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February 15, 2008

The Military-Scholastic Complex

peace%20corps.gif There's a lot of disquiet on the Internet these days concerning the relationship between the Peace Corps and United States intelligence agencies. The issue has found new legs in the wake of recent claims that Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar were asked by a United States Embassy official in Bolivia "to basically spy" on Venezuelans and Cubans working in Bolivia. In an interview last week with ABC News, Fulbright scholar John Alexander van Schaick said that he was told by Assistant Regional Security Officer Vincent Cooper "to provide the names, addresses, and activities of any Venezuelan or Cuban doctors or field workers I come across during my time here." Cooper had made a similar request to a group of 30 Peace Corps volunteers and students.

For soliciting Peace Corps members' and Fulbright scholars' assistance, Cooper has paid a price. Bolivian President Evo Morales has now declared him an "undesirable" person whose actions amount to an "attack" on Bolivia, and he has already been recalled to Washington D.C. As CrooksandLiars points out, just today, in a groundbreaking move, Bolivia filed espionage charges against Cooper. Cooper should have foreseen the firestorm that would likely ensue if his actions were made public. So why did Cooper feel it was appropriate to use Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar for intel work? Maybe there is a precedent that the rest of us are not aware of. The Huffington Post points out that there was a four-month span between when Cooper met with the Peace Corps volunteers and when he approached van Schaick. Clearly this was not an isolated event.

In the blogosphere, there's a long-running debate as to whether or not there is a provable relationship between the Peace Corps and intelligence agencies. On one side are those who vehemently defend the independence of the Peace Corps. They say that such a relationship is illegal, and that all intelligence professionals are expressly forbidden to join the Peace Corps according to the Peace Corps eligibility criteria. On the other side are those who maintain that people continue to transition from the Peace Corps into intelligence agencies regularly. And volunteers are quick to point out that they submit quarterly reports on their projects and communities, with potentially juicy intel.

In fact, there is a well documented historical relationship between cultural scholars, humanitarian aid workers and intel agencies—why should our scholars in the Peace Corps and Fulbright be excluded? The United States has long used social scientists in times of war to gather sensitive cultural information on our adversaries. During WWII, anthropologists including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Geoffrey Gorer provided key knowledge to military planners and ultimately played a prominent role in shaping United States policy in Asia. But some of the most notorious cases of military-academia partnerships occurred during the Cold War. In the 1960s, as part of a secret operation known as Project Camelot, the Pentagon secretly hired anthropologists to research insurgency elements in Latin America. When the program was brought to light, Robert McNamara was forced to shut it down. However, today the Department of Defense employs anthropologists as consultants, both in the field and in the Pentagon, utilizing their cultural knowledge as yet another tool in the war on terror.

The Peace Corps is an arm of our diplomatic presence in foreign countries. A semi-academic institution, it clearly offers a softer side of United States foreign policy than other agencies, and thus it plays a crucial role in shaping our image abroad. However, recent efforts to boost military recruitment by allowing soldiers to fulfill part of their military obligation in the Peace Corps have upset some volunteers, and reignited the issue of Peace Corps independence. If this doesn't demonstrate the willingness on the part of the Pentagon to blur the line between the military and the Peace Corps, than I'm not sure what does.

I don't believe that the Peace Corps is a CIA front, but we should be cognizant of the long tradition of social scientists as de facto intelligence gatherers, especially in this era of counterinsurgency warfare.

—Jesse Finfrock

'Boston' to Huckabee: Stop Playing Our Song!

It's not often you can feel genuine sympathy for rock stars that made truckloads of cash polluting the world with their catchy, but crappy songs. But given the above performance by Mike Huckabee's cover band Capitol Offense, it's easy to understand Boston founder and songwriter Tom Scholz's deep, unending shame for the artistic transgressions of his youth, lucrative though they were. Huckabee's recreation of the band's 1976 oh-my-god-please-make-Clear-Channel-stop-playing-that hit "More Than a Feeling" at an Iowa campaign stop—which featured a guest appearance by one-time Boston lead guitarist Barry Goudreau, a Huckabee supporter—invites, no, begs for all the mockery one can muster. Turns out, though, that Schulz's problem with the performance (aside from that it sucked) was Huckabee's use of the song to promote his presidential candidacy. Scholz, who alleges that the Huckabee campaign has continued to use the song since the ill-considered performance in Iowa, wrote a letter to the presidential contender yesterday, explaining his troubled mind:

Boston has never endorsed a political candidate, and with all due respect, would not start by endorsing a candidate who is the polar opposite of most everything Boston stands for.

Um, what, you ask, does Boston stand for? Personally, I thought it was slick studio over-production and a period of my life, around the 6th grade, when I had yet to kiss a girl or shave my peach fuzz, and my musical tastes were still recovering from Stryper and Ratt. But I digress... Scholz's letter continued:

By using my song, and my band’s name Boston, you have taken something of mine and used it to promote ideas to which I am opposed. In other words, I think I’ve been ripped off, dude!

Yes, he wrote the word "dude." For their part, Huckabee's people couldn't care less what Scholz thinks. His New Hampshire campaign manager responded to the letter:

Governor Huckabee plays "Sweet Home Alabama." Does that mean that Lynyrd Skynyrd is endorsing him? He plays "Louie Louie." Does that mean that the Kingsmen are endorsing him? To me, it's ridiculous. Never once has he said, "The band Boston endorses me."

