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February 24, 2006

National Security in the Polls

President Bush has used “national security” as his signature issue since 9/11. The economy’s down? Hey, don’t forget we’re fighting the war on terror. But for the first time in a long while, Americans have started saying that they trust the Democratic Party on national security issues more than they do the president, 43-41 percent. Considering that in 2004, Bush won partly because voters had more confidence in him than in John Kerry over the "war on terror," it's hard to dismiss these polls as significant.

Also, according to a new poll on the Dubai port deal, just 17 percent of Americans favor letting a Dubai operate U.S. ports, while a walloping 65 percent believe the sale should be prohibited. Where this will push Republican members of Congress, we don’t know. But to remain in the good graces of the 65 percent of Americans who don’t support the Dubai deal, it would seem wise to part ways with the president.

Feel-Good Story of the Day

It’s a departure from what we normally write about, but this story is too heartwarming not to link to.

Avian Flu Spreads to Africa

The WHO recently confirmed that the avian flue had migrated to Africa, and called on countries in the region to take emergency measures to prevent the flu's spread outside of Nigeria. The continent, which is dependent on backyard poultry, can hardly afford the onset of avian flue, and there is no infrastructure to deal with the problem. Veterinary care is meager, barefooted children play with sick poultry, testing is limited and backyard chickens have access to wild birds, increasing the risk of contamination. It's an uphill battle to convince African farmers to kill their chickens, and according to the chairman of Nigeria’s local poultry farmers association, Alhaji Aruna , farmers are more likely hide their poultry and turn to the black market than quarantine their animals.

"We live with the flu. It's not a big deal to us. We should be less concerned about it in Africa," Aruna said. "We should be more concerned about things that are more devastating to us than a white man's disease. If it is only in Africa, little effort would have been made. In fact, in all sincerity, corruption is the highest disease that we have." And it is that corruption that he anticipates will prevent Western countries from donating aid to Africa to deal with the flu, as lenders question whether farmers will actually receive any compensation for the chickens they kill. Moreover, Nigerians distrust the government so thoroughly that many people question whether the bird flu even exists, or is some sort of ploy.

In the past week cases of avian flu in birds were also found in India. In contrast with Africa, India immediately announced it had a stockpile of 80,000 doses of Tamiflu. Because of the thriving pharmaceutical industry there, one million more doses are in production.

It appears USAID in Africa is attempting to get around government corruption by building infrastructure for flu prevention. By building schools, increasing training and supplying equipment, USAID hopes to "build a fire hydrant before the fire." Additionally, the U.S. pledged $25 million to Nigeria in technical assistance. But if the bird infection cannot be restrained quickly, it could have devastating repercussions to a region whose livelihood is dependent on poultry, and is ill-equipped to face a major pandemic.

February 23, 2006

More Iraqi Journalists Targeted

Three Iraqi journalists were found dead today in a remote area north of Bagdad. One of the victims, Atwar Bahjat, was a prominent reporter for Al-Arabiya television, and was the seventh woman journalist killed since the beginning of the Iraq war. She and two colleagues were reporting live from the edge of Samarra, on the bombing at the Shiite shrine when two gunmen approached screaming, "We want the correspondent!" The three were kidnapped, and their bodies found bullet ridden and abandoned six miles north of where they were originally abducted.

This incident draws attention to the dangers facing Iraqi journalists, which are often overlooked in the Western media. While American journalists are kidnapped and used to attract international attention, their Iraqi counterparts are often killed without delay, their lives of little value to insurgents. Take for example Jill Carroll, for whom Sunday marks her50th day in captivity—her Iraqi translator, Allan Enwiyah, who was found dead on the side of the road on the day of the abduction.

According to al-Jazeera, when reporters asked Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, to permit journalists to carry weapons for personal protection, he instructed them to send an official request. This could be a significant development considering that 82 journalists and media assistants have been killed since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. It will be interesting to see how arming journalists will play out. Will the same rules apply to both Iraqi and international journalists alike, for instance?

