the first weeks that the bonuses were available, though much of the gain was attributed to a single unit from North Carolina, many of whose members signed up together in Iraq to get the tax break. It is too soon to gauge the program's impact, and the early numbers could have been "artificially strong," said Lt. Col. Michael Jones, deputy division chief in charge of National Guard recruiting.

Last year, the Guard attracted 49,210 soldiers, about 7,000 short of its goal of 56,000, reflecting its shifting role from weekend duty preparing for national disasters to defending foreign soil.

"The Guard is looking for an economic solution to a socio-political problem," said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland. "Fifteen thousand dollars is half a muscle car. I'd be surprised to see this policy have more than a marginal effect on the Guard's numbers."

Particularly in relatively poor areas of the country like Springer, a town of 1,200 people surrounded by small ranching communities, the Guard will be recruiting in coming months as its roster of recruiters swells to 4,100, from 2,700. A low-ranking Guard member can make about $35,000 a year in a combat tour in Iraq, or about $5,000 more than a young schoolteacher can earn here in a year.

Though $15,000 may stretch further here, the pay and the bonuses failed to sway many of the 515th who returned home with Sergeant Marez. Sgt. Dennis Trujillo explained why a couple weeks ago as he sat down for barbecue after the welcome-home ceremony concluded with a show of digital photographs of the unit in Iraq to a medley of hard-rock and heavy-metal classics.

No one in the 515th was killed in Iraq, Sergeant Trujillo said, but the unit had suffered about 40 indirect mortar attacks and its duties, which included supplying Army troops with gasoline and water, were sometimes grueling. The money the Guard was offering was "good but not enough," said Sergeant Trujillo, 29, who grew up in Roy, a ranching community of 400 people not far from Springer, and whose term with the Guard expires this summer.

"I'm happy to be back here," said Sergeant Trujillo, explaining how his main goal now was to secure a stable state job in the forestry service. "I don't see a reason to return to Iraq."

Ms. Marez, a 30-year-old teacher's assistant who stood by her husband's side throughout the ceremony celebrating the return of the 515th, did not look so favorably on the re-enlistment bonus either.

"This time of war has been so difficult," she said, holding back tears. "I don't care much for the Guard. It's taking my husband away."

If my partner did something like that without consulting me, I guarantee there would be trouble.

Blessed Are...

A couple of years ago, the Roman Catholic bishop of Saginaw, Michigan, put the church's money where its mouth was and demanded that every church meeting, from the parish level up, begin by asking what the effect of that meeting would be for the poor. Just for one year. It might be a wonderful thing if Congress would do that for just one session, just one year.

Where's the Faith In This Agenda?

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Saturday, February 19, 2005; Page A31

I was inspired to revisit Bush's famous compassion address by my friend David Kuo, who made news this week with an article criticizing the administration's failure to follow through on its faith-based agenda. "From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants," Kuo wrote in his essay on Beliefnet.com. "It never really wanted the 'poor people stuff.' "

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, inevitably altered the administration's focus, but they cannot fully explain why the "poor people stuff" received so little attention. Since Sept. 11, Kuo notes, the administration "has pushed an ambitious domestic agenda: Three huge budgets have been submitted, each of which had billions of dollars for other domestic 'priorities' but lacked any new money to pay for 'compassion agenda' promises, which are ever more in need of fulfillment."

Kuo is not some random liberal going after Bush. He was deputy director of Bush's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and was a compassionate conservative before the comcons were cool. In fact, Kuo was one of the people who persuaded me in the 1990s to take compassionate conservatism seriously.

Kuo's approach, then and now, was to criticize liberals for failing to see the promise of religiously based social action and to criticize conservatives for indifference to the poor. For Kuo, compassionate conservatism was not a political ploy. On the contrary, he was hoping its rise would encourage a serious dialogue across the lines of party and ideology about what a serious commitment to lifting up the poor would look like.

When I asked Kuo in 1998 to write an essay for a little book I edited on community and civil society, his title was characteristic: "Poverty 101: What Liberals and Conservatives Can Learn From Each Other."

To this day, Kuo speaks warmly of the president he served. "No one who knows him even a tiny bit doubts the sincerity and compassion of his heart," Kuo wrote on Beliefnet. In a phone conversation, Kuo insisted that his essay was not anti-Bush but "in support of what Governor Bush said in 1999."

This issue is personal for me, as it is for Kuo. Over the years I have organized conferences and edited volumes on the pros and cons of government help for faith-based charity. I still hope that liberals and conservatives might someday come together in acknowledging that alleviating poverty requires the energies of both government and the charitable sector, emphatically including our religious institutions.

Unfortunately, the president's new budget moves us no closer to that happy time. It cuts programs for the poor while insisting that no tax cut for the wealthy be left behind. The politician who spoke so movingly in 1999 about our "bonds of friendship and community and solidarity" and offered "a vision of the common good beyond profit and loss" was on to something important. Whatever happened to that guy?

Friday Afternoon Open Thread

Bumpers, I just got an urgent note from our friend pogge. He received this from his A/V software vendor and tells us

Update your virus definitions. I just got an email from the vendor of my virus software to put me on "high alert". They only do that when there's something new that's working mischief on the internet.

Consider yourselves warned.

The re-fi docudump is happening this afternoon so I'm going to be tied up for the next few hours. Use this as an open thread.

Fail to Learn the Lessons of History

First, They Attack the Past
by John Pilger

How does thought control work in societies that call themselves free? Why are famous journalists so eager, almost as a reflex, to minimize the culpability of political leaders such as Bush and Blair who share responsibility for the unprovoked attack on a defenseless people, for laying to waste their land, and for killing at least 100,000 people, most of them civilians, having sought to justify this epic crime with demonstrable lies? Why does a BBC reporter describe the invasion of Iraq as "a vindication for Blair"? Why have broadcasters never associated the British or American state with terrorism? Why have such privileged communicators, with unlimited access to the facts, lined up to describe an unobserved, unverified, illegitimate, cynically manipulated election, held under a brutal occupation, as "democratic" with the pristine aim of being "free and fair"?

Phony elections were arranged, hailed in the West as "free and fair," with American officials fabricating "an 83 percent turnout despite Vietcong terror." The guide alludes to none of this, nor that "the terrorists," whom the Americans called the Vietcong, were also southern Vietnamese defending their homeland against the American invasion and whose resistance was popular. For Vietnam, read Iraq.

The historical parallels are stunning, including the propaganda used to sell the war. And half of the public is buying it all over again. You would think that we had learned something from the last time, but that would mean remembering beyond the historical revisionism we are still fed.

Leviathan

The Cruel Saga of Asbestos Disease

By Paul Brodeur, Paul Brodeur, a staff writer at the New Yorker for many years, is the author of four books on asbestos disease.

The renowned epidemiologist Dr. Irving J. Selikoff was known to say that studying asbestos disease was like throwing a rock into a pond and seeing how far the ripples extended outward.

In pioneering studies conducted in the 1960s, Selikoff demonstrated the horrific extent of asbestos lung disease in heavily exposed asbestos insulators. He then showed that asbestos disease was also striking less- exposed workers who toiled alongside the insulators in shipyards and on building construction sites. Other scientists found that the wives and children of asbestos workers were dying through exposure to the relatively small amounts of asbestos dust their husbands and fathers were bringing home on their work clothes.

Is it any wonder that during the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of diseased asbestos workers brought product liability lawsuits against the manufacturers of asbestos insulation, which had failed to warn them of the hazard of inhaling asbestos fibers given off by the products? Or that most of these plaintiffs received compensation when they were able to prove that asbestos manufacturers had not only known for decades that asbestos could cause fatal lung disease but also had withheld this knowledge from them?

