Political MoJo

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have gone on the offensive recently, calling out Democrats and moderate Republicans who dare to question the administration's actions in the run up to the Iraq War. Some of Cheney's comments were timed poorly, coming out at the same time as Congressman and veteran John Murtha was making his case for a pull out (or a quasi-pull out, or whatever). Several days later, Cheney spoke at the American Enterprise Institute and said that he respected debate and disagreement, and that Murtha was "a good man, a Marine, a patriot" who was "taking a clear stand in an entirely legitimate discussion."

But Cheney went on to say this: "What is not legitimate—and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible—is the suggestion by some U. S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence."

Considering the National Journal piece by Murray Waas released today, you would hope Vice President Cheney would feel some shame. Citing "government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter," Waas says that President Bush was told only 10 days after the 9/11 attacks that there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. In fact, if there was any connection between the two, it took the form of reconnaissance Saddam was doing over the terror group, because he saw it as a threat to his secular regime. Yet the Bush Administration said repeatedly that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties when they were making the case for war. Bush, on September 25, 2002: "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." Rumsfeld, the next day: "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire…weapons of mass destruction capabilities."

Perhaps the worst was Cheney. He made the charge that Mohammed Atta had met with a senior official in the Iraqi intelligence service several times, even after the September 21st brief indicated no general connections existed and another briefing (perhaps several) indicated that the specific rendezvous he kept mentioning between Atta and the intelligence officer was discounted by the FBI and CIA. The 9/11 Commission would later write, "We do not believer that such a meeting occurred." More generally, they said, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

So claims from Democratic senators that the Bush Administration misled the America people and misrepresented evidence are not "dishonest and reprehensible." They are 100%, completely, absolutely true.

The Waas article does further work. It knocks down a couple of the Bush administrations claims about the prewar situation:

(1) The intelligence was to blame. The contents of the report Bush saw on September 21 made their way into a lengthy CIA analysis of Iraq's ties to terrorism. In the end, the information was seen by Bush, Cheney, the national security advisor, the deputy national security advisor, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and others. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the intelligence cannot shoulder all the blame for America's missteps. Some of the intelligence was accurate, but useless to an administration that would have war whether the facts supported it or not.

(2) The Democrats saw the same intelligence that the White House did. The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the September 21st report, the lengthy CIA analysis that followed, and several other briefings the President received. The Administration has refused to provide these documents, even though Bush and Cheney trumpet, over and over and over, the false claim that Congressional Democrats saw the same evidence that the White House did before they voted to go to war.

Cheers to Murray Waas. Good investigative reporting like this makes me (I hope others as well) proud of the press in this country. Bloggers, politicians and just about everyone dogs the media, and yet in the face of an cabalistic power structure headed by George "More Secretive Than Nixon" Bush, we get reporting that reveals the truth. In the end, the second major rational for war has fallen. The first was WMDs (remember those?), the second was that Saddam harbored and conspired with terrorists. Too bad, George. I guess we'll see you in the history books. Your headshot will someday be next to a picture of a helicopter pulling the last evacuee off an embassy rooftop in Iraq.

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Yesterday, the US government finally indicted the only American "enemy combatant" in the war on terror, Jose Padilla. But only after holding him for over three years, incommunicado, in a South Carolina military brig and denying him the basic legal rights guaranteed to all citizens.

The official charges are conspiring to commit murder and aid terrorists. According to Reuters, the indictment states that

The defendants…operated and participated in a North American support cell that sent money, physical assets and mujahideen recruits to overseas conflicts for the purposes of fighting a violent jihad.

Notably absent from the criminal accusation is any mention of his alleged plans to attack New York apartments or to detonate a "dirty bomb" within the US, both earlier advanced as primary allegations by Att. Gen. Gonzalez and Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld. In addition, there are indications that the evidence from a "top al Qaeda leader" was obtained though torture at the secret CIA "black-sites" abroad.

Yet, apart from the question of his guilt, is the legality of suspending a US citizen's right to habeas corpus indefinitely, holding him incommunicado without either formal charges or access to his lawyers. The indictment, even if it is not revoked—as it could be at any time, should not distract from the means used to achieve it.

Jennifer Daskal, Advocacy Director for U.S. Programs at Human Rights Watch, said:

This speaks to who we are as a nation and what we value, that we're still holding over five hundred detainees without charges for over three years. Padilla's indictment doesn't remove that. This is something that should concern all of us as Americans. We are a nation built on the rule of law. …Certainly, those who have engaged in terrorist activity should be held accountable. But like Padilla, these individuals should be charged, prosecuted, and given the opportunity to defend themselves.

Civil liberty and human rights groups have taken Padilla's case as a touchstone for the strikes against the fundamental protections that define U.S. citizenship. In a press release yesterday, Human Rights First issued a reserved welcome:

It is long past time for Mr. Padilla to have his day in court. [However,] it remains to be seen whether it is possible now to repair the damage done to the rule of law and the cause of justice by the past years worth of indefinite detention, incommunicado interrogation, and denial of the most basic due process rights.

Over the past three years, Padilla's case has gone through a series of courts that have flip-flopped in reconciling the Administration's demand for nearly-unlimited flexibility in the war on terror and a citizen's constitutional right to legal security. Rulings in his case concerning the legality of indefinitely detaining a US citizen incommunicado and without charges , have bounced between Federal Courts and US Appeals Courts, since he was seized from a Chicago airport as an "enemy-combatant" in 2002, and now sit before the Supreme Court.

The indictment was issued just six days before the Department of Justice was supposed to submit its arguments to the Court defending its anomalous procedures in detaining the American "enemy combatant." Padilla's lawyers assert that the timing of the indictment is intended to make moot the Supreme Court's decision to review the legality of those actions.