Action on Darfur? Not likely.

President Bush recently called for a "doubling" of peacekeeping forces in Darfur, as well as NATO intervention, to stop the ongoing genocide there. But it's not at all clear where the troops are going to come from—Bush administration officials have ruled out sending U.S. troops, and Europe has certainly shown no real interest in sending its people to fight in Africa. (Darfur isn't really an issue among civil society groups in most European countries, apart from Britain, sort of, and there's no real pressure to act.)

The guess is that nothing will come of Bush's proposal. When pressed for specifics, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack recently said: "It's really premature to speculate about what the needs would be in terms of logistics, in terms of airlift, in terms of actual troops. And certainly in that regard, premature to speculate on what the US contribution might be." Oh? Pray tell, when won't it be premature to speculate? A year from now? Two years? When everybody's dead?

It's also not clear how serious the United States is about pushing the UN on Darfur. In February, when the U.S. took over the rotating presidency of the Security Council, Robert Zoellick promised that U.S. would press for the Security Council to take over the peacekeeping force in Darfur. But at the UN, Ambassador John Bolton has done little constructive this month besides berating Kofi Annan, rather than actually working to convince China and Russia—who both have oil interests in Sudan and are reluctant to act against Khartoum—to agree to a strong resolution along the lines recommended by the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, namely:

The Security Council authorize, on an urgent basis, a transition of the African Union force in Darfur to a UN mission under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Such a mission should have a strong and clear mandate that will allow it to protect itself and civilians by force if necessary, and to disarm and disband the government-sponsored Janjaweed forces that have confiscated land or pose a threat to the civilian population.

The mission should also be specifically empowered to provide appropriate assistance to the International Criminal Court's investigations in Darfur including the arrest of individuals indicted for crimes against humanity and war crimes. [I]t should be a force large enough to provide security throughout Darfur---some 20,000 strong---with capabilities that, realistically, only countries with significant military assets and mobility will be able to provide.

That's what's needed. (And yes, as I've written before, there would be plenty of problems and risks involved in a more robust intervention; but stopping genocide, and preventing the Sudan conflict from spilling into Chad and beyond, is worth those risks.) But both the United States and Europe have dug in their heels, and haven't come around to supporting anything of the sort.

Under the circumstances, it's hard to see that Bush's proposal for a NATO role in Darfur will amount to anything significant. On the bright side, a Security Council list of names of those in the Khartoum government responsible for genocide was recently obtained and leaked by Mark Goldberg of the American Prospect, and there's some sign that now Sudan's leaders are getting nervous about targeted sanctions. That would be a decent, low-cost, first step. It's shocking that the Security Council can't even get around to imposing targeted sanctions, but it's not as if African genocide has ever received a quick response from the West.

The Broader Port Security Problem

The New York Times has a good article today on how the question of whether a Dubai-controlled company is allowed to operate a few ports or not is really the least of our port security issues:

The administration's core problem at the ports, most experts agree, is how long it has taken for the federal government to set and enforce new security standards — and to provide the technology to look inside millions of containers that flow through them.

Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers are inspected. There is virtually no standard for how containers are sealed, or for certifying the identities of thousands of drivers who enter and leave the ports to pick them up. If a nuclear weapon is put inside a container — the real fear here — "it will probably happen when some truck driver is paid off to take a long lunch, before he even gets near a terminal," said Mr. Flynn, the ports security expert….

"I'm not worried about who is running the New York port," a senior inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency said, insisting he could not be named because the agency's work is considered confidential. "I'm worried about what arrives at the New York port."

A while back Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard official who is now with the Council on Foreign Relations, had a longer piece in the Far Eastern Economic Review describing just how shaky port security is. Worth reading. And P.J. Crowley of the Center for American Progress did a short piece back in 2004 on how the administration just doesn't take this stuff very seriously at all: "Rather than increasing federal assistance in the face of new security requirements, the Bush administration's port security grant request is actually a huge reduction from the still inadequate total of $500 million allocated for port security in the first three years of the Bush administration."

