Bush Casts Aside Calls to Legalize Gay Marriage: President Bush said Wednesday he has government lawyers working on a law that would define marriage as a union between a woman and a man, casting aside calls to legalize gay marriages. "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and I believe we ought to codify that one way or the other and we have lawyers looking at the best way to do that," the president said a wide-ranging news conference at the White House Rose Garden.
Um ... you know, perhaps it's me, but I was pretty sure we had one of those already. That weird little thing called the Federal Defense of Marriage Act. I mean, maybe he's just pretending that, because it was enacted under Clinton, it doesn't exist, but I'm pretty sure it's actually there.
To be sure, I think, although I wouldn't swear to it, that he's trying to do an end-run around his party's conservatives, who want to enact a constitutitional amendment to that end. But surely enacting Yet Another Law to do what the first one already has would be rather pointless. The only way to ensure that the Supreme Court keeps its mitts off the question -- which is the real agenda behind all of this -- is to either enact a constitutional amendment, or to amend the Judiciary Act itself, placing marriage on the list of items that the Supreme Court is not competent to touch. Interestingly, such explicit overrules of Court decisions are relatively infrequent; you'd think that as often as Congresses of various stripes get pissed off at Courts of various eras, it would happen more than it does. Apparently, Congress just doesn't feel that it should do such things very often. Who knew?
Posted by iain at 10:52 AM
Media Relations: the mean machine/ July 30, 2003
Discerning readers may note that the middle of this piece originally appeared, substantially different and rather briefer, at the end of "Attack of the Fab 5". Things change.
Posted by iain at 12:15 AM
Pentagon Abandons Plan for Futures Market on Terror (NY Times, July 29, 2003, registration required): The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has quickly abandoned an idea in which anonymous speculators would have bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups in an online futures market. Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, said today that he had conferred with the program's director at the Pentagon, "and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped.'' The senator's announcement - made during a confirmation hearing for retired Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who has been nominated to be Army chief of staff - signaled the end of a program that was met with astonishment and derision almost from the moment it was disclosed.
I'm not surprised. What the hell could they possibly have been thinking? Were they thinking?
Under the discarded plan, traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel, say, or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have had the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the "broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.'' But two Democratic senators who disclosed the plan on Monday called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser. One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine,'' Mr. Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in - and is sponsored by the government itself - people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?'' After Mr. Dorgan and his fellow critic, Ron Wyden of Oregon, spoke out, the Pentagon sought to play down the importance of a program for which the Bush administration has sought $8 million through 2005.
Not terribly well funded, actually, even for a relatively small program. But nonetheless, an outstandingly brain-damaged idea.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that Congress was, to put it mildly, opposed to the plan. It's so stupid that opposing it would be a political freebie. What I find truly astonishing is that anyone in the Pentagon or the administration ever thought that this could be a good idea in the first place. A public betting market on whether or not terrorist acts will be committed, especially one that provides a payoff, would be pretty much guaranteeing that something would happen. Fairly frequently, one would think. I suppose it would make certain that the Pentagon had something to do, and the results would be used to justify the retention of the more draconian sections of the Constitutional Evisceration Decree ... er, that is, the USA PATRIOT Act.
I will admit to being baffled as to how this sort of thing could possibly have fit into any TIA program. Unless they planned to simply arrest all the traders who signed up for it, on the grounds that they were conspiring to commit terrorist acts. Which might even be true, up to a point. I also wonder how you collect your payoff when you could play anonymously. (Well, it was a government site, and connected with TIA. "Anonymous" would not have been a term with any meaning in connection to this program.)
Posted by iain at 01:51 PM
USATODAY.com - Poll shows backlash on gay issues (USAToday, July 28, 2003): After several years of growing public tolerance, the survey shows a return to a level of more traditional attitudes that was last seen in the mid-1990s. Asked whether homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal, 48% said yes, and 46% said no — within the poll's margin of error of 3 percentage points. In early May, legal relations were endorsed 60%-35%. Before this month, support hadn't been that low since 1996.
Of course.
That the country decided to swing back to the right on the issue is not in and of itself even mildly surprising. Mind, the sheer speed with which the country just whipsawed from "Oh, we think that maybe people ought to be allowed to do whatever they want to do in the privacy of their own bedroom" to "Ew. No. I just don't think so," is utterly blinding. Apparently, actually being confronted with the concept that people are now allowed to do what they like without the state having a say has made vast tracts of the country decide that perhaps chastity belts were not all that bad after all. Apparently, the country is only actually tolerant until its bluff is called.
Posted by iain at 09:12 PM
FindLaw's Writ - Mariner: Stopping Prison Rape..... On Friday, the House of Representatives, by a unanimous vote, passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. The bill was passed unanimously by the Senate on the previous Monday, and it now goes to President Bush for signature. Notwithstanding its ambitious title - an improvement over its previous, dismayingly modest title of Prison Rape Reduction Act - the new law will not put an end to rape in prison. The main focus of the legislation is on studying prison rape, collecting statistics relating to the problem, and developing national standards for the prevention and punishment of prison rape. Its enforcement mechanisms are relatively weak. (Indeed, the fact that the bill passed Congress unanimously should be proof enough that it lacks vigorous enforcement mechanisms, a failing that the text of the bill confirms.)
