MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: September 9, 2007

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September 15, 2007

Breaking: Wesley Clark Endorses Hillary Clinton

So lock that endorsement up. Clark is a big-time favorite of the netroots: he was a star at Yearly Kos and routinely does well in self-commissioned polls of the Daily Kos community. Will his endorsement help Clinton amongst the netroots? She trails in the Democratic field with those folks.

More on the ABC Debat Affair: Annotating ABC's Jundullah Report

A striking comment by ABC's Brian Ross in today's NYT:

ABC News has sent a producer to Pakistan as part of its second investigation into reports involving Mr. Debat. One report it is re-examining concerned a guerrilla organization called Jundullah, which, ABC reported in April, had the support of the United States and Pakistan for operations that led to the kidnapping and murder of several Iranian officials.

Pakistani officials ferociously denied the report, calling it “an absurd and sinister insinuation.” ABC announced that it was standing by its reporting and quoted Mr. Debat, saying that he had “just returned from the region.” Brian Ross, the correspondent who worked most closely with Mr. Debat, said the Jundullah story had many sources.

“We’re only worried about the things Debat supplied, not about the substance of that story,” he said.

Does Ross really dismiss the importance of whether the substance of what he reported is true?

That US is backing the Jundullah story represents among the most problematic of the Debat-Ross collaborations. And it's no small matter perhaps that Ross's name is on it.

My annotated version of that story (Brian Ross and Christopher Isham, "The Secret War Against Iran," ABC, April 3, 2007) suggests that the key allegations in the piece were sourced by Mr. Debat, ABC used Debat as a confirming expert analyst in the piece for dubious information he himself supplied, and that other sources cited in the piece deny the basic gist of the report.

Are Debat's interviews with tribal sources -- which form the very essence of this report -- any more real than his interviews with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Nancy Pelosi, and Kofi Annan? The evidence says no. History shows no. Knowledgeable regional experts say no. That people who fabricate something as easily, provably deniable as an interview with Senators and presidential candidates and the UN Secretary General cannot be trusted to be telling the truth about what the Pakistani tribal sources are telling them is, of course, obvious. The capacity for an extraordinary degree of mendacity demonstrated by Debat claiming to have conducted such high profile fake interviews speaks for itself.

Notice no where in the above report does a US or other official confirm what Debat is providing and the story is asserting. And that ABC used Debat as the channeled reporter on the main substance of the piece, providing the information from the tribal sources, and then featured him as a confirming commenter/analyst in the report. It's a sleight of hand an ordinary viewer might not have noticed, but nevertheless not worthy of a serious news organization that cares about telling its viewers and readers the truth.

In other words, if you remove the information provided by Mr. Debat in this report, and his presence in the report as an expert analyst, there would be nothing there but background information on Jundullah, and U.S. officials denying the report.

See my original story, "Subject to Debat" here.

(Parts of this cross-posted here)

Update: Spoke with Brian Ross, who says that "I feel very comfortable very with the thrust of that [Jundullah] report. ... We really did have a number of U.S. and European government sources who walked us through that story, which essentially is the US is not funding that group, but is offering advice and guidance and is in contact with that group." He couldn't provide more details on the record but could say that "We feel comfortable wih sources not from Debat that the U.S. has at least contact with and communication with that group on an ongoing basis ... to help fight al Qaeda."

September 14, 2007

Aftershocks of MoJo's Cover Story on 'School of Shock'

One of the most rewarding things about working for Mother Jones magazine is when you get to see one of our articles make a difference in the legal system. Yesterday the Boston Globe reported that our current issue's cover story "School of Shock," which documents how the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) uses electric shock to punish its students, "has reignited efforts to pass legislation limiting the facility's use of skin shock and aversive therapy."

Massachusetts state senator Brian A. Joyce, whom we interviewed for the story, has circulated a copy of the piece to every state legislator and is working to push up hearings, originally scheduled for January 2008, on existing legislation that would curb the use of the skin shock device and create a regulatory commission. And as we blogged last month, the Chancellor for D.C. schools opened an investigation into the JRC's use of electric shock.

O.J. Simpson, At It Again

AP reports: "O.J. Simpson says he only went into a casino hotel room to retrieve memorabilia that he felt was stolen from him. But police are investigating it as an armed robbery and named the fallen football star as a suspect Friday in yet another surprising chapter to his legal saga."

Read the rest here.

Senate Forecast Looking Sunny for Dems

From the LA Times:

Bottom-line: barring a major reversal of political trends, Democrats not only are poised to build on the narrow Senate majority they surprisingly captured in the 2006 election, they could substantially expand it.

They're going to need a substantial expansion. It takes 60 votes in the Senate to get anything done, due to procedural rules, and a 51-member majority, when one of those members is Joe Lieberman, just isn't going to cut it. The vulnerable seats:

Virginia, where Republican John Warner is leaving and Democrat Mark Warner (no relation) will mount a strong challenge.
Nebraska, where Republican Chuck Hagel is leaving and Democrat Bob Kerrey will mount a strong challenge if he gets in.
Colorado, where Republican Wayne Allard is leaving and Democrat Mark Udall will mount a strong challenge.
And Maine, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Oregon, where Republican incumbents are particularly vulnerable.

