Week of: |
11:09 AM
MoJo Blog has moved!
For those still linking to this page (or reading through a newsfeeder), we've now revamped the blog and moved it to a new address:
www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/
The brand new RSS feed, by the way, is here.
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12:29 PM
To torture or not to torture...
It looks like Donald Rumsfeld is busy trying to get more than half of the Guantanamo prisoners out of the naval base—and sent some place where they would have even less rights. Similar to "extraordinary rendition" procedures, detainees would be sent to prisons in other countries, often in places where torture is common. Pentagon officials claim that recent court rulings—especially those challenging administration claims that Guantanamo detainees have no rights—have been a motivating factor here.
The transfer may prove a fairly difficult task given the fact that the CIA and State Department aren't really keen on taking the fallout for sending more prisoners to places where they will be abused. Moreover, it seems that some of the destination countries "have largely ignored American requests for transfers."
Even as all this is going on, the Pentagon is still pushing for its $41 million financing request from Congress to build a more "modern prison" in Guantanamo. The new digs are for the rest of the prisoners who Defense Department officials claim "are expected to remain there for the foreseeable future." These roughly 200 semi-permanent prisoners are, apparently "too dangerous to be turned over to other nations or would probably face mistreatment if returned to those nations." Since when is the Pentagon worried about their "too dangerous" detainees being tortured?
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11:03 AM
Legal trickery...
Yesterday the New York Times reported:
Prompted by an international tribunal’s decision last year ordering new hearings for 51 Mexicans on death rows in the United States, the State Department said yesterday that the United States had withdrawn from the protocol that gave the tribunal jurisdiction to hear such disputes.
It's a new—and legally questionable—manifestation of the administration's desire to have no infringements upon its power. It all started with a memo from President Bush to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, directing state courts to review cases of non-citizen prisoners who claim that they didn't get access to their home-country diplomats, an act generally mandated by the International Court of Justice.
That memo seemed odd given the administration's general distaste for international institutions. Then the pieces starting coming together. Yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent a memo to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan declaring that the U.S. would wtihdraw from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations Concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes. A brief translation: "The protocol requires signatories to let the International Court of Justice (ICJ) make the final decision when their citizens say they have been illegally denied the right to see a home-country diplomat when jailed abroad." This legal safeguard has often been used to fight the sentences of foreigners who are facing the death penalty in the U.S.
Here is where things start getting good. It turns out that the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case of Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican currently on death row in Texas, on March 28. But thanks to the earlier memo to Gonzales directing a "review and reconsideration" in state courts, the Supreme Court case now appears moot at this point. Moreover, Medellin's case would fall exactly under the ICJ's purview, but given our convenient withdrawal from the protocol, the ICJ no longer has jurisdiction in these cases. So, Bush declared that Texas state courts grant a new trial to Medellin—and some 51 Mexican nationals currently in a similar situation—in the name of the principles of the ICJ, but then effectively took the enforcement power out of the Supreme Court and ICJ's hands.
Is there any hope? Well, the Supreme Court may not have a go at this case this term, but it will probably see it again. That's because Texas' state judges are pissed, and questioning the legality of the President to make demands on their state courts. (For the legal ins and outs of the President's claim vs. Texas state court's claim, check out SCOTUSblog.) If Texas state courts refuse to acquiesce to the President's demands, the case will probably head right back up to the Supreme Court.
Also, it has yet to be established whether the President can immediately and single-handedly withdraw from the Optional Protocol. From a preliminary scanning of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Miami law professor Michael Froomkin finds an article that states "a party shall give no less than twelve months' notice of its intention to denounce or withdraw from a treaty…" (Read more at his personal blog discourse.net.)
It looks like this administration is not only tired of international courts impeding on its power, but our own Supreme Court, not to mention Congress. Those pesky checks and balances…
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3:57 PM
Appeasing Hezbollah? Nonsense!
Ah, it appears my earlier skepticism on reports that the White House was adopting a more flexible Lebanon policy appears to be well-warranted. Condoleeza Rice is now saying that the U.S. has no plans to make nice with Hezbollah after all. What's interesting, though, is that European leaders are now seeing fit to take a harder line against the Islamic militant group, though they're not ready to call it a "terrorist group" just yet.
I was going to just leave this post at that, with maybe a link to this excellent Carnegie briefing on Lebanon (for those who need a concise refresher), but the EU about-face here is just asking for a bit of freewheeling speculation. So off we go. It's entirely possible that Europe is trying to convince the Bush administration that it too can take a tough stance on various militant groups or recalcitrant regimes or what have you. In the case of Hezbollah, I don't think a hard line is the way to go. On the other hand, though, one of the things that seems to be preventing the U.S. from getting more heavily involved in the ongoing EU negotiations on Iran's nuclear weapons program—involvement that would really be quite helpful—is the fact that the Bush administration doesn't think Europe will "get tough" on Iran if talks fall apart.
So we may be seeing some interesting convergence here. The White House earlier sidled over to the French multilateralist view on Syrian withdrawal, and the EU gives a little on U.S. views of Hezbollah. Hopefully the end result is sensible policy all around, but the process is important here too. Let's hope it's not illusory.
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3:43 PM
Still more to the story...
The ACLU has recently obtained some 800 pages of documents from the Defense Department via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Among the documents are newly-released annexes to the Pentagon's Fay-Jones inquiry into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The new documents reveal extensive testimony of widespread and systematic abuse on a scale not fully portrayed by the original report. There is no way the administration can use the "few bad apples" line any longer.
