So, do tell, what's been going on while I was away, part two

I've just had a very frightening experience.

First came the Supreme Court decision regarding eminent domain and the intent of the city of New London, Connecticut to seize a neighborhood of family homes to provide land for a private developer.

When I first posted about this back in October, after the Court agreed to take the case, I noted that

[t]he power of eminent domain, the power of government to take private land, is an ancient one, one of such long standing that even the most conservative, the most libertarian, do not challenge it in principle. But under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, it's limited in two ways by the closing phrase, "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation."

"Just compensation" is usually understood to mean fair market value. Although there are frequent arguments as to what is fair value in a given case, the meaning of the phrase is well established. Traditionally, "public use" was understood equally clearly: The land must be designated for use by the public. It must be for a road, a school, a post office, some sort of public facility.

Over the past few decades, however, that definition has slipped considerably and now cash-strapped localities are increasingly using eminent domain to force landholders - often homeowners - to sell in order to turn the land over to private developers for profit-making projects. The cities claim that because the development will bring in more tax revenue than the homes, that constitutes a "public use."

So what's at issue in the New London case is the constitutional limits, if any, on the definition of "public use" a government body can use to benefit private corporations.

And the Court ruled, 5-4, that for practical purposes there are none. As long as cities can argue that some other use of your land, your home, will bring in more tax revenue, you have no recourse against its being seized for the gain of some big-bucks corporate developer waving extravagant promises and hefty campaign contributions.

In a blistering dissent, Sandra Day O'Conner, joined by William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, declared that the majority were handing "disproportionate influence and power" to the rich and powerful and that "the specter of condemnation [now] hangs over all property." Indeed, as I said in October, I think these vastly-expanded powers of eminent domain are

a perversion of the Constitution. The "takings" clause of the Fifth Amendment, as it is known, was designed to protect people from arbitrary government authority, not to enable that government to take land away from one private party only to give it to another.

And we're seeing it more and more. That is, more and more, we are seeing, again as I said in October,

cities ripping up established, stable neighborhoods in order to mortgage their economic futures to greed-driven corporations, selling their birthright, as it were, for a mess of pottage ... in pursuit of what too often turns out to be a mirage rather than a miracle.

And now it's all right and proper and decent and upstanding and legal and fair. Consider it a lesson re-learned: When it comes to corporate power, Democrats are just as ready to kowtow as the Republicans, so-called "liberals" as quick to genuflect as conservatives.

But then, on top of that, there was today's decision in the case of NCTA v. Brand X. It would seem at a quick glance to be one of those arcane cases about regulatory interpretations but it actually could have a dramatic effect on the future of the internet.

What was at issue was if cable companies (such as Comcast, TimeWarner, and so on) were to be regarded as "common carriers" under the 1996 Telecommunications Act. (Bored yet?) If they were, they would be required to allow other service providers to obtain access to their networks for the purpose of transmitting information - data, voice, video, and audio. Thus, for example, if you used Comcast cable for your internet access but still wanted to use Earthlink as your ISP, you could, because Comcast would have to allow Earthlink access to its lines on an equal basis with everyone else.

In 2002, the FCC ruled that cable systems, unlike telephone systems, are not common carriers. A federal circuit court overruled the Commission - but on Monday, the Supremes reversed and upheld that FCC ruling. In what can only be considered utterly bizarre "reasoning," the majority in the 6-3 decision found that because cable companies provide packages that include other services as well as internet access instead of selling "stand alone" internet access, they are not "offering" high-speed access! And, therefore, they are not providing "telecommunications service" under the meaning of the act and thus not subject to the regulations derived from it. That, as Scalia pointed out in an inelegant but effective dissent, is like saying that because a pet store has a policy of providing a leash with every puppy sold that it's actually not selling puppies.

After all is said and done, after all the regulatory cant has been translated, and the smoke of agency expertise blown away, it remains perfectly clear that someone who sells cable-modem service is "offering" telecommunications.

So what's the big deal? Well, under this ruling, if you, say, sign up with Comcast, it could, if it choose, legally block you from using any other ISP. More significantly, it also could control what information goes through its system since it is under no obligation to provide access. As an obvious example, as a fine, upstanding, moral member of the community, it could block access to the new .xxx domain intended for adult sites. Not, you understand, that it'd enable you to do it, it'd do it and you'd have no say. Or it could execute a contract with Fox News to be its "exclusive" news provider and suddenly all other news sources are blocked. It could decide that antiwar sites are taboo and poof, they're gone. The Supreme Court decision authorizes cable systems to exercise total control over what content can be accessed through their networks.

Some of that may seem far-fetched - although I don't think it is - but there are two other very real and very immediate dangers: One is that local networks established by libraries and schools in rural areas which now depend on cable systems for access beyond their own networks could be forced to pay usurious fees or be shut out entirely. Since cable companies tend to hate those networks because they inhibit "market penetration," that is a very real concern.

The other is that phone companies are now likely to petition the FCC for a similar exemption from common carrier requirements for their DSL systems. The majority of the Court made a point of declaring it expressed no opinion on that, but as Scalia pointed out, based on Monday's decision there really is no way to lodge a rational objection. Especially because Thomas, writing for the majority, ended with this:

The questions the Commission resolved in the order under review involve a "subject matter [that] is technical, complex, and dynamic." The Commission is in a far better position to address these questions than we are. Nothing in the Communications Act or the Administrative Procedure Act makes unlawful the Commission's use of its expert policy judgment to resolve these difficult questions.

Or, more simply, after all is said and done, we'll rubber stamp whatever the FCC comes up with.

The only silver lining in this is that this is a regulatory, statutory, matter - not a constitutional one. Which means it can be corrected with legislation. Perhaps the outcry over media deregulation last year that caught the FCC and Congress so much by surprise can be repeated. There are those in Congress - Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA,7), who blasted the decision as "both anti-consumer and anti-competition" is one - who will raise this. It's still possible to head off the worst effects.

Okay, apart from the actual decisions themselves, what was the frightening experience here? Just this, and it still makes me quake: I agreed with Antonin Scalia twice in a row! Oh, my word, I believe I may swoon.

Footnote, Just in Time Div.: In the head-scratching split decisions over public displays of the Ten Commandments, which together concluded that such displays are okay - sometimes - Scalia said that

a "dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority" was denying the Ten Commandments' religious meaning. ...

"Nothing stands behind the court's assertion that governmental affirmation of the society's belief in God is unconstitutional except the court's own say-so," Scalia wrote.

That is, separation of church and state is not a constitutional principle, it's the result of a judicial "dictatorship."

Whew. Balance is restored.

So, do tell, what's been going on while I was away, part one

As you know, back on June 14, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL)

read from an FBI agent's account of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay being shackled to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures for up to 24 hours at a stretch.

Prisoners in those conditions sometimes urinated or defecated on themselves, the agent reported.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings," Durbin said.

The Shrub gang called that "reprehensible" (and who better to know) and various troglodytes blasted him as having "libeled the troops." (Of course, it would actually be slander rather than libel, which shows how much they understand their own arguments, but what do little things like accuracy matter when you're on a roll of feigned righteous indignation?)

After a week of attacks with no support (and some criticism) from fellow Dummycrats, Durbin caved.

"In the end, I don't want anything in my public career to detract from my love for this country, my respect for those who serve it, and this great Senate," Durbin said in an emotional statement on the Senate floor.

"I offer my apologies to those that were offended by my words." ...

"I'm also sorry if anything I said, in any way, cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military."

In fact, that was his second apology; he'd already done so in a statement but apparently that wasn't enough for the vultures and vampires.

The thing that got me most about the whole business is that the screaming GOPpers didn't claim that what Durbin said was untrue - they denounced him for saying it: "How dare you say our blessed troops, the flower of our youth, the summation of all our nobility, are doing such things!"

But, of course, our soldiers, with approval from on high, are doing such things, as even the White House has reluctantly admitted.

AFP, June 24 - Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In fact, it now emerges in a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, drawing on a previously unreported policy statement of the US Southern Command dated August 6, 2002, that the medical records of prisoners at Guantanamo are open to examination by interrogators and that

[m]edical personnel belonging to the U.S. military's Southern Command have also been told to volunteer to interrogators information they believe may be valuable,

the Toronto Star (Canada) reported on Thursday. Making that even more explicit,

"[a]n internal, May 24, 2005, memo from the Army Medical Command, offering guidance to caregivers responsible for detainees, refers to the 'interpretation of relevant excerpts from medical records' for the purpose of 'assistance with the interrogation process.'"