Since then, several hundred thousand lawsuits have been brought by construction workers, factory workers, refinery workers, brake mechanics and other members of the labor force who have either developed asbestos disease or whose chest X-rays show evidence of lung changes caused by their exposure. Asbestos diseases include asbestosis — a scarring of the lungs — lung cancer and mesothelioma, an always-fatal tumor.

Today, however, President Bush would have you believe that the justice system is being misused and that the economy is being held back by "frivolous asbestos claims." He and the Republicans in Congress are trying to convince the American people that there is no asbestos public health crisis, merely an asbestos litigation crisis, by pointing out that about 70 companies have filed for bankruptcy protection because of asbestos lawsuits, and that about $70 billion has already been paid out in claims and related costs.

What the president and the Republicans fail to appreciate is how far the ripples of asbestos disease have spread. For example, in the small town of Libby, Mont., where W.R. Grace & Co. mined asbestos-contaminated vermiculite, hundreds of the company's employees have died of asbestos disease, as well as many residents who never worked for Grace but were merely exposed to asbestos fibers in wind-swept dust coming from the mine. Grace not only knew about the asbestos hazard in Libby and did nothing to about it but also had been assessed punitive damages for outrageous and reckless misconduct in prior asbestos litigation. This did not deter Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, from describing Grace as a "reputable" company driven unfairly into bankruptcy.

When Thomas Hobbes wrote that, for the ordinary man, life was nasty, brutish and short, it was clear that he didn't think that this was a good thing. For Bushco, it seems more like a goal.

Bad Neighborhood

Bob Herbert is one of the few voices of clarity and truth in that sea of equivocation and Bush apologetics known as the NYT Op-ed page. I look forward to Fridays for all of the obvious reasons and for the fact that we get him and Paul Krugman together.

Our Friends, the Torturers
By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 18, 2005

The administration is trying to have it both ways in its so-called war on terror. It claims to be fighting for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and it condemns barbaric behavior whenever it is committed by someone else. At the same time, it is engaged in its own barbaric behavior, while going out of its way to keep that behavior concealed from the American public and the world at large.

The man grabbed at Kennedy Airport and thrown by American officials into a Syrian nightmare was Maher Arar, a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. No one, not even the Syrians who tortured him, have been able to present any evidence linking him to terrorism.

He was taken into custody on the afternoon of Sept. 26, 2002, and was not released until Oct. 5, 2003. He was never charged, and when he wasn't being brutalized, he spent much of his time in an unlit, rat-infested cell that reminded him of a grave.

Government officials know that this kind of activity is not just wrong but reprehensible, which is why they won't admit publicly to the policy that permits them to kidnap individuals like Mr. Arar and send them off to regimes known to engage in torture. The policy is known as extraordinary rendition, which is an extreme variation of a little-known but longstanding legal principle called rendition. Rendition most commonly refers to the extrajudicial transfer of individuals from a foreign country to the United States for the purpose of answering criminal charges.

Think, for example, of a drug kingpin who is abducted in Colombia and brought to the U.S. to stand trial for trafficking. The defendant is said to have been "rendered" to justice in the U.S.

The courts here have tended to overlook the circumstances surrounding the seizure of such suspects. But upon arrival in the U.S., the normal rules of due process in criminal proceedings kick in, and the suspect is entitled to a fair trial.

In extraordinary rendition there are no rules. The person seized, presumably a terror suspect, is thrust into a highly secret zone of utter lawlessness, with no rights whatever. The entire point of this atrocious exercise is to transfer the suspect to a regime skilled in the art of torture. It's as if a cop picked up a suspect on the street and handed him over to the Mafia to extract a confession. One's guilt or innocence is not relevant. No legal defense is permitted. If a mistake is made, too bad.

U.S. officials knew what they were doing when they gave the signal to ship Mr. Arar to Syria. As far back as 1996, the State Department had this to say in a report about human rights in Syria:

"Former prisoners and detainees have reported that torture methods include electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; the forced insertion of objects into the rectum; beatings, sometimes while the victim is suspended from the ceiling; hyperextension of the spine; and the use of a chair that bends backwards to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the spine."

According to the State Department, torture was most likely to occur at one of the many detention centers run by the Syrian security forces, "particularly while the authorities are trying to extract a confession or information about an alleged crime or alleged accomplices."

Extraordinary rendition is antithetical to everything Americans are supposed to believe in. It violates American law. It violates international law. And it is a profound violation of our own most fundamental moral imperative - that there are limits to the way we treat other human beings, even in a time of war and great fear.

Yellow Ribbons

Hurt Troops Often Denied Pay, Benefits
# Guard and Reserve soldiers injured in combat face financial and medical 'friendly fire' once back in the U.S., officials say.

By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Hundreds of Army Reserve and National Guard troops returning home after being wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone months without pay or medical benefits they were entitled to receive, military officials and government auditors said Thursday.

Because of a bureaucratic mistake, about 1,000 reservists and Guard members were removed from the active-duty rolls once home, even though their wounds entitled them to extended care, according to a Government Accountability Office study released Thursday.

"This is the equivalent of financial and medical 'friendly fire,' " Rep. Thomas M. Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, told military officials at a hearing.

The disclosures represent the latest in a list of problems confronting many returning war veterans, including shortages of physicians, a lack of mental healthcare and spotty medical treatment.

As the number of returning troops grows, Congress has increasingly focused on addressing their problems.

Defense officials and the GAO blamed the wartime crush of wounded part-time troops for overburdening a military health system that has not seen such an onslaught since World War II.

"This is clearly an example of not being able to handle the kind of operational tempo that we have today," said Gregory D. Kutz, director of the GAO's financial management and assurance office.

Lawmakers said they were fielding many calls from wounded Reserve and Guard troops who might have been wrongly denied their benefits. In one GAO sample of 38 wounded reservists who had trouble getting the Army to recognize them as being entitled to benefits, 24 went weeks or months without pay and benefits, according to the agency, the investigative arm of Congress. They confront a "convoluted and poorly defined process" to obtain benefits, the GAO said.

This, unfortunately, is nothing new. The same thing happened after the first Gulf War, Kosovo and Bosnia. The DoD and Veterans department are chronically unable to learn from past mistakes.

Two Views

Army Files Cite Abuse of Afghans
Special Forces Unit Prompted Senior Officers' Complaints

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 18, 2005; Page A16

Members of an Army Special Forces unit allegedly punched, slapped, kicked and beat Afghan civilians in two villages southeast of the capital of Kabul last May, prompting official complaints from two senior Army psychological operations officers who were present and said they witnessed the incidents.

The allegation is detailed in internal Army criminal files, released yesterday, that also document other allegations of abuse in Afghanistan as recent as last year. Previous abuse allegations have mostly concerned U.S. military activities in Iraq in 2003; these documents detail parallel conduct in Afghanistan in 2004.

In one strikingly similar event, the Army last year found about half a dozen photographs that depict masked U.S. soldiers standing with their weapons pointed at the heads of handcuffed and hooded or blindfolded detainees at a base in southern Afghanistan and, in one case, pressing a detainee's head against the wall of a "cage" where he was brought for interrogation.

The photographs were found on a compact disc left in one of the unit's offices, and the discovery set off a lengthy search by the Army for additional copies in the cars, homes, barracks, computers and cameras of members of the unit, part of the 22nd Infantry Regiment based in Fort Drum, N.Y.

None of the photos have been published -- unlike a set of photos the news media obtained last summer depicting similar acts of abuse and humiliation in Iraq -- and an Army spokesman said yesterday that they are being withheld from release "to protect the privacy" of the Afghan victims.