That's seven states. Then you've got a bunch where a Republican incumbent is kinda sorta vulnerable: New Mexico, Alaska, and Kentucky. No promises there, but still: looking good, folks.

"Humor is a Form of Common Sense": Further Notes on Franken's Minnesota Run

My story on Al Franken's Minnesota senate run hits the web today, and I thought I'd round it out with some more material on the blog.

There were three things that I heard consistently when I was on the ground in Minnesota. First, no one seemed to mind that Franken's background is an unconventional one for a Senate candidate. Here were some responses I got when I asked about it:

"I think a lot of comedians find real big problems in our world. And they point out problems by making humor out of them."
"It may be time we sent someone different to Washington."
"Anybody who listens to [his radio show] knows he knows his stuff. If you read his books, you know he knows his stuff."
"You can be a comedian and you can still be serious."
"Humor is a form of common sense anyway."

I was genuinely surprised that Minnesota Democrats (known as DFLers) were not more worried about Franken's history of dirty jokes and lack of public service. The national media seems to think those two factors make Franken's candidacy a non-starter, and Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, and other GOP forces are trying to play them up as much as possible.

The second thing I found is that Minnesotans deny being abnormally open to oddball candidates. It's a common media meme, based on the fact that Minnesota elected Paul Wellstone, a short, bald college professor with a fanatical devotion to extremely liberal beliefs, and Jesse Ventura, a wrestler and C-level actor. "I don't know if it's just an anomaly," Franken told me. "People embraced Paul because of his uniqueness, and I don't know if that was just… unique." He made the point that Wellstone connected in a very special way with people and was almost genetically truthful, and that voters from any state would have found him appealing. "And Ventura won in a three-way race at a point when the state was totally flush, when the economy was just tooling along, we had a surplus in the country and in the state. And I really believe that during that period... people went like, "How hard is it really to do this?"

Franken pointed something else out. "I think Ventura did speak to people's dissatisfaction with the blandness of politics at the time. You know he had Skip Humphrey and Norm Coleman on either side of him." As Minnesota native Garrison Keillor would say, "empty suits." (Coleman later went on to win Wellstone's senate seat after Wellstone died in a plane crash less than two weeks before the election.)

Even the professional punditry agreed. I asked Wy Spano, long-time Democratic politico and Director of the Center for Advocacy and Political Leadership at University of Minnesota Duluth, if Minnesotans like quirky politicians. He seemed taken aback. "I don't know about that," he said. He paused, and then went into a detailed explanation of Wellstone's and Ventura's elections.

This is the way Minnesotans account for their voting history, from Franken and Spano all the way down the line. If you examine the circumstances of Wellstone and Ventura individually, they say, and look at the accidents of history surrounding their campaigns, the explanations reveal themselves. As Mark Ritchie, Minnesota's Secretary of State, said to me, "I don't think voters appreciate quirkiness here any more than any place else."

As for authenticity, it's on the fore because of Wellstone — a man who Minnesotans, at least politically active ones, clearly still miss. Instead of a senator in Wellstone who was legendary for his rigid principles, Minnesotans got Coleman, a former Democrat with weathervane tendencies. One Democrat described Coleman to me as "one of the most transparently phony people in all of American politics."

Franken has an aura of authenticity that Minnesotans were buzzing about. Maybe it's that he sometimes gets so angry over a Bush Administration sin that he stumbles over his words and loses any semblance of a politician's veneer. Maybe it's that he has confronted all of the Right's biggest bullies (O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Gingrich, Wolfowitz, among others) and no half-hearted liberal would put his reputation in harm's way so recklessly and frequently. Regardless of the reason, people buy in. "We tend to send the same kind of people [to Washington]," said a retired farmer I spoke with Minnesota. "[They] are arrogant, have ambition, and have drive, and when they get there they kind of forget why they went. I think Al is the kind of person who if he got there would be the same kind of person he is now."

The question is, is that a good thing for Minnesota? And for the Democratic Party?

And PS - I should admit that I spoke mostly to Democrats when I was up north — following a Democratic candidate on the campaign trail doesn't put you in touch with many Republicans — so people were naturally disposed toward Franken. But the facts as I saw them do have bearing on his chances in the Democratic primary. I did attempt to contact Coleman's campaign and the Minnesota Republican Party — they didn't return my calls.

September 13, 2007

Subject to Debat: What did ABC Know and When Did It Know It?

In the end, it was Pascal Riché, a Paris-based former Washington correspondent for France’s Libération newspaper, who uncovered a scandal at a top US television news network. On September 7, Pascal reported that an ABC counterterrorism consultant, Alexis Debat, had faked an interview with Sen. Barack Obama that he published under his name in a French journal, Politique Internationale, and that he had published other alleged interviews in the same journal with Sen. Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. It turns out, ABC itself later reported, the interviews were apparently fabricated.

