Well, there's really no other word for it, is there?
WASHINGTON June 30, 2004 -- For the first time in more than a decade, the Army is forcing thousands of former soldiers back into uniform, a reflection of the strain on the service of long campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army officials on Wednesday announced that 5,674 former soldiers mostly people who recently left the service and have up-to-date skills in military policing, engineering, logistics, medicine or transportation will be assigned to National Guard and Reserve units that are scheduled to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. The first notifications are to be received July 6. They will be put on active duty for a minimum of 12 months and mostly likely for 18 months. The Pentagon's policy is to not keep troops in Iraq or Afghanistan for more than 12 months.
Robert Smiley, the Army secretary's principal aide on troop training and mobilization, told a Pentagon news conference that more former soldiers, in addition to the 5,674, are likely to get called up next year. He said he could not estimate the number but would not rule out that it would be thousands. [...] People in the Individual Ready Reserve are distinct from the National Guard and Reserve because they do not perform regularly scheduled training and are not paid as reservists, but they are eligible to be recalled in an emergency because their active duty hitches did not complete the service obligation in their enlistment contracts. It is the first sizable activation of the Individual Ready Reserve since the 1991 Gulf War, though several hundred people have voluntarily returned to service since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Interestingly enough, the old name for the IRR was the Inactive Ready Reserve. The IRR was to be the fourth line behind active duty, the military reserves, and the National Guard. Rumsfeld changed the name from Inactive to Individual when it became obvious that Inactive was the one thing that the Ready Reserve would not be in the near future. (One would also suspect that they would be surprised to hear that the reason they're being activated is that their commitment wasn't completed -- the contracts typically expressly stipulate that four or five years will be active duty, and the rest of the eight will be either Reserves or Ready Reserves -- but that's another issue.)
With nearly 6,000 people involuntarily forced back into the military, there's really nothing else to call it but conscription. A draft. In an odd way, they're forcing a situation onto the military that it hoped to avoid; yes, these people are better trained than your average inductee of the past, but they don't want to be there any more than those inductees. You're giving the army a cadre of people who will be resentful and angry, and for an even better cause than the draftees of the past; they thought they had served their country well and with honor, and were done. Now they discover that because they volunteered to serve their country in the past, they're being forced to do so in the present.
Posted by iain at 02:20 PM
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to extend a ban on enforcement of a federal law designed to shield minors from Internet pornography, ruling for the third time in seven years that a congressional effort to curb online obscenity threatens free speech. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court held that the government still has not proved that criminal penalties imposed on certain sexually oriented Web sites by the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) protect children without unduly limiting options for adults. The court sent the case back to a federal district court in Pennsylvania for trial, leaving an injunction against COPA's enforcement in place pending those proceedings.
"Content-based prohibitions, enforced by severe criminal penalties, have the constant potential to be a repressive force in the lives and thoughts of a free people," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court majority. "To guard against that threat the Constitution demands that content-based restrictions on speech be presumed invalid, and that the Government bear the burden of showing their constitutionality."
After the earlier turfing of the Padilla case -- which seemed the easiest of the cases to decide, and they're craven cowards for ducking it that way -- I'm glad to see this case turn out as well as it did. A flat overrule of the law would have been preferable, but it may be that they couldn't marshall a majority for doing so without having the case heard on its merits.
I will admit that the line up of justices on one side or the other is moderately peculiar; you wouldn't normally expect to see Thomas with this majority, or Breyer with that dissenting group.
Speaking of Breyer, as reported by the Post, his dissent is mighty odd:
...In dissent were three conservatives -- Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Antonin Scalia -- and a liberal, Stephen G. Breyer. In his opinion, Breyer voiced measured exasperation with the majority's opinion, asking, "What else was Congress supposed to do?" The court's logic would unrealistically shift the burden of controlling children's access to pornography from the government to parents, Breyer argued, noting that filtering software is expensive and that many parents are not at home to supervise their children's computer use.
Wait ... parents can afford a computer but not filtering software? That's not a remotely logical position to take. For that matter, it's not the government's job to protect parents from the expenses inherent in raising their child. Nor, for that matter, is it the government's burden to protect children from information that parents don't want their children to have. To assert that would seem to be a wilful misreading of American history.
Excerpts from the decision are available at Newsday; the person who did the headline for Newsday's excerpts should be spanked: Online Porn Excerpts, indeed.
Posted by iain at 10:08 PM
And he's outta here.
Blaming media that have "gotten out of control," Republican Jack Ryan folded his bid for the U.S. Senate today, saying its coverage of old allegations he took his wife to sex clubs has made it impossible to wage "a vigorous debate on the issues."
"What would take place, rather, is a brutal, scorched-earth campaign -- the kind of campaign that has turned off so many voters, the kind of politics I refuse to play," the Wilmette Republican said in a written statement. "Accordingly, I am today withdrawing from the race."
Yeah, that's right. Blame it all on the media. It's all their fault. Ryan, of course, bears absolutely no responsibility for lying to the media, misrepresenting the content of his divorce papers to the media, the public, and most importantly for his political future, the Illinois Republican Party hierarchy. It's all the media's fault that the GOP leadership were so upset about being, as they see it, lied to that they hung him out to dry. Right.
Whatta yutz.
(By the way Mr Not-Going-To-Be-Senator Ryan, just a small hint for the future: Should you find yourself marrying or even just very seriously dating again -- and assuming for the sake of argument that your former wife's allegations are true, as she's refused to retract them -- you might want to make sure that the person with whom you are, shall we say, knockin' da boots is on the same page with your inner freak. That she is, at the very least, well informed as to the existence of said inner freak and the ways in which it likes to get freaky. That way, if you go to the sex club and she decides that she really doesn't want to do this, and you later separate, she's somewhat less likely to use it against you in a divorce proceeding or palimony suit. More importantly, if after being fully informed, she says "No, I don't want to do that," then perhaps it would be to your advantage not to trick her into going to clubs without her knowledge. Just a thought. And next time you decide to run for public office, or some future Republican governor wants to consider you and your fortune --- er, that is, wants to consider appointing you to some position, make sure that they and everyone else directly concerned know about anything your inner freak has been getting up to in the mean time. At least, if it's going to appear in public documents, anyway. And finally, please don't try to lock away public documents any more, if you still harbor political ambitions. It gives a very bad impression of someone who wants to be a future public servant that they start by hiding information from the public to which they are legally entitled.)
Putz. (Or possibly "schmuck" might be more appropriate; I forget which is more derogatory. I think there's a species thing involved.)
Posted by iain at 12:44 AM
Hmm...
Legalizing same-sex marriages in all 50 U.S. states would boost government finances by roughly $400 million to $900 million annually over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Although same-sex couples would be able to collect Social Security benefits for spouses, some couples could be subject to the so-called marriage penalty when filing a joint tax return. Also, some couples may no longer be allowed to receive Medicaid and other benefits for low-income people once both incomes are counted, the budget office said in a report dated Monday.
"On net, those impacts would improve the budget's bottom line to a small extent," the report said, estimating the gain at less than $1 billion. The Congressional Budget Office is a nonpartisan agency that does official budget forecasts for Congress. Republican lawmakers advocating a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage have cited the potential costs of those unions to the government....
On the one hand, this is one of the few arguments likely to give more moderate conservatives a bit of pause, when the civil liberties arguments fail. And it comes out of the (theoretically) nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which is a plus; nobody there is supposed to have an axe to grind on the matter.
On the other hand ... well, look at how those moneys would be obtained for the Treasury. Through the "marriage penalty" -- which pretty much everyone feels is thoroughly unfair to straight people in and of itself -- and because people who don't have much in the way of income in the first place would become ineligible for some benefits, and thus would have even less income. So getting married would allow the federal government to be cruel and vicious to us in exactly the same way that they're cruel and vicious to straight people. Which, yes, would be entirely equitable and fair, but really, who needs the type of fairness that robs you of money and medical care?
The question is, would it maybe be the best of all possible worlds would be for the states to decide that they're going to recognize same-sex marriages, but for the federal government to maintain its illogical intransigence on the matter?
A puzzlement.
Posted by iain at 12:20 AM
It's fascinating to see how this particular matter has riveted the attention of the country. (To the extent it can be riveted, anyway. We seem to have hit the summer doldrums a bit early.) And to see how badly one can misread events when seen through the wrong lens.
