MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: May 27, 2007

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June 1, 2007

The Pentagon's "Martyrs" And Other Tales of Collateral Damage

There are more details on the paltry sums the U.S. military pays out to the civilian victims of its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, thanks to a new GAO report [PDF]. Some highlights:

Condolence payments for death, injury, or property damage max out at $2,500 in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Under new rules, generals in Iraq may authorize payments up to $10,000 in "extraordinary circumstances."

In 2005, the military paid out $21.5 million in condolence payments in Iraq; it paid out $7.3 million in 2006. Assuming that the $2,500 maximum was disbursed in each case, that means more than 11,500 payments were made. However, the military does not keep records on the number of payments or the reasons for them. It also does not keep track of denied requests for payment.

Here's an example of the system at work: "Two members of the same family are killed in a car hit by U.S. forces. The family could receive a maximum of $7,500 in [...] condolence payments ($2,500 for each death and up to $2,500 for vehicle damage)."

Civilians may also file for up to $100,000 in compensation under the Foreign Claims Act. Between 2003 and 2006, the Pentagon paid out $26 million on 21,450 claims filed by Iraqis under the act. That comes out to an average of $1,200 per claim.

Before April 2006, no condolence payments were offered for Iraqi soldiers, police officers, or government workers wounded or killed by U.S. and Coalition operations. The Pentagon has since started offering what it calls "martyr payments" for Iraqis killed on the job.

In short: One Iraqi life is worth the same as a totaled car, but very special Iraqis may be worth up to $10,000. Also, it's very hard to do math amid the fog of war, so don't bother asking about civilian casualty figures. And being called a martyr by the U.S. government? Priceless.

Informed Dissent: Get Informed, Get Involved

Last week was the first annual Whistleblower Week in Washington and it gave whistleblowers and their advocates a chance to convene. In the May/June issue Daniel Schulman wrote about the Office of Special Counsel and its antagonistic attitude towards whistleblowers, the very people the agency is supposed to protect. To find out more about current whistleblower legislation, supporting, or becoming a whistleblower check out the most recent edition of the "Informed Dissent" newsletter.

Go here to sign up to receive Informed Dissent every two weeks. Get informed, get involved.

Kos-Heads Love them Some Gore

The wonky white guys over at the Daily Kos go coo-coo for Al Gore! A poll measuring readers' interest in a Gore presidential bid comes back with 50 percent saying either "I would abandon my current favorite, go strong for Gore" or "I don't have a current favorite, I've been waiting for Gore this whole time." The next most popular answer, with 13 percent, is "I would stay with my current favorite, but consider Gore."

Hard to say if these political junkies are representative, but if I were Gore, I'd be dusting off the Weight Watchers literature. Just sayin'.

TB, the New Katrina

Lawmakers are beginning to ask the obvious question: Why was a man identified as having a strongly drug-resistant form of tuberculosis allowed to fly on an international commercial flight and cross the border into the United States even after his passport had been flagged? Concerns about drug-resistant TB have been circulating for years, and you'd think we might have learned our lesson about allowing flagged travelers into the United States after 9/11. If that's not bad enough, the infected man, Andrew Speaker, has told the press that the Centers for Disease Control stonewalled his requests to provide him with non-commercial transportation from Europe to the Denver hospital that, they had informed him, was the only place that could to handle the virulent strain of TB. That treatment came despite the fact that his wife's father works at the CDC. The U.S. government is going to have to get its act together, because drug resistant illnesses are on the rise and who knows what new viruses climate change will unleash.

Whatever Happened to Jingles in Political Ads?

Here are a couple old timey campaign spots to remind you of when politics was simpler. Or if politics wasn't simpler, political messaging certainly was. The message of the first? "I like Ike." Literally, that's it -- over and over and over. The message of the second? "Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy." Good times.

This one's from the Eisenhower campaign in 1952:

This one is from the Kennedy campaign in 1960:

But just so you don't think attack ads are a new invention, here's one where the Kennedy campaign gets nasty, using Ike's words against his own VP, Richard Nixon.