It will be fascinating to see exactly how this all works out. As Ms Mariner's article notes, looking at the actual text of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 is most illuminating. For one thing, it's going to come to the states as Yet Another Unfunded Federal Mandate. On its own, an unfunded mandate reduces both the ability and desire of any state to follow the dictates of that mandate. Second, as this particular unfunded mandate notes, that the states allow this situation to exist can, in and of itself, be considered a violation of inmates' constitutional rights. Thus, the states have every interest in minimizing any evidence that the situation exists. They already deny that inmates catch deadly diseases in prison as a result of sexual assault, despite the fact that they test for AIDS and hepatitis on arrival, and know full well that people develop the diseases in jail, despite the fact that the guards and the staff can tell them which inmates are being sexually assaulted. Both because the inmates will be kept in general population after reporting an assault and because the state itself frequently retaliates against the inmate for reporting such things, the inmates have no incentive to report.
To be sure, this is not an entirely unfunded mandate. The National Institute of Justice is "authorized to be appropriated" $15 million per year to fund independent study grants for researchers interested in studying the problem. And, to be sure, there may be no lack of researchers. There will, however, almost certainly be a lack of actual funds; "authorized to be appropriated" is not the same as an actual appropriation. The other issue is, with a prison population growing at nearly 3 percent per year, despite the odd decline in the crime rate, what precisely are the states expected to do about the problem? It's not that there aren't things they can do -- segregating smaller, younger and more vulnerable inmates would be a start -- but most of the things they could reasonably do cost money that states simply don't have. (And would not be inclined to spend on prisoner care if they did; prisoners are the ultimate in throwaway people in this society.)
It would be nice if something good comes from this act. It's just not terribly likely.
Posted by iain at 09:02 PM
KMUW: Kline Speaks on Limon Case (2003-07-25) (RealPlayer required)
The early part of the interview gives a very clear and concise summary of the case. In essence, Kline agrees with the ACLU that underage sex should not be punished differentially due to the gender of the offending parties, and that's what he's going to urge the state to do when the law is reconsidered (which, according to Lawrence vs Texas, it really must be). It will be interesting to see what the state actually does, since a whole complex of Kansas laws have just been removed from the books.
Regarding the actual case, as Kline notes, what is likely to happen on appeal -- absent the equal protection issue, which doesn't really seem to apply, despite his worries -- is that rather than rehear the case, since all are agreed that Limon did, in fact, commit the crime at issue, he will simply be resentenced to a length that is equal to the time served. It does depend somewhat on how the Kansas courts interpret the decision as affecting the law in question. The most likely outcome is that they will consider that they have been ordered to make the punishments for the crime congruent, and that more severe punishment for homosexual statutory rape is now illegal, thus reducing the maximum possible sentence to 15 months or thereabouts. (Note: by the time this case is heard in September or October, Limon will have served over two years.) The other, less likely, alternative is that the court will consider the law itself to have been removed from the books, and that absent any law to punish Limon under, the conviction and sentence itself must be purged. (This would, actually, be the more fair result, given the specifics of the case, but it's extremely unlikely.)
Posted by iain at 04:42 PM
Spotlight on Seabiscuit (NY Times, registration required)
OK, I have to admit, this is totally cool. In its coverage of the film being released nationally today, the Times has included not only its review of the film and original review of the book, but a few articles about Seabiscuit himself that were originally published back in the 1930s and 1940s. The older articles all require Adobe Acrobat for reading. But still, as product tie-ins go, this one is pretty cool.
The LA Times has a few human interest stories centered around the review, but peculiarly, they don't do anything like as comprehensive a package. Peculiar because Seabiscuit was based out of southern California; the big race that his owner always wanted to win, at least as much as the match race with War Admiral, was the Santa Anita Handicap. (As Santa Anita Park notes in its historical timeline, the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap was his last race, and they have a life sized statue of him erected in the Paddock Gardens.)
Then again, maybe the LA Times skipped it because the LA Daily News went hog wild. Or horse-wild, as the case may be.
(... They sawed off his hooves as memorabilia? And then turned them into ashtrays? Ew. People are just damn peculiar sometimes.)
And, of course, there was the earlier, less schmaltzy PBS special about Seabiscuit, including vintage racing broadcasts of some of his races.
Posted by iain at 12:07 PM
OK, just what the hell is going on? Like most people, I have received the odd virus now and again, and, except for an early and peculiarly fortunate collision betwen Melissa and a corrupted Outlook (which was so badly corrupted before I got the virus that it kept the virus from running - heh), nothing particularly notable has happened. Weirdly, except for a very few, almost all of the viruses I've received have come at my work email and not my personal email addresses.
Until today.
Today alone, I have received 195 messages containing viruses. And not all the same virus, oh no no no. These are all different. All special in their own perverted little way.
What on earth is going on out there?
(Oh, and for the people running the MyRealBox.com system, I would like to point out that yes, having a virus scanning gateway to catch the virus and notify the user that one was sent to him is a good thing. Having your virus scanning gateway then send on the still-infected virus laden message itself is, however, up there on the list of severely brain damaged things to be doing. Perhaps we might address this wee little problem, yes?)
Oh, and Microsoft is having yet another critical flaw that they want people to patch. Which is just the cherry on the frosting of this virus-choked cake of a day, really.
