Monday, December 31, 2007
Growing Up In The White House
Yesterday I was intrigued by the new nineteen year old Bhutto heir being put forward to possibly influence the fate of the World. No kidding. He even has a new slogan, "Democracy is the best revenge."
Then I watched some of the interview with Huckabee and Obama by the increasingly transparent and despicable Tim Russert. (How sweet it would be to see someone waterboard Mr. Potato Head.) Huckabee and Obama both did a fairly reasonable job on their job interviews. Like any job applicant, all the candidates want to get their foot in the door, get the job, and then figure out what they will do with it.
They, like the nineteen year old Bhutto, have their little product-differentiation routine. For instance, good old Hucks uses the old aw-shucks type of thing. Barack is a vision guy.
Well, Barack Obama has no more of a "vision" than Huckabee, McCain or Tancredo or the nineteen year old Bhutto. After being elected, the system will quickly whip the new President into line. They will find their means of governance whether they like it or not. Events will overwhelm vision and with time, experience and fate will determine how it goes. With luck, they may become a good President. Did that happen to George Bush?
Of course it did. The change in Bush over the last twenty four months is quite remarkable. If he knew then what he knows now, he would make a good President. Now that Bush knows what he is doing, but is being transferred and retired, we will have to train another new second lieutenant and call him General. "Democracy is the best revenge."
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Long, Gone Neocons
The Bush administration is no longer influenced by neocons. Instead, it's governing the way its predecessors have.
Michael Young | Reason December 27, 2007
Maybe 2008 will be the year when we will finally be rid of that vacuous belief that "the neocons" are in control of the Bush administration's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Habits are hard to break, particularly lazy ones, but if anyone bothered to look more closely, they would see that the United States has not really engaged in what we might call a neoconservative approach to the region since at least 2004, when the situation in Iraq took a sudden turn for the worse.
What are, or were, the highlights of a neocon approach to the Middle East and the world before 2003, when American forces invaded Iraq? Looking back at that most prominent post-9/11 neocon statement of purpose, the administration's National Security Strategy released in September 2002 (an assemblage of contradiction in which neocon ideas were recorded alongside classical liberal internationalist ones), they were roughly the following: a desire to maintain American paramountcy at the expense of the more traditional concept of a balance of power; greater reliance on the use of force and unilateralism in America's defense, through preemptive measures if necessary; and a more activist bent in spreading democracy, freedom, and free markets throughout the world.
But the truth is that soon after the takeover of Iraq, the administration gradually began acting in the Middle East pretty much like its predecessors. It was compelled to rely on the multilateral institutions it had spurned in the run-up to the Iraq war, implicitly accepting that U.S. military might was not enough to resolve all problems. As for its commitment to an agenda of democracy and freedom, while officially this was at the heart of American concerns after Bush's second inaugural address, in reality by then it was already in decline as a policy guide.
For example, in May 2003, the U.S. was compelled to seek an international resolution to govern its military presence in Iraq. While the Security Council, in Resolution 1483, recognized Coalition forces as a ruling authority, it labeled them an "occupying authority", with both the legal obligations under that status, and the stigma. The resolution was a compromise: the U.N. pragmatically acknowledged that it had to work with the U.S. in Iraq, and used this to try shaping political outcomes in its favor; the Bush administration realized that it needed international cover, even if in September 2004, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan again reminded Washington that its invasion had been "illegal."
Only days after the Security Council authorized the creation of a United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq on August 14, 2003, a bomb attack targeted U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing the organization's representative there, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and almost 20 other people. The U.S. was then still trying to rule over Iraq on its own, with Paul Bremer as high commissioner. Yet it was immediately clear to the Bush administration that the attack had harmed American efforts to normalize the situation on the ground in Iraq. The subsequent dramatic drawdown of U.N. personnel denied the U.S. a valuable partner in distributing much-needed aid to an impoverished Iraqi population, as well as an often useful mediator with Iraqi leaders who refused to meet with American officials.
By 2004, the U.S. was resorting to the U.N. in other Middle Eastern crises as well. For example, the Security Council was the preferred route for U.S. efforts in 2004 to push for a Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon. Far from going it alone, the Bush administration, in collaboration with France, its bitterest foe over Iraq, sponsored a Security Council resolution to that end. The U.S. didn't try to impose the resolution by force, even though American troops were on the Syrian border and had every reason to attack Syria because of the way it was infiltrating fighters and Al-Qaeda suicide bombers into Iraq. In fact, under even a loose interpretation of the National Security Strategy, the administration would have been justified in preemptively striking against the regime in Damascus for what it was doing to its eastern neighbor. But the U.S. held back.
Whenever Lebanon circa 2005 is mentioned, images of a "popular revolution" come to mind. The mass demonstrations against Syria after the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, were a powerful democratic moment for the country, and for the Arab world as a whole. The term "Cedar Revolution" was even coined by an American official looking for a serviceable tagline to compare what was happening in Beirut to democratic uprisings elsewhere in the world.
But the reality is that the Bush administration only latched onto the democracy imagery after the anti-Syrian rallies had started, then used these to bolster the argument that, together with the parliamentary elections in Iraq earlier that year, a democratic wave was sweeping Arab societies. Between the moment in September 2004 when the U.S. backed the U.N. resolution demanding a Syrian pullout from Lebanon and the moment of Hariri's assassination in February 2005, Washington had no clue how to implement the resolution. Lebanon was not an American priority, Iraq was. The administration didn't even realize that Lebanese democracy was something it could seize upon until the Lebanese took advantage of the American democratization mood (and military presence in Iraq) to buttress their own demands for a Syrian withdrawal.
In other words, for all the talk of a neocon cabal advancing Middle Eastern democracy, the administration was mostly unaware of the democratic potential in Lebanon until the Lebanese took to the streets. Only then did the U.S. provide the vital push, with others, to force the Syrians out. The moral of the tale: that you didn't necessarily have to believe the American democracy message to profit from it, was one that Arab liberals elsewhere ignored. Most amusing, American indecision in the period before Hariri's murder resulted from Washington's adhering to the consensual internationalism it had dismissed before the Iraq war.
One can go on. Since 2006, the Bush administration has all but abandoned the democracy agenda to rally the despotic Arab regimes against Iran. Containment is the new catchword and, no surprise, it is pretty much what the Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton administrations spent two decades applying to post-revolution Iran. The U.S. has also returned to an old "realist" template in selling sophisticated new weaponry to the Arab Gulf monarchies to partly balance Tehran's power. Neocon aversion to Saudi Arabia, a focal point of post-9/11 disputation (even if it was never as significant as some imagined), has evaporated.
Similarly, the Bush administration now finds itself back in the oldest gig in town: the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. That a settlement is necessary goes without saying, but how unexpected that the most bureaucratically cautious operator in the Bush administration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, should have tied her fate to resolving what many regard today as an irresolvable conflict. In so doing, Rice has applied a lesson taught by her realist predecessors: that the key to normalcy in the Middle East is peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That may be true or not, but it was always rubbish to the neocons.
So maybe it's time to stop referring to the neocon policies of the Bush administration. The neocons are gone, many for so long that no one seems to remember their leaving. What we now have in Washington is a mishmash of old political realism and improvisation, topped with increasingly empty oratory on freedom and democracy. That should please quite a few of Bush's domestic critics. He's returned to the futile routine in the Middle East that they always urged him to.
Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Arizona Democrat Enforces Laws Ignored by National Republicans
Gov. Janet Napolitano, DemocratBusiness on the Border
Arizona gets tough on employers to solve its immigration problem.
By Terry Greene Sterling | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Dec 28, 2007 |
Eighteen years ago, when John Eisenhower opened his Scottsdale, Ariz., tree care business, he vowed to honor a 1986 federal law that prohibited hiring undocumented immigrants. The former Christian missionary named his company Integrity Tree Service Inc., but his decision not to hire undocumented workers quickly put him at a financial disadvantage. He chose to abide by the law, but his competitors hired undocumented immigrants for substandard wages and "made big money riding the backs of illegals," says Eisenhower, now 53. He survived by building a devoted clientele. Today his six to eight Latino and Anglo employees enjoy benefits and paid vacations, and his manual laborers earn up to three times the hourly rate that some companies pay their illegal workforce.
Now a controversial state law—with national implications—is slated to take effect Jan. 1 and promises to level the playing field for Eisenhower's company and thousands of other law-abiding Arizona businesses. The employer sanctions law imposes tough penalties on businesses that knowingly employ undocumented immigrants. First offenders may have their business licenses suspended for up to 10 days and must sign an affidavit promising not to hire undocumented workers in the future. Fail to comply, and companies could lose their licenses to operate altogether. What's more, the law requires all of Arizona's 150,000 companies to run new hires through a free online federal database that checks immigration status.
Foes of the law include immigrant rights activists and representatives of the construction, agriculture, hospitality and manufacturing industries, which employ large numbers of unskilled immigrant laborers. The law's opponents questioned its constitutionality in federal court, but that case was dismissed on Dec. 7. Then, on Dec. 21, Judge Neil Wake of the U.S. District Court in Phoenix cleared the way for the law to take effect on New Year's Day. Critics of the law received another blow recently, when the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco refused to grant an injunction aimed at preventing the law from taking effect.
Gov. Janet Napolitano, a moderate Democrat, became a target of criticism after she signed the law last July, after Congress had failed to reform federal immigration policy. Arizona is particularly hard-hit by illegal immigration woes, because its nearly 400-mile border with Mexico is the preferred gateway for most immigrants traveling north. An estimated 500,000 to 600,000 undocumented people live in Arizona, Napolitano says, and sanctioning employers who hire them is part of an overall strategy to fix a problem the feds have long ignored. "Without the federal government taking action, the states must move ahead," she tells NEWSWEEK. "If Arizona is a laboratory for democracy, then so be it."
The Arizona law has divided the state's business community. Some are already finding the law easy to live with. The Salt River Project, a Phoenix-based utility with about 4,300 employees, says it has run about 900 new hires through the database in the last 18 months without a major problem. Jolynn Clarke, the utility's manger of staffing, says the database check mandated by the new law is a quick and easy way to ensure that employees "really are who they say they are."
Other employers, particularly those that rely on low-skilled labor, are taking a different view. Critics say undocumented workers provide an essential workforce in a state with a relatively low unemployment rate of between 3 and 4 percent. "We are literally shutting down immigration, and as we shut down immigration, we shut down the economy," says Joe Sigg, director of government relations for the Arizona Farm Bureau, a statewide coalition of farmers and ranchers.
"This is law by hysteria," says John Augustine, whose family has farmed and ranched in Arizona since 1950 and employs about 150 workers. Augustine and other business owners have prepared for the law by retaining lawyers and auditors to review hiring and record-keeping procedures. He says his cotton and alfalfa farm doesn't hire illegal immigrants, but that doesn't mean the law won't affect his businesses. "I have a hard time finding labor now," he says. "Because there will be fewer people in the workforce, it will be even harder to find labor, and you'll pay more for it."
The law has already had a negative effect on some businesses, says Maria Arredondo, owner of Meubeleria Central, a Phoenix furniture store that caters to Latino immigrants—both legal and illegal. Customers started dwindling when news of the law first broke in the summer, and now Arredondo wonders how long she can survive. Prospective customers tell her they like her furniture and they like her prices, but they're saving their money in case they get deported. With little business income to make her home mortgage payments, Arredondo rented her house and moved with her three young children into the furniture store. "I am an American citizen," she says, "and I don't know how much longer I can hold on."
It's proving to be a difficult time for Latinos in Arizona. It didn't help that Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon recently shocked the Latino community by appointing a panel to explore whether the Phoenix police should regularly check for immigration status. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has arrested nearly 1,400 undocumented immigrants, with the blessing of County Attorney Andrew Thomas. Arpaio relies on state laws that outlaw human smuggling and federal laws that allow officers to check citizenship or residency status in the course of their duties, for instance a routine traffic stop. "We don't arrest randomly," says Lisa Allen, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office. But immigrants fear they may be deported if they have even one traffic violation. And now the employer sanctions law looms.
"What you have is a slow-growing panic," says Alfredo Gutierrez, who was a state senator for 14 years and now owns a Phoenix-based lobbying firm and hosts a Spanish-language radio talk show. "You have a community feeling besieged," he says. "People are saving their money and waiting. They talk about leaving, but few have. The great and overwhelming majority of people are just going to stay here. They have very few resources to go check out jobs in places like Ohio."
In the near future, safe havens in other states may be hard to find. Arizona's law is viewed as a test case by other states, "trying to create order inside of chaos" caused by federal inaction, says Sheri Steisel, director of the immigration task force for the National Conference of State Legislatures. Steisel says state legislatures passed at least 244 laws related to immigrants and immigration in 2007, a three-fold increase over 2006. Although Arizona's new law imposes the toughest sanctions on employers, 19 other states passed measures related to employment of undocumented immigrants. Oklahoma now makes it a felony to harbor, transport or shelter illegal immigrants and, like Arizona, requires employers to verify immigration status through online databases.
Opponents of Arizona's law vow they'll continue to try block the law's debut on Jan. 1. Time, however, is not on their side.
The International Community
They led. Did Bush follow their lead?
Google "International Community" and you get 8,640,000 pages. It must be a rather popular concept.
"Community" is a rather comfy word. "International" is a big word, expansive and inclusive, and we all like big ideas and we must be inclusive. A phrase that includes big things and warm comfy things is a simple seductive idea. Two of the more inclusive proponents of "International Community" were Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
Both men, children of the sixties, liked the big rock concert, big demonstration, arm in arm process of governance. They preferred consensus and of course inclusion to help reinforce their ideas and beliefs. Blair and Clinton confirmed their ideas and the power of the "International Community" with the war on Kosovo.
Bill Richardson is so enthralled with the concept, that he and many others are calling on the "International Community" to act on Pakistan.
Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan are still unresolved, the IC is hardly in concurrence with Iran and now the call is going out for the "big chapatis", Pakistan. A read of a speech made by Tony Blair in 1999 should be made before we take a bite out of that loaf.
On 24 April 1999, Tony Blair made a speech that is hosted on A UK Government website: 'Prime Minister's speech: Doctrine of the International community at the Economic Club, Chicago' He had some interesting things to say in those warm inclusive days.
_____________
...While we meet here in Chicago this evening, unspeakable things are happening in Europe. Awful crimes that we never thought we would see again have reappeared - ethnic cleansing. systematic rape, mass murder.
I want to speak to you this evening about events in Kosovo. But I want to put these events in a wider context - economic, political and security - because I do not believe Kosovo can be seen in isolation.
No one in the West who has seen what is happening in Kosovo can doubt that NATO's military action is justified. Bismarck famously said the Balkans were not worth the bones of one Pomeranian Grenadier. Anyone who has seen the tear stained faces of the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming across the border, heard their heart-rending tales of cruelty or contemplated the unknown fates of those left behind, knows that Bismarck was wrong.
This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values. We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed. We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later"...
..."We need to begin work now on what comes after our success in Kosovo. We will need a new Marshall plan for Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania and Serbia too if it turns to democracy. We need a new framework for the security of the whole of the Balkans. And we will need to assist the war crimes tribunal in its work to bring to justice those who have committed these appalling crimes.
This evening I want to step back and look at what is happening in Kosovo in a wider context"...
..."Twenty years ago we would not have been fighting in Kosovo. We would have turned our backs on it. The fact that we are engaged is the result of a wide range of changes - the end of the Cold War; changing technology; the spread of democracy. But it is bigger than that
I believe the world has changed in a more fundamental way. Globalisation has transformed our economies and our working practices. But globalisation is not just economic. It is also a political and security phenomenon.
We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist. By necessity we have to co-operate with each other across nation"...
..."We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not"...
..."national interest is to a significant extent governed by international collaboration and that we need a clear and coherent debate as to the direction this doctrine takes us in each field of international endeavour."...
..."Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men - Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic."...
..."The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people's conflicts. Non -interference has long been considered an important principle of international order. And it is not one we would want to jettison too readily. One state should not feel it has the right to change the political system of another or forment subversion or seize pieces of territory to which it feels it should have some claim. But the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as "threats to international peace and security". When regimes are based on minority rule they lose legitimacy - look at South Africa."...
He forgot to mention Rhodesia, rather I mean Zimbabwe, of course. How could I forget?
Saturday, December 29, 2007
The Iowa Loyal Jirga
The Deciders
Plan A was a Freak Accident Waiting to Happen
Plan A is shot to hell, Musharraf is all but finished, Pakistan is at a cross roads and the US and UK planners are looking like bungling incompetents.
Plan A, Benazir Bhutto propping up and providing backbone to Pervez Musharraf so that he could finally get tough on the extremists, has been shot to hell and the experts tell us that there is no Plan B. Leaving aside (for now) the questions about the incompetence of implementing Plan A, we are now forced to scramble for Plan B which could include the Islamist connected Nawaz Sharif.
The problem is that we no longer know what to believe. Take the initial reports of the attack - A gunman/suicide bomber attacked Ms. Bhutto shooting her in the head and neck before detonating his bomb. Initial reaction; that's unusual, a trained, professional suicide bomber. Cool and calm even in the face of death. A real assassin. It makes more sense that the shooter and the bomber would be two different people. Considering how "doped-up" some of these bombers have been you wouldn't expect them to be marksmen and even if they were, you could understand that they might have a case of the nerves which precluded hitting the side of a barn.
The point is, the initial reports coming out a chaotic scene are merely initial reports coming out a chaotic scene. A bomb goes off, people are lying dead or dying and after a momentary stunned silence, the screaming begins and out of the smoke comes the initial signals. The problem is these reports are heard and filed away in the back of the mind. Everything heard after that is weighed and filtered against the "initial reports" and this sets a high hurdle for the truth.
The medical finding about the cause of Bhutto's death may well be true but too easily dismissed as too coincidental. When you first heard the news, didn't you think to yourself something like the following: "She was attacked by a gunman and a suicide bomber but you're telling me that the cause of death was a "freak accident? Give me a break!"
One day after Benazir Bhutto's death, the Pakistanis tried to pin the blame on al-Qaeda. From the Telegraph UK:
Here is a translation of the transcript of the alleged telephone conversation from senior al-Qa'eda leader Baitullah Mehsud to another militant said to have been intercepted after the assassination.Maulvi Sahib (MS): Asalaam Aleikum (Peace be with you)
Baitullah Mehsud (BM): Waleikum Asalam (And also with you)
MS: Chief, how are you?
BM: I am fine.
MS: Congratulations, I just got back during the night.
BM: Congratulations to you, were they our men?
MS: Yes they were ours.
BM: Who were they?
MS: There was Saeed, there was Bilal from Badar and Ikramullah.
BM: The three of them did it?
MS: Ikramullah and Bilal did it.
BM: Then congratulations.
MS: Where are you? I want to meet you.
BM: I am at Makeen (town in South Waziristan tribal region), come over, I am at Anwar Shah's house.
MS: OK, I'll come.
BM: Don't inform their house for the time being.
MS: OK.
BM: It was a tremendous effort. They were really brave boys who killed her.
MS: Mashallah (Thank God). When I come I will give you all the details.
BM: I will wait for you. Congratulations, once again congratulations.
MS: Congratulations to you.
BM: Anything I can do for you?
MS: Thank you very much.
BM: Asalaam Aleikum.
MS: Waaleikum Asalaam.
My first reaction after "walleikum Aleikum" was "Sounds fishy to me." I thought it was a little too timely. Too "johnny on the spot". Suddenly the ISI was the FBI and the bad guys were just dumb asses blabbering all on the telephones. How convenient. I don't totally discount it but I think that if the Pakistanis could produce the translated intercept so quickly, there's a lot more that they could have done and didn't do. A lot more that they knew and weren't telling us. The Musharraf Government has no credibility against Mr. BM's denials:
Bhutto Aides Reject Government ClaimBy RAVI NESSMAN, AP
Sat Dec 29, 4:22 AM EST
An Islamic militant group said Saturday it had no link to Benazir Bhutto's killing, dismissing government claims that its leader orchestrated the assassination.
Bhutto's aides also said they doubted militant commander Baitullah Mehsud was behind the attack on the opposition leader and accused the government of a cover-up.
The dispute and conflicting reports about Bhutto's exact cause of death were expected to further enflame the violence wracking this nuclear-armed nation two days after the popular former prime minister was killed in a suicide attack.
Musharraf is done. His goose is cooked. He has no credibility anymore. He should have stepped down when his book was just released and he was being feted at Davos. He would have been lauded as a courageous and honorable man. He should have quit when he was ahead but he didn't do that, he clung to power and now, no one believes him.
Once again, we've shot ourselves in the foot and Osama is frenetically playing bongo drums in a Waziristan motel room. Considering the disaster that was Plan A, one has to wonder about the competency of its planners who seem to be the products of outcome based education. Its time for new planners.
Where Were You on September 26th, 1983?
Stanislav Petrov may have prevented all out nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR
1983: The Brink Of Apocalypse is on Channel 4 on Saturday January 5, at 7.30pm.
With great power goes great responsibility, or so it should. But what happens when our rulers and masters overlook a detail or two, or make a mistake? Sometimes we get very lucky and have a small but sensible man step forward, break some rules and in doing so saves the World. Meet Stanislav Petrov.
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September 26th, 1983: The Day the World Almost Died
By TONY RENNELL The Daily Mail
Last updated at 01:00am on 29th December 2007
By TONY RENNELL The Daily Mail
Last updated at 01:00am on 29th December 2007
Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union's secret service, reluctantly eased himself into the commander's seat in the underground early warning bunker south of Moscow.
It should have been his night off but another officer had gone sick and he had been summoned at the last minute.
Before him were screens showing photographs of underground missile silos in the Midwest prairies of America, relayed from spy satellites in the sky.
He and his men watched and listened on headphones for any sign of movement - anything unusual that might suggest the U.S. was launching a nuclear attack.
Stanislav Petrov may have prevented all out nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR
This was the height of the Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. Both sides packed a formidable punch - hundreds of rockets and thousands of nuclear warheads capable of reducing the other to rubble.
It was a game of nerves, of bluff and counterbluff. Who would fire first? Would the other have the chance to retaliate?
The flying time of an inter-continental ballistic missile, from the U.S. to the USSR, and vice-versa, was around 12 minutes. If the Cold War were ever to go 'hot', seconds could make the difference between life and death.
Everything would hinge on snap decisions. For now, though, as far as Petrov was concerned, more hinged on just getting through another boring night in which nothing ever happened.
Except then, suddenly, it did. A warning light flashed up, screaming red letters on a white background - 'LAUNCH. LAUNCH'. Deafening sirens wailed. The computer was telling him that the U.S. had just gone to war.
The blood drained from his face. He broke out in a cold sweat. But he kept his nerve. The computer had detected missiles being fired but the hazy screens were showing nothing untoward at all, no tell-tale flash of an missile roaring out of its silo into the sky. Could this be a computer glitch rather than Armageddon?
Instead of calling an alert that within minutes would have had Soviet missiles launched in a retaliatory strike, Petrov decided to wait.
The warning light flashed again - a second missile was, apparently, in the air. And then a third. Now the computer had stepped up the warning: 'Missile attack imminent!'
But this did not make sense. The computer had supposedly detected three, no, now it was four, and then five rockets, but the numbers were still peculiarly small. It was a basic tenet of Cold War strategy that, if one side ever did make a preemptive strike, it would do so with a mass launch, an overwhelming force, not this dribble.
Petrov stuck to his common-sense reasoning. This had to be a mistake.
What if it wasn't? What if the holocaust the world had feared ever since the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, was actually happening before his very eyes - and he was doing nothing about it?
He would soon know. For the next ten minutes, Petrov sweated, counting down the missile time to Moscow. But there was no bright flash, no explosion 150 times greater than Hiroshima. Instead, the sirens stopped blaring and the warning lights went off.
The alert on September 26th, 1983 had been a false one. Later, it was discovered that what the satellite's sensors had picked up and interpreted as missiles in flight was nothing more than high-altitude clouds.
Petrov's cool head had saved the world.
He got little thanks. He was relieved of his duties, sidelined, then quietly pensioned off. His experience that night was an extreme embarrassment to the Soviet Union.
Petrov may have prevented allout nuclear war but at the cost of exposing the inadequacies of Moscow's much vaunted earlywarning shield.
Instead of feeling relieved, his masters in the Kremlin were more afraid than ever. They sank into a state of paranoia, fearful that in Washington, Ronald Reagan was planning a first-strike that would wipe them off the face of the earth.
The year was 1983 and - as a history documentary in a primetime slot on Channel 4 next weekend vividly shows - the next six weeks would be the most dangerous the world has ever experienced.
That the U. S. and the Soviet Union had been on the brink of world war in 1962, when John Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev went head-to-head over missiles in Cuba, is well known. Those events were played out in public. The 1983 crisis went on behind closed doors, in a world of spies and secrets.
A quarter of a century later, the gnarled old veterans of the KGB, the Soviet Union's secret service, and their smoother counterparts from the CIA, the U.S. equivalent, have come out from the shadows to reveal the full story of what happened. And a chilling one it is. From their different perspectives, they knew the seriousness of the situation.
'We were ready for the Third World War,' said Captain Viktor Tkachenko, who commanded a Soviet missile base at the time. 'If the U.S. started it.'
Robert Gates - then the CIA's deputy director of intelligence, later its head and now defence secretary in George Bush's government - recalled: 'We may have been on the brink of war and not known it.'
That year, 1983, the rest of the world was getting on with its business, unaware of the disaster it could be facing.
Margaret Thatcher won a second term as Prime Minister but her heir-apparent, Cecil Parkinson, had to resign after admitting fathering his secretary's love child. Two young firebrand socialists, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, were elected MPs for the first time.
Police were counting the dead bodies in serial killer Dennis Nilsen's North London flat, the Brinks-Mat bandits got away with £25million in gold bullion and 'Hitler's diary' was unearthed before being exposed as a forgery.
England's footballers failed to qualify for the European finals.
The song everyone was humming was Sting's Every Breath You Take - 'Every breath you take, every move you make, I'll be watching you.' It was unwittingly appropriate as that was precisely what, on the international stage, the Russians and Americans were doing.
On both sides there were new, more powerful and more efficient machines to deliver destruction. The Soviets had rolled out their SS-20s, missiles on mobile launch pads, easy to hide and almost impossible to detect.
Meanwhile, the Americans were moving Pershing II ballistic missiles into Western Europe, as a direct counter to a possible invasion by the armies of the Warsaw Pact (as the Soviet Union and its satellites behind the Iron Curtain were known).
They were also deploying ground-hugging cruise missiles, designed to get under radar defences without being detected.
Then Reagan, successor at the White House to Jimmy Carter, upped the ante in a provocative speech in which he denounced the Soviet Union as 'the Evil Empire'.
His belligerence rattled the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, a hardline communist and former head of the KGB whose naturally suspicious nature was made worse by serious illness. For much of the ensuing crisis he was in a hospital bed hooked to a dialysis machine.
His belief that Reagan was up to something was reinforced when the President announced the start of his 'Star Wars' project - a system costing trillions of dollars to defend the U.S. from enemy ICBMs ( Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) by shooting them down in space before they re-entered earth's atmosphere.
He saw this as an entirely defensive measure, but to the Russians it was aggressive in intent. They saw it as a threat to destroy their weapons one by one and leave the USSR defenceless.
Even more convinced of Washington's evil intentions, Andropov stepped up Operation RYAN, during which KGB agents around the world were instructed to send back any and every piece of information they could find that might add to the 'evidence' that the U.S. was planning a nuclear strike.
In the Soviet Union's London embassy, Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer masquerading as a diplomat, was ordered to watch out for signs of the British secretly stockpiling food, petrol and blood plasma.
In the KGB's Lubyanka headquarters, every small detail was chalked up on a board, filling it with words until the mountain of 'evidence' appeared overwhelming. But the problem was, as a U.S. observer noted, that the KGB, while strong on gathering information, was hopeless in analysing it.
In reality, what it was compiling was the dodgiest of all dossiers, in which the 'circle of intelligence' remained a dangerously closed one. Not for the last time in matters of war, the foolhardiness of fitting facts to a preconceived agenda were exposed.
East-West tension increased when an unauthorised aircraft flew into Soviet air space in the Bering Sea, ignoring all radio communications. Su-14 intercept fighters were scrambled to shoot it down in the belief that it was a U.S. spy plane.
It turned out to be a civilian flight of Korean Airlines, KA-007, that had strayed off course en route from Alaska to Seoul.
All 269 passengers and crew died. Reagan denounced the 'evil Empire' again, and Moscow detected once again the drumbeats of war.
And then came the event that nearly triggered catastrophe.
On November 2, 1983, Nato - the U.S.-led alliance of western forces - began a routine ten-day exercise codenamed Operation Able Archer to test its military communications in the event of war.
The 'narrative' of the exercise was a Soviet invasion with conventional weapons, which the West would be unable to stop.
Its climax would be a simulated release of nuclear missiles. Command posts and nuclear bases were on full alert, but, as the Soviets were repeatedly told, no actual weapons were involved.
The words 'EXERCISE ONLY' screamed out from every message. But the Soviet leadership, with its eye on Reagan's supposed recklessness, chose not to believe them. Andropov, in his sick bed, and his Kremlin advisers were gripped not just by current paranoias but by past ones.