Today's Chutzpah Award Goes To... Scooter Libby

From Scooter Libby's lawyers' response [PDF] to federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's sentencing memo, in which he reasserted that Valerie Plame Wilson was indeed an undercover CIA agent:

First, the government claims that its “investigators were given access to Ms. Wilson’s classified file.”....This is tantamount to asking the Court and Mr. Libby to take the government’s word on Ms. Wilson’s status, based on secret evidence, without affording Mr. Libby an opportunity to rebut it. Such a request offends traditional notions of fairness and due process.

Where to begin on this one? The irony of a former aide to Dick "You Can't Handle the Truth" Cheney questioning the government's word—its classified word, no less? (However, the government in this case is the CIA, which neocons know is a bunch of untrustworthy wusses.) But what really stands out here is that the legal protection that Libby is claiming, the right to see and confront secret evidence, is the very right the White House—the Office of the Vice President in particular—has spent five years denying to Guantanamo detainees. But wait—I thought we can't take the intelligence community at its word, especially when a man's freedom is on the line. Makes your head hurt, don't it? (Extra bonus points: Libby's law firm also represents Gitmo detainees.)

Oops—Forget You Ever Saw Pix of the Baghdad Embassy

A couple of days ago, we posted an image of the beach volleyball court inside the monster U.S. embassy complex under construction in Baghdad. The rendering came from the site of the architecture firm that designed it. But now it's pulled the images under pressure from the State Department, which claimed they were a security risk. Despite the warning, a spokesman for the architecture firm gave the bad guys even more ideas by revealing that "Google Earth could give you a better snapshot of what the site looks like on the ground." So I think it's still safe to show you this image of a Marine guard and a tiny pixelated diplomat.

Meanwhile, the embassy project has other problems—such as using coerced labor to get the job done. As Iraqslogger reports, American managers have complained that the builder, First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, has mistreated the thousands of South Asian, Filipino, and other foreign laborers brought in to construct the complex. Some of the allegations:

[C]onstruction crews lived in crowded quarters; ate sub-standard food; and had little medical care. When drinking water was scarce in the blistering heat, coolers were filled on the banks of the Tigris, a river rife with waterborne disease, sewage and sometimes floating bodies, they said. Others questioned why First Kuwaiti held the passports of workers. Was it to keep them from escaping? Some laborers had turned up “missing” with little investigation. Another American said laborers told him they were been misled in their job location. When recruited, they were unaware they were heading for war-torn Iraq.

As one American supervisor explained, “Every US labor law was broken.... I’ve never seen a project more fucked up.”

May 31, 2007

Ginsburg's Famous White Gloves Finally Come Off

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg led the dissent to the Court's 5-4 decision Tuesday on Ledbetter vs. the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The case, which decided that pay discrimination cases could not be brought against employers more than 180 days after any alleged discrimination, also marked the second time in six weeks that Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench: an unusually high rate of occurrence for the historically reticent justice who is described as friends as an etiquette-minded, "white-glove person." In fact, Ginsburg had never read her dissent to the Court's decision aloud twice in one year. Ginsburg went years without employing the tactic previous to this term.

Some, like the co-president of the National Women's Law Center, Marcia Greenberger, are interpreting these vocal dissents as attempts to garner attention for some serious issues. Greenberger characterized Ginsburg's recent vocal dissents as a "clarion call to the American people that… the court is headed in the wrong direction."

Indeed, partisan politics seems to have captured the Court, and Ginsburg can not have helped but notice. Ginsburg, now the only female Justice since Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement, has gone up against the same five justices (Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas) in both recent dissents. Those five frequently form the core of her opposition, and perhaps not surprisingly, three of these five justices were hand-picked by Bush presidents (Alito, Roberts, and Thomas). The other two were picked by Reagan. Ginsburg was joined in her dissent Tuesday by Justice Breyer, the only other justice on the bench appointed by a Democratic President (Clinton, like Ginsburg); by Justice Stouter, appointed by Bush in 1990 and a man who has drawn the ire of conservatives who consider him either an apostate or a phony; and by Justice Stevens, appointed way back in 1975 by Gerald Ford. Unable to persuade a majority of her colleagues on Ledbetter, Ginsburg called on Congress to overturn the Court's decision.

