MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: October 7, 2007

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October 12, 2007

Update: Blackwater Quit Trade Group to Avoid Scrutiny

This is an update to my recent piece on Blackwater's withdrawal from the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA), a private military industry trade group. Earlier today, the IPOA issued a press release, explaining that Blackwater's sudden departure from the organization, announced yesterday, may have been intended to quash an IPOA investigation of the firm's conduct in Iraq, specifically relating to the September 16 shootings in Baghdad, which killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded 24 others. According to the press release:

On October 8, 2007 the IPOA Executive Committee authorized the Standards Committee to initiate an independent review process of Blackwater USA to ascertain whether Blackwater USA's processes and procedures were fully sufficient to ensure compliance with the IPOA Code of Conduct.

Yesterday, I spoke with Doug Brooks, the IPOA's founder and president. He assured me that Blackwater's decision to withdraw from the organization had not been the result of an internal IPOA disciplinary process. He went on to praise Blackwater for its cooperation, saying "they've been quite open with us."

Nevertheless, Blackwater's decision appears to have had the intended effect: According to a source with knowledge of the IPOA's internal deliberations, the group's investigation of Blackwater's conduct has now been cancelled.

Barney Frank Gets Heat from LGBT Advocates

Gay rights supporters are confronting an unlikely foe—Rep. Barney Frank. Frank, who is gay himself and has been a longtime champion of gay rights, is getting heat from civil rights advocates for supporting a job discrimination bill even though it omits transgender people.

The legislation, which would be the first to protect gays, lesbians, and bisexuals in the workplace, is a compromise that was reached to move the bill forward. A poll done by a popular gay news site shows that its readers are divided on the issue, with one-third supporting Frank's position, one-third opposing it, and one-third saying gay and transgender people shouldn't be lumped together in the first place. At a press conference yesterday, Frank blamed the tension on the "ideological purity that plagues American politics, that holds liberalism back in a number of areas."

As much as I think transgender people should be protected, Frank has a point. The Bush administration's failure to give an inch on everything from Iraq to civil liberties over the last seven years has left our country deeply divided and the population completely disillusioned with government. It's time to let our Democratic leaders lead us in the right direction, even if it takes a while to get to our final destination.

—Celia Perry

Da Vinci Decoded: Vatican Publish Knights of Templar Papers

Get ready fans and foes of Dan Brown: The Vatican has "discovered" a cache of documents from the Knights Templar. For those of you who were spared the bad movie and worse prose (via AP):

The military order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon was founded in 1118 in Jerusalem to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land after the First Crusade. As their military might increased, the Templars also grew in wealth, acquiring property throughout Europe and running a primitive banking system. After they left the Middle East with the collapse of the Crusader kingdoms, their power and secretive ways aroused the fear of European rulers and sparked accusations of corruption and blasphemy.

The documents in question "reproduces the entire documentation of the papal hearings convened after King Philip IV of France arrested and tortured Templar leaders in 1307 on charges of heresy and immorality," which includes "a 14th-century parchment showing that Pope Clement V initially absolved the Templar leaders of heresy, though he did find them guilty of immorality and planned to reform the order, according to the Vatican archives Web site."

AP continues: "Historians believe Philip owed debts to the Templars and used the accusations to arrest their leaders and extract, under torture, confessions of heresy as a way to seize the order's riches."

Okay, this is all juicy stuff but what I love best is this:

Only 799 copies of the 300-page volume, "Processus Contra Templarios," - Latin for "Trial against the Templars" - are for sale, said Scrinium publishing house, which prints documents from the Vatican's secret archives. Each will cost $8,377, the publisher said Friday. An 800th copy will go to Pope Benedict XVI, said Barbara Frale, the researcher who found the long-overlooked parchment tucked away in the archives in 2001.

The Da Vinci Code book was published in 2003. The movie came out in 2006. So the entire stupid "is the Da Vinci Code right or wrong" industry could have been, I dunno, at least arguing over the facts for the past four years had only the Vatican released this earlier.

And, though this isn't strictly relevant, before he became Pope Benedict, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, known until 1908 as the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

Black Ministers Get Religion About HIV/AIDS

It's about damned time.

It's only been in the last two weeks that the black church came to Jesus about AIDS. Let us pray that it's not too little too late.

Having long ignored the alarms about the AIDS epidemic decimating an already ravaged community, blacks' most prominent ministers officially joined elected officials, the National Medical Association (formed when the AMA was segregated) and other groups in moving past their homophobia and brimstone to reality: blacks must do something about the cultural underpinnings that feed the flames of AIDS. Not since the 60s has the black church so thrown itself behind a community issue.

Read this for a snapshot of the crisis and news about the group's first meeting, but the bottom line is this: black refusal to deal with its attitudes about male privilege, sex, drugs, homosexuality and superstitions (please don't mention Tuskegee again) was threatening us with near extinction (AIDS is the number 1 cause of death for black women 25-34). Blessedly, last week's meeting was a success, complete with action plan:

"Following a two-day conclave, over 150 African American leaders proposed the National HIV/AIDS Elimination Act, which they plan to introduce to Congress as early as January. The act calls on the federal government “to declare the HIV/AIDS Crisis in the African American community a ‘public health emergency’” and urges “the Secretary of Health and Human Services to use his emergency authority to redirect resources to address this emergency.”