Activist Laurel Hester Dies

Laurel Hester, the New Jersey police lieutenant who fought for the right to leave her pension to her longtime domestic partner Stacie Andree, succumbed to lung cancer on Sunday. Hester, a 23 year investigator, made headlines last month when she pressed city officials in Ocean County, New Jersey to pass a domestic partnership resolution provided for by the Domestic Partnership Act which “gives counties and cities the power to extend pension and health care benefits to the gay partners of employees if they so choose.”

Following several months of heated debate and wavering, the Ocean County freeholders eventually reversed their original decision on January 25th, granting police and fire department employees the freedom to designate their own pension beneficiaries. Thanking freeholders, and present despite the advice of her medical team, Hester told them "you have made yourselves an example of what democracy is all about.” Laurel Hester certainly did not intend to become an activist, but she nonetheless became a hero in the fight for equality.

Sudanese Conflict Spills Into Chad

The ethnic cleansing in Darfur has gone on since 2003, forcing two million people to abandon their homes and seek refuge in neighboring countries. As the violence rages, tens of thousands of displaced citizens have taken refuge in bordering Chad, and bringing with them the threat of insurgency. According to a new Human Rights Watch report, Chadian rebel groups have support from the Sudanese government to launch aggressive attacks in Eastern Chad.

The report, Darfur Bleeds: Recent Cross-Border Violence in Chad, is based on investigations conducted over the last two months in response to the spillover conflict that is now destroying neighboring Chad. 30,000 Chadians have abandoned their homes along the Chad/Sudan border in response to recent attacks, which include the mass destruction of villages, killing civilians and looting cattle, all apparently carried out in according with ethnic motives.

According to Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa division at Human Rights Watch, Sudan’s policy of arming militias and letting them loose is spilling over the border, and civilians have no protection from their attacks, in Darfur or in Chad. Kaloy, a border village with a pre-conflict population of 1,904, now claims more than 10,000 individuals from 26 border villages, and has grown increasingly dangerous as the raids have followed settlers, overrunning the parameters of the village.

While the number of attacks continues to climb, the U.S. has calledfor UN peacekeeping troops to take over responsibility for the region from the African Union. (Today the Sudanese government rejected this proposal.) And President Bush has already attracted attention by calling French president Jacques Chirac raising "his concern about the deteriorating situation in Darfur and his view that NATO should be more actively involved in a robust international response to this crisis, and doubling the number of peacekeepers already there."

Civil War in Iraq?

Swopa rounds up evidence—okay, more like the barest of hints—that the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra yesterday may have been the work of militant Shiites looking to provoke some serious sectarian warfare. It's not impossible, I guess. And it certainly appears to be working, with Shiites and Sunnis battling it out all across the country. Quite obviously a lot of different groups in Iraq have a lot of different motives for edging the country closer to civil war, and it seems like that will only become increasingly easier to do as time goes on.

Meanwhile, it was only a few days ago that Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad threatened to withdraw aid from the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government if it insisted on engaging in sectarian warfare with the Sunnis. And now top Shiite leaders are blaming Khalilzad for encouraging the insurgents with that statement all while… engaging in sectarian warfare. So what will the U.S. do? President Bush sounds like he's planning to back the Shiite government and oppose the "terrorists" while calling for "restraint" on all sides. But this doesn't seem like the sort of thing you can really finesse in this way. Juan Cole says this is an "apocalyptic day." Very bad.

Should Corporations Handle the Ports?

Kevin Drum says he doesn't see why the sale of operations of six American ports to Dubai Ports World, a shipping company owned by the United Arab Emirates, is such a scandal. After all, the company wouldn't even be handling port security in those ports; the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Security would. Plus, over 30 percent of this country's port terminals are already operated by foreign companies anyway. And DPW already does this sort of thing in ports all over the world, and other countries seem okay with that. Okay, I'll buy all that.