The ACLU also obtained documentation of a formal agreement between the Army and the CIA to hide "ghost detainees." These were prisoners who were kept "off the records" so that the CIA could interrogate them without any oversight. Other documents verified that these "ghost detainees" were hidden from Red Cross monitoring.
Also revealed was evidence of a phenomenon that Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the head of a Military Police unit at Abu Ghraib, once called "releaseaphobia"—or fear that releasing an innocent detainee who was abused would not please higher-ups and may lead to the detainee joining insurgent forces. According to one contractor's testimony,
It became obvious to me that the majority of our detainees were detained as a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were swept up by Coalition Forces as peripheral bystanders during raids. It appeared that there was an extreme reluctance to release these low value inmates because of the fear that one of them might return to attack Coalition Forces.
The administration is trying to dampen the shock value of the newly-uncovered abuses by releasing these documents bit by bit. The hope here is that the media, seeing the Fay-Jones report as last year's news, won't see a new story in old documents. But it would be unfortunate, indeed dangerous, if the public assumes that they have already seen all this. As new documents come out, it becomes obvious that there is much more to the story that we have yet to see.
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12:29 PM
Still passing the buck?
The long-delayed Church report, which promised to investigate U.S. interrogation procedures used in Iraq, Cuba, and Afghanistan, has finally been completed. While not yet available to the public, the New York Times got a chance to peek at the executive summary. Not surprisingly, the report concluded that "Pentagon officials and senior commanders were not directly responsible for the detainee abuses." There is certainly a strong case to be made to the contrary, as evidenced by the recent lawsuit broughty by the ACLU and Human Rights First against Donald Rumsfeld for his role in various interrogation abuses. But that aside, and judging from the Times' summary, many of the Church report's findings themselves might contradict the conclusion that higher-ups are free from direct responsibility.
The Church report notes that in January of this year, a new set of interrogation procedures was approved by the military. (They have yet to be publicly released.) These new procedures, it seems, clear up any existing ambiguities that may have led to abuses. Yet Church still feels the need to paper over the motivation behind this clarification by stating that those ambiguities, "although they would not permit abuse, could obscure commanders' oversight of techniques being employed." It seems pretty hard to imagine that an "ambiguity" would keep a commander from seeing that sodomizing and beating detainees counts as torture. And it is an even further leap to suggest that the widespread nature of these abuses does not implicate Pentagon officials' clear sanctioning of these methods.
The closest the Church report comes to laying blame at the top is noting that high-level Pentagon officials did not provide "specific guidance on interrogation techniques…to the commanders responsible for Afghanistan and Iraq." Of course, the report merely calls it a "missed opportunity," a rather disgraceful way to describe the Bush administration's refusal to take seriously the various military personnel who came forward about inhumane interrogations, or its refusal to pay attention to the Red Cross reports that directly described detainee abuse.
There's still hope that the report will face scrutiny, and that future, less partisan, inquiries be launched. Today, the Senate Armed Services Committee is conducting a hearing on the report, and Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) is pushing for an independent review. Noting the ineffectual nature of the inquiries thus far, Levin states, "In the end, I can only conclude that the Defense Department is not able to assess accountability at senior levels, particularly when investigators are in the chain of command of the officials whose policies and actions they are investigating." Indeed.
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10:48 AM
Three cheers for terrorist appeasement!
Yeah, it's the mother of all flip-flops, but serious kudos to the Bush administration for employing a somewhat defter touch in Lebanon by extending an olive branch to Hezbollah:
After years of campaigning against Hezbollah, the radical Shiite Muslim party in Lebanon, as a terrorist pariah, the Bush administration is grudgingly going along with efforts by France and the United Nations to steer the party into the Lebanese political mainstream, administration officials say.
It's possible, of course, that those unnamed "administration officials" are nothing more than a few sane voices in the wilderness, futilely trying to convince gullible New York Times reporters that cooler heads are prevailing when, in fact, the Bush administration is still harboring serious antipathy for Hezbollah. That's possible. But bringing Hezbollah into the political fold remains the vastly more sensible move. And, after all, it's not like we've never invited militia-strapped Shi'ites to take part in fledgling democracies before. The primary argument for continued opposition to Hezbollah, however, is that Israel certainly wants to see the militias disarmed. Without wading too much into it, it's far from clear that the Bush administration will buck those demands, though further kudos if they decide to put sensible policy ahead of relatively narrow Israeli interests.
At any rate, from where I sit Hezbollah looks to be the key to events over the next few weeks. After the group's "pro-Syria" rallies yesterday, Syria felt confident enough today to install the old prime minister back in his spot, and as the Times reported today, "Syria seems now to have regained the initiative." Of course, the Syrian occupation still faces massive opposition—from Lebanon's Christians, Druze, and Sunnis—and if that opposition can extend a hand to Hezbollah, it will be difficult for Syria to keep dipping its fingers in Lebanese affairs. As noted yesterday, it's entirely possible that Hezbollah hasn't sided so vigorously with the opposition mainly because it thinks it will be targeted by an U.S.-dominated "liberation" of Lebanon. But Hezbollah doesn't want a civil war—it's not clear that they'd win or come out better for it—and would no doubt prefer to strike a deal with other Lebanese if a deal can be made. If all that is in fact the case, the White House's newfound terrorist-appeasement policies could end up doing a lot of good.
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10:02 AM
"National security" head fake
Back in April 2004, the ACLU brought a case against the United States government in which they argued that the FBI had no right to demand sensitive customer information from an unnamed internet company. In the case, the FBI had claimed that the Patriot Act expressly gave the agency this power, and moreover, that it could prevent the internet company from even informing its customers of the info handover. Eventually, a New York judge, Victor Marrero, declared this portion of the Patriot Act unconstitutional, and ruled against the FBI.