Posted by iain at 11:19 AM
Poynter Online - Name the Accuser and the Accused: In the crime of rape, it is time we named the accuser as well as the accused. [...] What fundamental elements of good journalism these are: Getting at issues that most people prefer not be dealt with. And naming names is an essential part of the commitment to accuracy, credibility, and fairness. This practice frequently brings pain to individuals; truth-telling does have its victims. My own view is that recovery from difficult times is, like journalism, abetted by openness and hampered by secrecy. But the larger point is this: Openness serves society as a whole. It serves enlightenment and understanding and progress. And it serves the criminal justice system .... But here is the new development: As a practical matter, whether shielding rape victims was the right thing to do or not, it no longer makes sense. Newspapers are not -- as they once were -- the gatekeepers of such information. The culture has changed.
On the one hand, it seems, and really is, inconsistent to name both the accuser and the accused in every other crime, but to shield the accuser for this one. Whatever a given policy is, its application should be consistent.
On the other ... Consider this: every day, people's houses are burgled, they're robbed at gunpoint and knifepoint. These people never give a thought to whether their personal details are published in relationship to those events, partly because they almost never are, absent some sensational hook, some odd aberration regarding the crimes. In the big city, those are common, every-day crimes. No blood, no guts, no gore, no reporting. Personal details are reported regarding other physical assaults -- which some do mind, to be sure -- and murder. However, the murdered are in no position to object.
On the other hand, most people would detest having details of their personal sexual history published without their consent. For all that rape is a crime of violence, unconsented and undesired, intended to degrade and humiliate, it is part of the individual's sexual history. Especially after you've been forced to yield that sort of intimate control over your own body, most people would prefer to maintain control over what is told about that crime and who is told; it's the one measure of control regarding that which they might retain.
One of Ms Overholser's points may no longer be true. In this day of mass media, of sensationalized details, of inaccurate reporting leading to the pillorying of innocent bystanders -- one of the accuser's friends in this case was inaccurately named as the accuser herself, and has been enduring a great deal of difficulty as a result -- the criminal justice system may not be at all well served by publishing the name of either accuser or accused. The names of both do need to be a matter of record. But exactly how public should that record be, and why?
People want to know everything, yes -- but what exactly do they have a right to know? One of the problems is that in the media's urge to sensationalize, and the public's desire for ever more sensational entertainment, it's very easy to report so much information with such detail, and such a slant, that it's impossible for the accused to receive anything like a truly fair trial. The accused also ends up taking much damage to their reputation. The culture has in fact, changed. The media has a much broader reach than it once did. Even 100, 150 years ago, a case like Kobe Bryant's would have been big news in Los Angeles where he lives or in the town where he stands accused, but wouldn't really have been much reported anywhere else. There were fewer national celebrities, and it was much more difficult for a case to reach a national or international audience. Not impossible, just more difficult. On the one hand, democracy depends vitally on an informed citizenry -- but what does knowing all this about the accused and accuser benefit the democracy itself? What is the value? On the other, the justice system may best be served by a somewhat UNinformed jury pool. You may have opinions on how certain crimes should be handled, to be sure, but you can't form a prejudiced opinion about specific cases when you don't know the details.
Interestingly, the one type of sexual assault case where the accuser is almost always named are those involving the kidnapping and assault of children. For the most part, this type of naming is accidental. Information about the child is released to enable the public to help the police find the child and the kidnapper. When the child and kidnapper are later found alive, the kidnapper is not infrequently charged with sexual assault, at which point everyone knows what happened. The media find themselves in the odd position of either trying to put the genie back into the bottle -- so you read terribly strange articles following well publicized abductions that talk about crimes committed against some abstract child when you know perfectly well who it is -- or shrugging and going ford to prevent looking that absurd. It's peculiar that the system protects adult women from this sort of disclosure when it can, but winds up forcing it on children.
Posted by iain at 12:33 PM
Just Write: The Gay Agenda, Part 3
Hum. Turns out there was supposed to be a graduation ceremony, too. Well. Who knew? Thankfully, the commencement speech has been posted, and the speaker was most articulate.
Up until now, you've been coddled in this liberal arts college, and let's face it, when you put liberal together with arts, we're talking homo. Great big gobs of gay sprouting out of every nook and crannie.
My, what an ... arresting image that puts into the mind. Tell that to the right people, and you could close down every liberal arts college in the country within the year.
And, then, of course, there's this ...
Before I retire back to my Eames lounger, let me leave you with some final advice. If you ignore everything else I have said to you today, and I urge you to do so, please reflect on these words and take them to heart, because I mean them sincerely and believe in them with every shiny black shard of my soul. Treat everyone with kindness, love, and understanding.
From here forward, it doesn't matter how you've been treated, or what names you've been called, or how much anger you've managed to swallow under a sugary coating of tolerance. Tolerance is an ugly, horrid, hateful word. Tolerance means, "I tolerate you." It means that I am allowed to continue to believe the wrong, ignorant, backwards lies I have always been told about you but that I can manage to sit here across the table from you and not take my steak knife and plunge it into your heart. It's been said that tolerance is the most we can ever hope for, and we should be glad of it where we find it.
Do not accept it, ladies and gentlemen. And do not spread it like the plague that it is. Stop tolerating, and start understanding. Ask questions, and listen to the answers. Explain yourself, and listen to explanations. And avoid the simple, gated, picket-fenced sidewalk of tolerance and move down the rocky, shaky, strenuous path of understanding.