Six years ago, Republicans demanded that Bill Clinton be investigated and impeached for having sex with an intern and covering it up. Now their nominee for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, Jack Ryan, is brushing off his then-wife's allegations that he repeatedly pressured her, despite her protestations, to have sex with him in front of other people. Instead of denouncing Ryan, many Republicans are defending him. [...]
Compare and contrast:
Beleaguered Senate Republican candidate Jack Ryan is considering quitting the race in the uproar touched off by the release of his divorce records, a Republican source told the Chicago Sun- Times on Thursday. "He’s reassessing," the source said.
Ryan canceled a trip to Washington today where he had planned to appear with Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) and attend a fund raiser headlined by Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), the chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. Another fund raiser that had been set for this morning with House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was also canceled when Hastert had a meeting at the White House. That cancellation contributed to the perception that the Ryan campaign was facing opposition from one of the top political leaders in the state.
The source said that Ryan was particularly concerned that the "tabloids are going after" Jeri Lynn Ryan, his former wife who alleged that Ryan brought her to sex clubs when they were married. Jeri Ryan is a television actress known for her roles on "Star Trek" and "Boston Public." The couple found that it was "not helpful" to refight old fights, the source said. [...] Ryan has a fundraiser scheduled for Lincoln Park tonight. It is not know the status of that event. "Everything is on hold" in the campaign while Ryan decides his future, the source told the Sun-Times.
Jeri Ryan said Wednesday she stands by allegations she made in their 1999 divorce that Jack Ryan insisted she go to sex clubs during their marriage and asked her to have sex with him while others watched. However, she supports her ex-husband’s candidacy.
GOP pols band together against Ryan (Chicago Sun-Times)
June 24, 2004
BY SCOTT FORNEK Political Reporter
They just want him to go away.
But they can't make him.
"There is almost a complete unanimity of opinion in all the leaders I spoke to saying, 'He needs to go and go quickly,' " said one top GOP leader. "But there is no way we can force it."
As top Republicans privately pondered Wednesday how to get Jack Ryan to step down as their U.S. Senate nominee, the embattled investment banker received another headache. Hollywood actress Jeri Ryan says she stands by allegations she made after their 1999 divorce that Jack Ryan insisted she go to sex clubs during their marriage and asked her to have sex with him while others watched, according to a statement aired Wednesday by "Entertainment Tonight." "Jeri's statement can be found in the original court documents and the truth has not changed in the last five years," a publicist for the star of "Boston Public" said. "We will not be releasing any additional statements, but Jeri does wish Jack the best of luck in his Senate campaign." The statement is the first to come directly from the actress since a Los Angeles judge unsealed records from the couple's 2000 and 2001 child custody dispute Monday.
Now I ask you, do those two articles sound like defense?
The problem with Saletan's article is that he was looking in the wrong place. He was talking to top Republicans in Washington, and it's logical to assume that what top Republicans want might have some sway. However, this is the sort of case where you see the meaning of Tip O'Neill's statement that "all politics is local". The people who control what happens here are all local to Illinois: Ryan himself and the local GOP machinery.
And the local GOP machinery is pissed.
And the truly remarkable thing is that, based on his public statements and interviews, Ryan doesn't seem to have the slightest idea why.
According to statements from GOP officials, Ryan assured them that there was nothing embarrassing or explicit in the divorce papers being unsealed, although he did reportedly say that the allegations were very nasty. The officials, including former governor Jim Edgar (still very very powerful in these here parts) and GOP chair Judy Baar Topinka, all went out and defended him based on these statements. They now all seem to feel that they were hung out to twist in the wind and look terribly foolish, and are furious at him as a result. Normally, this would be the sort of thing one would take with perhaps a teaspoon of salt. Thing is, I have to believe that if they had known the specifics of the charges, either their defense would have been different -- they certainly wouldn't have talked about the papers not being embarrassing -- or they would have flatly refused to say anything either for or against him, which would be far more likely. After all, getting mixed up in the aftermath of someone's divorce is bad enough; who wants to unexpectedly find themselves defending someone's alleged sex life?
The other remarkable thing is that Ryan truly does not seem to understand why his actions provoked such media attention. On Tuesday night's Chicago Tonight public affairs show on WTTW, he complained that normally, politicians' custody papers don't get such attention. After a moment's pause, Elizabeth Brackett, the show host, said to him -- rather more gently than most people would have -- that what attracted initial attention was that he had sealed documents that are normally public -- divorce and custory agreements are on file and available for public access in almost every state, including both Illinois and California -- which indicated that he had something to hide. Judging from his expression, that simply sailed right past; he doesn't seem to connect his actions with the results.
Nationally, the story is focused on Jeri Ryan and the sex club allegations. These are, of course, the easiest to present, and the most tittilating. Locally, attention seems to mostly be focused on the fact that the GOP is publicly furious at him, and wants him gone. Getting rid of the candidate at this late stage of the game, if such happens, virtually guarantees Obama the seat; a candidate would be getting a massively late fundraising start, plus they would need to figure out what their positions actually were. Additionally, simply finding a candidate will be difficult; the people who ran against Ryan in the primaries lost so very badly that the state GOP doesn't really want to touch them, and all the other Republicans of some stature have frequently and repeatedly declined to run for the office, even before this scandal. But only the Republicans of stature have big enough name recognition to alleviate some of the massive disadvantage they would have in being both late to the game, and being perceived as a poor second choice to a disgraced candidate.
Posted by iain at 12:35 PM
Young children and pregnant women who drink milk from California cows may be exposed to unsafe levels of a toxic chemical used in rocket fuel, according to a new study by an environmental group. The study released Tuesday by the Environmental Working Group comes as state and federal regulators consider setting new standards to regulate perchlorate -- the explosive ingredient in missile fuel that has been linked to thyroid damage. [...] In March, California health officials concluded that perchlorate could be dangerous at levels above 6 parts per billion in drinking water -- a level that could be used later this year to set the nation's first state standard.
But U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials, and some environmental groups, say that standard would be too weak. The EPA advocates a standard of just 1 part per billion. The new study on milk was based on laboratory tests the EWG commissioned as well as unreleased tests by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The EWG tests, conducted by researchers at Texas Tech University, found the chemical in 31 of 32 samples from milk purchased at grocery stores in Los Angeles and Orange counties. The average level of the chemical was 1.3 parts per billion.
I have to admit, the thing that surprises me most about this isn't that they found the chemical in milk -- nothing they find anywhere seems terribly surprising these days -- but that Our Glorious Shrub's eviscerated EPA is actually advocating a considerably more restrictive contamination standard than the state of California. Perchlorate manufacturers must not be major contributors.
Mind, one wonders if perchlorate manufacturers might not be major donors here and there in California, given the most peculiar reaction of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
The EWG tests, conducted by researchers at Texas Tech University, found the chemical in 31 of 32 samples from milk purchased at grocery stores in Los Angeles and Orange counties. The average level of the chemical was 1.3 parts per billion. The EWG said the Food and Agriculture Department tests found an average level of 5.8 parts per billion of perchlorate in 34 samples it tested from milk silos in Alameda, Sacramento and San Joaquin counties. Department officials confirmed those results, but spokesman Steve Lyle said the findings didn't show any need for consumers to drink less milk. "At this point, there is not enough information to suggest that eating foods with low levels of perchlorate poses a significant health concern," Lyle said.
So the EPA feels that milk containing more than 1 part per billion of perchlorate is unhealthy. California's tests find levels nearly six times that, but says that there's no cause for alarm.
All-righty, then!
(Yes, I do realize that they're trying to protect their dairy industry, but there's reasonable protection, and then there's idiocy, and this shades strongly toward the latter.)
Posted by iain at 12:31 AM
Ah. If it's gay pride month, then it's time for the The Village Voice's Annual Queer Issue, this year on the theme of "The Age of Do-It-Yourself Identity." (Rugby as an aspect of physical identity. Huh. Who knew?)
Mind, I do think the conclusion in the article about marriage is slightly off. Marriage is what you make of it, yes, but surely it makes something of you, else why bother? Why would so many straight couples do perfectly well living together, but self-destruct once they decide to go for marriage? Or, looked at another way, how could the institution itself not change you simply by its presence in your life? It must make some sort of difference in and of itself, else gays wouldn't want it so fiercely as a mark of equality and straights wouldn't be defending it so vociferously to maintain the lack of same.