As mentioned, this case took place way back in April, and Judge Marrero's ruling made the headlines, but details of the case itself were placed under a gag order by the U.S. government. It was only yesterday that the ACLU released documents from the case. Apparently, the government wanted some of the documents kept from the public solely because they contained the words "sensitive," "national security," or "FBI". Even an ACLU letter to Judge Marrero objecting to the gag order was kept from the public. Looking through the documents, it's hard to find anything that appears to be "sensitive information," besides perhaps the ACLU's argument that the FBI was doing something unconstitutional.
In a related vein, the administration has also been attempting to use the "state secrets privilege" to avoid even having to defend its actions in court. It is a growing body of evidence that reveals a systematic governmental effort to obscure basic information regarding the constitutional nature of the government’s actions from the public. This is all being done in the name of national security. The legitimacy behind this censorship should certainly be called into question.
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1:51 PM
Absenteeism in the House
Here's another interesting aspect of the aforementioned Slaughter report that I haven't seen mentioned before. Under Republican rule, Congress has been spending fewer and fewer days each year actually doing work:
Because the House leadership rarely scheduled votes before 6:30 P.M. on Mondays and gave away most of the Fridays they said the House would be in session, the typical House week consisted of three days in session---Tuesdays, Wednesday, and Thursdays. The result of this light schedule, as the graph below illustrates, was that the 108th Congress spent fewer days in session than any Congress since Republicans took over the majority in 1995.
Absenteeism, of course, seems like perfectly good political ammunition. But there's also an unmentioned substantive point lurking in here. Most members of Congress are now spending the extended weekend at home with their constituents. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it has hurt the ability of House members to develop working relationships with each other, as Senators tend to do in the upper house. Not surprisingly, more bipartisan compromises occur in the Senate. Indeed, former Rep. Vic Fazio told the Boston Globe last fall, "Today, members don't really know the other members of Congress. The two-day work week is another contributor to that." This state of affairs no doubt suits the House leadership just fine, but it's awfully difficult to pass decent laws when, you know, lawmakers barely even talk with each other.
One other point. It's difficult to figure out how many of these outrages are due to the specific individuals currently running the House—Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert, etc.—and how much due to the specific nature of the institution. After all, the House is essentially a small group of people governed by an intricate set of informal rules, which seems like it ought to be prone to abuse no matter who's in charge. Some deeper structural reforms seem even more necessary than a leadership change, so that good government doesn't entirely depend on the personal good will of the leadership. But outside of term limits, it's tough to come up with some good safeguards here.
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1:23 PM
What's tone got to do with it?
The good folks at TAPPED are poring over a new 147-page report (PDF), put out by Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Louise Slaughter, on how House Republicans have abused their power and basically instituted one-party rule. There's a lot of good stuff in here, and more in a bit, but first a broader observation on rhetoric. Over the past few months, a number of pundits have suggested that Democrats today need to do what Republicans under Newt Gingrich did back in 1994—namely, denounce the House as a corrupt, hidebound institution and cast themselves as the party of reform.
So how do the two efforts compare? Let's just look at tone. The Slaughter report starts off flatly calling Republicans "the most arrogant, unethical, and corrupt majority in modern Congressional history." Nice, but can they keep this up? Apparently not. A few pages down, here's how the report describes the Great Medicare Travesty of 2003, in which Republicans shoved through the largest entitlement expansion since the days of LBJ with little discussion and less debate:
[O]n this bill, a bill that changed the fundamental structure of the federal government’s largest health care program, the majority did everything it could to prevent the House from taking "clear positions" on "clear issues" related to Medicare reform. We were very disappointed, but not surprised, to learn later that the bill contained provisions that would give the pharmaceutical companies billions of taxpayer dollars at the expense of America’s seniors, and that Energy Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin, one of the authors of the Medicare bill, had negotiated a $2 million a year job for himself heading the drug industry lobby during the period the conference was producing its report.
The representatives the American people elected to write their laws had less input into this legislation than the drug industry and other special interests that stood to benefit from it. At the end of this secret process, the Republican leadership rushed the final product to the House floor and forced Members, both Republicans and Democrats, to vote on it before they knew its contents. It is safe to say that the Medicare prescription drug program would have been significantly different had Members been able to debate and amend the bill in a manner consistent with an open, democratic process.
"We were very disappointed"? "It is safe to say…"? I'm not sure it's too much to ask for a little more firebreathing and outrage. If the Medicare bill passage doesn't provide fodder for a good smackdown, what does? By contrast, here's what Rep. Diaz-Balart, a Republican, said about somewhat similar—though much less egregious—Democratic tactics back in 1993:
You know what the closed rule means... It means no discussion, no amendments, nobody here; nobody here even when this is full, can present an amendment to represent their constituents because of that thing called the closed rule. That is profoundly undemocratic, Mr. Speaker. The American people have got to find out about it, they have got to put the pressures on the leadership of this institution to undo and do away once and for all with that most undemocratic principle, most undemocratic practice called and known as the infamous closed rule.
That's more like it! A bit of "profoundly undemocratic," an appeal to the "American people," mixed with the word "infamous," (the closed rule, of course, has never actually been infamous so much as simply obscure) and now we're talking about real outrage. Meanwhile, here's what Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) had to say in his report on Democratic abuses back in 1993: "something has gone radically haywire with the constitutional scheme of things." Good stuff! Yeah, it's incessant grandstanding, but then again, the Republicans got a lot of media attention back in the early '90s, while the Slaughter report seems to be garnering very little. Just an observation…
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10:12 AM
Who cares about the bankruptcy bill?