Riché also reported that Debat claimed to have a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne that he did not in fact complete, and that he had exaggerated his CV in other respects—claiming to be an advisor to the French Ministry of Defense on transatlantic issues, for instance, when in fact he had been a lowly desk clerk in the bowels of the ministry for less than a year; claiming to be a visiting professor at Middlebury College, when in fact he had been a visiting instructor for a short winter term at Middlebury, and other such exaggerations. Mother Jones has obtained an annotated CV of Debat's—whose claims to be a former government official have apparently long irritated the government in Paris—outlining these and other discrepancies. (ABC believed the annotated CV was prepared by the French embassy, but sources now say it may have been annotated by a Washington-based French academic.)

Though Debat, often described in the American media as “a former French defense official,” insisted he would clear his name and sue Riché and his online magazine Rue89 for slander, the alleged fabricated interviews soon became a problem not just for Debat but for ABC. Since 2002, the network has employed Debat as a counterterrorism consultant and sometimes reporter, sending him to far-flung locations to report on Al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. (For the past year and a half, Debat has also served as the director of the terrorism and national security program at the Nixon Center; he resigned "for personal reasons" this week, an official with the Nixon Center said.)

Sources also say that Debat claimed in the spring to have received a "large chunk of money" from the Pentagon to conduct a study concerning radical Islam; when I inquired about the contract, a Defense Department official said he would check into it.

Following Riché's report, ABC publicly announced that it had demanded Debat's resignation in June, after obtaining the annotated CV and investigating his claims to have a doctorate. ABC said it had investigated his reports then, and was undertaking a more extensive investigation upon learning of the fabricated interviews at Politique Internationale, but that to date, it was confident that all of Debat’s reports for ABC had been vetted and multiply sourced and were standing up to scrutiny.

Interviews with journalists, think tank associates, and a former government official indicate that there were warning signs about Debat for years—even within the network itself. Two journalists familiar with Debat’s work point to ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross not only as the victim of Debat’s alleged deceptions, but as an enabler, who has promoted sensational stories—including some that Debat brought the network—at the expense at times of rigorous journalism standards. (Ross did not return Mother Jones’ phone call by press time, although an ABC executive has been in touch by phone and email.) They also say that they do not believe ABC has properly investigated Debat’s reporting at all.

The two key questions to ask ABC, one source familiar with Ross’ unit who asked to speak on background, are: “How is ABC investigating the information: Is it only being investigated by the Ross unit, or are outside reporters doing it? And in vetting or second-sourcing information brought to the network [by Debat], were resources outside of the Ross unit used?” Sources, and the AP reported late Thursday that ABC was sending long time Ross producer Rhonda Schwartz to Pakistan to investigate some of Debat’s stories.

Overall, the picture of Debat that emerges from these interviews is of a smart, ambitious and cunning operator who would claim to be getting text messages from Middle Eastern intelligence operatives while at meetings with Ross and others at ABC, with tips that seemed too good to be true (which some colleagues believe were bogus), yet were used as “exclusives.”

Sources provided multiple examples of stories that Ross—often with Debat’s contributions—reported, only to be forced to run a correction the next day. For instance, one source noted, on September 5 last year, Ross reported that a Pakistani general had said that Pakistan would leave Osama bin Laden alone as long as he didn’t cause any trouble. The Pakistani government angrily denied it, and the next day the ABC investigative unit’s blog, the Blotter ran a correction.

Another ABC news story largely sourced to Debat – claiming that the U.S. government was advising and encouraging an Iranian Baluchi separatist group Jundullah which was carrying out attacks against the Iranian regime – was followed by an ABC report the next day carrying a "sharply-worded" denunciation from the Pakistani government.

One ethical issue raised by ABC's handling of Debat concerns the investigative unit's use of paid sources/consultants, who are often put on monthly retainer. But in ABC's use of Debat as a paid "consultant" who also had for the past year and a half an appointment at the Nixon Center, ABC also frequently had him reporting on its blog, the Blotter, and appearing as a "source" inside others' stories, blurring the line between source (and a paid one at that, with outside -- also paid -- affiliations) and a journalist, not clearly identified in the report. ABC also sent Debat frequently abroad, to gather information which he would put on the air and on the investigative unit's website.

Network officials strongly deny that ABC has tried to sweep the Debat matter under the rug, and say they are taking the matter of investigating his stories very seriously. “We acted expeditiously to sever ties with Debat when we could not establish his credentials and we did immediately investigate his work,” ABC senior vice president Jeffrey W. Schneider emailed me.

In fact, the French news service AFP reported as far back as 2002 that according to the French government, Debat had never been a defense ministry official. “Alexis Debat, presented by the American [TV] channel ABC as ‘a former official at the French Defence Ministry’ in the context of the case of [Zacarias] Moussaoui … ‘has never belonged’ to this
ministry,” the AFP reported September 6, 2002. According to the annotated Debat CV, he had at one time had a low-rank desk job at the Ministry for less than a year.