The acts photographed in Afghanistan occurred without provocation between December 2003 and February 2004 and violated Army regulations, according to testimony in the Army documents. The Geneva Conventions, which the Bush administration pledged to respect in Afghanistan "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity," bar inhumane treatment as well as any "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

Members of the unit said they took the pictures for sport and also said they destroyed some images after photos appeared in the media of similar acts at the U.S. military's Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to the documents.

"I realized there would be another public outrage if these photographs got out, so they were destroyed," said a soldier whose name was deleted from an Army investigative report dated July 8, 2004. Another said his squad leader had directed that photos be deleted from a camera, adding that "I realize it makes me and my unit look bad, and in no way meant for this to happen."

Several of the published photos of earlier abuse in Iraq depicted the corpse of Manadel Jamadi, who had been in the custody of a Navy SEAL team and CIA interrogators. Yesterday, the Associated Press reported for the first time a claim by Army guards at the prison that before the man's death, he had his hands handcuffed behind him and was suspended by his wrists in an effort to coerce his cooperation.

The wire service, quoting what it described as a summary of an interview conducted by investigators with one guard, Sgt. Jeffery Frost, said Frost had depicted Jamadi's arms as so badly stretched he was surprised they "didn't pop out of their sockets." Eight Navy workers have received nonjudicial punishments in the case, while two others are awaiting further Navy judgment.

Funny thing, The Guardian covers this story with a whole lot of detail omitted from the WaPo's piece:

Papers reveal Bagram abuse

· Prisoners subjected to 'mock executions'
· Photographs of detainees being sexually humiliated

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and James Meek
Friday February 18, 2005
The Guardian

New evidence has emerged that US forces in Afghanistan engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse, taking "trophy photographs" of detainees and carrying out rape and sexual humiliation.

Documents obtained by the Guardian contain evidence that such abuses took place in the main detention centre at Bagram, near the capital Kabul, as well as at a smaller US installation near the southern city of Kandahar.

The documents also indicate that US soldiers covered up abuse in Afghanistan and in Iraq - even after the Abu Ghraib scandal last year.

A thousand pages of evidence from US army investigations released to the American Civil Liberties Union after a long legal battle, and made available to the Guardian, show that an Iraqi detained at Tikrit in September 2003 was forced to withdraw his report of abuse after soldiers told him he would be held indefinitely.

Meanwhile, photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing US soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid "another public outrage", the documents show.

In the dossier, the Iraqi detainee claims that three US interrogators in civilian clothing dislocated his arms, stuck an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, choked him with a rope until he lost consciousness, and beat him with a baseball bat.

"After they tied me up in the chair, then they dislocate my both arms. He asked to admit before I kill you then he beat again and again," the prisoner says in his statement. "He asked me: Are you going to report me? You have no evidence. Then he hit me very hard on my nose, and then he stepped on my nose until he broken and I started bleeding."

The detainee withdrew his charges on November 23 2003. He says he was told: "You will stay in the prison for a long time, and you will never get out until you are 50 years old."

A medical examination by a US military doctor confirmed the detainee's account, yet the investigation was closed last October. "It is further proof that the army is not seriously investigating credible allegations of abuse," said Jameel Jaffar, a lawyer for the ACLU.

The latest allegations from Afghanistan fit a pattern of claims of brutal treatment made by former Guantánamo Bay prisoners and Afghans held by the US, and reported by the Guardian last year. In December the US said eight prisoners had died in its custody in Afghanistan.

In a separate case, which the Guardian reveals today, two former prisoners of the US in Afghanistan have come forward with claims against their American captors.

In sworn affidavits to a British-American human rights lawyer, a Palestinian says he was sodomised by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Another former prisoner of US forces, a Jordanian, describes a form of torture which involved being hung in a cage from a rope for days.

Both men were freed from US detention last year after being held in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Neither has been charged by any government with any offence.

Fabricating Controversy

Drugs Raise Risk of Suicide
Analysis of Data Adds to Concerns On Antidepressants

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 18, 2005; Page A01

Adults taking popular antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as patients given sugar pills, according to an analysis released yesterday of hundreds of clinical trials involving tens of thousands of patients.

The results mirror a recent finding of the Food and Drug Administration that the drugs increase suicidal thoughts and behavior among some children, and offer tangible support to concerns going back 15 years that the mood-lifting pills have a dark side.

The examination of 702 controlled clinical trials involving 87,650 patients is the most comprehensive look at the subject and is particularly telling because it counted suicide attempts and included patients treated for a variety of conditions, including sexual dysfunction, bulimia, panic disorder and depression.

Experts cautioned, however, that the risks should be balanced against the drugs' benefits. They have been shown to be effective against depression and a host of other disorders in adults, a positive track record largely missing in tests of the drugs on children.

Adults with severe depression should continue to be considered for drug treatment, but those with milder symptoms should probably not be medicated, said John Geddes, a professor of epidemiological psychiatry at Oxford University, who wrote a commentary accompanying the studies.

"For a lot of time, these drugs were seen as a panacea for low mood in general," he said in a telephone interview. "We do need to ensure they are only prescribed for patients with clearly diagnosed depressive disorders."

The new study is certain to add to the controversy over the class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI's. After the arrival of Prozac in 1988, these drugs have transformed psychiatry in the United States, even as persistent critics have warned that their benefits were hyped and their risks ignored. A spate of lawsuits in recent years have claimed that the drugs were responsible for violent and suicidal behavior.

New analyses of clinical trials in children last year prompted FDA to require a prominent black-box warning on labels that the medications could increase the risk of suicide. The warning refers only to children but is given to all patients.

American psychiatrists continue to strongly back SSRI drugs. Groups such as the American Psychiatric Association say that fears of drug-induced suicide are vastly exaggerated and that untreated depression carries a far greater risk of suicide.

"If these medications were really increasing the incidence of suicide attempts, you would think we would be seeing more completed suicides," said David Fassler, an APA trustee and psychiatrist in Burlington, Vt. "In fact, we are seeing exactly the opposite."

There is less here than meets the eye, and the real story is missing. The press loves to hype a "controversy" so it creates them.

The psychotherapy industry has known for more than a half century that the risk of suidice is one of the by-products of treating depression. Some times depressed people get "better" enough to have the energy to attempt the very things they were too depressed to do before treatment. This is the reason why these drugs should always be offered within the context of ongoing therapeutic support.

Too often these days, the drugs are being prescribed by general physicians who can't provide that kind of support, or they are being given within an extremely curtailed therapy cycle of single-digit visits. The insurance industry has a lot to do with this, as mental health coverage is still not treated the same way as physical health insurance coverage in many jurisdictions.

A friend of mine once showed me an exercise you can do with the front page of the NYT or WaPo (two of the worst offenders.) With the print edition and a pen in hand, scan the front and look for heds, subheds, photos and ledes that contain words related to conflict or controversy. Circle them. On most days, you will find that you have circled one half to three quarters of the stories on the page. Check to see how many of those are above the fold. You will have just learned a great deal about the way "journalism" is taught these days.

Dismal Scientist

Three-Card Maestro
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 18, 2005

Let me make a detour here. The way privatizers link the long-run financing of Social Security with the case for private accounts parallels the three-card-monte technique the Bush administration used to link terrorism to the Iraq war. Speeches about Iraq invariably included references to 9/11, leading much of the public to believe that invading Iraq somehow meant taking the war to the terrorists. When pressed, war supporters would admit they lacked evidence of any significant links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, let alone any Iraqi role in 9/11 - yet in their next sentence it would be 9/11 and Saddam, together again.

Similarly, calls for privatization invariably begin with ominous warnings about Social Security's financial future. When pressed, administration officials admit that private accounts would do nothing to improve that financial future. Yet in the next sentence, they once again link privatization to the problem posed by an aging population.