The NEJM report, the Star points out, is the second such: Last August, The Lancet reported that doctors at Abu Ghraib had likewise offered medical assistance to interrogations.

But the point here is that as far as the attacks on Durbin were concerned, all that was irrelevant. What soldiers did or didn't do wasn't the focus or even the subject for the condemnation chorus. The accusation, when you come down to it, was not "libel" or even disloyalty, it was heresy, the crime of saying things that are simply not allowed to be said, the truth be damned.

In fact, Richard Daley, the Democrat mayor of Chicago whose voice gets muffled whenever he sits down, came closer to actually accusing Durbin of being untruthful than any right-winger I came across. They avoided issues of accuracy to focus on accusations of apostasy.

And as Durbin performed the heretic's traditional ritual of repentance, the tearful admission of error amid assertions that "Yes, I really do believe," I thought again, as I have so many times recently: We are on our own.

Link to the NEJM report via Crooks and Liars.

Footnote: The Star also reported that

[o]n Tuesday, the Bush administration rejected a proposal to create an independent commission to investigate abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said the Pentagon has already launched 10 major investigations into allegations of abuse and the system was working well.

Yes, but working well at what?

Where the heck you been, boy?

First off, I want to thank everyone who has kept faith with me through my silence, who has checked back to see if there's been anything new here. Particularly those - you know who you are - who took the time to drop a line to ask, in one form or another, WTF is going on.

Well, TF has to do with filters. Mental filters. It's something we all do: We all filter, we all filter constantly. We can't function if we don't. Did you ever have the experience of jumping at a sudden sound but then not being able to hear it - until you realize that what had happened was that the air conditioner or the refrigerator or the furnace or whatever had turned off? And that what you reacted to was not a sudden sound but the sudden absence of a sound? The sound itself had, of course, been reaching you all along - the sound waves entered your ear and vibrated your eardrum, which in turn jiggled the bones of the inner ear, and so on through the process of hearing until the nerve impulses reached your brain. Upon which your clever, amazing brain filtered them out of your conscious awareness because there was no need for you to pay any attention to them. When the sound stopped, however, it was a change that might call for some response - so that was passed on.

I actually came up with a tool for meditation based on that: I try to break down that filter by first listening for the faintest sounds I can hear, ones that had been filtered out of my awareness, while ignoring those louder. Then, focusing on those previously-ignored sounds, I can sort of backtrack through the more and more obvious ones until - rather quickly - it all becomes a buzzing, even a calming, even a centering, mix of white noise. The point here is the fact that we do not spend all our time wandering in a haze of white noise shows how adept our brains are at picking out sounds that may be relevant and banishing others from conscious awareness - that is, at filtering. Try it sometime: You may be surprised at what you had been hearing without "hearing."

It's not just sound, it's all our senses. What's your left little toe feeling like just now? If you think about it, you can tell, you can be aware of that sensory input. But were you aware before I asked? I feel safe in saying that, barring unusual circumstances, you weren't. That information was reaching your brain, you just were filtering it from your consciousness because it was irrelevant.

Not having that natural filter can be devastating: One of the ideas about autism is that autistic children lack the ability to filter, or at least their ability to do so is inhibited. The result is, for the most severely affected, they are unable to regard anything they hear or see or otherwise sense as more important, more relevant, than anything else they hear or see or otherwise sense. Their consciousness is overwhelmed, flooded, with sensory data and it's a constant struggle to make sense of it. They, if you will, go through their lives in a kind of a "haze of white noise" which they can penetrate and organize only with the greatest effort.

And even for those of us who are "normal," there's a limit to how much our conscious mind can handle at any one time. We constantly shift things in and out of our awareness, so easily, so quickly, we rarely even notice we're doing it. Kind of like a biological version of a computer's page-flipping. Just what the limit is, is a matter of some dispute but it's interesting to note that there is a method of inducing hypnosis that's based on it: Supposedly, the limit to the number of things of which we can be aware simultaneously is around seven or eight. The method involves repeatedly directing the subject's attention to different things while encouraging them to be aware of all of them - knowing that after several, some will drop out of awareness. So when the hypnotist refers back to them the subject can become confused by all the mental juggling needed to keep up, with the result that the suggestions for relaxation and trance that are mixed in slip by without critical consideration.

Filters. Filters on filters. We all do it. We even filter political events and issues, we focus on "the story" (or, at least a story or three) and even remark on attempts to distract us from what's important with a new "story" - as several have done about Snarl Rove's latest attempt to smear anyone to the left of John McCain as some kind of terrorist-loving traitor: Various bloggers have suggested Rove deliberately made an outrageous remark to change the subject from the Downing Street Memos. None of us can keep up with everything, none of us can manage everything. We even joke about "outrage overload."

So what does all this have to do with my latest disappearing act? My own sometimes shaky ability to filter events.

Some years ago I coined the phrase "the world is too much with me." (Well, in a way I did: I discovered later that others had used it before me to refer to a similar feeling, but at least I coined it in my own little piece of the universe.) It's meant to describe those times when, for whatever reason, my sense of the level of pain, suffering, injustice, and simple indecency (and I do not mean that in its sexual connotation) in the world becomes almost literally overwhelming. I am simply aware of it in a way, to a degree, with an intensity, which I'm normally not; it clings to every bit of news I read, every commentary anyone writes, it can haunt me even as I'm sitting by the water looking at the stars.

It's a debilitating, demoralizing, experience that makes every effort seem hopeless, every action pointless, every opinion irrelevant, even as it drives a feeling that something has to be done about it. I have to do something - but nothing I can do will make any difference. There is simply too much to be done. What's more, taking up anything means ignoring other things equally if not more important, paying heed to any cry for help means ignoring other, perhaps more desperate cries. It's paralyzing.

Sometimes it passes quickly, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it just fades away, sometimes I have to fight my way through it. And the world has been too much with me for a week now. So consider this part of the battle.

I have seriously thought about abandoning the blog. Not for the first time, either. I just wonder what it is that I'm actually contributing here - indeed, if I'm contributing anything, period. If there is a point. Yes, yes, I know I've gone on about this before, in fact as recently as three months ago. It doesn't change the fact that the feeling and the concern both continue to exist.

Part of it, I admit, is traffic - or rather, my lack of it. Or, rather, to be even more exact, my lack of repeat traffic. My hits per day have picked up some, hardly to any impressive numbers, but still up some - but my return hits haven't. People drop by, take a look, and for whatever reason aren't impressed enough to come back. Which leaves me, again, wondering if I'm doing any good.

What can I say that others with much louder voices are not already saying? What can I address, what can I reveal, what analysis can I present, that others with much greater reach are neither addressing nor revealing nor presenting?

Yes, there is some ego in this: Some degree of recognition in the form of traffic would be most pleasing. I've said before that I don't dream of becoming an Atrios or any of the other sites whose daily hits total in the five digits. I don't even want to be that big. But I do dream of having maybe, I dunno, what the hell say 200 regular (defined as maybe two or three times a week) readers who find something of value here. If I can't achieve that - and after more than a year and a-half I'm far from it - I have to wonder if I'm really serving any purpose here.

There's a saying I came across a long time ago for which I've been trying to find the source - without success. It said, in the form in which I originally heard it, "No man can live with the terrible knowledge that he is not needed." The principle would seem to apply with even greater force to political blogs. Or, at least, via my own convictions, to mine.

Over this week, I've made some decisions about the future of Lotus, which will play out over the next few months. In the meantime, well, the battle goes on, yes?

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the Metropolitan Museum of Art Carney?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
World Leaders

Born into a royal family of the Thembu people and expected to become a chief, he became a president in 1994.

Catching up

Jeopardy! for Sunday, June 19

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is E?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Arachnids
This arachnid is also called a harvestman.

=

Jeopardy! for Monday, June 20

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a daddy longlegs?

JEOPARDY!
The 1880s for $200
On June 20, 1887, Queen Victoria got her shot at meeting this markswoman.

=

Jeopardy! for Tuesday, June 21

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Annie Oakley?

JEOPARDY!
The 1880s for $600
In 1889, with Duman and de Maupassant protesting loudly, this 984-foot structure opened near the Seine.