Posted by iain at 04:22 PM
My, but it's fascinating the different ways that newspapers can present what is, at its core, the exact same AP wire service article. And whoda thunk that the staid, stolid Chicago Tribune would outsensationalize the former Murdock paper the Chicago Sun-Times in its headlines? And that the most detailed article (also built partially on the AP release) would be in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, which, for all that it serves downstate, is still an out of state paper
Chicago Tribune | Candidate Ryan says he won't quit over sex charges (registration required)
By Maura Kelly Lannan
The Associated Press
Published June 21, 2004, 9:01 PM CDT
The former wife of Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan claimed in divorce documents released Monday that he pressured her to perform sex acts in clubs while others watched. Jeri Lynn Ryan, an actress best known for roles on TV's "Boston Public" and "Star Trek: Voyager," said in the documents that she angered Ryan by refusing. She did acknowledge infidelity on her part, which she said took place after their marriage was irretrievably broken. In the documents, Jack Ryan denied the allegations, saying he had been "faithful and loyal" to his wife.
In a news conference Monday, Ryan refused to comment further on the allegations, saying his response in the court papers spoke for itself. "I am sticking by the exact things I said five years ago," he said.....
Ryan releases divorce records (Chicago Sun Times)
June 21, 2004
BY MAURA KELLY LANNAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan pressured his wife, actress Jeri Lynn Ryan, to have sex in clubs while others watched, she charged in divorce documents released Monday. The "Boston Public" and "Star Trek: Voyager" actress said she angered Ryan by refusing. She did acknowledge infidelity on her part, which she said took place after their marriage was irretrievably broken. In the documents Ryan denied the allegations, saying he had been "faithful and loyal" to his wife.....
Ryan file details sex allegations
By Kevin McDermott
Post-Dispatch Springfield Bureau
06/21/2004
U.S. Senate candidate Jack Ryan pressured and tricked his then-wife into going to sex clubs with "cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling" and tried to get her to have sex in front of others, she alleged in 4-year-old court records released Monday. In the records from a June 2000 child-custody battle, Ryan's ex-wife - television actress Jeri Ryan of "Star Trek: Voyager" and "Boston Public" fame - alleged that the Republican millionaire's pressure tactics included suggesting once that she owed him a trip to a sex club because he had eaten dinner out with her. In other instances, she alleged, he took her on what he said were going to be "romantic" trips that turned out instead to be journeys into places where "people were having sex everywhere."
Ryan himself distributed the records Monday, ahead of a California court that was going to release them next week. Ryan and his ex-wife had earlier fought their release, citing concern for their 9-year-old son. In the documents, Ryan generally dismisses the allegations....
(A digression before the discussion: what on earth are both the Tribune and Sun-Times doing quoting a wire service article for a piece where they had to have both been present? Perhaps they're saving the copyrighted articles for Tuesday, when they've had a better chance to analyze the papers.)
Presentation aside, the allegations are moderately damaging. Republican analysts are reportedly saying that it's a mark of Ryan's status as a political novice and of the poor advice he received from outside political advisors unfamiliar with Illinois politics that he didn't simply release these documents during the primary or right after the primary and have done with it. That said, the allegations are such that if he had released the records during the primary, he would almost certainly never have been the nominee of the Republican party; these allegations are so thoroughgoingly sordid that many people would have refused to vote for him--and may well do so now.
The official stance of the Republican party right now is to wait and see what happens.
Ryan files allege visits to sex clubs
By ABC7Chicago.com
June 21, 2004 (Los Angeles and Chicago)
The private life of Republican senate candidate Jack Ryan is now very public. Divorce records released Monday night show he allegedly asked his actress wife, Jeri Ryan, to have sex with him in front of strangers in sex clubs. In the court records Ryan denies it and says nothing more. [...] The state Republican Party chair, Judy Baar Topinka, is not exactly issuing a ringing endorsement. During the primary, Jack Yyan told Topinka there was nothing damaging in the court documents. Well, now, Judy Baar Topinka says she is going to need time to assess what is in the documents before deciding how to proceed....
Not the sort of ringing endorsement that Ryan had hoped for, one suspects; certainly not very encouraging, especially since the party hierarchy wasn't entirely happy with Ryan in the first place. And, of course, all of this rebounds to the advantage of Democrat nominee Barack Obama; he can make his case on the political issues to the people virtually unchallenged for the next few weeks while Ryan tries to haul himself out of this personal morass.
I don't know how harmful these records will be to their son. After all, he's a bit young to understand what's being discussed, as are his classmates. That said, if the judge truly felt that release would harm him, one wonders why he felt that the people's right to hear these allegations outweighted the harm being done. Thing is, ultimately, even if they're true, these allegations are not quite relevant to his positions on the issues. His divorce really doesn't matter. At least, that's what Obama said before the release of the records.
Of course, that's a traditionally liberal position, isn't it? And Ryan's not a liberal, and the irrelevance of one's personal life to one's political positions has never been a hallmark of conservative beliefs. So he's kind of screwed, really.
Posted by iain at 01:26 AM
Estimates of the number of people with the AIDS virus have been dramatically overstated in many countries because of errors in statistical models and a possible undetected decline in the pandemic, specialists say. In many countries analysts are cutting the estimates of HIV prevalence by half or more.
In Rwanda, for example, a new United Nations estimate due out next month will put HIV prevalence at about 5 per cent, down from more than 11 per cent four years ago. In Haiti, a recent unpublished study by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has found, HIV prevalence was less than 3 per cent, compared with the UN's most recent estimate of 6 per cent.
Several AIDS specialists said they thought the current estimate of 40 million people living with AIDS worldwide was inflated by 25 to 50 per cent, based on household surveys in nearly a dozen countries. That would go against assertions by the UN's specialist body UNAIDS that the disease is relentlessly on the rise.
On the upside, that's possibly 20 million fewer people with HIV and AIDS, which is good.
On the downside, that still leaves 20 million or so with the disease. The equivalent of something like 7 percent of the US population, if you will.
Posted by iain at 12:23 PM
Catholic church leaders across the state are considering rewriting employment policies in the wake of legalized gay marriage and may go so far as to call for the firing of church workers who tie the knot with same-sex partners. The proposed new policies - which also include a more lenient proposal to let employees follow their own consciences - are articulated in memos circulating among the state's four bishops and their staffs. No decision on which policy to embrace is imminent, said several people who have seen the documents.
So ... let me get this straight-ish: the Massachusetts Church is fine with having gay employees (one would reasonably assume that they're not all celibate), but if said employee actually marries, which is now entirely legal, then the Church might just want to fire them.
Well, the court battles resulting from that mess ought to be vastly entertaining. I suppose it might depend on whether or not they knew the person was gay at any prior point of their employment. If they didn't know, then I suppose the Church and its ancillary businesses might reasonably make the case that they wouldn't have hired the person. If they knew, however, then that would make the case somewhat problematic. There's also the small point that, even if someon the jury didn't approve of gay marriage generally, firing someone because they married is the sort of thing that will likely rub people the wrong way.
Posted by iain at 09:40 PM
I'm guessing that this answers, for the most part, the question of how high up the knowledge of various types of abuse went.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, acting at the request of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, ordered military officials in Iraq last November to hold a man suspected of being a senior Iraqi terrorist at a high-level detention center there but not list him on the prison's rolls, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials said Wednesday.
This prisoner and other "ghost detainees" were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment, and to avoid disclosing their location to an enemy, officials said. [...] In July 2003, the man suspected of being an Ansar al-Islam official was captured in Iraq and turned over to C.I.A. officials, who took him to an undisclosed location outside of Iraq for interrogation. By that fall, however, a C.I.A. legal analysis determined that because the detainee was deemed to be an Iraqi unlawful combatant - outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions - he should be transferred back to Iraq.
Mr. Tenet made his request to Mr. Rumsfeld - that the suspect be held but not listed - in October. The request was passed down the chain of command: to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then to Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, and finally to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq. At each stage, lawyers reviewed the request and their bosses approved it.
Of course, the fun part is that not only did the request to hide this prisoner from the Red Cross and other inspectors (including, of course, our own) go up to the top of both Defense and the CIA, but once they'd done that, they lost the prisoner. Completely forgot where they put him, forgot about questioning him after one cursory sesison, just misplaced him altogether.
