Category Archives: Featured

Live-blogging the Petraeus and Crocker Iraq hearings, continued

Posted on by
Reply

11:15 a.m. With the televised portion of the Petraeus and Crocker appearances now concluded–including a very little Q&A with some senators–there is indeed little new news. What Petraeus said, or projects for the future–“the way ahead,” it’s characterized–amounts to little good, for the public interest.

Gen. Petraeus

The ‘drawdown’ of the ‘surge’ buildup will be completed in about July. Then there will be a ‘pause,’ acc to SecDef Gates, tho Petraeus phrases it differently, for “assessment” and “evaluation.” The ‘pause’ is projected to last about 45 days, during which time apparently they’re not going to be trying to bring any more troops home. Then–it will be around election time.

I suppose we can all hope that John McCain will not suddenly notice that the Iraq war is wrong, go roadblock on national television at the end of October, and call for bringing all the troops home with a promise to do it himself if elected. Or if he does, we can but hope that the public will not be fooled. But both Ike and Nixon did milder versions of same, Ike with regard to Korea and Nixon w/ Vietnam.

Shots of Sen. Joe Lieberman always show him looking like McCain’s mini-me. All the speculation about how the three senators who are presidential candidates will present seems to me to be trumped by the inevitable: Sen. Clinton will come across bogus; Sen. McCain will come across used up by the system, played out; Sen. Obama will come across well.

CNN seems to have judged accurately that the news quotient of any remaining discourse will be comparatively negligible. Some senators might ask good questions, however. We can tune in at cnn.com.

Meanwhile, I wish the Code Pink people would demonstrate at Lockheed Martin, at GE (incl NBC), etc. Much of the political world has gotten the message. It’s the corporate world that needs to get it.

What Really Happened in New Hampshire?

Posted on by
Reply

What Really Happened in New Hampshire?

2008 New Hampshire voter

Serious discrepancies suggest a miscount in the New Hampshire primary. If the ballots counted by hand in part of the state are any indication, then Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) may have beaten Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for top spot in the Democratic primary, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) beat former Mass. Governor Mitt Romney by 13 points rather than by 3 as reported, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani came in just behind Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) instead of just above Paul.

Following the elections of 2000 and 2004, most people are aware of problems with electronic voting machines. But the problems do not all stem from voting electronically. There are also problems in electronic vote counting technology, even when votes themselves are cast on paper ballots.

The problems coming out of the New Hampshire primary are very, very serious. While these results may distress Democrats who support Mrs. Clinton and Republicans who support Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani, the vote anomalies in New Hampshire are larger than the interests of any one candidate.

Problems with voting and vote-counting technology

The unofficial vote tallies in the New Hampshire primary can be divided into two categories, votes counted by hand and votes counted by machine. New Hampshire uses paper ballots, but while 20 percent of ballots are counted by hand, the other 80 percent are counted by Diebold Accutron/Premier optical scanning equipment. As election researcher Kathy Dopp of the nonprofit USCountVotes points out, New Hampshire did not audit results manually after the election to verify the machine count accuracy.

In the January 8 primary, on the Democratic side,

  • Where votes were counted by machine, Clinton came out with about 40 percent and Obama with about 35 percent.
  • Where ballots were counted by hand, Clinton averaged 34 percent and Obama 38 percent.

On the Republican side,

  • Where votes were counted by machine, Romney and Giuliani did better than by hand, all the other GOP candidates worse.
  • Where ballots were counted by hand, Romney and Giuliani came out with worse percentages than by machine, all the other GOP candidates better.

The deeper point is that Clinton votes also come out differently from votes for John Edwards, Michael Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Richardson.

In a striking pattern for any set of election results, all the anomalies go in one direction:

  • Clinton was the only candidate who always came out a little better with machine counting than with hand counting.
  • With hand counting, all the other Democrats always came out a little better than with machine counting.

New Hampshire Secretary of State William M. Gardner announced Jan. 11 in a press release that Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich and Republican candidate Albert Howard have requested a recount. The recount begins Wednesday, January 16.

Counting votes in NH, 2008

It would have been unconscionable not to check. Nonprofit groups including Citizens for Legitimate Government, Democracy for New Hampshire, Election Defense Alliance, and the National Election Data Archive have already noted that New Hampshire results differed up and down the state in towns using the Diebold Accuvote optical scan election technology from those that counted the ballots by hand.

The statistics are disconcerting, but they are very solid. Where votes were counted by the Diebold Accuvote optical scan technology, Edwards averaged 16.7 percent. Where votes were counted by hand, Edwards averaged 17.6 percent. By machine, Mike Gravel averaged 0.139 percent, and by hand 0.144 percent. By machine, Dennis Kucinich averaged 1.227 percent, and by machine 1.843 percent. By machine, Barack Obama averaged 35.8 percent, and by hand 39.6 percent. By machine, Bill Richardson averaged 4.35 percent, and by hand 5.56 percent.

