Consilience Productions - Democracy

From Marvin Gaye: Happy Fourth of July, America!

2009-07-04T23:41:03-05:00

Now this is how you sing the National Anthem!

Break the Blackout! (in Iran)

2009-07-01T11:02:17-05:00

Avaaz.org is an amazing organization that assists movements across the world by leveraging the power of the internet to raise funds. They are running a campaign to help get servers back online in Iran to help in the resistance there. Since watching what was happening in Iran during the past week or so, it was impossible not to have a feeling of helplessness. Many have been asking, "What can I do to help?"

Well, now Avaaz.org has given us a particular way to get involved.

$10 a piece - that's all it takes!

From the Avaaz.org website:

IRAN: BREAK THE BLACKOUT! Last week millions marched peacefully to protest apparent election-rigging. Now a crackdown has killed scores and left hundreds arrested -- while the internet and media blackout and cyber-surveillance threatens to stop all Iranians communicating freely.
We can't let that happen. Unless Iranians are able to share information freely over the coming weeks, their voices may be silenced for good. Let's help break the blackout -- people in Iran are asking us to re-open secure and anonymous communication channels for them, particularly anonymous web proxy services.

One small donation of $10 can fund enough bandwidth for Iranians to send hundreds of secure emails. If 10,000 or more of us can donate, we can scale up these services massively -- with more servers, bandwidth and advanced technical support. The next two weeks will be crucial --

Donate now to break the blackout!!

Marg bar Dictator! ("Death to the Dictator!)

2009-06-20T16:42:42-05:00

The Iranian Revolution circa 2009 continues with these scenes from the ground:

From the NY Times:

The constant refrains in the chants are "Allah-o-akbar!" ("God is great!") and "Marg bar dictator!" ("Death to the dictator!").
As Borzou Daragahi explained in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, the first, religious chant that has become a rallying cry for the opposition in Iran this week, "harks back 30 years to the months before the Islamic Revolution. It was a way to reassure others that they weren't alone in feeling wronged and enraged. Today it motivates people to attend the peaceful marches that have become the largest acts of civil disobedience in three decades."

With more photos:

And then there's this aweful video of a young woman shot and killed on the street in front of the camera:

And finally, this eye-witness account from NY Times Op-Ed columnist, Roger Cohen:

The Iranian police commander, in green uniform, walked up Komak Hospital Alley with arms raised and his small unit at his side. "I swear to God," he shouted at the protesters facing him, "I have children, I have a wife, I don't want to beat people. Please go home."
A man at my side threw a rock at him. The commander, unflinching, continued to plead. There were chants of "Join us! Join us!" The unit retreated toward Revolution Street, where vast crowds eddied back and forth confronted by baton-wielding Basij militia and black-clad riot police officers on motorbikes.

Garbage burned. Crowds bayed. Smoke from tear gas swirled. Hurled bricks sent phalanxes of police, some with automatic rifles, into retreat to the accompaniment of cheers. Early afternoon rumors that the rally for Moussavi had been canceled yielded to the reality of violent confrontation.

I don't know where this uprising is leading. I do know some police units are wavering. That commander talking about his family was not alone. There were other policemen complaining about the unruly Basij. Some security forces just stood and watched. "All together, all together, don't be scared," the crowd shouted.

I also know that Iran's women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I've seen them urging less courageous men on. I've seen them get beaten and return to the fray. "Why are you sitting there?" one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. "Get up! Get up!"

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of "Death to the dictator!" and "We want liberty!" accompanied her.

There were people of all ages. I saw an old man on crutches, middle-aged office workers and bands of teenagers. Unlike the student revolts of 2003 and 1999, this movement is broad.

Just off Revolution Street, I walked into a pall of tear gas. I'd lit a cigarette minutes before -- not a habit but a need -- and a young man collapsed into me shouting: "Blow smoke in my face." Smoke dispels the effects of the gas to some degree.