In all seriousness ... that seems an unnecessarily narrow view of the concept of tolerance. The OED devines the word so: The action or practice of tolerating; toleration; the disposition to be patient with or indulgent to the opinions or practices of others; freedom from bigotry or undue severity in judging the conduct of others; forbearance; catholicity of spirit. Understanding does not exclude simple tolerance, and vice versa. Frankly, I may understand your predilictions and desires regarding some thing or another perfectly well, and still quite dislike them. That doesn't mean necessarily that I dislike you or feel the urgent desire to fire you out of a cannon into the nearest wall. (To use the simplest and most obvious example: I actually understand and even like most of the straight people I know. Doesn't mean that I have the least urge to emulate that particular aspect of their behavior.) "Tolerance" would seem to simply allow another to be whatever they are, without interference and without condemnation. After all, most people tolerate a great deal in this life that they understand yet dislike, not least their various friends' quirks and foibles.
And all that said ... "boundless, unfettered love and understanding" would be better for everyone, wouldn't it?
Posted by iain at 03:08 PM
Media Relations: attack of the fab 5/ July 22, 2003
Posted by iain at 12:45 AM
Media Relations: spike unspiked/ July 22, 2003
Posted by iain at 11:36 PM
Perhaps the Secret Service should join the FBI in finding something to do and getting, you know, a clue or two.
Cartoon in Times Prompts Inquiry by Secret Service (LA Times, July 22, 2003, registration required):
An editorial cartoon in The Times that depicted a man pointing a gun at President Bush prompted a visit to the newspaper's offices Monday by a Secret Service agent, who asked to speak to cartoonist Michael Ramirez. The agent was turned away. A Secret Service official said the inquiry was routine, according to Karlene Goller, an attorney for The Times who met with the agent and later spoke to an official in the agency's Los Angeles office. The government asks questions of anyone publishing material that might be construed as a threat against the president.
Frankly, you need to be working very hard indeed to construe the cartoon -- or, really any cartoon -- as a threat against the president.
Surely the Secret Service doesn't investigate each and every editorial cartoon featuring the president and weapons. That would leave them hardly any time for actually guarding his physical self.
(One would also note that, judging from the cartoonist's explanation of the content, he's actually one of the president's supporters. My, my, my.)
Posted by iain at 01:49 PM
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana, Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 284
Foreign Policy: Lessons of the Past, by Minxin Pei: ..... According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has conducted more than 200 military interventions abroad since its founding. Sixteen of these interventions, or about 8 percent, can be categorized as nation-building attempts. These missions have three characteristics. First, their practical goal was to achieve regime change or the survival of a regime that would have otherwise collapsed. (As in Iraq, creating or restoring democracy was not the original mission objective. Rather, core U.S. security and economic interests were the principal drivers of U.S. interventions.) Second, American nation-building efforts typically required that a large number of ground troops be deployed to provide security and basic services. Third, U.S. military and civilian personnel were active in post-conflict political administration. Such deep U.S. involvement in the political life of the target nations allowed Washington to select friendly leaders, influence policy, and restructure institutions.
If we judge these nation-building attempts by whether they created durable democratic regimes after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the results are sobering. Of the 16 attempts (see facing page), only four (Japan, Germany, Panama in 1989, and Grenada in 1983) qualify as successes. In these four countries, democracy, as measured by the widely used Polity democracy index maintained at the University of Maryland, was sustained 10 years after U.S. troops left. In the other 11 countries (excluding Afghanistan), democracy failed to emerge or endure during the same time frame. Worse, in the countries where U.S. nation-building efforts foundered, brutal dictatorships and corrupt, autocratic regimes gained power after the U.S. exit. This record implies a success rate of 26 percent (four out of 15 attempts)
The successes are also highly distinguishable, for the most part. In both Japan and Germany, not only had civil society been almost utterly and completely destroyed, but there was plainly nobody else in the world that really could manage any sort of direct administration. The only largely undestroyed areas were the Americas, and most South American countries simply didn't have the military resources for that sort of large scale administration (and considering US racial views at the time, we'd never have allowed all those brown people to have control over white Europeans, in any event). Both Japan and Germany were also ethnically more uniform than Iraq, and neither ethnic nor religious pressures provided internal desires to pull the countries apart permanently -- Germany's partition came about entirely through external forces. One would also point out that Grenada, at least, was nominally democratic in the first place; Reagan just didn't like the fact that they had elected a communist as their leader. One would also point out that in 1989, we didn't attempt to administer Panama at all; we played loud music at their dictator until he surrendered, stuck around long enough to make sure that the Canal wasn't going to go up in smoke or some such, and then we left pretty damn quickly.
This administration could hardly have gotten off to a worse start in nationbuilding in Iraq. (We'll just ignore Afghanistan for the moment, shall we? After all, they are.) A few weeks ago, the administration made a major misstep when it cancelled local elections in Iraq. Allowing people local administration might well have produced some amount of patience with the US' groping towards some method of direct national administration that worked. Instead, they created even more resentment and hostility by cancelling elections which would have allowed Iraqis to have (or at least feel they had) some voice, some control over their own lives.
To date, direct administration of Iraq clearly isn't working. The military is overstretched and clearly unable to do the peacekeeping work for which it was never trained, and the administrators are isolated behind the walls of one of Saddam's palaces. (And they could not have chosen a worse place, in terms of symbolism, than that. It may well be the only place that's defensible in the city, but then, the interim administration should not ostensibly be thinking of defensibility above all else.)