The point here is not that hand counting would have put Mike Gravel over the top. The point here, again, is that all the anomalies, as statisticians call them, go in one direction.

The same anomaly also emerges in the GOP results. On the Republican side, where votes were tallied by the optical scanning machines, Romney averaged 33 percent of the total and Giuliani 8.64 percent. Giuliani was not a factor in the New Hampshire race. Where votes were tallied by hand, Romney averaged 25.5 percent and Giuliani 8.14 percent.

Again, this factor differentiates Romney and Giuliani from all other candidates on the Republican side. Where votes were counted by op-scan, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee averaged 10 percent. Where votes were counted by hand, Huckabee averaged 13 percent. By machine, Duncan Hunter averaged 0.492 percent, by hand 0.581 percent. By machine, John McCain averaged 36 percent, by hand 39 percent. By machine, Ron Paul averaged 7.23 percent, by hand 9.22 percent. By machine, Fred Thompson averaged 1.171 percent, by hand 1.345 percent.

Had the hand count been the pattern for all GOP votes, headlines would have read that McCain beat Romney by almost 14 points, rather than by 3 points. Also, Ron Paul would have beaten Giuliani by a point rather than ranking just below him by a point. The rankings of all the other candidates would have been unchanged.

On the Democratic side, a vote total in line with the hand counting would have put Obama first in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, and the excessive media furor over New Hampshire would have reversed, although the primary would still have been close. The rankings of the other Democrats would have been unchanged.

But the exact magnitude of difference is not the main concern. The integrity of the election process is the concern.

Human error is a component in any election. The U.S. has a large body of election law, including a large body of law on election recounts. For the right to vote to be protected, recounting has to be protected, and American history includes hundreds of cases on the books, over the years, involving election recounts.

Human error, however, is random. When poor training, carelessness, and fatigue cause mistakes, the mistakes tend to be sloppy. As statisticians know, random error produces random results. Some mistakes benefit one side; other mistakes benefit the other side.

When mistakes all go in one direction, that is an anomaly itself.

Note: The hypothesis that the difference between hand counting and machine counting might stem from different demographics, different places, has already been addressed. The vote rundown is broken down very thoroughly for larger and smaller towns. Smaller towns that used the machines came out differently from small towns using hand count, and larger towns using machines came out differently from larger towns using hand count.

 

In any case, it is unclear what demographic would produce pluses for Clinton, Romney and Giuliani and minuses for all other candidates, Democrat and Republican.

 

The other hypothesis, that the difference between Clinton and Obama is a factor of race, can also be discounted. Again, it must be emphasized that the difference between machine counting and hand counting shows up with all the Democratic candidates, not with just Obama and Clinton. Why would ‘race’ have caused supporters of Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson to switch to Clinton at the last minute? Besides, if race were truly the deciding factor on the Democratic side, surely some other white male candidate would have benefited. No self-respecting bigot goes into the voting booth irresistibly impelled to cast his vote for a woman.

 

Obviously race could not have been a factor separating Romney and Giuliani from the pack on the Republican side.

 

Transparency requires full publication of raw New Hampshire exit polls, the most reliable form of polling. Meanwhile, the vote tallies raise questions. Clinton and Obama, after all, are not the only ones in the picture. The voters are supposed to be in the picture, too.

From machines to multinationals

Posted on by
Reply

From machines to multinationals

 

Administrations engaged in the old-fashioned political corruption of appointing people to government jobs because of donations or connections rather than expertise, accepting illegal campaign contributions, and using the power of office to solicit contributions are machines, like the old machine of Tammany Hall. The history of every big city in America is partly a history of machine politics. Big men in loose party organizations bestowed favors including jobs to do themselves good, bringing in nephews and in-laws, family friends and neighbors, dishing out jobs where the dishing was doable and sometimes inventing positions not previously available or heard of. Almost every ethnic community except people like the Mennonites made every effort to cover its own bases and to extend the umbrella over its own as much as possible, not only the Irish-Americans who went into law enforcement, but also Americans of Italian, Polish, and Jewish descent. Even Tammany had to negotiate with the machine in Harlem.

 

Machines at work

It would be misperception to gloss over the days of pure ward politics with nostalgia. Almost every new immigrant population did to the next what had been done to it, their tactics often dishonest, the results horrible, and the elections a joke. And those were the elections with livingvoters.

Politics reeked of the insularity, prejudice, and crime as flamboyant as in the famous 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race between Kluxer David Duke and the repeatedly-indicted Edwin Edwards.