I did what I could and he said, "We are with you" in English and with my colleague we tumbled into a dead end -- Tehran is full of them -- running from the searing gas and police. I gasped and fell through a door into an apartment building where somebody had lit a small fire in a dish to relieve the stinging.

There were about 20 of us gathered there, eyes running, hearts racing. A 19-year-old student was nursing his left leg, struck by a militiaman with an electric-shock-delivering baton. "No way we are turning back," said a friend of his as he massaged that wounded leg.

Later, we moved north, tentatively, watching police lash out from time to time, reaching Victory Square where a pitched battle was in progress. Young men were breaking bricks and stones to the right size for hurling. Crowds gathered on overpasses, filming and cheering the protesters. A car burst into flames. Back and forth the crowd surged, confronted by less-than-convincing police units.

I looked up through the smoke and saw a poster of the stern visage of Khomeini above the words, "Islam is the religion of freedom."

Amazing stuff from Cohen, risking his life so that us in the West might see and hear what's going on over there. Very powerful reporting...

Did Ahmadinejad win the Iranian election fair and square?

2009-06-15T22:24:31-05:00

There is obviously something very big and existential going on in Iran right now, and it almost makes the question of whether the election was fraudulent moot. There are now over 3500 videos on YouTube from Iran with many, more posts on Twitter. It's clear that the people there are fired up for change (see the video below). But did Ahmadinejad really steal the election?

Two correspondents from The New America Foundation came out with articles today making the claim that the election indeed was NOT fraudulent and that Ahmadinejad won fair and square. Could it be?

From Flynt Leverett comes this:

Without any evidence, many U.S. politicians and "Iran experts" have dismissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection Friday, with 62.6 percent of the vote, as fraud.
They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejad's 62.6 percent of the vote in this year's election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The shock of the "Iran experts" over Friday's results is entirely self-generated, based on their preferred assumptions and wishful thinking.

In particular, there was a final debate near the end of the two week campaign which heavily favored Ahmadinejad:

Like much of the Western media, most American "Iran experts" overstated Mir Hossein Mousavi’s "surge" over the campaign’s final weeks. More important, they were oblivious -- as in 2005 -- to Ahmadinejad's effectiveness as a populist politician and campaigner. American "Iran experts" missed how Ahmadinejad was perceived by most Iranians as having won the nationally televised debates with his three opponents -- especially his debate with Mousavi.
Before the debates, both Mousavi and Ahmadinejad campaign aides indicated privately that they perceived a surge of support for Mousavi; after the debates, the same aides concluded that Ahmadinejad's provocatively impressive performance and Mousavi's desultory one had boosted the incumbent's standing. Ahmadinejad's charge that Mousavi was supported by Rafsanjani’s sons -- widely perceived in Iranian society as corrupt figures -- seemed to play well with voters.

Meanwhile, Patrick Doherty wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post where he details the result of a Western poll taken during 10 days before the election (and that disastrous debate result for Mousavi) which he claims shows that Ahmadinejad should have won by a wide margin:

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.
Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, pre-election polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

Not being a polling expert, it's difficult to dispute these findings, although the poll did suffer from 42% of the recipients not responding. If nearly half of the people you speak to hang up the phone, is the poll even legitimate?

Well, Juan Cole took a swipe at these findings, and although he makes sense, it's important to read the comments section, too, which are almost completely in favor of accepting these election results:

But as a mere social historian I would say that the poll actually tends to confirm some of my doubts about the announced electoral tallies.
The poll did not find that Ahmadinejad had majority support. It found that the level of support for the incumbent was 34%, with Mousavi at 14%. Here's the important point: 60% of the 27% who said they were undecided favored political reform.