=

Jeopardy! for Wednesday, June 22

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the Eiffel Tower?

JEOPARDY!
The 1880s for $1000
The 1885 Congress of Berlin passed out slices of this continent like cake.

=

Jeopardy! for Thursday, June 23

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Africa?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Before and After for $400
It contains candy-coated popcorn, peanuts, and a prize-winning actor from Something's Gotta Give.

=

Jeopardy! for Friday, June 24

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Cracker Jack Nicholson?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Before and After for $1200
Lumberjack competition in which Mick "Light Feet" Jagger takes on Keith "Balance Man" Richards.

=

Jeopardy! for Saturday, June 25
YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is log Rolling Stones?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Before and After for $2000
New York cultural attraction at 5^th and 82^nd honoring the man who played Ed Norton.

Just making sure

Updated You've doubtless already come across the praise being offered to AP for its clear if belated article on the memos coming out of the UK proving that the Shrub team lied for a full year about its plans for Iraq.

London, June 18 - When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.

What I want to do here is to make sure, since I expect a fair number of you will have read a summary rather than having followed the link to the full article, that you have this: AP has posted the texts of six of the memos. They are in .pdf format and they are available at these links:

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/fcolegal020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/manning020314.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/meyer020318.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ods020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ricketts020322.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/straw020325.pdf

I've posted the text of the other two memos; the first one, the original Downing Street Memo, on May 7; the next one on June 15.

Footnote: The AP article does contain one real howler:

Details of the memos appeared in papers early last month but the news in Britain quickly turned to the election that returned Blair to power. In the United States, however, details of the memos' contents reignited a firestorm, especially among Democratic critics of Bush.

What? The memos were ignored in the UK but they caused a "firestorm" here, here where the major media wouldn't touch them, barely mentioned them, and where likely most people still haven't heard of them? The ass-covering self-deception of which our media is capable is truly astounding.

Updated to say that for some days after this was posted, trying any of the links to the memos as stored on AP got a "page not found" error. But they are all working now.

Uh, wait a minute....

Google, the world's biggest media firm and established enough to have given birth to the word "googling" as slang for doing a web search, has decided that it's not satisfied just providing information: It wants to be able to make some claims about the reliability of that information.

As reported by the Guardian (UK) on Saturday, Google has filed several patents

planning to rank news stories according to their accuracy and reliability as well as their topicality.

Google News now links to 4,500 news sources from around the world while making no claim to their accuracy.

Now, the power of the web lies both in its ability to crosslink information and to a significant degree in its anarchic sensibilities - the "information yearns to be free" idea. Most anything and most everything can be found somewhere in some dusty corner of the web (to nicely mix my metaphor). But there is a downside to that: You can find yourself 1)overwhelmed with more information than you can collate, 2)drowning in references that are kind of like what you're looking for but not quite, and/or 3)with no way of telling if the information you've gotten is accurate or not short of plowing through every piece to make critical comparisons, which of course dumps you back in either state #1 or #2.

Considering some of the utterly wacko "scientific" claims I've found on the web, not only such as creationists but people who claim to have "positively refuted!" relativity or one that insisted the center of Earth's gravity was not at the center of the Earth but spread out over the surface of a spherical space surrounding the planet at a height of, if I recall, about 50 miles, a concern for accuracy is not an idle one. So at first blush, Google's plan seems like a good idea or at least a good tool to have available.

But - you knew that was coming - consider this:

Google is looking to develop technologies that factor in the amount of important coverage produced by a source, the amount of traffic it attracts, circulation statistics, staff size, breadth of coverage and number of global operations

in determining a story's ranking.

What's wrong with that? It means, in effect, that size equals reliability and accuracy. By these standards, the bigger a corporation is, the larger a media conglomerate it represents, the more dominant it is, the higher it's stories will rank in a listing that is supposed to reflect accuracy. Media giants, the very ones most likely to buy into a corporate-comfortable status quo, become, by virtue of their size, defined as bearers of truth.

So, for example, the Washington Post's disgraceful, deceitful, and dismissive smear of John Conyers' hearing about the Downing Street Memo - Dana Milbank's coverage included the phrases "a trip to the land of make-believe," Conyers "spouted ... chairmanly phrases," "dress-up game," "mock ... inquiry," "Conyers and his hearty band of playmates," and "fantasy" - would be considered reliable while Conyers' blistering response, which I only saw on Raw Story, would pretty much vanish because of the, by comparison, "unreliability" of the source.

This is not a good thing.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the T-bone?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Alphabet Soup for $2000

This vowel is the only letter that stands alone on the back of the US $1 bill.

Catching up, three

Not quite a month ago, on May 22, I noted that, just like last year, the Guardian Council in Iran had blocked the candidacy of most reformers running for national office. Last year it was parliament, this year it is the presidency.

Well, the election took place on Friday and in one way it came out exactly as expected and in another, the results were a surprise.

As predicted, none of the seven candidates got the required majority for a victory. A run-off is scheduled for June 24. In addition, the top vote-getter proved to be, as expected, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani. He was followed by hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who will go up against Rafsanjani in the run-off), and reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi.

The surprise lay in that while a hard-liner and a reformer were expected to finish second and third, Ahmadinejad and Karroubi were not them. The candidates expected to finish second and third, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Mostafa Moin, instead finished fourth and fifth.

Ahmadinejad's "stunning political rise," as AP accurately described it, may have drawn some benefit from the fact that on Monday, just days before the election,

Iran was struck by a wave of deadly bomb attacks in the restive southwestern city of Ahfaz and in the capital Tehran, with the Islamic regime accusing Iraq-based terrorists of seeking to destabilize the country ahead of presidential elections. At least eight people were killed and 75 wounded by a series of four blasts outside several public buildings in Ahvaz....

Another blast hit a busy square in Tehran, killing one person and seriously wounding four, official media said.

A natural tendency to unite around official leaders in response to an attack, which officials blamed on - surprise! - foreign terrorists, could have produced a real boost for Ahmadinejad, who is the mayor of Tehran. (I still remember with some astonishment how Rudy Giuliani became a "great leader" - and Time's "Man of the Year" - in the wake of 9/11, pretty much solely by virtue of failing to panic.) This is of course speculation and without knowing how the vote broke down regionally I can't be confident, but it would help to explain his sudden emergence from the pack.

Another thing hard to measure is the meaning of the turnout, which was described as better than expected but still below that of previous presidential elections. A fair amount of thinking maintains that White House criticism of the vote as "illegitimate" on election eve actually increased turnout among people who regarded the statements as insults and interference. But the turnout, about 62.7%, makes that hard to judge; for the same reason, it's hard to estimate the impact of

anti-regime activists who are disillusioned about the prospect of change in a system run by clerics[, who] urged "none of the above." Boycott appeals had been carried on Web sites, pamphlets and satellite TV programs from the large Iranian community around Los Angeles - given the local nickname "Tehrangeles."

"We want to show the world empty streets," said Homa Sarshar, a journalist who works for one of the Los Angeles-based stations backing a boycott.

That may have resulted in an own goal, as Moin, the leading light of the reformists in the election, would likely have drawn his strongest support from among the very people most likely to have responded to such a call. But again, without detailed results, that is more speculation. What is clear, though, is that it's not only the Shrub team that questions the validity of an process where a group of reactionary clerics decides who gets to run for office in a government whose every action must be approved by those same clerics.

In France, several thousand people protested Iran's presidential election Saturday at a suburban Paris rally led by an exiled Iranian opposition group that denounced the vote as a sham. The demonstrators chanted: "Mullahs, No!"

And while the election is unlikely to upset that system, attempts at reform in Iran will likely continue. Before the election,

in Tehran, police broke up a gathering by women protesting over the Islamic Republic's gender discrimination, making at least two arrests as the demonstration threatened to spiral into a larger anti-regime protest.

The rally began with about 30 women assembled outside Tehran University, but they were quickly joined by about 200 passers-by. The crowd began shouting slogans including "Freedom for Iran" and "No to totalitarianism."

In the wake of the election, Elaheh Koolaee, a top aide for Moin, said "our failure ... doesn't mean reforms have come to an end or Iran doesn't need change." And as AP noted,

the real worry for the establishment is the vast pool of young Iranians. More than half of Iran's 70 million people are under 25 years old. The expectations for greater openness and opportunities - begun by [departing President Mohammad] Khatami - are only expected to grow.