Edwin Edwards

Some Edwards supporters plastered on bumper stickers that read, “Vote for the crook.  It’s important.”

Duke

Still, a big difference between the old machines and today’s mammoth maneuvering behind the scenes is that the machines were to some extent playing the politics of inclusion.

Today the smart money is exclusionary. The big money–the biggest in world history–is on keeping people out. This situation has a number of causes, including  consolidation in media outlets that tends to keep the entrenched mediocre and the mediocre entrenched. But the results are unequivocally destructive.

However bad the old machine politics were, they were at least understandable. Their principle, such as it was, was simple: you take care of us; we’ll take care of you. It was understood that each bunch of politicos, jobholders and ‘volunteers’ would try to get what it could and keep what it had, each group scrambling for itself, and neighborhoods, schools and businesses survived under the arrangement. They were fighting over turf, but it was turf developed by the people who worked, prayed, and sent their children to school on it, on which they built grocery stores, ran fire departments, and got law degrees by attending night classes.

What turf are today’s neocons and the actual foreign policy experts fighting over? Whose neighborhood or small town is Clinton or Romney or Giuliani scrambling to protect, or the biggest political contributors, mostly GOP, in the insurance, pharma and tobacco industries? All these parties have a vested interest in globalization, which means latching onto large corporations that cross national lines. Whose community are they working for? Taiwan?

This suggestion is not tossed out at random. Among the worst excesses of the traditional machines was their collusion with gangs and gangsters, and at this writing the D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia, the epicenter of yuppiedom, are also a hub of some strikingly aggressive Asian gangs. This topic is not one on which the White House and the First Lady, in her campaign for at-risk male youth, have touched publicly.

The flavor of American politics has changed with the economy, over the past thirty years; fire department, police and post office jobs aren’t handed out the way they used to be; the manufacturing sector and the rest of America’s basic industries – copper, steel, maritime, rails – have declined; and most people are dependent on a white-collar job or a pink-collar job or a no-collar job. And as typical white-collar jobs go, political appointments are fairly plummy; not everyone can get in. But it’s not the government jobs that are political plums, it’s the behind-the-scenes contracting in consulting, producing and handling campaigns, and contracting itself – contractors handle government and other procurement, and handle employment decisions for both public and private entities. Until the Internet opened up campaigns somewhat, campaigning became well-paid turf to be protected from the common gaze, even more than some government positions, and a committed citizen who went to a campaign headquarters to volunteer, full of zeal and enthusiasm, was at least as likely to be shunted off as brought in.

As said, the nature of campaigning has become more inclusive again, partly because of the Net roots. But the politically-influenced sector of the job market, and that is a huge sector, has not become more inclusive. These days, someone who applies for a job writing for the Postal Service, for example, is liable to be vetted by a subcontractor working – not for our government – but for one of the huge military contractors such as Lockheed Martin. And with 68 percent of college faculty teaching in part-time or non-tenure-track positions, virtually any former CIA director or other government official has a better chance of snaffling one of the few ‘good’ academic jobs than virtually any longtime professor.

In other words, it’s not just security-clearance, high-tech, defense-oriented positions that are increasingly controlled or influenced by our expanding military-industrial-surveillance complex, with damage to our foreign policy now abundantly documented. It is our intellectual infrastructure.

No candidate has voiced the damage done to our reading and writing realm in the United States by adverse dominance over what should be a realm of independent thought.

 

[This article, deleted by the system among hundreds of articles and blog posts in summer 2011, is re-posted using archives and Word files.]

Are all bloggers ‘covered’ under House ‘reporter’s shield law’?

Posted on by
Reply

Calling all bloggers: Are you ‘covered’ under House ‘reporter’s shield law’?

Yesterday the House passed by a substantial margin its version of the “reporter’s shield law,” titled the Free Flow of Information Act of 2007. The House version differs from the Senate bill of the same title in its definition of “covered person,” basically the definition of who is a journalist.

The House version reads,

“(2) COVERED PERSON- The term `covered person’ means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial
financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.”

The Senate version reads, “(2) COVERED PERSON- The term `covered person’ means a person who is engaged in journalism and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such person.”

For many reasons, the Senate version looks better.

First, a disclaimer: so far as I know, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t foresee having this kind of problem. Anyone who tried to force me to say something I didn’t want to say, a remote possibility, would be crossing a line; and anyway I tend to favor disclosure in the public interest.