They were the World War II generation, forever conscious of how Hitler had fooled Stalin and launched his savage Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1940 under the pretext of an exercise.
In the war that followed, 25million Soviet citizens died and the Motherland came close to caving in. To allow history to repeat itself would be unforgivable.
Now, the Kremlin watched and listened in horror as the West went though this drill. Top priority 'flash telegrams' went to Gordievsky and others in KGB stations around the world demanding 'evidence' that this exercise was a disguise for a real nuclear first-strike.
In Washington, the effect that Able Archer was having on the Soviet leadership was completely missed. In fact, rather than winding up for a war, Reagan was doing the opposite.
At Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, he had recently had a private screening of a made-fortelevision film called The Day After, which was a fictional reconstruction of the aftermath of nuclear war.
The former Hollywood cowboy was more affected by this than by any military briefings he might have had. The film predicted 150 million dead. In his diary he wrote: 'It left me greatly depressed. We have to do all we can to see there is never a nuclear war.'
The old war horse was changing course and soon he would begin to make overtures to Moscow that would lead to his first visit there, a building up of relationships and an easing of East-West tensions.
He very nearly did not get the chance. As Able Archer wound up to its climax, so too did the Kremlin's paranoia. In the Nato exercise, Western forces were on the brink of firing a theoretical salvo of 350 nuclear missiles.
In the Soviet Union, the military went on to their equivalent of the U.S. defence forces' DefCon 1, the final warning of an imminent attack and the last stage before pressing the button for an all to real massive retaliation.
On airfields, Soviet nuclear bomber pilots sat in their cockpits, engines turning, waiting for orders to fly. Three hundred ICBMs were prepared for firing and 75 mobile SS-20s hurriedly moved to hidden locations.
Surface ships of the Soviet navy dashed for cover, anchoring beneath cliffs in the Baltic, while its submarines with their arsenals of nuclear missiles slipped beneath the Arctic ice and cleared decks for action.
WHAT saved the situation were two spies, one on each side. Gordievsky, the KGB man in London, was really a double agent working for British Intelligence. He warned MI5 and the CIA that Able Archer had put Soviet leaders in a dangerous frame of mind.
It was the first inkling the West had had that the exercise was being viewed with such panic, and the Americans responded instantly by down-grading it. Reagan then made a very visible journey out of the country as a signal to the Soviets that he was otherwise engaged.
Meanwhile, an East German spy, Topaz - real name Rainer Rupp - had infiltrated the Nato hierarchy at a high level and was privy to many of its secrets, was asked by Moscow urgently to confirm that the West was about to go to war.
Deeply embedded Topaz would know for sure, and all he had to do was dial a certain number on his telephone to confirm his master's fears. His finger stayed off the buttons. His message back was that Nato was planning no such thing.
Moscow took a step back from the brink its own fevered imagination had created. At the same time, Able Archer reached its end, the simulation over, the personnel involved stood down. The date was November 11 - Armistice Day.
Only later did the West grasp how close the world had come to apocalypse. Reagan and his advisers were shocked, and more impetus was put behind finding ways to end the arms race with the Soviet Union.
The near-miss of 1983 has long been known by historians of the Cold War. But this documentary will bring it to a wider audience.
Today, the West's relations with post-communist Russia and its aggressive leader, Vladimir Putin, are strained. Bombers and spy planes nudge rival air space, testing nerves, just as they did in the early 1980s. The situation is ripe for misunderstandings.
Those events, 24 years ago, are also a reminder that, for all the concerns about global warning, mankind's greatest danger may still be its vast nuclear arsenals.
It has largely gone unnoticed that this year, with increasing fears of proliferation, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock up to five minutes to midnight, closer to nuclear catastrophe than at almost any time since the phoney war of 1983.
1983: The Brink Of Apocalypse is on Channel 4 on Saturday January 5, at 7.30pm.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Waterboarding - Terrifying but not Torture
The Point | In defense of waterboarding,
The Philadelphia Enquirer
By Mark Bowden
No one should be prosecuted for waterboarding Abu Zubaydah.
Several investigations are under way to find out who ordered the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, apparently an effort to cover up evidence of torture. Leaving aside for a moment the wisdom of destroying the tapes, I'd like to take a look at what was allegedly done to Zubaydah, and why.
When captured in Pakistan in 2002, Zubaydah was one of the world's most notorious terrorists. The 31-year-old Saudi had compiled in his young life 37 different aliases and was under a sentence of death in Jordan for a failed plot to blow up two hotels jammed with American and Israeli tourists. The evidence was not hearsay: Zubaydah was overheard on the phone planning the attacks, which were then thwarted. He was a key planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was thought to be field commander of the attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors on the USS Cole, and was involved in planning a score of other terror attacks, successful and unsuccessful. He was considered to be a primary recruiter and manager of al-Qaeda training camps.
He was, in short, a highly successful, fully engaged, career mass murderer. Think back to those pictures of workers crouched in windows high up in the burning World Trade Center towers, choosing whether to jump to their death or be burned alive. This was in part Abu Zubaydah's handiwork.
At the time of his capture in 2002, just six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was strong reason to believe Zubaydah knew virtually the entire organizational structure and agenda of al-Qaeda around the world. He was supervising ongoing plots to kill hundreds if not thousands of people. He was, for obvious reasons, disinclined to share this knowledge. Subjected briefly to waterboarding - less than a minute, according to published reports - he became cooperative and provided information that, according to the government, resulted in preventing planned attacks and capturing other key al-Qaeda leaders.
In the six years that have passed since the Manhattan towers collapsed, we have gained (partly through the interrogation of men like Zubaydah) a much clearer understanding of al-Qaeda and the threat it poses. While the chance of further murderous attacks is always with us, it is fair to say few of us feel the same measure of alarm we did then. The diminishment of this threat is at least in part due to the heroic efforts of the CIA, the military, and allies around the world in targeting terrorist cells.
In the process, the menace of Zubaydah himself has deflated. Today, he is just another little man in a orange jumpsuit at Guantánamo. Our national concern has shifted from stopping him to figuring out what to do with him.
And to second-guessing what was done to him. Waterboarding is a process by which a detainee is strapped down and forced to ingest and inhale water until he experiences the terror of drowning. It is not torture in the traditional sense of inflicting pain; it inflicts fear, intense, visceral fear, without doing physical harm. It is a method calculated to straddle the definitions of coercion and torture, and as such merely proves that both methods inhabit the same slippery continuum. There is a difference between gouging out a man's eyes and keeping him awake, and waterboarding falls somewhere in between.
In the unlikely event that Zubaydah knew nothing of value and that every bit of information he divulged was false, it was still reasonable to assume in 2002 that this was not the case. If his interrogators were able to stop one terror attack by waterboarding him, even if they violated international agreements and our national conscience, it was justified. All nations have laws against killing, but all recognize self-defense as a legitimate excuse. I think the waterboarding in this case is directly analogous, except that Zubaydah himself, although he richly deserves it, was neither killed nor permanently harmed.
I can understand why someone at the CIA ordered the videotapes destroyed. It was both to protect those who did it (more from their own government, I suspect, than from terrorist reprisals) and to prevent the images from ever becoming public. We have seen the disastrous, self-defeating consequences of such pictures, which untethered from context assume a damaging life of their own. Whoever made the call now runs the risk of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice, a risk I am sure was evaluated before making the choice.
Here's where the issue gets confusing. No information gained by coercive methods ought to be admissible, ever, in a trial or tribunal. Torture can be used to twist (the word torture literally means "to twist") testimony in any desired direction. The goal of any criminal proceeding is justice, and torture produces only the kind perfected during the Inquisition.
The goal of an intelligence operation in wartime, on the other hand, is to elicit accurate, timely information to thwart attacks. In this setting, interrogation is a process, one in which a prisoner is rewarded for the truth, and punished for lying. It is designed to save lives and ensure the success of a military operation. Coercive methods are rarely necessary. Most often, prisoners can be induced to cooperate by being nice to them. There are many other interrogation methods proven to be useful that do not require so much as raising one's voice. But there will always be hard cases like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, another mastermind of Sept. 11. With prisoners like these, defiant and dangerous, the only right question to ask is, What works?
What does work? Opponents of torture argue that it never works, that it always produces false information. If that were so, then this would be a simple issue, and the whole logic of incentive
disincentive is false, which defies common sense. In one of the cases I have cited previously, a German police captain was able to crack the defiance of a kidnapper who had buried a child alive simply by threatening torture (the police chief was fired, a price any moral individual would gladly pay). The chief acted on the only moral justification for starting down this road, which is to prevent something worse from happening. If published reports can be believed, this is precisely what happened with Zubaydah.
People can be coerced into revealing important, truthful information. The German kidnapper did, Zubaydah did, and prisoners have throughout recorded time. What works varies for every individual, but in most cases, what works is fear, fear of imprisonment, fear of discomfort, fear of pain, fear of bad things happening to you, fear of bad things happening to those close to you. Some years ago in Israel, in the course of investigating this subject exhaustively, I interviewed Michael Koubi, a master interrogator who has questioned literally thousands of prisoners in a long career with Shin Bet. He said that the prisoner who resisted noncoercive methods was rare, but in those hard cases, fear usually produced results. Fear works better than pain.
It is an ugly business, and it is rightly banned. The interrogators who waterboarded Zubaydah were breaking the law. They knew they were risking their careers and freedom. But if the result of the act itself was a healthy terrorist with a bad memory vs. a terror attack that might kill hundreds or even thousands of people, it is a good outcome. The decision to punish those responsible for producing it is an executive one. Prosecutors and judges are permitted to weigh the circumstances and consider intent.
Which is why I say that waterboarding Zubaydah may have been illegal, but it wasn't wrong.
Mark Bowden is a former staff writer at The Inquirer and is now national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly.
The Philadelphia Enquirer
By Mark Bowden
No one should be prosecuted for waterboarding Abu Zubaydah.
Several investigations are under way to find out who ordered the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, apparently an effort to cover up evidence of torture. Leaving aside for a moment the wisdom of destroying the tapes, I'd like to take a look at what was allegedly done to Zubaydah, and why.
When captured in Pakistan in 2002, Zubaydah was one of the world's most notorious terrorists. The 31-year-old Saudi had compiled in his young life 37 different aliases and was under a sentence of death in Jordan for a failed plot to blow up two hotels jammed with American and Israeli tourists. The evidence was not hearsay: Zubaydah was overheard on the phone planning the attacks, which were then thwarted. He was a key planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was thought to be field commander of the attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors on the USS Cole, and was involved in planning a score of other terror attacks, successful and unsuccessful. He was considered to be a primary recruiter and manager of al-Qaeda training camps.
He was, in short, a highly successful, fully engaged, career mass murderer. Think back to those pictures of workers crouched in windows high up in the burning World Trade Center towers, choosing whether to jump to their death or be burned alive. This was in part Abu Zubaydah's handiwork.
At the time of his capture in 2002, just six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was strong reason to believe Zubaydah knew virtually the entire organizational structure and agenda of al-Qaeda around the world. He was supervising ongoing plots to kill hundreds if not thousands of people. He was, for obvious reasons, disinclined to share this knowledge. Subjected briefly to waterboarding - less than a minute, according to published reports - he became cooperative and provided information that, according to the government, resulted in preventing planned attacks and capturing other key al-Qaeda leaders.
In the six years that have passed since the Manhattan towers collapsed, we have gained (partly through the interrogation of men like Zubaydah) a much clearer understanding of al-Qaeda and the threat it poses. While the chance of further murderous attacks is always with us, it is fair to say few of us feel the same measure of alarm we did then. The diminishment of this threat is at least in part due to the heroic efforts of the CIA, the military, and allies around the world in targeting terrorist cells.
In the process, the menace of Zubaydah himself has deflated. Today, he is just another little man in a orange jumpsuit at Guantánamo. Our national concern has shifted from stopping him to figuring out what to do with him.
And to second-guessing what was done to him. Waterboarding is a process by which a detainee is strapped down and forced to ingest and inhale water until he experiences the terror of drowning. It is not torture in the traditional sense of inflicting pain; it inflicts fear, intense, visceral fear, without doing physical harm. It is a method calculated to straddle the definitions of coercion and torture, and as such merely proves that both methods inhabit the same slippery continuum. There is a difference between gouging out a man's eyes and keeping him awake, and waterboarding falls somewhere in between.
In the unlikely event that Zubaydah knew nothing of value and that every bit of information he divulged was false, it was still reasonable to assume in 2002 that this was not the case. If his interrogators were able to stop one terror attack by waterboarding him, even if they violated international agreements and our national conscience, it was justified. All nations have laws against killing, but all recognize self-defense as a legitimate excuse. I think the waterboarding in this case is directly analogous, except that Zubaydah himself, although he richly deserves it, was neither killed nor permanently harmed.
I can understand why someone at the CIA ordered the videotapes destroyed. It was both to protect those who did it (more from their own government, I suspect, than from terrorist reprisals) and to prevent the images from ever becoming public. We have seen the disastrous, self-defeating consequences of such pictures, which untethered from context assume a damaging life of their own. Whoever made the call now runs the risk of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice, a risk I am sure was evaluated before making the choice.
Here's where the issue gets confusing. No information gained by coercive methods ought to be admissible, ever, in a trial or tribunal. Torture can be used to twist (the word torture literally means "to twist") testimony in any desired direction. The goal of any criminal proceeding is justice, and torture produces only the kind perfected during the Inquisition.
The goal of an intelligence operation in wartime, on the other hand, is to elicit accurate, timely information to thwart attacks. In this setting, interrogation is a process, one in which a prisoner is rewarded for the truth, and punished for lying. It is designed to save lives and ensure the success of a military operation. Coercive methods are rarely necessary. Most often, prisoners can be induced to cooperate by being nice to them. There are many other interrogation methods proven to be useful that do not require so much as raising one's voice. But there will always be hard cases like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, another mastermind of Sept. 11. With prisoners like these, defiant and dangerous, the only right question to ask is, What works?
What does work? Opponents of torture argue that it never works, that it always produces false information. If that were so, then this would be a simple issue, and the whole logic of incentive
disincentive is false, which defies common sense. In one of the cases I have cited previously, a German police captain was able to crack the defiance of a kidnapper who had buried a child alive simply by threatening torture (the police chief was fired, a price any moral individual would gladly pay). The chief acted on the only moral justification for starting down this road, which is to prevent something worse from happening. If published reports can be believed, this is precisely what happened with Zubaydah.
People can be coerced into revealing important, truthful information. The German kidnapper did, Zubaydah did, and prisoners have throughout recorded time. What works varies for every individual, but in most cases, what works is fear, fear of imprisonment, fear of discomfort, fear of pain, fear of bad things happening to you, fear of bad things happening to those close to you. Some years ago in Israel, in the course of investigating this subject exhaustively, I interviewed Michael Koubi, a master interrogator who has questioned literally thousands of prisoners in a long career with Shin Bet. He said that the prisoner who resisted noncoercive methods was rare, but in those hard cases, fear usually produced results. Fear works better than pain.
It is an ugly business, and it is rightly banned. The interrogators who waterboarded Zubaydah were breaking the law. They knew they were risking their careers and freedom. But if the result of the act itself was a healthy terrorist with a bad memory vs. a terror attack that might kill hundreds or even thousands of people, it is a good outcome. The decision to punish those responsible for producing it is an executive one. Prosecutors and judges are permitted to weigh the circumstances and consider intent.
Which is why I say that waterboarding Zubaydah may have been illegal, but it wasn't wrong.
Mark Bowden is a former staff writer at The Inquirer and is now national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly.
-------------------------------------
Waterboarding obviously is terrifying and it certainly seems to be an effective tool but is it torture? No!
Fixing Pakistan, Unintended Consequences.
Final moments (click to enlarge)
Bhutto Family MausoleumYou can be sure of one thing. She was given assurances that were not met. Whatever they were, she also had her own reasons for leaving a pleasant safe life to make her audacious move back into Pakistani politics. Her personal history contained some unfinished business.
Unfinished business is a huge motivator. We will soon see how the process she started evolves. With each day, we will get further from the truth. Further? Yes, because the immediate future of Pakistan can take many turns. The manipulation has begun and will continue, to suit the purposes of the political spin masters.
The White House announced that she has died for "Democracy". That's fine, but I have one observation. When the Shah started to lose power in Iran, President Carter intervened to control the outcome. Could things have been made made any worse in Iran with the US staying out of the mix? I doubt it and I doubt it will be any different this time.
Salvaging U.S. Diplomacy Amid Division
By HELENE COOPER and STEVEN LEE MYERS NY Times
Published: December 28, 2007
Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Steven Lee Myers from Crawford, Tex. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Vermont and David Rohde from New York.
______________________________
Salvaging U.S. Diplomacy Amid Division
By HELENE COOPER and STEVEN LEE MYERS NY Times
Published: December 28, 2007
WASHINGTON — The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday left in ruins the delicate diplomatic effort the Bush administration had pursued in the past year to reconcile Pakistan’s deeply divided political factions. Now it is scrambling to sort through ever more limited options, as American influence on Pakistan’s internal affairs continues to decline.
On Thursday, officials at the American Embassy in Islamabad reached out to members of the political party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, according to a senior administration official. The very fact that officials are even talking to backers of Mr. Sharif, who they believe has too many ties to Islamists, suggests how hard it will be to find a partner the United States fully trusts.
The assassination highlighted, in spectacular fashion, the failure of two of President Bush’s main objectives in the region: his quest to bring democracy to the Muslim world, and his drive to force out the Islamist militants who have hung on tenaciously in Pakistan, the nuclear-armed state considered ground zero in President Bush’s fight against terrorism, despite the administration’s long-running effort to root out Al Qaeda from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Administration officials say the United States still wants the Pakistani elections to proceed, either as scheduled on Jan. 8 or soon after. But several senior administration officials acknowledged that President Pervez Musharraf may decide to put off the elections if the already unstable political climate in Pakistan deteriorates further.
The administration official said American Embassy officials were trying to reach out to Pakistani political players across the board in the aftermath of the Bhutto assassination.
“Look, most of the people in Musharraf’s party came out of Nawaz’s party,” the official said, referring to Mr. Sharif and speaking on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities. While he acknowledged that an alliance between Mr. Sharif and Mr. Musharraf was unlikely given the long enmity between the men, he added, “I wouldn’t predict anything in politics.”
Foreign policy analysts and diplomats said that if there were one thing that Ms. Bhutto’s assassination has made clear, it was the inability of the United States to manipulate the internal political affairs of Pakistan. Even before the assassination, the United States had limited influence and did not back Ms. Bhutto to the hilt.
“We are a player in the Pakistani political system,” said Wendy Chamberlin, a former United States ambassador to Pakistan, adding that as such, the United States was partly to blame for Mr. Musharraf’s dip in popularity. But, she added: “This is Pakistan. And Pakistan is a very dangerous and violent place.”
That said, Pakistan has never been more important for the United States than it is right now as it teeters on the edge of internal chaos. Bush administration officials have been trying mightily to balance the American insistence that Pakistan remain on the path to democracy and Mr. Musharraf’s unwillingness to risk unrest that would allow Al Qaeda and the Taliban to operate more freely, particularly with American and NATO troops next door in Afghanistan.
That is why the administration had been fighting so hard, amid skepticism from many of its allies, to broker an agreement in which the increasingly unpopular Mr. Musharraf would share power with Ms. Bhutto after presidential and parliamentary elections. American officials viewed the power-sharing proposal partly as a way to force Mr. Musharraf onto a democratic path, and partly to relieve the growing pressure for his ouster.
On the basis of that plan, Ms. Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October after eight years of self-imposed exile.
But the power-sharing deal never came to fruition, as the increasingly besieged Mr. Musharraf imposed a series of autocratic measures that left him politically weakened.
Administration officials continued to prod Ms. Bhutto toward an arranged marriage with Mr. Musharraf even during the emergency rule. Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte traveled to Pakistan in November, and spoke by telephone to Ms. Bhutto while Mr. Musharraf had her under house arrest. With both sides balking at the power-sharing deal — an agreement one Bush official acknowledged was “like putting two pythons in the same cage” — Mr. Negroponte continued to push Ms. Bhutto to agree to the plan, according to members of Ms. Bhutto’s political party.
“I think it was insane,” said Teresita Schaffer, a Pakistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, of the proposed alliance. “I don’t think Musharraf ever wanted to share power.”
Until this week, Bush administration officials were still hoping that Mr. Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto would form an alliance between their political parties after Pakistan’s Jan. 8 elections, which would bring about as close to a pro-American governing coalition in Pakistan as the United States was likely to get.
The Bhutto assassination upends that plan, but Bush administration officials on Thursday had still not given up hope that Mr. Musharraf may be able to strike a ruling coalition with whoever becomes Ms. Bhutto’s successor in her Pakistan Peoples Party.
The problem with that scenario, though, is that Pakistani political parties are much more about strong, powerful individuals — like Mr. Musharraf, Ms. Bhutto, or Mr. Sharif — than about the parties themselves. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned Ms. Bhutto’s second-in-command, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, to offer sympathy, and she pledged to continue to support elections in Pakistan, administration officials said.
Mr. Bush’s continued strong support for Mr. Musharraf could further erode his already declining popular support, even if the administration still sees his leadership as the best guarantor of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
“The danger is the centrist elements of Pakistan will be so demoralized,” said Stephen P. Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He criticized the administration for not nurturing Pakistan’s opposition for so long after Mr. Musharraf’s coup in 1999. He expressed hope that the United States could still urge moderate parties to ally themselves with Mr. Musharraf, forming a governing coalition, assuming that the elections go ahead.
“It should wake up anybody who thinks that Pakistan is a stable country and that we can deal only with Musharraf,” Mr. Cohen said of the assassination.
Ms. Schaffer and other Pakistan experts say the administration was making a mistake by viewing Mr. Sharif with suspicion. They said that he was a moderate who will work with the United States in the fight against terrorism, citing his cooperation with Clinton administration.
Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, was in Islamabad with Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, on a scheduled trip and preparing to meet Ms. Bhutto at 9 p.m. Thursday when the news of the bombing broke. They watched the news in their hotel, with initial reports that she had escaped injury giving way to confirmation of her death.
“I think our foreign policy relied on her personality as a stabilizing force,” Mr. Specter told reporters by telephone.
“Now, without her, we have to regroup.”
Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Steven Lee Myers from Crawford, Tex. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Vermont and David Rohde from New York.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
“A Daughter of the East.”
Benazir Bhutto. June 21, 1953 - December 27, 2007.
Benazir Bhutto is dead and Pakistan and the world are poorer for it.
Born on June 21, 1953 she was a peer to many of us who watched her as she entered the world stage. Educated in a Pakistani Catholic convent and at Radcliffe, Harvard and Oxford she was intelligent, thoughtful and articulate. She was beautiful in those early days; a woman in full bloom. She was the total package when, at 35 years old, she was elected the Prime Minister of Pakistan.
For all her privilege, her life was no bed of roses. Her father, the Prime Minister, was overthrown, convicted of conspiracy in the murder of a political opponent and hung by the Pakistani military in 1979. A brother died under mysterious circumstances in the South of France in 1980, another was killed by uniformed Pakistani police. Her husband served eight years in jail for corruption charges. She was no saint and had to flee her country amid the politics and prosecutions about corruption. It's been said that more than once, she nearly brought her country to financial ruin.
She was a modern woman and brave. When she returned to Pakistan, she knew the risks she was taking and yet she took them. She described herself as a "Daughter of the East." Today the East killed yet another daughter.
Bhutto Murdered
Islamic democracy, yea right. My scepticism about the crusade for democracy on the recent previous post stands.
Blast hits Benazir Bhutto rally
BBC
Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been killed in a presumed suicide attack, a spokesman for the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) says.
There has been an explosion at an election rally in Pakistan shortly after former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had addressed it.
At least eight people have been killed in the suspected suicide blast in the city of Rawalpindi. Ms Bhutto is reported to be unhurt.
Earlier on Thursday at least four people were killed in election violence close to the city.
Ms Bhutto returned from self-imposed exile in October.
Exit gate
"The blast took place after she had left the rally," a spokesman for Ms Bhutto, Jameel Soomro, said. "She is safe."
At least eight people were killed by the explosion, reporters on the scene say. Some police officials say 15 people were killed.
Ms Bhutto had been addressing supporters of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) in a park in the garrison city.
Police say a suspected suicide attacker detonated the bomb at one of the exits to the park as people were leaving.
When Ms Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October, her cavalcade was hit by a double suicide attack that left some 130 dead.
The PPP has the largest support in the country.
Pakistan has been beset by violence in recent months.
Earlier on Thursday at least four people were killed ahead of an election rally that Pakistan's former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was preparing to attend close to Rawalpindi.
Predictions for 2008
A democrat in waiting.
That Wilsonian dream was pretty much retired by the close of the Cold War, put away by tough practical men.
Carter, doffed the political mantel and wore it like a cardigan. He dusted off democratic certitude and used it to dissuade the supporters of the Shah from saving their own necks. Many of them heeded Jimmy's solemn advice and were executed by the mullahs, who brought us Iran I.
The democratic crusade has been losing some support lately, but still is referred to when dealing with China and Russia.
Every argument for supporting lopsided trade with China centers around its helping spread democracy to China.
"Democracy will be coming to the Middle East", was another recent expensive trek.
My prediction for 2008 is that Russia and Serbia will not permit Kosovo independence, (which is a euphemism for enlarging Albania). Will the American public finally tire of our Jimmy Carter foreign policy? What do you think 2008 will have in store for us?
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS | 27.12.2007 DW
Serbia to Shun EU Path if Kosovo Independence Recognized
Serbia said it would reject any offer of membership of the European Union or NATO if they recognized the breakaway province of Kosovo as an independent state, raising the stakes in a long-standing diplomatic battle.
Serbia's national assembly voted 220 to 14 in favor of a resolution, which stated that Serbia would not sign international treaties that did not acknowledge its territorial integrity and sovereignty over Kosovo. The vote which took place on Wednesday, Dec 26, was specifically referring to the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) which would move Serbia along the path to EU membership should it sign on next month.
Kostunica said Serbia will never accept Kosovo's independence
As discussions began in the assembly earlier in the day, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said: "At this moment a powerful resolution which parliament will pass today must be our last line of defence from violence and unilateral independence."
Both President Boris Tadic and Prime Minister Kostunica, leaders of the two central parties in Serbia's center-right ruling coalition, backed the resolution, as did the nationalist Radicals and Socialists in the opposition.
But, the discussions over the resolution pitted parliament's nationalist and pro-Western parties against each other, with analysts speculating that the debate served more as a campaign platform for presidential elections in January.
"Blow to Serbia's EU ambitions"
The opposition Liberal Democratic party, led by Cedomir Jovanovic, rejected the resolution, saying the draft represented "a blow to Serbia's ambitions to become an EU member."
Pro-Western Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic expressed hope that Serbia would sign the SAA by the end of January, despite the resolution, but also without forfeiting sovereignty over Kosovo.
Belated funeral of 30 Kosovo Albanians killed during the 1998-99 war between Serbs and Albanian guerrillas
Serbia said it would postpone its decision on NATO membership, and said it would oppose a European Union supervisory mission ready to take over from the United Nations in Kosovo unless it won Security Council approval. Russia has already blocked the move in a bid to support its Serb ally.
"Serbia will never accept the independence of Kosovo," Tadic told parliament on Wednesday, adding that the diplomatic campaign against it would resume at a United Nations Security Council meeting scheduled for Jan. 9.
He also warned that if NATO peacekeepers failed to protect Kosovo's minority Serbs, "the Serbian Army is ready."
Kosovo ready to declare independence
Most Serbs live in northern Kosovo -- more or less already partitioned from the area dominated by the 90-percent Albanian majority. Kosovars, for their part, are preparing to declare independence in the next few months, with support from the European Union and the United States.
The United States and a number of EU countries have indicated
they will recognise a unilateral declaration of independence by
Kosovo Albanians, after the failure of almost two years of
UN-sponsored negotiations on the southern Serbian province's
status.
The United Nations has administered Kosovo since 1999, when a NATO bombing campaign drove out Serb forces who had fought ethnic Albanian separatists. 10,000 civilians had perished in previous clashes and 800,000 people were driven out of the country.
Serbia, which considers Kosovo its cultural cradle, has offered the two million Albanians in the breakaway province broad autonomy, but Kosovars insist on total independence.
War criminal thought to be in Serbia
Outgoing chief UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte
Earlier on Wednesday, Serbia's war crimes prosecutor Vladmir Vukcevic said that wartime Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic was hiding in his country. He said that the "noose is tightening" around the fugitive, but said the officials did not yet know Mladic's precise location.
It was the first admission by a Serbian official that Mladic, who is wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity for his role during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, is in hiding in Serbia. In particular, Mladic and Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic are wanted for the July 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica.
Belgrade has repeatedly claimed it does not know Mladic's whereabouts. However, Carla Del Ponte, the outgoing chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands, has insisted he is in Serbia.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Carving up the Trade Pig.
Mercantilism is nothing more thsn the using the power of the state throughout the economy to enrich the state. A mercantilist economy is a managed economy. Mercantilism is controlling the means and sources of producing goods and services for the national benefits of one state against another. It is based on manipulated trade and invariably leads to militarism and can result in war.