But The Nation's John Nichols, meanwhile, asks an interesting question: Why are ports run by corporations at all? Shouldn't this sort of vital national infrastructure be operated and run by the government? Well, my understanding here is that ports are run by the government, mostly: port operations (i.e., moving ships in and out of terminals) are handled by corporations, true, but the regulatory apparatus (i.e., security, customs, licensing, etc.) is handled by the state, and all major U.S. ports are owned by public port authorities, which oversee development, construction, port policies, etc.

Occasionally there's a move afoot to completely privatize the ports, but the current model remains. It's also the model in 90 percent of the world's major ports. There's one major exception, though: In 1983 the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher completely privatized the Associated British Ports. According to a World Bank report, the results were mixed, and "sale of either port land or regulatory duties and responsibilities to the private sector has a particularly dubious connection with improved port efficiency." It's also true that the fire sale decimated union representation in the docks (every port in Britain today is non-union), although the Bank seemed to see that as a good thing, naturally.

The World Bank study argues that partial privatization of ports—that is, the current U.S. model—is the way to go, with regulatory functions staying in the hands of the state and operations handled by private companies. (The land itself can be sold to corporations, but it doesn't seem like this has as big an effect on investment and development as one might think.)

According to the World Bank, in 1999 only 7 of the world's top 100 ports were completely state-owned anyway, mainly in Israel, Singapore, and South Africa, and these ports are all going to start partially privatizing soon enough. It's not clear that there's any significance one way or the other; privately-run ports aren't always that much more efficient, but it's also not clear that they're that much more unsafe. (They are almost certainly worse for unions, which in my mind is a major downside.) Still, I'm not sure Nichols has spotted the scandal he thinks he has. I'd be happy to hear otherwise, though.

Back to the UAE scandal. It also seems like the administration has broken the law by not doing a mandatory 45-day review of the DPW deal. It would be nice if we lived in an age where illegal activities on the part of the president actually mattered, but it doesn't seem so. Admittedly it's not entirely unpleasant watching the president get attacked by Republicans hopped up on the very war-on-terror hysteria he helped create. Although I'd rather we didn't have the hysteria in the first place, I guess.

I'd also be curious to know if there's anything to David Sirota's suggestion that the DPW deal was the Bush administration's way of buttering up the UAE for further free trade talks. And why is the president ready to use the first veto of his administration to protect the UAE? It seems shady enough that he doesn't really warrant a pass here.

February 21, 2006

GOP Requests Church Directories

North Carolina Republicans know where to find their friends, and aren’t afraid to give them a call. That is, if they can get the correct phone numbers. Over the protests of local national religious leaders, the North Carolina Republican party called on its members to submit their church directories to the party, stating that "people who regularly attend church usually vote Republican when they vote."

Bill Peaslee, the party's chief of staff, claimed he was simply targeting his demographic base. "The Republican Party believes that people shouldn't leave their moral and spiritual beliefs at the door of the polling place," the chief of staff said. "We're just appealing to one of our constituencies, just as the Democrat Party does. ... The Democrats may feel it's more profitable to go and do voter registration drives at a homosexual convention. We feel more comfortable going to churches."

According to the Internal Revenue Service, a church’s tax exempt status may be revoked if it engages in "any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office." In this case, local North Carolina clergy have called the practice of soliciting directories unethical, especially if it could potentially call the leanings of the church into question.

The Last Days of the Ocean

The fate of the world's oceans doesn't get a whole lot of press coverage these days—if any—but in fact they're all an utter mess, and it's a real problem. From Julia Whitty's now-online cover story from the March issue of Mother Jones: "Science now recognizes that the ocean is not just a pretty vista or a distant horizon but the vital circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive organs of our planet, and that these biological systems are suffering." Read on for the gruesome details.