And so it was with Mr. Greenspan. He painted a dark (and seriously exaggerated) picture of the demographic problem, and said that what we need is a "fully funded" system. He then conceded that Bush-style privatization would do nothing to improve the system's funding.

But privatization "as a general model," he said, "has in it the seeds of developing full funding by its very nature." Nice metaphor, but what does it mean? Clearly, he was trying to create the impression of links where none exist.

Mr. Greenspan went on to concede that the opponents of privatization are right to worry about the huge borrowing that Bush-style privatization would entail.

Privatizers claim that financial markets won't be disturbed by all that borrowing because the Bush plan prescribes offsetting cuts in guaranteed benefits for the workers who open private accounts. Mr. Greenspan, who does know a thing or two about markets, put his finger on the reason why those prospective future benefit cuts wouldn't offset current borrowing in the eyes of investors: "Well, the problem is that you cannot commit future Congresses to stay with that."

Yet the chairman managed to avoid admitting the obvious - that borrowing on the scale the Bush plan requires would substantially increase the risk of a financial crisis. And the headlines didn't emphasize his concession that crucial critiques of the Bush plan are right. As he surely intended, the headlines emphasized his support for privatization.

One last point: a disturbing thing about Wednesday's hearing was the deference with which Democratic senators treated Mr. Greenspan. They acted as if he were still playing his proper role, acting as a nonpartisan source of economic advice. After the hearing, rather than challenging Mr. Greenspan's testimony, they tried to spin it in their favor.

But Mr. Greenspan is no longer entitled to such deference. By repeatedly shilling for whatever the Bush administration wants, he has betrayed the trust placed in Fed chairmen, and deserves to be treated as just another partisan hack.

I listened to Mr. Andrea Mitchell's testimony before Congress earlier this week. The fact that he couldn't make the case for the dangers of a falling dollar with rising debt before his oversight committee tells me even more than Krugman's article that the man is a hack. This is our cental banker? We are in deep, deep shft. This is delusional.

Be Careful What You Wish For

A 'pragmatic' Islamist for Iraq
Ibrahim Jaafari, a former exile and a physician, appears poised to become Iraq's new prime minister.
By Dan Murphy and Jill Carroll | staff writer and contributor

BAGHDAD – Ibrahim Jaafari, a stern and careful Iraqi doctor whose Islamist activism began in his youth and continued during a 20-year exile, is pulling ahead of his rivals in the race to lead Iraq's first elected government since World War II.

Though there's still room for change, aides to both Mr. Jaafari and members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the party of his main rival, say they're close to a deal that will deliver him the premiership.

"There's a general acceptance that Jaafari should be our sole candidate,'' says Adnan Ali al-Khadimi, Jaafari's deputy chief of staff. "That's what we're hearing, but there hasn't been a formal announcement yet."

Jaafari's rise will put a Shiite Islamist in charge of the government for the first time in Iraq's history. It also underscores waning US influence over Iraq's politics. The US would have preferred to see a secular leader emerge, not an Islamist who once lived in Iran. Jaafari's party is also unlikely to support expanded ties with Israel, a goal articulated by the US at the start of the war.

And while Jaafari enjoys some support among Iraqis, his new parliament may well be consumed by politicking over constitutional issues rather than creating jobs that Iraqis desperately want and fixing the power supply.

The name of Jaafari's party loosely translates as "Islamic Call" or "Islamic Propagation." While his priorities are protecting the rights of all citizens and ending the war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, Islam is at the center of his party's vision for the country.

As a politician, Jaafari presents a blend of a secular style, human rights rhetoric, and commitment to Islamic values that sometimes seem contradictory to Western observers.

But his friends and allies say no contradiction exists - that he's a pragmatic politician who sees Islam as the best guarantee against more turmoil, and who believes that a modern interpretation of Islam's political role can be found that's acceptable to most who live here.

"Iraq's minorities must be protected, and they must be given their rights,'' Jaafari said in a recent interview with the Monitor. "But we must also respect the majority, so Islam should be the official religion of the state ... and we shouldn't have any laws that contradict Islam."

"He looks at Islam as a bridge to all humanity, not just for on particular type of people,'' says Mr. Khadimi. "He doesn't want an Islamic republic like Iran's, or a system like Saudi Arabia's. He wants to see something modernized and that recognizes that Iraqis are closely tied to their religion and traditions. He's going with what the Iraqi people want."

"I wouldn't say he's secular, or religious either,'' says Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary University in London. While Dawa - Iraq's oldest Shiite party - traditionally wanted sharia (Islamic law) for Iraq, Mr. Dodge says the exiles have recognized that something on an Iranian model would be distasteful to average Iraqis, and have altered their message. "Jaafari has been particularly honest about this. He is a pragmatist and the reason he has [some] support ... now is because he recognizes he can't fulfill the dreams of exiles."

But Iraq's top job will not come without complications. The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the religious Shiite slate that won 140 seats in Iraq's 275-member national assembly, has been locked for a week in marathon negotiations over how to divvy up power and patronage.

The UIA's main players are Dawa and SCIRI, who are sparring over both the premiership and ministerial posts.

Bush's worst nightmare. This is not the secular democracy Bush thought he could bring. C+ Augustus lost his first and last bid for empire.

The Dog's Day is Over

I typically don't link to blog posts, I figure that if you like my work you'll visit my blogroll. But once in a while I find one that's so compelling that I want to make sure that you see it before it scrolls off the front page of the blog it's on. I found one such this evening at BOP. Ian Welsh is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. I'm just going to give you a bit of the beginning and the end. It's long, so just go over and read it.

The Players
by Ian Welsh

The old male stands massive in the middle of the circling wolves. Blood stains his teeth, and under one massive paw a victim writhes. The old alpha is huge still, but his tendons stand out in clear relief, his limbs tremble and his eyes are mad with pain and rage. Old, weakened, he is still a dangerous foe, but his day as leader of the pack will soon be done.

It is the end of Empire – but the Game of Empire is eternal.

Sloppy Seconds

House Joins Senate in Backing Limits on Class-Action Lawsuits
By DAVID STOUT

Published: February 17, 2005

WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 - In a legislative victory for President Bush, the House of Representatives easily passed a bill this afternoon that would sharply limit the ability of people to file sweeping, multistate lawsuits against companies.

The vote to limit class-action lawsuits was 279 to 149. Since the Senate approved the measure last week by 72 to 26, it now goes to President Bush, who is eager to sign it and many do so as early as Friday.

The legislation has long been advocated by businesses, especially manufacturers and insurance companies. Business interests have complained that too many frivolous lawsuits by profit-hungry lawyers have sprung up under the label of class actions, roughly defined as those suits brought by large groups of people who are affected by the same questions of law and fact.

The bill passed today would bar state courts from considering the kind of suits most bothersome to corporate America. It would preclude those courts from considering claims of more than $5 million and those in which many members of the suing "class" live in states different from the defendant's.

This is really an obscenity, a blow job for corporate interests which privileges their rights over the rights of individuals (a trend that started with Reagan.) Any plaintiff should be able to seek relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.

Building Palaces

Critical Republicans Look to Cut Bush's $82 Billion War Request

By Mike Allen and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 17, 2005; Page A04

House Republican leaders said yesterday that they may cut some of the nonmilitary parts of President Bush's $82 billion budget request for Iraq and anti-terrorism efforts because they are not emergencies.

The sharp comments they made in challenging the budget request marked an abrupt departure from the deference the Republicans have shown Bush on earlier war funding. Party members said they are determined to reassert their authority over the budget at a time when the White House is accusing lawmakers of being big spenders.

