Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a stallion?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Animal Words and Phrases for $1200

Philosophically speaking, "all" of these "are gray in the dark."

I've heard that before

So the 9/11 Commission

identified nine "specific points of vulnerability" in the Sept. 11 plot that might have led to its disruption had the government been better organized and more watchful,

AP said on Friday. The as-yet unspoken meaning of that is that the TRAITOR Act is not actually about security for us, but about control by others.

Seems to me I already said that. On October 14, 2001, in fact, in a letter to my Senators.

The fact is, in the weeks since September 11, it’s become clear that as a security matter, the attacks didn’t happen because of a lack of police powers or security provisions but because of a failure to use those that already existed.

And as I added the following January (and have, I believe, quoted here before),

patient police work of effective investigation and intelligence has done and will do more to oppose terrorism than all our bombing sorties combined.

Footnote: The same article says that Bush "welcomed" the commission's recommendations as " very constructive" and assured the members that "where government needs to act, we will."

Translation: Don't call us, we'll call you.

A few recent notes from the daily grind

July 14 Too many of us are having to put in overtime to pay the bills. As soon as next month, for millions that may no longer be enough.

New York (CNN/Money) - Revised changes to overtime rules proposed by the Bush administration will still fail to protect overtime pay for 6 million workers, according to a new study. ...

The Bush administration issued proposed changes to overtime rules last year, but then revised them in March after criticism from some labor groups.

The original proposal would have stripped overtime protection for 8 million workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which studies issues affecting middle- and lower-income workers and receives funding from some labor groups.

But the revisions would still strip OT pay for about 6 million workers, EPI said in a study released Tuesday.

"The 6 million number may be a little high, but I think the [EPI] analysis is the most complete," said Thomas Kochan, a management professor at MIT's Sloan School of Business.

The trick remains what it was under the previous attempt: redefine workers' roles (change, that is, the description, not the actual work) so that millions become labeled "professional," "administrative," or "executive" and thus ineligible.

EPI did say that about 400,000 workers would gain overtime protection via a change in the income limits, but that is obviously dwarfed by the number that would lose it. The gain could be even smaller in the real world: In January, the Labor Department got caught telling employers how they could avoid paying overtime to workers newly covered.

(An additional benefit of changing definitions is that it makes it harder for unions to organize by limiting the size and thus power of a bargaining unit, since supervisory personnel aren't eligible. Making the definitions is a powerful tool in the hands of those who kneel before altar of the powerful. Just ask the graduate teaching and research assistants at Brown University in Providence, RI, who got told by the Bush-nominee-dominated National Labor Relations Board on July 16 that they have no right to form a union because, the Board declared, even though they do work and are paid for it, they are actually students.)

July 15 But certainly the expanding economy will provide for jobs, jobs, and more jobs, yes? Industrial output is on a steady upswing, yes?

No. From Reuters:

Output at U.S. factories, mines and utilities fell unexpectedly in June, recording its largest drop in more than a year, the Federal Reserve reported on Thursday.

The Fed said industrial production fell 0.3 percent in June after a downwardly revised 0.9 percent May increase. Wall Street had expected the June reading to be flat. ...

The overall industrial production drop was the largest since April 2003, when it fell 0.6 percent. ...

Companies also operated at a lower rate in June, at 77.2 percent of full capacity, down from a revised 77.6 percent capacity use rate in May.

Analysts had expected a 77.7 percent capacity use rate for June.

July 18 And what's the combined result of changed rules, weakened unions, and a go-nowhere economy? The New York Times told us what we already knew.

The amount of money workers receive in their paychecks is failing to keep up with inflation. ...

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that hourly earnings of production workers - nonmanagement workers ranging from nurses and teachers to hamburger flippers and assembly-line workers - fell 1.1 percent in June, after accounting for inflation. The June drop, the steepest decline since the depths of recession in mid-1991, came after a 0.8 percent fall in real hourly earnings in May.

Coming on top of a 12-minute drop in the average workweek, the decline in the hourly rate last month cut deeply into workers' pay. In June, production workers took home $525.84 a week, on average. After accounting for inflation, this is about $8 less than they were pocketing last January, and is the lowest level of weekly pay since October 2001.

What's particularly significant about the figures is that they reveal what I have long pointed to: the continued division of our economy into haves and have-nots.

"There's a bit of a dichotomy," said Ethan S. Harris, chief economist at Lehman Brothers. "Joe Six-Pack is under a lot of pressure. He got a lousy raise; he's paying more for gasoline and milk. He's not doing that great. But proprietors' income is up. Profits are up. Home values are up. Middle-income and upper-income people are looking pretty good."

But those Joe (and Jane) Six-packs, blue- and pink-collar workers, constitute 80% of the workforce. So why isn't this being more urgently addressed? Why isn't this thought more of a problem? Why are the only "answers" being proposed yet another round of tax cuts that won't even make up for what these workers have lost? The same article provides the answer, noting that while the lower and lower-middle class make up 80% of the workforce, they do only 30% of the spending - so frankly, corporate America and its paid-for politicians just don't give a damn.