The most likely mode of administration to function at all well might well be a UN-sanctioned and led approach. Unfortunately, although such an approach stands a moderately better chance of working, it's also an approach that this administration is unlikely to embrace any time soon. Having blown off the UN to wage this war in the first place, they're unlikely to go back, hat in hand, and say, "We're out of our depth. Please help." The UN is also likely to demand -- not unreasonably -- that having done most of the physical destruction, the US pay for most of the physical reconstruction. They're also likely to demand that the UN take over the awarding of reconstruction contracts, which will end the administration's ability to steer them to their old cronies. Even if, by some miracle, the administration decided to work with the UN, they would insist on maintaining control of the mission -- the US has never submitted its soldiers to direct UN control -- and under these circumstances, the UN itself might understandably decline that condition; after all, if the US were actually able to accomplish anything useful by maintaining control, we wouldn't look to the UN for anything, now would we? Thus, at least in the near term, the administration is not likely to work with the UN. The administration is also not going to want to lose face, as they will see it, before the elections by asking the UN for anything, especially since France, with its anachronistic veto, and Germany will be on the Security Council and will be helping shape its decisions on the issue. Therefore, our military and the Iraqis will simply sit and bleed, at least through the November 2004 elections. (The sad part is, if the administration just sucked it up and went to the UN now, it's likely that by the time the elections rolled around, things would be more stable. At the very least, to be entirely cynical about it, other nations' soldiers would be sharing in the one-a-day death rate, which would likely reduce the number of American soldiers who died, which would reduce that specific pressure on the administration. Unless, of course, the guerillas made specific efforts to target Americans, which they well might.)
Posted by iain at 01:01 PM
Weapons of Mass Stupidity BY HAL CROWTHER (Creative Loafing Charlotte, June 4, 2003)
So it turns out that if you click the above link, print out the article, and take it around town and read it, the FBI may come calling on you.
No, really.
Leaving aside the joys of having such an informative citizenry ... I think the FBI might need just a little something else to do. I mean, seriously, what on earth would you expect someone to be reading in public? "Terrorism 101: How to make the masses stupid"? I mean, what? Reading is suddenly "potential terrorist activity"? And since when was reading anything at all suddenly an unconstitutional activity, or something worth investigating on the say-so of a single person?
The FBI has just got to get itself a grip and a sense of proportion.
Posted by iain at 01:50 PM
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV (SFgate.com, July 18, 2003): Morale is dipping pretty low among U.S. soldiers as they stew in Iraq's broiling heat, get shot at by an increasingly hostile population and get repeated orders to extend their tours of duty. [...] On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
Well, that ought to just do wonders for morale, won't it?
To be sure, the soldiers are not officially allowed to voice such complaints. And it was unwise, to put it mildly, to be televised making such complaints. Nonetheless, it also seems unwise for the administration to retaliate in this way. Yes, it will probably keep soldiers from speaking out on camera again in the near future -- although it probably won't stop them from giving off-the-record or anonymously sourced quotes. However, the domestic audience is also a bit peeved at the administration for yanking the soldiers and their families around like this (largely because the administration chose to be dishonest with the country about the sort of commitment this would entail in both the short and long term, and the sorts of fighting the soldiers were likely to face). It will not go over well to punish soldiers this way, even if it's noted that they violated regulations to criticize their leaders in public.
Posted by iain at 01:34 PM
Report on USA Patriot Act Alleges Civil Rights Violations (NY Times, July 20, 2003, registration required): A report by internal investigators at the Justice Department has identified dozens of recent cases in which department employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil liberties violations involving enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.
How singularly unsurprising.
The report said that in the six-month period that ended on June 15, the inspector general's office had received 34 complaints of civil rights and civil liberties violations by department employees that it considered credible, including accusations that Muslim and Arab immigrants in federal detention centers had been beaten. The accused workers are employed in several of the agencies that make up the Justice Department, with most of them assigned to the Bureau of Prisons, which oversees federal penitentiaries and detention centers.
Only 34 complaints that the department considers "credible"? My. One wonders how many they received that they decided to discount, for whatever reason. All things considered, "34 complaints" sounds drasticaly understated, frankly.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Barbara Comstock, said tonight that the department "takes its obligations very seriously to protect civil rights and civil liberties, and the small number of credible allegations will be thoroughly investigated."
HA.
The report draws no broad conclusions about the extent of abuses by Justice Department employees, although it suggests that the relatively small staff of the inspector general's office has been overwhelmed by accusations of abuse, many filed by Muslim or Arab inmates in federal detention centers. The inspector general said that from Dec. 16 through June 15, his office received 1,073 complaints "suggesting a Patriot Act-related" abuse of civil rights or civil liberties. The report suggested that hundreds of the accusations were easily dismissed as not credible or impossible to prove. But of the remainder, 272 were determined to fall within the inspector general's jurisdiction, with 34 raising "credible Patriot Act violations on their face."
And both the higher numbers sound far more likely than the "34" complaints judged credible.
One wonders if these reports about the abuses the PATRIOT act has allowed will encourage Congress to finds its collective spine, repeal the act (or at least significant portions thereof) and actually exercise the oversight of the Justice Department that they are supposed to have. For example, Congress directly and explicitly told Justice that they were not allowed to arrest and imprison people for indefinite periods of time; they explicitly refused to allow that provision into the Patriot act itself. Yet Ashcroft decided that it should be done anyway, signed a directive making it so, and Congress has done ... nothing. Not said a word, not inquired as to why Justice is doing something they were explicitly told they could not do, not inquired of the president why he is allowing such things ... they have done exactly nothing.
If nothing else, perhaps seeing all these abuses will give Congress enough courage to keep Patriot Act II from becoming law. (Not that such actions will stop Our Lord High Minister of Injustice; clearly, he regards himself as being beyond such petty things as congressional oversight. Unfortunately, apparently, so does Congress.)