But as one of the readers in the comments section wrote, who was considered a reformer? Ahmadinejad or Mousavi? And another reader asks:

Additionally, Moiussavi claimed victory before polls closed. Now this purportedly was because his campaign was notified by their Interior Ministry that they had won. Apparently the Moussavi campaign was OK with this. However, later when the result was announced the other way, all of a sudden the speed of the announcement meant that this "proved" fraud because there was no way the count could be done so fast. So, Moussavi ahead, sure they can count that fast; Ahmedinajad ahead (several hours later), no way they could count that fast.

He makes a damn good point!

...and yet we still have thousands of these heart-breaking videos to contend with:

So what is really going on over there? Could this be an existential moment for the regime, or will this all just die down in a week or so? Wouldn't it be nice to get the religious zealots out of politics and governing once and for all and give the people the freedom they deserve?

One thing for certain is that the technology of the early 21st century (YouTube, Twitter, etc), has changed forever the relationship between the people and their (repressive) government.

Georgia10 at DailyKos wrote a very eloquent post on this very topic:

The saying popping up over the last several hours has already become cliche: the revolution will not be televised, it will be Twittered. Stripping away the hyperbole of that statement and we are left with the very real and grounded fact that the way citizens across the world organize, react, and participate has forever been altered by the cornucopia of 21st century mediums, each of which presents a new platform for how citizens interact with and even select their government.

Read on...

The Iranian Revolution: 2009 (more video)

2009-06-15T01:26:09-05:00

This video from the BBC is just incredible.

And the BBC satellite feed is being jammed by the Iranian government, too...

And then there's this from Andrew Sullivan:

The news on attack on Tehran University's students seems accurate. The students were reportedly protesting on the streets near their dorm, when some and special forces plain-clothes militia attacked them, injuring and arresting some.
The students started their protest at 9:15 shouting slogans such as "we don't want a coup leader" and "down with the dictator" and "Seyyed-Ali (Khamenei's first name) Pinochet, Iran is not Chile."

When the students got attacked by the mob and the guard, they defended themselves by throwing rocks at them. The students are staying in TV rooms in the dorms due to fear of getting arrested in hospitals. More than 11 male students are injured some in bad condition. The militia and guard then attacked women's dorms injuring 11 female students. The internet in the dorms has been out since afternoon.

And then you have Flickr and Twitter helping us learn more about the situation.

We can only hold our breath that something positive finally comes from all of this bloodshed over there...

The Revolution Will Be Twittered.

2009-06-14T00:34:07-05:00

Historic times in Iran:

From Andrew Sullivan:

Mock not. As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message. Here's the Twitter from a Moussavi supporter:
ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection

Amazing...

Plain, Honest Men.

2009-06-12T18:30:03-05:00

As this country stumbles around from issue to issue trying to find common ground upon which legislation can be written to help solve our problems, it's always important to look back to the founding fathers for guidance on how they forged this country from all the various competing factors. Richard Beeman's "Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution" is one of those revealing historical studies that plainly show how difficult it was to forge consensus. And yet they did:

We like to think of our nation's founders as men with unwavering fealty to high-minded principles. To some extent they were. But when they gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to write the Constitution, they showed that they were also something just as great and often more difficult to be: compromisers. In that regard they reflected not just the classical virtues of honor and integrity but also the Enlightenment's values of balance, order, tolerance, scientific calibration and respect for other people's beliefs. On almost all issues that they faced -- with one very big exception -- this art of compromise served them well.

It's an awesome story that every American should read to understand how on earth this country has survived over 200 years with so many different competing interests. It's just fascinating...

Chief Justice Roberts smile isn't so cheery afterall.

2009-06-05T01:18:24-05:00

Jeffrey Toobin has profiled John Roberts's last four years as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court over at The New Yorker and it is very illuminating:

Roberts's face is unlined, his shoulders are broad and athletic, and only a few wisps of gray hair mark him as changed in any way from the judge who charmed the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing, in 2005.
"Judges are like umpires," Roberts said at the time. "Umpires don't make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire." His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by "modesty and humility." After four years on the Court, however, Roberts's record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

Back in 2005, it was hoped that John Roberts's congeniality would translate into more empathy for the plight of the downtrodden. It may turn out that way yet...this story has decades to play out. But so far, his smiling face has belied the cold, rarefied background of a Washington, D.C. that seems to have led him to favor the powerful over the weak.