The main target of the rebellious Republicans is a request for $658 million to build what would be the largest embassy in the world: a fortress in Baghdad's Green Zone that would replace the former palace complex that U.S. officials are using.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during a flurry of appearances on Capitol Hill, faced repeated questions from Republicans about whether the administration is trying to sneak through expenses as emergencies so they would undergo less scrutiny. GOP lawmakers also complained that the White House funding requests were too vague to analyze.

This is predictable. Bush over-reach is going to cost them in their districts and they have to take defensive positions.

Miserable Failure

War Helps Recruit Terrorists, Hill Told
Intelligence Officials Talk Of Growing Insurgency

By Dana Priest and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 17, 2005; Page A01

The insurgency in Iraq continues to baffle the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the U.S. occupation has become a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials told Congress yesterday.

"Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," CIA Director Porter J. Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism," he said. "They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."

On a day when the top half-dozen U.S. national security and intelligence officials went to Capitol Hill to talk about the continued determination of terrorists to strike the United States, their statements underscored the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq.

"The Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists," Goss said in his first public testimony since taking over the CIA. Goss said Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who has joined al Qaeda since the U.S. invasion, "hopes to establish a safe haven in Iraq" from which he could operate against Western nations and moderate Muslim governments.

"Our policies in the Middle East fuel Islamic resentment," Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate panel. "Overwhelming majorities in Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia believe the U.S. has a negative policy toward the Arab world."

Jacoby said the Iraq insurgency has grown "in size and complexity over the past year" and is now mounting an average of 60 attacks per day, up from 25 last year. Attacks on Iraq's election day last month reached 300, he said, double the previous one-day high of 150, even though transportation was virtually locked down.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee that he has trouble believing any of the estimates of the number of insurgents because it is so difficult to track them.

Rumsfeld said that the CIA and DIA had differing assessments at different times but that U.S. intelligence estimates of the insurgency are "considerably lower" than a recent Iraqi intelligence report of 40,000 hard-core insurgents and 200,000 part-time fighters. Rumsfeld told Rep. Ike Skelton (Mo.), the committee's ranking Democrat, that he had copies of the CIA and DIA estimates but declined to disclose them in a public session because they are classified.

So let me see if I understand this correctly: Goss is saying that Bush's policy and Rummy's execution are complete failures. So where are the impeachment hearings?

Director of National Intelligence

The Center for American Progress's blog, Think Progress brings us the following news:

At 10AM this morning, President Bush will name John Negroponte as the new Director of Intelligence for the United States.

Negroponte maintained he knew nothing about them, leading to his nickname, “the ostrich ambassador.” The abuses, however, were widely chronicled in local papers. That means he either willfully ignored the mass murders and torturing of citizens or he was so out of touch that he didn’t see the atrocities going on beneath his very nose. Neither of these scenarios is what the United States needs in a National Director of Intelligence.

With a sponsor of torture running the DOJ, and this loon as DNI, this government has descended to new levels of squalor.

Prophecy

I met Fr. Dear when I first started working for the Washington Theological Consortium. He's the real deal, a prophet among us:

Pharisee Nation
by John Dear

I was not at all surprised that George W. Bush was reelected president. As I travel the country speaking out against war, injustice and nuclear weapons, I see many people consciously siding with the culture of war, choosing the path of violence, supporting corporate greed, rampant militarism, and global domination. I see many others swept up in the raging current of patriotism. Since most of these people, beginning with the president, claim to be Christian, I am ashamed and appalled that they support war and systemic injustice, that they do it in the name of God, and that they feign fidelity to the nonviolent Jesus who gave his life resisting institutionalized injustice.

In the old days, the early Christians had big words for such behavior, such lies. They were called “blasphemous, idolatrous, heretical, hypocritical and sinful.” Such words and actions were denounced as the betrayal, denial and execution of Jesus all over again in the world’s poor. But the empire needs the church to bless and support its wars, or at least to remain passive and silent. As we Christians go along with the Bush administration and the American empire, we betray Jesus, renounce his teachings, and create a “Church of Christ without Christ,“ as Flannery O’Connor foresaw.

This is one of my Lenten meditations.

The Begging Week

I start every Bump day with the radio, the place where I cut my teeth on the news and learned the business of politics as a shift announcer during NPR's tentative broadcasts of the Watergate hearings.

Even as my career moved on, I supported my public radio stations at their funder weeks each year. I don't anymore. As NPR has slid to the right, my dollars have gone elsewhere. When Bob Edwards was fired last year, that was the last straw.

I'm bringing this up now because my local NPR outlet is going through their semi-annual funder this week and I've been listening to it with increasing annoyance all week. They have become the tool of Archer-Daniels-Midland and I'm done with them.

If you are, like me, a former donor/member of an NPR station, how about donating those bucks to your favorite blogger this year? I've dumped those bucks into the needs of a couple of bloggers who would go silent without reader help in the last weeks. These are not always people that I always agree with, but I'm willing to put some cash behind the first amendment.

If you are listening to your local NPR drive or watching it (sigh) on your local PBS station, how about turning it into a funder for your sources in the blogosphere?

My donor bucks, particularly precious this year, went toward bringing a couple of bloggers back from the dead, writers who were losing their computers or Internet connections.

Let me propose this during Koufax Award week: I'm not a finalist for any of the awards this year, but let's all of us make this the fundraising week for the blogs each year. If you are used to shelling out for your local public radio and TV stations, how about diverting those donations to the blogs who are doing a better job of giving you the news than are the compromised networks? We can, on our own, turn Valentine's week into our own act of love.

Go seek out that PayPal or Amazon link at your favorite blogger's house and give. The blogger is doing it for nothing and putting time and expense out there in the public interest. For you. Give back. Go. Share the love.

More of the Myth

Greenspan Backs Idea of Accounts for Retirement
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: February 17, 2005

WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 - Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave his blessing on Wednesday to the creation of individual investment accounts in Social Security but expressed unease that the change could lead to trillions of dollars in additional government borrowing in the next few decades.

Mr. Greenspan's cautiously hedged support for the core of President Bush's plan to overhaul the retirement system came as Mr. Bush, in newspaper interviews published Wednesday, left the door open to raising taxes on upper-income people to help deal with Social Security's projected financial problems.

In what appeared to be an effort to show Democrats that he is serious about bipartisan compromise, Mr. Bush, responding to questions from a group of regional newspaper reporters, did not rule out raising or eliminating the cap on earnings that are subject to the payroll tax that pays for Social Security benefits.

The tax is currently levied on wages up to $90,000. Until now, Mr. Bush has said he is against raising "payroll taxes" but has been vague about whether he was talking about the earnings cap as well as the payroll tax rate of 12.4 percent, which is split equally between workers and their employers.

"The one thing I'm not open-minded about is raising the payroll tax rate," Mr. Bush said in the interviews, which took place on Tuesday at the White House. "And all the other issues are on the table, and that's important for people to know."

Asked specifically if he was open to raising the earnings cap, he replied, "I've been asked this question a lot, and the answer is, I'm interested in good ideas."

Taken together, the developments reflected the continued wariness on all sides about the costs, ideological ramifications and political risks of trying to reshape Social Security and put it on a sounder financial footing as the American population ages.

Did you want to know if Mr. Andrea Mitchell was an ideologue? I believe you have your answer. Back in the day when I could eat out occasionally, I'd run into them in some of the better restaurants in Washington. These high-livers won't be touched by the stuff they propose.

A Menu

Yes, I'm tiring of the bad news, so there are recipes ahead.

I'm the designated cook for this year's Easter Dinner. For me, this is both a sacred and historical dinner that my theological and geneological ancestors trod millenia ago, and my thoughts on the menu go back that far. Here is the proposed menu, noting that my Sister In Law can't eat onions or garlic.