"They cannot make us go backward," said 19-year-old Mohammad Reza Baradaran. "We've tasted a bit of freedom now."

On a more immediate note, Karroubi

accused Islamic vigilantes and soldiers of "intimidating" voters to back Ahmadinejad - who slipped past Karroubi 19.48 percent to 19.3 percent. Karroubi's aides demanded an official probe and warned they could unleash street demonstrations.

Karroubi's campaign chief, Ali Akbar Montashamipour, said any signs of military interference in politics would make "people rise up against the establishment."

That's an establishment that seems to have the upper hand now and even be regaining some previously-lost ground as addressing economic difficulties take precedence in many people's minds over greater political and cultural freedom. But all such regimes face a Catch-22: If they fail to improve economic conditions, they risk increasing resistance from a dissatisfied populace. But if they do, they equally risk increasing demands for other sorts of freedoms. Gandhi is supposed to have mused amazedly on the fact that every totalitarian system - without exception - has eventually fallen.

I'm reminded of People's Park in Berkeley. It has a long and tangled history, but the Reader's Digest version is that the University of California at Berkeley purchased and demolished the houses on a roughly 2-acre plot in the city with the declared intention of building student housing. It never did and in 1969, a diverse group of Berkeley residents took over the space, cleared it of debris, and created a community park.

Three weeks later, the University, with the help of 100 California state cops, bulldozed the park and fenced it in. Riots and demonstrations followed in which one person was killed, another blinded, and a good number more injured. At the end of it, People's Park was a muddy, vacant lot surrounded by a chain-link fence bedecked with flowers, peace symbols, and declarations of resistance.

That's the end of that chapter, but not the end of the story. The park has had its ups and downs over the years since, as the University has come up with various plans for its use for everything from a parking lot to volleyball courts. None of them overcame community resistance and People's Park is now - a park owned and managed by the University. It's not the community park originally envisioned and created, but it's a public park. In April, it was the site of a 36th anniversary festival.

The point of all this is that in the midst of the initial demonstrations, as the park sat sad and destroyed behind the University's barricade, a provost - I wish I could remember his name, but I can't - said "In the long run of history, flowers are always going to win against fences and students are always going to win against old men."

Keep hope alive.

Footnote: Last year's posts about the elections and the protests of reformers came on these dates:
January 17, 2004
January 22, 2004
January 29, 2004
February 3, 2004
February 6, 2004
February 8, 2004
February 14, 2004
February 19, 2004
February 23, 2004
March 9, 2004

Just to have a bit of good news

Of course it remains to be seen whether or not these fine, upstanding gentlemen actually pay any kind of appropriate price, but for the moment, enjoy the glow. From AP for Friday:

Former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski and a second executive were convicted Friday of looting their company of more than $600 million to fund extravagant lifestyles featuring expensive jewelry, an opulent Manhattan apartment and a gaudy Mediterranean birthday party.

A state court jury deliberated over 11 days before returning the verdict in the second prosecution of Kozlowski, 58, and Mark H. Swartz, 44, the conglomerate's former finance chief. Both were convicted of grand larceny, falsifying business records and other charges.

The verdict came after a four-month trial in Manhattan state Supreme Court. They now face up to 30 years in prison on their convictions - the maximum sentence for both under the law, prosecutors said. ...

Kozlowski and Swartz join a string of executives convicted in recent months in high-profile corporate wrongdoing cases, among them former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Adelphia Communications Corp. founder John Rigas and his son, Timothy.

Richard Scrushy, founder and former chief executive at HealthSouth Corp., is on trial on fraud charges and awaiting a jury verdict in federal court in Birmingham, Ala. And former Enron Corp. executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling are scheduled to go on trial early next year.

Back in the 60s, some nonviolent civil disobedience actions included a call for "jail, no bail." That is, resisters were pledging to refuse to bail themselves out pending trial. It also took on a more generalized, if inaccurate, meaning, of an intention to refuse to pay a fine in lieu of jail time. I'd be glad to see it applied here in either sense. Preferably both. Jail, no bail.

Ugh ugh ugh

I mean, just how low, how disgustingly low, can someone willingly crawl? At a time when even Bill Frist is saying that with the autopsy of Terri Schiavo confirming that she had massive brain damage, "the chapter is closed,"

Gov. Jeb Bush said Friday that a prosecutor has agreed to investigate why Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, citing an alleged time gap between when her husband found her and when he called 911[, AP said on Friday]. ...

In a letter faxed to Pinellas-Pasco County State Attorney Bernie McCabe, the governor said Michael Schiavo testified in a 1992 medical malpractice trial that he found his wife collapsed at 5 a.m. on Feb. 25, 1990, and he said in a 2003 television interview that he found her about 4:30 a.m. He called 911 at 5:40 a.m.

"Between 40 and 70 minutes elapsed before the call was made, and I am aware of no explanation for the delay," Bush wrote. "In light of this new information, I urge you to take a fresh look at this case without any preconceptions as to the outcome."

In addition to finding that last part rather odd - Do Florida officials normally begin investigations by making assumptions about what they'll find? - the whole thing is just, well slimy might begin to describe it. This whole thing hangs on the single thread that years after the fact Michael Schiavo would know with precision just what time events occurred. It is absurd on its face. It's not even a fishing expedition, it's a fishing expedition with no bait and a barbless hook. It's sick.

If I was Michael Schiavo, I know what my reaction would be:

"I'd just found my wife on the floor, unconscious, unresponsive, and I was supposed to, what, say to myself 'Gee I wonder what time it is? I should know just in case, y'know, in fifteen years some scumball politician wanting to re-establish his bona fides with a gaggle of reactionary crackpots wants to take some cheap shots at my expense.'"

Coming soon to an election near you: Shrub II!

Footnote: Frist is now trying to run away from his statements about Terri Schiavo.

What he said on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Thursday:

"I raised the question, 'Is she in a persistent vegetative state or not?' I never made the diagnosis, never said that she was not. I did say that certain tests should be performed to determine that before starving her to death."

What he said in March during Senate debate on the bill to allow federal court intervention:

"Based on the footage provided to me, which was part of the facts of the case, she does respond."

Discussing the diagnosis of a persistent vegetative state, Frist added: "I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office here in the Capitol. And that footage, to me, depicted something very different than persistent vegetative state.

Frist also said that "when the neurologist said, 'Look up,' there is no question in the video that she actually looks up."

But now, let's be fair. He said she was in "something very different" from PVS. He never actually said she was "not" in PVS. He never actually used that word.

And he never said "imminent," either.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a U-turn? (Acceptable: K-turn)

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Alphabet Soup for $1200

This steak is cut from the short loin.

Catching up, two

Corrected The parliamentary elections in Lebanon, the first since the Syrian withdrawal, are set for their final phase on Sunday. I considered some of the issues and factors back on March 30 so now's as good a time as any to see how things appear to be shaking out.

The elections for the 128-seat parliament are carried out in four stages, with elections on separate dates in the south, around Beirut, the east, and finally, on Sunday, in the north. Different parties, often representing different ethnic or religious groups, have strength in different regions depending on the local demographics. The first two rounds were so anti-climactic, the Daily Star (Lebanon) said, that Lebanese looked forward to the third, tightly contested, round as having some meaning. In the first round, in the south, Hizbollah, still honored by many in southern Lebanon as being responsible for driving Israeli forces out of the area, and its pro-Syrian allies swept the elections. In the next stage, around Beirut, the anti-Syrian alliance headed by Saad al-Hariri won overwhelmingly. Hariri is the son of Rafik al-Hariri, the former prime minister whose assassination on February 14 touched off the massive demonstrations that lead to the Syrian withdrawal.

Until recently, it looked like the anti-Syrian side was set for a clear victory overall and a large majority in parliament. That was thrown into question by the former warlord Michel Aoun, who returned to Lebanon just five weeks ago. He had been in exile for 15 years after he was driven out of the country by Syrian troops in a battle that ended Lebanon's 15-year civil war. Regarded as staunchly anti-Syrian, he stunned his erstwhile alliance partners by jumping over to support a pro-Syrian alliance after the opposition promised his grouping what he regarded as an insufficient number of seats, Reuters reported on Friday.