One way or another, Defense and the CIA continue to demonstrate their shining incompetence, day after day after day after day ...
Posted by iain at 06:13 PM
My, but the newspapers are outdoing themselves in the attempt to come up with clever headlines for this one. From the Sun-Times, we get Vatican: Inquisition overblown; from the Dallas Morning News, Vatican: Inquisition overblown; from the International Herald Tribune, of all places, we get Vatican downsizes the Inquisition
John Paul II Letter on Inquisition Symposium
On Publication of the Minutes of 1998 Conference
Date: 2004-06-15
To the Venerable Brother
Lord Cardinal Roger Etchegaray
Former President of the Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000
1. I have received with profound appreciation the volume that gathers the "Minutes" of the International Symposium on the Inquisition, organized in the Vatican from Oct. 29-31, 1998, by the Historical Theological Commission of the Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000.
The symposium was in response to the desire I expressed in the apostolic letter "Tertio Millennio Adveniente": "It is appropriate that ... the Church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel and, instead of offering to the world the witness of a life inspired by the values of faith, indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counter-witness and scandal" (No. 33).
Before public opinion the image of the Inquisition represents in some form the symbol of this counter-witness and scandal. In what measure is this image faithful to the reality? Before asking for forgiveness it is necessary to know the facts exactly and to acknowledge the deficiencies in regard to evangelical exigencies in cases in which it is so. This is the reason why the Committee asked for the consultation of historians, whose scientific competence is universally recognized.
2. The historians' irreplaceable contribution constitutes for theologians an invitation to reflect on the conditions of life of the People of God in their historical journey.
A distinction should guide the theologians' critical reflection: the distinction between the authentic "sensus fidei" and the prevailing mentality in a determined period, which might have influenced their opinion.
One must appeal to the "sensus fidei" to find the criteria for a just judgment on the past of the life of the Church....
Newsday.com - World News: Vatican reports a kinder, gentler Inquisition
Combined News Services
June 16, 2004
Torture, burning at the stake and other punishment for the faithful condemned as witches or heretics by church tribunals during the Inquisition was not as widespread as commonly thought, the Vatican said yesterday. "The recourse to torture and the death sentence weren't so frequent as it long has been believed," Agostino Borromeo, a professor at Rome's Sapienza University, said at a news conference yesterday. [...] In many cases, courts ordered mannequins to be burned when the condemned escaped capture.
That last line is the one that would indicate that someone kind of missed a point somewhere. After all, it amounts to, "Well, we would have killed more people if we could have found them, but we couldn't, so we just burned up a few dummies instead."
It's also worth noting that even though there may have been fewer people killed for heresy than originally thought -- although how they could really be certain of that, given recordkeeping at the time, one wonders -- in a few places, the depredations of the Inquisition were quite thorough enough.
Talk of trials, burned witches and forbidden books has echoed in the Vatican after Pope John Paul asked forgiveness for the Inquisition, in which the Church tortured and killed people branded as heretics. [...] A chart showed that Germany was where more male and female "witches" were killed by civilian tribunals around the start of the 15th century. Some 25,000 people of the then population of 16 million, were killed. But the percentage record went to Lichtenstein, where 300 people, or some 10 percent of the tiny population of 3,000, were killed for convictions of witchcraft.
Witchcraft counting for only one type of heresy, one suspects that Lichtenstein probably lost somewhat more than 10% of its population to the Inquisition when all was said and done.
Posted by iain at 02:25 PM
You'd think they'd have learned from the first time around, but apparently, the desire to remove lots of minority and Democratic voters from the rolls outweighs the concepts of fairness and common sense.
Thousands of eligible Florida voters may be removed from the rolls in this year's election because of a faulty database aimed at convicted felons. Despite protests from critics and nervous election supervisors, the state will continue with plans to implement the system.
Convicted felons are not allowed to vote in Florida unless granted clemency, but before 2000 there was little enforcement of the law. That year, then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired DBT Online to provide a database of felons to be purged from the rolls. But the list contained the names of many people who should not have lost their voting rights. Many supervisors refused to use the list, but others did. [...] A study by the Palm Beach Post showed more than 1,100 voters had been wrongfully turned away from the polls.
Felons voting list getting scrutiny in court, in Keys
By Jim Ash and George Bennett, Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 9, 2004
The question will reverberate today in a Tallahassee courtroom and in the halls of a Key West resort, where the annual meeting of county elections supervisors is buzzing about a shake-up at the state Division of Elections. Will Florida repeat the worst mistakes of the presidential election of 2000?
Polls suggest the electorate could be as evenly split Nov. 2 as it was four years ago when George W. Bush won Florida, and thus the presidency, by 537 votes. And a study released Tuesday by a New York-based advocacy center suggests that Florida again is in danger of relying on questionable data to purge thousands of alleged felons from the voting rolls. The Brennan Center looked at a state Division of Elections list that showed 145,823 people were granted clemency and had their civil rights restored by the governor and Cabinet since 1964. But when it asked the Office of Executive Clemency for the same list, the number came back as 171,408.
[Scott Schell, a spokesman for the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law] said that suggests that as many as 25,585 felons who have had their rights restored could be mistakenly on the state purge list, though he acknowledged the difference could be much smaller considering the number of people who may have died or moved away over the years, or the number of ex-felons who got their civil rights restored but never registered to vote.
Marielva Torres, assistant general counsel for the elections division, said there likely is an even easier explanation. The group appears to be reporting the total number of cases filed with the clemency office, not the number of felons granted clemency. "It's not comparing apples to apples," Torres said. "They did not talk to us. We would be happy to go over the data with them."
Either way, there's simply no pressing urgency to handle it this way. The more logical way to work would be to allow people to cast votes, and then discard them when they're proved to be inaccurate. Given the impressively short lead time the counties have to deal with this, there's a reasonable argument that they simply can't get this done in any accurate way before the elections, and that the lists should simply be thrown out. There will also, of course, be myriad lawsuits -- and the lawsuits can, after all, demonstrate not only pattern and practice indicating that this path should not be followed, but manifest ill will; the state knew, the first time around, that it would reject more valid voters than invalid ones, and allowed the database to move forward for partisan political reasons. You'd think that the state, partison or no, would have every reason not to want those issues to be raised again so close to the next presidential election, especially one that looks to be close in that state.
Well. If Florida is foolish enough to throw the issue into its voters faces again, perhaps there will be a strong enough reaction to ensure that the state's results aren't in any doubt.
Posted by iain at 02:04 PM
One begins to wonder if the people at the Pentagon have just put the Washington Post reporters on staff. The fact that the Pentagon is leaking information like this -- it's pretty much just flooding out, to extend the metaphor -- may indicate that the people actually working there have truly and completely had it with their civilian leaders. And while in this particular case, it's useful, in that it gets information out of a notoriously close-mouthed administration, institutionally speaking, this can't be terribly good for the Pentagon in the long term.
U.S. intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to use unmuzzled dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees during interrogations late last year, a plan approved by the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the facility, according to sworn statements the handlers provided to military investigators. A military intelligence interrogator also told investigators that two dog handlers at Abu Ghraib were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs, according to the previously undisclosed statements obtained by The Washington Post.
The statements by the dog handlers provide the clearest indication yet that military intelligence personnel were deeply involved in tactics later deemed by a U.S. Army general to be "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses." [...] The newly obtained documents reinforce the picture that the abuse falls into two categories: sexual humiliation and beatings at the hands of MPs, and intimidation using dogs that is clearly tied to military intelligence. The sexual abuse happened weeks and even months before the dog incidents, some of which appear to be part of an organized strategy by military intelligence to scare detainees into talking, according to the statements.
Sgts. Michael J. Smith and Santos A. Cardona, Army dog handlers assigned to Abu Ghraib, told investigators that military intelligence personnel requested that they bring their dogs to prison interrogation sites multiple times to assist in questioning detainees in December and January. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who was in charge of military intelligence at the prison, told both soldiers that the use of dogs in interrogations had been approved, according to the statements.
Yes, well, the issue was and is not particularly whether or not military intelligence was involved -- although I would imagine that it's of surpassing importance to them. The issue is whether or not they were directed to do so, and if they were, by whom.
Focus, people, focus.
