Trends

I don't follow the polls much; I especially don't pay attention to single polls. However, what I do notice is trends, that is, when polls keep moving in the same direction - or alternatively, when over time they refuse to move at all. (Which is different, just to be absolutely clear, from different polls reaching much the same result at a particular time. That may give you increased confidence in the accuracy of the numbers but it still only expresses a particular moment so unless the numbers are overwhelmingly one way, it doesn't tell you a whole lot.)

It's with that in mind that two results from a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll stand out. One is the continued decline of the public's judgment of Bush both on Iraq and in general.

The survey found that among all adults - not just likely voters - only 46 percent approved of Bush's performance in office - the lowest rating of his presidency in this poll.

After April's heavy casualties in Iraq and the emerging scandal of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops, only 44 percent said they believed the war was worthwhile - another low.

Fifty-four percent said last year's invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and only 41 percent of adults said they believed Bush was doing a good job handling the war.

Only 37 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States - a sharp drop from early January, when 55 percent said they were satisfied.

The other was the continued deadlock between Bush and Kerry.

Bush led Kerry 48 percent to 47 percent in the survey - a reversal of a poll taken last week, which found the Massachusetts senator with a 1-point edge, 49-48.

With a margin of error of 3%, that shift means nothing.

What I keep wondering about is why, if the public's view of Bush continues to fall, the effects haven't seemed to show up in the presidential horse race. I'd been saying all along that the election will be another cliff-hanger, and so far the numbers keep saying the same. What does that mean? That more and more people are disapproving of Bush but are going to vote for him anyway? If the polls are accurate, that's exactly what it means.

Why hasn't Kerry been able to take advantage of this? Two reasons suggest themselves. One is that the same poll indicates - as again, have others before, that is, it's remained true over time - that Bush has a large lead in the area of dealing with terrorism, where people say Bush would do a better job by a 17-point margin. That's all based on PR, smoke, and mirrors (Exactly what has he done to reduce terrorism?), but it's still a real and huge gap. Enough people, apparently, feel "safer" with Bush to overcome their doubts about Iraq, the economy, and the general direction of the country.

Here's the other reason:

Shedding Populist Tone, Kerry Starts Move to Middle

Phoenix, May 7 (New York Times) - He has dropped the red-meat riff on "Benedict Arnold C.E.O.'s." He is talking up tax cuts for corporations, playing up his deficit-cutting credentials and taking on teachers over pay-for-performance.

And on Friday, John Kerry came to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council here sounding little like the outraged, populist scourge of special interests and big business who fended off challenges from his left in the Democratic primaries.

"I believe, as I know you do, that the private sector is the engine of economic growth," Mr. Kerry told the group, which helped form many of Bill Clinton's policies on the economy, welfare and trade. "I don't pretend that it's the government that does it all. I refuse to lead a party that loves jobs but hates the people that create them."

Kerry has taken to calling himself an "entrepreneurial Democrat" and pointedly told a group of rich potential donors "I am not a redistributionist Democrat." He parades his support of Clinton-era welfare deform and promises that his "market-oriented, incentive-based" health care plan "will bring businesses to the table."

In other words, he's jettisoning the things that made people support him in the first place in search of the elusive "middle," which really means the endorsement of corporate America. "I'm safe," he's telling them. "No threat to your interests. All that stuff I said before? I didn't mean any of it."

Some call this a typical candidate track, going for the base during the primaries and moving to the "center" after them. I call it doing a Dukakis, running away from any notion of a passionate commitment to anything save perhaps "efficiency" and certainly ducking and hiding from anything that might be called gasp liberal. (I remember when the GOP said it was going to "nail Dukakis with the 'L' word." His response was "The 'L' word is "leadership." Big whoop.)

The result is to minimize both the actual and the apparent differences between him and Bush while conceding all the passion to the other side. In 1988, after it was too late, Michael Dukakis decided he had nothing to lose and started talking from his heart about what he really believed, offering what could be called in the best sense of the term a populist message. Not radical by any means, but at least openly liberal. In the last few weeks of the campaign he significantly closed the gap but fell clearly short.

Again, I believe the nation is too - I hate to use the word but it does seem to fit - polarized between "All Bush" and "Anybody But" for the final result to be anything but close. But I can also see a mini-version of 1988 playing out again, with John Kerry realizing too late that pursuing the "middle" with a seeming muddy lack of conviction carries a real price.

Can you say bullshit?

From the New York Times for May 7, comes the news that

[f]ederal drug regulators yesterday rejected a drug maker's application to sell a morning-after pill over the counter because of concerns about whether young girls would be able to use it safely.

Right. I believe that. That was the real reason. Despite the fact that a panel assembled by the FDA in December voted 23-4 to recommend that the drug be available over the counter, despite the fact that the panel said that women, including girls, could be trusted to understand how to use it. The real reason is the touching concern of the WHS* for the safety of young women.

Or maybe this is closer to the truth:

Wendy Wright, senior policy director at Concerned Women for America, a conservative women's organization, said that the agency had ignored political pressure and made its decision based on science.

"The F.D.A. is right to be cautious about having a potent drug that can be harmful to women sitting next to candy bars and toothpaste," Ms. Wright said. Broad availability of Plan B would allow people to slip the medicine to women without their knowledge, Ms. Wright said.

So which is it? A valid scientific judgment or a politically-driven appeal to the ignorant, narrow-minded, sex-hating, goggle-eyed fantasies of the extreme right?

We report, you decide.

*White House Sociopaths

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a tartan?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Royal Mothers

This queen was the mother of France's Louis XVII.

Reminders

There has been a fair amount of discussion about the recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll of over 3,400 Iraqis, much of which has revolved around either the finding that the portion of Iraqis who think of the US forces as occupiers rather than liberators has risen to 71% (for the pessimists) or that a majority say that are much or somewhat better off now (for the optimists).

What struck me, however, and what I think presents a greater danger to the future is a severe and serious disconnect between attitudes expressed by Kurdish areas and the rest of Iraq. A few examples:

- While 33% of all Iraqis say that, overall, the invasion did more good than harm, 97% of Kurds said that.

- 42% of all Iraqis say that Iraq is much or somewhat better off than before the invasion, 99% of Kurds say so.

- Only 31% of Iraqis said US-UK military action in Iraq can somewhat or completely justified. 95% of Kurds said that.

- As to whether or not attacks on US forces in Iraq can be justified at least sometimes, 52% of all Iraqis say yes, while less than 2% of Kurds agree.

- Asked if US-UK forces should leave within a few months, 57% of all Iraqis said yes - only 3% of Kurds agreed.

- The portion of Iraqis who now think of coalition forces as occupiers rather than liberators has gone up by 28 percentage points since the start of the war, to 71%. Kurdish attitudes have remained steady: 97% view them as liberators.

Perhaps part of the reason for the disparity is their differing recent experiences: In the four weeks preceding the survey, the portions of Iraqis who reported having had either no electricity, clean water, medicine, or food, ranged from 16% to 47%. In not one case did even 1% of Kurds report such difficulties.

In the midst of the standoffs and shootouts in Fallujah and Najaf, the underlying issues of the ongoing conflicts among religious and ethnic groupings in Iraq have been forgotten. But those conflicts have only been suppressed, not resolved, and suppressed only because Shiites and Sunnis see a common enemy: us.

Village of the Geek

New finds at a recently-rediscovered Maya city have pushed back the development of Maya culture by "several centuries," says the L.A. Times on May 5.

Archeologists excavating a 2,500-year-old Maya city in Guatemala have unearthed buildings and massive carvings indicating the presence of a royal metropolis of more than 10,000 people at a time when, scientists had previously believed, the Maya were only simple farmers.

New studies at the Cival site in the Peten jungle have unearthed the oldest known carved portrait of a Maya king and two massive stone masks of the Maya maize deity, discoveries indicating that the Maya developed a complex and sophisticated civilization hundreds of years earlier than previously believed. ...

[The work of Vanderbilt University archeologist Francisco] Estrada-Belli "is pushing back the time for the evidence of Maya state institutions by several centuries," said archeologist Elsa Redmond of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Cival is a Preclassic Period (c. 2000 BCE - 250 CE) city; it was found in the course of studying a Classic Period (beginning about 300 CE) Maya city in the area using satellite imaging and global positioning systems. (CE and BCE - Common Era and Before Common Era - are now preferred by archeolgists over their Christian-based equivalents of AD and BC - Anno Domini, or "the year of Our Lord," and Before Christ.)