A month ago, Ginsburg criticized the gang of five for the language and logic in their decision to uphold the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. She argued that their opinion reflected "ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution -- ideas that have long since been discredited."

In her dissent Tuesday, Ginsburg again accused the majority for being out of touch, this time for not taking into consideration common workplace practices and characteristics of pay discrimination. It can be difficult, she argued, for pay discrimination to be proved in the short 180-day period that the Court requires if pay disparity occurs in small increments over time or if comparative pay information is not available to the employee.

Though Ginsburg spoke up for women in the partial birth abortion case, and spoke up again Tuesday for a female plaintiff, her concerns are broader than her sex. She knows that the decision in Ledbetter could hinder anyone who has reason to bring a discrimination suit based on race, national origin, or sexual orientation. We can only hope that in an increasingly conservative court, we have an increasingly vocal dissenter in Justice Ginsburg.

-- Jessica Savage

Bushies: We "Will Fight to Keep Meatpackers from Testing for Mad Cow Disease"

The argument for free market economics—though we here at Mother Jones may have, on occasion, doubted its virtuosity—goes like this: Competition encourages innovation, and customers decide which innovations are worth keeping and get what they want in the process. Here's a case in point: A small business called Creekstone Farms Premium Beef proposed testing all of its cows for mad cow disease. Customers have long been skittish about mad cow disease, and testing would likely cause Creekstone's business to spike.

Innovation? Check. Benefit to consumers? Check. Fostering small businesses? Check. But the USDA has intervened to block Creekstone from conducting the tests. The rationale? It's not fair to agribusinesses, which buy, sell, and butcher so many cows that they couldn't possibly conduct the expensive test on all of them. The USDA also alleged that "widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry."

Protecting the strong from the weak and putting dollars above lives are standard practice at the USDA, which is pretty much a trade group for agribusiness. Mother Jones has highlighted other examples of the same mentality: Read about the USDA's watering down of organic standards here, and its past moves to block safety innovations here.

Now, for another reason to become a vegetarian. PETA has petitioned Congress to create a tax break for non-meat eaters. After all, the animal rights group argues, buying a hybrid vehicle entitles you to a tax break, although it reduces carbon emissions by only two-thirds as much per year as forgoing meat. It seems like a pretty righteous idea to me (full disclosure: I'm a long-time vegetarian, though I might have had a tiny taste of prosciutto last night)—the only problem is, how could the government determine who does and does not eat meat? Testing our poop is obviously out of the question: See above.

Acts of Gratuitous Violence Against Giuliani

If, like the NYFD, you hate Rudy Giuliani, you will go bananas for Matt Tabibi's verbal pummeling of "America's mayor" in Rolling Stone. Here's a teaser:

If this is a guy who chews over a perceived slight in the middle of a victory lap, what's he going to be like with his finger on the button? Even Richard Nixon wasn't wound that tight.…

[Rudy's] political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they're probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he'll keep an eye on 'em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.

.… Whether Rudy believes in this kind of politics reflexively, as the psychologically crippled Bush does, or as a means to an end, as Karl Rove does, isn't clear. But there's no question that Giuliani has made the continuation of Swift-Boating politics a linchpin of his candidacy.

Happy reading.

Mexico Sending Citizens for Health Care on the U.S.'s Tab

With immigration in the news, let's see what you think of a new program being offered by Mexican Consulates in the United States. The program, called Ventanillas de Salud, or Health Windows, "aims to provide Mexican immigrants with basic health information, cholesterol checks and other preventive tests. It also makes referrals to U.S. hospitals, health centers and government programs where patients can get care without fear of being turned over to immigration authorities," according to the Los Angeles Times.