Posted by iain at 12:53 PM
The Scotsman - Top Stories - MP suspended over visa fraud: A LABOUR MP was yesterday suspended from the Commons for a week for his part in a bogus immigration application by a Brazilian former male escort he employed as a parliamentary assistant. Clive Betts apologised "unreservedly" to the Commons after being found guilty of two breaches of the MPs' code of conduct in his dealings with Jose Gasparo. [...] The MP, who "came out" as a homosexual as a result of the events, took the unprecedented step of asking Sir Philip to investigate the scandal after reports emerged in newspapers.
Yes, I suppose he might have to "come out" after all that, mightn't he?
You know, the British have the most INteresting political scandals. I mean, our representatives just fool around with pages. Theirs hire rentboys to be their "parliamentary assistants" and help them with their visa problems.
Posted by iain at 12:09 AM
U.S. Commander in Iraq Says Yearlong Tours Are Option to Combat 'Guerrilla' War (NY Times, July 17, 2003, registration required) American troops in Iraq are under attack from "a classical guerrilla-type campaign" whose fighters, drawn from Saddam Hussein's most unyielding loyalists and foreign terrorist groups, are increasingly organized, the new commander of allied forces in Iraq said today. The commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, pledged that the United States and its allies would not be driven from Iraq by the guerrilla attacks, which today killed one American soldier and wounded at least six others around Baghdad. But he cautioned that pacifying Iraq might require fresh American troops to spend yearlong tours there, double the normal duration of Army forces on peacekeeping duty.
Well, that ought to do wonders for the morale of the troops in Iraq. They already feel that they've been lied to; they've been told three times that they were going home only to have the date changed. Now they're going to hear that they've got to stay there up to another nine months. On top of that, they're in a situation that they weren't trained for, in a place where the people hate them. (Although, in one of the classic Catch-22 situations that the military specializes in, the longer they're in place, doing peacekeeping work, the better trained they will be for peacekeeping work. In the meantime, soldiers sent to replace them will need to start from scratch, since the US notably does not train well for this sort of thing, so the simple fact that they've been doing the work for so long may wind up mitigating against sending the troops back anytime soon.) They went in not trusting the military to equip them properly. (And were apparently correct in that mistrust, which is appalling.)
The Pentagon had wanted to replace some of the troops with allied forces, but unsurprisingly, the allies are taking a good hard look at the situation and realizing that it would be foolhardy to send their people into that situation. (With the exception of Turkey, whose offer is ... puzzling, to put it mildly. After all, their interests lie in northern Iraq, not southern. One wonders why, after having been rather insistent about sending troops to the north, Turkey has made this offer.) The administration, in turn, is not particularly enamored of the concept of paying all of the costs but having none of the authority -- if you're going to make a deal that bad, you might as well stick with the status quo.
Posted by iain at 11:18 AM
Feds Refuse to Produce al-Qaida Witness: The Justice Department acknowledges its defiance of a judge's order may cause dismissal of charges against accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, but says it won't produce an al-Qaida prisoner for questioning by the defendant. The government notified the trial judge Monday that it wouldn't budge in its refusal to let Moussaoui, an acknowledged al-Qaida loyalist, interview a former superior - suspected Sept. 11 attack coordinator Ramzi Binalshibh. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema can now penalize the government, but the ultimate sanction of dismissal is not her only option for disobedience of her order to allow the deposition.
If the case is dismissed, one wonders how long it will be before the government moves this into a military tribunal. That said, both the government and the court have reasons for not wanting the case moved into the tribunals. The government needs a public show trial, one that shows the people that they're not acting in an arbitrary manner when they put cases into the tribunals. (Of course, they are acting arbitrarily, but that's beside the point.) The court would like to show that it can conduct such trials to prevent the government from convening even more tribunals. The court may simply wind up directing jurors that the witness was prevented from appearing by the government's recalcitrance, and that he can be presumed to have offered exculpatory evidence.
The government's case was not the strongest in the first place. One does wonder what they'll do if the civilian system actually produces an exoneration (although a hung jury is far more likely, and a conviction even more so). Would it constitute double jeopardy to put someone into the military tribunal system under the same charges?
Posted by iain at 10:18 AM
First HIV hybrid formed in a human revealed | New Scientist: The first case of two strains of HIV combining to form a new hybrid virus in a human has been revealed by researchers. More than one type of the deadly virus can infect a person at the same time - a state called "superinfection". Scientists have long suspected that different strains could combine to produce a hybrid - but this had never been demonstrated before. Now scientists have shown that two major subtypes of HIV-1 swapped genes with each other to form an entirely new virus in a female patient. Furthermore, the hybrid took over from the original infections to become the dominant virus in the woman's body. This caused her condition, which had been relatively stable, to rapidly deteriorate. As well as worsening the outlook for individual patients, this ability of HIV strains to recombine could pose a crucial stumbling block in the hunt for an AIDS vaccine. "Recombination resulting from superinfection with diverse strains may pose problems for eliciting the broad immune responses necessary for an effective vaccine," said Harold Burger, of the Wadsworth Center in Albany, New York, who led the research.
So not only is it possible for unprotected sex to lead to infection with more than one strain of HIV, but they can get together and have little HIV babies! How very special!
Reasonably speaking, then, you would need to find vaccines against all known strains of HIV, and you would need to give them to people at the same time to prevent the virus from doing this sort of recombination. Which may be neither realistic nor possible.