Of course, rock 'n' roll has an illustrious history when it comes to political campaigns. Bill Clinton rocked out to Fleetwood Mac. Obama jams to U2, and Hillary has a thing for Celine Dion (one can only imagine why she thinks that might help her chances at winning the White House). And until last week, McCain had a soft spot for the populist, Red-American icon John Mellencamp. But when the Indiana rocker complained about the misappropriation of hit songs "Pink Houses" and "Our Country" by the Republican candidate, McCain agreed to remove the songs from rotation.

NIU Shooting: Different School, Same Questions

Unfortunately, yesterday's shooting at Northern Illinois University seemed quite familiar. Young man in dressed in black walks into a school, shoots and kills five students, injures dozens more, and then shoots himself. He was mentally ill, unpredictable, acting strange in the weeks before the event. The public safety director of Northern Illinois University's response: “Unfortunately, these things happen.”

But "these things" are happening with frightening frequency. Just last April, the Virginia Tech shootings left nearly three dozen students dead. And that was after the perpetrator, who had a history of mental illness, had filmed himself with guns. And Virginia Tech happened years after similarly violent incidents at Columbine, Jonesboro, Red Lake, and Nickel Mines.

In 2008, a year less than two months old, fatal shootings have taken place at Louisiana Technical College and at E. O. Green School in Oxnard, California. A list of shootings and stabbings in K-12 schools for the 2007-2008 school year from a security services firm is sobering.

And yet each time students die, we ask ourselves the same questions. How can universities and schools be made safer? "Universities for decades, for hundreds of years, have been open institutions—the most open institutions," the president of NIU said. "And events like this and Virginia Tech and others are forcing us to reconsider how we do things. I think that is unfortunate but necessary."

But should the question really be how schools can be made safer? In many cases, shooters didn't go inside the school, but instead shot students from outside it. Wouldn't the simpler solution be to make sure handguns stay out of the hands of children and those with a history of mental illness? Sure it would, if only we didn't have a rabidly pro-gun population whose views are backed up by the powerful gun rights lobbyists in Washington. The issue of gun control always comes up in the wake of school shootings, but reforms—like the bill recently signed by President Bush providing funding to help states track and report prohibited gun buyers, including those who had been involuntarily confined by a mental health institution—are easily sidestepped by lax enforcement and by a loophole that allows dealers at gun shows to sell arms to anyone without first conducting background checks.

Until we get a handle on our gun problem, we will be forced to accept that "these things happen."

Women in War Zones: Female Correspondents Face a Second Line of Fire

As MoJo's own Elizabeth Gettelman pointed out, journalists are dying by the score in our war on terror. Horrendous, no question. If I were a young journalist today, I doubt I'd have the nerve to go after that story. No, I don't doubt it - I know I wouldn't.

Given the dangers there, it is the brave Iraqi journalists, translators, etc who are suffering, disappearing and dying disproportionately which adds another, special layer to the tragedy. Still, it's one thing to be kidnapped or killed by inexcuseable terrorists. What of female journalists being raped, harassed and exploited while working as foreign correspondents? It's ok if they both matter, isn't it, though death and imprisonment are surely worse?

Complain, and your bosses will either protect you by sending you home or demote you to junior varisty to keep you safe. How could they not? And, if it's a colleague or a boss - then what? Either way, you'll be seen as too vulnerable (read: weak) for the job, however regrettably. So, women suffer in silence and add the trauma of rape/sexual assault onto the trauma intendant upon life in a war zone.

From the increasingly indispensable Womensenews:

Judith Matloff doesn't like the term "war reporter."

"There is no glory to it," Matloff, a veteran reporter of global conflict for more than 20 years, told Women's eNews. "You can go for weeks without taking a bath; your colleagues could die; you could be in mortal danger."

For the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston newspaper, and Reuters, the British news wire, Matloff has covered the Chechen war, the Rwanda genocide and the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique.

Now she is finishing her second book...

She is also trying to challenge notions of a swaggering, hyper-masculine reporter at the center of a war zone. It's an image, she says, that not only obscures the presence of women but also fuels dangerous taboos surrounding female correspondents' struggles with sexual assault. "Women have risen to the top of war and foreign reportage. They run bureaus in dodgy places and do jobs that are just as dangerous as those that men do," Matloff wrote in an article last year in the bimonthly Columbia Journalism Review. "But there is one area where they differ from the boys--sexual harassment and rape."

I hope you're sufficiently teased. You simply have to read the piece, and the original, published in CJR, that led Womensenews to Matloff. It ran in the Columbia Journalism Review.

While my experiences don't hold a candle to foreign or war reporting, working (not to mention living) in America, I've faced continual sexual harassment (absolutely none from my colleagues in journalism - except one who headed a foreign bureau - but aplenty from sources and even luminaries I was profiling). I rarely told my bosses, or not until long after the piece ran. They're great guys who mentored me and would have tried to do something about what had happened but what could they really do? For their sake as much as mine, I realized early on that I'd have to be Xena: Warrior Princess about my personal safety.

Many men, especially men in the disadvantaged worlds I focus on, feel the need to regain power over the 'girl' reporter with the tape recorder and do so by quite obviously trying to sexually frighten me. I only have a few minutes to decide if they're truly dangerous (and abort) or if they just need to understand that it will be my way or no way. You've misbehaved, I make clear non-verbally, so my way means public places only, separate vehicles, zero tolerance of bawdy talk, VERY pointed note-taking while giving them the stink-eye. A marked change in the tenor of my questions and my disapproving body language. To a man, they're baffled when I don't either melt, or act afraid. The latter is what they all too clearly want.