You can read this month's complete oceans package online here, with articles on, among other things, the effects of over-fishing and how the fishing industry is allowed to regulate itself; how polar bears now face extinction; how Navy sonar is killing whales, and how a company set up by George H.W. Bush is killing off the most important fish in America you've never heard of.

Supreme Court to Consider Partial Birth Abortion Ban

The Supreme Court announced today that it will hear a challenge to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban passed by Congress in 2003:

The law, the Partial Birth Abortion Act, was passed in 2003 but was immediately challenged in court and has never taken effect. It was ruled unconstitutional by three federal appeals courts in the last year, in rulings based on a Supreme Court decision in 2000 striking down a similar law passed in Nebraska.
In that case, Stenberg v. Carhart, a 5-to-4 majority that included the now-retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor found that any abortion ban must include an exception for the health of the woman. Justice Alito was sworn in three weeks ago as Justice O'Connor's successor after a rancorous confirmation process that focused heavily on the question of abortion. The case accepted by the court today does not involve a challenge to the core ruling that established a legal right to abortion, Roe v. Wade. But it is certain to rekindle questions of whether the court in the post-O'Connor era will be more sympathetic to efforts to limit abortion rights.

The Times muddles the issue a bit here, partly because "partial birth abortion" is a vague term that gets used in a lot of different contexts. Most of the public, I would imagine, thinks that "partial birth abortion" refers to a late-term abortion on an otherwise viable fetus—primarily, an abortion in the third trimester. Opponents of this sort of thing argue that the baby is basically being birthed and then killed, and most people probably have something like this in mind when they tell pollsters that they oppose "partial birth abortion."

But very often "partial birth abortion" is used instead to refer to intact dilation & extraction (D&X), a medical procedure that's most often carried out in the second trimester (and sometimes even the first trimester), rather than the third. So laws that ban this procedure can end up banning far, far more than the common understanding of "partial birth abortion." In fact, as Jessica of Feministing points out, these sorts of laws can be so vague that in 1998, Wisconsin doctors refused to perform any abortions whatsoever after a (totally unconstitutional) D&X ban was passed by the state legislature and upheld by state courts. They just couldn't figure out what was being banned and what wasn't, and didn't want to risk prosecution.

Congress' 2003 law most resembles the Wisconsin law—mostly notably, the ban isn't limited to late-term or post-viability abortions—and even goes a bit further, banning procedures besides D&X. It goes far beyond "partial birth." (Law professor Jack Balkin had a longer discussion of these vagueness problems back in 2003.) Not only that, but it makes no exceptions for the health of the mother, which is, presumably, the main issue the Supreme Court will discuss. But if the law is upheld, it wouldn't be surprising if, in some states, it had the exact same effect that the Wisconsin partial birth abortion ban had. Not to mention the fact that it will make abortions even more difficult—or outright impossible—for many poorer women, who are often deterred by various state laws from getting access to abortions until later on in their pregnancies. And no doubt that's exactly what Roberts and Alito are after.

Chris Cox' Tenure So Far

Those of us who follow corporate scandals and governance issues were certainly expecting the worst when President Bush nominated Chris Cox to head the SEC, after the former chairman, William Donaldson, was forced out (Donaldson, despite being Republican, had a bit too much of a reformist for this administration to stomach). Cox, after all, had spent his entire career in the House working to weaken corporate regulations. But in the early months after his nomination, some commentators suggested that Cox might not be the right-wing nutcase everyone expected, but would instead carry out some of Donaldson's modest reforms and do his best to try to avoid another wave of corporate scandals similar to those in 2002.