And overnight Friday, Riché had a new scoop: a whistleblower inside ABC had alerted the network to its Debat problem, first in complaints to editors, and later, with a memo. “The ABC news reporter tried to alert the management of her network that Alexis Debat was not reliable,” Riché reported. “In an email she wrote last May to a researcher in a Washington think tank, she explained she had been ‘quietly concerned’ about Debat's work for ABC ‘for some time.’"

Stay tuned.

The War as They Saw It

Two of the seven non-commissioned officers who penned a New York Times op-ed that called the war in Iraq the "pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends" were killed yesterday when their vehicle turned over on a road near Baghdad. After hearing the news, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) sent a letter to the President. It reads, in part:

The tragic irony is that before their deaths, these two soldiers were not only trying to give us direction on how to end this war honorably, but they were also calling on us for help.... Mr. President, you didn’t listen to Staff Sergeant Yance Gray and Sergeant Omar Mora while they were alive. I hope that you will listen to them now, as they have paid the ultimate sacrifice for our country.

A Preview of Hillary Clinton's Health Care Plan

From yesterday's "presidential mashup": "I intend to dramatically rein in the influence of the insurance companies," she said, "because frankly I think that they have worked to the detriment of our economy and our health-care system."

—Nick Baumann

188 More Species Deemed Near Extinction

Today the World Conservation Union (also known, for reasons too arcane to go into, as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources or IUCN) came out with its "Red List" of species threatened with extinction. There are 188 additions to the list, bringing the total up to 16,306. There's particularly bad news about great apes and coral reefs, but across the taxonomic board, the news is "quite bleak," said Jane Smart, who heads the group's species program.

As Mother Jones' Julia Whitty wrote in Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth's Vanishing Biodiversity:

1 in 4 mammals, 1 in 8 birds, 1 in 3 amphibians, 1 in 3 conifers and other gymnosperms are at risk of extinction. The peril faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analyzed, but fully 40 percent of the examined species of planet Earth are in danger, including up to 51 percent of reptiles, 52 percent of insects, and 73 percent of flowering plants.

By the most conservative measure—based on the last century's recorded extinctions—the current rate of extinction is 100 times the background rate. But eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson and other scientists estimate that the true rate is more like 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate. The actual annual sum is only an educated guess, because no scientist believes the tally of life ends at the 1.5 million species already discovered; estimates range as high as 100 million species on Earth, with 10 million as the median guess. Bracketed between best- and worst-case scenarios, then, somewhere between 2.7 and 270 species are erased from existence every day. Including today.

We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never been—and will never be—known to us. In a staggering forecast, Wilson predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by the year 2100.

You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that 7 in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming, and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by most everyone outside of science. In the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining fossil bones and concluding "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of catastrophe," we have only slowly recognized and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behavior.

The rate of extinction is due to a variety of factors, but nearly all are human induced, including climate change, habitat loss, invasive species (transported by us), the plight of the oceans, and so on. As Julia notes:

All these disappearing species are part of a fragile membrane of organisms wrapped around Earth so thin, writes E.O. Wilson, that it "cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered." We owe everything to this membrane of life. Literally everything. The air we breathe. The food we eat. The materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers, medicines. Goods and services that we can't even imagine we'll someday need will come from species we have yet to identify. The proverbial cure for cancer. The genetic fountain of youth. Immortality. Mortality.

The living membrane we so recklessly destroy is existence itself.

Read Julia's article. It will haunt you. As will the accompanying photo essay by Richard Ross.

GOP-Supported California Ballot Measure is Unconstitutional

Remember how the GOP's law firm in California is supporting a ballot measure to change the way the state awards electoral votes? (A move that could hand the Republicans the Presidential election.) Well, it turns out that it's "patently unconstitutional". Doug Kendall explains in Slate:

The U.S. Constitution prohibits a ballot measure that would trump a state legislature's chosen method of appointing electors. In Article II, Section 1, the Constitution declares that electors shall be appointed by states "in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." That's legislature.

Tough luck, guys. Guess this race goes back to "Leans Democratic."

—Nick Baumann

If We Had Only Known

"The good intentions of the statesmen of Iraq, whose political experience is necessarily small, it is to be feared that serious difficulties may arise out of the differences which in some cases exist in regard to political ideas between the Shiites of the South and the Sunnites of the North, the racial differences between Arabs and Kurds, and the necessity of keeping the turbulent tribes under control.... These difficulties might be fatal to the very existence of the State if it were left without support and guidance.”

Where did such prescient advice come from? A 1925 League of Nations report on Iraq that Roger Cohen, noted in his column this morning. The GOP loves to accuse the anti-war left of having 20/20 hindsight. Looks like foresight is 20/20, too.