Kevin Drum wants to know how the horrendous bankruptcy bill passed through the Senate yesterday with such broad popular support. After all, liberals, moderates, and conservatives all hate it. On the merits, the bill has nothing to recommend it, eroding bankruptcy protection for those families who, say, lose all their savings after a child needs expensive surgery. (Is it good "character-building" for that family to struggle with debt payments long after bankruptcy? No…) And it's not like voters anywhere in the country are clamoring for an uptick in predatory lending. It's a classic corporate-whore bill. So what's up? We all expected Republicans to vote for it, and they didn't disappoint, but why did so many Democrats throw in their support?
Money's obviously a factor here: as the New York Times reports today, "the main lobbying forces for the bill," a coalition of credit card companies, raised more than $40 million in fund-raising, and millions more in lobbying. So the incentive was there—and big. But the flip side is that most voters presumably just don't care. No one thinks that he or she will ever fall prey to bankruptcy, so it's easy to sneer or scoff at the relatively small portion of America that does. Democrats probably thought they could vote for the bill, reap a bit of campaign cash, and not piss off any constituents. Indeed, that still seems like a safe bet. Elizabeth Warren argued somewhat quixotically yesterday that a lot of the internet activism against the bill may have made Senators think twice before pulling this crap, but it's hard to say how much the internet—with its notoriously short attention span—will ever affect things. A primary challenge against some of the bill's worst supporters, like Joe Biden (D-DE) or Tom Carper (D-DE), might be in order, but failing that, the noble internet effort was just a bunch of sound and fury.
It's probably more useful to ask why Americans might not care about bankruptcy. Part of the problem is that very few people—or at least very few political leaders—have woven the bankruptcy issues into the larger themes at work here: namely, the increasing economic risk faced by American workers, unaffordable health care costs, etc. I suspect that to many voters, bankruptcy seems like someone else's problem, rather than a symptom of a larger national problem. Paul Krugman has done some good work trying to write a grand narrative here, as has Elizabeth Warren in The Two-Income Trap, but it's not nearly enough. Until this becomes part of the public consciousness, Democrats and Republicans alike will feel no pressure not to screw over a few million unlucky Americans for a bit of campaign cash.
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3:16 PM
Is Abu Ghraib relocating?
The Progress Report points out today that Bush has yet to oversee the destruction of Abu Ghraib prison and rebuild a "modern, maximum security prison," as promised. Instead Abu Ghraib remains, and is filled well beyond its intended capacity. (Incidentally, even if it wanted to, the U.S. couldn't tear the prison down because of a June 2004 ruling by military judge Col. James Pohl declaring that Abu Ghraib was a crime scene, containing evidence in the cases against the American soldiers charged with detainee abuse.)
Perhaps even more worrisome than the overcrowding are the repeated insurgent attacks that Abu Ghraib is sustaining, due to some of the high-level prisoners detained there. In response, the U.S. military is thinking about pulling prisoners out of the prison and relocating to the Baghdad airport complex, according to today's Globe and Mail. It remains questionable as to whether this move would actually decrease the level of mortar attacks, which often come from populated areas. As John Pike of Global Security.org pointed out to me today, Abu Ghraib faces potential threats only from the west, whereas the airport is completely surrounded by populated areas.
The relocation might also end up attracting even more insurgent attacks to the airport area. The only prison detainment facilities currently within the Baghdad airport complex are small, such as Camp Cropper which holds about 100 high-profile detainees including Saddam Hussein. According to a former Australian security analyst, military officials in Camp Cropper were abusing prisoners before it became the trend in Abu Ghraib. Any word of continued abuses on a larger scale would likely fuel attacks on the new location. The Baghdad airport complex also has numerous military camps set up within the compound. Bringing even more high-level prisoners to the complex may increase the risk of attacks on these already-established camps.
The relocation may enable increased security in terms of greater manpower consistently being present to provide security, but in the end the military will have to weigh the risks of continued insurgent attacks in one location versus potentially more damaging attacks in a new, more central location.
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2:18 PM
Iraq the model... still?
Spencer Ackerman raises a very important point. The images of Iraqis voting on January 30, purple-stained fingers and all, was a huge propaganda victory (and I mean that in a good way) for activists around the Middle East seeking liberty and free elections. But the current gridlock within the newly elected Iraqi government—they still have yet to agree on a cabinet—could be a huge propaganda blow against democracy. It's a point we've raised here before, but Bush would do well to shift away from the "freedom" and "liberty" talk from time to time to talk about the actual, nitty-gritty institutions of democracy. The importance, for instance, of checks and balances and veto players and consensus-based compromises. It's boring stuff, no doubt, but really quite important.
Now with regards to Iraq, it doesn't seem that the United States can really do very much to facilitate discussion between the Kurds and Shi'ites, who are sparring over thorny local issues: the fate of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, or the status of militias, or the degree of federalism in the new Iraq. A few hopeful signs of agreement are emerging, but still, the real danger is that the various actors will get so fed up by gridlock that they'll decide to resolve their disputes at gunpoint. It's hard to say whether civil war in Iraq would stop, say, protestors in Lebanon from demanding free elections, but chaos certainly strengthens the hand of those Arab autocrats claiming that the region isn't ready for democracy.
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2:07 PM
Nous Sommes Tous Dinosaures ...