The group plans to hold the presidential candidates feet to the fire on AIDS as well. Officially at least, the taboo on acknowledging homosexuality from the pulpit (therefore in black life generally) will be lifted, however grudgingly. There'll be community education, outreach to homosexuals and relationships established with social services organizations which serve the AIDS community. Great. But something's missing.

What about confession and a request for forgiveness? As they've all no doubt preached, atonement, without a confession, is mere charity, a duty. Not a problem you helped create.

Many of these ministers only grudgingly admit that the black church had anything to do with the black AIDS epidemic denying, a la Ahmadinejad, that blacks would ever be gay, then sermonizing that homosexuality was an abomination, either ex communicating gays or forcing them onto the down low. (I'm amazed to realize in retrospect how many in my Southern Baptist congregation were total flamers. But as long as they stayed in their sham marriages and helped dog the 'queers' and 'bull daggers', they remained church leaders.) Several quoted ministers were at pains to deny that the church was overwhelmingly homophobic and saw AIDS as the wages of sin (though some saw the light early). But we don't have to look far for evidence, just to our HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities).

With 100-plus campuses, HBCUs are notorious for their conservatism; they routinely censor campus newspapers, squash rallies and flyer-distribution of flyers for campaigns like HIV/AIDS awareness, and even protests of the Iraq war, a position uncontroversial among blacks. In particular, young black gays trying to assert themselves on HBCU campuses find themselves stymied by their colleges’ administrators and alumni (many of whom are also ministers); few have been granted the student group charters required to officially exist on campus. The entrenched black religious, political and educational establishments see themselves in a battle for the soul of the black community and thus believe it is they, not black homosexuals, who are under fire for their beliefs; it'll be awhile before they get this new memo. Recently, black gays at Hampton University in Virginia tried, and failed, to establish a campus group for gays;

"You've got to recognize the history of HBCUs," said Larry Curtis, vice president for student affairs at Norfolk State University, where students recently formed a gay-straight alliance. "Most of them were founded by religious organizations."…

On historically black campuses, those tensions make life uncomfortable for gay students. "It's kind of hard to be out on campus and still be successful," said Vincent Allen Jr., head of Safe Space at Atlanta's Morehouse College. "As an out gay man, if I wanted to pledge [a fraternity], that door is pretty much shut to me. That's just the way it is."

But just as gay students can rightfully request campus inclusion, so too can black college administrators deny it, argued the Rev. William Owens, an HBCU graduate and head of the Coalition of African-American Pastors in Memphis, Tennessee. Those administrators may cite the Bible, or simply personal beliefs -- and they don't have to be politically correct, Owens said.

"They can say 'no' and I don't think they have to give a lot of reasons," said Owens, who joined other black pastors worried that, along with dismal marriage rates, socially accepted homosexuality "is a threat to the black family."

In 2002, the issue of gays on black campuses grabbed the attention of the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group that organizes annual "coming out" days. "We would send out information to all the colleges and universities about getting national coming out packets, and for some reason the only institutions they were not hearing back from at all were the historically black colleges," said the group's diversity manager Brandon Braud, who began calling campuses.

He learned of gay groups at two historically black schools: Washington's Howard University, and Spelman College, in Atlanta. Administrators elsewhere denied having gay students (emph added), or said that while gays attended, "they're very underground," Braud said.

You can read the whole thing here, but it seems clear that it black religiosity and cultural conservatism have everything to do with the AIDS problem. We can't fight one without fighting the other, and on multiple battle grounds.

At 2006’s high profile right wing Values Voter Summit, Rev. Dwight McKissic attacked as “insulting, offensive, demeaning, and racist” any consonance between gay rights and civil rights. He derided homosexuals as “comparing their sin to my skin” and who “can’t reproduce so they have to recruit.” While the Civil Rights movement sprung from righteousness, the gay rights movement springs from “the pit of hell itself” and is a “satanic anointment,” birthed from the anti-Christ who is himself homosexual. Black ministers like McKissic aver that the fight against homosexuality is the most pressing issue facing blacks, seconded even by liberal black ministers like civil rights activist Rev. Willie Wilson of Union Temple Baptist Church in southeast D.C. who sermonized in 2005:

“Lesbianism is about to take over our community ... I ain't homophobic, because everybody here got something wrong with him,' he said. 'But ... women falling down on another woman, strapping yourself up with something, it ain't real. That thing ain't got no feeling in it. It ain't natural. Anytime somebody got to slap some grease on your behind and stick something in you, it's something wrong with that. Your butt ain't made for that. "'No wonder your behind is bleeding,' he said. 'You can't make no connection with a screw and another screw. The Bible says God made them male and female.'

