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June 28, 2008

MoJo Convo: Iran Panic? Talk About It With the Experts

MoJo writer Laura Rozen asked an Israeli intel correspondent, an Iranian American activist, an arms expert, a former peace negotiator, and an anti-war intellectual:

How likely is a scenario in which the US or Israel strikes Iran before Bush leaves office? (Or is the Left falling for the hawks' propaganda?)

They'll be checking in on this MoJo Blog entry starting Monday to discuss their answers with readers—and each other. Want to talk to Daniel Levy, Yossi Melman, Trita Parsi, Danny Postel, and Jacqueline Shire about their take on Iran? Now's your chance. Leave a comment below for one of the five guest MoJo Blog moderators and they'll respond.

(Thursday Update: You can read some final thoughts from the forum participants at a follow up thread here.)

Daniel Levy, a former Middle East peace negotiator, is Director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation, and of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation:

I'm going to look at the Israeli side of the equation as I think this is the direction that any action is most likely to come from, although the blowback would of course most likely impact the US (and perhaps embroil it in a war with Iran). Also I will not address how disastrous the consequences of a military strike would be in my opinion, notably for Israel and its supporters in the US.

Bottom line: I still think a strike is still less rather than more likely, although I am increasingly concerned, more so than in the past. The Israeli political timetable may add a new element encouraging action, given that Prime Minister Olmert will remain in office only a limited number of months and Defense Minister Barak needs to justify why he has stayed in the Olmert government. This of course dovetails the US political calendar. These considerations are not sufficient to precipitate action, but if the Israeli Defense establishment is of the opinion that eventually a strike is inevitable (and I am not convinced it is) then the chances of a short timetable are enhanced.

The bombing of the Osirak Iraqi reactor in 1981, and of a suspected Syrian nuclear site in September '07, are problematic precedents in that they encourage a false Israeli presumption regarding the efficacy and minimal cost of a military strike. Iran is a different story. Israel's recent regional moves—negotiations with Syria, cease-fire with Hamas, and even the likely prisoner exchange with Hezbollah—all suggest a concerted effort to blunt some of the instruments that Iran could deploy in the region. Actually all of these moves make sense, but would be smarter as a backdrop to American engagement with Iran (I could explain more on this later). So why all the Israeli bluff and bluster? Well, it might be to push the P 5+1 and others into squeezing Iran harder, or part of Olmert's domestic spin that this is the wrong time to change Prime Minister. But few believe that the sanctions will lead to a unilateral Iranian climb down, and the political explanation is unsatisfying. Hence the worry. Still, the Israel-America no-surprises rule would certainly apply to a mission against Iran, so if Israel is planning something (and again I'm not convinced) then opposition from the Pentagon can prevent it.

Yossi Melman is national security correspondent for Israeli daily Haaretz and co-author of Every Spy a Prince, and The Nuclear Sphinx of Iran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran:

Very, very unlikely. The military and intelligence contingency plans to attack Iran are still in the making. From the operational point of view, Israel and the US are not ready yet. The supportive political-diplomatic environment has not been created yet. Attacking Iran is considered by Israeli military and political decision makers as a last resort. I assume that they and the international community, including the US, are waiting to see the results of next year's presidential elections in Iran, to be held in May 2009.

Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US and president of the National Iranian American Council:

The recent war rhetoric coming out of Israel seems more geared towards ensuring that America keeps its military option on the table, than towards signalling that Israel itself is prepared to take military action. Even if Israel does have the capability to strike Iran—which is debatable—Israel certainly does not have the capability to successfully eliminate all Iranian nuclear facilities. Would Israel initiate an attack—knowing it would fail—only to force the US to step in and utilize its military option? Possibly, but it would come at a great expense to Israel: the Jewish state's deterrence is to a large extent based on the outside world not knowing what Israel can and cannot do. By attacking Iran and failing to destroy the Iranian facilities, Israel would reveal the limitations of its capabilities and strike a major blow against its own deterrence.

Danny Postel is the author of Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism and a member of Chicago's No War on Iran Coalition:

None of us can be certain at this point whether the US or Israel will attack Iran, but I read recent signs as being just ominous enough that I'd rather err on the side of being too worried than of not being worried enough. Even that paragon of cool sobriety The Economist now concludes that Israel's recent maneuvers suggest that it might not be bluffing. One thing we do know is that the intellectual runway is being slicked for an attack. John Bolton has floated the suggestion that Israel will attack after the November elections but before the next president takes office, while Daniel Pipes has evoked the same scenario, only with the US doing the job. Pipes thinks Bush will attack only if Obama wins (the assumption being that McCain would take care of business himself), whereas Bolton sees Israel attacking no matter who wins. Norman Podhoretz not only "prays" that Bush will bomb Iran but has personally urged the president to do so in a private meeting between the two. (Bush, according to Podhoretz, "gave not the slightest indication of whether he agreed," but "listened very intently" and "looked very solemn.") The writing on the wall looks deadly serious to me. I'd rather fall for the hawks' propaganda than awake one morning to find out that I'd underestimated the threat. But even if it is just posturing, it's a very dangerous game with potentially cataclysmic consequences.

Jacqueline Shire is a senior analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, and served previously as a foreign affairs officer in the Department of State's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs:

For a host of reasons, ably articulated by others, I think the likelihood that the US attacks Iran before Bush leaves office to be quite low (due to reluctance to undermine Iraq's fragile stability or take on another military conflict with uncertain consequences, the economic impact of higher oil prices, opposition from international partners, and a pragmatic understanding that a strike may only drive Iran's nuclear program underground or fail to set back irretrievably the enrichment effort).

For similar reasons I believe that Israel too will ultimately decide to hold off, and suggest that if Israel were going to strike Iran, it might have already done so.