Illegal immigrants are not eligible for federal entitlement programs such as Medicare, but they are eligible for the Women, Infants and Children program and, like everyone else, must be treated at hospital emergency rooms. The federal government later reimburses hospitals for care provided and not paid for.

I'm having a hard time deciding if I think this program is a good idea or a terrible one. Providing some basic information and diagnostic tests at the consulates seems reasonable enough. And I'm generally in favor of the U.S. government providing basic human services to those that work for us and live among us. But when the Mexican government starts spending money to make sure its citizens in the United States are cashing in on our government's generosity (to the tune of $1.1 billion in Los Angeles alone last year), I find my feathers getting a little ruffled.

The Ventanillas program probably doesn't cost much, from the sounds of it, but why doesn't that money go into providing education, job opportunities, and health care in Mexico? It seems perverse that the Mexican government is eager to be "relevant in the lives of its citizens in the United States," as Steven A. Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, puts it, when it has failed to meet their most basic needs at home. I mean, is the Mexican government trying to outsource government, thereby admitting that Mexico is a failed state?

Weigh in in the comments section.

Iraq's a Disaster, NCLB Not Far Behind

This week's Time offers up its take on how to fix No Child Left Behind. The piece is a good primer on all-things NCLB; worth a read if, a) You don't know much about it but you're curious, or b) You need a refresher course on where things stand in 2007.

To fix NCLB, Time suggests that schools go beyond basic NCLB and Adequate Yearly Progress jargon when reporting on their school's progress and provide a fuller, more descriptive picture of school quality. Agreed, but guess what? More expansive reporting requirements are costly and give teachers less time and energy for teaching.

The article also suggests stopping the Feds from slapping "failure" labels on schools and investing in more localized remedies. Great idea. Who likes being told they're a loser? Try investing in local, neighborhood organizations that are already in the school trenches but doing so on shoestring budgets. Solid, community relationships are often already in place, so a little bit of cash from D.C. could go a long way.

Mentioned in the piece are David Berliner and Sharon Nichols, authors of Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools, who say that Bush's NCLB policies are as ineffective as his policies in Iraq. Harsh, maybe, but considering that they found evidence of administrators falsifying test data and forcing low-scoring students out of their schools to avoid public humiliation, maybe they're about right.

Time points out that where Europe has a uniform national curriculum and national tests, state and local jurisdiction is still prominent in the states. In response to state autonomy, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings reacted by saying, "Do you really want me sitting in Washington working on how we teach evolution or creationism? I don't want to!"

Umm, no, we probably don't want you meddling in how, and if, for that matter, teachers teach evolution or creationism. You don't have a teaching credential, so that would be against your own rules.

—Gary Moskowitz

Interim U.S. Attn. and Rove Protégé Timothy Griffin Resigns

I wrote yesterday about the rumors that Thompson's campaign-to-be was courting Karl Rove lackey and interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas Timothy Griffin. Griffin's appointment caused a stir as it became apparent during the imbroglio that is the U.S. Attorneys scandal that Bud Cummins (the former U.S. Attn. Griffin replaced) had been forced out to make way for a Rove protégé. Yesterday, the Arkansas Times blog (thanks to ThinkProgress for spotting this) reports that Griffin has resigned, effective June 1. No word on whether he is joining the Thompson campaign, but the timing seems opportune, no? Griffin is the young prosecutor Monica Goodling mentioned in her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week. According to Goodling, former coworker Paul McNulty was being untruthful when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in February that he knew nothing of Griffin's involvement in "caging" (a voter suppression technique). I stand by what I said yesterday. This not the best move for Thompson's campaign. Stay tuned.

FOX Loves New Debate Lineup: Biden, Kucinich, and Gravel

You've probably heard about this FOX News debate that is slowly bleeding participants. You see, it's a debate for the Democrats, and while some Dems thought it might be a good idea to get their ideas in front of FOX's largely conservative viewership, others felt it legitimized FOX's place at the serious-news table. And serious news FOX is not.

So everyone's been bailing. Edwards, Obama, and Clinton left a while back. Now, Richardson and Dodd have announced they will not participate either. So who's left? Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Joe Biden.