The upper echelons of consumer spending, at places like Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom department stores, are reporting gangbuster business. "I'm surprised by how well we've sold high-priced fashion at this stage," said Pete Nordstrom, president of Nordstrom's full-line stores.

But at the other end, sales at stores open at least a year at big-box discounters like Target and Wal-Mart have disappointed, while sales of used cars are declining year over year, government figures show.

So when you hear the voices of the victors claim that they're looking out for "you," just be sure to remember who it is they're actually talking to.

Keeping your priorities straight

Reuters for July 22 tells us that

now soldiers and their families can receive plastic surgery, including breast enlargements, on the taxpayers' dime.

The New Yorker magazine reports in its July 26th edition that members of all four branches of the U.S. military can get face-lifts, breast enlargements, liposuction and nose jobs for free....

"Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible," Dr. Bob Lyons, chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio told the magazine....

The Congressional ban on performing abortions at military hospitals except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the life of the mother - even if the procedure is paid for with the patient's own money - remains in effect.

Outrage unhappily accepted

I received an email this evening from United for Peace and Justice.

On Wednesday, July 21, United for Peace and Justice made a major announcement about our August 29 "World Says No to the Bush Agenda" protest: We are taking the West Street rally location which was imposed by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the NY Police Department. ...

Several weeks ago, we won our fight to march past Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican National Convention, but the rally site remained contested. We have been fighting hard for months to secure the Great Lawn in Central Park, and many of you have supported us in that fight.

Every alternative we proposed to City officials was rejected. Every attempt at resolving concerns was dismissed. The City cut off negotiations and refused to meet with us. Clearly Mayor Bloomberg, a pitbull for the Bush Administration and the Republican Party, is doing everything he can to silence dissent and erode basic Constitutional rights.

Back on July 12 in discussing threats to free exercise of dissent, I mentioned the problems with New York and noted that refusing to negotiate sites and routes with permit-seekers is an increasingly-common tactic in the efforts to isolate and curtail protest.

New York's actions in this case have been disgraceful, shameful, undemocratic, an insult to the First Amendment, shoddy, disgusting, and dangerous. UFPJ is urging people to

contact the Mayor and Police Chief Kelly to keep the pressure on these demands:

1) No Pens: We have made it clear that we do not want the police to use metal barricades to create pens or otherwise restrict movement in and out of the rally site, the assembly site or along the march route itself.

2) Free Water: Because there is no shade or access to stores or other facilities along West Street, we want the City to provide free water at the rally, as well as assistance with extra port-o-johns.

3) Free Shuttle Bus: We want the City to provide free shuttle buses from the rally site to the closest subway stations, which depending where you are along West Street can be some distance. The City is giving the RNC delegates free subway/bus passes for the week they are here and we would like the have the subway and bus fares waived on August 29 to make travel around town easier for the massive numbers of people expected to join the demonstration.

4) Compensation: Since the City is insisting that we rally on this site, we will incur major additional expenses for an adequate stage and sound system. We think the City should help cover some of these costs.

Do it. Do it! Remember that silence is assent.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Phone 212-788-3000
Fax 212-788-9711
Email http://nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly
Phone 646-610-5410
Fax 646-610-5865
Email: http://www.nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mailnypd.html

(Info from UFPJ.)

Go to their website for details of the march route and rally site.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Smith and Wesson?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Animal Words and Phrases for $400

This term for a male horse at stud also refers to a virile man.

French update

So it turns out that the woman in France who claimed she was assaulted by six Arab and North African men because they thought she was Jewish made it all up.

PARIS - A young mother who claimed to have been the victim of a vicious anti-Semitic attack that shocked France has admitted it never happened, authorities said,

the Toronto Star tells us.

When I mentioned this a week ago, I noted that there were questions about her story but I wondered if that really made any difference, because the fact the story was accepted so readily showed how much people were aware of how much anti-Jewish hatred there is in France. The question stands.

And another question emerges alongside it: Was the story easier to believe because the alleged attackers were Arabs and blacks? Some think so.

[A]nti-racism group Mrap criticized officials for being too quick to blame youths of Arab and African origin.

Mrap "strongly condemns the irresponsible comments of people who took advantage of this invention to once more use anti-Semitism as a tool against a specific group of people," it said in a statement.

And it appears that those who think so have good reason.

More racist and anti-Semitic acts occurred in France in the first half of 2004 than in all of 2003, official figures show.

A total of 135 anti-Jewish attacks were recorded in the first six months of this year compared to 127 in 2003, while there were 95 attacks on people of North African Arab or black African origin against 51 last year.

That is, there were 6% more anti-Jewish attacks in the first half of 2004 than in all of 2003. For Africans, the increase was 86% in the same comparison.

Racism, as the saying goes, is an equal opportunity destroyer.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "War" and peas?

JEOPARDY!
Quasi-Related Pairs for $1000

Guess? model Anna Nicole and the vegetable oil brand Florence Henderson endorsed in TV ads.