The more we look, the more we learn.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Giorgio Armani?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Clothes-minded for $2000

To be authentic, this type of plaid must be registered and approved by the Lyon Court in Edinburgh.

Some more reasons why we shouldn't be surprised about Abu Ghraib

I don't have links for the first two, older, items but I will see if I can find ones and if I can, I'll add them in an update. So check back in a few days.

First reason why we shouldn't be surprised is the fact that we've known for some time that US intelligence forces are let's call it not above a little torture to get what they want. From a Reuters dispatch for December 26, 2002:

CIA interrogators have been using "stress and duress" techniques on captured enemies in Afghanistan that blur the line between legal and inhumane, the Washington Post reported on Thursday. ...

Captives who refused to cooperate were sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, the Post said, citing intelligence specialists said to be familiar with CIA interrogation methods.

At times they were held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights - subject to what are known as "stress and duress" techniques, the report said. ...

[S]ome who did not cooperate were turned over - "rendered," in official parlance - to foreign intelligence services whose practice of torture has been documented by the U.S. government and human rights organizations, the Post said. ...

"The picture that emerges is of a brass-knuckled quest for information, often in concert with allies of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred," the Post reported. ...

The off-limits patch of ground at Bagram was described by the Post as one of a number of secret detention centers overseas where U.S. due process does not apply, where the CIA undertakes or manages the interrogation of suspected terrorists.

"Rendition" is something we also already knew about. And the cruelty, the (again I say it) brutalization of war was also on the record, as demonstrated in the June 20, 2003 issue of the Daily Mirror (UK):

American troops today admitted they routinely gun down Iraqi civilians - some of whom are entirely innocent.

As distrust of the invading forces increases amongst the local population US soldiers said they have killed civilians without hesitation, shot injured opponents and abandoned them to die in agony. ...

Sergeant First Class John Meadows summed up the prevailing attitude amongst his colleagues telling the Evening Standard that Iraqi fighters were dressed in civilian clothes.

"You can't distinguish between who's trying to kill you and who's not," he said.

"Like, the only way to get through s*** like that was to concentrate on getting through it by killing as many people as you can, people you know are trying to kill you. Killing them first and getting home."

And in an admission that directly contrasts with the line coming out from the Pentagon's spin doctors Specialist Corporal Michael Richardson added: "There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger.

"It was up close and personal the whole time, there wasn't a big distance. If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren't."

Describing the scene during combat Richardson admitted shooting injured soldiers and leaving them to die.

He said: "S***, I didn't help any of them. I wouldn't help the f******. There were some you let die. And there were some you double-tapped."

Making a shooting sign with his hand he went on: "Once you'd reached the objective, and once you'd shot them and you're moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn't want any prisoners of war. You hate them so bad while you're fighting, and you're so terrified, you can't really convey the feeling, but you don't want them to live."

What's more, the hatred, the coldness, the indifference, generated by a prison atmosphere has also long been demonstrated, as noted by the New York Times for May 6:

In 1971 researchers at Stanford University created a simulated prison in the basement of the campus psychology building. They randomly assigned 24 students to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks.

Within days the "guards" had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners' heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform sexual acts. ...

Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, a leader of the Stanford prison study, said that while the rest of the world was shocked by the images from Iraq, "I was not surprised that it happened."

"I have exact, parallel pictures of prisoners with bags over their heads," from the 1971 study, he said.

At one point, he said, the guards in the fake prison ordered their prisoners to strip and used a rudimentary sex joke to humiliate them.

Professor Zimbardo ended the experiment the next day, more than a week earlier than planned.

Prisons, where the balance of power is so unequal, tend to be brutal and abusive places unless great effort is made to control the guards' base impulses, he said. At Stanford and in Iraq, he added: "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches." ...

Craig W. Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was one of the lead researchers in the Stanford experiment, says prison abuses can be prevented by regular training and discipline, along with outside monitoring.

Without outsiders watching, Professor Haney said, "what's regarded as appropriate treatment can shift over time," so "they don't realize how badly they're behaving."

"If anything," he said, "the smiling faces in those pictures suggest a total loss of perspective, a drift in the standard of humane treatment."

A drift that included referring to prisoners as "it."

And given that we know that the CIA would not shy away from "stress and duress," a bit of verbal gymnastics on the same lines as declaring there are no "prisoners" at Gitmo because they are "detained personnel," the issue of following orders has to be considered, that is, how much of what was done was done because the soldiers knew that someone higher up wanted it done. On that score, too, there is prior knowledge. This is from the same Times article, describing studies done by Dr. Stanley Milgram some 40 years ago:

In a series of experiments, he told test subjects that they were taking part in a study about teaching through punishment.

The subjects were instructed by a researcher in a white lab coat to deliver electric shocks to another participant, the "student."

Every time the student gave an incorrect answer to a question, the subject was ordered to deliver a shock. The shocks started small but became progressively stronger at the researcher's insistence, with labels on the machine indicating jolts of increasing intensity - up to a whopping 450 volts.

The shock machine was a cleverly designed fake, though, and the victims were actors who moaned and wailed. But to the test subjects the experience was all too real.

Most showed anguish as they carried out the instructions. A stunning 65 percent of those taking part obeyed the commands to administer the electric shocks all the way up to the last, potentially lethal switch, marked "XXX."

Milgram's book on the experiments, Obedience to Authority, is still available. (By the way, Milgram is also the person who originated the "six degrees of separation" concept.)

Interestingly, the Times article ends this way:

Experiments like those at Stanford and Yale are no longer done, in part because researchers have decided that they involved so much deception and such high levels of stress - four of the Stanford prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns - that the experiments are unethical.

That is, it's simply not proper to subject people to these kinds of stresses. Unless, of course they are "enemies" and "its." Then it's not only proper, it's acceptable and even encouraged either directly by order or subtly by atmosphere.

We dehumanize others and thus brutalize ourselves, we make murder mundane and cruelty casual, we highlight hatred and condone callousness, and then we are astonished to discover that we have reaped what we have sown and ask each other with wide eyes, "How could they do it?"

"They" didn't. We did.

Footnote: It seems it's not just "enemy prisoners" who are being abused.

India asked the United States for information Tuesday on allegations that Indian nationals were being forced to work for contractors in Iraq with little rest and low pay and were kept in the country "against their will,"

the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday.

Update: Found links for those first two items.

I couldn't find a link for the Reuters dispatch, but the Washington Post article on which it's based is archived at the paper's site here. (Note that this is just a title and summary; the article itself must be paid for. But at least this can show the doubters that the article in questions exists.)

The link for the Daily Mirror article is here.

Additional Update: Found links to descriptions of the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram's experiment.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a tankini?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Clothes-minded for $1200

He studied medicine and served in the Italian army before becoming a clothing designer and opening his own Emporio shops.

Related post B

Back on April 21 I mentioned new restrictions on protest being enacted by towns in Georgia that expect to be the scenes of dissent when the next G-8 summit takes place there in June.

From an AP article for May 5 comes information on the more subtle means being employed.

For example: TOES, The Other Economic Summit, is a group planning round-table discussions of world economic issues in conjunction with the G-8 summit.

But when the group rented a conference hall for use during next month's G-8 summit of world leaders, the police took notice.

Savannah detectives visited the real estate office that rented out the hall to look at the group's contract. They also made calls inquiring about the hall's owners and the Georgia professor who signed the rental agreement.

The hall is the Progressive Recreation Center, owned by black employees of International Paper. And did the police call the owners? Did they look for criminal records? No - they called the owners' employer. Professor Margy Betz of the Savannah College of Art and Design was the one who signed the rental agreement. Who did the police call? Her? Of course not. They called the college, her employer.

Why we're supposed to image these people's employers would have knowledge of some secret destructive political tendencies I'm not sure. Frankly, it seems more likely to me to be an intimidation tactic: Dissent can get you in trouble at work, can get you maybe seriously fired.

Meanwhile,

Savannah detectives visited Oglethorpe Speedway Park, a race track in nearby Pooler, after hearing that a local protest organizer wanted to rent the venue for a benefit concert during the summit. Speedway general manager Ted Austad said he told the detectives he was leaning against the concert. A few days later, he said, Pooler Police Chief Clarence E. Chan also called.

"He just said he had concerns about that event and we might want to take a closer look before leasing it out to that person," said Austad, who backed out of holding the concert.

The police of course deny doing anything to dissuade Austad, but what other effect is intended to arise from getting a call from the Chief of Police advising you to "take a closer look" before allowing a benefit concert to take place?