That aside, there is an uncertainty to the Israel-Iran-strike calculus that bears examining. Over the summer and into the fall, we can expect that Iran will continue doggedly, if imperfectly, installing and operating centrifuges at Natanz, expanding and improving upon their uranium enrichment efforts where possible. Barring a last minute breakthrough, we can also expect the formal rejection of the latest diplomatic offer made by the EU's Javier Solana in June, and the start of more sanctions discussions at the UN Security Council.

Add to this dispiriting mix some incendiary rhetoric from an over-confident Tehran toward Israel, and Israel's reported conclusion that Iran’s timetable to a bomb is closer to late-2009 than the US intelligence community's assessment of mid-next decade, and we may wake up to a smoldering Natanz some morning before 2009.

While not likely in a greater-than-50-percent sense, this avoidable scenario depends largely on how Tel Aviv reads the news from Tehran—continued progress on enrichment, a rejection of diplomatic overtures, over-confidence in the political leadership—and marries it with other factors, in particular its own domestic political considerations, its assessment of how Sens. McCain or Obama would address Iran, and whether there has been any progress internationally on how to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions.

In short, who knows? Israel has very deliberately maintained opacity on this question, veering between shows of force and official denials. We are left to continue watching closely all the variables and pressing for a diplomatic resolution.

June 27, 2008

Newspaper Lays Off Designer Behind "Dying Newsroom"

What does it say about the state of the newspaper industry if it can't even chronicle its own demise?

That's the question prompted by this sad piece of news from Editor & Publisher today: Martin Gee, the longtime designer and illustrator who was behind Mother Jones' recent online photo essay, The Dying Newsroom, has been laid off from his job at the San Jose Mercury News. E&P quotes the Mercury News' publisher's explanation for this most recent round of layoffs: "We have had a very challenging 2008."

Gee's photos document the cumulative effect of layoffs in which the paper lost close to half its staff. They are surprisingly touching photos of ordinary office gear, receiverless phones, and the like, left behind by hastily departing colleagues. Gee wrote with one of the images: "I still believe in this place. I grew up with this paper, and this is the paper I always wanted to be at."

See the photo essay here.

Do You Forgive Scott McClellan?

As you are undoubtedly aware, Scott McClellan is traveling throughout the country promoting his book What Happened—and his conscience—to those willing to listen. Earlier this week, I joined an audience for a McClellan book event here in San Francisco, where not long ago McClellan was routinely castigated as Bush’s chief apologist. Here, in the heart of the progressive movement, McClellan would finally learn whether he's gained a comfortable landing pad among liberals.

As the event kicked off, it was unclear how the audience would respond to McClellan—one woman explained that she didn't approve of "spilling the beans" to redeem oneself. But what McClellan’s true motivations for the book are, we cannot know. Possibilities range from money to spite to remorse to a genuine belief in the need to advance openness in government.

Yet after sitting through his hour-long presentation, in the same hot event room where I celebrated my high school senior formal, I left with the strong sense that McClellan is fighting hard to steer clear of Bush’s doomed legacy. And one thing seemed clear: McClellan garners much of his recent support, moral and monetary, from many of his former detractors on the left.

To be sure, McClellan tells a good story, one which this audience enjoyed. A Texas boy, raised in a political family that taught him the value of honest public service, finds himself caught in a partisan White House bubble that’s pushing the nation to war. Realizing that he’s wrapped up in a "permanent campaign culture," he struggles to overcome his loyalty to a President he once loved and return to his founding principles.

And McClellan hit all the right notes. I noticed how the otherwise subdued audience applauded, laughed, and hooted each time McClellan characterized Bush as clueless, Cheney as secretive, and Rove as manipulative. His suggestions for their “tell-all” books were especially well received. (Cheney’s—No More Secrets; Rove's—The Lies I Told: To Whom and Why. "Scooter" Libby’s—Well, Pardon Me.)

It almost seemed Pavlovian: McClellan would say, “The War in Iraq was not absolutely necessary.” And the audience would applaud. McClellan would describe how Fox News lands privileged interviews. And the audience would chuckle knowingly. Then McClellan would recount a story about encountering lifelong republicans who are refusing to vote red in 2008. And the audience would applaud with gusto.

By the end of the event, the couple hundred people attending by and large seemed willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, accepting McClellan’s portrayal of himself as a victim of Washington’s destructive culture. Of the several self-described progressive audience members I spoke with, most could excuse, or even forgive, McClellan for his role as Bush’s press secretary. Several older gentlemen reminded me that he was “just the press guy, he didn’t make policy.” Two women from Berkeley said they forgive him because it was clear that he sacrificed to write the book. A 15-year old high school student, who was excused from class to attend his first political event, was enamored with McClellan’s courage to speak truth to power.

It’s reasonable for progressives, and for that matter Americans, to be aggravated and upset by this administration. But is McClellan—the enemy of my enemy—my friend? It’s disappointing that the left's visceral disdain for Bush & Co. is so cliché at this point that Bush’s former spokesman, a chief enabler of the Iraq War, is able to leverage caricatured talking points to gain support and empathy.

Sitting in the “ballroom” after the event, I thought back to the night of my senior dance and how I watched a fellow classmate drink down a live goldfish on a dare. This week I witnessed many fellow progressives drink McClellan’s Kool-Aid.

—Jesse Finfrock

Photo from the Wikimedia Commons.

McCain Campaign Responds to the Obama/Clinton Unity Event. Kind Of

When a presidential campaign wants to counter a big media push from its opponent, it tends to trot out surrogates with relevant experience or connections. When John McCain toured the everglades, for example, the Obama campaign put Florida's Democratic senator, Bill Nelson, on a conference call with reporters. The national press cared little that Nelson was the particular person voicing the Obama campaign's talking points. But the local papers were sure to give Nelson's anti-McCain arguments a more prominent place in their stories about McCain's visit because of Nelson's importance.

