MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: September 10, 2006

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September 15, 2006

I Left My Gun In San Francisco

In 2004, Morgan Quitno Press ranked San Francisco as the ninth safest American city with a population over 500,000, putting it in the top 30%. This apparently did not impress Republican consultant Ed Rollins, who, on Wednesday, declared that House minority leader Nancy Pelosi "comes from San Francisco, one of the bastions of lawlessness in this country."

Rollins' point about Pelosi was that she "is certainly not going to be the one that's going to convince Americans that the Democrats are going to get tough" on issues of national security.

Bad grammar aside, Rollins' comment, made on Lou Dobbs Tonight, is a reliable Republican talking point that has grown even more popular since Americans have indicated that they are fed up with the war in Iraq. There is also a concentrated effort to brand Pelosi as a "San Francisco liberal," a phrase which conjures up such notions as free love, drugs, gay sex and "radical" ideology.

This is an old theme. I remember standing in the Post Office line right after the 2004 election and hearing one of the clerks say to a customer, "Thank God the 'other one' wasn't elected. Can you imagine what would become of us?" I was hoping to wind up at her station so I could say "Yes, a war hero and geo-political expert--that would have made a really scary president." Unfortunately, I didn't get to say it.

Unless the opposition can do an effective job of showing the obvious--that the Bush administration has made America less safe than ever--the "Democrats cannot protect you" theme is guaranteed continued success.

Whistleblower: FCC Spikes Own Study After It Doesn't Match Ideology

The Federal Communications Commission was accused today by a whistleblower of discontinuing and concealing a study that showed locally owned TV stations broadcast more local news because the data conflicted with its agenda of media consolidation. Reported today in the Los Angeles Times, the accusation by former FCC attorney Adam Candeub provides some of the strongest evidence to-date that the Bush FCC has become a pawn of big media companies.

"The initial results (of the study) were very compelling, and it was just stopped in its tracks because it was not the way the agency wanted to go," Candeub told the Times. "The order did come down from somewhere in the senior management of the media bureau that this study had to end … and they wanted all the copies collected."

Media conglomerates have in the past disputed that their news coverage is inferior to that provided by independently owned outlets.

The year the FCC spiked the study, the agency was run by Michael K. Powell, son of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and an infamous skeptic of all things regulatory."Losing Signal," a 2001 Mother Jones article by Brendan Koerner, provides ample background on how the FCC under Powell could have become sufficiently ideological to ignore its own research. Koerner reports, for example, that Powell gave a speech on the future of communications in which he declared with almost religious certitude: “The oppressor here is regulation.”

Koerner went on to write:

On these and other far-reaching questions, the agency's positions are shaping up to be virtually identical to the ones being drawn up in corporate boardrooms. In April, during a panel discussion conducted by the American Bar Association, Powell dismissed the FCC's historic mandate to evaluate corporate actions based on the public interest. That standard, he said, "is about as empty a vessel as you can accord a regulatory agency." In other comments, Powell has signaled what kind of philosophy he prefers to the outdated concept of public interest: During his first visit to Capitol Hill as chairman, Powell referred to corporations simply as "our clients."

Ney Pleads Guilty, Could Face 2 Years in Jail

AP:

Ohio Rep. Bob Ney admitted improperly accepting tens of thousands of dollars worth of trips, meals, sports tickets and casino chips while trying to win favors for a disgraced Washington lobbyist and a foreign aviation company run by a gambler known as "the Fat Man."

Ney, a six-term Republican, had defiantly denied any wrongdoing for months, but he reversed course and agreed to plead guilty in court papers filed Friday. Prosecutors will recommend he serve 27 months in prison. Ney was expected to formally plead guilty in court Oct. 13.

"I have made serious mistakes and am sorry for them," Ney, 52, said in a statement. "I am very sorry for the pain I have caused to my family, my constituents in Ohio and my colleagues." His lawyer said he had begun treatment for alcohol dependency.

Ney became the first lawmaker to admit wrongdoing in the election-year congressional corruption probe spawned by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Ney said he was hopeful "that someday the good I have tried to do will be measured alongside the mistakes I have made."