These jackals know their time with a reporter is limited: subtle they are not and I'm equally unsubtle about not going into their hotel rooms with them to "find their notes" after they'd spent the previous hour trying to talk about how good they were in bed. Other subjects' hotel rooms, cars, and offices I do enter. I stake out dangerous housing projects alone in my car over night. I meet with recent parolees at dive bars and seek out the homeless in their haunts. Reading Matloff and remembering fighting my way out of limo back seats while drivers went conveniently blind, it occurs to me that you have to be kinda crazy for this job. But Third World reporting is a special kind of crazy I know I'm not up to. Read Matloff and spare a moment to think about how you get your news. Only released hostages and flag-draped coffins make the 11 o'clock. Sexual assault victims get nothing but the need to go on writing.

P.S. What did foreign bureau guy do? First, we drove around forever while love songs poured from his stereo and he made what seemed to be seductive talk. But he was interviewing me, right? So...where were the questions beyond my favorite movies, etc? Finally, when his PePe Le Pew overtures confoundingly didn't lead me to rip my clothes off and I headed for home, he tried for what seemed like two days to kiss me in the middle of Wisconsin Ave in DC, outside the Cheesecake Factory. The 'interview' ended in me giving him one to the 'nads outside the Friendship Heights Metro Station. We danced around like maniacs while I eluded one arm then the other. I was a full head taller. I had to laugh as he tried, on his little tippy toes, to plant one on me. He never had a chance. But, reading Matloff, I didn't laugh and I'll no longer enjoy telling that story. It's an insult to what female reporters face in the war zones of the Third World.

Hearing Regrets

So even Rep. Henry Waxman thinks the steroids-in-baseball hearing this week was a three-ring circus he wishes he'd never convened. But come on, what did he expect? Roger Clemens gave a preview of his performance on national television a few weeks ago. The fact that he was under oath this week probably wasn't going to change his tune much. Besides, Waxman should recall that one of the side-effects of performance-enhancing drugs is extreme mood swings and occasional violent outbursts. And of course, extreme denial (see Floyd Landis and Marion Jones et. al.)

John Lewis Dumps Clinton for Obama: A Tipping Point?

If there are tipping points in presidential contests, this surely is a possible one: Representative John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights era, has flipped. He had endorsed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic contest. But on Thursday, Lewis, a superdelegate, said he would vote for Barack Obama at the Democratic convention.

Up to now, it's been the Obama camp and Obama supporters who have seemed the most worried about those hundreds of superdelegates who could decide the race. Many Obama fans have expressed the fear that these Democratic insiders will pour into some backroom at the convention and throw their votes to Clinton, even if she places second in the race for the pledged delegates produced by the primaries and caucuses. But Lewis, who cited the "sense of movement" and "sense of spirit" in Obama's campaign, is proof that the wind can blow the other way. Put simply, insiders like a winner.

Lewis noted that he could not vote against the clear wishes of the voters in his Georgia district, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in that state's Democratic primary. And as perhaps the leading African American member of the House, he was, with his opposition to Obama, in an awkward position. How could he stand against the first African American (and Democratic) candidate with a decent chance of becoming president? But it turned out not to be such a tough spot to escape. The Clintons must be seething. Not just because they have lost Lewis's vote but because of the signal he sends to other superdelegates committed to or leaning toward Clinton: Yes, you can.

Lewis paves the way for others who are also moved by Obama's "movement"--or, to be polite about it, motivated by his momentum. While Clinton appears to have a modest lead in superdelegates, it is far from insurmountable. And like Lewis, many of the superdelegates will look to see what's happened on the ground before deciding how to cast their votes. If Obama's march does end up winning more popular support than Clinton's, many of these powerbrokers will not want to be left out of the parade.

February 14, 2008

The SEIU Picks Obama

The national executive board of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) endorsed Barack Obama Thursday evening. The members of the board voted electronically following a conference call that was scheduled for 6 p.m. A high level union official tells Mother Jones there was "overwhelming support" for Sen. Obama during the call. The endorsement doesn't become official until union locals representing 60 percent of the SEIU's members actually email in their vote, the official said. The locals have until 7:00 a.m. on Friday to do so, but given the results of the conference call any change in course seems highly improbable. An email from the union confirmed it will make a "major political announcement" on Friday at 1:00 p.m.

The SEIU has stayed neutral in the national contest until now, allowing its state affiliates to endorse any candidate. Many of the state organizations backed former Sen. John Edwards. But Edwards dropped out of the race shortly after a poor showing in South Carolina, where where he was born.

The SEIU's endorsement comes at a crucial time. Hillary Clinton, who has lost eight straight contests since Super Tuesday, is leading in the polls in Ohio and Texas, two delegate-rich states that will vote on March 4. Wins there could conceivably help her narrow the lead Obama has recently opened up in the delegate count. But the SEIU endorsement could alter the balance.

With nearly two million members, SEIU is the fastest-growing union in North America. It is also perhaps the most politically influential. A November 2006 National Journal ranking (PDF) placed the SEIU first among 20 major national interest groups in terms of political clout. The candidates the union supported had a win-loss record of 10-4 in "competitive" races during the 2006 election cycle. It registered over 4 million new voters and its members knocked on 10 million doors during the 2004 election cycle. It has won battle after battle organizing janitors in Texas, gaining 5,300 members in Houston alone in the past two years. And it has about 27,000 members-cum-potential-door-knockers in Ohio and around 100,000 total in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. That's a lot of political action.

The endorsement could also have an effect on SEIU members from demographics that have been voting for Clinton. The union likes to trumpet the fact that it is the "most diverse" union in the United States. Fifty-six percent of SEIU members are women, and it represents more immigrant workers—who are often Latinos—than any other union in the United States. Its members also include many working-class whites. All three groups—women, Latinos, and working-class whites—have tended to vote for Clinton this year. If the SEIU's political muscle helps turn those groups toward Obama, especially in Ohio and Texas, this endorsement could prove decisive.