Stanford Professor Jenny Martinez, who is part of the legal team representing Padilla, told the Washington Post, "If I were the government, I would not have expected to win in the Supreme Court. I think the government is clearly trying to evade Supreme Court review.

Martinez told the Post that they will be arguing for the Court to proceed with its review because his indictment is revocable and he his "enemy combatant" status is not yet officially removed. In previous cases, the Court has ruled to continue a review when an indictment was judged an act of "evading review" and that, therefore, the situation was "capable of repetition." Naturally, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, denies any political strategy in the sudden indictment.

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Conventional wisdom in this country has it that American businesses are uncompetitive partly because they have to spend so much on health insurance for their workers. Here's a common variation, from Dean Bakopoulos:

[W]e must implement a system that guarantees universal healthcare. American industry — from National Steel to Starbucks — would benefit from having the burden of health insurance lifted off its back. Why else would GM be aggressively investing in nationalized-healthcare Canada while U.S. plants shut down?

Say each year GM paid each worker $40,000 and spent $5,000 per worker on health insurance. That's a major drag, right? Well, look. Say national health insurance is then created, some system that doesn't rely on employers. Depending on how it's financed, GM could still be on the hook for that $5,000, so long as total worker compensation doesn't change—which it shouldn't, so long as it's set by the market. Maybe companies will now pay that $5,000 in wage form, to attract the same caliber workers (or because unions demand it). Or maybe the new system will be financed by payroll taxes or individual mandates, in which case the company might have to pay each worker $45,000 to cover the cost. But total compensation wouldn't change.

Alternatively, those companies that are currently paying nothing for health insurance can help share the load with companies like GM. But then you're just taking from one company to help out another—American businesses overall don't necessarily become more competitive. There are probably ways to redistribute the load that make sense, and that's why we have policy wonks, but the point is there's nothing prima facie business-friendly about this.

In reality, of course, things would look far more complicated. The current tax system makes things complex. And some health insurance systems are more efficient than others. National health insurance might be cheaper, on aggregate, than our current system, in which case everyone would be paying less, and businesses obviously become more competitive. But what if the new system was more expensive—given that 45 million new people would need to be covered? GM's fortunes would depend largely on how the system was financed and how good it was at controlling costs. European companies are more competitive on this front presumably because Europe rations its health care and so spends less (with similar, if not better health outcomes). If we could do that, it wouldn't matter quite as much how health care was delivered—cutting costs is where the benefits to business would lie, primarily.

There's another aspect here. Right now, when insurance premiums go up each year, GM usually has to cover the increase, which goes up faster than wages do, unless it wants to shift some of the cost onto workers—a move that usually causes a big stir and is somewhat hard to do. But if GM was paying its workers entirely in wages, and the government handling health insurance, then GM might be able to get away with avoiding the "necessary" wage increases whenever there was a premium hike. In that case, GM would save money and become more profitable by giving its employees a pay cut—who get, say, a payroll tax increase or premium hike from the government, but not enough of a corresponding wage increase from GM to cover it. But who knows.

I certainly think a national health insurance system is necessary in this country, one not tied to employment. It would help workers move from job to job more easily while remaining insured, and would guarantee that everyone had insurance. It's fair, moral, decent, etc. And it would likely be progressive, which the current tax deductions for employer-backed insurance certainly aren't. And so on. In theory reform could even help control costs, although I'm not as orthodox about that particular faith as some. But would it be a boon for American businesses? It really depends.

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In Foreign Affairs this month, Alexander Cooley has a good piece on the politics of American basing agreements that's worth a read. He does make the good point that the U.S. often seeks out basing agreements with authoritarian regimes, apparently on the theory that these countries will be more reliable allies from a military standpoint. But in fact, dictatorships can be unreliable, as Uzbekistan showed a few months ago, and Cooley argues that the U.S. is less likely to criticize a non-democratic regime for bad behavior if it has bases there, making reform less likely. (On the other hand, one might argue that, unless the United States has some sort of working relationship with an authoritarian country, whether it be military or economic ties, there's no hope of encouraging any sort of reform in those countries.)

Cooley then argues that democracies are in fact much more reliable footholds for our vast basing empire, and since agreements are negotiated openly, those bases are less likely to aggravate extremists or provoke a backlash. And they're actually more stable, since opposition leaders are less likely to campaign against an American presence negotiated by an authoritarian regime, as is now happening in South Korea. From a strategic standpoint, that's valuable. It's true, bases in democracies get a bad name because Turkey wouldn't let itself be used as an invasion platform in 2003, but that was something of an exception.

So it's an interesting piece, but it's not clear how much this advice applies to the current American basing empire. The Pentagon controls at least 725 military bases in about 130 countries around the world, valued at some $118 billion and employing half a million people. From a foreign policy standpoint, some of the bases seem to serve good purposes, some of them serve dark purposes—the ring of bases in Central Asia certainly have an "it's all about oil (and gas)" feel to them—but most of them seem to exist just to exist, and grow, and expand, as all bureaucracies tend to do. In time they create their own rationale for being there.

And few people have really taken the time to figure out whether this basing madness is all necessary for foreign policy—whether we actually need listening stations and covert operations in every corner of the earth, or whether they just exist for their own sake, because the military and its intelligence agencies are, for lack of a better phrase, addicted to control, addicted to seeking military and intelligence solutions to every problem, addicted to expanding their budgets every year. I certainly don't know. (Donald Rumsfeld seems to believe that the footprint of the empire needs to be reduced, but not its omnipotence.) If that's the case, then democracy, non-democracy, whatever; policymakers won't much care where the bases go, just so long as they're pervasive. Indeed, Cooley's piece seems to be searching for the right basing arrangement to carry out a preferred foreign policy, but it seems just as plausible that the reverse is how things tend to work, and the bases end up driving foreign policy.

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