Or at least that was the thought. But now Roger Lowenstein has a piece in the February American Prospect arguing that, no, no, the worriers were right all along; Cox probably will be as bad as everyone expected. Corporate America, after all, needs some serious reforms—and fast—in order to avoid meltdowns in the relatively near future:

The SEC staff has singled out "special purpose entities" (those off-the-books partnerships used so deftly by Enron) as needing more transparent treatment. Accounting for derivative deals is still abysmally incoherent. There are probably not a dozen people in America who can decipher the disclosures of, say, GE Capital. And accounting for pensions is simply nonsensical. Companies now book earnings based on the percentage gains they expect in their pension funds -- a number their treasurer pulls from thin air -- even if the actual performance is far better or far worse. Given the seriously underfunded condition of many pension funds today, Cox should be pressing the Financial Accounting Standards Board to rewrite such rules.

For more on the pension crisis, Lowenstein wrote a good—and unnerving—article for the New York Times Magazine awhile back that takes stock of the Jenga-like state of corporate pension funds. But back to reforms. Is Cox the guy to carry this stuff out? Probably not:

And it is clear that, under Cox, the business lobby is expecting a gentler SEC. "We think he’ll be a good addition … a calming influence," David Chavern, an executive at the Chamber, says pointedly. Cox deserves credit for running a more consensus-driven SEC, a departure from the Donaldson years. But it’s not hard to see why the Chamber is celebrating. With both his principles and his political future in mind, Cox appears to be charting a conservative course that nonetheless maintains a patina of Donaldson-style vigilance. He is going slow on some of Donaldson’s reforms while preserving them in a legalistic sense; letting others (shareholder access) lapse; ignoring areas in which the reforms are incomplete (mutual funds); and winning points as a “moderate” by picking a superficial initiative or two that will please the crowd.
Cox has said, for instance, that he may press for more disclosure on executive compensation. At first blush, this looks bold. On second look, it is mostly public relations. There is already a tremendous amount disclosed on what CEOs earn; the trouble is, pay totals keep rising regardless. It is doubtful that more disclosure will reverse the trend. To do more than grab headlines, the SEC will have to reach the people who set their pay -- the boards. Donaldson’s shelved proposal for letting shareholders pick directors is an obvious solution. Imagine how the calculus on CEO pay would change if the head of the compensation committee had to run against a candidate picked, say, by Calpers and other large outside shareholders. It would mean, in effect, real democracy. So far, Cox has said nothing to suggest that he favors it.

So no serious reforms are forthcoming. Only the appearance of serious reforms. And the country almost certainly needs serious reforms, rather than mere appearances. We can only guess where this is going.

The American Right Goes Global

Rachel Morris of Legal Affairs has an intriguing report on conservative Christian legal groups that are going abroad to fight various legal cases abroad, before those cases end up as fodder for Supreme Court decisions here at home. Justice Anthony Kennedy, after all, has suggested that the interpretation of Constitutional law should at least listen to what foreign courts are saying—see Jeffrey Toobin's profile of Kennedy in the New Yorker for more on this—and Stephen Breyer has more-or-less agreed.

At any rate, Morris tells the story of Reverend Ake Green in Sweden who gave a speech calling gay people a "deep cancerous tumor in the entire society." He was prosecuted under Sweden's hate laws, and the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Alliance Defense Fund, an American Christian legal organization that specializes in opposing gay marriage, flew in to file an amicus brief in defense of the reverend—whose conviction was eventually overturned. And the ADF plans to continue this trend:

In recent years, ADF has financed locally based lawyers to intervene in a number of foreign cases. It agreed to fund a challenge to the U.K.'s law allowing human cloning for research purposes, though the case never reached a courtroom. With ADF funding, lawyers from a new allied organization, the European Defense Fund, are advising German Christian parents who home school their children but fear they will be prosecuted for failing to send them to school, as Germany's laws require they do.