You're kidding yourself if you don't think this will be the most entertaining debate of the season. FOX would probably just cancel it if they weren't certain this circus will make Democrats look completely silly and extremist.

George Bush is Concerned About America Losing its Soul

Dan Froomkin notes at White House Watch that George Bush was recently asked why he cares so much about the issue of immigration.

"I'm deeply concerned about America losing its soul," Bush said. "Immigration has been the lifeblood of a lot of our country's history." He added: "If we don't solve the problem it's going to affect America. It will affect our economy and it will affect our soul."

He was not concerned about our soul when he mislead a country into war and questioned the patriotism of anyone who objected, nor when he failed to provide health care for the wounded of that war, nor when he suspended habeas corpus, nor when he fought Congress to keep it from passing an anti-torture bill. He was not concerned when he authorized the government to spy on American citizens, nor when the Abu Ghraib photos were released, nor when he underfunded the very education reform bill he touts as his greatest domestic achievement. He was not concerned when federal agencies left a city to drown, nor when Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, and Duke Cunningham turned Congress into a cash register, nor when a congressman was exposed preying on little boys. He was not concerned when he rang up the biggest budget deficits of all time, nor when he appointed a man who had just attempted an end-run around the Justice Department to run the Justice Department, nor when his vice president invited energy companies to help make energy policy, nor when his administration ignored global climate change, the greatest threat to our nation and the world in his lifetime. He wasn't concerned when he pushed to enshrine bigotry against homosexuals into the Constitution, nor when his Administration paid American journalists to support its policies, nor when it was revealed that the military was planting stories in the Iraqi media while simultaneously teaching Iraqis about the freedom of the press.

No. After six and a half years of turning this country into a banana republic that is hated by most of the world, our president is finally concerned. Well, thanks George. We're glad to see you're paying attention.

British Contractors Outnumber British Soldiers Three to One -- Is This the Future of Iraq?

On AMERICAblog, I spotted an article from the UK's Independent that says there are 21,000 British private contractors in Iraq. That's approximately three times the number of British soldiers in Iraq.

Is this the future of Iraq? Let's say September comes and goes the surge hasn't improved security conditions in Baghdad or elsewhere. Republicans may abandon the president in large numbers, forcing a withdrawal to begin over a presidential veto. The Defense Dep't can simply pay more and more private contractors -- who have no oversight over their spending or their actions on the ground -- to execute a bastardized version of their current mission.

The Democrats can enact laws that mandate stronger accountability over contractors, or even limit the number of contractors the Pentagon can employ. While a bill did pass in May that supposedly provided for stricter oversight over contractors, the bill was criticized by anti-contractor activists and suffered a credibility deficit because it had the support of the contracting industry itself. Congress may not want a strong light shone on the business of contracting, and the military probably likes it that way, but until we know exactly how many contractors operate in Iraq, and specifically what they are doing, we will never be fully sure the war is over.

As an example of the murkiness that surrounds contractors, estimates for the number of private contractors in Iraq range anywhere from 44,000 to 130,000. Mother Jones rode along with a couple of them in our latest issue.

May 30, 2007

Torture Double-Header: Immoral and Idiotic, and Aided and Abetted

In the lead-up to an expected executive order outlining new standards for military interrogations, social scientists from around the country are telling the government that, in matters of intelligence, pain does not equal gain. In fact, many of the coercive interrogation tactics—AKA torture—the military has been using since September 11 were adopted from a Cold War training module in which American soldiers were subjected to the worst and most sinister forms of abuse they might receive if captured by the Soviets. No evidence exists that such methods were effective, or even employed. Most of the post-9/11 "torture light" methods date from the Cold War, but at least one military interrogator claims that the even older World War II methods were both more humane and more fruitful—partly because the interrogators spoke the detainees' languages. (There are only 6 Arabic-speakers are on staff at the palatial new American embassy in Baghdad; numerous government employees fluent in the language have been fired because they were gay or, well, Arab.) Bush's executive order is expected to ban waterboarding (or mock drowning) but to authorize aggressive techniques not currently allowed by the Army Field Manual.