—Nick Baumann

More on L'Affaire Debat

In his piece on the Alexis Debat controversy -- the ABC consultant and French counterterrorism expert who apparently faked several interviews with political figures and luminaries such as Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Gates, Alan Greenspan, Michael Bloomberg oh and Kofi Annan -- the WP's Howard Kurtz failed to contact Pascal Riche, who broke this story of the faked interviews. Kurtz's piece seemed a bit thinly reported, featuring mostly Debat saying he was scammed, and Brian Ross saying he was scammed. What about the substance? Perhaps he was in a hurry.

But there's much substantive to consider. For instance, among other details, this is a guy telling the world media from several respected perches that there's a three day blitz planned to bomb Iran. It's not an uninteresting question, whether the information is solid, or is embellished, or is fabricated. It certainly creates a big echo, and is an interesting example of how misinformation or even disinformation can work. Kurtz didn't for instance, raise the question I raised here, which is blindingly obvious: did ABC bend the rules by paying a source who also served as their reporter while having a full time appointment elsewhere, smoothing over any complications by calling him an all purpose "consultant"? How much did Brian Ross approve the unusual arrangement and independently verify the information Debat was bringing from the dark corners of Pakistan? IF, and I emphasize if, Debat faked interviews for a French journal, what was to keep him from faking interviews that informed multiple stories for ABC? I fiind it implausible that ABC has independently re-reported all that stuff so quickly and determined it's kosher.

I also had an amusing, if slightly surreal, experience interviewing the real Rob Sherman - a Chicago radio talk show host - who has the same name and rough geographic location as the person who Debat claims conducted an interview with Barack Obama for him. You will not be surprised to learn, perhaps, that the real Rob Sherman says he has never heard of Debat, although he has interviewed Obama. One thing I am learning -- there's a bit of truth in many of the apparent fabrications.

The September 11th Tourist Attacks

This video will make you hate everyone. And it will make you vomit. It will make you hate everyone while you vomit.

But it has to be seen. When else are you going to hear the line, "The tourist attacks. September 11th. Is Iraq."

So grab a barf bag, click the link, and remember: we are all Ms. South Carolinas today.

Political Situation in Iraq Going Backward: Oil Law Dissolving

Let's see Ambassador Crocker try to put a positive spin on this:

A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a functioning government here....

Mr. Shahristani, a senior member of the Arab Shiite coalition that controls the federal government, negotiated the compromise with leaders of the Kurdish and Arab Sunni parties. But since then, the Kurds have pressed forward with a regional version of the law that Mr. Shahristani says is illegal. Many of the Sunnis who supported the original deal have also pulled out in recent months.

The oil law — which would govern how oil fields are developed and managed — is one of several benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressing the Iraqis to meet as a sign that they are making headway toward creating an effective government.

Again and again in the past year, agreement on the law has been fleetingly close before political and sectarian disagreements have arisen to stall the deal.

The Iraqis' attempts at oil sharing laws have never been impressive — and have often been suspiciously advantageous for multinational oil companies. But at least there was something, before recently, that the Iraqi government had come together to achieve. Now, even that moderate success is gone.

Breaking: Sunni Tribal Leader Assassinated in Iraq

A key U.S. ally in Iraq was assassinated near his home in Ramadi earlier today. Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, a senior member of the Anbar Salvation Council, was killed along with two bodyguards when a powerful roadside bomb destroyed his car. He had been a leading organizer of the so-called 'Anbar Miracle.' According to the Washington Post:

The council has been credited with helping tamp down violence in the area and retaking control from the insurgents, progress touted by U.S. officials as a sign their current strategy in Iraq is showing results. Abu Risha met just last week with President Bush during Bush's surprise trip to the country.

"This is a tragic loss," Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, said of Abu Risha's death. "It's a terrible loss for Anbar province and all of Iraq. It shows how significant his importance was and it shows al-Qaeda in Iraq remains a very dangerous and barbaric enemy."

Along with reaffirming the ability of insurgents to operate in Anbar, Abu Risha's assassination could raise questions about the future of the tribal coalition that had pulled together to quell al-Qaeda influence.

Petraeus, in Washington where he delivered a report to Congress this week, said he was confident the coalition will hold.

"I think that the tribes will pull together and go after whoever did this," Petraeus said in an interview with The Washington Post.

He said it was not clear who might emerge as a successor. He called Abu Risha "an important unity figure" in what had been until recently a fractious and violence-riven community.

Abu Risha, in his mid-30s, was "an organizing force that did help organize alliances and did help keep the various tribes together," the general said.

The emergence of the Anbar council, Petraeus said, caused a "political shift of seismic proportions" -- a dynamic that the U.S. is trying to replicate in other parts of the country.

Tearing the New Guy to Shreds

George Will is no fan of Fred Thompson, apparently.

Congress Asks CIA Lawyer Nominee to be Withdrawn

The Washington Post's Joby Warrick reports:

Members of the Senate intelligence committee have requested the withdrawal of the Bush administration's choice for CIA general counsel, acknowledging that John Rizzo's nomination has stalled because of concerns about his views on the treatment of terrorism suspects.

