Month: December 2005

Please, Let This Be True…

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by hilzoy

[Update: The ‘this’ that I want to be true is: the story immediately following, about Fitial flipping. Not, of course, the facts I describe later, which I very much wish were false.]

Via TPM again, from Pacific Magazine:

“The Marianas Variety Online reports that Governor-elect Benigno R. Fitial says he will cooperate with federal authorities in the ongoing investigation of Rep. Tom Delay and former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whom he once described as his “close friends.” House leadership spokesman Charles P. Reyes Jr. said Speaker Fitial “will comply with all the legal requirements asked of him.””

If Fitial cooperates, he will have quite a tale to tell, and I hope he tells every word of it, and can document the whole thing. Start with how he became Speaker:

“Two former top aides of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s brokered a political deal here five years ago that helped land island government contracts worth $1.6 million for a Washington lobbyist now the target of a federal corruption probe.

Using promises of U.S. tax dollars as bartering chips, Edwin A. Buckham and Michael Scanlon traveled to these remote Pacific islands in late 1999 to convince two local legislators to switch their votes for speaker of the territory’s 18-member House of Representatives. They succeeded.

Once in office, the new speaker pressed the governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands to reinstate an expired lobbying pact with Jack Abramoff, now under grand jury and congressional investigation.

Within months of the visit, Abramoff’s law firm had a contract paying $100,000 a month from the Marianas government. Also, the island districts of the legislators who switched sides soon won federal budget benefits from Congress, apparently supported by DeLay.”

Abramoff had had a contract with the Northern Marianas, but it had been suspended because the islands were having fiscal problems. DeLay’s aides (one of whom had moved on to lobbying, and one of whom was still on the federal payroll) travelled to the islands, met with the house members, both of whom claimed afterwards that the aides had promised them federal support for projects in their districts. Others deny this, but in any case, Fitial became speaker, Abramoff’s contract was reinstated, and, by a curious coincidence, money for the projects was suddenly given priority and appropriated by committees DeLay served on.

That would be our tax dollars DeLay’s aides felt so free to toss around.

So: why did the Northern Marianas have to hire a lobbyist? Well:

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Media Bias Strikes Again

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by hilzoy Via TPM: About ten days ago, Chris Cillizza, who blogs on politics at the Washington Post, wrote up a ‘scorecard’ on corruption scandals in politics. He said at the outset that he was going to limit himself to currently serving politicians, but stuck in Rep. Frank Ballance, who resigned in 2004, and whose … Read more

Liar, Liar: Take 3: In Which George W. Bush Reveals That He Lives In An Alternate Universe

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by hilzoy Today President Bush said this: “We do not render to countries that torture. That has been our policy, and that policy will remain the same.” Sometimes, it’s possible to find some peculiar way of interpreting this administration’s claims about torture and detention that makes them technically true. Do they say that it is … Read more

This Redstater Departs From Blanton

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by Charles In response to Blanton’s earlier post, whether McCain is a fool and charlatan is beside the point. Also irrelevant is his status as a self-aggrandizing publicity-seeking pol. I accept that the most dangerous place a person can be is between the Arizona Senator and a TV camera. I disagree with McCain’s tax policies … Read more

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire: Take 2

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by hilzoy I said in my post on Condoleeza Rice’s speech that I was not going to track down all the false statements she made. One that I decided not to bother with was this: “For decades, the United States and other countries have used “renditions” to transport terrorist suspects from the country where they … Read more

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

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by hilzoy

Once upon a time, our senior government officials used to pretend to tell the truth. Sometimes it was only a pretense. But, in general, they did not say things that were obviously, flatly false.

I guess that’s just one more thing that changed on 9/11.

Today, Condoleeza Rice made a speech that was remarkable for its sheer bald-faced dishonesty. I have not tried to pick out all the false statements she made. But here are a few of the more obvious howlers:

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New Orleans: You’re On Your Own

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by hilzoy

Peter Gosselin had a very good story on reconstruction in New Orleans in yesterday’s LATimes. In it, he makes two different points, both of which are very important.

The first is that despite President Bush’s promises, the federal government has really failed to deliver a lot of badly needed assistance:

“But in recent weeks, a new reality has settled in as the agencies that were stepping up to help guide the city’s comeback have stepped back down again.

FEMA said it would stop covering the hotel costs of more than 50,000 households at the beginning of December — later extended until Jan. 7 — even while acknowledging that many, especially in New Orleans, would have trouble finding alternative accommodations.

Despite repeated pleas, the corps and the White House refused to promise any strengthening of the levees beyond what was underway. Investigators, meanwhile, concluded that several of the protective walls that failed did not meet corps-approved standards, a discovery that raised doubts about the safety of the entire levee system.