Now for part two of your double-header: A subsidiary of Boeing—the same company tapped to build a virtual fence along the border with no government oversight—helped the government enact its immoral and ineffective torture policies, according to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU. The suit charges that the company, Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., of San Jose, "facilitated more than 70 secret rendition flights over a four-year period to countries where it knew or reasonably should have known that detainees are routinely tortured or otherwise abused in contravention of universally accepted legal standards." In an article in the Oct. 30 New Yorker, Jane Mayer reported that a former Jeppesen employee told her that a senior company official announced at a board meeting, "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights — you know the torture flights."

But don't get excited about learning something about the ultra-secret rendition program. The Bush administration will almost certainly request that the case be dismissed on the grounds that it will reveal state secrets. And even though the ACLU is basing the suit on "publicly available records" and a New Yorker article, the government will probably be granted its request because the "state secrets" privilege is wrongly recognized as a get-out-of-court-free card.

Thompson Campaign Courts Rove Protégé, Not Their Best Move

Amidst the "Fred Thomspson to announce" clamor, TPMmuckraker spotted a Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) article that claims Thompson's campaign is courting Timothy Griffin. Griffin is the young prosecutor and Karl Rove protégé who was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas in December of 2006. His appointment has received a great deal of criticism within the broiling U.S. Attorney firings scandal, as it is believed that former U.S. Attn. Bud Cummins was removed only to make room for Rove's lackey.

But that's not all the dirt on Griffin according to Monica Goodling's long-awaited testimony last week. Goodling claimed that her former coworker Paul McNulty falsely testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee when he claimed he had no information about Griffin's involvement in "caging" (a voter suppression technique). Greg Palast noted back in March that according to BBC Television, Griffin headed up a scheme to suppress 70,000 citizens' votes before the 2004 election, targeting black soldiers and homeless men and women. This, by the way, is illegal. Strangely, no one in the media is touching this, except, of course, Palast, who after Goodling's testimony cried out for people to pay attention to this scandal. Although, in doing so, he got McNulty's name wrong, calling him Kyle Sampson. (Oops, wrong resigned-DOJ official, Greg.) There is bound to be more news on this front but in the meantime a note to Thompson: I don't think this is your best move.

State Dep't Official Takes on the Bushies

Price Floyd left his post as the head of Media Affairs at the State Department just a few weeks ago and he is already going public with how difficult it was to make America's intentions and actions clear to the world with the Bush Administration in charge.

We have eroded not only the good will of the post-9-11 days but also any residual appreciation from the countries we supported during the Cold War. This is due to several actions taken by the Bush administration, including pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol (environment), refusing to take part in the International Criminal Court (rule of law), and pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (arms control). The prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and the continuing controversy over the detainees in Guantanamo also sullied the image of America.

Collectively, these actions have sent an unequivocal message: The U.S. does not want to be a collaborative partner. That is the policy we have been "selling" through our actions, which speak the loudest of all...

I was not a newcomer to these issues. I had served at the State Department for more than 17 years, through the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, numerous episodes of the Middle Eastern peace process and discussions in North Korea on its nuclear programs.

During each of these crises, we at least appeared to be working with others, even if we took actions with which others did not agree. We were talking to our enemies as well as our allies. Our actions and our words were in sync, we were transparent, our agenda was there for all to see, and our actions matched it.

This is not the case today. Much of our audience either doesn't listen or perceives our efforts to be meaningless U.S. propaganda.

The full op-ed in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is definitely worth reading. Spotted on Laura Rozen's War and Piece and Think Progress.

The Censored Stories of 2007

From Project Censored (via Ten 95) comes a list of the top 25 censored stories of 2007. Did you know that the Pentagon is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act? Or that the Department of Homeland Security contracts with KBR to build domestic detention centers? Or that six to seven million people have died in the Congo since 1996?

Project Censored has the scoop on all of those and more, so check out the link. But we'd like to point out that Mother Jones extensively covered two of the list's top ten.

6. Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
Special Counsel Scott Bloch, appointed by President Bush in 2004, is overseeing the virtual elimination of federal whistleblower rights in the U.S. government. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), the agency that is supposed to protect federal employees who blow the whistle on waste, fraud, and abuse is dismissing hundreds of cases while advancing almost none.

Yup, we were on that one. Check out "Office of Special Counsel's War On Whistleblowers" from our May/June 2007 issue. Also...

3. Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
Oceanic problems once found on a local scale are now pandemic. Data from oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fishery science, and glaciology reveal that the seas are changing in ominous ways. A vortex of cause and effect wrought by global environmental dilemmas is changing the ocean from a watery horizon with assorted regional troubles to a global system in alarming distress.

We did a whole issue on that, with articles like "The Fate of the Oceans", "The Catch", and "Net Losses."

Google Trying to Get Bigger -- and More Evil?

When Google announced a $3.1 billion acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick, European Union officials and internet privacy advocates warned that the massive trove of information Google has on virtually every internet user just got bigger.

Count Mother Jones amongst the concerned parties. In 2006, we ran a feature called "Is Google Evil?" that looked into the myraid different ways Google collects information on you -- and the ways it coughs up that information to snooping governments. Should you be concerned? Well, Google's famous founding duo certainly seems to be:

Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two former Stanford geeks who founded the company that has become synonymous with Internet searching, and you’ll find more than a million entries each. But amid the inevitable dump of press clippings, corporate bios, and conference appearances, there’s very little about Page’s and Brin’s personal lives; it’s as if the pair had known all along that Google would change the way we acquire information, and had carefully insulated their lives—putting their homes under other people’s names, choosing unlisted numbers, abstaining from posting anything personal on web pages.

Hmmm. Read the feature here.

Mexico Consumed by Drug Violence, Journalists Feeling the Impact

Increasingly violent drug cartels have been blamed for 3,000 murders in Mexico in the past eighteen months, according to a story in the Washington Post. But as the death toll rises, media coverage decreases. That's because cartel gunmen target journalists in addition to one another -- more than 30 journalists have been killed in the past six years in Mexico and scores more have been subject to intimidation -- kidnapping, office bombings, and so on. It all adds up to make Mexico the second most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist, according to the Post. First, of course, is Iraq. (The Post story has all sorts of good details and quotes from the reporters and editors on the ground -- worth a read.)

Mexico has gotten bad quickly. In 2005, I created two tables that illustrated how much worse Iraq was for journalists than all other countries around the world. Before the invasion of Iraq, the countries that routinely saw the most press deaths were Russia, Algeria, and Columbia -- they each had three or four a year for ten years running. Starting in 2003, Iraq saw 56 journalists killed in a three year span. Mexico wasn't even on the list.

But we could have predicted this. In a 2006 photo essay called "Born Into Cellblocks," Mother Jones sent a photographer into a Mexican prison to photograph the children who live there with their mothers. Chuck Bowden wrote the accompanying text, in which he explored the drug violence that was even then consuming Mexican towns near the American border. He also mentioned the growing violence against journalists. Snippets are below, the whole thing is here.

Bullets killed the police chief last summer, just a few hours after he took office. This brought in the Mexican army. The ongoing slaughter of many cops and citizens caused the U.S. government to shut down its consulate for a spell last August. This winter the local paper was visited by some strange men, presumably working for the cartels, and they fired dozens of rounds and tossed in a grenade. One reporter took five bullets. The editor promptly announced a new policy: His paper, one of the few Mexican publications on the line actually printing news about the drug cartels, would no longer report on the cartels...

Beneath this gore, women and children muddle on, some in Mexican jails. Incarceration, like law, is a bit different in Mexico. Conjugal visits are permitted; small children younger than six can be locked up with their moms; and men and women peddle goods and themselves within the walls in order to survive. Mexican prisons often do not provide grub. I’ve stood in line with family members who toted a week’s supply of food on visiting day, seen women reel out of cells in disarray after their weekly intercourse sessions with their men. Drugs are commonplace inside the walls, as are gangs. Money can buy anything. For years the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has complained about the posh quarters given to major drug players and how they continue to do business without interference while theoretically being under lock and key.