All this positive news for Obama comes with an important caveat: the huge California State SEIU (656,000 members) endorsed Obama five days before that state's primary. Sure, there wasn't much time before the election to get out the vote, but Clinton still won the state by around 10 points. By endorsing much earlier this time, the national board seems to have learned from the California state council's mistake. (Of course, the Washington state SEIU also endorsed Obama just days before that state's Democratic caucus, which Obama won handily.)

Another boost for Obama will come from the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union's endorsement, which was also decided today. That group has 69,000 members in Ohio and another 26,000 in Texas, according to the AP, and its political organization could do just as much as the SEIU to help Obama rally supporters and get out the vote in those battleground states.

The SEIU and UCFW endorsements should serve as a counterweight to Clinton's AFSCME endorsement, which she obtained in late October. The American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees is another labor powerhouse. By going with Obama, the SEIU and UCFW ensure that Clinton will not have a monopoly on major labor endorsements.

In its endorsement, the UFCW says: "We have the utmost respect for Senator Clinton and her tireless efforts on behalf of working people. And while both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have a vision to change America, we believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to build a movement to unite our country that will deliver the type of change that is needed - for good jobs, affordable health care, retirement security and worker safety."

Will that movement of Obama's be able to deliver the nomination? We'll see, but these two big endorsements can't hurt.

Dems Win on FISA! (Momentarily)

It looks as though House Democrats are going to head into the President's Day recess without acting on FISA, meaning that the Protect America Act will expire in a few days.

Most Democrats were happy to pass an extension of PAA, which allows the federal government to spy on foreign-to-foreign communications routed through the United States without a warrant, but the White House insisted it would veto the bill if it didn't include retroactive immunity for telecom companies that have helped the Bush Administration spy on Americans. (Chris Dodd recently lost this fight in the Senate.)

The House leadership (which is getting ballsier and ballsier) decided to risk the political attacks Republican will surely launch about leaving America unprotected instead of caving and passing a bad bill that helps undermine the Constitution. Kudos to them!

More info here.

Why NOT Lie To Congress?

After yesterday's day-long congressional hearing on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, the consensus on the matter here at our F Street headquarters boils down to two things: Roger Clemens was lying (duh), and devoting federal resources to baseball players is a colossal waste of time and taxpayer money. What makes it particularly "f*ing stupid," to quote my colleague Nick, is that nothing is likely to come of it. Sure, we got to learn some interesting things about Clemens' ass and the complications of injecting yourself with foreign substances. But here's the rub:

Clemens is not actually at risk of being prosecuted for using steroids, the issue at the heart of the entire brouhaha. After all, he's apparently stopped using them. That would be like prosecuting, well, any of us for having smoked pot in high school. (In fact most prosecutions of 'roid-using athletes have been for lying, not injecting.) But proving that Clemens committed perjury would basically require proving that he once used steroids, a pretty tall order despite the forces aligned against him. While trainer Brian McNamee, who claims to have shot up the famous Red Sox buns, has produced a pile of seven or eight-year-old needles and gauze allegedly soiled with Clemens' bodily fluids and HGH, it's a delightfully weird twist to the case but no smoking gun. The stuff is unlikely to ever see the inside of a courtroom because it's so comprised by chain of custody issues.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Clemens took a gamble that there wasn't much of a downside to lying to Congress. History would be on his side. Recall, for instance, the year 1994, when seven executives of the nations' leading tobacco companies came before the very same House Oversight committee that grilled Clemens. Each one raised his hand, swore to tell the truth, and proceeded to state emphatically that he did not believe tobacco was addictive. Nothing happened to any of those guys. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a single person convicted of lying to Congress since the Reagan administration, even though baseball players have provided rich targets. Back in 2005, during the last round of congressional hearings on steroids in baseball, home-run star Rafael Palmeiro vehemently denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs. A few months later, he tested positive for them. Oversight Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) declined to seek prosecution.

Mitt Romney to Endorse McCain

CNN's Dana Bash reports that former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will endorse senator John McCain. The endorsement is expected to happen at a Boston event at 3:30 p.m. ET today.

Two sources familiar with the decision confirmed the news, and said Romney now wants the delegates he won during his campaign to back his former rival.

Movement in the Making: Stop the Superdelegates!

Folks across the internet are upset that the nearly 800 members of Congress, state governors, and Democratic Party honchos known as superdelegates could decide the winner of the Democratic nomination. If the pledged delegate count (i.e. the delegates won through primaries and caucuses) is close going into the convention, the superdelegates' votes will be decisive, and who knows what they will do: they may vote for the candidate who got the most pledged delegates, or the candidate who got the larger share of the popular votes, or the candidate who won their state, or whomever they think is best for the country, or whomever guarantees them the most/best patronage in the next administration.

Point is, everyday folks are angry that the nomination won't be decided in a purely democratic fashion. MoveOn.org and Open Left are taking action: if you're worried about superdelegates, check them out.

To Protect White House, GOP Disrupts Congressman's Memorial Service

Congressional Republicans, specifically Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida, just interrupted the memorial service of recently deceased Congressman Tom Lantos.

At 11:05 am this morning, Diaz-Balart offered a motion to adjourn, which, if passed, would have ended the House's legislative day. It appears the intent was to keep the House from debating contempt citations for former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, which were on the agenda. According to the Congressional Research Service, "A motion to adjourn is of the highest privilege, takes precedence over all other motions, is not debatable, and must be put to an immediate vote." That means that the members of the House had to leave the Lantos memorial where they were paying their respects to vote on the House floor, for nothing more important than to keep the day's business open.