It was thought that free trade was the antidote, but then again, what is free trade?
I think I know it when I don't see it.
The End of Free Trade
By Robert J. Samuelson Washington Post
Wednesday, December 26, 2007; Page A21
Here's today quiz. What do the following have in common: (a) Vladimir Putin; (b) China's currency, the renminbi; (c) the U.S.-Peru trade agreement; and (d) Hugo Chavez? Answer: They all reflect the "new mercantilism."
It's an ominous development affecting the world economy. Even as countries become more economically interdependent, they're also growing more nationalistic. They're adopting policies intended to advance their own economic and political interests at other countries' expense. As practiced until the mid-19th century, mercantilism aimed to do just that.
It was an economic philosophy that favored large trade surpluses. At the time, this had some logic. Trade was an adjunct to military power. Exports earned gold and silver coin, which financed armies and navies. But mercantilism fell into disfavor as a way to promote national prosperity. Free trade, argued Adam Smith and David Ricardo, would benefit all countries, because each would specialize in what it did best -- the doctrine of "comparative advantage." The post-World War II economic order took free trade as its ideal, even though trade barriers were lifted slowly. Now mercantilism is making a comeback, as governments try to manipulate markets to their advantage.
The undervalued renminbi is a glaring example. China's leaders have staked their country's political stability on export-led job creation driven by an artificially cheap currency that puts competitors -- Mexico, India and other developing countries as well as the United States and Europe -- at a disadvantage. China's trade surpluses have swelled. In 2007, the current account -- a broad trade balance -- will register a $400 billion surplus, about 12 percent of gross domestic product, says economist Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute. That's up from $21 billion, or 1.7 percent of GDP, in 2000. As a share of GDP, China's current account surplus is "triple Japan's level in the 1980s when Japan-bashing was at its peak."
Mercantilist notions also affect the energy trade. "A bear at the throat" is how the Economist recently described Europe's reliance on Russia for about a quarter of its natural gas. Putin talks of a gas cartel, and Europeans fear that their dependence exposes them to political blackmail. Ch¿vez is already less subtle. He dispenses Venezuela's oil to Cuba and other friendly countries at discounted prices. The specter is that scarce energy supplies, now available to all on commercial terms, will be increasingly allocated by political commitments.
Finally, the retreat from global trade agreements also reflects the new mercantilism. The Doha round of worldwide trade talks is floundering. Countries feel more comfortable with nation-to-nation and regional trade agreements, where they have more control over the terms. The World Trade Organization counts about 400 such agreements; the U.S.-Peru pact is the latest.
The paradox is that as the Internet and multinational companies strengthen globalization, its political foundations are weakening. Of course, opposition is not new. Even if free trade benefits most countries, some firms and workers lose from added competition. But for most of the postwar era, a pro-trade consensus neutralized this opposition. That consensus is now fraying.
Two powerful forces had shaped it, notes Harvard political scientist Jeffry Frieden. First was the belief that protectionism worsened the Great Depression. Everyone wanted to avoid a repetition of that tragedy. The second was the Cold War. Trade was seen as a way of combating communism by promoting the West's mutual prosperity. Both ideas bolstered political support for free trade. For years the global trading system flourished on the inertia of these impulses, whose relevance has faded.
In a booming world economy, the resulting tensions have so far remained muted. China's discriminatory trade practices, for example, have excited angry rhetoric, but not much else. The Chinese have generally deflected protests by, among other things, announcing large import orders at crucial moments. When European officials recently visited, there was a placating order for 160 Airbus planes worth an estimated $15 billion.
But would a global slowdown change that if other countries blamed Chinese exports for destroying their domestic jobs? Would import quotas or tariffs follow? Already, China has turned from the world's largest steel importer to the largest exporter, says Lardy. In the United States, the present pattern of global trade is viewed with increasing hostility: U.S. deficits are seen as eroding industrial jobs while providing surplus countries with the dollars to buy large pieces of American firms.
The world economic order depends on a shared sense that most nations benefit. The more some countries pursue narrow advantage, the more others will follow suit. "What's the glue that holds all this together?" asks Frieden. "Is there a common agreement about cooperation that allows governments to give up something to maintain the international order?" It's an open question whether these conflicting forces -- growing economic interdependence and rising nationalism -- can coexist uneasily or are on a collision course.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
That Ancient Yuletide
1924 Vision of Christmas Yuletide.Yule celebrations at the winter solstice predate the conversion to Christianity. It was, in pre-conversion times, the name of a feast celebrated by sacrifice on mid-winter night of January 12th according to the Norwegian historian Olav Bø. [3] Though there are numerous references to Yule in the Icelandic sagas, there are few accounts of how Yule was actually celebrated, beyond the fact that it was a time for feasting.
According to Adam of Bremen, the Swedish kings sacrificed male slaves every ninth year during the Yule sacrifices at the Temple at Uppsala. 'Yule-Joy', with dancing, continued through the Middle Ages in Iceland, but was frowned upon when the Reformation arrived.
The custom of ritually slaughtering a boar on Yule survives in the modern tradition of the Christmas ham and the Boar's Head Carol.
"On Yule Eve, the best boar in the herd was brought into the hall where the assembled company laid their hands upon the animal and made their unbreakable oaths. Heard by the boar, these oaths were thought to go straight to the ears of Freyr himself. Once the oaths had been sworn, the boar was sacrificed in the name of Freyr and the feast of boar flesh began. The most commonly recognised remnants of the sacred boar traditions once common at Yule has to be the serving of the boar's head at later Christmas feasts".
According to the medieval English writer the Venerable Bede, Christian missionaries sent to proselytize among the Germanic peoples of northern Europe were instructed to superimpose Christian themes upon existing pagan holidays of the area, to ease the conversion of the people to Christianity by allowing them to retain their traditional celebrations. Thus, Christmas was created by associating stories of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure of Christianity, with the existing pagan Yule celebrations, similar to the formation of Halloween and All Saint's Day via Christianization of existing pagan traditions.
The confraternities of artisans of the 9th century, which developed into the medieval guilds, were denounced by Catholic clergy for their "conjurations" when they swore to support one another in coming adversity and in business ventures. The occasions were annual banquets on December 26,"feast day of the pagan god Jul, when it was possible to couple with the spirits of the dead and with demons that returned to the surface of the earth... Many clerics denounced these conjurations as being not only a threat to public order but also, more serious in their eyes, satanic and immoral. Hincmar, in 858, sought in vain to Christianize them."
Monday, December 24, 2007
Smart Iranian Nuclear Politics
In 1955, GE was ready for the nuclear age.Just count the countries and companies that will be lining up to bid on nineteen nuclear power plants. Should General Electric and Westinghouse be there? Iran is going to be a nation that runs on nuclear power.
President Bush, in a 13 September 2006 interview with the Washington Post, when asked what he would say to the Iranian people, said,... "In terms of the nuclear issue," he continued, "I understand that you believe it is in your interest -- your sovereign interest, and your sovereign right -- to have nuclear power. I understand that. But I would also say to the Iranian people, there are deep concerns about the intentions of some in your government who would use knowledge gained from a civilian nuclear power industry to develop a weapon that can then fulfill the stated objectives of some of the leadership [to attack Israel and threaten the United States]. And I would say to the Iranian people that I would want to work for a solution to meeting your rightful desires to have civilian nuclear power."
That being the case, would it not be better to have American involvement in the technology and commerce?
Iran to seek bids for 19 atomic power plants
Mon Dec 24, 2007
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Monday it rejected any preconditions for talks with the United States, which suspects it wants an atomic bomb, and a member of parliament was quoted as saying Tehran planned 19 nuclear power plants.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki made clear Iran's position on talks three days after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Washington was open to better ties and talks with Iran if it suspended sensitive nuclear work.
"After the publication of a report by America's intelligence organizations, U.S. officials have talked of negotiations with preconditions with Iran," Mottaki was quoted as saying by Iranian media.
"But we do not accept any preconditions for talks," he said in comments to an Iranian satellite television station, reported on the state television Web site and by Iranian news agencies.
He was referring to a U.S. intelligence estimate published this month which said Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, leading to calls by some Iran experts for Washington to drop its precondition that Tehran give up uranium enrichment before broader talks could begin.
At a news conference on Dec 21. in Washington, however, Rice dismissed such suggestions, saying the new intelligence estimate reinforced the need for sustained pressure on Iran.
Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil exporter, is embroiled in a dispute with Western powers who fear its nuclear program could be used to build an atomic bomb. Tehran says it is aimed at generating electricity.
Easing a diplomatic freeze that lasted almost three decades, Iranian and U.S. officials have held three rounds of talks in Baghdad this year, but those discussions have been limited to ways to quell the violence in Iraq.
The U.N. Security Council is discussing a possible third round of sanctions against Iran over its refusal to suspend its sensitive atomic work.
INTERNATIONAL TENDER
Mottaki's remarks came as Kazem Jalali, a spokesman for parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, gave details of a planned international tender for atomic plants a week after Russia said it had begun fuel deliveries to the Islamic state's first such facility.
Jalali said each power plant would have a capacity of 1,000 megawatts of electricity, the Iran News daily reported on Monday, without giving further details.
Russia said on December 17 it had delivered the first shipment of nuclear fuel to the Bushehr power plant in southern Iran, a step Moscow and Washington said should convince Tehran to shut down its own disputed uranium enrichment activities.
Iran, however, said it would not halt its efforts to enrich uranium, a process to make fuel for power plants that can also provide material for atomic weapons, if refined much further.
Iranian officials say domestically-produced fuel is needed for other power plants it wants to build as part of a planned network with a capacity for 20,000 MW by 2020.
Jalali, whose comments were initially carried by the official IRNA news agency on Sunday, suggested the tenders were in line with these plans. "The contract for building 19 power plants ... will in the near future be put on an international tender," IRNA quoted him as saying.
(Reporting by Zahra Hosseinian; Editing by Charles Dick)
Sunday, December 23, 2007
We Never Learn
Why can't we just stay out of it?
Fund the Palestinians? Bad Idea
By Daniel Pipes
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Lavishing funds on Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to achieve peace has been a mainstay of Western, including Israeli, policy since Hamas seized Gaza in June. But this open spigot has counterproductive results and urgently must be stopped.
Some background: Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about $1.5 billion.
The windfall keeps growing. President George W. Bush requested a $410 million supplement in October, beyond a $77 million donation earlier in the year. The State Department justifies this lordly sum on the grounds that it "supports a critical and immediate need to support a new Palestinian Authority (PA) government that both the U.S. and Israel view as a true ally for peace." At a recent hearing, Gary Ackerman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, endorsed the supplemental donation.
Not content with spending taxpayer money, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched a "U.S.-Palestinian Public Private Partnership" on Dec. 3, involving financial heavyweights such as Sandy Weill and Lester Crown, to fund, as Rice put it, "projects that reach young Palestinians directly, that prepare them for responsibilities of citizenship and leadership can have an enormous, positive impact."
One report suggests the European Union has funneled nearly $2.5 billion to the Palestinians this year.
Looking ahead, Abbas announced a goal to collect pledges of $5.8 billion in aid for a three-year period, 2008-10, at the "Donors' Conference for the Palestinian Authority" attended by over ninety states on Monday in Paris. (Using the best population estimate of 1.35 million Palestinians on the West Bank, this comes to a staggering amount of money: per capita, over $1,400 per year, or about what an Egyptian earns annually.) Endorsed by the Israeli government, Abbas immediately raised nearly that amount for 2008 at the donors' conference.
Well, it's a bargain if it works, right? A few billion to end a dangerous, century-old conflict – it's actually a steal.
But innovative research by Steven Stotsky, a research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) finds that an influx of money to the Palestinians has had the opposite effect historically. Relying on World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other official statistics, Stotsky compares two figures since 1999: budgetary support aid provided annually to the Palestinian Authority and the number of Palestinian homicides annually (including both criminal and terrorist activities, and both Israeli and Palestinian victims). Graphed together, the two figures show an uncanny echo:
The correlation is even clearer when the aid of one year is superimposed on the homicides of a year later:
In brief, each $1.25 million or so of budgetary support aid translates into a death within the year. As Stotsky notes, "These statistics do not mean that foreign aid causes violence; but they do raise questions about the effectiveness of using foreign donations to promote moderation and combat terrorism."
The Palestinian record fits a broader pattern, as noted by Jean-Paul Azam and Alexandra Delacroix in a 2006 article, "Aid and the Delegated Fight Against Terrorism." They found "a pretty robust empirical result showing that the supply of terrorist activity by any country is positively correlated with the amount of foreign aid received by that country" – i.e., the more foreign aid, the more terrorism.
If these studies run exactly counter to the conventional supposition that poverty, unemployment, repression, "occupation," and malaise drive Palestinians to lethal violence, they do confirm my long-standing argument about Palestinian exhilaration being the problem. The better funded Palestinians are, the stronger they become, and the more inspired to take up arms.
A topsy-turvy understanding of war economics has prevailed in Israel since the Oslo negotiations began in 1993. Rather than deprive their Palestinian enemies of resources, Israelis have been following Shimon Peres's mystical musings, and especially his 1993 tome, The New Middle East, to empower them economically. As I wrote in 2001, this "is tantamount to sending the enemy resources while fighting is still under way – not a hugely bright idea."
Rather than further funding Palestinian bellicosity, Western states, starting with Israel, should cut off all funds to the Palestinian Authority.
Mission Accomplished.
W had it right.
Do we have a time when we leave Iraq or do we garrison another piece of the US military in another part of the world indefinitely?
WHAT WOULD GEORGE DO?
Okay, He Never Saw a Chopper, but He Can Still Teach Us a Thing or Two.
By Joseph J. Ellis Washington Post
Sunday, December 23, 2007; Page B01
W hat would George Washington do about Iraq? An op-ed editor (not at The Washington Post, I should add) recently asked me to write an article answering that question, presumably because I had once written a biography of Washington and have just published another book on the founding generation. But, as I tried to explain, Washington would not be able to find Iraq on a map. Nor would he know about weapons of mass destruction, Islamic fundamentalism, Humvees, cellphones, CNN or Saddam Hussein.
The historically correct answer, then, is that Washington would not have a clue. It's tempting to believe that the political wisdom of our Founding Fathers can travel across the centuries in a time capsule, land among us intact, then release its insights into our atmosphere -- and as we breathed in that enriched air, our perspective on Iraq, global warming, immigration and the other hot-button issues of the day would be informed by what we might call "founders' genius." (Come to think of it, at least two Supreme Court justices who embrace the literal version of "original intent" believe that this is possible.) But there are no time capsules, except in science fiction. The gap between the founders' time and ours is non-negotiable, and any direct linkage between them and now is intellectually problematic.
This conclusion is not just irrefutable; it's also unacceptable to many of us, because it suggests that the past is an eternally lost world that has nothing to teach us. And if history has nothing to teach us, why in heaven's name should we study it?
One answer, I suppose, is for the sheer satisfaction of understanding those who have preceded us on this earthly trail. In that sense, history, like virtue, really is its own reward. But that answer doesn't really work for me. Nor does it explain the rather extraordinary surge of interest over the past decade in the men mythologized and capitalized as our Founding Fathers. Readers are buying books on the founders in unprecedented numbers because they think the founders have something to teach them. And they do. If we come to know them and listen hard enough, they will speak to us.
Suppose, then, that we rephrase the question. It is not "What would George Washington do about Iraq?" Rather, it is "How are your own views of Iraq affected by your study of Washington's experience leading a rebellion against a British military occupation?" The answer on this score is pretty clear. Washington eventually realized -- and it took him three years to have this epiphany -- that the only way he could lose the Revolutionary War was to try to win it. The British army and navy could win all the major battles, and with a few exceptions they did; but they faced the intractable problem of trying to establish control over a vast continent whose population resented and resisted military occupation. As the old counterinsurgency mantra goes, Washington won by not losing, and the British lost by not winning. Our dilemma in Iraq is analogous to the British dilemma in North America -- and is likely to yield the same outcome.
To take another example, your opinion on the current debate about how much power the executive branch should have will be significantly influenced if you read the debates about the subject in the Constitutional Convention and the states' ratifying conventions. For it will soon become clear that the most palpable fear that haunted all these debates was the specter of monarchy. Vice President Cheney's argument that limitations on the executive branch enacted in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate need to be rolled back is historically myopic. Virtually all of the Founding Fathers would regard the expansion of executive power since 1945 as a violation of the republican principles they cherished. And the way Congress has effectively surrendered war-making powers to the president since World War II represents a fundamental distortion of checks and balances as the founders intended them.
We have also strayed rather far from the world and wisdom of the founders in our current presidential-selection process. In our effort to replace the smoke-filled rooms of the old machine politics with a more democratic primary system, we have created a money-driven, media-dominated campaign culture that none of the founders would have been willing to tolerate. Indeed, they would have regarded anyone who succeeded in our modern-day electoral circus as a clown unworthy of the office. The degree of egomaniacal ambition required to negotiate the current campaign culture would strike all the most prominent founders, save perhaps Aaron Burr, as incompatible with the qualities of mind and heart essential for presidential leadership. It's a bit disquieting to acknowledge, but it's likely that none of our first six presidents -- Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams -- would have run for office in the current political environment.
Even though all efforts to have the founders join us in a conversation about our current issues are futile exercises, like trying to plant cut flowers, the urge to create this conversation appears to be irresistible. And the most seductive, resonant and controversial founder of all, the one who gets the most hits on the Internet, is Thomas Jefferson.
Because Jefferson was the prophet of the American promise, the author of those 55 words that begin "We hold these truths to be self-evident," he has always been a historical trophy that all sides seek to claim. For Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Jefferson was the ultimate prize, the ace of spades in the American political deck.
This would have struck Jefferson as highly ironic, for he was on record as believing that each generation should be sovereign, not weighted down by what he called "the dead hand of the past." In that sense, Jefferson's greatest legacy was to oppose all legacies. He also made it clear that, once the United States became a thickly populated, urban, industrial nation, his agrarian vision became essentially irrelevant. That means that our political context for nearly 100 years has been resolutely post-Jeffersonian. Those folks claiming his mantle, such as those Supreme Court justices who declare their allegiance to the "original intentions" of the framers, are invariably imposing their own values and convictions under the cover of his name.
Finally, and somewhat more problematically, an understanding of the founders' mentality complicates our view of our role as Britain's successor as the world's dominant power. The United States began with a conspicuously anti-imperial ethos, and we have had it imprinted on our political DNA from the very start. We were the first former colony to win a war for independence (against Britain, no less) and the first large-scale republic committed to the principle of government by consent rather than coercion.
In that sense, our primal values make us a very reluctant world power in the Roman or British mode. For good historical reasons, we lack the requisite imperial stamina of the British Empire in its "sun-never-sets" phase. Our origins are at odds with all previous versions of a world power. The Romans and British would have experienced no twinges of conscience in leaving a substantial military garrison in Iraq for an indefinite period. But we do, which is one reason why a healthy majority of U.S. citizens want us to leave Iraq as soon as possible. A republic, the world's first large-scale republic, simply cannot be an empire of the conventional European sort. This legacy of the founders complicates our status as the reigning world power.
One could counter with the claim that our anti-imperial origins were always more rhetorical than real. Just ask the Native Americans, or call attention to our apparently permanent military garrisons in Germany and South Korea. They certainly have the look and feel of old-style Roman and British imperialism, wholly compatible with the apparent current plan of the Bush administration to leave a garrison of about 50,000 troops in Iraq.
What would Washington do? Well, he did speak of a prospective American empire, though he was thinking primarily of our eventual domination of the North American continent, not the globe. On a few occasions, he seemed to suggest that if we played our cards right in the 19th century, the United States might replace Britain as the dominant power in the 20th. That indeed happened. But would he have endorsed a hegemonic U.S. foreign policy based on military power? Probably not. But that's my opinion, not necessarily Washington's.
Joseph J. Ellis is the Ford Foundation professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. His books include "Founding Brothers," "American Sphinx" and,
most recently, "American Creation."
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Is China a Paper Dragon?
China: It's Not As Big As You Think
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, December 18, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Competition: The common wisdom is that China's large and fast-growing economy could overtake the U.S. as soon as 2012. Not so fast. New data suggest China's not quite as big as economists once thought.
Related Topics: East Asia & Pacific
The World Bank's latest estimates for the global economy contained a stunner of a statistic: China accounts for just under 10% of the world's total output — or about 40% smaller than thought.
At $5.3 trillion based on 2005 data, China's economy is still No. 2. But it has considerably more ground to make up before passing the U.S. in absolute size — if, in fact, it should ever do so. Total world output in 2005 was $55 trillion. The U.S. produced $12.4 trillion of that — with a population only one-fourth the size of China's.
How did these new data come about? The World Bank uses what's called Purchasing Power Parities — PPP for short — to figure how big an economy is. Basically, it surveys a market basket of some 1,000 goods and services, and sees how much of each people in those countries can actually buy in their own currency.
Doing this around the world, the bank discovered that 12 economies make up more than two-thirds of the world's GDP. Seven of those are so-called high-income economies — the U.S., Japan, Germany, the U.K., France, Italy and Spain.
Five are "transitional" economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China (the so-called "BRICs") plus Mexico. Together, they make up about 20% of output.
But the one that sticks out is China. World Bank statisticians got access to real data on China for the first time ever, and came away surprised. "The previous, less reliable, methods led to estimates (of China's GDP) . . . 40% larger than the results of the new, improved methods and benchmark," the World Bank report said.
This should be a lesson for those who take international statistics at face value. Anytime you're off by 40%, it's more than a rounding error. It's a big mistake — largely China's fault, since it wouldn't let anyone accurately measure its economy before.
And this is of more than just statistical interest. It means, for instance, that there are likely more than 300 million Chinese who live below the World Bank's $1-a-day poverty line — not the 100 million previously estimated.
This helps explain why China's communist regime still cracks down hard on any manifestations of dissent — contrary to its PR of China as the land of perpetual economic boom. It knows how bad things really are in the undeveloped hinterlands.
It also calls into question China's financial ability to support a massive military buildup to challenge the U.S. Dollarwise, the country just won't have the money — at least not yet. And besides, it should be spending that money on development — not arms.
This doesn't mean China's economy isn't growing fast. It is. Nor does it mean China isn't a potential U.S. rival, both economically and militarily. Again, it is.
But to us, this smacks a bit of the CIA's faulty analysis of the Soviet threat in the 1950s and '60s. Back then, there were no good real-world data issued by the Soviets. So economics analysts fell back on the tried and true: toting up Soviet output using satellites, secret cameras and other means to count the raw number of trucks and trains leaving factories during a given month, then comparing it with the same month a year earlier. If a factory had 100 train cars leave its doors one year, and the next year it had 110, it was assumed that the plant's output expanded by at least 10%. Not a bad assumption — but a wrong one.
For while the Soviets churned out massive amounts of goods, their quality was suspect. Box cars could be filled with shoddy, virtually unusable goods intended to meet state quotas. But we pretended that output was the same as ours.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=282872994909236>
Friday, December 21, 2007
Commerce Über Alles. Faith Based Economics.
Sovereign wealth funds are a result of US foolishness in abandoning sensible trade, energy independence, and balanced budgets. They are the financial chickens coming home to roost and rule. The US could have its own spectacular fund if it privatized the surplus in social security, but the chosen who master us, continue ruin, and disallow it.
Sovereign funds have been outsourced to some of the more unsavory capitols of the world. In those capitols, for better or worse, financial decisions will be dictated by the commissars of oil and mercantilism. The outcome may be benign, hugely rewarding to a few, or a win-win for all. We simply do not know. Commerce Über Alles, a queasy state indeed.
Saudis plan huge sovereign wealth fund
By Henny Sender and David Wighton in New York and Sundeep Tucker in Hong Kong
Financial Times
Published: December 21 2007 09:23 | Last updated: December 21 2007 19:37
Saudi Arabia plans to establish a sovereign wealth fund that is expected to dwarf Abu Dhabi’s $900bn and become the largest in the world.
The new fund will be a formidable rival for other government-owned investment funds in the Middle East and Asia, which are playing an increasingly active role in channelling capital to western companies, particularly financial companies hard hit by the US mortgage meltdown.
News of the Saudi plan comes as Temasek of Singapore is in “preliminary” talks with Merrill Lynch concerning a multibillion-dollar stake in the ailing investment bank, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“Merrill and Temasek have been talking for a while about this, although there are no indications that a deal is imminent,” the person said. Temasek was also approached as a possible investor in UBS and Morgan Stanley, although the investment banks later struck deals with Government of Singapore Investment Corp and China Investment Corp respectively, the person said.
These stakes have avoided a serious political backlash but potential investments from the Saudis are likely to be subject to greater scrutiny.
The effort is likely to be spearheaded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which has a mandate to invest only internally. Previously, the Saudis’ oil wealth had gone partly to the kingdom’s central bank, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, and partly into the coffers of the ruling family.
While the balance sheet of SAMA is public information, bankers say the figures capture only a small percentage of the total wealth of the country. The myriad investment vehicles of the various members of the royal family have never been transparent.
Until now, SAMA’s investment policy has been conservative and largely limited to investment in bonds, especially US Treasuries, and shares. That contrasts with the mandate of its peers in the Gulf, which is increasingly geared to higher returns for when oil runs out, by investing in alternative assets such as private equity and hedge funds.
That emphasis has lately yielded to a focus on buying major stakes in troubled financial firms on both sides of the Atlantic in the wake of the subprime mortgage meltdown.
In contrast to its neighbours, Saudi Arabia has expanded its spending and next year’s budget includes ambitious infrastructure projects. King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s ruler, is believed to be a key sponsor of the investment initiative.
People close to the situation said Merrill’s strategy was being driven from New York, giving John Thain, who succeeded Stan O’Neal as chairman and chief executive this month, an early chance to stamp his mark on the bank.
However, Bill McDonough, a former president of the New York Federal Reserve, is also expected to play a key role in the talks. He is one of the 11 luminaries on Temasek’s international advisory panel, which also includes David Bonderman, the founder of TPG, and Ratan Tata, the Indian industrialist.
Mr McDonough is also an influential figure at Merrill Lynch, having joined the bank last year as vice-chairman and special adviser to the chairman. (
In October Merrill announced $8.4bn of writedowns on mortgage-related investments and corporate loans, and the departure of Stan O’Neal, its long-serving chief executive.
Some analysts predict that Merrill will announce an additional $8bn writedown when it unveils its fourth-quarter results in mid-January.
The US bank’s stock price has nearly halved this year, cutting its market capitalisation to about $47bn. Dealmakers believe that Merrill would be comfortable with Temasek taking a stake of around 10 per cent, should a deal materialise.
Merrill Lynch and Temasek declined to comment on Friday.
Morgan Stanley announced this week that it is to receive a $5bn capital injection from China Investment Corporation, having disclosed a total writedown in the fourth quarter of $9.4bn after a disastrous subprime bet.
Last week UBS took nearly $10bn from the Government of Singapore Investment Corp, a sister sovereign wealth fund of Temasek, while Citigroup received $7.5bn last month from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
The deals have underlined the growing importance of sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia, and their increasingly bold moves to take advantage of the need for capital among western institutions.
The three deals have yet to be endorsed or scrutinised by shareholders of the investment banks. The Financial Times reported on Friday that UBS is facing a shareholder revolt over its planned re-capitalisation deal with GIC and a mystery investor based in Saudi Arabia.
Serving Two Masters
Our previous post debate, touched on a problem as old as mankind, split loyalties. It is being discussed in the election and goes to the heart of who is a trustworthy American. Common sense would dictate that certain people should not be trusted in certain situations. That is done every day when US juries are selected. US law sanctions such discrimination.
Huckabee, Obama or Romney; are they flawed men because they have religious convictions that are suspect? Is Giuliani flawed because of a personal lifestyle that others on the religious right dissaprove? All difficult questions.
When it comes to security involving China, should Chinese Americans be suspect as security risks?
China taps into U.S. spy operations
By Bill Gertz Washington Times
December 21, 2007
China's intelligence service gained access to a secret National Security Agency listening post in Hawaii through a Chinese-language translation service, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
The spy penetration was discovered several years ago as part of a major counterintelligence probe by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) that revealed an extensive program by China's spy service to steal codes and other electronic intelligence secrets, and to recruit military and civilian personnel with access to them.
According to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, China's Ministry of State Security, the main civilian spy service, carried out the operations by setting up a Chinese translation service in Hawaii that represented itself as a U.S.-origin company.
The ruse led to classified contracts with the Navy and NSA to translate some of the hundreds of thousands of intercepted communications gathered by NSA's network of listening posts, aircraft and ships.
NCIS agents discovered that the translation service, which officials did not identify by name, had conducted contract work for the National Security Agency facility at Kunia, an underground electronic intelligence post some 15 miles northwest of Honolulu that conducts some of the U.S. intelligence community's most sensitive work.
Kunia is both a processing center and a collection point for large amounts of Chinese- and other Asian-language communications, which are translated and used in classified intelligence reports on military and political developments.
Naval intelligence officials familiar with the Chinese spy penetration said the access to both "raw" and analyzed intelligence at Kunia caused significant damage by giving China's government details on both the targets and the sources of U.S. spying operations. Such information would permit the Chinese to block the eavesdropping or to provide false and misleading "disinformation" to U.S. intelligence.