Furthermore, administration ‘sources’ do not call me up to toss Lawrence Lindsey overboard, or  Tom DeLay, or Alberto Gonzales, or any other public official, career or appointee. Nobody tells me anything. Or to put it more precisely, people tell me things, but I usually cite by name unless there’s a general-information kind of paraphrase involved, or just gossip, or some other good reason not to. And while I have been quasi-mugged on the street–by some guy who knocked me down & hit me, etc w/out taking my bags–and
have gotten a certain amount of nasty mail – though the letters of praise by far outnumber the other kind–I have never had anyone lean on me to pry confidential information out of me. It is unlikely to happen, since I’m not what they used to call ‘easy’. Insiders who call up some ‘journalist’ to plant a
smear under cover of ‘confidentiality’ are contemptible (that’s the real story), and journalists should not be serving as our contemporary substitute for the Lion’s Mouth in Renaissance Venice in a behind-the-scenes system of anonymous denunciation.

But to evaluate this reporter’s shield, one has to look  at who IS ‘covered’ under the House definition, and who is NOT. A key passage, as readers may already know, is that bit about “a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain.” Admittedly this passage takes a certain amount of guesswork, since the terms “substantial portion” and “substantial financial gain” do not come with dollar amounts. Still —

Here, in all likelihood, are some of the people NOT COVERED under this definition:
•        Most bloggers, except for reportedly Matt Drudge
•        Many web site editors and producers, especially of left-leaning, ‘liberal,’ green or progressive web sites
•        Almost all web site editors and producers of small web sites across the Net
•        Many or most columnists for small community newspapers such as the Prince George’s Journal, where I published articles from 1996 to 2004, and the Prince George’s Sentinel, where I published articles 2004-2006
•        Many reporters for small community newspapers
•        Many editors for small community newspapers
•        Many publishers of small community newspapers: producing them may involve expense but not necessarily profit, income
•        Any journalist contributing to a periodical on a volunteer basis
•        Many or most freelancers, depending on the time frame for defining finances
•        Retired journalists who weigh in with an occasional column or article at, e.g., the WashPost’s op-ed page
•        Interns who perform journalistic duties at recognized media outlets but without much pay or a job guarantee

Here, on the other hand, are some of the people COVERED under this definition:
•        Almost everyone who works for Fox News
•        Matt Drudge
•        Almost everyone who works for any of the major media outlets–CNN, the three original networks, their subsidiaries; the large daily newspapers; etc.–as long as that person has a good regular salary; see interns and retirees, above
•        Salaried writers and editors working for any of the trade periodicals – insurance, trucking, pharmaceuticals, etc.
•        Talk radio hosts, their writers and producers, if their income comes mostly from the gig

In other words, a ‘covered person’ is basically anyone Bob Novak could tolerate, and not covered is everyone who might hypothetically or even accidentally be perceived as a threat to the Novaks of this world. What could be sweeter? –for Robert Novak. Is it any wonder that this bill was introduced
by the GOP and that it has passed by a whopping margin, in a House full of terrified incumbents? Or that it is supported by the same mediocre media outlets that facilitated GWBush in the White House, the non-investigation of torture in 9/11 investigations, and the Iraq war?

John Conyers (D-Mich.) is one of my personal heroes, one of the best people in Congress, ever, not just for our time but a man for all seasons. I am absolutely confident that he supported this measure for the best of reasons. But the more I look at this language, the more it looks as though opinion makers hired by Richard Mellon Scaife and rewarded by the Bradley Foundation would be covered, and the homeless who write for Street Sense–D.C.’s homeless newspaper–would not be covered.

It also looks as though the overpaid would be covered, to a man, while any underpaid blogger, freelancer or reporter-editor who has to combine income sources would not be–a cohort disproportionately comprising women, the underemployed, members of poor fundamentalist or other ‘fringe’ groups from right to left, and simply people of modest means.

Too bad about the way it breaks down into people on one side, money on the other. It will be interesting to see what happens in conference, if the Senate passes its version. I’m not too optimistic; good thing I never looked to Congress for protection anyway. More the other way around, as I see it.

Bush administration helped Iranian hardliner get elected

Posted on by
Reply

Bush administration helped the Iranian hardliner get elected

Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, the only major Iranian figure who advocated reaching out to America, made indirect overtures to the Bush administration in the period leading up to the June 2005 Iranian election but was rebuffed, according to American businessman Barry O’Connell, who frequently travels to Iran.

McConnell at the Textile Museum

State Department personnel referred pejoratively to Rafsanjani, the political figure best known outside Iran and most favored by the international business community, as “that old fox” and “that old wheeler dealer,” O’Connell said. Feelers preceding the election last June were conveyed through members of the Iranian legislative assembly via business contacts, reaching the Southeast Asia section of the State Department. According to State Department personnel, O’Connell said, messages that Rafsanjani was interested in talking with the U.S. were relayed “upstairs” to the seventh floor offices of the Secretary of State.