The memorial service began at 10:00 am in Statuary Hall, which is an old House chamber in the Capitol. Speakers included Lantos' relatives, Bono, and Elie Wiesel. Diaz-Balart's vote was called during Joe Biden's tribute to Lantos.

It was purely obstructionist move by Diaz-Balart, made all the more crass and classless because it was used to disrupt the services of a widely admired public servant who was Congress's only Holocaust survivor. Accusations are flying back and forth about the matter. Incidentally, the motion to adjourn failed and debate of the contempt citations is currently underway.

Video after the jump.

How He Went Down: Mugniyah Assassination Plot Follow Up

As a tense south Beirut buried assassinated Hezbollah militant Imad Mugniyah Thursday and Israel and the region braced for feared retribution and an escalation of tensions, analysts continued to speculate on who killed the elusive terror suspect. (See this piece for a primer).

Former CIA officer Robert Baer, who served in Beirut and extensively researched Mugniyah, offered a model about how things might have gone down. "An old friend of mine," Baer emailed. "Friend may not be the word. Anyhow the Israelis persuaded him to set off a car bomb in a Damascus bus station. He used the Guardians of the Cedars, paid them something like $200,000. Bomb went off as requested."

"Point two is Syria these days is completely corrupt," Baer added. "You buy what you want."

Former Defense Department analyst and Levant expert David Schenker, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, ruled highly unlikely the Syrians doing it themselves. "The Syrians feel perfectly comfortable to kill their own and they do," Schenker said in a telephone interview. "But they don't do it like that. They render them," as they did Kurdish Workers' Party leader Abdullah Ocalan, as Turkish troops amassed on the the Turkish-Syrian border threatening an invasion.

"This is not a case like Ghazi Kanaan, who was the Syrian viceroy in Lebanon," Schenker continued. "In Arabic, they say, 'He was suicided.' He 'killed himself' with two shots to the head. He knew too much about the Hariri assassination."

"They looked at this guy [Mugniyah] as an Iranian official of sorts," Schenker continued. "You think the Syrians are going to kill an Iranian official in their own capital?"

"Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation," Schenker replied, when asked then about the Israelis. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

(You can catch Schenker and other colleagues from various perches blogging on the issue and all things Middle East here).

Israel has denied it carried out the Mugniyah assassination. "Israel rejects the attempt by terrorist elements to ascribe to it any involvement whatsoever in this incident," the office of prime minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement.

"They consider him a terrorist," one mourner at Mugniyah's funeral, Zahra, told the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid. "For us, he is a hero who was fighting our enemy."

February 13, 2008

Google Earth Lands in Hot Water in (Surprise) the Middle East

Reports Monday described how the Israeli town of Kiryat Yam is suing Google for slander after a Google Earth user added a note asserting that the town was built on the ruins of a Palestinian locality following the war of 1948. Google has said that it will not remove the note, which appears on the application's "community layer," because it is not "in any way illegal."

But earlier this month another problem developed that is potentially thornier for Google because it involves the company's official cartographic judgment. The problem comes in the form of a letter to Google's CEO from the National Iranian American Council loudly protesting the inclusion in Google Earth of the term "Arabian Gulf"—along with the more common "Persian Gulf."

Only a few years ago, in 2004, Google's co-founders told shareholders that "focused objectivity" was a trait "most important in Google’s past success" and "most fundamental for its future." But that was before Google Earth. And if the two complaints this month show anything, it's that a map is a highly subjective thing. Including "Arabian Gulf" was a classic hedge on Google's part, probably an attempt to strive for that ideal of objectivity. NIAC's letter, however, explains the term's somewhat untoward history:

The application of false and divisive references made to the Persian Gulf were first observed approximately 50 years ago, and formed part of a pan-Arab strategy aimed at diminishing the status of non-Arab influences in the Middle East. Iran and Israel, being non-Arab states, were the obvious target of this practice within the movement, initially attributed to and adopted by former Egyptian President and strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser, later promulgated and employed (violently, as evidenced by the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980) by the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

I talked with two experts on the region and an official at the U.N. Cartographic Section, all of whom agree with NIAC that Persian Gulf is the preferred, historically accurate term (though Robert Vitalis, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, called the matter simply "an aspect of nationalism" and, in the end, "a futile, unresolvable exercise").

As of this afternoon, according to NIAC, Google had not responded to the protest letter, nor to my requests for comment.

Google would do well to recognize that there can be no pure objectivity when it comes to political mapmaking. What would a map look like if every party's claims were afforded equal respect, without regard to merit or consensus judgment? Should, say, Taiwan really be identified as a province of China, as that government insists? It'll be interesting to see how Google plays the Arabian Gulf issue, if it decides to engage at all. And look for more, not fewer, controversies as the world discovers how addictive tinkering with Google Earth can be.

—Justin Elliott

The Three Trillion Dollar War

freedom-isn%27t-free.jpg

The Bush administration has spent a lot of money in Iraq since White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was fired in 2002 for daring to predict the war might cost as much as $200 billion. An estimate issued last August by the Congressional Budget Office suggested the war will have cost at least $1 trillion before it's over. A September report (PDF) by the Democratic staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee pegged the cost at $1.3 trillion. Now a new book by a Harvard professor and a Nobel Prize winner in economics claims the true cost could be more than twice that—as high as $3 trillion dollars. If you wanted to pay that off with a single wad of $1,000 bills, your billfold would have to be almost 240 miles wide.