Despite being called a "small tool" of Syria by opposition leader Walid Jumblatt, Aoun lead his slate to a solid showing in the third round of balloting, leaving the anti-Syrian bloc needing to take 21 of the 28 seats up for grabs on Sunday to obtain a majority in parliament. That's certainly not impossible for Hariri's alliance of Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze, since over half of the voters in the north are Sunnis and about 45% are Christians. Still, the pro-Syrian list endorsed by Aoun includes interior minister Suleiman Franjieh, a Maronite Christian with strong clan links in the north.

If Hariri falls short of a national majority, parliament will be split into three main groups - his anti-Syrian movement, the pro-Syrian group dominated by Shi'ite Muslim groups Hizbollah and Amal, and Aoun and his followers.

Aoun has thus set himself up as a potential king-maker with something to offer both sides: the anti-Syrian supporting a pro-Syrian slate.

In his first comments [after the third stage of the elections], Aoun said he was willing to talk with other factions in the new parliament and if there were no agreement he and his allies would be in opposition "carrying out our duties."

I'm sure he's willing. Once before he tried to set himself up as the head of a separate government in Lebanon. Dreams of power have a habit of dying hard. Lebanon's crisis is not over and I suspect will not be over even if Hariri's bloc does get that absolute majority it's after.

Footnote: One other detail tossed into the mix. On Friday, just two days before that final round of balloting, UN investigators declared there is "a probability of 99.9 percent" that the explosion that killed Rafik Hariri was above ground - likely a truck bomb.

This matters because

[s]ome anti-Syrian Lebanese have speculated the explosives used in the bombing were buried under the street - an act that would suggest the complicity of pro-Damascus officials, since digging up the street would draw attention and require permits. ...

In the campaign, opposition leaders, including Hariri's son, Saad, have touted the assassination as an example of the need to vote against pro-Syrian candidates. The opposition has accused Syria and its allies in the Lebanese security services of killing Hariri, a charge they denied.

A UN fact-finding mission had previously faulted both Lebanese and Syrian security for "the lack of security, protection, law and order in Lebanon," but placed no blame for the actual killing. To whatever extent the new finding undermines people's confidence in the charges of the opposition, to that same extent it favors others - likely Aoun. I think it unlikely it will actually make any difference, but if it does, whatever difference it makes will not be good news for Hariri's hopes for a clearly anti-Syrian parliament.

Corrected by changing the day for the final round of voting in the first paragraph to the correct "Sunday." There were also a few grammatical corrections and a few changes for clarity.

Catching up, one

I put up several posts during the renewed negotiations over Cyprus last year. It's interesting re-reading them now: I can see how my initial hope gradually turned to cynicism.

As you may recall, the outcome was a proposal by Kofi Annan to be voted on in separate referendums by both parts of Cyprus: the mostly Greek south and the mostly Turkish north, illegally occupied by Turkish troops since 1974. Both had to agree to the proposal for it to be passed.

The plan would have created a federation united by a weak central government, an outcome Greek Cypriots saw with justification as establishing de facto independence for the north. When it became clear that the Greek Cypriots were going to reject the deal, Annan, backed by the US and the EU (both of which wanted the whole thing to just go away), tried to turn the screws. It didn't work and the Greek Cypriot south overwhelmingly rejected the plan, for all practical purposes killing it.

In the wake of that, Annan refused to consider why his proposal might have failed, preferring to charge that Nicosia never wanted an agreement and to urge new openings to Turkish Cypriots as a reward for their endorsement of the plan. (An endorsement which was hardly surprising since it gave them just about everything they could have wanted.)

Apparently, time does not always allow for cooler heads, as a report in Kathimerini (Greece) earlier this week indicates:

Nicosia protested strongly yesterday to the United Nations after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he wanted the Security Council to endorse his report of last year, which recommended relaxing the isolation of the island's Turkish-occupied part.

After meeting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in New York, Annan said that he would ask the Council to re-examine the document that he put together some two months after the Greek Cypriots rejected his blueprint for reunification in a referendum in April 2004. Annan said he hoped the Security Council would "take action" on it. In the report, Annan laid much of the blame for the unpopularity of his plan at the feet of President Tassos Papdopoulos.

Considering that there is a move in the UN to try to arrange a new round of talks about the future of Cyprus, Cypriot Foreign Minister George Iacovou's description of Annan's statement as "badly timed" seems apt: It hardly seems wise to begin such an effort by placing all the blame on one (especially the wrong) side.

Ego is a bad quality in a peace negotiator.

Footnote: The previous posts on Cyprus:
January 26, 2004
February 5, 2004
February 14, 2004
February 20, 2004
March 17, 2004
March 23, 2004
April 5, 2004
April 18, 2004
April 24, 2004
June 1, 2004.
June 28, 2004
July 21, 2004
November 13, 2004

Jeopardy! for Thursday

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is John Steinbeck?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Alphabet Soup for $400

For a car driver, it's a complete 180-degree reversal of direction.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Iwo Jima?

JEOPARDY!
Nonfiction for $1000

Working Days is a compilation of journals he kept while writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Noted for the record, supplemental

This is the text of the new memo as presented in The Sunday Times (UK):

The paper, produced by the Cabinet Office on July 21, 2002, is incomplete because the last page is missing. The following is a transcript rather than the original document in order to protect the source.

PERSONAL SECRET UK EYES ONLY
IRAQ: CONDITIONS FOR MILITARY ACTION (A Note by Officials)

Summary

Ministers are invited to:

(1) Note the latest position on US military planning and timescales for possible action.

(2) Agree that the objective of any military action should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours or international security, and abiding by its international obligations on WMD.

(3) Agree to engage the US on the need to set military plans within a realistic political strategy, which includes identifying the succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions necessary to justify government military action, which might include an ultimatum for the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. This should include a call from the Prime Minister to President Bush ahead of the briefing of US military plans to the President on 4 August.

(4) Note the potentially long lead times involved in equipping UK Armed Forces to undertake operations in the Iraqi theatre and agree that the MOD should bring forward proposals for the procurement of Urgent Operational Requirements under cover of the lessons learned from Afghanistan and the outcome of SR2002.

(5) Agree to the establishment of an ad hoc group of officials under Cabinet Office Chairmanship to consider the development of an information campaign to be agreed with the US.

Introduction

1. The US Government's military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace. But, as yet, it lacks a political framework. In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it.

2. When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted.

3. We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the No Fly Zones. This is particularly important for the UK because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action. Otherwise we face the real danger that the US will commit themselves to a course of action which we would find very difficult to support.

4. In order to fulfil the conditions set out by the Prime Minister for UK support for military action against Iraq, certain preparations need to be made, and other considerations taken into account. This note sets them out in a form which can be adapted for use with the US Government. Depending on US intentions, a decision in principle may be needed soon on whether and in what form the UK takes part in military action.

The Goal

5. Our objective should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours or to international security, and abiding by its international obligations on WMD. It seems unlikely that this could be achieved while the current Iraqi regime remains in power. US military planning unambiguously takes as its objective the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, followed by elimination if Iraqi WMD. It is however, by no means certain, in the view of UK officials, that one would necessarily follow from the other. Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi WMD, it is certainly not a sufficient one.

US Military Planning

6. Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq. In a 'Running Start', military action could begin as early as November of this year, with no overt military build-up. Air strikes and support for opposition groups in Iraq would lead initially to small-scale land operations, with further land forces deploying sequentially, ultimately overwhelming Iraqi forces and leading to the collapse of the Iraqi regime. A 'Generated Start' would involve a longer build-up before any military action were taken, as early as January 2003. US military plans include no specifics on the strategic context either before or after the campaign. Currently the preference appears to be for the 'Running Start'. CDS will be ready to brief Ministers in more detail.

7. US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia. This means that legal base issues would arise virtually whatever option Ministers choose with regard to UK participation.

The Viability of the Plans

8. The Chiefs of Staff have discussed the viability of US military plans. Their initial view is that there are a number of questions which would have to be answered before they could assess whether the plans are sound. Notably these include the realism of the 'Running Start', the extent to which the plans are proof against Iraqi counter-attack using chemical or biological weapons and the robustness of US assumptions about the bases and about Iraqi (un)willingness to fight.