The feelers were ignored. Asked whether the Bush administration opposed Rafsanjani influenced the Iranian election, O’Connell answers, “Very much so.”

In the weeks leading up to the Iranian election, media sympathetic to the administration aired anti-Iran commentary including that of Bill O’Reilly, who has repeatedly attacked Iran on his Fox television program.

Typical

Other impediments to cooperation with moderate, secular or business sector Iranians were imposed in the weeks leading up to the election, including restraints to travel in and out of Iranian air space by companies including federal contractors. These signs were taken by many Iranians around the time of the election to signify that Iran was going to be attacked by America.

The administration rebuffs decreased the ability of Rafsanjani to draw support. “He was almost the only one reaching out to America, and they treated him this way?” O’Connell comments. “They said it to me personally, so they must have said it to others. This administration would not deal with him at all.”

One export of Iran, aside from oil, is Oriental rugs. O’Connell, an authority on Iranian rugs, has a vested interest in keeping the trade linking Europe, the U.S. and Asia alive. Despite sanctions and lists, commerce between the West and Iran still flourishes. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said on January 15 that Iranian trade with Europe overall stood at the same level as a year previously, although trade with individual nations has moved up or down.

That makes it more significant that the administration, with strong business connections, declined to show interest in approaching Rafsanjani. Indications that the administration is ginning up some version of assault on Iran have appeared since spring 2005, including sympathetic media representations. Since there are not enough U.S. ground troops for an infantry assault, any attack would have to involve heavy bombings.

Rafsanjani

In response to questions about other Iranian candidates, O’Connell says that the administration did not seem concerned about Ahmadinejad at all. There was no apparent concern, at the policy making level, that a hardliner or radical fundamentalist might be elected in Iran as a consequence of administration policy. The possibility, treated as inevitability in rightwing publications and think tanks associated with White House Middle East strategizing, seems not to have been regarded as an outcome to be avoided.

Since the election, Rafsanjani has increased in his powers, according to O’Connell. “He is not out of power at all.” New President Ahmadinejad gets the spotlight but does not have equivalent power.

The bulk of power is held by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamenei, in office since 1989, and by the head of the expediency committee. Thus power is largely shared among the Supreme Leader, the committee head, Rafsanjani and the new head who has received all the global attention.

These internal divisions in Iran are not reflected in official administration speech about Iran. The White House, Secretary of State Rice, and neoconservatives in media have focused publicly on President Ahmadinejad, whose lurid and inflammatory rhetoric makes the project easy. The National Review, founded by William A. Rusher, who also founded the Concerned Alumni of Princeton and is chairman of the media corporation that launched the most recent attack on Rep. John Murtha, is running articles about Iran that parallel past articles leading up to the Iraq war.

Bouquets, banquets, and saber-rattling

O’Connell points out that, while neoconservatives advocate several months of concentrated bombing Iran, to bomb purported Iranian nuclear sites, those sites are in residential neighborhoods.

Supposing the administration were to bomb millions of Iranians, for two or three months, as neoconservatives propose. “If we start another war,” in Iran this time, “how do we get out of it?”

Right now, the U.S. maintains a tenuous hold in Iraq because of the majority Shia population which, led largely by Ayatollah Sistani, has chosen to participate in politics in Iraq. But Shia in Iraq would react against the bombing of millions in Iran, where Shia are 89 percent of the population.

Shia Islam has two main schools of thought. The more theocratic school of thought predominates in Iran, and the school that more supports separation of church and state predominates in Iraq. Administration policy seems to aim at driving the two populations together in opposition to the U.S. This would approach the goal of war with all Islam, global war between the West and Muslims, advocated by some neoconservatives and also by Osama bin Laden.

 

bin Laden

Iran has no embassy in the U.S. But it does have an Iran Interest Section in the embassy of Pakistan. Protests have erupted across Pakistan at the deaths of Pakistani civilians in recent U.S. military strikes.

Following a speech on January 14 by President Ahmadinejad defending Iran’s nuclear research, Iranian officials complain that CNN translated a phrase “nuclear weapons” that should have been translated “nuclear technology.”

Meanwhile, a Russian government official said on January 15 that Russia is continuing its military and technological cooperation with Iran.

 

[This article, deleted by the system among hundreds of articles and blog posts in summer 2011, is re-posted using archives and Word files.]

 

 

What is the ‘centrist’ number of Americans and Iraqis killed in Iraq?

Posted on by
Reply

In 1971, decorated Vietnam War veteran turned antiwar activist John Kerry asked a Senate committee, “How do you ask a man to be the last man killed in Vietnam?”

Today we need to ask an updated question: what is the centrist number of people killed in Iraq?