Quick FYI

Another attack on electronic voting machines, this one talking about how votes can be manipulated by using one piece of software for tests and another for the actual count, is at Wheresthepaper.org.

Free the 100 million!

Heads are gonna roll over this....

Obviously, some sort of dreadful mistake has been made. Last week, the Christian Science Monitor reported:

Upset with the lack of political and economic reforms in Uzbekistan, the US State Department announced Tuesday its decision not to certify the country, effectively denying the renewal of $18 million in aid. ...

The Bush administration's decision to slash aid sends a signal abroad that despite the president's "with us or against us" formula, there is a point at which human rights abuses can overshadow military and diplomatic support for the war on terror.

Seriously, I don't really think this was a mistake. But I do think the "signal" is not from the US to any other dictators out there that boiling people is going a shade too far, but from the State Department to the rest of the administration that it's not willing to be completely cut out of foreign policy. Some others are of the same mind:

"I think this decision is the result of a battle in the administration between the State Department and the Defense Department," says David Lewis, the International Crisis Group's Central Asia director. "Decisive for this new sign was not so much that the human rights situation in Uzbekistan got slightly worse, but that the pressure was building on the administration to acknowledge it."

However, if the Pentagon is aware of such a battle, it gives no sign of it, gliding blissfully along, apparently confident of its continued dominance.

Despite the aid cut, there is no indication yet that the US will sever military ties beyond the ending of a training program for Uzbek officers. Indeed, Uzbek officials appear unphased by the rebuke.

"I am not disappointed by the State Department's decision," says foreign ministry spokesman Ilkhom Zakirov. ...

"The military cooperation will continue," Mr. Zakirov added.

A uniter, not a divider? Hell, Shrub can't even unite his own administration. But it's clear who has the upper hand here.

In an apparent attempt to mitigate the diplomatic blow, the US undersecretary of state for Europe and Central Asia met with President Karimov on a one-day visit to Tashkent Wednesday.

So the State Department takes a slap at Uzbekistan and not only do military affairs go on unaffected, but State's own ambassador is trotted out to make nice with a regime that both human rights organizations and the Department itself condemn.

Colin Powerless continues to merit the nickname.

As long as we're in that part of the world

Kathimerini also reported last week that in a discussion about NATO involvement in security preparations for the upcoming Summer Olympics in Athens, Defense Department spokesman Lawrence Di Rita specifically allowed for the possibility of unilateral US intervention, saying

"Well, we'll always act to defend our national interests and to defend US citizens around the world."

Needless to say, this didn't go over big in Greece.

Public Order Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis declared that security of the Games was Greece’s responsibility and the Communist Party voiced outrage at the "unprecedented provocation."

But don't you understand, you're not Turkey. We don't have to play nice with you. Welcome to the War on Terror^{(c)(tm)(pat. pend.)} and the world where "everything's changed," including the notion that you might, you know, have any say in what we might do in your country.

Footnote, just FYI: Kathimerini reported earlier that 300-500 armed US anti-terrorist troops will be stationed near Athens during the Games.

Happy belated birthday...

...to the bogus administration of Turkish Cyprus.

It was thirty years ago yesterday, July 20, 1974, that thousands of Turkish troops invaded Cyprus, producing the illegal division of the island that continues to this day.

The 30th anniversary yesterday of the Turkish invasion which divided Cyprus was marked by strikingly different ceremonies and moods on the two sides of the island. Greek Cypriots held memorial services for the dead and prayers for the return of refugees to their homes and the recovery of missing troops and civilians, while Turkish Cypriots celebrated with a military parade,

reported the Greek daily Kathimerini on Wednesday.

And well they might celebrate, as the US and the EU, both more concerned with connecting Turkey to Europe for military and economic gain than they are with justice, turn their backs on the stand they've maintained for three decades that so-called Northern Cyprus is an illegal breakaway state existing only by virtue of an occupying army and undeserving of international recognition.

The excuse for this was that Greek Cypriots rejected a supposed compromise proposed by Kofi Annan which would have "reunited" the island as two federated states under a weak central government, thus creating a de facto, if not de jure, independent northern Cyprus. Showing just how deep their commitment to the democratic process is when geopolitics step in, the US and the EU are now proposing various packages of aid of, and trade with, northern Cyprus, creating by fiat and money what they could not create by votes. From Kathimerini for July 10:

The United States said yesterday that it would provide $30.5 million in aid to Turkish Cypriots this year, saying it wanted to ease their isolation. This came a few days after the European Commission announced plans to provide 259 million euros in aid and initiate direct trade with the breakaway state on northern Cyprus....

Yesterday, a State Department official said the aid was the first "financial move" by the United States as part of measures to lift decades-long economic sanctions....

"We’ve announced a series of steps already, and we'll continue to announce things as appropriate," [State Department spokesman Richard Boucher] said. Among the previous steps was an easing of visa procedures.

For its part, last week Nicosia announced several "confidence building" measures, including proposals for a mutual pullback of forces from the "Green Line" and the establishment of a military-free zone along the line and the opening of additional checkpoints, easing transit from one area to the other.