"The congregation can be heard shouting its approval in the background during Wilson's sermon."

Whether the black church is conservative and gay-panicked because its community is, or vice versa, the result is the same: an AIDS epidemic. It's enough that the most powerful cultural strand in the black community has joined the battle. It would actually be Christian for it to humbly ask for forgiveness.

October 11, 2007

TSA Starts Using New 'Strip Search' X-Ray Machines

As of today, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport has begun using a new kind of x-ray to search passengers for possible weapons. The radiation-free x-ray, called a "millimeter wave," scans a person's entire body. In the process, it creates a blush-inducingly graphic image of the person being scanned. The TSA blurs the face in scans, and only allows a remote screener to see the final scan. But for some, that isn't enough: "If you want to see a naked body," ACLU director Barry Steinhardt told the Associated Press, "this is a naked body."

The millimeter wave is just one of a few kinds of advanced technology (AT) x-rays being tested by the TSA. Another kind of AT x-ray has received similar outcry (it's been called a "virtual strip search"). In response, the TSA altered the machine, but so much so that it obscured the very weapons it was supposed to find, as we reported in our July/August issue. The technology was initially developed for use in prisons and courthouses.

Despite privacy concerns, the TSA seems determined to roll out AT x-rays across the nation: they recently awarded more than $30 million in contracts to the companies that produce the machines and have used them at several airports including New York-Kennedy, Los Angeles International, and Regan National. So far, the machines have been voluntary, as an alternative to a pat-down in secondary screening. And, the TSA says, it has disabled the "save" function so that images cannot be stored or distributed. However, with the TSA's history of violating passengers' rights, I wouldn't bet on it.

Tutu, Part Two

Last week I noted that the University of St. Thomas had rescinded a speaking invitation to Archbishop Desmond Tutu because administrators deemed Tutu's previous criticisms of Israel to be "hurtful" to some Jews. This morning, Scott Jaschik of InsideHigherEd has some good news: St. Thomas' president has reversed his decision and will invite Tutu to campus after all.

The twist here is that Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman wrote a letter to St. Thomas objecting to its decision to cancel Tutu. This is an unusual outburst of sanity from Foxman and the ADL, which Glenn Greenwald has been pounding in recent days for seeming to apply "its outrage practices selectively and politically" and marching in lockstep with the right on issues like Iran. While Foxman still indulges in his annoying tic of describing people in terms of whether they are, in his opinion, "a friend of Israel"—in the letter, he deems Tutu "not a friend of Israel" simply for voicing a criticism of an Israeli policy—the ADL deserves credit here for standing up for free exchange on campus. Maybe the group is taking Greenwald's criticisms to heart.

—Justin Elliott

Army to Expand Numbers, Time in Iraq

Military leaders said yesterday that they plan to accelerate the Army's expansion, adding 74,000 soldiers by 2010, not 2012 as originally planned. The goal, they say, is to relieve the strain on troops currently serving while maintaining the numbers necessary to continue the war effort.

Sounds great, right? Hire more soldiers, give the troops on the ground a much-needed break. But where are they going to get these people? Defense Secretary Robert Gates specified that the recruiting needs to be done without forcing anyone to stay or loosening entry standards. That might be tough, considering how much the Army has already had to widen its net to meet recruiting goals. In addition, a big part of the plan involves retention—convincing servicemen and women not to leave the Army at the end of their tours. While in a perfect world this might mean rest between deployments, practically speaking, it probably means more time in Iraq.

To top it all off, last time I checked, General Petraeus had announced plans for a troop drawdown beginning next spring. Bush endorsed the plan provided he saw evidence of progress. But given the Army's current numbers, a troop reduction is inevitable. Does the expansion push mean there won't be a drawdown after all? More likely that even with the departure of 30,000 soldiers, we're still planning for the very long term.

—Casey Miner

Telephone Industry's Comical Consolidation

Surfing wikipedia can lead to wonderful things. Check out this neat chart we found showing the evolution of telephone company consolidation. Click the box to see a larger version.

Old AT&T really knows how to be persistent.

Update: Stephen Colbert has a typically awesome take on this.

BP and Chevron Go Virtual and Green

What do Chevron and BP have in common, besides being leading members of Big Oil? Computer games, apparently. Yesterday, the New York Times reported on BP's latest rebranding move—a "collaboration" with the video game company Electronic Arts. To learn more about these companies' quests into unknown territory, read the rest of this post on Mother Jones' environment and health blog, The Blue Marble.

Empire State Building to be Lit for Muslim Holy Day

New York City again shows that ~~the~~ as one of only two American ~~city~~ cities* actually attacked by Islamic terrorism, it is the one perhaps most willing to embrace Muslims, immigrants, and its own rich cultural diversity. From Newsday:

The Empire State Building will be illuminated green this weekend to mark the Islamic holy days of Eid-al-Fitr (EED-ALL-FEET-er).

The joyous "Festival of Fast-breaking" marks the end of Ramadan, a month of intense spiritual renewal.