UK Military Contribution

9. The UK's ability to contribute forces depends on the details of the US military planning and the time available to prepare and deploy them. The MOD is examining how the UK might contribute to US-led action. The options range from deployment of a Division (ie Gulf War sized contribution plus naval and air forces) to making available bases. It is already clear that the UK could not generate a Division in time for an operation in January 2003, unless publicly visible decisions were taken very soon. Maritime and air forces could be deployed in time, provided adequate basing arrangements could be made. The lead times involved in preparing for UK military involvement include the procurement of Urgent Operational Requirements, for which there is no financial provision.

The Conditions Necessary for Military Action

10. Aside from the existence of a viable military plan we consider the following conditions necessary for military action and UK participation: justification/legal base; an international coalition; a quiescent Israel/Palestine; a positive risk/benefit assessment; and the preparation of domestic opinion.

Justification

11. US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful. We would regard the use of force against Iraq, or any other state, as lawful if exercised in the right of individual or collective self-defence, if carried out to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or authorised by the UN Security Council. A detailed consideration of the legal issues, prepared earlier this year, is at Annex A. The legal position would depend on the precise circumstances at the time. Legal bases for an invasion of Iraq are in principle conceivable in both the first two instances but would be difficult to establish because of, for example, the tests of immediacy and proportionality. Further legal advice would be needed on this point.

12. This leaves the route under the UNSC resolutions on weapons inspectors. Kofi Annan has held three rounds of meetings with Iraq in an attempt to persuade them to admit the UN weapons inspectors. These have made no substantive progress; the Iraqis are deliberately obfuscating. Annan has downgraded the dialogue but more pointless talks are possible. We need to persuade the UN and the international community that this situation cannot be allowed to continue ad infinitum. We need to set a deadline, leading to an ultimatum. It would be preferable to obtain backing of a UNSCR for any ultimatum and early work would be necessary to explore with Kofi Annan and the Russians, in particular, the scope for achieving this.

13. In practice, facing pressure of military action, Saddam is likely to admit weapons inspectors as a means of forestalling it. But once admitted, he would not allow them to operate freely. UNMOVIC (the successor to UNSCOM) will take at least six months after entering Iraq to establish the monitoring and verification system under Resolution 1284 necessary to assess whether Iraq is meeting its obligations. Hence, even if UN inspectors gained access today, by January 2003 they would at best only just be completing setting up. It is possible that they will encounter Iraqi obstruction during this period, but this more likely when they are fully operational.

14. It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject (because he is unwilling to accept unfettered access) and which would not be regarded as unreasonable by the international community. However, failing that (or an Iraqi attack) we would be most unlikely to achieve a legal base for military action by January 2003.

An International Coalition

15. An international coalition is necessary to provide a military platform and desirable for political purposes.

16. US military planning assumes that the US would be allowed to use bases in Kuwait (air and ground forces), Jordan, in the Gulf (air and naval forces) and UK territory (Diego Garcia and our bases in Cyprus). The plans assume that Saudi Arabia would withhold co-operation except granting military over-flights. On the assumption that military action would involve operations in the Kurdish area in the North of Iraq, the use of bases in Turkey would also be necessary.

17. In the absence of UN authorisation, there will be problems in securing the support of NATO and EU partners. Australia would be likely to participate on the same basis as the UK. France might be prepared to take part if she saw military action as inevitable. Russia and China, seeking to improve their US relations, might set aside their misgivings if sufficient attention were paid to their legal and economic concerns. Probably the best we could expect from the region would be neutrality. The US is likely to restrain Israel from taking part in military action. In practice, much of the international community would find it difficult to stand in the way of the determined course of the US hegemon. However, the greater the international support, the greater the prospects of success.

A Quiescent Israel-Palestine

18. The Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank has dampened Palestinian violence for the time being but is unsustainable in the long-term and stoking more trouble for the future. The Bush speech was at best a half step forward. We are using the Palestinian reform agenda to make progress, including a resumption of political negotiations. The Americans are talking of a ministerial conference in November or later. Real progress towards a viable Palestinian state is the best way to undercut Palestinian extremists and reduce Arab antipathy to military action against Saddam Hussein. However, another upsurge of Palestinian/Israeli violence is highly likely. The co-incidence of such an upsurge with the preparations for military action against Iraq cannot be ruled out. Indeed Saddam would use continuing violence in the Occupied Territories to bolster popular Arab support for his regime.

Benefits/Risks

19. Even with a legal base and a viable military plan, we would still need to ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks. In particular, we need to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective as set out in paragraph 5 above. A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden. Further work is required to define more precisely the means by which the desired endstate would be created, in particular what form of Government might replace Saddam Hussein's regime and the timescale within which it would be possible to identify a successor. We must also consider in greater detail the impact of military action on other UK interests in the region.

Domestic Opinion

20. Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein. There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament. An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community. This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action.

Timescales

21. Although the US military could act against Iraq as soon as November, we judge that a military campaign is unlikely to start until January 2003, if only because of the time it will take to reach consensus in Washington. That said, we judge that for climactic reasons, military action would need to start by January 2003, unless action were deferred until the following autumn.

22. As this paper makes clear, even this timescale would present problems. This means that:

(a) We need to influence US consideration of the military plans before President Bush is briefed on 4 August, through contacts betweens the Prime Minister and the President and at other levels;

The text cuts off there because of the missing last page. Apparently aware of the importance of the information, The Times went to some lengths to protect their source against government snoops: The originals were photocopied, then returned to the source. Transcriptions were made from the photocopies and verified for accuracy. The photocopies were then destroyed because the paper feared that markings on them could have given clues to the identity of the source.

Which wound up incidentally showing that the Blair government, whatever its failings, is not as good at lying as the Shrub gang. Here, they would have refused to comment while Faux News and its wingerblog cheerleaders whipped up a frenzy about "forgery" and "fake" and "plant" until the ground had been laid for Scotty McMouthpiece to say with a straight face that "the president feels no need to respond to documents of unknown origin whose authenticity is under serious question."

Instead, Downing Street tried to dismiss the original memo by saying it was "nothing new" - which might work for the Washington Post and Andrea Mitchell, but coming from the British government, all it really did was confirm the documents were genuine.

Noted for the record

I'm a bit too world-weary these days for any kind of extended commentary so even though this deserves considerably more attention than I'm about to give it, what you see is what you get.

As I'm sure you know, new memos have emerged from the UK, further proving the contention that before the summer of 2002 the Shrub team made a definite decision to attack Iraq while publicly lying about it then and for months afterward, right up until the eve of the war. At a time when the major media were finding themselves forced to cover the first memo, the one that has become known as the Downing Street Memo, the new revelations have produced a range of responses, some of them quite bizarre: For example, some continued scrambling for excuses for their earlier failure to pay attention to the story; a popular version was advanced by Andrea Mitchell and the Washington Post, as Media Matters for America (MMFA) pointed out. The memo wasn't worth covering, they said, because it was "old news." Everyone, of course, knew Bush was bullshitting when he said no decision to invade Iraq had been made, they argued; Mitchell said "you had to be brain-dead not to know what he was up to." (Would that I had the resources to look back at their reporting at the time to see just how often they said or even hinted anything of the kind.)

On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times, which had been virtually silent on the matter, has now run a big story reporting that

[i]n March 2002, the Bush administration had just begun to publicly raise the possibility of confronting Iraq. But behind the scenes, officials already were deeply engaged in seeking ways to justify an invasion, newly revealed British memos indicate.

This from the paper in which, just three days earlier,

editorial page editor Michael Kinsley opted for sarcasm over serious discussion, deriding activists in a June 12 column for sending him emails "demanding that I cease my personal cover-up of something called the Downing Street Memo." Kinsley kidded that the fuss was a good sign for the Left: "Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes ideological self-confidence."

That from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which also noted that as of the day of Kinsley's column, the LAT had run precisely one story on the Downing Street Memo, that back on May 12, nearly two weeks after the story broke.

MSNBC also had a decent, if short, story on Monday noting how the new memos strengthen war opponents' case and contradict not only past but also recent White House claims:

Vice President Dick Cheney also told a National Press Club luncheon Monday, "Any suggestion that we did not exhaust all alternatives before we got to that point, I think, is inaccurate."

In fact, current and former diplomats tell NBC News they understood from the beginning the Bush policy to be that Saddam had to be removed - one way or the other. The only question was when and how.

(Sidebar: Raw Story has obtained transcribed photocopies of the documents which they confirmed with Michael Smith, the UK journalist who first revealed them. They are available in .pdf format through this link.)