Turkish Cypriot Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Talat dismissed the proposals as "a diversion," but someone speaking on Annan's behalf said the UN always welcomed any such efforts.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are Potts and pans?

JEOPARDY!
Quasi-Related Pairs for $600

Edwin Starr's 1970 No. 1 hit and pod veggies.

Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

From TomPaine we learn that Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) are reconstituting the old war hawk Committee on the Present Danger. This time, the ever-present, ever-growing, ever-looming, ever-underestimated-by-all-those-fools-out-there danger is not communism, of course, but "Islamic extremists."

Check out the membership list. So many old friends, so few new faces. That may actually be a good thing, yes?

Lieberman and Kyl announced their intention in an op-ed piece in Tuesday's Washington Post; it featured a wonderfully muddled metaphor about turning tides threatened by undercurrents washing away gains - those undercurrents, of course, being those of "public pressure," which apparently is an illegitimate force in their world.

They finished up by saying that

[t]ogether, we will prevail, and freedom's reach will expand.

Through the purity and essence of our natural fluids.

Yellow cake with non-fat, sugar free, vanilla frosting

Updated There has been a good deal of buzz over the past few days looking to resuscitate the claim that Iraq sought to buy yellowcake - milled uranium oxide ore - from Niger, with a parallel attempt to discredit Joseph Wilson, the diplomat who checked out the story on behalf of the White House and found it to be bogus.

This really took off when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report - you know, the one that said everything was the CIA's fault and the White House didn't have one silly blessed little thing to do with any screwups - went out of its way to attack Wilson, claiming that he got the assignment to go to Niger because of his wife, outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, that he repeatedly claimed more than he could know, and that he claimed The Big Dick Cheney had been briefed on the matter, which wasn't true.

When I say out of its way, I mean it. None of this really had anything to do with the Committee's work and could have easily been ignored without damage to its, uh, "findings." That a deliberate point was made of calling Wilson, in effect, a liar who got the Niger gig only through nepotism - thus challenging not only his honesty but his qualifications for the job - says that there's a broader point here.

And that could be, of course, the desperate search for an ex post facto justification for attacking Iraq. We found no WMDs. No WMD programs. No collaboration with al-Qaeda. No involvement in 9/11. No giving weapons to terrorists. No threat. After falling back on the "we brought them freedom" line, it now appears that ultimately there may not even be that, neither "democracy" nor even something we could manage to label as some kind of form of it.

But there's a subtler, darker purpose that I think is closer to the mark: By seeking to discredit Wilson and thus by extension Plame, the GOPpers want to take the heat off of the investigation of who illegally leaked Plame's CIA role. As Josh Marshall, who practically owns the Plame story, has noted, there are already noises being made to the effect. As a Washington Post story he quoted on July 10 has it,

[t]he report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction.

That, of course, is utter nonsense - as Marshall says, "there's no 'challenging the bona fides of a political opponent' exception to the law in question" - but it's apparently the best the GOPpers can come up with.

What makes this distressing rather than amusing is how some people who should know better have bought into the character assassination. For example, Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler, who apparently never liked Wilson, seems unfortunately eager to take the chance to gloat, saying "we warned you last year!"

After the SSCI released its report, Wilson wrote a reply to the claims about him, which was published in Salon; he also had a brief recap in the Washington Post. Some of Somerby's readers forwarded those to him and now he's taken an entire column to nitpick at Wilson's response and repeatedly condescend to his readers, who "didn't know" such and such or "didn't read" this and that, the overweening attitude being that his readers are, compared to him, simply too ignorant to make judgments.

For example, he makes much out of a memo included in the report in which Plame notes Wilson's credentials for the Niger trip and contrasts that to Wilson's statement that she had nothing to do with his selection. But he fails to mention the fact that Plame's superiors have insisted all along that she did not propose Wilson but was asked about the idea after it had already come up. Nor did she have the authority to assign him. That is, in effect what happened is that his name came up and she was asked if he'd take the job and she responded to the effect of "Yeah! I think he'd be great!"

Now, in that light it can be argued that Wilson's statement that she had "nothing to do" with his selection may be an overstatement because certainly an endorsement of an idea may serve to advance it. But since the charge being made and responded to was not that she endorsed his selection but that she was directly responsible for it, which she flatly was not, Wilson's description seems to me entirely fair. But to Somerby, it's "fudging of facts." Nonsense.

It's also nonsense to argue, as Somerby does, that Wilson is again "fudging" in reference to a February 19, 2002 meeting in which the issue of a Niger trip was broached with him. By accepted accounts, Plame brought Wilson into the meeting, introduced him, and left to avoid an appearance of conflict. (Somerby himself notes that the SSCI report quotes Plame as saying she was in the meeting for "about three minutes.") So what is the claimed conflict? It's that Wilson said in his book and his Washington Post piece that Plame wasn't at the meeting.