The officials did not say how long the Chinese operation lasted before being detected.
NCIS also discovered a major Chinese intelligence operation that sought to recruit Chinese Americans as spies, and to recruit Navy and civilian intelligence workers with access to Kunia's secrets.
According to the officials, China's program to recruit intelligence workers was discovered in 2005 after a Navy cryptographic technician was caught accepting a no-cost visit to China, paid for by Beijing's government.
The case led to an NCIS probe that discovered other intelligence personnel, many of them nearing the ends of their careers, who were targeted by Chinese intelligence for recruitment.
The ethnic recruitment effort involved similar tactics. China's intelligence service used intelligence officers and supporters to identify Chinese Americans with access to secrets who would be approached and offered free visits to China, often to meet relatives. The Chinese would then use the visit to attempt to recruit the Americans as spies.
Chinese-American ethnic groups in the past have denounced the U.S. government for singling out Asian Americans as spy targets, accusing counterintelligence officials of racism. But the Chinese recruitment program shows that Beijing actively seeks to develop spies through such ethnic targeting.
NSA and NCIS spokesmen declined to comment when asked about the Chinese intelligence-gathering operations in Hawaii.
I.C. Smith, a former FBI special agent, said both China's civilian MSS and military spy service, known as "2 PLA" for the Second Department of the Chinese military, are targeting NSA.
"There can be no higher target for an intelligence service, and that includes China's MSS and 2 PLA, than gaining access to an adversaries' codes and electronic intelligence," he said, because it is the ultimate in "foreknowledge" advocated by ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu.
Getting U.S. electronic intelligence and codes would give China specific information on what is known and allow Beijing to take defensive measures "based on knowledge, not supposition," Mr. Smith said, adding that "it also allows for disinformation to be done with confidence and it basically gives the intelligence service every advantage over the enemy."
The NSA Hawaii operations center employs several thousand people and was recently expanded at a cost of more than $350 million. An NSA press release in August stated the expansion is "one facet of the agency's efforts to evolve a global cryptologic enterprise that is resilient, agile and effective in prosecuting a dynamic threat environment."
The facility was singled out for criticism in the past by intelligence reform advocates because of its restrictive policies on information-sharing.
Will There Be Any Republican Candidate Before the Convention?
This Would be my choice in these match-ups:
Guiliani-Romney ...Guiliani
Romney-McCain ...Unsure
Any Republican-Huckabee ...Any Republican
Romney-Any Democrat ...Romney
Guiliani-Any Democrat ...Giuliani
Huckabee-Obama ...Unsure
Huckabee-Hillary ...Hillary
McCain-Any Democrat ...McCain
I simply do not see Huckabee or Obama as being presidential.
Romney Learns That ‘Facts Are Stubborn Things’
By MICHAEL LUO New York Times
Published: December 22, 2007
FORT DODGE, Iowa — There was the period last spring when Mitt Romney claimed while campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire that he had been a hunter “pretty much all my life,” only to have to admit later he had seriously hunted on only two occasions.
Then there was the endorsement Mr. Romney claimed on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday that he received from the National Rifle Association while running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, when it turned out the group had never endorsed him.
Mr. Romney’s latest concession is that he only “figuratively” saw his late father, George, march with Martin Luther King Jr., something he claimed in his highly publicized speech about his Mormon faith earlier this month. Some publications have raised doubts that the event ever happened at all.
Mr. Romney once said about misstatements by his Republican rival, Rudolph W. Giuliani, “facts are stubborn things.” But does he have his own problem with blurring the truth?
Some of the instances when Mr. Romney has tripped up on his facts show that he is prone to exaggeration, taking what is essentially a kernel of truth and stretching it to bolster his case.
On Thursday, for instance, at a campaign stop in Indianola, he ran into trouble when talking about his record on illegal drugs while governor of Massachusetts. Mr. Romney had been airing ads in Iowa attacking his rival, Mike Huckabee, for his record on clemencies while governor of Arkansas and for reducing penalties for methamphetamine-related crimes.
“I’m very proud of the fact that we, my state, when I was governor, we made it tougher for people with meth labs,” he said, echoing his commercial in which he claimed that he “got tough on drugs like meth” in the governor’s office.
“We cracked down on crime and on meth in particular,” Mr. Romney added. “It’s a very important topic. I want to make sure we do everything we can to keep our kids off of this terrible, pernicious, captivating drug.”
But both the ad and Mr. Romney’s claims on his record were misleading. Mr. Romney’s office proposed legislation that would have toughened penalties on those in possession of the drug and chemicals to manufacture it, but the bill stalled in the state legislature.
After The New York Times pointed out Mr. Romney’s misstatement in a posting on its politics blog, he made sure to correct himself before taking questions from reporters at his next campaign stop here.
“If I said this morning that we ‘got tough’ on methamphetamines, I proposed we get tough on methamphetamine and I’ve corrected that right here for all of you,” he said. “You don’t need to make any error of reporting that somehow Governor Romney actually got it done.”
His claim of being a lifelong hunter was similar. When asked at town hall forums about his stance on guns, Mr. Romney portrayed himself as a sportsman, a “hunter pretty much all my life,” who strongly supported the right to bear arms.
He even trotted out some stories, recalling how he went hunting with his cousins as a teenager but struggled to kill rabbits with a single-shot .22-caliber rifle. When they loaned him a semi-automatic, it became easier, he said, drawing laughs from an appreciative crowd in Keene, N.H. The last time he went hunting, he said, was last year, when he shot quail in Georgia and “knocked down quite a few birds.”
“So I’ve been pretty much hunting all my life,” he said again.
After the notion was challenged by The Associated Press, Mr. Romney’s campaign initially conceded that those were the only two instances he had really been hunting in his life, but later rushed to add that he had also gone pistol shooting for “varmints” at his vacation home in Utah, although he did not have a hunting license or own a gun.
On the National Rifle Association endorsement, Mr. Romney argued the group phone banked for him, but he conceded it did not formally endorse him.
“Frankly, I didn’t realize the N.R.A. had an official endorsement program that was different than their phone banking for me,” Mr. Romney said on Thursday to reporters here. “The fact that they phone banked and encouraged their members to vote for me, I thought qualified for saying they had endorsed me.”
With the questions now being raised by various publications about whether Mr. Romney’s late father, George, a former governor of Michigan, ever marched with King, no one is disputing that George Romney was active in the civil rights movement. What is being challenged is the precision of Mr. Romney’s statement.
Indeed, with many of these instances, there has often been at least an element of his truth in his claims. But for a candidate who has featured his business background and made much of his propensity for careful analysis of data, he is not always precise. Asked about it on Thursday, Mr. Romney said he would correct whatever might be wrong.
“There’s going to be hyperscrutiny of each word,” Mr. Romney said. “That’s part of running for president. I’m up to it. You can look at the things I’m saying about my record and about the events of campaign and history and you’ll find if now and then I miss a word or I get something slightly off, I’ll correct it, acknowledge where it’s wrong. But the overall thrust, the overall meaning of the story, is very accurate.” That, too, however, has not been so in every case.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
The Value of LIfe
UN Votes Against Death Penalty
By EDITH M. LEDERER, AP
UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday called for a moratorium on the death penalty with a view to abolishing executions, approving a resolution opposed by the U.S., China and Iran.
The vote in the 192-member world body was 104-54 with 29 abstentions. The resolution is not legally binding but carries moral weight and reflects the majority view of world opinion.
Two previous attempts to have the General Assembly adopt a moratorium on the death penalty — in 1994 and 1999 — failed.
Amnesty International, which campaigned for a resolution, said that since then, the number of countries that have abolished the death penalty in law or practice has risen.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the resolution "a bold step by the international community."
"I am particularly encouraged by the support expressed for this initiative from many diverse regions of the world. This is further evidence of a trend towards ultimately abolishing the death penalty," he said.
The Vatican, a leading opponent of capital punishment, also welcomed the vote. "It shows that despite persistence of violence in the world, an awareness of of the value of life ... is growing in the human family," the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said on Vatican Radio. "This vote is interpreted as a sign of hope and a step forward on the road to peace."
"The value life...is growing in the human family." With all due respect to Rev Lombardi, I thought the value of life was given in the Bible, Genesis 9:6.
"Whoever sheds man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man. (New American Standard).
Apparently, the Catholic Church like some Protestant denominations no longer consider the Bible as the cornerstone of their faiths. For thousands of years, it's been clear to Jews and Christians that the value of life has been sacrosanct and the penalty for taking a life was death but in these post-modern years we have decided that we are too wise, too educated, too "scientific" so to speak. It's a brave new world and the "human family" is writing its new rules on the fly. As we say in the south, "Lord, help us."
A Snowballs Chance in Global Warming...
From the National Post, Don't fight, adapt
The hysterics have climbed on board and their train has left the station. The debate is over, their minds are made up and these stories have a snowball's chance in global warming hell. Just bend over.
We should give up futile attempts to combat climate changeHattip: Bobal: U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007 Senate Report Debunks "Consensus"
Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations
Dec. 13, 2007
His Excellency Ban Ki-Moon
Secretary-General, United Nations
New York, N.Y.
Dear Mr. Secretary-General,
Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction
It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.
The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line
by government representatives. The great majority of IPCC contributors and reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.
Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:
z Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.
z The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.
z Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.
In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is "settled," significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/wg1_timetable_2006-08-14.pdf) to consider work published only through May, 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated.
The UN climate conference in Bali has been planned to take the world along a path of severe CO2 restrictions, ignoring the lessons apparent from the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, the chaotic nature of the European CO2 trading market, and the ineffectiveness of other costly initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Balanced cost/benefit analyses provide no support for the introduction of global measures to cap and reduce energy consumption for the purpose of restricting CO2 emissions. Furthermore, it is irrational to apply the "precautionary principle" because many scientists recognize that both climatic coolings and warmings are realistic possibilities over the medium-term future.
The current UN focus on "fighting climate change," as illustrated in the Nov. 27 UN Development Programme's Human Development Report, is distracting governments from adapting to the threat of inevitable natural climate changes, whatever forms they may take. National and international planning for such changes is needed, with a focus on helping our most vulnerable citizens adapt to conditions that lie ahead. Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems.
Yours faithfully,
[List of signatories]
Copy to: Heads of state of countries of the signatory persons.
The hysterics have climbed on board and their train has left the station. The debate is over, their minds are made up and these stories have a snowball's chance in global warming hell. Just bend over.
Barack Obama, Visionary, a Pussy Under Fire.
Yea right, this is the guy that will provide determined leadership for the United States of America. Light on experience, he is also light on courage. Just what we need.
Obama’s Vote in Illinois Was Often Just ‘Present’
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ and CHRISTOPHER DREW NYT
Published: December 20, 2007
In 1999, Barack Obama was faced with a difficult vote in the Illinois legislature — to support a bill that would let some juveniles be tried as adults, a position that risked drawing fire from African-Americans, or to oppose it, possibly undermining his image as a tough-on-crime moderate.
In the end, Mr. Obama chose neither to vote for nor against the bill. He voted “present,” effectively sidestepping the issue, an option he invoked nearly 130 times as a state senator.
Sometimes the “present’ votes were in line with instructions from Democratic leaders or because he objected to provisions in bills that he might otherwise support. At other times, Mr. Obama voted present on questions that had overwhelming bipartisan support. In at least a few cases, the issue was politically sensitive.
The record has become an issue on the presidential campaign trail, as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, has seized on the present votes he cast on a series of anti-abortion bills to portray Mr. Obama as a “talker” rather than a “doer.”
Although a present vote is not unusual in Illinois, Mr. Obama’s use of it is being raised as he tries to distinguish himself as a leader who will take on the tough issues, even if it means telling people the “hard truths” they do not want to hear.
Mr. Obama’s aides and some allies dispute the characterization that a present vote is tantamount to ducking an issue. They said Mr. Obama cast 4,000 votes in the Illinois Senate and used the present vote to protest bills that he believed had been drafted unconstitutionally or as part of a broader legislative strategy.
“No politically motivated attacks in the 11th hour of a closely contested campaign can erase a record of leadership and courage,” said Bill Burton, Mr. Obama’s spokesman.
An examination of Illinois records shows at least 36 times when Mr. Obama was either the only state senator to vote present or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote that way.
In more than 50 votes, he seemed to be acting in concert with other Democrats as part of a strategy.
For a juvenile-justice bill, lobbyists and fellow lawmakers say, a political calculus could have been behind Mr. Obama’s present vote. On other measures like the anti-abortion bills, which Republicans proposed, Mr. Obama voted present to help more vulnerable Democrats under pressure to cast “no” votes.
In other cases, Mr. Obama’s present votes stood out among widespread support as he tried to use them to register legal and other objections to parts of the bills.
In Illinois, political experts say voting present is a relatively common way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure. It can at times help avoid running the risks of voting no, they add.
“If you are worried about your next election, the present vote gives you political cover,” said Kent D. Redfield, a professor of political studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield. “This is an option that does not exist in every state and reflects Illinois political culture.”
The vote on the juvenile-justice bill appears to be a case when Mr. Obama, who represented a racially mixed district on the South Side of Chicago, faced pressure. It also occurred about six months before he announced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against a popular black congressman, Bobby L. Rush.
State Senator Christine Radogno, a Republican, was a co-sponsor of the bill to let children as young as 15 be prosecuted as adults if charged with committing a crime with a firearm on or near school grounds.
The measure passed both houses overwhelmingly. In explaining his present vote on the floor of the Senate, Mr. Obama said there was no proof that increasing penalties for young offenders reduced crime, though he acknowledged that the bill had fairly unanimous support.
“Voting present was a way to satisfy those two competing interests,” Ms. Radogno said in a telephone interview.
Thom Mannard, director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, said political calculation could have figured in that vote.
“If he voted a flat-out no,” Mr. Mannard said, “somebody down the road could say Obama took this vote and was soft on crime.”
Mr. Obama’s aides said he was more concerned about whether the bill would be effective rather than with its political consequences. They did not explain why he did not just vote no.
Lawmakers and other Illinois officials said the present vote was devised to enable lawmakers to recuse themselves from voting on bills that present personal conflicts. It can also be used in the routine day-to-day wrangling in the legislature.
In at least 45 instances, Mr. Obama voted with large numbers of fellow Democrats as part of the tactical skirmishing with Republicans over the budget.
Seven other times, he voted that way as part of a broad strategy devised by abortion rights advocates to counter anti-abortion bills.
Pam Sutherland, president of Illinois Planned Parenthood Council, said Mr. Obama was one of the senators with a strong stand for abortion rights whom the organization approached about using the strategy. Ms. Sutherland said the Republicans were trying to force Democrats from conservative districts to register politically controversial no votes.
Ms. Sutherland said Mr. Obama had initially resisted the strategy because he wanted to vote against the anti-abortion measures.
“He said, ‘I’m opposed to this,’” she recalled.
But the organization argued that a present vote would be difficult for Republicans to use in campaign literature against Democrats from moderate and conservative districts who favored abortion rights.
Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general who was in the Illinois Senate with Mr. Obama from 1998 through 2002, said she and Mr. Obama voted present on the anti-abortion bills.
“It’s just plain wrong to imply that voting present reflected a lack of leadership,” Ms. Madigan said. “In fact, it was the exact opposite.”
In other present votes, Mr. Obama, who also taught law at the University of Chicago while in the State Senate, said he had concerns about the constitutionality or effectiveness of some provisions.
Among those, Mr. Obama did not vote yes or no on a bill that would allow certain victims of sexual crimes to petition judges to seal court records relating to their cases. He also voted present on a bill to impose stricter standards for evidence a judge is permitted to consider in imposing a criminal sentence.
On the sex crime bill, Mr. Obama cast the lone present vote in a 58-to-0 vote.
Mr. Obama’s campaign said he believed that the bill violated the First Amendment. The bill passed 112-0-0 in the House and 58-0-1 in the Senate.
In 2000, Mr. Obama was one of two senators who voted present on a bill on whether facts not presented to a jury could later be the basis for increasing an offender’s sentence beyond the ordinary maximum.
State Representative Jim Durkin, a Republican who was a co-sponsor of the bill, said it was intended to bring state law in line with a United States Supreme Court decision that nullified a practice of introducing new evidence to a judge in the sentencing phase of the trial, after a jury conviction on other charges.
The bill sailed through both chambers. Out of 174 votes cast in the House and Senate, two were against and two were present, including Mr. Obama’s.
“I don’t understand why you would oppose it,” Mr. Durkin said. “But I am more confused by a present vote.”
Mr. Obama’s campaign said he voted present to register his dissatisfaction with how the bill was put together. He believed, the campaign said, that the bill was rushed to the floor and that lawmakers were deprived of time to consider it.
Mr. Obama was also the sole present vote on a bill that easily passed the Senate that would require teaching respect for others in schools. He also voted present on a measure to prohibit sex-related shops from opening near schools or places of worship. It passed the Senate.
In both of those cases, his campaign said, he was trying to avoid mandates on local authorities.
Who Eats Dogs?
Caddy was an 8-month-old, 50-pound German shepherd-Labrador mix
I know nothing about this newspaper, but I have a theory that the commissars who run it elected not to publish the names of the names of the two perps because they are not Amish. We would know who they were if they fell into one category, say of European heritage. They are obviously not, so the defenders of the"oppressed de jour" must be protected from white people getting impure thoughts about them. So it goes and goes in the culture wars.
2 nabbed after dog allegedly stolen and eaten
By Nelson Daranciang Honolulu Star Bulletin
ndaranciang@starbulletin.com
.
His owners, Frank Manuma and Debbie Weil-Manuma, never had children. Debbie never even had a pet dog before. She said Caddy was their little boy.
On Sunday, Caddy was taken from them, and they know he's never coming back. They said police told them two men confessed to stealing the dog and one said the dog was slaughtered and eaten. They said that was confirmed by a third person who told police the dog was taken to his house, where it was slaughtered.
"The horrific part is knowing how he died," Weil-Manuma said, "I hope he didn't suffer. It's still kind of shocking."
She said that police told her the thieves dumped what was left of Caddy into a river when they discovered police were looking for them.
Manuma usually left Caddy at home with his wife when he went golfing in the morning and picked him up to ride along during his afternoon volunteer security shift at Barbers Point Golf Course.
Caddy got his name because he was Manuma's golf buddy. During Manuma's security shift, Caddy sat in the driver's seat and Frank drove the golf cart from the passenger's side.
But on Sunday, Manuma took Caddy with him to Moanalua Golf Club because his wife was on the mainland. She was scheduled to return that evening.
Golf club manager Stephen Burke said the club doesn't allow members to bring their pets.
"Frank is a relatively new member. He asked if he could bring it. We made an exception to allow him to bring the dog, then take it with him to work later," Burke said.
Caddy stayed on a leash at the clubhouse while Manuma was on the golf course. When Manuma returned about 11:30 a.m., Caddy was gone. All that was left was his water and food dishes.
Confident that Caddy was not lost but just with someone, Manuma went to his volunteer job while Burke looked for the dog.
Burke discovered that two maintenance workers, whose shifts ended at 11 a.m., were seen taking the dog.
"We had some members see them load the dog into the car," he said.
Burke called police and called the employees back to work and fired them on the spot. He said one had been employed for about four years and the other, three years.
Honolulu police arrested the men, 43 and 58, both of Kalihi, under suspicion of second-degree theft, a class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison and $10,000 fine. Police released them without charges Monday pending further investigation.
The Hawaiian Humane Society also is investigating the case.
"We're working with (the Honolulu Police Department) and are investigating the case from the animal cruelty aspect of it," said Kawehi Yim, Hawaiian Humane Society spokeswoman.
Cruelty to animals had been a misdemeanor under Hawaii law punishable by a maximum of one year in jail and $2,000 fine. But earlier this year state lawmakers approved legislation designating the misdemeanor offense cruelty to animals in the second degree and creating a new offense, cruelty to animals in the first degree, a class C felony. It became law June 1.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Brought to you by Time's Person of the Year
I would say to this House, as I said to those who have joined this government: "I have nothing to offer but blood toil, tears and sweat." We have before us an ordeal of the most greiveous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.Winston Churchill.
It is unfortunate that we do not have the black and white clarity developed by the existential threat of Nazi Germany on the march in 1939. Instead we are treated to Time Magazine justifications for naming Vladimir Putin as its "Person of the Year for 2007."
From Imprimus January 2007 Freedom vs. Non-Freedom: View from Russia
Andrei Illarionov Former Chief Economic Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation
The Destruction of Freedom in Russia The story of the destruction of freedom in my own country, Russia, is sad. But this story should be told, should be known, and should be remembered—to avoid repeating it and in order one day to reverse it.
First, there was an assault on the people of Chechnya. Many Russian people thought that it was not their business to defend the freedom of the Chechen people. People in Chechnya lost their independence, their political rights and many of them—their lives. Many Russians lost their lives as well.
Then there was an assault on the Russian media. This time many Russian people thought that it was not their business to defend the freedom of the media. As a result, the media lost its independence—first television channels, then radio stations and newspapers. And now the censors are turning their attention to the Internet.
Then there was an assault on private business. Many Russian people thought that it was not their business to defend the freedom of private business. So private business has lost its independence and has become subjugated to the caprice of the executive power. This has been accomplished through so-called PPPs or public private partnerships, but it would be more correct to call what is happening CPC—coercion of private business by the corporation in power.
Then there was an assault on the independence of political parties. Many Russian people thought that it was not their business to defend the independence of political parties. As a result, independent national political parties ceased to exist.
Then there was an assault on the independence of the judiciary. Many Russian people thought that it was not their business to defend the independence of the judiciary. Now, there are no more independent courts or judges in Russia.
Then there was an assault on the election of regional governors. Many Russian people thought that it was not their business to defend free elections of regional governors. Today, regional governors are appointed by the president, and there are no more independent regional authorities in the country.
Then there was an assault on the independence of non-governmental and religious organizations. Finally, some people tried to defend the freedom of these organizations, but it was too late. And now even those who want to resist have neither the resources nor the institutions required to fight back. As a result, Russia has ceased to be politically free. For 2005, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World ranks Russia 168th out of 192 countries. Transparency International’s Global Corruption Report ranks Russia 126th out of 159 countries. The World Economic Forum calculates that Russia is 85th (among 108 countries) in avoiding favoritism in government decisions, 88th (also of 108) in its protection of property rights, and 84th (of 102) when measured by the independence of the judicial system. The Russian government could form another G-8 with countries that destroyed the fundamental institutions of modern government and civil society as quickly as it did over the past 15 years by partnering with Nepal, Belarus, Tajikistan, Gambia, the Solomon Islands, Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
What is the Russian government doing now, when it has destroyed freedom and achieved next to full control over Russian society? Is it stopping its assaults? No. It continues them, both within and beyond Russia’s borders. Inside the country, the government has started a campaign against human rights. It has created and financed detachments of storm troopers—the movements “Nashi” (“Our Own”), “Mestnye” (“Locals”), and Molodaya gvardiya” (“Young Guard”)—which are being taught and trained to harass and beat political and intellectual opponents of the current regime. The days for which these storm troopers are especially trained will come soon—during the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2007 and 2008. Beyond Russia’s national borders, the government provides economic, financial, political, intellectual and moral support to new friends: leaders of non-free countries such as Belarus, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Myanmar, Algeria, Iran, and Palestinian Hamas. At the same time, Russia is attempting to destroy hard-won freedom and democracy in neighboring countries. Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia find themselves in a new cold war as Russian authorities pursue hostile policies involving visas, poultry imports, electricity, natural gas, pipelines, wine, and even mineral water. The Russian government has just started a full-scale blockade of Georgia. Meanwhile, the state-controlled Russian media has launched a propaganda war against Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Baltic countries, Europe and the United States.
What do non-free countries have in common? What unites such disparate countries as Nepal, Belarus, Tajikistan, the Solomon Islands, Gambia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Myanmar, and yes, now Russia?
Only one thing: war, in which governments take away property and destroy society, in which they send people to camps or kill them solely because they have a different perception of the world, of faith, of law, and of their homeland.
Only through hatred, fear, and electoral violence can these governments hold on to what is dearest to them—absolute power. Without freedom there can be no open discussion of topics of national and international importance. There is an exclusion from public life of conversation about the most important matters. This primitivizes public life, degrades society, and weakens the state. The politics of non-freedom is the politics of public impoverishment and of the retardation of the country’s economic growth.
The greatest practical lesson of Russia’s recent history is that freedom is indivisible. The failure of freedom in one sphere makes it harder to defend freedom in other areas. Likewise, the fall of freedom in one country is a blow to global freedom. The inability to defend freedom yesterday comes back to haunt us at a great price today and perhaps an even greater price tomorrow.
Heartwarming Stories and Warnings from the Ether
In 1986, Mike Membre was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Membre approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant's foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Membre worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments.Membre stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Membre never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.
Twenty years later, Membre was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Membre and his son Cantri were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Membre, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down.
The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.
Remembering the encounter in 1986, Membre couldn't help wondering if this was the same elephant. Membre summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Membre's legs and raised him high into the air and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.
Probably wasn't the same elephant.
***********
On a serious note, here's a 'heads up' for those men who may be regular Home Depot customers.
Over the last month I became a victim of a clever scam while out shopping. Simply going out to get supplies has turned out to be quite traumatic. Don't be naive enough to think it couldn't happen to you or your friends.
Here's how the scam works:
Two seriously good-looking 20-21 year-old girls come over to your car as you are packing your shopping into the trunk. They both start wiping your windshield with a rag and Windex, with their breasts almost falling out of their skimpy T-shirts. It is impossible not to look.
When you thank them and offer them a tip, they say 'No' and instead ask you for a ride to another Home Depot. You agree and they get in the backseat. On the way, they start undressing. Then one of them climbs over into the front seat and starts crawling all over you while the other one steals your wallet.
I had my wallet stolen September 4th, 9th, 10th, twice on the 15th, 17th, 20th, & 24th. Also October 1st, 4th, twice on the 8th, 16th, 23rd, 26th, 30th, three times last Saturday and very likely again this upcoming weekend.
So tell your friends to be careful.
The Twisted Mind and Amorality of the Left
When will a murdered white cop and his decent family get justice? When will politicians have the guts to stand up and demonstrate that there is no special deal for any race? Not soon.December 16, 2007
Murdered by Mumia
By Bob Weir American Thinker
Twenty-six years ago, a police officer was brutally murdered on the cold, dark streets of Philadelphia. Patrolman Daniel Faulkner, making a routine traffic stop at about three o'clock on the morning of December 9, 1981, was knocked to the ground and shot several times in his upper body and face.
Four eyewitnesses to the cold-blooded homicide have identified the murderer as, Wesley Cook (AKA Mumia Abu Jamal). Mr. Cook was convicted of first degree murder the following year, and sentenced to death in the Electric Chair.
Well, here we are, 25 years later, and instead of an execution, we have something akin to a coronation. Mr. Cook has received money for the sales of books written while in prison, and he has been allowed to write a column in which he regularly rants about 'racial injustice in America.' In addition, his fight against the death penalty, for which he has had the support of several Hollywood celebrities, has proved fruitful because, a few years ago, a judge reduced his penalty to life in prison. Now, his international fan club, which has succeeded in getting him named an honorary citizen of 25 cities around the world, including Montreal, Paris, and Palermo, and even naming a street after him in the Paris suburb of St. Denis, is trying to get him released.
Maureen Faulkner, widow of the slain officer, recently co-authored the book Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain and Injustice. She should know; a part of her was murdered that fateful day.
When I think about the facts of this case, I have to agree with Mr. Cook, there is racial injustice in this country. Mr. Cook, a black man, murdered Officer Faulkner, a white man, and to this date Officer Faulkner has not received justice. Cook, a former member of the Black Panthers and an avid supporter of anti-government and anti-police groups, was observed firing a shot into Faulkner's back as the officer was struggling with Cook's brother William, the driver of the vehicle. The wounded officer spun around, drew his revolver, and fired back, hitting Wesley Cook in the upper torso.
At that point, the officer fell to the ground, writhing in pain from the back wound. Mr. Cook staggered a few feet, then, walked up to the helpless cop and fired at his chest. Faulkner was twisting furiously on the ground, trying to avoid the bullets. Ultimately, Cook placed the gun barrel within inches of the cop's face and fired again. Witnesses have stated that a few quick spasms signaled the end of Faulkner's life.
Before the officer stopped the vehicle, which was going the wrong way on a one way street with its lights off, he had radioed for backup, as police procedure dictates. After Cook fired the fatal bullet, he attempted to leave the scene, but his wound kept him from going very far. He was sitting on the curb with the murder weapon in his hand when the police arrived. When warned to drop the gun, he attempted to take aim at one of the responding officers, who, rather than shoot him, knocked the gun to the ground.
At the emergency room of the hospital, as Cook was violently resisting the police who brought him there for treatment of his wound, witnesses heard Cook shout: 'I shot the mother f...... and I hope the mother f..... dies.' The witnesses who were present at the shooting scene gave signed statements to the police only minutes after the occurrence. Without deviation, each one stated that they saw Cook murder Faulkner, and that they never took their eyes off him from the time he fired the fatal shots, to the time the police arrested him, just minutes later. At the subsequent trial, the witnesses testified accordingly.