Fat chance.

Money Can't Buy Happiness. Yes It Can.

From Germany's Institute for the Study of Labor:

“One of the famous questions in social science is whether money makes people happy. We offer new evidence by using longitudinal data on a random sample of Britons who receive medium-sized lottery wins of between £1000 and £120,000 (that is, up to approximately U.S. $200,000). When compared to two control groups – one with no wins and the other with small wins – these individuals go on eventually to exhibit significantly better psychological health.

Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers

New from Link TV, a 7-minute report about the film "Iraq for Sale - The War Profiteers," including an interview with director/ producer Robert Greenwald.

"The film takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children whose lives have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. Iraq for Sale uncovers the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq and the decision makers who allow them to do so."

Check it out. Also see motherjones.com/iraq_for_sale for our coverage of post-war contracting shenanigans.

California’s Solar Babies

There are many things not to like about California, and top of my list, right after the state’s self-satisfaction, is its political dysfunction—recalls, referendums, propositions, and the perennial standoff between the governor and the state legislature.

However, as this great NYT story (with a lot of multimedia bells and whistles) demonstrates, California’s politicians have put their differences aside to create a bold new carrot-and-stick approach to cut carbon dioxide emissions and energy usage.

That’s the kind of leadership we wish could come from Congress or the Bush Administration. But if Arnold, democratic assemblywomen, greens, and even anti-regulatory entrepreneur T. J. Rodgers can get together to save the planet (and turn a profit in the process), maybe there’s hope.

Points of interest:

California’s per-person electricity usage has remained flat since the 1970s, while the national average has risen by 50%.

A quarter of new hybrids are registered in California, where car dealers report that SUVs are no longer selling well.

Car makers and even dealerships have sued the state, saying that its new law requiring them to reduce the average CO2 emissions in cars sold in California by 30 percent by 2009 (light trucks and SUVs have until 2016) amounts to a backdoor way to legislate fuel efficiency—which is, alas, a federal domain.

The Supreme Court will soon hear a case brought by Massachusetts and a dozen other states arguing that the EPA should declare CO2 a pollutant and regulate it, which, but of course, the Bush Administration claims it has no authority to do. (But you’re The Decider!)

And Rudy Giuliani's firm is in the business of defending utilities from all this evil regulation:

Scott Segal, a lawyer for Bracewell & Giuliani who represents electric utilities, summarized California’s policy as: “All electrons are not created equal. We’re going to discriminate against some of them, and create artificial barriers in the marketplace for electricity.” California consumers could end up paying more for their energy and struggling to find enough, Mr. Segal said.

Discriminating against electrons! Start the meme watch.

September 14, 2006

Soldiers Describe Fighting In Afghanistan

American soldiers in Helmand Province have described to journalists from The Independent that "We are flattening places we have already flattened, but the attacks have kept coming. We have killed them by the dozens, but more keep coming, either locally or from across the border....We have used B1 bombers, Harriers, F16s and Mirage 2000s. We have dropped 500lb, 1,000lb and even 2,000lb bombs. At one point our Apaches [helicopter gunships] ran out of missiles, they have fired so many."

The soldiers went on to say that they are constantly ambushed, and in need of helicopters, but cannot get any. They have praise for the Afghan army, but say that the Afghan police force does not wish to fight the Taliban either because they are afraid to or because they are Taliban sympahizers.

New British troops have arrived to help, but France, Germany, Italy, and Turkey say they have no troops to spare because of the peacekeeping effort in Lebanon. In the meantime, Pakistani troops have withdrawn from the border, after getting a "promise" from the Taliban not to cross over into Afghanistan and continue to mount attacks.

According to Lt. Gen Richards: "You also have to think that each time we kill one, how many more enemies we are creating. And, of course, the lack of security means hardly any reconstruction is taking place now, so we are not exactly winning hearts and minds."