Huh? I have to say that if I was Plame and someone asked me later in normal conversation (i.e., not sworn testimony where you want to be precise with small details, even irrelevant ones) if I'd been at that meeting, I would have said no, in the same way that I wouldn't feel it proper for someone to arrive at work at 9am, leave at 9:03, then go around saying "I went to work today." To say there's some kind of "fudging" going on here is, to quote one of Somerby's favorite words, clownish.

A good deal of Somerby's column is like that, parsing Wilson's words like a trial attorney aggressively cross-examining a hostile witness. "Here, you said the box was about 140-150 centimeters long. But now you say it was about 145 centimeters long! Why can't you get your story straight? Why do you keep changing your answers?"

Then there's the matter of the forged documents. The report and Somerby lash out at Wilson for supposedly having told Walter Pincus of the Washington Post that

he had determined, as part of his trip, that the famous Niger documents were forged. The problem: Wilson had never seen these forged documents. Indeed, the documents weren’t even in US hands when he took his trip to Niger.

Aha! We're supposed to cry out! Gotcha!

Except for this, which again is something Somerby does not mention: The US didn't have the actual documents, but it did have a written summary provided by the Italians - a summary that the CIA used to brief Wilson prior to his trip. He hadn't seen the documents, but he was fully aware of what they said. If Wilson concluded, as he did, that there was no way the described transaction could have taken place, that no credence should be given to the claim that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake from Niger, then the documents saying that it did could not be true.

Now, in fairness, which is more than Somerby is willing to extend to Wilson, Wilson could not have concluded the documents were forged, merely that they were clearly wrong, and he's admitted that when he gave Pincus the interview, three months after the International Atomic Energy Agency had declared the documents an inept, transparent forgery, he may have gotten confused between what he knew then and what he had concluded from his trip a year earlier. To Somerby, however, this is not possibly a mistake: It's "absurd on its face." (I note that calling something absurd on its face absolves the claimant from the sometimes-awkward necessity of providing logical or factual proof, and indeed Somerby offers none.)

In the course of his column, Somerby at least three times refers to the report as "unanimous." That is either a distortion or gross sloppiness. As Josh Marshall pointed out on Sunday,

on the Wilson-Niger matter it's not unfair to identify this as a Republican document since the Democrats did not agree with the majority's conclusions on this matter. Indeed, as the Republicans themselves (specifically Sens. Roberts, Bond and Hatch) complained in their 'additional views' (p. 442) section, "Despite our hard and successful work to deliver a unanimous report ... there were two issues on which the Republicans and Democrats could not agree: 1) whether the Committee should conclude that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's public statements were not based on knowledge he actually possessed, and 2) whether the Committee should conclude that it was the former ambassador's wife who recommended him for his trip to Niger."

That is, the report itself says it was not unanimous on the very points Somerby is addressing! Apparently, it's not only Somerby's readers who can't read.

Then, on the question of if Cheney got briefed, the report says he didn't. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Wilson accepted that but said he was "surprised" because briefing Cheney would have been a normal part of "the way government works." (Particularly true here since it was a question raised by Cheney that lead to the Niger trip in the first place.) Even though Somerby himself refers to it as Wilson's "assumption," admitting that Wilson never said Cheney was briefed but rather that he believed the VP must have been in the normal course of events, our indefatigable nitpicker calls Wilson's acknowledgment "an adjustment" and "zig-zagging." If we're to accept Somerby, Wilson is so dishonest that even an admission of error is an example of it.

Believe it or not, it gets worse. Descending from absurdity into inanity, Somerby takes on the report's claim that "for most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal." Wilson disputes that conclusion and cites 11 examples from the body of the report that contradict it. (And, it's worth remembering, Wilson's view is the one that came to be accepted, even by those who may have initially had doubts.) So how does Somerby try to body slam Wilson? First by not mentioning a single example Wilson points to and then by repeating back exactly the assertion Wilson disputes! He says this was adopted "unanimously" by the committee as if that ended all discussion - despite the fact that, as Wilson shows, the report itself does not sustain the conclusion.

But all this childish nitpicking idiocy is just to get to Somerby's real target: Wilson says he never claimed to have "debunked" the claim that Iraq sought uranium ore from Africa. Gasp! Horrors! OMIGOD! "Take a seat. Strap yourselves in. Try to believe that he said it." It's an "amazing new admission."

Well, did he claim to have debunked it? So far as I'm aware, he didn't and Somerby never says otherwise. Instead, he blusters "what has the last year been about if Wilson didn't claim to debunk Bush's claim?" For someone whose usual undertaking is to point out how the press misinterprets and distorts what people actually say in service of a media theme - he still trembles with righteous indignation about press treatment of his hero, Al Gore, in the 2000 election - that's a truly odd (not to say self-serving, not to say intellectually bogus) position to take.

Of course, Wilson could not have claimed to have debunked a claim about Iraq seeking ore from Africa. He could only speak about Niger, not the whole continent. Somerby's floundering efforts to prove Wilson said something he actually didn't improperly and misleadingly conflate both Niger with the whole of Africa and what Wilson claimed to have proved himself with what he argued based on all public sources of information.