Trent Schroyer, president of TOES, said "We have never had this degree of surveillance. I have no affiliation with any groups dangerous to the country in any way - unless rational discourse is a real threat."

That's called answering your own question.

Update: Broken link repaired

Related post A

This is the text of an action alert recently sent out by the ACLU. More information and a way to respond can be found at the link.

Acting in the name of stopping terrorism, Members of Congress continue to seek expansion of government power despite widespread concern about privacy and protection against government abuse.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R- WI) has introduced one such bill (H.R. 3179) that would enhance the government's secret power to obtain personal records without judicial review. It would also limit judicial discretion over the use of secret evidence in criminal cases and allow the use of secret intelligence wiretaps in immigration and possibly other civil cases without notice or an opportunity to suppress illegally acquired evidence.

If passed, this bill would be a major and unwarranted expansion of the government's secret surveillance powers under the USA PATRIOT Act.

- This legislation would strictly punish Americans for refusing to obey secret "national security letters" that allow the FBI to get your personal records without going through a judge. The FBI currently has the secret power to obtain - without court oversight and without any need to show evidence that the individual is actually involved in criminal activity - a long and growing list of highly personal records from a wide range of businesses. These can include travel agents, casinos, Internet cafes and credit reporting agencies. This bill provides for criminal penalties for failure to comply with the FBI, or for breaking the strict gag order on the government request. For example, if an Internet cafe owner complained at a local chamber of commerce meeting about a broad FBI national security letter, he could face a prison term under this bill.

- Ties judges' hands in preventing the misuse of secret evidence, which cannot be properly challenged by the accused. Today, when prosecutors worry about compromising national security by introducing classified information as evidence in regular trials, they can apply to the judge for permission to submit a summary of the information. The judge has the discretion to consider the government's request in secret or to hold an open hearing. This new legislation would force judges to consider the government's request in secret even if the judge would prefer to hold an open hearing so the accused can properly respond to the accusations.

- Broadly expands the use of secret intelligence surveillance as evidence in civil cases. Prosecutors can already use intelligence surveillance in regular courts. However, because the surveillance is gathered without criminal probable cause or other safeguards, they have to give the accused a chance to challenge this evidence (which a judge then reviews behind closed doors to see if it was gathered illegally). If this bill passes, we could see the unfair deportation of innocent, long-term legal residents of the United States because they were unable to challenge the misleading and illegal national security surveillance that was secretly used against them.

It seems to me that passage of this legislation would create the closest thing to a Secret Police the US has ever seen.

Secret investigations undertaken without evidence of wrongdoing. A wide variety of personal information available to law enforcement on demand, without even having to go through the formality of getting a warrant from a court. Individuals and agencies being required to actively cooperate with such demands and never being allowed in any way to speak about them, under pain of prison. Courts where evidence cannot be challenged or, in some cases, not even seen by the accused.

The fact that most of that is already part of law shows how far gone we are. Instead of strengthening that process, it should be reversed.

Update: You have got to read this. It's a description of a suit the ACLU has filed challenging the constitutionality of National Security Letters which can be obtained without any "individuated suspicion," that is, without any cause to believe the person so targeted has done anything wrong.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit under seal to avoid penalties for violating the NSL statute's broad gag provision, a provision that the ACLU is challenging on First Amendment grounds. Similar gag provisions are attached to other controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, including Section 215 [which also refers to obtaining personal records], which the ACLU has challenged in another lawsuit.

That is, the case was filed in secret, with the ACLU not even able to reveal its existence, until it could work out a deal with the government about what information about the case could be released. That took three weeks with the government yielding only under legal pressure to allow any information to come out. The result has been the release on April 28 of a heavily-redacted complaint that even blocks out the name of the client on whose behalf the ACLU is suing.

This is getting really frightening.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the camera? (acceptable: television)

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Clothes-minded for $400

This two-piece bathing suit has a tank top and a bikini bottom, hence the name.

It's a Sadr situation

More indications are appearing that Moqtada al-Sadr has, as I've said, overplayed his hand, perhaps severely.

I'd mentioned previously the emergence of a shadowy group calling itself the Battalions of Thu el-Fiqar, which has killed at least seven members of Sadr's al-Mahdi Army in Najaf. Additional reports from the Iraqi Press Monitor for April 28, quoting the newspaper of PUK, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, say that group has also attacked places in Kufa where members of Sadr's militia were stationed. That same report claims the emergence of another anti-Sadr force, the "Young Believers Group in Najaf," which has supposedly had clashes with Sadr's miltia.

Perhaps more significantly, the New York Times, in describing a major gathering of Shiite clergy on Tuesday, says

several thousand people attended an anti-Sadr protest meeting outside the Imam Ali shrine in the city on Friday, according to several of the meeting's participants.

An increasing number of Shiite clerics have been becoming more vocal in criticizing Sadr. For example, the London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, quoted by IPM for April 28, said

A group of the Hawza clerics has condemned the Mahdi army for assaulting some stores, houses and government buildings in Najaf and Kufa, as well as arresting some people under different accusations. The Hawza statement said those under arrest have been tortured and sent to a so-called court of law where they were sentenced. Al-Mahdi elements are said to have occupied some Iraqi prisons.

And Bloomberg News said on Wednesday that

Mohammad Bahr al-Uloum, a Shiite leader, said yesterday in Baghdad, al-Sadr's militia must be disarmed, Reuters reported. "Najaf and Kerbala must be disarmed," he said. "These are holy cities that must have a Vatican-like status."

But perhaps the most dramatic call came from that gathering of Shiite clergy.

Baghdad, Iraq, May 4 - Representatives of Iraq's most influential Shiite leaders met here on Tuesday and demanded that Moktada al-Sadr, a rebel Shiite cleric, withdraw militia units from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, stop turning the mosques there into weapons arsenals and return power to Iraqi police and civil defense units that operate under American control. ...

Although Shiite leaders have made similar demands of Mr. Sadr before, it has never been in such strength. About 150 leaders attended the gathering, representing many of Shiism's most influential political, religious and professional groups. One group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or Sciri, has close ties to Ayatollah Sistani, who is regarded as Iraq's top Shiite cleric and the country's most influential political voice.

The Times article raises two interesting points in regard to Sadr and the Shiite leadership. One is that

[s]everal Shiite leaders acknowledged that they had delayed issuing their statement until there were clear signs that public opinion among Shiites had moved strongly against Mr. Sadr. ...

Mr. Mahdi, from the Sciri group, which is close to Ayatollah Sistani, was blunt about Mr. Sadr's decline in popularity. "He's 100 percent isolated across most of the southern provinces; he's even isolated in Najaf," he said. "The people there regard him as having taken them hostage." He said Mr. Sadr had also been criticized by his most powerful religious backer, Grand Ayatollah Kazem Hossein Haeri, based in the Iranian city of Qum, who had urged Mr. Sadr to pull his militiamen out of Najaf and Karbala and to stop storing weapons in mosques.

That is, the very fact of the meeting and the statement is a demonstration of Sadr's declining support to the point where they now feel they can speak out against him without provoking a reaction among fellow Shiites.

Also raised is the intriguing possibility that there is another reason for the renewed pressure on Sadr, quite apart from any motives of religion or public support.

Several speakers implied that the Sunni minority intended to derail the American-led political process, and thus the prospect of a Shiite majority government. ...

Equally disturbing to many Shiites, American occupation officials, faced with the dual challenges from Mr. Sadr and Sunni Muslim insurgents in Falluja, have handed some authority in Falluja to elements of Saddam Hussein's former army, despised by Shiites as an instrument of his repression.

In other words, the Shiite leadership may be coming to believe that Sadr has helped to disrupt the supposed political process toward a new Iraqi government, part of the result of which could be the re-emergence of Baathist elements and Sunnis in positions of influence - that is, that Sadr has become a hindrance to the prospect of Shiite rule.

Perhaps taking advantage of this opening, US forces on Thursday

moved to the outskirts of the southern city of Najaf and recaptured the governor's office, posing the most aggressive challenge yet to a radical Shiite cleric who has led a monthlong resistance,

the Times says. The seizure of the office, which a coalition official said is on the fringe of the city, about 1-1/2 miles from the Imam Ali shrine, came with little resistance. Sadr's militia is believed to be concentrated around the shrine, apparently involved more with protecting him than with sparking the nationwide uprising for which Sadr called.

I don't want to predict what Sadr will do now, and it has to be kept in mind that he is still popular in areas away from Najaf, such as in Shiite areas of Baghdad. Yet with his increasing physical and more importantly political isolation, so long as the US continues to be smart enough to not attack him directly, it's hard to see where he goes from here.