Conservative commentator waterboarded (video)

2009-05-23T15:59:39-05:00

With all of the debate on whether this country had an official policy to torture detainees or not, none of the debate has been more ridiculous than whether the act of waterboarding constitutes torture. Well, we finally have on video one of those folks who thought that it was only a form of "dunking" in a pool:

After a measly 6 seconds of this torture, he bails on the experiment, catches his breath and says,

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke." He added: "Had I known that it was that bad I wouldn't have done this ... I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

Could it be as simple as what Josh Marshall says?

The upshot is that the guy goes into it in cocky Hannity mode and then after maybe 5 or 6 seconds he struggles up and he's converted, claiming it's "absolutely torture", that he never realized it was that bad, etc.
Now, here's the thing. I'm genuinely surprised that he was was surprised that it was that bad. I'm not saying that for effect. Muller really seemed to think it was like getting dunked by your friend in a pool or something. Just factually, everyone who knows anything about this says that it's horrific and you pretty much instantly feel like you're drowning and at the edge of death. And it's a physiological response. So even if you've gone through it ten times and know rationally that you don't die, it doesn't matter. You're instantly put back into the mental space of drowning and being at the edge of death.

I must confess that when I see Hannity or the rest of these guys saying it's no big deal and it's not torture, I kind of figured they're playing semantic games and essentially saying 'I don't care what we do to evil Muslim terrorist bad guys.' Hang them from them toes, waterboard them, whatever, who cares? I don't agree with that. It's hideous. But I understand it. But here it turns out they're just completely ignorant, just haven't been paying attention. Just in the purest factual sense have no idea what they're talking about.

So, can we please just move on and accept that this country had an official policy of torture from 2002 - 2008 and move on? Granted, coming right after 9/11 it might have been easier to look the other way, since our gut feeling is that torture works (it doesn't). But there is, nonetheless, the little issue of bringing to justice those who made torture the official policy of the USA.

HellHole

2009-05-05T00:29:58-05:00

From a recent article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?

Thus begins this incredibly disturbing expose on the current prison situation here in the United States of America. In particular, it focuses on the horrendous use of solitary confinement in this country and how ineffective it really is:

Recently, I met a man who had spent more than five years in isolation at a prison in the Boston suburb of Walpole, Massachusetts, not far from my home. Brought up in the run-down neighborhoods of Boston's West End, in the nineteen-forties, Bobby Dellelo was caught burglarizing a shoe store at the age of ten. At thirteen, he recalls, he was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. (He and his friends learned to hide out in stores at closing time, steal their merchandise, and then break out during the night.) The remainder of his childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna, which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet. Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing. Usually, he stole from office buildings at night. But some of the people he hung out with did stickups, and, together with one of them, he held up a liquor store in Dorchester. By the time he was caught, Dellelo had been fingered for robbing the Commander Hotel in Cambridge as well. He served a year for the first conviction and two and a half years for the second.

What happened next launches Gawande's article:

Three months after his release, in 1963, at the age of twenty, he and a friend tried to rob the Kopelman jewelry store, in downtown Boston. But an alarm went off before they got their hands on anything. They separated and ran. The friend shot and killed an off-duty policeman while trying to escape, then killed himself. Dellelo was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He ended up serving forty years. Five years and one month were spent in isolation.