This year is the first time the famous skyscraper will be aglow for the Islamic holiday. A spokeswoman for the building's owner says it will be an annual event, in the same tradition of the yearly skyscraper lighting for Christmas and Hanukah.

In Islam, the color green symbolizes a happy occasion and the importance of nature.

* I am a complete idiot. Thanks to melissa in the comments.

Rudy Giuliani Out Flubs the Republican Field

I've blogged before about how much I love factcheck.org. They come through again with some real treats on the Republican debate in Dearborn, Michigan.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson got the facts straight for his GOP debate debut Oct. 9. But former Mayor Rudy Giuliani added to a lengthening string of exaggerations and misstatements:

Giuliani claimed Sen. Hillary Clinton once called the free-market economy "the most destructive force in modern America." She didn't say that. She quoted another author who said free markets were "disruptive." She also said free markets bring prosperity.

The mayor falsely claimed Clinton proposes to give $1,000 to "everybody." Her proposed subsidies to workers' retirement accounts would be for couples making up to $60,000 a year and would be $500 for those making up to $100,000.

Giuliani falsely claimed that more than 2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product is spent on "frivolous" lawsuits. The figure is from a study about the cost of all lawsuits.

Another Reason to Suck It Up and Buy a Minivan

One of the great enduring myths created by the American auto industry is that SUVs are safer than regular cars. The Ford Explorer rollover scandals in 2000 helped pierce this image a little, but Americans still seem to believe that an SUV is a safe place to store a family on the road. (The Frost children, in fact, who've been attacked by right wingers during the SCHIP debate were nearly killed when the family SUV slid off the road and hit a tree.)

The data, however, continue to show that most people would be safer in a Mini Cooper (or a minivan) than a Chevy Trailblazer. The latest news comes from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, whose new crash tests show that most SUVs perform poorly when hit from the side, even though they're much higher off the ground than other cars.

"People often think they're safer in one of these vehicles, but many cars hold up better than some of these midsize SUVs in this test," David Zuby, the institute's senior vice president, told the Associated Press.

You can watch the crash videos here.

October 10, 2007

Candidates' Kids Can Blog Better Than This

By now, you may have heard some of the buzz surrounding McCain Blogette, the new blog put out by John McCain's daughter, Meghan, and her friends (including "political fashionista" La-Toria Haven, thank goodness). The second family campaign blog this cycle, McCain Blogette is more of a shameless self-promotional vehicle than, say, a shameless pander for family-values votes like the Romneys' Five Brothers. But this new genre has real potential. Here are some other efforts we'd like to see:

Chelsea Clinton—McKinsey Confidential: Chronicling an ambitious young woman’s quest to make it in the all-boys club consulting world
Grace and Christina Dodd, Malia and Sasha Obama, Emma Claire and Jack Edwards, Jenna Brownback—The Playpen: Influential group blog for intelligentsia of the under-10 set
Randy Tancredo—Minuteman: Liveblogging the immigration fight, straight from the borderlands
Caroline Giuliani—My Obama Girl: Caroline signs on as occasional guest blogger at fan site
David Huckabee—Huck’s Heart: Online community service clearinghouse, part of court-ordered restitution for animal cruelty incident, weapons charges

Readers, let's see what you can come up with! There's a Beau Biden gag just begging to be made here.

—Justin Elliott

Lieberman Says No To Investigating Blackwater

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, says that he has no intention of investigating Blackwater USA and other government contractors who have been accused of criminal action.

Lieberman said he gets "angry when I hear about fraud or corruption in the spending of American dollars," but "You've got to set your own priorities, and it was clear to me that other committees were going to pick this up."

Where I come from, the alleged murder of seventeen people is not classified as "fraud" or "corruption," but Lieberman sees it another way. His counterpart in the House of Representatives, Rep. Henry Waxman, is holding hearings on the Blackwater incident.

Halo 3: Now You Can Kill Mother%#$@#s in Church

Halo 3, the violent video game that made Microsoft hundreds of millions of dollars in its first week on store shelves, is now being used to attract young men to church, the New York Times reports today. "Teens are our 'fish,'" one youth pastor wrote in a letter to parents. "So we've become creative in baiting our hooks."

The headline of the article is "Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church," which seems to be trying to paint church leaders as hypocritical for using Halo parties to get kids in the door, and then selling them the gospel. Sure, being against violent media and then using that same media to recruit churchgoers is hypocritical. But even though the author mentions evangelical opposition to violent games, he never presents an example of a pastor who condemned violent games and then used them for outreach. Without that, there is no evidence of hypocrisy. There are just some pastors disagreeing with other pastors about what is appropriate.

Simply believing in the 10 Commandments and then playing a violent video game is not hypocritical. Killing virtual aliens is not equivalent to violating the 5th (sometimes 6th) commandment, and it's insane for the Times to imply that it is. Most religious scholars agree that killing animals doesn't violate "Thou shalt not kill." Why would killing imaginary characters be prohibited?