So it was real head-scratcher when, after Senators Clinton and Obama spoke Friday afternoon in Unity, New Hampshire, the McCain campaign held a conference call with former Acting Governor of Massachusetts Jane Swift.

New Hampshire has two Republican Senators, Judd Gregg and John Sununu. Either one could have devoted twenty minutes to a call. After all, a talented politician could have done this call in his or her sleep — Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton may have hosted a "unity" event in New Hampshire today, but it is John McCain who has a real history of working across party lines to deliver real results for Americans. Any questions?

It is particularly confusing because Jane Swift was wildly unpopular as governor. She was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1998 and took over the top spot when the Governor was made an ambassador in 2001. Swift basically spent two years alienating people and making ill-advised decisions. She used a State Police helicopter to fly home to Western Massachusetts. She asked staffers to take vacation days to help her move. She had staffers spend unpaid time babysitting her kids and running errands for her. At a certain point, college newspapers were calling for her to resign. When Mitt Romney returned to Massachusetts with national ambitions, the Republican Party cleared Swift out and gave Romney the chance to win the governor's seat, which he did.

Swift only spoke a few minutes on Friday's call. She said what was expected. "I guess in looking at the event in appropriately named Unity today, it made me wish that Senator Obama had actually worked as hard to bridge the partisan divide in Washington DC, during his short time there, as he is working hard apparently to bridge the divide in his own party with Hillary Clinton voters." The source of her knowledge of the Senate went unexplained. She added, "I think that it is really important to have someone elected who's words mean something."

That was followed by two half-hearted questions from reporters about whether McCain had done anything to encourage others in his party to be embrace bipartisanship. McCain has worked across party lines, the reporters pointed out, but George W. Bush and McCain's fellow Republicans in Congress have fostered deep divides. When has McCain shown leadership on the issue of unity?

Swift pointed out that McCain has worked across the aisle on immigration and other issues, and at times will encourage his fellow Republicans to do the same. He led by example, essentially. Eventually a staffer chimed in to help. Together, the staffer and Swift added that McCain hosts events in which he takes questions from Democrats and independents. The relevance of the comment to the question was tangential, at best.

After two questions, the staffer, sounding vexed, said, "It seems we are out of questions" and hung up.

McCain 2008. Catch the fever.

Where's Your Economic Stimulus Check?

However my liberal friends and I may have tsk'd the Bush administration for claiming that $600 checks would save America, we broke liberals sure were excited to get our hands on that money. Congress passed the Economic Stimulus Act in February, giving the IRS a couple months to get payments to some 130 million taxpayers when it was already in the middle of filing season, and giving some 130 millions taxpayers reason to start freaking out about when—when?!—they were going to get their supplement. Thus, I wasn't shocked when I called to do just that and a recording told me that the IRS is currently experiencing heavy call volume and led me though an automated menu that ultimately told me to keep my pants on for three more weeks, and hung up. I had to wonder: How bad must the ESA suck for the IRS?

Pretty bad, according to testimony of national taxpayer advocate Nina E. Olson before the House last week. The IRS hauled ass to develop new programming code, create new pages and a stimulus calculator on its website, mail notices to more than 100 million taxpayers, mail information packages to 20 million more, develop outreach initiatives for seniors, and staff 700 walk-in sites in a "Super Saturday" assistance bonanza. By the first week of June, the IRS had received 27.7 million calls concerning economic stimulus payments. For that same week, call attempts were up 279 percent versus the same period last year. The level of service on the economic stimulus hotline was 30 percent. To deal, the IRS has shifted so many employees from account management and collections that collections will be reduced by $565 million.

Olson worried about the effects of delays and exceptions on taxpayers in her testimony, but admitted that, overall, the IRS is doing a pretty amazing job. Only 1,500 economic stimulus checks have been transmitted in the wrong bank account. About 350,000 people didn't get the additional funds for their dependents. About 20 million taxpayers who purchased refund anticipation loans or checks will get their checks tardily. Even those errors, the IRS says, will be rectified by mid-July. According to the IRS Web schedule, my check would be "mailed no later than (and received a few days after)" May 16. The agency sent me a letter on June 9 saying that I could expect to receive it by June 13. I called fruitlessly a few days after that, and my check came shortly after. So where's your check? It's probably coming. Keep your pants on for three more weeks.

Hypocrisy Meter Explodes

If you were to identify the two senators least qualified to take bold action in defense of marriage, who would they be? Well, no matter what side of the aisle you're on, you'd probably point to the guy who was caught trying to have gay sex in an airport bathroom and the guy accused of being a serial john, right? It's hard to deny that they are the two members of the Senate who have done the most to wreck their own marriages.

Well, it's funny how things work. Ten senators have introduced what they call the "Marriage Protection Amendment." It would, if passed, change the federal constitution to define marriage as a "union of a man and a woman." And lo and behold, Larry Craig and David Vitter are two of the ten sponsoring senators. No one in the Republican leadership pulled them aside and said, "Hey guys, why don't you sit this one out? You know, for the sake of our credibility."

If conservatism isn't dead by 2009, irony will finish it off.

Hey, Just FYI — Afghanistan Is Going Really Poorly

According to CNN, the number of foreign forces killed in Afghanistan in the month of June has reached 39. That's the highest monthly toll since our 2001 invasion of that country.

Obama, Clinton Slowly Coming Together, or Cash Heals All Wounds

Is anyone surprised? This is how you make friends in Washington.

Senators Obama and Clinton met yesterday and came away with clear messages for their respective supporters. Obama said: Dear donors, please help Sen. Clinton retire her campaign debt. I will lead the way by writing a $2,300 check to her, and will have my wife do the same.