Posted by iain at 11:54 AM
SF Weekly | Decisions, Decisions,At the Southwestern U.S. Pro-Am Rock Paper Scissors Invitational
... People compete in the oddest things sometimes.
The World RPS Society is dedicated to the promotion of Rock Paper Scissors as a fun and safe way to resolve disputes. We feel that conserving the roots of RPS is essential for the growth and development of the game and the players.
The World RPS Society is involved in many areas of the sport, such as; research studies, workshops, tournaments at both local and international levels, book publishing, and much more.
Mind, it would make a considerably less lethal way to solve certain disputes. Of course, it doesn't carry quite the same macho dickswinging thrill to say, "Hey, I just beat a couple dozen people at RPS today!" as it does to say, "Hey, I just beat down someone today!"
Gambits. There are gambits. Huh. Who knew?
Posted by iain at 02:10 PM
NOT a single Sudanese child refugee under the age of five will be alive in six months unless there is immediate and dramatic international intervention, a senior United Nations official warned yesterday.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees have poured over the border from Sudan into Chad in the past few months, driven out by a genocidal campaign against black African inhabitants of the Darfur region. Many are living in makeshift shelters, unable to get into established refugee camps, facing the constant threat of attack from the government-backed Janjaweed militias that have burned villages, killed thousands of people, raped women and girls and taken young children as slaves.
The UN has described the situation in Darfur - where something in the region of a million people have been driven from their homes and estimates have placed the potential death toll at 300,000 - as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, and the imminent arrival of the rainy season threatens to trigger a fresh catastrophe among the refugees who have sought shelter in Chad.
Aid experts estimated that around a quarter of the refugees in Chad would die before the end of the year unless aid could be put in place before the imminent rains begin in earnest. That figure includes 38,600 children under the age of five and 10,000 other vulnerable people, including pregnant women. It's believed 25,000 would suffer severe malnutrition.
HE WAS staring out of the window at the cattle grazing by the wadi near his house in the village in Darfur in western Sudan when he first caught sight of the Janjaweed.
The wadi was an important place: people from the neighbouring villages brought their cattle there to drink from its waters. Some of his friends and family were there too, keeping a watchful eye on the animals as they lapped at the water.
Some of the Janjaweed were on camels; the others rode horses. He remembers that they did not dismount, but rode hard, firing their guns towards the people and the cattle. The villagers began to run.
Inside his house, Abdou Abdallah Ismael scrabbled for his gun. The government in Khartoum allowed every village to keep three or four guns, to fight off the thieves who sometimes came to steal their cattle. But it reserved the most powerful weapons for the Janjaweed, the Arab militia it has decided to back in its attempts to wipe out the black Africans who live in the western part of Sudan, the Darfur region.
From inside his house, Abdou could hear the sound of gunfire. Looking out of the window, he recognised the Janjaweed from the uniforms the government had given them.
"I took my gun and when I stood up I saw people running away. Some took their cattle and others left their cattle and ran," he says. "I saw a lot of Janjaweed on horses and camels. They were circling the cattle and shooting at people. They killed 13 people.
"I was shooting back, and so were some of the others in the village. Some of the Janjaweed were killed too, but the others did not stop."
[...] It is not a fair fight; the Sudanese government has sent MiG fighter jets and helicopters to bomb the villages before the Janjaweed ride in to attack. Of course, it denies that it does any such thing, but those who have seen the evidence of the slaughter know better.
Day after day, the villages have been destroyed, until there is nothing left. Aid agencies warn of a humanitarian catastrophe, of hundreds of thousands of deaths before the end of the year as hunger and disease take their toll.
Facing extermination, the black villagers began to fight back. Many joined the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. In his village, Abdou became the local leader of the SLA.
Abdou is 32 years old. To study for his baccalaureate at the university in Khartoum, he first had to serve his time in the Sudanese army. Afterwards, he returned to his village and married Chowba Habiba Issa Mahatmat, and they settled down to bring up their two children, Allamadjine, a boy, and Islam, a girl.
Now, though, their village is gone.
Approximately 5 percent of young people consider themselves lesbian, gay or bisexual, and many adolescents know a friend, classmate, neighbor or relative who is nonheterosexual. Pediatricians are being asked with increasing frequency about sexual behavior and sexual orientation. In a newly revised clinical report entitled, "Sexual Orientation and Adolescents," the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) advises pediatricians to be attentive to the needs of patients who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, or who may be confused over their sexual orientation.
The report states that pediatricians are not responsible for identifying gay and lesbian youth, but they should create a clinical environment where adolescents feel safe to discuss sensitive personal issues, including sexuality and sexual orientation.
According to the report, sexual orientation is not synonymous with sexual activity or sexual behavior. Especially during adolescence, individuals may participate in a variety of sexual behaviors. Many youths label themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual if they are attracted to someone of the same sex....
My.
And only 25 years ago, homosexuality was considered a psychological disorder. How times have changed.
That said, how many adolescents would be comfortable discussing sexual orientation with their pediatrician? For many, it would be preferable to discussing it with their parents, to be sure. But .... well. Perhaps one is projecting, just a bit. My first pediatrician was older than god, or so I thought, and he was this kindly avuncular sort. The concept of discussing anything sexual with him would never have occurred to me. The last doctor I had in my adolescence was a family practicioner ... and I would sooner have flapped my arms and flown than to have discussed anything sexual with her, either.
All THAT said ... I don't imagine that most adolescents would trust their doctors to keep information confidential. After all, their parents are paying for the service; why wouldn't they get a full report from the person?
Still and all: a much needed policy statement. There are undoubtedly doctors who will take advantage of it, and adolescents who will discover that they need some adult who is not their parent to talk to.
Posted by iain at 02:07 PM
And we continue to discover that this administration has -- and apparently has had for some time -- curiously elastic definitions of "Humane treatment" or "consistent with the Geneva Conventions"
After American Taliban recruit John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed military intelligence officers to "take the gloves off" in interrogating him.
The instructions from Rumsfeld's legal counsel in late 2001, contained in previously undisclosed government documents, are the earliest known evidence that the Bush administration was willing to test the limits of how far it could go legally to extract information from suspected terrorists. [...] The documents, read to The Times by two sources critical of how the government handled the Lindh case, show that after an Army intelligence officer began to question Lindh, a Navy admiral told the intelligence officer that "the secretary of Defense's counsel has authorized him to 'take the gloves off' and ask whatever he wanted."
Lindh was being questioned while he was propped up naked and tied to a stretcher in interrogation sessions that went on for days, according to court papers. In the early stages, his responses were cabled to Washington hourly, the new documents show.
A Defense Department spokesperson said Tuesday evening that the Pentagon "refused to speculate on the exact intent of the statement" from Rumsfeld's office to the military authorities interrogating Lindh. "Department officials stress that all interrogation policies and procedures demand humane treatment of personnel in their custody," the spokesperson said. "The department is committed to searching further to ascertain the original source of the comment brought to their attention by The Times."
[...] In court hearings and legal papers, [Lindh's] attorneys complained that he was deprived of sleep and food, that his leg wound was not treated, and that for 54 days he was neither allowed legal assistance nor told that his father had retained lawyers on his behalf in San Francisco. Lindh's lawyers declined to comment on the matter this week, noting that a provision of his 2002 plea agreement stated he would not bring up the conditions under which he was held overseas. [...] On Dec. 14, 2001, Haynes' deputy, Paul W. Cobb Jr., told Lindh's San Francisco lawyers that "our forces have provided him with appropriate medical attention and will continue to treat him humanely, consistent with the Geneva Convention protections for prisoners of war." But court documents suggest that Lindh was treated much as the prisoners later were at Abu Ghraib. Along with nudity and the sleep and food deprivation, Lindh was allegedly threatened with death. One soldier said he "was going to hang." Another "Special Forces soldier offered to shoot him." At other times, soldiers took photos and videos of themselves smiling next to the naked Lindh, another image eerily similar to the Abu Ghraib photos.
Such actions appear to be in violation of the Geneva Convention, which requires that prisoners have adequate clothing, food and sleep and not be threatened or subjected to degrading treatment.
Absent that provision in his plea agreement, Lindh would seem to have ample grounds for having his sentence overturned. The case would also be irretrievably damaged by these actions on the part of the government; you could not get a conviction from any reasonable jury on these charges once the treatment was known.