1-3# leg of lamb, boned and butterflied
1# baby spinach
12 oz. feta cheese
3 0z. fresh rosemary

1/4 # butter
1 # Yukon Gold Potatoes

I Bunch fresh asparagus
1 egg
1cup olive oil
1 handful fresh tarragon

To roast the butterflied leg:

In the opened leg,spread the cheese, rosemary and spinach and roll up like a pastry. This will need to be tied for roasting with butcher twine. Wrap it soundly, thick end to thin. And recruit a girl scout with knot knowledge to tie it down fast.

Place in a roasting pan if the oven is pre-heated to 400 degrees.

If you care about such things, a meat thermometor placed in the thick part will tell you to retrieve it from the oven and let it sit when the thermometor reaches 150 degrees. About an hour and a half.

Slice the potatoes into eighths and scatter them arround the roast before roasting with the bits of butter. The oils from the roast will help them cook nicely.

When the roast is nearly done, break the asparagus. There is a point in each spear where you can separate the delicious tips from the woody stem. After you've washed them, find it with your fingers, the woody part won't bend, and get rid of it. They will need to be steamed for about two minutes in the microwave, so make the sauce first.

Into the food processor or blender, place one egg yolk, the juice of one lemon and one tablespoon of vinegar. Process on high, while slowly adding a cup of olive oil. In dribs and drabs, this really has to be slow while you use a spatula to drive the material on the walls of the processor back down into the main mix. Add the fresh terragon and process for 20 seconds. The resulting sauce will go nicely over your steamed asparagus and be a fine side with your lamb.

Your guests will wonder how you did it. Make up your own story.

House of Bush, House of Saud

Saudi Arabia's Meager Election

Published: February 17, 2005

By excluding women from the election - as they are from virtually all aspects of Saudi society - the kingdom's rulers turned the voting into another exercise in repression. By limiting the election to seats on municipal councils, they prevented even male voters from flexing true political muscle. The councils are largely advisory boards for mundane tasks, not power centers - and, in any event, only half of the seats were up for grabs. The other half, including the equivalent of the office of mayor, are still filled by appointees of the Saudi rulers. Functioning neither as forums of power nor as places for debate, the councils are far removed from issues like corruption, unemployment, women's rights and constitutional governance, which preoccupy Saudi reformers - some of whom are currently in jail.

Two more elections are scheduled, in March and in April. At that point, all of the kingdom's eligible men will have had a chance to cast ballots. (Only about one-fourth of those eligible registered for the first of the three elections.) If, against the odds, the elections were to move the kingdom toward some power sharing, that would be good. Success should be measured by the extent to which the Saudi people gain a true voice in their most important affairs.

But if the elections result in further consolidation of the royal family's power, the United States must be critical. That may be hard, given American dependence on Saudi oil and the high price Americans are paying - in blood, money and reputation - to promote elections in the Middle East. But the point of voting - and democracy - in Saudi Arabia and its neighbors is to remedy the dissatisfactions feeding Islamic extremism. If elections only solidify authoritarian rule, as they did in the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and still do in Syria and Egypt, they are worse than counterproductive.

This was a put-up job, a sham to play patty-cake with the Bush-Saud relationship. That they handled it so badly tells you how little they think of us, the consumer of such news. With half of our nation slumbering still, they'll get away with it.

What's On

Chuck Dupree over at Bad Attitudes has a terrific essay on how television coverage of the war affects the regular view and a little history lesson:

All Propaganda, Almost All the Time

I don’t think red-staters are bad people, but they do seem to be avoiding certain facts about the situation the country faces. This is why I’ve begun referring to Homer states and Lisa states instead of red and blue states: it makes it easier to keep track of who’s paying attention.

Venom

Paul Craig Roberts is in a cold fury:

Conservative Sycophants Lose Credibility
by Paul Craig Roberts

The conservative media will never recover from its role as Chief Sycophant for the Bush administration. Journalists who demanded that Clinton be held accountable for a minor sex scandal (Monica Lewinsky) and a minor financial scandal (Whitewater) now serve as apologists and propagandists for the Bush administration's major war scandals.

A former Delta Force soldier, Goff joined up with Military Families Speak Out. Roy penned a defense of the right of Iraqis to resist military occupation, and Wolf agreed that Iraqis have a right to resist Bush's occupation of Iraq. Frank views beatings, arrests, interrogations, torture, and death as appropriate responses to these peaceful expressions of dissent.

How did it happen that this kind of hate speech came to be acceptable? We are in more than just political trouble when these kinds of things start happening; the culture of public speech, and the popular culture, have become very, very sick.

The tradition of tolerance in this country never did run very deep. We have always been a nation of extremes, but I don't recall this level of poison since 1968.

Changing World

The Kyota Global Warming Treaty goes into effect today. As you probably know, the Bush administration has refused to be a signatory to this agreement, denying that the problem even exists. Via The Agonist, here is a link to a BBC photo essay which provides graphic documentation of the changes. It's stunning.

Intel Hearing Open Thread

RESPONSE TO TERRORISM
Intel Chiefs on World Threat
The Senate Select Intelligence Cmte. holds a rare open hearing on the world threat to the United States. Witnesses include FBI Director Robert Mueller, Central Intelligence Director Porter Goss, DIA Director Lowell Jacoby, Acting DHS Sec. James Loy, and others. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) chairs the hearing.

This one has the potential for some fireworks, as I expect the threat assessment to be highly politicized. C-Span provides a live streaming video link if you want to watch on-line. Since I'm a C-Span junkie, I would be watching but for the fact I have monthly spiritual directors peer group this morning and a boatload of errands in the afternoon. Fortunately for me, C-Span archives these things so I can watch later.

Use this as an open thread while I'm away this morning.

A River in Egypt

War price tag surpasses $300 billion
Bush asks for $82 billion
By Alan Fram, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Bush asked Congress on Monday to provide $81.9 billion more for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other U.S. efforts overseas, pushing the total price tag for the conflicts and anti-terror fight past $300 billion.

Republicans hope to push the package through Congress by early spring, reflecting both parties' desire to finance U.S. troops in the field and give Iraqis more responsibility following their national elections. Bush asked lawmakers to pay for the new spending by borrowing the
money — which will make huge federal deficits even larger.

"The majority of this request will ensure that our troops continue to get what they need to protect themselves and complete their mission," Bush said in a statement accompanying his request.

He also said the money would help continue the pursuit of terrorists and help the United States "seize the opportunity to build peace and democracy in the Middle East."

The bulk of the package — $74.9 billion — was for the Defense Department,
ranging from the direct costs of fighting and replacing damaged equipment to training Iraqi and Afghan forces.

There was also aid for U.S. allies like Pakistan and Ukraine, money to build a new embassy in Baghdad, and assistance for tsunami-damaged Indian Ocean countries and help for victims of war in Sudan.

Are the taxpayers aware of this? Probably not.

Iraq: the 25-second war
From Broadcasting and Cable, February 14, 2005
By John Eggerton

Although many considered the November presidential election a referendum on Iraq, that would have been hard to tell by the time devoted to the war in local TV newscasts.

Parts of the study suggesting underreporting of local races—8% of the over-4,000 newscasts studied covered local elections, the study found—are also expected to be used by Senator John McCain. Campaign reformer McCain, who has been pushing stations to do more election coverage, is planning to talk about the study at a press conference in Washington Tuesday.

Tough Book

Toshiba gets tough with notebooks
By Tony Smith
Published Tuesday 15th February 2005 16:45 GMT

Toshiba today launched a new line of business-oriented notebooks, claiming the systems offer better connectivity, data security and reliability than rival products.