Update: Journalists of any stripe -- not just those that cover the drug cartels -- are vulnerable in Mexico. After Lydia Cacho exposed a powerful hotel owner as the orchestrator of a child pornography and prostitution ring, she was arrested and almost killed by local police. Mother Jones interviewed Cacho in May.

May 29, 2007

A Virtual Tour of the Baghdad Embassy

Tom Engelhardt has come across what might be the first public glimpse of the $1.3-billion U.S. embassy under construction in Baghdad. At 104 acres, and with 1,000 staffers, it's going to be America's biggest embassy anywhere. It might as well have a giant "kick me" sign on its front gates—hence the 15-foot-thick walls and who knows how many Marines and Blackwater guys on duty. Visualizing the fortress-like enclosure has been a bit tough. Until now, thanks to some 3-D renderings Engelhardt found on its architects' website. It almost looks like the next backdrop for Grand Theft Auto, but with tennis courts, a pool, and housing for 380 families. That family housing stat is a new detail. Somehow I doubt that the balmy weather and outdoor pool will convince many embassy dwellers to bring along the kids.

Dems Virtually Assured Victory, Pessimist Reports, Tempting Fate

A new Rasmussen poll shows that if Barack Obama were to face Mitt Romney in the general election, he would trounce him by 12 percentage points. Fred Thompson fared slightly better against the black Harvard man, losing by just 7 percentage points. Another Rasmussen poll indicated that John Edwards could route Republicans on a scale resembling the 65-13 Oklahoma-University of Texas game of 2003. (Oddly, Rasmussen hasn't run the Clinton matchups, but other polls have predicted Hillary faring poorly in the general election.) I cautioned in a previous post against counting on a Democratic victory, but now I'm wondering, why even bother to hold a general election, when polls show that Americans believe Dems are better suited to lead even on issues that Republicans have historically owned, such as national security (46 percent trust Democrats more) and taxes (the Democrats lead 47 to 42 percent)? Democrats enjoy double-digit advantages on ethics and government corruption and the war in Iraq as well as on their traditional issues, including education, social security, immigration, and health care.

Anti-War Republican Wins "Iraq Joke of the Day" Contest

Our buddy Walter Jones (R-N.C.) has a suggestion for Paul Wolfowitz's next job: Mayor of Baghdad. You broke it, you ~~buy~~ run it, Paul.

Ron Paul is Still Throwing Elbows

Libertarian, internet sensation, and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul takes on Rudy Giuliani, explains why he's the only real Republican in the race, and comments on the importance of the internet for candidates like him who "can't raise $100 million."

I think the campaign needs characters like Paul and Mike Gravel. There will be months and months of dissection of the frontrunners and eventual nominees (some might argue there already has been). If we didn't have other people to focus on in these early months, we'd all be so burned out by the primaries that we wouldn't have any energy or attention span left for the general election. Besides, Paul is a smart, likable guy who I only disagree with 60 or 70 percent of the time. Better than most in his party!

Illegal Immigration—Terrorism Nexus Debunked

The anti-immigration forces have long pushed the myth that cracking down on illegal immigration is necessary to stop terrorism from seeping into the United States.

They might want to tell the Department of Homeland Security about their game plan. According to a new study that analyzed millions of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, only 0.0015 percent of cases filed in immigration courts by the Department of Homeland Security have had anything to do with terrorism. Only 0.014 percent pertained to national security.

The rest were mundane immigration cases. According to the study, 85 percent of the charges involved infractions such as not having a valid immigrant visa, overstaying a student visa, or entering the United States without an inspection.

So the Department of Homeland Security's immigration department is protecting our country from over-ambitious graduate students instead of terrorists. Unless there really aren't any terrorists trying to sneak in across the southwestern desert, in which case someone might want to fact-check Michelle Malkin.