One can scarcely imagine having more evidence for a trial and conviction than the incontrovertible facts presented here. During the trial, Mumia Abu Jamal, (He became an African tribal leader as soon as he found himself in a cell) repeatedly disrupted the proceedings on a daily basis with loud outbursts and verbal threats. An extremely patient judge and prosecutor dealt with his desperate attempts to make the trial about race, even allowing him to run his own defense and interview potential jurors.
In the end, the racially mixed jury convicted Mumia of First Degree Murder and recommended the death penalty. Up to that point, the system was working. If Mumia had been taken from the courtroom, brought to the place of execution, and been forced to pay with his life, justice would have been done.
But, this is America, the country that people like Mumia and others are quick to criticize as barbarous and primitive. In this country, the system of appeals is practically endless, and the race card has more stopping power than a .44 Magnum. Who cares that Officer Faulkner has been dead and buried for 26 years? Who cares that the evidence against his murderer is flawless? Who cares that the jury only needed 3 hours to arrive at a unanimous vote for conviction? Mumia is black, and that entitles him to proclaim that the only reason for his plight is his color.
Imagine if the situation were reversed. The white guy stood over the black guy and fired bullets into his face in front of 4 witnesses. Do you think the judge and the D.A. would be so patient with his courtroom antics? How many Hollywood celebrities do you think would be making appeals to save his life? Would he still be alive and able to spread his racist dogma in newspapers and magazines? Nah! He'd be toast!!
Mumia is right. This is a racist country.
Bob Weir is a former detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department. He is the executive editor of The News Connection in Highland Village, Texas.
Britney Spears 16-year-old sister pregnant. John Edwards not the father.
She is doing the right thing and not aborting it.In politics you can tell the truth and lie at the same time. A story can be told many ways. Drudge is preparing a banner that will give John Edwards a very bad day. True or not, it will have an affect in Iowa, for no other reason than putting his electability into question. Why would anyone in their right mind want to be President?
I have a feeling that this may blow-up in Hillary's face, if the Clintons had anything to do with it. Edwards had the bad luck of this story coming out the same time as this one:
Report: Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister pregnant
NEW YORK (AP) -- Another Spears baby is reportedly on the way -- and it's not Britney's.
Jamie Lynn Spears, shown in September, stars in the popular Nickelodeon series "Zoey 101."
Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16-year-old "Zoey 101" star and sister of Britney, told OK! magazine that she's pregnant and that the father is her boyfriend, Casey Aldridge.
"It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected," she said. "I was in complete and total shock and so was he."
Spears is 12 weeks along and initially kept the news to herself when she learned of the pregnancy from an at-home test and subsequent doctor visit, she told the celebrity magazine, which hits stands in New York on Wednesday and the rest of the country by Friday.
What message does she want to send to other teens about premarital sex? "I definitely don't think it's something you should do; it's better to wait," she told the magazine. "But I can't be judgmental because it's a position I put myself in."
After she found out from a doctor that she was pregnant, she said, "I took two weeks to myself where I didn't tell anybody."
"Only one of my friends knew because I needed to work out what I would do for myself before I let anyone's opinion affect my decision. Then I told my parents and my friends. I was scared, but I had to do what was right for me," she said.
Spears broke the news to her mother, Lynne, just before Thanksgiving, the magazine reported.
"She was very upset because it wasn't what she expected at all," Spears said. "A week after, she had time to cope with it and became very supportive."
Lynne Spears, already grandmother to Britney's young sons, told the magazine: "I didn't believe it because Jamie Lynn's always been so conscientious. She's never late for her curfew. I was in shock. I mean, this is my 16-year-old baby."
She said her actress daughter, the telegenic heroine of her popular Nickelodeon series, has known Aldridge for years and began dating him in high school.
But in a recent interview with The Associated Press, Spears said she had no steady boyfriend. "I kind of just keep my options open," she said. "I have a bunch of friends that I always hang out with, a bunch of guy friends." She declined to talk about her older sister.
Spears spoke to the AP shortly before Thanksgiving, the day she told OK! she informed her mother about the pregnancy.
Jamie Lynn plans to raise the baby in her home state of Louisiana -- "so it can have a normal family life."
Nickelodeon released a statement: "We respect Jamie Lynn's decision to take responsibility in this sensitive and personal situation. We know this is a very difficult time for her and her family, and our primary concern right now is for Jamie Lynn's well being."
A publicist for the network did not immediately respond to phone and e-mail requests for additional comment.
"Zoey 101" is scheduled to conclude its third season January 4 with a cliffhanger episode in which Spears' character must decide whether to leave her fictional Pacific Coast Academy boarding school in California to join her parents in London.
The show is scheduled to resume in February, and its producer, Dan Schneider, has said filming on the fourth season has already been completed.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
All Politics is Dirty. The Clinton 3% Solution.
Barack Obama is the recipient of a very tough political strategy from the Clinton campaign. The strategy is basic: Peel off marginal constituencies. It works best in a cumulative and sequential assault.
First, remind everyone that Obama is black, that will cost him let's say 3% who will never vote black. Next, remind everyone he is or has been Muslim, another 3%. He is young and inexperienced, 3%. He admittedly used drugs and until recently was still a chain smoker, 3%. Those four together make for a 12% advantage. That is a very big deal and lethally effective. Obama has almost no defense to such a strategy.
DECEMBER 17, 2007, 9:45 PM
Kerrey Tries to Explain Obama ‘Muslim’ Remarks
By KATE PHILLIPS NYT
Yet another day, yet another Clinton campaign surrogate explaining remarks made about one of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top rivals, Senator Barack Obama.
Let’s step back for a minute. Former Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat from Nebraska and president of the New School in New York who has just endorsed Senator Clinton, said this in a dispatch (it’s the second item in the linked post) this morning from Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post:
“The fact that he’s African-American is a big deal. I do expect and hope that Hillary is the nominee of the party. But I hope he’s used in some way. If he happens to be the nominee of the party and ends up being president, I think his capacity to influence in a positive way . . . the behavior of a lot of underperforming black youth today is very important, and he’s the only one who can reach them.”
Kerrey continued: “It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”
It’s probably not something that appeals to him? We don’t think we’ve seen anywhere that Mr. Obama has disowned his name, and in fact, he recently took heat from the Clinton campaign and Senator Clinton herself for talking about his breadth of experience — uh, foreign experience — by citing the fact that he spent part of his childhood growing up in Indonesia.
Well, Mr. Kerrey’s comments rippled around on Monday, in part because the Muslim-mentions permeate the Internet and are pervasive among the derisive comments on many blogs, including our own here at the Caucus. Mr. Obama’s father was indeed Muslim, from Kenya, but the senator is a Christian, as he says over and over — an especially important point in regions like Iowa or South Carolina where Christians form an influential part of the Democratic voting base. And an especially important point given the anti-Muslim sentiments that rival those of anti-Mormonism when it comes to Republican Mitt Romney, though granted for different reasons, that waft through various Internet venues (including our own).
So today, CNN’s correspondent John King asked Mr. Kerrey in the SitRoom about those comments:
Mr. King: Now, senator, you say that at a time when Barack Obama has to go out from time to time in his events and tell people “I’m a Christian. I’m a Christian,” because he thinks there’s a smear campaign going on under the radar about who he is, trying to maybe peel some people away who might get worried about a guy named Barack Hussein Obama.
So some would say this is cynical — a new Hillary Clinton supporter doing this to try to stir this up again.
Mr. Kerrey: Well, it’s now. … And I think that he is qualified. And the two things that I liked very
much about him, that I think will add a tremendous amount of value if he becomes the nominee and gets elected is the fact that as an African-American he can speak in an authentic way to underperforming black youth, who I think will follow his example.
And, secondly, I do — there is a smear campaign going on. And people are acting as if he’s an Islamic Manchurian candidate. And I feel it’s actually a substantial strength. He is a Christian.
Both he and his family are Christians. They’ve chosen Christianity. But that connection to Indonesia and a billion Muslims on this Earth I think is a real strength and will add an awful lot of value in his foreign policy efforts.
Mr. King: Well, you have to know when you’re about to say something like that, that some will twist it, especially in this age of the Internet and blogs. Did you think about that before you talked about it, or is it Bob Kerrey saying this is what I think; I’m going to say it?
Mr. Kerrey: No, it’s something — by the way, I’ve told Barack Obama when I’ve met with him. It’s something that I’ve spoken about before. So this is not something that just sort of came out in the head-birth (right term, my question?) out there in Iowa. I’ve thought about it a great deal. I’ve watched the blogs, try to say that you can’t trust him because he spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa.
I feel quite opposite. I think it’s a tremendous strength whether he’s in the United States Senate or whether he’s in the White House. I think it’s a tremendous asset.
O.K. Reel back to last week. New Hampshire’s William Shaheen, spouse of Jeanne Shaheen, Senate candidate and former governor; he is one of the Clinton campaign’s co-chairmen who stepped down after the Clinton camp disavowed his speculation in an interview about how the Republicans would use Mr. Obama’s admitted drug use — in his youthful days, uh, into his college years, doing marijuana and cocaine — against the Democrats. It played along the riding theme that Senator Clinton is espousing again and again that she is “battle-tested,” has no surprises in her background because it’s all out there and has been vetted.
Then this week, Mr. Kerrey — however in character as he is wont to speak his mind — raises the Muslim-madrassa-middlename Hussein of Senator Obama.
Thematic? Who knows. Code? Orchestrated? Anyone’s guess. But let’s think about the cumulative effect. That is what matters. Only words are heard, seen, read … over and over. Playing into wild rumors on the Internet that the Washington Post has already been criticized for reporting a few short weeks ago.
We asked the Obama campaign for comment on Mr. Kerrey’s comments to CNN. No response coming soon, a spokesman said.
Meanwhile, we’ll wait and listen and watch. Whisper campaigns reverberate off the buzz words.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Iran’s Khomeinists are winning
Walid Phares writing at Family Security Matters.org says that this NIE is reveals "the systemic crisis" of the politicized NIE.
The NIE failed to see and explain that the 2003 decision was a change of strategy not a halt to a strategy; for the Ahmadinejad plan was to ensnare the US in Iraq so that it couldn’t destroy the process of Iran’s shifting the balance of power in its crucial early stages. Tragically, what was missed in Washington is that Tehran was building the missiles before completing the fissile. While attention was focused on the uranium enrichment process, the Pasdaran were setting up the delivery system, i.e., the actual threat system.The bomb part of the Iranian nuclear strategy was the last stage, while the missiles were the most urgent to acquire first. Strategically it makes sense, because if the Iranians had produced a weapon, it could have been taken out via airpower without the risk of a second strike (since the delivery system would have been absent). But if the missiles were obtained before, the world couldn’t intervene preemptively against them. And when the bombs were ready (through assembly or purchase) they would be locked on the rockets. At that particular time, unilateral strikes against the Iranian weapons would run the risk of Iranian missile counter attacks against the free world.Tehran played it very wisely and outmaneuvered its enemies in the West; it got away with the missiles, which are now advanced and deployed. Hence all that the Khomeinists need to achieve by the end of 2007, as their delivery systems are developed, is a conclusion in Washington that will deter it from acting against the nukes, the fusion centers, the launching ramps and other types of deployment. The NIE report has paved the way for that decision.By cleverly convincing the American intelligence community and the public that Tehran had already abandoned the whole nuclear strategy in 2003, Iran has delegitimized America’s ability to act against the missiles. Hence the field is wide open for the secret nuclear program to accelerate, as the delivery system is being completed. By the time America discovers it has been duped, the nukes will be sitting on top of the missiles. All the Jihadi strategic planners had to do was to use America’s political systems against itself. Hence, because the NIE analysts failed to provide the global context of the Iranian strategy and have been pressing for a political agenda over national security priorities, Iran’s Khomeinists are winning, regardless of who will occupy the White House in January 2008.
China Cyber Strategy Becoming Clear
It has become increasingly clear that Chinese military strategy is being devised to disable and disrupt communication technology at the highest level. The Chinese economic expansion is deeply rooted into the Chinese army. The benefits of this investment are being returned handsomely. There is no affirmative action in the People's Army. Yikes.
China Scouts Colleges to Fill Ranks of Modern Army
By Maureen Fan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 17, 2007; Page A01
BEIJING -- The fliers circulating last month on the campuses of China's most prestigious universities showed three soldiers positioned against a Chinese flag and an appeal that read in part: "Carry Your Pen to the Army to Become More Accomplished."
In ancient times, the phrase was "Throw Away Your Pen and Join the Army," a challenge to China's intellectuals to stop wasting time and help defend the country. Now, the People's Liberation Army is recruiting college students in an ambitious modernization program designed to attract smart soldiers who can handle sophisticated equipment and transform the 2.3 million-strong force into a high-tech adversary.
Zhou Hao, left, and Tan Zhenwen are juniors at Tsinghua University who have signed up for the army. Zhou, who wants to work in government after college, said, "I think my experience in the army will help me to get a position." (Courtesy Of Zhou Hao)
"With the rise of China, China needs a powerful army," said Tan Zhenwen, a junior at Tsinghua University in Beijing who recently headed to Guangdong province to join the South China Sea Fleet. " . . . I don't worry about the low social status of soldiers. With more and more college students joining the army, the situation is changing and getting better."
While China's rising diplomatic power has helped fuel a desire for a more professional army, military commanders also need highly educated soldiers to maintain the "information-based" military power that has become increasingly important -- both internationally and as a means to dissuade Taiwan from declaring independence.
Domestically, the army already has come a long way. A military that 18 years ago was most readily associated with the shooting of protesters in Tiananmen Square is increasingly helping in relief efforts after floods and other natural disasters. The army has also been the driving force behind recent achievements in space exploration.
In a speech in August marking the 80th anniversary of the army, President Hu Jintao called for accelerated modernization of weapons and equipment, enhanced personnel training and strengthening of combat capabilities through technology.
One of the most important aspects of the modernization is a huge effort to shed the impoverished farmhands who have traditionally signed on as a way to ensure three solid meals a day. The once-bloated force had 4.2 million people two decades ago but has gradually reduced its infantry. It has, however, increased the number of personnel who serve in the navy, air force and Second Artillery Corps, which maintains China's nuclear missiles.
The army now advertises itself as an opportunity for young people to acquire technical skills and experience not easily attained in the private sector. This year, for the first time, the army took out full-page advertisements in newspapers. The ads featured an astronaut, a naval college professor and Peking University's first recruit since its students began signing up in 2005.
Six years ago, 26 universities produced roughly 1,400 army recruits through a special government program similar to the U.S. military's Reserve Officers' Training Corps, or ROTC. This year, the program has grown to include 110 universities, and officials hope to recruit 11,000 students, including some majoring in philosophy, law and medicine.
"Compared with the private sector, army salaries are not very high. But in recent years, the army has increased the salary for soldiers and officers," said Li Shengqiang, an officer at the army's Beijing Recruitment Office. "Because the army is trying to equip itself with advanced weapons and equipment, the quality and knowledge of soldiers has become correspondingly higher. . . . In the 1980s, primary school graduates could join the army. But now, no way."
Recruits are lured by financial incentives and programs that allow students to return to university after two years in the army with preferential standing for graduate school. Officials have introduced psychological tests to weed out unsuitable candidates and imposed penalties for ineligible applicants who try to bribe their way in. Also this year, for the first time candidates who want to be air force pilots must pass a language test in English or Russian.
Undergraduates from outside Beijing may be offered Beijing residency, an important perk, in exchange for two years of service, according to a proposal now under discussion, said another recruitment official who spoke on condition of anonymity because a decision has not been announced.
For Zhou Hao, 20, a third-year journalism student at Tsinghua University, joining the army had been a childhood dream. He was unaware that university students were eligible until he spotted a recruitment poster and discovered financial rewards for signing up. Last week he headed off to join the Second Artillery Group in Chuxiong city, Yunnan province.
"I prefer to work for the government after I graduate, and I think my experience in the army will help me to get a position," Zhou said. "I don't think I really give up anything for the army. But one thing is that more eyes will look at you. So, there must be more pressure, which will force me to do my best."
Zhou Hao, left, and Tan Zhenwen are juniors at Tsinghua University who have signed up for the army. Zhou, who wants to work in government after college, said, "I think my experience in the army will help me to get a position." (Courtesy Of Zhou Hao)
China's growing military budget has generated intense debate in Washington, where some analysts believe China's defense spending is much higher than the $45.3 billion officially earmarked.
Whatever the amount, one Beijing-based military expert added that some of that money is going toward China's military education system.
"We didn't use all those funds just for missiles or defense" but also for "better welfare" for troops, the expert said, noting that more than $1 million has been spent recently on uniforms.
"Maybe five years ago IBM had the most advantage. Most students wouldn't have joined the army. But now the situation is different," he said. "The army now offers higher salaries, higher status than before and more opportunities for advancement. If you wore the uniform before, maybe you couldn't get a girlfriend. Now, even that's different."
In addition, with an increasingly competitive job market, a growing number of college graduates are finding it difficult to secure a stable job with a good salary. Many are beginning to think two years of army experience will give them advantages over other candidates. Others worry that their lives are too comfortable and that they're unprepared for the world.
"Most young people my age have only focused on their studies since childhood. We are relatively delicate and fragile," said Jia Na, 21, a journalism student at Tsinghua University. "When you enter society, there are even bigger hardships. If I join the army and experience hardship, I will be well-prepared to face challenges in society."
Jia, from Shanxi province, is the first from her peasant family to attend university. She signed up after speaking with another Tsinghua student who had returned to campus after two years in the army.
"A teacher who knew him before said he had changed a lot in two years. I found his attitude to be serious and precise and his stories about the army impressed me," Jia said. "He said the labor in the last two years was more than all the work he'd done in his first 18 years of life."
Last week she packed her bags and headed for an East China Sea Fleet base in Zhejiang province, taking jeans, a sweater and a few books. She left behind her makeup, most of her clothes, her computer and her MP3 player.
Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Russia Unhinged, Needlessly.
It does not take much to rattle the inner paranoia so close and near to the Russian heart. It is always there. I don't know why it is there and to be honest it is not important. It is and that is all that matters. The Clinton and Bush Administrations needlessly and recklessly were too much in Russia's face. Nato expansion, Kosovo and missile defense were all pursued with an abandonment of thought. The thinking should have been simple, "What is the upside and what is the downside of various acts towards Russia?"
Was the expansion of Nato necessary to make Europe safer and did it make for a more reliable military partner? One only has to look at the paltry, timid and anemic participation of Germany in the Afghan war to come to the conclusion that the trade was a bad one.
The downside is apparent. Russia has become unnecessarily agitated. Nato has not been strengthened and neither has US security. The US taxpayer will foot the bill for another three or four hundred billion in unnecessary military systems that will never be used for a problem that need not to have existed.
We won the Cold War at a considerable cost with remarkably few casualties. It is a victory and peace that should have been understood and built upon. Instead we have non-problems being raised to a crisis of confidence. What fools we have for those that rule us.
General says U.S. looking for fight
By Mike Eckel The Washington Times
December 16, 2007
Baluyevsky
General says U.S. looking for fight
By Mike Eckel The Washington Times
December 16, 2007
Baluyevsky
MOSCOW (AP) — Russia's top military officer yesterday accused the United States of seeking direct confrontation with Moscow and warned again that U.S. plans to deploy missile defenses in Europe would destabilize the continent.
Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky spoke at a joint press conference along with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak, who repeated that Russia would not increase troop levels on its western border even after suspending participation in a key arms treaty.
Among the issues that have most undermined Russian-U.S. relations in recent years is a U.S. plan to put elements of a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic — former Warsaw Pact members that have joined NATO.
Russia has claimed the system will be used to spy on Russian missile and military forces; Washington says it will help defend Europe from a potential missile attack from Iran.
Gen. Baluyevsky said the U.S. missile defense plan would destabilize Europe and he repeated sharp warnings that Russia would respond in some fashion.
"We plan and, depending on the situation, will take appropriate and asymmetric measures aimed at preventing the deterioration of our defense capability," Gen. Baluyevsky was quoted as saying by Interfax. There was no explanation of what he meant by asymmetric.
Gen. Baluyevsky, the chief of Russia's general staff, said U.S. Defense Department policies continued to challenge Moscow openly.
"The question of confrontation with Russia, mildly speaking, including direct confrontation, unfortunately has not been struck from the agenda by my colleagues at the Pentagon," he told reporters. He did not elaborate.
On Wednesday, Moscow formally suspended participation in the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty, which limits the deployment of tanks, aircraft and other heavy weapons across the Continent.
Officials have said the moratorium was not a threat, but rather an effort to persuade NATO nations to ratify a 1999 update of the pact.
Mr. Kislyak repeated that Russia did not intend to increase its force levels on the western border despite the moratorium.
Joey Vento - Philly Cheesteak Warrior
This is America, when ordering; "Speak English"
Vento steaks his claim: Sign isn't discriminatory
By WILLIAM BENDER
Philadelphia Daily News
benderw@phillynews.com 215-854-5255
IT DOESN'T take a six-hour public hearing like yesterday's to know that Geno's Steaks owner Joey Vento and the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission have different approaches to dealing with the city's immigrants.
The commission, which enforces civil-rights laws and mediates inter-group disputes, distributes pamphlets that ask, "Are you a victim of discrimination?" - in seven languages.
Vento earns most of his cash selling one thing - cheesesteaks - and he wants you to order in one language.
"This is America. When ordering, please speak English."
That's what the sign says at Vento's South Philly sandwich shop on 9th Street and Passyunk Avenue.
But is there anything wrong with "The Sign"? Specifically, does it violate the city's Fair Practices Ordinance by discriminating against immigrants and non-English speakers who frequent Vento's business?
That question wasn't answered yesterday at the Arch Street Meeting House, where a three-person panel heard more than six hours of testimony from witnesses for the HRC, which wants the sign removed, and Vento, who refuses to comply.
A ruling won't come for at least a couple of months, said Joseph Centeno, who chaired yesterday's hearing panel. The panel will make a recommendation to the full commission, but the parties have about 60 days to file post-hearing briefs.
Vento, sporting a black leather jacket and lots of bling, showed up yesterday ready for battle, with his Atlanta-based legal team and dozens of supporters at his side. The sign, he said, posted more than two years ago, is designed to make a political statement and keep the line moving at the world-famous Geno's Steaks.
When Vento was called to testify, the 68-year-old grandson of Italian immigrants started paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt so quickly that the court reporter had to ask him to slow down.
"To be an American, you have to be American and nothing else. For if you say you're something else, then you're not a true American," Vento said, drawing on the words of the 26th president.
"I'm an American of Italian descent," he said. "I'm not an Italian-American."
More than 100 people attended the hearing, which had a trial-like atmosphere and ran so late that the staff of the historic meeting house wanted to close the place down.
There were pro-immigration groups, Vento loyalists and even some tears from one of his attorneys during the closing arguments - all over a 4-inch-by-9-inch bumper sticker that asks customers to order their food in English.
Paul Hummer, the attorney prosecuting the complaint against Vento on behalf of the HRC, said the sign "discriminates on the basis of national origin because national origin and language are linked."
Hummer drew parallels between Vento's English-only policy and the Jim Crow era in the segregated South. He argued that it violates the section of the city's Fair Practices Ordinance that prohibits places of public accommodation from withholding services based on race, color, ancestry and other classifications.
"Philadelphia is better than this," said Regan Cooper of the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition. "We can and should live up to our ideals as the City of Brotherly Love."
Another sign at Geno's that says employees have the right to refuse service to any customer, but Vento said it has been there for about 20 years and is not related to the speak-English sign. He testified that he has never turned anyone away because he couldn't order in English."Nobody goes away without a sandwich," Vento said.
"Do you think I'm stupid? I built the business from six dollars into a multimillion-dollar business . . . And you're gonna tell me I'm refusing service to people and I'm that successful?" he asked. "Well, if I am, I'm a very lucky guy and I should be on a plane to Las Vegas 'cause I'll probably break Las Vegas with this kinda luck."
Hummer countered that the sign "implies" that you can't get a cheesesteak there if you can't speak English, and is therefore discriminatory.
Meanwhile, Vento's business has been "phenomenal" since the controversy erupted last year, he said.
Vento, who still works the early-morning shift at his shop, has become an unlikely authority in the national immigration debate and probably the only cheesesteak vendor in the country whose presidential endorsement carries any weight. (He's backing Republican Rudy Giuliani, who visited Geno's in October.)
But, Vento said, he still doesn't understand all the fuss.
"The people that are protesting, I don't know where they're coming from," he said. "I'm not asking anybody to recite the Declaration of Independence." *
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Ho Down. Al Charlatan Under Investigation.
King Maker or King Fish?
Videotape shows Sharpton cutting a deal
By John Shiffman
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
With a hidden FBI camera rolling inside a New York hotel suite in 2003, an unsuspecting Rev. Al Sharpton, Democratic candidate for president, spoke candidly.
Sharpton offered to help Philadelphia fund-raiser Ronald A. White win a multimillion-dollar business deal, if White helped him raise $50,000 for politics.
White offered $25,000. "If you bring my guys up on this hedge fund, and I have the right conversation," White said, "I'll give you what you need."
"Cool," Sharpton said.
The Inquirer obtained an account of the May 9, 2003, conversation, which was recorded as part of the Philadelphia City Hall corruption case. The tape helped spark a separate inquiry into Sharpton's 2004 campaign and his civil-rights organization, the National Action Network. The FBI-IRS probe resurfaced publicly Wednesday, when Sharpton aides received subpoenas.
In an interview yesterday, Sharpton said there is "absolutely nothing illegal" about tying business deals to fund-raising because he is not a public official.
"The tapes vindicate me," Sharpton said. "They show that I did not talk about bribing a public official or paying money under the table."
The video was recorded by an FBI camera hidden in a lamp inside Suite 34A at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. Sharpton and White were introduced by La-Van Hawkins, a Detroit businessman.
At the time, FBI agents were investigating White and Hawkins, suspecting that they were involved in pay-to-play in Philadelphia - raising campaign funds for Mayor Street and others in order to win municipal contracts for favored donors. Later FBI agents in the case infamously placed a bug in Street's office, but it was discovered before it recorded anything.
FBI agents tapping White's phones in 2003 recorded more than 20 conversations between White and Sharpton, most of them related to fund-raising for the presidential campaign and an effort to secure a $40 million pension-fund deal in New York.
About a year later, White, Hawkins and a dozen others, including former City Treasurer Corey Kemp, were indicted in Philadelphia on federal pay-to-play corruption charges.
White died before trial. Hawkins was convicted of fraud and perjury and sentenced to 33 months. Kemp is serving a 10-year sentence for corruption, bribery and fraud.
No charges were brought related to Sharpton or the proposed New York pension-fund deal, which never materialized.
However, as The Inquirer reported in 2005, the New York-based investigation of Sharpton has continued. Sources said agents in that case are examining whether Sharpton violated campaign-finance laws or used money donated to his National Action Network for personal use.
FBI spokesman James Margolin in New York declined to comment yesterday.
When Sharpton and White teamed up in 2003, each had a need and a talent. Sharpton had access to business and government officials, and needed help fund-raising for his fledgling national campaign. White had access to campaign donors and was always looking for connections into business and government deals.
To qualify for matching federal funds in the presidential campaign, Sharpton needed to raise $5,000 in each of 20 states. According to a spreadsheet created by White's office staff, White and Hawkins raised contributions for Sharpton in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. White solicited funds from donors in Texas, New Jersey, Alabama and Maryland, and made plans to raise money in a half dozen other states.
Some contributors, however, were reluctant to help White contribute to Sharpton because they didn't want their names attached to the controversial preacher in public records. One businessman in Philadelphia is heard on one wiretap expressing such concern. White convinced him to move the money through White's political action committee instead.
On a few calls, Hawkins expressed his concern about Sharpton's shortcomings as a candidate. He was sloppy with campaign finances, Hawkins said, worrying that some campaign funds might get mixed with personal or National Action Network funds.
"He's a train wreck - a plane crash waiting to happen," Hawkins told White.
During the 2003 hotel meeting, Sharpton also discussed the wisdom of raising funds for voter-registration outreach because, unlike candidate contributions, there are no fund-raising or spending limits on them.
In May 2004, the FEC ruled that the Sharpton campaign had to repay $100,000 in matching funds because he spent more than twice as much as allowed of his own money on his campaign.
In the interview yesterday, Sharpton said that he has heard some of the wiretaps and they are not incriminating. He said his campaign finance reports show that he has done nothing wrong.
"It's not illegal for me to help guys get contracts . . . making introductions for Mr. White and Mr. Hawkins, if they help me raise money," Sharpton said. "I'm not a public official."
"You can make tapes sound like whatever you want," he said, "but the timing of this is ridiculous."
Sharpton was referring to his recent protests and commentary about the racial controversy in Jena, La., involving six black teenagers accused of beating a white classmate.
"This is government harassment," he said. "I knew this investigation would come back when we started the Jena protests."
Of the investigation, Sharpton predicted, "It went nowhere three years ago and it's going nowhere now."
Bali: The Ugly American
Everywhere in the media, the Bali Climate Change Summit is being characterised as a victory for the Climate Hysterics. The recalcitrant United States has been forced to kneel and victory has been snatched from the jaws of defeat.
Except that doesn't seem to the real story. It looks as if all that has occurred is that the United States has agreed to continue talking.