I do understand why Lindh's lawyers had him plead guilty. If nothing else, the plain fact is that he could not possibly have hoped to get a fair trial on those charges, in this time and place. All you would have had to do was mention the word "Taliban" in the courtroom -- and the government would almost certainly have tried him out of the district court in New York, regardless of where he lived, because they're the federal government and they can do that sort of thing if they like. And in 2002, New York was understandably in no mood to care that the government was in the business of torturing confessions out of people; they'd probably have cheered.
One wonders what really did happen to all those Muslims who were disappeared into the federal prison system around that same time. To be sure, by now, so we're told, most have been released and deported. (Most.) We've heard allegations of mistreatment, of course, and the Justice department verified quite a few of those charges. But given the types of mistreatment in which the government seems to specialize, absent documentary evidence, many of the people tortured would never have spoken of it. Which the government seems to be counting on.
Posted by iain at 01:47 PM
Media Relations: real cowboys don't kiss/ June 8, 2004
Anatomy of a kerflaffle ... with sheep.
Posted by iain at 05:45 PM
It's infrequent for one of these cases to spawn results that help others in similar situations, but this may actually have happened in Ohio.
Michael Green will get a lot of money from the city of Cleveland, but he's also getting what he wanted most: change in the justice system.
The city agreed Monday to pay Green $1.6 million for the 13 years he spent in prison for a rape he didn't commit. The payment is only a fraction of the $10 million Green demanded in a lawsuit, but he accepted less because the city also agreed to reopen more than 100 cases that included testimony from the same forensics lab worker who falsely testified in Green's trial. [...] As a result of the settlement, the city will conduct a "forensic audit" on the following:
[...] During Green's trial, Serowik offered testimony on lab results that didn't match his raw data. "Serowik testified about hairs in the case and he just simply got it wrong," said Cincinnati attorney Alphonse Gerhardstein, who also represents Green. "He matched pubic hair to head hair and he said one could actually cite statistics to defend his analysis. He had no such basis for saying that. In Michael's case, he said the washrag had a neat stain [only the rapist's semen], when that was physically impossible after a rape. It obviously contained both vaginal and penis secretions after the rape. [Serowik's] raw notes reflected that, but then he testified differently. When we asked him to pull his lab reports from the 10 cases previous to Michael's, it was painfully clear he regularly testified contrary to what he wrote in his notes."
[...] The city has hired attorney James Wooley, of the Baker and Hostetler law firm, as special master to oversee the forensic audit. If the audit determines wrongdoing on the part of the forensics lab, then notice will be given to each person convicted in courts during that time period, their attorneys and the chief prosecutor and presiding judge in the jurisdictions where they were convicted. Gerhardstein and Scheck also will be notified. Those on death row or still incarcerated will receive priority.
"It may turn out that a lot of these people are guilty," Scheck said. "The most important point is this: Cleveland is using the very best model to improve the quality of the lab, because every time an innocent person is convicted a guilty one walks away."
This is going to be an odd way to put it, but I hope that there are no people whose convictions are overturned due to this case. Not because I want cases to stay closed, or because people should be in jail for these crimes even if they didn't commit them, or because if they were convicted they have to be guilty of something even if they didn't commit the crime in question, or any of that type of dreck. No, what I'd like to see is that this was just an occasional time when the system got it wrong.
But given the parade of people marching off Illinois' death row for less malign errors, somehow, I don't imagine that Ohio will get off that easily.
Posted by iain at 04:45 PM
How very ... interesting.
In August 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified," and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in President Bush's war on terrorism, according to a newly obtained memo.
If a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist network," said the memo, from the Justice Department's office of legal counsel, written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance. It added that arguments centering on "necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability" later. The memo seems to counter the pre-Sept. 11, 2001, assumption that U.S. government personnel would never be permitted to torture captives. It was offered after the CIA began detaining and interrogating suspected al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the wake of the attacks, according to government officials familiar with the document.
The legal reasoning in the 2002 memo, which covered treatment of al Qaeda detainees in CIA custody, was later used in a March 2003 report by Pentagon lawyers assessing interrogation rules governing the Defense Department's detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At that time, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had asked the lawyers to examine the logistical, policy and legal issues associated with interrogation techniques.
Bush administration officials say flatly that, despite the discussion of legal issues in the two memos, it has abided by international conventions barring torture, and that detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere have been treated humanely, except in the cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for which seven military police soldiers have been charged.
Still, the 2002 and 2003 memos reflect the Bush administration's desire to explore the limits on how far it could legally go in aggressively interrogating foreigners suspected of terrorism or of having information that could thwart future attacks....
Ashcroft Refuses to Discuss Torture Memo
By John J. Lumpkin
The Associated Press
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; 11:59 AM
Attorney General John Ashcroft said Tuesday he was not aware of any order by President Bush that would violate U.S. laws or treaties banning torture of military prisoners captured in Iraq or elsewhere in the war on terrorism. "This administration rejects torture," Ashcroft declared under tense questioning by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But he steadfastly refused to comment directly about a policy paper on this issue, or say whether Bush ever responded to it. But, Ashcroft did say, "The Department of Justice will both investigate and prosecute individuals who violate the law. The Torture Act is a law that we include in that violation."
The lawyers who wrote the policy paper were not identified by name and were part of a working group writing a policy governing interrogation techniques to be used at the prison for terrorist suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Said Ashcroft: "The president of the United States has not ordered any conduct that would violate the Constitution of the United States, that would violate not one of the laws enacted by the Congress, or that would violate any of the various treaties."
Ashcroft would not comment directly on the 2002 departmental memo that laid out a rationale in which the president was not necessarily bound by anti-torture laws or treaties because of his authority as commander in chief to protect national security.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., asked Ashcroft whether there is any presidential order that "immunizes (from prosecution) interrogators of al Qaeda suspects?"
"The president has issued no such order," Ashcroft replied.
The attorney general said the policy memo on this issue would not be made available to the committee, however. And Ashcroft said that while he respected the constitutional right of Congress to ask questions, "there are certain things that, in the interest of the executive branch operating effectively, that I think it is inappropriate for the attorney general to say."
"Inappropriate". To say whether or not the apparently stated policy of Justice was that torture could be at times allowable. When that, among other things, is the express reason that he's supposed to be testifying. When that, in fact, is the question before us all.
Well. Yes. Quite.
Posted by iain at 12:53 PM
Well, this could have been foreseen ... even if they did have relatively little choice at the time.
The travelers entered Fallujah first through a checkpoint operated by the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a U.S.-trained paramilitary unit meant to add muscle to the American-led occupation. The men in black berets distractedly waved cars past, onto the city's main street. Then it became apparent who was really in charge. A few yards in, wild-eyed young men in masks pulled cars over at will, searched them and demanded identification documents. No one could leave or enter without passing muster. Other groups of fighters in masks roamed side streets and alleys, brandishing rifles at all sorts of angles.
It was not supposed to be like this. Under an agreement made last month with U.S. Marine commanders, a new force called the Fallujah Brigade, led by former officers from Saddam Hussein's demobilized army, was to safeguard the city. The unruly gunmen -- many of them insurgents who battled the Marines through most of April -- were supposed to give way to Iraqi police and civil defense units. Instead, the brigade stays outside of town in tents, the police cower in their patrol cars and the civil defense force nominally occupies checkpoints on the city's fringes but exerts no influence over the masked insurgents who operate only a few yards away. [...] Moreover, continuing mayhem on Fallujah's outskirts raises the question of whether the Americans have simply created a safe haven for anti-occupation fighters. On Saturday, a Fallujah-based group calling itself the Mujaheddin Battalions announced it was transferring its fight to Baghdad -- but was still committed to the truce in its home city.
New Iraqi Government Declares Militias Illegal
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 7, 2004; 2:00 PM
BAGHDAD, June 7 -- The new Iraqi government and U.S. occupation authorities declared all militias illegal Monday and outlined a $200 million program to redirect their estimated 100,000 fighters into official security forces, civilian professions or retirement.
The most immediate effect of the order, issued in the name of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, was to formally outlaw the Mehdi Army of Muqtada Sadr, the defiant Shiite Muslim cleric who has confronted U.S. occupation forces in bloody clashes for the past two months, according to senior occupation officials. The order also stipulated that Sadr and his lieutenants, as punishment for being members of a now illegal armed group, are barred from holding public office for three years. That threw up a legal barrier in the path of mainstream Shiite political and religious figures seeking to draw Sadr and his followers away from armed resistance to the occupation and into Iraq's postwar political process.