But even if the author didn't want to hunt down actual evidence of hypocrisy, there were still plenty of other interesting questions left unasked. As I wrote in an article two weeks ago, the Halo games have always been an online playground for bigots of all stripes. Homophobia, racism, and antisemitism are rampant in the smack talk that is a staple of the multiplayer game. So it's especially interesting to learn that some of the young men (they're almost all men) who are playing Halo are doing it at church. Are they shocked to hear what other players say? Do their pastors insist that they play with the mute button on? Or, more disturbingly, are some of these young Christian soldiers and the hate-spewers one and the same?

Let's Hope the Clinic Showed Baywatch Reruns

The missing mayor of Atlantic City has officially resigned after spending a week in a psych hospital. Robert W. Levy may have been in a little over his head as mayor. Before getting elected, he had served for decades as the city's chief lifeguard...

Che-nniversaries

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the killing of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. World Hum has the stories behind the popularity and endurance of the Che image, and Gridskipper has a list of all the places in San Francisco you can go to talk about The Motorcycle Diaries and sip mocha frappa whatevers. As they put it: "Oh socialist politics, you are so delicious when you're co-opted for a capitalist enterprise." Viva La Revolucion!

Want Health Insurance? Call Us Back When You're Homeless

Does living in a house worth $250,000 in Baltimore make a family of six rich? That's what conservatives seem to think.

After 12-year-old Graeme Frost helped Democrats lobby Congress to pass a bill expanding the State Childrens Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), conservatives vilified his family, claiming they were too affluent to qualify for the program. The state health insurance program helped pick up the tab when Graham and his sister were injured in a car accident that left them both in comas and hospitalized for five months. Because, among other things, they live in a house assessed at $263,000 (originally bought for $50,000) and make a little under $50,000 a year, critics seem to believe that the Frosts and their four kids were living high on the hog (and were apparently just too cheap to buy private insurance).

"Bad things happen to good people, and they cause financial problems and tough choices," Mark Steyn wrote on the National Review Online. "But, if this is the face of the 'needy' in America, then no-one is not needy."

The implication, of course, is that before getting any help from the government, the Frosts should have sold their home and everything else they own to pay the medical bills first. Aside from being highly irrational—a quarter-million dollars will barely buy a parking space in some parts of D.C., much less cover five months of hospital bills for catastrophic head injuries—what good is government-sponsored health insurance if you first have to become homeless and bankrupt before you're worthy enough to use it? The vicious attacks on the Frosts seem like a harbinger of things to come, unfortunately, should any democratic president actually succeed in getting some sort of health care reform off the ground.

Thomas Friedman Wants You to Be More Radical!

Friedman, from today's column:

I've been calling them "Generation Q" — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad. But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good.

He's right to call for activism and political engagement, but it's pretty ripe that a war supporter as influential as Thomas Friedman is criticizing young people for being the "Quiet Generation." The Iraq war didn't happen because too few students were marching in the streets. It happened, in large part, because trusted liberal public intellectuals like (gasp!) Thomas Friedman supported it. They legitimized the Bush administration's story and worked as cheerleaders for intervention. Just because it happened behind the TimesSelect paywall or on Charlie Rose doesn't mean we don't remember. The saddest part is that Friedman's still such an influential figure that many people in his generation will pick up on this convenient, self-absolving narrative: "It's all the kids' fault. They didn't protest enough." Don't be surprised if you hear your parents spouting this to you two weeks from now. But that's a pretty big glass house to be throwing stones from, sir.

Lynching Losers

I've been saying loud and long that, post-Imus, -Jena 6 - post-everything - we don't need a 21st century civil rights movement centered around protests and marches. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ever take to the streets, however, and engage in some heavy duty symbolizing and grievance redressing. This heinous, however cowardly and childish, event ought to certainly produce some mass Negro indignation.

A noose was discovered this week on the office door of an African-American professor at Columbia University, school officials and the New York Police Department said. The noose was found in a building at Columbia's Teachers College, said Joe Levine, executive director for external affairs at Teachers College. The noose apparently was placed on the 44-year-old professor's office door sometime before 9 a.m. ET Tuesday, Levine said.

This only happened yesterday, so we don't know much, like why this individual was targeted or who the likely culprits (you know there was more than one cowardly lowlife involved; it takes a gaggle of them to equal one real man. And yes, I'll bet they were male) are since they made sure to avoid surveillance cameras. Still, doesn't matter. Nothing, anyone did justifies hanging a noose on his door; it's a terror tactic no matter who the subject is though it's worse for blacks given our history.

The question is the proper response. There are those, black and not, who will say ignore it and rob it of its power. I tried that on for awhile, but, nah. A noose mean something whether you ignore it or not and they affect those around you even if you've got it in you to simply toss it in the trash. Yesterday's hastily organized demonstration is a great start. Here's hoping it grows and grows, with stalwart university support. Unlike Jena, this is a protest I'd inconvenience myself to attend, knowing the little I know right now. Also, I'm thinking: nooses made of something with in-your-face-*&^hole symbolism hanging from every campus door and a sizeable reward for information leading to the capture of these morons.