The decision followed a private meeting this week in which committee leaders concluded that the troubled nomination could not overcome opposition among Democratic members. It comes less than a month after a key member, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), announced his intention to block the nomination indefinitely.

Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer, has drawn fire from Democrats and human rights groups because of his support for Bush administration legal doctrines permitting "enhanced interrogation" of terrorism detainees in CIA custody.

In other intelligence news, Newsweek reports that intelligence czar Michael McConnell has asked to withdraw a statement to Congress that a recently passed electronic surveillance law contributed to the capture of German terrorism suspects earlier this month. Turns out, it didn't have anything to do with it.

September 12, 2007

Welcome to the New Mother Jones Website (Call it Version 1.1)

Potentially lacking the wit of our other esteemed bloggers, I hope to let the site speak for itself here... Our tech team has been working late into the night to make the Mother Jones website better looking, more readable, and more useful to you. Yesterday we launched what we might call a "first step" in a much fuller redesign project. We're eager to know what you think so far!

We're even more eager to know what you think about how far we have to go to build the best looking, best performing online media experience you can't get enough of.... I'll be popping on the blog periodically to inquire, but here's the first step: Drop us a comment or two. What do you love and hate about the site? Are you a designer? How about throwing some scrawled on napkins my way? naster-at-motherjones is the address.

We've got some great things up our sleeves — this is only the beginning.

Ignite! Sparks More Controversy

Ignite!, Neil Bush's educational company, has received thousands of dollars from school districts through the federal No Child Left Behind program even though it doesn't meet the program's standards, a DC watchdog group reported today.

"NCLB requires any kind of educational products to have been scientifically peer-reviewed, and Ignite! has not," Melanie Sloan, Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. Today CREW sent a letter to the Dept. of Ed Inspector General asking him to investigate the company. "NCLB is really benefiting cronies rather than kids," Sloan added. "I frankly don't understand why so many Democratic senators and congressmen, like George Miller and Kennedy are being so supportive [of NCLB] in the face of these problems."

Ignite! did not return a call from Mother Jones.

Neil Bush, the family's ne'er do well, is best known for his adventures in the savings and loan industry, which led to a taxpayer-funded bailout of $1.3 billion and a lifetime ban from the banking industry. In 1999, with no educational experience, he founded Ignite! with money from his family and international investors. For years Ignite has been dogged by questions about its effectiveness, and its reliance on donations from foundations to fund its purchase in schools. Last year, the Houston Chronicle reported that a donation from Barbara Bush to a Katrina relief fund was earmarked to Ignite! None of this has really slowed the company down of course. As of late it has been working in Russia and China, where I'd expect business will soon be booming.

ABC News Investigates (Itself)

ABC reports that Barack Obama denies he gave an interview to French journalist and counterterrorism expert Alexis Debat that appeared in a French journal, Politique Internationale. Debat himself acknowledges that he conducted the interview through a third party, and has provided an email from that person who says he carried out the interview and asked Debat to sign it and keep his name off it. An Obama spokesperson told ABC that they are not aware of that third party interview taking place either. Debat also acknowledges that he made a mistake. There's just one problem. Debat has been working since 2001 as a consultant for ... ABC News. Many of his reports are co-signed by other reporters at ABC, and one can presume that after an extensive investigation, ABC will determine that all of the stories he worked on as a "source" (but many also with a byline or co-byline) were multiply sourced and therefore they stand by all of them. As a colleague suggests, "Clearly they want to distance themselves from him, while still protecting" the institution. It may well be that all of his reporting is solid, and Debat has personally offered to discuss his sources and reporting with me, at my soonest possible availability. Sources suggest that ABC is not going to take Debat back, even if the investigation outcome is that his stories hold up. Debat firmly stands by all of his reporting for ABC, writing "ABC is currently taking all of my reporting apart, and has not found any reason to doubt it. It will not. I stand completely by 100% of the information I provided ABC."

Questions about Debat's interviews and representations were first raised earlier this week by former Liberation correspondent Pascal Riche at the website, Rue89. Debat has threatened legal action against Riche and Rue89, claiming the article "puts my entire professional life in jeopardy." ABC has indicated it demanded Debat's resignation in June, three months before the Rue 89 piece, saying that a French government official told ABC that Debat did not have the Sorbonne PhD he claimed to have. Debat has written that he recently learned there were administrative problems with his PhD and is working to resolve them.

Update: ABC's Jeffrey Schneider writes in reference to a post at my own blog, here "is a link to our blotter story about Debat. ... We have reviewed that story (and all the other stories he worked on) and we had multiple US and European government sources that informed our reporting. As you will see from the blotter story above, we acted expeditiously to sever ties with Debat when we could not establish his credentials and we did immediately investigate his work."

Meantime, we hear the Washington Post is working on its own story on the matter.

Update II: Here's the Post piece.