Tracing the Digital Trails We Leave -- and Government Follows

Here's a cool thing from Medill Journalism School -- a Flash presentation showing how your personal data can be used by the federal government or analyzed by intelligence agencies. (Yes, Flash can be annoying, as we've been hearing a lot lately; but there are some things, like this, that it can do very well; so give it a whirl.) It reveals how the government uses data mining and what data, from both public records and private data aggregators, is studied, what the privacy rules are and whether they're followed - and outlines "the digital trails we all leave in our daily lives."

Princeton: Diebold's Newest Voting Machine...Sucks

Talking of voting hiccups, the Center for Information Technology and Policy got hold of one of Diebold's latest-model voting machine, the AccuVote-TS, and took it for a spin. What they found is not reassuring.

1) Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.

2) Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.

3) AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.

4) While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

In the November 2006 elections, these machines are scheduled to be used in 357 counties representing nearly 10 percent of registered voters.

Politicians Cast Opponents as Villains. No, Really.

Yes, that's right, at least according to AP. Republican candidates "are eager to drop names like Pelosi, Clinton and Kerry [Each of these things is not like the others. Discuss.] in an attempt to associate their opponents with liberals and raise fears about what would happen if Democrats took control of Congress." Other boogeymen include Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il, and, yes, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, described in a recent RNC briefing as "a partisan nutroot who turned his hate-filled blog Daily Kos into a leadership post in the Democrat Party." (The blog can be way grating, true; but he's always struck me as a smart, thoughtful type unafraid to call BS on lame Democrats, which is an odd way of being "partisan.")

Democrats aren't above using boogeymen in their turn, as in a recent ad "showing a montage of GOP Senate candidates and Bush, followed by images of men sneaking across the border sandwiched between shots of bazooka-toting terrorists, bin Laden and the North Korean president." (Huh?) The ad was quickly withdrawn when Hispanic leaders complained. All of which explains, for the umpteenth time, why politicians are held in such widespread contempt--both because this kind of denigration by association can work and because the puerility and lameness of the strategy is so self-evident.

Palestinian Refugees Targeted by Shia Militia

A reminder that the world is complicated and contradictory, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East: Palestinian refugees in Iraq face particularly grave security threats, including targeted killings by mostly Shia militant groups and harassment by the Iraqi government. So says a new Human Rights Watch report.

“Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, Palestinian refugees in Iraq have increasingly become targets of violence and persecution,” said SarahLeah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Shia militant groups have murdered dozens of Palestinian refugees, and the Iraqi government has made it difficult for these refugees to stay legally in Iraq by imposing onerous registration requirements.”

There are about 34,000 Palestinian refugees in Iraq, and they've been targeted largely because of the benefits they received from Saddam’s government and their support (real and perceived) for the Sunni insurgency. Since 2003 successive Iraqi governments have either failed to protect them or shown outright hostility. The report calls for Syria and Jordan to open their borders to the refugees, who otherwise have nowhere else to go. (Earlier this year David Enders wrote for MJ.com about the plight of the Palestinian refugees, one of whom told him, "We all just want to leave.")

Amnesty: Hizbollah Guilty of War Crimes

A new Amnesty International report finds that "Hizbullah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel amounted to deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, as well as indiscriminate attacks, both war crimes under international law. Its attacks also violated other rules of international humanitarian law, including the prohibition on reprisal attacks on the civilian population." Hizbullah fired several thousand rockets into northern Israel, killing 43 civilians, including children.

Read the full report here. And click on the image to see a video that accompanies it.

Camel Jockeys in Dubai's Sinister Paradise

From the BBC: A class-action lawsuit filed in the US accuses the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum (and his brother and 500 other defendants), of enslaving thousands of young children from Bangladesh, Sudan and southern Asia and putting them to work as camel jockeys.

Mike Davis had a great piece a while ago on the "sinister paradise" that is Dubai. The Persian Gulf city state boasts a jelly-fish shaped underwater hotel, the world's largest mall, a 24-square-mile archipelago of coral-colored islands in the shape of an almost finished puzzle of the world, high-rise resorts, thousands of mansions, a dinosaur theme park--you get the idea.

As Davis noted, under the "enlightened despotism" of its Sheikh, Dubai also boasts, if that's the right word, labor laws skewed very much to the advantage of Capital.