It's a horrifying journey he takes us on, but one that every American should read:

As in other supermaxes -- facilities designed to isolate prisoners from social contact -- Dellelo was confined to his cell for at least twenty-three hours a day and permitted out only for a shower or for recreation in an outdoor cage that he estimated to be fifty feet long and five feet wide, known as "the dog kennel." He could talk to other prisoners through the steel door of his cell, and during recreation if a prisoner was in an adjacent cage. He made a kind of fishing line for passing notes to adjacent cells by unwinding the elastic from his boxer shorts, though it was contraband and would be confiscated. Prisoners could receive mail and as many as ten reading items. They were allowed one phone call the first month and could earn up to four calls and four visits per month if they followed the rules, but there could be no physical contact with anyone, except when guards forcibly restrained them. Some supermaxes even use food as punishment, serving the prisoners nutra-loaf, an unpalatable food brick that contains just enough nutrition for survival. Dellelo was spared this. The rules also permitted him to have a radio after thirty days, and, after sixty days, a thirteen-inch black-and-white television.
"This is going to be a piece of cake," Dellelo recalls thinking when the door closed behind him. Whereas many American supermax prisoners -- and most P.O.W.s and hostages --have no idea when they might get out, he knew exactly how long he was going to be there. He drew a calendar on his pad of paper to start counting down the days. He would get a radio and a TV. He could read. No one was going to bother him. And, as his elaborate escape plan showed, he could be patient. "This is their sophisticated security?" he said to himself. "They don't know what they're doing."

After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises -- the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

Check out the entire article. You'll never look at the U.S. of A. in the same light.

Jack Kemp: R.I.P.

2009-05-03T11:59:28-05:00

One of the leading Republicans who truly sought to alleviate poverty and inner city blight, not to mention a host of other societal ills, died yesterday at the age of 73:

Mr. Kemp won his House seat in 1970 because of his celebrity as an all-star quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, twice champions of the American Football League. He connected his concern for minorities with his respect for his black teammates, especially the linemen who had protected him from pass rushers.
Mr. Kemp was secretary of housing and urban development under the first President George Bush and the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1996.

His biggest task was cleaning up the corruption and favoritism that had marked the housing department during the Reagan administration. Again he was a bundle of energy. He met black leaders, visited homeless shelters and presided over the destruction of failed housing projects like Cabrini-Green in Chicago. He also offered proposals like tax preferences for inner-city "enterprise zones" and urged that public housing tenants be enabled to buy their homes. Most of these ideas went nowhere. One successful measure was the Affordable Housing Act, a block grant program that has spent about $1.5 billion a year since 1992.

It does make you wonder, though, why most of his novel ideas to reduce poverty went nowhere. This 1994 New York Times Magazine article by Nicholas Lemann (managing editor of The Washington Monthly) points out that Kemp's Empowerment Zone ideas never took hold with those who were espousing them in the first place:

Empowerment Zones get remarkably lukewarm endorsements from many of the very people who dreamed them up. Here are a few voices from around the Administration: "The evaluations don't provide an encouraging picture." "It was a given." "There are a lot of problems with it." On Capitol Hill, the committee chairmen who were responsible for Empowerment Zones, Representative Dan Rostenkowski of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the Senate Finance Committee, are both known to be nonbelievers. The person probably most responsible for the passage of Empowerment Zones is Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York. What does he think? "I rejected the whole concept under Reagan. But people came to me and said, 'How can it hurt?' So I just said, 'What the hell.' But when it started looking like the urban policy for the nation, it was obviously inadequate."

It could be that if you lift up the boat of those stuck in the inner city, they just move out:

The predictions being made for Empowerment Zones' ability to perform their job of revitalizing distressed areas are striking in their modesty. "It depends on your expectations," says Andrew M. Cuomo, an Assistant Secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and one of the program's architects. "If you expect to see Harlem as gentrified and mixed-income, it's not going to happen. If you look at people who moved out, it can be a success." Paul R. Dimond, the White House staff member most involved in planning Empowerment Zones, strikes a similar note: "I'm not saying it's going to succeed 100 percent. . . . If they're successful, lots of people will move out."