A Military Expert Analyzes Petraeus' Slides

Thomas Mowle, an associate professor of political science at the US Air Force Academy, a former member of the strategy branch, Multi National Forces-Iraq (MNF-I), and editor of Hope is Not a Plan: The Iraq War from Inside the Green Zone, offers these observations about Petraeus' slides, with reference to his testimony. He emphasizes that the below are all his own assessments, not official ones.

Slide 1: Interesting that the PKK is included, though not the MeK (Mujahedeen e-Khalq) or Pezak (the Iranian offshoot of the PKK, also known as PJAK). No reference to the Kurd-Arab/Turkomen violence around Kirkuk. All the yellow boxes list threats... except "anti-AQI Tribal Success" in Anbar --unless that success is being counted as itself a threat to Iraq. Foreign fighters appear to come only from Syria, not Saudi Arabia.

Slide 2: Probably the most effective slide. Long view, since October 2004. al-Askariyah shrine destruction appears to NOT have sparked an overall increase in attacks, but is merely a point on a steady increase from about March 2005 through December 2006. Mid-February listed as "Baghdad Security Plan," with testimony saying "forces began to flow in January." Most reports I've seen suggest the "surge" began in March; this has been difficult to track down. "Surge" was complete in June 2007, at which point the # of attacks drops rapidly. Not clear what is meant by "attacks:" does this include all acts of violence in Iraq, or only those aimed at coalition or Iraqi government targets? If the latter, that could explain the lack of a spike after Samarra, and also the discrepancy between the timing of this drop in attacks and the drop in deaths noted on later slides.

Slide 3: Starts in January 2006. Civilian deaths are down since Dec 06, by 50% in Iraq and 75% in Baghdad. Trend since Jan 06 is up 200% in Iraq and up 400% in Baghdad. Most of the decline is from Dec 06 to Feb 07 -- during the surge period, deaths in Iraq are down 15% and in Iraq down 33%. Baghdad now represents a smaller share of the violence: about 70% at the peak, but now only 33%. That is about its "share" of the Arab population of Iraq, but suggests that violence may have been tranferred to other places.

Slide 4: Maps start in December 2006, Graph in May 2006. The different starting dates are very strange. Looking ahead, other charts start in June 2006, October 2006, June 2006, August 2006, May 2006, January 2007, 15 June 2007, July 2007, and November 2005: 13 different sets of graphics, with 12 different start dates. Very odd. In any case, what are "clearly ethno-sectarian" deaths? Would AQI on cigarette-smoking clean-shaven Sunni Arab count? In maps of Baghdad, the demographic characteristics of neighborhoods never changes -- is this meant to imply there have been no changes, ignore such changes, or mere difficulty in coming up with a new map?

Slide 5: Lots more caches found this year. Is "cache" the best measure? Are these caches the same size as before, or are they smaller, meaning no more weapons have been captured? Does finding more caches suggest progress in finding them, or that there are more caches to be found?

Slide 6: IEDs: trend is good, corresponds to the surge... "Total IEDs = IED explosions + IEDs found + IED hoaxes?" What exactly is an "IED hoax?" Are there many cases of truly faked IEDs, or does this include situations where soldiers see something they think is an IED, but isn't? Could the decline in Total IEDs reflect only a decline in hoaxes, leaving the real categories unchanged?

Slide 7: Anbar attacks. We know this good news story. Peak shown for al-Anbar is October 2006. Attacks down 33% before the surge, and another 60% while the surge got up and running. Suggests that the success in al-Anbar has nothing to do with the surge.

Slide 8: Trends in Salah ad-Din, Baghdad, al-Anbar, and Ninewah. Why not Diyala? Would that graph look so good? Violence trends up while surge beginning, then down once complete, except in al-Anbar where the whole trend is down, and in Ninewah, where the downward trend is very minor. Measure is of violence, which = attacks + "murders events." What is a "murders event?" Why do the slides shift from deaths, to attacks, to level of violence?

Slide 9: High Profile attacks -- fits the surge story. Peak is in March 2007, then down except for suicide vests.

Slide 10: State of AQI. Almost impossible to comprehend without a story, which is not provided.

Slide 11: Lots of security volunteers, mostly Sunni.

Slide 12: # of "Fully Independent" battalions unchanged from April 2006-present. # of "Iraqi Lead with Coalition Support" battalions unchanged from September 2006-present. # of "Fighting Side by Side" unchanged over that same period. One would think that units would move steadily from level IV to level I over the nearly two years depicted. Possibilities: 1) It takes much longer to progress in capabilities than I think, so the lack of change is reasonable; 2) Units are progressing in capabilities, but once they become "fully independent" they get so cut up in battle that they regress all the way back to "fighting side by side." 3) Units are progressing to "fully independent," and then vanishing. 4) Not much progress is being made in developing independent capabilities for Iraqi Security Forces -- which is OK as long as they are not being counted upon.