It's hardly a revelation that the Internet is coming of age as a source of political news. But it's useful to have the trend quantified -- as by this Pew poll. In 2004, the study finds, 29 percent of Americans got at least some political news on the Web, as against 18 percent in 2000, a rise the Pew folks rightly call "dramatic." More striking to my mind is the degree of drop-off in (paper) newspaper readership: 60 percent got election news from a paper in 1996; by last year that number had fallen to 39. To call this a straightforward erosion of "the influence of newspapers," as press accounts have, is a bit misleading, newspapers being a major source of online news. Still, the findings should shake any last media technoskeptics out of their denial.
In other bad news for print, Le Monde, the venerable French leftish daily ("Nous sommes tous Americains"), struggling financially, and has just turned to private investors for a bailout, a humbling step one of the paper's journalists blamed on the "failure of Le Monde's management, both financially and editorially." Time, perhaps, to figure out how to make some money off le web site.
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11:07 AM
Who wins the Bolton confirmation battle?
Over at the Corner, Stanley Kurtz predicts that protesting John Bolton's nomination for Ambassador to the United Nations will be an electoral loser for the Dems:
Apparently, the Democrats are planning a big confirmation battle. Do they think they'll gain anything by opposing a guy who puts America's interests first? Fighting Bolton is catering to the Democrat's base. Nothing could undermine the Democrat’s hawkish make-over than a big confirmation battle over Bolton. We’ve had Nancy Pelosi’s dovishness, Ted Kennedys call for an Iraq pull-out, the grilling of Condoleeza Rice, and now a big confirmation battle over John Bolton. (I know I've left out plenty, but who has time.) I can’t see how fighting Bolton is going to do anything but carve the Democrat’s dovish image even more deeply into stone.
Now granted, Bolton may believe deep down that the UN is bad only insofar as America's interest should come first, as Kurtz seems to think. He may even genuinely believe, as he said in 1997, that "the United Nations can be a useful instrument in the conduct of American foreign policy" but merely needs some serious tweaking. And yes, if that was the reasonable assessment of Bolton, his confirmation hearings would be a breeze. And yes, if the Democrats tried vigorously to oppose someone who apparently thought all of that, they would look very dovish indeed. But here in the real world, there are stacks and stacks of Bolton quotes saying very extreme things, like this now-infamous comment: "If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." It's not going to be politically unpopular to arch an eyebrow at that. (Nor is it unwise, on more substantive grounds.)
On Kurtz' general point, meanwhile, polls tend to show that the public likes the United Nations, and generally approves of using multilateralist means to solve global problems. John Kerry perhaps took this bit of polling data a tad too far—with his bizarre view that the Iraq war would have been a perfectly fine idea if only the United Nations said okay (or at least a view that lent itself to that caricature)—but there you go. Naturally it's useful for the National Review folks to believe that Americans are all kneejerk hawks who think the rest of the world can go to hell, but the picture's far more complex than that.
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10:19 AM
About those Hezbollah rallies...
On the face of things, it looks like the massive pro-Syrian rally, organized by Hezbollah, in downtown Beirut today—a rally that has larger than any of the vehemently anti-Syrian ones—will put a crimp in the West's plan to "liberate" Lebanon. Perhaps, although it's surprisingly difficult to figure out what's going on here.
The standard line is that Hezbollah is insanely popular, has the support of most of Lebanon's Shi'ites (which compose maybe 35-45 percent of the country, though no one's taken a census for decades), that the Shi'ites don't want Syria to leave, and that Syrian withdrawal could well cause infighting among Lebanese factions. There's also decent reason to think that the Hezbollah rally has been largely cooked up by Syrian mukhabarat (the powerful secret police) and that Hezbollah may have just undermined its own national support by standing in as a tool and flunky for Syrian President Bashar Assad. (See Michael Young's take on this.) Once again, insert qualifier here.
One thing to note is that this seems like less of a "pro-Syrian" rally per se than a march against foreign influence in Lebanese affairs (most of the speeches seem to have been emphasizing the latter). So it's also equally possible that Hezbollah mostly thinks that they'll be targeted by the U.S. if Syria withdraws—remember, the UN resolution flogged by the White House demands that Hezbollah disarms—so they're throwing their lot in with Syria mostly out of that fear. Given that Hezbollah has a lot of guns and supporters, that fear is hardly insignificant. As pollster John Zogby writes today:
While it has become clear that the Syrian military presence in Lebanon has run its course, a Syrian withdrawal by itself doesn’t solve the Lebanon puzzle. Intense U.S. pressure to implement the other half of 1559 [i.e., the condition that Hezbollah and other militias disarm] may provoke counter-demonstrations that fragile Lebanon may not be able to easily digest.
Just so. None of this is to say that Syria should stay, but Lebanon remains a fragile and fractious place. Handling it bluntly—that is, loudly trumpeting UN Resolution 1559 as the cure for all that ails Lebanon—may cause more problems than it solves.
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9:38 AM
Compromise on Social Security?
Everything Max Sawicky says in this post is very important for the ongoing Social Security debate. Max is responding to a polling memo (PDF) circulated a few days back by Stanley Greenberg and James Carville suggesting that the Democrats need to propose some sort of alternative to the Bush privatization plan. "No deal!" Max says:
If I had a couple of extra days in the week, I'd set up my own SS site. Instead of www.thereisnocrisis.com, it would be NoProblemo.Com. Carville and Greenberg imply that the only qualification for a "Democratic" solution to the SS "problem" is something that did not include a carve-out and did include tax increases, all to fix deficits not anticipated until 2042 or later, little or none of which fix deficits staring us right in the face today. In other words, they say we should allow ourselves, once again, to be Greenspun.