In The Three Trillion Dollar War, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Linda Bilmes claim to have laid out the "true cost of the Iraq conflict." Instead of simply including appropriations costs and the estimated costs for the future care of soldiers, as most estimates do, Stiglitz and Bilmes take many other factors into account. They include the costs of paying the interest on the money we've borrowed to finance the war; the increased costs of recruiting and retaining soldiers given the fact there is a war on; the macroeconomic costs, like part of the increase in the cost of oil and the lost economic productivity from spending the money overseas instead of reinvesting it at home; and the cost to the economy of the loss of the dead and the seriously wounded and their caretakers, using a metric called a "Valued Statistical Life."

All this sounds very complicated, and it is. Some will certainly question Bilmes and Stiglitz's calculations. But arguing over the exact cost of the war won't change the fact that defense spending is very high in historical terms. In constant 2008 dollars, this year's military budget is the highest since World War II. And the U.S. military is spending millions of dollars a day in Iraq.

Even so, the financial cost is just one factor that Americans have to consider in deciding whether the war was, and is, worth fighting. The cost in lives and the geopolitical and strategic costs are also serious considerations. The cost in lives is, in some ways, easier to quantify and understand than the cost in dollars. And Americans who read the newspaper (or MotherJones.com) see the geopolitical costs of the war every day. So even if the difference between "an unimaginable amount of money" and "a twice as unimaginable amount of money" seems abstract or silly to you, Bilmes has a point. Speaking at the National Press Club Wednesday, she said: "The bottom line on all of this is if the public is trying to make a decision about whether the benefit of staying in Iraq is worth the money they ought to have an accurate price of what it is costing.... If this war costs significantly more than the administration says it does, then we have a responsibility to say, 'Well actually, this is the cost."

Huckabee is Officially Done

Plucked this from a McCain campaign email I just received.

It's official: the former Governor of Arkansas is toast. Now it's just a matter of time until he realizes it and drops out. But hey, he doesn't have anything else to do (other than firing up that popcorn popper). I say let him have his fun.

Dems Poised to Force Contempt Vote—Really

House Democrats are poised to push a vote to hold White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress. Sound familiar? If so, that's because congressional Dems have been vowing to hold Bolten and Miers to account since last July, when the pair blew off subpoenas compelling them to testify before Congress in connection with the U.S. Attorneys scandal. More than six months later, we're still waiting for the Dems' promised constitutional showdown with the White House.

In late July, the day after the House Judiciary Committee voted to authorize contempt citations against Bolten and Miers, Roll Call reported that the Democrats, citing "the busy House schedule," would hold off on advancing the measure until after the August recess. After House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers offered a "final warning" to the White House in early November, a vote was briefly scheduled for the middle of that month, then quickly postponed until December. Sure enough, December came and went with no House contempt vote (though, the Senate Judiciary Committee finally got around to voting on and approving contempt citations for Bolten and Karl Rove). In January, with contempt supposedly at the top of their agenda, the Democratic leadership again put off dealing with the politically thorny issue, citing their need to hammer out an economic stimulus package with the administration.

That brings us to today, when a number of news outlets are reporting that the House could vote on the contempt citations as early as tomorrow. This afternoon, Conyers introduced two resolutions related to the contempt proceedings, one of which would allow the Judiciary Committee to file suit in federal court if Attorney General Michael Mukasey refuses to enforce contempt charges, as he has already threatened to do. So perhaps the Democrats are moving forward on contempt charges after all. That said, don't be terribly surprised if there's a last minute delay—or if the looming brouhaha with the White House ends without the Dems delivering the hoped for blow to the administration's expansion of executive power.

Wearing White (To A Confirmation Hearing)

Yesterday, in a room full of assembled dignitaries, President Bush’s controversial nominee for the federal district court in Wyoming stuck out like the trial lawyer that he is. It’s the hair, really. In a fashion fancied by many jet-set plaintiffs’ lawyers, Richard Honaker came to his confirmation hearing coiffed with a thick mane of salt-and-pepper gray hair slicked back into a flip of curls at the nape. It’s not hard to imagine that the man might once have sported a ponytail, and not just because of rumors that he once was a Democrat. But what really set Honaker apart from the crowd, perhaps, was his wife Shannon.

Honaker has been a longtime member of the Home School Legal Defense Association and an anti-abortion crusader. As such, he has earned the enduring scorn of national women’s organizations who have branded him something of a cretin. So I half-expected his wife to resemble Phyllis Schlafly. After all, imagine the woman who would marry such a man? Instead, Shannon Honaker looked a lot more like the Ann Coulter without the Botox and anorexia. She is, you might say, hot.

Not only that, but Mrs. Honaker owns a “home-based fashion consulting and clothing business” called Classic Chic. Yesterday, she was wearing one of her own creations, a stark white pantsuit with cropped jacket over a black shirt. Given that it was February and 26 degrees outside, Mrs. Honaker sailed prominently above a sea of the gray flannel of official Washington, where the white suit really doesn’t properly debut until after Memorial Day. After the hearing, Mrs. Honaker told me that while her designs are not available in regular department stores, they apparently have gotten something of a following in Republican fashion circles: At the State of the Union address last month, none other than education secretary Margaret Spellings appeared wearing something from the Classic Chic line…

Clinton to Obama: Yes We Can

Just a few hours after Obama campaign manager David Plouffe insisted that Hillary Clinton has virtually no chance to catch his man in the race for pledged delegates, the Clinton campaign held a conference call saying that they intend to be tied with Obama after the March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas.