And in the meantime, it looks as if drugs are becoming increasingly less useful. Not a surprise, precisely, but the speed with which people are becoming resistant is surely alarming.
Tenth of H.I.V. Cases in a Study in Europe Are Resistant to Drugs (NY Times, July 17, 2003, registration required): The biggest study, so far, of resistance to AIDS drugs, to be released today at an international AIDS conference in Paris, finds that about 10 percent of all newly infected patients in Europe are infected with drug-resistant strains. The researcher who led the study called the level of resistance to some anti-AIDS drugs "surprisingly high." Other scientists at the conference agreed that the findings had worldwide public health implications and made the hunt for new classes of AIDS drugs even more critical. They said the figure suggested that many AIDS patients who are in treatment go back to engaging in high-risk sex or needle-sharing.....
Yes, I dare say they do.
Posted by iain at 10:10 AM
Attorneys file petition for al-Marri: Two weeks after Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri was dubbed an "enemy combatant" by President Bush, his attorneys have challenged that assertion in U.S. District Court here. A 22-page petition for a writ of habeas corpus, filed Tuesday, asks U.S. District Judge Michael Mihm to order government officials to allow al-Marri visits from his attorneys, the chance to meet with officials from his home country of Qatar and also to prove why they believe he's an al-Qaida "sleeper agent."
"If they have evidence of his involvement in al-Qaida, that has never been presented to us or in any courtroom," said one of al-Marri's attorneys, Lee Smith of Peoria. "We think it's an important part of our constitution to be presented with the evidence against you and then to have an attorney as an advocate." A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Jan Paul Miller in Springfield declined to comment. A call to a Department of Defense spokesman was not returned Tuesday. [...] The designation means al-Marri has no legal rights under the U.S. Constitution. Gone is the right to an attorney, the right to be tried before a jury and the right to a speedy trial.
Well, this ought to be entertaining, in a slightly nauseating way. We'll get to watch the government do its version of Lily Tomlin's "Ernestine the telephone operator" routine.
When asked why the phone company doesn't explain why it just did something capricious and arbitrary, Ernestine snaps, "We don't have to. We're the phone company. [flicks a switch] See that? Just lost Peoria."
The government's response to this challenge will almost certainly be a more officious version, something like: "Justify our case? We don't have to! We're the government! The judicial branch has no authority here! [lines drawn through numbers in budget] See that? Just lost all of Peoria's federal funding for any projects whatsoever!"
(OK, yes, I do realize that the government wouldn't be quite so petty as to cut Peoria's federal funds for this. But I'm sure they'd like to. This administration has been remarkably petty at times.)
First, of course, the government will challenge his attorney's ability to make any claim whatsoever; since al-Marri has been declared an enemy combatant, he has no right whatsoever to an attorney; thus, the attorney lacks standing. This may be a difficult case to make, however, since he seems to have had an attorney to represent him previously after he'd been arrested for more conventional reasons. If that line fails -- and I rather suspect it will -- then they'll fall back on the tried and true Ernestine Declaration.
The puzzling thing is still why on earth Al-Marri was declared an enemy combatant in the first place. He's been in jail since December 2001; even if he had known anything originally, the government made no such allegation at the time, and anything he might have known is now nearly two years out of date. He was originally arrested for credit card fraud and lying to FBI agents; one wonders if perhaps the case against him was terribly weak, and so the government decided to shift things over to a venue where the burden of proof is substantially less. After all, the government doesn't have to show us anything; military tribunals may be closed or open as the administration decrees. One suspects that the tribunal judges will be under a certain amount of pressure to churn out the guilty verdicts; the government can and has, after all, pressed military people in ways that would not be acceptable to use against civilian judges.
It will be fascinating. Assuming we get to see any of it, of course.
Posted by iain at 06:12 PM
You know ... every once in a while you just run across something truly surprising.
Mexico's transvestite candidate out in the open _ and may win (sfgate.com, July 3, 2003): Four female impersonators, all exquisitely made up, lip-synch and dance to pop music in Ixhuatan's town plaza. Traffic freezes as drivers and pedal-cabbies halt in the street to watch. Then out comes candidate Amaranta Gomez -- the first transvestite to have at least an outside chance of winning a congressional seat in Mexico. Campaigning in a flower-print skirt, and making no attempt to hide the fact that she lost an arm last year in a bus crash, she has become a symbol of the tolerance for diversity promoted by a small, new political party, Mexico Possible.
I wonder if a local transvestite candidate for national or local office would get even this much press. After all, our press tends to limit their coverage to those candidates who have at least an outside chance to either win or affect the outcome of an election. The conventional wisdom would say that such a candidate has little chance of doing either one in the US.
Gomez said her high-profile sexuality tends to obscure her record on political and economic issues, but she hopes voters will recognize that transvestites have a place in politics. "You don't have to stop being a transvestite," she said. "You don't have to stop wearing makeup. You don't have to stop being what you want to be to be involved in politics."
Bush Utters Taunt About Militants: 'Bring 'Em On' (washingtonpost.com)
Good land.
Our president is an idiot.
Not that this is entirely news, you understand, but just when you think that you have a grip on just how idiotic he may be, then he pops off like this and displays hidden depths of idiocy. (If idiocy can have depths.)