[Example headline: “Democrats Push Toward Middle On Iraq Policy,” WashPost Sept. 13, 2007]

Twentieth-century physics upended previous ideas about time,
space and mass. Mass converts into energy; energy changes rather than being
gained or lost; time and space are relative to each other. Albert Einstein, he
of the adorable face, space-physics hair, and loving eyes, combined some
premier principles into one simple formula.

Einstein

Heading into the 21stcentury–and stuck in Iraq, unless we the people do something about it–we need to apply some equally lucid conversion principles to the Iraq war.

Here is the simple formulation: the more time we spend in Iraq, the more lives lost.

Time translates to death. More time translates to more death and injury. Less time translates to less death and injury.

This is the formulation that the White House, the GOP in Congress, and most Republican candidates for the White House, with the honorable exception of Ron Paul, do not want mentioned. They keep trying to change the real formulation – more time means more fatalities – into the bogus alchemy of self-serving rhetoric – less time means ‘failure,’ while for unspecific reasons more time in Iraq means ‘success.’ Pulling out – that is, reducing our losses of life, limb and treasure suffered–means ‘losing,’ and staying means–again, for unspecified reasons– ‘victory.’

The real loss was going in. The real failure was the immoral, illegal and unconstitutional invasion of another country.

 

Meanwhile, top-crust administration figures and their allies in the large media outlets keep using a similar head-banging Orwellian lexicon to characterize the big argument about the war. People who want us out of Iraq, in this War-Is-Peace twist, are “left”–never mind public survey polls showing that a solid majority of Americans want us out of there. People who insist on our staying in Iraq, on whatever omigod pretext, are characterized as “conservative”–never mind that Congressman Paul (R-Texas) and many of his supporters are conservative, as are publications such as Chronicles Magazine that have consistently opposed the war.

Most grating of all, officeholders and candidates for office who keep us stuck in Iraq by waffling publicly, temporizing instead of taking a stand, are characterized as “centrists,” or “moderates” as in a series of Washington Post items about Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, designated “the anguished moderate.”

Virtually all the big media outlets have adopted this terminology, even though this kind of language desecrates the very notion of language– English–as communication.

More time in Iraq means more casualties. Less time in Iraq means fewer casualties. It’s that simple. So what is the ‘moderate’ number of young American servicemen and servicewomen to be injured or worse? Even aside from the fact that we are currently nearing the 4,000 mark, what was the ‘moderate’ position on the acceptable amount of death, injury, psychological trauma, sexual assaults and domestic violence, and all the other ills connected with war, going into Iraq? Now that we are nearing the 4,000 mark for deaths, what is the ‘moderate’ quota for American death in Iraq and Afghanistan? What, for that matter, is the moderate quota for killed and wounded Iraqis?

What is the ‘centrist’ number of deaths in Iraq?

Iraq escalation benefits only Jeb Bush

Posted on by
Reply

Iraq escalation benefits only Jeb Bush

Senator McCain presents as someone who figures it’s his turn, per
generally the way GOP presidential nominations work—the next man in
line steps up, wins the nomination usually without too much difficulty,
and then wins or loses the general election. The occasional exception
like Barry Goldwater is characterized for a generation in party lore as
someone who tore the party apart and then went on to lose the
presidential election in a landslide. McCain is showing his loyalty in
spades to the Bush team, to the Oval Office. But only some obliviousness
to history would predict that his loyalty will be repaid with unstinting
support by Team Bush.

McCain

There can be no happy Iraq outcome for McCain. If things get worse–the overwhelming probability–then even he will be forced to bail on
the policy at some point, and the question will always be why he did not
do so earlier, saving more lives; why he did not put his independent
power base to better use. He will be associated with, and he is
aggressively associating himself with, catastrophe. If things were by
some miracle to get better, the Iraq War is still Bush’s war. Meanwhile,
Governor Jeb Bush sits comfortably by in Florida, in relative political
safety in spite of Mark Foley, the sugar growers, his family’s several
run-ins with the law, the ecological disaster in the Everglades, and the
ongoing election fraud in Florida. Jeb Bush is not tied to Iraq policy;
he has no son in Iraq; he is not storming the country in support of
Bush’s escalation.

Jeb Bush

White House Iraq policy at this point, in other words, may be guided by
desire to help Jeb win next time. This is the only perspective from
which the escalation makes even bad sense.

Of course, a plausible alternative explanation is that it makes no sense
at all—that it is merely Bush’s vain effort to prolong the war, which
is what he cares about most, while his cronies with both hands in the
cookie jar frantically extract their utmost.

What prolonged the Vietnam War?

Posted on by
Reply

What prolonged the Vietnam War?