Clinton had the natural response: Dear donors, we must elect Barack Obama. Please donate to him.

And with that, everything is peachy. Conversations about Clinton as VP, or a Clinton surrogate as VP, have been tabled for a later date, or perhaps forever. The pair will campaign together today in the town of Unity, New Hampshire. Both the candidate and the ex-candidate are insisting they expect to have a wonderful time. It was that simple.

June 26, 2008

Arnold Has Had Enough of Your Offshore Drilling Nonsense

Not all environmentally friendly Republicans get along. Here's California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) at the Florida Climate Change Summit in Miami, hosted by Governor Charlie Crist (also R), who recently made a strong bid to save the everglades:

"Politicians have been throwing around all kinds of ideas in response to the skyrocketing energy prices, from the rethinking of nuclear power to pushing biofuels and more renewables and ending the ban on offshore drilling, it goes on and on the list. But, anyone who tells you this will lower our gas prices anytime soon is blowing smoke."

Haha, whoops. John McCain supports offshore drilling because it will help Americans psychologically with high gas prices, and Gov. Schwarzenegger's host, Gov. Crist, recently switched his position to match the party's nominee. For more on offshore drilling, uh, read MoJoBlog.

House Judiciary Committee To Subpoena Mukasey

Rep. John Conyers is the quintessential congressional Democrat. He's polite and gracious and knows how things work on the Hill. For the past year, he's been patiently sending off a variety of polite and gracious letters to Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking if, please, he wouldn't mind handing over to the House Judiciary Committee a bunch of documents related to various investigations it's conducting on such topics as the New Hampshire phone jamming case or the enforcement record of the Justice Department's civil rights division. Not so graciously, Mukasey has all but told the elder statesman to blow away.

So in May, Conyers got serious and told Mukasey that if he didn't respond to some of these document requests by the 16th, Conyers was going to have to issue a subpoena. The 16th came and went and still no documents. Conyers sent one last letter on June 18 making basically the same request, and once again, Mukasey ignored him. So now Conyers, it seems, is going to make good on his threat. The subcommittee on commercial and administrative law, chaired by Rep. Linda Sanchez, voted today to authorize the full Judiciary Committee to issue the subpoenas, the first step in forcing Justice to be overseen by Congress. Sanchez said in a statement, "The Department of Justice is trying to run out the clock on congressional investigations of possible misconduct. We have taken this step because the Department has indicated that it will not voluntarily comply with Congress’ constitutionally mandated oversight role. There are questions in various investigations that the American people deserve to have answered.”

Yoo and Addington Visit Congress, Say Nothing

Today's House Judiciary Committee questioning of John Yoo and David Addington, architects of the Bush Administration's interrogation policies, was not impressive.

Yoo was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel and Addington was and is Dick Cheney's consigliere. They were present at the formation of the administration's policies on which interrogation tactics are permissible and which are not, and they have spent the six or seven years since revisiting, studying, and defending those policies. Some of the congressmen questioning them weren't even in Congress when the policies were formed, and none of them have focused on these issues full-time.

As a result, the questioning was at times laughably one-sided. Addington often showed his questioners little respect, and deliberately provided long and unnecessary citations to chew up their allotted time. Despite his reputation as a whip smart lawyer, he repeatedly claimed to not remember certain key meetings or events. Yoo, either because he has a greater sense of shame or because he is simply a less artful participant in the hearings dance, would admit that he did know certain things but that he couldn't specify them because the Department of Justice had prohibited him in advance for doing so.

The chairman of the hearing, Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), repeatedly responded to Yoo's claims that the DOJ prohibited him from answering by demanding to know exactly what privilege Yoo was invoking in order to avoid testifying. Yoo asserted two things: first, attorney-client privilege, which he largely dropped after Nadler pointed out that such privilege was not allowable in Congress, only in courts; and second, that answering would inevitably reveal sensitive matters of national security.

Eventually, however, it became clear that in some instances, neither of those assertions applied. At one point, for example, Yoo insisted that he couldn't say whether a military program called Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) was the basis for the administration's interrogation methods, supposedly due to the DOJ's instructions. Nadler pointed out that Steve Bradbury, the current head of the DOJ's Office of Special Counsel, Yoo's old unit, admitted to Congress that SERE was in fact the basis for interrogations. The guy sending Yoo the instructions had answered the question Yoo claimed that he couldn't. Neither a vague attorney-client privilege nor national security were at question.

At another juncture, Yoo was asked if then-Attorney General John Ashcroft ever expressed concern that Yoo was communicating too frequently with Addington and other members of the White House, instead of with him. Yoo said that under the DOJ's instructions, he couldn't answer.

Yoo said the DOJ has already decided that the subjects in question fell within either attorney-client privilege or "executive deliberative process privilege." It slowly dawned on everyone, including Yoo, that Yoo's position was that before the DOJ had heard today's questions, it already knew the answers would be impermissible. And further, it had the right to issue a blanket prohibition on Yoo's most problematic answers. Eventually Yoo stopped trying to justify the instructions from the DOJ, pleading with Nadler, "The Department of Justice gave me these instructions, sir, and I can't go beyond them. These are the instructions they gave me in an email and I have to follow them."

As you would expect, the congressmen lost their cool, repeatedly. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) wasted several of his five minutes arguing with Yoo over the definition of the word "implement," or, more accurately, whether Yoo knew the definition of the word "implement." Rep. Mel Watt (D-NC) choose to ignore Yoo and Addington entirely, calling the process of questioning them akin to "banging my head against the wall," and spoke with a Democratic witness for his five minutes.

Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) seemed to realize that he couldn't catch the witnesses in a contradiction, nor get them to admit to anything they hadn't admitted to previously. Even on the question of whether or not the president has the right to bury a detainee alive, the assembled congressmen couldn't get a straight answer. Instead, Davis lectured the witnesses on their arrogance. When these policies were being formed, he told the witnesses, you had a Republican House and Republican Senate. "You had a Congress that was a rubber stamp for the administration's national security agenda.... Everyone in this room knows to an absolute certainty that they would have given you everything you wanted in October 2001 if had you bothered to ask." If the Administration had gone to the heads of the appropriate congressional committees, they would have rewritten the laws to make the Administration's decisions easier and better founded. If you had done this, Davis said to Yoo and Addington, you wouldn't be sitting here alone defending indefensible policy. Congress would share the blame.

It was the only point Davis could make. Yoo and Addington had little to say in response.

White House Won't Read Emails About Global Warming

What does the White House do when you send it an email about the need to control CO2 emissions? Refuse to read the email, of course. If you still need convincing that our country is run by toddlers, head on over to The Blue Marble and read all about it.

Supreme Court Overturns DC Handgun Ban

So much for that vaunted era of good will on the Roberts court. The media have been suggesting all year that after all its splintered, contentious decisions in 2007, the Supreme Court's conservative majority has been working hard to find some common ground with the liberals and to just get along better for the good of the country. The story line seemed to hold up all term, as the court issued one 6-3 or 7-1 decision after another. But today, the court issued a whopper of a 5-4 decision that split entirely on ideological grounds. Saving the biggest case for last, the court ended the term by releasing its opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court upheld a lower court ruling invalidating the District’s strict ban on handgun ownership.

The case was unusual in large part because the court hasn’t ruled on a Second Amendment case in 70 years, but also because the Solicitor General—the legal arm of the Bush administration at the court—supported the District, while the Vice President entered into the case on his own to recommend overturning the city’s gun ban. During the oral arguments in the spring, the justices spent a great deal of time mulling over whether early settlers in this country would have needed guns to protect themselves from grizzly bears or for hunting, a sign that the right to bear arms extended beyond the well-regulated militia identified in the language of the Second Amendment. So it’s no surprise that hunting figures prominently in the majority opinion, written by Justice Scalia, who has, of course, spent a great deal of time hunting with the vice president.

Scalia suggests that the District and its supporters (including Justice Stevens, at whom he makes several caustic digs) are foolish to think that the right to bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment applies only to a military context, given how much hunting those drafters of the Constitution did. He writes, “[I]f “bear arms” means, as the petitioners and the dissent think, the carrying of arms only for military purposes, one simply cannot add “for the purpose of killing game.” The right “to carry arms in the militia for the purpose of killing game” is worthy of the mad hatter. Thus, these purposive qualifying phrases positively establish that “to bear arms” is not limited to military use.”

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer points out that nothing in the District’s handgun ban would have infringed upon city residents’ ability to go hunting. Indeed, unless they really intend to use handguns to shoot rats and pigeons in the alley, D.C. residents have to leave town to find game worth killing anyway. But the practical concerns of the District didn’t carry much weigh with Scalia, who not only struck down the handgun ban, but also found that requiring guns in the home to have trigger locks was also unconstitutional.

The court’s majority did throw a bone to the law enforcement community, which had feared that if the found that the Constitution protected an individual right to bear arms, rather than a collective one, it would severely undercut efforts to keep guns off the street and out of the hands of bad guys. Scalia tries to allay those concerns by writing, “The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

On a practical level, the decision simply means that for the first time in 30 years, D.C. residents will be able to get a license to keep handguns at home. Since it’s clear that huge numbers of city residents are already keeping guns at home illegally, it’s hard to see how this is going to have much of an impact on things one way or another, though perhaps the rats should start to worry.

Photo by flickr user dubswede used under a Creative Commons license.

Federal Investigations of Pentagon Intrigues: Don't Forget the Chalabi Leak

Regarding my recent articles on signs of a federal investigation seemingly looking at at least one Pentagon official, a colleague reminded me of the following. That the Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency did forward a crimes report to the Justice Department on the question of who leaked to Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi the allegation that the U.S. had broken Iran's communications codes in Iraq, a detail which Chalabi allegedly shared with his Iranian intelligence interlocutor.

For instance, revisit this Newsweek piece:

NEWSWEEK has learned that the National Security Agency first uncovered evidence indicating Chalabi's possible compromises of U.S. intelligence and sent a criminal referral to the FBI requesting an investigation into the alleged leak to Iran. A similar referral was sent to the FBI by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which until recently was responsible for managing Pentagon payments to Chalabi's group and for supervising its intelligence-collection efforts.

Last week, U.S. intelligence officials requested that NEWSWEEK and several other media organizations refrain from publishing some details about what kind of intelligence information Chalabi and the INC were alleged to have given to the Iranians. After some details surfaced in print and TV reports earlier this week, however, officials withdrew their requests, leading to a spate of media reports alleging that Chalabi or one of his associates told the Iranians that U.S. intelligence had cracked a secret code system used by the Iranian intelligence service. U.S. political activists close to Chalabi have told reporters in recent days that Chalabi learned about the codebreaking in Baghdad from a drunken U.S. official.

The evidence that Chalabi had compromised U.S. codebreaking was disclosed to President Bush and Vice President Cheney several weeks ago and was a factor in the decision to raid the INC's headquarters in Baghdad last month. It also influenced high-level Bush administration efforts to distance the administration in recent days from Chalabi, who had once been viewed by Pentagon civilians as a favored candidate to replace Saddam Hussein as Iraq's government leader. ...

Officials of the NSA and DIA declined to comment. But law-enforcement sources confirmed that the FBI has opened an investigation into the codebreaking leak. The investigation will look into whether Chalabi or his group supplied information about U.S. codebreaking efforts to the Iranians. But, given that Chalabi is not a U.S. citizen and does not have a U.S. security clearance, the more critical issue for investigators will be to find out who in the U.S. government might have leaked such highly sensitive information to Chalabi and the INC, some officials say. Law-enforcement sources indicated that the American investigation will likely focus on whether sensitive information might have been leaked to Chalabi by officials in either the Pentagon or the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. ...