Now if only our so-called national paper of record had found news fit to print instead of printing someone's fit as news. I sent the following to the New York Times with a copy to its new public editor, Byron Calame.

I am quite astonished that as patently misleading an article as David Sanger's June 13 piece about the latest Downing Street memo could appear in the pages of the New York Times.

Sanger goes out of his way to ignore context and meaning in an attempt to claim that this latest memo contradicts the earlier one, revealed by The Times (London, UK) on May 1. That's the one, dated July 23, 2002, that said "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" and "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided."

Sanger's rebuttal to this is to take a single phrase out of the new memo and impose an assumed meaning on it: It "explicitly states," he writes, "that the Bush administration had made 'no political decisions' to invade Iraq." This, however, is the actual sentence from the memo containing the single occurrence of the phrase:

"Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq."

Note first the word "decisions," plural. If instead of "decisions have" it read "decision has," Sanger's forced reading might have been at least a little persuasive. But it doesn't (and the use of "have" rather than "has" eliminates the possibility of it being a typo). Clearly, something more general is being referred to here.

What that something is can be determined from the previous paragraphs in the memo, which say US military planning "lacks a political framework" and takes the US to task for having given "little thought" to "creating the political conditions for military action" before going on to say "We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework." By any rational reading of the document, those are the sort of "political decisions" to which the sentence fractionally quoted by Sanger refers.

Coupled with the memo's opening reference to Tony Blair's April 2002 promise to George Bush to support the US intent for "regime change" in Iraq, it becomes undeniable that the phrase Sanger quotes does not constitute an "explicit" denial - or any other kind of denial, for that matter - of the charge that the decision to invade Iraq had already been made by July, 2002. Indeed, the entire memo is premised on the conviction that military action is coming and concerns itself with what is required to establish the conditions necessary for the UK to carry though with Blair's promise.

This memo does not rebut the earlier one, it confirms it - as The Times (London) seems to agree; its own article on the new memo opened with:

"Ministers were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal."

David Sanger's attempt to turn it into something else is either incredibly sloppy, indeed incompetent, journalism or deliberate distortion. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse.

Yes, I know, I shouldn't have been "astonished" to find such in the NYT, and I wasn't. At one time some years ago I would have been, but no more. But I'm not above a little sucking up in the hope of getting a bit closer attention to what I was saying.

And another point I could have made was that, contrary to Sanger, it's the first memo that's "explicit." It says

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action....

But I'll go with what I did say as adequate to the purpose.

(And just to be clear, the link to the story in The Times was not included in the message to the NYT.)

Footnote: The New York Times' quick publication of Sanger's pro-White House brief, coming the day after the The Times' article on the new memo, was in marked contrast its response to the earlier memo, its coverage of which "languished" in Calame's word, leaving readers of the paper "pretty much in the dark." No excuse, not even a mealy-mouthed one, has been offered for that abject failure.

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YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Princess Diana?

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Nonfiction for $600

In Flags of Our Fathers, you can read about the six men who raised the flag on this Japanese island.

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YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Wilkommen?

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A Royal Duty is Paul Burrell's account of working as a butler for this beloved princess.

And it just keeps on coming

The at least more or less good news, that is. Over this past weekend, the International Herald Tribune for Monday reported, a deal was cut to wipe out $40 billion in debt owed by 18 of the poorest nations in the world, a "major breakthrough on a dauntingly complex issue."

It will result in only modest increases of money available to the 18 to improve the lot of their people - on the order of $1.5 billion per year - but the significance does not really lie in the amount: It lies in the fresh start those countries now have, freed from a crippling cycle of indebtedness that left them borrowing money to pay the interest on previous loans, pushing them further and further into a hole from which many had no hope of emerging.

And it shows that at long last the developed world may be getting serious about dealing with the crushing burden of world poverty, a world where half the population lives on an average of $2 a day and where the combined Gross Domestic Product of the poorest 48 nations (roughly a quarter of the total number of countries) is less than the combined wealth of the world's three richest people.

[A]dvocates hope that this victory on an issue they have put at the heart of years of hard-fought lobbying will bring fresh momentum in their broader global antipoverty campaign on the trifecta of debt relief, increased aid and reduced trade barriers.

And there is indeed more, much more, to be done. Tony Blair has announced a hope to win promises from the G8 nations at their summit next month for aid to the poor nations of the world totaling an additional $50 billion a year on top of the roughly $75 billion Western nations provide now.

"We should see this as the hors d'oeuvre, not the main course," said Kevin Watkins of the United Nations Development Program. "And the main course has to be a huge increase in aid."

(Blair's commitment - which in this case appears to be a valid description - to having the industrialized world do more for poor nations is not brand-new. In 2000 his government issued a white paper called "Eliminating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the Poor," available at this link in .pdf format. Ironically, it's signed by Clare Short, Blair's secretary of state for international development, who resigned over the Iraq war.)

For its part, the US agreed to write off the debt and have the industrialized nations share in recompensing the World Bank and other lending institutions for what they would lose rather than having those nations just pay the debt down over time. Still, the White House is reluctant to agree to any increase in aid, noting that in dollar amounts, the US gives more than any other country. However, when measured as a portion of GDP, by the most recent (2004) figures, the US ranks next to last among the 22 Western industrialized nations (basically western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) in its level of development aid, and avoided last place, its usual spot, by .01% of GDP.

In fairness to the US, it needs to be mentioned that there are other ways of measuring national aid to poor nations; some include disaster relief and others count private contributions attributable to tax policies. By some of those measures, the US ranks somewhat higher - although according to at least one study that did include the latter consideration, the US still ranked 19^th out of 21 nations.

At the same time, even by the first-cited set of standards, the other 21 countries considered haven't exactly been sterling examples on their own. At the 1992 Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro, a standard goal of 0.7% of GDP in development aid was set for developed nations. Of those 22 nations, only five - Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden - hit that target each of the last four years. In fact, those five are the only ones to reach that target any of the last four years. The US peaked at 0.16% of GDP in 2004.

Still, the hope now is that this agreement on debt relief shows that the rich nations of the world are finally realizing that promises don't fill empty bellies, don't clean polluted waters, don't teach people to read and write. Resources do that.

There are occasions - rare, but they do exist - when what is right is also what is profitable. Henry Ford made a fortune and shaped the industry of a nation by realizing it was good business to pay his workers enough so that they could afford the cars they were building. Could that be part of the dynamic here? Could the industrialized nations be realizing that it's no use to produce the sort of hi-tech goods and services in which they are coming to specialize if there aren't enough people who can afford them and make use of them?

I admit, I'd much rather that this seeming at least partial shift in attitude came as a result of realizing the moral imperative, the straightforward justice, of abolishing poverty; of insuring adequate food and water, clothing, education, and heath care as a basic human right. But I doubt that's the source. Much more likely is good, old-fashioned, enlightened self-interest. Still, I will take that and ride it as far as it will take us. Yes, it means that there will still be battles to be fought and maybe some of them will be more difficult for having been put off - but like the man in the movie said, "Small steps, small steps." As long as the steps are in the right direction.

Warming up for bigger things

I just don't know. Every time I'm getting into a really juicy, self-pitying, blue political funk, some things come along to get in the way. There was Shrub's dropping approval, which admittedly isn't all that big a deal because of the lack of real alternatives out there (the Dims do not deserve that accolade) but still indicates that people might finally be getting fed up with the bullshit. There was the sense that we're slowly winning on Iraq. There was the at least implied approval of the constitutionality of federal regulations on media ownership.

And then there's this, from USA Today:

Don't look now, but the ground has shifted on global warming. After decades of debate over whether the planet is heating and, if so, whose fault it is, divergent groups are joining hands with little fanfare to deal with a problem they say people can no longer avoid.

General Electric is the latest big corporate convert; politicians at the state and national level are looking for solutions; and religious groups are taking philosophical and financial stands to slow the progression of climate change.

There are still a lot of ifs and buts in this, particularly on the question of what to do about global warming, and some of the corporate commitments seem, well, not what we might have hoped: The $1.5 billion a year GE proposes to spend is for research rather than action and the figure amounts to about 1.1% of its annual sales. Still, company chairman Jeffrey Immelt did make the announcement - with executives from American Electric Power, Boeing, and Cinergy standing alongside him.