There's no doubt that nooses are more a reflection of some whites' sense of waning superiority in the racial hierarchy than of actual threat (without knowing more) but then so can rape and sexual harassment be. The bastards have to be locked back in their cages.

Republicans Go Green on CNBC

There was a surprise winner at yesterday's Republican presidential debate in Dearborn, Michigan: the environment. The candidates — joined for the first time by Law and Order star Fred Thompson — came out nearly universally in favor of increased research on renewables and a decreased dependence of foreign oil. But their motivations weren't of a Save-the-Whales strain.

"This is a matter of national security," said Rudy Giuliani. "You've got to support all the alternatives. Hydroelectric power, solar power, wind power, conservation — we have to support all of these things. We've got to support them in a positive way. And this is an area in which the federal government, the president has to treat this like putting a man on the moon." And just in case you forgot, he added, "It is a matter of national security."

And while Sam Brownback made it clear he would drill for oil in Alaska and off the coast of basically every American state if it meant the United States imported less oil from the Middle East, he also challenged the automakers who had welcomed the candidates to the Detroit area. "We've got to get more electricity involved in our car fleet," he said. "They've got hybrid cars; they've got flex fuel cars. I think that's a big part of the answer. I'd like to see us move forward with getting those first 20 to 30 miles off of electricity that you plug into at night."

When asked if oil companies should use their record profits to fund renewables research, John McCain sounded just a little like Al Gore. "I would not require them to, but I think that public pressure and a lot of other things [might cause them to do so voluntarily]. Including a national security requirement that we reduce and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil and [that] we stop the contamination of our atmosphere." Climate change, he said, "is real and is taking place."

But no matter how green-friendly the field got, they couldn't separate their rhetoric from the overly-simplistic black-and-white nature of their foreign policy vision. Governor Mike Huckabee, for example, expressed frustration with the slow pace of renewables development ("We keep talking about 15-, 20-, 30-year plans; that's nonsense. If we don't start saying we'll do this within a decade, we're never, ever going to get there.") but then drowned it out with the sound of rattling sabers. "We're in a race for our lives against people who want to kill us," he said. "And a lot of the reasons that we are entangled in the Middle East is because our money buys their oil, that money ends up coming back to us in the way of Islamo-fascism terrorists."

But liberals and environmentalists may just abide the tough talk of Huckabee and his Republican brethren, because the end result is one they can embrace. Said Huckabee, when he closed his thoughts on the subject, "Everything is on the table: nuclear, biofuels, ethanol, wind, solar — any and everything this country can produce."

(Transcript of the debate available through the Wall Street Journal.)

October 9, 2007

Who Will Hack US Elections?

At an e-crime summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh last week security experts predicted voters will increasingly be targeted by internet-based dirty tricks campaigns. And that the perpetrators will find it easier to cover their tracks, reports New Scientist.

Dirty tricks are not new. On US election day in 2002, the lines of a "get-out-the-voters" phone campaign sponsored by the New Hampshire Democratic Party were clogged by prank calls. In the 2006 election, 14,000 Latino voters in Orange County, California, received letters telling them it was illegal for immigrants to vote. But in those cases the Republican Party members and supporters were traced and either charged or named in the press. Online dirty tricks will be much less easy to detect, security researchers say.

Spam email could be used against voters, experts say, by giving the wrong location for a polling station, or, as in the Orange County fraud, incorrect details about who has the right to vote. . . Telephone attacks like the New Hampshire prank calls would be harder to trace if made using internet telephony instead of landlines . . . Calls could even be made using a botnet. This would make tracing the perpetrator even harder, because calls wouldn't come from a central location. What's more, the number of calls that can be made is practically limitless.

Internet calls might also be made to voters to sow misinformation, says Christopher Soghoian at Indiana University in Bloomington. "Anonymous voter suppression is going to become a reality." Manipulation can also happen in more subtle ways. In 2006, supporters of California's Proposition 87, for a tax that would fund alternative energy, registered negative-sounding domains including noon87.com and noonprop87.org and then automatically routed visitors to a site touting the proposition's benefits.

The summit's conclusion: the problem will happen. The only unknowns: when and by whom.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent. You can read from her new book, "The Fragile Edge," and other writings, here.

Abuse of Presidential Power and the Ghost of Nixon

The Supreme Court today refused to hear the appeal of German citizen Khaled El-Masri, who was contesting a March decision by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss his lawsuit against the CIA. El-Masri alleged that in 2004 he was kidnapped by the CIA and rendered to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he was tortured.

The Court's refusal to hear the case affirms the decision of the Appeals Court, which ruled against El-Masri on the grounds that allowing him to seek judicial redress would expose state secrets. The court's opinion relied heavily on the precedent of United States v. Reynolds—the 1953 case that legally enshrined the State Secrets Privilege. Though not based in the Constitution, the Reynolds precedent allows the government to withhold evidence from a legal case if its disclosure would endanger national security—a privilege most notably invoked by Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

In Reynolds, the Court held that the widows of three Air Force contractors who died in a 1948 crash could not be compensated, because litigating the case would expose military secrets. But in 2000, the documents related to the crash were declassified, revealing that what the military sought to conceal was not in fact a state secret, but instead evidence of the Air Force's culpability in the men's deaths. The Court ruled without ever seeing these documents, since they were, at the time, classified.