I do not look forward to a scenario where the Republicans come out saying the Dems forced us to do tax increases, benefit cuts, and a pissant add-on account. Sorry, that's the best we could get, vote for us and we'll give you BETTER accounts and roll back the austerity measures.
Indeed. And once more: Indeed! Democrats need to be thinking in the long term here, both on a political level and on a policy level. It's fair to say that the long-term goal of privatizers is to provoke a fiscal crisis such that the Social Security Trust Fund—which was largely funded by payroll taxes on low- and middle-earners—never needs to be repaid, thus letting high-earners keep their Bush tax cuts. Any policy that tears a new hole in the current budget deficits, including the sort of "add-on" private accounts proposed by the Democrats, only contributes toward this goal.
Setting the terms of the debate are also important here, something Max has suggested time and time again. As soon as Democrats cede ground on the "pre-funding" issue—as soon as they say, yes, it's reasonable to make drastic changes in order to fix slight shortfalls that are at least 45 years away—they've lost the whole game. Because as soon as those 75-year deficits reappear on the balance sheet, this whole "crisis" nonsense will start up again. And the next time around, Republicans can say that Democrats keep raising taxes and cutting benefits and still can't get us to solvency from now until year infinity plus one, so therefore it's time for privatization (or whatever bizarre term they plan on using in the future). There's a semi-permanent coalition of privatizers out there continually sharpening their knives, and while unions are making good headway into breaking up that coalition, groups like CATO have been waiting 20 years to phase-out the system. They're not going to shove the knives back in the drawer just because we have "add-on" accounts.
Right now, the Social Security program is in healthy, tip-top shape. Look at the worst case scenario: even if nothing, absolutely nothing, was done to the program, and we suffered sluggish economic growth for the next 40 years, even then, the payable benefits in 2052 or 2062 or 2072 will still be higher in real terms than they are today. We can well afford to wait and see if those deficits actually materialize, but otherwise, it's silly to pretend we can permanently alter the system 50 years from now. And, as Max notes, if the American public is really hankering for private accounts, then let's expand the existing IRA system. This message might not "resonate with the American public" as yet, but it's true, and there's no reason to shy away from it.
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5:06 PM
Still refusing to prosecute genocide...
The Bush administration has already gone so far as to use the dreaded "g" word in reference to ongoing atrocities in Sudan. But, genocide or no, the administration has still refused to sanction the referral of the prosecution of crimes in Sudan to the International Criminal Court (ICC), despite the fact that the UN Commission of Inquiry for Darfur recently noted that the ICC was "the only credible way" to ensure justice. (This despite the fact that the United States sponsored the resolution creating the commission in the first place.)
As an alternative to the ICC, the United States has proposed an independent tribunal in Tanzania using the infrastructure "already in place" from the Rwanda tribunals. But, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is in no position to handle the Sudan cases, as it suffers from a lack of funding and experienced judicial officials, as well as nepotism. Moreover, the fact that the Rwanda tribunals are active only on an ad hoc basis will make raising funds a constant challenge. Likewise, the time-limited aspect of tribunals encourages guilty parties to wait out the duration of the court; this is happening with both the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. (For more on why the ICC would better ensure justice, go to Human Rights Watch.)
Because the U.S. proposal is, as Human Rights Watch remarks, "seriously flawed," one might think it wouldn't pose a serious challenge to the use of the ICC. Unfortunately, Sudan is not a party to the ICC treaty, which means that Security Council action will be needed before the court can begin prosecuting crimes in Darfur. After the other Security Council members shot down the "independent tribunal" proposal, however, the U.S. requested a 45-day delay in the decision-making process. That’s 45 more days without any real action against the Sudanese government's campaign of genocide.
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4:11 PM
Dean brings in the green
The DNC says it raised $3.4 million in the three weeks since Howard Dean became party chair. The good news: this is twice as much as the Democrats raised in the the same period after Bush's first election. (The less-good news: it's a little over half as much as the Republicans raised in the same period.) The DNC credits its "grassroots marketing strategy" for the good showing. (That's direct mail and telemarketing; they haven't started working the internets yet). True to his vow to help revitalize the state party, Dean's also been getting out of Washington to shake the trees (raising $90K in Mississipi and $45K in Kentucky, for example). No doubt there's a honeymoon effect at play here, but Dean got the job in large part because he's good at raising money, and it augurs well for the Dems that he's gotten off to such a good start. Now, what they do with the money is another story ...
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2:20 PM
Rick Santorum's minimum-wage flimflam
Wait a minute -- Rick Santorum doing right by workers!? (And low-wage workers at that!) There's got to be a catch. Well, there is. The Republican senator has proposed an amendment (to the truly awful bankruptcy bill currently stinking up the Senate) that would raise the minimum wage by $1.10, to $6.25. A hike is long overdue: the wage is worth 26 percent less than in 1979, and there's been no rise in eight years. Problem is, the Santorum amendment comes tricked out with a bunch of creative provisions designed to screw low-wage workers every which way.