A couple of weeks ago Sadr gave himself an out by saying that he'd "implement any order" - including one to disarm - issued by the Shiite religious establishment. It's an out he's had chances to use in the interim but hasn't. Now, even in the face of the clearest such demand yet, I frankly doubt that he'll change his mind and use the exit.

I just flashed on the Weather Underground of the 60s. One tactic it employed was doing outrageous things - such as the Days of Rage - with the idea of provoking an overreaction on the part of police, which would provoke such anger in "the people" as to dramatically strengthen the hand of antigovernment forces. It didn't work for two reasons, one being that people even in those more, if I can call it this, radical times were nowhere near ready for violent revolution. The other is that the police didn't fall for it. They busted skulls but didn't engage for the most part in the kind of wild overreation the WU desired. (Yes, there was a lot of police overreaction, police violence, and "police riots," as Chicago 1968 got called by an investigating committee. But by being more careful about how they dealt with the WU, the police upset their plans and undermined their power as a symbol.) I can't help but wonder now if Sadr made the same mistake: He counted on an overreaction that never came.

Prisoners of their own delusions

Even as the sociopaths in the White House try to clamp a lid on the fallout from the revelations of US abuse and torture of Iraqi captives, the issue continues to widen. Amnesty International, for example, charges that what's been seen is "the tip of the iceberg and that it has uncovered widespread torture," reported CNN on Sunday.

Nicole Choueiry, Amnesty's Middle East spokeswoman, said the group had detailed "scores" of reports of ill-treatment over the past year but the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq had ignored them.

"We have said there are patterns of torture by coalition forces," Choueiry told CNN on Sunday.

"The only good thing to come out of this would be if the pictures forced the coalition to launch an independent investigation and for its findings to be published in full."

(Amnesty's press release can be found here; a March 18 report on the state of human rights in Iraq is here.)

And Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch, writing in the International Herald Tribune for May 3, reminds us that Iraq is not the only case.

Across the world, the United States is holding detainees in offshore and foreign prisons where allegations of mistreatment cannot be monitored. It has also been accused of sending terror suspects to countries where information has been beaten out of them. ...

The classic case, of course, has been Guantanamo, Cuba, which the Bush administration deliberately chose as a detention facility for more than 700 detainees from 44 countries in an attempt to put them beyond the reach of the U.S. courts - and of any courts, for that matter. The U.S. government has argued that U.S. courts would not have jurisdiction over these detainees even if it they were being tortured or summarily executed.

But Guantanamo may not be the worst problem; indeed, it may even be a diversion from more extreme situations. ...

This is all the more disturbing because the United States has failed to provide clear information on its treatment of 10,000 civilians held in Iraq - and has provided no information at all for at least 200 so-called "high security detainees."

In Afghanistan, the United States is also holding civilians in a legal black hole at a number of off-limits detention facilities - with no tribunals, no legal counsel and no family visits.

Human Rights Watch has presented compelling evidence that there, too, U.S. personnel have committed inhumane and degrading acts against detainees. ... Three people have died in U.S. custody there, and two of the deaths were ruled homicides by U.S. military doctors who performed autopsies. ...

The Bush administration has still not answered charges leveled in The Washington Post which, citing numerous unnamed U.S. officials, described the rendition of captured Al Qaeda suspects from U.S. custody to other countries, such as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, where they were tortured or mistreated. These countries, like Syria, are ones where the United States itself has criticized the practice of torture.

In the case of the murders in Afghanistan, Reuters tells us on May 4 that

a soldier was convicted in the U.S. military justice system of killing a prisoner by hitting him with a rock, and was reduced in rank to private and thrown out of the service but did not serve any jail time.

Somehow, "you're fired" doesn't seem to do justice to the accusation.

In the meantime, this has of course spurred rage across the Muslim world and has provoked fundamentalist Islamic parties to accuse the US and the UK of having demonstrated "the hatred of their countries toward Islamic people" in the words of Nasharuddin Isa, secretary general of the fundamentalist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, the country's largest opposition group.

I don't believe that the US has a hatred of Islamic people - obviously there is among some, too many, hatred of and among many more paranoia about Muslims in general and Arab Muslims in particular (part of the problem being that so many of us don't know the difference) , but no, I don't believe it can be said that "the US hates Muslims." However, what I believe can be said is what I've already said before: The brutalization of war can turn ordinary people into callous beasts, especially ordinary people from an insular society largely ignorant of other cultures who are trained to think of their "enemies" as "ragheads" and "towelheads." (I still recall the quote from the first Gulf War where some fighter pilot expressed his confidence about the upcoming battle because "I can't believe that some camel jockey with a towel on his head can be as smart as I am.")

I recall reading some time ago a quote by General S. L. A. Marshall:

A revealing light is thrown on this subject through the studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of the combat fatigue cases in the European Theater. They found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle fatigue in the individual, and that fear of failure ran a strong second.

It is therefore reasonable to believe that the average and normally healthy individual - the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat - still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.

(From Men Against Fire, 1947.)

Marshall saw that as a problem "which needs to be analyzed and understood if we are to prevail against it in the interest of battle efficiency." That is exactly what Basic Training is designed to do: to prevail against the disinclination of normal human beings to kill others. I have long argued that the prerequisite for turning someone into an effective combat soldier is convincing them to think of their enemy as somehow not quite human. As I used to put it, the US didn't fight Germans and Japanese in World War II, it fought Krauts and Nips. In Korea and Vietnam, it was gooks. Now, it's ragheads.

While I say again that I refuse to exonerate the soldiers who gleefully abused, humiliated, and beat prisoners while turning their suffering into souveniers, I say also that the source of their sickness was not some perversion of their own, not some failure of command, but rather the success of command in getting them to think of a prisoner as, as appears in a number of descriptions, "it." (One such example is found in Monday's New York Times; check the last paragraph of this story. Note that the speaker was not even one of the abusers.) That's why this is not an isolated incident and why it will get worse before it gets better.

But of course, we already know it's not isolated. We already know about the report given more than two months ago, March 3 to be exact, by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who said that

[b]etween October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.

This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison (BCCF).

Despite that, the administration is still sticking to the "isolated incident" defense. Colin Powell referred to the "small number" of American troops involved while Condoleezza Rice talked about the "specific cases of those particular photographs." But as the matter continues to spin beyond their control, look for the shift to the "terrible things sometimes happen in war" defense. That will be the sign that they know they're in real trouble.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are your lines?

JEOPARDY!
Show Biz Sayings for $1000

Proverbially, it "adds ten pounds."

And now the evening news

In line with my desire to cut back a bit for the next two weeks pre-vacation, no commentary here, but several news items noted just 'cause I think they're worthy of your attention for one reason or another.


From the Beeb for May 4:

UN officials who have visited Sudan's western Darfur region say conditions there are as bad as reports suggested.

James Morris of the UN's World Food Programme said it was "one of the world's worst humanitarian crises".

He confirmed earlier reports that more than a million people had been forced violently from their homes. ...

Mr Morris said food was available for only about half of the displaced people. ...

"Everything has been taken away from these people. This is tragic," he said, adding that he had never before seen such frightened people.

Mr Morris added that security was the key issue and for this the Sudanese government was responsible.

He said it was up to the government to bring the Arab militias - known as the janjaweed - under control.

The UN has accused Sudan of backing the militias in a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against black residents.

Two rebel groups in Darfur - the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) - took up arms last year, accusing the government of ignoring the region.

A ceasefire was signed between the government and the rebels on 8 April to allow humanitarian aid to reach those affected.

But the rebels have accused the government of consistently breaking the truce by bombing villages and backing the militia in the area.

As a footnote to that, you might check this.


Also from the BBC for May 4:

About 50 retired US diplomats have written to President George W Bush to criticise current American policy towards the Middle East. ...

"Your unabashed support of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon's extra-judicial assassinations, Israel's Berlin Wall-like barrier, its harsh military measures in occupied territories and now your endorsement of Sharon's unilateral plans are costing our country its credibility, prestige and friends," the letter warned. ...

The signatories say they were inspired by a similar letter written by 52 former British diplomats to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair last week. ...

Mr [Andrew]Killgore[, organiser of the American missive,] said the letter was mainly about policy towards Israel and the Palestinians, but it touched on Iraq too.

"If anything Iraq is worse," he said. ...

There has been no response yet from the White House, our correspondent says, though in the past, the administration has been quick to savage its critics.

From the New York Times for May 4:

The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday. ...

Disney executives indicated that they would not budge from their position forbidding Miramax to be the distributor of the film in North America. Overseas rights have been sold to a number of companies, executives said. ...

Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor. ...

A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax's distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore's film is deemed to be against Disney's interests not because of the company's business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore's film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.

From the Christian Science Monitor for May 5:

Americans spend twice as much on healthcare as other countries, but it turns out that they're not getting twice the quality for the price when they go to the doctor or hospital.

In the first international comparison of healthcare quality, researchers found that of the five countries studied, none is consistently the best or the worst. ...

But researchers concluded that it was the Americans who should take particular note of the findings.

"The US should be particularly concerned about this report," says Arnold Epstein, chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard University's School of Public Health in Boston. "If I'm spending twice as much, I'd expect to have the better outcomes."

But it turns out, the US was in the middle of the pack for the majority of health issues that were compared.

From David Brock's new website MediaMatters for America, May 5:

Rush Limbaugh justified the U.S. guards' mistreatment of the Iraqis [at Abu Ghraib prison], stating that they were just "having a good time," and that their actions served as an "emotional release." ...

From the May 4 Rush Limbaugh Show, titled "It's Not About Us; This Is War!":

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men --

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

The day before, on his May 3 show, Limbaugh observed that the American troops who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were "babes" and that the pictures of the alleged abuse were no worse than "anything you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage."

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war - have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture.

LIMBAUGH: You know, if you look at - if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don't know if it's just me, but it looks just like anything you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I'm - yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City - the movie. I mean, I don't - it's just me.

From an AP wire story, May 5:

Breaking with others in his industry, the chief executive of CVS Pharmacy called Wednesday for legalizing imports of prescription drugs. The statement by the nation's largest wholesale purchaser of prescription medicines came a day after the Bush administration's health secretary said legalizing imports appears inevitable.

Support is also growing in Congress, even among Republicans who previously opposed importation but now say constituents are clamoring for relief from soaring prescription prices. ...

On Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said he believes Congress will pass a bill this year and he would advise President Bush not to stand in its way.

From an AP story for May 5:

Global treaties to cut barriers to international trade aren't enough to boost the economies of the world's poorest nations, a senior United Nations official said Wednesday.

Countries can't benefit from easier access to foreign markets unless they get help to improve their infrastructure, train staff and attract investment, said Rubens Ricupero, secretary-general of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. Without that help, nations simply can't supply the products even if consumers want to buy them, he said.

"I think there is more to the equation that trade brings development than trade negotiations, because we have to make countries capable of trading," Ricupero said.

"People still think that (increased production capacity) will automatically follow trade negotiations, and I think this is the big delusion."

As if we didn't know

According to Tuesday's New York Times, the Congressional Research Service is accusing the Bush administration of having violated federal law when it ordered Richard Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, to withhold information from Congress during the debate on Medicare deform.

Foster would have told Congress that the White House's gift to the insurance industry would cost tens of billions of dollars more than the White House claimed. Thomas Scully, who was then the administrator of Medicare, has admitted he told Foster to keep quiet.

That, the CRS says,

"would appear to violate a specific and express prohibition of federal law." The actuary, it said, has a duty to "make professional and reliable cost estimates, unfettered by any particular partisan agenda."

The White House gave bland assurance that the matter was being investigated, but William Pierce, speaking for the Department of Health and Human Services, said "we are looking to the future, not the past."

In other words, don't count on anything because they're too busy figuring out their next scam.

It really is becoming difficult for me to express the level of contempt I have developed for these people. They have no regard for the public, the world, for principles, honor, honesty, decency. They are not only self-centered, hypocritical, lying, zealous fanatics, they are casual self-centered, hypocritical, lying, zealous fanatics. It's just ordinary to them, there's not even a sense of passion about it. It's just the normal way of doing business. Hannah Arendt's banality of evil for the 21st century.

There's an old line about the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath being that a psychopath doesn't know the difference between right and wrong and a sociopath knows the difference but just doesn't care. Logically, then, a psychopath wouldn't try to cover up their cruelties because they wouldn't recognize them as such. Which seems to indicate that "sociopaths" is the correct description of the Bush cabal. And so it will be.

Footnote: In March, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson promised to make Foster's cost estimates available to Congress. In April, it wrote Congress refusing to do so. Which means, by CRS's account, the White House is still deliberately and consciously violating federal law to advance it's own political agenda. Sociopaths.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "go on?"

JEOPARDY!
Show Biz Sayings for $600

Spencer Tracy's acting advice was remember these and don't bump into the furniture.

Just thinking

I've been thinking today about my very first post on this thing, back oh so long ago on November 13. I said (in part):

I was finally moved to start a blog (after thinking about it for a while without ever getting around to it) by a recent phone conversation with a friend, in which the morass in Iraq came up. As such conversations do, this one then veered off in several related directions at once, all revolving around a core of our mutual distaste for George Bush. After a few minutes, my friend sighed and said there was no point getting all worked up about it.

"Yes, there is," I replied. "The truth is, my hope is nearly gone. My anger is the only thing that keeps me going."

So now I have an outlet to express that anger, to discuss what I'm angry about, why I'm angry, and, in my calmer moments, to try to rediscover that hope and offer a different vision of what we as a people, a nation, a culture, might do, might be, might become. (And, of course, I also need to wonder if this will become just navel-gazing, an exercise that makes me feel better without actually accomplishing anything.)

That last part has been coming back to me. What exactly am I accomplishing here; in fact, just what does this whole blogging business accomplish beyond letting us think we're accomplishing something? Yes, there are a handful of very popular, very widely read blogs that might actually have some impact in terms of producing some action if nothing else (certainly there are a few that have raised a fair amount of money for their favored candidates) - but what of the rest of us, the mere mortals?

The truth is, I think I'm suffering from outrage overload. I'm feeling frustrated and tired and discouraged about the world at large and our (that is, the US's) particular place in it and as a result I'm wondering if I'm doing anything more here than engaging in ego-tripping, imaging what I write is of interest or use to anyone or makes a flipping bit of difference.

Maybe I'm just tired (I am) or maybe it'll simply pass (it has before) or maybe I'm just impatient (for what, I'm not sure, but it has that edgy feeling to it). What I really think I need is either a break or some sense that doing this means more than reading my own words.

Actually, I am taking a break soon - Donna and I are taking a vacation, and no, I don't do mobile blogging. That's in just under two weeks and we'll be gone for a week. That will do me a world of good.

In the meantime, I expect the blogging will be a bit on the light side. Since I started doing this, I have posted something every day except for when we were moving and I had no access to my computer. I did a quick, if pointless, check and not counting the Jeopardy! posts I've been averaging nearly five posts a day. So maybe letting that slip to two or three for the next two weeks wouldn't be a bad idea.

Of course, after one good night's sleep I could change my attitude and my mind. We'll see.

In the meantime, any feedback or words of support would be appreciated.

Meanwhile

The International Herald Tribune for May 5 reports that Abu Ghraib is not the only target of investigations.

The U.S. Army, even while struggling to contain the damage over the abuse of prisoners at an Iraqi prison, said Tuesday that it had begun criminal investigations into the deaths and assaults of 20 prisoners across Iraq. Two of the deaths have been classified as homicides.

General George Casey Jr., the army vice chief of staff, said 10 more homicide investigations were under way....

Inquiries have begun into prisoner treatment not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where two terror suspects who are U.S. citizens are being held.

The article also quoted Ted Kennedy as saying "This does not appear to be an isolated incident" and that this appeared to be "the beginning, really, rather than the end" of the matter.

From the Some Questions Need Only Be Asked Dept.

From CNN for May 4:

The Bush administration moved aggressively Tuesday to signal it took seriously abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as detailed by a Pentagon investigation. ...

Secretary of State Colin Powell condemned such acts as "immoral" and "despicable."

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice gave television interviews to three Arab networks ... indicating the White House appears to be keenly aware of the outrage around the world, particularly among Muslims.

Rumsfeld said he would take "all measures necessary" to ensure that such abuse of detainees "does not happen again."

So why did all this "aggressive" movement only take place after the horrendous torture was revealed to the world?

Footnote: Donald Rumsfeld insisted on calling the treatment "abuse." "I'm not going to address the 'torture' word," he said, because "I'm not a lawyer."

Apparently, neither is he a human being.

Shhh!

From TalkLeft we learn that the use of secret warrants continues to skyrocket in the wake of the adoption of the TRAITOR Act, doubling between 2001 and 2003.