Anyone else see the legal Catch-22 here? The El-Masri decision is less about national security than it is about the President's right to invoke the privilege of state secrets. Without judicial process, we'll never know if that claim is legitimate or lawful. Before dismissing El-Masri's case, the Court might have looked to another old opinion, also cited in the March ruling of the Appeals Court:

Neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.

That was United States v. Nixon—the famous Watergate decision in which the court ruled unanimously to limit Presidential power.

—Casey Miner

Pakistan Election a Big Sham, No Surprise

This past Saturday, Pakistan held its presidential election. It's no surprise that the good General came out on top. In Pakistan, presidents are chosen by an electoral college, consisting of the Senate, the National Assembly, and the Provincial Assemblies and these governing bodies were elected in 2002 during a rigged election. Musharraf's re-election was a guarantee.

Musharraf now needs approval from the Supreme Court, which will look at the legality of his re—election beginning on October 17. Under the Pakistani constitution, one is prohibited from running for president while still acting as an army chief. Most argue that it's unlikely the Supreme Court will rule against Musharraf.

The White House commented that "Pakistan is an important partner and ally to the United States and we congratulate them for today's election." This response doesn't raise eyebrows: the U.S. stands behind Musharraf quite often and has even helped broker the recent "power—sharing deal" between former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf. This partnership will allow Musharraf to remain in power for another five years, as her support stands to legitimize Musharraf's rule.

No wonder the British publication, the Independent called the election a "charade masquerading as democracy."

—Neha Inamdar

A Label of One's Own

If he's not careful, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson is going to end up in the racial rogue's gallery right next to me, misunderstood and villified by those too blinded by America's moribund racial discourse to know that they're in violent agreement with us. In fact, Robinson's own words show that he, too, suffered from the same myopia from which he seems now to be in the early stages of recovery.

In a now infamous column written earlier this year, I pointed out the obvious: Barack Obama isn't black. He's an immigrant black, or a la Stephen Colbert either a nouveau black or a 'late to the scene' black...call him what you will, just don't call him black and think you've conveyed any useful information. But neither should you think you've conveyed a put down. Just consider it a community service to have bothered to define your terms.

The point isn't that immigrant blacks aren't 'authentic' or that they haven't suffered through the slavery experience and are therefore unworthy of blackness, concepts which I reject as puerile and unworthy. The point is that the term 'black,' in the American socio-political context, simply doesn't make room for them. It leaches them of all context except an inapplicable one - descent from American slaves and the legacy of Jim Crow. Other than skin color, 'black' doesn't tell you anything you need to know about immigrant blacks - the function of a label, if I'm not mistaken - and in fact misleads you with false information. Be honest: when someone is described to you as black or African American, doesn't it make a difference to learn that their parents came here from Jamaica or that they recently arrived from Ethiopia and speak only Amharic? Trick question, because if it doesn't it should; there's no reason to assume a political or cultural consonance between immigrant blacks and the slave-descended. So why use the same term? Labels ought to illuminate more than they obscure, a test which the label 'black' fails pretty abysmally in 2007. We don't need yet another word for blacks (colored, Negro, Black, African American - a person could get dizzy.) What we need is to interrogate the label wherever we encounter it until 'black' or 'African American' means what Asian, for example, does: not much until you have more information. Are they Viet Namese, Korean or Tibetan? Now those are labels that actually illuminate a few things whereas 'Asian' only gives you over-broad physiognomic hints. If 'Asian' matters in any particular situation - quick! what's the Asian attitude toward affirmative action? - you can't procede until you know which flavor, which region of America. Ironically, if only to me, many of the hundreds of insulting emails I received in the wake of that column began something like "I'm from Ghana. You are a m(*&^..." or "My parents came from Trinidad and your mama is a m(&^..." If black skin is all that counts, all it takes to helpfully occupy the same term, why mention their homelands? How odd, their insistence on minimizing what is surely more important to their identity than the cotton my ancestors picked. How odd, to help keep whites' racist essentializations alive and well. Eugene Robinson, who criticized my take on Obama, is beginning to agree though he isn't fully 'there' yet.

In his latest column, he wrote, "black America" is an increasingly meaningless concept -- nearly as imprecise as just plain "America." ...Let's start by opening our eyes and recognizing that if there ever was a monolithic "black America" -- absolutely and uniformly deprived and aggrieved, with invariant values and attitudes -- there certainly isn't one now."