The Economic Policy Institute has a useful analysis paper (sorry, PDF) detailing just what's inside Santorum's "Trojan Horse." Highlights include:
- Curbs on the right of workers at small businesses to work overtime
- Abolition of the 40-hour week, to be replaced by an 80-hour two-week pay period. (Translation: if you have to work 50 hours one week and then work 30 the next, no overtime pay for you)
- A 100 percent tip credit, wherein employers will be allowed under state law to pay nothing to tipped employers as long as their tips add up to the minimum wage
- Weakening of safety and other workplace protections
So, uhm, thanks, Rick. The amendment comes up for a vote later today, probably, as does a rival proposal by Ted Kennedy that would bump the rate up to $7.25, which EPI estimates would benefit more than 7 million workers. (Santorum's plan would benefit about 1.8 million, while harming many millions.) Nathan Newman has more.
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2:10 PM
Invoking the "state secrets privilege"
The U.S. outsourcing of torture has been receiving a fair amount of publicity of late. Unfortunately, all that publicity has yet to provoke any legitimate response from either the Bush administration or the CIA. Rather, the administration has continued to use every legal clause it can think of to try to shut down legal challenges against it before they go to court.
Case in point: the Bush administration is currently trying to invoke the "state secrets privilege" in a case being brought against it by Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was apprehended by the CIA and sent to Syria to be tortured. Arar was eventually released and no charges were brought against him. But the Bush administration now claims that merely offering a defense of its actions would "adversely affect national security." Given that no charges were even brought against Arar, it seems pretty unlikely that the administration's sources, if revealed, would pose a threat to national security. But, it all depends how you interpret the "state secrets privilege."
The "state secrets privilege" is not a law and it hasn't been authorized by the Constitution or Congress. It is based on a Supreme Court case from 1953, in which the families of three civilian engineers who died in a military aircraft sued the government and requested the full text of the Air Force accident investigation report. The Air Force refused to provide the information on the grounds that it would threaten national security. The Supreme Court sided with the U.S. government. Over 50 years later, the precedent, which was famously used during Watergate, is now being brought up in defense of extraordinary rendition.
(Incidentally, the woman who brought the original Air Force suit is now trying to bring a new case of fraud against the government. As it turns out, when the Air Force accident investigation report eventually became declassified, the cause of the crash was linked to poor maintenance.)
In the Arar case, the administration claims that the information it would have to provide for its defense "would pose an exceptionally grave or serious risk to diplomatic relations and national security." In a way, White House lawyers are right. If it comes out that the administration had no substantial grounds for sending hundreds of people to countries that sanction the use of torture, then the president's credibility abroad would be badly tarnished. On the other hand, if the government succeeds in using the "state secrets privilege" in the Arar case, a precedent will be set for all potential cases brought by those who detained and tortured in the "extraordinary rendition" program. The administration would bear no culpability for its actions.
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1:41 PM
A victory for new media?
"The internet is going to spark a revolution!" Everyone's heard variations on that theme before, but today Joseph Bradue assembles some interesting evidence that the internet really is acting as a catalyst for change in the Middle East, although the actual extent of its revolutionary powers remains up for debate:
[I]t seems likely that the web's most crucial impact on Arab politics won't be in alerting the west to human rights abuses or rallying support in the international community; it will be in allowing Arab dissidents to talk to one another and coordinate their activities. I recently read extensive Arabic blogging, dated from January and early February, on behalf of an anti-Mubarak group called the People's Peaceful Front for the Rescue of Egypt. A series of rambling entries began with an invitation to join an anti-government demonstration planned for Alexandria, "place and time to be announced shortly, God willing." Stay tuned, apparently.
That seems about right. Meanwhile, as Abu Aardvark points out, satellite TV is having, perhaps, even more of an influence on the region: undercutting the legitimacy of Arab regimes, shifting the terms of debate, alerting a wider Arab audience that protests and opposition are actually taking place. Obviously the tangible effects here are difficult to measure, but the anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon certainly seem to indicate that some of the dynamics in the region are changing. Says Aardvark: "the televised images of the Lebanese people, seemingly unified against Syria, tapped in to the core narrative of this new Arab identity: a unified, mobilized Arab public protesting against oppression and an intolerable status quo."
This brings up another point. It's important to note that there's only so much the U.S. can do to instigate change throughout the Middle East. At the moment, with Hizbullah now declaring its support for Syria's presence in Lebanon, it seems that Lebanon will hold free and fair elections this spring only if a couple of things happen. Either the Lebanese opposition will convince Hizbullah to oppose Syria's presence and take part in a new, democratically-elected government. Or Europe will—perhaps—threaten to levy sanctions on Syria to get Bashar Assad to withdraw fully, including his intelligence services. But most of this is now out of U.S. hands, regardless of how much Bush can take credit for pushing it thus far (and I think he can take a fair bit).
One thing the U.S. can do, however, is to support those media outlets—including satellite TV outlets like al-Jazeerah—that are fostering the free exchange necessary for change to occur. It's not everything, but it's certainly something. Over the past four years, the Bush administration has been very hostile towards al-Jazeerah—including banning the station from Baghdad—which, as Abu Aardvark notes, has rather unhelpfully made it easier for Arab regimes like Jordan to crack down on satellite media. There's never going to be "one true method" by which the U.S. will nudge the Middle East towards democracy, and we're going to need all the means at our disposal.
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12:45 PM
Liberals and federalism
In the Sunday New York Times, Frank Foer argues that liberals are now rediscovering the joys of federalism:
Liberal energies once devoted to expanding the national government are being redirected toward the states. New York's attorney general Eliot Spitzer, declaring himself a ''fervent federalist,'' is using state regulations to prosecute corporate abuses that George W. Bush's Department of Justice won't touch. While the federal minimum wage hasn't budged since the middle of the Clinton era, 13 (mostly blue) states and the District of Columbia have hiked their local wage floors in the intervening years. After Bush severely restricted federal stem cell research, California's voters passed an initiative pouring $3 billion into laboratories for that very purpose, and initiatives are under way in at least a dozen other states.