South Asian contract laborers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls, make up the great mass of the population. Dubai lifestyles are attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan, and Indian maids, while the building boom is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians working twelve-hour shifts, six and half days a week, in the blast-furnace desert heat.

Dubai, like its neighbors, flouts ILO labor regulations and refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on "forced labor."

House Intel Report on Iran: "Erroneous, Misleading and Unsubstantiated"

The Washington Post reports on complaints to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House intelligence committee, about a recent HIC report on Iran's capabilities, "calling parts of the document 'outrageous and dishonest' and offering evidence to refute its central claims." Those obfuscating, deceiving, complaining Iranians! Except that the complaints, which cite "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements," are coming from U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program.

For example:

Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect," noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.

A technical quibble, you might say; but wars have been launched on the strength of finer distinctions. (And anyway, privately, several US intelligence officials said the report included "at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate.")

As said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector said, "This is like prewar Iraq all over again. You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that's cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors."

Another reason--as if one more were needed--to pray the House switches in November.

U.S. Can't Stay in Iraq and Can't Leave

Kofi Annan, no doubt trying to be helpful, neatly captures the impossibility of the American posture in Iraq.

"The U.S. has found itself in the position where it cannot stay and it cannot leave. I believe that if it has to leave, the timing has to be optimum, and it has to be arranged in such a way that it does not lead to even greater disruption or violence in the region."

I think "optimum" went out the window a while back.

Voting Glitches on Primary Day

As Sasha Abramsky amply details in his recent Mother Jones article, voting can be a dicey business these days, in spite of--and in many cases because of "improvements" introduced by the 2002 Help America Vote Act. Tuesday's primaries brought fresh evidence that the machinery of American democracy doesn't run smoothly everywhere. In Ohio, Texas, Florida, California, and Chicago, (poorly trained) poll workers had difficulty operating new voting machines, or didn't show up; and in one place, suburban Washington D.C., essential voting equipment was missing.

Voting machine companies blame poll workers, often no doubt with good reason. “If you prick their fingers and there's blood coming out, they serve,” R. Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, which represents state and local election officials, told USA Today. But of course the machines themselves have a history of screwing up, often in ways that aren't immediately obvious. (And, of course, they can be hacked.)

Some of the problems can be put down to the pace of (enforced) change--resulting in, for example, some counties receiving their touch-screen machines only two weeks before voting day. And many should be ironed out by November. (Yes?) But some election officials take a gloomy view. "I really believe that we've got a crisis of confidence in our voting systems," says one from Travis County, Texas.

Judge to Saddam: "You Are Not A Dictator"

There was I, waxing sentimental about Saddam's trial and the sight of a Kurd taunting the big guy. But now we slide from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Questioning a Kurdish witness Thursday, Saddam said, "I wonder why this man wanted to meet with me, if I am a dictator?"

The judge interrupted: "You were not a dictator. People around you made you (look like) a dictator."

"Thank you," Saddam responded, bowing his head in respect.

I'm no lawyer, but that judge strikes me as less than fully objective.

Saddam and six others have been accused of genocide and other offenses committed in the 1980s. The prosecution alleges that about 180,000 Kurds died.

Saddam also vowed to Kurdish witnesses to "crush your heads" after listening to them tell of the horrors allegedly committed by his regime.

September 13, 2006

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

That's the title of a new documentary by director Kirby Dick, whose latest project exposes the irrational, incompetent, secretive, and downright bizarre goings-on at the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board.

Dick, who was interviewed by Terry Gross on the NPR show, Fresh Air, said that the names of the board members are kept secret, so he hired a private detective to find out who they were. Once he knew their identities, he said that some of the facts about them did not match the demographics publicized by the MPAA. He also said that none of the rating board members is given any training, and that no one on the board has any expertise in film or child development. In fact, during his tenure as president of the MPAA, Jack Valenti went out of his way to exclude such experts as child psychologists from being part of the process.