To sum up in one sentence: Somerby's argument is trash.

And so is the conclusion all of this is evidently intended to reach:

Was Bush's claim [about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa] false? We still don't know — and neither does Wilson!

Bullshit. Utter bullshit. Yes, we do know it was false. We do know it was bogus. We know because if there was any chance it was true, the White House would not have admitted it shouldn't have been in the State of the Union address the day after Wilson's New York Times article appeared. We know because the only documents known at the time or that have turned up since indicating such efforts were the clumsy forgeries. We know because as the report itself notes (page 56), the CIA said at the time, "the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory." We know because there is no evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program anywhere around that time or in fact for several years before.

The very most that can be said is that there were a couple of feelers which may or may not have had to do with uranium ore and if they did may have had to do with some possible dealings at some point in the future. Note that the prime minister of Niger said he "assumed" uranium is what Iraq wanted to talk about but despite having met with an Iraqi delegation, has given no indication the subject ever came up. In short, vapor.

We don't know? Only in the sense that we "don't know" if Bob Somerby is actually a sleeper agent for North Korea and we "don't know" if the Detroit Pistons were secretly replaced with basketball-playing androids. Back here in the real world, where tinfoil is wrapped around sandwiches, not heads, we do know.

Not long ago, I emailed Somerby about something he wrote, suggesting an aspect he hadn't covered that while going beyond his usual focus of how the media deals with issues, I thought merited a mention. He replied that he would be satisfied just to see some accurate reporting.

Would that he practiced what he preached.

Updated to add some links.

Rhetorical question

I'm sure all of you, good blog-readers all, are already aware of this story.

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs. ...

[T]he informants told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the Prime Minister's personal security team watched in stunned silence.

The first point that has to be made clear is that this comes from the Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia), an internationally-respected newspaper. Okay? And the reporter, questioned later on Australian TV, emphasized that he got the story not as a rumor but from two people who claimed to be eyewitnesses, neither of who knew the other had spoken to him.

The two witnesses [the Morning Herald article says] were independently and separately found by the Herald. Neither approached the newspaper. They were interviewed on different days in a private home in Baghdad, without being told the other had spoken. A condition of the co-operation of each man was that no personal information would be published.

Both interviews lasted more than 90 minutes and were conducted through an interpreter, with another journalist present for one of the meetings. The witnesses were not paid for the interviews.

And as the article took pains to point out,

in a sharp reminder of the Iraqi hunger for security above all else, the witnesses did not perceive themselves as whistle-blowers. In interviews with the Herald they were enthusiastic about such killings, with one of them arguing: "These criminals were terrorists. They are the ones who plant the bombs."

So all in all the story would seem to be well-sourced enough to merit at least some attention.

So here's the question: What are the chances it will actually be investigated seriously?

Absolutely none.

Consider first the official responses.

The Herald has established the names of three of the prisoners alleged to have been killed. ...

The three names were provided to the Interior Ministry, where senior adviser Sabah Khadum undertook to provide a status report on each. He was asked if they were prisoners, were they alive or had they died in custody.

But the next day he cut short an interview by hanging up the phone, saying only: "I have no information - I don't want to comment on that specific matter." ...

Sabah Khadum, a senior adviser to Interior Minister Mr Naqib, whose portfolio covers police matters, also dismissed the accounts. Rejecting them as "ludicrous", Mr Khadum said of Dr Allawi: "He is a doctor and I know him. He was my neighbour in London. He just doesn't have it in him. Baghdad is a city of rumours. This is not worth discussing."

For its part, the US issued a non-denial, with ambassador John Negroponte saying "If we attempted to refute each [rumor], we would have no time for other business. ... [T]his case is closed."

Well, not quite closed. Certain appearances must be maintained. The next day, Iraq's Human Rights Minister, Bakhtiar Amin, said that he would investigate the claims

although he had serious doubts they were true. "I will check this and I will talk to the Prime Minister as well. We will check this information.

"This is not the Iyad Allawi I know. He's not a killer. And he's not the type of person who goes out killing people. You don't see him carrying weapons."

That all presages a hard-hitting, open-minded inquiry, doesn't it?

(Sidebar: Ludicrously, Allawi spokesman Taha Hussein said

Dr Allawi is turning this country into a free and democratic nation run by the rule of law; so if your sources are as credible as they say they are, then they are more than welcome to file a complaint in a court of law against the Prime Minister"

and in its follow-up, the Morning Herald said

Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, expressed his confidence in Mr Amin's investigation and repeated his call for [reporter] Paul McGeough, to take his evidence to Iraq's police,

saying "There's no reason to believe he won't examine the claims properly.")