Clinton strategist Mark Penn pointed out that Texas' Democratic electorate, which is usually 25 percent Latino, could be as much as 40-50 percent Latino this time around. Ohio, Penn said, is suffering the economic ills that only Hillary Clinton—someone in the "solutions business, not the "promise business"—can heal. Also, in a memo sent around to reporters, Penn pointed out that 41 percent of Ohio's Democratic primary voters in 2004 were white women, a block that is larger than the ones we saw yesterday in Virginia and Maryland.

There are vulnerabilities in Penn's arguments, but also points of strength. Economically minded voters no longer seem to trend to Clinton, no matter how many solutions she has to offer. But white women remain a powerful block for her, and while Latinos in the Potomac Primary went for Obama, they were a tiny percentage of the electorate there and are likely a bad data point when predicting Texas' Latino turnout. The Latino community is Texas is more likely to resemble the one in California that voted heavily for Clinton: more first- and second-generation Latinos that are less assimilated than Mid-Atlantic Latinos and closer to the Latino political machines that are loyal to Clinton.

Team Clinton made sure to point out that they are not focusing solely on Ohio and Texas, however. They mentioned an ad buy in Wisconsin—get ready for the WI/HI primary next Tuesday!—and have apparently set up offices and hired staff in every primary state left on the calendar, plus Puerto Rico. They are ready for a long race, that, in Communications Director Howard Wolfson's words, will ultimately hinge on superdelegates.

Putin to Ukraine: We'll Sell You Natural Gas, But Might Nuke You, Too

Break out your Scorpions records and your parachute pants, for the neo-Cold War is here. Just as your high school's star quarterback now daydreams about past glories while stocking the cereal aisle in your local supermarket, Russia's Vladimir Putin has never quite been able to let go of his KGB past. Like any member of the old Soviet elite, he's gripped the reigns of power with an iron fist and has demonstrated his nostalgia for the once-powerful Motherland by emulating its approach to politics—the political assassinations, the press intimidation, and the corrupt, old-boy political style. Now add military gamesmanship, nuclear sabre-rattling, and economic extortion to the list.

At a Kremlin press conference yesterday, Putin and Viktor Yushchenko, his Ukrainian counterpart (disfigured after being poisoned, allegedly by Russian agents, in the run-up to the Orange Revolution) unveiled a last-minute compromise that would allow Russian natural gas shipments to Ukraine to continue. Russia's state-owned gas monoply Gazprom had threatened to reduce supply by 25 percent until Ukraine agreed to pay down what the company said was a $1.5 billion debt. It was not the first time Putin had used the bitter chill of winter to wage what could literally be called a "cold war"—Russia suspended wintertime natural gas deliveries to Ukraine two years ago, only a month after Yushchenko's Western-leaning regime took power after a disputed election. This winter's threatened reduction in supply had stoked fears of a shortage and price increases in Western Europe, where 80 percent of all natural gas imports, while en route from the Russian Arctic to lucrative Western markets, must first pass through Ukraine. The compromise, reached only minutes before a Russian-imposed deadline on talks, pacified Ukraine by eliminating the participation a Swiss middleman company from natural gas deals in exchange for Russia taking a 50 percent share in the Ukrainian natural gas market. Score one for Putin.

And if that wasn't good enough, at the press conference announcing the deal, Putin pulled out the nuclear card. Asked by a reporter for his reaction to Ukraine's recent application to join the NATO alliance, a particularly touchy subject for an old Soviet, Putin said Russia might retaliate by targeting nuclear missiles at Ukraine, a former Soviet republic. "It's horrible to say and even horrible to think," he said. "Russia could target its missile systems at Ukraine. Imagine that for a second." For his part, Yuschenko made an effort to remain diplomatic and cordial, but quickly responded that the Ukraine has the right to form alliances with whomever it likes, thank you very much.

Meanwhile, also on Tuesday, Russia offered the latest installment of its nostalgic return to military prominence, imagined though it may be, when a Tu-95 long-range, nuclear-ready bomber buzzed the deck of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean, while a second bomber circled about 50 fifty miles away. Such incidents were old-hat during the Cold War, but had fallen off to zero in the years after the Soviet Union's demise. Putin, however, is trying to reinvigorate the Soviet bomber fleet and navy with a more aggressive posture. Stunts like this may play well for Russian domestic consumption (remember the Soviet midshipman in The Hunt for Red October who rejoiced, "Captain's scared them out of the water!"), but the American navy doesn't seem overly concerned. "We knew they were coming," Navy Admiral Gary Roughhead, chief of U.S. naval operations, told the Washington Post. "It was a very predictable flight, early detection, and then we just followed it in." Navy fighters quickly intercepted the bomber after its approach and escorted it away from the carrier group. So, what was the point of all this? "I think what we are seeing is a Russian military, a Russian navy that is emerging, particularly in the case of the navy, desiring to emerge as a global navy." Translation: The Russian armed forces are just trying to fulfill Putin's dream of restoring Russia's military honor. Given the state of the old Red Army, though, it will likely be a long road.

Obama to Clinton: You Can't Catch Me

David Plouffe, Barack Obama's campaign manager, was not gloating the morning after. But he did have a message for Hillary Clinton's camp: you can't catch us.

That is, in delegates awarded via primaries and caucuses.

Speaking to reporters on a conference call on Wednesday morning--after Barack Obama swept Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia by supersized margins--Plouffe was low-key in manner but confident in substance. He maintained that, by his campaign's number, Obama now had a lead of 136 delegates in the race for pledged delegates (that excludes superdelegates). He termed it an "enormous" advantage and noted that Clinton could not close this gap without running up a string of "blowout" wins in the coming primaries, including big states (such as delegate-rich Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania) and other states. "Even the most creative math does not get her back to even in pledged delegates," he insisted.