These developments may look like a desperate reaction on the part of some liberals to the conservatives' grip on Washington. But in fact the well-known liberal liking for programs at the national level has long coexisted alongside a quieter tradition of principled federalism -- skeptical of distant bureaucracies and celebratory of local policy experimentation.
As a descriptive matter, this trend seems quite real, but liberals ought to be wary of relying primarily on the refuge of "states' rights". First of all, to a large extent, "local policy experimentation" can only be carried out against the larger backdrop of federal regulation. If, say, a Bush-appointed Supreme Court were to start rolling back New Deal-era laws, like the minimum wage or workplace safety regulations, that instantly limits how much states can do. It's all well and good to raise the minimum wage a couple bucks here in California, but if companies can move to states without any wage laws at all, more and more of them will. Political scientists have demonstrated time and time again that, in the absence of national standards on things like welfare and health care, states compete against each other to offer lower benefits in a race to the bottom, so that no one gets stuck with an influx of poor rent-seeking immigrants. There's no reason the same wouldn't hold for environmental standards, wage laws, workplace protections, etc. State power is oftentimes largely illusory.
These concerns matter less for issues like gay marriage or stem cell research, but they quite obviously matter. Meanwhile, it's important to note that the modern Republican Congress has consistently assaulted the states' abilities to set their own economic regulations. See Nathan Newman's lengthy and important post for details. As Nathan explains, conservatives seem to be trying to stifle those "laboratories of democracy," lest progressive economic policies set by states bubble up to the federal government. So what you have really isn't a debate between "states' rights" and "federalist." It's a battle between those who think economic standards are a good thing and those who don't, and it's really being fought at all levels.
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12:13 PM
Details, please?
ABC's The Note—the great barometer of beltway conventional wisdom—points out a rather frustrating facet of the whole Social Security debate:
The pressure seems mostly off the White House to come up with details of its own (And, remember, the details, when they get to benefit cuts and/or tax increases, are NOT going to be lovely; better to leave them to the "legislative process.").
We all know where this leads. President Bush has said he won't "negotiate with himself". So all the gritty details of privatization—the benefit cuts, the deficits, the tax increases—get left to Congress. Meanwhile, the instant a Democrat proposes his or her own Social Security reform, he or she will get hammered for advocating tax increases or benefit cuts. And Bush does this, of course, because he is personally very unpopular on the Social Security issue, with approval numbers mired in the low 30s. So why haven't the Democrats seized this? Why on earth is the pressure "mostly off the White House to come up with details of its own"?
The obvious place to start, it seems, would be to note that the White House has released the outlines of a plan—explained by Jason Furman here—which would entail 40 percent benefit cuts, $4.5 trillion in transition costs over the next 25 years, and wage indexing that would freeze guaranteed benefits at today's levels over time. Until someone in the White House wants to suggest something more specific, this just is the Bush privatization plan, and it's reasonable to assume that this is what any final GOP bill will look like.
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10:49 AM
Credibility on arms control
Ever since North Korea officially declared itself a nuclear power in early February, the whole situation has sort of faded from the news. But today we learn that China has urged the Bush administration to negotiate with North Korea one-on-one. You'll recall that back in the presidential debates last fall, President Bush berated John Kerry for proposing such a thing, claiming that China wanted to preserve the six-party talks. That was false then—China has made similar noises in the past—and it looks even more false now, if that's possible.
The key issue, however, seems to be that China doesn't trust U.S. intelligence on North Korean weapons programs. The White House has tried to suggest that Kim Jong Il is selling nuclear technology to buyers around the globe, and therefore urgent and forceful action needs to be taken, but Chinese diplomats aren't buying it. That's not terribly surprising, given Iraq and all that, but it's becoming a real problem.
With regards to that other rogue nuclear power, Iran, U.S. intelligence-sharing has also raised issues. As Europe has negotiated various deals with Tehran over the latter's budding nuclear program, the White House has often interjected with claims that Iran continues to violate the treaty. And yet too often, no one in the U.S. seems too inclined to share this rather crucial intelligence with anyone. (In at least one case, U.S. allegations were proven false.) Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has for the past year tried to investigate the nuclear smuggling ring formerly run by Pakistan's A.Q. Khan. Again, though, no intelligence-sharing. Back in December, the New York Times reported:
Given the urgency of the Libyan and Khan disclosures, many private and governmental experts expected that the Bush administration and the I.A.E.A. would work together. But European diplomats said the administration never turned over valuable information to back up its wider suspicions about other countries. "It doesn't like to share," a senior European diplomat involved in nuclear intelligence said of the United States. "That makes life more difficult. So we're on the learning curve."
Federal officials said they were reluctant to give the I.A.E.A. classified information because the agency is too prone to leaks. The agency has 137 member states, and American officials believe some of them may be using the agency to hunt for nuclear secrets. One senior administration official put it this way: "The cops and the crooks all serve on the agency's board together."
Those concerns certainly might be valid, but it's impossible to say. It's also fairly possible that the White House is withholding intelligence on North Korea or Iran in order to maintain a more hawkish stance than the evidence would otherwise warrant. The main point, though, is that no one can know. The word of the United States, sadly, is no longer good enough for the rest of the world. One would think, by the way, that the nomination of the ever-hawkish John Bolton—who, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, led the charge in refusing to share intelligence with the IAEA—to ambassador of the United Nations would only exacerbate this problem.
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