Slide 13: Notable lack of dates after July 2008. Unclear what is going on with the stars and their location. If forces are drawing down, three possibilities: 1) ISF will backfill the capability as they become ready ("we stand down as they stand up"). Based on prior slide, that could be a while. 2) ISF will not be needed, because coalition forces will not withdraw until violence is down and stays down, and will not go back up later. 3) Coalition forces withdraw, ISF are not capable, and ...Probably not a victorious scenario.

"All of the above are my own assessments, not official ones -- but I stand by them as a professional."

Posted with permission.

Cheers,

Tom Mowle
US Air Force Academy

Big Pharma Misses Lincoln Chaffee

Former Sen. Chaffee wasn’t particularly activist on behalf of drug companies, but it was clear today on the Hill that some of those companies are extremely unhappy with his replacement, former Rhode Island attorney general Sheldon Whitehouse. To big companies and the tort-reform industrial complex, Whitehouse is evil incarnate. That’s because, before coming to the Senate, he was the attorney general of Rhode Island, where he had the nerve to hire the big-shot plaintiff firm Motley Rice on a contingency basis to represent the state of Rhode Island in litigation against lead paint manufacturers. Motley Rice scored a major jury verdict for the state last year that potentially puts the paint companies on the hook for billions of dollars in paint clean-up costs.

In 2006, the companies campaigned aggressively against Whitehouse, who also earned the wrath of groups like the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), which has since been pushing legislation to ban states from contracting with plaintiff lawyers. But here he was today, presiding over a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the mind-numbing question of whether federal regulatory agencies have been improperly inserting “preemption” language into regulations that would ban lawsuits over dangerous products from coming into state courts—an issue near and dear to the drug companies’ hearts.

Whitehouse, a veteran prosecutor, made ample use of the gavel (and absence of any other senators in the room) to put on an entertaining show. He smirked only a little as he faced off with a lawyer for the drug companies dispatched by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as well as Viet Dinh, Bush’s former assistant U.S. attorney general for legal policy.

Whitehouse used the opportunity to bash ATRA, noting that its spokesman had told the Washington Post yesterday that “Regulatory experts are better arbiters of what is a potential threat to a consumer than a judge or jury in Michigan." Whitehouse then asked Dinh, now a professor at Georgetown Law School, “How do you think Ronald Reagan would respond to the notion that bureaucrats are better" than judges and juries at identifying what’s a threat to their communities?

Dinh pointed out that Reagan had a dim view of the “litigation system,” but conceded that the preemption movement is a bit at odds with the Republican Party’s professed fealty to state’s rights.

No word on whether the Judiciary Committee (or Whitehouse, for that matter) actually plans to do anything about the whole preemption issue, but you can read more about it here, in a report published recently by the Center for Progressive Reform, co-authored by David Vladeck, another Georgetown Law prof who also testified at the hearing today. (As with all such studies, this one comes with its own bias. It's funded in part by the Pound Civil Justice Institute, which is an arm of the national trial lawyers association.)

More Bad News for Edwards, Obama

Kevin Drum blogs today's Los Angeles Times poll (PDF):

[Clinton's] supporters are more firmly in her camp than Edwards' or Obama's. Interesting! I would have guessed that Obama had the bigger corps of highly dedicated supporters. Second, and more important, Hillary leads not just in the general category of "more experienced," but in the very specific categories of "best at fighting terrorism" and "best at ending the Iraq war." And she leads by enormous margins.

Also worth noting is that Clinton leads the "Have the best chance of beating the Republican candidate in November" category by double digits in Iowa and a stunning 30 or more points in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Since concerns about electability derailed Howard Dean's campaign and brought John Kerry to the forefront in 2004, Hillary's advantage in this category could prove to be decisive. The problem, of course, is that primary voters were wrong about John Kerry's electability. Could they be wrong about Hilldog's?

—Nick Baumann

Making Sense of Putin's Dissolution of Russian Government

If you're trying to make sense of today's revelation that Russian President Vladimir Putin has dissolved his country's government, try Nikolas Gvosdev's explanation in the National Interest:

As expected, six months prior to Russia's 2008 presidential elections, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov has resigned his position. Fradkov, a technocratic figure who was expected to keep the government's trains running on time, was never expected to succeed Vladimir Putin as president of the country, and it was widely expected that he would be asked to step down in order to allow a possible presidential successor to Putin to, in effect, be anointed.

...It's difficult to see [appointed Prime Minister Viktor] Zubkov as being the designated "heir" to become president. It is important to note that if one looks at the last years of the second term of the Yeltsin Administration, a series of prime ministers were appointed, in part to keep the political establishment off balance.

This also gives some "breathing room" if the overall succession issue has not been settled by having another technocratic prime minister in place for the next several months, while negotiations would continue over how power would be distributed. Remember, the lesson many in the Russian elite learned from the Orange Revolution of 2004 in Ukraine was that when the elite is divided and cannot reach consensus, the system becomes destabilized.

Gvosdev also has something to say about Prime Minister Abe's resignation in Japan. Check out his article here. And thanks to Laura Rozen for forwarding it along.

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 09/12/07 at 9:20 AM | | Comments (0) |