Basically, this truce has pretty much ensured either a fundamentalist Muslim enclave in what's left of Iraq -- the new governing authority has no ability to deal with them, and unless they resort to a draft to pull in large numbers of people, will never have the armed forces necessary to cope -- or that the US occupation army will eventually be forced to head into Fallujah (and later, Najaf) to deal with the situation once and for all. They've likely not prevented countless civilian noncombattant casualties and the damage and (hopefully) incidental destruction of Muslim holy sites; it's merely been delayed until the insurgents are stronger and better able to deal. In the meantime, they'll be exporting their tactics to other parts of the country. That the militias themselves have been branded illegal is of no particular significance, at the moment; it's not as if the Iraqi Governing Council has the ability to go after them, and we don't have the volition ... or, for that matter, the ability.
“EVERYTHING is going to move everywhere.” With these words Douglas Feith, the American under-secretary of defence for policy, described how America’s military presence around the world was to be shaken up dramatically. In the past week, the picture of what that shake-up will look like has become clearer. The New York Times reported that America is planning to move two army divisions out of Germany, its main cold-war base in Europe. It may also move a wing of fighter aircraft from Germany to Turkey, provided that the Turks allow the Americans full control of them. Other naval forces could move from Britain to Italy. And on Monday June 7th, South Korea announced that by 2006 America will withdraw some 12,500 troops from the country, roughly a third of its total presence there. [...] The South Koreans have more reason than the Germans to be nervous. They still face a cold-war threat: the million-man North Korean army parked just across the “demilitarised zone” (DMZ) that runs between the two countries. America had already announced that it would move 3,600 of its troops in South Korea to Iraq, and had moved those along the DMZ somewhat further south. Monday’s announcement of the much larger withdrawal is thus the continuation of a process already begun (though it is not known where the rest of the 12,500 will go). The smallish American presence on the ground was never much more than symbolic in any case. The brunt of any fighting would fall on South Korea’s nearly 700,000 soldiers. America has reiterated its commitment to defending South Korea from attack by the communist North, stressing that its improving technology and weapons more than make up for reduced troop numbers.
U.S. to Pull 12,000 Troops From South Korea
By JAMES BROOKE (New York Times, June 7, 2004)
The United States plans to withdraw one third of its 37,000 troops from South Korea by the end of the next year, according to a South Korean government official. [...] The cutback appears to be part of a wider rearrangement of American troops in the Pacific. In Tokyo today, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported that the United States is sounding out Japan about moving some of the 14,000 United States marines stationed in Okinawa to a Japanese base in Hokkaido.
And no doubt Hokkaido is sitting there thinking, "Well, what the hell would WE want with all those troops?"
One suspects quite strongly that the troops, depending on how long it takes to rework the troop strength, will simply be sent to Iraq. At this point, it's the only move that makes sense. They're already dismantling training units here to send to Iraq, thus ensuring that troops being sent out will now be less well trained. Might as well send troops already deployed to try to somewhat ease the burden on troops already there. (And never mind the fact that what were originally time-limited enlistments have turned into eternal enlistments with the latest "stop-loss" order; the government's current policies are pretty much ensuring that the military will endure several lean recruiting years. Desire to serve has its limits, and for many, those limits are likely to be the fact that service looks to be a permanent career choice, whether you want it or not. But I digress.)
The problem with this, of course, is Korea. Granted that the troops there were never more than symbolic. The combination of decreasing troop strength, plus moving them back out of direct harm's way, sends a signal both to Seoul and to Pyongyang: Sorry we can't help out over ther, but we're busy right now. Please leave your name, number and a brief message at the sound of Pyongyang blowing up a South Korean city or two. BOOM!
Posted by iain at 02:08 PM
... You have GOT to be kidding.
Microsoft has successfully patented using short, long or double clicks to launch different applications on "limited resource computing devices" - presumably PDAs and mobile phones. The US patent was granted on 27 April.
Now any US company using a variety of clicks to launch different software functions from the same button will have to change their product, pay licensing fees to Microsoft or give Microsoft access to its intellectual property in return.
British company Symbian, which makes operating systems for mobile phones that employ double clicks and has offices in the US could be affected, as could PalmOne in California, which supplies PDA software.
Several activists who oppose software patents say that Microsoft's patent is not a "sensible use" of the patenting system because the idea of the long, short and double clicks is neither novel or non-obvious.
You wonder how long it will be before patent offices decide that (a) software can never ever ever ever EVER get patented -- copyrighted, yes; patented, no -- and that they should scrutinize all technology-related patent applications so long and thoroughly that the technology companies just surrender and apply for copyrights instead.
I mean, really, this is just beyond silly.
Posted by iain at 01:48 PM
Media Relations: philadelphia freedom?/ June 3, 2004
In which the City of Brotherly Love is always chasing rainbows (preferably with dollar signs attached), watching clouds drifting by; their schemes are just like all their dreams, ending in tne sky.
Or, you know, something like that.
Posted by iain at 04:01 PM
You know ... it would be nice if the Environmental Protection Agency actually protected the environment.
Or if it protected us from the environment that it's allowing to be created. Either one would be nice. Alas, neither one can be expected.
Professor Tyrone B. Hayes watches as one of his students leans over a table covered with small plastic cups, each containing a few ounces of water and a single African reed frog. The short, trim professor hovers, carefully checking the fluid and the frogs, glistening and mottled green in their makeshift miniaquariums. The water in each cup contains a minuscule amount of a single chemical, an amount that can be compared to the weight of one one-thousandth of a single grain of salt. The chemical is atrazine, the most widely used large-scale weed killer in the world. It is pervasive in U.S. streams and waterways and so persistent it can be detected in rain. It is officially considered safe at three parts per billion in human drinking water.
Hayes is experimenting on frogs, dosing them with atrazine at levels far below what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says humans can consume. What he's found is frightening, at least for the frogs. He has occasionally encountered not only the frog malformations previously related to pesticides in farm, golf course, and highway runoff -- missing limbs, deformed or missing eyes, partial jaws, no jaws -- but also one other, statistically widespread effect. Hayes has found that atrazine turns the testosterone in male frogs into estrogen, causing them to develop ovaries as well as testicles. In other words, atrazine is a chemical castrator. Research has also linked it to human prostate and breast cancer.....
... Last June, atrazine was reviewed by the EPA and by a scientific advisory panel composed of scientists from outside the agency. Seventeen atrazine studies were presented for review. Twelve of these studies were submitted by Syngenta, and three were from Hayes. The other two studies came from independent researchers, Heisler says. In this case, it seems, the scientific advisory panel and the EPA felt that the weight of the evidence supported continued use of atrazine. In this case, it also seems, the EPA was not overly concerned about apparent conflicts of interest. More than two-thirds of the studies supporting atrazine were provided by Syngenta, the company that manufactures it, and the advisory panel that helped conduct the risk review included Ronald Kendall, the Texas Tech scientist who had led Syngenta-funded research into atrazine's risks.
Hayes believes the EPA's risk review process, which not only allows but requires companies to study the dangers of their own often highly profitable products, leads, inherently, to biased results. "There has to be some way to police what the company is doing," he says. "If the company is required to study the safety of its own product, no one else is going to do it."
Seven countries in the European Union -- France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Austria, and Italy -- have banned atrazine. These countries have a policy of banning pesticides that occur in drinking water at levels higher than 0.1 parts per billion.
After the initial phase of an ongoing review in the United States, and even though it did not take atrazine off the market, the EPA did recently acknowledge that "there is sufficient evidence to conclude that atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs." There apparently is not enough evidence, however, to stop farmers from dumping 80 million pounds of atrazine per year on U.S. farms.
Interestingly, Mr Hayes says that he's not trying to have atrazine banned; he's trying to protect the scientific process. So theoretically, the net result could possibly be the EPA allowing atrazine to remain on the market, but with explicit warnings required that the pesticide causes sexual abnormalities.