It's also interesting to note how right and wrong Andrew Cuomo was about Harlem. Fifteen years after he said Harlem couldn't be gentrified, the real estate boom of the past 10 years has led to many wealthy whites moving in (oftentimes with the corresponding racial stress that accompanies gentrification). But did that lead to many blacks moving out? Probably not...

Or it could be that the issue is really one of systemic paralysis:

Someone who was able to look at this situation afresh -- a modern-day de Tocqueville -- might well ask, Why is the Government addressing a problem of this severity with a solution that its own officials don't really seem to believe in? The answer transcends the Clinton Administration. Instead, it has to do with the strange way American society outside the ghettos deals with the problems inside. For three decades, Administration after Administration has pondered the ghettos and then settled on the idea of trying to revitalize them economically -- even though there is almost no evidence that this can work. Nearly every attempt to revitalize the ghettos has been billed as a dramatic departure from the wrongheaded Government programs of the past -- even though many of the wrongheaded programs of the past tried to do exactly the same thing. The old cliche about ghetto life is that it's "a cycle of despair." Actually it's ghetto policy making that's a cycle of despair: The leadership class repeatedly turns to policies that sound appealing but are doomed to fail -- and then their failure practically guarantees that the country won't face the issue head on.

Go look at areas of Brooklyn which are still quite bleak: Brownsville, Ridgewood, Bushwick. This is still America...falling down insfrastructure, crappy public schools, crime...It's quite sad, actually. And although Jack Kemp's heart was in the right place, perhaps his colleagues in Congress never had the stomach to properly tackle the the problem. Or the American public just doesn't give a damn about inner-city poverty:

Programs to make daily life in the ghettos decent and to put inner-city residents on the track to something better are problematic for Washington. Voters are absolutely certain that social services cost a lot and don't work, so political support for them is hard to come by. Meanwhile, there is considerable evidence that out in the ghettos, people are finding ways to deliver social services, especially housing and day care, effectively. Everybody involved in antipoverty work knows this, which is the reason that, on the ground, community efforts focus primarily on housing, safety, education and job training -- and the reason that Washington tries regularly to sneak more financing for these social services into legislation. What the people who know won't do, at the moment, is state these goals directly. They fear that public hostility to Government social-service programs is too strong. It's a tragedy. What is gained in the short run by making a promise that sounds more appealing -- economic development -- is far outweighed by what is lost in the long run when the dream doesn't come true.

This is the America that we live in today, and although Jack Kemp tried to make it a better place through his empowerment zones, ultimately most Americans couldn't care less. Let's hope that our first Community Organizer President - Barack Obama - can change the way we look at this part of America and challenge us to come up with some new, fresh ideas to help reduce the poverty and suffering endured by this "other" class. Jack Kemp devoted his career to trying...we should too.

Was torture used to seek an Iraq-al Qaida link?

2009-04-25T13:14:57-05:00

The McClatchy news service, which was the only paper to properly question the build-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003, reports on the release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on abusive tactics:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The article goes on to quote an unnamed source:

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.
"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

Who is this unnamed source and why won't he go on record? A former U.S. army psychiatrist had no problem going on record:

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Excerpts from Burney's interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Furthermore, the McClatchy article quotes others involved as saying they knew of no pressure:

Others in the interrogation operation "agreed there was pressure to produce intelligence, but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaida," the report said.

So, who were those others? And who's correct? The first unnamed source, the former psychatrist, or these "others" named in the report?

Perhaps, like most truths, the reality lies in the middle. It could be a mixture of paranoia that another attack was coming down the pike in 2003 and 2004 that led to these abusive tactics, or that Cheney et. al. had to prove a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida by any means necessary.

What we do know is that we need more reporting on this, for sure.

Torture Retorts.

2009-04-22T23:35:05-05:00

Ever since the Obama administration last week released the now infamous "torture memos" that legalized acts of torture by government employees (CIA) on behalf of its citizens, each new revelation creates new questions and commentary:

Eric Etheridge as The Opinionator over at the NY Times has the "Torture Retorts":

A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military's use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.
The 232-page report, the product of an 18-month inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification.