Emergency spending slowed sharply. The national flood insurance program temporarily suspended claims payments for Katrina, and program officials hinted broadly that they would tighten eligibility requirements to get coverage for the next storm.

Even the tiny agency charged with gauging the elevation of America’s ground added an unexpected hurdle. It quietly announced that New Orleans and environs had sunk more than anticipated, forcing it to replace all of its measuring sticks. The result is that New Orleanians will have to build higher to escape future floods.

With so many new strikes against it, the city’s recovery, already grindingly slow, has ground still slower. Three months after the storm, Entergy New Orleans, the bankrupt utility that serves the city, said that 55,000 of its 190,000 customers had resumed electrical service. Municipal officials estimate that less than one-third of the population has returned to live.

To an extent almost inconceivable a few months ago, the only real actors in the rebuilding drama at the moment are the city’s homeowners and business owners. To be sure, Washington is offering many relief payments, tax breaks and FEMA trailers. The city is speeding the approval of building permits. But for the rest, individual New Orleanians are struggling to come back largely under their own power, using mostly their own resources and negotiating their return substantially on their own terms.”

This is unconscionable all by itself. But it’s a lot worse given the second point: that rebuilding New Orleans is, in large part, the sort of collective action problem in which the government can play an absolutely crucial role. And its failure to step up to the plate means that it is not doing what only it can do to help solve that problem.

“”There is no market solution to New Orleans,” said Thomas C. Schelling of the University of Maryland, who won this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of the complicated bargaining behavior that underpins everything from simple sales to nuclear confrontations.

“It essentially is a problem of coordinating expectations,” Schelling said of the task that Vignaud and her neighbors must grapple with. “If we all expect each other to come back, we will. If we don’t, we won’t.

“But achieving this coordination in the circumstances of New Orleans,” he said, “seems impossible.””

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Come Home, Joe

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You were my man in 2004 (well, aside from Mitch).  Only you can restore dignity and competency to an office disgraced by incompetence and stupidity.  Joemomentum my ass:  this is duty, manifest destiny style.  The Ninja must do what others have not and cannot. The left wing of the Republican party pines for you (we … Read more

Not So Extraordinary After All

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by Katherine

It was almost two years ago that I asked the question, "How Extraordinary is Extraordinary Rendition?"; whether what was unusual about the U.S. sending Maher Arar to be tortured in Syria without any real evidence that he was a terrorist was that it happened, or that we knew about it. The answer seems to be "that we knew about it." As Hilzoy noted below, the Washington Post reported Sunday that the CIA is investigating up to 36 "erroneous renditions".

So. Who are these men? We know of at least two: Maher Arar and Khaled el-Masri (whose case is decribed in the Post article). Who else?

I don’t know what standard they use to declare a rendition erroneous—whether the suspect needs to affirmatively show innocence, or merely that he does not produce "actionable intelligence" and there is no evidence against him other than his own or someone else’s confessions under torture. There are also many cases where I have no real idea about the suspect’s guilt or innocence. So the CIA could be including some of the other renditions that have been publicly reported in that total.

But I have followed this subject very closely, and I definitely do not know about three dozen renditions that a CIA officer would be likely to describe as "erroneous." Nowhere even close to that.

And where are these men? It is possible that some of them were released, but neither they nor their family has ever spoken to the press or a human rights organization. In the cases that we do know of, there is often a fairly long delay between the suspect’s release & his speaking to the press or the public, so it is possible that some may choose never to do this at all. Perhaps that is even a condition of their release from custody. But does that describe 25 or 30 of them? I doubt it. I really doubt it.

Of the 20-odd renditions that I do know of, a very small number of people have been freed: Maher Arar, Mamdouh Habib and Khaled el-Masri. That’s it. Muhammad al-Zery was reportedly released from an Egyptian prison but remains under surveillance and cannot leave the country or speak freely about what happened to him. The rest remain in prison—whether it’s Guantanamo, some CIA detention site, or foreign custody. We know from reading Priest’s description of el-Masri’s case that the discovery of a suspect’s innocence does not necessarily immediately lead to his release. And Khaled el-Masri is a German citizen. Mamdouh Habib is Australian. Maher Arar is Canadian. It is not a coincidence that the men released are citizens of wealthy, Western democracies that are U.S. allies.

Based on all of this, I would guess that most of the thirty-odd prisoners who were “erroneously rendered” are still in prison somewhere. I would also guess that some of them are still being subjected to torture right now.

But this won’t end when they stop being tortured, or when they are released from prison. Not for them.