Nixon with Kissinger

Diaries of Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, demonstrate that Nixon was fully aware in election year 1972 that the Vietnam War was not popular. The White House turned a paranoiac, watchful eye ever outward, constantly alert, scanning the political zodiac for any sign that the Democrats were going to capitalize on the unpopularity of the war.

Nixon came into the White House knowing he would not have won in 1968 had Robert F. Kennedy, his campaign rocket-propelled by opposition to the war as well as by the Kennedy mystique, not been assassinated; had Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey not been inextricably tied to Vietnam; and had the early and effective opposition to the war by Eugene McCarthy not been derailed by RFK. The history of the Sixties is partly a series of flukes, had they not been tragic; a series of near-misses that narrowly avoided ending the Vietnam War on the larger scale and the political career of Richard M. Nixon among others on the smaller. At any moment the nation had the potential to rise up in organized, spontaneous political action to break the stranglehold of Vietnam.

RFK

Nixon knew it. Even the impossibly late entry into the 1968 nominating process of George McGovern, hero to the young, helped fuel the passion against Nixon and the war; even with opponents of the Vietnam War hopelessly split, there was such a Democratic reenergizing in the last few weeks and especially the last days of the 1968 campaign that Hubert Horatio Humphrey almost managed to squeak out a win. Citizens who had at long last turned away their scrutiny from LBJ and focused it on Nixon and Agnew got so motivated, or so steamed, that in some places HHH came into respectful treatment as a candidate that he scarcely received at the time he was nominated. At the start of his campaign, Humphrey could hardly get paid attention. At the end, there was such a surge that ordinary donors were literally throwing money–tens, small bills–at him or his people in personal appearances; his volunteers were opening hastily sealed envelopes of miscellaneous sizes and stationery, into which money had been thrust without request for receipt or sometimes even a note, sent via regular mail.

Unfortunately the Democratic Party of the time never did adequately focus on and oppose the Vietnam War, not in an adequately organized way, and historians are free to wonder why not. One cause was certainly the grief, fear and demoralization brought about by the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. (It is Orwellian that those murders, which did so much to wound and cripple the Democrats, have been vaguely blamed on some culture of Sixties permissiveness.) Another cause was the lack of a blocking agent, as John Stuart Mill would put it, in that the press was as usual royalist and timid in scrutinizing the actions of presidents in conducting war. (Regarding Vietnam, the press was additionally confused by a gullible view that Henry Kissinger would bring about peace if Nixon would let him.) Undoubtedly another cause was White House manipulation of internal Democratic Party politics, using tactics including bribery and assisted by several prominent personalities of the time including John Connally, Billy Graham and George Wallace.

But the war was always present, and opposition to the war was growing daily. One did not have to start from any particular spot on the political spectrum. When combat veterans started coming home from Vietnam by the thousands, if alive and relatively healthy they came home with a single, lucid, across-the-board recognition that many of them had acquired within a few minutes in Southeast Asia: “nobody [back home] knew anything.” The recognition did not necessarily translate into instantaneous and organized opposition, but it did translate into solid, bedrock, widespread lack of enthusiasm. That, in other words, was square one – not among draft resisters and war opponents but among people who had gone, and their relatives and acquaintance. Anecdotes about fragging First Lieutenants will do that.

Nixon knew it, and took steps accordingly.

Over the next few weeks, we in our time will be facing a chief executive bent more than Nixon was on prolonging and expanding a war. As always when there is heavy rightwing rhetoric on “moving forward,” we have to look backward to some extent for guidance on the tactics that will be used. Forewarned is forearmed.

The process might also shed some light, valuable for historians including amateur historians, on the question about Watergate often scanted even in good histories of Watergate. Why was the Democratic National Committee headquarters broken into in the first place?

They knew Iraq was not a cakewalk, knew we would not be liberators

Posted on by
1

The National Security Archive now reveals that the Pentagon knew from 1999 on that invasion and occupation of Iraq would entail disaster.

Through a FOIA request, the National Security Archive has obtained documents of “Desert Crossing” war games conducted by CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command) in April 1999 to assess outcomes of invading Iraq. Outcomes were not rosy.

As the NSArchive introduction observes, “Some of these conclusions are interestingly similar to the events which actually occurred after Saddam was overthrown. (Note 1) The report forewarned that regime change may cause regional instability by opening the doors to “rival forces bidding for power” which, in turn, could cause societal “fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines” and antagonize “aggressive neighbors.” Further, the report illuminated worries that secure borders and a restoration of civil order may not be enough to stabilize Iraq if the replacement government were perceived as weak, subservient to outside powers, or out of touch with other regional governments. An exit strategy, the report said, would also be complicated by differing visions for a post-Saddam Iraq among those involved in the conflict.”