The fun part of the article comes in the middle, however, where other scientists talk about what's happened to them when they publish research contrary to certain commercial interests. All of the scientists have had incorrect information about them and their research deliberately given to the press by the conglomerates, they've tried to delay or suppress publication, they've done horrendously (and obviously) flawed research studies to refute solid studies that talk about the problems of their products; in one case, a researcher's home was burglarized, his research files stolen -- and research of any sort would be a thoroughly peculiar thing to steal, and would, one might think, point the finger directly back at that company -- and he alleges that they've slandered him internationally to discredit him.
Regarding the shell of what was once a vaguely competent Environmental Protection Agency ... unfortunately, not all of its sins can be laid at the foot of the Bush administration. Much of the process described in the article existed prior to this administration coming into office. That said, given the thoroughgoing evisceration of the agency and any of its enforcement powers that has taken place under the Bush administration, it might not be too much to say that they've certainly exacerbated an already somewhat untenable situation. (They're so very good at that, aren't they?)
Posted by iain at 10:57 AM
Lord Tebbit sparked fury today by suggesting ministers were responsible for Aids and obesity by "undermining marriage". Tory leader Michael Howard faced calls to withdraw the party Whip from the peer after he accused the Government of "promoting buggery".
The former party chairman's remarks came in a radio discussion on rising obesity rates with Conservative frontbencher Boris Johnson. Ministers were to blame for "persuing the breakdown of family life", Lord Tebbit told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "Families now so seldom eat together. They don't prepare meals properly," he said. "Wives are virtually pressurised into thinking they ought to go out to work instead of looking after their children. And it is the breakdown of family that is at the root of it and very poor education in these matters in schools."
Marriage was being undermined by tax and social policies such as the "gay marriage Bill" currently before the Lords, he continued. "We not only have an epidemic of obesity ... we have a huge problem of Aids and the Government's attitude is to do everything it can to promote buggery. Maybe those two are somewhat intimately connected."
Yep. That's right. All the fat people in the world: we did it. We snuck into the house of each and every fat person everywhere -- including the gay ones, because we wanted to make sure that nobody realized the depths of our cunning plan -- and injected pounds and pounds and pounds of fat under the skin. Oh, not all at once, of course, oh no no no. We had to keep doing this slowly, a few ounces at a time, night after night, around the world.
At the same time, we changed the face of society by promoting women's rights. Once we got all those women out of the home, and out and working, we knew that people would start eating badly, thus aiding our goal. Between the fat injections and eating badly, we the gay people estimated that all the straight people would be spectacularly overweight -- yes, each and every one of you -- no later than 2006.
And then, of course, your skins taut and bulging, you'd all just blow up. It would be messy to clean up, but we'd just make the Fab Five from "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" -- all of their various incarnations from around the world -- take care of the mess. After all, they and their crew do that week after week, but once all the straight guys blew up real good, they wouldn't have jobs any more, now would they? So they'd be free to handle that little problem. (Oh, yes, some of y'all would die of heart attacks and other things like that, but really, we were counting on the whole kablooey factor, just for the pure visual spectacle. Some of the fat we injected was time-released, so that it would grow more fat cells itself without injecting, and thus we could ensure that all of the straight people went kaboom at the same time.)
But alas, Lord Tebbit has discovered our Cunning Plan. Whatever shall we do now?
(Yes, I know. It's not nice to make fun of the sincerely stupid straight people. But really, what else can you do with such sincere, epic and thunderous stupidity announcing itself from the ramparts like that? He's not elected -- and not here, in any event -- so getting mad about it would be kind of pointless. The British are actually stuck with the guy, which just might be one of the problems with having an hereditary house of government.)
To be sure, Lord Tebbit asserts that he never suggested the connection. Given his plain words, this would seem to be somewhat disingenuous, to put it mildly.
Then again, he does appear to be ... well, not the brightest bulb in the box. Maybe he just mixed up his words a tad. (Although that leaves him being utterly and absolutely inarticulate about what he meant, rather than being articulate but stupid. Neither choice would strike one as particularly good.)
Posted by iain at 08:20 PM
Remember Afghanistan? That other war? The place where the terrorists actually, you know, were? ... No?
Well, don't be too hard on yourself. (Let me do it for you!) Nobody else seems to remember it either. If nothing else, the combination of Iraq and Afghanistan will serve as a cautionary tale for the future. Assuming that we remember to read it, anyway.
The handful of valiant American warriors fighting the ''other'' war in Afghanistan is not a happy band of brothers. They are undermanned and feel neglected, lack confidence in their generals and are disgusted by Afghan political leadership. Most important, they are appalled by the immense but fruitless effort to find Osama bin Laden for purposes of U.S. politics.
This bleak picture goes unreported because journalists are rarely seen there. It was painted to me by hard U.S. fighters who are committed to the war against terrorism but have a heavy heart. They talked to me not to undermine policy but to reveal problems that should and can be corrected.
Afghanistan constitutes George W. Bush's clearest victory since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The Taliban regime has been overthrown, eliminating al-Qaida's most important base. But the overlooked war continues with no end in sight. Narcotics trafficking is at an all-time high. If U.S. forces were to leave, the Taliban -- or something like it -- would regain power. The United States is lost in Afghanistan, bound to this wild country and unable to leave....
Something of a side note: you know things are perhaps not going the best for a president when ideologues of his own party are joining the incessant drumbeat of criticism of him, however muted.
It's also very strange to be -- repeatedly -- agreeing with so many conservatives and neocons about administration policy. Kind of makes you wish they'd go back to being unthinking ideologues; it would make it so much easier to continue to dislike them and all that they stand for.
Posted by iain at 01:22 PM
Media Relations: but he's ... THE LIBRARIAN!/ June 2, 2004
Battleaxes ahoy!
Posted by iain at 12:25 PM
The Kansas Supreme Court has agreed to consider the American Civil Liberties Union's appeal on behalf of a gay teenager who was sentenced to 17 years in prison for consensual oral sex, the ACLU said today. Matthew Limon has already been in prison for four years and three months - three and a half times longer than the maximum sentence he would have received if he were heterosexual.
"The only reason Matthew Limon is still in prison today is because he's gay," said Tamara Lange, a staff attorney with the ACLU Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, which represents Limon. She added, "The Kansas Supreme Court has an opportunity to correct the grave injustice that has been done to this young man and the mockery that his sentence makes of the equal protection guarantees in the Constitution." [...] This is the second time that his case has been sent to the Kansas Supreme Court for review. The first time, in July of 2002, the court refused to consider Limon’s case and the ACLU asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear it. The High Court sent the case back to a Kansas appeals court, ordering it to reconsider in light of its decision last summer in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down same-sex-only sodomy laws. In January, the appeals court again upheld Limon’s conviction.
The earliest that the Kansas Supreme Court is likely to hear arguments in the case will be in August.
Well, it's something, I suppose.
Mind, I don't have any hopes that this case will be resolved at the Kansas Supreme Court. Kline, Kansas' attorney general, has demonstrated surpassing bloody mindedness and determination to persecute Limon; if Kansas loses at the state supreme court level, he will certainly appeal it back to the US Supreme Court. Again.
That said, I don't happen to believe that the state of Kansas will lose this particular case in its supreme court. The state of Kansas' court system has sent itself into conniption fits justifying the retention of a law and a jail sentence that the US Supreme court all but ordered them to overturn. The key words, of course, being "all but". Why the US Supreme Court didn't reverse and vacate the sentence, rather than reverse and remand the case, I really don't understand. The state would almost certainly have gone after Limon again -- because they're so very broad minded, you see -- but the guidance from the US Supreme Court would have been explicit and unmistakeable. As it is, in a year or two, assuming the sentence is upheld at the Kansas Supreme Court level, this is going to proceed one more time to the US Supreme Court, which will likely issue yet another reversal, this time hopefully with absolute and explicit directions and an explicit overrule of the law in question.
But that will be more than a year from now, of course. Limon's case will be heard by the end of this year in the Kansas Supreme Court. Decision likely to be announced either late this year or early next year. Appeal launched immediately by whichever side loses. Three to six months for the US Supreme Court to decide whether or not to take the case. If they receive the case after January or February 2005, it will likely be heard in the 2005/2006 term, with a decision announced sometime in 2006.
Posted by iain at 12:41 AM
Media Relations: seriously cancelled/ June 1, 2004
In which there is very mild gloating. It's not pretty, but hey! it happens.
Posted by iain at 12:26 PM