Toshiba is shipping a range of Tecra notebooks - the A3, A4, S2 and M3 - with EasyGuard technology built in, along with a new Portégé, the M300, that incorporates the system. All five systems are offered in a variety of configurations. The M300s are priced from £999, the Tecra M3s from £1649 and the S2s from £699, and the A4s from £699. Tecra S2 pricing was not available at press-time.

Finally, a computer for klutzes. Given the way I chew through keyboards, this is clearly the computer for me when it gets to be time for a notebook. I am one of those people who are perpetually poorly oriented as to space: I'm always covered with bruises from collisions with doorframes and furniture that I don't remember having. I drop and bump things because the distance between them and my hands is always something I misgauge. While I never actually dropped any of my previous laptops, it was a near thing more than once.

Moral Questions

All I can do is post this story and step back, shaking my head in wonder and confusion. My country is a moral monster.

White House Turns Tables on Former American POWs
# Gulf War pilots tortured by Iraqis fight the Bush administration in trying to collect compensation

By David G. Savage, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The latest chapter in the legal history of torture is being written by American pilots who were beaten and abused by Iraqis during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And it has taken a strange twist.

The Bush administration is fighting the former prisoners of war in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The rationale: Today's Iraqis are good guys, and they need the money.

The case abounds with ironies. It pits the U.S. government squarely against its own war heroes and the Geneva Convention.

Many of the pilots were tortured in the same Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers abused Iraqis 15 months ago. Those Iraqi victims, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, deserve compensation from the United States.

But the American victims of Iraqi torturers are not entitled to similar payments from Iraq, the U.S. government says.

"It seems so strange to have our own country fighting us on this," said retired Air Force Col. David W. Eberly, the senior officer among the former POWs.

The case, now being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, tests whether "state sponsors of terrorism" can be sued in the U.S. courts for torture, murder or hostage-taking. The court is expected to decide in the next two months whether to hear the appeal.

Congress opened the door to such claims in 1996, when it lifted the shield of sovereign immunity — which basically prohibits lawsuits against foreign governments — for any nation that supports terrorism. At that time, Iraq was one of seven nations identified by the State Department as sponsoring terrorist activity. The 17 Gulf War POWs looked to have a very strong case when they first filed suit in 2002. They had been undeniably tortured by a tyrannical regime, one that had $1.7 billion of its assets frozen by the U.S. government.

The picture changed, however, when the United States invaded Iraq and toppled Hussein from power nearly two years ago. On July 21, 2003, two weeks after the Gulf War POWs won their court case in U.S. District Court, the Bush administration intervened to argue that their claims should be dismissed.

"No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of this very brutal regime and at the hands of Saddam Hussein," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters when asked about the case in November 2003.

Government lawyers have insisted, literally, on "no amount of money" going to the Gulf War POWs. "These resources are required for the urgent national security needs of rebuilding Iraq," McClellan said.

The case also tests a key provision of the Geneva Convention, the international law that governs the treatment of prisoners of war. The United States and other signers pledged never to "absolve" a state of "any liability" for the torture of POWs.

Former military lawyers and a bipartisan group of lawmakers have been among those who have urged the Supreme Court to take up the case and to strengthen the law against torturers and tyrannical regimes.

"Our government is on the wrong side of this issue," said Jeffrey F. Addicott, a former Army lawyer and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University in San Antonio. "A lot of Americans would scratch their heads and ask why is our government taking the side of Iraq against our POWs."

Prior Punishment

Self-Inflicted Wounds

Jane Mayer wrote recently in The New Yorker about Maher Arar, a Syrian-born citizen of Canada arrested by American agents on vague suspicions of terrorist ties. He says he was was shipped to Syria, a country routinely denounced by Washington for its brutality, and tortured for a year. Ms. Mayer wrote that Mr. Arar "eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say," but the Syrians said they had found no terrorist link.

In Sunday's Times, Raymond Bonner wrote about Mamdouh Habib, accused of helping to train some of the 9/11 hijackers. Even if he is guilty, he'll never be charged. Mr. Habib says he was beaten by American jailors at Guantánamo Bay, where a female interrogator threw what seemed to be menstrual blood at him. He was then shipped to Egypt, where, he said, he was beaten and burned.

These accounts cannot be dismissed as tales concocted by the nation's enemies; they fit right into patterns documented by witnesses, the International Red Cross and the American government's own investigations. The Bush administration still clings to the policy of "extraordinary rendition," the bureaucratic euphemism for sending prisoners to countries where the public and the press don't kick up a fuss about torture. The new attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, defended it in his recent confirmation hearings in the Senate.

What's been going on here is not what supporters of the administration's policies depict: an awful but necessary and skilled inquiry reserved for the worst terrorists, who hold secrets that could cost innocent lives. That's the stuff of 21st-century fiction, where Kiefer Sutherland saves mankind with a well-placed pistol butt. This is about a system that was hastily conceived, ineptly formulated, incompetently administered and now out of control. It lowers the humanity of the people who practice it, and the citizens who condone it.

An Israeli judge, Aharon Barak, summed it up six years ago when he ruled that abuses of Palestinian prisoners were illegal. "This is the destiny of a democracy," he said, "as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it."

And it continues, although I can't say that the US media are covering it very well. The ICRC continues to lodge complaints and it doesn't appear that anything is being done.

We live in this weird age where real reportage has to be done by FOIA request.

Failed Thinking

Top Iraq Rebels Elude Intensified U.S. Raids
Military Shifts to More Selective Targeting

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 15, 2005; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Feb. 14 -- Intensified military raids in Iraq over the past few months have significantly battered the ranks of mid-level insurgents but have scored few gains against the 30 or so most wanted rebels, according to senior U.S. military officers here.

As much as a third of this group is thought to move in and out of Iraq with some frequency, the officers said. Many have eluded U.S. and Iraqi forces by a combination of moving constantly, avoiding use of telephones and receiving protection from family or tribal connections.

"Are we having success rolling up some of the top-tier leaders? Not at this time," said Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas, the highest-ranking Army intelligence officer in Iraq. "But we're successfully working the second- and third-tier leaders to put pressure on the top tier."

After a lull in the days after the Jan. 30 elections, insurgents have resumed bombings, suicide attacks and assassinations, an increasing share of them directed against Iraqi civilians and security forces. There are now an average of about 60 attacks each day, close to the rate before the elections, according to U.S. military tallies, and most remain concentrated in Sunni Muslim-populated provinces of central and northwestern Iraq.

This is all whoosh. You don't defeat a well-established fourth generation war with top-down thinking and tactics. The truth is, successful fourth generation campaigns are non-heirarchical and improvisatory, able to move quickly and respond to circumstances. The Army continues to use set-piece thinking, which is why this war was lost when it began.

My only question now is if we withdraw in good order or perform the Iraqi equivalent of lifting off a 'copter from the roof of the Saigon embassy.

Catastrophic Success

No Fast Exit From Iraq

By Fareed Zakaria
Tuesday, February 15, 2005; Page A17

The biggest obstacle to a productive U.S. relationship with Iraq is the widespread anti-Americanism in the country. That's why some of us were so critical of the many mistakes of the occupation; they threatened to destroy the possibilities of a long-term U.S. involvement there. But I do not believe that this hostility is endemic. Polls suggest that most Iraqis have been frustrated, disappointed and enraged because the occupation failed to deliver to them basic security and a better life. If and when conditions improve, they will see the United States in a different light.

Remember those often-cited studies saying that having a large force to secure the peace is crucial in nation-building? Well, all of them point to another, perhaps even more important, requirement for success: Don't leave. During the 1990s the places the United States and its allies left -- Haiti, Somalia -- were failures. The places where they stayed -- Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor -- have been relative successes. Look at Afghanistan. It's faring decently today, but if foreigners left, it would almost certainly regress, probably into some kind of failing narco-state.