Dick studied various films that had been given restricted ratings because of sexual content, and discovered that, though two films may show exactly the same sex scenes, the ones with homosexual characters receive more restrictive ratings. Not surprisingly, there is also evidence that violent scenes are not scrutinized nearly as carefully as scenes containing sex.

In order to understand the secretive ratings system, Dick submitted his documentary for a rating, then took the rating to the secretive appeals board, whose members are all highly ranked motion picture industry executives. At the meeting, everyone wore a number or her or his lapel--including Dick--and when he tried to introduce himself, each appeals board member turned and walked away.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated is being released, as you may imagine, without a rating.

P.S.: It's also reviewed in the current issue of Mother Jones.

House Republicans Aren't Giving Up On Immigration

House Republicans prove that fear of terrorism isn't the only card they have to play this fall. Back by popular demand -- and despite talk that it would reced as an issue -- it's...fear of immigrants!

House Republicans said Tuesday that they're preparing a package of tough border security initiatives that they hope will satisfy constituent demands for a crackdown on illegal immigration before they face voters in the Nov. 7 midterm elections.

The initiatives, which are expected to include more Border Patrol agents and unmanned aerial vehicles and possibly hundreds of miles of fencing along the U.S-Mexico border, will be unveiled this week amid fading prospects for more comprehensive legislation embracing President Bush's call for an immigrant guest-worker program. [...]

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., on Tuesday reiterated the House leadership's position that Congress must first take aggressive action to "stop the bleeding" at the border before considering a guest-worker program. "We've got to get the border fixed first," he said.

Hastert presided over a roundtable conference of House committee and subcommittee chairmen who held 22 hearings in 13 states during the August recess to reinforce the House leadership's call for tough border enforcement. The hearings also were aimed at spotlighting what lawmakers saw as shortcomings in the Senate bill, which many House conservatives have denounced as "amnesty" that rewards illegal behavior.

"Stop the bleeding" at the border, eh? Nice Freudian slip.

Guantanamo a "Shocking Affront to the Principles of Democracy"

The highest-ranking official in the British legal system says how he really feels about US detention policy:

Guantánamo Bay is a "shocking affront to the principles of democracy" and a violation of the rule of law, the lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, said today. ...

Lord Falconer said Washington was "deliberately seeking to put the Guantánamo detainees beyond the reach of law" and that "use of torture by a state is contrary to fundamental human rights law".

"Democracies can only survive where judges have the power to protect the rights of the individual," he said.

Of course, Falconer has about as much pull with the Bush administration as...hmm...Tony Blair, so don't expect this to have much effect. But it's an indication that the pressures brought to bear on administration policies--which contributed to last week's (very) qualified climbdown on secret prisons--is unlikely to let up.

Kurd to Saddam: "Congratulations! You Are in a Cage."

Without getting into whether it's "worth" all the blood that's been spent over the past three years, I do think it's pretty great that such a thing as this can happen (Los Angeles Times).

A Kurdish villager mocked Saddam Hussein in court Tuesday as the man recalled the disappearance of his relatives during a 1980s military campaign in northern Iraq.

"Congratulations! You are in a cage," said the witness, Ghafour Hassan Abdullah, addressing Hussein and his six codefendants seated behind metal grates in the courtroom.

Worth reading also for the nutball utterances of the former dictator himself. ("When I am right I cannot be scared, and I don't think there is a power on Earth that can shake even one hair of my mustache." etc. etc.)

An Indictment of Our Long-Term Counterterror Strategy

Okay, so we've got a deadly spike in violence in Afghanistan, a terror attack in Syria and a deteriorating situation in western Iraq. Terror experts are saying this kind of thing:

Dan Benjamin, a national security analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the surge of violence in Afghanistan shows a familiar pattern. "It is clearly the case that tactics pioneered elsewhere, such as Iraq, particularly suicide bombing, have been taken up in Afghanistan," he said.

"There is no question that there is a global circuit now. Technology and strategy and tactics are being shared among different groups in different theaters," Benjamin added.

Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, said episodes like the increase in violence in southern Afghanistan, western Iraq and the bombing attempt in Syria show things are getting worse, not better. "It's an indictment on our long-term counterterror strategy that we haven't had any great success in reducing the long-term trends toward more terrorism," he said. (AP)

And, as noted earlier, a new poll says the American people, who a week or so ago trusted the Democrats more to keep us safe, now, after an all-out fear-mongering offensive by the administration, have more faith in Republicans to fight terror. Right, then.

Texas Court to Reconsider DeLay Conspiracy Charge

AP reports that Texas's highest criminal appeals court said today it would consider reinstating a conspiracy charge against Tom DeLay, further delaying his felony money laundering trial. As a reminder:

Prosecutors accuse DeLay and the two consultants of violating state law by funneling $190,000 in illegal corporate money to the Republican National Committee, which then donated the same amount to Texas candidates. Under Texas law, corporate money can't be directly used for political campaigns.

DeLay and the consultants, Jim Ellis and John Colyandro, say the transaction was legal.

The dispute over the dismissed charge centers on whether the conspiracy statute applied to the state's election code in 2002. DeLay was accused of conspiring to violate the election code, but his attorneys say that transaction was not illegal at the time. DeGuerin says the dropped charge accuses DeLay of conspiring to violate the election code as it stood in 2003.

The other conspiracy count DeLay faces accuses him of conspiring to launder money.

ABC Poll: Public Trusts Republicans More on Terror

Via the Note. It would be nice if people weren't so...well, you know.

"Terrorism has inched up in importance in the 2006 midterm elections and Republicans have regained an edge in trust to handle it helping George W. Bush's party move closer to the Democrats in congressional vote preference," writes ABC News' Polling Director Gary Langer.

"The Republicans lead the Democrats in trust to handle terrorism by 48-41 percent among registered voters in this ABC News poll, a flip from a seven-point Democratic advantage last month. And 16 percent now call terrorism the top issue in their vote, a slight five-point gain."

"The Republicans' edge on handling terrorism is still vastly below their 35-point lead on the issue heading into the 2002 midterm elections. But it's still their best issue, the one Bush rode to re-election. And part of their gain is among independents, the key swing voters in any election: They now split between the parties in trust to handle terrorism, after favoring the Democrats by nine points last month."

Bush's Great Awakening (And Great Smelling of Coffee)

Don't miss Peter Baker's story about Bush telling conservative reporters that the nation is going through a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion as a result of the war on terror. This will come as news to some historians who believe we're already due for the Fourth or the Fifth in the Great Awakenings series. Then again, there's Robert William Fogel, the University of Chicago Nobel laureate who maintains that we're witnessing the political consequences of the Fourth Great Awakening, the rise of charismatic, evangelical, and pentecostal expressions of faith in the second half of the 20th century. The thrust of this movement includes, according to Fogel, an "attack on materialist corruption; rise of pro-life, pro-family, and media reform movements; campaign for more value-oriented school curriculum; expansion of tax revolt; attack on entitlements; return to a belief in equality of opportunity." Among Fogel's devotees, it seems, is Karl Rove. Now for that "return to a belief in equality of opportunity" part...

Torture Insurance: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

CIA officers are getting--and the government is paying for--insurance to cover their legal costs and any civil judgments should they get sued by people alleging they were abused in secret agency prisons (or, presumably, not-so-secret facilities like Baghram and Abu Ghraib). Granted, so far the only CIA-related case along those lines was that of David Passaro, a private contractor found guilty of killing an Afghan detainee who died after being severely beaten with a flashlight. But many at Langley are worried, reports the Washington Post, that a Justice Department that encouraged them to stretch the law won't be there for them when the hammer comes down from the courts or Congress (something our own Jim Ridgeway suggests could happen on a number of scores).

"There are a lot of people who think that subpoenas could be coming" from Congress after the November elections or from federal prosecutors if Democrats capture the White House in 2008, said a retired senior intelligence officer who remains in contact with former colleagues in the agency's Directorate of Operations, which ran the secret prisons.
"People are worried about a pendulum swing" that could lead to accusations of wrongdoing, said another former CIA officer.

Posted by Monika Bauerlein on 09/13/06 at 12:50 AM | | Comments (0) |