Attorney General John Burnedfarm insisted that the data showed that the DOJ is serious about tracking terrorism. "We are acting judiciously and moving aggressively," he said. However,

officials say investigators have complained of a backlog of weeks or sometimes months in warrant applications, and a staff report last month from the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks spoke of "bottlenecks in the process," which the Justice Department is seeking to correct through increased personnel and organizational changes.

In other words, DOJ's "judicious" actions have produced so many requests for covert surveillance warrants that the system is overwhelmed.

It's also worth noting that

authorities made a total of 1,727 applications last year before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret panel that oversees the country's most delicate terrorism and espionage investigations, according to the new data.

Of that number, exactly one was completely turned down.

To be expected, I suppose. There is, after all, more than one definition of "oversight."

Keep your eyes on the prize

In this case, the prize is national office, for which any number of observers say Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is trying to groom himself. That, some say is what's behind his Ahab obsession with forestalling and limiting same sex marriages, which become legal in Massachusetts this month.

(Sidebar: I've been saying May 21. Apparently, I was reading my calendar wrong; the historic date is May 17.)

It's also likely behind his latest caper:

Boston, May 2 (Washington Post) - A group of scientists and legal experts appointed by Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has agreed on guidelines for crafting a death penalty law for Massachusetts, which abolished capital punishment two decades ago and has not executed anyone since 1947.

Outrageously, the committee was not to make any recommendation about if there should be a death penalty but only how one should be administered. That is, the key question of the death penalty itself was never entertained.

When Romney set up the committee, he said the intent was to "correct flaws" in how other states impose capital punishment. What his committee came up with was a plan for the death penalty that would apply to so few crimes and with such a high degree of proof that its imposition would be extremely rare at most. In which case, it needs to be asked, why bother? Supposedly the purpose of capital punishment is as a "deterrent." (Which it's not, but leave that aside.) But if it is an extremely unlikely penalty, what deterrent effect could it have? By definition, the deterrent effect lies in the likelihood of its being imposed, which means that making it more of a "deterrent" means making it more likely, which brings us right back to the terrible risk of executing the innocent which proposals such as the committee's are designed to prevent. So just what the hell is the point?

The point, I suspect, is politics. Support for the death penalty in Massachusetts peaked several years ago and has been declining since. There is probably not much chance this new effort would succeed. Just as in the case of same-sex marriages, Romney is pursuing a case which will look good to conservatives nationwide without risking much at home since his initiative is unlikely to make a damned bit of difference.

Duh!

From the Any Idiot Could Have Told Them That Dept. comes this:

Chicago (AP, May 3) - Overweight adolescents are more likely than normal-weight children to be victims and perpetrators of bullying, a study found, bolstering evidence that being fat endangers emotional as well as physical health.

The results in a study of 5,749 Canadian youngsters echo data from British research and follow a U.S. study published last year in which obese children rated their quality of life as low as young cancer patients' because of teasing and weight-related health problems. ...

Obese boys and girls were more than two times more likely than normal-weight youngsters to be victims of "relational" bullying - being intentionally left out of social activities. Obese girls were about twice as likely to be physically bullied on a weekly basis than normal-weight girls; among obese boys the risk was slightly lower but still substantially higher than for normal-weight boys.

The report said it underscored "the importance of enlisting teachers and schools in the fight to prevent and treat obesity in children." However, while it said that reducing bullying and thus social isolation could help children struggling with weight issues, it apparently fails (or refuses) to reach the obvious conclusion that the way to reduce the bullying is to fight the bigotry against overweight people, who are routinely regarded as clumsy, inept, unattractive, and slow-witted.

Being overweight, even being obese, is not an illness. Fat people are not "sick." They are at greater risk for a number of conditions, and for that reason obesity is not something to be desired but to be avoided. But being overweight and being "sick" are not the same thing. Smoking puts you at greatly increased risk of cancer and heart disease - but no one would say a smoker is sick (I'm speaking medically, not colloquially) unless they had some identifiable condition. Women with certain types of breasts are, statistically, at increased risk for developing breast cancer - but no one would say that such a woman is sick unless she actually is.

The same is true of obesity and I suspect, frankly, that our description of it as an "illness" to be "treated" is less an expression of our concern than a justification of our prejudice.

Disappearing act

Now he said it...

"The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?'

"That's too bad. They've been given a window of opportunity with very little terrorism now, and they're not taking advantage of it."

- L. Paul Bremer, February 26, 2001

...now he didn't.

"Criticism of [President Bush] was unfair. ...

"I regret any suggestion to the contrary. In fact, I have since learned that President Bush had shared some of these frustrations, and had initiated a more direct and comprehensive approach to confronting terrorism consistent with the threats outlined in the National Commission report.

"I am strongly supportive and grateful for the President's leadership and strategy in combating terrorism and protecting American national security throughout his first term in office."

- L. Paul Bremer, May 2, 2004

Doncha just love intellectual consistency?

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Oprah Winfrey?

JEOPARDY!
Show Biz Sayings for $200

"Shakespeare in Love" snaps this at someone who stammers, "The show must, you know ..."

Think globally, act locally?

I said this on Friday:

And maintaining that false notion of perpetual American innocence will be the root of yet another Afghanistan, another Iraq, another - Syria, perhaps?

Or something a little closer to home.

Washington (AP, May 2) - A government commission is recommending to President Bush a series of measures to cut U.S. dollar flows to Cuba as part of a broader policy to hasten the end of the country's communist system, an administration official said Sunday night. ...

Until now, the administration's policy has been to hasten a democratic transition in Cuba. The commission report goes a step further in recommending what amounts to regime change.

I love the expression "regime change." It's so unemotive as a phrase, so antiseptic. Not like "overthrowing governments which don't serve our purposes." "Regime change." Almost wholesome. And of course it's something which we're entitled to do whenever we want because after all, we're Americans and we know what's right and what's wrong and what's the matter, don't you believe in freedom?

Actually, Cuba does present an interesting, if you will, intellectual exercise for progressives. On the one hand, Castro is a dictator and there is more than ample reason to be concerned with - amend that, condemn - his record on human and civil rights. Yet at the same time in areas such as public health and education, Cuba surpasses, sometimes by a considerable margin, most developing nations - and it's been quite some time since that could be attributed to the financial backing of the old USSR. Plus, the fact is, while there is an oppressed opposition, by most accounts a clear majority of Cubans endorse Castro's rule. (Although for the sake of accuracy it has to be said that some attribute that to a siege mentality generated by unremitting US hostility, a rally-'round-the-leader impulse identical to that which saw Bush's approval ratings hit 90% in the wake of 9/11. Indeed, some have argued that the best way to undermine Castro is for the US to stop opposing him, denying him the "distraction" of perpetual external threat.)

Be that as it may, the general consensus about this commission report is that it's designed to solidify Bush's standing with Cuban-Americans, who were key to his phony Florida election "victory" in 2000. One of the proposals is a cut in the legal limit of $1200 a year which Cuban-Americans are allowed to send to friends and family in Cuba. Some wanted to ban the practice, some wanted to maintain it for "humanitarian" reasons; the prediction is the final decision will be somewhere in between. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out when the community the White House is wooing is told they can't send as much to the folks back home as they have gotten used to.

With allies like these....

No comment is really necessary, I would think. From the BBC for April 30:

Macedonian officials have admitted that seven alleged Pakistani militants killed in March 2002 were in fact illegal immigrants shot in cold blood to "impress" the international community. ...

At the time, the interior ministry said they had been killed after trying to ambush police in the capital, Skopje.

But a police spokeswoman said they had in fact been shot in a "staged murder".

The Macedonians were apparently trying to show the outside world that they were serious about participating in the US-led war on terror, officials say.

Maybe we've misunderstood all along and what Shrub actually has been saying is "coalition of the killing."

Gee, some good news two days in a row - what is the world coming to?

In a toughly-worded slam of their technology and their corporate practices, California secretary of state Kevin Shelley has

banned the use of more than 14,000 electronic voting machines made by Diebold Inc. in the November election because of security and reliability concerns.... He also declared 28,000 other touch-screen voting machines in the state conditionally "decertified" until steps are taken to upgrade their security.

Mr. Shelley said that he was recommending that the state's attorney general look into possible civil and criminal charges against Diebold because of what he called "fraudulent actions by Diebold"

and called the company's behavior, which included installing uncertified systems in four counties and then lying about it, "despicable" and "deceitful."

There have been two main and one (by comparison) minor complaints against touch-screen voting: They can be hacked, the lack of a paper trail makes a recount impossible, and if they break down, few election officials have the training to get them working again; indeed, the companies making the machines usually try to keep such information to themselves.