General Zinni, who retired after the war games, tried unsuccessfully to remind the current administration about Desert Crossing. In an act of political heroism, he went public with some of his concerns. Aside from other problems, “the former CENTCOM commander noted that his plan had called for a force of 400,000 for the invasion — 240,000 more than what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved. “We were concerned about the ability to get in there right away, to flood the towns and villages,” USA Today quoted Zinni as saying in July 2003. “We knew the initial problem would be security.” (Note 7)”

Portions of the conclusions are being reported on CNN.com today.

Selected emails disclose that one of the entities involved in planning Desert Crossing, along with CENTCOM, was the giant security contractor “Booz Allen.” The emails refer to Booz Allen Hamilton, a huge northern Virginia firm numbering members and signatories of PNAC among its principals and the government among its chief clients. Booz Allen is a privately held mega-funded global contractor.

logo

The company name hit the news earlier this fall with revelations that the Bush administration was secretly monitoring bank transactions (SWIFT). The White House said that the electronic surveillance was being supervised by Booz Allen, a claim that itself arouses problems. As this article by Liana Forest reminds, Booz Allen also developed Carnivore, the discredited data mining process, for use by the FBI. Thus we have a purported check and audit on government electronic surveillance being handled by a company that has demonstrably not seen fit to warn the public about what government is doing, either in regard to Iraq or in regard to financial spying.

Back to Desert Crossing: no argument can be made that key government agencies were left out of the loop. As the report afterward makes clear, “Over 70 participants, including the Department of State, Department of Defense, National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency took part in the seminar.” Donald Rumsfeld, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby and David Addington had access to the information processed by their predecessors in the Defense department. Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley had access to material available to the National Security Council.

Even couched in the value-neutral language of bureaucracy, the conclusions of the report are horrifying: “The dimensions of preparing a post-Saddam policy for Iraq and the region are vast and complex. Early preparation of a political-military plan as called for in Presidential Decision Directive 56 should be a priority. The accompanying policy debate will expose a variety of contentious positions that must be reconciled and managed. Key discussion points include: benefits and risks associated with various strategic options; information requirements; and the likelihood that intervention will be costly in terms of casualties and resources.”

Setting aside if one could that calling the invasion of another country “intervention” is quintessentially Orwellian; setting aside if one could that one nation has no right to remake another nation in the first place; setting aside if one could the injuries and deaths of thousands, one is still faced with the obscene presumptuousness with which under-qualified individuals set themselves on a course to do something they never had a chance of doing. We keep asking how–how could they do it? –how could personnel as negligible as George Walker Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Wolfowitz and Libby, Hadley and Addington even think they could accomplish the remaking of Iraq? What made them think they had the right to do so?

PNAC

In a sense the question answers itself. Invading and trashing a country that has not attacked us is self-evidently invalid. Only unqualified, ignorant, selfish people–ignorant in spite of all their resources, their wealth and their access to information and expertise–could imagine either that they could, or that they should give it a try.

Bush-connected company won in court

Posted on by
Reply

Bush-connected company won in court September 12, 2001

In a brief unpublished opinion, the California court system handed an obscure and now-defunct security company called Securacom one of its few court wins. The date is memorable–Sept. 12, 2001.

Securacom, as readers may recall, was the name of a security contractor later renamed Stratesec. Its board of directors throughout the 1990s included Marvin Bush, youngest brother of George W. Bush. It was headed by Wirt D. Walker, who also headed two other now-disbanded companies, Aviation General (formerly Commander Aircraft) and the Kuwait-American Company (KuwAm). It was capitalized largely with funding from Kuwaiti royals; a member of the ruling al-Sabah, Mishal al-Sabah, a longtime friend and business associate of Walker’s, also held company positions and sat on the board of directors.

The unpublished ruling reads in full,
“Information Systems and Networks Corporation, Cross-complainant and Appellant v. Securacom Inc., Cross-defendant and Respondent S099607

SUPREME COURT OF CALIFORNIA
2001 Cal. LEXIS 6179

September 12, 2001, Decided

NOTICE: [*1] DECISION WITHOUT PUBLISHED OPINION

PRIOR HISTORY: Appeal from First Appellate District. Division One. No. A091315.

OPINION: Petition for review DENIED.”

Securacom, the company, was notable chiefly for its big-time, long-term clients including the World Trade Center and Dulles Airport; for its repeated infusions of capital in spite of a track record of questionable financial management; and for its connections to the Bush family.

With all the press attention now given–belatedly–to longtime ties between the Bushes and the Sauds, the fact that the ruling family of Kuwait has also looked after Bush family interests for years has been overlooked.