(Though this article indicates it was updated in October 2007, I believe it was originally published in May 2004.) I am told that a report in the Wall Street Journal a couple years back confirmed this investigation was still active.

Stay tuned.

June 25, 2008

Obama's Campaign Manager Displays the Confidence that Comes with $300 Million

David Plouffe looks ready to roll. At a Washington, D.C., press conference, Barack Obama's campaign manager surveyed the general election political landscape for several dozen reporters, and he spoke confidently, like a man who will have the money to do all that he believes is necessary and optional. Which he is, because he can expect to have $200 to $300 million to deploy--now that Obama has decided to sidestep the public financing system (which awards $85 million to party nominees) and raise much more from individual donors.

Plouffe repeatedly noted that the Obama campaign will have the resources to challenge John McCain in practically every state and to pursue multiple strategies for victory. That is, the campaign can attempt to win by holding on to every state John Kerry won in 2004 and swinging only Ohio from R to D, or it could win by bagging Iowa plus Colorado and New Mexico. Or how about losing Pennsylvania but winning Virginia and North Carolina? Plouffe claimed that Obama was already competitive in states that are not traditionally Democratic in presidential races, such as Alaska and Montana and that he can make a run at McCain in Georgia (where Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr, a former GOP congressman from Georgia, might draw votes from McCain). Plouffe has the money to invest in a number of game plans--to run ads and set up staff in various states. And as the election approaches, he will be able to determine which states to stick with or abandon. He's in a candy store with plenty of allowance.

How will he use the money? Plouffe told the reporters that a top priority is to "shift the electorate." He wants to spend a lot on registering African-Americans and voters under the age of 40 to "readjust the electorate" in assorted states so the voting pools in these states are more pro-Obama. "A couple of points here, a couple of points there," he says, and red states can go blue. Especially smaller states, where a swing of 10,000 votes could be decisive. And, he emphasized, his campaign will have sufficient resources to identify the people it needs to register, contact them directly, and mount targeted get-out-the-vote efforts. The campaign, he said, is not just going to set up registration tables outside community events.

And there's more. Plouffe boasted that Obama's campaign will not have only an edge in volume (more volunteers, more organizers, more door-knocking, more phone-banking, more precinct work, more advertising); it will have an advantage in quality. There's a "persuasion army" working on behalf of Obama, he said. He pointed to polls showing that Obama supporters and Democrats are far more enthusiastic about this election than McCain supporters and Republicans. Consequently, Obama persuaders--supporters who volunteer or merely talk up Obama among friends and relatives--are likely to do a better job than McCain persuaders. This is "a hard thing to quantify," Plouffe remarked. But he added, "we think it means a lot."

It was an impressive performance: more cash, more volunteers, more ads, more opportunities to go on offense, more enthusiasm, more...everything. And when I asked Plouffe about possible racial bias among voters, he said that based on the campaign's own research, "we certainly don't believe it will be a major impact....It's not a barrier for the people who will be deciding this election." In other words, voters who won't vote for Obama because he is biracial are the same voters who wouldn't vote for any Democratic nominee. Is Plouffe right about that? Well, he seemed confident. But, then, he seemed confident about everything. He did acknowledge that all elections have unforeseen twists and turns. Yet whatever comes, he and Obama will not have the excuse, "if only we had more money, we could have tried...." Plouffe essentially said that he is going to play every angle he can imagine. And that's not spin.

Feingold and Dodd Take to the Floor of the Senate

Last night, Chris Dodd took to the floor of the Senate and made an impassioned plea to his colleagues not to support the House FISA legislation. The video, and text are available here.

Earlier today, Russell Feingold followed suit, in words that echoed his remarks in response to my question at a New America Foundation event on Monday. Here's a snippet:

This legislation has been billed as a compromise between Republicans and Democrats. We are asked to support it because it is a supposedly reasonable accommodation of opposing views. Let me respond as clearly as possible: This bill is not a compromise. It is a capitulation. This bill will effectively and unjustifiably grant immunity to companies that allegedly participated in an illegal wiretapping program – a program that more than 70 members of this body still know virtually nothing about. And this bill will grant the Bush Administration – the same administration that developed and operated this illegal program for more than five years – expansive new authorities to spy on Americans’ international communications. If you don’t believe me, here is what Senator Bond had to say about the bill: “I think the White House got a better deal than even they had hoped to get.” And House Minority Whip Roy Blunt said this: “The lawsuits will be dismissed. There is simply no question that Democrats who had previously stood strong against immunity and in support of civil liberties were on the losing end of this backroom deal."

I think it’s safe to say that even many who voted for the Protect America Act last year came to believe it was a mistake to pass that legislation. And while the House deserves credit for refusing to pass the Senate bill in February, and for securing the changes that are in this new bill, this bill is also a serious mistake…Mr. President, the immunity provision is a key reason for that. It is a key reason for my opposition to this legislation and for that of so many of my colleagues and so many Americans. No one should be fooled about the effect of this bill. Under its terms, the companies that allegedly participated in the illegal wiretapping program will walk away from these lawsuits with immunity. There is simply no question about it, and anyone who says that this bill preserves a meaningful role for the courts to play in deciding these cases is wrong…But I’m concerned that the focus on immunity has diverted attention away from the other very important issues at stake in this legislation. In the long run, I don’t believe this will be remembered as the ‘immunity’ bill. This legislation is going to be remembered as the legislation in which Congress granted the executive branch the power to sweep up all of our international communications with very few controls or oversight.