President Bush yesterday delivered a colloquial taunt to militants who have been attacking U.S. troops in Iraq, saying "bring 'em on" and asserting that the forces in Iraq are "plenty tough" to deal with the threat. [...] The Pentagon, which is studying whether it needs additional troops in Iraq, is straining to sustain more than half the Army in Iraq while maintaining other troop commitments in Afghanistan, South Korea and the Balkans. Other countries are also resisting entreaties to help in Iraq. In the latest sign of the squeeze, the foreign secretary of India, from which the administration is seeking an entire division, said yesterday that his government remains wary of sending troops to Iraq. Bush's vigorous defense of his administration's decisions in Iraq -- his second defense in as many days after a period of relative silence -- came as another U.S. Marine was killed and three were injured while clearing mines in Iraq, while a soldier died from wounds suffered in an attack on Tuesday. At least 64 Americans have been killed -- 26 from hostile fire -- since Bush declared the bulk of fighting over two months ago.
Leaving aside the puzzlement of what the other 38 Americans have died from -- surely the accident rate can't be that high -- I would imagine that the Joint Chiefs are trying hard to think of some way to politely tell the commander-in-chief to keep his big trap shut. The one thing they don't need is to provoke the guerillas, or anybody else, for that matter.
A Day After Bush Assurances, 10 U.S. Soldiers Hurt in Iraq (NY Times, July 3, 2003, registration required): A day after President Bush asserted that coalition forces in Iraq were prepared to deal with any security threat, American troops came under attack again today, with 10 soldiers wounded in three separate incidents. [...] The attack suggested that the urban warfare that had so concerned military planners before the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime was materializing in unexpected forms. The attack against the three-vehicle convoy on Haifa Street was at least the second rocket-propelled grenade assault in broad daylight in Baghdad this week. In both cases, the attackers escaped. Whether out of fear or sympathy for their cause, bystanders and witnesses have done nothing to help coalition forces apprehend attackers. [...] The crowd's ire seemed to be fueled by a lack of jobs and electric power in Baghdad — most parts of the city still have no more than 8 to 10 hours of electricity a day. "It's not because of Saddam people are doing these things," one man said. "It is because there's no government, there's no electricity, and just false promises."
So let's see: we have more powerful and more sophisticated attacks coming from the guerillas. We have bystanders who are understandably not eager to help -- what with coming down with the odd case of bystander death, the cancellation of local elections, keeping Ba'athist administrators in power, and the like, Iraqis might understandably feel a bit betrayed. This, of course, does not take into account the widespread destruction of the country and our continuing failure to get basic services functioning again.
Political Veteran (Washington Post): ..... Cleland has come full circle. In 1963, he arrived at American University's Washington Semester Program as a naive student and left dreaming of a career in the Senate. Now, after six years in the Senate, he's back at the Washington Semester Program, this time as a "distinguished adjunct professor.'' But he lost a few things along the way. In 1968, he lost his right arm and both legs in Vietnam [...] The war in Iraq is beginning to look awfully familiar to Max Cleland. "Now wait a minute," he says. "Let me run this back: We have a war. A bunch of Americans die. After the war, we try to figure out why we were there. There's a commitment of 240,000 ground troops with no exit strategy. You know what that's called? Vietnam! Hey, I've been there, done that, got a few holes in my T-shirt."
Aside from the fun in Iraq, Our Glorious Leader is now considering supplying troops to the peacekeeping forces in Liberia. Not that there's any actual peace to keep at the moment, but that's not entirely the issue. The issue is that all but two divisions of US troops are now committed, either in Iraq or elsewhere. The administration's ability to respond militarily to ... well, anything, really, is getting stretched rather thin.
Posted by iain at 01:59 PM
Berlusconi begins presidency with Nazi jibe | Times Online: Italy's presidency of the European Union got off to a rough start today when Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, caused uproar by likening a German MEP to the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp. [...] As Romano Prodi, the EU Commission President and political adversary looked at the ceiling, Signor Berlusconi swung on to the offensive, with his voice rising and finger jabbing. His accusers knew nothing of Italy, he said. "You are just democracy tourists. If you come to Italy and actually listen and watch you will see that the Italian media are independent." He singled out Martin Schulz, a German Social Democrat, who had treated him to a particularly virulent attack over his immunity and a suggestion from Umberto Bossi, Minister for Constitutional Reform, that illegal immigrants should be shot. "Mr Schulz, I know there is in Italy a man producing a film on the Nazi concentration camps. I would like to suggest you for the role of commandant. You would be perfect."
My goodness.
I should imagine that Europeans are abruptly very thankful indeed that the rotating EU presidency is only for six months.
But a very entertaining six months it should be for them.
Berlusconi granted immunity \ BBCNews: The Italian parliament has approved a law which will make Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi immune from prosecution as long as he holds the job. The decision by the lower house of parliament to pass the immunity bill will almost certainly kill off a current corruption trial against Mr Berlusconi in Milan. The upper house, the Senate, had already passed the bill. Critics say the bill has been rushed through parliament to spare Mr Berlusconi the potential embarrassment of a guilty verdict during Italy's six-month presidency of the European Union which begins shortly. [...] By the time Mr Berlusconi has left his post, too much time will have elapsed for a resumption of the Milan trial to be legally possible.
Interesting. I don't know that similar laws exist in any state in the union. (We know from long and painful experience during the Clinton/Paula Jones mess that no such law exists at the federal level.) I can't imagine that if such laws exist in the US that the statute of limitations on any particular event wouldn't be suspended for as long as the person is in office. It might be in the common interest to spare your officeholders from being distracted by an ongoing court proceeding, but it's certainly not in the common interest to keep them out of court forever by having such laws.
Posted by iain at 01:45 PM