Spin from a front-runner? Plouffe's math seemed more right than wrong. Under the Democratic Party rules, delegates are awarded proportionally. If Obama's streak comes to an end and he places a close second to Clinton in most of the upcoming contests, she will not net a great many delegates. Clinton will have to beat Obama by large margins in Ohio, Texas and elsewhere to catch up. Plouffe claimed that the Obama campaign has already created a "buffer" in the race for pledged delegates, asserting that "it is unlikely it will be eroded....The math is the math."

The numbers are certainly clear on one point: neither candidate is likely to win enough pledged delegates to reach the magic number needed to snag the nomination. So if Plouffe is correct, the issue becomes, what will the nearly 800 superdelegates do? Could Clinton orchestrate a come-from-behind victory by coaxing a majority of them to back her? Asked about this possibility, Plouffe replied, "We believe the pledged delegate leader will be the nominee." He said not much else on the subject.

"We couldn't be in a stronger position," Plouffe remarked. That's not much of an exaggeration (though winning California would have put Obama in a stronger spot). As of now, Obama has won more states than Clinton, the onetime favorite, and more delegates. In politics, when you're in the lead, spin is easy to do. You can simply tell the truth. Shortly after Plouffe was done, political reporters received an email announcing that Clinton officials would be holding their own conference call with reporters to discuss the "state of the race" and their strategy for victory. But Clinton's new campaign manager would not be participating in the call. After all, she had only been on the job for two days.

Barack Obama's Messiah Complex

Barack Obama has a messiah complex and no one will convince me otherwise.

You can find the prepared version of last night's victory speech here, and you can video of his delivery here. Comparing the two reveals that Obama improvises quite a bit, and does so impressively. But what he improvises is some awfully heady, almost messianic, stuff.

Follow me after the jump.

Here's a lengthy improvised section that I transcribed off the video. It's gorgeous, especially when you hear the crowd respond to it. But Obama puts himself in some exclusive company.

Nothing worthwhile in this country has ever happened unless somebody, somewhere is willing to hope. Somebody is willing to stand up.

Somebody who is willing to stand up when they are told "No you can't" and instead they say, "Yes we can."

That's how this country was founded. A group of patriots declaring independence against a mighty British empire—nobody gave them a chance—but they said, "Yes we can." That's how slaves and abolitionists resisted that wicked system, and how a new president charted a course to ensure we would not remain half slave and half free.

That's how the greatest generation—my grandfather fighting in Patton's Army, my grandmother staying at home with a baby and still working on a Bomber assembly line—how that greatest generation overcame Hitler and fascism, and also lifted themselves up out of a Great Depression.

That's how pioneers went West when people told them it was dangerous, they said, "Yes we can." That's how immigrants traveled from distant shores when people said their fates would be uncertain, "Yes we can." That's how women won the right to vote, how workers won the right to organize, how young people like you traveled down South to march and sit in and go to jail, and some were beaten and some died for freedom's cause. That's what hope is. That's what hope is.

That's what hope is, Madison.

That moment when we shed our fears and our doubts. When we don't settle for what the cynics tell us we have to accept. Because cynicism is a sorry sort of wisdom. When we instead join arm in arm and decide we are going to remake this country, block by block, precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state. That's what hope is.

There's a moment in the life of every generation, when that spirit has to come through if we are to make our mark on history. And this is our moment. This is our time.

This is our moment to do what? To march? To organize? No. To vote for Obama. As if simply by voting for one man, we make a mark upon this country as indelibly as those who fought the Nazis or sat at lunch counters.

But the easiness of Obama's movement isn't what bothers me most. I am profoundly troubled that any candidate would chart the course of American history as follows (and I'm rearranging Obama's history here to make it more chronological):

American Revolutionaries -> Manifest Destiny -> Slaves/Abolitionists -> Suffragettes -> the Labor Movement -> the Greatest Generation -> the Civil Rights Movement -> Himself.

Does this post play unhelpfully into the pernicious and growing Obamaism-as-cult meme that we'll likely see repeated over and over by the right wing if Obama gets the nomination? It does. Sorry. But Obama's rhetoric makes an undeniable suggestion: that his election, not an eight-year administration that successfully implements his vision for America, would represent a moment in America of the grandest, most transformative kind. And that's a bit much.

A Terrorist is Assassinated in Damascus: A Whodunnit

When the news broke that Imad Mugniyah was killed by a car bomb in Damascus on Wednesday, speculation quickly turned to who brought down the wanted Hezbollah terrorist, a man accused of plotting the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut and the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, along with a host of other terrorist attacks.

Naturally, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad seemed a likely candidate (and Hezbollah quickly accused the "Zionists of martyring" him). Israeli security officials made no secret that they considered Mugniyah's death a service to humanity. "I don’t know who killed him, but whoever did should be congratulated," former Israeli military intelligence official Gideon Ezra told Israel Radio. Ultimately, the office of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert denied Israeli involvement, saying in a statement that “Israel rejects the attempt by terrorist elements to ascribe to it any involvement whatsoever in this incident."

"There are a lot of motivations to kill him, but in particular anti-Syrian groups have the means and the motive," said former CIA officer Robert Baer, who served in Beirut and spent extensive time investigating Mugniyah, in a telephone interview. "That would be [the family of assassinated Lebanese prime minister Rafik] Hariri and his son. You've got Lebanese Christians, you've got the Druze. They would be pushing back for the deputies of Lebanon's parliament that were assassinated they think by Hezbollah or Syria."

"It’s a huge embarrassment for Syria," Baer added. "Here’s probably the most da