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Will To Win Watch

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by hilzoy When I realized that all we really need in order to win in Iraq is will and resolve, I thought my life would get a lot better. No more reading about American and Iraqi soldiers being blown to bits, the ominous rise in sectarian violence, the emergence of death squads, and the like. … Read more

Teh Funny!

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by hilzoy The entire point of the rest of this post is to get you to click this link. (Via Pharyngula.) Trust me: do it now, and skip the summary. *** OK, mistrustful people: it’s a description of a fight about linguistics, which is, in the world of the piece, “widely and justifiably seen as … Read more

The War On Christmas, Swedish Style

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by hilzoy Who could resist a headline like: “Vandals Burn Swedish Christmas Goat, Again“? “Vandals set light to a giant straw goat Saturday night in a central Swedish town, police said — an event that has happened so frequently it has almost become a Christmas tradition. It was the 22nd time that the goat had … Read more

Oops; Our Bad.

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by hilzoy

There’s a new story about rendition in the Washington Post. Specifically, it’s about cases in which we kidnapped people, held them incommunicado, and in some cases transferred them to the intelligence services to be tortured, because we thought they were terrorists — but oops! we were wrong:

“The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls “erroneous renditions,” according to several former and current intelligence officials. One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

“They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism, one CIA officer said.”

I had always thought that the possible consequences of giving someone a bad grade didn’t go beyond minor unpleasantness*. Apparently, I need to think again.

Here’s how it happened:

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Priorities

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by hilzoy Via War and Piece, a story from Knight-Ridder: ” The State Department has been using political litmus tests to screen private American citizens before they can be sent overseas to represent the United States, weeding out critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, according to department officials and internal e-mails. In one recent … Read more

A Techie Bleg

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by Charles

One of my computers is driving me nuts!  Help!

I’m not sure how it happened, but my best guess is that either my wife or son clicked on an attachment they shouldn’t have.  I have a Dell 2400 Dimension PC and it runs the home version of Windows XP.   The problem is this.  I can’t open Internet Explorer, My Computer or Control Panel.  All other programs that I’ve tried work fine, including other Microsoft products.  I’ve run spyware and anti-virus programs to no avail.  I think what I need to do is initiate the system restore wizard and set the date for a week or two prior to the beginning of this sad episode, but I can’t do this because I can’t open Control Panel.  I think I can accomplish a system restore by clicking on the "run" button, but I can’t figure out how to find the file name to make this process happen.  So here I am, at my wit’s end, begging for help.  Any suggestions?

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Bush’s Plan

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by hilzoy

Now that I have slept a bit, I have decided to post a longer version of my quick take on the President’s new Strategy For Victory.

I completely agree with the President’s take on the consequences of losing in Iraq. (see pp. 5-6. Short version: it would be a disaster.) I only wish the gravity of these consequences had occurred to President Bush before he decided to invade on the cheap, without a plan for the occupation.

However, I think that the President has misidentified the main problem facing Iraq. The main problem, according to the President, is the insurgency:

“The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists affiliated with or inspired by Al Qaida. “

According to me, the insurgents are the main threat to our troops. The main threat to Iraq, however, is the presence of armed militias generally*. The insurgents are the group(s) who attack our troops. But the existence of any armed militia that the government cannot control threatens the Iraqi state and its people. The existence of armed militias means that the Iraqi government cannot enforce its will over those parts of the country controlled by the militias; ultimately, the armed militias threaten Iraq with an all-out civil war.

This entire complex of problems is glossed over in the President’s plan. For instance, on p. 21, “Building representative Iraqi security forces and institutions while guarding against infiltration by elements whose first loyalties are to persons or institutions other than the Iraqi government” is listed as one of the remaining ‘security challenges’, but no solution to this problem is given. Moreover, the plan’s security track relies heavily on training the Iraqi army, and many of the accomplishments it cites concern progress in training that army.

If you think that the main problem is the insurgency, then one solution to this problem is to train Iraqi troops, who will eventually be able to fight the insurgents on their own. The infiltration of the Iraqi security forces by members of militias is, on this view, a secondary problem, since members of other militias might do a perfectly good job of hunting down insurgents. But if you think that the main problem is the existence of armed militias more generally, then it’s not at all clear that training Iraqi troops is the solution, for two reasons.

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Yikes!

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by hilzoy I once (at another school) had a colleague who used our department’s research budget to hire half the football and rugby teams as his research assistants. As a result, not only have I come in to find a (clothed) student I didn’t know in my office using my computer; I have also encountered … Read more

Personal Status Update

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I just now got the MRI results from my doctor: normal.  Which rules out some of my worst fears; that I had something structurally wrong up there, or that the mice had chosen that site to put up a playground (I’m picturing an exercise wheel, here). All of which is good news, in that it … Read more