On the other hand, moments ago Diane Feinstein just announced that she's read the Department of Justice's legal memos, the written requests from the White House to the telecommunications firms, and met with representatives from those firms, and after contemplating that balanced body of information, has decided to support the legislation.

Good Gov't Groups Push McCain, Obama on Bundling Disclosure

Eight campaign finance reform and watchdog organizations sent letters to John McCain and Barack Obama Wednesday asking them to identify exactly how much each of their bundlers has raised.

Bundlers are the closest thing to fat cats in today's fundraising landscape. Each individual can only donate $4,600 to a presidential candidate ($2,300 in the primary and $2,300 more in the general, if the candidate is declining public funds), but a bundler can lean on all of his contacts to put together hundreds of other people's donations, thus delivering anywhere from $50,000 to many millions to the candidate.

For that kind of money, a donor can expect some influence.

And that's why the eight groups — Campaign Finance Institute, the Center for Responsive Politics, Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters, Public Citizen, the Sunlight Foundation, and U.S. PIRG — are asking McCain and Obama to make public how much bundlers collect.

This isn't really an unreasonable request. According to the reform group Public Citizen:

In 2004, Bush provided the names and states residence of bundlers who raised $100,000 (called “Pioneers”) or $200,000 (“Rangers”). The information was displayed in an obvious place on his campaign Web site and appeared to be published promptly. Kerry provided lists of bundlers who raised at least $50,000 or $100,000.

And indeed, the Obama and McCain campaigns are already halfway to compliance. The Obama campaign puts the name of every bundler over $50,000 on its website. Occupations, states of residence, and specific amounts raises are missing, however, and the list is not easily accessed from the campaign's homepage. Moreover, the largest category is "over $200,000." Considering that Obama will soon be meeting with fundraisers who bundled over a million for Hillary Clinton, said Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer, the $200,000 cap seems "quaint."

John McCain, who has inherited a number of George Bush's fundraisers, also discloses his bundlers. Cities and states of residence are included, but occupations and specific amounts are not. The highest category is "$250,000 or more."

But the good government groups want more. Both the McCain and Obama campaigns have set up joint fundraising accounts with their respective national parties. Currently, a large donor is invited to write a single check to that account, with party staffers distributing the money. Each donor can give $28,500 a year to the DNC or the RNC, and $10,000 more to each individual state party. There is, however, a $65,500 overall cap on the donations given to state and national parties in a each two-year cycle.

That means a single donor can cut a $60,000 check, with $2,300 going to Obama and the rest being distributed around the party at the party's discretion. A bundler with a number of big-money contacts could bring millions and millions of dollars in these large checks. The groups writing to the campaigns today want the names and amounts collected by any such people.

If there were ever two presidential candidates who would take a request like this one seriously, it's the two we have now. Both are among the very small portion of their parties that care about reform, and while they have at times wavered in their commitment to transparent and open government, they are as likely to acquiesce to this request as any politicians in America.

We've Got an FEC

The longstanding vacancies at the FEC have finally been filled. Last night, the Senate confirmed five commissioners to join the only sitting commissioner, Ellen Weintraub. The panel, composed of three Democrats and three Republicans as per the usual, will finally have the quorum it needs to address issues like this and this, and deal with the DNC's newly filed lawsuit challenging John McCain's withdrawal from the primary election matching funds program.

Don't expect the new FEC to usher in an era of reform. Good government groups have long criticized the FEC for being a collection of party loyalists more prone to gridlock and slaps on the wrist than to firm and effective oversight. That said, a weak FEC is better than no FEC, particularly during an election year. So, happy day.

Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR), Getting Desperate

What do you do if you're a Republican incumbent in a blue state that the Democratic nominee for president is almost certain to win? Put out an ad making it look like you and that Democrat are best pals.

This is an obvious response to Gordon Smith's dwindling lead in the polls. The Obama campaign's response? "Barack Obama has a long record of bipartisan accomplishment and we appreciate that it is respected by his Democratic and Republican colleagues in the Senate. But in this race, Oregonians should know that Barack Obama supports Jeff Merkley for Senate. Merkley will help Obama bring about the fundamental change we need in Washington."

Ouch.

Supreme Court Overturns Exxon Valdez Verdict

Exxon today has proven the benefits of the endless appeal. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the $5 billion punitive damage award handed down by an Alaska jury in 1994 for its role in the massive oil spill in Prince William Sound, Exxon today landed a major victory at the Supreme Court. In a 5-3 ruling, with Alito sitting out, the court overturned a lower court decision that had reduced the verdict to $2.5 billion, and sent the case back saying that the punitive damage award was excessive and should not exceed about $500 million, the same as the compensatory damages.

The decision strikes yet another blow against what is essentially the capital punishment of the civil justice system, in a long-running campaign by Exxon and other big companies to try to abolish these sorts of awards entirely. Punitive damages are the extra damages added to a jury verdict to punish especially egregious conduct by a civil defendant. As the former West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Richard Neely once wrote, punitive damage awards aren't given out for innocent mistakes, but are generally reserved for "really stupid defendants, really mean defendants, and really stupid defendants who could have caused a great deal of harm by their actions but who actually caused minimal harm." Punitive damages put the real teeth in the legal system, and serve as an ad-hoc form of regulation by standing as a potential deterrent to all sorts of egregious behavior. That, of course, is why business really hates them.

In the Valdez case, an Alaska jury concluded that Exxon was a really stupid defendant, and they hoped to send a message to the company to change its behavior with a punitive damage award that was the largest in American history at the time. Commercial fishermen had filed the suit after the captain of the Valdez ran the ship aground and spilled millions of gallons of oil into previously pristine fishing grounds. The fishermen alleged that Exxon had wrecked their livelihoods. Exxon countered in court that it had already paid out billions in clean-up costs and fines to the government for violating the Clean Water Act, and that the jury verdict essentially constituted double jeopardy.