Well, they didn't get them. The US didn't get all it wanted either, which was the inclusion of developing nations particularly China and India in the agreement. See this BBC analysis. Although disappointed that firm carbon reduction goals were not agreed to in Bali, the Greens will use what was agreed to as a cudgel over the course of the next two years. The BBC reports:Despite an aggressive EU-led campaign to include specific emissions reduction targets for industrial nations _ by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 _ the final road map has none.
The guidelines were eliminated after the U.S., joined by Japan and others, argued that targets should come at the end of the two-year negotiations, not the beginning.
The agreement, by consensus among some 190 nations, was nonetheless hailed as a crucial development in the world's struggle to come to grips with global warming, which scientists say will lead to widespread drought, floods, higher sea levels and worsening storms.
"This is a real breakthrough, a real opportunity for the international community to successfully fight climate change," said U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer. "Parties have recognized the urgency of action on climate change."
Environmentalists welcomed the final agreement, though some complained the document lacked specific emissions targets and did not include strong commitments for rich countries to provide poorer ones with green technology.
"The people of the world wanted more. They wanted binding targets," said Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace Brazil.
The "Bali roadmap" initiates a two-year process of negotiations designed to agree a new set of emissions targets to replace those in the Kyoto Protocol. The EU had pressed for a commitment that industrialised nations should commit to cuts of 25-40% by 2020, a bid that was implacably opposed by a bloc containing the US, Canada and Japan.The final text does not mention specific emissions targets, but does acknowledge that "deep cuts in global emissions will be required to achieve the ultimate objective" of avoiding dangerous climate change.
It also says that a delay in reducing emissions will make severe climate impacts.
Is the GOP Launching a Ship to Go Down In?
Huck and Barack on their new adventure.Huckacide
By Rich Lowry
December 14, 2007
The ghost of Howard Dean haunts the pundit class. As soon as a candidate of either party spikes up in the polls, he is compared with Dean, who had a spectacular boomlet in the second half of 2003 only to deflate as soon as people began to vote in early 2004.
After many false prophecies, Dean circa 2008 has finally arrived. He is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Not because he will inevitably blow himself up in Iowa. But because, like Dean, his nomination would represent an act of suicide by his party.
Like Dean, Huckabee is an under-vetted former governor who is manifestly unprepared to be president of the United States. Like Dean, he is rising toward the top of polls in a crowded field based on his appeal to a particular niche of his party. As with Dean, his vulnerabilities in a general election are so screamingly obvious that it's hard to believe that primary voters, once they focus seriously on their choice, will nominate him.
The GOP's social conservatism inarguably has been an enormous benefit to the party throughout the past 30 years, winning over conservative Democrats and lower-income voters who otherwise might not find the Republican limited-government message appealing. That said, nominating a Southern Baptist pastor running on his religiosity would be rather overdoing it. Social conservatism has to be part of the Republican message, but it can't be the message in its entirety.
Someone needs to tell Huckabee. His first TV ads in Iowa touted him as a "Christian leader," and his target audience of evangelicals has responded. But according to a Pew poll released in early December, only 1 in 7 nonevangelical Republicans support him in Iowa and 1 in 20 nonevangelicals in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Huckabee has declared that he doesn't believe in evolution. Even if there are many people in America who agree with him, his position would play into the image of Republicans as the anti-science party. This would tend to push away independents and upper-income Republicans. In short, Huckabee would take a strength of the GOP and, through overplaying it, make it a weakness.
He'd do the same on taxes. In general, the public tends to support Democratic proposals for bigger government, which Republicans counter by saying that the proposals will require higher taxes. Huckabee will be equipped poorly to make this traditional Republican comeback, given his tax-raising history in Arkansas. Huckabee tries to compensate with a sales-tax scheme that allows him to say he supports eliminating the IRS, but is so wildly implausible that it would be a liability in a general election.
Then, there's national security, the Republican trump card during the Cold War and after 9/11. Huckabee not only has zero national-security credentials, he basically has no foreign-policy advisers either, as a New York Times Magazine piece this Sunday makes clear. In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in September, Huckabee struck notes seemingly borrowed from Barack Obama, hitting the Bush administration for its "bunker mentality" and strongly supporting direct talks with Iran. A foreign-policy debate with a Democratic nominee would be a competition over who can promise to be nicer to foreign countries.
None of this is a winning formula. Huckabee has been running his campaign out of his back pocket, and has done it extremely well. There's a reason, though, that serious candidates surround themselves with policy experts. It's necessary to running a campaign based on more than sound bites. Wherever you scratch Huckabee on policy, he seems an inch deep. Do Republicans really want to enter what is already a tough political year with a candidate apparently allergic to preparation, and who has shown no predilection for organizing or fundraising, when he can do cable TV appearances instead?
Democrats have to be looking at Huckabee the way Republicans once regarded Dean -- as a shiny Christmas present that is too good to be true.
Friday, December 14, 2007
The Bali Roundup
Gore hits at US over climate change
By John Aglionby in Nusa Dua, Bali and agencies
Published: December 13 2007 13:35 | Last updated: December 13 2007 14:52
Al Gore savaged the US government’s “obstructing” attitude and urged delegates at the UN conference on climate change to ignore Washington if necessary to pursue the “moral imperative” of a new global regime.
“My country is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali,” the former US vice-president told 2,000 of the 12,000 people attending the conference on Thursday. “[But] over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now.”
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Global Carbon Tax Urged at UN Climate Conference
BALI, Indonesia – A global tax on carbon dioxide emissions was urged to help save the Earth from catastrophic man-made global warming at the United Nations climate conference. A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”
“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, told Inhofe EPW Press Blog following the panel discussion titled “A Global CO2 Tax.” Schwank is a consultant with the Switzerland based Mauch Consulting firm
Schwank said at least “$10-$40 billion dollars per year” could be generated by the tax, and wealthy nations like the U.S. would bear the biggest burden based on the “polluters pay principle.”
The U.S. and other wealthy nations need to “contribute significantly more to this global fund,” Schwank explained. He also added, “It is very essential to tax coal.”
The UN was presented with a new report from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment titled “Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation.” The report stated there was an “urgent need” for a global tax in order for “damages [from climate change] to be kept from growing to truly catastrophic levels, especially in vulnerable countries of the developing world.”
The tens of billions of dollars per year generated by a global tax would “flow into a global Multilateral Adaptation Fund” to help nations cope with global warming, according to the report.
Schwank said a global carbon dioxide tax is an idea long overdue that is urgently needed to establish “a funding scheme which generates the resources required to address the dimension of challenge with regard to climate change costs.”
'Diminish future prosperity'
However, ideas like a global tax and the overall UN climate agenda met strong opposition Thursday from a team of over 100 prominent international scientists who warned the UN that attempting to control the Earth's climate was "ultimately futile."
The scientists wrote, “The IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions." The scientists, many of whom are current or former members of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sent the December 13 letter to the UN Secretary-General. (See: Over 100 Prominent Scientists Warn UN Against 'Futile' Climate Control Efforts – LINK)
‘Redistribution of wealth’
The environmental group Friends of the Earth, in attendance in Bali, also advocated the transfer of money from rich to poor nations on Wednesday.
“A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources,” said Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth.
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A bureaucrat's dream'MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen warned about these types of carbon regulations earlier this year. "Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat's dream. If you control carbon, you control life," Lindzen said in March 2007. (LINK)
In addition, many critics have often charged that proposed tax and regulatory “solutions” were more important to the promoters of man-made climate fears than the accuracy of their science.
Former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth reportedly said in 1990, "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." (LINK)
(LINK)
Will the Real Barack Obama Please Stand Up?
Shelby Steele offers some insight into Mr. Obama.
People do well because they are loved and because much is asked of them--not because they are black or white. Their own sense of responsibility is always their greatest asset. Whatever consolations blackness may offer, it is not an agent. It does nothing. And there is indeed a "fresh" politics to be made from these simple truths. Who better to do this than Barack Obama? Here, within his own actual experience, is his chance to deliver the "freshness" that so many Americans look for in him.
Caught in the Middle
But Obama is not likely to take this path. He is a man bound by forces outside himself and by a practice that is central to the minority experience in America: masking. As the word itself makes clear, the mask is not an authentic representation of one's true self; rather it is a presentation of the self that angles for advantage. Today we blacks have two great masks that we wear for advantage in the American mainstream: bargaining and challenging.
Bargainers make a deal with white Americans that gives whites the benefit of the doubt: I will not rub America's history of racism in your face, if you will not hold my race against me. Especially in our era of political correctness, whites are inevitably grateful for this bargain that spares them the shame of America's racist past. They respond to bargainers with gratitude, warmth, and even affection. This "gratitude factor" can bring the black bargainer great popularity. Oprah Winfrey is the most visible bargainer in America today.
Challengers never give whites the benefit of the doubt. They assume whites are racist until they prove otherwise. And whites are never taken off the hook until they (institutions more than individuals) give some form of racial preference to the challenger. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are today's best known challengers. Of course, most blacks can and do go both ways, but generally we tend to lean one way or another.
Barack Obama is a plausible presidential candidate today because he is a natural born bargainer. Obama--like Oprah--is an opportunity for whites to think well of themselves, to give themselves one of the most self-flattering feelings a modern white can have: that they are not racist. He is the first to apply the bargainer's charms to presidential politics. Sharpton and Jackson were implausible presidential candidates because they suffered the charmlessness of challengers. Even given white guilt, no one wants to elect a scold.
But the great problem for Obama is that today's black identity is grounded in challenging. This is the circumstance that makes him a bound man. If he tries to win the black vote by taking on a posture of challenging, he risks losing the vote of whites who like him precisely because he does not challenge. And if his natural bargaining wins white votes, he risks losing black votes to Hillary Clinton. Why? Because Hillary Clinton always identifies with black challengers like Al Sharpton. This makes her "blacker" than Barack Obama.
There is only one way out of this bind for this still young politician. He has to drop all masks, all obsessions with identity, all his fears of being called a sell-out, and very carefully come to reveal what he truly believes as an individual. This is what America really expects from Barack Obama.
Blacks Vote Black..."Golly gee, I didn't even notice Obama was black."
Too bad for the liberals. Their diverse inclusive world vision occassionaly gets occluded when they catch a glimpse of reality. Despite her inter-racial marriage to the first black president, Hil learns that "blood" is thicker than water. Blacks know a brother when they see one and the twista-sista looks like Miss Anne. Too bad, I thought only whites were racially sensitive or is that insensitive?
More Blacks Lean Toward Obama
Shift in Allegiance From Clinton
Could Tighten Primaries in South
By JONATHAN KAUFMAN and VALERIE BAUERLEIN WSJ
December 14, 2007
Barack Obama's rising poll numbers among white voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are having an unexpected ripple effect: Some black voters are switching their allegiance from Hillary Clinton and lining up behind him too. That could mean a further tightening of the Democratic presidential race, especially in southern states where blacks make up as many as half of Democratic primary voters.
The evidence of movement is most clear in South Carolina, site of the first primary where black votes figure to make a significant impact. There, four polls now show Illinois Sen. Obama with a lead among African-American voters for the Jan. 26 vote. As a result, the race in South Carolina has tightened, with some polls calling it a dead heat. A Rasmussen poll completed last week among South Carolina voters shows Mr. Obama now attracting 51% of the African-American vote, compared with 27% for Mrs. Clinton. A month ago, the candidates were tied among South Carolina black voters. Along with other polls, Rasmussen shows the two candidates essentially tied among all South Carolina voters.
Readings of the national black vote are less clear, but there are suggestions of movement there also. A Pew Research poll completed late last month shows New York Sen. Clinton and Mr. Obama virtually tied among black voters nationwide; two months ago Mrs. Clinton held a 12-point advantage. But an ABC News/Washington Post poll this week shows Mrs. Clinton still with a commanding lead among African-Americans nationwide.
"We're in a better position today than ever before, and a significant amount is due to the movement of African-American voters," says Steve Hildebrand, Mr. Obama's deputy campaign chairman.
But some analysts say Mrs. Clinton may do well because many of her black supporters are women and senior citizens who typically turn out for primaries in high numbers. "Hillary's voters are likely to vote," says Ron Lester, a Democratic pollster who has done extensive work polling African-Americans in the South. "That is going to help her hold her own."
The black vote is likely to be crucial in the cascade of primaries that follow Iowa and New Hampshire next year. Blacks make up almost half of Democratic primary voters in South Carolina and Georgia, one third in Virginia and a quarter in Tennessee. They also make up a fifth of primary voters in New York and 15% in Delaware and Ohio.
A big factor behind the rise in black support for Mr. Obama in South Carolina appears to be his popularity among white voters, though he is also expanding his outreach to black voters, and many of his views, especially his opposition to the Iraq war and support of social programs, resonate strongly with them.
"I see how [Obama's] charisma is among other races," says Ed Robinson, owner of Posh soul-food restaurant in downtown Florence, S.C. "He has been able to attract people from all races." Mr. Robinson said he strongly considered backing Mrs. Clinton but has now decided to back Mr. Obama.
"A lot of African-Americans in the South have questions about whether a black candidate can be elected president," says David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which studies black issues. "Picking someone who is going to have a good chance to win is very much on their minds. If Obama shows he can win and that white voters can vote for him, there will be a lot of African-Americans who will be lining up to support him."
Mrs. Clinton initially built a big lead among black voters based in part on her husband's popularity. She also won a plethora of early endorsements from prominent black ministers and politicians, including civil-rights icon and Georgia Rep. John Lewis.
But now Mr. Obama is making a big push for the black vote. His political director in South Carolina is a popular 34-year-old black former college-football star at the University of South Carolina who lists "old-school hip hop" as his favorite music on his MySpace page. The Obama campaign began running TV commercials in the state in the past two weeks but has been airing radio spots on 36 African-American radio stations for three months.
The campaign says it has won the endorsement of more than 100 black ministers -- a response to Mrs. Clinton's early endorsement by dozens of black ministers -- and named "congregation captains" in churches to get out the vote. In South Carolina and elsewhere, Michelle Obama has emerged as a powerful advocate for her husband among blacks, especially among black women.
Mr. Obama is reaching out to blacks nationally as well. He recently took Rev. Al Sharpton, the former presidential candidate and black activist, out to a publicized lunch, and he held a fund-raiser at Harlem's Apollo Theater.
At the Apollo, black comedian Chris Rock rallied blacks to support Mr. Obama: "You'd be real embarrassed if he won and you wasn't down with it. You'd say, 'aw man, I can't call him now. I had that white lady. What was I thinking?' "
Mr. Obama has also benefited from a storm of publicity surrounding his rise in the Iowa polls and his appearance with Oprah Winfrey. His appearance with Ms. Winfrey in South Carolina drew more than 20,000 people, making it the largest political event in the state's history.
Nationally, far more African Americans cite Mr. Obama (51%) than Clinton (27%) as the candidate they have heard the most about recently, according to a poll released yesterday by Pew Research. In November, these figures were roughly the reverse, with 50% naming Mrs. Clinton and 15%, Mr. Obama. Whites were also more likely to name Mr. Obama this month compared with last month, but the increase wasn't as great -- 23% this month, up from 9% in November.
Billy D. Williams, a retired African-American interior decorator in South Carolina, supported Bill Clinton twice for president but says he is supporting Mr. Obama now because "it's time for a change. I'm not talking about a change like the Republicans slap on us, but I'm talking about a real change."
He says Mr. Obama's support of education is critical, because the predominantly black schools in rural eastern South Carolina are failing.
Mr. Obama's efforts to woo black voters could create challenges for a candidate who has so far minimized the issue of race.
"To some extent, white voters like Obama because he is nonracial and they are used to candidates like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton" who are more confrontational and emphasize black issues, says Mr. Lester, the pollster, who is African-American.
At the same time, says Mr. Lester, "when Obama goes south, he will have to make extra efforts to get black voters. How that will play with white voters will be very interesting."
India Subscribes to Star Wars
Our world is changing at a mind numbing pace, whether it be in science, economics, technology or in this case, military power. India, through a new missile defense program is taking a step that puts her in line to be a super regional military power. This cannot go unnoticed and not responded to by China, Russia, Japan, Pakistan, Iran and many of the increasingly super wealthy Gulf States. It has major implications for US Asian strategy.
A country with great defensive power tangentially achieves a greater offensive capability. It is not clear to me that there is anything the US should or could do about these changes. It highlights the futility of a contemplated military strike against Iran for the purpose of eliminating any nuclear weapons system. Advanced military equipment is too widely available and spreading to countries that would have been incomprehensible to military planners a generation ago. It is a very sobering development. This article from the left leaning Guardian is obviously opposed to any missile defense programs but gives a good brief synopsis of the implications of the program.
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· Missile defence would protect big cities by 2010
· Plan revealed as Pakistan tests short-range missile
Randeep Ramesh, South Asia correspondent
Friday December 14, 2007
The Guardian
India aims to have a missile defence system able to track and shoot down incoming warheads by 2010, scientists in the capital announced yesterday, in a move that analysts say could spark a new arms race in the region.
The announcement would see India join an elite club of countries that have such military capabilities - with the US, Russia and Israel. It came just days after Pakistan tested a cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
India's top military scientist, Dr VK Saraswat of India's Defence Research and Development Organisation, said: "If I keep quiet and wait for [a missile] to fall on my city and then start sending my own deterrent missile ... a lot of damage is done. It is essential you have a system which will first take on that kind of a threat.
"Because we have a ballistic missile defence system ... a country which has a small arsenal will think twice before it ventures," he added, in an apparent reference to nuclear-armed rival Pakistan.
Last week the Indian military demonstrated its missile defence systems by shooting down a warhead off its east coast. Saraswat said that within three years, major cities such as Delhi and Mumbai would be under a protective shield.
India is also beefing up its armoury. It has announced a nuclear-capable missile with a range of 3,700 miles - far enough to hit Beijing or Rome.
Analysts say Pakistan's rapid build-up of short- and medium-range missiles is of special concern to India despite an ongoing peace process between the two.
K Subrahmanyan, a writer on defence issues, said that India needed to raise the "uncertainty levels for Pakistan".
"Pakistan is acquiring advanced missile technology from China. No missile defence system is perfect, but if we can knock out three out of every five warheads, it means our adversary has to fire more rockets. It is a means of deterrence."
Analysts in Pakistan say such thinking is hastening an arms race. "The first impulse is to ask how does Pakistan get [a missile defence system]," said Ayesha Siddiqa, a defence analyst. "The next will be to increase the number of missiles to make sure it has enough to evade the shield."
Other countries are also racing to develop "Star Wars" technologies. This year, after Tokyo saw North Korea test ballistic missiles and conduct a nuclear test, Japan's parliament authorised $2.5bn (£1.3bn) to develop a missile defence system. The US, which has run 36 missile defence tests since 2001, has authorised an annual spend of a half a trillion dollars on a missile shield.
There are no indications of the cost of the Indian missile defence system, but many analysts say there are better uses for India's money. "The US can afford such follies, but a developing country like India cannot," said Bharat Karnad from Delhi's Centre for Policy Research. "We should be getting more missiles, not finding ways of shooting them down."
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Baseball Hall of Shame. Cheats and Liars All?
Everyone of these players, if the charges hold, are guilty of infractions greater than that of Pete Rose.PLAYERS NAMED IN THE REPORT INCLUDE:
Chad Allen
Rick Ankiel
David Bell
Mike Bell
Marvin Benard
Gary Bennett, Jr.
Larry Bigbie
Barry Bonds
Kevin Brown
Paul Byrd
Jose Canseco
Mark Carreon
Jason Christiansen
Howie Clark
Roger Clemens
Jack Cust
Brendan Donnelly
Chris Donnels
Lenny Dykstra
Bobby Estalella
Matt Franco
Ryan Franklin
Eric Gagne
Jason Giambi
Jeremy Giambi
Jay Gibbons
Troy Glaus
Jason Grimsley
Jose Guillen
Jerry Hairston, Jr.
Matt Herges
Phil Hiatt
Glenallen Hill
Darren Holmes
Todd Hundley
David Justice
Chuck Knoblauch
Tim Laker
Mike Lansing
Paul Lo Duca
Exavier "Nook" Logan
Josias Manzanillo
Gary Matthews, Jr.
Mark McGwire
Cody McKay
Kent Mercker
Bart Miadich
Hal Morris
Daniel Naulty
Denny Neagle
Rafael Palmeiro
Jim Parque
Andy Pettitte
Adam Piatt
Todd Pratt
Adam Riggs
Brian Roberts
John Rocker
F.P. Santangelo
Benito Santiago
Scott Schoeneweis
David Segui
Gary Sheffield
Miguel Tejada
Ismael Valdez
Mo Vaughn
Randy Velarde
Ron Villone
Fernando Vina
Rondell White
Jeff Williams
Matt Williams
Todd Williams
Steve Woodard
Kevin Young
Gregg Zaun
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Who is Jaime Escalante ?
The Teacher's unions hated him.
In the Iowa Republican Presidential debate, Duncan Hunter referred to a man that I had not heard about. I think you may find this interesting.
Wikipedia
Jaime Escalante was born in La Paz, Bolivia. While living in Bolivia he taught physics and mathematics for 12 years. He also taught physics to bare-footed indians in the Altiplano. In 1964 he decided to move to the United States. To prepare himself he started studying science and mathematics at University of Puerto Rico.
Upon moving from Puerto Rico to California Jaime still could not speak English, and had no valid American teaching credentials. To rectify this he studied at night at Pasadena City College to earn a degree in electronics. At this point he took a day job at a computer corporation, while continuing his schooling at night to earn a mathematics degree at California State University, Los Angeles where he studied calculus under the noted professor Louis Leithold.
In 1974 he began teaching at Garfield High School, in East Los Angeles in Los Angeles County, California. Initially Escalante was so disheartened by the lack of preparation in his students that he called his former employer and asked for his old job back. Jaime eventually changed his mind about returning to work when he found 12 students willing to take an algebra class.
The school administration opposed Escalante frequently during his first few years. He was even threatened with dismissal by an assistant principal because he was coming in too early, leaving too late, and failing to get administrative permission to raise funds to pay for his students' Advanced Placement tests. This opposition changed with arrival of a new principal, Henry Gradillas.
Gradillas overhauled the academic curriculum at Garfield, reducing the number of basic math classes and requiring that those taking basic math had to concurrently take algebra. He denied extracurricular activities to students who failed to maintain a C average and new students who failed basic skill tests.
Escalante continued to teach at Garfield but it was not until 1979 that Escalante would actually instruct his first calculus class. Escalante did this in the hopes that it could provide the leverage to improve lower level math courses. To this end Escalante recruited fellow teacher Ben Jimenez and taught calculus to 5 students, 2 of whom passed the A.P. calculus test. The following year the class had increased in size to 9 students, 7 of whom passed the A.P. calculus test. By 1981 the class had increased to 15 students, 14 of whom passed.
In 1982 he came into the national spotlight when 18 of his students passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam. The Educational Testing Service found these scores to be suspect and asked 14 of those who passed to take the exam again. Twelve of the 14 agreed to retake the test and did well enough to have their scores reinstated.
In 1983 the number of students enrolling and passing the A.P. calculus test increased over 100 percent. That year 33 students took the exam and 30 passed. That year Escalante also started teaching calculus at East Los Angeles College.
By 1987 the program had escalated to the point where 73 students passed the A.P. calculus AB exam and another 12 students passed the BC version of the test. This was the peak for the calculus program. The same year Gradillas went on sabbatical to finish his doctorate with hopes that he could be reinstated as principal at Garfield or a similar school with similar programs upon his return. Gradillas’s replacement, Maria Elena Tostado, did not share his views on education. Due to this, the relationship between the administration and Escalante became strained.
1988 saw the release of a book, Escalante, The Best Teacher in America by Jay Mathews (ISBN 0-8050-1195-1) and a movie Stand and Deliver detailing the events of 1982. During this time teachers and other interested observers asked to sit in on his classes. Jaime also received visits from political leaders and celebrities, including then President George Bush and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Escalante has described the film as "90% truth, 10% drama". He stated that several points were left out of the film:
- It took him several years to achieve the kind of success shown in the film.
- In no case was a student who didn't know multiplication tables or fractions taught calculus in a single year.
Over the next few years Escalante’s calculus program continued to grow but not without its own price. Tensions that surfaced when his career began at Garfield escalated. In his final years at Garfield, Escalante received threats and hate mail from various individuals.
- Escalante suffered a gall-bladder attack, not a heart attack. This distinction was clouded in the movie.
By 1990 he had lost the math department chairmanship. At this point Escalante’s math enrichment program had grown to 400+ students. Jaime’s class sizes had increased to over 50 students in some cases. This was far beyond the 35 student limit set by the teachers' union and in turn increased criticism of Escalante’s work.
In 1991, the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570. That same year, citing faculty politics and petty jealousies Escalante left Garfield with Ben Jimenez. Escalante found immediate employment from the Sacramento, California school system. Angelo Villavicencio took the reins of the program after their departure and taught the remaining 107 A.P. students in 2 classes for the next year. 67 of Villavicencio’s students went on to take the A.P. exam, and 47 passed. Villavicencio’s request for a third class due to class size was denied and the following spring he followed Escalante and quit Garfield.
The math program's decline at Garfield became immediately apparent following the departure of Escalante and other teachers associated with its inception and development. In the space of just a few years, Garfield experienced a sevenfold drop in the number of A.P. calculus students passing their exams. In 1996, Angelo Villavicencio contacted Garfield’s new principal, Tony Garcia, and offered to come back to help revive the dying calculus program. His offer was politely rejected.
In 2001, after many years of preparing teenagers for the AP calculus exam, Escalante returned to his native Bolivia. He lives in his wife’s hometown, Cochabamba, and teaches part time at the local university. He returns to the United States frequently to visit his children.
Carack Obama
"Only did lines when he could afford it."
Dec 12, 6:21 PM (ET)
By PHILIP ELLIOTT MyWay
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - A top adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign said Wednesday that Democrats should give more thought to Sen. Barack Obama's admissions of illegal drug use before they pick a presidential candidate.
Obama's campaign said the Clinton people were getting desperate. Clinton's campaign tried to distance itself from the remarks.
Bill Shaheen, a national co-chairman of Clinton's front-runner campaign, raised the issue during an interview with The Washington Post, posted on washingtonpost.com.
Shaheen, an attorney and veteran organizer, said much of Obama's background is unknown and could be a problem in November 2008 if he is the Democratic nominee. He said the Republicans would work hard to discover new aspects of Obama's admittedly spotty youth.
"It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" said Shaheen, whose wife Jeanne is the state's former governor and is running for the U.S. Senate next year.
"There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome," Shaheen said.
Clinton's campaign said it had nothing to do with his comments.
"Senator Clinton is out every day talking about the issues that matter to the American people. These comments were not authorized or condoned by the campaign in any way," spokeswoman Kathleen Strand said.
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said in response to Shaheen's remarks:
"Hillary Clinton said attacking other Democrats is the fun part of this campaign, and now she's moved from Barack Obama's kindergarten years to his teenage years in an increasingly desperate effort to slow her slide in the polls. Senator Clinton's campaign is recycling old news that Barack Obama has been candid about in a book he wrote years ago, and he's talked about the lessons he's learned from these mistakes with young people all across the country. He plans on winning this campaign by focusing on the issues that actually matter to the American people."
Obama wrote about his teenage drug in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father." His rivals have largely remained silent on the subject.
"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final fatal role of the young would-be black man," Obama wrote. Mostly he smoked marijuana and drank alcohol, he wrote, but occasionally he would snort cocaine when he could afford it.
Speaking to Manchester high school students earlier this month, Obama said he was hardly a model student and had experimented with drugs and alcohol.
"You know, I made some bad decisions that I've actually written about. You know, got into drinking. I experimented with drugs," he said. "There was a whole stretch of time that I didn't really apply myself a lot. It wasn't until I got out of high school and went to college that I started realizing, 'Man, I wasted a lot of time.'"
New polling shows Clinton and Obama basically tied in New Hampshire. A CNN-WMUR-TV poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire shows Clinton at 31 percent support, Obama at 30. The same poll had Obama trailing by 20 points in September.
Clinton's campaign has distributed its first flier that criticizes Obama's health care plan for leaving 15 million people without insurance. TV ads following the same theme also have been prepared.
"This is not the time to go back to the same old politics of, 'now I'm going to smack you over the head with a baseball bat and call into question your character,'" Obama co-chairman Ned Helms told reporters in a conference call earlier on Wednesday, decrying what he said was Clinton's negative campaign.
"I think it will backfire on them. I think they had instinctively good judgment to say Hillary Clinton would not take personal attacks. But once polls showed them losing out on the positive argument to Barack Obama, they have chosen to go negative."
In Cycles the Climate Rhetoric Heats Up
Bali – The Brainwashing
In order to save the planet, an English woman has had herself sterilized and an Australian obstetrician/professor, Dr. Barry Walters, has proposed a one-time tax of $5000 (Australian) on babies born into families which already have two children. It doesn't stop there, he says another $800 per year would be in order to, as he put it, "counterbalance the carbon debt." He says he "rejoices in every baby" his patients have but I wonder if he has considered how many will be aborted if ideas such as his are implemented?