In addition, their abysmally bad performance in California and Florida didn't help their reputations.

As a result, they have become more and more controversial. While California has gone further than other states which initially adopted the technology, there is growing concern, even a backlash against the machines.

A voters group in Maryland, the Campaign for Verifiable Voting, filed suit against the Maryland Board of Elections last week to block the use of the state's 16,000 touch-screen machines until paper-based verification systems that display each vote can be added to them.

Federal lawmakers, including Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, have called for voter-verified paper trails as well.

Two excellent resources on this are at VerifiedVoting.org and BlackBoxVoting.org. The latter site is run by Bev Harris, who almost single-handedly pushed this issue into the national consciousness.

Update: BlackBoxVoting reports that Ireland, Venezuela, and the Philippines are dumping touch-screen voting.

Only those with something to hide worry about privacy

That's what they tell us. Therefore, unless we're terrorists, we shouldn't be the least upset that in the wake of 9/11,

the nation's largest airlines, including American, United and Northwest, turned over millions of passenger records to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, airline and law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday.

Those records, typically including a passenger's name, address, destination, and credit card number, were provided willingly for periods covering as much as an entire year before the attack.

"There was no reluctance on the part of anybody," said a senior FBI official quoted in Saturday's New York Times.

In fact, United not only provided "thousands of pages of records," it

set up extensive facilities for F.B.I. agents in its headquarters near Chicago.

This is, of course, in addition to the previous revelations that at least three airlines - Northwest, American and JetBlue - gave the feds what was supposed to be confidential passenger data as part of develop enhanced passenger screening, a practice which so far seems to have succeeded only in causing travelers headaches with delays and false accusations.

The FBI defended the sweeping nature of the data gathering as a means

to detect attacks in the making through patterns in the travel records.

"They developed a model of what these hijackers were doing," he said, "and went back and looked, based on that model, to see if we could find associates, conspirators or other groups out there, particularly in the time immediately following 9/11."

There is no indication that the passenger data produced any significant evidence about the plot or the hijackers, the F.B.I. official said.

In other words, it was a miserable failure, again succeeding only in reducing privacy with no gain in security.

David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center called it "a vacuum cleaner approach to investigations involving information on the lawful activities of millions of citizens," noting the massive amount of data handed over without even a fuss being made.

But a former privacy official for the Clinton administration, Peter Swire, said that the request and the cooperation should be viewed in the context of the terror attacks and might qualify as the kind of "hot pursuit" of criminals that temporarily gives law enforcement greater leeway.

"This is probably the tip of the iceberg of what companies gave the government right after Sept. 11," said Mr. Swire, who is now a law professor at Ohio State University.

I'm sorry, but just how is that supposed to make us feel better?

Footnote: At least two of the carriers, Northwest and United, issued statements asserting that release of the information was "consistent" with their privacy policies. That's very likely true, which is an indication of just how useless most of corporate America's vaunted "privacy" polices (usually attached on websites to a blaring headline along the lines of "Your privacy is important to us!") actually are.

Try reading some of them sometime. Most contain provisions like they won't share any personal information they have about you - except with affiliated companies, law enforcement agencies, or, sometimes, "business partners," or when they think it necessary to "protect" themselves (against what, they never seem to say). Oh, and of course they're not responsible for anything any of those to who they give the information do with it.

One final note: Don't be fooled by website that display that certification about their privacy policy. All that certification means is that they have a policy. It could say "we'll dig out everything we possibly can about you and then tell anyone anything we damn well please and you don't like it, bite us" - but as long as they have a policy, they can get the certification.

Choose one from Column A, two from Column B

A series of experiments by neuroscientists from UCLA aim to determine the way Democratic and Republican brains differ in how they interpret political images, said the International Herald Tribune for April 21.

The tests involve having a subject lie inside an MRI machine and watch various political commercials while the researchers observe which parts of their brain "light up" (become active) and when. The subjects are first shown pictures of Bush, Kerry, and Nader - to which, perhaps not surprisingly, they all react emotionally (or, at least, areas of the brain related to emotional responses become active). But after they're shown a Bush campaign commercial, the reaction changes: They still react emotionally to their own preferred candidate but their reaction to the opposing candidate becomes more rational.

"It seems as if they're really identifying with their own candidate, whereas when they see the opponent, they're using their rational apparatus to argue against him," [lead researcher Marco] Iacoboni said.

Any interpretations are speculative; since the experiment is only half over - that is, they want to test twice as many subjects as the 11 they have so far - even the researchers themselves don't claim to have proved anything.

Not yet, anyway.

However, they already claim to have noticed a difference in those who identify themselves as Democrats as opposed to those who call themselves Republicans: When shown either the Bush commercial that used images from 9/11 or the famous, once-shown "Daisy" commercial used by Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater in 1964, Democrats showed greater activity in an area of the brain that responds to threats and danger. (For those who have never seen it, "Daisy" shows an image of a little girl in a field counting the petals she pulls off a daisy; her voices fades into a sober countdown, leading to an atomic explosion.) They speculate that this supports the notion that Democrats are in general more reluctant to use force than Republicans.

So why isn't this a geek post, just some interesting science, in this case better understanding how the brain works? Because this is how the article ends:

While new to political advertising, brain imaging has been used to analyze other kinds of responses to commercials, both by "neuromarketers" selling services to corporations and by academic researchers like Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who has studied brain responses to soft-drink advertising. He said that research like Iacoboni's could help expose manipulative techniques during political campaigns.

"This research can show how a candidate is unfairly targeting the weaknesses and foibles of voters," Montague said, "and that can be empowering."

Empowering, my ass. This is, rather, another example of science being perverted (or at least setting itself up to be perverted) into the service of existing power. Does Montague really believe that the use of this research would be to "expose manipulative techniques" rather than to improve them? That the result will be less deceit instead of more, more substance instead of less?

Perhaps, in fact, he does believe that, since a story in the October 26, 2003 New York Times calls him "purely academic in focus, studying the consumer mind out of intellectual curiosity, with no corporate support." However, if he does, he is incredibly naive. That same article immediately adds:

Increasingly, though, there are others - like several of the researchers at the Mind of the Market Laboratory at Harvard Business School - who work as full-fledged "neuromarketers," conducting brain research with the help of corporate financing and sharing their results with their sponsors.

That is, their avowed purpose is to find "New! Improved!" ways to influence, direct, and control consumer behavior for the benefit of corporate profit.

Now, I actually agree with the folks at the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (source of the link to the Times article) when they say that "the hype around is neuromarketing is much larger than it's actual power to steer consumer behavior." Indeed, as I understand it, there's not much evidence any advertising drives consumer behavior beyond the limited realm of brand choice within a category. (That is, advertising can't make you drink soda but it can affect whether soda-drinkers buy Coke or Pepsi.) My concern is not with the present but with the future, with the potential for more effective manipulation arising out of continued advances in neuroscience and refinements of technique and its application to areas beyond product choice to other kinds of choice.

Whether you can be effectively unconsciously manipulated to prefer Coke to Pepsi isn't really important; whether you can be so manipulated to prefer Candidate A to Candidate B, is.

Just for a change of pace, a bit of hopeful news from another front entirely

According to the BBC for April 30,

[s]ome 19,000 former Liberian combatants have handed in their weapons, the United Nations mission there says.

This is almost half of the 40,000 fighters, many of them children, who took part in Liberia's long civil war.

The ex-combatants from all sides are eager to disarm, a UN spokeswoman told BBC News Online.

The long, bloody, vicious war, marked by widespread cruelty and more broken ceasefires than a reasonable person could keep track of, finally ended last year with the departure of the murderous Charles Taylor.

The UN now has 14,000 peacekeepers in Liberia, but has yet to deploy in the far southeast, an area held by rebels. Still, no one seems to think that there will be problems in completing the disarming of the various groups so that the new power-sharing government can have a chance to stabilize and begin rebuilding the country.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "The Big Sleep?"

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Awards and Honors

The NAACP's Spingam Medal for 2000 went to this talk show host.

Down the dark ladder

Every time I read about the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, it gets worse. The cruelty is more pronounced, the conscious intent more obvious.

There simply is no question but that these are war crimes and they should be prosecuted as such, and the prosecutions should include, in fact be focused on, the military intelligence hierarchy that not only endorsed but encouraged this heinous behavior, prosecutions which, outrageously, maddeningly, shamefully, disgracefully, seem unlikely to happen:

What, if any actions, are being taken against the interrogators [CBS asked Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt]?

"I hope the investigation is including not only the people who committed the crimes, but some of the people that might have encouraged these crimes as well," says Kimmitt. "Because they certainly share some level of responsibility as well."