The ADF is also closely watching the emergence of hate speech and antidiscrimination laws in Canada. "If the Canadians will accept certain limitations on freedom, there's a certain currency of thought in the U.S. that it must be O.K. for us, too, because Canada's our first cousin," Bull noted. The organization hired a Canadian lawyer for Stephen Boissoin, a minister who railed in the newspaper of Red Deer, Alberta, against those who support the "homosexual machine that has been mercilessly gaining ground in our society since the 1960s." The Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission initially dismissed a complaint against the minister brought by a university professor, but it has since agreed to hear the case.

You could almost call it, "Fighting them over there so they don't have to fight them over here." This also brings to mind an old Foreign Policy article about the NRA doing something similar—fighting gun-control laws around the world (and in the UN). On the left, you see somewhat less of this, it seems. The most obvious candidate, labor, shot itself in the foot during the Cold War after the AFL-CIO undercut its strength abroad by backing various U.S.-allied dictatorships and opposing leftist trade unions, but that's been changing in recent years (and the breakaway unions, led by the SEIU, have hinted that international organizing will be a goal—see, for instance, Matt Bai's interview with Andy Stern in the New York Times). But the right has been rapidly shifting its battles to the international stage, and it would be dangerous not to pay attention to this trend.

Scholar Convicted of Holocaust Denial

Yesterday in Austria, David Irving, a once-respected British scholar, was sentenced to three years in jail after being convicted of denying the Holocaust. Before his arrest in November, Irving had already banned in both Austria and Germany because of his views. He further cemented his reputation when he unsuccessfully sued an American historian, Deborah Lipstadt, for calling him a racist in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

Among other things, Irving had claimed in his book Hitler’s War that Hitler knew nothing of the Jewish genocide, and that the majority of deaths during the Holocaust resulted from the diseases such as typhus. Within two weeks of his arrest, however, Irving said that he was misinformed, and that both the Holocaust and gas chambers did in fact take place. But despite presenting himself as a changed man, Irving was convicted under Austria’s 1992 law which criminalizes anyone who "denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media."

The sixteen year old warrants were issued in response to a 1989 speech during which Irving toldan audience of 300 that the mass destruction of 1,350 synagogues under Nazi Germany was actually committed by "unknowns" dressed up as members of the SA. He then added "that Anne Frank could not have written her diary herself, because the Biro wasn't invented until 1949, and that Hitler never gave an order to exterminate the Jews." Irving also concluded—citing a now-discredited technician on executions that "no significant traces of cyanide gas were found at Auschwitz, and accused the Jewish World Congress of spreading the 'legend' in 1942 that the Third Reich was preparing its Final Solution."

Holocaust denial is currently a crime in Austria, France, Germany, Israel, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania and Switzerland. But does respect for the atrocities of World War II come at the price of limiting free speech? One could argue that Irving, despite his allegations, has become a martyr for this right. But whereas the U.S. holds the right of free speech to be (nearly) inviolable, there are obvious historical reasons why countries such as Austria have criminalized expressions such as the Hitler salute and the swastika. With World War II still not a very distant memory, Austria must make small compromises in civil liberties to cut off any channels that could potentially lead to neo-Nazism.

February 20, 2006

Privacy and Civil Liberties Board still has not met

What do the White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and the Vice President's Terrorism Task Force have in common?

Neither believes in holding meetings. Ever.

Though the media never talked or wrote about it much, Dick Cheney's Terrorism Task Force, formed in May of 2001, never held a meeting. Such is also the case with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, formed at the recommendation of the over-praised September 11 Commission in December of 2004. There has been conflict over the board's budget, its powers, and its membership. On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved two of Bush's nominees to the board, but it is estimated that it could take months before the board is actually ready to work.

Carol E. Dinkins, an attorney and former member of the Reagan Justice Department, is chairwoman of the board. She was the treasurer of George W. Bush's 1994 campaign for governor of Texas, and co-chair of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney, an organization which recruited attorneys to handle legal conflicts after the 2004 election. She is also a member of the law firm where Attorney General Alberto Gonzales once worked.

Only one board member, vice chairman Alan Charles Raul, appears to have any experience in the field of civil liberties.