A generation of young people are being indoctrinated with this kind of language and thought. It’s only a matter of time before some brain-washed fanatics take it upon themselves to do in the “bastards who are killing mother earth.” After all, it's the moral thing to do.
Mr. Ban Ki Moon, the hitherto little known UN bureaucrat and recently elected Secretary General of the United Nations has issued a warning and laid the foundation for future events:
According to AP:
It's time to chill-out with the hot rhetoric. Look at the words being used to incite action:
According to AP:
Guidelines on greenhouse gas emissions cuts opposed by the United States may be "too ambitious" to include in a final statement from the climate conference in Bali, the U.N. chief said Wednesday.Reducing green house gas emissions by 25 to 40 percent in the next 12 years? What are the chances of that happening? Given the track record of the Kyoto signatories, not bloody likely. A BBC article pointed out the nations which first signed to Kyoto 10 years ago have not met their CO2 reduction goals.
Drafts of the conference statement obtained by The Associated Press have included a call for industrialized countries to reduce emissions blamed for global warming by between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, however, said such goals might have to wait for subsequent negotiations, though he added that at some point targets for emissions cuts would be necessary.
"Realistically, it may be too ambitious" to set guidelines now, Ban told reporters, when asked about steadfast opposition by the United States, though he urged Washington to be flexible.
Later he added, "Practically speaking, this will have to be negotiated down the road."
Japan - a signatory to Kyoto - should have cut by 6% but it has increased emissions by 7%. Italy (+7.4%) and Spain (+59.8%) are missing their targets by a mile.Two governmental henny-pennies are issuing catastrophic warnings:
In the UK, carbon emissions have recently been going up despite all the government's green rhetoric.
Now, science advisors to two governments with claims to leadership in global climate politics, Germany and the UK, have told BBC News it is unlikely that levels of greenhouse gases can be kept low enough to avoid a projected temperature rise of 2C (3.6F).The Guardian UK also reported the doom and gloom urgency of the Secretary General’s warning:
Professors Sir David King and John Schellnhuber say the world is more than 50% likely to experience dangerous levels of climate change.
They believe politicians have been too slow to cut emissions.
Current science suggests that above 2C, billions of people will face water shortages, the world's food supplies could be threatened and widespread extinction could be triggered.
Neither scientist believes that the world would achieve the goal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of stabilising emissions by around 2015.
It all means that since the world committed to avoid dangerous climate change, emissions globally are up around 22%, the highest levels of CO2 since dinosaurs roamed a sweltering earth.
The time to act on climate change is now, the UN secretary general today warned delegates gathered in Bali to negotiate a new global deal on climate change.
As talks intensify during the crucial top-level section of the climate change conference which begins today, Ban Ki-moon urged ministers and heads of state to reach an agreement for the sake of future generations.
Calling climate change the "moral challenge of our generation", he said: "Succeeding generations depend on us. We cannot rob our children of their future."
"As we convene here in Bali, the eyes of the world are upon us - this is a historic moment long in the making.
"The science is clear, climate change is happening, the impact is real, the time to act is now," he warned, adding that price of inaction - including floods, famine, rising sea levels and loss of biodiversity - would be far higher than the costs of taking action.
"Climate change is as much an opportunity as it is a threat. It is our chance to usher in a new age of green economics and truly sustainable development."
It's time to chill-out with the hot rhetoric. Look at the words being used to incite action:
Floods, famine, extinction.
Sweltering temperatures,
Sweltering temperatures,
Moral challenge.
In order to save the planet, an English woman has had herself sterilized and an Australian obstetrician/professor, Dr. Barry Walters, has proposed a one-time tax of $5000 (Australian) on babies born into families which already have two children. It doesn't stop there, he says another $800 per year would be in order to, as he put it, "counterbalance the carbon debt." He says he "rejoices in every baby" his patients have but I wonder if he has considered how many will be aborted if ideas such as his are implemented?
A generation of young people are being indoctrinated with this kind of language and thought. It’s only a matter of time before some brain-washed fanatics take it upon themselves to do in the “bastards who are killing mother earth.” After all, it's the moral thing to do.
Forget Water Boarding. The US Government Will Get Americans Killed.
In a 15 State study, over two-thirds of released prisoners were rearrested within three yearsSome bureaucrats on an innocuous commission have made a decision that is going to take property, safety and lives from US citizens. The results of this action are predictable and guaranteed. While the press and politicians are worried about water boarding a few American enemies, our rulers and masters are going to do a lot worse to the American people.
Cuts in prison time for crack approved
By Jerry Seper Washington Times
December 12, 2007
The U.S. Sentencing Commission yesterday unanimously voted to give retroactive status to an amendment in the federal sentencing guidelines that reduces penalties for crack-cocaine offenses.
Retroactivity of the amendment is effective March 3, but not every convicted crack-cocaine offender will be eligible for a lower sentence as a result of the decision. A federal sentencing judge will make the final determination whether a person qualifies and how much their sentence could or should be lowered.
Commission spokesman Michael Courlander said final determinations will be made only after the consideration of many factors, including the panel's direction to consider whether lowering the offender's sentence would pose a danger to public safety."Don't leave home without one"
The decision comes in the wake of a 7-2 ruling Monday by the Supreme Court, which said federal judges can issue shorter prison terms than federal guidelines recommend in cocaine cases — addressing a sentencing disparity for crack- and powder-cocaine convictions widely considered to be more punitive for blacks.
The seven-member commission voted to amend federal sentencing guidelines effective Nov. 1, after a six-month congressional review period. The amendment was intended as a step toward reducing some of the unwarranted disparity between federal crack-cocaine and powder-cocaine sentences.
The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 authorized the commission to provide for retroactive effect of amendments that result in lower penalties for classes of offenses or offenders, as this amendment could.
The decision could affect as many as 19,500 people, mostly blacks — including 3,800 who could become eligible for sentence reductions within the next 15 months.
Mr. Courlander said the panel made its decision on retroactivity after months of deliberation and years of examining cocaine-sentencing issues. He said it solicited public comment on the issue and received more than 33,000 letters or written comments, almost all of which were in favor of retroactivity.
Last month, the commission held a full-day hearing on the issue and heard from key stakeholders in the federal criminal justice community.
The overall effect of the amendment is anticipated to occur incrementally over 30 years, Mr. Courlander said, due to the limited nature of the amendment and because many crack-cocaine offenders will be required under federal law to serve mandatory five- or 10-year sentences because of the amount of crack involved in their offense.
Mr. Courlander said the commission considered a number of factors, including the purpose for lowering crack-cocaine sentences, the limit on any reduction allowed by the amendment, whether it would be difficult for the courts to apply the reduction, and whether making the amendment retroactive would raise public safety concerns or cause unwarranted sentencing disparity.
Ultimately, he said, the commission ruled that the statutory purpose of sentencings are best served by retroactive application of the amendment. Mindful of public safety and judicial resource concerns, he said, the commission issued direction to the courts on the limited nature of this and all other retroactive amendments and on the need to consider public safety in each case.
Over the past several months, the commission called on Congress to address the issue of the 100-to-1 statutory ratio that drove federal cocaine sentencing policy, noting that only Congress can provide a comprehensive solution to a fundamental unfairness in federal sentencing policy.
Mr. Courlander said the commission has "consistently expressed its readiness and willingness to work with Congress and others in the criminal justice community to address this very important issue."
In a press conference yesterday, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey voiced opposition to the plan of retroactively reviewing cases, saying it could result in the release of inmates to communities not prepared to deal with them.
The commission delayed the effective date on retroactivity to give the courts sufficient time to prepare for and process the cases.
The bipartisan commission, an independent agency in the judicial branch of the federal government, was organized in 1985 to develop national sentencing policy for the federal courts. The sentencing guidelines help to ensure that similar offenders who commit similar offenses receive similar sentences.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Kosovo Independence Will Come With a Cost
"Once you're into this family, there's no getting out."
When that call comes, blood rises. It is a call stirred by fighting words, a racial slur, hardcore bigotry or a call to nationalism. Some of us become more of who we are with age or by being provoked by real or perceived external threats. Symbols, flags, songs, or words can all stir our tribal instincts.
Multi-culturalism and diversity can be less than skin deep.
Opponents of Kosovo Independence Fear Separatist Reaction
Radio Netherlands
The expected declaration of independence by Kosovo has a number of nations on edge. Those who oppose Kosovo's autonomy harbor separatists of their own. A free Kosovo could be just the rallying call these movements need.
With all the signs pointing towards a declaration of independence from Kosovo after the UN-set deadline for reaching a settlement passes on Monday, the European Union is bracing itself for a wave of renewed calls for autonomy from separatist movements across Europe.
If Kosovo declares independence from Serbia, it will set a powerful precedent for movements from Spain to Scotland, all wanting to rewrite the map of Europe and form their own independent states, according to experts.
"There is a real risk that the quasi-dogma of the intangibility of borders which has existed since the end of the World War II will fall," French political scientist Jean-Yves Camus of the Paris-based IRIS institute told AFP. "This would benefit movements which seek to rewrite the map of Europe based on ethnic, linguistic or cultural criteria," added Camus, a specialist on separatist movements in Europe.
The emergence of similar lifestyles and English as a common language in Europe, combined with the disappearance of borders and the lack of democratic legitimacy of EU bodies, had fueled "the development of micro-distinctive identities," said Camus.
While Kosovo's ethnic majority leaders have vowed not to unilaterally declare independence from Serbia without US and European Union approval, they are expected to announce their intentions to form a new state in early 2008.
Opposition includes fear of own breakaway states
Many of the countries which oppose the creation of an independent state of Kosovo have at least one separatist movement working towards autonomy within their own borders.
Russia has been fighting Chechen separatists for years
Serbia's ally Russia, which leads the opposition, has problems with separatists in Chechnya and the Caucasus region while Spain has had a long-running dispute with the armed ETA movement. Other countries against Kosovo's independence such as Cyprus and Greece have ethnic minorities which demand more power.
"In the West, this [Kosovo] solution will set off separatists in Europe,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published in French newspaper Le Figaro earlier this year. ”Look at Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque Country."
Spain is currently experiencing a period of unease as its northern Basque Country and its wealthy northeastern region of Catalonia have stepped up their demands for more autonomy.
Last year Catalan voters overwhelmingly backed a new charter which recognized the region as a "nation" within Spain and grants it enhanced powers in taxation and judicial matters.
Separatists claim EU structure makes autonomy possible
As in other separatist regions of Europe like Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium, and northern Italy, supporters said Catalonia deserved extra powers because it makes a bigger contribution to the economy.
The armed Basque separatist group ETA ended a 15-month ceasefire in June while the Scottish National Party, which came to power in May, plans to hold a referendum on independence in 2010.
Lingusitic divisions have led to a debate on splitting Belgium
Belgium meanwhile has been without a government for six months after a general election on June 10 highlighted deep divisions between the nation's majority Dutch-speakers and Francophones.
For many nationalists, membership in the 27-nation European Union has only served to make separation seem more viable.
"Europe can regulate our functionings and transfer payments. Why must we maintain this intermediate roof we call Belgium," the leader of the Flemish nationalist party, Bart De Wever, told French daily Le Monde last month.
Russia to block independence at UN level
Meanwhile, Russia stepped up its opposition Tuesday by announcing that it would demand that the UN Security Council annul any unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo.
"Russia will of course demand the annulment of such a decision. We will demand a meeting of the Security Council because it would be a violation of a Council resolution," Russia's Interfax news agency quoted the country's chief Kosovo negotiator Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko as saying.
What States Can Huckabee Carry in a National Election?
President George McGovernHuckabee basks in success
By Stephen Dinan Washington Times
December 11, 2007
MIAMI — Mike Huckabee jokes that if he's not the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, someone better tell the other campaigns to turn their fire elsewhere.
While he's not quite comfortable with the term front-runner — "I would like to say we're 'emerging,' " he said yesterday — the former Arkansas governor finds himself facing near-smothering press attention and the concentrated attacks from other campaigns. But whatever he's called, his emergence means the former two-man race between Mitt Romney and Rudolph W. Giuliani is now a lot more complicated.
Mr. Huckabee spent the morning in Miami yesterday picking up the endorsement of one of Florida's most powerful politicians, House Speaker Marco Rubio, the latest in a line of substantial backers Mr. Huckabee is amassing.
Mr. Rubio said he had planned to stay neutral in the race, but in the past few weeks had felt compelled to back Mr. Huckabee as the candidate who best communicates a pro-life, conservative-values message. Mr. Rubio said that's what helps Mr. Huckabee spar with far better-funded campaigns.
"There's a difference between a campaign and a movement," Mr. Rubio said. "When you're leading a movement, all you need is people. And he's leading a movement."
That movement, though, will have to brave Mr. Huckabee's past, which is increasingly scrutinized. From paroles issued during his 10 years as governor, to his presiding over a net tax increase to his past comments on Christianity and AIDS, Mr. Huckabee is now on the hot seat.
Yesterday, he defended his stance as governor on immigration, when he protested federal immigration authorities' workplace raids. He said his concern then was that citizen children were in effect "abandoned" because social services wasn't alerted to the raids beforehand.
"A raid is a legitimate thing to do. But what is not legitimate is to do it without the cooperation of local authorities," he said.
And in earning the endorsement of Mr. Rubio, the top-ranking Cuban official in the state, Mr. Huckabee said he was wrong five years ago when he called for an end to the embargo on the island nation.
The big-name endorsements have been accompanied by a strong surge in polls.
A new CNN poll has Mr. Huckabee trailing Mr. Giuliani nationally by only two percentage points, the tightest survey yet. And state-by-state surveys show him expanding his lead over Mr. Romney in Iowa, taking the lead in South Carolina and surging in Michigan and Florida, though Mr. Huckabee does not fare as well in New Hampshire.
Florida Senate Majority Leader Daniel Webster, a Republican who has also endorsed Mr. Huckabee, said the former governor's base of support is likely to weather the attacks because many of them chose him even before he seemed to be a viable candidate.
"They had to make a decision to say 'I'm going to take my vote, and even though this vote may not be for the winner, I'm going to do it.' So they had to make a decision, and that makes it hard to pry away his base vote," he said.
That will soon be tested.
Fred Thompson's campaign appears to be making Mr. Huckabee its chief focus, with Mr. Thompson himself questioning Mr. Huckabee's flip-flops yesterday. And Mr. Romney last night announced that he will begin running an ad in Iowa attacking Mr. Huckabee's immigration record.
"Huckabee is peaking right now," said Paul Pate, Mr. Giuliani's Iowa campaign chairman. "The longer people look, though, they obviously start picking at your warts and blemishes. I think Huckabee's going to have a few slides on his poll numbers."
He said despite Mr. Huckabee's rise, Mr. Giuliani's strategy — counting on strong showings in the big states later in the season, and hoping to capture an early state or two along the way — still looks sound.
"The run for the presidency is a long distance race, not a short one, even with all the early hurdles, the front-loading of all these caucuses and primaries," he said.
Paul Erickson, a Romney backer who was political director for Pat Buchanan's 1992 campaign, said Mr. Huckabee's ante won't carry him very far.
"It's not only that the Huckabee campaign is unprepared for what they're about to go through this month, but as a practical matter, there is virtually no way to build an operation between a strong showing Jan. 3 and the de facto end of the primary season Jan. 19 in South Carolina," he said.
"The highest electoral hope of the Huckabee candidacy seems to be to provide the necessary confusion to nominate Rudy Giuliani for the presidency," he said.
But Mr. Huckabee's supporters say there was a built-in set of voters looking for another candidate to emerge, and Mr. Huckabee is the conservative-values candidate they were looking for.
"There always was a cry out there for a fourth candidate, from the beginning, and the question was who was it going to be," Mr. Webster said.
Freaking Afghanistan!
Apparently, Musa Qala has been retaken although, there seems to be some confusion. I'm not surprised as it seems the Brits never cared about the town one way or another.
From a news report that I heard about two days ago, one Afghani said that he had seen a convoy of Taliban leaving town by the hundreds. I thought, "Well why didn't we see them from the air and do something about it? Why did we just let them drive off into the sunset? This is no way to run a war.
Here's an article that never made out of the EB que.
It's been reported that Musa Qala was the only town in Afghanistan under Taliban control. This November 2006 Bill Roggio report sheds light on why:
We recently heard that some 60% of Afghanis want some kind of power sharing arrangement between the Karzai government and the Taliban. It seems that in large parts of the country outside of Kabul, there are no police and no courts, which means no way to resolve disputes . Supposedly, the Taliban come in and bring a judicial system and security. And we have Brits who do either do not want to fight or are out manned by a ragtag militia of rag heads...kinda like Bush and the Democrats.
The Marines were recently turned down when they offered to redeploy from Anbar to Afghanistan. Why? Maybe the Brits said "No way we want those cowboys over here!" It's disgusting. Why don't we just pack up now? Fold our tents and come home.
Well, I heard (from an Afghani government education spokesman) that Afghan has over six million children enrolled in school. A record number, two-thirds of whom attend in tents... Tents! The spokesman said that they need three times the amount they are currently being budgeted for education. Hey, that sounds familiar doesn't it. I wonder if he's an NEA man. That country will be a worse investment than a boat.
This ain't no way to build an empire.
Around 2,500 troops are based in Camp Bastion, with hundreds flying the 30 minute journey to the frontline in Musa Qala. The base also hosts the regional hospital, and has received casualties from the battle over the last few days, although officials would not say how many.
A spokesman for the Nato-led force said that Afghan army troops entered the centre of Musa Qala today, on the fourth day of the operation to recapture it. but fighting was continuing. In Kabul, a Defence Ministry spokesman said that Afghan, British and US forces had "completely captured" the town.
A British military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Eaton, said that he could not confirm that the Taleban had left the town’s centre but said he would not be surprised if that were the case.
"This is what happens. We have had a number of operations in the past where once the Taleban realize they are overmatched, they tend to leave," he said. "I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the case here. Ultimately our aim is to take Musa Qala, and if we take Musa Qala without a big fight, that’s fantastic."
From a news report that I heard about two days ago, one Afghani said that he had seen a convoy of Taliban leaving town by the hundreds. I thought, "Well why didn't we see them from the air and do something about it? Why did we just let them drive off into the sunset? This is no way to run a war.
Here's an article that never made out of the EB que.
Allies prepare to seize Taliban stronghold
By Tom Coghlan, Kabul Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:01am GMT 06/12/2007
A key Taliban-held town in southern Afghanistan is expected to fall to British troops and the national army within a matter of days.
Residents report that Nato aircraft have dropped leaflets warning of an imminent assault on Musa Qala in the north of Helmand province.
The town is of huge symbolic value to the Taliban. It has been in its hands for 10 months and is the only urban centre that the Islamist group has been able to take and hold.
Western sources have told The Daily Telegraph that it is planned that Afghan forces will lead the assault - the first time that the fledgling national army has undertaken an operation on such a scale.
After advancing from the base at Sangin, the British and Afghan troops are now said to be just two miles from the town. Local people have now begun to flee into the surrounding desert.
"Anything could happen, it is in God's hands," said a member of the tribal council of the town, who begged not to be named for fear of reprisals.
The air-dropped leaflets gave warning that the Taliban would be pursued from the area and urged the tribal leaders in Musa Qala to eject the insurgents themselves.
Contacted by satellite telephone, Taliban commanders stated that they had already mined routes to the town, which is about the size of Cambridge. They also claimed to have captured and destroyed a British tank.
"I have 300 Mujahideen with me," said Mullah Ahmad Muslim. "We have brought our best artillery. We have ZSU anti-aircraft guns in place to attack the helicopters."
But when asked whether the Taliban would stand and fight in Musa Qala, he did not rule out the possibility of a withdrawal into the Taliban-held mountains to the north. "The Mujahideen are ready to fight. It is hard to say whether we will make a tactical withdrawal. We will see."
One town resident said that Mullah Tor Jan, the overall Taliban commander in the town, had told local leaders that they would "save the town from destruction" by withdrawing once a "screen" of his fighters to the south of the town was breached by British forces.
However, on their website, the Taliban issued a blood-curdling rejoinder to the warnings of imminent attack. It read: "Foreign occupiers and their internal mercenaries are once again targeting Musa Qala.
"They are dropping leaflets from the air calling on the people to leave their homes as the area will be bombed and their homes will be rebuilt in a modern style.
"It is a known fact that wherever they have gone with all their power, their strength has melted, their equipment has been destroyed, their skulls have remained [on the battlefield], and they have left the battlefield defeated and broken. The Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate are completely confident that the enemy will not be able to advance one step, and with every step their tanks will be set on fire."
One local tribal leader said: "Everyone knows that the town can be taken, but to keep power there is the key thing.
"It depends on the skill of the government to make the people trust them.
"If they are not skilful, then the people will turn to the Taliban."
**********
It's been reported that Musa Qala was the only town in Afghanistan under Taliban control. This November 2006 Bill Roggio report sheds light on why:
Further south, in Helmand province, the secret deal between the British and pro-Taliban tribal leaders has reached the predictible conclusion. The Times Online reports Musa Qala has now fallen back into the hands of the Taliban. Nafaz Khan, the former chief of police of Musa Qala who fought along with the British of the Royal Irish Regiment, said the negotiations to turn Musa Qala over to 'local tribesmen' was just a ruse. "Those British soldiers were cursing with us when we were all told to leave... They said that they had fought and lost friends to keep the town. And now these tribal elders who are in charge of Musa Qala are the same who gave the Taliban support when they fought against us. The deal was just a clever trick to get the foreign soldiers to go.” Nafaz Khan's statements are backed up by Haji Dad Mohammed Khan.
We recently heard that some 60% of Afghanis want some kind of power sharing arrangement between the Karzai government and the Taliban. It seems that in large parts of the country outside of Kabul, there are no police and no courts, which means no way to resolve disputes . Supposedly, the Taliban come in and bring a judicial system and security. And we have Brits who do either do not want to fight or are out manned by a ragtag militia of rag heads...kinda like Bush and the Democrats.The Marines were recently turned down when they offered to redeploy from Anbar to Afghanistan. Why? Maybe the Brits said "No way we want those cowboys over here!" It's disgusting. Why don't we just pack up now? Fold our tents and come home.
Well, I heard (from an Afghani government education spokesman) that Afghan has over six million children enrolled in school. A record number, two-thirds of whom attend in tents... Tents! The spokesman said that they need three times the amount they are currently being budgeted for education. Hey, that sounds familiar doesn't it. I wonder if he's an NEA man. That country will be a worse investment than a boat.
This ain't no way to build an empire.
Monday, December 10, 2007
War is for Hard Men not Lawyers
Cutler sent this gem to us with the note that:
EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION IN U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM POLICY:
THE IMPACT ON TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS
http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/34712.pdf
Note Scheuer's testimony. Then read the Q&A for gems like this:
"The bluntness demonstrates why I like Michael Scheuer. Even when he's wrong, he's a patriot, first and foremost, not an ass coverer.
I too have grown to like Michael Scheuer. I wish there were more men like him; not timid about doing the job they were given to do. On the other hand, I can understand how in a day and age when these men are forced to carry Legal Insurance why they are hesitant when they should be bold. Instead of hard men, we get lawyers. I guess we'll have to let the lawyers defeat the terrorists.
----------------------------
US Congressional Hearing:EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION IN U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM POLICY:
THE IMPACT ON TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS
http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/34712.pdf
Note Scheuer's testimony. Then read the Q&A for gems like this:
Mr. SCHEUER. I think absolutely, sir; and probably not from any
altruistic reason at all but simply because we knew we would get
to the point where we are today, where you and some Members of
this Congress behave as if CIA is a rogue organization, rather than
a service organization servicing the President and the Congress
and all branches of the United States Government."
andMr. SCHEUER. And if you can prove that there was not due diligence in designing the target package or assembling the information that caused that operation to go forward, then you have a case against someone. Otherwise, it is a mistake.
Mr. DELAHUNT. It is just a mistake.
Mr. SCHEUER. Yes, sir. They are not Americans. I really don’t care.
Mr. DELAHUNT. And if they were not Americans you don’t care. That is very interesting.
Mr. SCHEUER. I never got paid, sir, to be a citizen of the world. Maybe you do.-------------------Main Testimony:Mr. SCHEUER. All right. The CIA’s Rendition Program began in late summer, 1995. I authored it and then ran and managed it against al-Qaeda leaders and other Sunni Islamists from August, 1995, until June, 1999.There were only two goals for the program: First, to take men off the street who were planning or had been involved in attacks on the United States or its allies; second, to seize hard copy or electronic documents in their possession when arrested. Americans were never expected to read those, and they could provide optionsfor follow-on operations.I would like to add interrogation was never a goal under President Clinton. Why? Because it would be a foreign intelligence or security service without CIA being present or in control who would conduct the interrogation, because the take from the interrogation would be filtered by that service holding the individual and we never knew if it was complete or distorted, and because torture might be used and the information might be simply what an individual thought we wanted to hear.The Rendition Program was initiated because President Clinton and Messrs. Lake, Berger and Clarke requested that the CIA begin to attack and dismantle al-Qaeda. These men made it clear from the first that they did not want to bring those captured to the United States or to hold them in U.S. custody.President Clinton and his national security team directed the CIA to take each captured al-Qaeda leader to the country which had an outstanding legal process for him. This was a hard-and-fast rule which greatly restricted CIA’s ability to confront al-Qaeda because we could only focus on al-Qaeda leaders who were wanted somewhere for a legal process. As a result, many al-Qaeda fighters we knew of and who were dangerous to America could not be captured.CIA warned the President and his National Security Council that the U.S. State Department had and would identify the countries to which the captured fighters were being delivered as human rights abusers.In response, President Clinton and his team asked if CIA could get each receiving country to guarantee that it would treat a person according to its own laws. This was no problem, and we did so.I have read and been told that Mr. Clinton, Mr. Berger and Mr. Clarke have said, since 9/11, that they insisted that each receiving country treat the rendered person it received according to U.S. legal standards. To the best of my memory, that is a lie.After 9/11 and under President Bush, rendered al-Qaeda operatives have been most often kept in U.S. custody. The goals of the program remain the same, although Mr. Bush’s national security team wanted to use U.S. officers to interrogate captured al-Qaeda fighters.This decision by the Bush administration allowed CIA to capture al-Qaeda fighters we knew were a threat to the United States without on all occasions being dependent on the availability of another country’s outstanding legal process. The decision made the already successful Rendition Program even more effective.
The following particulars about the Rendition Program may be of interest to you.First, from its start until today, the program was focused on senior al-Qaeda leaders and not aimed at the rank-and-file members. With only limited manpower to conduct the Rendition Program, CIA wanted to inflict as much damage on al-Qaeda as possible and therefore focused on senior leaders, financiers, terrorist operators,field commanders, strategists and logisticians.Second, to the best of my knowledge, not a single target of rendition has ever been kidnapped by CIA officers. The claims to the contrary by the Swedish Government regarding Mr. Aghiza and his associate and those by the Italian Government regarding Abu Omar are either misstatements or lies by those governments.Indeed, it is passing strange that European leaders are here today to complain about a very successful and security enhancing U.S. Government counterterrorist operation when their European Union presides over the earth’s single largest terrorist safe haven, and has done so for a quarter century. The EU’s policy of easily obtainable political asylum and its prohibition against deporting wanted or convicted terrorists to a country with a death penalty have made Europe a major, consistent and invulnerable source of terrorist threat to the United States.Third, each and every target of a rendition was vetted by a battery of lawyers at CIA and not infrequently by lawyers at the National Security Council and the Department of Justice. For each rendition target, I, and then my successors as the chief of bin Laden/al-Qaeda operations, had to prepare and present a written brief citing and explaining the intelligence information that made the rendition target a threat to the United States and/or its allies. If the brief was insufficient, the lawyers disapproved and no operation was conducted until that target—against that target rather until additional reliable evidence was collected.Let me be very explicit and precise on this point. Not one single al-Qaeda leader has ever been rendered on the basis of any CIA officer’s hunch, guess, or caprice. These are scurrilous accusations that became fashionable after the Washington Post correspondent, Dana Priest, revealed information that damaged U.S. national security and, as a result, won a journalism prize for abetting America’s enemies and when such lamentable politicians as Senators McCain, Rockefeller, Graham and Levin followed Ms. Priest’s lead and began to attack the men and women of CIA who had risked their lives to protect America under the direct orders of two U.S. Presidents and with the full knowledge of the intelligence committees of the United States Congress. Both Ms. Priest and the gentlemen just mentioned have behaved disgracefully and ought to publicly apologize to the CIA’s men and women who have executed their government’s Rendition Program.To proceed, the Rendition Program has been the single most effective counterterrorism operation ever conducted by the United States Government. Americans are safer today because of the program. But that degree of safety will ebb as the senators just mentioned slowly but surely destroy the program.If there are those in this Congress, in the media or in this country or in Europe who believe that we would be safer if Khalid Shaykh Muhammed, Abu Zubaydah, Mr. Hambali, Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, Khalid bid Attash and several other senior al-Qaeda leaders were still free and on the street, then the educational systems and the reservoirs of common sense on both sides of the Atlantic are in a much more dilapidated shape than I thought.Fifth, on the issue of how rendered al-Qaeda leaders have been treated in prison, I am unable to speak with authority about the conditions these men found in the Middle Eastern prisons they were delivered to at President Clinton’s direction. I would not, however, be surprised if their treatment was not up to U.S. standards.This is a matter of no concern as the Rendition Program’s goal was to protect America, and the rendered fighters delivered to Middle Eastern governments are now either dead or in places from which they cannot harm America. Mission accomplished, as the saying goes.Under President Bush, the rendered al-Qaeda fighters held in U.S. custody have been treated according to guidelines that were crafted by U.S. Government lawyers, approved by the executive branch and briefed to and permitted by at least the four senior members of the two congressional intelligence oversight committees.Sixth, finally, I will close by saying that mistakes may well have been made during my tenure as the chief of CIA’s bin Laden’s operations; and if they were, they are my responsibility. Intelligence information is not the equivalent of courtroom quality evidence, and it never will be. But I will again stress that no rendition target was ever approved or captured without a written brief composed of intelligence information that persuaded competent U.S. Government legal authorities. If mistakes were made, I can only say that that is tough, but war is a tough and confusing business and a well-supportedchance to take action and protect Americans should always trump other considerations, especially pedantic worries about whether or not the intelligence data is airtight.