Significantly, Cinergy executive Kevin Leahy said "On the business side, it just looks like climate change is not going away," calling it a problem that has to be managed. It may be their bottom line that they're interested it, but it's starting to sink in, particularly among energy companies and utilities, that climate change is going to have a real impact on that and they had better do something about it if only to avoid getting clobbered with massive restrictions later. That matters because

"[a]s big companies fall off the 'I don't believe in climate change' bandwagon, people will start to take this more seriously," says environmental scientist Don Kennedy, editor in chief of the journal Science.

Change is coming on other fronts, as well: For one example, socially conscious investor firms are starting to take policies related to global warming into account in their investment decisions and corporate activism. Just last month, Christian Brothers Investment Services, which advises Catholic institutions, spearheaded a stockholders' motion demanding that ExxonMobil justify its denial "of the broad scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels contributes to global climate change." It got 10.3% of shareholders' votes, representing shares worth more than $36 billion, despite the opposition of management. That's a very significant achievement.

To be sure, many companies - most notably oil industry leader ExxonMobil - still express skepticism about the effects of global warming. And the Bush administration has supported research and voluntary initiatives but has pulled back from a multi-nation pact on environmental constraints. ...

Nonetheless, the tides of change appear to be moving on.

And that is the significant part.

Footnote: James Dooley of the Battelle Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Maryland, was quoted as saying

"We need a whole series of 'home runs' and maybe even a couple of 'grand slams' to successfully address this problem. More efficient refrigerators, better and cheaper solar cells, hybrid automobiles, fuel cells, power plants that capture and store their (carbon dioxide) deep below the surface and nuclear power. They all have important roles to play."

"No one seriously talks about trying to address climate change with one technology," Dooley says. "Everyone understands that there isn't a 'silver bullet' out there waiting to be discovered."

There's good and bad combined in that statement. What's good is the somewhat belated recognition that there needs to be a variety of changes if we're to have any hope of having a livable environment and sufficiently limiting global warming so that what we face over the next century is merely bad instead of catastrophic. (Twenty-five years ago I proposed an energy policy based on regionally-appropriate, environmentally-sound renewable energy under the slogan "No One Answer.")

The bad part is two-fold: First is the embrace of nuclear power, a destructive answer to a destructive problem, as I noted the end of April. Presenting nukes as a response to global warming reminds me of the move back when I was in college encouraging cigarette smokers to switch to pipes: You usually don't inhale pipe smoke, the argument went, so it cut your risk of lung cancer. And it did - at the cost of sharply increasing your risk of lip, mouth, and throat cancers. I for one am not interested in "answers" that ultimately only propose to switch from one sort of environmental cancer to another. That is a very bad idea.

The other bad part is that it still sees any answers as found in new technology. It's as if we insist on saying "Don't worry, everyone: You'll still be able to have your SUVs and all your other power-hungry hi-tech goodies, all those vital necessities of everyday life we pitched you into getting hooked on. It'll be entirely painless, you won't have to do anything."

But the fact is, we will have to do something. There is no way we can deal with what's coming without lifestyle changes, some merely irritating, some potentially quite serious including dealing with more (and more severe) storms, droughts, and floods; weather-driven disruption of food supplies; and the very real possibility of having to step back from the ocean shoreline. It is pointless and even destructive to suggest otherwise. In the meantime, here is one non-technology step every one of us can take:

Use less! Whatever it is. Find ways to live with less of it.

Keep on keepin' on

Two items of interest:

- According to a new Gallup poll, about 30% of Americans are saying "Out Now! of Iraq - and another 30% are saying some of the troops should be withdrawn now. It's the strongest support yet for withdrawal. Meanwhile, 56% say they would be upset if more troops are sent and a roughly equal percentage say the war was not worth fighting, a figure reflected in an ABC-Washington Post poll, taken, like the Gallup one, in early June.

- Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) is a solid conservative who supported the invasion of Iraq (and was responsible for "freedom fries" replacing "French fries" on the Capitol cafeteria menu) but has become probably its biggest critic among GOPpers. On Sunday he said "we've done about as much as we can do" in stating his intention to introduce legislation calling for a timetable for withdrawal.

"When I look at the number of men and women who have been killed - it's almost 1,700 now, in addition to close to 12,000 have been severely wounded - and I just feel that the reason of going in for weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the Iraqis to make a nuclear weapon, that's all been proven that it was never there," Jones said on ABC's "This Week."

The ranks of the dissenters, even among the GOP, are growing. I said it recently: Slowly, painfully, with too much blood shed and too many lives lost and too much hatred generated, but still, slowly - we are winning.

Taking what you can get

It shows how bad things have become when this can - and will - be greeted as good (or at minimum, relieving) news rather than with what would be the reaction in a just world of a shrug and "of course."

Reuters, June 13 - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear appeals by media companies challenging whether ownership restrictions are constitutional, leaving it up to federal regulators to decide the appropriate limits. ...

[In 2003,] [t]he FCC eased several ownership limits [on media corporations]....

Consumer advocates, arguing that the relaxed limits would hurt diversity in viewpoints and opinions, challenged the regulations in court. A federal appeals court last year agreed to put the rules on hold and ordered the FCC to better justify them.

Media giants, including the Tribune Company and Gannet, claimed that even the remaining restrictions were a violation of corporate "free speech" rights and they should be allowed to do pretty much as they damn please, pointing to the 1996 Telecommunications Act for support. But the Supreme Court, by refusing to listen, in effect rejected that argument.

So while the constitutionality of regulatory controls on corporate concentration in media has not been decided de jure by the Supremes, it has been decided de facto in the affirmative. And while, again, that should be an "of course," it is nonetheless good news.

Footnote: I still have trouble getting my head around the concept of corporate free speech, especially at a time when human free speech continues to be under pressure. I also have trouble getting my head around claims that all we need to do is to elect Democrats when I recall that the prime movers behind the 1996 Act, which many at the time said would lead to increased media concentration, were Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Stupid headline of the week award

Or maybe it's the most revealing headline of the week. From Monday's Boston Globe:

Militant's case poses dilemma for US
Tug between terror war, opposition to Castro

The "militant" in question is Luis Posada Carriles, a man who in any other circumstances would be labeled what he is: a terrorist.

This is someone who, as I noted just over two weeks ago, has been implicated in the destruction of a civilian airliner, who openly bragged about being responsible for blowing up a string of hotels, and who was convicted of a plot to kill Fidel Castro by blowing up a car full of explosives on a public street in Panama.

Even the CIA cut off relations with him because of evidence he was smuggling cocaine into Miami.

So what the hell is the "dilemma?" How could there even be a "dilemma?"

Unless - there is that little CIA thing. After escaping from prison in Venezuela during his trials over the airliner downing, he hooked up with the CIA and became a central figure in the US supply route for another gang of terrorists, the contras. Now, it seems, the CIA is afraid of "abandoning" him because, it's said, that will make other terrorists less willing to carry out murder and sabotage on behalf of the agency. Why this is a bad thing seems unclear.

And then I suppose there's that "votes in Florida" thing, too. After all, you can't expect the Bush gang to risk 25 electoral votes (not to mention getting people pissed at Jeb) just for the sake of something vaguely approaching decency and moral consistency, can you?

I'm serious. You can't, can you?

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YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Dr. Robert Goddard?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Songs from Musicals

It's the German word that's the title of the first song in Cabaret.

Footnote to the preceding

Dodging what would very likely have been a humiliating defeat, the US has dropped its opposition to a third term for Mohamed ElBaradei as the chief of the IAEA, Reuters reported on Sunday. The Shrub team had mounted a serious lobbying effort to get other nations to agree to his ouster on what were widely considered the spurious grounds that no one should serve more than two terms. US opposition never gained any traction and now Washington has flip-flopped to endorsing him.

It's very likely that the real reason, as suspected by most diplomats, for the original opposition was that the White House wanted to punish ElBaradei for what they perceived as his "softness" on Iran and before that on Iraq. The fact that his insistence that there was no evidence Iraq was running a nuclear program proved to be right was, of course, irrelevant.

In fact, there may have even been a more pointed reason: It was the IAEA that effortlessly proved the White House-brandished memo supposedly "proving" that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake from Niger was a clumsy forgery. That kind of embarrassing smackdown is not something the folks making up the White House cabal easily or quickly forget.