The case has dragged on so long now that the interest Exxon has earned on the original $5 billion award is now close to paying the award twice over. It's bounced back and forth between the trial court and the 9th Circuit appellate court so many times that in the last ruling in the case, in 2006, the 9th Circuit practically begged Exxon to give up, writing with exasperation, "It's time for this protracted litigation to end." More than 6,000 of those original plaintiffs—a fifth of the total—have since died as Exxon has tried every conceivable angle to avoid paying the award, including buying expensive social science research from Nobel Prize-winning economists designed to prove that juries are incapable of fairly awarding punitive damages in lawsuits.

Clearly the campaign was successful, if for no other reason than that Exxon was able to drag on the appeal long enough for President Bush to stack the court with two new business-friendly justices who are fairly hostile to the notion that regular people sitting on juries ought to be able to hit big companies where it hurts—in the pocketbook--for reprehensible conduct. The court expressed the business community's concern that punitive damages can be too unpredictable to be fair. In the majority opinion, written by Justice Souter, the court explained that, "A penalty should be reasonably predictable in its severity, so that even Holmes’s “bad man” can look ahead with some ability to know what the stakes are in choosing one course of action or another."

Taken another way, most good trial lawyers translate this to mean that big business wants to know with more certainty just how much it will cost to kill someone (or fish, in this case), so the cost can be factored into the bottom line. In his dissent, Justice Stevens suggested that the court had gone too far in reducing punitive damages in the case and in maritime lawsuits in general and was legislating from the bench. He said the justices ought to respect the decisions of the lower courts, particularly the Alaska jury, whose decision was reviewed no fewer than four times by the District Court and upheld three times. After all, he writes, "In light of Exxon’s decision to permit a lapsed alcoholic to command a supertanker carrying tens of millions of gallons of crude oil through the treacherous waters of Prince William Sound, thereby endangering all of the individuals who depended upon the sound for their livelihoods, the jury could reasonably have given expression to its “moral condemnation” of Exxon’s conduct in the form of this award."

Stevens' view, though, didn't prevail, and Supreme Court instead rewarded Exxon for its tenacity—in a signal to other companies that such scorched-earth litigation tactics will definitely pay off. Hopefully for the plaintiffs, at least, this should finally be the end of the story.

June 24, 2008

Does Your City Toke or Do Blow?

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In the quest to discover your neighbors' vices, the only data more valuable than Google search records might be the records you leave in your toilet. In cities around the world, scientists have begun to measure concentrations of illegal drugs at sewage treatment plants, hoping to get a sense of what people are sending down the pipes. Results so far indicate that Vegas-goers do more meth than some of their midwestern counterparts, Angelenos outdo the Old World in cocaine use, Londoners fancy heroin more than Italians, and everybody smokes a whole lotta pot.

Clearly, the most obvious place for this information is an online quiz site: "If your city were an illegal drug, which one would it be?" Beyond that, the real-life applications aren't yet clear. Environmentalists are interested in the potential consequences of so many chemicals in the pipes—who wants to find out that, in addition to being filled with prescription drugs, their drinking water is also laced with coke? And no city wants to broadcast that its citizenry is, uh, high (San Diego has already refused researchers access to its sewage). The scientists who conducted the European study (.pdf) think it will be most useful as a real-time data collection tool, not to mention a vast improvement over just asking people how many drugs they do—the study notes that the concentration of cocaine in Milan's sewage suggests that actual use is more than double the reported rate.

Such information could certainly help law enforcement and public health officials improve their approach to combating drug use, but it's easy to see how things could get out of hand. What happens when the DEA shows up at your door with a warrant and a urine sample you didn't know you were giving? You laugh, but the scientist who pioneered this idea believes it would be possible to analyze sewge at the level of "a community, a street, even a house." In that way, studying poop is like studying Google searches— you'll probably find out more about your neighbors than you wanted, or needed, to know.

Photo from Flickr user PabloBM.

GAO: U.S. Lacks Post-"Surge" Plan For Iraq

Violence in Iraq has fallen precipitously since January 2007, when the Bush Administration upped U.S. troop presence there. Combined with other fortuitous developments like the Mahdi Army's ceasefire and fragile alliances of convenience with Sunni tribesmen, the U.S. "surge" strategy has reduced the average number of enemy attacks by 70 percent, from 180 per day in June 2007 to 50 per day last February. But, says the GAO in a report released today (.pdf), improved security has not yielded significant progress toward other reconstruction goals. And now that U.S. forces are beginning to draw down, the Bush Administration has yet to formulate a comprehensive post-surge plan.

The old strategy—dubbed "The New Way Forward" by the White House—outlined a series of political and economic reconstruction goals for Iraq, all scheduled to be achieved by the end of 2007. But, so the thinking was, security first had to be improved, starting with turning the Iraqi Army into a self-sustaining force that could eventually take over for U.S. troops. The results have been mixed: the number of Iraqi units "in the lead" during combat operations has risen to 70 percent, says the Pentagon. But it likewise admits that just 10 percent are capable of mounting operations without U.S. assistance, primarily for lack of logistical capability and proper training and leadership. As of last month, just 9 of 18 Iraqi provinces had taken "lead responsibility" for their own security, according to the GAO report.

So, what of the other goals outlined in The New Way Forward? According to the GAO, progress has been halting. Here are the highlights:

De-Baathification: Reforms have not been implemented because legislators in Baghdad cannot agree on how to readmit former Baathists into the government.

Oil: Legislation for managing oil resources and distributing revenues among the provinces has not been enacted; Daily oil production is up, but not anywhere near the target set by the Bush Administration.

Electricity: Supply is currently about half of what is required.