But so far, none of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib are facing criminal charges. In fact, a number of them are civilians, and military law doesn't apply to them.

Well, if military law doesn't, some damn law does. A White House that claims the authority to hold citizens indefinitely, without charge or access to lawyers, can damn well find a way to punish people acting on its behalf with a stricter weapon than a bad performance review. I repeat: They are war criminals and should be treated as such.

However, unlike some I am not willing to exonerate the soldiers who actually did the deeds. Gary Myers, attorney for Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick, one of the accused, says his client shouldn't even have been charged

because of the failure of his commanders to provide proper training and standards.

"The elixir of power, the elixir of believing that you're helping the CIA, for God's sake, when you're from a small town in Virginia, that's intoxicating," says Myers. "And so, good guys sometimes do things believing that they are being of assistance and helping a just cause. ... And helping people they view as important."

Frederick says he didn't see a copy of the Geneva Convention rules for handling prisoners of war until after he was charged.

Well, dammit, so what? Who the flaming hell cares? What kind of "proper training" does it take to realize that it's wrong to do things including

[b]reaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee,

along with stacking them naked in a pile, forcing them to simulate oral sex, forcing them to masturbate while you point, laugh, and take pictures?

I don't have to read the Geneva Convention to know that's just wrong. Just no excuses, no finessing, no evasions, flat-out wrong. And it can't be excused on the grounds of inadequate supervision.

I said it before: War brutalizes, war dehumanizes, war hardens the soul and drains the spirit. It turns you into what you say you oppose. It turns ordinary people from "a small town in Virginia" into brutes of a kind they likely would have claimed was impossible just a few months earlier. But at the same time remember that this came to light because one person refused to countenance it. One person, Specialist Joseph M. Darby, refused in at least this case to surrender to the dehumanization of war and reported it instead of reveling in it. And in terms of our knowledge, that has made the difference.

All power to the moral dissenters.

Footnote: Myers told Seymour Hersh

that his client's defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence.

We'll see how "I was only following orders" works as a defense when it's one of us rather than one of them that's in the dock.

First they came for abortions, but I wasn't having an abortion, so....

For years, reproductive rights activists have warned to laughing derision that if abortion is successfully outlawed, birth control will be next.

Well, guess what. Abortion isn't illegal - at least not yet - but birth control is already under attack. In a trend Lisa Boyce, vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, calls "not an epidemic, but noteworthy," pharmacists are claiming their consciences won't allow them to fill prescriptions for birth control pills - or even, on at least one occasion, to transfer the prescription to another pharmacist.

The pharmacists have in some cases faced disciplinary action; some have been fired. The one who refused even to transfer the prescription, in effect denying the medication to the customer altogether, faces a disciplinary hearing on Tuesday which could cost him his license.

His lawyer, not surprisingly, claims it's a matter of religious freedom: "He sincerely believes he would be committing an act of sin to dispense [birth control], and to call someone else to dispense it." That is, he was not only obligated to refuse to fill the prescription, he was also obligated to prevent, to the extent he could, anyone else from filling it.

Now I admit I don't see the overall issue as cut and dried: I do believe in the right (and power) of individual conscience. But as Linda Rankin, a medical ethicist and philosophy professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, says,

"When people take on the life of a pharmacist, they have to realize what might be asked of them."

They need to realize - and damn well should realize - that filling prescriptions that might violate personal beliefs comes with the territory. Most times, that shouldn't be a problem. Michael Stewart of the American Pharmacists Association says the association holds that

[a] pharmacist who objects to dispensing a particular medication must tell an employer. If one pharmacist refuses to fill a prescription on grounds of conscience, another pharmacist must do it. Some customers may be referred to another pharmacy. Other prescriptions may be delivered by mail.

"In the great majority of cases, the pharmacist's right to conscience is exercised appropriately and seamlessly, so the patient is not even aware that the pharmacist has exercised that right," Mr. Stewart says. "A pharmacist can say, 'Let me get Bob for you, ma'am,' and that's the end of that."

There is a huge difference between that and cases such as the above, between saying "I can't do it" and "I will prevent you from doing it."

Oh, and please don't try to tell me it's "civil disobedience" unless you're also claiming that the intent is in fact to put an end to the availability of birth control. Because if you're not, then the intent is to impose one's personal morality on others with no consequences to oneself - and that is not civil disobedience of any form I can recognize. But if you are, I will resist that effort and applaud moves to put an end to it, including firing and revoking the licenses of offenders.

As Lisa Boyce said,

"No woman should have to shop around until she finds a pharmacist who will dispense her doctor-prescribed birth-control prescription."

That's especially important in many rural areas, where there may only be one pharmacist for some miles. Linda Rankin put it well:

"Would they be able to fill these prescriptions? If they can't, then they have a moral obligation not to practice at a place where they are the only pharmacist, and where not to do this would cause serious harm to other people."

But I truly wonder if such considerations are driving or would drive the people involved here.

Quick note

Sorry for the paucity of posts today; Blogspot seems to be having one of its periodic fits and posting has been sluggish and difficult. I'll do my best to catch up on a few things tomorrow.

Another sorts of quagmire

With only a month left before it's self-imposed deadline, the UN is having great difficulty finding enough peacekeeping troops to fulfill its pledge to take over security in Haiti from the US, the New York Times reported on Friday.

Diplomats pointed to several "challenges" involved, but the biggest ones are that

large parts of the country remain under the rebels' control, and that there has been no systematic effort to disarm them. ...

In addition, some potential contributors are reluctant to offer troops because of lingering doubts about the conditions of Mr. Aristide's departure....

"The big problem they have is the controversy over Aristide's departure," said a senior diplomat who is involved in the negotiations. "It remains a cancer, and it tends to limit support."

CARICOM continues to resist recognizing the new government, having put off any decision until July. Few nations, it seems, are willing to pick up after our mess. Again.

Stopping terrorism at its roots

From a column April 28 Daily Star (Lebanon), we hear of some of the questions on the application for getting a visa to enter the US.

You would have to dish out a hundred dollars, schedule an appointment, take dorky passport pictures with both your ears showing, fill in a lengthy application and get interviewed. Not too tough a process, for you can almost say it in one breath.

Now, just before you make the trip to Awkar [the Beirut neighborhood where the US Embassy is located], you have to fill out a detailed application, which is simply highly amusing.

The questions, each with boxes to ticks off your "yes" or "no" answer, include

- Are you a member or representative of a terrorist group?
- Have you ever been a prostitute or a procurer for prostitutes?
- Have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the Nazi government of Germany?
- Have you ever participated in genocide?

As for all the honest terrorists, who dutifully tick the "yes" box and accordingly "seek to enter the US to partake in subversive activities," well don't worry because your answer "does not automatically signify ineligibility for a visa." There is hope! ...

So you've finally received your visa? Yippee! But bear in mind that tiny note typed in the minuscule box toward the end of the application: "I understand that possession of a visa does not automatically entitle the bearer to enter the United States of America upon arrival at a port of entry if he or she is found inadmissible." Bon Voyage.

And welcome to America, where we can still consider you a terrorist if we damn well want to.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Robert Frost?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
A Sleepy Category for $2000

Raymond Chandler is credited with coining this term for death in the title of a 1939 novel.

If this is true, it's very disturbing

As reported by the BBC on Thursday,

President George W Bush says he had a "wide-ranging and cordial" conversation with the commission investigating the 11 September 2001 attacks. ...

"I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I took the time... I enjoyed it," Mr Bush said after the conversation lasting more than three hours.

Bush's very own Charles Sandman, Republican Jim Thompson, said there was some laughter and "the president is a bit of a tease."

So much for an actual investigation.

Footnote: Shrub "laughed off" the idea that the joint appearance with the Big Dick Cheney was to avoid the possibility of contradictory testimony."

"If I'd had anything to hide, I wouldn't have met them," Mr Bush told reporters outside the White House.

Uh, excuse me, but -

- Bush opposed creation of the commission, only giving in under political pressure.

- The White House dragged its feet on providing documents, only giving in under political pressure and even then putting harsh limitations on access.

- Bush opposed extending the time for the commission, only giving in under political pressure.

- Bush resisted having Condoleezza Rice appear, only giving in under political pressure.

- Bush initially refused to appear, then wanted questioning limited to one hour with just the chair and co-chair of the commission, in each case only giving in under political pressure, then would agree to appear only together with Cheney, only in private, and only if there was no official record or transcript of the meeting.

Just what part of that does not sound like a person with something to hide?