Then consider the response of the US media - which is actually kind of hard because there really hasn't been any. Apparently, the only ones to mention it so far are the Washington Times (yes, that Washington Times), the Philadelphia Daily News, and now the July 19 Daily Update on terrorism of the Christian Science Monitor. Why the blackout? Now, I don't go much for media conspiracy theories, that is, the idea that the media are deliberately spiking it in order to advance the US agenda in Iraq, which this certainly has the potential to damage. I usually go for the sloppy, lazy, sheep explanation: It hasn't been covered because no big-name US politician (preferably at the White House) has brought it up and lacking that there is no "domestic hook." Besides, they say, we're too busy with really important stories like do John Kerry and John Edwards touch each other too much?

There are, however, two other explanations more likely than either of those. The first is a calculated pose of worldly cynicism, in which any such story is laughed off as the product of those Middle Easterners' over-active imaginations. It's just not taken seriously. That's the attitude Newsweek adopted:

Baghdad's streets are as mean as any in the world, and since Ayad Allawi took office, the stories people tell in them are even meaner. Soon after he became prime minister of the interim government last month, many Iraqis whisper, he ordered two suspected insurgents shot in front of him. Or, goes another account, he shot seven captive terrorists himself, one after another. Or he personally chopped off the hand of a suspect with an ax.

That is, this is just one more of those silly, bizarre rumors running around Baghdad. The fact that this particular story is published in a respected newspaper backed by two independent eyewitness accounts makes no difference. It didn't come from "official" sources, so you just can't credit it and you're afraid of looking foolishly naive to your colleagues if you go with it.

The other is what Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler refers to as the meme of a story, the line, the frame, that gets adopted and into which all coverage must then fit. And of course the meme for Iyad Allawi is that he's the Great Hope for Stability and the Future of Democratic Iraq and the idea that he could be or become another Saddam-type thug just doesn't fit the picture - so it gets ignored.

But a there is every reason to think that a thug is exactly what Allawi was, is, and can/will be. Indeed, the Morning Herald says that according to the memoirs of Talib Shabib, a foreign minister under Saddam who broke with the regime in 1978, he began his political career in 1963 - as an assassin.

Seymour Hersh fleshed things out a bit in the June 28 issue of The New Yorker.

[H]is role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies — Saddam became President in 1979 — is much less well known. "Allawi helped Saddam get to power," an American intelligence officer told me. "He was a very effective operator and a true believer." Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, "Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug."

Early this year, one of Allawi's former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising questions about his character and his medical bona fides. She depicted Allawi as a "big husky man ... who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students." Allawi's medical degree, she wrote, "was conferred upon him by the Baath party." Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975.

"If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does," Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. officer, said. "He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff." A cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi's personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that sought out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. ... At some point, for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital stay.

It was only then that he began his association with MI6 and the CIA, the latter of which funded and still funds his Iraqi National Accord, including supporting an INA campaign of car bombings in Baghdad in the mid-1990s, notes Edinburgh's Sunday Herald for July 18, which also says

[t]he break with Saddam came, it is suggested, over money – not political principle.

All of which seems to blow several huge holes in the "Oh no, he couldn't do that!" defense. But it won't matter, because too much of the media is either too scared or too lazy to be out in front of the pack unless it involves personal scandal with at least a whiff of sex. Just like "welfare reform" was judged a success because welfare rolls dropped even as officials admitted they had no idea what happened to the rest - Did their situation improve or did they just get dumped in the gutter without hope of help? - so here will Allawi be judged a "success" if the number of "terrorist incidents" declines - no matter how that decline was brought about.

Before the shootings, [the Morning Herald reports,] the 58-year-old Prime Minister is said to have told the policemen they must have courage in their work and that he would shield them from any repercussions if they killed insurgents in the course of their duty.

The witnesses said the Iraqi police observers were "shocked and surprised". But asked what message they might take from such an act, one said: "Any terrorists in Iraq should have the same destiny. This is the new Iraq.

"Allawi wanted to send a message to his policemen and soldiers not to be scared if they kill anyone - especially, they are not to worry about tribal revenge. He said there would be an order from him and the Interior Ministry that all would be fully protected."

That is, it appears, you can kill enemies of the state with impunity.

Even Newsweek, busily dismissing reports about Allawi as just rumors, admits that

only weeks after taking office, Allawi is already flirting with dictatorship....

Allawi has flooded the streets with cops, many of them from the old regime. He's started a new General Security Directorate, otherwise known as the secret police. Every few days his troops attack neighborhoods where criminals have gathered, rounding up men by the hundreds, cracking heads and sometimes fighting running gun battles. Iraqi TV shows footage of exultant policemen firing their guns into the air as they leave the scene of a roundup. Magistrates have been put on 24-hour duty to handle the intake of prisoners - 527 from one raid alone. "He's tough as nails on security," says the U.S. official. "Tougher than we are."

And there is, of course, also the matter of the new security law, reinstating the death penalty, and the fact that Allawi hinted about delaying elections before quickly backing down. Testing the waters, perhaps?

The thing is, as I noted on June 30 and more recently on Saturday, a goodly number of Iraqis would favor tough measures even at the expense of democracy and personal freedom, seeing them as necessities and even arguing that a strongman is exactly what Iraq needs.