It isn't new for blacks to point out that their community isn't an affirmative action-supporting, 'hood-living, OJ-supporting one-note wonder. Unfortunately, though, that's usually a Potemkin village erected only to highlight white disinterest in black complexity; any black who stray off the plantation (Clarence Thomas, Sec. Rice), intermarry or offer internal critiques of the party line are swiftly punished and ex-communicated. So much for diversity. What is new is an apparent willingness for a leading thinker to follow that train of thought to its logical conclusion - a redefinition of the term 'black' and a possible wholesale realignment of the politics of blackness. The piece deserves a read.

Unfortunately, Robinson, like most blacks, ignores entirely the existence of immigrant blacks, a glaring omission in a discussion of black diversity and suggests that it might best be those immigrants who lead the charge for a label of their own. Their quiescence is a testament to both the strangle hold that traditional blacks enjoy on the race discourse and, one has to believe, an immigrant buy-in to that discourse such that it needs its consciousness raised as to its own marginalization. What must they think when they read reports like this one (emphasis added):

'Any black student will do'

A disturbing report shows some African Americans are being squeezed out of the US university population. Joanna Walters reports.

When Shirley Wilcher went to a reunion at her prestigious alma mater, Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, she got quite a shock. The number of black graduates whose parents were born outside the US seemed to have grown dramatically compared with those whose families had been in America for generations - back to the times of slavery - like herself. She suspected that, in the process of becoming more diversified, top universities had recruited more black students but, increasingly, they were not those from post-slavery African-American US backgrounds who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the civil rights movement and controversial policies such as affirmative action.

Wilcher demanded data from reluctant admissions officials and her suspicions were confirmed: student recruits from what is termed the native, or domestic, US African-American population had been dropping. Not only were blacks overall still under-represented, but within the black student population African-Americans were being squeezed out.

"It's shocking. Awfully short-sighted, at best. I'm disappointed," she says.

Wilcher is the executive director of the American Association for Affirmative Action, which promotes policies that discriminate in favour of black students in an effort to correct the long legacy of racism in the US. And there was wider confirmation of her informal research to come.

A report just released shows African-Americans losing out at selective colleges across the country, particularly at elite universities, and their places being taken by first- or second-generation American immigrants, at least one of whose parents was born in the Caribbean or Africa.

The joint University of Pennsylvania-Princeton report found that although immigrant-origin black students make up only 13% of the black population in the US, they now comprise 27% of black students at the 28 top US universities surveyed.

And in a sample of the elite ivy league universities the figures were even more dramatic. More than 40% of black students in the ivy league now come from immigrant families.

"Immigrant and second-generation blacks are over-represented at these schools, while overall black students are still too few," says Dr Camille Charles, sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the report's co-authors, "which means the problem of access for African-Americans - that group which has the longest history of oppression in the US - is of even greater concern than we thought."

My, oh my. Where to begin with such madness?

Let's just say that the above is what I mean by the way 'black' and 'African American' are used on the socio-political ground, whatever its politcally correct definition. When those terms are not meaningless they're worse; they're tools for silencing immigrant blacks even as blacks fight to keep their 'brothers' in their place.

Come on over to the dark side, Eugene. But don't forget your flak jacket.

Making a Killing: A Blackwater Timeline

An investigation ordered by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki into Blackwater's September 16 shooting in Baghdad, in which 17 civilians were killed and another 24 were wounded, has determined that the company's operators opened fired indiscriminately and without provocation. The official Iraqi report on the incident demands that the U.S. government pay $8 million in compensation to each of the victims' families and sever all Iraq-based contracts with Blackwater within the next 6 months. It also demands that the Blackwater operators involved in the shootings be handed over to Iraqi authorities for possible prosecution in Iraqi courts.

It's unclear if the U.S. government will comply and perhaps even more unclear if it could meet the Iraqi government's demands even if it wanted to. Civilian employees of the State Department rely on Blackwater for protection. If the company were banished from Iraq, U.S. diplomatic operations would be paralyzed, at least until another private contractor could be hired for the job. Even if this were to happen, it's doubtful that booting Blackwater would make much difference. More than likely, its operators would quickly find work with competitors like Triple Canopy and DynCorp, who would have to fill the Baghdad security void in Blackwater's absence. The private security sector is a small one after all. Even Andrew Moonen, the Blackwater operator who got drunk in the Green Zone last Christmas Eve and murdered one of the Iraqi vice president's security guards, found a new job with Combat Support Services Associates, which put him back to work in Kuwait just two months after the shooting.

So, will Blackwater survive this latest scandal? It's impossible to know for sure, but there's little reason to believe otherwise. The company, which started as a small-scale provider of firearms training in 1998, has grown into a billion-dollar Goliath, complete with an army of lobbyists and sympathetic politicians to press its agenda on Capitol Hill. Guided by its reclusive founder, Erik Prince, the company, over its short history, has deflected controversy with ease, all the while simultaneously expanding its reach into new markets and generating ever more profitable government contracts. What follows is a timeline that documents Blackwater's rise and its history of misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan.

1965
Prince Corporation is founded in Holland, Michigan, by Edgar Prince, father of future Blackwater founder Erik Prince. The company specializes in auto parts.

June 6, 1969
Erik Prince is born.

1973
Prince Corporation begins mark