The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq -- stripping detainees, placing them in "stress positions"or depriving them of sleep -- originated in a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE, intended to train American troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations.

According to the Senate investigation, a military behavioral scientist and a colleague who had witnessed SERE training proposed its use at Guantanamo in October 2002, as pressure was rising "to get 'tougher' with detainee interrogations." Officers there sought authorization, and Mr. Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques.

It goes on and on from there, but suffice it to say that the fact that we're even having this "torture debate" in this country shows you how low down we've sunk. There are still people who are convinced that "water boarding" is not torture.

Firedoglake has been deconstructing the memos here and here, and it's most definitely worth reading through.

It's always helpful to read from across the pond what The Economist is saying about this issue, too.

And finally, we have the following interview by Chris Matthews of former CIA operative, Bob Baer, where he's asked the simple question, "Does torture work?"

Final summation (so far) from the NY Times.

From SNL to the USS.

2009-04-14T17:52:22-05:00

Meet the next Senator (finally) from Minnesota:

Will Norm Coleman ever give up? ...geez! ...

postscript: This article in the NY Times basically captures the surreal nature of this race which was concluded almost 6 months ago:

Mr. Franken and Mr. Coleman are caught in a political twilight, players in a race that will not end. A three-judge panel declared Mr. Franken the winner on Monday by 312 votes out of roughly 3 million cast, after a seven-week trial, but Mr. Coleman promptly announced that he would appeal to the state's highest court, raising the prospect that Minnesota will not get its second senator until the Congressional recess begins this summer.

And after the Minnesota Supreme Court certifies Franken the winner? Well, the Republican leadership in Washington is promising to go federal on this:

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the head of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, said Tuesday that Republicans were also prepared to take the battle into federal court if Mr. Coleman loses yet again.

Getting the Feds involved in this state issue is ridiculous and particularly partisan. Let the state Supreme Court decide the thing and then move on, for Pete's sake!

36 cents a day for health benefits.

2009-03-31T01:29:55-05:00

Americans really, truly, hate unions - even when it only costs them $.36 a day!

Randy Cohen - who writes "The Ethicist" column for the NY Times - fielded this question recently:

The board of our 273-unit co-op wants to replace our union cleaning service with a nonunion service to save $35,000 a year, although the board acknowledges that our present service performs admirably. Facing rising costs, the board stresses its duty to stay within its budget and hold down monthly fees. Is the board acting ethically? What can residents do if they disagree with it?

Mr. Cohen brilliantly points out what this dilemma means in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way:

The board's proposal is a dubious first step. It should instead begin by negotiating with the current service, seeking to preserve good union jobs without busting your building's budget. In tough times like today's, some unions have agreed to renegotiate their contracts. (See Detroit.) Dissenting tenants should express their willingness to pay a bit more rather than squeeze the cleaning crew. It would cost each unit only $10.68 a month to make up that $35,000 -- about 36 cents a day -- less than the cost of a daily candy bar (and it can't be healthful to eat all that candy).
Here's another way to phrase the issue: Should sacrifices be made only by the poorest-paid employees, or should they be shared by their (presumably) wealthier employers? I'm going to go with . . . shared. To dump union workers often means saving money by denying their replacements health insurance, vacation and pension benefits, not to mention decent pay. New employees are not more productive; they can just be induced to work for less -- economic desperation has a way of doing that. While the board has financial obligations to the co-op owners, it also should treat its employees fairly rather than force them into a race to the bottom.

Amen to Randy for making these points!

And shame on this building in Boston for choosing the wrong solution:

update: The board replaced its unionized service with nonunion workers. The union company found jobs in other buildings for the original crew, but not full-time work.

The really sad part of this story is that it has certainly played out in similar fashion all across the country over and over again. Let's hope that we're beginning a new era of empathy for the workers in this country who are toiling in the ditches serving the lifestyles of others.