To destroy the Rendition Program because of a mistake or two or more would be to sacrifice the protection of Americans to venal and prize-hungry reporters like Ms. Priest, grandstanding politicians like those mentioned above and sanctimonious Europeans who take every bit of American protection offered them while publicly
damning and seeking jail time for those who risk their lives to provide that protection. If the Rendition Program is halted, we will truly be able to say, by paraphrasing the late John Wayne, that war is tough, and it is a lot tougher if you are deliberately stupid.
China Speaks Africa's Language
DNA proves that all human corruption evolved in Africa, and Africans are superb at it. You can buy your way into most anything, cheap. Just open your email and and you can probably share in great wealth with the opportunity sent to you from the Shuck and Jive Cyber Cafe, somewhere in Nigeria. Africa is corrupt to the core and the Africans seem to like it that way and get annoyed with European and US moralizing.
The Chinese don't do moralizing. They specialize in human cynicism and are exporting it with gazillions of dollars of targeted trade, financed by the surpluses they made with manufacturing pirated technology, fudged trade, and manipulated currencies.
The Africans and Chinese understand each other and the Europeans and Americans do not. Guess who wins that deal.
China the victor as Europe fails to secure trade deal with Africa
By Andrew Grice
Published: 10 December 2007
European and African leaders have signed a pact promoting free trade and democracy but failed to make a breakthrough on formal trade agreements between the two continents.
At a two-day summit in Lisbon, overshadowed by the presence of the Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, the 53 African and 27 EU nations papered over their differences over Zimbabwe and Darfur.
The new "strategic partnership" is seen by the EU as a way of combating China's growing influence in Africa.
However, there was little sign that the first EU-Africa summit for seven years had made the hoped-for breakthrough on trade. The EU wanted to meet a 31 December deadline set by the World Trade Organisation for securing a new trading system with former colonies, including those in Africa. But only 15 of the 76 poor countries involved in talks have so far signed economic partnership agreements (EPAs) with Europe.
Abdoulaye Wade, the President of Senegal, said a majority of African leaders at the summit had opposed such agreements. "We are not talking any more about EPAs, we have rejected them," he told reporters. "We are going to meet to see what we can put in place of the EPAs." Claiming that China's approach was winning more friends, he said: "Europe is close to losing the battle of competition in Africa."
Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, commenting on the trade talks, said: "It is a challenge for both Africans and Europeans and will require time."
Asked what his message to Europe was, President Mugabe said nothing but raised his arm and made a fist. His involvement persuaded Gordon Brown to boycott the summit.
Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, who backed Mr Brown's stance, dramatically removed his dog collar during a live television interview yesterday and vowed not to wear it until President Mugabe was no longer in power. He cut his dog collar into pieces which fell to the studio floor of the BBC's Andrew Marr Show to illustrate what the Zimbabwean leader was doing to his own people.
"Do you know what Mugabe has done? He has taken people's identity and literally, if you don't mind, cut it to pieces," he told a surprised Mr Marr.
The archbishop, who urged people to demonstrate against the Mugabe regime, said: "As far as I am concerned, from now on I am not going to wear a dog collar until Mugabe has gone." He said: "South Africa has got to wake up to the fact that people there are starving."
Mutiny or Sloppy Governance. You Decide
This is the mission statement of the CIA under Gen. Michael V. Hayden
Director, Central Intelligence Agency:
The Mission
We are the nation's first line of defense. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go. We carry out our mission by:
- Collecting information that reveals the plans, intentions and capabilities of our adversaries and provides the basis for decision and action.
- Producing timely analysis that provides insight, warning and opportunity to the President and decisionmakers charged with protecting and advancing America's interests.
- Conducting covert action at the direction of the President to preempt threats or achieve US policy objectives.
____________________
Dec. 8, 2007, 3:11PM
Bush is to blame for collapse of presidential authority
By JIM HOAGLAND Chron.com
The Fourth of July came on Dec. 3 this year for the U.S. intelligence community.
The nation's espionage agencies delivered their own declaration of independence from the war aims and rhetoric of President Bush and Vice President Cheney in a National Intelligence Estimate that was ostensibly about Iran's nuclear program.
But the CIA, DIA and 14 other agencies grouped under the director of national intelligence also delivered a riveting if implicit X-ray of the changing nature of leadership in Washington, where the White House's once-commanding authority over government has been smashed but not replaced by any other power center.
This has happened not in spite of, but largely because of, the overweening Bush-Cheney obsession with restoring presidential authority. It is as if this administration has developed a political version of Jimmy Carter's aborted project for a neutron bomb, which was to destroy people while sparing buildings. Bush consistently manages to destroy or damage goals he proclaims and friends who support him, while strengthening foes.
The publication of an unclassified version of the NIE, which concludes that Iran is "probably" not working on a nuclear weapon at this time, has triggered multiple unintended consequences. Iran's diplomatic hand is strengthened — while foreign diplomats and officials who have pushed their governments to join the U.S. campaign of sanctions and international condemnation are suddenly undermined. "We will be exposed to a lot of criticism at home now," one official from the developing world glumly told me shortly after the estimate was issued.
"They won't say it, but our leaders must be devastated by the way this was handled," an Israeli friend says." Not by the facts of the report, which can be discussed reasonably, but by the presentation and interpretation of the report. This happens when intelligence agencies become traumatized by previous mistakes and overreact the other way the next time."
Domestically, the most significant fact about the NIE is its public manifestation. The White House was powerless to prevent publication of a document that made Bush aides unhappy and uncomfortable. The administration went along because it knew that the document — and any attempt to suppress it — would have been immediately leaked.
Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte (and formerly the director of national intelligence) subtly but clearly pointed to the underlying cause-and-effect syndrome when he recalled in an interview on PBS' The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer that "there was a time when one simply did not publicize any of this activity, nor was it leaked."
The intelligence community — and particularly the CIA, which was conceived as an exclusive tool for the president's use in making and executing his most difficult decisions — has today made itself a separate agency of government, answerable essentially to itself. This NIE makes clear that for better or worse, spy agencies today make the finished product of policy rather than providing the raw materials.
That significant change in the ways of Washington should not go unremarked, whatever we think about the publication of these necessarily vague predictions about Iran. On balance, the consequences of disclosure are positive: As its authors clearly intended, the document removes any basis for the U.S. military strikes on Iran that many of us have argued would be unwise and unnecessary.
As a journalist, I welcome the sunshine that comes when the important analytical work of intelligence agencies is exposed to public scrutiny and discussion. Transparency has been a consistent goal of Gen. Michael Hayden, first at the National Security Agency and now as head of the CIA.
Hayden's appointment 18 months ago to replace the hapless George Tenet began the chain of events that led to last Monday's breakout of the analysts. The Air Force general immediately told associates that his mission was to re-establish the agency's credibility, which had been shredded by the failure to detect both that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons in 1990 and was not in 2003. That meant "low-balling" — or being extremely conservative — intelligence estimates to restore confidence, Hayden remarked.
Bush bears heavy responsibility for the collapse of presidential authority on his watch. His reckless disregard of the hard work and details of governance has made followership a difficult and dangerous pursuit under him. The spies understand and reflect that reality in their thinly disguised disavowal of his gravely compromised credibility.
But technology and other forces are undermining hierarchal relationships in social and professional organizations everywhere. Bush's successor should not anticipate — with even medium confidence — that things will snap back to "normal" in the world of espionage when he or she arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Hoagland is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, specializing in foreign affairs. (jimhoagland@washpost.com )
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Denominating Oil Outside of Dollars
Now let me think about this for a second. Assuming oil would be priced in Euros, does that have any long term consequence to the dollar? Probably not, but it could get risky for oil producing countries who wish to sell to the US. Just ask any Japanese or German manufacturer how a declining dollar improves their export business.
Any currency mechanism that makes oil more expensive for the United States, will dampen US demand and have an adverse effect on the world economy. It will accelerate the long term trend, now established, that the US must replace foreign imported oil. A No Dollars Thanks Very Much
greater demand for Euros would place an unwanted burden on European economies which are heavily weighted towards export markets.
Any currency mechanism that makes oil more expensive for the United States, will dampen US demand and have an adverse effect on the world economy. It will accelerate the long term trend, now established, that the US must replace foreign imported oil. A No Dollars Thanks Very Much
greater demand for Euros would place an unwanted burden on European economies which are heavily weighted towards export markets.
_____________________
Oil Min: Iran Has Halted Oil Transactions In Dollars -AFP
TEHRAN (AFP)--Major crude producer Iran has completely stopped carrying out its oil transactions in dollars, Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said on Saturday, labeling the greenback an "unreliable" currency.
"At the moment selling oil in dollars has been completely halted, in line with the
"The dollar is an unreliable currency, considering its devaluation and the oil exporters' losses," he added.
The world's fourth-largest oil exporter, Iran has massively reduced its dependence on the dollar over the past year in the face of U.S. pressures on its financial system.
The U.S. has successfully encouraged major European and Asian banks to cut their dealings with Iran in a bid to make the Islamic republic give way on its controversial nuclear program.
Washington has also blacklisted major Iranian banks for alleged support of terrorism and seeking nuclear weapons, charges denied by Tehran.
Iran has reduced its assets in dollars held in foreign banks and urged OPEC to take collective action to price oil in other currencies such as the euro, instead of the U.S. currency which is used across the world at present.
The decline of the dollar, which has weakened considerably against the euro and other currencies in the past 12 months, has affected the revenues of OPEC members because most of them price and sell their oil exports in the U.S. currency.
The Putsch by US Intelligence Agencies
Former ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, says the the latest intelligence estimate is meant not to inform but to influence policy.
When President Bush and the Republicans controlled the entire US Government, they had a chance to reform US Intelligence. They did not do that. They frittered away an opportunity. The consequences of that unfortunate decision are now being realized.
It is ironic that President Bush decided to change the Iraqi government with a dogged determination, but lost his enthusiasm to tidy things up in his own. The Democrat's Pavlovian response to the destroyed interrogation tapes will further distract any serious review of the role of US Intelligence in the governance of The United States of America.
_________________
Bolton calls report on Iran 'quasi-putsch'From Reuters
December 9, 2007
BERLIN — U.S. intelligence services attempted to influence political policy by releasing their assessment that concludes Iran halted its nuclear arms program in 2003, said John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Der Spiegel magazine quoted Bolton on Saturday as alleging that the aim of the National Intelligence Estimate, which contradicts his and President Bush's position, was not to provide the latest intelligence on Iran.
"This is politics disguised as intelligence," Bolton was quoted as saying in an article appearing in this week's edition.
Bolton described the report, released Monday, as a "quasi-putsch" by the intelligence agencies, Der Spiegel said.
The intelligence estimate said Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program four years ago but was continuing to develop the technical means that could be used to produce a bomb. This contradicted Bush's assertion that Iran was actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon.
The hawkish Bolton has long criticized Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, who has said that there was no hard evidence that Tehran was pursuing nuclear weapons.
ElBaradei said the report "somewhat vindicated" Iran, which has denied allegations that it was secretly trying to build nuclear weapons. It says its nuclear program is to generate electricity.
Update: Eurabia and the World of Islam
It is becoming increasingly clear that "post-modern modernity" and Islam have a problem. Unfortunately, it hasn't become clear enough to the politically correct multi-culti crowd that the problem is widespread and growing. The Telegraph has interesting story: Muslim apostates threatened over Christianity detailing abuses and attitudes in the British Muslim community.
Religious persecution of the kind Sofia suffers, however, is increasingly common in Britain today. It is hard to get an accurate notion of the scale of the problem, not least because very few of the people who leave Islam are willing to complain to the police about the way they are treated.
"Intimidation is very widespread and pretty effective," says Maryam Namazie, a spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. She believes that many of the deaths classified as "honour killings" are actually murders of people who have renounced Islam.
"I get threatened all the time: emails, letters, phone calls," she says. "When I returned home this afternoon, for example, there was a death threat waiting for me on my answering machine…" She laughs nervously.
"A lot of them aren't serious, but occasionally they are. I went to the police about one set of threats. They took a statement from me but that was it - they never contacted me again."
Last week, it was reported that the daughter of a British imam was living under police protection, after receiving death threats from her family for having left Islam.
But it is not only extreme Muslim families that believe it is their religious duty to threaten, and even kill, members who renounce the religion.**********
Most leading Muslims in Britain are unequivocal in their denunciation of British Muslim parents who threaten to kill their children for leaving Islam.
Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), says that it is "absolutely disgraceful behaviour… In Britain, no Muslim has the right to harm one hair of someone who decides to leave Islam."
Inayat Bunglawala, also a spokesman for the MCB, insists that such behaviour in Britain is "awful and quite wrong. The police should crack down on it."
And yet a significant portion of British Muslims think that such behaviour is not merely right, but a religious obligation: a survey by the think-tank Policy Exchange, for instance, revealed that 36 per cent of young Muslims believe that those who leave Islam should be killed.
There is considerable support, from the Koran and other sacred Islamic texts, for that position - which may explain why, out of the 57 Islamic states in the world today, seven have a legal code that punishes Muslims who leave the religion with death.
That number may soon increase: Pakistan is currently considering a Bill that would make apostasy a capital crime for men and one carrying a sentence of imprisonment for women.
As it is, ordinary Pakistanis take the law into their own hands and kill Muslim apostates. The same thing happens in Turkey where, earlier this year, two people were killed for "having turned away from Islam".
Patrick Sookhdeo was born a Muslim, but later converted to Christianity. He is now international director of the Barnabas Fund, an organisation that aims to research and to ameliorate the conditions of Christians living in countries hostile to their religion.
He notes that "all four schools of Sunni law, as well as the Shia variety, call for the death penalty for apostates. Most Muslim scholars say that Muslim religious law - sharia - requires the death penalty for apostasy.
"In 2004, Prince Charles called a meeting of leading Muslims to discuss the issue," adds Dr Sookhdeo. "I was there. All the Muslim leaders at that meeting agreed that the penalty in sharia is death. The hope was that they would issue a public declaration repudiating that doctrine, but not one of them did."
The reluctance to condemn sharia law is widespread. I asked Mr Bunglawala, for instance, to condemn the Islamic states that imposed the death penalty for apostasy. He did not do so, merely commenting that "it was a matter for those states".
Given the acceptance by some that Muslim religious law does indeed require that apostates be killed, it is hardly surprising that many ordinary Muslims think that it is their religious duty to carry out that punishment - or at least to threaten it.
"There can't be freedom of religion in Britain while so many British Muslims take that attitude," Sofia says. "It frightens me, because attitudes have hardened over the past decade."
Still, won't her parents eventually just recognise that she has chosen to change her religion? Won't they, in 10 years' time, accept her back? "No," Sofia says, her eyes full of tears. "That will never happen. I know it. They will never accept me the way I am."
*****************************
Like a scratched record, I have said over and over that Islamic fundamentalism is in a waxing phase and this time, unlike any other in history, the enemy is in the gate. Our world is being turned upside down right now, before our very eyes. Europe is being remade and what it will become is anyone's guess.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
The un-slut generation
5:00AM Saturday December 08, 2007 New Zealand Herald
By Simon Collins
Two young women researchers are calling for a new form of sexual ethics that would allow women to have casual sex without feeling that they're "sluts".
They say the popular view of women as either promiscuous or passive victims has failed to reduce incidents of rape and sexual assault.
Instead, they want both women and men to think about what each of them really wants out of a sexual encounter, and negotiate how to get it.
Canadian sociologist Melanie Beres, a post-doctoral researcher at Auckland University, and Auckland doctoral student Pantea Farvid told a sociology conference yesterday that rape prevention efforts should stop just giving women tips to avoid harm and promote an ethic of "self-care and care for the other".
Dr Beres interviewed young Canadians aged 19 to 25 about their casual sex experiences, while Ms Farvid interviewed New Zealanders in the same age bracket. The New Zealand women were more likely to have actively initiated casual sex, whereas the Canadians were more likely to say it "just happened". Drink was used by some as an excuse for their choices.
Studies have shown New Zealanders start sex younger than in many countries and have high rates of teen pregnancies and STDs. By the age of 25, 13 per cent of women have had more than 10 sexual partners.
Dr Beres said some women deliberately challenged society's "double standard" that said casual sex was okay for men. One woman in her study took the initiative in sexual encounters and another had decided that a serious relationship would hinder her career, so she sought casual sex to meet her physical needs.
Ms Farvid said a more open approach to sex would move away from the legal idea that the only issue in sexual morality was consent.
In some highly publicised group sex cases, men had escaped conviction because of doubts over consent. But on the basis of care for oneself and others, it would be unethical to have "four men in a room with a woman".
Boeing 787 Dreamliner, Is the Dream a Nightmare?
The least amount of necessary parts involved with a working machine, the better. Simply stated, there are less things to go wrong. In planning the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing has built a manufacturing model dependent upon an intricate supply chain of sub-contractors and vendors. That means instead of one accounting and finance division, the Dreamliner is dependent upon the financial divisions of every vendor. Those vendors are supplied by other vendors and all, starting with Boeing, will naturally attempt to shift the financial burden up and down the line. Finance rules in manufacturing. At an optimum, everyone shares in the profits. The down side is a sharing in losses.
Boeing, late for its first deliveries, has been saying it has a nuts and bolts (fastening problem), caused by late vendors. Sounds more like the old cash flow problem to me. It only makes sense that vendors and sub-contractors only make money when a project flows on time. Start a delay chain with multiple parties and you have a growing multitude of problems.
Perhaps it would have been better to call it a Dreamliner after it achieved dream status.
Behind Boeing's 787 delays
Problems at one of the smallest suppliers in Dreamliner program causing ripple effect
By David Greising and Julie Johnsson | Tribune staff reporters
December 8, 2007
When Boeing Co. announced a costly, six-month delay in the first delivery of the world's fastest-selling airplane, the 787 Dreamliner, it singled out a shortage of bolts and screws as the chief cause of trouble.
But the Tribune has learned that the problems go deeper and are more difficult to solve. Boeing's 787 meltdown also stems from trouble with the daring global manufacturing network it put in place to make the plane, flying in sections of the plane from companies in Japan, Italy, South Carolina and Kansas and "snapping" them together in only three days' time, an audacious idea that promised to revolutionize the way airplanes are built.
Yet the impact of a little-known Texas company that fell months behind building tools needed to assemble the plane highlights how a hiccup can play havoc with Boeing's tight 787 timetable.
The company, Advanced Integration Technology, has fallen short supplying Vought Aircraft Industries, itself the Dreamliner's most troubled supplier. Dallas-based Vought has struggled to fabricate its fuselage sections to Boeing's standards, according to several Boeing suppliers contacted by the Tribune.
Because AIT plays a key role in connecting virtually the entire length of the 787's fuselage, the company's troubles are having a ripple effect, the suppliers say.
The delay of the 787, which has not yet flown, is costing Boeing and its suppliers billions of dollars in penalty payments and cash shortages and raising questions about whether Boeing can meet its revised delivery schedule.
Three major suppliers face a total cash shortfall of $1.2 billion next year because their payments from Boeing have been delayed along with the initial 787 deliveries, according to a Tribune analysis of financial disclosures.
At least five of Boeing's largest partners say they have demanded to renegotiate their payment terms. Boeing itself expects to take a cash hit of $2.5 billion in 2008 from paying penalties to antsy airline customers and keeping its suppliers afloat.
The trouble with the bolts and screws, known as fasteners, with AIT and with previously disclosed software snafus point up the daunting challenge, and the scant margin for error, Boeing took on with the 787.
The production problems appear so complex that suppliers and analysts think it is unlikely that Boeing can meet its plan to produce 40 of the new aircraft by the end of next year and 109 total planes by the close of 2009.
Even so, the company on Tuesday is expected to reassure analysts and reporters in a worldwide conference call that it is mending the 787's broken supply chain.
"We're doing what we need to support our partners at this crucial time, but we're not going to get into specific details," a Boeing spokeswoman said in an e-mail Friday.
A critical juncture
The troubles are a jarring turn for an airplane that stirred excitement, and sales topping $100 billion, after Boeing launched the 787 Dreamliner program in 2004.
The Chicago-based aerospace giant is at a critical juncture, observers say. Boeing's airline customers have built their strategies around on-time deliveries of the new airplane.
Suppliers are facing cash-flow and logistical problems coping with endless tweaks in design and production, while for the first time bearing the cost of those changes, thanks to Boeing's new outsourcing strategy.
The cost of delays has Boeing's suppliers worried about "unk-unks," aerospace jargon for "unknown unknowns." They fret that the supply-chain problems will continue, that unexpected problems will arise during flight tests, and that Boeing's schedule will slip beyond the initial six-month delay.
Any further setbacks could unsettle confidence in Boeing's timetable and create a competitive opening for Airbus SAS, Boeing's European archrival.
Ultimately, Boeing's effort to grapple with the troubles could determine whether its broad vision for a global supply chain can work. Already bearing roughly half the 787's $10 billion development cost, suppliers might balk on Boeing's next program if delays mount and red ink flows.
"It's proven a good business model for Boeing in the short term," said David Pritchard, aviation researcher at the University of Buffalo. But, he said, "If these risk-sharing partners took a financial hit on the 787, are they going to be willing to play the risk-sharing game again?" the rest of the tale
How About The Magna Carta for Xmas?
it is worth a click to the photo for a close-up
I have linked a translation. The BBC says it will sell for something over $25 million. My money is nothing under $100 million. Talk about a legacy gift. Any guesses on who will buy it and what they will do with it?
Here is more on this magnificent document.
Magna Carta: 2,500 words, 710 years old –and for sale
By Lisa Anderson | Tribune national correspondent
December 8, 2007
NEW YORK—Even in the hyperbole-prone world of fine art, antiques and documents, there is the "rare," there is the "important" and there is the Magna Carta.
As rare as it is important, a 13th Century original copy of this medieval template for modern laws upholding human rights and freedoms will be sold to the highest bidder on Dec. 18 at Sotheby's here. It could be yours for an estimated $20 million to $30 million.
Such a chance may never come again, according to David Redden, Sotheby's vice chairman, who showed off the vellum manuscript at a preview Friday. He described the document as the most important ever to be sold at auction.
"I guess the most astonishing thing is it's here and it's for sale," said Redden. Only 17 original copies of the Magna Carta are known to survive. English archives and libraries hold 15 of them and Australia has one, none of which is likely ever to be sold, he said. He noted there are no restrictions on who may bid on the Magna Carta or where they may take it.
The document is being sold by The Perot Foundation, a philanthropy founded by Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, which purchased it for $1.5 million in 1984. For approximately five centuries before that, the document belonged to the wealthy English Brudenell family of Deene Park in Northhampshire, although it is not certain how they acquired it.
Sotheby's is auctioning the only original copy of the manuscript that has been held primarily in private hands since it was produced by a royal scribe in 1297. That was the year the Magna Carta, originally written in 1215 and revised through the 13th Century, finally was entered into English common law by King Edward I. Handwritten copies were made for distribution around the kingdom.
Long, elegant manuscript
Written in ink on a 710-year-old sheet of animal skin vellum and bearing the wax seal of King Edward, the manuscript has held up surprisingly well. Although it is marred by some staining and missing words, Sotheby's Magna Carta, or Great Charter, is about 14 inches wide by 16 inches high and features 2,500 Latin words densely packed into 68 lines of text. Most of it is legible, particularly if you use a magnifying glass. The now-sepia-colored handwriting is exquisite, in an elegant chancery script with flourishes on perfectly formed letters that are only about one-eighth-inch high.
"Quite frankly, the reason it's called Magna Carta is it's big," said Redden, noting that because the document was long and vellum was valuable, scribes had to write in the most economical manner possible.
But, he added, "In a very important way it doesn't matter what it looks like because what one is offering is one of the most important symbols of world history."
Beyond England, the Magna Carta provided the foundation for legal systems throughout the world, Redden said, including those of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, former British colonies in Asia and Africa and, of course, the United States. Many of the ideas and language used in the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence find their roots in the Magna Carta.
These include the right to a speedy trial before a jury of one's peers; no taxation without representation; the concept of government of the people, by the people and for the people; the idea of government drawing power from the consent of the governed; the right of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful imprisonment; and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
Most important, the Magna Carta established the revolutionary concept that no man is above the law, even the king. In 1215, it was forged out of outrage against the abuses of King John, a cruel sovereign who ran roughshod over his subjects. After a rebellion by barons, he hammered out the first version of the Magna Carta with them and signed it at Runnymede, a meadow alongside the Thames. Although it was revised over the years, the document did not become part of common law until 82 years later. The catalyst was rebellion against another abusive king, John's grandson Edward I, who exploited his subjects, seizing goods, extorting loans and raising taxes to finance his wars of expansion.
On display in archives
After The Perot Foundation purchase of the document, it spent most of the last 23 years on display at the National Archives in Washington. It was removed this fall. Proceeds of the sale will fund medical research, education and aid to wounded soldiers.
"It wasn't our copy. It belonged to The Perot Foundation. We always knew it was on loan to us. That's the nature of a loan, it's not permanent," said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper. When asked if they would like to get it back on loan from the next owner, she declined to speculate.
But Redden was not as shy on their behalf. "The National Archives would like it back," he said, crisply. "They very much, explicitly, would like it back."
lbanderson@tribune.com
Friday, December 07, 2007
Faith
The reason they call it faith is because it is unprovable and not based on demonstrable fact. If you prefer, you can choose someone else's faith or you can make up your own. The someone else sort gathers credibility with aging. With aging, it achieves a dogma. Dogma become fighting words and fighting words become killing words. People die for their faith and kill for their faith, and all that based on the unprovable and thus the unknowable.
Faith in politics is worse than politics in faith. Hearing a politician say, "You will be in my thoughts and prayers" is a tooth cracking experience. It would be refreshing to hear, "You will not be in my thoughts and prayers." That would be too honest for politics.
Please Lord, spare us.
Faith in politics is worse than politics in faith. Hearing a politician say, "You will be in my thoughts and prayers" is a tooth cracking experience. It would be refreshing to hear, "You will not be in my thoughts and prayers." That would be too honest for politics.
Please Lord, spare us.
7 December 1941. Sixty Six Years On.
Burying the dead after the attack
Pearl was one of those truly transitional moments in US history. A singular event dragged America onto the World stage, where it remains today. To put the times in context, look at this Dept of Interior Film from 1937, four years before Pearl.
The US South on the eve of WWII
The US South on the eve of WWII
Thursday, December 06, 2007
CIA Keeps Secrets Secret by Burning Tapes.
In Shredders We TrustThe CIA is not the Village Voice. It is a clandestine intelligence agency designed to protect the USA from foreign enemies. It does so in secrecy. They have shredding machines and burn bags. They practice the "need to know." The CIA is supposed to destroy tapes to keep them out of the way of irresponsible parties such as the agenda driven New York Times that gives not a whit about the consequences of irresponsible reporting.
Given a choice between trusting the New York Times or the CIA would be a toss-up on many matters, but deciding which agency is more trustworthy with classified information? You must be joking.
C.I.A. Destroyed Tapes of Interrogations
By MARK MAZZETTI NYT
Published: December 6, 2007
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.
The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.
The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.
The existence and subsequent destruction of the tapes are likely to reignite the debate over the use of severe interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and their destruction raises questions about whether C.I.A. officials withheld information about aspects of the program from the courts and from the Sept. 11 commission appointed by President Bush and Congress. It was not clear who within the C.I.A. authorized the destruction of the tapes, but current and former government officials said it had been approved at the highest levels of the agency.
The New York Times informed the C.I.A. on Wednesday evening that it planned to publish an article in Friday’s newspaper about the destruction of the tapes. Today, the C.I.A. director, General Michael V. Hayden, wrote a letter to the agency workforce explaining the matter.
The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.
C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.
Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui — showing that the Al Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.
General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk,” and that if they were to become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.”
“What matters here is that it was done in line with the law,” he said. He said in his statement that he was informing agency employees because “the press has learned” about the destruction of the tapes.
General Hayden said in a statement that leaders of Congressional oversight committees were fully briefed on the matter, but some Congressional officials said notification to Congress had not been adequate.
“This is a matter that should have been briefed to the full Intelligence Committee at the time,” an official with the House Intelligence Committee said. “This does not appear t