"You can have an overdose of democracy," a young Iraqi translator tried to explain last week to the American colonel he works for. "That was our problem. We need somebody strong,"

said Newsweek.

After a decade of sanctions and 15 months of chaos, violence, and terror involving hunger, unemployment, and between 11,000 and 13,000 civilian dead, that desire for security, for stability, is undoubtedly strong and equally understandable. But it won't come easily and could well come at the cost of the democracy we claim to be establishing. On Saturday, I mentioned Saddam and Tito as examples of the "strongman" who keeps a divisive and divided nation together. But they did it by utter brutality, by crushing dissent, by playing one faction off against another - by being dictators who were ruthless to whatever degree was necessary at the moment. (Tito moderated over the years, as his own personality rather than repression became the uniting force, but that's not how it got started.)

So is that what it's all about? Is that what it's come down to? Meet the new SOB, same as the old SOB? And I mean the old SOB, the 1980s SOB, the one that was an SOB but was our SOB. In the wake of Gulf War I, the US stood by as popular rebellions rose against Saddam both among Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. According to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report from May, 1991,

the United States did not want the popular rebellion to succeed...Administration officials [said] that they were looking for a military, not a popular, alternative to Saddam Hussein.

In a letter of December 10, 1991, I noted that the same staff report also quoted a National Security Council aide as saying "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam Hussein, not his regime."

It's taken over a decade and come in a very roundabout way, but it's possible that at the end of the day that's exactly what Iraq might wind up with. In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?" It seems to me that by virtue of our ignorance, our arrogance, our conceit, our selfishness, all we have succeeded in doing in Iraq is putting people through 15 months of madness in order to face them with the choice where do we go from here: chaos or dictatorship, hot-blooded civil war or cold-blooded brutality?

You tell me which is worse. Because I really don't know.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are the Texas Rangers?

JEOPARDY!
Quasi-Related Pairs for $200

"Designing Women" actress Annie and unfavorable reviews.

Geekdrah, Volume 2

Same link, because this appeared as a sidebar to the article noted in the preceding post.

A new treatment for inflammatory bowel diseases may be worming its way into the medical armamentarium.

University of Iowa gastroenterologist Joel Weinstock developed the concoction, which consists of a popular beverage — he declines to name it — and 2,000 pig whipworm eggs per serving. The worms come from pigs raised at a local U.S. Department of Agriculture facility and then slaughtered.

It's generally held that in inflammatory bowel disease, the body's immune system is in "overdrive," as the article puts it, leading to persistent diarrhea, abdominal pain, and weight loss. Medications can relieve the symptoms but are no cure.

However, as part of their own natural defenses, intestinal worms dampen the immune response. Coupling that with his observation that such diseases are most common in industrialized countries, where the chances of people acquiring intestinal worms is small, gave Weinstock his idea.

Weinstock chose to test pig whipworms because they don't venture out of the gut, they don't survive more than six or eight weeks and they don't appear to make people sick. Their eggs are less than half the size of a grain of sand, so they're basically undetectable in Weinstock's drink. The worms, which are less than half an inch long and thinner than a human hair, emerge in the gut.

Weinstock has tested worm therapy in 120 patients with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, the two types of inflammatory bowel disease, which affect up to 1 million Americans. The treatment was tolerated well and appeared to improve symptoms. "It's likely to be effective in both diseases," Weinstock says. He hopes to conduct a larger, multicenter trial of the therapy.

Moral: There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Geekdrah, Volume 1

Two ancient methods of treating certain wounds and conditions have gained the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration as "medical devices."

Leeches and maggots.

Leeches were used for many years for bloodletting, based on the idea that diseases were caused by an "imbalance" in the four body humors. In some cases, that is, the patient had too much blood, so a cure could be effected by drawing some of it off. The problem was that if the patient didn't get better, their doctors might think that not enough blood had been removed, so - well, you can see where this could wind up. Finally, doctors had to admit that patients treated this way did no better and often worse than those who hadn't and in the 19th century the practice died out.

But used properly and for the right reasons, leeches can be very helpful.

Medicinal leeches are bloodsucking, aquatic cousins of the earthworm that hail from Europe. ...

It's often trickier to connect veins, which carry blood back to the heart, than arteries, which carry blood from the heart. So before grafted tissue gets new vein growth, it can become congested with blood. Sometimes surgery can fix the problem, but if it can't, the graft might fail.

Enter the leech. Not only does it suck out excess blood, but its saliva contains a powerful blood thinner. So even after it fills up and drops off, bleeding continues.

The humble maggot, in this case the blow fly larva, meanwhile, has seen a surge in popularity over the last several years for a simple reason: Maggots only eat dead flesh. Or, to make the point clearer, they only eat dead flesh and will ignore living flesh - which makes them ideal for debreeding wounds, especially deep or large ones that would be difficult to treat surgically. The resulting cleaned wound is not only less prone to infection, it tends to heal better and faster than otherwise.

Moral: Icky can be good.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a gnu?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Baseball

A baseball team is named for this noted group of mounted state police that dates back to the 1830s.