The outstanding cases of U.S. success at nation-building and democracy-making are, of course, Germany, Japan and South Korea. It is not coincidental that American forces remain in those countries to this day. That model may not be appropriate in Iraq, but we should approach this endeavor with a similar sense of commitment. That will help produce success, and that's the only sensible strategy, whether or not it produces an exit.

Fareed is delusional, there is no way Afghanistan can be considered a success. Our appointed puppet, Hamid Karzai is the mayor of Kabul, and the tribal warlords govern the out provinces as narco states. The opium harvest last year was the largest on record. We've got fewer than 15, 000 troops total in Afghanistan, with a population of 28 million. We can't find bin Laden and there is no way we provide security in a country the size of Texas with a bare division.

In Bed with the Airlines

Robert Scheer:
What We Don't Know About 9/11 Hurts Us

For the last three years, administration apologists have tried to make the FAA the scapegoat for the 9/11 attacks. But it is the president who ultimately is responsible for national security, not a defanged agency that is beholden to the industry it allegedly monitors.

The terrible fact is that the administration took none of the steps that would have put the protection of human life ahead of a diverse set of economic and political interests, which included not offending our friends the Saudis and not hurting the share prices of airline corporations.

The warnings provided by intelligence agencies to the FAA were far clearer and more specific than suggested by Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission when she reluctantly conceded the existence of a presidential briefing that warned of impending Al Qaeda attacks. Rice had dismissed those warnings as "historical," but according to the newly released section of the 9/11 report, an astonishing 52 of the 105 daily intelligence briefings received by the FAA — and available to Rice — before the Sept. 11 attacks made specific reference to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Given this shocking record of indifference on the part of the administration, it is politically understandable that it tried to prevent the formation of the 9/11 commission in the first place, and then for five months prevented the declassification of key sections of the final report. Commission members, including its Republican chairman, Thomas Kean, stated in the past that there was no national security concern that justified keeping those sections of the report from the public.

And let's be clear: The failure to fully disclose what is known about the 9/11 tragedy is not some minor bureaucratic transgression. Not since the Soviets first detonated an atomic bomb more than half a century ago has a single event so affected decision-making in this country, yet the main questions as to how and why it happened remain mostly unanswered.

Even worse, what we do know calls into question our government's explanation that a diabolical international terrorist conspiracy exploited our liberal, naive society. What has emerged, instead, is a portrait of an often bumbling terrorist gang allowed to wreak havoc because the top tiers of the administration were so indifferent to the alarms, which former CIA Director George Tenet described so graphically: "The system was blinking red."

Had the business-friendly administration put safety first and ordered a full complement of air marshals into the air, over the obscene objections of airlines loath to give up paid seats, nearly 3,000 people might not have died that day. And had the president of the United States taken some time from his epic ranch vacation that August to order a nationwide airport alert, two bloody wars abroad, as well as an all-out assault on civil liberties in this country, probably would not have happened.

Instead, an administration that resisted spending the tens of millions required to fortify airline security before 9/11 is nearing the $300-billion mark on Afghanistan and Iraq. And declassified documents have unmistakably said the latter had nothing to do with 9/11. Meanwhile, those countries that at least indirectly did, most notably "allies" Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, have been let off the hook.

Indeed, the 9/11 commission was not allowed to get near that story: It is an unnoticed but startling truth that the basic narrative on the tragedy derives from the interrogations of key detainees whom the 9/11 commissioners were not allowed to interview. Nor were they permitted to even take testimony from the U.S. intelligence personnel who interrogated those prisoners.

When the truth and governmental transparency are arbitrarily trumped by the invocation of national security, the public is simply incapable of making informed decisions on the most crucial decisions we face — starting with whom we elect as our commander in chief.

Bush was criminally negligent. I wanna see an impeachment vote in the Senate.

Performance Review

Condi, don't forget Nepal and Togo

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | February 15, 2005

THE ITINERARY of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was quite lovely. England. France. Germany. Italy. Belgium. Luxembourg. Poland. Turkey. Israel. West Bank.

Most human beings want to ease into their first few days on the job, and she obviously is no exception. In her inaugural foray abroad, she gave a lot of speeches about freedom and democracy in places that are free, democratic, and in the upper half of the world's wealthiest nations. No heavy lifting.

Even her visit to Israel and Ramallah came at a moment of hope between the Israeli government and Palestinians. She got in and out of Paris without any nasty confrontations to remind her how the French opposed the invasion of Iraq. You just got the feeling that the stars were aligned for her to save her energy for places that really need her to fight for democracy.

Thus, we await word on what the good secretary is going to do about Nepal and Togo.

Rice is representing a president who recently bragged, ''I firmly planted the flag of liberty'' in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it should be a matter of only a few seconds before Rice threatens to haul Nepal and Togo before the United Nations, right? Then again, there is no need to bother with formalities.

Since the presence of weapons of mass destruction are no longer an American prerequisite to invade countries to plant our flag, let's gear up the National Guard right now.

Even as Rice prepared to jet overseas, King Gyanendra of Nepal sacked the government, shut down all communications, closed the international airport, called a state of emergency, suspended freedom of speech, assembly, and privacy, banned criticism of him for six months, sealed the borders, arrested political leaders and activists, and what else? Let's see. Oh, yes, he claimed it was all in the name of democracy!

In Togo last weekend, the military propped up Faure Gnassingbe as president after his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema, died of a heart attack. Eyadema was the world's second-longest-standing leader after Fidel Castro of Cuba. Eyadema was a leader of a 1963 coup and took sole power of the nation in 1967. His repressive reign was marked by things such as murderous and corrupt reelection campaigns, police killings of pro-democracy activists, and his nation being cited as a ''case study'' in child trafficking by Human Rights Watch.

The son appears to be no different. Gnassingbe's presidency was rubber-stamped by a cowering parliament. He sealed the borders and closed the airports. Three days later, Gnassingbe made a speech where he offered amnesty to opponents and said he would hold ''free and transparent general elections as soon as possible.'' No one seems impressed. The 53-nation African Union condemned the takeover and is talking about sanctions. Togo was suspended by France's league of French-speaking nations.

All the United States has had to say about this is, ''The United States has long encouraged Togo to move toward a full and participatory democracy.'' That was from State Department spokesman Edgar Vazquez. On Nepal, deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said, ''These are actions which deeply trouble us. It is a serious step back from democracy.'' Ereli did not volunteer the small matter of how the United States has given $22 million in military aid to Nepal on the notion the government would use the money to fight Maoists.

So far, neither Togo nor Nepal have made their way into Rice's speeches, even though she said last week about Iran that ''its behavior toward its own population is something to be loathed.'' The United States has to do more than issue deadpan outrage and travel warnings. It has to start talking sanctions and other forms of diplomatic pressure.

We know that the Bushies are more than just yack because they've managed to spend 1,500 American and untold Iraqi lives in the interests of freedom and democracy. Or something. The fact that they are incompetent at it, however, ought to have some sort of re-call mechanism. You fire incompetent employees, right?

Clickable

Here are my "go to" places for news about the federal budget, all things economical and jobs:

Center for Budget and Policy Priorities

Economic Policy Institute

Job Watch (an initiative of EPI)

Center for American Progress'sEconomic Policy Shop

Max Sawicky

Brad deLong

Morgan Stanley's Global Economic Forum

Y'all are smart people. You can read and make up your own minds.

If you are using Firefox or Mozilla for browsing, you can easily add these to your bookmarks. After you have done so, click on "manage bookmarks" and "sort by name" and it will alphabetize them for you. Isn't that easy?